Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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).

i only just got to the half abt ED (the first half -- which is barely abt her -- is a bit of a trudge tbh, tho i kind of get why it's germane): the whole short section on em's obsessive social avoidance is interesting and funny, and i feel tells us something abt her poetry: also i whooped when it said her family describing her dodging out of neighbourly encounters as "elfing it"

Yeah, O'Leary uses that later, and so will I! This section, and consideration of the poetry, incl. how editors and crits struggled with it, has me thinking of her as an outsider-y (contemporary of Star Sailor Melville?) *kind of* descendant of Blake. if more spidery---also protopunk forerunner of Flannery O'Connor, but never mind the Cathlocicism, or "going outside for 15 years," much less going off to study writing---and in hyping up the dark glamour even more than the writing calls for (but it does need promotion!), reminding me (also in how different people responded, incl. through the ages) making me think of Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth---would like to see O'Leary or somebody do something like that re: ED---it's not mere "debunking," because a lot of takes on the Brontes did incl. what seem like valid perceptions, to various extents, as seen in here (Mabel was a pretty good editor, Millicent was better, etc.)

I finished LRB 6.5.2021.

Anthony Grafton on Antiquaries: hard going. Reading a long article about antiquaries, I still barely came away knowing what they were. Not a very good job.

Caroline Weber on C18 Libertines: this is a review of a book about 7 libertines, which spends almost all its time talking about two better-known ones who are not in the book.

James Butler on Owen Hatherley on London: well, this is an awful lot better than last time, I must admit. Butler even, a couple of times, redeems himself by actually implicitly attacking people who have launched cynical attacks on socialists: Mayor Khan with his scumbag "we deserved to lose" BS in 2019, and in the last paragraph, the people who have attacked young people for their enthusiasm for the Left since 2015.

The review is supposed to be of Hatherley's book and of a history of London leftism, presumably especially in local government; and it talks quite interestingly about these things; but it keeps cutting back to the 2021 Mayoral contest and current situation, rather like a New Yorker essay that makes a big deal of cutting between different moments of reportage. Most of the information given through all this is quite good, but a simpler approach could have told us more about what the book says and whether it's good or, in any ways, bad. The LRB doesn't do that? Often it doesn't, no. But isn't there another unspoken issue here: Butler knows the author, certainly online and probably in person, and probably doesn't want to argue with him in print. (His previous review was partly of another pal - Owen Jones!) Thus, the standard LRB / insider / nepotism type effect may be finding a new, localised instance with the current Left. Will they get Butler to review Bastani's MORTALS? (I expect they won't review it at all.)

A bad, almost meaningless statement: "Khan is probably the only British politician who can talk convincingly about faith". But otherwise Butler is mostly sound on Khan. He is also prescient or insightful in emphasising the financial crisis for TfL and its clash with central government. And it's quite refreshing that he doesn't use later controversies around Ken Livingstone to dismiss what he actually did as GLC Leader and Mayor (though I'm not sure how good his Mayoral record actually was). Overall, I have to hand it to Butler, on a good job this time.

Colin Kidd on NI backchannels: an interesting topic though I don't care for Kidd.

Seamus Perry on Seamus Heaney: this is nominally a review of Roy Foster's little book, which it calls 'compact but comprehensive'. I'm afraid that in truth the review gives an excessively favourable view of the book, which despite Foster's brilliance as a historian is very standard stuff. The same, in brief, is true of the review, which takes a long time to chew the cud and say almost nothing new about Heaney. Which raises the question: when did anyone - academic, journalist, writer - say something new and fresh about Heaney? This review buys into a lot of Heaney's own dubious Eliotic self-descriptions re: poetry coming up from a primal depth, an ancient mentality. Actually these ideas don't stand up to much thought; it would be more interesting to see someone taking them on and down.

Philip Terry: essentially an advert for his own poems, telling us that Heaney liked them. The assertions become ludicrous, and the self-indulgence (or the indulgence, by the paper) is appalling.

Jonathan Flint on Covid-19 testing: interesting on enthusiasm for many testing models which never came to pass.

Ange Mlinko doesn't make Yiyun Li sound interesting.

Amber Medland on Nella Larsen: a worthy topic, surprisingly doesn't mention the high amount of 'queer' / same-sex intimations in the novel PASSING.

Christopher Tayler on Patrick O'Brian: I see the interest of the false life, and the bizarre author Tolstoy; odd to have so little on the fiction itself.

Ben Walker on digital art sales: had to give this up in incomprehension.

Tom Stevenson on nerve agents / poison: OK.

Marina Warner on Sally Bayley: very bad, and left me wondering who Sally Bayley is and why she has written two memoirs.

Michael Hofmann on Shirley Hazzard: has the virtue of briskness, but often felt like classic LRB belle-lettrism, mewing with delight at quotations that are sometimes good, sometimes not so much.

