Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

LRB 16.2.2023.

Izzy Finkel on 'shopping basket' for Retail Price Index: informative. She knows a lot. The article seems like it could be about inflation in general but keeps diverting into the actual 'items in the basket' and becomes more about that.

Rosemary Hill on lighthouses: more entertaining than expected for being so critical of the book reviewed. Rather than 'a glorious tour through the history of the lighthouse', it's 'a rather disappointing and inconsequent muddle' and the author seems never to have been in a lighthouse.

Emma Smith on Twelfth Night: very irritating, banal reading of an old play, full of strained arguments. She modishly hitches her reading to contemporary events, then complains that critics do this, then says she'll do it anyway. The fact that this is a UCL lecture suggests that the old UCL-LRB links endure.

Adam Shatz on Adolfo Kaminsky: I'd never heard of this character, had no idea what it would be about, but Kaminsky turns out to have been an admirably principled person who served the oppressed and endangered for most of his life. The ethical commitments he makes, to Jews under Nazism, Algerians resisting France, or against Israeli military policy, are remarkably sound, consistent, impressive. He worked with one Francis Jeanson, who appears as himself in Godard's LA CHINOISE (1967). The article is odd in not seeming to fit anywhere, as a review of anything or part of a larger project, unless that's Shatz's forthcoming book of essays.

Thomas Meaney on George Grosz: so often I find LRB visual art essays pointless. Here, for a change, is one with energy and direction as well as description and information. We get a real sense of Gross's career and its political implications.

Julian Bell on Cezanne: for a while I felt the same here, that Bell's taut and well-controlled writing takes us a long way into interest in Cezanne. It makes me decide to go to the exhibition before it closes.

Ian Pace on Hugo Wolf: I was amused to remember Mark S's comments on this essay's failure to dig into its subject. A funny thing about the essay is that it stages big aesthetic confrontations between Wolf and eg: Brahms, but if you don't know what Brahms sounds like, as I don't, then the meaning of the confrontation is entirely unavailable.

LRB 2.3.2023.

William Davies, 'The Reaction Economy': LRB Winter Lecture. Davies is intelligent, thoughtful, well read, often makes distinctive observations about contemporary life. He deserved to get a Winter Lecture slot. I hoped for good things from the article. But ultimately it's a curious letdown.

He's right to posit the 'reaction economy' in some form. Right that people are used to 'reacting' on social media. Right that this can be connected to 'feedback loops'. The connexion with behaviourism is less clear. That movement might be better connected with the modern usage of 'triggering'.

But WD proves unable to connect these things convincingly with his other themes, like (predictably) the 'populism' of Trump and BJ. He doesn't really show that those politicians have much to do with liking social media posts. He brings in the word 'reactionary', seemingly almost as a joke, then forgets that it's a joke and acts as though it (in its origins) closely relates to his 21st century theme. He finally turns - again rather predictably nowadays - to Hannah Arendt and preaches 'forgiveness' as a radical action. This is useless unless we have some criteria about whom to forgive, for what, and when. Actually there are numerous people in public life that I will not, and do not wish to, forgive. And if I did, it would not be a beneficial action to anyone.

The simplest problem here is that WD just can't connect up the different themes he wants to talk about; his article isn't really a whole but pretends to be one.

But another problem is that he falsely extrapolates from extreme examples. It's definitely true that lots of people go on holiday and take pictures and post to Instagram. But it's not true that large numbers organise their holidays around potential photos, taking large amounts of time preparing things 'including costume, hair and make-up' for the shoot. This is only true of 'influencers', models, etc -- not most people. By a like token, WD spends much time talking about 'reaction videos'. These may indeed be popular with some people. But the fact that WD has to spend a lot of time explaining what they are suggests that his audience, at the lecture or in the LRB, are not really familiar with them, and would not spend hours each day watching them. The dedication involved in making and following them cannot be in the same category as 'Liking things on Facebook'.

There is an element here of ;anthropological inquiry', exploring 'the other', those strange people over there who do these queer things - yet WD covers this up by saying 'we'. But I think his 'we' is unconvincing. I don't think he himself is much part of these particular reaction chains he describes - a fact that he could reflect on, re the differentiation of the 'reaction economy'.

