Book Reviews? LRB vs the failing New York Review of Books vs ... ?

Not to further derail the NYRB publishing imprint thread and to continue this discussion.

The NYRB seems to be really unravelling under Buruma. I let my subscription lapse a couple of years ago but from the occasional issue I've picked up or read bits of online, it seems to be inconsistent in tone both from issue to issue and within an issue. Which I think is a pity because I like many of its regular contributors and don't know where else you would be able to find several of them published in the same place.

The whole Fall of Men seems almost parody and at best appears to be a shameless and tasteless attempt to have an issue go viral. Maybe there'll be an editorial coup in the office and they'll replace him with one of their female editors/regular contributors and/or return to two editors(Silvers/Epstein) to provide a better counterbalance (Darryl Pinckney? Daniel Mendelsohn?).

I do think the LRB is still pretty good but also not as consistent as it used to be. I only pick up the occasional issue where there is an article or two or three I know I want to read. I do like that they continue to publish more interesting younger writers (at least relative to other places).

Where else do people regularly read reviews? James Wood is sometimes good in the New Yorker, depending on what he's writing about. I haven't read the TLS in a long time - maybe worth revisiting?

I often enjoy book reviews in the NYer but it probably doesn’t compare in hypothetically comprehensive usefulness to the three outlets mentioned. I don’t know how many books LARB actually reviews but they’ve got to be a bit fresher in editorial outlook.

Before this later Fall of Men Donnybrook (on which I will reserve judgement until I read the piece in question) I hadn’t noticed any particular decline at the NYRB. It seemed like mostly the same writers covering mostly the same subjects. It was never a magazine known for consistency of tone.

Reluctantly say TLS is best for fiction reviews/coverage although I look mainly online, scavenge whatever I am interested in. All sorts of off piece in The New Republic and The Nation.

The other copycat RBs (there is a Brixton review of books now: http://www.brixtonreviewofbooks.net/) are all mildly interesting as an area.

o.nate, maybe it's a reflection of my lack of personal interest on areas of its coverage? It dates back to the last couple years of Silvers' reign to be sure but I've just been finding less and less of it very engaging and I've skipped over an increasing % of articles (and I feel like it's been more the case since Buruma took over).

There have also been a few pretty bad/weak one-off reviews over the last few years that I feel wouldn't have meet their editorial standards earlier, as well.

I don't mean to say that regular contributors continuing their beat(s) - so to speak - have all of a sudden declined, but that outside of that I personally find it's been getting less interesting.

I'll go back and look, but I think there have still been a fair number of interesting articles per issue. If there's been a decline, I'd say it's been fairly slight. It's not like NYRB under Silvers never courted controversy either. Silvers continued publishing Freeman Dyson for instance, even after he fell afoul of climate activists by taking a slightly skeptical stance on how much certainty was possible and suggesting that technological solutions might be worth considering (to be fair Silvers also published Bill McKibben and others).

Hate to say good things about a Murdoch publication but I do like the TLS, I think it reviews a much wider range of things than the LRB or NYRB. I find myself reading about mediaeval calligraphy or something I'd never normally read about and finding I'm getting something out of it. All too rare an experience with online reading.

A glib, but perhaps accurate, statement would be something like:

The NYRB is for people who think Colm Toibin is a good critic.

Unfortunately this statement would also somewhat redound on the LRB, to which I am a long-term subscriber.

The NYRB always feels attractive to me, as something comparatively unknown - and bulky, hefty, dense.

But I fear that in truth it is worthy, stuffy, bulky or hefty in a more figurative and unattractive sense.

It's also obsessed with the minutiae of US politics -- understandable maybe, but to a degree that makes it almost like a news review (Spectator, New Statesman or something) rather than a reflective literary / intellectual journal.

Another statement that I fear could be a bit accurate is:

The NYRB is the place where even Lorrie Moore writes uninterestingly.

I subscribe to the NYRB on-line, primarily to be honest for its archive. Since Charles Rosen died I think the only NYRB writers I actively care about are Garry Will, Joan Didion and very occasional ilxor Luc Sante. Probably I've forgotten someone obvious and important. I feel Buruma was a poor choice as editor: even ignoring his bad opinions, he seems out of his depth.

I subscribe to the New Yorker on-line, also primarily for access to its (enormous) archive. I posted that I'm not a huge Remnick fan on the other thread, and it's true -- I don't like his own writing and I think some of his big-name hirings have been bad. Jia Tolentino's take-down of the Ghomeshi affair was good, though.

I subscribe to the LRB to arrive in the post (and generally read most of it, except the fiction reviews). It probably actually has the widest scope of the three.

I find myself reading about mediaeval calligraphy or something I'd never normally read about and finding I'm getting something out of it. All too rare an experience with online reading.

This kind of thing has totally happened to me w/ the LRB.

It would be great if they offered an option to digitally bundle articles from each for a monthly fee but from their POV would probably be a bad move, eating into their subscriber base.

Lol, I like Colm Toibin's essays and think you could say the same about the LRB. I do agree it has the widest scope and a less Anglo bias.

The archives of each are a great resource - was something I dove into when I had my subs to NYRB and LRB (I like how the LRB links off to related articles online - one of my university libraries had all of the old print issues going back to the mid 80s, it was good fun to go back and look through the old personal ads which alas I don't think migrated to the digital archives).

Luc Sante posted here, really? He's also one of my NYRB faves.

I subscribe to the LRB, but it's a bit like gym membership: rarely feel I'm getting the most out of it. No matter how much of each issue I read, all the interesting letters in the next one are about stuff I missed. I *never* read the poems.

The NYRB is for people who think Colm Toibin is a good critic.

er..the people at the LRB think so:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/colm-toibin

There is much crossover between contributors at both places. Obviously you'd expect the NYRB to have more on the US and less on the NHS (and vice-versa for the LRB).

Ultimately its been a poor year for the LRB - and that's not to include the mountains of poems by Frederick Seidel! The Grenfell piece, Lanchester's fiction, Perry Anderson's two parter on Powell (whatever his merits we could do with better coverage of fiction, and that really wasn't it).

I don't really see both publications being that sustainable in the long run. Politically it does feel - more than ever - like these projects are at the end of their runs, along with their politics (I never cared much for The New Yorker - like all of these good stuff is published - but the Bannon invite is where you see the writing on the wall for these ppl...just this very basic failure to be decent).

Another vote for the TLS here. Also The Literary Review, https://literaryreview.co.uk/

The NYRB is for people who think Colm Toibin is a good critic.

― the pinefox, Tuesday, September 18, 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Unfortunately this statement would also somewhat redound on the LRB, to which I am a long-term subscriber.

No, I wouldn't expect the NYRB to write about the NHS, as the LRB sometimes does. But I said "the minutiae of US politics -- understandable maybe, but to a degree that makes it almost like a news review (Spectator, New Statesman or something)".

Writing about the NHS is somewhat different: long-range analysis of social issues.

The politics minutiae is something that the LRB used to do (but less than the NYRB) in Ross McKibbin's regular reviews. He was clearly retired out of that role - surely he can't have asked to quit it? - and the paper no longer carries many of those contemporary politics articles. The closest thing to the new McKibbin has been Tom Crewe, who I find mostly very creditable.

The obvious reason for the paper stopping rolling politics coverage in print is the sense that such fast moving developments are better covered online, in its blog. So you could plausibly say that the LRB blog is its answer to the NYRB's vast print political coverage.

The claim that any print publication is unsustainable necessarily looks plausible.

But if a specific claim is made that these publications are unusually unsustainable, I don't see evidence for that in the LRB's case.

re the LRB specifically: I have heard here and there that it now has a bigger print circulation than ever, as well as its online readership. It also has its own healthy though small promotional / esteem-building ecosystem with its author events and films, which are always packed -- the shop in general would appear to be solid infrastructure in the LRB's make-up now.

If the claim is that the LRB's politics are out of date, eg because it is 'centrist', I don't agree because by UK standards it has been quite far to the political Left for many years. Anderson, Eagleton, Hatherley, even Jameson and Zizek (who longer appears for some reason) are regulars, or contributors, who are Marxists. More to the point, perhaps, Crewe is closer to the Corbyn position and movement, as many of us are. And it has embraced the latest wave of feminism in a big way, albeit still provoking claims of imbalanced coverage, which I think have in turn led to more women writing and being written about, in the last year or so.

I can't claim that any of the above applies to the NYRB - a different matter.

mckibbin is 76 so he may have bowed out decided of his own accord

he started writing sentences like that

I agree.

I was just thinking about Alan Bennett as an LRB political figurehead (long quoted as saying he likes it cos it's the most radical literary review).

His schtick in effect is: 'the "national treasure" that "Middle England" loves, but who is actually a left-wing critic of our society, radical in a way that would worry many of his admirers'.

As such, it occurred to me that he could literally be called an avant-gardist - as in, say, someone who covertly takes the fight deep into enemy territory.

I wouldn't call him an avant-gardist in other ways.

It might possibly be that AB's status as key LRB totem is well on the wane, and that he is withdrawing much as McKibbin did (as above).

The LRB and NYRB are entwined with a kind of pre-cold war politics. It's left, but its Perry and Tariq Ali, no intersectionality. Like nyrb it engaged with the issues but as the stats show it doesn't have enough women reviewing, and I can see the LRB making the exact same mistakes the NYRB made.

Ultimately and once the trust fund cash runs out I can see the whole thing dying off.

Sorry cold war, like its left but as the Grenfell piece showed it has different colours.

I don't like the Grenfell piece, but I don't think it represents the political stance of the whole LRB (certainly not all of its contributors) -- more the political stance of its author.

It's true, though, that in publishing it across the whole issue, the paper allied itself with the article, which I think was very poor judgment.

The Cold War seems a red herring to me. The LRB has an interest in Russian history (Sheila Fitzpatrick) but otherwise the Cold War isn't really much part of its politics at all, no more than anyone else's. Once again, Crewe's engagement with Momentum, et al, seems more significant than any of that.

If 'no intersectionality' means that not many of the writers (or topics) are non-white or female, then this is broadly true, but not more true than of most equivalent titles (are they all also unsustainable for the same reason?). More to the point, the engagement with a) changing that, at least re gender and b) taking on big political issues of the time, eg Rose on Trans, Mishra on white nationalism, etc, seems genuine and increasingly extensive. That's not to say that the actual writing has always been good.

The LRB doesn't need me to defend it - I have been frustrated by it as much as most people - and it will survive or it won't, regardless of what we say. So I suppose I am merely trying to state facts.

Once more, the financial facts are another matter - you may know more than the rest of us about the balance of the paper's income. I don't know about trust funds, do know that it was long recipient of an Arts Council grant. I agree that such sources of income can be important to keep these presses going, and think it's a good thing that they do.

Once more, the NYRB seems to be a different thing, part of a somewhat different culture. But we would need evidence for the claim that it is financially unsustainable.

The LRB's underwritten by Mary-Kay Wilmer's family fortune - low estimates are about a million a year. I think… accounts show a £3m loss last year..

