Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

I am not saying you should not ask it again, though.

I very much enjoyed reading the book reviews in the CULTURE section of the Guardian though - but think they could have been far more bilious wrt BERGDORF BLONDES. I admit I didn't read any reviews which took up a whole page ftb I was very very hungover and the print was jumping about in front of my eyes (not in a good way).

I like the LRB
Because if you're me
The LRB's free

Because some bloke I live with is always subscribed to it. It is the real reason I don't live alone.

ha ha! that is perfect. My bloke bought me a Granta subscription several years ago, and that always keeps him in my good graces.
TLS or LRB - in America, it's hard to find either. I haven't tried, but are they available on line? I read the NYT book review and shall be receiving the NYRB soon.
I find it amazing that all you/us posters have time to read reviews as well as books. Sometimes I get completely befuddled by reading a review of a book by an author of a book that I wanted to read. Does that make sense?

Is the LRB's bookshop still in business?

Most people I know get their LRB in the post, so availability isn't really an issue.

Gregory, dish!

Can you name any other independent bookstores that've opened in the past 3-4 years? God bless 'em, but I'm not sure how they do it.

The TLS is the Times Literary Supplement, Carol.

There's free stuff to read on both of 'em, and it's often really good.
I'm just glad they're both there, but major props to whichever one had James Wood review Elizabeth Costello; I haven't even read it yet, but that article has been one of the highlights of my year.
Um, yeah. Must get out of the library more often...

I have!

I want to know what you said, eg about underrated and overrated writers!

Maybe it is not available in the Republic of Letters, I mean, Ireland.

Underrated: Norman Rush.
Overrated: Ian McEwan.

Given how critical I've been of Colm Toibin, it is fair to say: his recent LRB review of Thom Gunn is one of the better critical pieces I can ever remember reading from him. He knows the poetry, compares collections, makes it personal without being too self-indulgent.

Very good:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n15/john-henry-jones/diary

It is.

Another wonderful Katherine Rundell
https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n13/katherine-rundell/consider-the-hare

"And it highlighted the fact that over the 10-year period, the London Review of Books did not publish a single review of a non-white poetry book, or the writing of a single non-white poetry critic. A total of 105 poetry articles by 39 poetry critics were published by the LRB over this period.

“All 39 were white. Those 105 articles reviewed 127 different books and all were by white poets,” says the report. “No other magazine in the UK has published more articles without a single non-white critic. It is the only magazine in our data set to have never published a review of a non-white poet.”

The Ledbury analysis points out that since 2009, eight non-white poets have won the UK’s major poetry awards, the TS Eliot and the Forward prize, including Derek Walcott, Claudia Rankine and Ocean Vuong. “The LRB has reviewed none of these,” it says."

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/25/diversity-in-poetry-on-the-rise-but-resistance-to-inclusivity-remains?

As July begins, I have reached the first LRB of May.

Still reading articles about the pandemic from the beginnings or first half of its duration thus far. It felt more dramatic then.

The poetry that gets printed by the lrb is generally from a very small number of poets (Anne Carson, John Ashbery (rip) August klienzahler, Rae armantrout) some I love (eg the first two) some I quite dislike (the second two). But like the rest of what they publish its for the mostpart from within a very narrowly defined cultural milieu. Hard to even imagine them going as off-piste to include more experimental contemporaries of armantrout (Susan howe say). In part the narrowness of the lrb is part of what can make it good. The article they published about Theresa may is one of my favourite and it's insights only make sense from within the same parochial 'i went to Oxford' perspective that unites their core staff. Patricia Lockwood is a real oddity and her regular articles delight in contrasting with a house style that can feel oppressively uniform in its tics. It says something of what is so simultaneously monstrous and refreshing about the lrb that its obvious that reflecting greater 'diversity' wouldn't even occur to them.

I think I'll never catch up.

But then I think: I won't bother reading Jacqueline Rose. And I don't need to bother with this preposterously long, utterly typical Colm Toibin article about letters that Robert Lowell wrote about having an affair.

Lol I remember that one. I couldn't help thinking that I would love to read an article of similar length about someone in another profession's utter shit-headedness towards an ex. A profession like hairdressing or database management. I don't know why writers' private lives are supposed to be particularly interesting. I know the justification is that Lowell wrote a book of poems about it, and that it was supposed to be a particularly scandalous conflation of the private and the public etc but frankly the length of the article and the detail therein just felt like wallowing in exactly the worst parts of the whole affair.