The one reaction chain that WD was indeed part of was Twitter, which he mentions at the start. But a strange thing that WD does not notice, though it is oddly germane, is how far social media engagement has gone *down*. In the case of FB, of course, large numbers have left it and certain demographics remain. In the case of Twitter, it is very common to see people say 'my engagement has dropped by 90% in the past year', due to Elon Musk algorithms or whatever reason. And on Instagram, many ordinary users have likewise found 'engagement' (number of likes and comments) plummeting. One reason for this last, I think, is that IG is now so full of adverts, and also recommendations for other things, rather than the accounts (of friends, et al) you are actually supposed to be following. So 'monetizing the reaction economy' is actually diminishing 'engagement'? These more localised factors might need to be taken into account in a full account of WD's case.

One would also expect WD to have a more nuanced historical sense of the emergence of what he describes. That is, not to depict it as something that's just handed, but something that has been developing gradually. His version of that is to cite Erich Fromm. OK. But a really historical narrative of how 'reaction' was different in 2023, 2013, 2003, 1993, 1983, 1823, would also help.

A small example comes to mind. People now display their holidays on IG. 40 years ago, a staple of sit-coms was: 'Oh dear, Gerald -- Marjorie and Duncan want us to go over and look at their holiday photos'. Duncan would project the pictures on a screen in a darkened room, and give a lengthy commentary on them. Gerald would mutter at the tedium, but also have to give a polite 'reaction', while hoping for another G&T. Yes, 'reaction' has changed, but 'narrating the self', 'displaying experience', etc, are also very long-standing features. By a similar logic, you could posit Trump not as new and unprecedented, but as an extension of Reagan - and so on.

"That is, not to depict it as something that's just handed"

For handed, read landed.

Agree the Davies piece was not good but I hadn't really thought much about why. So this is very satisfying to read and articulates a lot of what I think my subconscious was.... "reacting" to.

yes, I thought it was all a bit "so what?" too

at the point he suggested ppl watch twich because of a fear of freedom as theorized by the Frankfurt school I had to think "you sure about that one sport?"

(possibly mangling the argument a bit here but it was something on that level)

LRB 2.3.2023 has turned out to be a dull issue. Compact Michael Hoffman on the pathos of the DDR is the best thing I've read in it.

When I rediscovered the fact that it contained a long review of W.H. Auden I thought I still had a treat in store. I didn't, really, because I soon realised this this review is of a particular kind that the LRB publishes, mainly (or only?) about major poets. (But I can't think who else now, save multiple overlong articles on Eliot.)

This particular kind of review:
* doesn't start by providing any basic background; part of its schtick is the implication that we all know the basics already. But why does that apply here, and not to other topics like physics or Ancient Roman military campaigns? (NB I, personally, don't especially need a basic introduction to Auden; I love a few of his poems; but others might need it more than I do, and actually the challenge of writing down basics can actually clarify for a writer what they aren't clear about.)
* doesn't proceed by clearly reviewing and describing the material in question (but I'm well aware that is standard LRB procedure).
* doesn't move forward chronologically, in a way that might best help most readers to grasp a writer's career, but jumps about arbitrarily between phrases from different moments.
* quotes these phrases sonorously and pointedly, and draws some paradox out of each, but doesn't seriously examine them in context.
* doesn't quote or discuss whole poems at length, thus producing a misleadingly decontextualised sense of a given poetic line or couplet.
* strikingly, doesn't make any advancing *argument*. After I'd read a page of the elegant musing of Matthew Bevis, I realised that I had no idea what his main arguments about Auden or even his basic view of Auden might be.

It would be good, just as an instructive kind of experiment, to imagine an alternative kind of review that would do the opposite of these things.

haha i leapt for my copy in a "let's see if i can disagree with the pinefox" mood and realised that
(a) i'd actually already read the auden review
(b) literally totally forgotten this fact and also everything from the review

so in conclusion i do not disagree with the pinefox

Good.

I don't like James Butler but his Care article is creditable. Takes on a difficult, largely unhappy subject, with a lot of reading and facts, combined with reflection. The financial accounting becomes beyond me: Butler could have explained it more directly. But the more speculative thought is welcome, eg when he talks of the omnipresence of corporate 'care' alongside the 'invisibility' of the care industry.

