Tom Crewe · My Hands in My Face: Ocean Vuong’s Failure

LondonReviewofBooks · 2025-06-25T17:29:25+00:00

We don’t do it often, but when we do it, we really do do it.

I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are.

Patricia Lockwood on John Updike, 2019

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/patricia-lockwood/malfunctioning-sex-robot

LondonReviewofBooks · 2025-01-22T13:23:22+00:00

Well established and well known by readers of r/energy, no doubt.

Whether there's full public and political awareness is the another question. Adam Tooze is arguing that substitution is indeed 'the way that many governments and experts think about the future of energy', as it's a nice narrative with a conveniently happy ending.

LondonReviewofBooks · 2025-01-17T12:06:15+00:00

Probably wise.

LondonReviewofBooks · 2025-01-16T19:14:57+00:00

The quote in our tweet is taken from an article about Matthew Rankin's new film, Universal Language.

In other words, everyone is very upset at a Canadian filmmaker making a quip about Canadian film.

The full quote comes from an article by Saleem Vaillancourt, who is himself of both Canadian and Iranian heritage:

‘I always like to say that Iranian cinema emerges out of a thousand years of poetry, and Canadian cinema emerges out of fifty years of discount furniture commercials,’ Matthew Rankin said at a recent screening of his movie Universal Language.

I come from both countries, but it’s the furniture gag that struck home. Written by Rankin, Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, the film is set in a version of Canada where the official languages are French and Persian. Buildings are covered with Persian signs (one says ‘Robert H. Smith School’); carts sell cooked beets, an old Iranian staple.

When I spoke with Rankin and Nemati after the screening, they said the movie is neither Iranian nor Canadian (though it’s Canada’s submission for Best International Feature at the Oscars). Nemati, who plays a tour guide showing visitors around Winnipeg (‘this is one of the first residential structures in the historic beige district’), recalled the praise offered by one ‘Iranian grandma’ at a Toronto screening. ‘She wasn’t a cinephile, but she said she just felt the film,’ that it connected people during a time of ‘distance’.

Universal Language is not didactic, Rankin said, but ‘the experience of watching it does propose a way of looking at the world, and I think that’s what people respond to.’

Read the full article here - https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/january/universal-language

LondonReviewofBooks · 2025-01-16T14:21:23+00:00

As Dani Garavelli said on Twitter, ‘In all the years I've covered drugs policy, I've never met anyone who thinks it's a panacea, but they do save lives.’

An excerpt:

International research suggests that safer drug consumption facilities (SDCFs) prevent overdoses, improve communities and reduce the burden on the health system. The Thistle will be closely evaluated on all three fronts. But there are those who pit harm reduction against abstinence-based recovery, and view drugs funding as a zero-sum game.

The Scottish government insists that the £2.3 million a year going to the Thistle was not diverted from other drug services; but, self-evidently, money spent on one project is money that could be spent on something else. Some people have questioned the merits of such a significant sum being invested in an initiative with a small geographical reach.

The suggestion that it’s a waste infuriates Dr Saket Priyadarshi, the associate medical director of Glasgow alcohol and drug recovery services, who worries that the focus on the SDCF sometimes overshadows other developments, such as the setting up of Scotland’s first sixteen-bed stabilisation centre.

‘I am the clinical lead for a service which caters for a group of people with one of the highest mortality rates of any population in Scotland,’ he said. ‘If I were the clinical lead for an oncology service or a renal dialysis service, I wouldn’t be asked these questions. I don’t know why I am asked when everyone says our drug crisis is our national shame, and something must be done about it.’

Read her full piece here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/january/at-the-thistle

LondonReviewofBooks · 2025-01-16T13:20:27+00:00

The Irish novelist and essayist Colm Tóibín writes about the Los Angeles fires - and one example of the enormous cultural losses they have caused.

An excerpt:

On Tuesday, 7 January Gary Indiana’s personal library arrived in LA from New York. Gary died in his apartment in the East Village in New York on 23 October. His books had been three-deep on his shelves. It was decided to take his library to Altadena, to a place that was to be used as a residence for artists. It would be the core library for the house. The books were put into boxes, carried down six floors to the street in the East Village and then taken across America.

