a kind of simulation but better than the real thing ever was - the Tom McCarthy thread

So, after Ishmael K's comment that he felt ILB could sustain more threads, I thought I'd start this, mainly to discuss C without spoilerizing/cluttering up the what are you reading threads.

I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it slightly less than I thought I was going to enjoy it after the first section, which I really enjoyed. And although I'm going to be nitpicking, I do want to stress that I enjoyed it.

The first section, with its combination of child's viewpoint, and yes, the slightly stilted present tense delivery, the naive lack of distinction between animate and inanimate substance, then the wonderful pageant, where the various relationships and indeed the environment are redefined in the mythological terms of drugs, rape and the underworld, as well as the narrative drive of Sophie, Widsun, half seen through the child Serge's eyes all worked brilliantly. And while I found the spa a bit of a let down, the continued conflict between light (Lucia) and the dark troglodytic masseuse, seemed to continue Serge's voyage in the underworld, and his ultimate rebirthing into adulthood out of his caul.

And then, well, I'm not sure the rest of it really lived up to that for me. The style is great for the reconfiguring of sensational reality set pieces, like the drugged-up flights, but does seem to toil slightly otherwise. Also, I don't know, what suited the child Serge increasingly seems a narratorial imposition (especially in the final Egypt section), not really justified by his own perception of reality.

Also by and large avoided in the first section, but more and more obvious through the book, is explanatory and meta-analytic dialogue, also characters spewing out information. The narrator acknowledges this, and after all, it makes sense in McCarthy's universe, but this didn't really ever stop it feeling like I was being fed author research.

This in turn can make some of the linking between the thematic bric-a-brac of the novel (coherers! scarab beetles! copper! carbon!) seem like the sort of fanciful linking between stuff that we've probably all engaged in, a linking of haphazard resemblances, but which smacks more strongly of Coleridge's 'fancy' than his 'imagination'. This is probably also misleading - there's a clear and strong will to produce a metaphysics of machinery and substance, (a sort of reverse gnosticism?), to convey the material nature of the immaterial, so the Egyptian stuff is a natural conclusion and synthesis of much of the material being dealt with. Still doesn't stop it feeling slightly arbitrary.

Gravity's Rainbow is a clear antecedent - nothing wrong with that, except that perhaps the comparisons don't do C too many favours. I thought I detected strong echoes of Kipling's They as well, in fact his latter writing generally (the similarity and conjoining of man and machine). The indifferent distinction between man and machine I guess is a Beckettian thing as well.

But really this novel's great achievement, and the thing that stops it sinking beneath the various issues I had with it, is the aesthetic of a sort of coldly sexualised and tangible metaphysics (the book is laden with death and a very underground, earthy underworld), and the teeming ether, that substance holds the key to existence, not spirit, that what lives after death is not the soul, but the body. All this as an aesthetic framework, and the spiritual drive of the book (clearly continuing some of the obsessions of Remainder) is I think extremely successful and compelling. It just gets a bit diffused from time to time.

i've sorta/maybe given up on this for the moment. i'm at the fighter pilot part & its lost enough of its momentum that when i think of picking it up again it feels like a chore. jennifer egan was talking about this book on a podcast and she sd that the most interesting/remarkable thing about it is that it inverts the 'traditional novel' by foregrounding the 'technical'/'interpretive' part of of the novel and backgrounds the narrative part. & so the reader is sort of peering through the exposed architecture of the novel at the extravagant story within.

which... maybe? there is the "explanatory and meta-analytic dialogue" and the attempt at mimicking 'thought'. hmm. really i should probably finish the novel, before i post much about it.

pretty sure i wont be into this...

posted this on Rolling Contemporary Lit thread not five minutes ago:

read mccarthy's C and eh I don't know. I thought this dude was supposed to be all "postmodern" but this seemed like your basic "dude saunters through various representative historical situations" (I don't really know how to express this but where the time period is exhibited by the main character experimenting with radio, fighting in WWII, going to a seance, being in Egypt as the country gains its independence and the British Empire collapses) novel. I feel like I was missing something big.

Also I haven't read Remainder but everyone says it's funny, and there was like almost no trace of humor in C at all. It was interesting enough that I finished it but overall it left me cold.

― congratulations (n/a), Friday, September 24, 2010 12:24 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Agree with GR for the most part. The opening is great, stalls, with flashes of brilliance after that. Liked it a lot, have more to say, but posting from phone. Will expand when at a keyboard.

The opening is great

so much of this reminded of the childhood idyll part of "ada, or ardor" although i really cant put my finger on what, exactly, resonated so strongly

Entirely incidentally, thought the whole London section was extremely similar to the second, poorly received but execellent imo episode of the BBC's Sherlock Holmes.

I say entirely incidentally, but I read the Professor Challenger/Ac Doyle account of a seance and i have to say found it more convincing that McCarthy's despite its clear propaganda. Reality as a version of decodable information. Really did love that Sherlock Holmes series on the BBC.

Also I haven't read Remainder but everyone says it's funny,

Fuck, would love to read a new novel in the English comic tradition but... well, what happened to funny? Remainder was amusing, only occasionally found it funny, but yes, would entirely agree. lolz?

