Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

Thought this piece from Andrew Durbin on gay bars was a good one:

‘We should never assume that the gay bar is a safe space by nature. In his chapter on The Apprentice in London’s East End, Lin discusses the gay skinheads and white nationalists who used to frequent the local pubs: violence within as well as without.’https://t.co/l03zvu29HK

— London Review of Books (@LRB) January 8, 2022

LRB 6.1.2022.

Much of this doesn't appeal and unusually I actually decide not to read further: Turner, Penman, and Adam Phillips who remarkably is still being allowed to produce reams of general vagueness about feelings.

On the other hand: James Meek on Ukraine is good - informed, readable, hostile to Vladimir Putin while also resisting notions of a Russian masterplan.

Tim Parks on duelling also proves a good review: conveying the book while also highlighting what's questionable in its judgments.

Michael Wood on Sebald: this is such a potentially big subject that I can't help wondering if the situation is: Wood is increasingly too old to write sustained, long, analytical work, so he tends to be allowed, or encouraged, to write suggestive pieces that stop short when you want them still to get going. The article roams around from a) questioning the circumstances of Sebald's death (perhaps prurient), b) indulging extreme claims about the moral wrongs that Sebald might have done in using real people's pictures, and back to c) a more standard, respectful view that Sebald developed a mode of art that could represent the unrepresentable at the end of a tragic century.

It all makes me think that the truth about WGS is simpler, more banal and less dramatic: he was a quiet, scholarly, erudite career academic who eventually found a fairly distinctive way of producing books, which were quite interesting and effective, then he died quite prematurely. He doesn't deserve to be condemned for moral outrages - absurd - nor, in truth, to be hailed as a moral sage.

Colin Kidd on the John Birch Society and US paranoia is good, very solid, but makes me wonder: don't they have an American to write on this? Scottish Unionist Kidd seems to be as much of a go-to as blokeish Burrow. The ascendancy of neither in the paper has ever been explained.

In this mixed and sometimes irritating collection, Jonathan Meades on Wiltshire via Pevsner provides a highlight: knowledge, strong opinion, style.

Lockwood on Knausgaard was my highlight of the issue but ymmv. Made me want to read the book even though I thought My Struggle was ok at best.

The 'gay bar' book may be good, but the 'at the gay bar' article quotes another book from 2003 that describes mid-century gay culture as 'a roman fleuve ... far richer and less verbal than anything described in Ulysses'.

Maybe in its original setting this made more sense - maybe Ulysses had come up, or the reference was eg: to Joyce's Nighttown (which certainly wasn't, in reality, very 'rich').

As it stands, it seems to be saying 'a very large section of mid-century American real life was richer than a particular novel'. Well, real life generally is, in a way, richer than any novel, by definition - unless you grant the particular kinds of richness that a novel can have, which might be different. It might be best to accept that they're two different kinds of thing, which don't compete. 'Less verbal'? Well, most novels are 100% verbal, so it's not surprising that real life would be 'less verbal' than them. You might as well say a hospital is less verbal than a poem. As for 'roman fleuve': well, Ulysses isn't a roman fleuve - it's practically the opposite of one. So if you've defined something as a roman fleuve, it's not surprising that Ulysses won't compare with it.

This seemingly bad statement is the responsibility of the original 2003 author, but the LRB writer shouldn't have quoted it approvingly. Or if it did somehow originally make sense, he should have shown us how it did.

Too much bad stuff in the paper these days - and bad editing, at a basic typographical level, never mind a higher one.

Lots to enjoy in the January issue. My favourite section was reading Lockwood and Wood side-by-side on writers I don't really care for, reviewing books by (or on) them that they don't particularly care for, just using it as a jumping off point on a discussion of their methods of work (it brings to mind that Sebald and Knausgaard are quite similar: the former is far more diaristic and the latter often meandering and discovering things for himself on a journey he undertakes, and both of them aren't very interested in novels). Quite striking how both of these critics will also go on to say the same sorts of things, about readers becoming accomplices with the writers, or how they won't divulge (or spend much time on) whether the book was good or not (Lockwood more directly than Wood), they are aiming somewhere else and play with your expectations of the review too (though LRB readers should be well acquainted with this kind of play). Very striking how Lockwood is coming along; Jameson struggled to say anything much on Knausgaard compared to Lockwood. As she goes on writing for the paper it will be interesting to see where she goes with it.

Ian Penman wrote probably his best piece so far for the LRB, mostly because of the book which he had to argue with rather than the biographies he usually will review over to talk about the subject. Here is a Black woman, a British punk writing on Solange, and he has to do something more, keep up and remain sharp.

