Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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!

LRB 15.7.2021.

Nick Richardson has a chequered past on the LRB - but hand it to him here, he's informative about M. J. Harrison, makes me feel that Harrison should have been covered here much more, covers the whole career in a way that feels reliable, is playful about SF while recognising its value, and makes the recent novel sound rich in its melancholy, as he (NR) quotes phrase after phrase that are actually relevant.

A good review - _pace_ the claims that reviews aren't good or useful anymore.

Richard Norton-Taylor on the IRA and British intelligence: a topic I like, an informed writer, an interestingly sceptical view of the book that, however, is never really fully revealed (ie: RNT doesn't really tell us how bad the book is or why, just hints at it). And yet - some disastrous writing / proofing / editing here. There are lines that don't quite grammatically accord; a quotation that seems bizarrely mangled in p.43 column 2 top para; and what looks a classic failure of drafting (copying and pasting without tidying up) as a phrase ('fierce debate') is quoted without introduction, then properly introduced 2 paras later.

Malcolm Gaskill on alchemy: a lot better than the same author on quitting his academic post. Oddly long, I'm still only halfway through it.

But I also at last, over a pint by the Thames, read blokeish Burrow on Empson. It's been discussed already here but the main thought must surely be a degree of disbelief that the LRB is publishing another long essay on Empson - and not occasioned by the necessity of, eg: a brand new volume of Empson letters, or a reconstituted series of lectures that we didn't know, but just two of his most famous books being reissued. Admittedly they're scholarly editions - in which case shouldn't the review mainly have been about what these editions specifically bring, how well and badly the annotation is done, etc? It only touches on that.

So much of all this is familiar - at least two LRB mainstays have written at length on Empson before; even Frank Kermode who practically invented the LRB loved Empson, as far as it went - it's hard to justify another introduction to Empson in these pages. Yet some of it is actually quite good. And some of it is quite bad. Readers will be glad to know that I can't be bothered to talk about what's bad, except that I must say that CB's major metaphor - Empson 'taking his false teeth out' - as well as ugly and distracting, is remarkably bad and unclarifying even on its own terms.

But one has also to remark on the meta-fact of Burrow reviewing this. Whom do you associate with the LRB? O'Hagan and Lanchester, yes. Wilmers, hitherto, and Diski, et al. Wood. Even Anderson and Bennett, in their niches; or nowadays Lockwood. But the odd thing is - Burrow seems to dominate the LRB more than any of these - without being anyone notable; without having arrived with fanfare; without any of us probably, for instance, knowing what he looks like. He's like a - yes, I'm tempted to say, he's like a Japanese knot-weed that has crept over the paper. And here, as well as spreading the usual bluff blokeish declarations, he's reviewing 'admirable' editions by ... Seamus Perry, an LRB regular whom I actually used to confuse with Burrow; and (with someone else) Stefan Collini. It could hardly be more of an inside job. Does it occur to anyone at the LRB that this could look at all bad? I doubt it.

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.

Thanks for mentioning the Orwell piece, which is online. It's an amusing piece which does in fact mention the financial situation of the typical book reviewer (If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover.) It also overlaps with some of the same complaints in the n+1 piece, some of which are very old indeed, such as the fact that most books are simply not very good and there's not much one would wish to say about them, if one were not being paid to do so, and thus the reviewer is often compelled to feign more enthusiasm either positive or negative than they actually feel, in order to make it seem that there is some reason for the reader to care about the book under discussion.

in the US in particular there's a strong heritage of quasi-literary magazines dedicated to the long read on all manner of topics

I was also wondering about where all these "Contemporary Themed Reviews" are appearing, but I think this hits the nail on the head.

Here's a response which suggests than n+1 itself is a place where many pieces of this type have appeared over the years:

N+1 has arguably been the best home for CTRs since its founding: examples include Marco Roth's essays on neuronovels and clone novels; Nicholas Dames on theory novels and novels nostalgic for the 1970s; an unsigned piece on globalized literature (written, I believe, by Nikil Saval); and myself on something I called "magic feelism."

https://www.gawker.com/media/the-intellectuals-are-having-a-situation

Wow! Amazing to see this immediate, lengthy and remarkably persuasive riposte. Thanks, o.nate!

