Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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).

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.

Sure there are some kids who play truant or don't study or whatever, but how many will end up in the system anyway, doing some 9-5 job or other, compared to how many forget all the world capitals or the causes of the first world war or the pythagorean theorem? Obviously it's not *just* schools indoctrinating people, the whole system is geared to perpetuate itself; still they are a large part of it.

Chinaski: I agree about that article.

"how many will end up in the system anyway, doing some 9-5 job or other, compared to how many forget all the world capitals or the causes of the first world war or the pythagorean theorem"

Aren't these the same people?

I don't think people do a 9 to 5 job because they're obedient, but because they need money to survive.

Started on LRB 17.12.2021, reading Lanchester on Neanderthals. This has been discussed before - perhaps by Fizzles the Neanderthal? - so I will be brief:

Lanchester can communicate. He can inform - including, I suppose, about subjects that are quite technical. I suppose this is a skill.

But I hate his ready recourse to vulgarity and how the LRB lets him get away with this (or, presumably, anything).

And this article heavily includes a bad feature: positing 'what you think you know' and then saying it's wrong, without any evidence that his reader does think it.

There is also a strange contradictory moment near the end when he says, in effect: 'Neanderthals are utterly different from us, so it's *amazing* to think that science shows that we are part-Neanderthal'. But surely this scientific finding would suggest that Neanderthals are *not* entirely different from us, and therefore it becomes less amazing. We need to think of them as part of our make-up rather than a strange 'other' - and if we do that, then it's not strange that they're part of our make-up?

Possibly these points were alreeady made by Fizzles and others.

Lastly, btw, Lanchester's article ends surprisingly badly, with a sentence that doesn't have a main verb. I understand that rhetorically we use such formulations all the time, especially in speech; but one would think that (especially from an ... experienced author) the last sentence of a quite long article would want to end on a resonant note, not an abbreviated one that feels off-key.

I realise LRB 7.12.2021 is old news, but it's turning out pretty well.

Lanchester was at least readable. Julian Bell on art history is serious, conceptual, stimulating; gets too abstract for me, but then ends by appealing away from abstraction.

Rubert Beale on vaccines is the clearest thing on the pandemic and vaccines that I've ever read.

And Perry Anderson, 'The European Coup', Part 1 of the series, the one that Fizzles so admired ... I'm only about 3pp in and it often goes to places whose relevance is hard to see, but it's pure PA in its immense erudition, its love of intellectual history, political thought, its cool exposés of the histories of politicians we've never heard of. Remarkable.

Lots of us have been amused by INVASION OF THE SPACE INVADERS for a long time, but I didn't know that Tom Shippey (much discussed here) had reviewed it along with DICING WITH DRAGONS by Ian Livingstone, a book I've owned for about 35 years.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n24/tom-shippey/vidkids

I watched the film of High Wind in Jamaica recently - had forgotten that a young Martin Amis played the oldest child, who hilariously falls to his death out of a window near the end of the film.

Spoiler!

LRB 17.12.2020, concluded:

Neal Ascherson on the German Revolution: I never much relish reading NA, but I did seem to learn something here, about an important period.

Eric Foner on Lincoln: OK.

Rosemary Hill on Con MPs' wives: utterly dreadful people, shouldn't be covered here.

Alison Light on 1930s poltergeists: for me this raised a familiar issue: when people write about things like mediums or ghosts (especially when they're safely in the past), they don't like to be clear about the status of those alleged phenomena. The reason this book's subject is noteworthy at all is that it's outlandish: we don't believe in poltergeists - do we? If we did, and thought they were quite normal, then we wouldn't need the book. So did the poltergeists exist? Or if they didn't (as most of us presumably intuitively assume), what was really going on? That's the question Light doesn't seriously acknowledge. Saying things like 'the woman who claimed to be a medium was troubled', or even 'the 1930s was an anxious period' (as the book does), is evasive, unless you actually believe that those facts could cause paranormal effects. If they can't, then, again: what was really going on?

David Trotter on Mullan's Dickens: not great: Mullan's book sounds relatively banal, if probably readable, and DT spends half the review in classic LRB fashion autonomously developing theories of his own.

L O Rowlands on Virginie Despentes: informative about an aspect of literature, I suppose, but not my cup of tea.

