Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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.

His granny seems sound though.

Frances Stonor Saunders seems to have published an entire (short?) book in 3 issues of the LRB.

Avoiding most of it has been a good way of catching up on LRB issues.

Jenny Turner really is the best the LRB has. This write-up of the Feminist movement is so good and comprehensive with some nice reflections as a (somewhat, sometime) participant (losing books by Feminists through so many house moves). Really necessary.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/jenny-turner/dark-emotions

jenny T and i once got chucked out of soho's the FRENCH HOUSE for running up its narrow stairs too noisily when the upstairs bit was in fact closed

when oh when will i write up my tales of the wild 80s

900-page biography of Warhol, reviewed at great length (as always) by Colm Toibin, who mainly just tells the story of AW's life, apart from a pretentiously digressive non-linear (ie: later event) opening that doesn't go anywhere or have any positive structural effect.

What is the point?

the element in that wound me up most: he's arsey abt the biographer's mundane attempts at art crit but while he quotes some much better crit (the generally good wayne kostenbaum, the reliably great gary indiana) he delivers none at all of his own, no toibinesque insight or perspective

i mean i think the precis IS the point -- you read this so you don't have to read a full 900-page warhol biog, i use LRB this way a fair amount -- but if that's all you're doing you don't really get to cast sneery shade at the person who handed you the materials you're boiling down imo

David runciman's talking politics podcast used to advertise some website that would summarise dreadful airport pop sociology books so you could get the jist in minutes. It came in handy when I had an awful boss who used to prescribe these as part of my job and actually quiz me on them.

Mark S: yes, I agree, the worst thing about the article is that it offers no insight at all of its own.

For you or me, writing for the LRB would, frankly, be a big deal. We would give it our best shot. In that perspective, to do it as lazily and badly as Toibin is insulting.

It's astounding that F. S. Saunders ended up using her three very long episodes to transcribe letters saying things like 'Oxford, 1949: Are you coming up for the summer hols?'

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

Pretty good though it has a sorta clunky analogy to video games which is probably true up to late 90s when I stopped playing them.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n05/colin-burrow/ogres-are-cool

Alan Garner is a great writer notably hard to categorise and I honestly feel deserves better than Adam Mars-Jones stumbling through a review (of a book of essays he barely touches on) alternately missing the point and smoothly patronising him. AMJ’s thing as author & reviewer is a kind of mid-range grown-up novel I don’t really read myself & tbf he probably does provide a sketch-map of this territory I don’t and will never know well. Has he ever convinced me of anything? No! But he examines when and where such books work and don’t — and that’s fine I guess, someone has to patrol these reaches.

But Garner’s work I do know — well enough for once to be able to check back against Mars-Jones as a reader. When 2012’s Boneland belatedly completed Garner’s original trilogy I was happy to revisit all the books I’d read and loved as a kid in the 60s, when he was very much celebrated as a front-rank children’s fantasy writer and I was devouring everything that got the thumbs-up in Puffin Post. But somewhere between 1960’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and 2021’s Treacle Walker — and more exactly between The Moon of Gomrath in 1963 and Red Shift in 1973 — Garner had moved away from the limpid directness generally expected of books popular with children, towards a blunted and cryptic opacity of style honestly pretty demanding for readers of any age.

Not untypically for an LRB essay, AMJ treats this collection mainly as a pretext for restating in précis much that he’s raided from the collection. He gives descriptive summaries of the earlier books, with genuine praise here and there for well wrought sentences and scenes — and takes care to insist on blunders everywhere made (as he sees it) against novelistic practice and taste, about failing to “set the scene” or “sketch character” or whatever. He doesn’t seem to have much of a sense why children’s books and the avant-garde might by choice diverge from the the conventional adult novel — which leaves him little purchase on Garner’s apparent stylistic evolution from kidlit to daunting experiment. And when Garner does explore this, Mars-Jones completely misreads him, arguing dismissively only with this misreading.

So Garner talks about the effect on his fiction, and notable his writing of dialogue, of producing scripts for television, and how the tape recorder has changed how we thinking about words on the page: he contrasts an excerpt from Thomas Hardy with a (post-tape) passage from Red Shift. AMJ finds it baffling that anyone could think this passage is a more convincing representation of how we speak— but in fact this isn’t even slightly Garner’s claim, which is that technology causes us to encounter dialogue less as found material immutably tied to solid social observation, and more as one more element to be worked on and with, for its faceted plasticity of potential meaning — by the author but also of course by the characters.

Garner’s is not a new claim or a strange one (it’s pretty central to modernism’s entire explanation of itself) and of course you can quibble with the quality of his extract as an example — though probably best not to do this by chopping out the context and half the quote (adding here that I literally had to buy this collection on Kindle to confirm AMJ ’s wild misprision lol). What’s happening in Red Shift at this point is two young lovers speaking past one another and one of them silently lamenting his inability to retool how he manages speech. He desires a red shift of his own, to better refit his conversation for his girlfriend’s comprehension.

