Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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.

it’s actually a little bit of a shame because the quality of the quotation in the piece generally is extremely high and part of its value. but this is not a v good poem, and the essay sinks like soufflé in the middle because of it.

At one level the point is simple. We don’t expect systems of representation to replace one another

ffs this should be the first sentence of the essay!

what an extraordinarily uneven essay.

slightly irritated by his reading andrea del sarto but forgiven for the excellent opening quote from How It Strikes Contemporary

Well, I never could write a verse, — could you?
Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time

clearly Atocha Station’s left luggage wasn’t closed that day *otherwise i wdve gone earlier this year*

LRB 6.10.2022.

Tom Stevenson on COMMAND and military history. I have remarked before that TS is a remarkable find for the LRB; a significant gain. He seems to be someone with profound, detailed knowledge of military practice who is also progressive and intelligent. This essay seems to me the most important and impressive part of the issue. In his off-beat focus on the UK defence / academic establishment, TS here comes uncannily close to ... Perry Anderson in his long conspectus AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AND ITS THINKERS (2014 I think). He even writes: "The British defence intelligenstia has an endorheic quality" - in a sense, the most PA sentence not my PA that I have read for a long time. (I still don't know what "endorheic" means.)

Miranda Carter at Westminster Abbey: not very interesting but does convey the sense that it's a kind of museum.

Daniel Soar on McEwan: for much of its length this is an excellent, incisive, critical treatment of an author about whom much has already been said. But it has one major flaw, which is that the novel evidently strongly features a kind of abuse (an older woman developing a sexual relationship with a boy), which is a very serious subject to say the least, and Soar makes light of it.

Alex Abramovich on Robert Johnson: I note that AA is writing with Courtney Love having previously co-edited a terrific Robert Sheckley collection with Jonathan Lethem. As Mark S has already observed, this is a very interesting review about the memories of Robert Johnson's surviving step-sister.

Clare Bucknell on Maggie O'Farrell's THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT: the book sounds remarkably predictable and dull; CB is uncritical.

T.J. Clark: discussed above: better than his usual over-indulged rambling, but still rambling. Mark S was correct to note that the hair-raising moment in the article is when TJC, analysing poems, says "and now I'll analyse one of my own poems". The spiral of self-indulgence here is perhaps beyond parody and out the other side. But the final analysis of Ciaran Carson is actually not bad.

Blake Morrison on TOMB OF SAND: the novel sounds absolutely atrocious. I used to read books like that, I hope I won't again.

Nicholas Penny at the Wallace Collection: manages to be insulting about both Disney and Duchamp; fails to register the work done by others showing old connections between Disney and modernist thinkers.

I did read all the other articles, except the first one, but don't have enough to report on them.

jumping in here to say the "space snooker" squib in the 20.10.22 issue is wildly my jam, since its abt large rocky debris in and out of space, and what to do abt it: "there is no reliable record of anyone being killed by a meteorite strike" writes chris linott. well only a few days ago i was googling "people killed by meteorites", with a view to starting a thread about it (another and a dinosaur-light thread)

anyway i found nothing that challenges the quoted claim -- though what's interesting about it is p much that what's actually unreliable is whether or not an object that certainly seems to have killed people can be known to be a meteorite (and not some other much more mysterious whatever): viz the deathtoll of the tunguska event is often placed at just 0-3, so ok, if it was indeed three (and i believe local lore now suggests it was somwhat more than three), the issue is wtf caused it? if it wasn't an alien spaceship made of anti-matter and powered by anti-gravity cocking up its trajectory thru the middle of the earth (as some argue) or an igniting gas-mud bubble or undiscovered volcano (two other suggestions), well, it was p likely a precursor to nearby* chelyabinsk?

*nearby in cosmic terms

also the LRB piece doesn't mention ann hodges of sylacauga, alabama, clattered on the thigh as she slept on the couch by a 1954 bolide that had just smashed her ceiling and her radio

plus there's clear tales of sailors killed at sea by mysterious falling rocks (which yes, actually might have been ejected from volcanoes near the ship's route) and back in the deep past in china (twice) and in israel-palestine (once) there were colossal high-heat explosions over cities that killed enormous numbers and, well, yes maybe the chinese ones were the gunpowder shed blowing up at an unfortunate time and the one near the red sea (= possible inspiration for sodom and gomorrah), whichvitrified fortified walls and salted and for centuries rendered infertile the landscape with the water it churned up… i mean it might not have been a meteorite

anyway the piece is cheerfully and chattily sciencey and compact, has a nice photo of an asteroid we just blew to pieces, and veers well away from all my diseased speculations and fascinations…

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.

