Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

Feel like John le Carre has replaced GG wrt uncitical reverence, the serious but popular novelist who 20 yrs ago was still largely considered a thriller writer.

haha I enjoy the Le Carre I've read but even at his best he always read so desperate to be Graham Greene

Eric Ambler is the OG genre GG imo

^

greene just feels in full eclipse these days -- last person i read gushing abt him was probably lol julie burchill c.1982

im sure most of you did but i did not know that diana wynne jones was colin burrows’ mother.

i like the idea of niela orr's short piece on MF Doom -- disquisition on masks and death, personal as well as cultural -- but i don't feel it quite work weaving these topics and modes together, likely bcz the editing isn't especially confident abt the topic. of course they're outsourcing the expertise (which is fine) and yes they want to make more space this for material (and for younger writers outside the usual bastani-mocked tight white london circle), but they needed to push harder on what will need translation to their current readers and what might bring in new ones?

case in point (i already moaned abt this on twitter): set down in print, rap verses often don't do the required work to convince a reader (doesn't have to be a hiphop-sceptical sceptic) that they have of course done for a fan when heard on record, and this disparity needs addressed bcz it's locked into the justification for the discussion being in the magazine at all. (by which i mean: a reader unfamiliar with the source will sometimes read a line being described as "great" and think "but as i read this line isn't that great? quite the opposite!" -- meaning that the reasons for the stated judgment need also to be placed on the page (which precision is maybe 3/5s of good criticism anyway). of course when she's writing in the baffler orr can assume a familiarity and an alignment on the reader's part, and needn't spend time on this over there. but if this is about opening the LRB up to new -- presumably an editorial line more than it's orr's own crusade -- rather briefly opening a door in order to shut it again, then the editing needs to be more clear-headed abt who's being taught to appreciate what. the allure of cool -- or just the desire just to be a more youthful cultural loop -- are both engines that will s[putterc quite quickly in this context

adding that LRB's writing abt poetry -- where the "right to be there" isn't even contested, even if half of us just skip the actual poems -- generally does put a fair amount of the required work in? poetry's slant affect w.r.t. prose being a long-known issue.

peace out

(hiphop-sceptical sceptic = hiphop-sceptical reader)

also ignore the open brackets before "by which i mean"

"s[putterc" is what i meant to write tho

Mark S is right. I'm sure if I get round to reading this piece I'll conclude that what it's talking about is repulsive garbage.

Maybe not great to talk of a recently deceased musical artist that tons of ppl on here have a deep love of as "repulsive garbage".

Eric Ambler is the OG genre GG imo

Is Ambler despondent about the state of the British empire and the moral vacuum at the centre of it? I've never read him.

yeah pinefox I know you have "previous" with hip hop, but... I find it difficult to understand how you could be sure about your feelings about something you've not read yet, about an artist you're not familiar with

Daniel_Rf he was more overtly political than that but kinda. Less despondency and more action imo. Amateur protagonists always being underestimated by cruel and amoral professionals

ambler more disgusted than despondent i think: everything is rotten

Len Deighton a big Ambler disciple irrc - and Kingsley Amis a big fan - both of them post-war rottenists in their way

Adam Shatz on the end of the Trump era: solid maybe, but so standard, so much bien-pensant box-ticking. It's more like an Observer op-ed than the LRB. The one useful argument he makes here, which the Observer might not like, is that violence and domestic terrorism are American not unAmerican, and that African Americans might see the issues differently from whites.

Randall Kennedy on the Supreme Court: now this is much better, the real deal. Factual, clear, unflinching, with no faff about figures of speech or personal anecdotes. Just straight ahead through the salient realities and the arguments, with a cold-eyed conclusion from a progressive standpoint. More political analysis should be like this.

I'm sure that Mark S and I had a period of online admiring Len Deighton's COOKSTRIPS.

Yeah in a way a book like Ambler's Cause For Alarm is akin to one of those early modern Everyman books - a simple dude just trying to get along gets ensnared in rottenness and has to hack his way out of it

COOKSTRIPS is grebt, as is the scene in THE IPCRESS FILE where harry palmer has an unexpected meet-cute with his posh old-school boss in a modish supermarket -- which may or may not be a very early UK safeway -- and then baffles said boss by openly buying TINNED CHAMPIGNONS, bcz the best non-posh spies only use the very fanciest ingredients

I had mentally dismissed Ambler as a John Buchan type so very excited to hear he's more interesting than that!

Also need to read Deighton - really enjoyed the adaptations to cinema I've seen. Mind you a friend of mine was reading a Deighton where the German villain "perfectly emulates the Portuguese accent, as the Germans are so adept at" and as a child of German parents growing up in Portugal I'ma have to call bullshit on that.

