Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

Publish this in the LRB

From Papua New Guinea’s London correspondent. This is epic. pic.twitter.com/bOSuctmEj8

— Barbara Sage (@ladybie11) August 8, 2022

Julian Barnes' introduction to the Renard book appears to be his 2011 LRB essay:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n13/julian-barnes/badger-claws

This already received a letter from an academic offering a different view of Beatrix Potter.

LRB 4.8.2022.

I learned some things from Lanchester who wrote clearly about money scandals.

Emma John gives yet more publicity to Suzanne Wrack, a not very interesting sports reporter and, come to think of it, a regular Guardian colleague of Emma John.

William Davies on current UK is good, though he doesn't really match this up with historical 'declinism'. I would like to know more of Edgerton's work.

Laleh Khalili on Helen Thompson, DISORDER: not a good review. Thompson's book sounds bewilderingly wide-ranging and complex. The arguments it makes (eg that oil prices caused Brexit) sound surprising and hard to understand or assess. A review needs to take all this on, slowly and clearly - as Perry Anderson would do, actually. Khalili instead spends the first half not only talking in general terms about oil, but talking about herself. That may or may not be interesting but it's not a good use of words when trying to explain a complex subject. She then spends the end of the review just complaining that Thompson didn't write a different book altogether.

Fredric Jameson on Nazi crime fiction: daft but more readable than his other recent contributions.

Wagnerism: not very interesting or surprising.

O'Hagan on Dolly Parton: I've had many problems with him but must admit, his constantly wry tone seemed to me to work here, mainly on the ghostwriter rather than Parton herself.

not happy with the thread's backsliding on lanchester and o'hagan >:(

as e.p.thompson once scolded perry anderson: "they are scoundrels! we must stiffen our tone!"

The final piece in this issue I bothered with was Rory Scothorne (who seems like an excellent commentator in general and whose twitter I follow) review a book on The North. It's pretty solid.

O'Hagan on Dolly Parton: I've had many problems with him but must admit, his constantly wry tone seemed to me to work here, mainly on the ghostwriter rather than Parton herself.

I'm not sure ghostwriter is the right term to use for the world's best-selling author whose name is emblazoned in bold type on the cover. The book is co-branded as a Patterson/Parton joint effort, and I would guess Patterson's name is for many readers as much of a draw as Parton's. Tbh, I wasn't really sure the point of reviewing this in the LRB. Patterson is kind of a critic-proof author. His readers know what to expect, and they invariably get it. Taking him to task for writing in a hackneyed potboiler style is a bit on the nose, isn't it? It seems the LRB only reviews Patterson when he has a famous co-author. The last time he was featured in its pages was a review of the novel he wrote with Bill Clinton back in 2018. Interestingly the writer of that critique blamed the books short-comings on Clinton more than on Patterson, whereas in this case, the writer lays the blame on Patterson and portrays Parton's role in the creation of the work as fairly passive. Or maybe he felt it would be ungentlemanly to criticize a lady.

i saw several ppl who i like tweet-highfiving o'hagan for this piece, which i thought was mostly glib slick lazy nonsense and the chance to write "yeehaw" and such

LRB 18.8.2022.

Jonathan Coe on 1970s UK TV and film: Coe has his detractors as a novelist, but simply as an LRB reviewer he's very good: consistent, lucid, on-topic, always producing well-shaped articles with beginning, middle and end. In this instance I think the 'magic of watching films in bad 1970s conditions' idea is overplayed but Coe does quite shrewdly, politely say that Rob Young's alternative UK canon of occult TV is actually a rather familiar list by now. (Not that I've actually seen most of the titles myself.)

James Meek on Ukraine: you could say it takes courage to go to the most dangerous place in Europe when you don't have to, and it's quite impressive that one of the best commentators on the recent state of UK privatizations is also a war reporter.

read the lanchester on the two big german frauds: bearing in mind the usual caveats abt his basically terrible financial writing this wasn't awful, bcz the two main stories are so cut-and-dried -- tho if i were his editor i would as always force him to re-structure it to foreground the idea he bumbles into very late (which is that massive eye-stretching scandals are on the whole more likely in high trust societies like germany)

there's one mildly funny bit, which he doesn't deliver especially well but it works despite him: that the real actual whistleblower who brought everything down was for wirecard was the designated whisleblower's mum

I do like Michael Wood's general method of reviewing (even if I'll never engage with his film reviews again) in trying to pick a few things around what he is looking at without saying outright whether a thing is good or bad, as in his review of a new work by Celine, and the recent study in the new LRB.

