Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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.

I enjoyed the very clear explanations of the evolution of drum machines in order to capture swing rhythm in that J Dilla piece - agree with xyzz that it tends towards overstating Dilla's influence, certainly in the mainstream.

I enjoyed the dilla piece but, as before when his name has cropped up around here or when he's appeared in my Spotify discover weekly, my cloth ears failed to distinguish anything notable or unusual in the tracks mentioned.

LRV 3.11.2022.

Hatherley on Birmingham: I have to hand it to him, this is excellent and he has become a distinguished exponent of this genre (LRB review essay). OH shows that he knows about places and towns, as well as - as you might expect - knowing and having opinions on specific buildings, which many people wouldn't have heard of. He can casually refer to the fact that Norwich saw a lot of post-war house building - a fact that even I, who know Norwich better than almost anyone who doesn't live in Norwich, don't really know. The prose is good, elegant, paced just right. The last para, positing Birmingham as capital of places without strong identity, is striking.

Tom Shippey on paganism: like Mark S, I appreciated this. Brisk writing as he covers a brisk dismantling of several myths.

Perry Anderson in conversation with John Lanchester this evening to discuss DIFFERENT SPEEDS, SAME FURIES, his study of Proust and Anthony Powell, just out from @VersoBooks in conjunction with the @LRB pic.twitter.com/SyGxLdOdlk

— LRB Bookshop (@LRBbookshop) November 18, 2022

jesus.

That's right

LRB 3.11.2022.

Thomas Powers is blatantly, deliberately out of place in the LRB, an old time US man's man, a Cormac McCarthy character - or so he likes to appear. Here he goes into a long personal anecdote and back story about Joan Didion which would be relevant to a Didion biographer (guess there must already be one), rather as the memoir of Pynchon that the LRB once published would be useful to a Pynchon biographer; but which mainly pertains to a particular novel which is not at all under review here. The actual book under review is a slim volume of essays from different moments - Powers gives you little idea of that, though he alludes to a couple of essays.

Bridget Alsdorf on Florine Stettheimer: I didn't come away feeling that the paintings were good.

Ange Mlino on Frank O'Hara: have to hand it to Mlinko here. O'Hara has become all too easy to read and write about in a certain way, something she notes. Reading LUNCH POEMS would encourage you to do that. But she's reviewing MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY, and she takes the trouble to see and say that it's an earlier phase, a slightly different poet; she shows the other sides to O'Hara, less camp and ditzy, more Romantic (her word) or ambitious, than we often emphasise. In this sense she does bring out something worth remembering.

Leo Robson on Percival Everett: it's true that Everett is an extraordinary writer, so prolific and inventive, and deserves this kind of assessment at least. Oddly late on I can't easily Robson whether Robson is criticising the work or just voicing the work's criticism of other things.

LRB 17.11.2022.

David Runciman on Con government: better and more interesting than usual.

David Goldblatt on Qatar World Cup: informative. Passes too readily over corruption but correct to say that people would become less interested in controversies once the sport started.

Rosemary Hill on menus: good job, with neat ilustrations. Hill somehow became LRB food correspondent.

Anthony Grafton on the week: good subject in theory - why divide time into 7-day units? - but oddly narrow focus on the US (which was hardly early in doing this) and doesn't narrow in on the question of why it happened.

Patricia Lockwood on George Saunders: dire.

Michael Wood on Kafka's aphorisms: has the virtue of talking a bit about textual history, and characteristically comparing translations; but too brief and brisk to be a really substantial treatment of this topic. The aphorisms are only sporadically treated in Wood's book on Kafka also. My sense is that at his age, Wood won't deliver any more long pieces of writing.

Tom Stevenson in Tunisia: yet again I have to hand it to Stevenson. This subject has very little interest to me, but he knows it all, has been there and talked to people, can report the whole history for the last dozen years. Yet again he shows himself the closest heir to Perry Anderson.

Joanne O'Leary on Elizabeth Hardwick: given that Hardwick was married to Robert Lowell, the miracle is that this isn't by Colm Toibin. It's much better than it would be if it were. Feels extremely standard LRB fare, the ups and downs of this literary life. But O'Leary carries it off well, in the right proportions.

ILB poster Table has stated that Lowell was a bad person as well as poet. This article supports the case that he was a bad person.

T.J. Clark on Mike Davis: this short contribution from T.J. Clark is certainly more palatable than the usual very long contributions from T.J. Clark.

Clare Jackson on Robert Harris: feels odd for this popular historical novelist to be taken so seriously. But what's quoted from the novel doesn't sound terrible, and the material - C17 Republicans - has its interest.

From the Xmas LRB:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n01/tim-parks/i-ve-71-sheets-to-wash

Not a novel I want to read (unlike "Confessions of an Italian", mentioned at the end of the review) but it's good on the details of early Italian history and the formation of the state, and how a work is adopted to be emblematic of it.

i read alan bennett's diary as is traditional: he is in decline (physical, artistic) and very evidently knows this

it's not much use as a record of or commentary on 2022 tbh, but i maintain his link to the literary world of his youth remains valuable (no one else covers this beat these days) (they're all dead)

he is the last surviving new elizabethan! like capt crozier stumbling through frozen nunavut years after erebus and terror foundered

Doesn't it follow that the most useful thing he could do would be just to write about the literary world of his youth, not presume to have views about Liz Truss MP, Elon Musk, et al?

