Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

the corks are how the ships of the armada kept the sea on the outside iirc

xp lrb is the worst place to get fiction recommendations, i hardly ever read the reviews because ***spoilers!!!***

feel free to disregard the LRB and take it as a Daniel_Rf recommendation instead :)

I learn that my LRB subscription has apparently expired.

I am probably now two issues behind.

Still on the 18th May issue, really nice to see a review of a Lídia Jorge novel! Everyone should read her.

― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 5 June 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Forgot this, will look.

Michael Wood on William James

This was interesting. Thanks. I recently read "Principles of Psychology", and the biographical tidbits about James were intriguing. I ordered the Richardson bio that was being reviewed. It seems like perhaps a good book saddled with a bad title. "Modernism" is something I would associate much more with James's brother Henry. The Wood review was ok, but seemed to focus primarily on James the pragmatist, which to me, is probably the least interesting James (after James the psychologist, and James the founder of religious studies).

Glad it's of interest, o.nate.

I continue to read LRBs from 2007-8, in great detail, lacking new issues as I do.

Last night I read a whole Jerry Fodor article on Darwinism.

Michael Wood on BELLE DE JOUR, 2000:

The trouble with these interpretations is not that we can’t (more or less) get them to work, but that they are too tempting and seem desperately wrongheaded, whatever their logical or narrative attractions. More precisely, we can abandon any of these interpretations easily enough, but it’s amazingly hard to give up the game of interpretation itself, the attempt to make the events of this movie behave like the events of a proper story, however complicated. It’s a false trail, but we stay on it, as if addicted; of course we are supposed to stay on it, even as we lose all faith in its destination, because the trail and its disappointments are the very movement of our watching the movie. Why is it a false trail? How do we know it is? Well, we don’t know for sure, but the pleasure of the movie seems different from its riddles, larger, simpler, more direct. […] Our attempts at resolution fail, but that failure, if we work at it enough, becomes the form our success takes.

doesn't really belong in this thread except that i discussed it a little a while back but there's a nice big piece on the tunguska incident full of info new to me in the NYRB:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/06/22/fireball-over-siberia-tunguska-andy-bruno/

(the claim is made that the locals kept the incident mysterious to visitors and researches bcz they mistrusted them and didn't want to be bothered; also that the guy who mainly put it on the map was a bit of a dick)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FyRLlpRWcAA8dN_.jpg:small

That "Black Male Escort" as has been around for ages...

In the new issue I really enjoyed reading about Fassbinder and Noel Coward. Love how they are place next to each other.

Not TLS/LRB, but I really enjoyed Julian Baggini's review of the Parfit biography in Prospect: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/61751/mr-morality-the-astonishing-mind-of-derek-parfit

This extract made me laugh:

A clue to Parfit’s fundamental error comes in one of the countless extraordinary anecdotes recounted by Edmonds. Parfit once watched a documentary about the Nazi invasion of France in which Hitler danced a little jig after his army’s triumph. The philosopher said, without irony, “At least something good came out of the German victory.”

Dani Garavelli on the murder of Nikki Allan was tough reading but essential for those who like to collect examples of police being as thick as shit and indulging in their favourite ongoing and inexplicable pastime of fitting up innocent people.

Letter from Gary Groth (!) in the TLS, correcting their Stan Lee bullshit:

https://scontent.fman1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/355367175_10232110532849428_2906632073585977626_n.jpg?_nc_cat=104&cb=99be929b-59f725be&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5cd70e&_nc_ohc=AMZ-EklucwoAX8L3qaR&_nc_ht=scontent.fman1-1.fna&oh=00_AfD0JwhZrU6BCrvwYEv1DIa6KaNz04PK42oREOhEKH-6EA&oe=64A7B416

drag their asses gary

Very infectious enthusiasm again from MH. I wasn't really fancying this book but now...

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n13/michael-hofmann/russian-podunks

In the latest issue I see Tim Parks (another constant favourite reviewer-translator) on Camilo Jose Cela's The Hive (which I read earlier this year).

In the new issue I really enjoyed reading about Fassbinder and Noel Coward. Love how they are place next to each other.

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, June 24, 2023 2:06 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Coward's joke about De Gaulle, as reproduced in this review, made me do an IRL LOL

Yes, that was funny.

Guess who's back?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/patricia-lockwood/where-be-your-jibes-now

I wish I had Lockwood's incredible confidence in her middling comic bits.

i started reading that and then i wondered why i would do such a thing.

I enjoyed the essay but it did feel sort of like she'd only handed half of it in?

There's a lot of good stuff, but the shtick is getting shtickier, kind of like Anthony Lane's did, although her non-shtick is much better.

Absolutely fucked how DFW was obsessed by Thatcher?! Never gonna bother with this guy.

I normally enjoy lockwood's none more subjective 'this is how I experience the world' shtick but if you find you don't experience the world in that way or if you want a more, say, level headed approach it can be tiresome. don't know how much dfw I read back in the day, not much, some short stories and essays maybe. she doesn't make me want to read more - the quote she picks in the penultimate para? yeesh.

never really stuck for me, tho i did get some of the way into IF - maybe gave up at the point lockwood highlights. v uneven piece. hard going, almost incomprehensible in places with occasional little bolts of critical lightning.

