Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

an era of normal, principled 'conservatism'.

i mean this never happened but otherwise otm.

"Grim" sure but it's a pretty grim topic? I don't tend to go to the LRB for feel good writing.

Ledge: if you mean 'conservatism has always been bad and corrupt' - then I would be inclined to believe you.

In which case, the reviewer's mistake would not be to fail to point out that 'conservatism' now is vile and corrupt (which I am certain it is), but to fail to point out how corruption has been endemic to it.

But I don't really know enough about eg: 18th century conservatism to know how corrupt it was compared to other politics at the time, or now.

The fundamental problem with the review is taking 'conservatism' seriously as an *intellectual* tradition (from Burke etc) and conflating this with a contemporary (never mind past) practical politics that is not intellectual or serious or principled in any whatever, but simply vile and corrupt.

The corruption is endemic to the very principle of conservatism, stated thus: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect..."

(I don't know if this formulation is already considered cliched despite being recently coined, i find it refreshing and useful.) Re: the intellectual tradition, the author goes on: "As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny."

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-travesty-of-liberalism.html

Funnily enough I don't think ILB's favourite prolix analyst Perry Anderson would agree with the last statement - he has analysed conservative thinkers, on their own terms, at great length. Maybe, indeed, too much length.

FWIW I think my view would be: it is OK in theory to discuss conservative ideas as potentially valid ideas, but it is misguided to discuss actual conservative political practice today* as an enactment of such ideas, rather than as corruption. The LRB article went wrong in doing that -- and was just remarkably banal and complacent.

(*Today, but possibly, as Ledge implies, ever)

"maybe… too much length"

i mean the clue is in the author (it's why we love him so)

{maybe… too much)

18.3.2021

Michael Wood on Billie Holiday film: not his best. Odd that he likes the film so much when at least some other critics didn't.

Malcolm Gaskill (wait, this is the same bloke that wrote that dreadful article about quitting UEA!) on Puritans - disappointing. Very little on the social relation between puritanism and radicalism in the 17th century, as per Christopher Hill long ago, which seems more interesting. Meanwhile the theology is obviously cobblers.

Josephine Quinn on Alaric the Goth: well-informed on the Fall of Rome et al. The LRB has such a constant attachment to classical history; is it because the editors were steeped in it?

This issue is quite a slog.

Adam Shatz has written a really good overview of Edward Said's life and work, finished it at like 1am last night so there is some interesting bits on identity politics as it was like then.

Today, it seems like a version of it has become matter for the culture war, which has become like a lot of the noise of politics today.

Finishing with LRB 18.3.2021:

Niela Orr on THE WIZ: not a good article, but reminds me that I always liked this film and was then always surprised, even pleasantly surprised, to see people mention it - maybe I should see it again.

Laleh Khalili: on Chinese infrastructure projects outside China: I was at least surprised to learn how far back these went, to the 1950s.

Thomas Jones on KLARA AND THE SUN: probably gives away too much of the book. Disjointed review, really. In standard LRB fashion it refers to all the author's past works, meaning that there is now a whole string of LRB reviews of KI talking about everything KI has published - here even referring back to those earlier reviews. Was this really the place to talk about how great THE UNCONSOLED is?

Mouin Rabbani: direct and instructive about Middle Eastern politics.

David Trotter on gimmicks: simply incomprehensible. They should have sent it back and told him to rewrite it so that an ordinary reader could have any idea what he was on about.

Ange Mlinko on Harry Mathews: the reviewer is admirably knowledgeable about poetic terms, but doesn't convince me that this particular body of poetry is appealing.

Tim Parks on Gianni Rodari: somewhat interesting on an Italian children's author; seems deliberately to punctuate the review with tellings of the tales.

Arianne Shahvisi: mixes practical knowledge of bricks and building with a much more social and political view of the building of homes. I'm relatively gratified that it seems to confirm my view that we should have less emphasis on building new buildings and more on making better use of existing (including empty) ones.

In the end I'm afraid nothing in this particular issue was very appealing.

David Trotter on gimmicks: simply incomprehensible.

lol my thoughts exactly, I wondered if it was just me.

I've been reading the LRB for around six years now. For I think the third time ever I've bought a book based on a review. First was Outline by Rachel Cusk, 5/5, got the two sequels. Then a book on Victorian working class economy for my mum, and now The Idea of the Brain by Matthew Cob. Maybe Patricia Lockwood wouldn't have been so much on my radar without the LRB.