I scrolled down at first and was surprised to find that this was by Christian Lorentzen. I didn't think I liked him. (I met him once!) But now I like him a bit more.

LRB 29.7.2021.

Lanchester on cheating in sport: not entirely bereft of insight, and he *knows* a lot (for instance, he knows far more than I do about chess, a game I quite like, and rugby, which I don't). But I'm not very convinced by the fundamental claims about 'rules' vs 'ethos', whose basis is unexamined and not argued for. He also makes the mistake of thinking that "fans" think the same thing about everything, when they don't.

But the most glaring offence in Lanchester is simply his ready recourse to entirely unnecessary obscenity. This is telling, not only of his coarseness of mind, but of his complacency as an LRB regular. If I wrote for the LRB (which is, precisely, something that won't happen), I wouldn't write slackly and I wouldn't write obscenities unless it were necessary. That Lanchester does this shows a kind of privileged contempt for others.

Yet this one line struck me as actually good: "Rugby players don't feign injury, they feign health".

*banging clipboard*
HIRE 👏 ADRIAN 👏 CHILES 👏

LRB 29.7.2021.

Clare Bucknell on Rivka Galchen: I can't say I really want to read Galchen's very specific historical novel, but credit to her for taking on something so abstruse. She seems an intelligent, thoughtful writer.

Alison Light on Barbara Pym: mostly quite well done, but didn't give me much idea of how Pym's fiction was actually interesting and worth reading. I glanced at a review of the same book in the TLS, other object of this thread, and it ended by heretically saying that Larkin's excessive praise of Pym had become a curse - which was at least an interesting provocation.

Andrew O'Hagan, very briefly 'on the bus': dreadful. He shouldn't be allowed to print this stuff.

Hal Foster on Absentees: the concept seems to bring together too many different things; the review becomes a pretentious parade of names.

Gary Younge on Baltimore: solid, factual, informative.

Lavinia Greenlaw on Diana statue: quite interesting to hear about it aloft a Madison Square Garden no longer in existence.

Patrick Leigh Fermor on Mani olives: one of those odd cases where they print an old text that someone's discovered. I don't know this author, but at times I felt: yes, that's fine, composed writing - unlike what I might often read here. On the other hand, out of context, it was hard to tell what it was all for or about. I've never heard of Mani. It took me a while to find out that it is some kind of place in Greece.

Nicholas Penny on Rosemary Hill and antiquaries: a lot of circularity here: Hill being reviewed because she reviews for the LRB; Penny returning to the same kind of thing on which, I think, he wrote quite impenetrably recently; and it was only, what, 3 months?, since the last article on antiquaries. I quite like the very grudging last paragraph, attacking modern fashions. Many might not.

That n+1 article discussed here complained about the Contemporary Themed Review.

Some of us didn't know what that was or couldn't recall often seeing it.

Oddly, something like it perhaps appears here, in Vanity Fair:
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/08/the-state-of-the-literary-jonathans

Shockingly bad, offensive article; should never have been published, or indeed written. In a way, maybe its existence does give some validation to the n+1 complaint.

the author of that piece is married to one of the prime n+1 dudes haha

That is a terrific piece. This is a very funny way of saying how fucked it is to try and write for a living.

Most authors have day jobs, which is nothing new; Herman Melville worked as a customs inspector. The difference in 2021 is that traditional side careers are less viable and also less “side.” My 50-plus-year-old friends worked as typists and came home with creative juice left in the tank. Employers today demand 24/7 access to your mind and soul and claim to be “like family,” which is accurate in the darkest sense. The competition for tenure-track MFA jobs is so intense that candidates are virtually clawing one another’s eyes out over the chance to move to, for example, Arizona. The other way authors used to make a living was journalism. In 2021, that’s like working as an aspiring actor to subsidize your true passion, waiting tables.

My 50-plus-year-old friends worked as typists and came home with creative juice left in the tank.

their fingers were probably pretty sore though

Bit of repetitive strain injury, as a treat

LRB 29.7.2021.