(fwiw I think it's an excellent way to use an inheritance)

Mary-Kay Wilmers' father was a successful Belgian industrialist which helps fund the LRB and lets it operate at a loss (a good use of the money, I would say). It has a wide circulation for a magazine/journal/paper of its kind (bigger than the NYRB, maybe, if we incl Europe?) but I don't think it's a profitable enterprise (maybe because it's never felt as much pressure to be it hasn't had to make sacrifices or changes to aggressively try).

I remember reading that the NYRB was successful year over year (not sure if this is still the case), but I think it has a wide subscriber and institutional sub base that keep it afloat. Also there are maybe more ads? Or am I just cranky and noticing them more?

I definitely am more sympathetic to the LRBs politics and while, yes, there is a generational thing think it's mostly among their old guard of regular contributors (Perry, Tariq, etc.). I think some of the younger contributors they've been bringing in are better engaged with different currents in the left (Benjamin Kunkel, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Adam Shatz - also in the NYRB but mostly just writes about jazz, Joanna Biggs, Emily Witt). It's not the same, but they do also publish other good younger writers on their blog. The NYRB on the other hand seems pretty firmly fixed in its leftish early 90s post-Cold War liberalism which - with the notable exception of some individual writers - seems fairly out of date.

(I didn't read the Grenfell issue though was discouraged after hearing some of the critiques about its treatment of it).

Even though I read both much less frequently, I hope both remain sustainable in one way or other, whether it be as the recipients of public funding/a benefactor or by subs/ads. I

mary kay wilmers subscribe to my patreon

Largely agree with Federico. FWIW I'm not sure that Adam Shatz is young.

There was a moment, perhaps about 2007, when the LRB tried to bring on board n+1 writers -- Batuman, Kunkel, at least. That was one of those moments of partial generational transition, which was something of a precursor to the present with Witt, Heti, Diane Williams et al in it regularly. We probably discussed it on here, over a decade ago.

Though people often complain about the same old names, it is fair to say that for good or ill, it is a different paper from what it was. Kermode, Rorty, McKibbin, Sturrock, James Wood, various others used to be regulars; several are now dead. It's largely a different generation now, with continuities (Collini) and new staples (Runciman).

The copy-editing has declined (Mark S and I both see this), and possibly parts of the writing are also worse. I don't think either of these will damage it commercially at all.

The closest thing the LRB has to a regular / old guard US 'cold war [?] liberal' type, who would tie it in with the NYRB, is ...

David Bromwich.

I don't much like him and I'm glad he no longer appears very often.

twitter is claiming that buruma is out at NYRB

Confirmed: Ian Buruma is out as editor of the New York Review of Books, following much criticized decision to publish piece by Jian Ghomeshi. "I can confirm that Ian Buruma is no long the editor of The New York Review of Books," said a spokesman

— Cara Buckley (@caraNYT) September 19, 2018

:D

Must be a real trip to reach the apex of your profession and then lose all credibility with your entire organization in one fell swoop.

aww I was kinda looking forward to my first angry cancellation letter

it’s not too late

I don't know the story here, or whether IB should go over this particular incident -- but I'm instinctively inclined to be glad about this, as I remember him writing a regular Guardian column, maybe 15 years ago, that I found unpleasant and reactionary.

It seems puzzling to me that someone should publish an essay, presumably after lots of discussion, copy-editing, official agreement, etc -- *then* be told (by bosses?) that it was unacceptable.

Wouldn't or shouldn't they have made this clear at an earlier stage?

lol kicker in the NYT story about it

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DneaxZFVYAAA4rW.jpg

Note: the Brixton Review of Books doesn't seem to have any content online?

i would guess that robert silvers published whatever the hell he wanted, so there may have been no apparatus overseeing buruma editorially. i would also guess that his publisher (and buruma himself, obviously) had no idea what kind of firestorm it would bring. i don't know what the NYRB's last major public fracas was, but i'll bet it happened before twitter was available to magnify things beyond a series of angry letters over the following issues

i was a NYRB subscriber from ... 2010 to 2015ish.

i was always a month or three behind reading them. the ability of their US politics writers to make predictions that, in the time it took me to get around to reading the article, turned out to be laughably wrong was notable. i'm sure i'd feel the same way about other politics writing if i read it on a 3 month delay. but the tone was so above the fray that i kind of felt/feel they should do a better job than the news.

their science (and history of science) coverage was (and perhaps is) excellent and afaict unique (serious, accessible, humane, etc.)

daryll pinkney being the fossil they wheeled out (and perhaps the only person on their roster) capable of reviewing ta-nahesi coates earlier this year doesn't bode well. (it was a good review though.)

i've never had an LRB subscription but i read more of their stuff these days via the web. e.g. i have saved 5 LRB pieces this year, and zero NYRB (unless you count the odd blog post, e.g. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/06/17/world-cup-2018-the-yob-swagger-of-inger-land/ was fun).

*Darryl *Pinckney

also: i liked it more when i didn't live in new york. when i lived in mitteleuropa it felt like they might know lots of things i didn't, but it seemed more obviously out of touch when i moved to NYC and had more direct knowledge of the culture/institutions it covers.

Well, look at that...

This is certainly an opportunity for them to re-think the mag and have a more considered approach to who takes over the editorship (I think in large part Buruma was named because he was there and regularly contributing for so long).

I think it would be swell if they went back to two editors and perhaps opted to not continue only under the helm of an older white guy. I don't know if I'm optimistic this will be the case, but you never know...I think they are self-aware enough, like the Paris Review was, not to do it but, you never know.

Note: the Brixton Review of Books doesn't seem to have any content online?

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 19 September 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I know its very small, only 2/3 issues and I've only seen it sold in our local 2nd hand bookshop lol.

I pretty much read the NYROB for Elizabeth Drew.

i was always a month or three behind reading them. the ability of their US politics writers to make predictions that, in the time it took me to get around to reading the article, turned out to be laughably wrong was notable. i'm sure i'd feel the same way about other politics writing if i read it on a 3 month delay. but the tone was so above the fray that i kind of felt/feel they should do a better job than the news.

Can believe that although iirc Michael Tomasky was dispassionately assessing Trump's chances and wasn't discounting him.

I think these two papers are not much better than the general media in terms of analysis and prediction (trying to think of Adam Shatz (writing for the LRB) on Egypt but I'm too exhausted to check and assess).

This is all happening while two new magazines have launched this week in this island of ours. Centre-right Drugstore Culture and democratic socialist Tribune.

It seems puzzling to me that someone should publish an essay, presumably after lots of discussion, copy-editing, official agreement

i don't know the set-up at the nyrb but i think it unlikely -- and have never imagined -- that there were people senior to IB that he generally had to clear content with: even given his plan to "democratise" that mookieproof cites, he would have been the moral, intellectual and aesthetic conscience and the buck would stop with him

(at least this is what i'd guess: not all publications work like this but it is normally what "editor in chief" means)

in the slate piece he said it had been discussed with his editorial staff and some had said no: but then it was decided and everyone went along -- i forget the exact words but this could well have meant that his staff, or anyway some of them, strongly demurred, and he put his foot down and they acknowledged force majeure and went off to do their jobs muttering to themselves "on yr head be it"

it hadn't -- in my judgment -- been edited, beyond routine proofing for spelling and grammar: to be publishable at all in the context buruma claimed for it in the slate interview it need two or three more serious rewrites and rethinks, with tough editorial notes requiring a whole bunch of stuff (like -- minmally -- accurate descriptions from ghomeshi of what he'd been a accused of!) but clearly none of that had been done

who can say -- there would have been a furore either way -- but i suspect what truly sunk him was the interview, which was jaw-dropping to the point of being weird. (this is what i wrote on the other thread, to save retyping it all):

it's one thing a good editor defending running a strong piece of writing that argues a very bad political line (perhaps even an evil one?): but here we have a self-confessedly* bad editor NOT really defending an eye-stretchingly BAD piece of writing arguing nothing more than he jian ghomeshi is the real victim here.

*buruma stating in public that the facts in the case are "not my concern" undermines all his staff and all his writers, and (obviously) spits in the face of his readers, who have the absolutely right to expect otherwise. he might as well have said "i am entirely incompetent and very out of my depth." if he doesn't resign pretty quickly it will destroy the magazine i think.

my guess is the revolt -- and the demand for his resignation -- came from below not above: editorial staff maybe (tho they had -- so he said -- signed off on it) but much more than that, other contributors threatening to walk, and of course readers

this is the first time i've ever actually posted an angry letter or email demanding someone resign, so this is a gratifyingly quick result! maybe i should write more! (obviously i choose to believe mine is the one that did the trick, it was 🔥 🔥 🔥

The NYRB is for people who think Colm Toibin is a good critic.
er..the people at the LRB think so:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/colm-toibin

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, September 18, 2018 1:06 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha i was gonna say

i also wrote an email, as did at least a couple other ilxors. i suspect they got a lot more reader feedback than they're used to

I’m looking forward to the Apology Issue

they will run my email on the cover i expect

i wanna read everyone's angry emails tbh

Colm Toibin is a poor critic? News to me!

nyrb ppl think he's good, lrb ppl think he's bad: it's like melody maker versus nme in the late 80s, and grebo

i wanna read everyone's angry emails tbh

― macropuente (map), Wednesday, September 19, 2018 6:04 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i would buy this issue

I'm reading Toibin's review of the Gunn collection and so far it's not bad. I've liked several of his novels and have never minded his criticism.

nyrb ppl think he's good, lrb ppl think he's bad: it's like melody maker versus nme in the late 80s, and grebo

― mark s, Wednesday, September 19, 2018 6:08 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in what way do lrb people think he’s bad? he’s in like every other issue

I don't like the Grenfell piece, but I don't think it represents the political stance of the whole LRB (certainly not all of its contributors) -- more the political stance of its author.

O'Hagan is one of the LRB's 17 million contributing editors, who as far as I can see can publish whatever they like.

That NYRB issue hasn't even been published yet: I wonder if they'll actually run the article that blew up in their faces.

Interview with Buruma:

‘I am embroiled in a big scandal, in the middle of storm on social media,’ said Ian Buruma on the phone from New York. ‘It is rather ironic: as editor of The New York Review of Books I published a theme issue about #MeToo-offenders who had not been convicted in a court of law but by social media. And now I myself am publicly pilloried.’

really makes you think

it's a pity he was a man

Twitter runs the NYRB now.

new editors: shanley and the helldude

Flopson: yes, I know that Colm Toibin writes a lot in the LRB. I have said this twice on this thread. That is one reason that I said that my original comment was deliberately glib. The fact that he writes in the LRB is also the reason I have read loads of his essays, and think he is a quite bad and extremely overrated essayist.

Nonetheless, I think that Mark S's joke also has something to it -- I think that CT *is* more respected in the US than the UK. He works there, and anecdotally I have met American scholars who think he is wonderful and couldn't believe I didn't think the same.

The question re whether he is actually good or bad, in any individual's view here, should probably better be discussed on another thread. I think I have probably already said what I thought about it somewhere on this board.