I open an April LRB, see Lanchester on shipping, Tooze on Krugman that people discussed above. This is going to take forever.

You don't have to read it

The Lanchester was fine

i realised that i haven't read the lrb in maybe months. since the first perry anderson was published. I kindof wanted to hate read it but never did and it has ended up casting a pall. i've thumbed it a bit and read the odd article. maybe the said article will renew my interest.

Or that Tim Parks piece on Rodari. It's very good.

As incentive for the PF to keep on keeping on, there is a quite good nice review of Roy Foster's Heaney book by Seamus Perry in the 6 May issue.

Yes, both good and nice.

I have read that book!

I managed to read Tooze on Krugman. I note that others above have already commented on this, largely from the POV of: what is economics, is it valid, can it predict? - etc. The article also made me think a bit.

Tooze writes well. He's brisk. I believe that he's progressive, intelligent, thoughtful, good. Like others, I'm glad that he is getting more and more of a platform or hearing.

But the article did make me, too, think about economic commentary. Often, I felt: I am no longer really understanding this. Perhaps it was too specialised; perhaps too much jargon; as when he introduced Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models. 'Stochastic' is a word I don't understand, so I wasn't going to do well with those models.

This would then raise a meta-question: is economic commentary in the LRB, or generally, like this? Should it be made easier for us to follow? Or are we, many readers, the problem? Is this in fact the same for other areas - for instance, why should someone with little knowledge of poetry understand the LRB's poetry articles (let alone the poems?!)?

But what Tooze especially made me feel was: among the labels (like Neo-Keynesian), what concrete policies is he talking about? I think this is the area where he, or such writers, could do more, without writing less intelligently.

I asked myself what kind of economic policies are available to a government. Like:

* raising taxes (on certain groups)
* lowering taxes (on certain groups)
* investing state funds in infrastructure, eg: building hospitals or repairing roads -- thus putting money into circulation (eg: for the construction workers), while also making concrete gains.
* hiring government staff, eg: civil servants -- thus increasing those people's spending power, thus perhaps increasing economic activity (is this 'stimulating demand'?)
* setting a minumum wage -- perhaps increasing workers' spending power, and thus spreading economic benefit, though employers may find grounds to argue against it.
* regulating banking or the stock market (but here I run back into abstraction as I'm not sure what the regulation concretely is)
* altering interest rates (but here I run into difficulty as I have never really understood interest rates or their relation to other things).

Are these the kinds of things that Tooze is talking about, when he talks about economic policy? Or is it something else?

Most of the things in that list, many of us could understand. But Tooze stays quite aloof from mentioning them much. It might help me, and some readers, if he mentioned them (or other, concrete policies), and their direct effects, more.

I also note that Tooze becomes increasingly figurative. In the last couple of pages he starts to talk casually about 'running the economy hot'. But he doesn't define that term. It's almost as if he has run out of vocabulary at the end of a long seminar and is falling back on loose talk that he knows everyone will nod and broadly say they understand. He does it again 3 paras from the end, writing that the plan is 'to dry out the labour market'. Dry out? Where does dryness come from? Is it related to being 'hot'? I suspect not directly in a chain of images, though it may be connected in his actual thought about causality.

It's normal for people to use metaphors. I don't blame Tooze for that. He wants to remain brisk. But I find, as I say, a certain shorthand turn to loose metaphors, which are not defined, when he could keep talking in concrete terms. I think that the problem with this intelligent and accomplished article is that it remains too abstract; too coolly aloof from concrete decisions and actions; too much at the level of labels.

I agree with poster James Morrison: Lanchester on shipping, despite what one says about him, was basically sound. Readable, informative, concrete. The notion of flags of convenience, ships registered in countries they have nothing to do with, struck me.

He only goes wrong at the end where he repeatedly says "We have colluded with ignoring the world of shipping", "We put it out of mind". He himself has stressed that shipping has become "invisible", so the ascription of agency to ordinary people ("us"), who have many other things to think about, for repressing it is false. (It would be more reasonable to say this about homelessness.) It's an example of how Lanchester can easily fall into lazily bad thinking and writing, despite having written a mostly useful article.

i can help fill in some blanks, pinefox

But the article did make me, too, think about economic commentary. Often, I felt: I am no longer really understanding this. Perhaps it was too specialised; perhaps too much jargon; as when he introduced Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models. 'Stochastic' is a word I don't understand, so I wasn't going to do well with those models.

dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models are mathematical models of the economy coded up as programs on the computer. once coded up, you can feed the simulated economy an unanticipated "shock" to the model (that's the stochastic part) and then it tells you how a variety of objects in the economy (GDP, unemployment, wages, interest rates, inflation--that's the general equilibrium part) will respond over time (that's the dynamic part). the output looks like a bunch of different wiggly lines:

https://forum.dynare.org/uploads/default/original/2X/8/8bbb50e96bf0fadab72e6ec8de4a9064ca501e31.png

the minimal intellectual history background that you need to know about DSGE models is that they have been out of favour since the great recession for being insufficiently realistic along various dimensions, and also having poor predictive power.

an example of an unrealistic assumption is that of a "representative household": the idea that patterns of consumption, employment and savings in the economy at large (which are formed by aggregating over millions of heterogeneous households) can be represented by one household

keynes critiqued exactly this kind of aggregation with an example he called the paradox of thrift. suppose everyone in the economy saves 10% of their income. then they reduce their consumption on goods by 10%. then all shops in the economy see 10% lower sales, and hence they cut wages by 10%. then the same households that initially saved 10% of their income now have 10% lower earnings. therefore, the total amount of savings in the economy may decrease in response to an increase in the rate of savings. this is not the way it works if an individual household decides to increase their savings

an example of a poor prediction made by DSGE models can be seen in the chart above: all the wavy lines tend to return to their initial value. this property, that an economy rebounds to its initial state after a shock (and does so relatively quickly), is in dispute after the great recession. here's a graph of greece's gdp; as you can see, no rebound

https://www.theglobalist.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/mayer-chart-5.png

* raising taxes (on certain groups)
* lowering taxes (on certain groups)
* investing state funds in infrastructure, eg: building hospitals or repairing roads -- thus putting money into circulation (eg: for the construction workers), while also making concrete gains.
* hiring government staff, eg: civil servants -- thus increasing those people's spending power, thus perhaps increasing economic activity (is this 'stimulating demand'?)
* setting a minumum wage -- perhaps increasing workers' spending power, and thus spreading economic benefit, though employers may find grounds to argue against it.
* regulating banking or the stock market (but here I run back into abstraction as I'm not sure what the regulation concretely is)
* altering interest rates (but here I run into difficulty as I have never really understood interest rates or their relation to other things).

Are these the kinds of things that Tooze is talking about, when he talks about economic policy? Or is it something else?

he is mostly talking about macroeconomic stabilization (fighting recessions) which consists of two parts

(1) fiscal policy: government sending out cheques, extending unemployment insurance, spending money on infrastructure, etc. during a recession

the basic idea here is that governments have license to spend in excess of their usual budget during a recession. this is in part because there is more need (many unemployed people, increases in poverty) and partly because some resources sit idle during a recession, so if government spending can get those resources back in use there is a potential for output to increase.

(2) monetary policy: central banks cutting interest rates, printing money, buying debt

the only thing you really need to know about interest rates is that they are a cost (specifically, the cost of borrowing and the return to saving), and all the interest rates in the economy (rates on car loans, mortgages, the rates firms face when they borrow money to make investments, etc.) move up and down with the interest rates set by central banks. in general if the central bank raises interest rates, you are raising the cost of doing things in the economy, and output contracts. if the central bank cuts interest rates, economy-wide costs decrease, and output expands.

these two different approaches, fiscal and monetary, can both be used in tandem to fight recessions.

I also note that Tooze becomes increasingly figurative. In the last couple of pages he starts to talk casually about 'running the economy hot'. But he doesn't define that term. It's almost as if he has run out of vocabulary at the end of a long seminar and is falling back on loose talk that he knows everyone will nod and broadly say they understand. He does it again 3 paras from the end, writing that the plan is 'to dry out the labour market'. Dry out? Where does dryness come from? Is it related to being 'hot'? I suspect not directly in a chain of images, though it may be connected in his actual thought about causality.

"running the economy hot" is jargon for leaving interest rates low and keeping government spending high even after the economy has recovered from a recession. the idea is that, after the recovery (say, after output and unemployment have returned to their previous trend), low interest rates could be too stimulative. they might cause an excess of borrowing and debt which may cause problems down the road.

