Iain Sinclair’s Olympics volume 34 number 16 30 august 2012 £3.50 us & canada $4.95 David Trotter: Lady Chatterley’s Sneakers Karl Miller: Stephen Spender’s Stories Stefan Collini: Eliot and the Dons Bruce Whitehouse: Mali Breaks Down Sheila Heti: ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’ London Review of Books volume 34 number 16 30 august 2012 £3.50 us and canada $4.95 3 David Trotter Lady Chatterley’s Sneakers editor: Mary-Kay Wilmers deputy editor: Jean McNicol senior editors: Christian Lorentzen, 4 Letters Karuna Mantena, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Amit Pandya, Ananya Vajpeyi, Paul Myerscough, Daniel Soar assistant editors: Andrew Whitehead, Miles Larmer, Marina Warner, A.E.J. Fitchett, Joanna Biggs, Deborah Friedell Stan Persky editorial assistant: Nick Richardson editorial intern: Alice Spawls contributing editors: Jenny Diski, 8 Steven Shapin World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement Jeremy Harding, Rosemary Hill, Thomas Jones, by Robert Crease John Lanchester, James Meek, Andrew O’Hagan, Adam Shatz, Christopher Tayler, Colm Tóibín consulting editor: John Sturrock 11 Karl Miller New Selected Journals, 1939-95 by Stephen Spender, edited by Lara Feigel and publisher: Nicholas Spice John Sutherland associate publishers: Margot Broderick, Helen Jeffrey advertising director: Tim Johnson 12 Bill Manhire Poems: ‘Old Man Puzzled by His New Pyjamas’, ‘The Question Poem’ advertising executive: Siddhartha Lokanandi advertising manager: Kate Parkinson classifieds executive: Natasha Chahal 13 Stefan Collini The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Vol. III: 1926-27 edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden circulation manager: Suzanne O’Brien subscriptions manager: Chris Larkin subscriptions executive: Eleanor Crane 17 Bruce Whitehouse What went wrong in Mali? subscriptions assistants: Michael Coates, Karen Horan, Zuzana Minarikova 18 John Burnside Poems: ‘A Frost Fair’, ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’, ‘First Footnote on marketing manager: Renée Doegar uk marketing manager: Jill Tytherleigh Zoomorphism’ office managers: Andy Georgiou, Anikó Dobos rights: Vanessa Coode finance manager: Taj Singh 19 Stephen Sedley Living Originalism by Jack Balkin finance: Marija Radonji´c, David Ridge cover: Beth Holgate 21 A.W. Moore Writing the Book of the World by Theodore Sider typesetting: Sue Barrett, Brenda Morris, Anna Swan paste-up: Bryony Dalefield 23 Julian Bell At Tate Modern production: Ben Campbell web: Rachael Beale, Jeremy Harris 25 David Conn Football and Money editorial board: Linda Colley, Michael Neve, Steven Shapin, Inigo Thomas, Jenny Turner, James Wood, Michael Wood 26 David Bromwich Short Cuts address: 28 Little Russell Street, London wc1a 2hn, UK 28 Frederick Seidel Poem: ‘The Lovely Redhead’ editorial telephone: +44 (0)20 7209 1101 editorial fax: +44 (0)20 7209 1102 editorial email: [email protected] 29 Lidija Haas Georgette Heyer by Jennifer Kloester website: www.lrb.co.uk advertising telephone: 718 797 3130 31 Sheila Heti Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner advertising fax: 718 797 3156 advertising email: [email protected] classified email: [email protected] 33 Benjamin Lytal Seven Years by Peter Stamm, translated by Michael Hofmann subscriptions (toll free): 1 800 258 2066 subscriptions fax: 386 447 6460 subscriptions email: [email protected] 34 Michael Wood At the Movies 35 Emily Witt Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea by Donovan Hohn In the next issue: James Meek writes about 38 Iain Sinclair Diary Britain’s electricity. Julian Bell is a painter and the author of Lidija Haas is between contributor’s notes. A.W. Moore is professor of philosophy at Iain Sinclair’s latest book is Ghost Milk. Mirror of the World: A New History of Art. Oxford. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be? Making Sense of Things appeared earlier this David Trotter is the King Edward VII Pro - David Bromwich is co-editor of the Yale will be published by Harvill in January. year. fessor of English Litera ture at Cam bridge. edition of On Liberty. Next year Harvard will publish Literature in Benjamin Lytal teaches at the University of Stephen Sedley, a former Lord Justice of the First Media Age. John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone won the For - Chicago Graham School. His forthcoming Appeal, is currently a visiting professor at ward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize last year. first novel is called A Map of Tulsa. Oxford. Bruce Whitehouse teaches anthropology and global studies at Lehigh University in Stefan Collini teaches at Cam bridge. What Bill Manhire’s Selected Poems will be pub- Frederick Seidel’s new book of poems, Nice Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He recently con - Are Universities For? came out earlier this year. lished next month. Weather, will be out in September. cluded ten months of field research in Mali. David Conn writes for the