Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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.

yr mention upthread suggests you have a degree of scepticism towards him, or anyway mild impatience? i first encountered him writing from poland during the solidarnosc era when he was really very good indeed (eastern europe is his zone of for.corresp.expertise) so i am perhaps today more indulgent than i shd be?

but i basically think he's a good thing not a bad…

I agree that he is more good than bad.

caught up with the David Thompson/Spektor piece pinefox praises upthread and it is indeed excellent. v much want to read the book.

thomson

for some reason this stuck with me (on the revolting sounding zevon)

The Q whom Specktor kissed had once been involved with Zevon, and Specktor asked her: ‘Did you ever forgive him?’ She looks at him and ponders, like a Tuesday Weld close-up: ‘I never thought of it that way.’

LRB 10.3.2022: again I open the wrong issue, am all out of order. No dates on the envelopes these days!

I've read about 5 articles here and none are exceptionally interesting - Simon Akam on the Army probably the standout though. Will Reynolds on McLaren (a figure who, if I think about it, doesn't appeal or interest me at all) be the highlight?

as someone who's recently read quite a lot abt thomas cromwell and watches every TV romp feat.the tudors i found the piece on the dissolution of the monasteries genuinely interesting and useful

we tend to encounter it merely as a side-issue in the melodrama of ann boleyn (and we tend to see e.g. monks as losers and not worthy of our attention) -- but it was a colossal and a radical re-organisation: the wiping away of a whole layer of social activity (and the transfer of a much smaller strand of it into proto-modern schools and universities) (which we now regard as unustly surviving institutes of privilege)

i also like james butler's piece on medieval possession and exorcisms but it's more about diverting anecdotes than a sketch of a wider and very different world (and i'm less of a fan of ken russell's THE DEVILS than butler is, derek jarman's design notwithstanding)

just completed akam on the army and i agree that it is very good: starts with the relatively easy task of taking apart a bad and lazy book, but brings to this a LOT of strong and interesting critical information, including the author's own travails when penguin random house got cold feet and cancelled *his* (much better sounding) book abt these issues

Akam's own book was prominently reviewed by the LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n13/tom-stevenson/the-most-corrupt-idea-of-modern-times

Butler did a good job with his task re Exorcism, but I found the article rather pointless. It's odd that Penguin have even published a special anthology of Exorcism, at this point.

My impression re: closing monasteries was that it was mainly about generating wealth for the Crown. Have not much looked into it and am only 30% through the article on it, which is well-written and of course expert.

Of the two rock biogs recently reviewed Lavinia Greenlaw did a bit better when drawing out interest in Nico than Simon Reynolds did for McLaren. This, despite the latter being very much a one-off, and despite Reynolds having this obsession that he seems embarrassed by now. Maybe he should forget it all, but why should we?

Diarmaid Macculloch is so good! I really enjoyed the piece on the monasteries too. I couldn't get into James Butler's piece. Agree that the David Thomson piece from a few issues back was superb too.

One of piece I really liked was Laleh Klalili on this book by a former US army type that goes through the soldier to consultant to author to kinda guru industry. Very strong, powerful ending.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/laleh-khalili/stupid-questions

Diarmaid MacCulloch's long and knowledgeable article ultimately left me unsure why the vast dissolution of monasteries process had taken place at all, except for one brief reference to my own very half-baked idea that it happened to get finance for the Crown.

Hal Foster on Kurt Schwitters is crisp as usual but processes it all through a set of abstractions that quickly come to feel banal.

Simon Reynolds on Malcolm McLaren: for much of the article I found this dreadful. McLaren comes across as a horrible, selfish, destructive individual who purveyed bad creative work, and Reynolds as a vapid cheerleader for empty ideas of 'subversion', who seems to have gained nothing in maturity in the last 30 or 40 years despite the profound experiences that he has doubtless gone through. And yet - in the last column or two, it changes. SR actually says that MMcL was bad, and did bad things, and this should be counted against him. His statement that 'destruction and disorder are the opposite of what we need today' is vague enough to be right or wrong depending on context, but it's potentially more serious and constructive than the garbage he's been espousing earlier.

Yet in the last lines he lets this welcome turn lead him to the extreme of apparently saying, not merely that we should stop talking about punk, but that we should do the same for the whole of C20 culture. Talk about throwing the baby out with the Vartry water. 'At some point they will become incomprehensible to young people, requiring too much historical backfilling to be worth the effort' - maybe he should warn Diarmaid MacCulloch of this?

