Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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.

some people *are* arseholes though!

Have just come across this 2001essay via twitter:

Halfway through, it's astonishing..

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n04/wynne-godley/saving-masud-khan

do I need to read about some fucking orwell y/n

i know colin burrow is is a bit deprecated round here but tbh i enjoyed his dyspeptic scepticism on this overworked topic

also i liked learning that mr decency planned tortures for his enemies in the bath of a morning: i count myself to sleep sheep-style by imagining the terrible ends of mine (includes no ilxors)

Have just come across this 2001essay via twitter:

Halfway through, it's astonishing..

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n04/wynne-godley/saving-masud-khan🕸

Yeah, read this over the weekend. Wow. A couple of lines from Masud floored me ('have you ever thought about killing yourself? You wouldn't know who to kill' being the most devastating). Made me think of similar things that were said about Lacan. What a monstrous prick.

Amazed he re-built his life after that.

Piece on Schulz really good on Jewish writing and thought in decaying European empire, as well as the strange afterlife of his visual art.

Wiltold Gombrowicz’s and Bruno Schulz's mutual appreciation across the years.

Gombrowicz said they 'were effectively conspirators'. pic.twitter.com/MVM2JLaTQO

— Brian Davey (@b_davey) October 18, 2023

Adam Shatz of @LRB blocked me because I asked why they would not invite a Palestinian to write about their conditions. https://t.co/vabUkolY0l pic.twitter.com/f93DfqxJ28

— Abdalhadi Alijla عبد الهادي العجلة (@alijla2021) October 21, 2023

Patricia Lockwood meets the Pope

wake me up when she meets the pinefox :)

I found it typically sparky at the sentence level but strangely hollow or formless. I suppose it is just a diary piece. In the same issue the piece about Switzerland's erstwhile goiter problem was much more interesting.

Lockwood at her lolrandom! worst. I am now desperate for a social situation into which I can drop my Swiss goitre knowledge; it will probably happen in about 8 yrs' time, when I've forgotten most of the detail.

yeah lockwood is best when you can tell she is trying to write something accurately that you can assess - like her updike piece. lolrandom! is a good description for when her zany descriptions are not ways of making strange something you already have some familiarity with. When she says somehting like 'I felt like a small child trying to imagine Mariah Carey lyrics in Spanish' (or whatever) this is totally pointless unless there's something it manages to weirdly nail. If you're relying on it for an account of something you don't know about already its less than helpful.

Just sorta looked through at the Xmas issue.

See Alan Bennett's life is apparently so boring that he hasn't written the diary. Pretty obvious read into this and it's kinda sad even though I never engaged with it

Otherwise Meek on Prestige TV is fine enough. It probably needed someone with a sharper grasp of US TV history to write it. Read fine but felt there were gaps I can't put my finger on rn.

i believe it's a genuine normal diary, i.e. entries made daily at the time, so it probably is *written* -- just that he feels it doesn't catalogue anything worth publishing publicly

(agree re the sad read of the situation: he is 89 and not particularly strong or well)

the katherine mansfield essay is great (in that it relays what a bonkers weirdo* she seemed**, and that biographers have been unable to agree on which of the many tales she told abt herself are true and which false -- tbh i know her entirely from being one of the authors re-published by virago press in the 70s and 80s, i've never read a word)

*yes i know this is super unkind and dismissive of possible (indeed likely?) causative trauma, but she was not exactly a fount of kindness herself (e.g. towards her faithful companion ida)
**virginia woolf hated and envied her, in which feud i am already very much on mansfield's side, full story be damned

(to be clear i have also read very little virginia woolf, im a total imposter when it comes to the literary canon)

I skipped the Meek prestige TV article once he mentioned Miami Vice to illustrate pre-prestige commercial goodies vs baddies television when it's common knowledge that show is one of the forerunners of the prestige format and very much not about good triumphing over evil all the time. I don't even have any emotional investment in it but come on do your damn research.

(adding: also to be clear i enjoy reading that The Greats™️ -- alexander pope, emily dickinson -- are often spiteful and petty articles, as i have a spiteful streak myself)

Yeah, the Mansfield article is full of great details -

Ida ... tried to charge society girls for ‘scientific hair brushing’, which didn’t take off

My additional detail - John Middleton Murry's son was the SF author Richard Cowper

Otherwise Meek on Prestige TV is fine enough. It probably needed someone with a sharper grasp of US TV history to write it. Read fine but felt there were gaps I can't put my finger on rn.

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 11 January 2024 11:42 bookmarkflaglink

I felt this was pretty thin, a weak theory, and yes v gappy tbh. didn't cohere. might express that a bit more thoroughly, tho not sure i cbf'd tbh.

i like quotidian gossip so i usually enjoy diaries, Alan Bennett's included. does feel like we've seen the last of them.

and, not at all unrelated to the above, yes by god alexander pope had a spiteful side, but then that milieu was something else for cat and spite, libels, slanders and squibs etc all conducted more or less publicly. tremendous energy for it.

The Mansfield piece was really good, should read a few short stories. I liked how she hated/had no time for the Bloomsbury set, apart from Woolf and even then it's sorta complicated.

Rebecca Solnit on San Francisco in the new one is pretty dreadful. Not that I disagree with it but it is such a generic "tech ruined SF" piece it could have been written by ChatGPT.

I am just going to come out and say that I think Solnit is an abysmal writer, always has been.

This is such a great essay, on Sumerian lit:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/anna-della-subin/wreckage-of-ellipses

yeah loved that

Really good side-by-side pieces on aspects (Technology and education) of the medieval/renaissance in the latest LRB. Automatons and Jesuits.

Jon Day on Ronnie O'Sullivan was fine, OK, though there is an aftertaste of an irritating, explanatory tone. As I know as much (if not more than the author, for a rare change) on snooker the odd omission really grates on me (Ronnie was considered a failure for a long time, like he was going to squander his talent, until he began to realise it and keep at it through advances in mental health provision and all round fitness which wasn't a thing in a lot of sport for a long time, which has kept him going in snooker a lot longer than otherwise.)