Deighton a handy midcentury artist/illustrator also: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UyG48ICMzHA/To1XXWbzrCI/AAAAAAAAB80/pNDlaA4xD_U/s320/Penguin+no.+1442.jpg

I have owned that edition for decades. Amazed to learn that Deighton drew the picture!

via digression into the entire cockburn family and even orwell lol this is my ilx commentary on or around ambler

also you can find user aimless serially missing all the points abt him if you use the search function precisely enough

"Randall Kennedy on the Supreme Court: now this is much better, the real deal. Factual, clear, unflinching, with no faff about figures of speech or personal anecdotes. Just straight ahead through the salient realities and the arguments, with a cold-eyed conclusion from a progressive standpoint."

Sounds like Perry Anderson on the EU.

never ever listen to any lrb podcasts ever. it’s like pinefox’s observer editorial comment enacted x1000.

lol

Randall Kennedy on the Supreme Court

Aw, fuck, now the LRB is turning into the NYRB.

this piece on Mary Kay-Wilmers retiring contains two interesting quotes:

“Newspapers say the same thing over and over again and we’re all horrified and collectively up in arms and there’s normally more than one side to something,” she told the Observer in 2014. “So if you hear somebody saying something coherent and intelligent that’s not totally out of order, it’s interesting to read it.”

what happens if it's coherent and intelligent and out of order? I would think that is more interesting to read.

Last year, she explained that the LRB had endured “because we have a sense of humour that you can see without it necessarily being declared. We’re not po-faced, as it were.”

lol rite.

also, consulting editor, who was the editor, senior editor and deputy editor taking over - someone who knows about editor roles tell me whether this is a recipe for disaster? My only analogy is management where having someone who used to be in charge still with an ability to make their opinion felt, and two people in authority feels very very bad.

Those quotations from her seem broadly accurate. You don't agree?

'out of order' seems a floating phrase here - if something is coherent and intelligent, then it is already in order? Maybe what she meant by 'out of order' was contrarian / offensive, in a way that maybe the SPECTATOR is.

I don't think the LRB suffers from lack of humour. Maybe even too much of the wrong kind - as in the indulgence of Bennett but also the blokeishness of Burrow.

I don't know much about McNicol. I think I once met Spawls, at an LRB event. Does she go on as much as Friedell does about how ex-boyfriends are awful, Jane Austen is great for breaking up with awful ex-bfs, etc? That's a tiresome motif.

if “not totally out of order” isn’t an additional qualification what’s it doing there? it feels like a v constraining - “intellectually v sound and well written of course but simply beyond the pale, couldn’t possibly publish”.

and yes i think that the lrb can be incredibly po faced - certainly many of its core writers - (some of their sillinesses might be more easily exposed if they weren’t so sonorous) but this is an area in which we differ, which is part of an ongoing conversation, i feel! (and i still mean to go back to the lockwood with your critique in mind pf)

i mean that “not totally out of order” might just be a way of defining editorial voice, which ofc is necessary, but it leaves questions begging and also seems like not a good way of defining editorial voice!

I agree that 'out of order' confuses her point. It does seem like she's saying 'some things I wouldn't want to publish because I don't agree with them'. Which I suppose I can go along with.

What's an example of LRB writers being too solemn? I don't see it.

Here are some LRB writers who are in different ways comic, dry or ironic: O'Hagan, Lorentzen, Hofmann, Eagleton, Lockwood, Michael Wood, Burrow, Perry, Collini, Runciman, Mount, Mars-Jones. James Wood has a kind of sense of humour but can certainly come closer to solemnity (but less so now). Perry Anderson is, in a way, the least comic but even he has his own kind of sarcasm.

I don't like all those writers much but I don't think excess of seriousness is their problem.

FWIW I would suggest that if you think the LRB is an insular club (something many of us have felt at various times), then humour would tend to reinforce this, and flat seriousness would be the best way to cut through it.

It occurs to me that when he started out in about 1990, James Wood's high seriousness had such a rhetorical function: he was puritanically aloof from backslapping, logrolling UK literary culture.

the humour is a good point. immediately and without much reflection i would say there’s a silly and not at all funny sort of “tittering” literary humour that you notice most in the lrb podcasts, but which i think is present in the writing.

if you’re going to tell me that runciman isn’t unbearably solemn then we may differ on our basics. i would perhaps say that there is a rough space where i would put solemn, self-satisfied, pompous, self-regarding, which i would tend to put along with lacking in humour and that i think lanchester, for all his occasional tone of cumbersome levity, and a fortiori runciman exemplify this.

