Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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

😃

Colm Toibin on Pope Francis: a) better than most Toibin, especially as he could report on events he'd attended in the 1980s; b) oddly inconclusive, in a typical Toibin / LRB way; c) ultimately seemed quite sceptical / critical towards the Pope -- whom even I tend to like.

My unasked for and banal opinion on Pope Francis- I like that he at least attempts to be a force for good more than malevolent reaction and obscurantism, it feels like a huge improvement on his predecessors. But on the other hand, he's the Pope lol

I'm enjoying that Toibin piece; I don't think his support for totalitarian regimes and the context in which his read-as-anti-homophobic statements were said are very well known.

John Lanchester talks to Patricia Lockwood about her new novel, No One is Talking About This (Bloomsbury)

is it your birthday soon, pinefox?

contributing ed and nethead, John Lanchester.

oh no

net buff

tear him, mark.

i got absolutely neathed at glastonbury in 2013 iirc

I don't know much about LRB contributor Lauren Oyler, but / and was surprised to read in the New Statesman that she has previously written scathingly about Patricia Lockwood. I would have guessed that they were quite similar. This review of Oyler's book made it sound bad, anyway. It was confusing as it sounded as though Oyler was bad in the way she criticised other people for being bad; as though she couldn't recognise the same tendencies in herself.

Those two books -- Oyler and Lockwood -- are being reviewed alongside one another, with Lockwood being preferred.

My Pope Francis opinion: he is good on twitter.

Oyler wrote a very negative review of Jia Tolentino's book which I thought was very poorly done (I haven't read Tolentino's book and have no opinion about it, I just found Oyler's review completely unconvincing!)

that review was...a thing. Oyler strikes me as v smart but the review got weirdly personal. I like Tolentino’s book, but it’s certainly not above criticism, but I found that review hard to follow at times. Her novel sounds sort of unpleasant to read to me!

That review was v mean girls

I really liked the latest diary - abolish the police, except replace 'the police' with 'schools':

It seemed obvious to me that despite what everyone said, schools were not primarily about education. Formal learning made up a minimal fraction of the activity there (and the part adults later find the least memorable). The real purpose and priority of the school system was to instil the habit of obedience, of deference to our superiors. Learning was to be discouraged if it interfered with this end.

LRB 4.2.2021:

William Davies on Brexitland: some insight into social identities.

Mike Jay on CIA / LSD: this feels like a zany Pynchonian story that comes up repeatedly.

Peter Geoghegan on FOI: useful and well done.

Namara Smith on Yaa Gyasi: this novel sounds bad.

Alex Harvey on Denis Johnson: this sounds pretty poor too - sort of cult of Bukowski stuff.

Thomas Meaney on Castro in Harlem: much better and more interesting.

Freya Johnston on Wollstonecraft: brings out her individuality, but puzzling to end it with such swingeing attacks on feminism now.

Nicholas Spice on Hans Keller: a few good details and brings back some Third Programme / Radio 3 culture.

David Runciman on Larkin: I think better of this than others - because ultimately it's a quiet tribute to DR's father, W.G. Runciman, and that last column or so is decently done.

Samuel Earle on Carrere: sounds an odd writer.

Marina Warner on saints and angels: it's funny how typecast MW is, how she has spent decades reviewing things about fairy tales and saints, and she's still happily doing it and telling us that in lockdown, we need fairy tales more than ever. She's as solid and repetitive as an Alan Shearer or Leon Osman.

LRB 18.2.2021:

Thomas Powers on Robert Stone: it's embarrassing in a way what an old-school all-American male Thomas Powers seems to be. He writes about men having instincts like wolves. He talks some nonense in this review, in his resonant rhetorical way so it will go unquestioned. One of the worst things he does is, again to an embarrassing degree, repeat, as if it's a new idea, the very discredited idea that 'the Vietnam war was really about the effect it had on America' (not the Vietnamese). People were criticizing Vietnam films for saying this 40 years ago!!

Tony Wood on Russia: good to see him being pretty uncompromising on corruption and not over-complicating it.

Andy Beckett on LA in the 1960s: sound. Great Elvis anecdote.

Most of the rest doesn't appeal, but I will keep going.

Very flawed by its treatment of the great John McDonnell MP, but nonetheless a country mile ahead of the LRB's treatment of the same material:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii127/articles/oliver-eagleton-vicious-horrible-people

One of the worst things he does is, again to an embarrassing degree, repeat, as if it's a new idea, the very discredited idea that 'the Vietnam war was really about the effect it had on America' (not the Vietnamese). People were criticizing Vietnam films for saying this 40 years ago!!

I don't get this. Powers is characterising the debates going on amongst US intellectuals of that time - surely the fact that ppl found this in US Vietnam war movies confirms, rather than denies, that this was the case?

That's a good argument.

But my sense was that TP endorses the claim, as a continuing insight, rather than saying: "This is a limited and ethnocentric thing that people used to say in those days, but we have now tried to move beyond it."

Finishing the TP review - I'm stunned by how bad it is; how portentous about inanity. You could say that it resembles Hemingway, or writing about Hemingway. It feels like a throwback of about 35 years to a time when men were men and they wrote about Carver and Mailer.

One way of indicating my incredulity is to say -- this review would bear incredulous reviewing by Patricia Lockwood.

Given (as I think Mark S likes to point out) how much instant opinion is out there now, I'm a bit surprised if people online haven't already demolished this.

