being a record, week-on-week, of the astounding digressive fragment detail or item which sets each issue of the LRB apart from any other publication, similar or elsewise

(by virtue -- despite severe variation -- of its reliable presence and its unfathomable content)

viz: "He wrote more than twenty books in all, ranging from a social history of tattooing to murder mysteries featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas as amateur detectives in Paris"

kevin brazil in LRB vol.42 no.4, 2 feb 2020

being a record, week-on-week, of the astounding digressive fragment detail or item which (by virtue -- despite severe variation -- of its reliable presence and its unfathomable content) sets each issu

this just pinged into my inbox: "NEW Handmade Ceramics from the LRB"

brb sending off for a really crappy coiled pot made by edward luttwak

"By the 1650s the attacks were so frequent that fishermen became reluctant to put to sea since it meant leaving their families ashore unprotected. Oliver Cromwell decreed that any captured corsairs should be taken to Bristol and slowly drowned. Lundy Island, where pirates from the Republic of Salé made their base, was attacked and bombarded, but the corsairs continued to mount raids on the coastal towns and villages of Cornwall, Devon and Dorset"

lundy is here lol

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/11/18/article-2063138-0EDA77B800000578-870_233x334.jpg

Lundy, Fastnet - is that the progress of the shipping forecast? it’s in my head from when i used to wake up screaming at horror o’clock to the UK theme, shopping forecast and farming today. all fucked. drown them all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxHa5KaMBcM

Showers. Good. Occasionally not bad.

lol.

Posted this to the outbreak thread already, but:
Regarding schooling at home in China, via https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n05/wang-xiuying/the-word-from-wuhan

Children were presumably glad to be off school – until, that is, an app called DingTalk was introduced. Students are meant to sign in and join their class for online lessons; teachers use the app to set homework. Somehow the little brats worked out that if enough users gave the app a one-star review it would get booted off the App Store. Tens of thousands of reviews flooded in, and DingTalk’s rating plummeted overnight from 4.9 to 1.4. The app has had to beg for mercy on social media: ‘I’m only five years old myself, please don’t kill me.’

Walter Dornberger, a favourite of Hitler who oversaw the V2 rocket programme and its extensive slave labour workforce, emigrated to the US after the war and soon found employment in the arms industry. In the 1950s he presented the US air force with a proposal for a ‘boost-glide’ weapon, first conceived by his former colleagues in Germany. His initiative led to Dyna-Soar, a manned aircraft that would be boosted to the edge of space by a powerful rocket and then glide at high speed around the planet, dropping nuclear bombs at designated spots along the way.

I'm surprised I don't recognize more of what's on this admittedly brief thread, as I read possibly more of each LRB (about 90%) than anyone else on ILB -- but then that means I'm way out of date, which might explain it.

I always think I read most of it, but each issue has at least one letter about a piece in the previous issue that I missed but sounds like the most interesting thing they've ever publisheed.

^^^

I just re-started my subscription. Seems like the right time and £12 for £12 issues is madness.

the cover of this week’s is absolutely gorgeous

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n12/adam-shatz/who-does-that-for-anyone: "Melville’s refuge was his desk, where he wrote his scripts and edited in the middle of the night, with his sunglasses on and all the windows and shutters closed."

This is very much in my wheelhouse at the moment (it's Stevenson and his time in Bournemouth: Henry James, writing Jekyll and Hyde) and I liked it very much: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/andrew-o-hagan/bournemouth

The Greenland shark can live for 500 years; there are some alive today that lived through the plague: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/katherine-rundell/consider-the-greenland-shark

what?????

That piece is amazing!

"sorry twitter, this greenland shark is not actually full of pee"

Astonishing. Written with tender affection as befits the ole shark, too.

ive been saving up the various katherine rundell pieces, which seem like a really nice idea well delivered

Saving up?

Surely they'll all become a bijou book at the top of the LRB bestseller list, if their shop ever reopens?

yes i just mean i'll read a bunch of them in one go maybe

Yes, that book is a book I would buy in a second. Her pieces are wonderful.

I liked the shark too. Also that piece about Cromwell in power

Watermen and Hackney Carriage drivers falling out

classic hackney

Colported home by Leo Amery, the judgment of De l’esprit de lois re-emerges as the deeper truth of our institutions after all, whatever historians may say.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n20/perry-anderson/high-jinks-at-the-plaza

l'esprit DES lois, no ?

I cannot parse that sentence.

'Colported' is a genuinely unknown verb to me. It looks like a pun on 'Cole Porter' (or even The Coal Porters), but can't be.

Budo Jeru looks correct to me - if lois is plural then surely it should be des; so maybe it should be 'de loi'?

The adjacency of 'of De' is confusing also, I admit.

'the judgment of Of the spirit of the laws re-emerges' ?

de l’esprit des lois is a book by montesquieu so it's certainly an error from author and sub -- i imagine he's referencing the concept at the book's root (having not read it) rather than the book per se

colportage is the distribution of books, tracts and other publications, often somewhat disparaging: the "peddling" of same

as before i conclude that subs don't get to touch perry's prose, or don't really bother (you assume he's mainly correct even when it makes no sense, and that he'll bite yr head off if you point out a mistake so fuck him)

i suppose i shd read the whole thing now lol

Impressive knowledge of Montesquieu and Colportage.

i see now that it's a perry anderson piece from 1992, so i think it's more likely to be an error in the process of digitization (?); strikes me as unlikely that PA doesn't know his montesquieu, but perhaps mark's theory is correct.

