Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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

Thinking again of TE's disappointing review of FJ, I wonder if part (yet not all) of the reason might be that FJ actually doesn't make a coherent or useful argument in this book.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3638-the-benjamin-files

Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination. The three-way tug of war over his heritage between adherents of his friends Scholem, Adorno and Brecht can also be better grasped from this position, which gives the Brechtian standpoint more due than most influential academic studies. Benjamin’s corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity; and its political motivations are clarified by attention to the omnipresence of history throughout his writing, from the shortest articles to the most ambitious projects. His explicit programme – “to transfer the crisis into the heart of language” or, in other words, to detect class struggle at work in the most minute literary phenomena – requires the reader to translate the linguistic or representational literary issues that concerned him back into the omnipresent but often only implicitly political ones. But the latter are those of another era, to which we must gain access, to use one of Benjamin’s favorite expressions.

I don't really see much of interest in these statements.

"premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer" -- is almost the most obvious premise you could have about WB.

"Benjamin’s corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity" -- this surely is the kind of thing people were saying by, say, the late 1970s; it's a premise of TE's 1981 book on WB!

Still, it's possible that another reviewer, more energised than TE, might somewhere actually find something to argue with in the book.

i've been taking notes on this review all morning: i agree w/pf that this is very poor work from TE and then disagree on a number of points

sadly i have work to do before i write it up

unrelated work i mean (actual work)

here we go foax

1: my first issue with this review is that I am not at all convinced eagleton has done more than skim this book. His entire argument is a kind of eagletonian fantasia on the verso blurb pf linked above, drawing attention mainly to those issues of form that he can take in via skimming (constellated form, lots of lists).

2: now a “proper” review would set out the books argument and then dissect it. For good or evil, LRB allows some latitude here. And terry is also making a kind of argument about the ”politics” of the ”proper” — indeed it’s possible (tho hard to prove w/o a snitch among the LTB subs) that this piece was conceived as constellated itself and handed in this way, per Theses on History or the Arcade Project or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Definitely it reads this way: as a succession of thought-dots that the reader (or perhaps the messiah) is to supply the joins for. Bcz that’s modernism and we’re all modernists now, and here’s why. Except as a succession it’s pretty feeble, and the sub editors have anyway run all the dots together — so it no longer looks constellated — and besides terry is in no way cut out for such formal experiments or for modernism as he chooses to define it: thickened texture, scrambled syntax, not slipping down too easy like some kind of COMMODITY ugh ugh vomit vomit.

3: … tho of course the thing eagleton is most (and justly) admired for is the lucidity of his prose. He has made a tidy career (or as he would call it a ”commodity”) of ensuring that a wide range of thinkers “slip down easily”…

4: the first page is largely classic terry — a couple of minor observations abt the topic (wally b) are ceded to FJ, before we proceed to a whole raft of claims, without any clartify which are TE’s judgments and which are fred’s (and which are simply well recognised positions that all critics agree on). Eagleton has form for this slippage — or shall we say appropriation: once when he gave a book by gayatri chakravorti spivak a dusty review, the LRB received a tart letter from a reader pointing out all the stuff he’d co-opted into his position that was straight-up derived from hers.

5: This is one exception, which is curious and potentially fascinating and I wish he’d taken it somewhere of made more of it: anything you try to make of it is just guesswork — and the guesswork begins almost immediately). It’s the digression about Wittgenstein and the parallels TE claims to be drawing (tho they’re not in my view actually parallels, since they mostly locate the two writers as moving in different directions on the larger map that TE is vaguely handwaving towards )(which at a minimum has on it modernism and postmodernism, theory and criticism, history and religion, philosophy and marxism).

6: Anyway this digression is NOT derived sneakily from fred’s book — which we know because terry says so. As comparative speculation it is in fact entirely an Eagleton joint, TE riffing to himself (Ludwig is a long-time Eagleton enthusiasm: he wrote the screenplay for Jarman’s film abt him) (and may have explored thses topics elsewhere — eagle-heads let me know)

7: … and FJ says never a word about wittgenstein! A silence that TE calls “eloquent” — an odd word to use that I’m going to return to, bcz it might be sly critique or else a coded kind of praise.

