Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

np. Three Paths to the Lake is not covered in Emre's piece but it's good not bad.

Vaguely related: I am reading Adam Mars-Jones's new novel(la), BOX HILL, a very funny and engaging story of a frankly monstrous relationship.

T.J. Clark on Pissarro and Cezanne: observant about what's in paintings, often good at finding words to describe them. But also full of pretentious, preening verbiage, and allowed to spin it out for a ludicrous 8 or 9 pages.

Might have been OK if they'd said: You can have one page for this, use it to say what you really want to say.

i was quite enjoying that piece, but had only got one page in before the LRB got dropped behind the bathroom radiator, and i haven't bothered to go online to finish it.

reading James Meek on conspiracy theories in the latest LRB, and it continues an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with Meek, which too a certain extent gloms onto my feelings about Lanchester's LRB writing. overall, what i was left with after reading the piece was that it was as much about Meek's engagement with it as it was the subject itself. Maybe i need to put that differently, the treatment of conspiracy theories felt summary and underdone, treating what is already well known and covered elsewhere, as a major topic of what i've got into the bad habit of calling 'the current conjuncture', and the bits that remain of the piece when you remove that are to do with Meek's struggle to understand people without doubt who believe things that are not true. I don't think that is valueless, btw, and in fact the closing paragraph about the greatest damage that epistemology – without doubt, without curiosity – does, is to the notion of learning, is important.

other things i took from it was Popper's original notion of the 'conspiracy theory,' that is the predilection to conspiracy as a mode of thinking: "Popper's notion of conspiracy theory referred to a personal predisposition that could attach itself to anything, precisely because it was nested in the holder's brain." Meek judges, I think correctly, that the development into 'conspiracy theories' as situations is beneficial to that mode of thinking.

Meek contests the assertion that QAn0n can be considered dangerous, like al-Qaeda, outside of a couple of examples, because of Q's instructions to passivity. Define 'dangerous' maybe (epistemic danger, or the danger that one nut goes and kills someone – which Meek acknowledges), but it did make me wonder what the reaction of QAn0n conspiracy theorists would be to a Trump loss. Whether it results in personally damaging destabilising disbelief, with a world coming crashing down, potentially creating a desire for violence, or, in a more benign possibility, whether Trump himself gets converted into a secular saviour, Barbarossa like, into a figure capable of making a future return, perhaps in another form.

Still, leaving those thoughts aside, the overall impression, as with Lanchester, is of a piece converting contemporary complexity, founded to a degree in frameworks like social media and the internet, paradigmatically different to previous frameworks of social communication, requiring new sets of knowledge, into a sort of LRB housestyle pabulum, easily digestible for an implied readership too superannuated to keep up with new concepts. it feels fuddy-duddy, not up to date with current thinking, old man struggling with the world, sort of writing. I'm being v unfair to meek, he's a lot better than lanchester, but i find meek in some respects to be a weak version failure of the strong lanchester version.

as i say, I may be being unfair. I'm not very knowledgeable on conspiracy theory, but i still may have a much better grounding in it, just by being on twitter, say, and that means I don't see the value of Meek's summary. Still, when I look at the set of thinking he's summarising, it seems a bit of a backdated number.

although they're only one voice, and there's often stuff to disagree with, someone like @Aelkus operates in spaces and with tools - video gaming, memes, infosec (with a military analyst background), and a good awareness of contemporary theory - which make them much more illuminating on the given subject. they feel like the right tools and frameworks with which to be analysing the object in question, in part because they comprise the platform on which the object is operating/feeding/infecting.

For example, Meek covers the problem of institutional trust, and the idea that conspiracy theories delegitimise those institutions, in what i would consider a fairly straight way - delegitimisation of institutions is bad because it reduces their effectiveness, and because, at base, they deserve legitimacy. He has a paragraph where he struggles with how to convey this message to conspiracy theorists, imaging himself pitied as 'a credulous centrist.' Well, I think for me, he may not be so far from the truth there, and not so far from the problem I find with this piece. As I say, he skates round the issue several times, almost as a matter of personal doubt: ('...which made me think: "That's exactly the way I feel about Boris Johnson right now." But my scepticism doesn't extend to complete cynicism about the institutions themselves.")