Michael Wood on Paul Celan: the first page did not make Celan, with his wistful, wry and unilluminating late remarks, sound interesting. But the review picks up by becoming quite scholarly - or, simply, doing something that Wood, in his books as much as reviews, occasionally does: delving into facts, chronologies, producing and assembling them for a reader who needs to know them. He then gets into close reading, which I respect though what he quotes of the poetry still does little for me.

Andrea Brady on poet John Wieners: makes this poet sound dire, self-indulgent and utterly uninteresting.

Peter Phillips on Thomas Tallis: a relatively rare instance of the LRB using such technical terms and knowledge (here it's musicology and ecclesiastical history) that the 'lay reader' can't follow it.

Simon Cartledge on Hong Kong: I naturally dislike the superfluous obscenities, but otherwise informative on the tense situation. Gives the impression that China is bad and oppressive to HK and its people; a bit more surprisingly suggests that this presents problems for China, and that a movement for HK independence is growing.

I'd forgotten to mention an unusually bad letters page: a couple of the letters on Beatles vs Stones are as dreadful as almost any I've read in the paper.

wait, what was hard to follow in the tallis piece? it was interesting and lucid!

it's true that the LRB remains non-great on music (= doesn't commission me or say yes to my very good pitches)

Mark S: I think the short answer is just - technical terms. The very first sentence uses a religious term that I don't know.

But maybe it's just that I have zero idea of the music being referred to.

brb starting a pressure group to ensure that eng lang literary scholars get an adequate historical grounding in elements of church practice (C of E, its rivals, it predecessors), as they will be AS IMPORTANT when recognising and explaining allusion and reference as e.g. shakespeare and that latecomer guff!

(yes i know shakespeare is proposed as one of the actual authors of some of the eng lang versions of the king james bibles and the big-name prayers)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificat

This is the verse reached (noting the political irony etc): "He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek"

LRB 12.8.2021.

David Runciman on Trump: this feels like the latest, possibly last, in a long series.

Andrew O'Hagan on royals' books: this is bad. I thought about precisely why - it's something about struggling to keep up a sarcastic tone, at length, when the material isn't there to support it, so the bridge of sarcasm he's trying to build is actually collapsing beneath him as he writes. It reminded me of Marina Hyde. I think Mark S had a stronger view of why it was bad. But O'H is often, also, an incredibly slack writer, yet still thinks himself a good one.

Neal Ascherson on Culloden: I learned from this, and the review is also good in actually talking about strengths and shortcomings of the book.

Charles Glass on early CIA: this again feels very well-trodden LRB ground, but is well done. Scandalous what was done to, among other places, Iran.

Ditto, more so, Benin, as described in Adewale Maja-Pearce on museums. The detail here made me sad and angry about imperial violence. The author is also interesting in writing, from Nigeria, with scepticism about the return of treasures to Nigeria.

Jon Day on doping: again well informed and interesting, on the kind of quirky topic that this contributor usually seems to be given.

Lydia Davis on a French city: only started this but it's not promising.

LRB blog entry attacks JC.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/august/corbyn-s-suspension

Disgusting. Guardian-type garbage. Makes me want to cancel the subscription.

LRB 12.8.2021.

Colm Toibin on Pessoa - a writer deeply well known by people on ILB, almost entirely unknown, really, to me.

I don't think Toibin a good reviewer (pinefox, passim) - yet, curiously, he does this fine. The same was true of his Flann O'Brien article which may have been all of 10 years ago now, which I'm sure connected FOB to Pessoa and perhaps Borges.

When CT talks, as maybe other Pessoa people do, of "the many other authors he came to know ... who were the true authors of his work", etc, part of me wants to say: It's not that complicated - one bloke made them up. Yet I know that this reductiveness is somewhat hypocritical, as I've talked in similar ways, though less precious and mystical, about Flann O'Brien, and I thus ought to accept that affecting to believe in pseudonyms, heteronyms or whatever can be a worthwhile act as a reader, a way of honouring the imagination in question.