― the pinefox, Tuesday, October 4, 2022

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/oct/29/ian-jack-guardian-columnist-and-former-granta-editor-dies-aged-77

It's a pity I didn't notice this in the paper, and maybe no-one here mentioned it, as it is, naturally, sold out.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/perry-anderson-and-john-lanchester-on-anthony-powell-v-marcel-proust-tickets-430925669277

Pretty much the ultimate ILB LRB event.

massive lol. the idea of proust being a 'touchstone' for lanchester is making me bounce up and down in my seat.

he dunked the sweet sponge-like confection his housekeeper had bought from the local bakery, where they sold a variety of bread and cakes and also pastries for people to buy who were on break for lunch from work, into his mug of tea. Memory is what it was, he thought, as he munched on the soft crumbs.

I would probably have a heart attack at this event.

another big lol. presumably we can attend remotely? i think you should attend. hire a defibrillator.

I don't think any remote link is involved. But surely it will be recorded.

LRB 20.10.2022.

William Davies first up with a topical analysis which was quite good, but rendered out of date almost by the time it was published, because of the absurd speed of UK political and economic news lately.

James Vincent on Dylan Mulvin on 'proxies': this became puzzling as the supposed 'proxies' were too diverse and didn't really all seem, especially, to be 'proxies'.

Rosa Lyster on IRA art thief Rose Dugdale: a colourful story I didn't know, but surprised to see an IRA activist and fundraiser of the 1970s and 1980s, who organised and funded bombings, described as heroic.

John Kerrigan on Irish studies, via the film BELFAST. I happen to know this area quite well, have read much of the early Seamus Deane work referred to. I think Kerrigan is correct to express some scepticism about Deane's judgments (important critic but never my favourite in the field). The descriptions of later Irish Studies become quite dreary, though - an academic field seemingly just going through the kind of fashionable evolutions for the sake of it that such fields do. Kerrigan's tone isn't really steady and consistent enough (it's too journalistically polemical, ironic, snide and under-evidenced) to give us a balanced view of what's good and bad in all this. And he ends up for some reason with a dreary, slightly contrarian restatement of the rights of NI Protestants. Maybe he should think more about the politics now being delivered or undelivered on their behalf.

Eric Foner on C. Vann Woodward: I learned things here, about this liberal historian of slavery who ended up more politically ambiguous. I don't think I'd ever heard of him. The article is careful and judicious, rather than journalistic in the bad way I just mentioned.

Charles Glass on Henry Kissinger: strong indictment of Kissinger's actions and how they led to violence. Good personal element with Glass disagreeing with an old contemporary (the author reviewed) from 50 years ago.

Susan Pedersen on conscientious objectors: a good under-referenced topic. Pedersen quite even-handed on the ethical paradoxes that may be involved in their stance.

Adam Mars-Jones on Hernan Diaz: superb takedown based on close reading and structural critique. I've read it twice and loved it. No-one now does this as AM-J still does.

Chris Lintott on 'space snooker': I share Mark S's appreciation. Very appealing subject.

Long Ling on China: it's odd that this author is some kind of Communist Party member or even official, as her articles always make China sound terrifying and dystopian, even when you read them in BJ's / Truss's / Sunak's Britain.

oh i must read that long piece - i’ve enjoyed articles in the past. the recent unfortunately paywalled piece in the ft on their shanghai corespondent being put in “close contact” covid quarantine is excellent and has a similar feeling of dystopia, probably for good reason.

long ling. confusing.

The Long (Ling) Read.

LRB 3.11.2022.

Christopher Clark on France 1848. Quite clearly written and different, smoother and blander ever, than much LRB work. I don't think I understand the relations between France's multiple revolutions though. Oddly Flaubert figures in the book reviewed but not really in the review.

Jenny Turner on Stuart Hall: I don't understand the structure of this review, in terms of its relatively random moves between temporal periods. It is relatively clear on Hall's ideas, also uncritical and repeats some points and phrases I disagree with. It could be valid to have a more carefully critical engagement with Hall's ideas, though this will always come from a particular position, socialist or otherwise. Something the review could do is the very non-LRB practice of reviewing the books and telling us why they have been published and what's in them. Here that seems somewhat relevant. I am not at all surprised that there is a volume of Hall on race & difference co-edited by Paul Gilroy, though JT could tell us what's actually in it. I am still somewhat more surprised that there is a whole volume of Hall on Marxism. He wrote a huge amount about Gramsci, true. Is that what's in this book? Or are there essays on Marx, Lenin, Althusser, Adorno? JT gives no clue.