To take Adam Elkus on the same subject (get it while you can; he assiduously deletes his tweets), specifically around institutional communication about masks:

For a lot of people I follow and interact with regularly here, the mask fiasco alone burned what little trust they have in the idea of counter-disinfo https://t.co/3zRbaNRozQ

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

with the important point

What I get the picture of, increasingly, is the lack of a positive theory of legitimacy. E.g people assume that institutional trust is the default condition rather than something that is difficult to achieve (sometimes for reasons entirely beyond institutional control!)

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

with a subsequent important but perhaps seemingly paradoxical point that people can as a consequence overdetermine on the role of social media and 'technology':

There are real things that happen *offline* that might.....just might.....influence people's orientation towards mainstream institutions and sources of information!

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

this sort of thing leads to a certain age and certain type of commentator creating a 'it was the russians wot did it' explanation and putting in a bucket marked 'social media.'

of the NYT role in legitimating that 'Russian strategy' argument:

its just casually mentioned once, and then dispensed with as "imperfect system self-correction" amid paragraph after paragraph of turgid exposition about the woes of Facebook and such

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

enjoyed 'Wang Xiuying''s piece on 'China after Covid,' though it was also interesting to read a counterpoint to the view that gongye dang (the 'technocrat/technological/industrial party) view is dominating, in the thread here:

Currently just as many academics and lawyers as there are engineers at the top; dominant position is held by business management, finance, economics, and degrees in socialist theory/party management

— T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) October 16, 2020

fwiw adam elkus has an archive of essays on his github which i think are often write-ups of his tweet-essays: https://aelkus.github.io

ffs is popper responsible for the present-day salience and flavour of the term "conspiracy theory"? it is 1000 yrs exactly since i last read the open society. there's a piece in GQ by never-say-former ilxor d0rian lynsk3y abt CTs -- i checked to see if it was behind a paywall (no) and googled to see if the names epstein and hofstadter feature in it (no and yes) so i'm guessing it's bad not good but i haven't actually read it yet

jeet heer recently wrote an excellent takedown of "the paranoid style" in the nation -- DL seems just to be treating it as "magisterial in its authority" or w/evs

yeah that github repository is rly good. still, there’s a lot of value in his feed, but it’s SO MUCH ALL THE TIME.

meek says popper is the originator but doesn’t say populariser so not sure. thx for the links - will definitely the read the jeet heer. maybe even the DL if i’m feeling like a benevolent elephant.

New LRB contains Paul Keegan on T.S. Eliot / Emily Hale correspondence. I started leafing through and it went on ... and on. 10 pages?

I happen to be one of the perhaps few actually *interested* in this - I'll read every word of this article - and even I can see that this looks excessive. The material will be covered by any specialist Eliot journal, etc - it hardly requires such massive, intense coverage in a generalist paper.

And what is the issue anyway? Private letters between two people who had a bit of an on-off relationship? It's not like 500pp of Eliot and H.D. debating poetics. Hard to justify.

Fizzles: your own thoughts about Meek and conspiracy appear to be more subtle and substantial than the tweets you then posted from somebody else.

on the eliot letters i must admit doing the same pf. i think the status of the letters are a lot to do with eliot and the eliot estate having a symbolic power in lit politics disproportionate to their actual cultural importance. basically they had to cover it and boy have they covered it.

on adam elkus - i think he’s a v good guide and illuminator of modern media and technology spaces. possibly i would suggest that individual tweets do not do justice to more sustained engagement but possibly he may not be congenial!

From your theorist: 'The mask fiasco'?

... when you go out, most people carry and / or wear masks, at least when they're in shops. (I expect this includes you, like me.)