Kinda sad to keep hearing the Pynchon comparisons - not that I don't expect C to be a mighty fine piece of work, but, well, Remainder really was something else, y'know? I've read more than a few grandiose sprawling epics of Pynchoneon dimensions and, after Remainder, it strikes me as a step back.

But then again, I've yet to read the book.

Not sure what my drunken posting on Friday was about. I think 'lolz?' was meant to indicate 'whither the lolz?' or something.

Anyway, went to see him talk last night, a colleague having picked up some tickets. I'm often reluctant to go to these things, and I'm not sure why really, perhaps because I just feel slightly awkward at them. Despite I got a fair bit of scowling done last night, I enjoyed it, found it stimulating.

Scowling first - If you're going to contrast Marinetti with Wyndham Lewis, you're probably better off picking something like Blasting and Bombardiering and saying it sounds like Wodehouse. Blasting and Bombardiering was written, as Lewis says at the beginning, to give a popular insight to modernism and to a certain extent his own personal history. Probably worth having a look at Lewis's proto-Beckettian play Enemy of the Stars, set in an abstract postwar landscape, then the contrast becomes less marked.

Still, there's an argument to be made for Lewis being more satirist than modernist, and furthermore, Lewis's belief that the English sense of humour was inimical to art that would perhaps help solve the question returned to throughout the evening, why modernism didn't graft to English culture. I'm not sure I buy that anyway (I'm sure we've talked about this on another thread) - McCarthy means specifically High European Modernism, and that's kind of exclusive of English modernism by definition. It may well be, even in this argument, that the English comic novel (as the literary representative of the English sense of humour) has a role to play in explaining why England's modernisms were different from Europe's. (Lewis blessed as well as blasted the English sense of humour iirc).

What Lezard slightly lazily called the literature of 'common sense' may be fitting in somewhere round here, but I'm not really sure where.

Still, you've got to say something, and by and large Lezard was a congenial host, notwithstanding an amusing tic where, when he wanted to move things on a little, he would punctuate McCarthy with a very sceptical sounding 'hmmmmm'. And McCarthy was eloquent, amusing and interesting about the things he likes, about competing realities, the problems of realism, and about the various elements that go into C (and I thought the talk stood as a good gloss to the novel).

Lamp - McCarthy mentioned Ada, or Ardor as a specific influence, saying that he lifted the insect/scient/incest thing from there.

So, just some of what I recall on C.

Started terrifically I thought: that whole country house/pageant section very good. Sets a lot rolling very quickly - communication networks, hidden vs open, hive-humanity, symbol systems, the invisible & secret - with a great style. Enough momentum to carry me through the spa stuff, which felt a little pastichey, but well executed. Some of the best prose in the flying/war section, and yes a fine rendering of the experience of a peculiar flat consciousness; the prisoner section was starting to feel tired (like the escape committee that might not exist might as well be pulled straight from Gravity's Rainbow), and then in the 20s london section that I felt research was really weighing it down. There's a bit of predictability too: feel like once things are set up, you know there's going to be spiritualism (i mean he sort of has to go to a seance, right, once you've got him in 20s London?), gnosticism.

Again, I really enjoyed it, and yes, it's the right novel for me, but like most I'm a bit disappointed after Remainder, which as R Baez rightly says, was something else.

The marketing of this has been quite odd: strange to see it pushed in this 'are you read for an EXPERIMENT that will BLOW UR MIND' way, with everyone reading or reviewing having to say 'actually, it's pretty straightforward. Conventional even. A bit cold is all'.

i just finished remainder - i really, really liked the idea, the concepts, and i do think the expression of them was really articulate... but i just didn't enjoy this novel at all. i can't really put my finger on it except to say that it's 'just not my thing', i guess??

the concepts really resonated with me, but they made me really uncomfortable at the same time.

Lamp - McCarthy mentioned Ada, or Ardor as a specific influence, saying that he lifted the insect/scient/incest thing from there.

yeah lol shouldve caught that really.

i finished it but idk what 'ideas' were really all that important & it was kind of boring to read? wish i had more to say, really

did you like remainder?

kind of want to read this dude

his journalism is kind of 'english lecturer at further education college' tho

... specifically what? i can sort of believe that, i guess, but all i've read is his review of josopovici's new book and his book on hergé, neither of which quite fit that bill; also his philosophical manifesto bullcrap, which eh

i have been carrying around a copy of 'men in space' but i have started reading three or four other books in various places instead of reading it

"his review of josopovici's new book" -- yeah, this. and i think there was s.thing in the new statesman

Here is a review I wrote of Remainder, the first paragraph of which I've reproduced here:

In Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, a man suffers a traumatic injury and adopts an unusual method of recovery: a quest for authenticity. He builds enormous sets and hires actors to resurrect his life from before the accident, careful that his stagecraft not only mimics but recreates his previous more perfect life. The narrator’s form of therapy, in other words, is nostalgia, a way to reach back to a time when his life still felt whole and authentic. Yet as the narrator grows more and more obsessed with living only in these flawless moments, Remainder suggests that our fixation with authenticity may be itself a trauma. It describes the truth of representations and stars a man who erects his memories as gigantic art pieces and finds himself frustrated by how simulations can only stand-in for reality. Think here of postmodern metafictional novels and their precursor Beckett, whose plays also resemble art installations; like Krapp’s Last Tape, Remainder is a non-stop quotation of stark repetitions. But Remainder is also about another more political conception of “truth”—being true to one’s own self. Sharing some territory with the works of David Foster Wallace, Daniel Clowes, and Alexander Payne, Remainder is a story about how modern life corrodes the self’s ability to live a “right” life.

i have now read men in space

Any good?

it has a really awful blurb explaining that the characters are "negotiating all kinds of space - social, emotional, physical" (not exactly phrased that way, but just as bad.) which, hey, thanks for that.

it is pretty good though. (sorry, xpost.)

it's very pynchonesque. in the way the cast are handled, and in a lot of turns of phrase, and in a lot of sentences about concrete things that turn out to be abstract things, or vice versa.

which i think a bunch of people thought this was written before remainder, on those grounds -- that it wouldn't make sense for a voice as strongly felt as in his first novel to then fall back to another person's style in his second. but if c is like this, as well, than maybe that is what happened.

Cheers, thomp, will probably give it a go at some point, although I'm all McCarthy'd out at the moment. Argh I hate blurbs like that - movie descriptions often particularly culpable. Yes, I am only a member of the public and you are a top film student who understands these things thx.

xpost, I think it was his first work, but published after? I think probably the idea was so strong in Remainder that it helped define the voice to an extent that isn't the case in C (or from the sounds of it Men in Space).

i am in the home stretch of this right now & am only posting to say that the phrase 'a kind of simulation better than the real thing ever was' appeared to me hugely more powerful from having seen it on Site New Answers so many times. like reading a john donne sermon and finding 'ask not for whom' in its native place for the first time.

btw i liked it. i liked the authorial perverseness-- the way that people never seemed to be described (except i guess the nurse at the spa and that for obv reasons) while places might be excessively (the description of the house right at the beginning pissed me off tbh but thankfully that seemed restricted to learmont-pov); the way that all these modernist symbols are written of with such unmodernist style. The allusions and repetitions didn't feel belaboured, either, you registered them and kept moving rather than having to sit through an explanation. There was a lack of hysteria that I liked. When you're calling up the ghost of Wyndham Lewis or Marinetti or Blavatsky (or even even Evelyn Waugh who is secretly there in all writing abt the 20s even if only in my heart) it is hugely refreshing to have something that does not use hysteria as a tool.

i had a 'wait is that a quote from something' moment

well chosen phrase for thread imo. i spent a long time convinced it was somewhere in 'remainder' even though i had read remainder and it is not to be found in there

xpost

yeah i had assumed it was a ref to remainder, because all i've read about remainder (yes yes i need to read remainder, i know) suggests toward it. but no!

glad people like the quote - chose it as a connecting point between Remainder and C.

in some ways think the obsession with that which is residual in 'reality', that which remains after the simulation and is issimulable, is more of a connecting obsession, (rather'n it being 'better than the real thing') but also ended up liking the quote as a sort of McCarthian definition of fiction/art.

also glad you liked C, c#m - find myself getting a bit tired of feeling defensive about the book, cos although it's not a masterpiece I do think it's quite interesting (in a good way - like cricket ahem - rather than as a euphemism for 'dull'), and I'm not sure any sort of it's great!/it's crap! conversation serves it v well.

writing this in the pub, Probs not making much sense.

xpost

i just finished C, which came out in paperback last week.

i really liked it! which is probably to be expected.

its hard to talk about it without thinking of pynchon: the deadpan comedy (tho pynchon's much funnier), the "world war adventures," the thematic obsessions with communication, translation, mapping, modeling, 'modernism,' etc.

hes much colder than pynchon tho, and less of a show-off; pynchon's novels are mostly shaggy-dog stories, late-night dorm-room "whatever happens happens" kinds of bullshit sessions; this is more mechanical and plotted. you dont get the sense that mccarthy writes 1/3 of the book stoned the way you do with pynchon.

i havent heard the egan thing that lamp talks about in the second post (and i need some more time to marinate on the book) but i wonder if she's not getting at what i liked about it--the kind laying-bare of mccarthys elaborately fashioned network of ideas.

i suppose for some people it might even be too "obvious"? or "trying too hard"? i didnt much care; it was trying at things im interested in.

and yes i agree with everyone that the first half is much stronger than the second, and even if it picked up a bit in the egypt section it was starting to get very on the nose at that point.

now read remainder

hi, i did

read it again

and again

i think the most interesting thing about 'remainder' is that its become such a cultural touchstone

it has?

burn

*shrugs*

?

it probably has attained some sort of afterlife that 'c', or perhaps anything else he writes, is unlikely to

this is p empty-headed and flimsy but i guess i feel like its becoming/has become 'the infinite jest of the oughts' with all that implies about its critical status/readership/'importance'

you think really? we hang out in different crowds

lamp do you work in publishing? or are you retired or what? i can never remember

carbonizay

i have no idea what that means?

