Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

"The five basic tastes are detected by specialized taste receptors on the tongue and palate epithelium.[56] The number of taste categories humans have is still widely debated, with umami being the most recently accepted fifth category, or sixth, if looked at with the Chinese addition of the spicy/pungent category.[57] Ancient Taoists debated there were no taste categories"

ancient taoists hurtling in with the best challops here

fabled tastes
tastes belonging to the emperor
tastes included in this classification
etc

Thinking again of TE's disappointing review of FJ, I wonder if part (yet not all) of the reason might be that FJ actually doesn't make a coherent or useful argument in this book.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3638-the-benjamin-files

Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination. The three-way tug of war over his heritage between adherents of his friends Scholem, Adorno and Brecht can also be better grasped from this position, which gives the Brechtian standpoint more due than most influential academic studies. Benjamin’s corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity; and its political motivations are clarified by attention to the omnipresence of history throughout his writing, from the shortest articles to the most ambitious projects. His explicit programme – “to transfer the crisis into the heart of language” or, in other words, to detect class struggle at work in the most minute literary phenomena – requires the reader to translate the linguistic or representational literary issues that concerned him back into the omnipresent but often only implicitly political ones. But the latter are those of another era, to which we must gain access, to use one of Benjamin’s favorite expressions.

I don't really see much of interest in these statements.

"premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer" -- is almost the most obvious premise you could have about WB.

"Benjamin’s corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity" -- this surely is the kind of thing people were saying by, say, the late 1970s; it's a premise of TE's 1981 book on WB!

Still, it's possible that another reviewer, more energised than TE, might somewhere actually find something to argue with in the book.

i've been taking notes on this review all morning: i agree w/pf that this is very poor work from TE and then disagree on a number of points

sadly i have work to do before i write it up

unrelated work i mean (actual work)

here we go foax

1: my first issue with this review is that I am not at all convinced eagleton has done more than skim this book. His entire argument is a kind of eagletonian fantasia on the verso blurb pf linked above, drawing attention mainly to those issues of form that he can take in via skimming (constellated form, lots of lists).

2: now a “proper” review would set out the books argument and then dissect it. For good or evil, LRB allows some latitude here. And terry is also making a kind of argument about the ”politics” of the ”proper” — indeed it’s possible (tho hard to prove w/o a snitch among the LTB subs) that this piece was conceived as constellated itself and handed in this way, per Theses on History or the Arcade Project or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Definitely it reads this way: as a succession of thought-dots that the reader (or perhaps the messiah) is to supply the joins for. Bcz that’s modernism and we’re all modernists now, and here’s why. Except as a succession it’s pretty feeble, and the sub editors have anyway run all the dots together — so it no longer looks constellated — and besides terry is in no way cut out for such formal experiments or for modernism as he chooses to define it: thickened texture, scrambled syntax, not slipping down too easy like some kind of COMMODITY ugh ugh vomit vomit.

3: … tho of course the thing eagleton is most (and justly) admired for is the lucidity of his prose. He has made a tidy career (or as he would call it a ”commodity”) of ensuring that a wide range of thinkers “slip down easily”…

4: the first page is largely classic terry — a couple of minor observations abt the topic (wally b) are ceded to FJ, before we proceed to a whole raft of claims, without any clartify which are TE’s judgments and which are fred’s (and which are simply well recognised positions that all critics agree on). Eagleton has form for this slippage — or shall we say appropriation: once when he gave a book by gayatri chakravorti spivak a dusty review, the LRB received a tart letter from a reader pointing out all the stuff he’d co-opted into his position that was straight-up derived from hers.

5: This is one exception, which is curious and potentially fascinating and I wish he’d taken it somewhere of made more of it: anything you try to make of it is just guesswork — and the guesswork begins almost immediately). It’s the digression about Wittgenstein and the parallels TE claims to be drawing (tho they’re not in my view actually parallels, since they mostly locate the two writers as moving in different directions on the larger map that TE is vaguely handwaving towards )(which at a minimum has on it modernism and postmodernism, theory and criticism, history and religion, philosophy and marxism).