It's presumably because they've heard this is advisable / necessary / mandatory.

Some people, regrettably, don't comply.

Not really much of a fiasco.

he’s referring to the consistent advice at the beginning of the pandemic that masks did not help prevent the spread of covid and might even do harm. this despite a number of vocal commentators (zeynep tufekci the most prominent) showing strong evidence that it was known that at worst they were a cheap risk avoidance method and at best would help spread the prevention of covid.)

advice was then switched to masks being mandatory on the basis of changing scientific evidence without much actually changing at all other than masks being more available. the UK was even further behind than the states in this respect.

that’s the fiasco to which he’s referring.

his point being is that it’s hard to convince people that institutions aren’t responsible for top down disinformation in scenarios like that.

and that such doubt contributes (in his view “wrongly but nevertheless”) to conspiracy theorising.

I think the current UK government is the most evil and mendacious in my lifetime. I hate the current UK PM more than any politician ever. But on the particular issue you cite, I think they were simply (another of their great flaws) stupid, hapless and incompetent.

That's bad, but not really conspiracy theory material.

i think elkus is discussing the situation in the US

My comments on Fizzles' thinker (whom I don't know) led away from the real topic, on which Fizzles was interesting: Is Meek's article good or bad?

I read it last thing last night and I can somewhat now see what Fizzles meant.

Reading the article I mostly felt: this is OK. No real problems with it.

But it leaves doubts. As far as I recall, Meek never defines what he means by conspiracy theory. Which means that we can never really tell whether someone has a conspiracy theory, or a bad theory, or just a theory.

Meek also implies a kind of pathology - that conspiracy theorising is a sort of condition / illness that you get into or out of - but doesn't explain the mechanism by which you get into or out of it.

A corollary of all this is: Meek doesn't really admit that there might be a continuum of thought, from 'mad conspiracy theories' to what many of us could consider 'sensible critical thinking', and a lot of contested mixture in between.

The figures in the poll he quotes at the start are worth looking into. They look very high. Is this, then, that poll that attributed 'conspiracy' thought to people holding what actually sounded sensible views? There was a lot of criticism of that at the time.

xposts and apologies for re-de-railing.

i've taken the odd step in this post of just indicating for each para what specific area that para applies to, to avoid crossing the streams here.

[abstract argument about epistemic health] yep - US. though i think the general points he's making, about epistemic health – from where do we get information and what is the quality of that information – holds more widely true. the general application here is that it's not necessarily about the masks specifically, but the fact that this sort of institutional gaslighting creates the conditions for conspiracy theorising.

[abstract argument about epistemic health] riffing beyond what he says slightly, institutional silence and institutional lying are obviously not unknown historically, perhaps what is different here is the easy shift from one message to another without evidence change and with a fair bit of institutional 'you must do this' and 'don't you see', which is why i call it gaslighting above, perhaps slightly dangerously.

[meek lrb article]the general reason to bring it up here is that Adam Elkus is like a monkey in the rigging on this sort of stuff. plenty to disagree with and chew on, yes, but meek looks like a bit of a landlubber in comparison. you might allow it if his article were full of links and further reading (again, something elkus is good at), but there's Popper and one recent book on conspiracy theory (which may be v good), and the rest is Meek in the park arguing with randos.

[specific thing about masks] just finally on masks specifically, rather than as one example of a more abstract argument, i actually find the UK example even more 'fiasco' like than the US. One thing that was notable in the US was from very early on a very noisy cohort of people writing about how we should be definitely wearing masks to help reduce the likelihood of transmission. The most obvious figures were the slightly silly but still quite powerful Nicholas Nassim Taleb (of The Black Swan), and the very good Zeynep Tufekci in The Atlantic. It produced a sizeable social media group of people actively pushing masks, and attacking the CDC and other institutions for not doing the same. Those institutions responded robustly on masks and then later equally robustly said people should be wearing them.

