Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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.

Lockwood on Knausgaard was my highlight of the issue but ymmv. Made me want to read the book even though I thought My Struggle was ok at best.

The 'gay bar' book may be good, but the 'at the gay bar' article quotes another book from 2003 that describes mid-century gay culture as 'a roman fleuve ... far richer and less verbal than anything described in Ulysses'.

Maybe in its original setting this made more sense - maybe Ulysses had come up, or the reference was eg: to Joyce's Nighttown (which certainly wasn't, in reality, very 'rich').

As it stands, it seems to be saying 'a very large section of mid-century American real life was richer than a particular novel'. Well, real life generally is, in a way, richer than any novel, by definition - unless you grant the particular kinds of richness that a novel can have, which might be different. It might be best to accept that they're two different kinds of thing, which don't compete. 'Less verbal'? Well, most novels are 100% verbal, so it's not surprising that real life would be 'less verbal' than them. You might as well say a hospital is less verbal than a poem. As for 'roman fleuve': well, Ulysses isn't a roman fleuve - it's practically the opposite of one. So if you've defined something as a roman fleuve, it's not surprising that Ulysses won't compare with it.

This seemingly bad statement is the responsibility of the original 2003 author, but the LRB writer shouldn't have quoted it approvingly. Or if it did somehow originally make sense, he should have shown us how it did.

Too much bad stuff in the paper these days - and bad editing, at a basic typographical level, never mind a higher one.

Lots to enjoy in the January issue. My favourite section was reading Lockwood and Wood side-by-side on writers I don't really care for, reviewing books by (or on) them that they don't particularly care for, just using it as a jumping off point on a discussion of their methods of work (it brings to mind that Sebald and Knausgaard are quite similar: the former is far more diaristic and the latter often meandering and discovering things for himself on a journey he undertakes, and both of them aren't very interested in novels). Quite striking how both of these critics will also go on to say the same sorts of things, about readers becoming accomplices with the writers, or how they won't divulge (or spend much time on) whether the book was good or not (Lockwood more directly than Wood), they are aiming somewhere else and play with your expectations of the review too (though LRB readers should be well acquainted with this kind of play). Very striking how Lockwood is coming along; Jameson struggled to say anything much on Knausgaard compared to Lockwood. As she goes on writing for the paper it will be interesting to see where she goes with it.

Ian Penman wrote probably his best piece so far for the LRB, mostly because of the book which he had to argue with rather than the biographies he usually will review over to talk about the subject. Here is a Black woman, a British punk writing on Solange, and he has to do something more, keep up and remain sharp.

Other than that I liked Jenny Turner reporting on COP26: she explains the acronym (without the obvious joke), is good on the history of COPs and gets into the noise of its ineffective politics, which seems like all we have left. Though she talks about what is outside of it (via previous pieces on eco-terrorism in a previous issue) and also what is cast as outside from within. This should be read alongside Maja-Pearce's short dispatch from the oil pielines in Nigeria, where you see other things done to refineries.

Meades was good.

6.1.2022.

Essay on Fragonard: promising as Fragonard's pictures do actually come up a lot, and can be very attractive - but the book reviewed seems to make very half-baked arguments, academic in a bad sense. The reviewer ends up not able to give them that much respect.

Nicole Flattery on Katie Kitamura: extremely flat.

Alan Bennett Diary: I think I am finally past the point of being appalled by the egotism of this, and more able to laugh at that and enjoy what's enjoyable. It's always at least easier to read than most of the LRB. But some extremely banal content.

The level of self-deprecation here I actually like:

I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role I was allowed to play. I say I know the play well, but in those days I just used to learn my own part (and that not very well), plus a rough acquaintance with my cues, and no sense at all of the plot or direction of the play. I don’t think I even understood what The Taming of the Shrew was about.

This, underplayed, I think genuinely funny:

My dad had his hair cut on the same parade as his butcher’s shop in Meanwood, though never to the satisfaction of my mother, who claimed he came home ‘looking like a scraped cock’. She meant a plucked fowl, but had no thought of being misunderstood.

The egotism here is extraordinary:

23 March. Asked by the Guardian if I would like to interview Andrew McMillan, the poet. Though I’m an admirer I say no, only because if I did it would be as much about myself as about McMillan and how his life has been very different from mine.

WHY would it have to be about yourself? Why not make it about ... the other person?

The banality here is at a new level:

A lovely dinner last night: poached sole, dauphinoise potatoes, fresh broad beans and some samphire. R. was disappointed the spuds weren’t creamier, though this was because he was stingy with the cream. It suited me though and I cleaned my plate, as he almost invariably does his.