CT says that FP was politically ambiguous, both conservative and liberal. Yet the right-wing statements he quotes are extreme, and the liberal ones are mild. So the description may be evasive. I'm surprised to find that FP was, in part, so right-wing; I'd never guessed it.

CT quotes a statement from FP that I would say is very anti-semitic. In my admittedly very detached, ignorant sense of FP, I have never heard anyone mention this as an aspect of him. Now, again, I suspect that people who deal closely with FP's work will say "oh, questions of FP and racism and anti-semitism have been discussed for decades". But they haven't seeped through to a broader perception of him. People don't apologise for liking an author who could write such things, or say "of course, he's a complex and problematic case - we must take the unsavoury side with the brilliance". The Half Pint Press edition of FP probably doesn't carry a health warning admitting that the author was capable of racist statements and that there is a helpline you can call if this troubles you.

I think that's sensible and proportionate. Others may disagree. Regarding other authors, anyway, others seem to want to insist much more on dragging things to the light and suggesting that they inflect the whole of the work. Strangely, nothing that I have ever read by the notorious and hated anti-semite T.S. Eliot is as anti-semitic as what CT quotes from Pessoa.

CT gives the impression that FP was gay, in some way. I hadn't known that either. It's not surprising that CT would talk about it. It's fair to say that being gay, then, would lead logically to multiple identities. Something less well known is that there is some reason to wonder if Flann O'Brien was also, in a secret or frustrated way, gay. The point seems almost too obvious to draw out, but once again, the link between sexuality and evasion around identity suggests itself. I don't recall whether CT made this point about FOB also.

Can anyone do a copy pasta on this?

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-magician-colm-toibin-book-review-michael-hofmann/

On the latest LRB I really enjoyed this triple run of pieces:

- Rosemary Hill on Constance Spry's flower arranging exhibition at the garden museum.

- Priya Satia's discussion of anti-colonialism in a review of Naoroji's autobiography.

- Marina Warner's review of Beryl Gilroy's memoir of her years in education, teaching despite the racism encountered across the sector.

Finding myself utterly uninterested in Eagleton on Jameson on Benjamin. The piece on Lawrence was the usual tired discussion of Lawrence's work.

i will write up how bad the eagleton piece was (he's always bad but this was worse lol)

i enjoyed the lawrence piece, it dwelt on and got across how funny he often is (which his bigfoot critical enthusiasts generally miss: leavis in particular had zero sense of humour)

adding: i never actually did elucidate why the o'hagan piece on the royals was so extremely bad, i'd have to go back and reread it (may not do this)

one element was probably this: mocking meghan's attempt at a book for children aoh does a thing a lot of literary commentators do, which is assume that they know a lot abt writing books for children without e.g. having read any since THEY were children, on the grounds that they're profrsssional writers for adults and how hard can it be just to guess, it's the asame thing played on easy level

it is not the same thing played on easy level (amis also once made a fool of himself along exactly the same lines but he was already a talentless villain so it got shuffled into the "45623847 similar crimes asked to be taken into consideration")

LRB 12.8.2021.

David Trotter on Elizabeth Bowen - such a standard LRB topic again, if not as much as Empson - an impulse is to say: for goodness' sake, has any LRB reader not now been given the chance to read about this? It would be different if new material were being produced (thus eg: an edition of Empson's letters was worth reviewing), but these are simply reprints of standard Bowen fare.

The idea must be, then: you haven't yet seen Trotter on Bowen; this critic will be a distinct experience.

The circularity is once again embarrassingly indicated when Trotter notes that the edition of stories he's reviewing has an Introduction that appeared in ... in ... yes ... the LRB, in ... February 2020!

I remember it well

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n04/tessa-hadley/hats-one-dreamed-about

and remember thinking: Bowen again? OK ... It was perceptive enough, but note that that article was ... a review of the Collected Stories! Which is now being repurposed as ... the introduction to the Selected Stories! And published in the same paper, all of 18 months later!

They have no shame.