LRB 16.3.2023: Nicholas Spice on Wagner and conductors is a very Mark S article. History of classical music, some good challenging thoughts about the nature of the conductor (the way he queries the conductor's centrality makes sense to me as an outsider), and even material on the great Mark S topic, technology / recording / music.

Keenly waiting for Mark S to explain what's wrong with Spice's article.

i think it's very good and very interesting and i need to reread it and take notes! i like the way he treats tár as simply a jumping-off point for a much broader on-going discussion (which tbh i think is the correct response to it). i think there's more to say on the effects of technology on the evolving understanding of this strand of music but that's why i'm writing (or was writing but plan once more to restart) a history of it -- what spice says seems largely true and is well jigsawed into the official aesthetics as it evolves after hanslick

(i might add that i find the run of the 19th century theorists of the aesthetics of music, and wagner worst of all, just unbearably prolix and exhausting to read -- these are not ppl who had to wash their own dishes! -- so it's always handy when a brisk modern can sum them up nice and swiftly)

my one complaint is quite minor: he never explains why or in what way adorno's phrase "conductor's music" in the opening sentence was intended as negative? i think it might have been instructive! in search of wagner, adorno's book on wagner is openly his funniest, from its epigraph on in: "horses are the survivors of the age of heroes"

(as a legendarily prissy sourpuss TWA is very underrated as a funny writer)

I am glad to know that Mark S appreciated the most Mark S article in the paper.

Isn't Nicholas Spice the LRB's publisher? He seems to be another of those elderly LRB blokes given free rein to write about anything that floats through their transoms. It sounds like this article is at least coherent though!

Yes, and yes. But, curiously, he only publishes rarely - the whim just occasionally takes him. And yes again: this particular article is, I think, well-informed and clearly written.

The one thing that *I* could use a bit more of here is: why is Beethoven different, revolutionary, mindblowing compared to previous composers? Here I feel like Spice is repeating a received idea and I don't know the basis of it. But assuming it's somewhat true, he could probably explain it in a couple of sentences.

he does kind of explain it -- or anyway gestures towards an explanation, abt the material that a musician will need to have mastered to play music before beethoven (viz haydn and mozart) vs what they will need to master from beethoven onwards, but yes, it could perhaps have done with more expansion

spice seems now to be a kind of publisher emeritus (the mastehad says "consulting publisher" = not actually a title i've encountered before, but as i've probably noted elsewhere, every non-vast magazine parses and divvies up the tasks and the titles differently anyway so this only means anything concrete to someone in their office)

i feel that if a publisher can write then they should be allowed to! they are on-staff! and as PF says he doesn't write often -- fewer than 50 pieces in more than 40 years. "anything that floats through (over, surely? — ed)their transoms" in spice's case is almost all (a) classical music or (b) related to matters austrian

the transom thing is now bothering me: a transom is a crossbar but it's the crossbar at the top of something, in which case "over it" it is also wrong!

the usual explanation is that it goes "over the top of the door but through the little window above the door" -- which is a great figure for receiving something you weren't expecting but also weirdly intricate and detailed lol

the earliest spice contribution is actually a letter (from just over 40 yrs ago) complaining abt a review by a tom paulin!! which results in a very spicy exchange

spice spicy ugh 😔

the transom thing is a reference to Spinal Tap, the scene where David St Hubbins is explainig his spiritual journey:

DAVID: Before I met Jeanine, my life was cosmically a shambles, it was ah, I was using bits and pieces of whatever Eastern philosophies happened to drift through my transom and she sort of sorted it out for me, straightened it out for me, gave me a path, you know, a path to follow.

apolgies for introducing cheesy references into serious LRB discussion!

haha lol no my apologies to you! my actual-real dayjob (asking impertinent questions abt the would-be author's intended meaning while i correct their spelling and facts) was intruding there

Trust Mark S to find a way to bring Tom Paulin back into it.

he is there at the root of everything: oldest and fatherless

That post is classic!

I still haven't finished Spice on conductors, but add the amused observation that he repeatedly says quite obscure things and indicated that they can be taken for granted.

