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

O_0

there are no heavily faded Ramones T-shirts (put the correct T in there just for you mark) in the wild now, surely?

i am not really a fan of his journalism either tbh

Yeah, I found Whoops! a slog, and always assumed it was me being thick about basic economics. But looking back, the writing is dire (and I'm still thick about economics).

The first two sentences of this are classic Lanchester, saying the same thing twice, boringly

When Iona woke up in the house she knew where she was straightaway, and she knew she was alone. There was none of that blurry intermediate state of semi-consciousness that people usually get when they’re in an unfamiliar place.

He truly is the Colley Cibber of our age

That para Matt posted is abominable.

Bringing 'old people' into his description of the low bed. He must mean him, surely. 'But Iona was not old. Her mouth tasted fresh' is car crash of free-indirect speech and authorial presence, and as a consequence comes across as not-even-faintly pervy.

Also... arghgh who says... thinks... *anythings* 'My mouth tastes fresh'. The painful realisation over the next few sentences is dire. Does he never go through one of these thinking out loud processes and realise that the point he's reached at the end of that process informs what goes onto the page? You don't need to keep the painful hobbling of your mind there for posterity's sake, John.

'... it would smell sweet. The bathroom was en-suite.'

i literally got a sensation like a trapped nerve when i read that. is it deliberate? i mean i'll allow the bathos must be, but the *rhyme*? Who would *do* that? Apart from Lanchester. Why are you making me read this.

Wait, Matt, was that just superb parody? I haven't seen the story. I don't know what's real and what isn't any more.

I suppose he might be trying to reflect his perception of banality in the people. I don't want to think about it.

oh god it's real i just checked.

i like how mary-kay wilmers is handing over larger and larger chunks of her beloved magazine's real estate to more and more awful writing, it's the right way to turn 80 imo

― mark s, Wednesday, 25 July 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

counter: 25K by Perry Anderson on Anthony Powell.

Mona:

* Not old
* Unable to smell own breath
* Near an ensuite bathroom
* Fresh-tasting sweet mouth

I assumed Matt's paragraph was a parody too. Fucking hell. 'Put her feet on the bare but warm floor' is the bit that sticks out - it's like the vague mentalese that precedes the thinking before a first draft. It *has* to be premeditated.

What do people think of Anderson on Powell?

I think:
* It is oddly slightly worse written than Anderson's usual prose; more like a slack first draft at times
* I have not read Powell so had better not try to judge the judgement on that
* I find it very appealing to see someone authoritative being critical of Proust in public
* the column or so concluding 'the case for sexism doesn't stand up' is somewhat embarrassing from a man of about 80 - he should probably be more circumspect about such judgements
* It is hard to think what part II will be about, except Powell's politics (but perhaps others have already read part II)

I did not like O'Hagan on Grenfell btw as it was massively self-indulgent and repetitive and thus clearly did not need to be anything like as long. I think it was quite a bad piece of writing.

part two is described as "sums up" which is funny as it is by itself 1523452345 times as long as anything else that isn't by o'hagan -- i need to reread both parts in one (long) go i think

my instant hot take is that there were no long words i had not previously encountered and this is bad not good

perry shd have his own thread tho, it is not fair to fizzles

Powell does have a thread: Anyone read Anthony Powell?

I was thinking about Lanchester writing in the LRB the other day, and remembered this article he did a few years ago about Elon Musk, which now looks spectacularly wrong-headed:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/john-lanchester/lets-all-go-to-mars
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it should probably have been possible to discern that Musk was the kind of charlatan Lanchester has condemned in his financial journalism.

Enjoyed the Anderson piece because it is always enjoyable reading long critiques of Powell and Proust. The main problem I have is that the two novel sequences, superficial similarities aside (eg very long, about 'high society', clearly autobiographical, dry comic moments etc), aren't very much alike in terms of the actual reading experience.