A curious fact when you read old Hall essays is how often he says "we need to realise that socialism is not inevitable"; "we do not have a magic button that will produce the revolution". It is strange that he so often said this, as it seems more than obvious to us -- people for whom, it is always said, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism". So did so much change, in this regard, between, say, the mid-1980s and now? Were people really talking about the inevitability of socialism 30-40 years ago? Or maybe if you go back 50 years it would be clearer. Even then, though, surely only a tiny minority of people would have talked that way - people at SWP meetings and so on. It's odd that Hall's writing so often seems, in this respect, to be addressed to people at SWP meetings.

Owen Hatherley on Birmingham promises something more distinctive and surprising.

Azadeh Moaveni and Tony Wood both informative on Iran and Chile from what seem principled positions.

Paul Taylor on USS pensions: I did not comprehend this despite having such a pension. Dommage.

i actually own and am slowly digesting the two books of hall's essays, so i can supply some of the needed info here: for example the why of their publication is hall's relatively recent death (8 yrs ago, time flies!) combined with the slightly disgraceful fact that no such collections already existed; as for the marxism, i think the surprise of this today may be addressed by JT's (correctly, in my view) locating (more cultural) work of the late 80s and 90s as a kind of swerve away from the earlier, much more evidently political work. he was -- for example -- the editor of new left review before the sanctified perry a took over in 1962, and the early key to his project is very much re-addressing of a good deal of marxist theory through the lens of the (for want of a clearer summary) caribbean

as i'm already embarked on the reading and knew some of the relevant things (and am also almost exactly jenny's age and a former colleague at city limits and just generally fond of her) i perhaps found this review more useful that pinefox did: in fact i think there's a solid run of pieces in this issue from the 1848 revolution through to tom shippey's on paganism which are all good and interesting

"evidently" should probably be "conventionally" there

Mark S: I am aware that Hall died and that Duke are publishing a load of books of his material (because he died, or they would have done it anyway? - well, either way -) - have seen various volumes advertised and think this probably a good thing.

My specific surprise was that there is a whole book's worth of Hall on Marxism. My surprise is not vast - it's much more likely than a book of Frank Kermode on Marxism - only slight, as in: that's interesting, we should say more about this fact.

And as I said, it would then have been quite good to be informed what Marxism Hall actually engages with, apart from, certainly, Gramsci. There is an old Hall essay possibly called 'the concept of ideology', maybe about 1979, which I suspect is in the book, whatever it's called.

Of course Marx himself turns up in the 1848 Paris article.

I went to a sell-off of Hall's books some time after his death and one thing I felt, and reflect now, that I liked, is that he was quite a polymath. His interests and knowledge included sociology, cultural studies, media; black and colonial studies; but also history, current politics and electoral data, philosophy, economics (he would probably have found the ILX economics thread beneath him) and even, of course, literature. Reading the LRB review reminded me that someone should establish how much remains of his Henry James doctorate and,

... and, if a lot, publish it. Or more realistically just make it available in the relevant archive (Birmingham?).

i just looked and there is a 1983 essay in the marx collection called "the problem of ideology: marxism without guarantees", which was written for a book of essays by various ppl called marx: 100 years on, which oddly enough i also own tho i haven't looked at it for roughly 100 years and it's currently in a box in storage

but perhaps that's not the essay you mean

xpost: yes:

FWIW the essay was thinking of was

4. The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees [1983]

-- as listed in the new volume.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/selected-writings-on-marxism

From those contents one can plainly see that some of eg: THE HARD ROAD TO RENEWAL is in this book. Turner's review cites THE HARD TO RENEWAL. Fair enough, it was influential. But if we're just going to cite the old book as was, why have, or review, the new book? This is what she doesn't address at all.

I think the book of MARX: 100 YEARS ON also included Raymondo's MARX ON CULTURE essay.