anyway, having done a bit of research, the sentence becomes clearer: the "colportage" in question is really the notion, recorded in "thoughts on the constitution" by leo amery, and paraphrasing montesquieu of course, that "the division and equipoise of our Constitution is its chief characteristic and the secret of its success." that's from 1947, so the weirdo verb" colported" (i suppose) refers to the fact that montesquieu had largely fallen out of favor in the preceding years, and it was amery who evidently succeeded in smuggling back in to british intellectual history one of M's core observations about the british constitution—that its separation of powers ensures the preservation of british liberty. ferdinand mount, having cited all this, then quotes james madison to make a broader point about the notion of the separation of powers, and the influence of montesquieu generally, having always been at the core of both the british and american theorists' development of their respective constitutions, hence (i think) the "re-emergence" or re-affirmation.

p.s. i'd encourage anyone hoping to gain a basic understanding of montesquieu to read the first chapter of raymond aron's "main currents in sociological thought"

Impressive knowledge from budo jeru also!

i feel the subbing has got less stringent recently (or maybe i've got more particular, and less over-awed by PA)

my entire current knowledge of montesquieu and colportage comes from googling earlier this morning lol

ha ! yeah, i def relied on some creative googling, too

Mark: in general I have seen more (but few) typos in the LRB in say last 3 years, when I used to see none.

I'm on issue of 21st May.

I find it hilarious that Edward Luttwak begins an article on Italian fascist military failure with this, a random element that isn't about said failure at all:

Scuba diving​ was pioneered in Italy and so was the combat frogman and all his equipment, including hand-placed limpet mines and the explosive motor boats and manned torpedoes that the Japanese would copy as suicide weapons – the originals allowed the operators to save themselves, if they were lucky. With a tiny fraction of the Italian navy’s resources, between 1941 and 1943 Italy’s sea commandos destroyed two British battleships, wrecked a heavy cruiser and two destroyers as well as 18 supply ships and tankers. Aside from much technical ingenuity, this exemplary force multiplier required heroism of a particular kind, not just individual but collective, not just episodic but habitual: the fragile prototypes that made up the equipment could be deadly even in training, let alone when intruding into enemy harbours and through torpedo nets.

the combat frogman and all his equipment

https://img.favpng.com/16/12/1/axel-f-crazy-frog-youtube-popcorn-song-png-favpng-DQjzQiHt6pXWAfy31juAVym2D.jpg

insta-fp

a-nim-nim-NAH

"Floating through wonderful, sometimes ominous, scenery for five days, Stella fell into a dream-like state, not unlike moods in a Chinese poetics of which she was unaware"

fuck OFF perry

this piece is readable and fascinating as regards the history -- though the attempt to frame it as a memoir of PA's father doesn't really work (memoir not entirely his forte)

Do I need/want to read the ongoing France Stonor-Saunders thing in the last couple of issues?

Don't read it if you want to know what's in the suitcase. Or if you don't really care about the life stories of this guy's parents and grandparents and great grandparents.

Not a guy! Sorry.

From this review: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n16/tom-crewe/a-girl-called-retina

Julie Welch’s father, we are told, turned into such a drunk that he once ‘“plumped up” the dog, thinking it was a sofa cushion’.

been a bit useless updating this good and handy thread, apologies all

From Nicholas Penny's review of Rosemary Hill's Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism: "The century before Scott’s The Antiquary (1816) saw the burgeoning of a type of antiquarianism about which Hill has less to say. It is well illustrated by Three Hours after Marriage, a farce written by John Gay, with the assistance of John Arbuthnot and the young Alexander Pope, which was performed at Drury Lane in 1717. The leading character, Dr Fossile, has just married a much younger woman (‘the best of my curiosities’) and is unaware that two would-be seducers have moved into his domestic museum: Plotwell, disguised as an Egyptian mummy, and Underplot, as an alligator. I refrain from revealing the outcome but note that the mummy and the alligator, like coins and shells, neatly illustrate the artificial and the natural curiosities studied by the man who inspired the character of Fossile: John Woodward (1665-1728), then a figure hardly less eminent than Newton."

dr fossile! they don't write em like that any more (plays)

missed a bunch of possibilities recently but this made me grin this morning:

"Then, in 1733, [Curll] advertised his intention of publishing a Life of Pope, for which ‘nothing shall be wanting but his (universally desired) Death,’ and asked people to supply him with ‘Memoirs &c’ to fuel it" (from Colin Burrow on Pope and hius feud with the publisher Edmund Curll, 21 Apr 22)

not actually very digressive but still a good detail

Early* emergence of by-now smugly whiskered cultural trope, at unexpected angle:
“[Shawnee evangelist Tecumseh’s brother] Tenskwatawa’s status as a holy prophet was confirmed after he predicted a solar eclipse in 1806. (He had consulted an almanac.)”

*Perhaps not the first…

(neither week-on-week lol nor in this instance digressive: this item actually gives a good indication of the complexity of the topic under review)

Frank Frazetta-ass story:
“[I]n 811 [the Bulgar khan Krum] turned the emperor’s skull into a silver-chased drinking cup and the Bulgarian kingdom remained a powerful force in the region for two centuries”

solid potted hustory of the eastern roman empire (which lasted a lot longer than the western one and shd not be referred -- according to the author reviewed -- as "byzantium”)

ilx alumni phil-two covered that story 20 years ago on the Tell me about Bulgaria

Also, there was this famous Bulgarian King named Khan Krum who smooshed the Byzantine Army, killing the Byzantine Emperor, then at the victory banquet, toasting his commanders using the Emperor's skull as his wine glass. Yuk. Then he was planning on laying siege to Constantinople, then he died. Probably syphillis or something. Oh, now some winery in Bulgaria makes Khan Krum Chardonnay.

― phil-two (phil-two), Tuesday, 10 February 2004 01:00 (twenty years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Secretary [pounding clipboard] KHAN KRUM, KHAN KRUM, KHAN KRUM!

got this one remaining of the stuff i wanted to read this ed. thanks for the reminder.

noisy reminder.