Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

Neal Ascherson on break-up of Britain stuff. I'm reluctant to criticize him as he's such an old stager, but I find him too figurative and imprecise a writer to do this well. He creates generalities (Britain and England) to make an argument when they might as well be reversed.

He's also wrong to think that no-one in England cares about the union with Scotland. On the whole he writes on this stuff from too much inside his own self-confirming bubble. And when will people, from the great Perry down, stop citing Tom Nairn's deeply uninteresting and unhelpful coinage of 'Ukania' as though it's a brilliant and witty insight? (They won't.)

Enjoyed this account of Gornick's writing, which is nice to read in parallel with Turner's piece I linked last week:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/08/vivian-gornick-desk-daring/

Bee Wilson on wheat: one of the most tedious and impenetrable LRB articles I've read.

And compounded by starting with 'During lockdown, my Cambridge neighbours have been helping each other buy flour to make their sourdough bread. Isn't it interesting how during this uncertain time, we've all returned to the joy of baking'.

I'm now in a position I can hardly remember ever being in: Have finished every backlogged LRB and passed them on and have no current LRB at all until the new one arrives.

It's a rare pleasure, bask in it.

i can send you my login if you like, so you can start again at the beginning

Nick Cohen used to write for them

I am also caught up, but only because I am now waiting for 4 issues to actually show the fuck up.

Christopher Tayler quite generous to Amis.

Clair Wills surely too generous to Ali Smith.

I was interested to learn (from the Backlisted podcast, not deep knindie knowledge) that Andrew O’Hagan was once in The Big Gun, whose single I am sure I once owned, but don’t seem to own anymore:

https://youtu.be/JuDI1X84sHU

the cohen contributions (3, all 1998-99) seem like relics from a difft order: back when he was mainly known for being a critic of blair?

i mean i could actually read them but

lol Stewart Lee sent in a letter

Avoid reading on Amis and Smith and if you are starved of literary coverage read this excellent piece on Chinese classical poetry instead.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/08/du-fu-li-bai-poems/

i am finally reading the papyrus forgery story omg 🧐🤪😳

(the story is amazing, the piece so so)

I like Tim's post though am unsure whether 'knindie' is his coinage.

(It is, I thought it looked funnier than “nindie knowledge”)

Is 'nindie' a recognised word, then?

did anyone read Andrew O'Hagan on Soho from back in the summer? Terrible nonsense of the first order, naturally I came here to post it so we can all have a good laugh https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n14/andrew-o-hagan/seventy-years-in-a-colourful-trade

The piece that unwrites itself: "When it’s over, when your youth is gone, you wonder what those times were all about, but there’s no point asking. They were about Soho and a whole lot of nonsense you’ll never hear again."

i am so old i remember when o'hagan was an interesting writer (i shd go back to those pieces and see if i was just a bad reader)

he seems to be putting together a lot of stuff on literary gossip and the scenes that engender it (as a massive gossip myself i am not immune to the pull of some of the tales tho my attitude to jeffrey barnard being unwell has always been #whocare)

there were the seeds of something interesting there- I think Julian Maclaren-Ross is a figure worthy of examination- and maybe Soho of yore deserves purple prose, but THIS purple?

His first book from the 1990s on missing people was very good, but that was long long ago.

yes it's the essay that led to that missing people book that i'm remembering i think, also -- was it the same piece? -- something on how sociopathic children can be w/o it being abnormal exactly

(also also a little booklet on farming round the time of BOVID SPONGIFORM, which i bought my mum as a present, and did start rereading more recently -- but i don't recall my recent conclusion)

Yes, I read the Soho article. I agree that it was purple, or perhaps just flamboyantly casual. I didn't really buy it.

The one thing I've liked by him was: James & Stevenson.

re gossip, he wants to stress that he is part of the group of gossips, and party to the gossip. He is very keen to emphasise how often he has met Norman Mailer and everyone else.

I didn't mind the Soho article as a piece of uncritical nostalgic fluff. I feel oddly attached to that particular version of the Soho mythos.

Made me think of bullshit like this
https://youtu.be/cjRLhkBi1gI

I read O'Hagan on New Romantics. (He uses a brief para to say the name doesn't matter and means nothing - an unhelpful attitude. He could at least have noted Duran's actual use of it in a song.)

It's mostly not *factually* wrong, as far as I can tell. But it's characteristically obnoxious. This writer almost always comes across as arrogant and as writing too fast and carelessly.