max, yeah, i feel like thats true, or at least becoming true. i think zadie smith's essay about 'remainder' and 'netherland' was p impt in helping to develop its reputation as a novel thats capital-i important but i also think the whole backstory to it, the types of ppl i know who have read and really admire it, idk, i just think its sorta slotting into that 'space' in the discourse.

i think nabisco and pinefox touch on this a little itt where they/we discuss that zadie smith essay btw

do you have a link to that thread? one reason i am/was skeptical of 'remainder' being the 'infinite jest of the aughts' is that (id thought) ilx hadnt discussed it very much! the thing is i dont hang out with many people who are 'into' literature/literary culture so i guess it wouldnt surprise me if i had just missed out on the remainder phenom

btw one reason it baffles me to hear you say that (and one reason i am baffled by ZS's contention that remainder is/was "the future of the novel") is that it seems so pointed _not_ avant-garde. arguably its theoretical concerns are "post-modern" (but even those specific concerns are like 30-80 years old [thinking here of, sorry to drop names, baudrillard and deleuze and before him even heidegger, at least in the case of remainder]) but its tone and style are so... modernist! it feels like hunger or one of the other thousands of novels about a loner slowly going mad, but, set in 2001! or something

same thing with C, which similarly isnt doing anything "new" or "avant-garde" stylistically, technically, thematically, philosophically. arguably.

whereas, sorry, didnt infinite jest (also arguably) set a "tone" for a whole generation of writers, v. that maud newtorn nyt mag piece from a few weeks ago?

to me its less about what 'remainder' actually accomplishes or even aims to accomplish and more the critical or popular narrative around it which marks it out as especially idiosyncratic and ambitious and 'difficult'. like read some of the early reviews for 'C' and youll see what i mean, this sense that mccarthy is potentially the standard-bearer for this 'non-narrative' tradition & for the '21st c. mind' or s.thing

again i dont theres really anything remarkably contemporary in the way 'remainder' grapples with ennui or lack of identity/rootlessness or w/e in the same way that dfw taps into new ways of writing 'being/thinking/understanding' w/ infinite jest and maybe ppl like egan or smith wld say that im misinterpreting their praise for the novel. i do think that there in order to develop a kind of cult of influence some time in the wilderness helps, its too early to say whether mccarthy will have much influence. i mean hes less imitable (and distinctive) than dfw, certainly

As far as I can tell it's the clear and vocal engagement with Continental modernism and criticism that makes him marketably distinct.

As I think woof said upthread many critics noted, after Remainder, how conventional C felt. People were expecting him to go one way and he didn't.

If you believe in the search for an authorial voice, then I think the assurance of Remainder, which was the consequence of having a strong idea, led people to believe he had a strong voice that wd persist in future works.

C showed that he's still searching for it. He's clearly interested in continental thought and writing, but in C this wasn't represented with a single strong idea but in engagement with a number of ideas. The voice as a consequence became more diffuse - occasionally felt like it was the victim of its content in fact. This was confusing, partly because he was still talking about Freud, Blanchot - he is still the same! - and partly maybe because of the pre-modernism setting, with its wafts of Kipling (as I said elsewhere, everyone who reads C should read Kipling's short story Wireless). Getting nommed for the Booker, presumably on the basis of Remainder, possibly confused things further.

I think - I hope - the search will be interesting, because it feels good to have someone interested in these things on the block and being creative, but I think he might end up a very different sort of writer than using Remainder as a compass might suggest.

the notion that a concern for the great writers of the last dozen or so decades from the rest of europe is enough to make an english writer distinct is infinitely dispiriting and probably true

I guess I am sort of skeptical of the claim that McCarthy is more clearly or vocally engaging w/ "Continental modernism"/post-structuralism/what have you than--say--Kundera, Ballard, Murakami, Eco, Sam Delaney, etc. (And that's without getting into "postmodern" Americans like Pynchon & DeLillo, who are surely influenced by French thought though maybe in a more diffuse and indirect way.)

I'm not sure that either of you are necessarily making the claim I'm disputing here, though, so maybe this thread isn't the place to argue it.

I do agree with what's being said about C feeling less unique or special than Remainder (though no less smart)--as you allude to he's best (so it seems) when he can really bear down on a single, fairly narrow concept and wring it for all it's worth; C ends up being this gorgeous patchwork of ideas but in the end you miss out on the kind of gripping, k-hole focus of Remainder.

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/3716/gbg1.jpg

re-read Lamp's post and want to rephrase what I said slightly. It's Remainder that made him marketably distinct, the voice of Continental philosophy in the Great British Lit Media came after, then despite the Booker thing, the marketability of Remainder didn't carry on into C so all that's left is voice of Cont. Phil. in GBLM.

continental philosophy is carrying too much weight here possibly, but it's what drives his writing away from Lit. Fic. realist tradition and gives it its distinctive tang/æsthetic.

Suspect you're right, nakh, and if my rephrasing is more accurate in terms of reduced profile marketability on the back of the confusing C even that my be overstating the case.

max - I think Ballard is a good call - or was, crucially. But his role as science fiction writer and his dreams of futurity possibly allowed critics to approach him or for him to be assimilated in a slightly different way. JGB's non-fic prose important here.