8: round here he also begins to elaborate a two-fold hint at a point never properly enlarged on (bcz constellated!): which is that benjamin’s line on the advance of history (and apparently terry’s own) precisely opposes that of ordinary marxism, which we might (and I think this is his unstated claim) also term “modernist” marxism: the — the “myth of perpetual progress”, as terry call it at one point. Terry: “progress and continuity are fictions of the ruling class” — and yet Marx says that the underlying forces will destroy the oppressors? Benjamin says (in TE’s ever-deft rephrase): “revolution isn’t a runaway train but the application of the emergency brake. History is hurtling out of control, and revolution is necessary if we are to get a decent night’s sleep.”

9: Then there’s Wittgenstein digression, and then terry calls walt is a “modernist theorist” (for formal reasons: constellated prose! doesn’t write proper books!) rather than a “theorist of modernism”. But of course WB’s not a “theorist of modernism” at all — better IMO to call him a “theorist of modernity”, better still a “diagnostician of modernity” (viz look what mass reproduction does to the aura, plus all the recording angel stuff that terry is busily rephrasing at several points.

(9a: nicest rephrase of benjamin’s understanding of revolution btw: “the meaning of… events is in the custodianship of the living… it is up to us to decide whether, say, a Neolithic child belonged to a species that ended up destroying itself” — this is vivid and eloquent and well done TE)

10: then a discursus on modernism as a description of WB (and of the anti-philosopher Wittgenstein), particularly that approach to writing that frees one from the tyranny of the “coherent whole”. This he pretty much flubs. First he makes a grand and sweeping claim (“everyone from Aristotle to I. A Richards” believe art must be a whole — which for example entirely sidesteps the very aphoristic Nietzsche, who also didn’t write ”proper” book) and also weirdly crashes into the claim that this is merely an “arbitrary diktat”. It might be wrong even if everyone does it, but it’s not arbitrary dude. Get a grip.

11: then his somewhat comical mixing of metaphors to summarise the degradation of the ability of language to express the world — apparently is it has become “stale” and also “threadbare”. Are there things in the world that can be both stale and threadbare? Maybe a very old but not-quite-fully-eaten spaghetti bolognese? None more commodified.

12: now comes the ur-language, this being a belief of benjamin’s that he shares with e.g. heidegger and tolkien (neither of whom are modernists in my opinion), but TE sets it up — via images and surrealism somehow — as an element in the truer modernism that benjamin cleaves to, which is that it is a doomed attempt to rescue itself from a degraded ordinary language (which has lost touch with the pure tongue of god) by refusing to speak anything like an ordinary language. This argument is also a bit of a mess I think but constellation works for him here bcz the reader (me) (or possibly the messiah) spent some time trying to untangle it for him. Anyway there’s a whole bunch of topsyturvy contrarian stuff going on here, channeled thru a rewording of the Recording Angel image — which jameson as a mere normie marxist doesn’t get — and the theses of history and the redemption of nostalgia. Anti-modernism as the true modernism because the homesickness “for a time when… there absolute and infinite existed” — modernism (per terry here) is not as an escape from god, but a botched way to see god (in the eloquent silences if you like lol)

13: unlike e.g. that shallow bullshit POSTMODERNISM ugh ugh vomit vomit, which says there is “no haunting absence in the world” and look you shouldn’t scratch where it doesn’t itch (R. Rorty).

14: ok, so go back to Wittgenstein and Jameson’s “eloquent” silence. My first read of the word “eloquent” was that terry was saying lol, this omission is an eloquent tell of how much smarter I terry am than he fred lol lol. My second is a bit more complicated and kinder — though it also makes less sense (sorry, I’m just trying to unravel the constellated form here…): Jameson’s “eloquent” silence is bcz he — who of course wrote the book on postmodernism (a point not made out loud but maybe it doesn’t have to be) — deliberately omits mention of wittgenstein bcz his latter-day (post-tractatus/anti-tractatus) anti-philosophy is much closer to rorty than to benjamin. Tractatus kinda sets logic up as the tongue of god. A whole slooch of philosophers veered off in pursuit of this silly idea for a while, until wittgentsein pointed — ver much not in book form — that this isn’t at all how ordinary languages work, and this means something important (about god and tongues and itches etc). So TE is in fact recruiting FJ, botchedly gazing at an absent mourned god via his silence, which is “eloquent” bcz it can somehow thus be jimmied into terry’s own never-ending rarely fair or honest religion-based shadow-war on pomo .