Despite my typical great frustration with his essays I did read his book on Bishop. I'm not sure now if I thought it was better than the essays.

I have read two of his novels - I think they would need separate judgement.

It would be a pretty amazing own of Buruma by the disgruntled members of his former staff if the next issue was indeed composed entirely of the angry letters/emails and, of course, tweets of the last few days.

As a reward for making them see sense on this NYRB should commission mark s to review the dril book.

Update, September 20 at 9:36 a.m.: Buruma spoke briefly about his departure to the Dutch outlet Vrij Nederland, saying that he has “been convicted on Twitter, without any due process.” He also claims that he resigned from the position and that university presses, who advertise in the NYRB, were threatening a boycott because they feared adverse campus reactions to the Ghomeshi article.

It’s not a trial, dipshit!

The blaming of the college kids is such a giveaway.

oh noes i was convicted on twitter just for being a shithead

(also the magazine would have lost a fuckton of revenue had i stayed on but waaaah social media)

idk how many college kids are aware of the NYRB enough to pressure university presses -- i'd guess the presses were more scared of a faculty response

(if any of that part is even true)

this thread is interesting but buruma doesn't seem like a dutch guy through and through.

his behavior is more simply explained by the fact that he is an old man and the apparent cultural consequences of polder model sound a lot like what you see everywhere else.

you remember my writings, discussions, rants, and other assorted peeves I got with Dutch media's mechanism of "debate"? Buruma, a Dutch guy through and through, tried to polder model sexual abuse and now has to contend with the fact that it is not an acceptable approach https://t.co/d6O4WOdgy6

— Flavia Dzodan (@redlightvoices) September 19, 2018

how would "campus kids" even stage a boycott of university presses?

(lol except by not doing the reading i guess, a boycott without a discernible effect in many cases amirite?)

(sidebar: i love the word "polder" and the various dutch concepts that supposedly arise from it)

w/Flavia there are no simple explanations (one of the best things about her).

I was quite interested recently to find POLDER as a term within SF criticism.

Link please, if possible

if "polder" does not appear somewhere in a Fall song I will eat someone's hat

A Polder Lover etc.

James Redd:

http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=polder

doomed like the flying dutchman forever to sail the world's media, on his forehead a post-it note reading "dick" which everyone can see but him: the ian buruma story

his behavior is more simply explained by the fact that he is an old man and the apparent cultural consequences of polder model sound a lot like what you see everywhere else.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, September 20, 2018 5:16 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^ this.

See a lot of Dutch13s trying to appropriate what happened to try and explain this happened because he is Dutch. There's a black hole at the heart of the polder model, it has been used for eternity to cover things up or smooth things (hello racism) over. This particular case though seems reaching... He's an old white man, that's p much it in this instance imo.

very enterprisingly the NYRB, now that it has my email -- thx to me sending the message that toppled IB -- has begun spamming me with trailers for pieces not by jian ghomeshi

(i don't really mind this, i do think it's funny)

A publisher who once threatened me with legal action also simultaneously added me to their mailing list

Just got my digital copy of the NYRB: it has the offending article, no angry letters, and lists Buruma as editor, so no last-minute changes to this edition.

Posted in the LRB thread, but figured I'd also share here - one of the nice things the LRB does which I don't think the NYRB does (?) are publish 10K+ word essays/reviews.

I haven't finished this one from the new issue, but so far this is very moving and powerful.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n18/tom-crewe/here-was-a-plague

nyrb/buruma update, posted in the weinstein thread here (in case anyone missed it): Weinsteins step down as Miramax CEOs

"The article was shown to only one male editor. Most members of the staff (including six female members of staff...) were excluded from the substantial editorial process”
^^^so much for the polder model!!

1/ Just received email of letter from 110 NYRB contributors protesting firing of Ian Buruma “His dismissal in these circumstances strikes us as an abandonment of the central mission of the Review, which is the free exploration of ideas.” pic.twitter.com/XI84Fkwrob

— Cara Buckley (@caraNYT) September 25, 2018

*eyes roll out of head, onto floor, into the pits of hell*

nooo Luc Sante

he's going to be very put out when they run my email on the cover of the "reader's respond" issue

alfred brendel's response i'm less concerned abt at this juncture

lol i hope they actually call it "reader's respond": ALL DRIL ALL THE TIME

I wonder who organized this letter, and how many of the signatories read the "not my concern" interview, and who was asked to sign and refused.

Maybe some of the signatories know him well enough to discount a poor choice of words in an interview vs the guy they know.

it wasn't just a poor choice of words though, was it? He lied about the editorial process that led to the article

I don’t see much description of the editorial process in the interview. He says there was an office discussion but that seems to have taken place after the substantive editing had taken place. So “lied” seems a bit strong. Maybe disagreements were stronger than he let on.

Late to this, haven't read Mark's Burumabusting letter, am only familiar with "ponder" in its xpost Science Fiction Encyclopedia sense---"ponder modeling" is consensus-building, right? Normalizing etc. And he lied about consensus-building among the editors. re contributors' protest, don't see what the Ghomeshi piece had to with xpost ideas, or literature (he's not exactly the Celine of unrepentant sex offenders).

has anyone spotted the complete list of signatures anywhere? i've only found summaries and the cut-off alphabetical seen above

(my letter is not yet and may well never be publicly available, dow: it is merely one of i assume many emails sent to the nyrb)

Everyone is going to have one signatory in that list which is just going to cut you to pieces isn't it? Janet Malcolm re-think this!

The letter they signed isn’t really Trenchant enough for me to be that fretful about any of the signatories.

I still haven't recovered from learning Jan Morris love watching Mrs Brown's Boys, so not able to even consider looking at signatories to that list

I actually agree with the writers of that letter. It's such an overblown reaction to fire someone because of one stupid decision. Jonathan Haidt said on Sam Harris' podcast last week that the only correct way to deal with an internet mob is to ignore it. And here's Laura Kipnis in the New York Times:

Do we now live in such unforgiving times that one problematic essay (or interview) guillotines a job? If so, my fear is that no editor in America will be taking editorial risks ever again.

What’s painful about the stance of many now claiming the #MeToo mantle is the apparent commitment to shutting down voices and discussions that might prove distasteful or unnerving. What use is such an intellectually stifled version of feminism to anyone?

Again, i suspect it's not so much the article alone as the completely clueless follow-up interview that did him in.

Yeah, what will we do if no editor will take brave risks like getting a scumbag to lie in an article and then keep the article away from editors so that the lies aren't caught in the editorial process. I mean, if prestigious magazines aren't willing to do that, then what are they even for?

The letter is disappointing, but it seems a lot like a professional group closing rank. They would rather not let outsiders have the ability to determine if an editorial process was good or bad.

I wasted an hour looking up the ages of half the people on this list. the oldest i found was 93, the youngest was 42, and the average age was 69. https://t.co/C23ongVmPq

— t e whalen (@tewhalen) September 26, 2018

It's so revealing that they without a shred of evidence - and despite NYRB denying it - just assumes Buruma was fired because of the 'public reaction' to the piece. Elitist assholes who needs their right to write anything without the public having a say.

Lol @ "one stupid decision".

Jonathan Haidt said on Sam Harris' podcast last week

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.tenor.co%2Fimages%2F8e10cbf4afc08787dcfb915a1b88483c%2Fraw&f=1

interesting that garry wills -- who's been pressing extremely hard on the related problems in the catholic church for almost two decades now -- is not on that list

nor is joan didion

also they spelled jonathan freedland's name wrong lol

In all honesty I could see this go Kavanaugh and a bunch of them go 'He did what? Ok, I did not know that...'

Freedland beginning to write for it -- which I think is quite recent -- was a really bad move

agreed, tho since the 80s new york media has a bit of a history of hiring unsufferably glib london-media lightweights for its entire UK coverage (here we briefly mourn the passing of the great mollie panter-downes, a briton of another age)

The letter, I have to say, reads like a pro forma loyalty round robin: “we deplore this turn of events”. I think it fairly likely that a significant proportion of the signers aren’t aware of all the details — the Slate interview, perhaps even the publisher’s account (which took way too long to come out, ideally it should have preceded and certainly should have been put out within an hour of the resignation announcements). They will have signed for a variety of reasons, including:
1: friendship and personal loyalty (e.g. Margalit co-wrote a book with Buruma)*
2: a p much knee-jerk (and in most circs entirely correct) sense that in a dispute they have deeper craft ties to the editor than the publisher, and shd back the one they work with against the big bad boss…
3: I hope not but some may be straightforwardly onside with the piece ghomeshi wrote!
4: some will feel that Buruma was brought in (as per the letter) to bring some new energy to NYRB’s contribution to public debates, so shouldn’t be sanctioned at the first whiff of cordite
5: harsh to come down after just one mistake

But it’s not one mistake, it’s three.

A: commissioning the piece
B: denying it the routine editorial procedure
C: that interview

In my opinion it’s B and C that sunk him. A by itself was bad judgment but salvageable. This is what I wrote a week ago and I stick by it (not least bcz I called some the facts abt the editing based just on reading the piece):

it hadn't -- in my judgment -- been edited, beyond routine proofing for spelling and grammar: to be publishable at all in the context buruma claimed for it in the slate interview it need two or three more serious rewrites and rethinks, with tough editorial notes requiring a whole bunch of stuff (like -- minimally -- accurate descriptions from ghomeshi of what he'd been a accused of!) but clearly none of that had been done

who can say -- there would have been a furore either way -- but i suspect what truly sunk him was the interview, which was jaw-dropping to the point of being weird.

Re A:
Buruma wasn’t hired for his years of editorial experience (he had none); nor to radically and experimentally shake up the world’s ideas of good editorial process (inasmuch as I understand “polder model”, it’s what an editorial process at a mag like NYRB will normally be, with Buruma declaring at that pre-appointment point that he will happily take advice from his experienced team).

No, he was hired as a celebrity intellectual and storied author, who the contributors can trust even as he re-injects some pizazz back to the coverage of the more controversial elements in present-day politics (predecessors Silver and Epstein’s first decade had been notably controversial: they put a grenade on the cover at some point in I think 1968, to flag a piece by Andrew Kopkind abt the student revolt). Buruma was I believe heavily involved in Dutch debates abt free speech (the Dutch-knowledgeable ilxors can correct me here? — my main source of info has been Wilders-fantype crackpots on twitter cheering IB’s current plight…)

So, as a commission, this matches up with the reasons he was brought in. His error isn’t toying with the idea, or looking some way into it — “let’s see the piece” — it’s what he did next.

Re B:
There are two reasons you put a piece into the usual process of your magazine editorial. One is to make it better — you make use of the varied thoughts and expertises of a number of people at a number of levels, from the spellcheck and fact-check desks on up. It turns it from “any old piece” to “a piece this magazine is publishing”: it becomes a collective work and in that work, much value is added. The second is — frankly — covering your arse: if you make a mistake, and everyone else on the team has signed off on it also, then it’s not purely yours to own. They can’t sack the whole staff (well, obviously they can and sadly we’ve seen just this on dozens of other titles in recent years, but the NYRB has surely set its institutional face against that culture).