The other authors I'm foggier on tbh, but none of them quite feel right in this role - tho I admit that may be because of the focus on Eng writers in Eng media here. Don't quite get the desire for hardcore stylistic experimentation (Beckett influence?). DFW probably close here, but I've only read some of IF and too many people here are too good on him for it to feel anything other than fatuous passing comment.

Yeah, I don't really know what I'm arguing at this point since I'm admittedly not very up on American literary culture let alone British literary culture, and it seems to me that an author could occupy a certain "role" without being the first or only author to do the things necessary to assume that role.

(Also I was kind of fudging it with Kundera and Murakami who are clearly well-versed in continental philosophy but don't approach in the same kind of direct way as McCarthy [I remember kind of raising my eyebrows at McCarthy's use of a couple formulations that are common ways of translating Heideggerian concepts--he cals radio a "gathering-together" for example]; rather, they're kind of... "existentialist" authors? I can't think of a better way to put it. But as you point out nominating non-British or non English-language authors is maybe missing the point.)

nakh_gamaliel otm - part of Remainder's unusualness is that it didn't feel like anything else in the British literary scene - partly the continental theory, partly that 'k-hole focus'.

You definitely can put together a list of British novelists who like or fit with continental theory in a various ways - Ballard, maybe Christopher Priest, and quite a few more from the SF scene; old-school experimental world (Christine Brooke Rose?); and a grab-bag of marginal names (Stewart Home) - but Remainder has a focus that's like early Ballard or Priest, with no genre taint (literary!) + a flat realist front (accessible!).

also on his reception here: he understands establishment game (good school + New College) & can play it better than hard undergrounders I think. and that presentability is outside the work, but a factor – brit lit scene always reassured by having a well-educated serious white male somewhere about the place.

nakh_gamaliel otm

seem to have created hybrid poster, nultifications of le queux novels ahoy.

I guess I am sort of skeptical of the claim that McCarthy is more clearly or vocally engaging w/ "Continental modernism"/post-structuralism/what have you than--say--Kundera, Ballard, Murakami, Eco, Sam Delaney, etc.

Yes I think as others have said its really unusual for any British writers to say something like 'french writing isn't gobbledygook REALLY' w/out getting laughed out of town and getting buried in their underground bunker, so he gets the token experimental guy treatment instead.

Don't know how comparable he is to BS Johnson (?)

Gilbert Adair. He should be on the list of British french-difficult-things-likers too.

I think as others have said its really unusual for any British writers to say something like 'french writing isn't gobbledygook REALLY'

would add that another approach, increasingly common, is a kind of defanging/habilitation, ie 'they're saying something quite nice and sensible really'. Might be as theorists become historical figures (no-one's angry at Barthes any more, right?), might be just the the literary caste all got comfortable with cont phil at uni.

actually I stopped and thought about it and it isn't really the theory that makes remainder odd, more the plain voice & descriptive intensity - finds a technique to manage the ideas without declamation, namedropping etc.

Not the best example of the defanging approach – because it's so confused – but this rotten essay by Edward Docx does it a bit.

eugh that essay. should've stopped at this sentence

Thus, if modernists like Picasso and Cézanne focused on design, hierarchy, mastery, the one-off, then postmodernists, such as Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning, were concerned with collage, chance, anarchy, repetition.

I think one thing that's striking about Remainder is the way it fuses this (at this point) ancient modernist one-man's-slow-descent-into-madness trope with "postmodern" ideas.

jaw agape, just finished Remainder

the first part of the book, it comes across as a more ideas-heavy take on Chris Morris' Blue Jam monologues

then the dream-home reenactment gave me a terrifying loathing of all that lay around me, even as I luxuriated in its discovery, its oh-so-nearly perfect discovery of the authentic, the repeatable. a fever-dream of disappointment in the mutabilitie of life. at this stage I wasn't even sure I liked the book, even though I was aware of its brilliance

and then the spell was broken in the last third. from the moment he reenacts the tyre-change, he emerges as not the dismal by-product of an atomised age whose attempts to find integrity are characterised by the impossible demand of stasis, but as the will to truth, the one who will conquer the imperfections, the one who will transcend, who will leave the mark that cannot be erased, who will repeat forever

of course, once the short councillor figure appears (as if to confirm this by mirroring its doubts back and thus allowing them to be dismissed), the novel enters a new pitch of brilliance. the final 2 or 3 chapters are astonishing, just astonishing. mccarthy's writing actually reaches this zone of perfection that it hadn't even attempted to manifest earlier on. it climaxes, soars and leaves me...well, numb and tingling, mostly

and jaw agape

the ultimate failure of naz's logistics - the scarab's death - is beautifully-drawn and necessary too - the narrator's triumph is not that of logistics - it is the opposite of logistics - the unplanned state of authenticity - whose being is unmade, quite unmade, by logistics (and vice versa)

those last three chapters

anybody read his bk abt Tintin?

yes, i really adored it but you probably have to be a "theory person" or at least theory-curious

anybody read his bk abt Tintin?