6: Anyway this digression is NOT derived sneakily from fred’s book — which we know because terry says so. As comparative speculation it is in fact entirely an Eagleton joint, TE riffing to himself (Ludwig is a long-time Eagleton enthusiasm: he wrote the screenplay for Jarman’s film abt him) (and may have explored thses topics elsewhere — eagle-heads let me know)

7: … and FJ says never a word about wittgenstein! A silence that TE calls “eloquent” — an odd word to use that I’m going to return to, bcz it might be sly critique or else a coded kind of praise.

8: round here he also begins to elaborate a two-fold hint at a point never properly enlarged on (bcz constellated!): which is that benjamin’s line on the advance of history (and apparently terry’s own) precisely opposes that of ordinary marxism, which we might (and I think this is his unstated claim) also term “modernist” marxism: the — the “myth of perpetual progress”, as terry call it at one point. Terry: “progress and continuity are fictions of the ruling class” — and yet Marx says that the underlying forces will destroy the oppressors? Benjamin says (in TE’s ever-deft rephrase): “revolution isn’t a runaway train but the application of the emergency brake. History is hurtling out of control, and revolution is necessary if we are to get a decent night’s sleep.”

9: Then there’s Wittgenstein digression, and then terry calls walt is a “modernist theorist” (for formal reasons: constellated prose! doesn’t write proper books!) rather than a “theorist of modernism”. But of course WB’s not a “theorist of modernism” at all — better IMO to call him a “theorist of modernity”, better still a “diagnostician of modernity” (viz look what mass reproduction does to the aura, plus all the recording angel stuff that terry is busily rephrasing at several points.

(9a: nicest rephrase of benjamin’s understanding of revolution btw: “the meaning of… events is in the custodianship of the living… it is up to us to decide whether, say, a Neolithic child belonged to a species that ended up destroying itself” — this is vivid and eloquent and well done TE)

10: then a discursus on modernism as a description of WB (and of the anti-philosopher Wittgenstein), particularly that approach to writing that frees one from the tyranny of the “coherent whole”. This he pretty much flubs. First he makes a grand and sweeping claim (“everyone from Aristotle to I. A Richards” believe art must be a whole — which for example entirely sidesteps the very aphoristic Nietzsche, who also didn’t write ”proper” book) and also weirdly crashes into the claim that this is merely an “arbitrary diktat”. It might be wrong even if everyone does it, but it’s not arbitrary dude. Get a grip.

11: then his somewhat comical mixing of metaphors to summarise the degradation of the ability of language to express the world — apparently is it has become “stale” and also “threadbare”. Are there things in the world that can be both stale and threadbare? Maybe a very old but not-quite-fully-eaten spaghetti bolognese? None more commodified.

12: now comes the ur-language, this being a belief of benjamin’s that he shares with e.g. heidegger and tolkien (neither of whom are modernists in my opinion), but TE sets it up — via images and surrealism somehow — as an element in the truer modernism that benjamin cleaves to, which is that it is a doomed attempt to rescue itself from a degraded ordinary language (which has lost touch with the pure tongue of god) by refusing to speak anything like an ordinary language. This argument is also a bit of a mess I think but constellation works for him here bcz the reader (me) (or possibly the messiah) spent some time trying to untangle it for him. Anyway there’s a whole bunch of topsyturvy contrarian stuff going on here, channeled thru a rewording of the Recording Angel image — which jameson as a mere normie marxist doesn’t get — and the theses of history and the redemption of nostalgia. Anti-modernism as the true modernism because the homesickness “for a time when… there absolute and infinite existed” — modernism (per terry here) is not as an escape from god, but a botched way to see god (in the eloquent silences if you like lol)

13: unlike e.g. that shallow bullshit POSTMODERNISM ugh ugh vomit vomit, which says there is “no haunting absence in the world” and look you shouldn’t scratch where it doesn’t itch (R. Rorty).

