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Today, our managing editor Evan Kindley picks
four standout pieces from the archives.
Frank Conroy © Bruce Davidson
What appealed to me from the beginning about the Los Angeles Review of Books was that it aspired to build a coalition between various too-often-Balkanized people of the book: poets, novelists, professors, journalists, artists, grad students. I must admit, though, as an almost-Ph.D. myself, I have a soft spot for the academics, and I take a special pride and interest in working with them to communicate their ideas to the broadest possible audience. Many of them, of course, don’t need much help. The received idea that academic prose is by definition stilted, awkward, or inaccessible is, like all clichés, unfair and untrue. (Except when it isn’t: you know who you are.) (Except when you don’t.) It feels appropriate to put forward this defense of my fellow academics as “real writers” before recommending Mark McGurl’s “The MFA Octopus: Four Questions About Creative Writing,” itself a defense of another much-maligned set of university denizens: MFA students and professors. Mark’s piece, one of our earliest and most popular, is a brilliant point-by-point response to Elif Batuman’s skeptical review of his book The Program Era in the London Review of Books. He sent it to us in pretty much the same form you see here; we did little but ask a few questions about Mark’s questions, and let him go. Everyone loves a good literary dust-up; would that more of them were conducted with as much intelligence, passion, respect for the opposition, and sense of higher principle. (And speaking of respect for the opposition, and at the risk of being accused of fence-sitting: Elif, we love you, too! Stay in touch.)
Grove Cover image by Roy Kuhlman courtesy of Arden Riordan
Working with Loren Glass, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, to excerpt his book in progress on the history of Grove Press into a series of article-length pieces for the Review is, to date, one of my proudest and most exciting experiences as an editor. Of course, most of the work was done long before it got to me: Loren had read everything from the period there was to read and talked to everyone who was left to talk to (which, at the time of the articles’ original publication, included Barney Rosset — R.I.P.), and had formulated his own nuanced, persuasive interpretation of the sweep of events. The challenge was to get this incredible surfeit of fact, anecdote, and analysis into a few manageable magazine-sized chunks that would both satisfy on their own and whet appetites for Loren’s forthcoming book. Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde, which will appear in 2013 from Stanford University Press.
I tend to gravitate toward sprawling, NYRB-style review essays covering multiple books, impracticable as it has been, what with our nominal budget, to acquire such pieces. But, scouring the 2011 fall catalogs, I knew that we’d want somebody to cover four books on the state of American higher education: Philip W. Jackson’s What Is Education?, John Marsh’s Class Dismissed, and Professor X’s In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, and Felicity Allen’s anthology Education. Tom Lutz suggested we ask his colleague Steven Brint, a distinguished sociologist, author of In an Age of Experts and Schools and Societies, and the director of the National Science Foundation’s College and Universities 2000 study. Steve, unsurprisingly, hit it out of the park, with a searching and comprehensive overview of the predicament facing students and professors alike today. To date, his magisterial (and immensely depressing) essay “The Educational Lottery” is our single most-viewed post.
James Joyce by Constantin Brancusi
From Three Fragments from Work in Progress by James Joyce
(Paris: The Black Sun Press, 1929)
From Three Fragments from Work in Progress by James Joyce
(Paris: The Black Sun Press, 1929)
And then there’s Joshua Clover, a versatile, prolific writer who, though a professor of English at the University of California at Davis, the term “academic” only begins to cover. I encountered him first as a razor-sharp pop music critic (under his own name as well as the pseudonym Jane Dark), and then as a dazzlingly insouciant lyric poet in the grand tradition of Frank O’Hara. For his third act, Joshua is making a name as a leftist public intellectual par excellence: in addition to writing frequently for The Nation and The Village Voice, he was closely involved from the beginning with the ongoing UC student protest movement that, by many accounts, helped inspire Occupy Wall Street. His 5,000-word essay on Giovanni Arrighi, Robert Brenner, and the follies of economic prediction was a bold speculative contribution to the way we might collectively imagine our fledgling century — and the first of what we hope will be many contributions to the Los Angeles Review of Books.
It’s been an honor and an education to work with people who are thinking and writing on such a high level. John Jeremiah Sullivan suggested out to our own Mike Goetzman in an interview last November that editing writers who are much better than you is a great way to improve one’s own writing. I hope he’s right.
Evan Kindley is the managing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