High praise for Rory Stewart. Tell it to poster Calzino.

re pinefox contra bennett in previous years:

lol fvck i wrote a long and superbly devastating response to this and ilx totally ate it

― mark s, Tuesday, 19 January 2021 11:59 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

i will come back to it on a day when i'm not meant to be doing something extremely different and look it's noon already ffs

― mark s, Tuesday, 19 January 2021 12:00 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

re ilx being weird: the long piece i wrote is RIGHT THERE two posts above this^^^, ilx clearly un-ate it and put it carefully on the page after all (i only called it "devastating" bcz i thought i had lost it forever and no one could see it, it is not devastating)

i am not bothered by the ego, it's a diary

i am not bothered by the ego, it's a diary

was that your response?

response in full was here, only gets into the ego by implication, as being an unavoidable element in campy green room gossip?: Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

I like Lockwood a lot but she already seems to be her Anthony Lane-style journey from wit to witty shtick

*be on her

The little I remember of Lane's work as having v little interest. Lockwood really grabs you.

Mark S: yes I saw that long post of yours at the time.

I am glad to see that a year ago I was comparing Bennett to Bastani. Still astounding lack of self-awareness that he said what he did about Graham Greene.

Emily LaBarge on Helen Frankenthaler: I hoped for great things for this, have an idea that I like HF, but - the article is well-written, finds lots of words to describe the paintings well enough, but they all seem interchangeable really. A strong sense of being about nothing. Disappointed.

LRB 6.1.2022:

I'd thought that Malcolm Gaskill on spies looked a chore, but have to admit, the story he tells, mainly about the Russian woman spy Ursula Kuczynski, is extraordinary. Multiple countries and continents, three husbands and a child with each, careers in publishing, espionage techniques from radiography to bomb-making, a plot to kill Hitler that's aborted ... Incredible.

As with Colin Kidd on the US, I wonder: why is the LRB getting a Medieval / Renaissance historian to write at length on the Cold War? Just because he's an insider? Depressing on the face of it - yet Gaskill does, in fact, doe an excellent job.

LRB 6.1.2022:

among many other things, Patricia Lockwood writes:

Critical response to this undertaking has been maniacal. Jonathan Lethem calls Knausgaard ‘a living hero who landed on greatness by abandoning every typical literary feint, an emperor whose nakedness surpasses royal finery’. That is objectively an Orson Welles parody, but here’s the thing: I was as excited as anyone.

What does her comment on Lethem's statement mean? It puzzled me.

JL loves Welles, so maybe he would enjoy the description.

Though I don't share others' view of Lockwood, I would actually be interested to read her, at length, on Lethem. I think that she might be better than others at following and matching certain aspects of his work - the perversity, the inconsistency, the repetitiveness, the solipsism, as well as the occasional brilliance and insight.

This is apparently one of FOUR threads dedicated, at least initially, to the question of whether the TLS or the LRB is better.

It seems the question has been decided.

But what about Literary Review? Apart from the Bad Sex Award I don't think I've ever read it.

I've read it, Tracer. It's readable and easy to digest. No long, off-topic articles that don't even pretend to read the book. Whether it's better than the TLS, I'm unsure. Its production values are maybe higher (ie: glossier paper, more expensive cover illustrations). A copy is quite a good investment, if you like this kind of thing - you, or at least I, can dip into it for days or weeks.

LRB 2.1.2022.

Jonathan Parry on political corruption: a historical essay with a newsworthy 'corruption now' element tacked on.

Wolfgang Streeck: actually an egregious example of LRB style. He reviews a book arguing that technocracy and populism can, surprisingly, be combined, by people like Blair and Macron. Rather than assessing these claims, he utterly ignores them and writes an essay about Angela Merkel, whom the authors had consciously *not* included in their arguments.

Macron seems to me a perfect instance of technocratic populism. Unsure whether Merkel really was.

James Lasdun on cars: this looked unappetising but it's worth persisting with: the story of the car executives does actually become quite sensational.

Rivka Galchen on vaccination: has the odd distinction of repeating specific information and stories featured in another recent LRB, about cowpox and smallpox. I'd learned from that that 'vaccination' related to cows; I relearned it here.

Adam Mars-Jones on Atticus Lish: strong in assessing a broad question: how can narrative cope with degenerative illness? As often, AMJ gets his blue pencil out and attends closely to technical matters; whether his judgment is sound here, I think one would need to read the novel to check.

