Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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

Gretel Adorno wrote personally to Benjamin in 1934 regarding her "great reservations" towards Brecht's "often palpable lack of clarity"

Look who's talking.

speaking of which: "derailed by bringing in Derrida - predictably, the discussion immediately becomes woolly and uninformative"

i didn't feel this was true, except in the transferred sense of wooliness which derrida is also actually concerned with (and which kant might be imagined to be removing, but instead embeds): that universalised principles of generosity and openness as enacted in the world as it is will produce effects entirely at odds with intentions

the (bad) concrete situation is precisely (i.e. not woollily) an example of the problem as analysed at the general level (there is an elided extra step or two in davies's argument: the central role of kantian injunction in the fashioning of universal principals of right, tho i feel that to dwell on these steps will refocus concerns in the wrong place -- the issue isn't whose thought shd form our basis if not kant's, it's more like how shd we go abt building structures of social order out of principles of good when philosophy will always take into topsyturvy zones

LRB 15.7.2021.

Ange Mlinko on Adrienne Rich: informative, readable, critical - perhaps the best thing I can recall reading from this reviewer. I would never have known that Rich was originally a conventional 'Harvard wife' of the 1950s. I didn't know how ill she was, either. Living to 82 with that condition may be an achievement. Mlinko convincingly, and sceptically, shows in the first column how many of Rich's lines seem current now.

Niela Orr on Lauren Oyler's novel: the novel sounds dreadful. The review does well to hint at this, and take a distance from it - Orr seems smart enough to see how bad the material is and why. But I feel nonetheless that the fact that Oyler has written for the LRB, knows people who know Orr, or whatever, leads to too much soft-pedalling.

Joanna Biggs on Natasha Brown: dreadful review of a novel that again sounds dreadful. The review is bad in various ways, but some of what's quoted from the novel sounds like 6th-form material.

These two reviews together make me worry about the new (?) generation of writers, or just the quality of the LRB itself nowadays.

Not directly relevant, since most LRB reviewers seem to be academics of one kind or another, but this editorial from the new nplusone mag touches on some of these issues:

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-40/the-intellectual-situation/critical-attrition/

The main problem with the book review today is not that its practitioners live in New York, as some contend. It is not that the critics are in cahoots with the authors under review, embroiled in a shadow economy of social obligation and quid pro quo favor trading. The problem is not that book reviews are too mean or too nice, too long or too short, though they may be those things, too. The main problem is that the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine, hopefully with better lighting and tools, but at the very least with better pay. What kind of job or opportunity for the reviewer depends on her ambitions.

as someone insanely on-line myself i have a vague plan to read a big bunch of the recent "very online" fiction (starting with early outrider natasha stagg) bcz given the splay of responses i slightly wonder if there's a category error being enacted (by the authors? by the reviewers?)

let's make a list of fiction that's "about" life online and then not poll it bcz polls are for babies and also they suck

I also just happened to be sent that link that Piedie Gimbel posts. I'm afraid I'm finding this n+1 tone unbearable, and very much of a piece with Oyler and the people who write about her. I couldn't believe how that n+1 article went on and on.

These people are incredible whingers who are obsessed with writing at massive length, in sarcastic world-weary tones, about how they hate Twitter and are always on Twitter. It all seems worse in the US than UK, fwiw.

Quite right, they should bang on about how bad most of the reviews are in the LRB, but how they keep reading the LRB, instead. Priorities people!

O'Hagan and Lanchester's continued existence is a far, far bigger problem for the LRB than Oyler, who did lots of work to write around the US ecosystem for the likes of Baffler to then end-up as an LRB regular, and who got things ultimately right about the likes of Tolentino. That she might not write a great novel is just the way it is.

that n+1 piece is excruciating

i agree that being a critic sucks but pls don't dramatize literally every detail of it

"the likes of Tolentino" -- not sure i know what this means and nor do you

"the likes of" is a phrase that shd always be struck out

sorry if this offends, do the brainwork plz

No brain me work

The n+1 piece makes some good points but it's way too long. Maybe there was some self-awareness in these lines:

After so much reading, research, and annotation, the freelance critic has a lot to say — too much to fit into a six-hundred-word review or a five-thousand-word review essay. So begins the painful work of cutting and condensing, until she’s left with only a few choice quotes and a paragraph or two of analysis; the rest is backstory. But say that isn’t her problem — say she’s given all the space she wants, for an online magazine that has no word limit and pays a flat rate. Bliss, no? No. Pressure still stalks her. No word limit means no excuses: the potentially bottomless page will only make it clearer if she doesn’t have anything to say.