Garner’s subject matter has always been the intrusion into the modernity being navigated by ordinary young adults of items from the deep and magical past, sometimes author-invented (the elves, goblins and Gandalf-ish wizard of Brisingamen; the treasures, unicorn and melancholy dying otherworld bursting into the Manchester of Elidor) but just as often that of actual-real local myth (King Arthur sleeping with his legions under Alderley Edge in Cheshire, the pan-European legend of the Wild Hunt in Gomrath, the ancient tales from the Mabinogion trapped in a hill-bound mid-Welsh valley in the The Owl Service). What seems to change for him (courtesy the tape recorder and the TV scripts) that dialogue stops being the affirming irruption of the merely observed real into his stories as they unfold, and becomes — if you like — part of the art that the same characters can work on, the choices they can make (or sometimes can’t). Conversation as the arrival of powerful objects from the past (the things we’ve programmed ourselves to say things) as matter that fails to help or to contribute: how might fiction and fiction’s characters navigate this (scientific?) fact. Routine communication, it turns out, is extremely unlimpid — and this is part of the adventure (and perhaps why the adventures seem to become distinctly grimmer). Red Shift sees a sequence of unhappy pasts and presents intersecting in unsettling ways: and the matter of the magic at issue must of course include the author’s own writing that binds them together, and the reading too, as it binds in the reader — or apparently not, if that reader is Adam Mars-Jones.

You make Red Shift sound appealing---I've only read Owl Service, also on your (and others') say-so: awesome, but also I'm ready to see him try something a bit different. Doesn't sound terribly diff, re young lovers speaking past each other, one of them reproaching himself, rings an Owl Service bell: plenty of gender and class clash in that one, and I can also see how it might have been a good read for me when much younger (though as technical child I was more about science fiction and comics).

one difference is that red shift has three storylines -- the modern one, one from the civil war and one from post-roman times, about romans left behind after the empire had quit

all three are very readable in themselves (tho the action is sometimes very implied and you have to be paying close attention to pick out); the exact nature of their relationship with one another (and how much much it matters) is definitely some of the difficulty of the book

"AMJ’s thing as author & reviewer is a kind of mid-range grown-up novel I don’t really read myself & tbf he probably does provide a sketch-map of this territory I don’t and will never know well."

I avoid AMJ like the plague because he is always reading books like he has a manual of how to write books in front of him.

But I have been reading back issues of the LRB a lot lately so might read this.

the upside i guess to the irritating mars-jones review is that not only did i buy POWSELS AND THRUMS to read (👍🏽) on kindle (👎🏽) when i realised AMJ was missing all kinds of points abt it, but i realised as i read the relevant how-i-wrote essay that i was being spoilered for the novel THURSBITCH, which i had in the house but had never cracked open: so i read it (👍🏽👍🏽) and then i read the relevant essay, which is among other things a true semi-ghost story of garnerlief in that part of cheshire (👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽)

POWSELS AND THRUMS basically means odds and bobs and is apparently correct archaic cheshire lingo used to textile trades-ppl tho also on repetition faintly twee in effect: he shd totally have called the books of essays HOW I WROTE THURSBITCH MAN

Yes! But what is garnerlief?

tales of life as a garner (a. garner)

POWSELS AND THRUMS gives off a v strong "I am old and will call my book whatever the fuck I like" vibe.

also have thursbitch. also haven’t read it. powsels and thrums has v late victorian / edwardian end-of-career actor memoir vibe to it. powsels and thrums: a miscellany. powsels and thrums: recollections of a travelling artiste.

Thursbitch is vg IMO - I think my favourite of all of the post The Stone Book books (I haven't read Boneland).

here, this josephine quinn review of a classical history through the lens of shorelines is v weird. quinn sets it up with anecdotes of the 18th century and Victorian leisure in Britain, before moving onto the book which she says “isn’t a retrojection of the British day out at the seaside”. well no because it isn’t about that at all. you’ve literally just introduced that topic at the beginning. which is a shame because i was rather hoping for an essay on the british seaside resort (of which i am sure there are a few already). v odd. rest of review a bit janky as well.

LRB write- up kn Stein felt weak to me.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/adam-thirlwell/devotion-to-the-cut

It’s not clear, in this miasma of blame and disapproval, what the accusation against Stein really is. She was no Resistance hero, but almost no one was a Resistance hero. Equally, there is no evidence that she knew about Faÿ’s anti-Masonic purges, nor is there evidence that she had any sense of being protected by him or his friends. In 1939-40 she translated a selection of Pétain’s speeches, an endorsement that is, no question, deplorable, except that at the time many people believed that in saving France from total occupation through signing the armistice Pétain had also saved French culture. In any case, the translations are so literal and so clumsy that it’s hard to tell what Stein was really trying to do. Certainly, she abandoned the project very quickly and never returned to it. Much of the disapproval has centred on her failure to disavow her friendship with Faÿ at his trial, but then, she had her own values of friendship and loyalty. And most important, the people she actually felt protected by – and it seems correctly – were the villagers she lived among and who had known her and Toklas for years.

From the paras preceding to this one its fairly clear what the accusations are. Excusing translating Petain in the above isn't convincing. Agreeing elswhere w/Stein that there might be freedom in France with a straight face, when you have to hide who you are in occupied land isn't it. Maybe they could've moved somewhere else other than the US. Maybe not.

Or maybe they didn't need to move because there was some sort of guarantee they would be safe. Even if it lasts a year many would take it. There is no piece of evidence either way and we should say this, instead of this fudge because we like the writing. Maybe I am harsh on it because I don't care for Stein.

Stein is like Pound or Eliot to me: someone whose legacy of what their work inspired is much more interesting and significant than their own work could ever be.