Lowell is boring but toibins writing on him is appalling drivel

Haven't read the particular article you're referencing

And I don't need to bother with this preposterously long, utterly typical Colm Toibin article about letters that Robert Lowell wrote about having an affair.

lol that is a pretty fair summation

I don't know why writers' private lives are supposed to be particularly interesting.

Everyone loves gossip + parasocial relations with celebs.

I read that Tobin piece and concur, but for the bits on Hardwick, whose writing I've been getting to know more in the last year or so.

The piece by Rose on Camus is really fine and you all should read it. The way it integrates covid with a novel that has had a bizarre re-discovery.

Tracer Hand's post above is my favourite on ILX for some time.

LRB used to (might still do) advertise internships only in its own classifieds. I guess it saves money, but doesn't do much for diversity.

Thank you pinefox! :)

I don't know why writers' private lives are supposed to be particularly interesting.

They are to other writers it would appear. Especially Phil Space.

i think LRB's been quite meaty recently but but my reason for reading tends towards "odd perhaps useful fact i was till now unaware of" rather than "deeper understanding of specific topic or person close to my heart" -- and on the whole i prefer the fact to be historical rather than personal these days

i vaguely had an urge to write a letter abt runciman's whitewashy takedown of rahm emmanuel (but i was too busy writing abt adam ant) (who still doesn't feature often enough in this so-called magazine)

(i sent them an actual pitch a couple of months back but got no reply) (i am very very bad at pitches)

i like jacqueline rose but also tend to leave her big long pieces to "read later" as i assume they will be intellectually demanding -- and then entirely forget to read them

adam ant) (who still doesn't feature often enough in this so-called magazine)

Excellent!

it reads like the pitch i sent was abt adam ant but it wasn't (one of several problems with it)

"The poetry that gets printed by the lrb is generally from a very small number of poets (Anne Carson, John Ashbery (rip) August klienzahler, Rae armantrout) some I love (eg the first two) some I quite dislike (the second two)."

Btw I have noticed more people whose poetry I've heard of on twitter being published in the lrb in the last year or so.

"i will never log off"

I came across this piece from Al Alavarez's (someone I hear about now and then but never in an interesting enough way to actually read up on) ex-wife today, reviewing Al's account of their marriage:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n10/ursula-creagh/first-chapters

It has that tediousness of the literary brand of gossip, but its a one of a kind too.

enjoying the big piece on robert louis stephenson and henry james in bournemouth -- which i think does the spadework to establish how a long gaze at entwined biographies can in fact be illuminating

(if only bcz it notes -- claims? -- that henry jekyll of jekyll and hyde fame is in fact a. based on his close friend james ftb same initials and b. kind of a critique of james' attitudes to the world and to writing?)

(also bcz fucksake it's fascinating that these two writers were so close)

i thought the hardwick reaches of the lowell-affair essay were also interesting, tho very VERY buried in much too much material abt lowell, who always elicits a massive #whocare from me -- not that i give much of a fuck abt poetry at all but with him it's like "what if beat poetry but dully posh?"

Might fuck about with the Christopher Rick's archive:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/christopher-ricks

(Read the piece on Empson's Using Biography last week, which I did enjoy. I finished Gulliver's Travels recently so his piece on Swift is just in time)

A lot of swearing going on here.

I very much agree with Mark S's post except his spelling of RLS's name.

Is RLS in the TLS or the LRB?

eagleton always better when you replace key parts of his sentences IME

i was going to post a note abt his recent hegel-related review in the LRB, which is full of sly nonsense lol, but i've been busy with work (which i don't like)

Trying to go one better: play with being a tankie, which angers absolutely everybody around you, and causes more work than its worth.

haven't read a copy so i might be wrong, but something about the fence gives me a bad vibe

the vibe is maybe oxbridge student mag for the hip london lit crowd

Essays really short at times. Gornick on the Village Voice - - besides the anecdote at the beginning - - felt really slim, full of things unsaid, maybe?

feeling very seen in this essay on dark matter:
“WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), which might weigh anything between ten thousand and a million times more than an electron“

wait till you hear about p-branes
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane

here's the phrase i'm stealing from raymond queneau, when confronted with yr posts: "i cannot countenance such laxity"

i posted the above when i'd only read the first page of the queneau review (so that i didn't forget): i've read the second now and am delighted to discover that there's a collective of translators inspired by oulipo (the OUTRANSPO), which seems a very good development that the piece shd have explored a little further!

