Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

*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.

I didn't know about the blog posts. I'll check them out. Something that Zeynep Tufekci said that I think is true is that generally speaking military analysts did a better job of predicting this invasion than political analysts. Experts on Russian politics reasoned (perhaps correctly) that from a domestic political perspective this action made little sense, so that led them to discount the risk. Military analysts on the other hand studied closely the forces being deployed and rightly concluded on that basis that there was no other reasonable explanation for such a build-up other than an invasion.

LRB 27.1.2022 - for once I read a whole issue, every word, even the poems, which I didn't like.

Helen Thaventhiran on Rita Felski: I don't think this entirely hits the mark but it's good that it treats Felski with scepticism. I see that RF has replied in a later issue. What emerges is the odd spectacle of academics struggling to find ways to say "I enjoy this text" - I'm reminded of Michael Wood saying of the very late Barthes that his declarations of being moved by literature could only seem a radical move to someone to whom this hadn't been normal discourse for decades. A bit too much Zadie Smith in this particular review, anyway.

Philip Terry on Lascaux paintings as code: extraordinary! The things sometimes tucked away in the Diary, secrets waiting to be found.

David Thomson on Matthew Specktor on Hollywood: I left this till last, and found it possibly the finest work I've read in the LRB in a long time. It bears quoting a little.

His book is in some ways a work of critical commentary, as mind-expanding as a perfect peach (eat it now – by tomorrow it may be going off).

There’s a moment’s misgiving as we wonder if this is a set-up for pure puffery. Don’t fret: the peaches are all from the same tree, with secrets about creative careers piercing the reverie of what it has been to be Matthew Specktor, ever yearning and searching for ‘success’, knowing all the while that the swimming pool was waiting. The book is not reliable as biography, but the lives discussed did not organise themselves around facts, or any thought that these people knew what was happening to them. We know the scenario is evolving out of reach. We make stuff up.

She had one other big credit, The Fortune (1975), which has passed into history as a failure, buried beneath the weight of Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, such pals that no one trusted anyone. Specktor admits that he is ‘unabashedly in love’ with Eastman (as if ‘unabashedly’ was a decent trope of sincerity), and I think that’s because in life and in Hollywood, possibility is the most touching thing – and the thing that can have you waiting by the phone for months.

Not that I can believe he would write about anyone he didn’t love, probably without knowing them, just having them perpetually on the screen.

I’d guess she is nicely discontented.

Just imagine what the film of Play It As It Lays might have been if for three minutes Weld had ignored the script and the subdued looming of Mother Didion, and just been funnier and smarter than Milton Berle. Never happened, but keep it in mind.

I regretted that he had too little space for Cimino, who went on to publish novels in France which have never been translated into English. One of them, Big Jane, is ‘the story of a six-and-a-half feet tall female motorcycle enthusiast who escapes the dullness of 1950s Long Island to fight in the Korean War’. Tell us more. Cimino had deep strains of the fake in him: he lied a lot, but in LA, lies are allowed, or just forgiven and reappraised as word of mouth.

It isn’t that Kael didn’t deserve some comeuppance, and she had walked off her own plank by going out to LA (she couldn’t drive!) to produce or counsel Warren Beatty and James Toback. Nobody said Kael was smart: brilliant, yes, but out of line silly or desirous. Like anyone patient enough to read 8000 words on Kael’s prose, Adler seemed shocked by the aggression in what she had done. She is alive still somewhere in the East, undiminished. Yet that isn’t quite plausible; you feel she ought to be holed up in a comped suite in Las Vegas, playing three-dimensional solitaire with gangsters and sheikhs.

Nobody else could do this.

Yeah, I loved that.

LRB 24.2.2022.

William Davies on 'the mechanisation of learning'. This actually covers a number of areas: plagiarism; online learning; the pandemic; the business / economic side; ideology; the idea of a utilitarian approach to the humanities and their eclipse by other subjects; finally anxieties about language.

The article is well informed and mostly measured and careful in tone. That's one of its best features. I think WD correct to think that economics, ideology, technology are all interrelated here, all motivating and driving factors in what's happening.

He's correct that there is a 'crisis' (another one!) in the humanities purely in the sense of numbers taking them in HE, which threatens them much more than any mere ideological controversy. He's correct to see that these raw numbers, and the effect of government policy, are what ultimately most shapes things, and the positions that academics take are froth on the top by comparison.

I think, though, that he doesn't fully pursue every point that he makes; that he can be evasive or too ready to say what people want to hear without fuller investigation.

