Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

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

that's a beautiful little piece

this is the (2-part) LRB piece that srinivasan links to: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n02/derek-parfit/why-anything-why-this

(possibly subs only)

Natalie Merchant gunning hard for the LRB audience was unexpected.

What kind of dilbert licker takes music recommendations from Alain de fucking Botton?

despite my casual & rude dismissal of parfit in my prev post I enjoyed those two others. although...

Atheists may reject this answer, thinking it improbable that God exists. But this probability cannot be as low as one in a billion billion.

this I call the fallacy of being unreasonably impressed by arbitrarily large numbers, or fbuibaln.

LRB 4.5.2023: apart from Mike Wood, my favourite items are Tom Stevenson on superstates, lively and bright, and oddly, Jessie Childs on the Spanish Armada, an old-fashioned topic I knew little about. (Perhaps Plymouth correspondent Mark S can share arcane knowledge of Sir Francis Drake.)

Article on Spotify maintains an LRB tradition of covering major contemporary topics. It mostly made me feel quite glad that I don't really use Spotify. It's funny how when things become super-'convenient' (though for people with technical difficulties like me they often aren't very convenient), a few people end up fleeing from the convenience and saying 'I want the awkward slowness of having to turn over the vinyl record so I can really concentrate and have a deeper experience'.

The LRB haven't been sending me recent issues. Going on a trip, I was thus compelled to dig out a random back issue. It's 30.9.2007. I read most of it.

First article is ... Simon Jenkins! Now who can remember him ever even being in the LRB?

Hilary Mantel, of all people, writes about AIDS in South Africa, but in a mystifying way that mostly tells us about false and implausible beliefs about the illness, and cultural assumptions around it, rather than facts, which might be useful. Her bio note says she is 'working on a novel called WOLF HALL, about Thomas Cromwell'.

Hal Foster on Renzo Piano shows that he's been writing in this same tedious way for a long time.

Michael Wood on William James I never read till now - how can this be? It's philosophically slippery but contains many great Wood throwaways. Marvellously amusing paragraph about James's views of dogs.

Perry Anderson on the EU: several pages long, though still not an epic by his standards. 9 years before Brexit, and he is already making clear many of the problems of the EU. It's powerful, even devastating material, a lot more original and well informed than most of the vague lamentations in recent years.

literally everything i know abt drake without looking him up is contained in that article:
• singed king of spain's beard ✅
• supposedly played bowls as armada loomed ✅

there is yet a bowling green which very much claims to be one and the same -- tho oddly enough you can't actually see the sea from it as it's on the far-side slope of the hoe

In the latest I enjoyed Neal Ascherson's crisp (as he almost always is, whatever he writes about) account of 1848.

Going through the write-up on Parfitt (just halfway). I am liking it, mostly, it touches on the culture of All Souls college, and how the output of it by one of its residents seems to mirror this. I really like how he works through what could be described as 'ivory tower', but doesn't resort to that aggressive wording (so far). The stuff on biography and how that applies to philosophy is nicely done.

literally everything i know abt drake without looking him up is contained in that article:
• singed king of spain's beard ✅
• supposedly played bowls as armada loomed ✅

Blowing up a cork factory(?) in Cadiz thus greatly hampering the Spanish fleet? Something like that anyway. (I got that from Horrible Histories).

Still on the 18th May issue, really nice to see a review of a Lídia Jorge novel! Everyone should read her.

the corks are how the ships of the armada kept the sea on the outside iirc

xp lrb is the worst place to get fiction recommendations, i hardly ever read the reviews because ***spoilers!!!***

feel free to disregard the LRB and take it as a Daniel_Rf recommendation instead :)

I learn that my LRB subscription has apparently expired.

I am probably now two issues behind.

Still on the 18th May issue, really nice to see a review of a Lídia Jorge novel! Everyone should read her.

― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 5 June 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Forgot this, will look.

Michael Wood on William James

This was interesting. Thanks. I recently read "Principles of Psychology", and the biographical tidbits about James were intriguing. I ordered the Richardson bio that was being reviewed. It seems like perhaps a good book saddled with a bad title. "Modernism" is something I would associate much more with James's brother Henry. The Wood review was ok, but seemed to focus primarily on James the pragmatist, which to me, is probably the least interesting James (after James the psychologist, and James the founder of religious studies).

Glad it's of interest, o.nate.

I continue to read LRBs from 2007-8, in great detail, lacking new issues as I do.

Last night I read a whole Jerry Fodor article on Darwinism.

Michael Wood on BELLE DE JOUR, 2000:

The trouble with these interpretations is not that we can’t (more or less) get them to work, but that they are too tempting and seem desperately wrongheaded, whatever their logical or narrative attractions. More precisely, we can abandon any of these interpretations easily enough, but it’s amazingly hard to give up the game of interpretation itself, the attempt to make the events of this movie behave like the events of a proper story, however complicated. It’s a false trail, but we stay on it, as if addicted; of course we are supposed to stay on it, even as we lose all faith in its destination, because the trail and its disappointments are the very movement of our watching the movie. Why is it a false trail? How do we know it is? Well, we don’t know for sure, but the pleasure of the movie seems different from its riddles, larger, simpler, more direct. […] Our attempts at resolution fail, but that failure, if we work at it enough, becomes the form our success takes.

doesn't really belong in this thread except that i discussed it a little a while back but there's a nice big piece on the tunguska incident full of info new to me in the NYRB:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/06/22/fireball-over-siberia-tunguska-andy-bruno/

(the claim is made that the locals kept the incident mysterious to visitors and researches bcz they mistrusted them and didn't want to be bothered; also that the guy who mainly put it on the map was a bit of a dick)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FyRLlpRWcAA8dN_.jpg:small

That "Black Male Escort" as has been around for ages...

In the new issue I really enjoyed reading about Fassbinder and Noel Coward. Love how they are place next to each other.