Rosa Lyster: informative on Egypt-Ethopia relations as determined by water.

LRB 20.5.2021.

James Wolcott on Philip Roth: this is vast - practically Perry Anderson proportions. Well, James Meek proportions. Need it be? No. Roth has been covered at great length by the LRB before. As with many writers, you could say, there's nothing especially interesting about his life, as against his writing; not enough to merit this, anyway.

Mark S dislikes Wolcott. I don't think he's explained why at length. Wolcott is unusual as an LRB writer, trying to bring fizz and pizzazz to every sentence. In a way he succeeds. But this can still be excessive; can perhaps draw too much attention to himself; and can lead him into saying things that are imprecise, exaggerated or inappropriate. I wonder, a bit, in what publication this mode would be normal? And how far other readers or even LRB editors can see how unusual Wolcott is in these pages?

I think I stated on the Writers You Will Never Read thread that I had managed never to read Roth, and hope to maintain this record. I hate the idea of him, while having barely read a word of his actual work. So naturally I don't like this review which aggrandises him just by treating him at such length. The review also makes him sound awful in numerous ways, again and again. Most seriously, perhaps, it makes light of his promiscuity. Is that as it should be - because it's OK to be promiscuous? Or is this case of it something much worse than that, as it seems to have involved preying on younger, perhaps vulnerable people (including, for instance, his students) on an almost industrial scale? I'm unsure, but I'm not sure that Wolcott's tone is good enough for this.

Overall, unpleasant; I'll sign on for the Mark S rejection of Wolcott.

Adam Phillips on 'being left out' was mentioned upthread, and cited as bad. The surprise is, it's worse than that. It's shockingly bad. It treats utter incoherence and frippery as respectable thought. It's one of the most intellectually bankrupt things I've read in the LRB since - no, wait, they publish a lot of rubbish. Still, this is rubbish of another order. It made me feel: "If this is what psychoanalysis is like, then ..." - but I must check myself a little, for, though I'll never be signed up to that school, even I know that psychoanalysis has sometimes (or even usually) been more serious and substantial than this.

Haven't followed him in a long time, and yeah he could seem silly when I did, but Wolcott's early 80s Harper's column on Jean Stafford was important to me. I knew nothing about her books, had never seen them, had rarely seen a reference to her, and then only as one of Lowell's wives. What he said turned out to be otm. Several years later, when asked about that column in a interview, he said people were still thanking him for it, a boast he'd earned.

Jean Stafford -- ILB's favourite!

now finished the (very long) em dickinson piece: in conclusion, ok perhaps she was "selfish, nasty and emotionally impaired" but most of the (more gregarious) ppl round her were much worse! shutting yrself away from all of amherst -- "elfing it" -- seems like the correct response in context!

i enjoyed this piece bcz i am a gossip and a featherbrained PoS, it made me like and recognise ED as a fellow modern (i mean i am not a shut-in and i am nice but i am also not a sentimentalist) -- i also liked the read that her religiosity is a long high-school project of badmouthing god (by passing weird mean messages around class)

The review also makes him sound awful in numerous ways, again and again. Most seriously, perhaps, it makes light of his promiscuity.

The listing of women he supported and helped along in his life was such a "some of my best friends" moment.

i think i have explained my dislike of wolcott? i find his "style" a try-hard glibly full-of-itself and aggravating version of an approach i enjoy in others -- there probably isn't really much more to it than that in the end.* jw plainly loves roth's fiction (as did many of a particular era) and knows it well (fair enough) and finds it hard to step back to explore how someone once considered daring truthful and liberating might have become trapped squeezed and devalued in the tectonic shifts in sexual mores since then (possibly bcz his own shaping values wd get a bit of a squeezing in the process)? there's a story here but he talks all round it without at all confronting it?

(tldr the mid-60s are a very long way away now -- some of the ways we left them behind were the wrong ways after all)

*(thinking a bit harder: jw's a former rockwriter who gained a grown-up platform -- at lol vanity fair -- by "growing up", e.g. asset-striping some of rockwrite's flippant energies while patronisingly mocking some of its simplicities? but tbh this is me projecting back, i don't have the week-on-week receipts, except for my allergy to his "style")

Rosa Lyster: informative on Egypt-Ethopia relations as determined by water.

I found this fascinating (headline stats: 95% of Egypt's water comes from the Nile, at least 80% of which originates in Ethiopia); also informative (and depressing) about the current political situation in Egypt - dictatorial, dysfunctional, corrupt, inhumane and repressive.

I didn't know that Wolcott had actually been a rock writer! He seems much too immersed in the literary scene (ie: talking ironically about Mailer's feuds, while not having anything more interesting to talk about than Mailer's feuds) for that.