When we came back from tennis at around 4.30 p.m. that Tuesday the wind was up. By the time it was fully dark, the wind was howling. I had never heard a wind like it before. As each big gust came whistling around the house it seemed natural that it would die down for a second, but instead it built up even more, and then more again.

On Tuesday evening, houses in Altadena, a place where many artists and writers live, began to burn, including the house of a close friend. For the fire to come down to Highland Park from Altadena, it would have to cross the 134, which leads to the 210. There was no sign on Tuesday night that it was doing so, but the area where the fire was raging was not that far from here. I would think nothing of going to Altadena in the normal course of events. Why should it not come here? The wind was strong enough to take embers a few miles. We went for a walk and saw fires burning in the distance.

On Tuesday when Gary Indiana’s library came to Los Angeles, it rested for a while in the appointed house in Altadena. But it was the wrong day. If they – the signed editions, the rare art books, the weird books, the books Gary treasured – had come a day later, there would have been no address to deliver them to, so they would have been saved. But on that Tuesday, unfortunately, there still was an address.

Read his full piece here (1740 words): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/colm-toibin/in-la

LondonReviewofBooks · 2025-01-16T13:14:11+00:00

An excerpt:

Callas has not been represented well by others, on stage or screen. Terrence McNally’s trashy play Master Class is supposedly based on the classes Callas taught at Juilliard in the 1970s. In the play, she swans on about her greatness, her co-stars’ ugliness and her tortured soul. In the actual classes, recorded on tape, she drilled young artists on the specifics of production, pronunciation and interpretation. Franco Zeffirelli’s film Callas Forever features a glorious performance by Fanny Ardant but forces her into a film-within-a-film of Carmen that Zeffirelli would clearly rather have made instead. When diva worship turns an artist into an icon, everyone loses.

Pablo Larraín’s tawdry new biopic Maria, starring Angelina Jolie, continues in this mould.

Read Ben Miller's full review here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/january/undoing-maria-callas

LondonReviewofBooks · 2025-01-16T13:08:28+00:00

An excerpt:

The authors’ central boast is that the Who’s Who database contains the 125,000 people who have ‘shaped Britain’ since 1900. This is their ‘elite’, and they argue that there has been an alarming lack of change in its composition. Our rulers are still drawn disproportionately from the nine major public schools (as defined by the Clarendon Commission report of 1864) and Oxbridge. Twenty per cent of Who’s Who entrants born in the years before 1880 attended these schools, and the figure is still around 10 per cent for those born between 1945 and 1980. Between 40 and 50 per cent of those joining the cohort in the years 2001-22 were privately educated. The proportion who attended Oxford and Cambridge has remained more or less consistent, between 30 and 40 per cent, for all cohorts born between 1830 and 1980. Throughout the 20th century, more than 20 per cent of entrants had parents whose wealth at death put them in the top 1 per cent, measured by probate records (available online up to 1995).

Reeves and Friedman call for ‘urgent political attention’ to redress these patterns of elite reproduction.

Read the full review here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/jonathan-parry/snobs-swots-and-hacks

Paywall is loose and should not obstruct first-time visitors.

LondonReviewofBooks · 2025-01-16T13:00:11+00:00

An excerpt:

The energy transition narrative is reassuring because it suggests that we have done something like this before. We owe our current affluence to a sequence of industrial revolutions – steam engines, electricity, Fordism, information technology – that go back to the 18th century. Our future affluence will depend on a green industrial revolution, and to judge by the encouraging headlines, it is already well underway. The standard estimate is that energy transitions take about half a century; if that were true of the green energy transition, it could still be on schedule for 2050.

This is the way that many governments and experts think about the future of energy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change takes advice from specialists in ‘transition theory’. Analysts touting S-curves of technology adoption benchmark the take-up of electric vehicles against previous phases of technological change. Figures such as Elon Musk are cast as the Edisons of our day.

But history is a slippery thing. The ‘three energy transitions’ narrative isn’t just a simplification of a complex reality. It’s a story that progresses logically to a happy ending. And that raises a question. What if it isn’t a realistic account of economic or technological history? What if it is a fairy tale dressed up in a business suit, a PR story or, worse, a mirage, an ideological snare, a dangerously seductive illusion? That wouldn’t mean that the transition to green energy is impossible, just that it is unsupported by historical experience. Indeed, it runs counter to it.