Yes, very well said by both o.nate and Brad Nelson.

current issue:

— the neal ascherson piece on culloden is good (solid summary of the issues facts and implicatitions round a very specific event including some good LRB-style quirky oddities)`
— the piece on the late roman writer scholar and politician cassiodorus manages to cut thru the obscurity of the history of that date -- the first gothic lords of rome in conflict with the byzantiuum-based emperors -- to make some nice points abt histioriography (i have a weird affection for this era bcz it's also one of the few stretches of history i learnt abt in school… for some reason in my specific stream i ended up doing very little history, and mainly remember my teacher spending one lesson reading from a novel by denis wheatley of all ppl, possibly something extremely disobliging abt catherine the great) (the other stretch of history i was taught was the formation of the russian empire)
— the andrew o'hagan piece on the books by megan and fergie is exorbitantly bad enough that i might send in a letter abt it lol

lol this is the denis wheatley book in question (there are 12 roger brookl books)

The Shadow of Tyburn Tree tells the story of Roger Brook – Prime Minister Pitt's most resourceful secret agent – who, in 1788, is sent on a secret mission to the Russia of that beautiful and licentious woman Catherine the Great. Chosen by her to become her lover, Roger is compelled to move with the utmost care, for if it was known that not only was he spying for two countries but also having an affair with the sadistic and vicious Natalia, he would meet certain death. The story moves to Denmark and the tragedy of Queen Matilda, to Sweden and the amazing ride of King Gustavus to save Gothenborg, and finally back to England where Roger returns to the arms of his one great love, Georgina.

^ that blurb indicates the book seems to be disappointingly lacking in satanic cults

the andrew o'hagan piece on the books by megan and fergie is exorbitantly bad enough that i might send in a letter abt it

This does sound a bad prospect.

I know it's a case of battering an exhausted mule, but that now much-discussed n+1 article 'critical attrition' nags at me, beyond agreement with o.nate and Brad Nelson on it, such that I wish to note why it seems somewhat mistaken.

Its premise is that:

What effect does this have on her reviews that make their way to our reader? Put simply, they are not written for him. He may learn a thing or two — glean an insight, absorb an opinion, and draw some conclusion about what he needs to read and what he can get away with pretending to have read. But should he get a niggling sense somewhere in the back of his head that the critic isn’t thinking of him — of the earnest reader, and the limited time and money he has for literature — he will be right. She isn’t thinking of him at all.

This sounds authoritative. But it actually raises questions like:
- how would we know if a review was 'written for the reader'? Would it show in the text or is it an inscrutable psychological fact about the reviewer?
- what if a reader (like me) does in fact lots of current reviews relatively accessible and informative? Is this a delusion?
- Supposing that the premise is true, and we confront the fact that 'reviews aren't written for the reader, but for the reviewer to pursue their other career interests' -- is this new?

That leads me to what seems the basic flaw of the article: that it conflates

a) new problems that arise from digital publishing creating 'disruptions' and crisis for business models (the most obvious problem being that there isn't enough money to pay reviewers anymore)

with

b) general problems with book reviewing, like: conflicts of interest, reluctance to tell the truth about a work's quality (the article posits a case of this, the reviewer being unwilling to trash a book by a junior scholar), insider-dealing and log-rolling, or, again, the fact that a review is *partly* written to advance some cause of the reviewer's (either just financial or maybe even more ambitious and aesthetic) --

all of which are real issues but are very old! You could find them if you go back to eg: Martin Amis on reviewing in the 1970s, or Orwell's 'confessions of a book-reviewer' in 1946 - which I'm sure said, among other things, that book reviewing was a precarious occupation that didn't make much financial sense. I even suspect that you could go back to the age of Grub Street or Addison and Steele and find some similar angst.

So, one would really want an account of these issues that could see how many of the supposed problems are standard stuff, and how many of them are new features of an economically destabilising digital era.

Actually, the article seems to me inaccurate even in more basic ways, eg: in positing that big Contemporary Themed Reviews are the norm, and that they misrepresent or under-represent novels. Strangely, I never see such reviews. You don't really find them in the Guardian, TLS, Literary Review, LRB, NYRB. Presumably you find them somewhere - but if they're absent from so many mainstream spaces, are they really such a problem?