Also good was the piece on antiquity's apocalyptic visions.

Read the so-so piece on Barthelme, whose stories I've read but didn't know anything about.

Reading Tom Crewe (who has managed to get a contract for a novel - how? Because he works at the LRB?) at length on Walter Sickert reminded me of how much space the LRB gives to long essays about vintage painters. When these are by T.J. Clark I no longer bother at all. Why do they do it? I think a) the LRB people are from a cultural heritage that still thinks these old painters are obviously important and interesting (maybe they are); b) also an overcompensation for the wordiness of the LRB, a determination to say 'we're visual too'.

How to write about these painters and paintings? With Crewe (who seems determined to let us know that he is at home in the world of old painting. Maybe he studied it in the past, or maybe he has just furiously boned up on it for this assignment?) we get biographical material, but also very long descriptions of paintings: this painting contains colours a, b, c and d, in patterns x, y, z. I suspect that some people think this is good art criticism, close reading. But I find it uninformative and certainly uninspiring. Does Crewe justify the 4 large pages given to Sickert? Not really.

Meanwhile K^sia B0ddy, whom oddly I have met, gives us some facts on Barthelme's career but doesn't make Barthelme sound good, and reminds me that every time I have tried to read Barthelme I have taken little or nothing from it, the one possible exception I can think of being the nuclear-paranoia story 'Game'. Barthelme's sense of humour, if that's what it is, seems to have very little overlap with mine - a large contrast with (a relevant comparison, another 'collagist'?) Flann O'Brien whose comic intelligence for at least 15 years I find unerring.

Finished LRB 18.8.2022: that was a slog. Including an article about classical apocalypse that I couldn't follow. Michael Wood at least sharp again - to a fault, on the poor fellow whose book on Céline he discusses.

Started the next one I have: LRB 22.7.2022. This looks even more of a slog. Of note, though: David Runciman at the Blair Institute. Though detached and amused about technocrats, Runciman repeatedly expresses a degree of sympathy with and admiration for Tony Blair that I have not seen from anyone credible for a long time. I combine this perception with the fact that Runciman attacked socialists in recent years, and the fact that here he says no-one has any big ideas; 2-3 years after a party did put forward big ideas, disdained by Runciman. In short, he seems to be a bad person.

not just bad, infuriatingly glib and smug while we're at it. He also has annoying opinions about sport.

Unsure as to why he hasn't been kicked from the LRB, not sure what he brings.

DR is a contributing editor (unclear what duties this entails but certainly that he's a senior and probably an immovable contributor)

he's one of the Bad Three IMO (along with ohagan and lanch): by which i mean there's other bad contribs but the three seem to have sanction to be worse lol

he's a cambridge polprof and his full title is 4th viscount runciman of doxford and i'll thank you to call him nothing else from here on in

oh holy christ, he's that smug cunt from the Talking Politics podcast that I once accidentally listened to for about 2 minutes 34 seconds.

calz spinning the dial for the highest quality melts he can locate

seeing as it's confession time I did actually go through a Tooze phase, which included admiring a few of his books (Deluge, Wages of Destruction, Crashed - I give up on the latter half way through it!) and listening to him podcast without yelling STFU, lol!

I have heard that Tooze is good.

I doubt that I would understand his work well enough to find out.

But yes, DR has his own podcast where he talks as Calzino describes. I know that from hearing, I think, a 30-second advert for it.

I concur with Mark S that nothing is going to oust DR from the LRB. He is readable enough, but he is a reactionary. They don't seem to have noticed.

Wages of Destruction is a study of Nazi economics and is v good, you learn some interesting stuff. Like for example during the period that Hitler was building the Atlantic wall. Such was the demand for bricklayers they were being paid higher wages than brain surgeons. It's a good conversation piece that, for when I'm trying to pass myself off as an expert Nazi historian.