Link to a letter sent to the LRB re: Hal Forster's review of a book on surrealism.

I read but my knowledge isn't more than surface.

Letter by Dawn Ades, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Steven Harris, Georges Sebbag and Michael Richadson, Editors of the 'International Encylopedia of Surrealism' in response to Foster's claim that "Surrealism has been passed on the right" and other statements. pic.twitter.com/F2MgSUZ9WS

— Abigail Susik (@AbigailSusik) July 15, 2024

Somewhat bizarre conclusion in this piece looking at the work of this Victorian literary reviewer.

"In any event, he deserves better than simply to be remembered for having been Virginia Woolf’s uncle."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/stefan-collini/saturday-reviler

Some good stuff on magazine ecology in the Victorian-era but its mainly looking at this writer. Collini doesn't state the biggest problem with Fitzjames Stephen's writing: that he was proven to be totally wrong. Maybe that was too 'shooting fish in barrels'.

it is ungentlemanly for intellectual historians to resort to such vulgarities!

Zhou Enlai and Barbra Streisand has been the most enjoyable double bill in a while

pleased to see perry taking my line on the cultural revolution lol

Will dive in later to see if there is any mention of O'Hagan's piece on Grenfell.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/james-butler/this-much-evidence-still-no-charges

there's only this very indirect implied mention: "An opposing argument eventually emerged in the press, insisting that the council had been maligned: beneficent and detached patricians, lumbered with an ungrateful tenantry and incompetent TMO, their sins were, in the scale of things, minor."

i imagine this wording is the result of negotation with his editors, everything else about the piece seems cogent and toughly expressed (that it's been run at all is a tacit admission the earlier piece was a blunder, tho not of the scale of the blunder -- let's see if they run any letters about it)

does it signal a changing of the guard? butler has a “contributing editor” for several months (there are 19 and i believe he's the newest); o’hagan is these days termed “editor at large” -- there's only one of these. i don't really know what these titles entail*, my guess for o'hagan is “senior staff writer with wide-roving focus”, while the “contributing editors” are regular reviewers who are encouraged to offer readerly input comment and advice on items run and general direction? (this is literally a guess).

*to be fair no two publications deploy the staff-name designations the same way lol

thanks to a curtailed teenage encounter with jude the obscure (most witchy titled in a bound set on a bookshelf on a rain-best family holiday in wales), hardy is someone i am not at at all likely now to be drawn to (novels *or* poetry), but i have to say i'm getting a lot out of the matthew bevis piece on him: as a much more anxiously strange figure than anywhere i'd placed him* in relation to the fireworks of the first part of the 20th century

*probably unjustly but probably not totally unjustly lol

That Hardy piece says he "must be the first, I think, to have smuggled the word ‘whang’ into a poem", in 1924. Perhaps but in the next issue we read of William James' "sun [...] whanging down", from 1868. A back issue search also finds this joyful title: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n10/ian-hamilton/whangity-whang-whang

thrilling research/article about physics, race, and an old painting!

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n22/fara-dabhoiwala/a-man-of-parts-and-learning

yeah that was good. I also enjoyed the piece about grimoires in the previous issue, especially the ending.

I enjoyed yr bit about bluesky on the blog Mark. Someone in the comments called you a 'pseud' lol

Yup, v enjoyable, couple of other lolly comments

thank you! never read the comments! i am a pseud tho, that's totally fair

Mere Pseud Mag Ed

keep those takes coming

New issue looking great from a fiction perspective. Review of novels by Jelinek, ETA Hoffmann and Balzac

Collini, Tooze and and Lears articles all excellent. From Tooze I learnt the staggering fact that in the last 20yrs China's production of steel and concrete has equalled all hitherto created human building and infrastructure.

This chart from a recent Toozestack is quite a striking graphic representation (apols if huowge)

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F76fa4d8d-52bd-4b9b-b0e2-5dc11b8205cf_1730x1132.png

Full substack post here https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-343-polycrisis-and-the

(Steel and concrete production/urbanisation as major drivers of carbon emissions, but you get the idea)

Hell of a piece.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n02/patrick-mcguinness/diary

Horrific piece about the south african government deliberately trapping underground and starving thousands of 'illegal' miners. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n04/helen-sullivan/diary

you’re not kidding. jesus christ.