Other than that I liked Jenny Turner reporting on COP26: she explains the acronym (without the obvious joke), is good on the history of COPs and gets into the noise of its ineffective politics, which seems like all we have left. Though she talks about what is outside of it (via previous pieces on eco-terrorism in a previous issue) and also what is cast as outside from within. This should be read alongside Maja-Pearce's short dispatch from the oil pielines in Nigeria, where you see other things done to refineries.

Meades was good.

6.1.2022.

Essay on Fragonard: promising as Fragonard's pictures do actually come up a lot, and can be very attractive - but the book reviewed seems to make very half-baked arguments, academic in a bad sense. The reviewer ends up not able to give them that much respect.

Nicole Flattery on Katie Kitamura: extremely flat.

Alan Bennett Diary: I think I am finally past the point of being appalled by the egotism of this, and more able to laugh at that and enjoy what's enjoyable. It's always at least easier to read than most of the LRB. But some extremely banal content.

The level of self-deprecation here I actually like:

I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role I was allowed to play. I say I know the play well, but in those days I just used to learn my own part (and that not very well), plus a rough acquaintance with my cues, and no sense at all of the plot or direction of the play. I don’t think I even understood what The Taming of the Shrew was about.

This, underplayed, I think genuinely funny:

My dad had his hair cut on the same parade as his butcher’s shop in Meanwood, though never to the satisfaction of my mother, who claimed he came home ‘looking like a scraped cock’. She meant a plucked fowl, but had no thought of being misunderstood.

The egotism here is extraordinary:

23 March. Asked by the Guardian if I would like to interview Andrew McMillan, the poet. Though I’m an admirer I say no, only because if I did it would be as much about myself as about McMillan and how his life has been very different from mine.

WHY would it have to be about yourself? Why not make it about ... the other person?

The banality here is at a new level:

A lovely dinner last night: poached sole, dauphinoise potatoes, fresh broad beans and some samphire. R. was disappointed the spuds weren’t creamier, though this was because he was stingy with the cream. It suited me though and I cleaned my plate, as he almost invariably does his.

High praise for Rory Stewart. Tell it to poster Calzino.

re pinefox contra bennett in previous years:

lol fvck i wrote a long and superbly devastating response to this and ilx totally ate it

― mark s, Tuesday, 19 January 2021 11:59 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

i will come back to it on a day when i'm not meant to be doing something extremely different and look it's noon already ffs

― mark s, Tuesday, 19 January 2021 12:00 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

re ilx being weird: the long piece i wrote is RIGHT THERE two posts above this^^^, ilx clearly un-ate it and put it carefully on the page after all (i only called it "devastating" bcz i thought i had lost it forever and no one could see it, it is not devastating)

i am not bothered by the ego, it's a diary

i am not bothered by the ego, it's a diary

was that your response?

response in full was here, only gets into the ego by implication, as being an unavoidable element in campy green room gossip?: Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

I like Lockwood a lot but she already seems to be her Anthony Lane-style journey from wit to witty shtick

*be on her

The little I remember of Lane's work as having v little interest. Lockwood really grabs you.

Mark S: yes I saw that long post of yours at the time.

I am glad to see that a year ago I was comparing Bennett to Bastani. Still astounding lack of self-awareness that he said what he did about Graham Greene.

Emily LaBarge on Helen Frankenthaler: I hoped for great things for this, have an idea that I like HF, but - the article is well-written, finds lots of words to describe the paintings well enough, but they all seem interchangeable really. A strong sense of being about nothing. Disappointed.

LRB 6.1.2022:

I'd thought that Malcolm Gaskill on spies looked a chore, but have to admit, the story he tells, mainly about the Russian woman spy Ursula Kuczynski, is extraordinary. Multiple countries and continents, three husbands and a child with each, careers in publishing, espionage techniques from radiography to bomb-making, a plot to kill Hitler that's aborted ... Incredible.

As with Colin Kidd on the US, I wonder: why is the LRB getting a Medieval / Renaissance historian to write at length on the Cold War? Just because he's an insider? Depressing on the face of it - yet Gaskill does, in fact, doe an excellent job.

LRB 6.1.2022:

among many other things, Patricia Lockwood writes:

Critical response to this undertaking has been maniacal. Jonathan Lethem calls Knausgaard ‘a living hero who landed on greatness by abandoning every typical literary feint, an emperor whose nakedness surpasses royal finery’. That is objectively an Orson Welles parody, but here’s the thing: I was as excited as anyone.

What does her comment on Lethem's statement mean? It puzzled me.

JL loves Welles, so maybe he would enjoy the description.

Though I don't share others' view of Lockwood, I would actually be interested to read her, at length, on Lethem. I think that she might be better than others at following and matching certain aspects of his work - the perversity, the inconsistency, the repetitiveness, the solipsism, as well as the occasional brilliance and insight.