15: Is Wittgenstein postmodern, with his non-book books and such? Well Lyotard deploys LW’s concept of “language games” at length in The Postmodern Condition: which is not dispositive, but Eagleton absolutely knows this. Even if he doesn’t tell us this. His silence, you might, say, is “eloquent” (viz you can project any old bullshit onto it, positive or negative, depending on how you feel towards terry) (I usually feel bad)

(15a: anyway the botched modernist gaze that TE allows us via his constellated text of a non-normie god-spying benjaminian marx would very much be worth reading about all spelled out — as it’s just a monster of a claim — but terry is a coward and keeps it all on the hinted downlow)

16: And now, in I guess the last fifth of the essay, we finally reach jameson at length. A bit of sucking up (“ the finest cultural critic in the world”) to leaven an attack: FJ doesn’t understand that perpetual progress is a myth, he knows nothing of theology or ethics, his sentences are all far too long, an exhaustingly prolix writer whose prose could every time be cut by a third and still mean the same thing (this is my sharper redraft of something TE fawningly pretends is all “writerly” virtue, which it isn’t). Fred has “none of Benjamin’s misgivings about writing books”, except wait, is he not perhaps “wondering rather late in the day where books ate really possible”? (subs totally snoozing on this little clash, the second bit only 20 lines after the first)

(16a: digression on cowboy movies. I’m glad to say it’s been a long long while since TE was routinely rolled out as the designated commentator on matters pop cultural, here to make a sweeping comment abt something he knew very little about: viz hammer horror and the gothic, vernacular depictions of aliens, what have you). It’s good that the LRB has grown beyond this kneejerk (and now employs many writers who reliably know much more), bcz this is the kind of noise he tended to say: “It is an American puritan view of morality, later to be transplanted into cowboy movies.” First: later than what? Jameson was born in 1934, but even so cowboy movies predate him. Second: lol whut, wtf is this very extremely dumb and ignorant claim abt morality in cowboy movies?)

17: and finally the bit where fred is praised for going constellated in s section where TE is summarising at such high and compressed speed that it reads like that exam essay you have suddenly to finish up because you should you had 40 minutes left and you only have five. Last paragraph, about literary theorists and close reading, is a strawman contradiction — actually we know these folks all read closely, who the hell says otherwise? — masking the fact that (a) TE didn’t leave himself proper time to read this book, or (b) leave himself proper time to write this piece.

Read the piece by Adam Mars-Jones piece on William Gaddis (online) a couple of days ago. While I do like this rubbing up of attentiveness to past novelistic technique that M-J can bring to anything there is also a feeling that he is inadequate to tackle what deviates in a significant way. A lot of the points are about organisation, or lucidity of sentence - he mystifies a "feeling for the medium" when comparisons to novels that apparently make points better and have been forgotten are run through, just in case they fall flat (which they often do, I like half of the sentences M-J says are bad, and sometimes he will miss the point of them). Goes without saying that a lot of this could be written about Ulysses, but which he'd never get past an editor at the LRB today. So he needs to be careful, M-J needs to give his due to modernist-era writers who are already in the canon. so, 'Pierre Menard' has vast interior spaces. That's just the natural order of things. But Gaddis? He can't write 'literary prose', which appears to mean M-J has to read a sentence more than once to parse some meaning.

He likes JR more, but he starts his discussion of this book with a comment on Joy Williams' intro. So it seems that one woman has taken interest in Gaddis!!! Its one of the most disgusting things I have ever read in a book review in this paper and they should be ashamed to pusblish it.

JR fails the bechdel test

Say what?

joke: the novel JR by william Gaddis consists exclusively of dialogue from crank phone calls made by a boy, therefore it trivially fails the Bechtel test as there is no scene where where two women talk about something other than a man—because there is no scene where two women talk (actually i forget if there is even one woman in the novel). xyz is offended that adam Mars-Jones’ review (allegedly) implies that zero women like the writing of william gaddis, contrary to the evidence that at least one woman (joy Williams) claims to like it. the fact that JR fails the bechdel test, a minimal (yet clearly superficial and inadequate) test of a works’ feminism, is offered tongue-in-cheek as a reason why women don’t like gaddis

here’s the passage in question

Joy​ williams’s name on the cover of JR (she wrote the new introduction) is proof that an almost caricaturally male enterprise, and the challenge of yomping across vast inhospitable tracts of literary terrain, has appealed to at least one female sensibility in the 45 years since the book’s publication.

I've finally picked up a copy of the BRIXTON REVIEW OF BOOKS.

It's free!

I will read at least part of it with interest.

the novel JR by william Gaddis consists exclusively of dialogue from crank phone calls made by a boy

Er, no it doesn’t

It does have at least one woman character, a love interest, who is not well drawn iirc - it’s not a novel of rich characters tbf