The book, Eucalyptus, will take seven years to write, so it may be these plans aren’t as good as they look. Meanwhile, H is ‘on a hair trigger’, suffering from nocturnal hot sweats, and V says that he has to ‘have “an asbestos suit on” in order to criticise her work’. One evening in 1992 before Cosmo is published, he takes her bare feet in his lap and finally tells her what he thinks of it. The first section makes ‘a very strong story’ he says, but her friend O, who suffered from a brain tumour, would have been shocked to see himself ‘revealed and scrutinised’ on the page. In another discussion, V says she has an obsessive interest in ‘death, rape, murder and so on’ and H wonders if this is true and, if so, ‘Is it wrong?’ He is also of the opinion that she is limited by her subject matter; she should get away from the 1970s, which he describes as ‘a period of bullshit’. When H counters that his work feels like the 1950s, he says it is set ‘in no-place and no-time’. (Ah, the men who don’t write about anything.)

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n08/anne-enright/i-stab-and-stab

Very nice

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n11/jonathan-meades/ranting-cassandras

At least one ilxor thanked in the acknowledgments of the Hatherley bk (which is good but almost comically overstuffed with info - more images, in better repro, would have helped a lot imho).

More of a overview of Plath as oposed to just a review of the prose (you can never just review Plath, the writer, that wouldn't be any fun). Touches on Malcolm's book.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/patricia-lockwood/arrayed-in-shining-scales

Pretty good though it has a sorta clunky analogy to video games which is probably true up to late 90s when I stopped playing them.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n05/colin-burrow/ogres-are-cool

Alan Garner is a great writer notably hard to categorise and I honestly feel deserves better than Adam Mars-Jones stumbling through a review (of a book of essays he barely touches on) alternately missing the point and smoothly patronising him. AMJ’s thing as author & reviewer is a kind of mid-range grown-up novel I don’t really read myself & tbf he probably does provide a sketch-map of this territory I don’t and will never know well. Has he ever convinced me of anything? No! But he examines when and where such books work and don’t — and that’s fine I guess, someone has to patrol these reaches.

But Garner’s work I do know — well enough for once to be able to check back against Mars-Jones as a reader. When 2012’s Boneland belatedly completed Garner’s original trilogy I was happy to revisit all the books I’d read and loved as a kid in the 60s, when he was very much celebrated as a front-rank children’s fantasy writer and I was devouring everything that got the thumbs-up in Puffin Post. But somewhere between 1960’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and 2021’s Treacle Walker — and more exactly between The Moon of Gomrath in 1963 and Red Shift in 1973 — Garner had moved away from the limpid directness generally expected of books popular with children, towards a blunted and cryptic opacity of style honestly pretty demanding for readers of any age.

Not untypically for an LRB essay, AMJ treats this collection mainly as a pretext for restating in précis much that he’s raided from the collection. He gives descriptive summaries of the earlier books, with genuine praise here and there for well wrought sentences and scenes — and takes care to insist on blunders everywhere made (as he sees it) against novelistic practice and taste, about failing to “set the scene” or “sketch character” or whatever. He doesn’t seem to have much of a sense why children’s books and the avant-garde might by choice diverge from the the conventional adult novel — which leaves him little purchase on Garner’s apparent stylistic evolution from kidlit to daunting experiment. And when Garner does explore this, Mars-Jones completely misreads him, arguing dismissively only with this misreading.

So Garner talks about the effect on his fiction, and notable his writing of dialogue, of producing scripts for television, and how the tape recorder has changed how we thinking about words on the page: he contrasts an excerpt from Thomas Hardy with a (post-tape) passage from Red Shift. AMJ finds it baffling that anyone could think this passage is a more convincing representation of how we speak— but in fact this isn’t even slightly Garner’s claim, which is that technology causes us to encounter dialogue less as found material immutably tied to solid social observation, and more as one more element to be worked on and with, for its faceted plasticity of potential meaning — by the author but also of course by the characters.

Garner’s is not a new claim or a strange one (it’s pretty central to modernism’s entire explanation of itself) and of course you can quibble with the quality of his extract as an example — though probably best not to do this by chopping out the context and half the quote (adding here that I literally had to buy this collection on Kindle to confirm AMJ ’s wild misprision lol). What’s happening in Red Shift at this point is two young lovers speaking past one another and one of them silently lamenting his inability to retool how he manages speech. He desires a red shift of his own, to better refit his conversation for his girlfriend’s comprehension.