There is now an idea that 'English in schools has become mechanical; pupils are learning grammar in an inhuman way; it leaves no room for imagination'. WD echoes all this, and doesn't challenge any of it. It could be that these claims are largely true. But one should at least try looking at them from other angles. Was English in schools so great before? Was knowledge of grammar or other technicalities worse than we would like? (Yes, in that most of us, like me, have no idea about these things.) Is it a good idea to change this? (Maybe.) Is there a better way to do that than the current system? (Maybe.) Is the current, supposedly rigorous system actually improving literacy or producing a generation or two of people with a better grasp of English and languages? ... Anecdotally, I don't see any evidence that it is. But we should try to assess these outcomes rather than just starting with an idea that we don't like this approach to English and then finding circular confirmation of this view everywhere.

Another odd feature, that WD doesn't seem to notice, is that in such discussions, things like mathematics and sciences become rather disdained, as the opposite of humanities, and as what, lamentably, pupils and students now prefer to study. On p.8 he laments 'a long queue to speak to the maths and science teachers' at a private school, while humanities are ignored. Sure, that's worrying for the livelihoods of humanities teachers. But I feel like it wasn't long since I was hearing that there was a dearth of interest in maths and sciences, a dearth of teachers, a dearth of knowledge in this country (doubtless in contrast to Korea). Is that changing? Is the UK getting better at maths and sciences? If so, that would actually be ... a good thing. And, in truth, maths and sciences aren't ultimately totally unrelated to the humanities, or uncreative themselves. There are ways to bring these things together.

Lastly, WD's account of 'heightened anxiety' about correct language is insightful and useful in tying this to a more fragmented sense of language that now exists (isolated words and snippets circulating without context), but incomplete in then saying that such anxieties come back to the kind of 'mechanistic' educational approaches he deplores.

I haven't read the article directly above but just want to comment that the pinefox's analysis seems to capture aspects of the current situation in linguistics as I understand it. (1) Departments seem to be shrinking. (2) A long shift to rule-based (e.g., Chomsky) and statistical approaches (e.g., Manning) does not seem to have affected how those outside the discipline view it. I think people tend to think of anthropologists and field linguistics or historical linguistics, which are still important subdisciplines. (3) The object of study (i.e., spoken language) is being transformed into online speech.

<blockquote>I think, though, that he doesn't fully pursue every point that he makes; that he can be evasive or too ready to say what people want to hear without fuller investigation.</blockquote>

I am not sure the pinefox agrees fundamentally that there is a problem, but I am guessing he wants the humanities to survive and wants its defenders to do a better job. I think the resolution might have to do with an investigation, understanding, and defense of methodology that can stand up to the sciences on its own terms.

(I should have clicked on formatting help; I am beyond help ... For example, law has stare decisis vs. pragmatic effect ...)

LRB 24.2.2022.

Neal Ascherson on Brezhnev: I must admit, NA is well-informed about this stuff. I learned something. Makes a change for Sheila Fitzpatrick not to be writing about the USSR.

On to Laleh Kahili on Stanley McChrystal. I'd forgotten the episode where President Obama fired him. That was a surprise and felt like a risk.

LRB 24.2.2022: a good session reading more of this in a pub last night:

David Trotter on Garbo: something incongruous about DT coming on as a big film expert, and yet ... I suppose he *is* a big film expert. Some great Hollywood details and some decent sidelong witty writing in the review.

Seamus Perry on Colm Toibin: too much fastidious fiddling of a kind that can obscure thought. Too much obsequiousness, eg about CT's 'fine Jamesian essays'. Can't you acknowledge that CT might in some way not always be good? Yet knowledge here too: of Mann, of James, and of Yeats who makes for a genuinely productive suggestion at the end, ie: that CT should write a novel about him. And the description of CT's novel sounding like a biography is very suggestive, though SP could entertain the idea that this is just bad writing rather than a clever aesthetic effect.

Tony Wood and Michael Wood share the same page. TW on Mexico City conveys teeming vastness. MW makes NIGHTMARE ALLEY sound interesting but loses the thread; but I like a lot the opening play with the line from César Vallejo.

the very first LRB i bought had a charcoal portrait of the young neal ascherson on the cover

i was introduced to him once at a test department show of all things (he was somehow involved with its libretto or research for its libretto; it was the show where the performance space gradually fills with water and the audience had to clamber up onto little made of piles of sandbags)

anyway he was perfectly friendly but also hugely drunk lol

His Brezhnev article is announced as his 100th for the LRB.