Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

Is the LRB's bookshop still in business?

Most people I know get their LRB in the post, so availability isn't really an issue.

Gregory, dish!

Can you name any other independent bookstores that've opened in the past 3-4 years? God bless 'em, but I'm not sure how they do it.

The TLS is the Times Literary Supplement, Carol.

There's free stuff to read on both of 'em, and it's often really good.
I'm just glad they're both there, but major props to whichever one had James Wood review Elizabeth Costello; I haven't even read it yet, but that article has been one of the highlights of my year.
Um, yeah. Must get out of the library more often...

I have!

I want to know what you said, eg about underrated and overrated writers!

Maybe it is not available in the Republic of Letters, I mean, Ireland.

Underrated: Norman Rush.
Overrated: Ian McEwan.

Given how critical I've been of Colm Toibin, it is fair to say: his recent LRB review of Thom Gunn is one of the better critical pieces I can ever remember reading from him. He knows the poetry, compares collections, makes it personal without being too self-indulgent.

Very good:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n15/john-henry-jones/diary

It is.

Another wonderful Katherine Rundell
https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n13/katherine-rundell/consider-the-hare

"And it highlighted the fact that over the 10-year period, the London Review of Books did not publish a single review of a non-white poetry book, or the writing of a single non-white poetry critic. A total of 105 poetry articles by 39 poetry critics were published by the LRB over this period.

“All 39 were white. Those 105 articles reviewed 127 different books and all were by white poets,” says the report. “No other magazine in the UK has published more articles without a single non-white critic. It is the only magazine in our data set to have never published a review of a non-white poet.”

The Ledbury analysis points out that since 2009, eight non-white poets have won the UK’s major poetry awards, the TS Eliot and the Forward prize, including Derek Walcott, Claudia Rankine and Ocean Vuong. “The LRB has reviewed none of these,” it says."

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/25/diversity-in-poetry-on-the-rise-but-resistance-to-inclusivity-remains?

As July begins, I have reached the first LRB of May.

Still reading articles about the pandemic from the beginnings or first half of its duration thus far. It felt more dramatic then.

The poetry that gets printed by the lrb is generally from a very small number of poets (Anne Carson, John Ashbery (rip) August klienzahler, Rae armantrout) some I love (eg the first two) some I quite dislike (the second two). But like the rest of what they publish its for the mostpart from within a very narrowly defined cultural milieu. Hard to even imagine them going as off-piste to include more experimental contemporaries of armantrout (Susan howe say). In part the narrowness of the lrb is part of what can make it good. The article they published about Theresa may is one of my favourite and it's insights only make sense from within the same parochial 'i went to Oxford' perspective that unites their core staff. Patricia Lockwood is a real oddity and her regular articles delight in contrasting with a house style that can feel oppressively uniform in its tics. It says something of what is so simultaneously monstrous and refreshing about the lrb that its obvious that reflecting greater 'diversity' wouldn't even occur to them.

I think I'll never catch up.

But then I think: I won't bother reading Jacqueline Rose. And I don't need to bother with this preposterously long, utterly typical Colm Toibin article about letters that Robert Lowell wrote about having an affair.

Lol I remember that one. I couldn't help thinking that I would love to read an article of similar length about someone in another profession's utter shit-headedness towards an ex. A profession like hairdressing or database management. I don't know why writers' private lives are supposed to be particularly interesting. I know the justification is that Lowell wrote a book of poems about it, and that it was supposed to be a particularly scandalous conflation of the private and the public etc but frankly the length of the article and the detail therein just felt like wallowing in exactly the worst parts of the whole affair.

Lowell is boring but toibins writing on him is appalling drivel

Haven't read the particular article you're referencing

And I don't need to bother with this preposterously long, utterly typical Colm Toibin article about letters that Robert Lowell wrote about having an affair.

lol that is a pretty fair summation

I don't know why writers' private lives are supposed to be particularly interesting.

Everyone loves gossip + parasocial relations with celebs.

I read that Tobin piece and concur, but for the bits on Hardwick, whose writing I've been getting to know more in the last year or so.

The piece by Rose on Camus is really fine and you all should read it. The way it integrates covid with a novel that has had a bizarre re-discovery.

Tracer Hand's post above is my favourite on ILX for some time.

LRB used to (might still do) advertise internships only in its own classifieds. I guess it saves money, but doesn't do much for diversity.

Thank you pinefox! :)

I don't know why writers' private lives are supposed to be particularly interesting.