Terry Eagleton on Malcolm Bull: for a change, and unlike with his article on FJ and WB, TE makes an effort rather than phoning it in, as we used to say. He shows impressive knowledge of all Bull's work, building up to the current book, and delivers a deft assessment. Bull ought to be glad.

What does her comment on Lethem's statement mean? It puzzled me.

I'll take a crack at this. I was also puzzled by the term "Orson Welles parody" so I did a bit of internet sleuthing. The Know Your Meme site relates that the most meme-worthy thing about Orson Welles was the series of TV commercials he did for Paul Masson California wines from 1978 to 1981. As this wikipedia page relates, these commercials became "a much-parodied cultural trope of the late twentieth century". The notoriety of these commercials gained a more recent boost when outtakes leaked on Youtube of an apparently very bored and inebriated Welles flubbing his cues with complete indifference to the proceedings. But how exactly does Lethem's statement function as an "Orson Welles parody"? I would guess it relates to Welles' grandiloquent manner in these commercials. So perhaps she means that Lethem's praise is perhaps a touch too effusive.

There was someone on twitter who I can no longer find doing a thread of orson welles parodies that would have been instructive, but here's the man himself using the kind of language the parodies riff on:

I wish there was a directory of film directors where you look a name up and it's just a summary of Orson Welles roasting them. pic.twitter.com/IEmo5eolkf

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) August 6, 2019

Those are superb!

O.Nate, I tend to agree that PL was basically saying that JL was being grandiloquent. But the particular way that PL said it made it more obscure to me.

I figured it as "unable not to backhand any compliment"

That's interesting! I definitely didn't see that.

LRB 27.1.2022.

Chris Lintott: Short Cuts on a new space telescope: brings the astounding scale that only writing on space can. The fact that scientists on Earth can manipulate the moving parts of a telescope thousands of miles away ... it makes you think anew about wifi limitations.

Marco Roth on Russell Hoban: I'd be cautious of Roth, but he does something very well here: in just one page he summarises RH's whole career, touching on many books while quoting and explicating convincingly from the best known. He convinces me that RH was as interesting as he thinks. To do this in a page is commendable when you think of how some LRB writers squander pages: Frances Stonor Saunders, Clair Wills, Colm Toibin.

Talking of whom ... Colm Toibin on John McGahern. A volume of letters of over 800pp: how many pages of letters CT must have read over recent years - not just these but thousands of pages of Bishop's and Lowell's, at least. To get someone who knew McGahern to review McGahern's letters is one thing. To get a correspondent of McGahern, whose letters from McGahern are, as far as I can, *featured in the book under review*, to review it ... may be another. Insider dealing as usual.

CT is at his worst when he throws in a paragraph (p.23) unrelated to anything around it, out of temporal order, highlighting the fact that he visited McGahern who gave him the MS of what CT says is McGahern's best story. The logrolling about himself is extraordinary.

And yet ... for all this, I have to say that by CT's standards, this is not a bad review. It draws on acquaintance with McGahern to tell us things we don't know (including his words in the last paragraph). It describes McGahern's fiction actually quite accurately and convincingly. It sees the resemblances between the texts and quite well describes how they work; Heaney's quotation on p.26 assists. Despite being by such a self-regarding bore of a writer, it's actually, probably, quite a useful and acute account of John McGahern.

“AhhhHHHHH…the crypto market!” pic.twitter.com/U4GGFF3pll

— Michael D. Fuller (@michaeldfuller) February 14, 2022

I missed the space telescope and Hoban in the last one, will have to go back to them.

10/2/22 Lethem on Lem might be the final push I need to read more Lem. And maybe to get started on Lethem. Also enjoyed the diary, and Nagel on Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch - ironically because he makes less of an effort than in his last piece to make the philosophy seem important or useful to anyone outside of the discipline.

Wolfgang Streeck: actually an egregious example of LRB style. He reviews a book arguing that technocracy and populism can, surprisingly, be combined, by people like Blair and Macron. Rather than assessing these claims, he utterly ignores them and writes an essay about Angela Merkel, whom the authors had consciously *not* included in their arguments.

Lol, tbh, this doesn't bother me as much as it probably should. My main aim in reading something like the LRB is to be entertained and learn something, though not necessarily about the book in question. This piece gave me a new perspective on Merkel which I found interesting.

i have been enjoying “flicking through” (electronically) the TLS recently. no, no particular articles. just the aggregate of shorter stuff really.