TS: TLS vs LRB

cheers. we get back on the horse innit. "funnily enough" woody contributed a jacket-quote to the book wot i (entirely justifiably) trashed. in all fairness i don't think he'd read it.

I find Michael Wood's film articles pretty annoying - he has never heard of the concept of "spoilers", and often seems to just summarise the plot of the film.

I sent a letter into the LRB once. They did not pay me, but they did print it.

can't be worse than philip french, surely?

xpost

The LRB gets a 20K from the arts council: some right-wing journal was complaining about that, but I haven't googled it.

re: Michael Wood I always feel there is a missed opportunity: he reviewed Eyes Wide Shut in conjuction with the Novella its based on, and his account of difference and similarities (and their effects) was pretty good. The actual film revs on their own are a bit thin.
His archive is great tho'. Was reading this really nice article on Bunuel last weekend.

Also they never really try to cover other arts: Peter Campbell doing the Michael Wood role for the visual arts, only one film rev, almost nothing for music or theatre.

not really a frequent reader of either but through twitter i ended up reading a tls article about a supposed meeting between dostoevsky and dickens which rapidly morphs into this amazing detective story about the hoax, its origins and the guy behind it all. i'm a sucker for stories like these and this one is quite crazy, reminded me a bit of the 2666 part about the search for the elusive author (clearly my memory of that book is very fuzzy). anyways did anybody else read it and enjoy it? might have been mentioned on another thread i missed?

also, this is one of 4 TS: tls vs lrb threads, it's kind of hilarious to see the almost exact same thread name show up in search.

oh and the link to the story:
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1243205.ece

yes! read this a few days ago, amazing story.

there is something absolutely fascinating to me that this man just kept writing things about various topics, creating new aliases and casually dropping huge things in his writings. the article doesn't get the answer to this but i'd be curious to know if harvey wanted his hoaxes to be picked up by people or if he was just content making up all those things

i get the feeling there was a kind of virtuosic self-satisfaction about the whole process, like in his head he's casting himself as neglected genius, weaving a fleet-footed jig around the dryasdusts of the academy & pygmies of modern fiction - I would guess his favoured outcome is being recognised by posterity rather than some dude in the TLS.

Basically he's a Nabokov character

(and to visit thread-title-topic - the article is maybe a bit sluggishly written & holds back a bit too much - LRB might have been a better home for it - editing's sharper & they're willing to play lively.)

there is def self-satisfaction about the whole process, the guy writes an article comparing one of his unknown novels to that of one written by doris lessing! one of the things that i found extremely enjoyable is how he uses a different alias to dismiss his own work as being incorrect or insufficient, while still managing to declare it not devoid of a certain interest (that whole passage about "the harvey theory").
as for the writing i don't read either of those often enough to be able to state on which would have edited it better but i do agree that at times it is written a bit laboriously.

yes this is one of the best things i read all year

i mean i have a bunch of edit quibbles but the material is so ace

feel like a d harvey should come hang on ilx, teach us about socks done proper.

i agree with whoever said above the right answer was NYRB, but then LRB but I am allowed to enjoy all of em

Basically he's a Nabokov character

― woof

My first thought was Pessoa, but yeah. Amazing article.

so impressed with this article. creating all those characters and having them interact must make him so _happy_. i'm sort of jealous.

By his own count, since receiving his PhD from Cambridge he has applied for around 700 university positions in Britain, but has been invited for interview only eight times. (This lack of success in the British academic job market has perhaps confirmed him in his staunchly critical view of the hiring and promotion processes to be found in most English universities.)

that seems a strikingly poor ratio for someone with a cambridge phd

what has he been doing wrong huh?

700 university positions in britain?

doesn't that seem strange? given that some of those were probably 30/40 years ago when the number of positions/applications must have been fewer and a 1%~ interview rate seems unfeasibly low for some random provincial university appointment

the letter about grammar/public schoolboys written during his own undergraduate days suggests he is of a certain type given to a resentful life on the periphery of institutions, who in the ferment of the late 60s was still caught up in the internecine cultural politics of an earlier era, crankishness a self fulfilling prophecy leading to further estrangements and nurtured grievances

i do enjoy this sort of literary sleuthing but given that the initial dostoevsky hoax was quite engaging and in any event fairly harmless, it's saddening to find out how useless and shitty his other escapades have been