Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

in many ways we are all stealing king ottakhar's sceptre

you’ve read the essay then?

Great comments Fizzles.

TM is dire at this stuff.

graeber-world (including on ilx!!) is very much torn between ppl who throw the entire book at the wall bcz he is super-careless with facts he doesn't need to be careless with (his stans shout "mere pedantry" but the other side can point to a mounting pile) and ppl who greatly enjoy the energy with which he seems to be dismantling a larger orthodoxy, and align with the implied politics (they argue that the mounting pile of wrong facts doesn't really affect the bigger picture)

when the debt book came out he had a guest spot at crooked timber which went famously badly: like a sequence of essays from CT's regulars and invited guests from different disciplines picking at various elements -- the overall tone was "we're broadly pretty excited by this book, here's some elements we'd like to explore more plus this on page xx seems wonky" and he flounced away from this in a tremendously silly thin-skinned rage very early on

(CT has many many enraging faults and he possibly had a point, or was just still too close to the material, but he did not cover himself in thoughtful glory)

i also slightly know someone who roomed with him at college, who was quite sardonic abt him and his politics given his background (but tbh they hate literally everyone so)

LRB 7.10.2021

Michael Wood on Proust: back on form! I don't like Proust but MW can make even Proust fairly worthwhile. I also note, again, how good MW can be at simply conveying facts - an underrated activity.

Christopher Tayler on Jenny Erpenbeck: felt to me that Tayler, usually an excellent and interesting reviewer, was struggling to find something interesting to say about this writer, who sounds dull, even though East Germany is not a dull topic.

John Whitfield on scientific publication: excellent: one of the clearest things to appear in the LRB for a long time (again, information is good), and relatively rare for them to go into this area, which can actually be an interesting one.

i am halfway thru the mccarthy and so far i summarise it thus: "if everything is writing and everything is machines and everything is capitalism then in conclusion everything is everything else! also in this tintin book one time tintin used a wireless or something, just like moby-dick if radios were harpoons"

That sounds very accurate, and a good demonstration of why TM is bad, which is what I understood Fizzles to be showing.

yes

this writer, who sounds dull

(re: Erpenbeck) fwiw I've only read Visitation by her but it wasn't dull.

Somehow I reach LRB 18.11.2021.

Tom McCarthy, black box: Fizzles' critique of this was entirely accurate. But Fizzles is generous. He was too polite to add that this article is shockingly, shamefully bad.

The first two paragraphs alone should make anyone doubtful about publishing McCarthy - as a human being, never mind an intellectual. The whole article makes you wonder how he keeps getting published. Someone ought to say: no more of this. Time's up.

lol. the poverty of the essay and the fact that he hasn’t moved on *at all* did make me wonder if it was some sort of LRB dole for old time’s sake and because he needs it.

oh wait he has a novel out how did i miss this.

wapo review written by a good friend, oh god.

a favourable review that makes it sound awful lol.

will read obv even tho satin island was dreck.

mccarthy had somehow entirely passed me by till now -- presumably bcz i dont read or think abt present-day novels that much and maybe also bcz his earlier LRB pieces are mainly reviews of same? so i've just skipped em?

what's so maddening abt this *particular* piece for me is that it's full of things i'm otherwise interested in (writing! technology! the technology of writing! vampires! whalers! tintin AND derrida, together at last!), all yok'd by violence together except it's not violence so much as a kind of slack-jawed attention drift with nothing at all behind it. i've had the same abreaction in the past against erik davies and friedrich kittler, who he quotes here several times…

also i used the search engine to see what ppl had said abt him and found this, miss u nilmar

tom mccarthy should write a roman a clef about the period of research lanchester undertakes prior to the writing of this book

― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Monday, 10 June 2013 20:41 (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Mark S: to my recollection, his earlier LRB articles are not reviews, but pontifications like this one. They're dire.

From Fizzles' link:

In McCarthy’s telling, it seems she may have found it — but her archive at Purdue lacks the crucial jigsaw piece (it is “perdu,” or “lost,” as McCarthy punningly observes).

yes. i think i physically winced and made a slight retching sound at that.

xpost to mark - yeah it’s that everything=everything attenuation (that is to say no tautness or direction between the composite elements) or drift that really grinds.

letting myself off the hook somewhat as the lrb search engine says he hasn't written for them since 2014 and only delivered six pieces ever, inc a blog (on kittler zzzz) and two reviews

someone described the premise of the new Nathan Fielder show and it sounded exactly like the plot of Remainder

a long time ago there was a very long colm toibin piece on lowell and hardwick which tested this thread's patience lol: this is a more useful route into some of the same material i think (as in, one of the same books): https://newrepublic.com/article/164389/vivian-gornick-wrong-elizabeth-hardwick-biography-review

Super happy to read grumbling about McCarthy, his stuff is so bad, and he always seems to have many defenders

This is on the books by Malm. See the LRB has two pieces on him, which according to this is a laughable state of affairs.

https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/ecological-leninism-friend-or-foe/

V funny bit that mentions Lanchester.