This is apparently one of FOUR threads dedicated, at least initially, to the question of whether the TLS or the LRB is better.

It seems the question has been decided.

But what about Literary Review? Apart from the Bad Sex Award I don't think I've ever read it.

I've read it, Tracer. It's readable and easy to digest. No long, off-topic articles that don't even pretend to read the book. Whether it's better than the TLS, I'm unsure. Its production values are maybe higher (ie: glossier paper, more expensive cover illustrations). A copy is quite a good investment, if you like this kind of thing - you, or at least I, can dip into it for days or weeks.

LRB 2.1.2022.

Jonathan Parry on political corruption: a historical essay with a newsworthy 'corruption now' element tacked on.

Wolfgang Streeck: actually an egregious example of LRB style. He reviews a book arguing that technocracy and populism can, surprisingly, be combined, by people like Blair and Macron. Rather than assessing these claims, he utterly ignores them and writes an essay about Angela Merkel, whom the authors had consciously *not* included in their arguments.

Macron seems to me a perfect instance of technocratic populism. Unsure whether Merkel really was.

James Lasdun on cars: this looked unappetising but it's worth persisting with: the story of the car executives does actually become quite sensational.

Rivka Galchen on vaccination: has the odd distinction of repeating specific information and stories featured in another recent LRB, about cowpox and smallpox. I'd learned from that that 'vaccination' related to cows; I relearned it here.

Adam Mars-Jones on Atticus Lish: strong in assessing a broad question: how can narrative cope with degenerative illness? As often, AMJ gets his blue pencil out and attends closely to technical matters; whether his judgment is sound here, I think one would need to read the novel to check.

Terry Eagleton on Malcolm Bull: for a change, and unlike with his article on FJ and WB, TE makes an effort rather than phoning it in, as we used to say. He shows impressive knowledge of all Bull's work, building up to the current book, and delivers a deft assessment. Bull ought to be glad.

What does her comment on Lethem's statement mean? It puzzled me.

I'll take a crack at this. I was also puzzled by the term "Orson Welles parody" so I did a bit of internet sleuthing. The Know Your Meme site relates that the most meme-worthy thing about Orson Welles was the series of TV commercials he did for Paul Masson California wines from 1978 to 1981. As this wikipedia page relates, these commercials became "a much-parodied cultural trope of the late twentieth century". The notoriety of these commercials gained a more recent boost when outtakes leaked on Youtube of an apparently very bored and inebriated Welles flubbing his cues with complete indifference to the proceedings. But how exactly does Lethem's statement function as an "Orson Welles parody"? I would guess it relates to Welles' grandiloquent manner in these commercials. So perhaps she means that Lethem's praise is perhaps a touch too effusive.

There was someone on twitter who I can no longer find doing a thread of orson welles parodies that would have been instructive, but here's the man himself using the kind of language the parodies riff on:

I wish there was a directory of film directors where you look a name up and it's just a summary of Orson Welles roasting them. pic.twitter.com/IEmo5eolkf

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) August 6, 2019

Those are superb!

O.Nate, I tend to agree that PL was basically saying that JL was being grandiloquent. But the particular way that PL said it made it more obscure to me.

I figured it as "unable not to backhand any compliment"

That's interesting! I definitely didn't see that.

LRB 27.1.2022.

Chris Lintott: Short Cuts on a new space telescope: brings the astounding scale that only writing on space can. The fact that scientists on Earth can manipulate the moving parts of a telescope thousands of miles away ... it makes you think anew about wifi limitations.

Marco Roth on Russell Hoban: I'd be cautious of Roth, but he does something very well here: in just one page he summarises RH's whole career, touching on many books while quoting and explicating convincingly from the best known. He convinces me that RH was as interesting as he thinks. To do this in a page is commendable when you think of how some LRB writers squander pages: Frances Stonor Saunders, Clair Wills, Colm Toibin.

Talking of whom ... Colm Toibin on John McGahern. A volume of letters of over 800pp: how many pages of letters CT must have read over recent years - not just these but thousands of pages of Bishop's and Lowell's, at least. To get someone who knew McGahern to review McGahern's letters is one thing. To get a correspondent of McGahern, whose letters from McGahern are, as far as I can, *featured in the book under review*, to review it ... may be another. Insider dealing as usual.

CT is at his worst when he throws in a paragraph (p.23) unrelated to anything around it, out of temporal order, highlighting the fact that he visited McGahern who gave him the MS of what CT says is McGahern's best story. The logrolling about himself is extraordinary.