"drying out the labour market" is a mixed metaphor, but it's related to running the economy hot. here's the basic idea. before the covid crisis started last march, the unemployment rate was around 3.5%. then it spiked to over 13%. over time, it has gradually come down and now sits at 6%. interest rates have been low and government spending high in the hopes of bringing this number down further. suppose unemployment continues to fall, such that it eventually reaches 3.5%. if the central bank continues to keep interest rates low, and the government keeps spending high, they are running the economy hot. if unemployment continues to decrease, say to 2.5%, then firms may find it hard to find workers. they may even resort to raising wages in order to fill positions. the labour market is then "dried out." the idea is not just to wait until the labour market reaches its pre-crisis normal, but to go a bit further and hold it there a while

Thanks, ILB poster Flopson, for taking the time to share your knowledge at length. It's all too rare that one finds this anywhere in life.

I'll try to read your posts properly and try to understand them.

np, happy to answer any follow ups

Meanwhile, finished at last with LRB 22.4.2021.

Rivka Galchen on the brain: credit to her, she takes on a topic like this that isn't, I think, her field, and writes knowledgeably and accessibly on it, if only on the basis of the hefty books under review.

James Romm on the invention of medicine: this turns out to be all about ancient Greeks like Hippocrates and at exactly what dates they wrote. Specialised but in a way more satisfying than vaguer conceptual stuff would be.

Irina Dumitrescu on early medieval women's writing: worthy, but expands the idea of 'collaboration' too far when it describes a present-day writing process.

Richard J. Evans on 'civilising Europe': looks like it'll be OK, but it's remarkably poor - ending up saying little about the book but little about the real topic either, and instead just giving a generalised, clichéd account of the last 70 years of world history. Ends up vapid.

Stephen W. Smith: informative on French military adventures south of the Sahara.

I ploughed through most of the others but no comment really needed.

On to the next issue and Edward Said: already fascinating on him and the whole issue looks promising.

Rivka Galchen on the brain: credit to her, she takes on a topic like this that isn't, I think, her field, and writes knowledgeably and accessibly on it, if only on the basis of the hefty books under review.

she has an MD and specialized in psychiatry, so i think it very much is her field

I learn that an MD is a postgraduate medical degree -- that's very impressive!

I only knew ms Galchen, or apparently *Dr* Galchen, from more literary essays.

LRB 6.5.2021:

I liked reading the essay on Edward W. Said. Not a big fan of Adam Shatz, but I learned from the essay how political Said was - not just a commentator or sympathiser, but deeply involved with the PLO. The review states that Said had numerous affairs but that the biography refuses to tell us who with. It also states that Said was troubled, insomniac, anxious. And what about the fact that he once killed a motorcyclist in a motoring accident in the Swiss mountains? You'd think that would stay with you. But I have never heard a word about it till now.

Why does Ferdinand Mount still appear in the LRB? He knows a lot, he can refer to the classics and other periods of history - yes. But even if you leave aside his participation in Thatcher's governments, something that many people would not choose to forgive - then his commentary is too often whimsically dilettantish in tone. His review of Peter Oborne feels like something written a few years ago, like something that's been published before. He digresses to the history of lying and to Oborne's other works, not focusing on what Oborne is actually saying now or why. And he's the kind of person who says garbage like "It's hard not to laugh along with Boris Johnson, even though, on reflection, one realises one shouldn't". Anyone who starts with that attitude to BJ shouldn't be in print.

I appreciate Peter Geoghegan's more straight-talking approach in (Short Cuts here) identifying and explaining the corruption of the UK government.

I've just abandoned Adam Phillips in the latest issue, too much freudian garbage.

As the French psychoanalyst Nicole Oury writes, ‘the destiny of the child is also weighed down by the unrepresentable place of his origins, the desire between a father and a mother.’ The child can never really know the nature of the desire through which he was conceived: he is left out of his own conception. If the male child can ‘possess’ the mother he will never be excluded from her presence, and if he can kill the father she will have no other object of desire and he will have no rival. In a more benign and in some ways more instructive reading of the Oedipus complex, Bela Grunberger proposed that the father who excludes the son from the mother’s bed is the guardian of the child’s future potency: if the son was to attempt sex with the mother he would be physically incapable and therefore humiliated.

Oh no I've been left out of my own conception *cries*, luckily I never humiliated myself by attempting sex with my mother.

Although he brings in Kafka and Hamlet I've no idea what place such an essay has in the LRB.

Phillips is someone who can apparently come up with any old nonsesnse and the LRB will publish with little or no editing. At least PAnderson writes about particular topics!

Kafka, Hamlet and Milton's Satan. I found it sketchy too, it is funny that the cover advertises it as "on fomo" tho.