Malm’s superficial engagement with the era of militant environmentalism in the United States also means that he omits single incidents that would have been relevant for his book. For example, he speaks of “Lanchester’s paradox”, named, by Malm himself, after the British novelist John Lanchester who opened a 2007 piece in the London Review of Books with the observation: “It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism,” for example “vandalizing SUVs”. In the year 2000, Jeff “Free” Luers was sentenced to 22 years in prison (eventually serving ten) for doing exactly that, at a car dealership in Eugene, Oregon. The case drew attention far beyond the borders of both the United States and militant environmentalism. It seems odd that Malm would make vandalizing SUVs a main feature of his book without mentioning Luers once.

a long time ago there was a very long colm toibin piece on lowell and hardwick which tested this thread's patience lol: this is a more useful route into some of the same material i think (as in, one of the same books): https://newrepublic.com/article/164389/vivian-gornick-wrong-elizabeth-hardwick-biography-review

― mark s, Thursday, 18 November 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Read this last night - really great. I love pieces where the writer goes 'I was wrong'.

imperative someone now write an actually good piece on "tintin, moby dick, dracula, victorian technology" for me to read.

i mean in a sense dracula is already a book on victorian technology tintin

it's mainly just filling in v minor victorian blanks -- when did arthur hugh clough's poetry last matter if ever? -- but i enjoyed fergus mcghee's piece, which is witty on the english hexameter as a vector mainly for uncertanty and changing yr mind a lot and places this very minor man as an oh so mind-changeable hinge between several much more robust 19th century figures (wordsworth, arnold, florence nightingale)

also it helped me slightly unmuddle him from arthur henry hallam (who is even more minor if that's possible but also the anguished topic of tennyson's in memoriam, as blind-quoted in one of my favourite m r james stories and as read by dr wilson to and from the pole bcz he was a total gloombot lol)

anyway florence nightingale's brusque note is very funny: lytton strachey notwithstanding she is absolutely the most modern figure mentioned

i guess both the arnolds in fact

a long time ago there was a very long colm toibin piece on lowell and hardwick which tested this thread's patience lol: this is a more useful route into some of the same material i think (as in, one of the same books): https://newrepublic.com/article/164389/vivian-gornick-wrong-elizabeth-hardwick-biography-review🕸

― mark s, Thursday, 18 November 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Read this last night - really great. I love pieces where the writer goes 'I was wrong'.

Mark S: amusingly, I hope, until halfway through your post above I was confusing A.H. Clough with A.H. Hallam.

they are the same! (they are not the same but they are very easily confused)

AHH so inextricable from In Memoriam, and AHC from the sententiously victorian “say not the struggle nøught availeth” that emotionally i reject the idea of confusion even tho duh of course they can be easily confused.

Clough's a fine poet! Haven't read the 2 big ones (Amours de voyage and the Bothie of something or another) in years but I remember them being bright and sharp and def not grimly victorian.

i need to read some more clough then! a friend was v into him and i never took the cue.

say not the struggle still sententious tho.

I enjoyed the Sigrid Nunez story in the Nov. 4th issue of the LRB.

LRB 2.12.2021: finished with this at last.

Isobel Williams' Catullus: I couldn't get the concept of this, and didn't really want to, and the omnipresent Burrow probably wasn't the best person to convey it in any case, so I gratefully stopped.

Perry Anderson on Stella Ghervas: isn't this sub-par, low-key by PA's standards? Few strong arguments, not even many recondite words for Mark S to delectate over.

Richard J. Evans on controversies over history: mostly persuasive.

Sheila Fitzpatrick on USSR: very standard from her. Oddly makes the republics sound worse than the central Moscow authority.

Christopher Tayler on Stan Lee: good topic, how often has this been in the LRB? (Not often; Lethem did it twice in the early 2000s.) The discussion of Wertham at the start is rather a red herring (but a reminder that Wertham is interesting). The article perhaps exaggerates how badly the later years of Lee's life turned out.

