Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

nice to see a letter in the LRB from none other than ishmael reed, who i find it strangely hard to imagine is an enthusiastic regular reader lol (happy to be proven wrong of course)

this is in an otherwise rather tetchily nitpicky and/or trivial letters page i felt, or maybe i'm just in a sour mood today

Only read the piece on Shankar so far. The quote from Shankar on the deeper uniqueness of the Indian classical tradition as opposed to Jazz or other types of music it was lazily compared to was quite interesting. How it didn't stop him from collaborating with Western musicians and doing more to take his music to the West, plus his family background, make for a really enjoyable piece.

At last I'm ready to leave behind LRB 3.3.2021.

I was about to report on what else was particularly worthy of remark in it, but - actually nothing much was.

I wrote 3.3.2021. I meant 3.6.2021.

LRB 1.7.2021.

Tom Stevenson on the British Army since 9/11: devastating. Stevenson seems a recent arrival in the LRB's pages. He's brutally sound here: as knowledgable as his judgment is unforgiving.

Peter Howarth on Christina Rossetti: disappointing. PH is one of the best writers on poetry I know, but this gets bogged down in tedium of C19 Christianity and says little about the poems.

Stephen Sedley on legal history: quite strong, giving the sense that 'the common law' is a good thing and ought to be stronger as against statute law. I'm still not really sure what the common law is, though.

Ferdinand Mount on threats to UK farming: I think I'm tiring of the hypocritical bleating of this veteran Thatcherite.

The piece in 15.7.21 about wind turbines is very good but it seems to make a couple of promises and only deliver on one of them. About halfway through there's this:

At this point it would be fair to ask: why shouldn’t CS Wind act this way? Shouldn’t the Vietnamese have jobs too? Should Vietnam not be allowed to export manufactured goods to richer countries, as richer countries export manufactured goods to them? Sure, it’s a shame for the workers of Campbeltown; but at least the disadvantaged people of Vietnam, who suffered decades of war and the inept imposition of a Soviet-style command economy by the war’s victors, are now enjoying the fruits of a boom. Well, yes. But also very much no.

It's not clear whether that 'yes but no' refers to the actual questions posed about fairness or the following sentence about the benefit for Vietnam workers, either way he does follow up on both the problems of non-international labour movements, and the flipside of that supposed benefit. Earlier on though there's this:

There’s something more unsettling involved too: an inspiring, utopian, internationalist movement to save humanity from climate emergency comes across a once inspiring, once utopian, once internationalist movement to save humanity from capitalist exploitation, and walks on by.

and I can't figure out what he's referring to, apart from one unexpanded and unsubstantiated aside about an international labour movement from 'long ago' and, rather obscurely, 'the Communist University of Labourers of the East, which operated in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s'.

Good to see Gary Younge in the latest LRB.

Not read the piece but it's the one I'll be reading first.

Halfway through LRB 1.7.2021.

I notice that Peter Howarth is now an assistant curate; no wonder about the Christian detail.

Toril Moi on Simone Weil.
Rupert Beale on Covid, again. Unsure I managed to follow this. They keep changing the name for the illness, or variant, or whatever it is.
Deborah Friedell on Ethel Rosenberg.
Emily LaBarge on Nina Hamnett.
Erin Maglaque on Renaissance books: quite poor, when they have better people who can do this.
Andrew O'Hagan on David Storey: some self-righteous cobblers needlessly aligning him with the working man, but actually by AO'H's standards this isn't bad.
Mike Jay on Poe and science: remarkable how far hoaxes could go in the C19.

Tony Wood on Cuba ought to be topical. He is now a lecturer at Princeton; unsure if nepotism had anything to do with that. Well, TW's writing is substantial and expert in its own right, so maybe not.

The piece on Nagorno-Katabakh (17/06) is really good though it's the usual parade of conflict along religious and partocular historical and geographical lines. V interesting use of drones that seem to have had a role on bringing the fighting to an end. For now.

From 15/07 Fitzpatrick is usually good and reliable on an aspect or other of Soviet history. This time it's perfume that gets the treatment!