An "expert Nazi historian" like this guy?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f8/David_Irving_1_%28cropped%29.jpg/1200px-David_Irving_1_%28cropped%29.jpg

lol, what a waste of skin. But hey at least you've achieved something if you get to be portrayed by Timothy Spall in a very mediocre movie.

he does actually look a bit similar to Sir Richard John Evans

sorry for posting that huge slab of gammon on this thread

I just read J. Robert Lennon's quite good review of a book called THE ANOMALY. This at least helps me slightly to understand what I think posters Fizzles and Ledge were talking about on another thread.

Michael Hofmann on Hrabal, whom I've of course also not read: well-written, or at least flamboyantly written, in this reviewer's distinctive way.

LRB 21.7.2022 turns out to be an unusually bad, boring issue. Not a great sign when Wood at the movies is practically the best thing in the paper.

enjoying shippey as usual, this time on crecy: TS has a good grasp of cultural as well as political-military history across a great reach of period, and plus he likes to drop in as illustration an old-timey map of the battle which -- while amplifying a point the book under review makes which interests him -- also looks very extremely like tolkien's hand-drawn maps with its lettering and its forests made of lots of little hand-drawn trees, no way this wasn't deliberate

Tooze is great. surprised to see anyone confess to having once liked him

LRB 8.9.2022.

Helen Thaventhiran on Eliot: contains bad exaggerations and extrapolations about poetic sounds. General feeling remains that Eliot is over-indulged, ie: written about too much, as a subject, certainly in the TLS and in other like publications also. And I don't even dislike Eliot.

Collini on the Huxleys good.

Jonathan Parry on Clubs bizarrely spends its latter section talking not about clubs but about modern politics. Not very fair on the book or its author.

I admire Tom Stevenson's authority on military matters. He also seems politically sound and critical. I see that Verso will publish his LRB articles. Why would an LRB reader then buy that book?

This was a relatively good issue.

I am a bigger enthusiast for Michael Wood than anyone I know, and even I must admit that his review of BULLET TRAIN is unusually bad. Drifting, tonally awkward, it contains several climactic sentences that barely make sense.

Havent been reading much of these recently and I just can't summon up the energy to read anything in the current issue (44/18).

LRB 22.9.2022.

Florence Sucliffe-Braithwaite on London since 1960s: very standard stuff. The first sentence -'In the early 1960s, London was boring' - seems dubious. Any such claim needs a comparative frame - was Kings Lynn in the early 1360s more exciting? How about Greenock in the early 1660s? Or for that matter London in the 1760s? Even in a more limited frame I would expect historians now to talk about how 'the 1950s were in fact much more vibrant than we might assume', in which case the 1960s were probably not less vibrant. Further, any life can be boring, sadly, and any period might look boring, anachronistically, to a later observer. I lived in Norwich in the early 1990s and it would seem boring to many young people now - no mobiles, no Internet, most things shut on Sunday, no craft beer (but plenty of old pubs), no modern cafés. But this is not a very useful perspective to assess how it felt then.

I suppose after that first sentence the only way was up.

Ian Jack's article takes up much of the issue. Is anyone actually going to read it and find out what it really says?

Stephen Sedley on Sydney Kentridge, who defended the ANC in court: genuinely interesting and important topic.

Michael Hofmann on Jane Feaver: livelier than most of the issue.

I finished LRB 22.9.2022 by properly reading in full Ian Jack on the Ferries Fiasco, "so you don't have to".

The story is that two ferries were commissioned to sail between Scotland and the Western islands. They went over budget and over time and still haven't been delivered. It seems that people in the Scottish state signed off on flawed contracts when they shouldn't have.

That's about it. I see the waste of money, and the frustration. It's a relatively marginal story, in almost any sense, in that it pertains mainly to islands with small populations, so it's not something affecting millions of people every day -- except in the sense that lots of public money has been wasted. It's like a story about bus routes to Penzance in that sense. Not that people in Penzance, Oban, or anywhere, shouldn't have their rights protected by the rest of society and the state.