They are to other writers it would appear. Especially Phil Space.

i think LRB's been quite meaty recently but but my reason for reading tends towards "odd perhaps useful fact i was till now unaware of" rather than "deeper understanding of specific topic or person close to my heart" -- and on the whole i prefer the fact to be historical rather than personal these days

i vaguely had an urge to write a letter abt runciman's whitewashy takedown of rahm emmanuel (but i was too busy writing abt adam ant) (who still doesn't feature often enough in this so-called magazine)

(i sent them an actual pitch a couple of months back but got no reply) (i am very very bad at pitches)

i like jacqueline rose but also tend to leave her big long pieces to "read later" as i assume they will be intellectually demanding -- and then entirely forget to read them

adam ant) (who still doesn't feature often enough in this so-called magazine)

Excellent!

it reads like the pitch i sent was abt adam ant but it wasn't (one of several problems with it)

"The poetry that gets printed by the lrb is generally from a very small number of poets (Anne Carson, John Ashbery (rip) August klienzahler, Rae armantrout) some I love (eg the first two) some I quite dislike (the second two)."

Btw I have noticed more people whose poetry I've heard of on twitter being published in the lrb in the last year or so.

"i will never log off"

I came across this piece from Al Alavarez's (someone I hear about now and then but never in an interesting enough way to actually read up on) ex-wife today, reviewing Al's account of their marriage:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n10/ursula-creagh/first-chapters

It has that tediousness of the literary brand of gossip, but its a one of a kind too.

enjoying the big piece on robert louis stephenson and henry james in bournemouth -- which i think does the spadework to establish how a long gaze at entwined biographies can in fact be illuminating

(if only bcz it notes -- claims? -- that henry jekyll of jekyll and hyde fame is in fact a. based on his close friend james ftb same initials and b. kind of a critique of james' attitudes to the world and to writing?)

(also bcz fucksake it's fascinating that these two writers were so close)

i thought the hardwick reaches of the lowell-affair essay were also interesting, tho very VERY buried in much too much material abt lowell, who always elicits a massive #whocare from me -- not that i give much of a fuck abt poetry at all but with him it's like "what if beat poetry but dully posh?"

Might fuck about with the Christopher Rick's archive:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/christopher-ricks

(Read the piece on Empson's Using Biography last week, which I did enjoy. I finished Gulliver's Travels recently so his piece on Swift is just in time)

A lot of swearing going on here.

I very much agree with Mark S's post except his spelling of RLS's name.

Is RLS in the TLS or the LRB?

LRB, in May.

woops

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n13/amia-srinivasan/he-she-one-they-ho-hus-hum-ita

I’ve​ had the wrong pronouns used for me – ‘he/him’ instead of ‘she/her’ – by two people, as far as I know. One of them was an editor at this paper, who I am told used to refer to me as ‘he’ when my pieces passed through the office. In his mind only men were philosophers. The other was Judith Butler. I had written a commentary on one of her books, and she wrote a reply to be published along with it. In the draft of her response, she referred to me by my surname and, once, as ‘he’. Just a few lines later she wrote: ‘It is surely important to refer to others in ways that they ask for. Learning the right pronoun ... [is] crucial as we seek to offer and gain recognition.’ I wrote her a meek email – this was, after all, Judith Butler – pointing out the error. She replied not twenty minutes later: ‘Sorry Amia! I always did have trouble with gender.’ Swoon.

Dreadful, dreadful first paragraph. The highlighted sentence is very offensive, all the more so in the context of what follows. I made it a couple more paragraphs in but I've decided not to continue.

Can you explain to me, what's wrong with the sentence, the paragraph, or the piece?

I'm a little curious as to your thinking here.

I laughed at the bit highlighted (guess the editor either moved on or took it with good grace).

That was one the best things the LRB has published this year. Great essay on language and politics and one of the few things that should be read by more people and re-published in places like The Guardian xp

The sentence attacks another, unnamed, person, without evidence.

The attack is based on hearsay - 'who I am told' - rather than any written evidence seen by the author.

The attack is false - as anyone who is an editor at the LRB will be able to name several women philosophers. Including Judith Butler, who writes for the LRB.

The basis for the attack is undermined further in the next sentence, which notes that Judith Butler made the same mistake. The author doesn't then state that in Butler's mind, only men were philosophers.

Personally, if editing the work of someone whose gender I didn't know, I would check it. I think that people should always be careful about this kind of thing. Maybe this editor wasn't caeful, and should have been (but then, the editor's behaviour is purely hearsay - most things reported third hand are unreliable).

But the primary reason that any UK editor would make this mistake, in this particular case, is simply that 'Amia' might not be such a familiar first name to them. Personally I am not sure I have encountered another person with this name, apart from this author. I would assume that a name ending in 'a' was female or feminine, as that is quite conventional - but hardly universal.