Again, setting aside issues of content, this act was just so reckless! What did IB think was going to happen — he was publishing a highly controversial piece and shut out most of the staff to do so. Did he think no one would notice or voice displeasure? Why would the staff still have his back in this most arrogantly dismissive od circumstance? Who was the one other man who saw it? Was he literally just the spellcheck desk? (It slightly makes me wonder if there hadn’t already been run-ins and ructions with the support staff he was supposed to be polder-modelling with…)

Re C:
OK, in “YOU HAD ONE JOB” terms, IB’s job was NOT GIVING THAT FUCKING SLATE INTERVIEW. He is the public face of the magazine: he should not be so utterly easily first-time ambushable (I know Chotiner is a master at this; all the more reason to dodge the call until you have yr ducks in a row and — ifs — have the contents and the background of the piece at issue AT YOUR FINGERTIPS).

It’s such a stupid and bad interview that I actually have some sympathy for O.Nate’s point. There’s no good reason to assume anything said in it is well said: in other words, that he gets across what he actually meant, courtesy the various ridiculously damning pull-quotes people have made. Again though: his job is knowing what he makes in that situation and getting it across. He couldn’t; he’s out. True it’s not quite fair in the blurred portrait of the process he gives to argue that he deliberately lied: more accurate say he misled by omission — by failing to state that the usual editorial process had not taken place. (Repeating: why he thought the staff wd back him here is baffling to me: it’s their professionalism he’s basically allowing to be impugned, for his blunders.)

*Re signing these types of letter our of collegiate loyalty: it kind of happens A LOT and ppl get caught out when the person organising them is a fool or not entirely on there up-and-up (we don’t now who organised this, but IB himself will have said all their emails!) (which is why I’m interested who didn’t sign). In the Avitall Ronell case, a bunch of ppl who really should have known better signed a substantially more problematic letter in which they extended their knowledge of her public behaviour (which they approved) into assumptions about her behaviour in an private intimate context (which by definition they knew nothing of). This case isn’t that case (the public vs private dynamic is there but it’s very different): still, as we are repeated learning in this dismal time, this extension of indulgence is a fatally easy move to make in respect of those you have a lot of time for (with good reason) in other circumstances. “Their prose is persuasive and intelligent, they can’t be this much of a dick; I like our phone chats abt my work, he can’t have taken leave of his moral senses” and so on.

And all in the high-speed world of email (which as noted is not the world many of these writers grew up with).

I HAVE OPINIONS

(which i have filled full of typos for yr decoding pleasure)

Yeah, I can't help but think of the Avitall Ronell case.

This is really good: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/24/male-cultural-elite-blind-me-too-nyrb-ian-buruma

shorter me above, this multipart jeet heer thread lol (which i hadn't read when i posted):

1. So, this letter on behalf of Ian Buruma raises an interesting question but doesn't persuade because it fails to grapple with why Buruma was actually fired (or perhaps forced to quit). https://t.co/4c0ymp9BLu

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 26, 2018

here's the silvers/epstein "grenade" cover i mentioned (ie not a grenade but a molotov cocktail, and 1967 not 1968):
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DoBlT9WX0AA6T28.jpg

good issue! (i have not read it as an issue)

alfred brendel and marina warner are the names on there that cut me the most in case anyone's keeping score

did brendel say something other than signing the letter?

the only independent comment i've spotted so far from a signer -- not that i've been looking very hard -- was joyce carol oates on twitter going in HARD abt how bad the JG essay is

(in fact, having done that, she also goes on to say this will blow over -- like remnick/bannon -- bcz no lasting harm done and later, when proved wrong, to lament that it's too harsh sacking IB for just a single blunder)

i did not previously have a fully formed opinion of joyce carol oates -- prolific! enjoys boxing! -- but her twitter has convinced me that she is Bad

It is not too harsh firing someone for a single blunder when that blunder completely undermines a leader’s ability to lead their staff, as I’m certain happened here. I think that’s what the letter’s signatories might not be sensitive to. That trust won’t come back and the organization would sink slowly if Buruma didn’t exit quickly.

Enraging dipshit thread from NYRB signatory Harry Shearer below this tweet

If you're designated a "sexually violent predator", does that mean you can't hang around kids and feed them Jell-O any more? #AskingForAFriend

— Harry Shearer (@theharryshearer) September 25, 2018

the only independent comment i've spotted so far from a signer -- not that i've been looking very hard -- was joyce carol oates on twitter going in HARD abt how bad the JG essay is

Fintan O'Toole had a piece in The Irish TImes last week with his take

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-metoo-cannot-win-in-a-climate-of-fear-1.3639666

(tl, dr: The article was bad and Buruma "made mistakes' but he's a mate and we need editors who are willing to take risks)

I agree with a lot in that article, but nobody needs a man to explain how much leeway should be given to men before women are allowed to lose faith in them.

Many many XPs, but yes we need a Mollie Panter-Downes in the world again

I know this joke has been made approx 50 million times but: Fintan O'Tool

I guess its whether you think Buruma was taking a risk or trying to burn down the building.

I think it fairly likely that a significant proportion of the signers aren’t aware of all the details

Which, if true, is something given a lot of them aren't some rent-a-penny journo crying over getting yelled at on twitter but are able to churn out often considered thoughts of around 2-5K on a book, often covering a subject they've spent years thinking about. Maybe they'd take a pause and think about what they are actually signing.

this piece isn't quite as good as it could be -- it needed also to grapple with ballard tbh -- but the kicking that remnick gets pleases me, he is bad not good

lol i mean THIS PIECE: https://hmmdaily.com/2018/10/02/man-writer-against-nature/

(xp why do I keep typing "ponder" when I mean "polder") Do you think Remnick is a bad editor? Never read him much, but a lot of good writing (maybe mostly nonfiction) has been published during his time on top, whatever he actually had to do with it.

i'm no judge of the fiction as i barely read it: the cartoons seems trapped in a loop of sameness (the make-up-yr-own captions are almost always better): some of the arts is OK tho i HAAAAAAATE anthony lane: the long-read non-fiction reporting has highs (ronan farrow is so far a p good hire!) but i think the long-read non-fiction political commentary is patchy at best: jeffrey goldberg, george packer, jeffrey toobin, jon lee anderson -- an inadequate poor gaggle going back to the early 00s and iraq (toobin inadequate all the way back to the OJ trial tbh).

a friend on twitter who hadn't read a full copy for a few years picked a recent one up to read on a train and said it was entirely nervously obsessed with trump without being remotely insightful. which, ok, join the club in US media terms (on and off ilx haha) but i remember* when it stood well away from the lack and made something of that.

*bcz lol i am old, shawn 4evah

s/b pack but i've been wrestling with lacan half the day sorry

Anthony Lane is a miserable old lech who never met a turn of phrase he couldn't belabor into several painful paragraphs

Lane genuinely used to be good

not for a long time though

when, in the 70s?

…when he was apparently an adolescent? wow.

no he was bad from the get-go tho not as bad

Reportage, yeah: taking me deep or at least far into Yemen, Brazil, American Halls of Justice ( & related, incl. detention camps), for instance. Also Superfund sites, dark money, other related.

i like some of its younger crew of short commenters also: jia tolentino, osita nwanevu

(and to be fair to remnick tina brown hired anthony lane)

Sanneh still a bright spot. The Xtian rock piece was fun.

Yes. Also, the leftfield, for inst:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/08/the-comforting-fictions-of-dementia-care

...or else seemed to have reached a point at which the question of where they were was no longer important. GOAL.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/responses-to-reflections-from-a-hashtag/

no mark s. letter, no cred

it'll be the cover i'm sure of it

he's baaaaack

Buruma or Ghomeshi?

buruma, in the FT

i am reading this for some reason

it sucks and he sucks

without at all being aware of it "i am entirely incompetent and very out of my depth" still seems to be his line

doomed like the flying dutchman forever to sail the world's media, on his forehead a post-it note reading "dick" which everyone can see but him: the ian buruma story

― mark s, Thursday, September 20, 2018 10:39 PM (six months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my line is also unchanged

The picture of him in that piece is amazing.

"the age of outrage" -- better known as "the age of the unending self-own"

as you'd expect, this is good: https://hmmdaily.com/2019/04/01/ian-buruma-still-cant-talk-about-metoo/

I bought a copy of LITERARY REVIEW for the first time this week: an indulgence taking me away from LRB territory and into something easier and in some ways more wide-ranging.

Yeah, the LR is reAlly worthwhile.

Shocked into shame to discover that there is a *good poem* in the new LRB for maybe the third time in my time reading it :0
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n08/paul-batchelor/a-form-of-words

That was really...epic?

https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/molly-crabapple/

Pieces like this = the nyrb is good again

Or this:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/05/23/not-about-sex/

James Wood on Eton might at least have had entertainment or literary value. But it doesn't, really.

There is a particular strain of writing about Brexit to which the LRB quite embarrassingly gives a lot of space - a very caricatured, tiresome caricature of a tiresome thing, a ventriloquism of other people's supposed belief in Empire and British greatness.

I can believe that this critical strain has some factual basis, ie: some or many Brexit people really are like that. But as a rhetorical form it is even more exhausted than the thing it tries to caricature.

I think that a more useful approach to writing about Brexit, if one wants one, is to get at angles that are not quite so obvious (but perhaps this is obvious also), eg: the way that Brexit people are really not very pro-British at all but are multinational corporate cynics -- as has repeatedly been shown with Rees-Mogg and is (as far as I recall) probably true of Farage also.

Colin Burrow's piece on Wordsworth this week is terrific. I've never particularly cared about Wordsworth one way or another but he made me care.

Not for me! (this essay was discussed at the FAP)

Burrow knows a lot of poetry, which is good in itself, but I increasingly dislike him as a writer.

And the whole argument about 'Wordsworth's Fun', which CB largely endorses, seems utterly perverse - often amounting to 'WW is unwittingly funny because so solemn and bathetic', etc.

I felt he took that as a starting point in order to undermine it though! i.e. he preferred the superficially bathetic "I measured it - it was three feet wide" etc.

I don't know enough about Wordsworth, or the history of scholarship around him, to appreciate whether CB is actually saying anything particularly noteworthy about him. But it made me interested.

Same! This is mostly the line I took last night. I think if I knew more about him I might not like the details of what he was saying - which isn't just that WW is 'fun'. For instance, CB maps out WW's politics and its contours for about a 20 years period, which I liked, and then his r/ship with Milton (its useful to read his piece on Milton at the archive below: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/colin-burrow, his archive -- alot of which I've spent the past month reasing -- is a largely good primer on various middle-to-Reanaissance era poets)

The 'Wordsworth's Fun' element is (only) half the review. I was not conflating it with the other half - WW's politics - which seems basically more valid.