The story could probably be told in 1 page. Jack pads it out to 12 by reciting the entire history of seafaring around Scotland, the development of types of ship 100-200 years ago, and family history around particular small Scottish towns, especially Port Glasgow. He is correct to say that Scottish shipbuilding has an old romance, and even I am susceptible to it - it makes the article feel worth persisting with, for me, as one about Mexican or Chinese shipbuilding probably wouldn't.

Thank you for your selfless devotion to the cause

I enjoyed this.

truely no one I would rather read on Andrea Dworkin than @amiasrinivasan https://t.co/KNOxDlm3Se

— molly smith (@pastachips) October 7, 2022

found alex abramovich on annye c. anderson on her step-brother the blues guitarist robert johnson useful and exact, and very good (viz agrees with me) on the role of technology in the music -- i knew anderson existed, i saw her interviewed in a as i recall not especially great documentary made or anyway presented by john hammond jr back in the 90s. she already seemed tiny and tremendously old back then, and the interview treated her more as a marvel -- a survivor from the age of magic! -- than an important intelligent analytical witness, so it's good her story is now on paper and at thoughtful length

(of course it's the tale of how those who immortalised johnson also basically stole a great deal from him and his family, which i suppose is also somewhat the role of technology in music)

i like TJClark's writing abt art -- not least bcz it engages with the question "what are we doing when we write abt art" -- so his piece on poetry and painting (which i am halfway through) is also my kind of thing (i write abt music and worry abt i guess related questions)

a thing i did NOT expect him to do was to talk abt blake and wallace stevens and william carlos williams and then bring in ONE OF HIS OWN POEMS (abt a painting by cézanne): he in no way claims it's a good a or a successful poem, let alone comparable to its fellows in the essay, in fact he's using what he considers its failures (in hs own view) as a way into what other poets might be intending, but still OMG lol

I am *really* struggling with TJ Clark’s opening para. maybe because I think any intellect or intelligence I had is in the bargain bin now, as if i had suffered some sort of brain lesion, maybe because it’s been a long day, maybe because i’m not in the groove, but i don’t really get what a painting that did for poetry what poems do for paintings would look like (i think it would look very different to the painting to poetry route and may well be partly covered by images like Thomas Chatterton or Gottfried Kneller’s portrait of Pope).

ok i’ve talked myself through it now and will continue the article.

it has also produced for me an embarrassing moment which is that i have never read Marino Faliero, in fact hadn’t heard of it and had to look it up, and was horrified to see it was Byron someone i would have assured you i’d read reasonably comprehensively. I will be rectifying this weekend.

here is how much byron i have read: 0

:0

Don Juan is fun.

in the right mood.

the mood where you’re unlikely to be punctiliously irritated.

not a mood i’m in much these days but still.

i’m on the second sentence of the second para. having problems.

“There is no shortage of paintings derived from verse, often importing material (even mood and atmosphere) directly from the text”

even.

Not very keen on that article, though it's better than Clark usually is.

He's one of several people who has a license to write any old twaddle and see it in the LRB.

I have now read that entire issue, and started the one that starts with William Davies speculating about the future of controversial Chancellor K. Kwarteng.

the quote from Zbigniew Herbert in the Clark essay is v fine:

I felt I had waited an age for just this painter, that he filled a gap in the museum of my imagination I had sensed for a long time. It was accompanied by an irrational conviction that I knew him well and for ever … A road through a village, a ferry floating down the river, a hut among dunes – these are the typical subjects of Goyen’s paintings … Often the topography of his works isn’t clear: somewhere beyond the dune, on the bank of some river, at the turn of a road, on a certain evening … Canvases with no anecdote, loosely composed, flimsy and slim, with a weak pulse and nervous outline, they quickly leave their imprint on the memory. The eye assimilates them without any resistance … It was said he had the cheapest elementary props you can imagine in his studio: clay, brick, lime, pieces of plaster, sand, straw. From these leftovers, rejected by the world, he created new worlds.

now halfway through and despite what i still think is a very weakly held opening i think the essay is v strong indeed.

the moment where he quotes his own poem is indeed v amusing.