Even if you supposed, hypothetically, that the unnamed editor, unsure of gender, had defaulted to male -- something that one should not do, and could be worthy of criticism -- then this accusation should be stated as such, not confused with the hyperbolic and false allegation in the sentence. Hyperbole and falsehood tend to obscure the real issues that need addressing. For instance, the fact that more men than women get to publish in the LRB.

My comments are on this paragraph - I make no comment on the rest of the article.

Sometimes people report others behaving in ways that seem alien or wrong-headed to you, because these are not ways you could ever see yourself or imagine yourself behaving, therefore it's incomprehensible to you that others might act that way. (Such as not checking an unfamiliar name on a byline.)

In these situations, is your reaction to assume that the person describing these experiences is lying, or mistaken, or otherwise just plain wrong? Or is your reaction to think about the ways that people who aren't like you, might have access to experiences that are quite different from yours, that you have never encountered?

Because I think the latter technique is really important to understanding what pieces like this article are *about*. What if instead of that "this must be a hyperbolic lie", you thought "this person is a woman, and I am not; this person is Asian and I am not. Maybe they've had different experiences that led them to different conclusions?" and went along reading the rest of the article with that understanding in mind? They might not be wrong, they might just be different.

Because it really is a very good, very interesting article about the challenges of grammar, and about getting stuff right, and about how to behave when you accidentally get stuff wrong. When Judith Butler gets your pronoun wrong, that's *funny* - and the humbling of a person who is considered an expert on gender actually provides a lovely intro to how other people, who are less smart than Butler, can also learn to negotiate that grammar.

I really liked this piece, tbh, and wish more stuff by Srinivasan was in the LRB. Her cephalopods article was one of their best.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/andrew-o-hagan-the-great-chip-pan-fire-novelist-of-the-age-1.4338597

Speaking of social media, O’Hagan had his own experience of “cancel culture” in 2018 when he published a long essay on the fire at Grenfell Tower, London, which had killed 72 people. In it he was “disgusted that the Tory government were manipulating this fire for political purposes. I went into depth on how international companies had been able to flout British safety laws for their own profit. But those things still didn’t please my friends on the left, because I also pointed to their unfairness.” He rejected the idea that the Conservative council in whose borough the fire took place did not help the victims and their families, and he was critical of the response on the night by the London Fire Brigade and of some of the activist groups that claimed to speak for the residents of the tower block. “It was obvious,” he says of his critics, “how few of them had actually read the piece. It was 65,000 words, and within 45 minutes of it being published, thousands of people were online, quoting each other, saying I should be shot.”

What rubbish.

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

Terry Eagleton: "The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don't like, is that you don't like to work".

It strikes me this would be more accurate if you replaced "being a socialist" with "posting to ILX".

it me

eagleton always better when you replace key parts of his sentences IME

i was going to post a note abt his recent hegel-related review in the LRB, which is full of sly nonsense lol, but i've been busy with work (which i don't like)

Trying to go one better: play with being a tankie, which angers absolutely everybody around you, and causes more work than its worth.

haven't read a copy so i might be wrong, but something about the fence gives me a bad vibe

the vibe is maybe oxbridge student mag for the hip london lit crowd

Essays really short at times. Gornick on the Village Voice - - besides the anecdote at the beginning - - felt really slim, full of things unsaid, maybe?

feeling very seen in this essay on dark matter:
“WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), which might weigh anything between ten thousand and a million times more than an electron“

wait till you hear about p-branes
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane

here's the phrase i'm stealing from raymond queneau, when confronted with yr posts: "i cannot countenance such laxity"

i posted the above when i'd only read the first page of the queneau review (so that i didn't forget): i've read the second now and am delighted to discover that there's a collective of translators inspired by oulipo (the OUTRANSPO), which seems a very good development that the piece shd have explored a little further!

Link to a letter sent to the LRB re: Hal Forster's review of a book on surrealism.

I read but my knowledge isn't more than surface.

Letter by Dawn Ades, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Steven Harris, Georges Sebbag and Michael Richadson, Editors of the 'International Encylopedia of Surrealism' in response to Foster's claim that "Surrealism has been passed on the right" and other statements. pic.twitter.com/F2MgSUZ9WS

— Abigail Susik (@AbigailSusik) July 15, 2024

Somewhat bizarre conclusion in this piece looking at the work of this Victorian literary reviewer.

"In any event, he deserves better than simply to be remembered for having been Virginia Woolf’s uncle."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/stefan-collini/saturday-reviler

Some good stuff on magazine ecology in the Victorian-era but its mainly looking at this writer. Collini doesn't state the biggest problem with Fitzjames Stephen's writing: that he was proven to be totally wrong. Maybe that was too 'shooting fish in barrels'.

it is ungentlemanly for intellectual historians to resort to such vulgarities!