So I said I enjoyed Andrw O’Hagan’s piece on Lillian Ross. Well, I did. For three reasons:

A: it’s about the New Yorker, at the peak of its imperial phase (mid/late-40s) and the long languorous tumble down from that. I love stories about the old-days New Yorker, they’re almost as much the reason I’m in the job I’m in as is the NME 1977-1983. So here were more.

B: without saying it out loud — and perhaps without actually realising it — it’s also about the much-contested roots of the ‘New Journalism’, in fact and as ethos (lol “Tom Wolfe — talentless”). This too is something I’m very interested in. (Subscribe to my patreon u fucks, so I can write more stuff like this… )

C: it’s explicitly an exploration, albeit a very brief and cheekily trollish (and rather sly) one, of what makes for good journalism. So that’s three.

The first spread is largely a character sketch from someone who was “there” (exactly where and when not well back up, let alone why and how): entertaining insider stories about people you’ve half heard of, with their most composed public-facing masks removed. Her hates (good list – esp.if you know something abt these various ppl, which I mostly do)(never very sure abt george plimpton tbh), her motivations, her distrusts blah blah blah. A gesture at her actual technique, again from the angle of someone “there”, at least at one stage of the process. Blah blah Shawn’s mistress for 40 years. Important claim (important anyway, but also for O’Hagan’s purpose): “only bad writers strategise about their possible critics before they choose how to write a story.” Blah blah more abt Shawn mistress for 40 years, inc. A defence from Janet Malcolm (“pretentious”). More in-person stuff, inc.a little bit which briefly illuminates the the intellectual/anti-intellectual tension of the old-days New Yorker: the gift that founder-editor Harold Ross (no relation, Lillian — who died two years ago aged 99 — was born Rosovky) and his gathered team brought into to literary journalism a series of editorial techniques aimed at wringing the most out of this very anxious divide. The tale of the New Yorker 1925-55 at least is the tale of the encounter of old-school newspapermen (H.Ross, Thurber etc) with fancy college kids from Cornell (E.B.White) or Bryn Mawr (Katharine White) or Harvard or Yale or etc or etc.

This clash and this mode of resolution were extremely important. (This is my thesis and I’m sticking to it: more elsewhere soon, I hope.) Clash and mode are both also part of the backstory at the modern-day LRB, its strengths and its flaws. It’s entirely unsurprising that O’Hagan only mentions it subtly side-swipey, borrowing lots of the energy from the Refreshing Contrarian TakeTM, without actually stating what’s at issue, especially for him. (A point worth making re strategising about yr possible critics, since AO’H entirely elides it, is that under Ross and then Shawn, e.g. from 1925-87, every single piece published by the New Yorker went through a redoubtable and indeed remarkable battery of fact-checking, editing, restructuring and rewriting: if they’d been accepted into this process a good writer maybe didn’t even actually need to pre-strategise, bcz all these editors were doing it for them. But in fact a Good New Yorker Writer –– one whose prose passed through the process not much altered, let’s say — was almost certainly someone who’d internalised the internal editorial critique right down to nerve-level.)

So, the things AO’H admires in her: her hatreds, her rudeness, her spite, her ruthlessness. And the theory that such flaws may make someone a better reporter – which he states at the close of p1 and expands in the first column and a half of p2: the writer-and-friendship theory. “She thought like a reporter. It wasn’t her job to be loyal and it wasn’t her think to be nice.” Cue LR quote abt the kindliness that she also be present: “Her entire career was spent igoring the force of that passage” (i.e. the one quoted) Someone butthurt calling her a Delilah for what she did to her friend Hemingway: “If you ask me, there aren’t enough Delilahs.” A
And then the review of the new edition of LR’s Picture (first pub.1952) and some guff to close: from here on he really does “bring nothing” (in Chairman Alph’s cheeky phrase).

The theory is in no way original to O’Hagan. Paraphrasing since I can’t be bothered to leaf thru anything for actual quotes but here are some examples:
— Journalism is stories someone doesn’t you to tell, or else it’s public relations – ppl think Orwell said this but actually it’s Voltaire William Randolph Hearst (!)
— A journalist is always betraying someone (Janet Malcolm)
— Reporters and editors don’t have friends ( Harold Ross, from the Thurber book I think?)

There was a little ilx-type spat abt marie le conte a while back, bcz she’d enthused abt the fun of the game of inside-westminster political reporting — and some of her foes were pulling prissy moralistic faces abt how “this is what’s wrong with journalism today”. Not to defend anything else MLC has ever written (not sure I’ve even read much she’s written off-twitter and I don’t follow her on) but my feeling here was: NO, it’s good to state yr pleasures and yr motivations up-front, not least bcz it’s so easy piously to lie abt same, and pious lying doesn’t make for better reporting either. Good writing is unrelated to good character: Good reporting is unrelated to “good” motivation. ilx in unfazed by the first idea but seems leery of the second.

Less the first page (as censored by books dot google), here’s a piece Vagabonds and Outlaws written in 1981 for Harpers, by Alex Cockburn, abt good journalism and its likely motivations, about the meaning of the phrase the “duty of the press” – and against the high-minded self-regard of a great of high-end US journalism. I meant to link it ages ago when ppl were kicking Gawker as it went down. (Gawker’s position being that it is absolutely wrong for information to be cheerfully circling within media’s offices that was then routinely being withheld from the public at large…) One of the heroes in it is (of all fkn ppl lol) Derek Jameson: “I’m not defending what I’m doing, Sometimes it’s right. Sometimes it’s wrong. I don’t hold with high-falutin’ talk. I don’t claim to be pure… I’m a newspaperman. I tell stories.”

tbh I like it when this claim resurfaces: because I think it’s worth bringing back to the surface the tensions that e.g. the Ross process for a time made a creative energy of harnessing — and which the emergence of ‘New Journalism’ so-called began to pull back apart. I think as a collective processing machinery it was in fact losing its salience: the Harvard-Yale faction had bedded itself, as it was always going (for one thing, the newspapermen-bred-and-born never took good physical care of themselves: Thurber was only 66 when he died, Ross only 59).

Anyway, I will expand on some of this elsewhere shortly, but for now — arriving the final twist — the sly element of all this is how AO’H weaves himself into the praise he’s directing at LR. “I was there, she used me thus, one day I would use her likewise, that day is now come: SHE IS GREAT AND SO AM I AND FOR THE EXACT SAME REASONS.”

tl;dr: u tht my grenfell piece sucked but guess what h8rs, the fact it wound YOU up is why it’s good not bad QED and out

This argument does not even slightly fly – but it’s useful to have it out in the world, along with the praetorian guard of the assumptions he uses to convince himself. There is in my mind a VERY GOOD AND URGENT CASE INDEED to re-address the Hearst-Ross-Cockburn-Gawker thesis, for all kinds of reasons (and to wonder, also, if one of the elements that disguises its worst misuses is the ever-vexed issue of “good” writing)

(So in conclusion this piece is GOOD for making me think abt all this stuff even if its motivations are bogus and its in-person insights are placed "in question" by his behaviour on other stories QED and out)

I do actually think that AO'H's last line is quite good.

colin burrows on wordsworth: haven't gathered my thoughts yet

malcolm bull on william davies: ditto (i llke davies's tweets)

james wood on eton: intermittently mildly interesting but the second sentence strikes me as highly unlikely ("at school, everyone is 'ambitious', everyone loudly stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws") -- sorry, "everyone" is bullshit in this sentence. eton is a very big school, and NOT everyone was ambitious: i didn't go to eton but i know this for a fact and it undermines wood that he says it at all. i am historically very much niot a wood fan -- for his bad opinions and his manner of expressing them -- so it's bit too tidily pat that i can now say "lol of course he's bad, he went to eton!" i do actually slightly know one quite nice good person who went to eton but i won't name-and-shame them here, even tho some ilxors will know of their work and possibly admire it.

the macron piece, the shining path piece and the keith thomas piece were all readable enough, and probably useful

Colin S. Burrows ?

Different views:

Bull on Davies surprisingly disappointing - failed to engage with what I suspect is a strong and important argument at book length from WD. This seems a real wasted opportunity for the LRB.

Macron I think useful, yes.

Shining Path, yes well-informed at least.

Keith Thomas review quite bad - another example of a bad LRB mode, where it just starts cataloguing stuff into obvious categories.

Wood ... I like some of what he has done historically, but - as I said above! - this is poor, disappointing, tells you almost nothing that is new and worth knowing.

Surely re the 2nd sentence, while it may be true that not everyone at Eton is ambitious, it is a further, in fact bigger problem that most people do not go to Eton so 'school' for JW does not mean what it mean for the rest of us?

re ilxor going to Eton: this reminds me of Prof Carmody's tendency, 15-20 years ago, to fixate on the public school to which the founder of ILX went. (I wouldn't know what it was called.)

now i mean colin "no s" burrow and i don't understand yr joke :)

it's pitched as an "insider account" but yes, it
(a) fails to examine the how the structures "inside" might produce effects not produced at other schools (not least bcz he wasn't also an "insider" at lots of other schools!). but
(b) (which is what i was getting at) i don't actually think it's necessarily a very insightful insider account! bcz he doesn't seem to spot that his second sentence is only not nonsense if you qualify it so tightly that it becomes circular ("everyone ambitious was ambitious, including perhaps some ppl you didn't notice were ambitious")

lol robin would know the name of the scottish headmaster briefly mentioned (as oddly enough do i), and would build his CV and possibly something hew's said publicly into his critique (which i wd not attempt)

re keith thomas: i think i just enjoyed the sketch-listing of historical ways to be rude? and i will never not enjoy rediscovering what dirty DIRTY birds were the nobility in ages past cf eg also: Let's bitch about our stupid, annoying co-workers

(not really yr kind of thing PF, maybe don't click thru if you hate being disgusted?)

i agree that the reviewer merely handwaves at an idea of a larger history of respectability politics (in part by critiquing KT for not delivering same) while not really doing much more than dabbing at ditto (but as i say, the dabbing is funny stories abt sacked maids curtseying in a scornful manner etc etc so it's not all downside)

i tht the m bull article was bad and rong and i also hated it for making me fold the paper down halfway so that no one could read the offensive and indefensible headline over my shoulder

There was a little ilx-type spat abt marie le conte a while back, bcz she’d enthused abt the fun of the game of inside-westminster political reporting — and some of her foes were pulling prissy moralistic faces abt how “this is what’s wrong with journalism today”. Not to defend anything else MLC has ever written (not sure I’ve even read much she’s written off-twitter and I don’t follow her on) but my feeling here was: NO, it’s good to state yr pleasures and yr motivations up-front, not least bcz it’s so easy piously to lie abt same, and pious lying doesn’t make for better reporting either. Good writing is unrelated to good character: Good reporting is unrelated to “good” motivation. ilx in unfazed by the first idea but seems leery of the second.

Someone would need to argue MLC was a good reporter and no one was doing that (Andrew Farrell liked her but it mostly seemed to be a corrective to the male haters piling on poor MLC). I am not sure ilx is that fazed by the second idea. What's the consensus on Seymour Hersh? This recent review in the NYRB shows someone who was clearly good @ reporting, although he used dubious methods and he isn't someone who had the best of intentions.