Big chunks of it; fun - dude wields his jargon with a deft and loving touch.

Olly Kendall ‏@OllyKendall Apr 22
Loughborough Junction host to second day of filming of BFI-funded feature, based on the Tom McCarthy novel, Remainder pic.twitter.com/7G0tw5JwTs

aw, they've even got the location right

new book satin island:

http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2014/06/23/tom-mccarthys-next-book-will-likely-resist-easy-classification/

colour me unexcited

Anyone read this: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n12/tom-mccarthy/ulysses-and-its-wake

I started..

yeah I got half a page in

down with tom mccarthy

does anyone have online access who might conceivably pastebin that or suchlike

http://pastebin.com/cfSuQfB7

http://i.imgur.com/A1Mnk5f.gif

article seemed a bit pointless (tho again I didn't make it all the way thru, that sums me up right now).

but I'm still looking forward to the book - first third of C was superb, tho I thought it fell apart badly after that. and he still feels likely to do something interesting, wants to use European models, go into untracked spaces. I'm p excited.

the essay is worth reading in full, there are some interesting paragraphs and some paragraphs that seem to have been written by k-punk circa 2006

picked this up again on your recommendation - thanks nakh - and because i found it still folded over where I'd left it in the mess of papers on my desk. worth doing. i'd stopped towards the end of the description of Ulysses, which felt like oldish ground - language, shit; you can see how engaged i was when i read it initially - reconfigured by McCarthy's interests: the black stain of ink and celluloid, the transformation through death of flesh (I mentioned this with regard to C in the first post: that for McCarthy 'substance holds the key to existence, not spirit, that what lives after death is not the soul, but the body").

but i was wondering 'how is this about what?'

if i'd read a bit further, i'd've seen him reclassify déclassé into the notion of a sort of mundane alkahest, describe the notion of speculative systems that require the deferral of expression, and a vision of the importance of understanding material reality as information. these are fine as riffs on Ulysses, but as or more interesting to me as the articulation of McCarthy's creative mechanics. I was going to mention in the post above, after 'European [sic] models' and 'untracked spaces', the way he'll apply non-adjacent sets of information to each other, which at a very simplified level can be described as taking Continental theoretical models and applying them to a Brixton road junction, or theories of transformation of information to pre-WW1 radio.

I've been about to take down again, as I was writing a long thing on Dartmoor, which I visited a few weeks ago and which was originally intended for the Real England thread, but has become too long, too not about Real England, heavily weighed down by a laborious groping towards half-understood Spinozan monism. but amidst that there was something about the practical expression of science and Dartmoor, which is undoubtedly a thing for that landscape (peculiarly underexpressed, but where expressed vividly expressed). And whenever i started thinking about it, I started thinking about C again, because the excellence of the first third or so is least in part the particular flavour of the application of a French theoretical scalpel to that Edwardian landscape of Kipling. The flavour is curious because in fact Kipling is not so far from the dishumanised abstraction of people into material information.

It's that hacking of literary register to find a single plane where close impossibilities forge a landscape. The alkahest is the code of information, variously understood and manipulated via fantasy into something that looks very like materially embodied reality.

It hardly needs saying that I love all this stuff.

I'm assuming from the cover that the new book is designed to put close registers of different types of literary work or exposition next to each other, but I must admit I'm slightly uneasy about the tone of this sort of venture, tho also pathologically drawn to the false essay, the fake testament, the synthetic historical artefact etc.

still, yes, EXCITED.

day off today, thank xt, wish i had more of these things as tend to plunge headfirst into all sorts of stuff i haven't got time for at the moment with the inevitable result that my efforts peter our into incoherence.

I always like Fizzles, online and in person, and admire and appreciate his posts greatly, but on this one occasion I didn't understand much of what he just said.

thanks pinefox, and I always see you as one of the great policers of literary sense (in a manner that I realise is infuriating to many, but which I find congenial and amusing I have to say)

so I went back and checked and really I can see that I just splurged some disconnected thoughts into a post - always seem to be rushing these days, and I was aware if I spent any more time typing I'd miss this train I've got to catch. I'll try and unpack into sensible language when I'm on the train.

right, let's try this again:

1st. thanks to nakh for getting me to finish off the essay which, as it turns out, I hadn't really engaged with the finer details of properly anyway.

2nd. my first impression had been of an essay that claimed to be talking about a specific problem - the problem of how and what to write after Ulysses - but which nevertheless fairly immediately went into a critical description of Ulysses, much of which I had heard before, in different forms. Loosely described - a dangerous enterprise with the pinefox, particular when it comes to Ulysses, but necessary for the sake of emphasis and brevity - loosely described, I say, it was an approach to Ulysses which emphasised its bodily aspects, particularly the baser types, and its totally transformative use of language as a central subject and mechanism. These approaches tend, if I'm remembering rightly, to emphasise how Ulysses stands in distinction to modernism as much as (if not more than) being a part of it. I appreciate that almost any critical evaluation could hardly avoid either of these, particularly the element of language. My synopsis was glib to indicate my original rather uninspired reading of McCarthy's essay.