I finally got enticed into restarting my sub, see if I manage to actually read the fucker this time. So far the long piece on roth ok but kind of annoying/clunkily written in places (what began as a parade float ended up a runaway garbage fire) & the one about mycelial networks is fascinating and crazy

I haven't of course reached that issue but agree with Ledge: that paragraph is full of garbage. Why print it?

the roth piece is by james wolcott who is absolutely one of my pet hates as a stylist (if they want a write who does this style well they shd hire the much funnier tom carson)

they should just cut all of wolcott's adjectives out, it wd improve his writing by a million percent

also they shd put drawing pin on his chair

― mark s, Sunday, 20 January 2019 11:02 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Wolcott is no great stylist but he certainly dishes the dirt, which is at least half the fun when it comes to reviewing Great Men of Literature books

or maybe I'm just irredeemably shallow

im shallow too! im also capriciously selective and packed with obscure rockwrite beefs!

hah fair enough

Adam Phillips is worthless and should be replaced with someone that can write on psychoanalysis and draw something interesting out of it. They have Jacqueline Rose but there are a couple of interesting writers I found through twitter that would be a perfect fit for the paper. This is where the editors just need to keep digging on through their twitter feed tbh.

The highlight of the latest LRB (haven't finished but I doubt it will be beat) is the piece on fungi that wins mentions and the back-to-back takings (down rather than up) on Adorno on two separate pieces. Keith Thomas on the enlightenment was fine -- if a bit bog-standard if you know bits of it, his para on Leviathan is awesome -- but towards the end he gets himself in a tangle when talking about Dialectic on Enlightenment I think, the remark on it is relying on Frankfurt School being pro-Soviet Union which it isn't (?) The last bit on a lot of some Enlightnment thinkers already wanting statues pulled down was also silly because they didn't get it done, whereas people with other politics did.

Then you turn the page and Claire Hall's piece on astrology also cites Adorno's take on the astrology column in the LA Times. Its an excellent piece. The thinking moves from an account of an interesting book to insinuate how much of the thinking that is taken seriously today is so speculative as to be astrology-like (Data Science).

Elsewhere I liked the piece on Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Oyler's review of Detransition, Baby.

i like keith thomas a lot but yes he totally miscues TWA & Hork: them calling de sade an enlightenment figure is a massive and conscious provocation obv but it is a claim with an argument behind it not a silly error (zizek recaps the idea in an essay on kant and de sade istr)

odd really bcz religion and the decline of magic is absolutely a dialectical study of that phenomenon (the good things came at a cost!)

tbh the author of this possibly very good book sounds like a completre FACT & LOGIC "sky goblin" dullard when it comes to the present day lol

i see i appear to be using the claim "zizek also does this" as if to say "so it must be right" -- in conclusion zizek is often wrong (especially on the facts bit of FACTS * LOGIC) but nevetheless very good at finding the weak and tender spots in routine slabs of modern day ideology

im shallow too! im also capriciously selective and packed with obscure rockwrite beefs!
― mark s, Thursday, May 20, 2021

Best self-description on ILX in years.

thats right

Wolcott v invested in appearing above the fray regarding Roth's change in standing, aside from saying that "When She Was Good" still bangs. He doesn't seem to want to bury or defend, or alternates between the two. It felt pretty feeble when, after listing Roth's numerous betrayals and infractions in his romantic life, the article goes on to talk about how nice he was to certain women.

Claire Bloom has been haunting me*, having accidentally stumbled upon her in The Haunting, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and this piece within the past two weeks.

Agree with consensus on Adam Philips. The first premise of his piece - that even after we've learned to swim we always remember what it was to be a non-swimmer and so in our deepest hearts we don't know how to swim - just felt so bafflingly wrong to me that I skipped right ahead.

Skipped past that fungi piece too because I am squeamish and that picture with the ant was seriously grossing me out.

* despite still being alive

I like Phillips' early books (up to around Houdini's Box) and have found him a good literary critic in the past. But I think - being generous - he's written himself out, or simply become a dark parody of himself.

I just read this statement:

‘Papers speak through their writers. And of all the London Review’s writers Frank Kermode was the one through whom we spoke most often and most eloquently.’
– Mary-Kay Wilmers

Woeful. Utterly incoherent and discreditable description of what a writer in a 'paper' (containing many different writers) does.

I trust that Kermode, like anyone else writing an article, spoke for himself.

Then there's this chronicle of sagas and vice-versa: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/joanne-o-leary/bitchy-little-spinster Eventually, between the peaks of power stuggles, some good comments about the work, as supported by quotes and description, also sense is made of the publishing history, I think (must find eyeballs).