At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

faster you fucker!

(actually i like alan bennett and the ironic use of twitter bitch-memes shd be avoided if at all possible)

I actually misclicked the link for Bennett's diary in this LRB and got the Lanchester story by accident. It even started 'Monday', so it took me a sentence or two of going 'WTF?' before I worked out what I had done.

Lol James

Here for the retire bitch memes those are good!

I love this thread. Thank you, Fizzles.

ha ha james m.

and thanks tokyo r - it's a pleasure.

and I realised that as i was walking around the park the other day. it *is* a pleasure. lanchester's prose exerts a weird fascination. i remembered william empson's good question about whether we saw Shakespeare as great because of the amount that had been written about him. we've stared so much at him, and written about him and considered him so much that he seems everything. No, concluded Empson, because other writers would not be able to sustain that level of interest. We've been able to write so much about him because his writing has proved inexhaustible by time or changing attitudes.

in Lanchester, as i said upthread, you can pick at specific problems of syntax and style in Lanchester, and then realise you need to extend the problem of syntax to general manner, and then on to general approach, and then to the whole point of fiction, and ultimately the representation of the world itself. there is that connection between the failure of syntax and the act of imagining in lanchester that makes it fascinating, a connection of the microcosm and macrocosm.

this made me realise that lanchester has something he shares with empson's analysis of shakespeare - he is inexhaustibly bad. does this mean in some sense, in an aesthetic of badness, he is

good?

Good not Bad: A dialectical approach to the imaginative prose of John Lanchester.

of course it doesn't. he's awful.

right, last day of the holiday for me, I must spend it wisely. i've got a full pot of tea, a bowl of porridge, and Obnox on the stereo. Let's do this.

what stopped me in my tracks last time was a long-is passage about him trying to download Great Expectations to his Audible app over his data plan in a church crypt, while the old woman with the shawl shouted rău rău rău at him.

one problem with this sort of live blogging version of close reading is that it's bad for judging tempo, plus the column format of the LRB means that sections can look longer than they are, and in lanchester's case that means the badness seems to go on for longer than it actually is. and it's not even amusingly bad, it's just, ugh, it's just dreck:

The implication was that she was objecting to my using my mobile at that particular site, where as it happened the data signal was helpfully strong. I decided to make light of the situation.

'Nothing wrong with my data plan, madam!' I said. 'It's covered under my UK allowance!' Which in fact happened to be true. If it had been otherwise I would have waited until I was on wifi before downloading the book. One can run up very substantial data bills otherwise. But my levity did nothing to appease the hag.

'Rău, rău!' she kept shouting. And then, stretching for what little English she knew: 'No! Very bad!'

I am always polite and reasonable, even when provoked.

'You are a silly, silly woman,' I said to her. 'Go away.' My words had no effect, but the download was soon complete.

no fascination here, just something akin to embarrassment at someone taking a shit on the literary table. and i don't mean, you know, sullying the memory of Henry James or Jane Austen, but someone smearing their shit over anyone whose put their thoughts and imagination down to some effect.

If it had been otherwise I would have waited until I was on wifi before downloading the book. One can run up very substantial data bills otherwise.

picturing Martin Freeman as the narrator is not improving this

now convinced Lanchester was watching tv while he pooped this out

to make a point i made earlier, your unreliable narrator is still a character. the only person i have ever heard talk like this was a man called Giles who used to run the English Language section at Foyles (still works there I believe) and would bawl things at customers like 'DON'T START TRYING TO TAKE THE INITIATIVE, SIR'. that's the closest real world analogue to this mess of uninterested unobserved thoughts.

think he may have been pooping while he pooped this out.

i never really liked Virginia Woolf's dictum of writing being 'the right words in the right order', but tbf Lanchester does a lot of the wrong words in the wrong order:

The old woman from the entrance had, without my noticing, come towards me while I was looking at my phone, and was now standing in front of me, bent-backed and gasping with effort, waving the stick on which she had been leaning.

because he's done 'come towards me' and 'now standing in front of me' without reference to the stick, at the end of the sentence he has to describe the ludicrous 'waving the stick on which she had been leaning'. you definitely want to finish that sentence, if you want to finish it at all, with 'waving her stick'. Of *course* she was leaning on the stick - I understand the rudiments of observable life, John. But no, you get thrown back with a bump to the beginning of the sentence, and asked to reimagine that which you have already imagined.