Fizzles, everything you're saying, to me, confirms the idea that there is *too much* humour, not too little.

The fact that these podcast people josh along chuckling together can't be a sign that the LRB is too solemn, can it?

Runciman unbearably solemn? I find that description incomprehensible. If anything I think he's too blokeish and informal.

Lanchester, again, clearly isn't solemn. He's very similar: blokeish, joshing, ironising - but not actually funny.

To understand what we're describing, we need to be able to posit what the alternative to this mode would look like. I think, again, that Perry Anderson is a relatively good example of the alternative: someone who IS almost always serious, and NEVER indulges the blokeishness.

In fact the NLR would be a much, much better example of a journal that IS solemn. To 99% of people it would be less entertaining than the LRB, though I can still find it entertaining at times.

Guess Mary-Kay Williams going explains why they've hired more women to write for it over the last couple of years.

i still need to write my "defence of bennett" i think (but not today as i am super busy w/non-writing stuff)

busy writing things like tolk = "2horny4elfs"

^^^the wit the lrb needs i feel we can all agree

Runciman unbearably solemn? I find that description incomprehensible. If anything I think he's too blokeish and informal.

so, i think the issue here is that these overlap for me. in that blokeishness = a self-serious male tone, incredibly pompous, which precludes the vulnerability from which self mocking and humour (and i mean humour as separate from self-mocking - allowing the subject and your approach to it to allow itself to be made fun of) can emerge.

but this i think is giving it all more analysis than it deserves, and we'd need to do some work on a shared framework to make any headway, though as discussed before there is a wider discussion to which it contributes.

i quite like the bennett yearly diary. probably for all the reasons i'm supposed to like it, gossipy parochial observation of the world with the background of bennett's experiences and history in letters and the arts and what i'll loosely call english society with a medium sized s. like the author it's become more frail over time, and that was particularly noticeable this time around, but i don't mind it particularly.

"in letters and the arts" -- including in particular the camp* green-room bitchiness of theatre-style gossip

*AB's relationship to camp is complex and somewhat reserved tho: i feel that he finds full-on high camp a bit tiresome and vulgar

Lost in all this again, but wondering why it's the Russians wot done it is a discussion of social media is nec. to be dismissed, thinking of Mueller and other US Gov reports, also why is favorable mention of Hofstader grounds for dismissal (not saying it's not, been a long time since I've read him)??

*in* a discussion of social media

Your favourite LRB writer Patricia Lockwood with main literary feature in the Guardian this weekend.

Unfortunately it's written by bilious reactionary Hadley Freeman.

I'd like to say that if I were in PL's position I'd refuse to be interviewed by HF, but I'm sure you don't get to make such choices.

yes i saw that. hadley freeman also covering herself in glory lashing out at the excellent women’s and gender diverse bookshop the second shelf is good timing as well. not sure how much of a choice you get but ew, do not want to read anything by hadley freeman even if it’s about My Favoruite LRB HERO Patricia Lockwood She Can Do No Wrong. (i haven’t read priest daddy and have no particular urge to - should i?)

I did read that a couple of days ago. HF was totally the wrong person. Not only bcz bigotry, but also she is the wrong person to talk to Lockwood about shitposting.

as i defended a runciman piece upthread i’m checking in to say uncharitably that mournful personal connection or no i don’t know where uk crits got the idea there is some kind of bottomless global appetite for larkin/kingsley anecdotage. it has to stop. however

Even now I shudder and moan involuntarily. M says: “Is it death again, or Mrs Thatcher?”

this is, eerily, exactly what i said when i saw the headline

(it was both, but mostly death)

The Lydia Davis "piece" in the last issue I received is abysmal toss:

Alarmed to see Lydia Davis has reached the Updike state of publishing any half-arsed thing she can think of (and is being abetted in this by editors and publishers). The rest of us do this sort of thing on twitter for free. pic.twitter.com/2JcQSz8DMX

— Caustic Cover Critic 📚 (@Unwise_Trousers) January 29, 2021

I concur.

i mean two of the many great things abt twitter are
A: that it delivers the not-even-half-assed in too-cheap-to-meter quantities (so we resent feeling we're paying for it from bluechecks)
B: some account choosing to call themselves like @posada_spunkah_666 is funnier and more pertinent for free than all the ppl hired by the grownup papers combined

Through twitter you see both i) what a waste of energy work is, we could all be doing something that's actual fun instead of paying rent. And ii) that despite this, we can still have fun.

my current project is to get across how corrosive the entire concept of writing for money is in general, while also getting paid to explore this