14: ok, so go back to Wittgenstein and Jameson’s “eloquent” silence. My first read of the word “eloquent” was that terry was saying lol, this omission is an eloquent tell of how much smarter I terry am than he fred lol lol. My second is a bit more complicated and kinder — though it also makes less sense (sorry, I’m just trying to unravel the constellated form here…): Jameson’s “eloquent” silence is bcz he — who of course wrote the book on postmodernism (a point not made out loud but maybe it doesn’t have to be) — deliberately omits mention of wittgenstein bcz his latter-day (post-tractatus/anti-tractatus) anti-philosophy is much closer to rorty than to benjamin. Tractatus kinda sets logic up as the tongue of god. A whole slooch of philosophers veered off in pursuit of this silly idea for a while, until wittgentsein pointed — ver much not in book form — that this isn’t at all how ordinary languages work, and this means something important (about god and tongues and itches etc). So TE is in fact recruiting FJ, botchedly gazing at an absent mourned god via his silence, which is “eloquent” bcz it can somehow thus be jimmied into terry’s own never-ending rarely fair or honest religion-based shadow-war on pomo .

15: Is Wittgenstein postmodern, with his non-book books and such? Well Lyotard deploys LW’s concept of “language games” at length in The Postmodern Condition: which is not dispositive, but Eagleton absolutely knows this. Even if he doesn’t tell us this. His silence, you might, say, is “eloquent” (viz you can project any old bullshit onto it, positive or negative, depending on how you feel towards terry) (I usually feel bad)

(15a: anyway the botched modernist gaze that TE allows us via his constellated text of a non-normie god-spying benjaminian marx would very much be worth reading about all spelled out — as it’s just a monster of a claim — but terry is a coward and keeps it all on the hinted downlow)

16: And now, in I guess the last fifth of the essay, we finally reach jameson at length. A bit of sucking up (“ the finest cultural critic in the world”) to leaven an attack: FJ doesn’t understand that perpetual progress is a myth, he knows nothing of theology or ethics, his sentences are all far too long, an exhaustingly prolix writer whose prose could every time be cut by a third and still mean the same thing (this is my sharper redraft of something TE fawningly pretends is all “writerly” virtue, which it isn’t). Fred has “none of Benjamin’s misgivings about writing books”, except wait, is he not perhaps “wondering rather late in the day where books ate really possible”? (subs totally snoozing on this little clash, the second bit only 20 lines after the first)

(16a: digression on cowboy movies. I’m glad to say it’s been a long long while since TE was routinely rolled out as the designated commentator on matters pop cultural, here to make a sweeping comment abt something he knew very little about: viz hammer horror and the gothic, vernacular depictions of aliens, what have you). It’s good that the LRB has grown beyond this kneejerk (and now employs many writers who reliably know much more), bcz this is the kind of noise he tended to say: “It is an American puritan view of morality, later to be transplanted into cowboy movies.” First: later than what? Jameson was born in 1934, but even so cowboy movies predate him. Second: lol whut, wtf is this very extremely dumb and ignorant claim abt morality in cowboy movies?)

17: and finally the bit where fred is praised for going constellated in s section where TE is summarising at such high and compressed speed that it reads like that exam essay you have suddenly to finish up because you should you had 40 minutes left and you only have five. Last paragraph, about literary theorists and close reading, is a strawman contradiction — actually we know these folks all read closely, who the hell says otherwise? — masking the fact that (a) TE didn’t leave himself proper time to read this book, or (b) leave himself proper time to write this piece.

Read the piece by Adam Mars-Jones piece on William Gaddis (online) a couple of days ago. While I do like this rubbing up of attentiveness to past novelistic technique that M-J can bring to anything there is also a feeling that he is inadequate to tackle what deviates in a significant way. A lot of the points are about organisation, or lucidity of sentence - he mystifies a "feeling for the medium" when comparisons to novels that apparently make points better and have been forgotten are run through, just in case they fall flat (which they often do, I like half of the sentences M-J says are bad, and sometimes he will miss the point of them). Goes without saying that a lot of this could be written about Ulysses, but which he'd never get past an editor at the LRB today. So he needs to be careful, M-J needs to give his due to modernist-era writers who are already in the canon. so, 'Pierre Menard' has vast interior spaces. That's just the natural order of things. But Gaddis? He can't write 'literary prose', which appears to mean M-J has to read a sentence more than once to parse some meaning.