So regularly the fundamental failure of his prose is that you have to read it twice or even more to work out what he means.

Paradoxically this is a consequence, as above, of him leaving nothing to chance. In a sort of ironic conceptual pun on the form of his output against the content - he has no economy.

Wednesday

*Wakes up with a start* Oh yes, christ, yes ok.

I've just scanned down the next column and i'm genuinely struggling to do this. Enormous fatigue. But then I've seen what's coming and you haven't. new vistas.

to misquote MES misquoting lovecraft:

the most merciful thing in the world is man's inability to correlate all of his mind's contents. but Lanchester one day, some say it is already upon us, will eventually open up such terrifying
vistas of reality that we will either go mad from the revelation or flee into blissful sleep, peace and safety of another new dark age

As I have already said, the fact that this story has no supernatural component was one off my reasons for downloading it. It was therefore with consternation that, on starting the Audible app, I found my recollection to be inaccurate. Anyone who has read the passage Pip encounters Magwitch in the graveyard for the first time will remember it, but there were aspects that I had not accurately recalled.

'As I have already said' - yes you have, many many times already in this short story.

'on starting the Audible app' - what is this formulation? this 'on starting the' thing? you get it a lot in Capital too - 'on opening the email application that the computer had etc'. my grammar isn't wot it shd be. Also he could just say 'Audible' by now if he wanted to. i would understand what he meant with my memory. otoh maybe it's an attempt to convey 'the press of the new'. because although i said he's not doing 'cat person' in a way he is. he's trying to include the concepts of the modern world into 'i've now settled down into middle-aged complacency and am not now going to change until i die' man's mind. like seeing people peering over their glasses, holding a phone at arm's length, and poking at the screen with experimental aggression.

'but there were aspects that I had not accurately recalled' - noooooo, he's going to do Dickens isn't he?

here for this

yes he's going to do Dickens.

The passage concerned describes the moment when Magwitch leaves Pip:

At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms, – clasping himself, as if to hold himself together, – and limped towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.

When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a man whose legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for me. When I saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best use of my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms, and picking his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into the marshes here and there, for stepping-places when the rains were heavy or the tide was in. To my horror, I saw that the graves behind him were indeed unquiet. A form which resembled half a person was dragging itself out of the ground. The figure crawled not in the direction of the departed man, but towards me. It saw me look at it and stretched out its arms and made a wordless noise, which carried to me on the salt breeze. I turned again and ran until my legs could carry me no further.

lanchester bits in bold obv. nothing really too objectionable here - cautiously in the manner of MR James. but the twists and turns this 'ghost story' is taking are bloody laboured.

sorry all that bit apart from the first line is a block quote from Great Expectations obviously, apart from the Lanchester riff.

lol

mrj wd have condensed all this into a brief paragraph in "stories i have tried to write": …some of them I have actually written down, and they repose in a drawer somewhere. To borrow Sir Walter Scott's most frequent quotation, "Look on (them) again I dare not." They are not good enough…

i'm half tempted to shitpost this thread with the rest of the story. i've just read a long section where the narrator goes to an art gallery, and then in a cafe afterwards, a female art critic (female again - got a problem, John?) asks whether he enjoyed it, and he says he didn't like the fact artists choose to waste their time on subjects that aren't true, like Christ's crucifixion. it's quite long as there's quite of a lot of simplistic parody of academic speech and quite a lot of the narrator being implausibly stupid and wilfully ignorant.

this isn't satire obviously, but this sort of writing does share with satire one of its key areas of tension - that its content is that which it despises or seeks to mock or destroy. the content of satire is vice, presented into the most disgusting, ludicrous or grotesque way. in other words it is seeking to destroy its own content - it despises itself. the aesthetic qualities of satire are to be found in its wit, its imagination (usually visual) and the management of this central self-destructive tension via irony. in other words its a high-wire act that relies entirely on style and ability.

if the content is ill-delivered and boring, as it is here, then that is what the reader gets. there's no tension. the narrator is so ridiculous, such a figment, that Lanchester hasn't challenged himself at all, and there's no enjoyment for the reader.

he's just mocking something that's come out of his head, so as a reader you just, at best, shrug.

were it not for how bad it is in other ways of course.

just a christmas story in the lrb, it's just a christmas story in the lrb. breathe.

i've always liked that MR James quote. that whole short piece in fact, with its tantalising snippets of stories that didn't quite come together. maybe via some strange loop this story and the whole concept of john lanchester writing it is one of those never-to-be-seen stories that resides in MR James's desk.