While I wouldn't read a book about McLaren, the fact that there is now an 855pp book about him reminds me of what I tried to suggest on the ILM Cure thread: that it's slightly anomalous that there are not serious historical works covering the careers of more major pop acts, as part of the overall history of culture. Dylan, Bowie, even Smiths, yes. But why isn't there a 500-page rigorously researched fully referenced history of Siouxsie and the Banshees? ... Maybe there is.

there was a magnificently sniffy letter from the author of the McLaren tome in a recent LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n06/letters

the book is presumably this long bcz it's extremely well illustrated? design and fashion are paul gorman's primary wheelhouse, including a history of beloved style mag the face, a (by no means bad and very well illustrated) book on barney bubbles, plus an oral history of the music press (uk and us) which certainly is full of handy anecdotes

he was also the ghostwriter of GOLDIE's first autobiography (which goldie has since somewhat repudiated tho this is not really gorman's fault IMO) (i am extremely close pal's with the ghostwriter of goldie's SECOND autobiography so i know everything abt this) (perhaps i shd be angling to become goldie's third and defnitive ghostwriter)

this mfer wrote pal's

That letters page (poster Neil S's link) looks a good one!

LRB 10.2.2022: ultimately not one for me, save the one long article I read first: Lethem on Lem. One of the best, most important pieces of non-fiction he's produced for some time. Great to see him filling in his relation to SF in a way he hasn't done for years.

The first half of the article on J.C. Oates is decent - the reviewer really knows her Oates (who has written 50 novels!). I daresay that Oates should be given more attention. What's quoted from her here reads well.

Inclined to agree, belatedly, with Mark S's statement that Joe Dunthorne's Diary looks like fiction as much as fact.

It's odd that Penguin have even published a special anthology of Exorcism, at this point.

Ressurgence of interest in paganism, witches, folk horror, I think it's prob selling well.

quickly on walter de la mare (in v44 no6, by LRB regular mark ford): i was disposed to like this as i went in bcz the LRB twitter account quoted a line that was mildly disobliging abt leavis lol* but it spends too much time saying "WdlM is unfashionable these days but actually there's lots to like" and not enough IMO abt his his strengths as a means to sidestep the modernist juggernaut (which he wasn't a fan of): those strengths = viz he was a key figure in the children's verse movement (as poet and as anthologist) and he was also a very active ghost-story writer

tbf both are facts carefully mentioned, but only as adjuncts to the Real Work™️ (= his poetry for grown-ups)

anyway it made me go and dig out his 1910 children's classic THREE MULLA-MULGARS (aka THREE ROYAL MONKEYS) and start rereading (it alsmo made me realise i kinda mix up john masefield and walter de la mare, since i went to look up when the latter was poet laureate but the poet laureate was the former)

*in truth not disobliging enough

LRB 24.3.2022: opened it last night. Very unpromising. Even Fredric Jameson, writing about ancient religious stuff, was too tedious to continue with for long.

The article that Mark S mentions actually looks the most appealing of all to me.

adding: to be clear i do not had the argument sketched even roughly in my mind (re the dynamic interaction between modernism, kidlit and ghosts) but i sense it's there and someone needs to make it (me, in the LRB) (they don't do anything like enough on kidlit)

re this issue as a whole: i imagine most of the energy went into the ukraine material and i will certainly read that at some point, without great enthusiasm (the robespierre piece seems very by-numbers to me, not least bcz it cites simon schama a couple of times)

oh i shd read the wdlm one. some of his short stories are amongst my favourite things.

so the lrb has finally arrived and i have read the de la mare piece. i have some thoughts, but i'm not even going to attempt to put them cogently – more a sort of list.

the interplay with modernism is generally misframed, i think - i don't especially mean in ford's article, it's not particularly egregious in that respect but it does probably result in what mark correctly says is a repeated 'not v fashionable these days' observation, expressed in one way or another.

