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

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