Oh yeah, he wrote the Creem review, the lead in that issue, I think, of Another Green World and Discreet Music: really different for Creem, and for him (also wrote for the Voice during peak of the CBGB 70s, though I didn't think of him as being one of the Noise Boys, who were mainly Bangs-Meltzer-Tosches). Several of my friends ran out and bought those after reading that, to an extent that surprised me (I listened to their copies).
There was an in-depth, but not wallowing like O'Leary in the more lurid-to-ludicrous sexcapade details, piece on Roth and his ways in The New Yorker recently, tied in with an apparently pretty well-balanced new bio. He could be generous, yes, to men as well as women, but either way, relationships could go really wrong, or, in the case of women, be pretty twisted from the beginning. Things could get pretty wild, and his friends barely dissuaded him from publishing some shit that would have made it even worse, in several ways. That's really all I care to know about his life, so better not read several of the novels, if I ever start back (got off the bus after Portnoy's Complaint).
I give him credit for retiring, when he realized he'd said it all/run out of ideas, as he announced at the time. The NY article indicated that he'd seen some of this friends, like Bellow, go on too long. A lot of people do.

The LRB review states that he announced his retirement after a very serious health problem which seems to have meant that it would be safer not to go on writing.

iirc wolcott himself came up with the term the "noise boys" (of bangs-meltzer-tosches): maybe it's now also applied to him but he's a very difft kind of writer

his "immersion" in the lit scene comes across -- to me, bitter, judgmental -- as constantly yelling "look! i read books as well!"

He also published at least one novel...pinefox, I've seen a direct quote, somewhere, about realizing he had nothing more to say, but maybe he was putting a spin on it, or maybe it was impetus and the body giving out simultaneously( also, a review of the recent bio referred briefly to dementia).

(I know "impetus" usually is of the body, but I meant like impelled, compelled, highly motivated, not wanting say "inspiration.")

From the review of Rachel Cusk's latest novel:

We learn that he is probably a man, and certainly a poet.

A case for singular 'they'.

i loved the dickinson piece and it made me reread my emily dickinson by susan howe and while doing so i noticed that the lrb article uses many of the same quotes as the intro (including the same denise levertov quote with the same cutoff points) by eliot weinberger (neither this nor howe are mentioned in the article)

Lunchtime Euros

Throughout Euro 2020, we’ll be hosting short online conversations about one of the day’s (or the previous day’s, or the next day’s) matches. Kicking off at 1 p.m., expect a bit of history, geopolitics, literature, but mostly just football.

Monday 14 June: Sunder Katwala and Jude Wanga on England vs. Croatia

Wednesday 16 June: Misha Glenny and Peter Pomerantsev on Ukraine v. North Macedonia

Friday 18 June: Val McDermid and Helen Thompson on England v. Scotland

Tuesday 22 June: Sukhdev Sandhu and George Szirtes on Germany v. Hungary

Tuesday 29 June: Peter Geoghegan and John Lanchester on the Last 16

Plus: A conversation about the later stages still to be announced!

Somehow I don't think this will be good.

Perry A Vs Mark S for the final please.

George Szirtes is very very good but fuck listening to anything about football

Jude Wanga should be good on Eng Croatia, she wrote a really good thing on racism and football.

i wd totally own him (perry) by the technique of emojis and internet acronyms and short cheeky replies

going through that Emily Dickinson article and she pickled kittens?? not living ones I hope

How will you produce emoji in spoken form?

with serene charm

Ian Penman on The Meatles

meanwhile i continue to trudge my way thru this thomas nagel essay on consqeuentialism, deontology and moral intituition -- not bcz i am lloving it but bcz i want to get a renewed bead on a discursive praxis i enaged with and revolted against as a student back when dinosaurs were gazing haplessly at the incoming asteroid. nagel i know is a BIG NAME CHAP in such waters (philosophy of mind, wikipedia tells me; indeed he already was in the 1980s and i feel i was given essays of his to read back then) and i can appreciate the painstaking step-by-step clarity of the type of thought he is taking us through

but i also -- just as strongly as back then but i feel with more lived justification lol -- very much think "what use is this?" assume that clarification is reached and something is learned (assume i merely finish reading this piece) that gets done what what i've learned? at issue -- in some sense -- is the ok-ness or otherwise of e.g. lying, torture and so on (lying appears in his opening gambit, torture has been mentioned in passing a couple of times).

right, so both are evidently routine things in the world: assume we wish to change this, and assume we wish both happened less often. and assume some moral facts about this get established by nagel and chums in discussion. the gap between the world where these facts are established and the world where such changes are effected seems -- to me -- to be if not unbridgeable, then at the very least so vast that just a fvckton of other things are going to be relevant to any project of change (which will derive -- in either direction actually) from the struggles of people in pursuit of their interests (group x want to tortuure more ppl; group y want not be tortured so much)

anyway i guess this post is my clumsy pardody of this way of thinking and approaching the world, and its relative exhausting and irritating unreadableness and irrelevance is a mark of how weird and useless i feel that i find it all

more when i reach the end of the piece i guess