Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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.

“mauvais ton” literally means bad or vulgar taste. i think the nearest translation in the book would be “poor or bad form” (being mean to one’s inferiors, behaving in uncultured or unbecoming ways).

it’s undoubtedly a classist term to do with “manners” as you can see - one of the main dynamics explored in the book is between class and money.

to “class” i might add “inherited or culturally innate” knowledge.

Actually (to answer again Fizzles' question) I just recalled that Trotter's summary of the SAMURAI novel made it sound reminiscent of the J.S. Foer novel EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE which as I recall is also about a precocious, possibly irritating boy going out and talking to various citizens. I don't really think that novel is very good. I suspect that DeWitt's novel is somehow better but the resemblance does not encourage me.

i was careless in my use of 'literally' – mauvais ton *literally* means 'bad tone'.

The Arizona prison system bans...the London Review of Books. pic.twitter.com/4GnXrA6sqF

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) December 31, 2022

they dont like colin burrow

LRB 15.12.2022.

Bee Wilson on Maria Montessori: a good topic: I can't recall the last time I read anything on educational theory and history, in this way, in the LRB. Odd of Wilson to start by advertising her ignorance about Montessori - even I knew a bit more about her conservatism - but she does then a good job of telling us about MM's actual ideas. One is that children prefer, or can or should prefer, work to play. Another is that children have amazing powers of concentration. Both ideas I find interesting. MM remains an ambiguous figure, though: high-handed, keen to marry her theories with religion, and, as this review makes clear, keen to seek an accommodation with fascism. It seems that one can't wholly accept her as a character, and can't wholly dismiss her work.

The eternal Neal Ascherson on Flora MacDonald: I started wearily, thinking this could hardly be worth it, could I drag myself through it - but in truth the topic is worthwhile: a Scottish woman who helped Bonnie Prince Charlie to escape Scotland after military defeat. NA's most interesting ideas here are about the flexibility of 'loyalty' in the period.

Peter Howarth on G.K. Chesterton. Why read Chesterton? What did he do? I know that he wrote Father Brown stories, THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, and some other fiction. You don't learn much about all that from this review, which is almost entirely about GKC as a polemical newspaper opinion writer who often engaged in bigotry. The reader wonders why this person would be worth reviving about or writing about now. I am reminded of the chapter in Julian Barnes's FLAUBERT'S PARROT where he produces 2 or 3 biographical sketches of Flaubert, each based on facts but each distinct. Here, likewise, is one version of GKC, which makes him seem mostly unpleasant and pointless. Perhaps another version is available.

The articles about 17th century Spanish classical music and promiscuity in 1990s Paris, I had to give up on. One on Ottoman cities after dark feels niche.

as someone who knows quite a lot abt GKC and nevertheless learnt several new things here, the most curious omission from the chesterton review is any discussion of the motivation of its author: like chesterton, richard ingrams was also for many years the editor of a scurrilous paper devoted to harrying the corrupt and the comfortable, sometimes in quite unpleasant terms: viz private eye! joining these dots might have done some of the work needed to justify this piece!

(it does gesture towards their both being catholics, but merely notes that ingrams wishes GKC had been a better catholic by staying truer to his more explicit catholic proselytising, which in both directions skimps the bravura oddity of chesterton's catholicism IMO)

"in both directions": i mean howarth is skimping it but so (if howarth is citing him fairly) is ingrams

Mark S: I agree: apart from not telling us anything about GKC the writer of literature, it doesn't seem at all curious about why this biography should appear, from this author, now. Big omission indeed.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n02/geoffrey-wheatcroft/not-even-a-might-have-been

This, from the very latest issue, is a the go-to piece, a review of the publication of the Diary of 'Chips' Channon, a former Tory MP and society figure, who was born in the US, came from Old Money and married into the Guinness family. The reviewer weaves it as an account of old society -- the crypto-Nazi anti-commie antisemitic appeasing sort (he supported Chamberlain and loathed Churchill) (Simon 'Corbyn will reopen the camps' Heffer is on the editor's chair). This diary and life is compared to Harold Nicholson throughout, which in my view is a weakness, serving to overrate the qualities of the Chips Diaries. As the review says Nicholson was pure establishment, his diaries had to be somewhat more discreet about who he was writing about in politics and society, so we don't quite know what they might have been like, as Channon was more an outsider, who was only an insider because money. Channon was a real bastard, who was utterly disparaging about a lot of Royalty while courting it (that's always funny). That sort of insider outsider quality is not too dissimilar from Proust (who Chips met) with the obvious caveat, though in terms of describing sexuality and transgression of the time he had much more in common with someone like Genet. He was similarly wicked in the way Chips would delight in others' passing (Chips would be banned from the ilx obituary thread pretty quickly, that's for sure) and what society women were up to (sleeping all round London etc.), and there is a hell of a portrait of homosexuality before the ban was lifted.