In the UK i didn't notice any particularly noisy pro-mask people, although the government and crucially the government medical advisor message was that there was no evidence they made any difference and may indeed do harm. so i think if there wasn't perceived to be a 'fiasco' in the UK, it's only because all media was fairly quiet on it.

i felt i noticed this in particular because i had a bit of a bee in my bonnet whenever travelling through east Asian countries about how many people were wearing masks and what i perceived to be overzealous health cordons at international borders. well, obviously it was the experience with SARS and almost immediately Covid hit the UK i was thinking why aren't they recommending wearing masks? (I did not myself wear a mask). needless to say i feel very fucking silly now.

pinefox i think the questions in your post are interesting, and - you're right - meek sort of raises but doesn't address them.

i think my general recent experience of meek is a bit cruder, which is i tend to say 'and?' or 'so?' at the end of his articles. or a feel he's described the situation, but not usefully gone into either underlying mechanics of it (insight), or what might be done.

i also thought the figures were high. I wondered if this was an approach that took many examples of conspiracy thinking and saw how many people believed in (rather like that excellent report into UK anti-semitism, which found that although the number of people who were anti-semitic was very low, the number of people who held at least one example of anti-semitic thinking was high).

just answer whether i think the piece is good or not, i think my answer would be... not really? if i were a teacher marking an a level essay i would say “C+ covers the subject well but doesn’t attempt any higher
level analysis. doing this will help you get a B, doing it well will help you get an A”

The more I think about Meek's article, the more I agree with Fizzles on it.

"this sort of institutional gaslighting creates the conditions for conspiracy theorising."

This seems accurate. But then - you and I both agree that there has been such gaslighting, and yet we don't believe we have fallen into conspiracy theorising.

Conspiracy theorising is always someone else's problem. This is one of the most obviously suspicious things about it.

"there's Popper and one recent book on conspiracy theory (which may be v good), and the rest is Meek in the park arguing with randos."

Yes, this is part of the problem here. Meek's other articles have been much longer and much fuller. He writes about farming, and talks to lots of farmers, and learns about farming. Here, he ... randomly meets someone in a park. And randomly meets someone at a demo. That's it.

re: the study I mentioned that inflated conspiracy numbers: here is a link:
https://leftfootforward.org/2018/11/guardian-and-academics-under-fire-for-indirectly-branding-entire-british-left-conspiracy-theorists/

The survey stated:
“The most widespread conspiracy belief in the UK, shared by 44% of people, was that ‘even though we live in what’s called a democracy, a few people will always run things in this country anyway'”.

Lefists, including Owen Jones as I recall, stated that this was not a conspiracy theory but a reasonable observation.

This is simply an example of the possibly fluid or contested border between 'conspiracy theory' and 'sensible critical approach to society'.

I do think that there must be a distinction between mad conspiracy theories and sensible critical views. But Meek doesn't properly theorise what it is, even though it's what his whole article relies on.

Here is another example of a problem that Meek does not even mention:

When RLB was fired this year - one of the most significant stories certainly in the UK Opposition in 2020, and one with big effect on the politics and even membership of the Labour Party - the official reason given was that she had endorsed an 'anti-semitic conspiracy theory'.

She hadn't. To say that she had was a slur - practically libellous. But this was the official reason given by LOTO, not just by a Daily Express gloss on the event. So 'conspiracy theory' is a term that can be easily used, very officially, by extremely mainstream people, to delegitimise statements that they find inconvenient. This suggests that a critical and cautious approach to the term may be appropriate.

I think ultimately what Fizzles has helped me to notice is that this was a peculiarly poor instance of Meek's work - short by his standards (which can seem a blessing), half-baked, under-researched, failing really to carry through its thought or define its terms, relying on shared starting terms of reference rather than being prepared to question them.

Andrew O'Hagan, Short Cuts on fresh air in Berlin: rambling, random, yet much more readable than usual, and less offensive.