I would read this article, but my LRB subscription stopped some time ago. I should try to resume it.

At one point that piece was kinda trolling ilx 2001 where we were all into big bulky books by AMERICAN MEN

It occurs to me that from my own particular POV, Lockwood vs DFW is like Katharine Birbalsingh vs Jess Phillips.

would pitch in to crowdfund renewing pinefox's lrb subscription

i watched this 2003 dfw interview from german tv on youtube last night. i think it's one of the worst videos i've seen. he's so visibly uncomfortable. the interviewer asks these vague and "deep" questions that keep him going over the same topics. there are 5 questions in a row about how drugs in infinite jest are a metaphor for contemporary american corporate capitalism. as someone who occasionally feels nostalgia for the 2000s, it made me very relieved that the decade is now far in the rear view mirror

this supercut that compiles all his nervous tics from the interview is one of my favourite videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqmIAbHXr0Y

Goings on in African colonial wars are something I often shy away from bcz it's so so grim but this is a pretty good piece on a book that's handling quite a lot of material and a fairly big cast of characters across many territories.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n12/kevin-okoth/poison-is-better

*cough* if you use the Tranquility plugin for Chrome, you can read the LRB articles.

assigned reading merch!

https://londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/collections/books-for-the-next-twenty-years

Article on Spotify

If I’m not mistaken this mentioned a longtime ILM poster and data wizard.

Keith Watson?

Glenn McDonald. He used to do those amazing stats for ILM EOY polls.

last posted here five days ago :)

I have restarted my subscription to the LRB, and read most of issue 27.7.2023.

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite on nuclear attack: sobering, but I don't see why she disparages the author as a 'tourist', and she is wrong to suggest that the main lessons we can learn from past nuclear fear are about climate change, rather than the dangers of war now. Strange to do this while a nuclear power is at war on the edge of Europe and the risk of nuclear annihilation is the main reason that NATO countries aren't fighting.

Deborah Friedell on J. Edgar Hoover is remarkably clear, readable, entertaining, balanced. It made me think slightly, it's curious that they leave an English person to review this very US topic, then I realised or remembered that Friedell is actually American.

the seamus perry piece that revisits e.waugh in 10.8.23 (v45 no16) is useful, at least to me, in a "why i never need read further waugh"* for (i) establishing that the adjective is "WAVIAN" and (ii) locating perhaps the tartest demolition of EW's moral worldview via (of all ppl) his son auberon, courtesy the tale of the three bananas

*i have read scoop and pinfold, both a very very long time ago

I finish, at last, LRB 18.5.2023. This included rereading the whole of Adam Mars-Jones on James Purdy, which is often so good that I can imagine I'd like to read it again one day, when I've forgotten it for a second time. I can't think of any reviewer so fastidious with phrasing. Even down to the last paragraph's throwaway notion of 'some obscure outfit operating in the wilds of Godalming'.

I missed this in print. Aged 80, TE still writing judiciously.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n13/terry-eagleton/be-like-the-silkworm

Oh, now I want to read that article on Purdy. Love his work.

Lol that review was hilarious.

Amos’s character shifts sharply, no longer a pure lover destined for one man but a seducer across a broad front. He captivates a millionaire with no previous responsiveness to his own sex, but who is soon saying, ‘I just love you, that’s all there is to it, and I could drink your come in goblets,’ a style of compliment that is unlikely to catch on.

Very gd piece on Richter, and how this critic thinks and writes of him. There is quite a bit on Capitalist Realism and the 'third way'.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n16/malcolm-bull/squeegee-abstracts

It's one of these pieces where you know a bit about it beforehand, and you learn just a bit more afterwards.

LRB 10.8.2023. An issue containing much bad, irritating or boring material.

I started reading Malcolm Bull on Gerhard Richter, couldn't bear it, was glad to realise I didn't really have to go on.

James Meek in Ukraine at least worthy and informative, though not enjoyable. Reliable Tom Stevenson agreeably critical of a UK diplomat.

Worst thing in the issue must be Seamus Perry's superfluous, pointless lengthy display of indulgence towards Evelyn Waugh, who comes across (though Perry doesn't seem troubled) as arrogant, obnoxious, superficial and delusional. Space wasted that could have been given to others who don't get representation.

The one unusual positive: Randall Kennedy on affirmative action, writing with lawyerly care and rigour about the issue and advancing his own view. None of the usual slack, self-indulgent LRB rhetoric, just clear statements adding up to persuasive arguments. I could wish that much more writing, in places like the LRB, was like this.

Paul Keegan's piece in the latest LRB reviewing the Penguin compilation of French short stories is really thorough, diligent: about the stories and their authors, what is missing, what shouldn't be in, the sequencing among other editorial choices (criticising an LRB contributor now and then!), it's many varieties of short story, both from the earliest days of French literature to the present, both from France and it's colonies.

Really showing the world here.

I read a recent TLS, including Oliver Herford on Browning's THE RING & THE BOOK in a new scholarly edition from Longman, via Routledge.

The review was very well turned and communicated what Browning's poem is about. So now I know something I didn't.

Good low-key clowning of Peter Singer by Lorna Finlayson, and the best criticism of his basic enterprise that I've come across.

I found myself in a rather Pinefoxian mood disapproving of all the swearing.