An example: 'famously condemned by Elias Canetti in CROWDS AND POWER'. The LRB is quite an intelligent paper, but I don't think most of its readers know Elias Canetti's CROWDS AND POWER, and I'm sure that this book is known to an even tinier proportion of the rest of the population.

He is a Nobel Prize literature winner so they ought to know the name (if not for that then for the association with Iris Murdoch). I guess 'famously' is a bit weird.

also canetti was mainly active in vienna, which i think is spice's main frame of (literary) cultural reference -- "famously" may even be true if you speak and read german?

(i mean i don't particularly and have no idea) (adding: well handled such obscurities can be catnip to the curious reader; coaxing them to go out and inform themselves so they don't feel left out) (i base this entirely on me and the nme in c.1978, which was full of commentary totally opaque to me and very alluring as a consequence)

Ian Penman on Baudelaire was pretty good just to see what a non-academic would make of the book; the review is printed in the quasi-academic LRB space. And is reviewing a book by a person who never quite fitted anywhere (via Walter Benjamin who also never fitted anywhere). The book is translated and edited by a very learned scholar so you see the tension bubbling in this set-up throughout the piece.

xp

A HIDDEN LANDSCAPE ONCE A FORTNIGHT

thats right

"which i think is spice's main frame of (literary) cultural reference"

Yes, don't know his background but in the archive he has written on Musil and Marlen Haushofer, who are two of the greatest Austrian writers in the last 100 years. He is very big on it.

Posh Spice was once horribly condescending to me on the phone in a professional capacity oooh 25 years ago...? I was young and new in post and naively trying to do the LRB a favour, business-wise, bcs I knew I was the only prick in my organisation who subscribed to the damned thing. I guess he was high on Arts Council funding back in those days, but it's one of those things that stays with a person.

actually 15 yrs ago, what am I saying?

Quite an interesting, short piece on the artist and spiritualist -- who made things that could be seen as abstract -- and worked around early 20th century circles who went on to accept/welcome fascism.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n06/jo-applin/take-the-pencil

I learned some things from that piece on conductors. It would have been interesting to see the subject developed further into non-classical musics such as jazz, e.g. the role of the bandleader in big bands such as Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman, and then continuing through Sun Ra to Anthony Braxton, John Zorn and Butch Morris, who melded conducting with non-idiomatic free improv.

there was a conductorless orchestra in the soviet union in the 20s -- persimfans -- which was organised round musicianly collectivity rather being directed, which ran for at least a decade (being wound up in an era when "being directed" was how you say back in fashion 😔)

at the time in the west it was p much considered an ideologically driven eccentricity i think, and discussed mainly with amused amazement or plain derision

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n08/toril-moi/don-t-look-back

From the latest issue. A pretty thoughtful write-up of the French novelist's career and manner, her ways with psychology needs a bit more explanation (is it that this is Lacanian or that her characters lacks psychology? I wasn't clear.) Moi doesn't look at her films, my speculation is that the "Durassian gaze" is something derived from her work in the cinema? But it was good for her to write this up and describe it with examples in the first place.

Also good to hear that her first few (wartime) novels are worth a read. I tried one of her early novels and found it weak.

I just read that Duras, it was very good. It interestingly bridges her earlier more conventional writing and her later very interior writing.

I actually read a TLS article recently, about Dylan's book and a new Greil Marcus book on Dylan (really). It was quite good, well informed, rather indulgent to both.

I would quite like to read the TLS more.

LRB 16.3.2023: a couple of highlights to mention before I shed this issue:

Mark S's favourite (apart from Tom Paulin) Tom Shippey on the Normans - with a reminder of the idea that the Normans were Scandinavians in France.

Ben Jackson on Amy Edwards on investment culture in the UK: unusually direct and distinctive case about recent history. Having experienced the era, I enjoyed the reminiscence about 1980s adverts / TV dramas etc about the City. The large argument that emerges is that individual shareholding didn't triumph, rather, shares ended up mostly held by large bodies like pension funds (cf. ILX finance thread where such things were, possibly, once explained).

I now realise that I haven't yet properly read the piece by Jane Miller. I had once wondered how she got into the LRB. Now I see: 'Karl, my husband'. That's about as pure clique as you can get.

I forgot properly to comment on Penman on Baudelaire.