Raban on Italian landings: I feared that this could be self-indulgent family memoir, but must admit it was a more serious historical account of war than that.

Wood on Dietrich: slim; spread too thin across all those films perhaps.

Celia Paul on being a late painter's one-time gf: unusually dire even by bad LRB standards.

LRB 4.3.2021: promising.

Adam Mars-Jones on HINTON: good review, with AMJ's characteristic factual pedantry, though I will never understand the science.

Susan Pedersen on Sylvia Pankhurst: I'm only halfway through but enjoyably rambunctious and critical attitude to the author's vast (924-pp) tome.

I finished that review. Dreadful!

Someone should tell this reviewer: Not everything is always about you.

Rosemary Hill: London's West End, Oxford Street: OK but perhaps too slanted towards aristocrats and not the amount of ordinary work going on in this supposed 'pleasure district'?

Colin Kidd on Scottish independence: quite informative (and also quite familiar) - though this writer is very parti pris. When nationalists (including dear friends of mine) talk as though nationalism is the only option I am sceptical, but I am also a bit dubious of CK's always venting the same opinion on the other side (albeit that is now 'devo max' or whatever, rather than a conservative Anglophile Unionism). Quite insightful, though, about what unionism and nationalism tend to share.

Colm Toibin on Francis Bacon: is the LRB ever not carrying a long essay by Colm Toibin on Francis Bacon?

Just read the Terry Castle piece on Highsmith in that issue, astonishingly irritating.

This review of an Italian communist children lit writer's life and work was strong.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n06/tim-parks/have-you-seen-my-hand

The LRB seldom tips you onto interesting fiction you haven't heard of before.

Do we have our first mention of shitposting in the LRB's article on Ubuweb?

I finished that review. Dreadful!

cant tell which this review was?

Pedersen on Holmes on Pankhurst.

ah ok, you seemed very positive when you started

someone shd tell the reviewer that everything is about me

You're right, Mark, on both counts.

I finished enough of LRB 4.3.2021.

Terry Castle on Highsmith: I understand James M's irritation but actually this came through for me. TC had done the work of reading the other biographies, knew her stuff, was able to explain what was bad about Richard Bradford's (has any modern biographer been more frequently deplored?). Highsmith is one writer I know I ought to read.

Rupert Beale on viruses vaccines: I failed to comprehend this.

Stephen Sedley on compensation culture: good. I quite like SS's old-school brisk style. He is quite sound.

Tom Stevenson on war in space: outstanding! Astoundingly knowledgeable and well written. The sections on whether satellites are really in space became so thrilling.

Clare Bucknell at National Gallery: like a lot of art writing this seemed just to be talking round the art and struggling for something to say.

Francis Gooding on anthropology: informative, on Boas, Mead, Hurston et al. Actually a good model of a review with clear beginning, middle and end.

Rebecca Armstrong on The Aeneid: didn't love it but at least it cleaves closely to the text.

Thomas Jones on Bill Gates: takes the easy option of jeering at Gates, rather than (like Bastani, Britain's best political commentator) actually taking an interest in the practical solutions he proposes.

Michael Wood on Coe on Wilder: helpfully focused after a vague start. I realised that the good reason that MW reviewed this is that he knows Wilder's cinema better than anyone else at the LRB.

Tessa Hadley on Bette Howland: didn't much convince: some flashes of good writing amid quite tedious stuff, but the late work indeed sounds awful.

John Foot on Italian academic corruption: this slightly chimes with my own experience of Italian academia. It's annoying, though, to see him and later letter writers say that it's just as bad in the UK. It isn't. In my experience patronage actually isn't a big part of the UK academy: it makes for a sharp contrast when you go to Europe and struggle for a minute to understand how they do things.

Susan McKay on the DUP: a good reminder of how nutty they can be, and interesting on the future - I hadn't realised that the old prophecy of Catholic demographic takeover was actually coming closer to reality.

LRB 1.4.2021:

Collini on meritocracy: really excellent.

Neal Ascherson's presence makes me think: is he, in fact, the most frequent contributor of full-length articles to the LRB? Say every 4 or 5 issues?

Rupert Beale on viruses vaccines: I failed to comprehend this.

Me on every piece about the virus that isn't an explainer for dummies. :(