New York vs London Review of Books

Because they pay me to write things! (Sometimes).

But also because for some reason I've always found the NYRB a little impenetrable and bitty and the LRB full of long, in-depth, excellently written stuff - a proof that there is still room for intelligence and depth in the media.

(Especially my bits)

I don't know the NYRB classifieds by the LRB ones are certainly a hoot.

I like NYRB better because their science and history of science coverage is better than that in any other publication. LRB's science coverage is a joke.

poss explanation: nyrb is more interested in actual things that exist in the world right now?

as against Israel, Palestine, Lebanon & Iraq, the current states of one or more of which are discussed in every issue?

i have no idea what either of you mean

truth bombs

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n23/mamd01_.html

what is the lrb's deal, with its terrible political coverage? i'm not surprised the pinefox admires it, in a way: there is something sort of unworldly about it, almost highminded, even when supporting maniacs and killers.

im not sure how that piece is "supporting" mugabe

basically he confuses "land reform" with "state terror".

to be fair, they've published a long letter demolishing the article this week.

Not surprisingly, the justice dispensed by these demagogues mirrored the racialised injustice of the colonial system. In 1979 I began to realise that whatever they made of Amin’s brutality, the Ugandan people experienced the Asian expulsion of 1972 – and not the formal handover in 1962 – as the dawn of true independence. The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact.

Stopped reading here.

Now I feel bad for Kenya, Jamaica, India, etc. still living in the settler colonial era.

I've never said that I admire the LRB's political coverage. I don't know whether I do. Most of it tends to be about issues and places I'm not that interested in. It's much more the Dirty Vicar's thing. I often don't read it, except for the pieces on UK politics. Sometimes I enjoy those, sometimes they can annoy.

I admire the intelligence, knowledge and eloquence of most people in the LRB, a lot of the time, but not all. They also now feature that awful lady whose name I forget but who likes Vampire Weekend almost as much as Nabisco does.

fair enough: i read too much into yr post up there. i rate a lot of their guys, like stefan collini.

He's great, David Runciman is also very good on UK politics. Stephen Sedley is good on law and civil liberties too.

Why did you stop reading there, caek? Factual disagreement, aversion to sobering facts, preference for ideals over alleged realities?

Sedley knows his stuff, is a judge I believe. Conor Gearty has also written well for them on legal issues.

Collini is a knowledgeable intellectual historian and very readable, and his judgements are often convincing - but he's also terribly verbose. I often feel he needs an editor to knock out a few senior-common-room qualifiers out of his prose.

I'm not sure I like Runciman so much, but sooner him than Lanchester. I actually enjoy Ross McKibbin more than any of them, but he really does raise the question of whether this is too high-minded to get much purchase on the real.

P.S. Nothing about that piece "supports" Mugabe, unless you are of the opinion that anyone who writes his name without putting "maniac and killer" in front of it is somehow in his corner. Also it's pretty clear about the distinctions between land reform and state terror; I think it's the post up above that wants to ignore those distinctions!

which is the sobering fact there? he's drawing an inference from his perception of what happened in uganda. perhaps the perception is legit, but it's a big leap from there to zimbabwe. there's something wrong with the tone, as well as with the assertion. why is that the place to start, rather than with, say, the desperate position of most zimbabweans? many of them have evidently not seen 2000-03 as the start of true independence and have suffered for their opposition.

xpost

x-post to Pinefox I think Lanchester is an excellent writer, both in the LRB and in his novels. What don't you like about him?

Why did you stop reading there, caek? Factual disagreement, aversion to sobering facts, preference for ideals over alleged realities?

― nabisco, Saturday, December 13, 2008 3:19 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I guess factual disagreement, if those are the only options ; )

I don't yet know Lanchester's novels, I'm sorry to say. I think that the first two at least sound OK. But his LRB work is sometimes horribly blokeish. I'm perhaps thinking above all of his dreadful, vacuous commentaries on the World Cup. He does, I suppose, know a lot. But I guess I have an aversion to reading English blokes in that mode - it's too close to home? - where I'd better tolerate an American. Maybe.

Actually

a) I still prefer Lanchester to the pompous, preening Andrew O'Hagan (I've seen him lecture twice and chair a panel once - dire performances every time, horrendously self-regarding), and

b) I do get irritated by some US writers too, maybe especially the younger ones - Greif, Gessen (though he was OK on, was it Alfred Kazin? but his novel is pretty awful) and the dire lady whose name I remembered at a party last night: Elif Batuman.

i have nothing to add to the debate about the LRB but i have to say that O'Hagan's "Be Near Me" is one of the worst books i have read. i threw it across the room in a fit of rage about half way in (so i can hardly say i've read it, i read it to that point). "Pompous, preening" and (especially) "horrendously self-regarding" just about sum it up but you would have to add pretentious, unconvincing and poorly written too. there's a housekeeper in the book that speaks like father ted's mrs. doyle without the jokes. it's actually embarrassing.

I see what you mean about Lanchester, pinefox. His books aren't at all laddish, though. Fragrant Harbour, about Hong Kong, is one of the best books of the last ten years IMO.

And yes I agree about O'Hagan, he's pretty insufferable. Terry Eagleton can be similar, particularly when he's blathering on about theology.

eagleton is a copper-bottomed moron. i forgot he wrote for them. yep, ao'h is rubbish too. oh and michael wood -- incredibly ignorant guy. i think that the standard of reviewing is generally very high, though.