the yellow book, late 19th century aestheticism, laforgue, the grotesque, modernism being a diversion, maybe coherent in intent, but not coherent in terms of its influences, there is continuity from de la mare backwards and forwards. it is the literary canon, and its 'and then modernism' narrative that makes it seem like de la mare is off to one side (sure he is, but *more* than literary modernism? why are *they* at the centre? i do not mean to get all carey - i like modernism, and no i don't know why i've put this bit in brackets) - all of these scumble the modernism v de la mare framing. plus, late christian eliot is different from early eliot. he also became something of a guardian of literature, i think – he raised a similar subscription for arthur machen. he was a mystic too! (in a way that the high catholic that wyndham lewis became was not).

i'm a bad reader of poetry, so i found the quotations useful, and i'm interested to read Wootten's book. i think we had a boxed copy of come hither when i was growing up. mystified to know why – wouldn't have appealed to either my mum or my dad, and if it was a gift to me, i never picked it up - the cover and the tweeness emanating off it put me off. i will look for it the next time i visit my mum, as now i'm interested.

Walter de la Mare's The Vats (1915) and JG Ballard's The Waiting Grounds – unusually... uniquely?... taking place off earth – are the same story. i've been meaning to put something down on paper about this for years. notes everywhere. but yes, they are the same. not entirely sure what this means other than people underrated ballard's victorian-ness.

slightly to mark's point - a comparison of the evolution of british science fiction from fin-de-siecle and edwardian lit, as compared to the US paths from Lovecraft/Machen etc and the different places they reached, and expressions they uh expressed, is v interesting, as is their unification in things like quatermass and that other thread that covers children of the stones and sapphire and steel and such like that i cbf'd to link to atm.

Read this excellent piece on Whiteness in an earlier issue. It puts together a lot of names and thinking around anti-racist discourse over the last century, up to the present.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n03/musab-younis/to-own-whiteness

Late to Reynolds on McLaren. The idea that Punk's destructive side has been overlooked in favour of its DIY/creative side strikes me as totally absurd - this might at most be true for Reynolds himself and a few other post-punk specialists, but the general legacy of Punk in mainstream popular culture is 100% the destructive, cartoonishly violent stuff; that's still the caricature that comes up when most ppl think of what a punk is, the Grundy interview is still their most iconic moment, etc.

Agree. That's convincing.

NYRB subscribers are wild pic.twitter.com/PmTZFB50Dr

— Chris (@CMccafe) April 4, 2022

it me

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n06/bee-wilson/too-specific-and-too-vague

A classic example of saying almost nothing of the titles under review but using their subject as the basis of your own little essay.

Good one!

I didn't enjoy Patricia Lockwood in the same issue, I suppose the diary is the most self indulgent section but she didn't have anything perceptive or interesting to say on Kafka and her humour fell flat for once.

NYRB has gotten pretty boring, IMO. Maybe partly a retrenchment to not doing anything that might offend their advertisers since the Ian Buruma controversy, and also just the fact that it's very difficult to fill Bob Silver's shoes. Too many boring reviews of boring books.

LRB 24.3.2022:

Tom Stevenson on the history of economic sanctions. A good topic, and of course timely. I'd like to think that sanctions against Russia now are effective, but then I tend to imagine that like most other things they are spoiled and rendered moot by the corruption of the world's power and money. But some well-meaning people also say that sanctions are *bad*.

Stevenson tends to make sanctions sound harsh and effective, but he doesn't at all make me think that they are as bad as war. Thus he makes me feel like they are a preferable alternative to war. There is also something intuitively reasonable about the notion of sanctions which there is not about the idea of war -- analogous to, say, not answering someone's calls, as vs going and burning down their house. Others will say that this analogy and judgment are misguided.

So, sanctions:
- are good because they can hurt nations that act badly (like Russia)
- are good because they are not war (like NATO fighting Russia)
- are bad, many people say, because they hurt innocent civilians (many people say that sanctions on Iraq and Iran have been cruel or criminal)
- but then again are good, many similar people also say, and should be extended though vested interests oppose them? (South Africa then, Israel now.)

Between all these positions I'm not certain what the correct position is on sanctions, but am still inclined to say they look more good than bad, compared to other things.

I forgot to note that Fredric Jameson's review of Tokarczuk is not really a review at all, nor a coherent article about the issues behind the text in question. It would be kindest just to say it's a man of 88 enjoying himself, and that the whole article would be fairly OK if it were a long private letter to a friend who had also read this 892pp novel and knew what it was about.

