Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

I very much enjoyed reading the book reviews in the CULTURE section of the Guardian though - but think they could have been far more bilious wrt BERGDORF BLONDES. I admit I didn't read any reviews which took up a whole page ftb I was very very hungover and the print was jumping about in front of my eyes (not in a good way).

I like the LRB
Because if you're me
The LRB's free

Because some bloke I live with is always subscribed to it. It is the real reason I don't live alone.

ha ha! that is perfect. My bloke bought me a Granta subscription several years ago, and that always keeps him in my good graces.
TLS or LRB - in America, it's hard to find either. I haven't tried, but are they available on line? I read the NYT book review and shall be receiving the NYRB soon.
I find it amazing that all you/us posters have time to read reviews as well as books. Sometimes I get completely befuddled by reading a review of a book by an author of a book that I wanted to read. Does that make sense?

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.

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

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