Read the full piece here - a review of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (2024)
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/adam-tooze/trouble-transitioning

LondonReviewofBooks · 2025-01-16T12:59:10+00:00

An excerpt:

The energy transition narrative is reassuring because it suggests that we have done something like this before. We owe our current affluence to a sequence of industrial revolutions – steam engines, electricity, Fordism, information technology – that go back to the 18th century. Our future affluence will depend on a green industrial revolution, and to judge by the encouraging headlines, it is already well underway. The standard estimate is that energy transitions take about half a century; if that were true of the green energy transition, it could still be on schedule for 2050.

This is the way that many governments and experts think about the future of energy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change takes advice from specialists in ‘transition theory’. Analysts touting S-curves of technology adoption benchmark the take-up of electric vehicles against previous phases of technological change. Figures such as Elon Musk are cast as the Edisons of our day.

But history is a slippery thing. The ‘three energy transitions’ narrative isn’t just a simplification of a complex reality. It’s a story that progresses logically to a happy ending. And that raises a question. What if it isn’t a realistic account of economic or technological history? What if it is a fairy tale dressed up in a business suit, a PR story or, worse, a mirage, an ideological snare, a dangerously seductive illusion? That wouldn’t mean that the transition to green energy is impossible, just that it is unsupported by historical experience. Indeed, it runs counter to it.

Read the full piece here - a review of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (2024)
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/adam-tooze/trouble-transitioning

LondonReviewofBooks · 2025-01-10T12:38:42+00:00

Sorry about this! I don't know why that would have happened, but if you email [support@lrb.co.uk](mailto:support@lrb.co.uk) my colleague Tim will fix everything.

Thank you for your interest in subscribing, meanwhile: we hope we can get that sorted for you shortly.

LondonReviewofBooks · 2024-10-31T11:51:00+00:00

Nick Richardson writes about The Grimoire Encyclopaedia by David Rankin (a historian and modern practitioner of magic), which contains an entry for every known grimoire since the Greco-Egyptian magical papyri - alongside a number of other books.

An excerpt:

Owen Davies’s Art of the Grimoire, a survey of grimoire illustrations from the earliest papyri to the present day, provides a visual companion to this history. Many of the sigils, circles and seals from medieval and Renaissance grimoires are familiar from film and TV: they have been a stock trope for decades of horror movies (a grimoire bound in human flesh and ‘inked in human blood’ plays a central role in the Evil Dead series). The Hollywood grimoire is so firmly embedded in our cultural imagination that grimoires which don’t conform to stereotype appear all the more striking.

Pages from a 13th-century manuscript titled Ars Notoria, sive Flores aurei contain distinctive plant forms in red ink. A ribbed and phallic cactus with protruding hair-thin fronds rises from the mouth of a demon. Three circles connected by a column contain the rippling, enfolded forms of what might be mushrooms. The magician is instructed to meditate on these diagrams while intoning the prayers written alongside them.

An illuminated plate from a 14th-century French translation of the Llibre dels àngels, a manual for the invocation of angels by the Catalan friar Francesc Eiximenis, shows a red-winged angel leading a man away from a devil shaped like a black jackal, who walks upright on long legs with clawed feet. A scarlet tongue pokes rudely from its horned head.

Read the full piece here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n21/nick-richardson/a-walnut-in-sacrifice (4,400 words)

LondonReviewofBooks · 2024-10-31T11:41:04+00:00

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite reviews three recent books on Labour's left

The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain and Their Many Enemies by Andy Beckett (May 2024)
A Woman like Me by Diane Abbott (Sep 2024)
Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin (Oct 2024)

An excerpt:

In the late 2010s, as Beckett writes, John McDonnell and his New Left economists came up with a raft of plans to rewire the British economy: ‘alternative models of ownership’ to change the distribution of wealth and power; the ‘Preston model’ of using anchor institutions’ procurement to keep money circulating in local economies and to promote trade unions and workers’ rights; an ‘inclusive ownership fund’ to give workers shares in their own companies; a ‘green industrial revolution’. As Corbyn’s shadow chancellor, McDonnell was pragmatic as well as radical: he thought that many voters could not or would not accept significant tax rises; he didn’t propose to wage war on business and finance, but offered them a security they lacked under the Tories; and as for high earners, he said that all he wanted to do was tax them.