Mark Ford on Walter de la Mare: I don't know this poet, but found this article fairly good and the best thing in the rather sub-par issue.

Touching to read that WDLM 'grew up in Charlton and Forest Hill' then lived in 'Beckenham, Anerley and Penge'.

Confusing to realise, after rereading, that 'Walter de la Mare' was his *real* name and 'Walter Ramal' his early pen name - I'd thought it was the reverse.

I forgot to note that Fredric Jameson's review of Tokarczuk is not really a review at all, nor a coherent article about the issues behind the text in question. It would be kindest just to say it's a man of 88 enjoying himself, and that the whole article would be fairly OK if it were a long private letter to a friend who had also read this 892pp novel and knew what it was about.

I scanned it because I do intend to read the book and that was my impression - or the rather less considered 'what the fuck are you talking about', anyway. I'll go back to it after I've read the book.

dont bother, fredric james svcks even more than terry eagleton >:(

The "Responses to Ukraine" feature was pretty dire. It reminded me of the NYRB US 2020 election issue, where they got all their contributors to write some blurb on the upcoming election. This kind of forum, in which you'll be lined up alongside other contributors, asked to comment on a politically-charged issue, and not really given space to develop an argument (essentially Twitter in periodical form), brings out the most conformist tendencies and becomes a purely rhetorical exercise: find a novel angle on rehashing the conventional wisdom.

Strong words but somewhat fair, I think, o.nate.

I was predisposed not to like this feature - why on Earth should I care what Prof R*se thinks about this world-historical issue? - but actually found it a bit better than expected. It seemed that they had primed contributors to talk about different things. But on the whole, no, not keen.

Finished that LRB and on to LRB 7.4.2022.

Apart from Lethem on Lem I've found LRBs quite unappealing lately. Here the one definite highlight would appear to be Adam Mars-Jones. Who is now listed as 'director of the Writers' Centre at Goldsmiths'.

But actually the issue holds a bit more than that. Tom Stevenson in Ukraine: he seems a notable addition to the LRB roster in being a military expert who is also politically critical. I like his clear factual writing here.

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite on Wales: a good topic (how often does the LRB cover Wales next to Scotland or NI? It doesn't). She's very positive about devolved government. It's also noticeable, maybe unsurprising, how far the diminution of the Welsh language resembles what happened in Ireland.

The front cover advertises 'A poem by Maureen N. McLane'. Unusual. I thus read the poem, and thought it was bad.

Even if, unlike me, you thought that aspect of the cover was good, you might still think this cover bad, including the slanted text announcing Julian Barnes.

Poor, dull letters page save the list of alliterative actresses.

I actually read all I was interested in the latest April issue, in about an evening a week ago.

John Gallager on a really interesting book (partially written by Carlo Ginzburg), its the strange case of a man who claimed to be a Werewolf. The book has a curious design, because the two authors are making contrasting arguments from the same source material, which is not something I see published often. Lydia Liu's piece on the Chinese typewriter (ofc the computer makes all attempts null and void, and its funny how this is swiftly covered) was a quietly good, back end piece. In the middle you have Kevin Okoth's piece on Cedric Robinson, which started a bit slow but when it gets going its great on the critiques (and counter-) of Marx. I never get to read enough about these so its nice to encounter these arguments in a digestible manner. Rosemary Hill on publisher Joseph Johnson was used to draw a picture of the London literary scene back then. I always like sitting down with one of her pieces, they always introduce me to something I wouldn't normally seek to read about, in a very conversational way. Finally Michael Hofmann on a curious book -- "An African in Greenland" -- which is just as the title says. Love this very short one pager, and it doesn't cut what MH is excellent at, which is either saying this is really good or really bad and using some passages and comparison to enforce the very basic, brutally made judgement. I ended with Chris Mullin's diary piece on the attempts to make him fess up on the identity of the remaining Birmingham bomber.

Tolstoy...is good now

https://t.co/RFioMoJGOQ pic.twitter.com/1rjSCdT9Z8

— Jess Bergman (@jesslbergman) April 18, 2022

Would I enjoy a whole book by Matthew Specktor, mooning around the smog of L.A.? Maybe---I do enjoy the detailed, flashlight clarity of his thoughts and feelings about the Dream Syndicate, especially live, leading to the download of his collection (the link still works, I just now used it again):
https://saveyourface.posthaven.com/the-dream-syndicate-live-1982-1983

Finished LRB 7.4.2022 - leaving me in the very unusual position of having no LRB to read.