He likes JR more, but he starts his discussion of this book with a comment on Joy Williams' intro. So it seems that one woman has taken interest in Gaddis!!! Its one of the most disgusting things I have ever read in a book review in this paper and they should be ashamed to pusblish it.

JR fails the bechdel test

Say what?

joke: the novel JR by william Gaddis consists exclusively of dialogue from crank phone calls made by a boy, therefore it trivially fails the Bechtel test as there is no scene where where two women talk about something other than a man—because there is no scene where two women talk (actually i forget if there is even one woman in the novel). xyz is offended that adam Mars-Jones’ review (allegedly) implies that zero women like the writing of william gaddis, contrary to the evidence that at least one woman (joy Williams) claims to like it. the fact that JR fails the bechdel test, a minimal (yet clearly superficial and inadequate) test of a works’ feminism, is offered tongue-in-cheek as a reason why women don’t like gaddis

here’s the passage in question

Joy​ williams’s name on the cover of JR (she wrote the new introduction) is proof that an almost caricaturally male enterprise, and the challenge of yomping across vast inhospitable tracts of literary terrain, has appealed to at least one female sensibility in the 45 years since the book’s publication.

I've finally picked up a copy of the BRIXTON REVIEW OF BOOKS.

It's free!

I will read at least part of it with interest.

the novel JR by william Gaddis consists exclusively of dialogue from crank phone calls made by a boy

Er, no it doesn’t

It does have at least one woman character, a love interest, who is not well drawn iirc - it’s not a novel of rich characters tbf

i see that terry e gets schooled on matters wittgenstein on the letters page of the newest LRB so maybe i went overboard assuming he actually has knowledgeable interest in him (but he did write the screenplay for the jarman film)

can it be Mark S of this parish writing in the LRB blog?

🎻🎻🎻🎻

I've probably said it a few times: writing on the blog is probably the best way in to writing in the paper.

(Apart from other measures like having affairs with the editors, doing a postdoc at All Souls College, etc.)

I have read Mark S's post.

I don't know the music he mentions. It's impressive that he knows so much about this.

I find this comment quite shrew and convincing:

But Bartók is no more a Classic FM regular than Hendrix is, and Kennedy is fighting on this noisy battlefield too far away from two rather different fronts. Inviting black musicians and then having them play black music risks affirming precisely the divisions to be challenged (as Chineke! were perhaps hinting to the Guardian). You can expand the repertoire or you can tackle the lack of diversity in professional orchestras but it’s hard to do both at once, even when the issues are so intimately related. People love to insist that such stunt projects are breaking down barriers – but as popularity often also makes for unfashionability, they may just be moving them instead.

I quite like it when he talks about people on TV in the 1970s.

The one part I can't quite make sense of is this formulation:

"aggressively unrespectable spectacle, the opposite of counter-revolutionary string-driven gentrification"

as being respectable and being counter-revolutionary and gentrifying sound like part of the same thing, rather than opposites.

*SHREWD, of Shrewsbury

It does have at least one woman character, a love interest, who is not well drawn iirc - it’s not a novel of rich characters tbf

― siffleur’s mom (wins), Sunday, 19 September 2021 bookmarkflaglink

JR is a satire, strong characters is not a thing that it does (MJ compared it to a comedy, which seemed like a basic error to me)

LRB 9.9.2021.

Rosemary Hill on Constance Spry's flower arranging at the garden museum: quite good to see this covered. Notable that ms Spry had a complete career teaching health to women in Ireland, before this artistic and horticultural turn.

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite on the coal industry and deindustrialisation: one of the best things of its kind in the LRB in ages. I like the way this essay builds up from basic facts, including the nature of coal itself, and tells a chronological history of the industry. It explains why working in it was tough; why nationalisation was good; why things changed c.1970s-1980s. It carefully insists on distinctions and precision. It makes clear statements. It's just what such an article should be like.