Pros:

1: Penman has style. He won't write a paragraph merely flatly. He wants everything to swagger or to point in some direction, even if it's bathos. On the whole I think this good, though an addiction to style can also make it harder for a writer to talk straightforwardly and convey content or thought. Another oddity is that the style, when it's the series of verbless sentences, is very, very close to Iain Sinclair. Which raises the question, who influenced whom? Experts have reported that we don't know.

2: If what you wanted was 'the cultural legacy of Baudelaire', IP would be doing quite a good job. His main angle is to say 'Patti Smith and Jim Morrison liked this, and you could look cool by carrying a Penguin Modern Classic volume of it'. This is frankly over-familiar, with no fresh insight, but it would be reasonable to say that Baudelaire's rather diluted repute of this kind is a reason people still remember and talk about him. It's fair for IP to bring it up, though it shows nervousness and limitation that he keeps going back to it, as if always more comfortable talking about Rock.

3: IP is quite sound in describing and judging the actual content of the CB book reviewed: his fragmentary diary full of attacks on Belgium. I think IP is correct to find this essentially a record of failure, weakness and despair, rather than anything more impressive.

I now see that I've already got into the Cons - the problem of too much style, the shallowness of bringing everything back to Rock. Other Cons include:

1: IP's criticism of academic language on p.34 is unconvincing, not because serious criticisms can't be made (I think he's right about the tendency to over-value), but because the style IP is criticising is so close to ... IP himself. Much of his own review has consisted of phrases not very different from the ones he scorns.

2: I have to mention the absurdity of saying that CB 'didn't feel "modern" in the way Rilke or Jarry or Apollinaire did' - not to menion O'Hara or Warhol. Now, this statement is accurate. It's also so obvious as to be almost tautological. CB died in 1866 - Rilke 60 years later. O'Hara wasn't even born till the mid-1920s. This is like me saying 'Somehow, Charles Dickens doesn't feel as "modern" as Bob Dylan'.

3: IP's last para is again rather too much a statement of the obvious: Baudelaire as part of a tradition of deviants or 'between-the-cracks boys'. Wouldn't it be more striking to show how CB was *not* part of such a lineage? Actually, when you look closer, the claims are themselves, in IP's word, 'flaky'. Walter Benjamin wasn't an 'asexual weed'. He had a wife and son, and a lover or two. He wrote and delivered scores of scripts for radio, with impressive professionalism. He wasn't an 'autodidact' - he had a PhD! OK, he's just one figure here - but maybe the others are also problematic on more than passing examination.

4: But all this is a side dish to the underlying question about the review. Does Penman remember the French he studied as a teen? He can use the word 'utile', in a not very helpful context. Can he read Baudelaire in French? Does he think it might be worth looking at the originals of the passages he does, quite reasonably, praise? His review is of a translation, so it's right and proper that he focuses on that, and quotes the English. But the feeling remains that he should show more awareness that he's talking about a translation, a new text, and these words are not what Baudelaire actually wrote.

If I were a French language scholar, I might be frustrated to see Baudelaire reviewed by someone who doesn't show much evidence of being able to read the original (either of this new text or of the main CB oeuvre). On the other hand, I might think: that's good, this character who talks about Patti Smith can bring CB to a different audience. Perhaps it's not wholly a good or bad thing.

Really liked Meades and Sutcliffe-Braitwaite on gentrification and a history of the Welfare state (which focused on sick pay, one of the few pieces that actually spends a bit of time looking back at that something that occured during covid.) Both of these show how the people got something -- housing, healthcare while being ill -- and both pieces show how those things were flawed in design, inadequate in many respects and now slowly crumbling away (Meades is actually a bit more scattered, he goes into the politics of architecture and the over-usage of the word iconic).

Because they follow one another in the paper copy it feels more powerful than if I was reading these on my phone.

LRB 30.3.2023 is not proving hugely rewarding.

Thomas Laqueur writes rather captiously and at great length about US genealogies, irrelevantly starting off by going on and on about genealogies of Zeus (who I don't think existed) and Jesus Christ.

I couldn't bring myself to read all the detail of the review of David Graeber's PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT which claims that pirates, at least in a particular region, were pioneering egalitarian radicals.

Michael Wood on BROKER ends 'Think again. And then stop thinking'. OK.