Zhou Enlai and Barbra Streisand has been the most enjoyable double bill in a while

pleased to see perry taking my line on the cultural revolution lol

Will dive in later to see if there is any mention of O'Hagan's piece on Grenfell.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/james-butler/this-much-evidence-still-no-charges

there's only this very indirect implied mention: "An opposing argument eventually emerged in the press, insisting that the council had been maligned: beneficent and detached patricians, lumbered with an ungrateful tenantry and incompetent TMO, their sins were, in the scale of things, minor."

i imagine this wording is the result of negotation with his editors, everything else about the piece seems cogent and toughly expressed (that it's been run at all is a tacit admission the earlier piece was a blunder, tho not of the scale of the blunder -- let's see if they run any letters about it)

does it signal a changing of the guard? butler has a “contributing editor” for several months (there are 19 and i believe he's the newest); o’hagan is these days termed “editor at large” -- there's only one of these. i don't really know what these titles entail*, my guess for o'hagan is “senior staff writer with wide-roving focus”, while the “contributing editors” are regular reviewers who are encouraged to offer readerly input comment and advice on items run and general direction? (this is literally a guess).

*to be fair no two publications deploy the staff-name designations the same way lol

thanks to a curtailed teenage encounter with jude the obscure (most witchy titled in a bound set on a bookshelf on a rain-best family holiday in wales), hardy is someone i am not at at all likely now to be drawn to (novels *or* poetry), but i have to say i'm getting a lot out of the matthew bevis piece on him: as a much more anxiously strange figure than anywhere i'd placed him* in relation to the fireworks of the first part of the 20th century

*probably unjustly but probably not totally unjustly lol

That Hardy piece says he "must be the first, I think, to have smuggled the word ‘whang’ into a poem", in 1924. Perhaps but in the next issue we read of William James' "sun [...] whanging down", from 1868. A back issue search also finds this joyful title: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n10/ian-hamilton/whangity-whang-whang

thrilling research/article about physics, race, and an old painting!

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n22/fara-dabhoiwala/a-man-of-parts-and-learning

yeah that was good. I also enjoyed the piece about grimoires in the previous issue, especially the ending.

I enjoyed yr bit about bluesky on the blog Mark. Someone in the comments called you a 'pseud' lol

Yup, v enjoyable, couple of other lolly comments

thank you! never read the comments! i am a pseud tho, that's totally fair

Mere Pseud Mag Ed

keep those takes coming

New issue looking great from a fiction perspective. Review of novels by Jelinek, ETA Hoffmann and Balzac

Collini, Tooze and and Lears articles all excellent. From Tooze I learnt the staggering fact that in the last 20yrs China's production of steel and concrete has equalled all hitherto created human building and infrastructure.

This chart from a recent Toozestack is quite a striking graphic representation (apols if huowge)

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F76fa4d8d-52bd-4b9b-b0e2-5dc11b8205cf_1730x1132.png

Full substack post here https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-343-polycrisis-and-the

(Steel and concrete production/urbanisation as major drivers of carbon emissions, but you get the idea)

Hell of a piece.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n02/patrick-mcguinness/diary

Horrific piece about the south african government deliberately trapping underground and starving thousands of 'illegal' miners. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n04/helen-sullivan/diary

you’re not kidding. jesus christ.

The book, Eucalyptus, will take seven years to write, so it may be these plans aren’t as good as they look. Meanwhile, H is ‘on a hair trigger’, suffering from nocturnal hot sweats, and V says that he has to ‘have “an asbestos suit on” in order to criticise her work’. One evening in 1992 before Cosmo is published, he takes her bare feet in his lap and finally tells her what he thinks of it. The first section makes ‘a very strong story’ he says, but her friend O, who suffered from a brain tumour, would have been shocked to see himself ‘revealed and scrutinised’ on the page. In another discussion, V says she has an obsessive interest in ‘death, rape, murder and so on’ and H wonders if this is true and, if so, ‘Is it wrong?’ He is also of the opinion that she is limited by her subject matter; she should get away from the 1970s, which he describes as ‘a period of bullshit’. When H counters that his work feels like the 1950s, he says it is set ‘in no-place and no-time’. (Ah, the men who don’t write about anything.)

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n08/anne-enright/i-stab-and-stab

Very nice

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n11/jonathan-meades/ranting-cassandras

At least one ilxor thanked in the acknowledgments of the Hatherley bk (which is good but almost comically overstuffed with info - more images, in better repro, would have helped a lot imho).

More of a overview of Plath as oposed to just a review of the prose (you can never just review Plath, the writer, that wouldn't be any fun). Touches on Malcolm's book.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/patricia-lockwood/arrayed-in-shining-scales