Blake Morrison on Simon Okotie's detective novels: I'm quite surprised that old stager BM still does so much for the LRB, and quite touched. He can still do a good job. His description of these novels is very fine, and conveys much. Where I'm sceptical is that he doesn't indicate that the humour of this concept or conceit wears thin after a while, whereas for me it had done so by the end of his review.

pleased to see that comments on my blog are all abt resale prices of an old ELP record

Really great -- and much better than the LRB's -- review of Said's biography. It gives so much space to the intellectuals in the global south he argued with.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/unexamined-life-omar

yes it's very good indeed

LRB 23.9.2021.

Christian Lorentzen on Sally Rooney, whom I haven't read, but I watched all of the terrible TV version of her novel. I think it's good that they gave this to CL (someone now more distant, in the US), and respect the fact that he has expressed scepticism. Broadly most of what he says sounds accurate to what I know about this writer whom I haven't yet read. He conveys a sense of boredom and blandness that corresponds well with the TV version.

I don't think that CL quite nails down his critical response to SR's seemingly quite bad and bland political critique of consumerism. CL goes into emotional extrapolation here but doesn't really explain why what SR's character says is wrong. I suspect it's not really wrong, more that it's quite bad writing.

I like CL's review, but I think that he could say more about SR's writing, as writing, and why it's bland, as it seems to be. He doesn't really nail that down either; he's fairly fixated here on characters and what they do.

It's noteworthy that SR has written for the LRB, but has here received a bad review. Even if you like SR and think CL is wrong, this is a rarity. The LRB is full of pals' puffs and log-rolling. It's good that for once they broke that cycle.

i think this is a good counter (it's something i've seen irish readers say about reviews of rooney by ppl who aren't a bit irish): https://www.gawker.com/culture/sally-rooney-is-irish

caveat: i am not irish, i haven't read her books, i quite liked the TV show mainly for its feel and pace, and for its sense of a place i don't know and am not competent to judge a portrait of

as for PF's second point, now that i'm "in" the LRB, they shd hire me to TAKE DOWN LANCHESTER (who is apparently a director of the parent company lol so this wd be a wise and hilarious move on my part)

I have seen, online, the claim that "we need to reassert that Sally Rooney is Irish".

I think everyone knows very well that she is Irish.

It's practically the most obvious thing about her.

Yes, Mark, I would enjoy seeing you do that. :D

Let's not forget that Dion Boucicault, author of THE SHAUGHRAUN and THE COLLEEN BAWN, was actually Irish.

i mean the burden of the gawker counterargument does go beyond the four words contained in the URL -- and definitely gets at something absent from christian lorentzen's review which lorentzen isn't even aware is missing? but as i say i haven't read the novels and am therefore leaning on the positions of others who have (whose opinion in this regard i very much trust, but i can only ventriloquise so far)

It's noteworthy that SR has written for the LRB, but has here received a bad review. Even if you like SR and think CL is wrong, this is a rarity. The LRB is full of pals' puffs and log-rolling. It's good that for once they broke that cycle.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 29 September 2021 bookmarkflaglink

This is not the case. She has two articles, both published in 2018. It's clear both of them have moved on. She is a high selling author - she'll never write for the LRB again so there is just no way this was part of the calculation.

Meanwhile the TLS actually got Michael Hofmann to bulldoze Colm O'Toibin's latest book. That would never get published in the LRB.

"the book is provocatively underedited"

i only met dave keenan once that i know of, and i don't know remember where it was

sorry: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n19/paul-mendez/screwdriver-in-the-eye

Pleasingly scabrous review that. Who's got the time to read 808 pages of David K33nan? The only review I've read of this was Andy Mi11er's, which was so ecstatic in its register, it wasn't really a review at all.