3. Even in that first, somewhat descriptive part of the essay, McCarthy's approach contains elements of his aesthetic. He dwells somewhat on ink and celluloid stains - I can't remember in what context i am now on the train - which reminded me of C. He also talks about the way mundane materials are persistently transformed in terms of their excresence, and that there is a sense of morbidity about this - he quotes Joyce describing cheese as the corpse of milk. This reminded me of C as well, as I seemed to recollect that something I had thought distinctive about that novel was that it considered death to be a productively transforming process. I had a look at my first impressions, at the top of this thread, and was pleased to find a handy statement I had made in respect of this subject, that for McCarthy in C, "substance holds the key to existence, not spirit, that what lives after death is not the soul, but the body". I felt mildly pleased that my intuition from reading C was to a certain extent born out by McCarthy's essay. One of the notions that McCarthy uses to examine these processes is of things becoming déclassé - a term used by Bataille to mean here 'sinking in essential status', a de-grading of mundane materials.

4. I gave up reading because I couldn't really see what the whole point of McCarthy's essay was. I flippantly described this as 'wondering "how is this about what?"'. This was deliberately but unhelpfully cryptic.

5. On reading further, I discovered that soon after the point I'd given up (intending to return of course) McCarthy did start talking about the problem of writing after Ulysses. I'll add here that he doesn't do so in that fatuous 'all literature is impossible after this point' but by looking at what such a total approach to language (language as character, language as mechanism, language as motivating force) means for those, including Joyce, wishing to write after Ulysses.

6. He approaches this main theme by reconfiguring déclassé to mean something which is able to declassify concepts and things, in other words removing their boundaries, so that they are able to exist next to each other and communicate with each other (in my mind I may have used the simplifying phrase 'conceptual collage'). He likes this to hacking via a phrase from A Hacker's Manifesto:

to hack is

to produce the plane upon which different things may enter into relation

'to open grounds of possibility for the new creative event' he adds.

(Incidentally this bit caused me to raise my eyebrow somewhat.'lol McCarthy' was what *that* meant - why bring hacking into it? It's the sort of gimmick you allow a writer because it's typical of them, tho here there is perhaps a *little* too much rhetorical weight on this lightly deployed association with 'hacking'. nm.)

To reprise, by removing the categories of material, it enables the creative artist to have them jostle fruitfully next to each other. Here things get *very* confusing, because I start describing this declassification, which McCarthy also typically calls 'decoding', in terms of 'information'. I did this because I feel that is indeed McCarthy's universal solvent - the mechanic by which he achieves declassification. I use the unhelpful term 'alkahest' tho not before checking that, according to Philalethes, alkahest dissolves only composed material into their constituent, elemental parts, which was appropriate. That was from Wikipedia. Still, the term was unhelpful. I admit I wanted to use an alchemical term. They're fun.

7. There's a bit here about applying 'nonadjacent sets of information' to each other. This was *extremely* unhelpful. What I meant on a quite simple level is that he'll apply concepts to scenarios not traditionally associated with those concepts and that this is part of his significant appeal. That is to say, he'll take Continental philosophy, which outside Ballard has not traditionally been part of the aesthetic approach of UK writers, and apply it to typically English scenes (I'm talking about Remainder and C here. However, I also wanted to frame that in terms of that transformative decoding/declassification mechanism he talks about. This was partly because I had in mind his new book, Satin Island, which suggests on its cover that its going to play with the boundary categorisation of different literary forms. I feel this is a difficult thing to do because I feel the closer in nature the things are (here different types of writing, distinguished by register) the more difficult it is to play successfully with destroying their boundaries. It was also because I'm still trying to assess what I like about the early parts of C. I think part of its peculiar flavour comes from the fact that the two elements that are combined (a mid-to-late 20thC understanding of coding and information & pre-WW1 20thC writing, particularly Kipling) are deliberately not too far from one another in some ways. His recoding-to-combine with things that are actually already quite close is perhaps partly embodied by the quote from Timon about how gold solders 'close impossibilities' (another theme in theessay is how the 'economic register' is itself a system or plane in or on which things can be encoded so they uncharacterisitically combine). It's possible to understand the notion of 'close impossibilities' in broader terms - close theories are often incompatible because they may disagree over shared details, but wildly divergent or distant theories can be compatible.

8. I've been thinking about C quite a bit because its presentation of how quite organic or spiritual transitions as from life to death, can also be understood in terms of the encoding and decoding of information in a scientific sense, and this seemed to me to apply somewhat to something I was trying to put together about a visit to Dartmoor. Then I burble on a bit about why I was having difficulty completing it, somewhat disingenuously as the truth is I haven't had time to spend on it.

Hope that's a bit clearer?

Thanks for your efforts Fizzles.

I hope that you are enjoying this latest intellectual adventure.

I will read the TM essay and then I will have a better idea of what he says and whether I like it.

Your use of the recondite word 'alkahest' was one of the things that confused me most, in the first instance.

Fizzles - on your account I read TM's LRB article last night. I disliked it greatly. I could say more but perhaps that is more than enough.

ah. have you read any of his novels?

I'm a frayed knot.