I liked the Keith Thomas review, and that it had criticisms - purely to see what this would look like - even if it did operate as an afterthought.

This one's from the failing (maybe not so much any more?) NY Review of Books, but the Marilynne Robinson piece on the Puritans was very good.

the despard story in the current issue is interesting and good: i knew it already in outline bcz it's in "the making of the english working class" -- but that great (and large) book does overlook almost the entire atlantic-caribbean dimension of the full story, which linebaugh's current book (with its v long title)* seemingly somewhat puts right

(i think i knew kate despard was black? it somehow reminds me of the fact that long john silver's off-page wife is black, and that there was a significant wing of pirate culture that was in certain ways very forward-looking culturally and politically: the linebaugh-rediker line in other words, and the masterless vessel as the root of constitutionalism -- viz the pirates who, when they took slaveships, freed the slaves, allowing those who wished to become pirates) (the bad wing of pirate culture did not do this obv)

(and probably not enough work done on how the linebaugh-rediker line has since distorted in the US towards libertarianism and even sovereign citizenship -- i have a very glib little book that explains how pirates were the original sea-steaders lol)

*Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Culture, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class and of Kate and Ned Despard by Peter Linebaugh

Good to see Elisa Gabbert in the new LRB. They are expanding what they review and who reviews. Hopefully they can give Adam Mars-Jones less work.

So, I got to review Andrea Lawlor's very fun and good novel PAUL TAKES THE FORM OF A MORTAL GIRL for the @LRB, and they gave it the best of all possible titles: https://t.co/MJKkr1OWQk

— Elisa Gabbert (@egabbert) July 24, 2019

Mark S reminds me of a remarkable thing -- I read the Despard essay while at Trinity College Dublin last week (and am surprised to learn that Irish suffragist Charlotte Despard was a distant relation by marriage if anything - no family connexions are advertised between them) --

and came back to London and on Sunday night watched POLDARK

and was amazed to find that Edward Despard is now a major character in POLDARK! He is a 'good' character, heroic; Poldark is heroically trying to help him. (His wife is included.)

https://poldarkbbc.fandom.com/wiki/Edward_Despard

https://www.bustle.com/p/who-is-vincent-regan-poldarks-edward-despard-boasts-impressive-film-tv-resume-18184929

good work poldark!

https://i.imgur.com/upu1dHJ.png

(still no sign of my letter they said they were considering publishing)

xxp I thought that Despard essay was excellent, and he was a fascinating character

In NYC for 2-3 days I tried to find a copy of the NYRB. I walked up and down Manhattan. I looked all over town. No sign! Ridiculous!

I bought the New Yorker instead, at Pennsylvania Station. And I finished it! All of it!

I came to New Haven and at last in an independent bookstore found an NYRB. It's the same one with the Fintan O'Toole essay people have mentioned.

I needed something hefty to read while off-duty etc and it fits that quantity bill OK - while costing $9.50, which is now about 8 quid - but is it very interesting?

One basic problem is that it reviews some of the same books as the LRB, so I'm familiar with them already (I already spent all that time reading about Harper Lee and that trial!), though certainly different positions may emerge.

It has a big essay making the case against war with Iran. This possibly exemplifies an aspect of the NYRB? -- it's written on the basis of existing US interests in the Middle East as legitimate; it takes the status quo as normative; it carefully apportions blame to the US and Iran, while certainly cautioning against Trump's administration and the risks of war.

The idea that for the US to contemplate starting a war with, even invading, a country 7,000 miles away, where it has no business interfering whatsoever, is criminal, disgusting, Orwellian in the bad sense, an insane moral obscenity -- this isn't really contemplated.

I think the LRB would be somewhat more clear-headed on such an issue.

From the author bios:

He was National Security Council Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa from 2011 to 2012.

He was National Security Council Director for ­Political-Military Affairs, Middle East and North Africa, from 2011 to 2013.


I think the NYRB doesn’t have a very consistent political perspective. It varies from author to author. They range from moderate left to left. They used to publish folks like Gore Vidal on US foreign policy.

yeah their politics are completely incoherent

odd glaring solecism in seamus perry’s review of geoffrey hill:

Its sheer miscellaneousness somehow mitigates against the political response it otherwise appears to provoke..

I was just finishing that essay and was going to post how much I disliked it. Everything he quotes from Hill, certainly from the new book, is rubbish - flatulent self-indulgent jottings. And he gives it space and respect and acts like it's significant poetry and worthwhile ideas.

One problem here is a very widespread tendency, that it's hard not to join, to quote poetry's statements about itself (so you write about MacNeice being 'incorrigibly plural') - and to make your whole discussion about content, about ideas, but not seriously address the fact that this is poetry, not prose. (Maybe Hill's is prose - so why treat it with the special dignity of poetry?)

Another problem, I feel, is a tacit sexism - an old male like Hill can get away with turning out this crap and it gets analysed as a serious contribution. I don't think that a woman would get the same treatment so readily, except maybe in a very deliberately feminist context. I think it's useful to think about how Hill's dross would be treated if it were produced by someone else, as this helps to show how little patience you'd have for it in another context.

I wrote some more on Andrew O'Hagan and Lillian Ross and Tom Wolfe, but you'll have to subscribe to my patreon to read it lol: https://www.patreon.com/posts/intimations-of-29855762

(subscribe to my patreon)

So, in addition to their terrible politics in relation to women and people of colour more generally, called out beautifully by @ziahaiderrahman it turns out that the London Review of Books has refused to publish a review of Insurgent Empire despite multiple people pitching it.

— Priyamvada Gopal, Uppity Esquire (@PriyamvadaGopal) September 11, 2019

I've pitched things to the LRB. They ignored me. I didn't go on social media and say they had violated my inalienable right to be published in their pages.

If you publish a statement calling a publication 'structurally racist and misogynist', why do you think they will want to have anything to do with you? And if that's what you really think of them, then why do you want anything to do with them?

Well its this and I can well believe it.

This is a very *deliberate* decision (there's more and worse but I can't really reveal it yet).

lol wrong formatting (that's a quote from the thread).

i'm interested how you square yr point on the hill piece -- which i think is a poorly structured mess with some half-explored ideas abt the politics of poetry studded here and there in it* -- with yr point abt the stance that gopal is taking

if it's the case (as you appear to concede) that the LRB could be called structurally sexist (viz that it will publish seamus perry at length on geoffrey hill's minor jottings when it would never do the same for a woman), how shd women respond? yr saying "well why don't they just walk away? why do they care?"

but gopal answers this: she's arguing something like "we don't WANT to walk away and sulk, we want to engage and encourage the platform to improve -- but there comes a time when you realise it isn't doing so!" they care because they want the respectful attention accorded to others, which they believe is withheld not for malicious or bigoted but for "structural" reasons; which is to say reasons that can be addressed, if and when more widely recognised. she has been arguing for a while now that similar issues (and worse) exist within academia

obviously she's not just talking about sexism in her case -- and perhaps it's tactically nagl to move to the new stance over the response to ignore yr own book, tho it is the kind of thing that crystallises into a final straw! but if you want to change such structures you have to start somewhere…

*i'm interested in hill and some of the points touched on (difficulty and democracy, for example) even when i think the anti-pop-culture stuff is mostly fairly dumb

Well just seen this. Some reflection that they must do better:

A statement: pic.twitter.com/q1idsIda4c

— London Review of Books (@LRB) September 12, 2019

More in regards to the 40th anniversary but intersects with what Gopal and others over the years have talked about.

For an org that reviews and has writers that look at progressive politics* it's incredibly tone deaf from them, and that's being charitable.

* Let's recall Pankaj Mishra's attack on Niall Ferguson's pro-Empire book. If they publish that why can't they publish Gopal?

Gopal has a very good and valid point, not sure whether that's the reason for no review for her own book. Hardly any books actually get reviewed in the LRB, compared to the number published that would theoretically be in their wheelhouse, and of those that do the review sometimes doesn't turn up until a year or two after publication.

Mark: I was quite struck by your ingenious parallel between the two issues / posts, but I think they are basically different.

Unlike me, Dr Gopal appears to be seeking a veto over LRB editorial policy, on pain of blackmail, ie: if they don't do what she want, she will publish polemical attacks on them whose tone would be libellous if applied to any individual more wholesome than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

We discussed this issue very extensively at an ILB FAP (with Tim and xyzz). If we assume that the LRB is effectively a private company, funded by individuals' money and by the re-investment of sales and advertising, then it is not appropriate for an individual who is not an employee or does not have a financial stake in this entity to try to exercise a veto over what it does or does not choose to publish.

The case would be different, in my view, for any public body eg: a local council, NHS trust, police station, or indeed possibly eg: Arts Council, South Bank, BFI, where it can be argued that these are state bodies that must be transparent and accountable to the public in decision-making. I think this would apply to the LRB also if it were nationalised under Prime Minister Pidcock.

In the FAP discussion I noted that if the LRB is still in receipt of Arts Council funding then this could complicate the situation.

More simply, for any author to publish a statement that 'Magazine X has a duty to review my important book' is inherently preposterous and offensive.

IIRC my position in that discussion was to agree that a private individual can't have a veto over the behaviour of a privately-owned operation, but that same private individual has every right to hold, and express, an opinion about the way that privately-owned operation behaves.

More simply, criticising an editorial policy is not the same as exercising a veto over that editorial policy.

Yes - I think that's right.

But I think that demanding that a magazine reviews your book, and expressing outrage when they don't, tends to cross from the one thing that we think is OK, to the other thing that we don't.

there's nothing *wrong* with it -- it's just petulant and childish

typical author stuff really

wrt diversity, does the LRB still advertise for staff/interns only in its own pages? it used to. And does it still receive a grants form the Arts Council?

I put this on the poetry thread but worth mentioning that the LRB archives are currently open, until (I think) the end of January.

Has anyone got any recommendations? I enjoyed this Michael Wood piece on ghosts: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n01/michael-wood/icicles-by-cynthia

low-hanging i guess (weird dinosaur biz) -- and also in the current issue rather than the archives -- but i enjoyed this: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n01/francis-gooding/hell-pigs

some pieces i bookmarked for reasons i can no longer remember despite the fact that i read them in the last few months

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n07/donald-mackenzie/how-to-solve-the-puzzle
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n13/john-lanchester/after-the-fall
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/patricia-lockwood/malfunctioning-sex-robot
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n18/tom-crewe/here-was-a-plague
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n24/owen-bennett-jones/can-t-afford-to-tell-the-truth

lanchester bookmarked but unread, u hate to see it

i read em all! i just forgot what they said!

Anything by Amia Srinivasan
https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/amia-srinivasan
but especially her tour de force on octopuses
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-sucker-the-sucker
and her piece on incels and their horribleness
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex

Patricia Lockwood on John Updike is a treat.