"stiff little fingers – post-punk chroniclers of the Troubles"

dude they are NOT post-punk, get a grip

they are new wave

I remember reading in some music paper decades ago that the earliest version of SLF were a "cabaret metal band". NOT REAL PUNK! A metalhead I worked with used to play their cds in the van, but I stopped complaining because it was that or Chris Moyles.

my dead father haunted my dreams – until I drowned his caul

https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/06/a-moment-that-changed-me-my-dead-father-haunted-my-dreams-until-i-drowned-his-caul

gotta respect the grift

Started that bestiality article in the LRB and I feel like I'm back in high school and some kid is trying to show me shit on rotten.com

I've only read "Normal People" but it seems Lorentzen's view of that book at least is a bit uncharitable, or at least it didn't give me a very good sense of why people might like it. I guess her new book is supposed to be more political, but I'm not sure she's trying to convey a coherent and specific political theory of the world in the way Lorentzen seems to want her to.

The best review of Sally's latest was in The Nation.

I really enjoyed this piece on Uwe Johnson. It's where LRB writes about a book years after it was released really pays off though in this case it's a book about the writer who wrote the book (Anniversaries, which is nearly 2000 pages and got some panicky reviews at the time the translation came out).

It also writes nicely about 'Real England'. Lots of little things in it.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n20/patrick-mcguinness/outside-in-the-bar

Yes that was a very good piece, it made me want to investigate both Johnson himself and the book's author, Patrick Wright.

Highly recommend Wright's On Living in an Old Country, which also writes nicely about real and unreal England.

The Village that Died for England is also very good.

LRB 23.9.2021:

Adam Mars-Jones on William Gaddis proved to be outstanding, the best thing I can remember reading in the LRB all year.

LRB 21.10.2021:

Patrick McGuinness on Patrick Wright somewhat informative on the content, but wildly extravagant in its praise for the book, and doesn't make Uwe Johnson's own very long fiction sound good. Not very keen on this reviewer.

(I have used Wright's OLD COUNTRY many times but his later work has the feature that every book is massively long. I have THE VILLAGE ... on a shelf, it might as well be a doorstop, can't see that I'll ever actually get through it.)

Owen Hatherley on Soviet architecture very sound: not just knowledgeable but well-turned.

Lorentzen on Richard Powers: having no great investment in the author, I enjoy such a take-down. Again I note CL's boldness in doing this.

Deborah Friedell on Franzen: a good contrast: after 20 years, a great, refreshing relief to read something on Franzen that doesn't mainly sneer at his extra-curricular statements, but actually thinks about what's good and distinctive about him as a novelist.

Maggie Kilgour on Milton: serviceable review, but surely people who truly work on this stuff aren't going to get new material from a biography at this stage?

Hatherley was good. As was Milton, but I wasn't sure I learnt a lot from it.

Also really liked Emily Wilson's review of Aristophanes. Just the range of reference she brings on a very difficult comic playwright for modern audiences. It's good they are using her more despite Burrow's somewhat cautious review of her translation of Homer a year or two ago. It was actually a way in for her, she had hardly contributed before.

Maggie Kilgour on Milton: serviceable review, but surely people who truly work on this stuff aren't going to get new material from a biography at this stage?

For people who truly work on it, I guess I can imagine someone working on Milton-as-poet or Milton-in-the-Restoration not knowing the detail of the 1630s, or its recent historiography?

But as an interested amateur/ex-semi-pro, I was wondering the same - I'm not sure where the space is if it's basically the Campbell/Corns biography (2008), only longer. Might be a bit more narrative both on Milton & the 1630s - c/c is most comfortable being scholarly iirc (but this new one does not sound pop). May read it.

Ahead of its publication in the next issue, I offer this essay on Andreas Malm, climate politics, fossil fascism and direct action on today's #COP26GDA

Why not read it on the way to an action near you? https://t.co/GxxsH4hZpI

— James B (@piercepenniless) November 6, 2021

Adam Mars Jones' hatchet job on the booker winner, the book sounds pretty bad (and classic booker material) but AMJ sure has some funny ideas about what you can and can't do in novels.

Yep, I felt the same about AMJ's Gaddis review - incredibly prescriptive about what a novel can and can't do, or be, and seemingly oblivious to the idea that a writer of 'experimental' fiction like Gaddis might deliberately be frustrating certain readerly expectations about consistency of form, style etc.