It also has the problem, first diagnosed on ILM, of A-level cliché. "If you think about it, New Romantics were braver and more outrageous than indie musicians!" would hardly have been a new thought at the start of Tom Ewing's poptimist movement 20 years ago -- it doesn't bear repeating as a new thought now.

really enjoyed emily wilson’s piece on three new translations of the oresteia. vivid descriptions of the mechanics of metaphor and politics, and in particular the role of women in the play and the translations.

i have seen the oresteia performed and i admit i struggled despite a vivid presentation. wish i’d had this to guide me at the time and it makes me want to read the trilogy, tho admittedly in greek rather than in translation.

also includes an angry attack on diversity in classics academia and the translations under review themselves.

It also has the problem, first diagnosed on ILM, of A-level cliché. "If you think about it, New Romantics were braver and more outrageous than indie musicians!" would hardly have been a new thought at the start of Tom Ewing's poptimist movement 20 years ago -- it doesn't bear repeating as a new thought now.

What struck me is that this argument, unlike something Ewing would write, didn't actually talk about the music at all - it's the subcultures he's comparing, where indie fans = political scolds and new romantics = more radical because they were messing with sexuality. This is an unconvincing binary, but also the way he sets it up is very old fashioned because today's kid subcultures are clearly a synthesis of these two - both highly politicized and interested in queerness.

Emily Wilson's piece is terrific, the discussion of the politics of translation is really striking better notes. Bet the letters in the next issue will be a laugh.

Emily Wilson: good when she analyses the texts, demonstrating her considerable expertise.

Bad when she attacks others for being 'elderly'.

Maybe one day she'll discover that getting old isn't that much fun. It probably isn't made better by people complaining at you for the sin of having managed not to die yet.

Emily Wilson (49, not old or young) was making a point about the demographics of translators of classical literature. That did not stop her from enjoying the translation by a 77 year old man the most.

Is there anything good on the politics of New Romantics? Couldn't understand it from what O'Hagan was talking about. He made this link with Brexit that seemed the laziest you could do.

I'd like to think someone like Penman would at least re-listen to the records.

simon price wd be my go-to here i think: dave rimmer's "like punk never happened" is very readable and i'm fond of dave -- i stayed in his berlin flat a couple of times in the 80s and he's chums w/biba kpof of all ppl -- but it kind of smash-hitses round the politics tbh

or my adam ant book if i ever get it together lol

xyzzz otm on Wilson, she's not attacking the translators for being elderly any more than she is attacking them for being white or men

49 is young, sorry if this offends

comments? closed!

*types in the box, pressing send to check whether I have been banned (for a week)*

Meanwhile this is what the former editor of the TLS is up to:

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/john-murray-reveals-forthcoming-books-podcast-stig-abell-1222179

Looking forward to having David Baddiel tell me about American Classics.

Excellent set of pieces on a novel that could be read alongside The Oresteia:

‘The unknown woman herself becomes the threshold between spheres and appears to initiate her own erasure.’ Matthew Turner on the architecture of fascism in Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel ‘Malina’ https://t.co/SJchAMrUTf pic.twitter.com/3arn3SmfzW

— frieze (@frieze_magazine) September 17, 2019

Merve Emre is good:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/22/ingeborg-bachmann-meticulous-one/

Timely! I literally just read that the Basque translation of Bachmann's 'Simultan' ('Three Paths to the Lake' in English) won best translation prize this year. A collection of five stories I've not read yet. Thanks for that link btw.

np. Three Paths to the Lake is not covered in Emre's piece but it's good not bad.

Vaguely related: I am reading Adam Mars-Jones's new novel(la), BOX HILL, a very funny and engaging story of a frankly monstrous relationship.

T.J. Clark on Pissarro and Cezanne: observant about what's in paintings, often good at finding words to describe them. But also full of pretentious, preening verbiage, and allowed to spin it out for a ludicrous 8 or 9 pages.