I would probably pick up a vol for a pound in a remainder shop, read it avidly while hating myself.

Don't know anything about Wheatcroft. Made his carrer in the right-wing press but his book on Churchill seems to have divided ppl. This is from the wiki:

"His 2021 biography of Winston Churchill[8] was described by conservative historian Andrew Roberts in The Spectator as a "character assassination";[9] in The New York Times, Peter Baker wrote: "They are, of course, taking different views of the same man. Roberts's book was described in these pages as the best single-volume biography of Churchill yet written. Wheatcroft's could be the best single-volume indictment of Churchill yet written."[10]"

"incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James" <-- m .r. .james's cousin (once removed)

Going back to the Xmas issue:

- Mendez's piece on George Michael was pretty good, was struggling to recollect when the LRB last put out a piece around a big popstar that didn't have a very strong rock angle they could put on. There was some nice writing about the sadness of his life mostly spent in the closet and the damage of it, and his relationship with black music.

- Blake Morrison on Jon Fosse's novels was fairly weak. There was one line about it not being modernist that could've done with expanding otherwise I didn't see what he got out of this sentence-less work. Seemed to be just descriptions of what Fosse was doing, going through the motions of having this thing on their desk.

(fwiw i proposed some free jazz-related reviews last year and got a pretty dampening response, as if to say "it's not you, we like you, it's the topic, give us a topic we can work with")

Really lame given they aren't afraid of an obscure topic. They have a piece on Frederick Delius on the latest, a composer that can't be on that many people's radar.

yes i was a little surprised, it's like the nme and metal between 1980-87 :D

i will keep trying

They don’t like jazz because they’re threatened by its freedom, clearly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8lrpSk0XYI

L,R: mark s, LRB editor.

LRB 5.1.2023.

Alan Bennett unusually bad, and often needlessly vulgar. The Queen material does, as Mark S implied, have some, limited historical / archival interest. But much of it is a reprint of something he's written before (typical of AB to republish his own material as often as possible), and his credulous attitude actually reminds me, I realised, of those "FBPE types" who would maintain that the Queen was secretly opposing Brexit or 'trolling Donald Trump'.

The quality of this diary is so low that one paragraph is spend talking about how bad the diary is while talking about his own earlier section on the Queen, which we have read 5 minutes ago.

A nadir appears when he tells us that he once told Geoffrey Palmer that he hoped to write a play beginning with lines about 'Sodomy was the bugbear. They seem to have settled at Lytham'. Perhaps there is a specific joke or pun here I don't see. As far as I can tell, it's a very standard Bennett-ism, pastiche Bennett that most of us could come up with in 30 seconds (except that I might not have expected AB to say 'sodomy' on stage, at least not in earlier decades). So Bennett is rehashing mediocre, characteristic lines from a play he never wrote, and going out of his way to tell us about them and preserve them in print, though they were barely worth writing down in the first place.

One of the biggest egos in modern letters.

Anne Enright on Toni Morrison: a potentially promising theme of reading and rereading, and some notions about reading and neurology which, while they have personal pertinence to her via her mother, draw her less helpfully into a bunch of half-baked neuro-claims (we have an app for empathy that is no longer being switched on? A lot more citations needed, from what must be a vast field of tentative research). The article then goes on to become very obnoxious.

Tom Crewe on Hornby on Dickens and Prince: a bad topic, but Crewe redeems the assignment by being properly critical, or disdainful, of Hornby, rather than indulgent. This should happen more.

James Meek on floods and building: have to hand it to Meek: again and again, for several years now, he goes to the big topics (war, energy, Brexit, farming, ecology, privatisation, housing) and tackles them head on, at a length which looks tedious but actually always turns out not really to be. He always does the same schtick, talking to councillors, businessmen, locals, people he agrees with and doesn't, and gives them a fair hearing - a scrupulous or generous interviewer. He presents data and educates the public. In this instance, oddly, his evidence gives an impression that things are less bad than one had thought.

Christopher Kelly on Roman London: obviously a rich subject, and starts off with some good fun about fake etymologues and histories - but gets oddly bogged down in a question of whether London was originally commercial or military, private or public sector. Given that the book is 573pp long, I have a suspicion that it is less obsessed with this perhaps misleading binary than the reviewer is.