Alice Spawls describes being incapacitated by a medical condition (which I thought somewhat interesting re her capacity as editor, ie: maybe this could be a useful instance of someone in a leadership role being 'disabled' and thus thinking more about such issues?), and having a private operation to fix it. She strongly implies that the NHS should be given more money.

David Runciman states that the NHS would be better if it were more privatised.

Runciman's duality of 'capitalism' and 'democracy' appears initially to work but soon becomes reified so that the statements he make are almost meaningless. He appears to have no interest in alternatives to 'capitalism', and he has no criticism of the idea that we need 'economic growth', though recent LRB articles have shown what a tricky or possibly dangerous idea growth is.

Daniel Trilling on the Metropolitan Police: strong, stays factual and measured, doesn't overreach into polemic, usefully gives quotations from a police view, even if (if you dislike the police) this is only 'giving them enough rope'.

Steven Shapin on Thomas Kuhn: informative, but also infuriating. Shapin gives an account of (he claims) Kuhn's thought in THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS. He makes it sounds thoroughly relativist, historicist, constructionist, call it what you will. He then spends the next 2,000 words complaining that people 'misread' Kuhn as ... relativist, historicist, constructionist, and tells us again and again and again how much this annoyed Kuhn and how ill-tempered Kuhn was about it.

Maybe it was a misreading; maybe Kuhn's theory wasn't relativist, historicist, constructionist. But *Shapin's own account of the theory indicates that it is*. If Shapin wants us to share the eye-rolling at the 'misreading' then he needs to show why it was a misreading. Instead he just keeps saying it was a misreading. That doesn't prove anything.

The Daniel Trilling piece on the police is fantastic. It goes into quiet a bit of detail about the Morgan case, which will never be solved but rumbles on.

Unbelievable. The Metropolitan Police is institutionally corrupt. pic.twitter.com/FFAaqXC44T

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) May 10, 2023

Steven Shapin on Thomas Kuhn: informative, but also infuriating. Shapin gives an account of (he claims) Kuhn's thought in THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS. He makes it sounds thoroughly relativist, historicist, constructionist, call it what you will. He then spends the next 2,000 words complaining that people 'misread' Kuhn as ... relativist, historicist, constructionist, and tells us again and again and again how much this annoyed Kuhn and how ill-tempered Kuhn was about it.

Maybe it was a misreading; maybe Kuhn's theory wasn't relativist, historicist, constructionist. But *Shapin's own account of the theory indicates that it is*. If Shapin wants us to share the eye-rolling at the 'misreading' then he needs to show why it was a misreading. Instead he just keeps saying it was a misreading. That doesn't prove anything.

I agree that this is a problem with Shapin's piece, but the problem is also with Kuhn's work, Kuhn seemed unwilling to accept the implications of his own theories, and I think the tetchiness came partly as a result of this. Kuhn did row back on some of the more radical theoretical implications in later years, I believe, but by that time the damage (in his view) had already been done.

My understanding from the Kuhn article was that Kuhn was a physicist by training, not a philosopher, and he was fairly innocent of the warring philosophical tribes when he published his book. So it annoyed him to see these warring tribes take up his book as a cudgel in battles that he hadn’t taken a side in. It seems this unpleasant experience inspired him to study philosophy of science more deeply later in his career in order to contextualize his work properly in that tradition. He particularly seemed to dislike the way his work was interpreted as an attempt to lower the status of scientific knowledge.

yes, I think that's a good summary. Shapin doesn't fully explain (as it were) early and late Kuhn in his article, it would have been better if he had done so.

stephen mulhall's parfit hit-job is readably funny and IMO a p focused take-down of a larger issue = why this is a bad way to go about moral philosophy (and anything that follows from that)

for those who prefer the internet to the LRB it even has trolley-problem content :D

https://www.utilitarianism.com/utilitarian-memes/trolleyology.jpg

yeah that was a good takedown of the book and its subject, his life and his life's work. at the start when it said he was one of the pre-eminent 20th century philosophers or whatever I though hmm maybe I should find out more about this guy. by the end I thought lol nope.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/january/remembering-derek-parfit

This quick piece by Amia Srinivasan, who is always good value, on Parfit