Really unusually poor letters page in LRB 22.10.2020, including a feeble (though lengthy) defence of the judgment of R.B. Ginsburg by someone who lives in Shrewsbury.

checking the shrewsbury letter out in case it's some clown i went to school with

(no afaicr)

https://londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/collections/debut-novelists-in-conversation-with-preti-taneja

LRB-based event featuring Eley Williams who is known to Tim.

I had been thinking that maybe my previous dismissal of the ludicrously long Eliot letters article was unjust; that maybe it would be good reading.

It's quite well written (but too arch, with various references to the poetry unsignalled, perhaps unfair to those who don't know them). But it has almost no structure, is just one of those articles that, given large amounts of space, allows itself to ramble anywhere without progressing (except maybe, very gradually, in chronology).

I am still only halfway through. Perhaps it will change my mind. But so far:

My sense is that it's a lot of fuss about something rather embarrassing -- the fact that TSE was happy to have a 'relationship' of sorts as long as it was at the longest possible arm's length (ie: virtually two continents away if possible).

Larkin and Flaubert also had this kind of correspondence, but that was with women with whom they had sexual relationships -- but who were frustrated that they couldn't live with the writers. There's an unhappy situation here of needing relationship and needing to escape it. This could happen to anyone - it's not a crime - but it's not worth vast exploration either.

TSE's tale seems more pathetic than Larkin and Flaubert's as, as far as I know so far, he didn't even have a sexual relationship with this woman (maybe rest of the article will contradict this). She was just a friend, but someone he spun out in this special way for a ridiculous amount of time -- before eventually deciding this hadn't even been worth doing. And the impression is that her letters were totally unlike his, and she wasn't getting what he was getting from the correspondence.

It's a case of human fallibility. I can sympathise. We all have such failings. But it's too pathetic, I think, to bear this amount of rambling coverage. It's breaking a butterfly on a wheel.

I started Patricia Lockdown, I mean, Patricia Lockwood, on Vladimir Nabokov with quite high hopes. It started well - bold, vivid, imaginative.

As it went on, my hopes fell. Disappointing, frustrating. Even what had initially seemed such a strong gambit turned out to be oddly ill-founded. In my head I formulated a long account of specific things that were not quite right about the article, but then realized there was no point writing it out. No-one else would ever agree anyway.

I will just propose:

1: This is a talented writer who may not be currently doing full justice to her talent.

2: This writer, in what I've read, relies heavily on received ideas. That is, much of her prose seems to be about bouncing off images of, eg a writer, that the reader already has. I can see some appeal in this. And her LRB readership is typically well-read enough for it to work.

But there are limits to it also. It could be a good exercise for her to write about something in a way that doesn't presume a bank, an 'image-repertoire' as Barthes' translators put it, of pre-existing clichés about it, but has to describe and explain it to the reader from the ground up.

Sadly, despite being such an annoying disappointment, this review may well be the most interesting thing in this issue of the LRB.

Evidently I'm operating at a far lower level of sophistication but I found something to enjoy in every paragraph of this piece!

Also think that all LRB reviewers should henceforth be obliged to produce bingo cards for the authors under review like PL's of Nabokov.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ElbxFMAXgAEe904?format=jpg&name=large

This thread title is peculiarly fulfilled by an LRB article about the TLS.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n21/stefan-collini/book-reviewing

I'm currently navigating the thorny problem of intrusive thoughts developing into intrusive speech with one of my kids (and the attendant problems of shame and censure) and I idly put 'taboo' into the LRB search and came across this (mostly) great Nicholas Spice essay on psychoanalysis: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n01/nicholas-spice/i-must-be-mad

I think it'll be useful, by the by, but I was mostly glad to notice that one of the letters in response was from Mike Brearley, who I always forget is a practising psychoanalyst. That was my Sunday morning.

i enjoyed the lockwood, and actually laughed out loud at two lines in it. i would have been curious at your itemisation of things that weren't quite right pinefox, because i think that idea about using perceptions of a writer, such as nabokov, to describe her own version of nabokov, is an interesting one. i need to go back to the article again, but i thought it was a success.

