Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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.)

Pankaj Mishra's piece is doing the rounds but it's also been taken apart in this thread. Linking to stuff on Primo Levi here.

I can't believe someone can be let print such nonsense in what's supposed to be a respected magazine. Levi of course never said that the Commentary thing "estinguished his will to live" in any serious way, I know all the interviews he did during the 80s. The Commentary article…

— Annibale (@Annibal97783312) March 3, 2024