Jenny Turner on Colette: unusually bad.

Still over half of this issue to go; which may be a good thing as I haven't received the next one.

They don’t like jazz because they’re threatened by its freedom, clearly

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Friday, 13 January 2023 22:09 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

it's true that the LRB remains non-great on music (= doesn't commission me or say yes to my very good pitches)

― mark s, Thursday, 2 September 2021 14:51 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^tbf this was in response to a piece on thomas tallis that i had enjoyed but which pinefox found over-technical

I remember that!

BTW I was going to say: the LRB publishes quite regularly (not necessarily in a way I like much) on pop music, and I suspect that the simplest way for Mark S to be in it would be to pitch a straight review / article on rock and / or rockwriting.

On the other hand, I agree with the point that someone has made in the past, that it is strangely light on film. I don't mean that At The Movies is bad (as everyone but me thinks), but that the paper carries almost no other writing about film - reviews of books on directors, etc - unless you count occasional David Thomson meditations which are always welcome.

my read on this is somewhat coloured by a rejection i got many years ago -- an idea for a piece on rock-writing! -- which was less obviously allergic the response to the free jazz idea (tho it slightly overlapped) and more like "we would love to run more stuff like this but our hands are tied! also we are afraid of you, like the inhabitants of a small fishing village as a fleet of pirates sail past on the horizon!"

anyway tbh i think they got over this fear -- perhaps since mary-kay w retired? certainly i took her to be the one tying their hands lol -- and now they routinely do publish pieces on music, yes (an odd selection IMO, they shd hire me as CONSULTANT EDITOR on this territory)

You should be the one to publish an LRB review of SURRENDER, by Bono, including a reassessment of their superb double soundtrack LP RATTLE & HUM.

that's right!

LRB 5.1.2023.

Paul Taylor on 'Chat GPT': some kind of AI writing program that I have heard of people using. I understand that there are important issues here, but I don't comprehend the article itself in its description of the program.

Fraser MacDonald on lighting fires: a person with manual skills I will never have.

Tim Parks on author Manzoni: something I knew nothing about, fair play, he explains it as straightforwardly as he can - a good thing for such an article to do.

Linda Colley on Convicts: again well balanced and informative.

Michael Dillon on Uyghurs in China: I have heard of this issue before, never knew anything about it, now I do, a bit. I like, again, the way the article is factual and cautious in its assertions. He doesn't bother with grandstanding, rhetoric, opinion, he just reports what we know, or what it seems reasonable to say is known. I increasingly want more writing to be like this.

I quite like how when there is a big prominent novel out, the LRB turns to its old hand Christian Lorentzen. He gives us a lot of information about the two Cormac McCarthy novels. He makes them sound bad without saying they're bad. I note that McCarthy's verbless sentences recall late DeLillo's. Both strike me as a somewhat complacent way of writing.

Paul Mendez on George Michael slightly reminds me how much I like some of GM's songs, though really it's Wham! not the solo material for me. It's quite good that the author occasionally makes factual corrections to the reviewed text, though he doesn't challenge Tracey Emin's reported statement that the 1980s were 'one of the most demoralising, most depressing times we'd ever had for young people in British history'. Depends what you mean by 'one of' and 'times' perhaps. It is reasonable to say that the 1340s were even more depressing.

Blake Morrison is somewhat informative about Jon Fosse's work which sounds very tedious and bad.

I think that Raban used to write for the LRB. RIP.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/18/jonathan-raban-travel-writer-and-novelist-dies-aged-80

Actually a significant writer, wrote a number of imaginative non-fiction books, SOFT CITY among them.

Really sorry to hear of Raban's death. I loved his travel writing and read pretty much all of them in the early 00s. He's very much of the 'lone male, running from something' school of travel but he writes beautifully, particularly about being on (or near) water. I've read *Coasting*, his book about circumnavigating Britain in a boat, 5 or 6 times.

Just recalling a section of (I think) *Hunting Mr Heartbreak* where he sets up home in a shack on the shores of a lake in the American midwest and makes some extra money writing book reviews for the LRB. He talks about how demanding it is as a job, particularly when one is on the move; how he'd have to order all of a writer's previous books and have them sent in a parcel to a forwarded address and never be sure if they'd arrive etc.

COASTING sounds like one of the most interesting.

And amusing that he'd have to read *all of a writer's previous books*!

Fraser MacDonald on lighting fires

This was a highlight of the issue for me. Made me wish I had a wood-burning stove.