And yet ... for all this, I have to say that by CT's standards, this is not a bad review. It draws on acquaintance with McGahern to tell us things we don't know (including his words in the last paragraph). It describes McGahern's fiction actually quite accurately and convincingly. It sees the resemblances between the texts and quite well describes how they work; Heaney's quotation on p.26 assists. Despite being by such a self-regarding bore of a writer, it's actually, probably, quite a useful and acute account of John McGahern.

“AhhhHHHHH…the crypto market!” pic.twitter.com/U4GGFF3pll

— Michael D. Fuller (@michaeldfuller) February 14, 2022

I missed the space telescope and Hoban in the last one, will have to go back to them.

10/2/22 Lethem on Lem might be the final push I need to read more Lem. And maybe to get started on Lethem. Also enjoyed the diary, and Nagel on Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch - ironically because he makes less of an effort than in his last piece to make the philosophy seem important or useful to anyone outside of the discipline.

Wolfgang Streeck: actually an egregious example of LRB style. He reviews a book arguing that technocracy and populism can, surprisingly, be combined, by people like Blair and Macron. Rather than assessing these claims, he utterly ignores them and writes an essay about Angela Merkel, whom the authors had consciously *not* included in their arguments.

Lol, tbh, this doesn't bother me as much as it probably should. My main aim in reading something like the LRB is to be entertained and learn something, though not necessarily about the book in question. This piece gave me a new perspective on Merkel which I found interesting.

i have been enjoying “flicking through” (electronically) the TLS recently. no, no particular articles. just the aggregate of shorter stuff really.

re "is stuff getting shorter" -- i've read several pieces in recent issues which felt as if they were brought to a close very abuptly, almost cut-from-the-bottom style. just as the writer seemed to be easing into the second half of the discussion on the next spread there was that abrupt little square

(this is a newish sensation: i think post-MKW there *is* an emergent new editorial ecology, tho i don't think it's bedded in quite yet

also: the joe dunthorne diary in v44i3 -- i think this story is almost entirely made up

a couple of the wider scams he mentions -- which obviously don't involve him -- are real and on-going

Who, if anyone, had said that LRB articles were getting shorter?

Perhaps it was me. I don't recall it.

re: "brought to a close very abuptly, almost cut-from-the-bottom style" -- this has been very precisely my sensation with numerous LRB articles for a very long time, but *not* recently.

I once attended an LRB event about Frank Kermode, and made precisely this observation about FK's articles, and the panelists coyly turned to MKW asking her if it was true, and she said nothing, and my question was dissipated very unhelpfully.

Fizzles: do you need a subscription to do what you are doing with the TLS?

One reader on twitter recently bought up the question of articles getting shorter.

oh yes lol it was twitter, i thought it was here

frank "the sense of an ending" kermode: say it aint so

I did reply that I didn't get a sense of that happening but that was after spending most of an evening getting through an issue and thinking it isn't a very different experience from before.

The Rosemary Hill article in v44i3 was a particularly noticeable example of being cut off in mid flow.

i think that was the piece i primarily had in mind: maybe they've always done it and they're just getting more brazen or careless or clumsy

I think they're doing it less !

Re things getting shorter - they apologise for accidentally cutting off the last line of a recent Jorie Graham poem in the new issue! I wonder who other than Jorie might have ever noticed?

my child aged four could have painted it!

i never read any of the poems so definitely not me

Fizzles: do you need a subscription to do what you are doing with the TLS?

So, Fizzles -- it sounds like the answer is ... "yes" ?

You do have a subscription and that's why / how you are reading these articles?

Sorry, slight misreading, i thought the question was 'do you need a subscription to do what you need to do,' not 'what you are doing with the TLS'. The answer is indeed yes.

Though it also certainly used to be the sort of thing to which libraries subscribe, including digital subscriptions.

William Davies on the new issue on the ongoing assault on humanities courses, what is valued when teaching literacy (crossing experiences of friends and his own children in various parts of the system). It's something that's been written about in the LRB a lot by different people over the years, and ofc, given that the mag is a showcase of sorts on the values undergoing the kinds of assault it's not a surprise. Though I don't think the university as a haven from the values outside it's gates has ever really been written much about. The last line in the piece -- around writing and reading without judgement and evaluation -- is not something that can be enjoyed by people who want to, because it doesn't pay the rent. It's not as if Davies doesn't know this reality, but to face it is another matter.

On the other hand: James Meek on Ukraine is good - informed, readable, hostile to Vladimir Putin while also resisting notions of a Russian masterplan.

I read this last night. Of course it's easy to criticize with hindsight, but overall I found it informative, especially about trying to understand Putin's state of mind. Although Meek, like many analysts at the time, has a hard time conceiving that Putin would actually do what he eventually did, the article overall is not dismissive of such fears and ends on an ominous note.

Accurate assessment.

Meek has also written a ton of later LRB blog posts from Kyiv, which I've not yet read.