Garner’s subject matter has always been the intrusion into the modernity being navigated by ordinary young adults of items from the deep and magical past, sometimes author-invented (the elves, goblins and Gandalf-ish wizard of Brisingamen; the treasures, unicorn and melancholy dying otherworld bursting into the Manchester of Elidor) but just as often that of actual-real local myth (King Arthur sleeping with his legions under Alderley Edge in Cheshire, the pan-European legend of the Wild Hunt in Gomrath, the ancient tales from the Mabinogion trapped in a hill-bound mid-Welsh valley in the The Owl Service). What seems to change for him (courtesy the tape recorder and the TV scripts) that dialogue stops being the affirming irruption of the merely observed real into his stories as they unfold, and becomes — if you like — part of the art that the same characters can work on, the choices they can make (or sometimes can’t). Conversation as the arrival of powerful objects from the past (the things we’ve programmed ourselves to say things) as matter that fails to help or to contribute: how might fiction and fiction’s characters navigate this (scientific?) fact. Routine communication, it turns out, is extremely unlimpid — and this is part of the adventure (and perhaps why the adventures seem to become distinctly grimmer). Red Shift sees a sequence of unhappy pasts and presents intersecting in unsettling ways: and the matter of the magic at issue must of course include the author’s own writing that binds them together, and the reading too, as it binds in the reader — or apparently not, if that reader is Adam Mars-Jones.

You make Red Shift sound appealing---I've only read Owl Service, also on your (and others') say-so: awesome, but also I'm ready to see him try something a bit different. Doesn't sound terribly diff, re young lovers speaking past each other, one of them reproaching himself, rings an Owl Service bell: plenty of gender and class clash in that one, and I can also see how it might have been a good read for me when much younger (though as technical child I was more about science fiction and comics).

one difference is that red shift has three storylines -- the modern one, one from the civil war and one from post-roman times, about romans left behind after the empire had quit

all three are very readable in themselves (tho the action is sometimes very implied and you have to be paying close attention to pick out); the exact nature of their relationship with one another (and how much much it matters) is definitely some of the difficulty of the book

"AMJ’s thing as author & reviewer is a kind of mid-range grown-up novel I don’t really read myself & tbf he probably does provide a sketch-map of this territory I don’t and will never know well."

I avoid AMJ like the plague because he is always reading books like he has a manual of how to write books in front of him.

But I have been reading back issues of the LRB a lot lately so might read this.

the upside i guess to the irritating mars-jones review is that not only did i buy POWSELS AND THRUMS to read (👍🏽) on kindle (👎🏽) when i realised AMJ was missing all kinds of points abt it, but i realised as i read the relevant how-i-wrote essay that i was being spoilered for the novel THURSBITCH, which i had in the house but had never cracked open: so i read it (👍🏽👍🏽) and then i read the relevant essay, which is among other things a true semi-ghost story of garnerlief in that part of cheshire (👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽)

POWSELS AND THRUMS basically means odds and bobs and is apparently correct archaic cheshire lingo used to textile trades-ppl tho also on repetition faintly twee in effect: he shd totally have called the books of essays HOW I WROTE THURSBITCH MAN

Yes! But what is garnerlief?

tales of life as a garner (a. garner)

POWSELS AND THRUMS gives off a v strong "I am old and will call my book whatever the fuck I like" vibe.

also have thursbitch. also haven’t read it. powsels and thrums has v late victorian / edwardian end-of-career actor memoir vibe to it. powsels and thrums: a miscellany. powsels and thrums: recollections of a travelling artiste.

Thursbitch is vg IMO - I think my favourite of all of the post The Stone Book books (I haven't read Boneland).

here, this josephine quinn review of a classical history through the lens of shorelines is v weird. quinn sets it up with anecdotes of the 18th century and Victorian leisure in Britain, before moving onto the book which she says “isn’t a retrojection of the British day out at the seaside”. well no because it isn’t about that at all. you’ve literally just introduced that topic at the beginning. which is a shame because i was rather hoping for an essay on the british seaside resort (of which i am sure there are a few already). v odd. rest of review a bit janky as well.