Thursday

lol this is interminable.

omg this is great. a single paragraph just keeps coming at you with lanchester body blows:

The morning was divided into two parts. I had a choice between panel sessions on a range of unappealing topics and in the end went to one at random. This was a mistake, since the session turned out to be called 'Ghosts, Werewolves, Quarks and Other Unknowables'. A physicist gave me a short introduction to particle physics and then some literary scholars and anthropologists started in on their nonsense. I discreetly – norms! – unplugged my earpiece from the radio that was carrying the translation and plugged it instead into my mobile phone. I started the Audible app and was soon back with Pip and his unfortunate childhood on the Kent marshes.

on the ropes here.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/aa/Norm_Peterson_Cheers_Motion_Picture.png

Besides, although i did not have great expectations, I had Great Expectations.

-_- x 1000

ha ha, i can't stop re-reading that previous paragraph.

what if kindle, but count magnus

I had a choice of panel sessions on a range of unappealing topics <- these very much don't exist do they? i mean i'm very glad Lanchester didn't exert himself to list them, but these are simply pasteboard words.

...unplugged my earpiece from the radio that was carrying the translation

classic lanchester

wait is it choice OF or choice BETWEEN? RUMBLED fizzles you are just making these up i knew it

I am starting to experience some measure of suspense

ok elephant in the room

- norms! -

so totally freed from context the effect is like someone random coming up to you in the street suddenly and shouting norms! at you. it takes you a while to settle down and realise he means 'social norms' but some time did pass while i considered whether he meant some sort of weird insult ('normies!'). and it's so free from meaning (you do kind of need 'social' there), that briefly a set of beings like the moomins came into my head, sort of shapeless furless balls of grey.

lol i thought it meant "normal" like adorbs means adorable

i noticed you have skated right past my question about because vs of

he's seems to have set himself a weird double-task: on one hand, he's made the narrator a pompous idiot, on the other, he wants to guy -- if more gently than sokal -- this kind of conference and paper

but of course if CANON [insert hungarian name here]'S APP BOOK is a thing, then the werewolves&ghosts paper is on the right track after all -- so all yr really poking fun it is poor (as in mannered) approach to language, which erm

oh wait, you're right! ha ha. fizzles rewrites lanchester rewrites dickens.

i'm typing from the paper copy rather than doing the sensible thing, which using the shortcut keys on my portable laptop to copy and paste sections of text from the original website of a literary journal where the story had been published.

CORRECTION:

I had a choice between panel sessions on a range of unappealing topics

choice between ... on a range...? lanchester i'm saving your ass here, you'd better come thank me when i'm done. (tho choice between ... a range isn't really disastrous i guess).

mark s otm.

tho i wd say that mocking the narrator and that which the narrator mocks is legit, it just takes a load more skill, and a much much better choice of targets. i mean actual targets rather than just stuff that's skimmed in op-eds.

if they were all unappealing why is the one he (randomly) chose a mistake? or is this foreshadowing of some kind?

Dickens's knowledge of the processes of ageing and dementia was, obviously, not scientifically modern, but to a surprising extent he still had an evidentiary basis for some of his fictionalised account. Cf the narcoleptic boy in The Pickwick Papers. Obviously a fully modern knowledge of these areas would have made Dickens a more complete writer.

did JL just leave a draft note to himself in there?