I've read a ton of archive pieces when I used to have a subs so entered a bit of a block with the archive opening even though my interests have widened a bit more in English Lit. I will look at Helen Vendler on Hopkins! (as per the poetry thread)

From 2016, when I went to a smouldering golf course and imagined everything going on fire: https://t.co/KozzDDekN5

— Karl Whitney (@karlwhitney) January 8, 2020

Almost anything by Michael Wood is better than almost anything by anyone else.

Except Perry Anderson.

counterpoint: Wood is unbearable, particularly when writing about film

tbf perry writing abt film wd certainly be worse, luckily he hasn't heard of cinema as we proved in an earlier episode

Lol Wood being almost their sole film critic is such a nobody fucking cares move from the LRB. Give it to Perry, please, do something anything.

i have always kind of assumed it's michael wood the TV historian with tight jeans but it's michael wood the US-based (tho UK-born) literary academic (with a sideline in film crit)

it always reads as what it is: notes-to-self run-off abt movies he's watched in the course of his more focused academic work, to clear his mind's decks (they shd give it to me, my "work" is also mainly notes-to-self run-off, and LRB wd prob pay me better than twitter and ilx do)

i *never* clear my mind's decks tho, they are awash with foam and jellyfish

You're all wrong.

Except that PA on film would be entertaining. In a way. But PA on film already exists - 'The quality of the Russian cinema in the 2000s attained a nadir unprecedented since the death of Protazanov', etc.

This is interesting on a day when people are making silly comparisons with Meghan Markle

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they-could-have-had

xp Wood and Eagleton are the worst IMO, insufferably self-satisfied. PA is that too of, course, but he has the heft to bring it off, somehow.

The 3 best writers in the LRB.

hah each to their own!

penman in the lrb -- tho perhaps not the best penman -- is better than all three :) and ditto patricia lockwood (tho i know pinefox doesn't like her and she does a very different kind of writing)

eagleton's self-satisfaction isn't really the problem, it's that they routinely let him comment in passing on matters pop cultural, which he is always then incredibly wrong about. i also find his misdirectons on theorists he disapproves of extremely iffy. he is to his credit an admirably lucid writer tho (it's just that his lucidity is sometimes used for iffy ends)

the problem with wood is as chairman alph says that he's more or less the *only* routine voice they have on film (notes-to-self run-off is a good mode! tho i do it better)

penman sucks ass imo

though admittedly i haven't read a word he's written since his racist prince essay

yes in general he doesn't in fact

(i still haven't read that essay tho)

idk if i can bring myself to value any other ideas or sentences by someone who wrote something that bad

a piece that was wildly celebrated by fans of his writing incidentally. not for me i guess!

well i can't strip 40 years of reading him out of my own critical dna so i'm starting at the wrong end for persuading you

42, jesus

actually brad yr lovely piece on 80s van morrison -- the one that finally gave me a landing point to get VM and like him rather than just be puzzled and alienated by everyone's veneration -- was very penmanish to me (and i'm not saying this just to troll you -- or not entirely anyway: it worked on me the same way his piece on MOR-era scott walker did (but that was in the wire not the lrb)

oh thank you! i totally take that as a compliment bc it's very obvious penman is talented, even though i also don't like that scott walker piece lol

Re: film in the LRB - David Thomson sometimes gets to write a review of a movie star biog there, and even late, self-regarding and p lazy Thomson is better than Michael Wood imho - DT still has insightful things to say about acting and old school Hollywood, and his recentish piece about 'Vertigo after Weinstein' seemed like a noble attempt at a self-critique for past reviewing sins and sexism.

Actually, I think it would do Penman good to write about films more and music less.

some of my sensitivity about penman may be that our approaches to artist catalogues are very similar but he doesn't go far enough and feels he has to maintain some kind of bullshit evenhanded critical distance, which leads to a lot of the bad ideas that prevail through the prince piece even before the racist stuff starts

Bennett on Larkin

sorry: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n06/alan-bennett/alas!-deceived

I don't think I have ever read a better critic, of anything, than Michael Wood.

Wood, like most people, reveres Empson, and would say Empson is (much) better, and that would be a fair suggestion.

Anderson is a model for non-literary English prose.

Terry Eagleton has probably influenced me more than any other writer.

Overall, aside from writers of actual literature, those three have influenced me more than anyone as a writer, insofar as I am a writer.

actually in answer to the archives query, and if empson is being suggested (as he should be), he did write a little for the LRB before his death in 1984: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/william-empson

i have looked these up and read them all at some point: i don't now remember if they're his best work or otherwise tho

paul foot's LRB pieces are generally worth digging out also: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they-could-have-had

(this just popped up on my twitter feed, i s why i thought of it)

Re: Empson - that's surely too small a selection

I think I satisfied a lot of my English literature turn with a reading of Colin Burrow archive.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/colin-burrow

For Getman Lit J.P.Stern was good.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/j.p.-stern

And Michael Wood is good in Latin American lit. I re-read an excellent piece on Juan Carlos Onetti (whose short stories have recently been translated into English)

thanks for the Burrow tip. This review of William Boyd's Bond book is a delight

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n24/colin-burrow/semi-colons-are-for-the-weak

Any interesting writers on politics? I was thinking of making my way through Patrick Cockburn but idk...Anyone more interesting on the middle East?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/patrick-cockburn

Also was thinking of any pieces on the Balkans and how the LRB might have covered it?

I really liked Mark Mazower's book on the Balkans and I've found the couple of bits of his I've read in the LRB interesting: https://www.lrb.co.uk/search-results?search=mark+mazower

Thanks!

Must go through the Anne Carson archive:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/anne-carson

The Oyler piece on Jia Tolentino this week. Yikes. They've finally found a writer who makes John Lanchester look graceful.

she's TERRIBLE

so is tolentino though so i enjoyed the carnage

*leave Britney alone voice* leave Jia alone!

It’s a terrible hit job though! Very meagre carnage.

listen i did not know i would enjoy a writer i can't stand going after another writer i can't stand so much, it's embarrassing for everyone and i'm here for it. plus i think a few of the sentences see tolentino's work clearly, hard as they are to read lol

oyler of course has never graduated from high school emotionally so the piece also feels awfully petty about how many friends jia has, it's just... amazing, i love it

I only just discovered that the New York Review of Books was a publishing house too. A whole rang eof their books just appeared in my local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop last week. Have some interesting titles in there too. They have about 50 titles spread over the 2 sides and shelves on a table in the shop.

nyrb is a ridiculously great publishing house, i think there's a thread devoted to that too

https://www.nyrb.com/
found the website for them.
There is some great stuff there. May need to go back and have a more thorough look through what they have in locally. See a couple of titles I'd really like while looking through the titles there and probably a lot more if I found out what they actually were beyond the title.

first pick from the NYRB list: Oakley Hall's "Warlock"

or their reprint of Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"

here's the thread on the publishing house: NYRB Publishing

i was ready for a jia takedown but there were so many words and so few hits

have to say jia herself (who i like, such little as i've seen) was impressively gracious abt this review on twitter: "i was due a takedown and this one is often perceptive" being the gist of her response

imo being gracious is a great way of making people who hate you even madder

yes tweeting out a negative review to her many fans v gracious

don’t read your reviews

i couldn't get through the oyler piece but did like that, for some reason, the headline they chose was "ha ha! ha ha!"

Obviously loved the Oyler piece - just insane levels of hate that Tolentino surely didn't understand. Or more likely she did, but she knows social media (as Oyler points out)...still weird to show a level of grace that simply isn't human after such a tearing down. But that was her reaction to that piece.

I don't know who either of these people is - but I did read this and it wasn't utterly dreadful:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/lauren-oyler/excessive-weeping

otm

the first thing i ever read by her was her lady bird review for the baffler and it gets that movie so spectacularly wrong and is so steeped in her own deathless high school resentments that it’s almost impressive

then she defended dan savage for the outline, which just confirmed for me that she’s a bad take machine that can’t write

a reliably great feature of the LRB continues to be the following kind of semi-digression within a review (from this): "… their family friend John S. Clarke, an ILP MP not very happily in the late 1920s, a pretty terrible political poet, but also a lion-tamer (he’d joined the circus at 17) who cured Lenin’s dog when he was in Russia as a delegate at the Second Congress of the Third International in 1920"

which is not not to the point but

a bad take machine that can’t write

I feel like there’s still a great Tolentino takedown out there waiting to be written. That one tried so hard but barely left a scratch, so I’m not too surprised Tolentino could be magnanimous about it.

This was a 2nd best thing where the writer becomes a sort of mediator between two writers who disagree.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n02/jenny-turner/nothing-natural

i have a lot of time for jenny turner (who i used to know a little years ago, she was books editor at city limits)

Jenny Turner is quietly great. Always read her.

Thanks for the Tom Crewe essay on the Aids crisis. Fantastic piece.

The Nicholas Leman piece on the state of journalism in NYRB this week has some interesting perspective on how the golden age of news was a unique confluence of economic and technological trends and how newspapers underestimated the threat of the internet platform/aggregators.

feel like I've read that story before

the tolentino take down is good imo. even though i don't particularly warm to oyler while reading it and have enjoyed things by tolentino that i've read

Yeah, I've liked ust everything I've read by her, though didn't finish the recent piece on TikTok (note to self: must.extend. my interests. na) Wrote this on current What Are You Reading:
I just read a book first published in 2019, by an actual youngperson! Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror---Reflections on Self Delusion. At thirty, she looks back to her Canadian-Filipina origins, with prodigious parents who got religion in Toronto, and vaulted to a megachurch lifestyle complex, which the author and her friends referred to as "The Repentagon," somewhere in the "fathomless sprawl" of Houston---which had no zoning laws, so it was near a teen club dedicated to the music and memory of DJ Screw---and as a young and restless, yet well-schooled teen, she found the szzyrup experience compatible with her ideal of eternity---later sought in the desert, while doing psychotrophics---which might have something to do with her attraction to the writings of Simone Weil, the Christian mystic who escaped to WWII London yet starved herself to death in solidarity with the victims of Hitler (since this book came out, JT's New Yorker archive has incl. illuminating, disturbing examination of what had seemed to me something of a mystery trend: millenials posting "just kill me now, blow me away," in ecstatic context).
Back to life: her storytelling essays may have been strengthened by actual journalism, which she first practiced while going back to her alma mater, the University of Virginia, in the wake of the Rolling Stone debacle. She immediately recognizes and sharpens her view of shady nuances, while meeting people close and closer to the center of the recent furor.
Also rides the rapids through tunnel of mirrors, "The 'I' in Internet," seeking to make sense of some involvements, to get perspective on others that make all too much sense, or seem to (Russian nested doll tendencies of some psychedelic and even weed experiences, splitting difference between self-awareness and self-consciousness, may also apply). And she works hard to make the money required for the good food and exercise (esp. a mostly female-inhabited hivetivity known as the barre, which might have come from an unholy collaboration of Ballard and Atwood) required to make the money for
Oh well, she's got a good acerbic sense of humor about all this. Also a lot of good stuff about her favorite children's books, and discussions of seemingly familiar voices---Weil, Plath, Ferrante, several others--while pointing out things I hadn't thought of and didn't know about them.
The only section I have doubts about is "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams," mainly because Trump upstages everybody.