Guardian. Richer Karl Miller was the Lord Northcliffe Pro - Steven Shapin teaches at Harvard. Never than God, his history of Manchester City, is fessor of Modern English at UCL and the Pure, a collection of essays on the history of Emily Witt lives in New York. She is work- out now. founding editor of the LRB. science, is out in paperback. ing on a book about female sexuality. LRB annual subscription rates: UK (post free): £76.80; Europe and Rest of the World (including postage): £98.40; USA (post free): $42; Canada (including postage): US$50. Canada Post, Canadian GST #R125261792. US Postmaster: send address changes to ‘London Review of Books’, PO Box 433060, Palm Coast, FL 32143-9978, USA. Periodicals postage paid at Miami, FL and additional mailing offices. ISSN 0260-9592, Vol. 34, No. 16 (US No. 747). The LRB is published semi-monthly (24 times a year). The journal is distributed in North America by ProCirc, 3191 Coral Way, Suite 510, Miami, FL 33145. 2 london review of books 30 august 2012 n a letter written in July 1926, a Various genealogies of cool have been pro- couple of months before he embarked on Lady Chatterley’s Sneakers posed, ever more speculative in tendency as Ithe first version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, they reach back into the 19th century and D.H. Lawrence gave voice – as he often did – beyond. It’s not altogether impossible that to the hatred he felt for ‘our most modern David Trotter one or other of them may have crossed his world’. Tin cans and ‘imitation tea’ feature path. In The Virgin and the Gypsy, in some re- prominently on his list of things not to like Platinum, india-rubber, celluloid: all have unlikely to flourish either in the big house spects a dry run for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, about being ‘most modern’. Tin cans often been dissolved in metaphor. or in the gamekeeper’s cottage. virgin and gypsy demonstrate their mutual featured on such lists, either as litter or as Embarking on the short journey from all- It seems to me that Lawrence, whose affinity by displays of coolness. His has to do culinary short cut, in both cases signifying mod cons Wragby Hall to the ancient forest temperament and prose style might be with the way he moves (he’s a proto-rapper), degeneracy: ‘modern world’ was then and which contains the gamekeeper’s hut and thought to tend perpetually to the condition hers with the ‘nonchalance’ she exhibits still remains an expression that summons cottage, Connie gets ready to swap celluloid of molten lava, was in fact, when the mood from the moment of her first encounter up a familiar tableau of emblems. But imit - and radio sets for forget-me-nots woven took him, an advocate of cool. In Cool Rules: with him. ‘Nonchalance’ was the contemp - ation tea is a nice touch, because it recovers into pubic hair: signs made in anger for Anatomy of an Attitude, Dick Pountain and orary translation of sprezzatura, the doctrine the starkness of the contrast between the signs made in tenderness. Something sim - David Robins define cool as a ‘new secular of the well-rehearsed concealment of effort organic and the inorganic which knowing ilar happens to Bowling in Coming Up for virtue’ – the official language of a private first put forward by Baldassare Castiglione that you’re most modern always involves. Air, when he revisits the market town in or subcultural rebelliousness retuned from in his Book of the Courtier. She has, we later Lawrence couldn’t help describing what he which he grew up. The danger in all such gen eration to generation, as well as of learn, ‘that peculiar calm, virgin contempt of meant to hate before he dissolved it in alleg - exchanges is that the second performance worldwide commodity fetishism. According the free-born for the base-born’. This class- ory. Like the other iconic banned books of will simply cancel out the first, without to Alan Liu, in The Laws of Cool, it’s a ‘way or based understanding of nonchalance was, the period between the world wars – Ulysses, either transforming it in the process or cut- manner of living’ in a world structured by however, already out of date. In revising The Well of Loneliness – Lady Chatterley’s Lover ting loose from it altogether. The result is technological and other systems. Cool ex- Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence removed has long since ceased to be notorious. Un- stalemate. In an essay on John Galsworthy’s ploits the element of ‘give’ or ‘slack’ in any from it the last traces of the propaganda for like them, it has not yet acquired a different Forsyte Saga written while he was complet- such system. It is information designed to a new aristocracy which had driven his writ- kind of fame. But what it does best, better ing the second version of Lady Chatterley’s resist information: ‘information fed back ing in the years after the end of the First than any other novel of its time, better than Lover, Lawrence argued that ‘the thing a into its own signal to create a standing inter - World War.