[insert effective sentence here]

i don't think it's foreshadowing. he also somehow conveys (I think via 'turned out to be called') that the one he randomly went into wasn't one of the ones in the 'range of unappealing topics' that he looked at earlier.

if that does turn out to be foreshadowing, then you might almost suggest some authorial subtlety there.

i don't think it's foreshadowing.

ha ha yes exactly.

there's a huge bit of Lanchestered Great Expectations coming up.

just to pause for a moment, as with Capital, it's extraordinary how badly proportioned his writing is. perhaps it's to do with those pasteboard words earlier. he labours through everything that comes into his mind, so you have huge chunks of stuff. his lack of economy is in fact a lack of ability to use or rely on inference. if it's in his head, it's going down. nothing is purposefully left out.

i remember in Capital plot points or subjects would just be dropped and picked up without any meaning much later on. I remember Matt DC saying that the book doesn't end, it just sort of stops.

between / a range is typical of his problems in that it acts like a pebble throwing your bike slightly off course; by the time you reach the end of the graf the cumulative effect has wrapped the bike completely around your neck

ok, deep breath.

Pip had made his visit to Miss Havisham and was leaving her premises after being frightened boy Estalla's cruel game with an effigy. It had woken superstitious feelings in him, which Dickens, if my memory served (it usually does), cleverly renders vivid without endorsing any nonsense of their supernatural origin.

Nothing less than the frosty light of the cheerful sky, the sight of people passing beyond the bars of the courtyard gate, and the reviving influence of the rest of the bread and meat and beer, would have brought me round. Even with those aids, I might not have come to myself as soon as I did, but that I saw Estella approaching with the keys, to let me out. She would have some fair reason for looking down upon me, I thought, if she saw me frightened; and she would have no fair reason.

She gave me a triumphant glance in passing me, as if she rejoiced that my hands were so coarse and my boots were so thick, and she opened the gate, and stood holding it. I was passing out without looking at her, when she touched me with a taunting hand.

‘Why don’t you cry?’

‘Because I don’t want to.’

‘You do,’ said she. ‘You have been crying till you are half blind, and you are near crying again now.’

She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon me. I went straight to Mr Pumblechook’s, and was immensely relieved to find him not at home. So, leaving word with the shopman on what day I was wanted at Miss Havisham’s again, I set off on the four-mile walk to our forge; pondering, as I went along, on all I had seen, and deeply revolving that I was a common labouring-boy; that my hands were coarse; that my boots were thick; that I had fallen into a despicable habit of calling knaves Jacks; that I was much more ignorant than I had considered myself last night, and generally that I was in a low-lived bad way.

I was halfway home, with my spirits thus troubled, before I began to sense a presence behind me. I was possessed with a growing feeling of unease. The woes I had experienced that day made me reluctant to embrace a new source of disturbance but I could not shake off a desire to turn and look. My weariness was forgotten in a sudden surge of anxious energy. I turned my head and for a moment thought that my impression of being followed was nothing but the work of my imagination, still troubled by the encounter at Miss Havisham’s. Then, with a growing feeling of horror, I realised that my initial apprehensions were not mistaken. There was indeed a figure following me, a shape I had not seen at first glance because I was looking for a man standing or walking. This was neither standing nor walking, nor, perhaps, was it a man. At a distance of perhaps a hundred yards a shape was slithering towards me along the ground. It was moving with the propulsion of its arms, assisted by convulsions of its torso. It was neither crawling nor walking because it appeared to have no legs. Its face was largely shapeless but its mouth was open and it appeared to be exhaling, or hissing, with all the force in its lungs.

I turned and ran.

I like the spark notes start that looks like it's just been converted from something like this:

Pip makes his visit to Miss Havisham and is leaving her premises after being frightened by Estalla's cruel game with an effigy.

(also correction 'by' for 'boy')

again, not too much that's exceptionable in that,

'made me reluctant to embrace a new source of disturbance' is a little odd, and 'slithering' seems odd but i can't quite work out why. feels out of place.

there's a famous e.b.white explanation of a technically unnecessary comma in a new yorker short story sentence: "that's there to allow them to pull the chair out and sit down" or something like that

in other words, sentence content and rhythm as an analogue for the action described: with the old lady leaning on the stick before she comes towards him, or here with the mechanism of his random selection (which i take -- after some thought -- to mean he chooses a room at random, without confirming in advance which of the unappealing panels is to occur within, so topic is pot luck), he requires you to push your reading mind through a confused and confusing version of a REALLY SIMPLE activity, like approaching someone, or going into a room

x-post i guess, though merely an hommage to the master