Hal Foster on Jasper Johns: running on empty.

Ange Mlinko on Lydia Davis's essays: I wouldn't expect to enjoy these (LD's last venture in the LRB itself was a bore), but Mlinko does draw out interest, re: translation and languages.

David Wallace-Wells: a consistently, convincingly apocalyptic writer about the present; one of those who has taught me how awful things really, already are. Oddly the focus on the damage caused by air pollution here seems to be pulling away from other kinds of disaster (including Covid!), but he then returns to wildfires at the end, which are, it seems, a big source of the pollution.

Charles Hope on altarpieces: truly one for the specialists.

Started the next LRB on my pile: apart from an Adam Mars-Jones review it's mainly unpromising.

I don't feel like there was a concept to the Catallus as such, and Burrow is usually at his best when reviewing anything Classical up to the Renaissance - he is so good at going over how this or that author has landed in English.

I will have a look at the Lydia Davis piece, as well as The Diary on the Tavistock clinic. Maybe PA, maybe..

The Stan Lee review was one of those rare LRB instances where I know a lot about the subject. I agree that the opening on Wertham is largely irrelevant - and Tayler doesn't make enough of the fact that Wertham is now known to have distorted and falsified much of the research used in Seduction of the Innocent. Other than that, I didn't find much to quibble with, factually. I remember the absolute shock I experienced when I first started seeing Jack Kirby original art pages with his pencilled story notes still left in the margins: here was physical proof of Kirby's contribution as the primary WRITER of the Marvel Universe, with Lee his semi-hostile translator, editor, hype man. It's always good to see wider exposure of Lee's decades-long theft of other people's creativity, income and credit.

Ward Fowler: do you know Jonathan Lethem's 2004 essay on Lee and Kirby?

(It appeared as 'My Marvel Years' in the LRB, and under two other titles elsewhere - which is rather too much.)

To a true expert it wouldn't hold any revelations, but it's well-informed and engaging.

I don't know it, Pinefox, but will look out for it. I did read an interview with Lethem in the fan magazine The Jack Kirby Collector, some years ago now, where he definitely came across as being on 'Team Kirby' and knowing Kirby's work very well.

The article:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n08/jonathan-lethem/diary

well worth reading even though you, personally, might be unlikely to learn new facts from it.

There is a series of other comic / superhero articles in JL's collection THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE, some of which are good.

not sure i like that title

Pinefox, thanks for that link. As a memoir it's fine and good reading, but I disagree with a number of his value judgements, and statements like the following have not aged well in 15 years imho

I’d be kidding if I claimed anyone much cherishes the comics of Kirby’s ‘return to Marvel’ period. Even for souls who take these things all too seriously, those comics have no real place in the history

Even at the time, I would say as many people cherished Kirby's 70s work as disdained it, and now lots of that work has become canonical - it's definitely found a place in the history, even though most would agree these are 'broken' comics in certain ways that were in and out of Kirby's control. And that 'even for souls who take these things all too seriously' seems like a loss of nerve (but as a comics fan, I would say that I guess).

Also don't like the regularly trotted out Lennon and McCartney comparison with Kirby and Lee, which doesn't make any real historical sense and actually muddies the nature of the relationship between Stan and Jack. A much closer example might be Simon & Garfunkel, where the public perception is of shared creativity, but in fact only one of the two is the 'creative' half of the partnership. But to me Kirby is more like a Dylan, or a Godard - someone who demands (critical) attention in their field, and whose every work is of interest.

Ward Fowler: these are sound, well grounded criticisms.

The point about Lee / Kirby NOT being Macca and Lennon is well taken: Macca is, to my own mind, the greatest British artist since Virginia Woolf, so Lee would have to have some considerable creative contribution to his own partnership to merit the comparison even granted that the two cases are different. And you seem to be saying that Lee wasn't, in fact, very creative.

Very interesting about S&G, though G had talent (as a singer).

Your last sentence is deeply Lethemesque. Lethem has just that habit of cross-media canonical comparison, almost always involving Dylan; so it's exactly like a great many of the sentences that appear in Lethem's book THE DISAPPOINTMENT ARTIST, in which that Marvel essay is reprinted.

i like that title better

LRB 4.11.2021:

Charles Nicholl on Elizabeth True Crime: good, gimmicky highlighting of an actual phenomenon with a cross-historical purchase.

Jenny Turner on Hannah Arendt: I didn't like this.