Back to Trotter. The usual LRB feature of going on about texts that are not under discussion; very little really direct reviewing of what's actually, nominally, in front of him. He knows his stuff; I've admired one or two of his books; his vice, I come to think, is a penchant for needless obscurity. Here a major culprit is the phrase 'atmospheric entropy', which he coins and decides to keep going with.

Finally he compares Bowen to contemporary producers of the 'Internet Novel'. I don't know how far the comparison is persuasive, how far merely modish. 'Add some internet' is not a promising phrase. The review ends badly.

I gave up with the Eagleton piece. Rambling and tbh it felt like what it was: one auld fella reviewing another. I find Seamus Perry very readable and enjoyed his Lawrence piece.

Do you not like Elizabeth Bowen or just the fact that they are always writing about her?

James Redd: I think she is good, and deserves to be read and indeed written about.

I also think that she's somewhat part of the LRB canon - though less so than Empson.

In this specific case, as noted, there's the additional involution that one of the books being reviewed has an introduction that appeared in the LRB 18 months previously.

I think that's taking insularity a bit far.

But yes, Bowen herself is highly worth reading. And to a degree, these LRB articles have at least had the virtue of restating that.

THE LAST SEPTEMBER (1929) is an extraordinary novel - Bowen's 2nd, I think - that does do what Trotter quotes Bowen as saying she was doing (I hadn't recalled this line): 'writing history in fiction', or similar.

That is, the political turbulence of a moment that was only, what, less than a decade earlier, is deeply embedded in that novel, and the political ambiguities and identities are finely discussed and performed.

FWIW I'd see it as one of the 10 key Irish texts of the 20th century - or some such kind of qualification.

Walking to the market today I thought of Terry Eagleton. I don't think he's been in the LRB much in the last year or two. He's 78. Maybe he's not much wanted. Maybe he's in poor health. Maybe the pandemic has affected him. Maybe he's winding down. I'm not sure how many more times I'll have the pleasure of seeing his name listed above a new article.

It's a natural process. At any rate, as long as I'm around, I'll cherish being able to reread the extraordinary legacy of work - around 50 years' worth - that he has given us, and from which I have learned more than from perhaps any other living writer.

LRB 9.9.2021. One of the few times that I have been up to date, if I am.

Thomas Meaney on Afghan withdrawal: seems good to get this article out promptly; I like some of its political position; but really it's too brief to be substantial, and a deeper problem: its tone is too posturing and sarcastic to be a fully useful statement either of facts, or of a position. Increasingly, I find, I'd like writing, especially about politics, to be plainer, more factual and more forthright.

The most worrying thing that TM says is that Joe Biden's stance looks sound and but really he will be focusing on the next military or imperial horizon. TM doesn't give much evidence for this, but it sounds accurate, despite the satisfaction that some socialists have taken in the end of this war.

Despite the thinness of the article, I like the quotations at the start, especially as they implicate liberal thinkers.

Andrew Cockburn on the Cuban Missile Crisis: one of the best things I've seen in the LRB for a while. It comments on the books, makes a case (the importance of domestic politics), and, as usual with these topics, draws out many juicy and intriguing facts.

Daniel Soar on 'the sixth taste': I couldn't follow this or tell what it was about - a taste that 'we now know as umami'. I don't - I've never heard the word before. Something else 'was, of course, monosodium glutamate'. I don't know what that is either. Rather than explaining, the article veers off into many other things about food corporations and Chinese restaurants in the 1960s. I gave up.

Seamus Perry on BURNING MAN: THE ASCENT OF D.J. LAWRENCE: The most Geoff Dyer title ever for a book not written by Geoff Dyer? I was thus amused when I came across the book yesterday and it had an endorsement from ... Geoff Dyer.

I worried that Perry would just be taking the cue to wax on about Lawrence, but eventually he does actually review the book - a big plus - and properly describe it. His case that DHL's 'metaphysic' (why is DHL the only person ever with a 'metaphysic'?) is happily undermined by its complement, ordinary naturalism and unexpected detail, is convincing enough, and also, by the same token, very conventional and predictable to the point of being dull.