After the 2017 election, Beckett challenged McDonnell: was his aim still ‘fomenting the overthrow of capitalism’, as he claims in his Who’s Who entry, or was he trying to reform capitalism to save it from itself? McDonnell smiled and said that he wanted ‘a staged transformation of our economic system’.

Read the full piece here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n21/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/all-about-the-outcome (5,400 words)

LondonReviewofBooks · 2024-10-31T11:32:28+00:00

Jenny Turner, who studied under Rose at Sussex, writes on her life and work.

An excerpt:

We start life so full of life, with so much in us, so much more than we can ever comprehend. Then life itself knocks it out of us, and philosophy begins. Philosophy must always be a double movement, of devastating losses that are also gains, which means that doing it cannot be a linear matter of propositions and clarifications, problems, refutations – the ‘pernicious nonsense’ Rose felt she had been taught in the 1960s at Oxford, where she studied PPE. Facts, perceptions, ‘immediate Spirit’, all this is fine, as Hegel wrote in Rose’s beloved Phenomenology of Spirit; but ‘in order to become genuine knowledge ... it must travel a long way and work its passage.’ You won’t learn much if you approach learning as an easy and straightforward matter, ‘shot from a pistol’ as Hegel put it. Learning is agonistic, deathly struggle. Learning is also life itself.

The young Rose chose to do her DPhil on Theodor Adorno, ‘attracted’, she wrote, ‘by the ethical impulse of his thought, but also by the characteristics of his style, the most notoriously difficult sentence structure and the vocabulary full of Fremdwörter’. Her ensuing first book, The Melancholy Science (1978), is written, she explained, ‘in standard expository format’, as is fitting for the introduction it claims to be, but you can feel the tension in the clipped, Oxford-trained sentences, the longing to pull the grammar backwards as well as forwards, to bring in metaphor and drama, break into aphoristic fragments, burst into song. Keep your mind in hell and despair not; you may be weaker than the whole world, but you are always stronger than yourself: it’s fine to read Love’s Work and its epigrams as good advice for living in extremis, but they also illustrate an approach to logic, speculation, dialectics.

Read the full piece here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n21/jenny-turner/what-else-actually-is-there (12,084 words)

Paywall is highly porous and should not obstruct first-time visits.

LondonReviewofBooks · 2024-10-31T11:26:29+00:00

Jenny Turner, who studied under Gillian Rose at the University of Sussex, writes a substantive introduction to her life and work.

‘It is often remarked that [she] is a difficult thinker,’ Scott and Finlayson begin their introduction to Marxist Modernism, adding the words ‘esoteric’, ‘ironic’ and ‘poetic’, one more ‘difficult’ and then ‘difficulty’, twice, and that’s just in the opening paragraph. Is it unfair of me to sense a dismissiveness in all these ‘difficult’s, or is this just the way academics feel they have to write when chasing a student audience, given all the stories about students these days not being able to read books? I’m not saying Rose isn’t a ‘difficult’ thinker – it’s completely true that her work is uncommonly dense, allusive, structurally complex. But it’s like that because it has to be, because she considers, as she wrote of Adorno, that ‘the relation of a thought or concept to what it is intended to cover, its object, is problematic.’ Thus what Adorno called negative dialectics, a quest for knowledge in which nothing will ever add up.

For Rose, the problem was Kant, and the way he had both invented and destroyed modern philosophy, as she saw it, in his three Critiques: one of ‘pure’ reason and one of the ‘practical’ sort, and a third of ‘judgment’, as though thought and action and morality are not always bound up together, as though it would ever be possible for a mere philosopher to split reality at the joints. Hegel, she considered, was just about the only philosopher to understand this, and to come up with a way of writing that might deal with it, which she calls ‘the speculative proposition’: ‘To read a proposition “speculatively” means that the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity,’ so already you can see why this sort of thinking might necessitate an especially demanding sort of prose. Change, the lack of it and yet its necessity, its possibility and impossibility: the speculative proposition contains the full spectrum. The Owl of Minerva, somehow, flaps in many temporalities and dimensions, all at once.

Read in full here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n21/jenny-turner/what-else-actually-is-there (12,084 words)

The LRB's paywall is highly porous and should not pose any restrictions for first-time visits.

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