{"id":4937,"date":"2020-01-16T08:57:26","date_gmt":"2020-01-16T16:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4937"},"modified":"2020-01-16T08:57:26","modified_gmt":"2020-01-16T16:57:26","slug":"los-angeles-review-of-books-the-london-review-of-books-turns-40","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4937","title":{"rendered":"Los Angeles Review of Books: The London Review of Books Turns 40"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I alway ask serious readers which publications they find reliably interesting, and each year they struggle harder to come up with titles. Those who read print sources usually mention the\u00a0London Review of Books<\/em>, and an explanation of what keeps them coming back must, I suspect, begin with its headlines. Here\u2019s Frank Kermode on Martin Amis\u2019s\u00a0The War Against Clich\u00e9<\/em>:\u00a0\u201cNutmegged.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Michael Wood on Philip Roth\u2019s\u00a0Sabbath\u2019s Theater<\/em>:\u00a0\u201cI Am Disorder.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Jenny Turner on Rachel Cusk\u2019s\u00a0Outline<\/em>:\u00a0\u201cI Blame Christianity.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0John Lanchester on Don DeLillo\u2019s\u00a0Mao II<\/em>:\u00a0\u201cOh My Oh My Oh My.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0The\u00a0LRB<\/em>\u2019s first cover, dated October 25, 1979, bears a rambling headline about William Golding\u2019s\u00a0Darkness Visible<\/em>. Forty years later, it published a much-circulated reevaluation of John Updike under the title\u00a0\u201cMalfunctioning Sex Robot.\u201d<\/a><\/p>

Surely one for the history books, that headline came too late to make it into\u00a0this<\/em>\u00a0history book, published to celebrate the\u00a0LRB<\/em>\u2019s 40th anniversary. However far the paper\u2019s headlines may have stood out in the thoroughly analog late 1970s, they stand even farther out in our digital present. Many internet-native publications label every piece of \u201ccontent\u201d with a title engineered to maximize share counts and game search-engine rankings, and even legacy publications founded in the print era now exhibit online the same tendencies toward deadening explanation and formulaic provocation. Some surviving magazines and newspapers embitter the pill further, appending beneath the digital version of a piece the less intelligence-insulting headline under which it appeared in print.<\/p>

An\u00a0LRB<\/em>\u00a0headline usually comes straight from the piece, often from quotation of the book under review: Kermode includes Amis\u2019s description of a goalkeeper looking \u201ccapable of being nutmegged by a beachball.\u201d Sometimes the words are the reviewer\u2019s own: Lockwood imagines Updike as not just a malfunctioning sex robot but one \u201cattempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter.\u201d The lack of context makes the headlines all the more enticing, as does the implicit assumption of our willingness to read the whole piece to discover that context. The average word count of the pieces named above exceeds 3,600, but others go far longer: the past few years alone saw 9,000 words from Lanchester\u00a0on Facebook<\/a>, 10,000 from David Bromwich\u00a0on free speech<\/a>, and an entire 60,000-word issue from Andrew O\u2019Hagan\u00a0on the Grenfell Tower fire<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I alway ask serious readers which publications they find reliably interesting, and each year they struggle harder to come up with titles. Those who read print sources usually mention the\u00a0London Review of Books, and an explanation of what keeps them coming back must, I suspect, begin with its headlines. Here\u2019s Frank Kermode on Martin Amis\u2019s\u00a0The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4939,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4937\/revisions\/4939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}