SP's case about the 'metaphysic', life without consciousness etc, is very close to the sort of thing long said by ... Terry Eagleton, who often likes talking about authors in philosophical terms rather than commenting on them closely. The partial resemblance to TE is sealed when SP says that DHL, like Yeats, is not 'silly like us' (Auden) but a lot sillier. Is SP aware that TE said precisely the same thing about Yeats in an LRB review of Yeats's letters in 1994?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n13/terry-eagleton/spooky

That brings us to TE on FJ on WB. I love TE, like FJ, and I suppose like WB a lot; so this ought to be ideal. I enjoyed it, but frankly it's TE on low power. For one thing he writes most of it in his most basic introductory mode - a way more typical of how he'd write for the Guardian than the LRB. (Look at that Yeats review and see the difference - in energy, tone, humour, detail.) But the main problem is just that he writes (very very generally) about WB, not about FJ, who's the actual subject of the review.

The fact that FJ has written a book on WB is noteworthy; so is the fact that it is, by the sound of it, fragmentary and elliptical - which TE is right to say has not been FJ's style. But then we need to know much more about all that, and about FJ's specific observations on WB, and the review doesn't take the opportunity to tell us. Its comments on FJ as a writer are broadly correct, but TE has been saying that stuff for 40 years (his great essay 'The Politics of Style' on FJ dates from about 1982). Even the fairly interesting observation that FJ is using more exclamation marks fails to recall that FJ's single most famous sentence features one. 'Always historicize!'

Mentioned this to the Pinefox in person over a pint of a plain, but... Picked up the current TLS on the strength of Michael Hofmann's evisceration of Colm Tóibín's The Magician ("not just a bad book or a misconceived book, or a book that should never have been written: it is in some sense a book that doesn't exist. Crap hat, no rabbit.") and found myself reading rather more of it than I have done many recent LRBs and found myself thinking the unthinkable: Now that Stig has left, is the TLS better than the LRB?

Did a lot of finding myself there. 🤔

It's a good case. This LRB vs TLS ILB thread has long been dominated by the LRB. I'd like to hear more about the TLS, and to read it more often too. I don't know the editors, but this Hofmann review sounds excellent.

Presumably it's still the case that a TLS book review will normally ... review the book, to a degree that the LRB often won't.

There can be gains to that rangy, digressive LRB approach, but I suppose it has also led to me reading many thousands of words that were pretty superfluous, often featuring tedious anecdotes from the reviewers' lives. I suspect that the TLS doesn't print those.

Daniel Soar on 'the sixth taste': I couldn't follow this or tell what it was about - a taste that 'we now know as umami'. I don't - I've never heard the word before. Something else 'was, of course, monosodium glutamate'. I don't know what that is either. Rather than explaining, the article veers off into many other things about food corporations and Chinese restaurants in the 1960s. I gave up.

I have heard of umami and monosodium glutamate/msg, as the article says they are often mentioned in 'the popular press', though if you never read about food you might not have come across them. Anyway given that knowledge I thought the article did a good job of covering the whole history of msg including 'chinese restaurant syndrome', i was intrigued that the letter that started all that was a hoax and wanted to read more, and discovered that the story of the hoax is probably itself a hoax:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/668/transcript

Was the article actually about monosodium glutamate, then? (Not that I know what it is. At first I thought it might mean salt.) I couldn't tell what it was mainly supposed to be about.

Yes it was about msg and how it became a pariah ingredient and how 'umami' rescued it.

I went on a ramen making course a little while ago, the instructor had prepared a huge pot of broth and he poured what seemed like a staggering amount of salt it and asked us to taste it, we all thought 'hmm needs more salt'. Instead he added what seemed like a staggering amount of msg, after that it tasted saltier but also more rounded and pleasant than it would have if he'd just added more salt.

"The five basic tastes are detected by specialized taste receptors on the tongue and palate epithelium.[56] The number of taste categories humans have is still widely debated, with umami being the most recently accepted fifth category, or sixth, if looked at with the Chinese addition of the spicy/pungent category.[57] Ancient Taoists debated there were no taste categories"

ancient taoists hurtling in with the best challops here

fabled tastes
tastes belonging to the emperor
tastes included in this classification
etc