Nicholas Penny I have only noticed in LRB in last couple of years: his old-school rigour and niche obsessiveness are not exactly enjoyable, but here the fastidiousness becomes comic:

it is a surprise to find him described in an essay by Audrey Flack, reprinted in the catalogue, as ‘cast aside’ and rather amusing to read of his ‘discovery’ by her – not in a dark chapel in a rural church, nor in the basement store of a provincial museum, but hanging in the Renaissance section of the Met!

In conclusion - his tone could be from the 1960s or 1930s:

It is a small exhibition but well judged as an introduction to the artist. The unobtrusive labels are supplemented by a free exhibition guide with succinct texts drawing attention to details and explaining puzzling features but not telling us what to think. There is no entrance charge and when I was there at half-term, the ‘us’ consisted of many visitors of all ages and diverse backgrounds.

Matthew Karp on Robert E. Lee: I enjoyed this, realised I knew nothing of Lee, was very interested to read of him as failed military tactician.

Adam Mars-Jones' article turned out to be a systematic critique: great to see.

Couldn't much follow the Chinese alphabet, did get more than expected from the werewolf.

Chris Mullin's one of the most historically and politically significant pieces.

I should probably have a new issue by now, shouldn't I?

Some v good stuff on the LRB blog lately

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/april/a-beacon-of-openness-and-generosity

We have made our 21 April issue free to download as a PDF – if you like what you read, be sure to take advantage of our subscription offer and get 12 issues for just £12!

Free issue here: https://t.co/SpUDGvtr5J

Subscribe here: https://t.co/r9zMz9RJtw pic.twitter.com/LhHXyNsVvc

— London Review of Books (@LRB) April 25, 2022

Reading criticism of Ted Hughes led me to the 1988 poem 'On the Reservations', which I was surprised to find had appeared in the LRB.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n11/ted-hughes/on-the-reservations

I'm not sure that I think this is a good poem, but I do find it an interesting text, and not especially what I'd have expected from Hughes, especially when he was literally writing poems in celebration of the Royal Family. The diction and form of this seem to be something that you could find in eg: Iain Sinclair's CONDUCTORS OF CHAOS anthology.

She dreams she sleepwalks crying all the dead
huddle
in the slag-heaps wrong
land wrong
time tepees a final
resting for the epidemic
solution every
pit-shaft a
mass grave herself
in a silly bottle shawled
in the canal’s
fluorescence the message
of the survivors a surplus people
the words
washed off her wrists
and hands she complains keep feeling
helpless

The poem makes repeated references to mining, and it would seem accurate to say that it is consciously a post-miners' strike poem.

I finished LRB 21.4.2022.

The front cover mentions 'Cosmolgy'. I thought this new spelling must reflect the content of the article. It doesn't. It seems just to be a typo, in an unfortunately prominent location.

Collini on BBC is entertaining and readable, but to a rare degree confirms Terry Eagleton's old description of SC as a liberal 'standing dauntlessly in the middle of the road'.

Andrew O'Hagan now has some kind of licence just to write 'personally' about anything. He says here: 'I love the internet, perhaps more than anyone, but my innocence died with its success'. Most of that sentence seems to me bad and false.

Erin Maglaque writes rather indulgently about a book about love that sounds quite bad. But not entirely indulgently.

Tom Crewe on Turgenev is very standard LRB stuff on an old writer, relatively well done. Crewe is becoming a novelist.

Lots of history in this issue: France and England in the C19, Italy in Egypt.

Ubiquitous blokeish Burrow does not make Pope sound enjoyable or appealing.

The next issue seems worse.

yes it's weird going with an unusual spelling of turgenev on the cover as a tease (it looks like a typo but apparently isn't) and then missing the actual typo

by the grace of god in all my days as a sub the only error on a cover that was let thru was miles davis's birthyear when trailing his obit (still wrong but less obvious)

I might be the rare ILBer who likes Phillips, but I’m trying to figure out if I should get a subscription to the LRB, the NYRB, or the Brooklyn Rail.

(I know you non-US folks will probably have no idea what “The Rail” is, but it is similar to the other two, tho a bit more focused on visual art and certainly much more generally “left” in its contributor base).