It's somewhat interesting to revisit, via Turner, the NEW TIMES controversies (which I suspect Mark S remembers well; and I have the original multicoloured NEW TIMES book on a shelf above me). What struck me reading this section, which I am not sure whether JT brings out, is the sense that New Times did happen, but turned out to be worse than old times. The slightly utopian and optimistic flavour of New Times was understandable, but actually what was developing was greater precarity and inequality -- never mind the environmental aspect (which I suspect is there in the NEW TIMES book which, like Mark S not getting his book out of storage, I am not going to reach high enough to take down from the shelf).

So New Times was true but was bad news - would be my theory.

Owen Hatherley on Birmingham promises something more distinctive and surprising.

I enjoyed this, a decent summary of the book and of the enigmatic nature of the city, and actually engages with the book rather than simultaneously pretending that it doesn't exist and that the reviewer would have done a better job of writing it. As a Birmingham resident of four years I learned some things, like Edgbaston is 'a colony of Italianate villas' - I'm aware of some leafy streets and large houses but I tend to think of it as being the cricket ground and rather uninspiring environs, but it's one of those areas which seems too large and various to be described by a single name; also though I know there are deprived areas I didn't know how bad the unemployment situation was.

re pf's new times theory: yes and to be fair ppl said so that at the time! but many of them by then were ppl the rest of us were all kind of tired of, the argumentative margins of the late 70s and 80s had been incredibly exhausting

also the zones in which such disputes were taking place were shrinking and many were fleeing for comfier ground if they could find it

this is my favourite bit of the birmingham piece, so dry that i shouted out loud when i read it:
"The street was designed as a showcase of municipal grandeur, and as proof that an English provincial city could match the glories of the Italian Renaissance or contemporary Paris. In this it failed."

Yes, that's good indeed. (Haven't reached it yet.)

NEW TIMES memories and Mark S's comment prompts me to describe an old rhetorical formula from the 1980s and 1990s.

Basically someone (P) would be saying something fancy and new, typically about postmodernism for instance, and then another person (S) would respond, rising slowly to their feet as it were, grimacing, expressing irony, and saying something like "well ... this is all very interesting ... but some of us might remember reading it before, in a certain volume called THE GRUNDRISSE chapter 2 ... Indeed - hahah - some of us even still remember the word 'Socialism', though our learned friend (P) seems temporarily to have forgotten it ..."

And broadly I would tend to have a kind of sympathy with S, though I have made them very dislikeable in this caricature. And yet I think, and in truth I always felt, that really this was a rhetorical position, a piece of one-upmanship, a claim to older authenticity (here socialist) which was convenient and made some people nod obediently and say "Of course, we must remember the important things that S has said here", but which actually had little effect in actually accomplishing anything, let alone socialism.

It seems to me that Hall was probably quite often positioned as P, in relation to S, though I am also sure that these positions, for him, were sometimes reversed. He could quote Marx himself after all.

But the final "ruse of history", as I now suspect it, is that S was strangely right all along, more than they seemed to be or knew, in that socialism has in fact returned as the site of interesting thought -- for younger people baiting older liberals, rather than old people like S baiting slightly younger postmodernists.

A concrete and slightly different version of the scenario is that I can imagine, say, Jeremy Corbyn MP, in 1985, 1995, or 2005, saying these things, to increasingly small audiences, and seeming increasingly pointless - and yet I now think he was right all along and I was wrong to doubt him.

This is quite notable:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n20/francis-gooding/basement-beats

LRB attempts to write about hip-hop. Although bits and pieces of it grate (ghosts in the machine) and well, I don't get the sense that a lot of hits came out of it (though an 'influence' is worked in the D'Angelo example) this was a pretty interesting read on Rhythm in pop music.

also uncritical

I don't think this is true - or it might be of some of Hall's work, but the article is pretty explicitly scornful of the New Times era, siding with Sivanandan's critiques of same (tho I'll admit I didn't get a full grasp of the objections either).

A curious fact when you read old Hall essays is how often he says "we need to realise that socialism is not inevitable"; "we do not have a magic button that will produce the revolution". It is strange that he so often said this, as it seems more than obvious to us -- people for whom, it is always said, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism". So did so much change, in this regard, between, say, the mid-1980s and now? Were people really talking about the inevitability of socialism 30-40 years ago? Or maybe if you go back 50 years it would be clearer. Even then, though, surely only a tiny minority of people would have talked that way - people at SWP meetings and so on.

Think it's still a popular component of marxist thought amongst many that it is "scientific", that history's gradual replacing of different systems was inevitable and this ending at communism is likewise so. Amongst SWP types yes but I have actually heard it out in the wild as well.