Andrew O'Hagan on Joan Eardley: this gave me an idea. You know how on politics threads people sometimes highlight a Scots politician saying something that might be dubious but they say it with a vague Scots word added - "I'm goin' to vote for bus privatization because I'm a minging gallus bairn the now ... The socialists will look like a dreich day at the kirk when we're finished"? ... I started to think that O'Hagan is a literary version of this - he really thinks he wins us over by writing reams about "wee Jimmy and wee Gladys took the lemon bottle tops back to Mr McGraw at the top of the road. The auld trams clanked by, sendin' up sparks in the dirty reekin auld city - aye but it was the dear green place and we'd ne'er be withoot it!"

Jo Applin on Linda Nochlin: I like the broad-minded, multi-angled approach here - rather than just hailing Nochlin, seeing her and her legacy more critically, and ending with a different view.

Sigrid Nunez story 'It Will Come Back To You': on hearing loss and cognitive decline this is poignant. The family relationships stuff, I think not so much.

Adam Mars-Jones on Damon Galgut: outstanding, a rare pleasure. AMJ's 'craftsman' idea of criticism, always implying choices and techniques on a writer's part, brings the connotation that he's a tutor giving feedback (on which he played in his perhaps notorious Rowling review). There are times when his approach may be misplaced, but here it seems unerring: he makes the (acclaimed?) book seem dire, inept and offensive.

Steven Shapin on nuclear secrets: notably readable, entertaining, dry, as well as knowledgable. Doesn't maintain the tone it initially purports to strike (what's the opposite of a secret?), but does give a serious history of an aspect of the world since c.1940.

Tareq Baconi on homosexuality in the developing world and Palestine: what's notable here is how the author doesn't just report on positions but really gets involved in the political debates, between, maybe, a kind of 'liberal' and 'radical' positions, and ultimately aligns himself squarely with the latter. I ultimately quite admired the earnestness and clarity of this.

Blake Morrison: as I've said before, curious that he still writes for them so much. Seasoned review which makes the book sound quite tiresome. I wonder how BM knows so much about the regional conflict.

Pooja Bhatia on Ozy Media: which I'd never heard of. Good factual reportage of a case which turns out to be typically hair-raising. You could even say that the clear rendition of salient facts, which imply judgments, has something distantly in common with the writer everyone's been talking about ... Joan Didion.

The only piece I've read in the latest issue is this excellent one on duelling:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n01/tim-parks/a-venetian-poltroon

Thought this piece from Andrew Durbin on gay bars was a good one:

‘We should never assume that the gay bar is a safe space by nature. In his chapter on The Apprentice in London’s East End, Lin discusses the gay skinheads and white nationalists who used to frequent the local pubs: violence within as well as without.’https://t.co/l03zvu29HK

— London Review of Books (@LRB) January 8, 2022

LRB 6.1.2022.

Much of this doesn't appeal and unusually I actually decide not to read further: Turner, Penman, and Adam Phillips who remarkably is still being allowed to produce reams of general vagueness about feelings.

On the other hand: James Meek on Ukraine is good - informed, readable, hostile to Vladimir Putin while also resisting notions of a Russian masterplan.

Tim Parks on duelling also proves a good review: conveying the book while also highlighting what's questionable in its judgments.

Michael Wood on Sebald: this is such a potentially big subject that I can't help wondering if the situation is: Wood is increasingly too old to write sustained, long, analytical work, so he tends to be allowed, or encouraged, to write suggestive pieces that stop short when you want them still to get going. The article roams around from a) questioning the circumstances of Sebald's death (perhaps prurient), b) indulging extreme claims about the moral wrongs that Sebald might have done in using real people's pictures, and back to c) a more standard, respectful view that Sebald developed a mode of art that could represent the unrepresentable at the end of a tragic century.

It all makes me think that the truth about WGS is simpler, more banal and less dramatic: he was a quiet, scholarly, erudite career academic who eventually found a fairly distinctive way of producing books, which were quite interesting and effective, then he died quite prematurely. He doesn't deserve to be condemned for moral outrages - absurd - nor, in truth, to be hailed as a moral sage.

Colin Kidd on the John Birch Society and US paranoia is good, very solid, but makes me wonder: don't they have an American to write on this? Scottish Unionist Kidd seems to be as much of a go-to as blokeish Burrow. The ascendancy of neither in the paper has ever been explained.

In this mixed and sometimes irritating collection, Jonathan Meades on Wiltshire via Pevsner provides a highlight: knowledge, strong opinion, style.