(I haven't read the diary yet but merely say this as logical extrapolation.)

with the exception of hilary mantel and HM the queen* that is p much where he's ended up this year: he makes a mild passing joke abt having nothing to say abt truss until after she's been toppled** and very briefly discusses the effcts of covid on ghis writing in the same passage. that's it for current affairs.

*both obit mentions
**unsure what other form wd this writing abt the literary world of his youth wd take besides the journal -- which is plainly his way into this material, a (his word) serendipitous*** pretext. otherwise he writes (or wrote) theatrical dramas and monologues and also introductions to the dramas (which tned to be sketches of the ppl involved in the making of the drama). feel like there'd be an old-cat new-tricks issue at work.
***actually horace walpole's word, invented in a letter to former ilxor horace mann

i enjoyed Rosemary Hill on menus as well.

In the new one I thought the piece on Helen DeWitt was weak, the part reviewing The English Understood Wool shamefully so.

the piece on GK Chesterton and his horrible brother covers reasonably well-known ground, but it's useful to have it in one place. Much is made of Chesterton's childlike innocence, but as the piece points out, that's not much good if that innocence eg about money means people working on your rag don't get paid properly. Being nice isn't a prophylactic against the consequences of being a bit useless in some critical areas. Chesterton comes across badly in this, making poor choices for, as far as is explained here, quite frivolous reasons (the romance of the individual standing up against the world). I still very much enjoy his writing of course, including his apologetics, but the combination of heroic + quixotic in life is far less appealing than it is in his writing.

Tom Stevenson in Tunisia: yet again I have to hand it to Stevenson.

I probably wouldn’t have read this without your encomium and I’m glad that I did. I also knew little about Tunisia going into this, but he really made an interesting and illuminating story out of there recent, brief detour through democratic government.

“their”

were i galen strawson writing letters to the LTB i wd always sign myself "formerly of henry cow"

LRB ffs

I just recently started listening to the LRB Podcast. Normally, I'll mark as played most episodes before the most current, but there are a lot of real gems in the earlier episodes (the feed goes back to, I think, 2012 or so).

Fizzles: George Orwell once wrote that G.K. Chesterton was very ignorant. Not knowing much about GKC, I never really understood that but have always remembered it.

LRB 1.12.2022 proved, on the whole, unusually dull. Some articles, like one on Albertus Magnus, I simply couldn't be bothered to keep reading.

Hal Foster on T.J. Clark: this reads as something of an inside-job whitewash, ie: Clark who gets to write lengthy, dull rambles in the LRB now gets his book reviewed and Foster, who's also usually in the LRB, naturally says mostly generous things. The actual level of thought here, while aspiring to sophistication, is often banal, viz. the column in which Foster cites Marx on commodities and even, would you believe, 'all that is solid melts into air' as though they are insightful here.

Collini on the history of literary criticism is much more interesting, and on the face of it the one highlight of the issue. But even this gets strangely fumbled. Once Collini in his verbose way gets into listing qualifications re Guillory's argument, they mostly prove nugatory. One is that he's not sure when the discipline really began (but he doesn't make any strong counter-argument), another is that I.A. Richards' importance is overstated (but ditto). It feels as though any real debate here is muffled by eiderdown. Extraordinarily woolly.

LRB 15.12.2022. Again much quite dull and unpromising material here.

Colin Burrow on Roald Dahl: odd for this to be foregrounded given that the reviewer notes that the book offers little new on top of two older biographies. The reviewer has read a lot of Dahl, maybe all of Dahl, for one reason or another. He's quite perceptive, I'd say, in describing Dahl's literary effects. It's unpleasant to read that Dahl 'slept with starlets'. He should have been more grateful for that.

Jeremy Harding on Bruno Latour: Latour is revered by many UK academics. Harding, an often very boring writer, does quite well both to convey some of his thought and to note where he might not understand him. I'm reminded that my sense is that Latour's intellectual influence may actually have been bad, though I may here be mixing up the influence of ANT with the influence of OOO.

Harding makes clear that Latour became very concerned by climate change and committed to eco-activism. Good. I agree and appreciate these views and acts. But discussing it at the level of 'philosophy' shows a problem, that philosophy, theory, etc, are mostly not very relevant to these ecological and political issues. Most of what Latour is quoted as writing about this stuff is not more politically useful than almost anything by George Monbiot, Greta Thunberg, or if you prefer, David Wallace-Wells. The issues are vastly, urgently vital, but Latour isn't really the kind of writer who will illuminate them.

It's a bit like how 30 years ago Jacques Derrida would talk about inequality, capitalism, ecology, and so on, and people would marvel that JD was saying these things, and quote him. But what JD had to say about politics was usually relatively banal. It was no better than any op-ed writer between liberalism and socialism could come out with. JD's views were well-meaning, but you didn't need to be JD to hold them, and philosophy didn't help with them.