Andrew O'Hagan on M K Wilmers: really bad. Horribly smug, self-satisfied writing in O'H's usual manner of trying to go over the top and provoke. His sentence 'I knew then that we would never be married' - is preposterous, a failure all round.

But my sense was that TP endorses the claim, as a continuing insight, rather than saying: "This is a limited and ethnocentric thing that people used to say in those days, but we have now tried to move beyond it."

I parsed it as descriptive, not passing judgement either way. I would hope most LRB readers can figure out what a morally reprehensible pov it is by themselves, but then they DO also publish that dude who was all "Japan should get over the bomb".

Given (as I think Mark S likes to point out) how much instant opinion is out there now, I'm a bit surprised if people online haven't already demolished this.

I'd imagine no one much has bothered because no one cares about Robert Stone? Was really surprised that this was the lead article over, say, Olivia Butler.

re Japan: is that Edward Luttwak?

I would hope most LRB readers can figure out what a morally reprehensible pov it is by themselves

Quite possibly many would think as I, and it seems you, do -- but still, Powers himself was explicitly saying that this was an example of Stone's 'genius'!

I looked Powers / LRB up on Twitter and indeed it seemed that no-one had commented at all.

I agree that it's odd the status that Powers seems to get. Amusingly and naturally, he turns out to be writing a book about ... his father.

Still, I admit that his biography makes him historically a more substantial and veteran figure than I knew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Powers

It's a strange way to go about reviewing a biography to simply retell the story the book tells in your own words without saying anything much about the quality of the book itself. It's not even clear whether Toibin is telling you things he knows, or thinks he does, about Bacon or simply regurgitating facts he's gleaned from this book. What's the point?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n05/colm-toibin/open-in-a-scream

It's a strange way to go about reviewing a biography to simply retell the story the book tells in your own words without saying anything much about the quality of the book itself

this is lrb house style, no? "i am three times more knowledgeable on the subject than the author of this book i shall barely deign to mention."

toibin has form for this:

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

― mark s, Saturday, 19 September 2020 19:30 (five months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think you're right. I actually stopped reading it a few years ago and this may have been one of the contributing factors.

ah! thanks mark,

i wouldn't call it LRB "house style" exactly -- but i do think it's an element in the service they offer

(and sometimes and in some hands a useful one!)

incidentally, the Gary Indiana review of that Warhol bio in Harper's mag is searing.

lol yes it's terrific: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/06/always-leave-them-wanting-less-andy-warhol/

Really enjoyed that

GI has written for the LRB a few times, they shd use him more often

Adam Shatz on Algeria: I learned from this, about the way that Algeria was to France rather like a cross between Vietnam and Northern Ireland, say. I think that it's rather like the Wollstonecraft review in becoming needlessly, and less interestingly because more generically, present-oriented at the end.

Pretty much finished a lot of that issue this afternoon. Found the later bits of the Shatz more interesting just because of how France seem to be taking steps -- however half-hearted and awkward -- to some kind of recognition to what they did in Algeria. Also interesting overview on how Algeria plays in French culture.

Really enjoyed Lockwood on Ferrante, partly because she didn't like her latest that much.

It was a especially good issue -- although maybe because I haven't read for pleasure that much since the start of the year. Andy Beckett on LA, the story of Cigarettes and their decline (which is more complicated than you think), as is the history of churches pre-, during and post-Soviet union as they live in photographs, all the way through to histories of Jewish outside-insiders and Daniel Trilling's write-up of old Hackney community projects and their archives. Just one page after the other.

Jenny Turner on Octavia Butler's work was the first piece I went to. Worthwhile though sad 'cuz I can't remember much of Butler's writing. I should revisit, but when.

Onto the next and Terry Castle on Patricia Highsmith. I wanted more analysis on why Highsmith is so good (she was though I haven't read enough). This is the downside of reviewing biographes of the subject (not just the one under review but the two previous ones were discussed as well), like just use as an excuse to riff on the subject.

LRB 18.2.2021: Unusually bad, unenjoyable issue.

A few things I've mentioned before, like the bad Thomas Powers and O'Hagan articles.

I don't much like Jenny Turner, but Butler is a major figure who deserves extended treatment. And the article did contain some noteworthy things, like the aphorism:

There’s nothing new
under the sun
but there are new suns.

I think that's quite stimulating. The article also shows (though it could state more clearly) that one of Butler's strengths was to imagine aliens as really other, not just as exotic humanoids.

Friedell on schizophrenia: bleak but at least factual and quite clear.

Lockwood: I read about a page and decided my life would be happier if I didn't read any more.

Nocilla Trilogy: at first this sounded like the kind of contemporary avant-garde thing that Tim eruditely likes. But the more I read, the more it just sounded rubbish.

Even Michael Wood was unusually below par.

Bad, evasive article on cigarettes.

LA, ancient cities and Russian churches: fine (I think I already remarked that the Elvis anecdote in the first was a highlight).

Frank Ramsey: strange hothouse / prodigy Cambridge-centric account of the kind you don't so much see anymore. I didn't generally understand the philosophy.

Hackney Museum: mostly bad.

Lorna Finlayson on schools: partly convincing in that I agree that people don't seem to learn much at school, but unlike her I'm not convinced that they learn obedience either.

After giving that issue away I opened the one (17.12.2020) with the first Perry Anderson EU article. This will all take ages.

I found the schizophrenia article hard work. Clear and factual, as you say, but almost devoid of compassion. A tough read.

I'm so behind, that I'm pretending the a huge chunk of back issues don't exist. I'm enjoying the Pankhurst article in the latest issue (certainly not shy of offering an opinion on the text discussed).