If the second part is about Powell's politics, there's definitely an interesting piece to be written about why so many lefties (Christopher Hitchens, Tariq Ali, Anderson himself) adore Dance to the Music of Time.

Lanchester:

As for human spaceflight, I think it’s an inherently progressive activity, not so much in its practical consequences but in the way it changes our species’s frame of reference. The modern ecology movement was in effect created by the image of the whole earth, vulnerable and isolated and full of life, sent back by Apollo 8. The progressive atmosphere of the 1960s was profoundly influenced by the space project, by the idea that we as a species can Do Better. The prospect of humans on Mars would have a similar effect.

Having not read Powell (from the quotes yes the experience in reading Powell is very different to MP) my problem was Anderson over-cooking some of the criticisms of Proust which have been talked about, (eg Proust is not as panoramic as ppl say, needs an editor esp in some of the later vols) to then prop up Powell's so-called achievement. The later section where he narrows in on Powell himself was quite good. xp

grist to that politics piece: balzac was marx's favourite writer

adding naughtily: the thing that links all three of those particular lefties = quite posh background :D

Powell is my favourite author and I've read Dance a number of times, I'm a sucker for long, sustained narrative fiction. I think Anderson's summation of the extent of Powell's achievement is a good one. He also manages to refute some of the incorrect accusations made against Powell (e.g. "he only writes about the upper classes") while being clear-eyed about some of his limitations (e.g. he writes about women less well than men).

Ian Samson also wrote about Powell in the LRB and is much more ambivalent: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/ian-sansom/every-rusty-hint

xpost
Yep! Powell's friendship w/ Orwell also quite important there, I think.

xps
yes - there's a bit of chat on the Proust thread, and I mention there Anderson being specifically Eton + Oxford might be a factor in his passion. I don't know the detail for all of them, but it feels like there's that dual thing of posh, but not pure-posh in in the backgrounds of Powell and his New Left fans - families are military, naval, Pakistani, Anglo-Irish.

the column or so concluding 'the case for sexism doesn't stand up' is somewhat embarrassing from a man of about 80 - he should probably be more circumspect about such judgements

The statement itself may have been a bit too categoric but overall I thought he did a good job of explaining that Powell is bad on women not due to misogynist portrayals but due to a dearth of interest in female characters - which isn't letting him off the hook, I don't think.

Widmerpool is a bourgeois Labour Party careerist managerialist, right? Can see why ridiculing such figures might be popular amongst New Left types.

isn't he from hackney also

If your definition of Hackney has now extended to the East Midlands (something that would not surprise me) then yes, yes he was.

Tariq Ali on ADTTMOT: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/26/fiction4

Tim's last comment about the East Midlands is great and makes me smile.

you will all rue the day

just catching up a bit again but this from Ward

The main problem I have is that the two novel sequences, superficial similarities aside (eg very long, about 'high society', clearly autobiographical, dry comic moments etc), aren't very much alike in terms of the actual reading experience

is spot on imo. i've been toying with the idea that roman fleuve as a mode is not a useful category for comparison. the texture of the roman fleuve is the content of the times and lives it deals with. I'm not sure that works, but it was in response to a slightly odd comment in the Anderson piece (I'm only a quarter of the way through) where he said that Powell was good at changing fashions and times and Proust was less good – it remains static. But one of the entire points of the period that Proust deals with is

From what I remember it's also true to say that Musil was probably more of a favourite author and even influence on Powell than Proust.

Second mark s's point about poshness being something that seems to thread through public admirers. And also woof's point - I think the word 'rackety' is used in older Powell criticism, indicating people more mobile in their fortunes and misfortunes than more solidly established classes and wealth. nabobs, arrivistes, and the actors, writers and wider demi-monde.

Jocelyn Brooke is the true English Proust if anyone is arsed about looking for one <- this is a hill I will die on.

I'm ion a train to Portsmouth and should probably take this opportunity to read the rest of the Anderson.