Might have been OK if they'd said: You can have one page for this, use it to say what you really want to say.

i was quite enjoying that piece, but had only got one page in before the LRB got dropped behind the bathroom radiator, and i haven't bothered to go online to finish it.

reading James Meek on conspiracy theories in the latest LRB, and it continues an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with Meek, which too a certain extent gloms onto my feelings about Lanchester's LRB writing. overall, what i was left with after reading the piece was that it was as much about Meek's engagement with it as it was the subject itself. Maybe i need to put that differently, the treatment of conspiracy theories felt summary and underdone, treating what is already well known and covered elsewhere, as a major topic of what i've got into the bad habit of calling 'the current conjuncture', and the bits that remain of the piece when you remove that are to do with Meek's struggle to understand people without doubt who believe things that are not true. I don't think that is valueless, btw, and in fact the closing paragraph about the greatest damage that epistemology – without doubt, without curiosity – does, is to the notion of learning, is important.

other things i took from it was Popper's original notion of the 'conspiracy theory,' that is the predilection to conspiracy as a mode of thinking: "Popper's notion of conspiracy theory referred to a personal predisposition that could attach itself to anything, precisely because it was nested in the holder's brain." Meek judges, I think correctly, that the development into 'conspiracy theories' as situations is beneficial to that mode of thinking.

Meek contests the assertion that QAn0n can be considered dangerous, like al-Qaeda, outside of a couple of examples, because of Q's instructions to passivity. Define 'dangerous' maybe (epistemic danger, or the danger that one nut goes and kills someone – which Meek acknowledges), but it did make me wonder what the reaction of QAn0n conspiracy theorists would be to a Trump loss. Whether it results in personally damaging destabilising disbelief, with a world coming crashing down, potentially creating a desire for violence, or, in a more benign possibility, whether Trump himself gets converted into a secular saviour, Barbarossa like, into a figure capable of making a future return, perhaps in another form.

Still, leaving those thoughts aside, the overall impression, as with Lanchester, is of a piece converting contemporary complexity, founded to a degree in frameworks like social media and the internet, paradigmatically different to previous frameworks of social communication, requiring new sets of knowledge, into a sort of LRB housestyle pabulum, easily digestible for an implied readership too superannuated to keep up with new concepts. it feels fuddy-duddy, not up to date with current thinking, old man struggling with the world, sort of writing. I'm being v unfair to meek, he's a lot better than lanchester, but i find meek in some respects to be a weak version failure of the strong lanchester version.

as i say, I may be being unfair. I'm not very knowledgeable on conspiracy theory, but i still may have a much better grounding in it, just by being on twitter, say, and that means I don't see the value of Meek's summary. Still, when I look at the set of thinking he's summarising, it seems a bit of a backdated number.

although they're only one voice, and there's often stuff to disagree with, someone like @Aelkus operates in spaces and with tools - video gaming, memes, infosec (with a military analyst background), and a good awareness of contemporary theory - which make them much more illuminating on the given subject. they feel like the right tools and frameworks with which to be analysing the object in question, in part because they comprise the platform on which the object is operating/feeding/infecting.

For example, Meek covers the problem of institutional trust, and the idea that conspiracy theories delegitimise those institutions, in what i would consider a fairly straight way - delegitimisation of institutions is bad because it reduces their effectiveness, and because, at base, they deserve legitimacy. He has a paragraph where he struggles with how to convey this message to conspiracy theorists, imaging himself pitied as 'a credulous centrist.' Well, I think for me, he may not be so far from the truth there, and not so far from the problem I find with this piece. As I say, he skates round the issue several times, almost as a matter of personal doubt: ('...which made me think: "That's exactly the way I feel about Boris Johnson right now." But my scepticism doesn't extend to complete cynicism about the institutions themselves.")

To take Adam Elkus on the same subject (get it while you can; he assiduously deletes his tweets), specifically around institutional communication about masks:

For a lot of people I follow and interact with regularly here, the mask fiasco alone burned what little trust they have in the idea of counter-disinfo https://t.co/3zRbaNRozQ

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

with the important point

What I get the picture of, increasingly, is the lack of a positive theory of legitimacy. E.g people assume that institutional trust is the default condition rather than something that is difficult to achieve (sometimes for reasons entirely beyond institutional control!)

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

with a subsequent important but perhaps seemingly paradoxical point that people can as a consequence overdetermine on the role of social media and 'technology':

There are real things that happen *offline* that might.....just might.....influence people's orientation towards mainstream institutions and sources of information!

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

this sort of thing leads to a certain age and certain type of commentator creating a 'it was the russians wot did it' explanation and putting in a bucket marked 'social media.'

of the NYT role in legitimating that 'Russian strategy' argument:

its just casually mentioned once, and then dispensed with as "imperfect system self-correction" amid paragraph after paragraph of turgid exposition about the woes of Facebook and such

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020