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

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)