I'm too cheap to subscribe to anything, and lazy enough to stick to the local library's latest print WSJ (weekend Wall St. Journal). Usually a few titles and quotes to note, avoiding easily-spotted Murdochy reviewers (also I'm taking a break from reading anything about WWII, which saves a lot of time).

Murdochy (etc.) key phrase: "identity politics," which never means anybody to the Right.

feel like I've read that story before

It's not a new narrative, but he adds some interesting color.

seem to be an issue behind, but enjoyed Alexander Zevin’s combative response to Collini’s review of his book on The Economist.

As an adept of ‘voice’, Collini delights in the conceit that the Economist speaks as if from On High. What it is saying hardly matters. ‘If you want to know what’s happening in the world, read the New York Times,’ he urges us. ‘If you want to know what’s wrong with what’s happening in the world, read the Guardian. If you want to know what’s going to happen next in the world ... read the Economist.’ A sillier flourish is hard to imagine. The Times was telling us what was happening in the world as it toasted Hillary’s Clinton’s cruise to the presidency? The Guardian was telling us what was wrong with the world when it cheered New Labour and adored Obama? Was the Economist telling its readers what was going to happen when it hailed the invasion of Iraq as the dawn of a new world order as wonderful as America’s forging of the Free World in the time of Acheson? Or when it had no glimmering of the financial meltdown of 2008?

I like Collini but Zevin is spot on with that

tbf i can imagine sillier flourishes

Yeah, and he could have said worse about all those three---but I sure wouldn't want any of my (music) reviews judged by where they appeared---although some reviewers do seem proudly to ingest and exude the surrounding airs and disgraces---and maybe I have too, without getting called on it---?

that “impossible to imagine x” formula in its various formats is always so rubbish. literally that’s what imagination is capable of.

anyway i was as much approving of its slightly overmuscular combativeness as its sentiment tho also the sentiment is correct and the flourish was also i maintain silly as it often is.

Yes, I side with Fizzles here - and Zevin.

I am about 3 issues behind so his quotation is a FUTURE PREVIEW for me.

No it's not - I've now opened that issue, 20.2.2020! But I think I'm still at least two behind, as I read almost everything in every issue except the poems.

go back to the beginning and read all the poems pinefox

LRB 20.2.2020:

1: Colin Burrow's 'Fiction and the Age of Lies' is like an exemplar of the things that people here have been saying is bad about the LRB for ages. I'm surprised no-one here has mentioned this.

2: ILB people like Jenny Turner - somewhat more than I do. But her memoir of Deborah Orr is, I think, rendered a bit ridiculous by its opening admission that she hadn't seen Orr for over 16 years. There are lots of people who I liked from ILX in 2003 whom I haven't seen since, but if they died now I wouldn't really feel best placed to write a massive memoir about them in a top literary paper.

If that doesn't convince you to agree with me, as I don't expect it will -- she also repeatedly, favourably quotes Suzanne Moore.

as much as anything it's a memoir of shared work-time and (very intense) life in the city limits editorial office in the late 80s, which is i think a little different from encounters on a message board, however joyful? but i am interested -- some wd say over-invested -- in the qualities and values of the alt.press in that era, what gave it its drive and flavour, and why that dissipated

dissipated or in fact gradually became bad not good -- which is an argument JT might indeed have made, tho i think it wd be a sour place to make it and despite being joint editors of CL at that time orr and moore are not merely interchangeable

(disclaimer: i delivered review copy to jenny during this time and remember its travails fondly, its surprisingly large office was in curtain road)

Email from LRB shop concludes:

"The paper itself will, for now, continue to be published."

1: Colin Burrow's 'Fiction and the Age of Lies' is like an exemplar of the things that people here have been saying is bad about the LRB for ages. I'm surprised no-one here has mentioned this.

i can't tell what might be bad about this piece because my eyes glazed over before the end of the first column.

i read it while trapped in a hospital waiting room so i actually finished it: at the time i found some of it was p interesting tho i'd have to look back to see what (it is overlong)

re that Age of Lies article, for once I would say I would like to see XYZZ's view on it -- as he knows, I usually diametrically disagree with him on these things but this time we might just be in accord.

(But more likely he would perversely find a way of approving of it.)

Haha I will read it later. The piece on the Japanese Royal family is the first thing I have read from the LRB in a while.

meanwhile more ppl need to be contributing to this thread: being a record, week-on-week, of the astounding digressive fragment detail or item which sets each issue of the LRB apart from any other publication, similar or elsewise

as much as anything it's a memoir of shared work-time and (very intense) life in the city limits editorial office in the late 80s, which is i think a little different from encounters on a message board, however joyful?

I actually can't really endorse this defence - that would be a very worthwhile article, but this is actually not very much about that. It's mostly self-indulgence and passive-aggressive self-promotional whingeing, an unfortunate aspect of Turner.

to be fair to me (the best kind of fair) my declaration of investedness and hence distortion of response is contained in my second sentence

I've been enjoying the "Pandemic Journal" dispatches in NYRB. This is a good one about being on literal coronavirus lockdown:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/04/06/pandemic-journal-april-6-12/#longworth

tfw you tweet something p sour abt the buruma affair to a twitter pal and one of the signatories of the open letter protesting it (who i entirely forgot follows my twitter pal) faves yr tweet

maybe bcz they now regret signing? or bcz skullduggery in gathering said signatories? anyway they didn't sign the stupid harpers letter (tho naturally buruma did)

pssst...The New York Review of Books (@nybooks) has a new website. To celebrate, the full site (including the archive of 50+ years of articles), is unpaywalled from now until Nov. 3! https://t.co/cjeZB9HPLe pic.twitter.com/rzoKcAG6zo

— NYRB Classics (@nyrbclassics) October 19, 2020

Moderately distressed to find that the mention of me in the NYRB didn’t make it to the site because it was in a little call-out box rather than the main article :(

The website is beautiful.

Started reading a few pieces last night. I didn't realize Empson wrote a couple of pieces for them including an exhausting review of a book on Donne by John Carey.

having a look now. will definitely “do the donne” but please post any good articles people itt find during the free period. (i get access via an institution normally but don’t make anywhere near enough use of it, so re ups for old pieces gratefully received as well)

gonna send an email congratulating them on the new website but complaining about the lack of tim tbf.

classic empson letter

The first thing we need to recognize, because modern Christianity goes to extreme lengths to hush it up, is that the moral character of God had become very hard to defend, and that this was widely known, by the time Calvin and Luther had followed Aquinas.

The chief new defense invented for God is that he intends to resign, and will do so as soon as he conscientiously can, as soon as a workable alternative to his rule has been prepared.

also the review (of a Raymond Williams book on cultural vocabulary, that starts

The book is continually interesting; never more so, from my point of view, than when it is plainly wrong; but it is usually right, I could not deny.

love the way he starts from the position that any book reads is in likelihood wrong. always looking of course to pick an argument with a book.

Part of the gloom, I think, comes from a theory which makes our minds feebler than they are—than they have to be, if they are to go through their usual performance with language. The entry on the word interest is a good example. Our modern uses of the word, he explains, derive from capitalist procedures, and at first ranged from “compensation for loss” to “investment with a right or share.” In medieval times, usury was forbidden, but compensation was allowed, so there could be a gradual development of capitalist practices; interest in the modern financial sense had arrived by the end of the sixteenth century. But the “subjective” use, for curiosity or attention, is not clear before the nineteenth century:

The question is whether this sense of an object generating such interest is related to the active sense of interest—of money generating money…. It seems probable that this now central word for attention, attraction and concern is saturated with the experience of a society based upon money relationships.

I went straight for some Helen Vendler but would absolutely welcome recommendations.

I did not know that Michael Wood wrote the original review of Gravity's Rainbow! https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/03/22/rocketing-to-the-apocalypse/

thse guys also have their lore

time to ilx it up imo

Will fuck about with The Charles Rosen archive:

https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/charles-rosen/

donne piece contains a section of pure Empson, arguing a controversial textual reading via dramatising an imaginary but commonplace scene (he does this with Shakespeare a few times):

Whereas, if we look at the matter the other way round, every step is intelligible. One evening around 1600 Donne’s boss, the lord keeper, was giving a dinner party for some other top legal figures and invited his secretary to read them a few of his poems afterward, before the music. Donne felt that this poem, put among some more romantic ones, would suit the old buffers very well, so long as the point of it was left out; as a porner they would like it, but they would feel positively insulted if told that the affair was innocent. So, while dressing for dinner and considering what to read, he drew a line through due to and wrote “much less” over the top, merely to remind himself on the occasion. He could speak these words so as to sound encouraging and conniving, though they might look bad to a reader; he had no intention of altering his poem permanently. Maybe he crossed out the addition next morning, leaving a complete bafflement for the copyists.


it makes you gurgle at the effrontery and audacity of it, almost trolling, and the thing of it is, that i think his reading is (must be actually) the right one, which reverse engineering from that conclusion means he may well not be wrong in his scene (or if not the scene, the motivation for the emendation).

couple from the archive: pieces by john gregory dunne on policing in LA, written just after the king beating but before the uprising

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/10/10/law-disorder-in-los-angeles/
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/10/24/law-and-disorder-in-la-part-two/

also everything by freeman dyson is at least good fun, if not better

https://www.nybooks.com/search/?size=n_10_n&filters%5B0%5D%5Bfield%5D=author&filters%5B0%5D%5Bvalues%5D%5B0%5D=Freeman%20Dyson&filters%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=all

this was true of lots of people who wrote for the nyrb but most notable to me in dyson, perhaps because he lived so long -- the fucking ground they covered was just incredible. dyson would be like 'this one time i was having beers with niels bohr and enrico fermi . . .' yes please tell me everything about your personal interactions with a guy who won his nobel 90 years ago

Ha, I just dipped into his review of the James Gleick Newton biography and

“We knew that the fat young man was second in command to Sir Oswald Moseley in the British Union of Fascists, and if his friend Adolf had successfully invaded England he would probably have been our Gauleiter. Being well-brought-up English children, we listened to the fat young man politely and never showed him our contempt.

When I was bringing in the harvest and listening to the fat young man, I did not know that he had been the owner of the Newton papers. I learned this two years later from the economist John Maynard Keynes.”

Lmao perfect

lol

Even as a long-term fan, I was beginning to find Patricia Lockwood insufferable in the LRB, but her piece on Nabokov in the new issue is simply delightful.

I ended up sorta logging boring reactions to my read of the Charles Rosen archive (with links to the relevant pieces)

Terrific piece on Burton and 17th century prose, time to chase protestants:https://t.co/tMURjGOVXR

— non consumiamo marx (@xyzzzz__) October 26, 2020

Are you still able to read NYRB pieces? For some reason I can't log on..

Is it really the “New York Review of Each Other’s Books”?

short answer: yes

Oh my God? https://t.co/cMhQTen7ne pic.twitter.com/7b8yYqnz7p

— Brandon (@blgtylr) May 20, 2023

🙃🙃🙃