Yeah, it seems to me exactly backwards to suggest that Proust depicted a static world. He's interested in how prejudices and class allegiances shift and disintegrate through the Dreyfus Affair and World War I; changing fashions (the women in the Bois de Boulogne), technologies (the telephone, automobiles and airplanes), taste in music, art, and literature; generally, how memory is distorted and things get left behind under new systems of value.

But one of the entire points of the period that Proust deals with is

finish this sentence!

Enjoyed the Anderson piece because it is always enjoyable reading long critiques of Powell and Proust.

Am I imagining this or did he basically do this in two articles in successive issues?

yes, it's a two-part essay

Perry Anderson

I started reading the new story and I find it as bad as Fizzles says. The plainness and banality of Lanchester's prose is strange.

But one of the entire points of the period that Proust deals with is

finish this sentence!

― mark s, Wednesday, 1 August 2018 14:37 (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol can't believe i did that. but i'm now on the train BACK from Portsmouth so i can exclusively reveal...

one of the entire points of the period that Proust deals with is that it is a decadent and static end of epoch period. Powell self-conscious deals with the first world war and the second and both result in significant changes, and - given the notion of 'rackety' mobility - result in social convulsions that are represented in the novel. both musil and proust are retaining an entire period kept in aspic, devastatingly so. the nature of the roman fleuve is the nature of the time it depicts, not the fact it is a roman fleuve. Musil is of course also a master of the static society - an entire edifice of class and imperialism that is kind of crumbling into deep space through sheer inability to change. Just as Powell's stuff is change, Proust's is the opposite. Retention of a period.

Also i was going to say i the earlier post that style is another factor. i'm not equipped to talk about the influences on proust's style, but i've read criticism that will put it in bergsonian, sensual time etc. Powell is, as an English snob, influenced by and an ally of Waugh, and both of them saw the comic potential of Hemingway's style - those pages of brief, non differentiated dialogue - mixed with a bit of Firbank (who i've never really made the effort to understand or enjoy). This makes Powell and Proust substantially and importantly different. They're not doing the same thing, to emphasise Ward's point. (except they are a bit, and i feel a bit disingenuous emphasising it)

'devastatingly so'<- kill me now

I doubt that anyone in the history of mankind has ever written "second-best sleeping shorts" before Lanchester managed it

he describes things that do not exist as mental-linguistic objects. notionally, second-best sleeping shorts' exist, and i guess we all may notionally gesture at this sort of thing. but lanchester coming in with his authority, sorting through your socks and pants. i need to think this through, there's something important here, but there are two men next to me on the train who are talking incessantly about horse racing and it's both kind of interesting and also really fucking dull and stopping me from either reading or dozing.

'just one race, brian, it was £230,000. just one race. i don't mind. jackpot at epsom. saturday. go there on the wednesday. up there at four o'clock in the morning. i went up there. up there with the duchess. standing in one line.'

where's john when you need him.

'won by the shortest nose you've ever seen in your life. we both looked at each other - £670,000, right down the pan. i'll never forgive Zoe for that'

Ihe shorts and especially the "low bed, the kind that older people find it hard to straighten up from" add just a bit of friction to the read as you have to pause each time and realize that no, this isn't a clever touch that adds something to the description, it's just a touch.

As Fizzles has said - the work doesn't seem drafted or rewritten. It's all like a first draft - maybe delivered verbally to a computer (something Lanchester once wrote about in the LRB, ie: talking to a computer to get things done).

Yesterday I saw a Lanchester article in the New Yorker where he talked about the difference between, I think, economic and literary outlooks, as though he has a literary outlook, an aesthetically thoughtful mind.

yes, i’ve noticed his manner on that sort of thing before and i’m amused at the harmless self delusion usually - a sort of lit dunning-kruger. then i remember that this is usually a prestigious literary journal or media publication and i end up stomping round loudly asking myself HOW. accepting self delusion is always possibly, HOW does everyone else nod and smile and say lanchester the great man of letters of our age?