Richard Rorty probably understood this better than most philosophers.

Laleh Khalili on McKinsey: what is McKinsey? Some kind of big 'consultancy' firm that 'reorganises' companies, privatises them, etc, it seems. Gradually, through this article, it emerges that firms like this are terrible and are engaged in neo-liberalisation, shock-doctrine stuff. I come to see that this is depressing and important stuff. The issues are hard to hold on to, though, as they mainly get expressed through a lot of numbers. On the other hand, the article starts dreadfully, with an anecdote of sorts, far from the centre of the topic, which doesn't illuminate it. Here is a general technical problem of writing: too many writers, eg in the LRB, will do this, starting way away from the topic and not making much effort to tell you what the topic basically is.

The same problem, in fact, afflicts David Trotter, writing about Helen DeWitt. This author has been praised on ILB for 15 or 20 years. I've never understood much about her, who she is, what she writes, how much, even what nationality she is. Once I asked poster Fizzles about her, on here, and he refused to answer. She remains quite a mystery, to those of us who happen not to have read her. Trotter does, usefully, tell us what two or three of her books are about. They don't sound interesting or enjoyable - but perhaps that's just the effect of the review. Perhaps, as actual books, they're good. I don't know. Trotter doesn't help much by blathering on and on about C18 writing and the idea of the 'laconic'. Is DeWitt laconic? I'm not sure. My impression is that Trotter has randomly become interested in this concept and has plastered it all over a review of DeWitt, with limited relevance. Once again, I think: he should just have started by telling us: Helen DeWitt is a novelist from X. She has written the following novels: A, B, C. I had forgotten how in thrall to gimmicks Trotter is. He goes off into information theory, without showing us it's relevant. He quotes Ulysses, which again, to be honest, doesn't seem relevant. Just stick to the point - it's probably complex enough already.

Brigid von Preussen on Josiah Wedgwood, by Tristram Hunt. I can't get excited about this but at least it's quite clear. Hard not to feel that the most interesting part of the equation is Hunt, the sometime would-be Blairite MP turned gallery director.

did i refuse to answer?! istr you asked about The English Understand Wool - why it was called that and what it was about, rather than Helen DeWitt more generally, which I would have been happy to answer.

I didn’t answer those specific questions because I felt “why is it called that?” was an understandable question - it’s an unusual title - but also slightly, forgive me, silly: it’s what it’s called. to be less reductive i might have said “it’s a line from the book” or “it refers to the concept of terroir, as a form of knowledge, which one of the book’s themes” but really answering that why would have been answering what the book is about. even that last felt like it was encroaching too dogmatically on the title and the book.

and answering what it’s about would either have involved describing the incredibly slight narrative, which is pleasurable to read and see opened up or unfolded for the first time, or the main dynamics (i might use the word themes or concepts) at play in the book. I felt I couldn’t do that better than the book itself and with considerably less concision. So my recommendation was to read the book, which is shorter than many LRB articles and indeed shorter than some of my posts.

“laconic” is fair but not enormously insightful in the direction in which he takes it. like you i thought it was poor.

Regarding this novella, Trotter uses the words 'bon ton' and then 'mauvais ton' without explanation.

I didn't know what he was talking about.

Looking it up now, I see that it possibly means 'good manners' and 'bad manners'.

Why not just say that? Or say whatever it does mean?

There also seems to be a shop called Bon Ton, which may be confusing.

From Trotter's review I had the impression that the book might be set in the distant past. But he also mentions a film biopic so probably not.

What about BCBG, does that get a mention?

I haven't heard of it. What is it?

Trotter makes these novels sound very unappealing.

But people, like Fizzles for instance, have read them and liked them. So there must be something about the novels which is quite distinct from what Trotter has to say.

Bon chic bon genre. Parisian preppies.

Apparently it was also used in a clothing line with which I am not really familiar but there are plenty of posts about it.

why do they sound unappealing to you, pf? amusingly, to me anyway, some of her characters remind me of you.

'mauvais ton' is a phrase used, as something of a shibboleth, or instructional phrase, by the main character's mother. it is something the main character to a considerable degree internalises. the mother is french. one appealing thing about the novel is a pleasure in the social and cultural variety of the world.

And having read the book, can you confirm that this phrase, in the book, means something like 'good manners'? Or 'good taste'? I had never encountered it before.

The stories described sounded unappealing. Something about some prodigy boy seeking a surrogate father? He didn't sound likeable or entertaining at all. And something about a French girl making a biopic about how her mother used to buy the finest wool from Shetland or somewhere? I don't think, from the summaries, that I could see what it was all about or why these stories would be of interest.

I accept, though, that any fictional story merely summarised could be unappealing, and the pleasure could be in the detail of the text.

BTW I idly translated Fizzles' 'mauvais ton' as 'good taste' which must be the reverse of what it means. In any case Trotter should have been clearer about the phrase and why he was citing it. We agree that his review is not very illuminating.