Colin Burrow is fine enough on Empson though if the LRB produced a bad piece on him then maybe it would be time to shut it down. Same for Newham on Dante.

James Meek on green capitalism is really good at looking at one example of one company, off-shoring and onshoring of Labour and goods, and how that intersects in decarbonisation. The conclusion you draw is how little climate change is taken seriously, though you know it, but this adds meat to the bone.

the empson piece is fine -- lightweight whirl thru the practice and the weaknesses -- until we get to this bit: i knew abt his hatred of derrida (probably from an earlier LRB piece tbh) but all we get as explanation of the hositlity is (to me) garbled or evasive at best: "The principled reason for his hostility to structuralism and post-structuralism was his conviction that the meaning of words is both social and personal: words mean what they mean because this person is using this word in this way to or about this other person, and because this word has this particular history which may or may not complicate how this particular person uses it."

the sentence after the colon probably does function as a critique of a hardcore structuralism (which barely existed in lit crit outside the analysis typres of folktale)* but the force of the "post" in "post-structuralism" is of disavowal -- insofar as post-structuralism defines a coherent school at all (it doesn't), these were ppl who'd STOPPED being structuralists and thought structuralism wasn't enough. so they happily elaborated a variety of critiques

i'm pretty tempted to argue that empson disliked derrida bcz they were actually coming from an extremely similar place -- not identical, sure, but that closeness is where the most venomous crackles often arise. there's nothing in the passage from "words mean" onwards which derrida doesn't also believe and (in my opinion anyway) insistently argue. all that stuff abt the free play of the signifier? they were both relentlessly playful -- and playa hate playa lol

(i have no idea of derrida's thoughts on empson: had he encountered him likely very generous, since he was an exorbitantly generous critic)

*ok yes barthes behaved for a season as if he were a rigorous structuralist, bcz as a rigour it jemmied open some useful ideas for him — S/Z is great! luckily no one else fllowed him down that road -- but once these ideas were opened he simply moved on (and is now almost always gathered into the "post-structuralist" category)

"this word has this particular history which may or may not complicate how this particular person uses it."

This statement is totally empty, after the word "history". And it's not very enlightening up to that word either.

That statement was fine as shorthand. The piece on pronouns from a while back was a great example on just this sort of thing -- people choosing to use words, and choosing not to as well. All of which has social and political repercussions.

Don't think Empson ever pursued his various issues in an essay length piece. Just vague statements. The piece can't help but mirror these.

pursued his issue with derrida? maybe not. here's the LRB piece (by kermode)* i knew the nerrida story from (which hints that WE had at best skimmed one piece by JD):

"Norris knows very well what Empson thought of these precepts and principles. He once sent the great man some essays from the new French school, including Derrida’s famous lecture ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, later treated as a manifesto by his American followers. Empson wrote back to say he found all these papers, including the one by Derrida, or ‘Nerrida’ as he preferred to name him, ‘very disgusting’. Norris, or Dorris, as Empson might have called him in his later career as a theorist, laments, not without reason, that his correspondent showed no signs of having understood what he had found disgusting. On the whole the current tendency is to compare and contrast him not with Derrida but with de Man – Norris spends time on this comparison, and Neil Hertz, in the collection reviewed here, has a whole essay about it. One can only imagine what Empson would have said about that, or what names he would have found for these in so many respects unlikely mates. True, Empson and de Man shared a certain hauteur, and a certain iconoclasm, but the political adhesions were different, and so were the critical dialects, one conscientiously bluff, the other rarefied and prone to gallicism."

the piece can in fact "help but mirror these" -- it could for example express puzzlement at the animus! and openly note that empson never expanded on why he felt this way (ans = he was old and tired and died in 1984 by which time it was too late). i don't quite agree with pinefox that the end part of that statement is "totally" empty, tho it is massively handwavy, because i think (as noted above) that it does effectively exclude the most rigorous form of structuralism (which is that the structures imposed by the form of society can't be sidestepped, so words mean things only because a mass of people accept those meanings, and that individual variance -- which others call "play" -- is impossible). words mean what they mean bcz history, or sometimes just bcz whim! this has non-empty content because it's an element in a pushback (against "bcz history and only"). but it's a pushback against a shadow -- the barthes of s/z, the russian formalists if he considers them relevant (they're not, really, except as dim beasts on the horizon), but otherwise (in lit crit itself) no one -- and no pushback against deconstruction, which is just as anti-totalising as empson was, and similarly (and notoriously) hard to reduce to a motto.