I suppose that all of this has some source in a characteristic n+1 tone (maybe long-standing) - not that I see it that often - which is what I was referring to the other day: very critical, negative, but also world-weary, sarcastic, ironic, generalising, and tends to be self-referential (cf: other n+1 article I'd seen the previous day about how Twitter is awful and unavoidable). I don't really see this tone so much elsewhere, even in the LRB (though eg: the recent review of Oyler was moving more in that direction).

Maybe this editorial is really a bit of an outlier, then. I think the *economic* problems it points to are real, but I'm not so convinced by the rest of its analysis.

Colm Tóibín's review of a biography of Fernando Pessoa was a piece I was nervy about reading as I don't particularly like CT but he has genuine feeling for Pessoa and what he wrote. I am slightly suspicious of his account of Pessoa's politics -- I mean I'd like to believe there were all of these shades to it though I think CT is greying out more than he should -- but his account of the Disquiet is worthy of the great book.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-40/the-intellectual-situation/critical-attrition/

The main problem with the book review today is not that its practitioners live in New York, as some contend. It is not that the critics are in cahoots with the authors under review, embroiled in a shadow economy of social obligation and quid pro quo favor trading. The problem is not that book reviews are too mean or too nice, too long or too short, though they may be those things, too. The main problem is that the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine, hopefully with better lighting and tools, but at the very least with better pay. What kind of job or opportunity for the reviewer depends on her ambitions.

― Piedie Gimbel, Wednesday, August 11, 2021 4:50 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this quote is funny because i disagree with the last point (that the reason criticism is bad now is because each piece of criticism is being read by future prospective employers) for the same reason i agree with the intiial point (that the reason criticism is bad now is not because critics are in a tightly wound social network with obligations towards each other that blunt their incentives)--it was ever thus

was there ever a time when anything writers wrote in public venues was not in some way an "audition" for future writing jobs? that doesn't seem unique to the present moment at all

I agree.

It's odd to stake such a lengthy polemic on such an ahistorical, 'presentist' attitude.

I must admit that LRB 15.7.2021 has a lot in it. I feel like I've spent time on it but haven't even started the presumably superfluous Empson review yet, nor Ian Jack's diary, nor finished the quite informative M. John Harrison article nor the one on alchemy.

"You don't really find them in the Guardian, TLS, Literary Review, LRB, NYRB"

TLS, LRB, NYRB and Lit Review are all terms "reviews" bcz they're actively designed to be a sequence of book reviews (and little more): but in the US in particular there's a strong heritage of quasi-literary magazines dedicated to the long read on all manner of topics, which routinely always veers towards book-coverage: from titles as ancient as harpers (est.1850) or the atlantic (est.1857) via the new yorker of course (est.1925) through, to the much more recent "po-mo" foundations, like the baffler (est.1988) or mcsweeney's (1998). these have a chattier and less scholarly affect to their prose and it seems like that the n+1 piece is attempting to diagnose bad trends in that area? (not that i read anything like enough to know if it's actually accurate or not)

s/b routinely always veers

Mainly for Mark S's amusement I'll add a thought I had:

Polemics about how the Internet has been bad for eg: reviewers (and everything else), while they may make salient points, rarely talk about how the Internet has been good for reviewers.

The most banal aspect of this is so banal that it's never mentioned: it's incredibly easy to send copy in to an editor or publisher, of any kind, nowadays (eg when submitting a whole book MS, never mind a 500-word review).

I suspect that Mark S can recall a time when it was normal to turn up at an office, miles from where you lived, with typed copy to hand over in person to an editor. Or, maybe you'd need to be at the office to type it.

I suspect also that the editor of A HIDDEN LANDSCAPE ONCE A WEEK might add that this actually had good effects, in producing more encounters and exchanges. Still, no one, in their screeds against being online, ever mentions how much more convenient some of these things have become!

lol i mean this is a vast topic and getting bigger -- the specific issue has been the effect of the existence of a single website where the world of prose-production gathers to deliver slices of it max length 280 characters, with its own specific allure and protocols of success (as judged by an audience but also as judged by the writers who engage with it). ppl like it and want to capture that in otjer prose forms! and also the hate it and ditto ditto. they want to explore how "being good at twitter" mighty deliver content -- and possibly even value -- away from twitter

and some ppl think it's bad and can't, and frame the change in that way. is this related to the fact that i can email someone at the paris review to say i want to write about celebrity gogglebox? yers and no! is it related to the fact that a vital now vanished aspect of magazine life in the 80s and still a little in the 90s was the in-office culture of the editorial team? also yes and no!