Ian Pattern on Ngaio Marsh: It was never made clear why write specifically about Marsh at all. It's really more a survey of Golden Age detective fiction - and not an exceptionally inspired one. Does include a mild demurral from Lanchester, for Lanchester-controversy fans.

Thomas Meaney on US power had some insights, lost focus at the end, was at least in the same grand zone as Perry Anderson's vast NLR special on the same theme a few years ago.

Artist Rosa Bonheur was new to me. I could agree that her interest in animals was the most interesting thing about her.

The Lockhart Plot against Bolshevism was also new to this reader.

Barbara Newman on Medieval arts of dying: quite good.

I have walked past the Warburg Institute thousands of times, didn't know about Warburg's special collection of images or that people compared him to Benjamin.

None of these was more interesting than the flawed Lockwood.

I don't much relish reading Ferdinand Mount on Andrew Adonis - might as well read Michael Heseltine on Peter Mandelson - but it must be done.

ferdie on adonis on ernie bevin is a bit of a "posh boys lament the lost red wall" special tbh

the recent swerve into fannish luxuriating in the good and bad of mid-tier tecfic (presumably sparked by lanch's butterfly mind, here as you say w/a very guarded dissent) interests me bcz of this very belated rapprochement w/genre fiction of any type at all

belated editorial rapprochement i mean

Rosa Lyster on a climate fiction novel: refreshingly critical, though maybe veering into non-relevantly / unfairly critical perspectives by the end.

Mount on Adonis on Bevin: yes, better than I'd hoped. It managed not to remind me much of what a terrible person Adonis is. It makes Bevin seem excellent, but I suspect that this is quite a partisan position and, say, a TRIBUNE writer could give a different picture.

My boyfriend finds lockwood unreadable and i find her pieces very enjoyable. His main criticism, which has really tarnished her writing for me is how often at the moments she seems to be about to deliver a real insight or sharp observation it suddenly flips out into an observation about herself. Once you notice this its hard not stop noticing it. He found the piece she wrote on lucia berlin unbearable for this reason. he had just read a book by berlin and i thought he might enjoy the piece but he felt that it kept telling him more about lockwood than it did about berlin. I don't want to read a piece about patricia lockwood he said and this feels incredibly self regarding.

i think pinefox's observations on her are really sharp. i think she is very funny and has a way of pulling at her metaphors or coming at them sideways but yes they do often avoid the work of describing the thing she is talking about but instead pull at assumed shared assumptions about them. There is a line that is v memorable from the john updike piece where she says he grows up, not into an adult but into a country club member which i think is a v good example of her appeal as a writer and how she can be simultaneously both very witty and very lazy. I think this is a big part of her appeal, her writing reminds me of a friend who is very funny in a similar way, but i suspect she could be a lot better.

"His main criticism, which has really tarnished her writing for me is how often at the moments she seems to be about to deliver a real insight or sharp observation it suddenly flips out into an observation about herself."

Think this could be the function of being very online, which also merges with a current for auto-fictional narratives.

Lockwood being given the task of writing about male ++ writers is simultaneously interesting and lazy.

the updike one was very very funny but i got bored of the nabokov one quickly. the women writers series is much patchier than youremember as well

that said, if i see her name on the cover i'm pretty pleased

in general a thing i guess i find frustrating abt the lrb is the non-on-line-ness of its editors (gawkersphere-style) -- almost all of our crit in these theads is abt editing as much as writing

by contrast the lrb shop's account is twitter MVP hall-of-famelol

mary kay wilmers go on cum town is what im saying to an extent

cum town?

It's an irony (not really leftist, but has some currency on us left twitter) podcast

oh ok i was not sure what user mark s was advising famous octogenarian literary editor mary kay wilmers do but it sounded rather unwholesome

"by contrast the lrb shop's account is twitter MVP hall-of-famelol"

You'd also never expect it coming from the guy who runs it (if it is indeed him)