*frank. norris is of course christopher norris. i had forgotten norris argued that de man and empson somewhat overlap. i did re-buy allegories of meaning as i promise so at some point before i am old and tired and dying i may report back…

Yeah his issues with Derrida. For someone who is very combative in print too.

"the piece can in fact "help but mirror these" -- it could for example express puzzlement at the animus! and openly note that empson never expanded on why he felt this way (ans = he was old and tired and died in 1984 by which time it was too late)."

Maybe. Though I think if you start by saying the first bit then I feel you would also need to keep speculating tbh. The bit in brackets would surely be too awkward to state or even hint at. Burrow's alternative is lacking but I like that he had a go at his own answer, from his perspective, as a set of remarks on criticism after Empson's life.

Derrida's generosity was his most vicious trait

Empson very strongly believed in authorial intentions, and that critics should always posit and infer them.

That is probably one of the larger ways in which he differed from much French theory.

ok but he was not implacably hostile e.g. to the freudian claim that unconscious contradictory drives might be impelling the poet's apparent decisions, and the ambiguities that might as a consequence arise and need to be explored: ambiguity not as a consequence of intentional control but the opposite

Lanchester's piece about cheating in sport reads as if it was written for The Guardian. He's got their jokey-blokey columnist style down to a T. Did he always write like this? "It is a truth universally acknowledged that the most important thing ever to have happened is England qualifying for the final of Euro 2020". There's some edgy swearing, an "(only joking!)"; real Zoe Williams-level stuff.

he always writes like this, yes — despite my best efforts i have not yet reached the final pages on whoops! for exactly this exhausting reason

That's a good description, mahb. He is blokeish but I didn't know he was quite that blokeish.

Empson was very given to saying things like "in another part of his mind, I think that Herbert felt this was wrong", or "Donne may have been drawing his hostility to her from ideas that were lying about in his mind".

I suppose, therefore, that he had a very spatial way of talking about the mind, thought and intention, though I can imagine him saying that as far as he can see, there isn't really any other way.

i read the first page of lanchester: if anything it is *worse* than he usually is, bcz he's now porting in helpings of clive james-ish glibness in order basically to say "i've always thought i john lanchester was cleverer than wittgenstein, and having never read wittgenstein except a single quote that clive james was poking smarmy fun in 1985, i shall prove it by doing a wittgenstein on cheating to the amazement of all"

it's maddening: sack him and hire adrian chiles

the examples he chooses are all the most blindingly obvious (Hand of God, again!) and there's a lot of "my friend, a big rugby fan, reckons the following, which conveniently validates the point I am trying to make". Infuriating.

Lol mark

"Maguire… dived like Odette in Swan Lake"

brb my interest in ballet just surged unexpectedly (wtf does this even mean?)

the master of broken simile hand-of-gods his prose over the bar yet again

I couldn't even manage an apathy read of it, let alone a hate read. Abject.

New board description.

(i made it to the end and am now available for comments on who's smarter, wittgenstein or lanchester)

no spoilers please

Young's piece was really good and harrowing. So much of this world to fix.

The checked out Michael Wood on Celan - overall good though a lot of Michael's Wood ticks grate through over-familiarity with his style. Especially his questions with no answer as he chews over a line of poetry.

The Diary section is often something I don't care for at all, though I can't remember why. But I gave the piece on Hong Kong a once over even if I have my reservations on Brit expat commentary on some of these issues. Who is fucked is a question that will take decades to sort out, that's for sure.