It's great to have reached such widespread agreement - 3 people! - on O'Hagan.

I don't care for TE on theology, but I don't really care for anyone on theology. Otherwise I'd rather read TE than most other people in the LRB, and this after 15 years of reading him at length. I am perhaps the only person here who likes him, and will not seek to persuade anyone else.

But it is worth seeing that TE's style is not self-regarding in the same way as an O'Hagan's. It is much more of a machine - a machine for producing TE sentences - which just never stops functioning, and has been producing much the same sentences for decades now. There isn't really much 'ego' in it because it's almost an autonomous entity, a style which seems able to crank elegantly on in its author's sleep. O'Hagan is a different animal - the piety and pomposity of his ego is everywhere, certainly in his public appearances, probably in his prose also.

I have been wondering what one could say to dispel the idea that Michael Wood is 'incredibly ignorant'. But I think one might as well just let the claim stand, and its author fall.

he's ignorant about movies, which seems to be his main beat. you'll have to trust me.

Not being a reader of Sight & Sound or the like, I enjoy Wood, just because I occasionally enjoy reading about film at length. I'm not sure I always agree with him, but he's generally thought provoking. Pls to explain his ignorance?

his perspective on film is basically limited to the crest moments of art-cinema and the approved list of classical hollywood directors, whom he treats as if they were novelists in the worst cahiers tradition.

he's quite a fluent writer, but, perhaps because he has to assume ignorance in his readers, you get really dull articles like this about 'miami vice':

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n16/wood01_.html

first sentence: "There are all kinds of differences between movies and television, and one of them is that TV thrives on situations, faces, interruptions and short-term drama" -- no. this makes no sense! it's like trying to generalize about "radio" or "the internet," but even then, i don't think he explains how movies *don't* thrive on situations, faces, and, uh, interruptions.

some of my favourite movies involve faces and situations.

anyway, the film is visually one of the most exciting of the decade. i suppose he praises the colour palette, but there are more interesting things to talk about than the basically literary elements to do with crockett and tubbs's relationship -- which he gets wrong. (he clearly hasn't seen much of the tv show but it's too boring to go further on this point.)

and here's him praising the truly weak 'american gangster' -- http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n24/wood01_.html -- this is kind of a qed because the film is so bad, but all he does is drag coat over the plot.

Okay, so you're saying he's to into director-as-auteur. I can see what you mean by that. The generalisation you mention above is indeed a bad one.

I like reading MW on film, but it's not his primary responsibility or subject. His major works are on Stendhal, Nabokov, contemporary fiction, South American novelists, and the relationship of literature to knowledge. Two or three of those books are, in part or even perhaps in whole, brilliant. He's written shorter books too, including a predictably good one on Kafka. (There's also an early one on cinema, which I have not properly read, and he was a film critic on New Society in the 1970s; his LRB film work was presented as a late return to that role.) He's now writing, I think, on Proust and Borges. Whatever else he is, he is not an ignorant fellow.

argh, just lost a post. but in brief: obviously he's not ignorant *within his field*, being eng lit; but whereas the lrb scrupulously matches writers to books, movies are deemed a small enough field that one guy who knows his eng lit can be entrusted with the whole thing. he's part of a long tradition -- the weeklies have often relied on dabblers -- and i don't entirely blame the lrb since film professors proper, especially in the US, tend to be illiterate lunatics. but still.

Well, the good news for all of us is that when Wood doesn't write that column, it's taken over by ... Andrew O'Hagan !!!

I'm not sure it's a case of the LRB deeming movies a small field, more that the LRB's primary function is reviewing books, and that any attempt to cover film is by its nature going to be tokenistic. That said, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be picking an appropriate person for the job. Whehter that person is Wood is perhaps debatable.

it's a fair point. they probably cover more films than art exhibitions, which is nice. (is it a sign of anything that their own staff, when they write reviews, have things like 'is a deputy editor for the london review' in their byline? i.e. not 'the london review of books'? thinking of the long history of reviews, which have (obviously) always had books as their main thing, it does seem oddly limiting. on the other hand, better that than 'london review of literature'.)

ha @ pinefox -- o'hagan used to be the torygraph's main reviewer, amazingly.

Probably just a space saver TBH! I think it is telling that their art correspondent, Peter Campbell, is himself an artist and is therefore talking about something he practices. Certainly not the case with Wood.

I think Wood has been involved in the making of a couple of films, in fact!

http://jacketmagazine.com/23/king-wood.html

Wow, good spot!

zomg i had no idea he worked on 'praise marx'! his story is quite reminiscent of fellow lrb man iain sinclair's. (i suppose it is hard to call him a dabbler now, but... ah.)

Golly, that interview, almost the length of a dissertation, is like a stroll through the Elysian Fields.

Massing’s piece on Ohio last week in the NYRB was particularly awful. However, Sarah Kerr’s piece on Bolaño and Orhan Pamuk’s story were particularly interesting.

I live with 12 roommates and I feel like a dick because I subscribe. Whenever someone else puts away the mail someone always makes a comment about it … blah.

i really like the new york review, and the way it's printed on different types of paper? i think the lrb could help itself by including a few photos and less artless covers

uh oh someone's butthurt (first letter)
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n22/letters

i wonder if any ilxors w/ lrb subs want to read this - http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n02/kevan-harris/a-fistful-of-tomans - and then send me a pdf copy so we can discuss it (or just jump to the pdf sending part)

great issue of NYRB this week