I caught up with Penman on The Beatles.

Dire. He should pack it in.

exemplary quote posted here re the nicholas penny review of the rosemary hill book: being a record, week-on-week, of the astounding digressive fragment detail or item which sets each issue of the LRB apart from any other publication, similar or elsewise

i've seen rosemary hill battered a bit on left twitter for something dismissive she said in passing abt some 20th century phenom? and for some reason she tends to get unleashed in the LRB on items pertaining to gossip (so pinefox will likely have formed a poor opinion): but her actual scholarship is imo a different matter, unearthing unexpected popcult dimensions of the late 17th and early 18th century, a period somewhat lost to cliche even in academia

(i shd add i know her a little and like her personally, she was contributing editor at and one of the best things abt a magazine i worked at for many years: shrewd and funny and mischievous)

I don't have any view of ms (or is it Dr? I can't tell) Hill - don't recall any of her work.

I agree that the quotation in your link looks droll.

I find it rather odd that ms or Dr Hill would be battered on Twitter -- that sounds rather cruel, given her vintage compared to them.

Her own site states:
"Born in London, where she now lives, Rosemary Hill went to school in Surrey, to university in Cambridge and again, much later, in London. She was married for twenty-six years to the poet Christopher Logue until his death in 2011. She married the architectural historian Gavin Stamp (1948-2018) in April 2014."

Sadly Mr (or is it Dr?) Stamp died in 2017.

17.6.2021:

I really liked the Adam Mars-Jones review of Francis Spufford's LIGHT PERPETUAL. He quotes passages that make the book sound superbly written; he is very respectful, even as he regretfully takes a distance and says that the book is flawed, mainly by being set at periods of time that are spaced too far apart.

As often, I greatly appreciate AM-J's focus on this kind of 'technical decision' (he's a rare reviewer who talks of fiction in this way) and also the detail of content (here almost self-parodied in his citation of an error he picked up by watching Antiques Roadshow).

The novel sounds appealing in that, unusually, it talks about places where I grew up, viz. SE13, SE18.

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

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 24 March 2021 19:23 (four months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Strangely I remember writing something like that but would have thought it was years ago, not 2021.

I do, yes, remember being disgusted by the existence of that review.

I think Tory wives is very much in line with what the LRB does, they definitely review weird/vanity books as gossipy matter into the ruling classes, or just things to be disgusted by.

This review by Jenny Diski of a book on Harold Pinter by his Tory wife was a classic.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n04/jenny-diski/short-cuts

omg

i like and miss jenny diski and no doubt her description of that marriage does indeed reflect fraser's descriptions of it in that memoir -- but tbh it's genuinely a marriage i'd like to know more about, because there's a great deal more to pinter than gets into diski's rather flippant portrait, and fraser, if never a heavyweight, was a competent and respected middlebrow historian (i have a battered copy of her biography of cromwell: it's not christopher hill but it's not useless)

is, in fact, since she's still alive

ann carson uses that biography/memoir extensively in one of her pieces and its very funny

Posting this without having it read it:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/antonia-frasers-must-you-go-review-by-norris-church-mailer

LRB 17.6.2021:

Tessa Hadley on Mary Ellen Meredith (née Peacock?): actually quite engaging. Somehow typical of the LRB to be interested in this stuff.

Niamh Gallagher on Charles Townshend on THE PARTITION of Ireland: a bold, critical review. Gallagher proposes that Townshend posits an ancient tribalism when he should look to historical contingencies. I feel that I'm on her side. Yet it's odd if such a fine historian as Townshend has really been as simplistic and credulous as she implies. His book REBELLION on the Rising is one of the most compelling history books I've ever read. It's odd, more broadly, how historians can still argue about things which are, in a way, in plain sight and well known.

As ever with this material, the fine details start to provide the fascination: the Boundary Commission, the Council of Ireland, the fact that Edward Carson expressed hope for a united Ireland (?!? - he can only have meant a united Ireland under British rule?). At the very last, Gallagher rather over-emphasises Brexit.

Colin Burrow on poet Fiona Benson: blokeish Burrow was not the person to write this, if anyone was.

Having just read BEAR, I much enjoyed the new Patricia Lockwood piece on BEAR

17.6.2021.

William Davies on hospitality: potentially good material on a grim situation, derailed by bringing in Derrida - predictably, the discussion immediately becomes woolly and uninformative.

James Romm on Nero's Rome burning: I hadn't known that Nero was so much accused of starting this fire himself.

Lucie Elven on Eve Babitz: Babitz seems to have belonged to a certain genre of comic style, between Joan Rivers and Joan Didion; or maybe close to Gavin Lambert ... or Renata Adler? A whole generation of those people.

Stuart Jeffries on Adorno and Kracauer: only started this, but must admit, after decades of reading Adorno, I had not known that he was, perhaps, gay.

17.6.2021.

Jeffries seems to me rather downmarket for the LRB, let alone Verso - but I have to hand it to him, that Kracauer review is as good as anyone's would have been. I learned a bit more about Kracauer's longevity as a critic.

Edmund Gordon on Jon McGregor: did he have to make it about himself?

Patrick McGuinness: irritatingly establishes an extreme binary between Oxford University and parts of the city, with tendentious and unreliable claims along the way. As for arriving in Oxford, here said to be awful: I don't often do it but I've always enjoyed it, whether by train or bus.

I open another LRB and start on James Meek on wind turbines. Hats off to him: he continues to investigate material objects and processes that most writers, like me, know nothing about.

15.7.2021.

Yes, credit to Meek - he sees it through and reveals facts. Like another poster or two upthread, I'm not so clear about the conflicts he draws between green and socialist politics. The deeper issue that in this instance he doesn't seem to probe is - how green is this green energy? How much difference are those wind turbines really making?

Sheila Fitzpatrick on perfume: maybe the concept of the book (Chanel No 5 and a Soviet perfume) is actually coherent, but if so, she doesn't make it sound that way. She spends much of the review talking about how different and unrelated the two relevant individuals are. Worse, she goes out of her way to tell us that descriptions of perfume are, to her, 'gobbledygook'. Is this a good thing to say when you've agreed to review a book about ... perfume?

Worse still, she digresses into whatever irrelevant things she can think of, bizarrely trying to fill space - 'and of course there is Proust's madeleine in the related area of taste'. Unbelievable. Possibly even worse is the opening: a whole paragraph about her own memories of various smells, utterly unrelated to the book. It's something of a curse of LRB style, as I just noted above. The book isn't really about you.

Barbara Newman on Dante: this encomium mostly reminded me that I don't like Dante.

Michael Wood on THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD'S WIFE: relatively back on twinkling form, at least a little, after a lot of dreary and earnest reviews.

i realise this is no kind of counter -- especially back in times when being gay was illegal and actively dangerous -- but
(i) adorno's wife gretel was an intellectual of some accomplishment herself (a trained chemist, close to benjamin, thanked in the acknowledgments to the dialectic of enlightenment, as stenographer and sounding board)
(ii) Gretel's wikipedia entry mentions "at least two affairs" during 40+ forty years of marriage biographer stefan müller-doohm (good name) indicates several more -- TWA's affairs and sexual fantasies were written up in his dream-diary and also his letters to his mum (which gretel had very often typed up for him)
(iii) in his useful little book adorno: a guide for the perplexed, sometime ilxor dr alex thomson reminds us that (a) TWA kept toy animals around and above his writing desk (giraffes, a monkey) and that the pet names teddy and gretel had frore one another were "cow" and "hippopotamus"

in conclusion he was clearly (a) bisexual and (b) a furry

Furryism the least of it:

A ceremony in which I had been solemnly installed as head of music in a high school. The repulsive old music teacher, Herr Weber, together with a new music teacher danced in attendance on me. After that, there was a great celebratory ball. I danced with a giant yellowish-brown Great Dane – as a child such a dog had been of great importance in my life. He walked on his hind legs and wore evening dress. I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I."

thats right