Aren't you the same piece of string who tried to post here yesterday?

sure he's part of a number of threads tbh.

anyway, regardless, wd be interested to know what your objections are, pinefox. I'm assuming from the Ulysses pov? for me Brian it was chiefly interesting for the understanding it gives to McCarthy's writing.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2687649/Top-Gear-fresh-controversy-staging-crash-scene-woman-died-horrific-head-collision.html

that is exquisite

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/ScreenShot2014-07-29at214505_zps04adaea2.png

who's that. my mate james doesn't like it either

Haven't read this guy really but the little I've sampled gives me the impression that he is humorless.

What does that link have to do with?

remainder is pretty good and fairly humorful

xpost i mainly posted it out of amusement the image of a person rage-finishing a book where they were 0/10ing on every page - bit like me with Capital i guess, and also partly because of the discrepancy between my reaction and theirs, tho that's wrong-headed I think - it's v much a 0/10 book.

Humour? Yeah, I don't think he's a funny writer - I think there's a wry humour at how much he pushes the concept in Remainder. Deadpan yes, but with no punchlines that's just tone.

His writing in C, even in the good bits, was positively cackhanded at times, in terms of the narrator/character/situation triangle, which through fairly miniscule tweaks of dramatic irony and minor dislocations tends to produce humour.

Of the small handful of modern writers I read, I only really see Helen deWitt as capable of a line that makes you laugh. David Mitchell isn't funny, tho there's an occasional straining that way, to his detriment.

Lorrie Moore?

Ken Dodd?

I'm glad to hear that TM is bad, Fizzles.
'rage-finishing' a book you hate would be like my experience with Gravity's Rainbow.

fizzles, what did you make of lightning rods

loved it. great control of ironic tone and treatment. ease of execution conceals the savagery.

the last samurai had a more or less conventional plot structure, with very strong innovative content (language, learning). with LR that innovative content becomes the structure. using non literary models like statistics as the scaffold for her writing makes it feel fresh (yes, new, but also fresh in the sense of impertinent).

her new work looks like it's going to have Wordpress stats as a fairly central narrative engine, which is why I'm belabouring this point perhaps more than a single novel gives reason to. her knowledge of programming and maths means these can be used not metaphorically but as mechanisms within the writing.

I think these areas are important, to bald about it; new landscapes that should be artistically explored, partly for aesthetic reasons (freshness), partly because they are areas that are underattended to in literature. I don't see anyone else better equipped to work in them than HdW.

take Pynchon's Bleeding Edge - that dealt with coding and the early days of websites and the first dotcom boom. by and large this tech is used metaphorically. the deep net and dark web are visualised spatially - old netherworld and underworld tropes. this space represents a portal to Pynchon-like aesthetic possibilities but the laws that govern them are not the actual laws that govern them, but metaphorical laws, or laws of aesthetics.

HdW uses the laws of what she's studying to give her books their content and shape. they are not metaphorically intended, tho she gets a lot of freedom to do so if she wants, because that's not their sole use.

this isn't to say she isn't literary - it takes an enormous amount of literary skill to do this I think. lightning rods was a high wire act with tone that's almost swiftian. it's not exactly - the lacerations are less obviously savage, but the constant and inventive exploitation of the gap between what's said and what's meant, and the tying of nooses from the rope of your opponents language, is the same.

she's the contemporary writer I'm most excited about.

TMcC is dangerously close in some ways - dangerous in the sense when you learn a foreign language some English looking words are dangerous - he can look the same but the fundamentals are different. so he'll use the recursive mechanism in remainder as a narrative tool, not as a metaphor, but it is the theoretical or philosophical notion he's interested in exploring - and the humour in the practical application of theory (so yeah I guess there is humour there really). more meaningfully perhaps, he's interested in the detailed mechanisms of radio or the structures of insects in C, but as aesthetic bric-a-brac, rather than, say, as Kipling used the Kodak camera, microscope, lighthouse or steam engine - interested in how their mechanisms could affect the form of what he was trying to do, how they shape the emotional content.

written this on the tube, so am expecting a bunch of wtf are u on about fizz - if that's the case I'll try a more textually based treatment of the above when I get home and have a drink in my hand

I am (by total chance) starting on Lightning Rods next week so I'll read with some of your thinking in mind. Really appreciate your thoughts on it.

wondering, now, if i can be said to have massively misread lightning rods. i thought it made a lot of problematic assumptions in a hand-wavey sort of way (like, the reader is probably too smart to buy the account of male vs female sexual motivation contained therein, but the reader will assume the author is also too smart to do same, so it doesn't matter) which kind of curdled it as satire for me

i'll pick it up again thomp. iirc it's about how an absurd, morally repugnant idea that is able to successfully develop, transforming the workplace of a nation, and this transformation (in terms of literary credibility) is managed several ways:

1) The use of statistics as a 'morally neutral' engine of change in society today.
2) The particular keenness in offices for this sort of evaluative mechanism. It's a cross between notions of managerial competency and also what I saw described elsewhere as 'the politics of what works'.
3) The narrative tone being of an innocent on an exciting voyage of discovery - learning the ways of business, accumulating money. It's a seductive tone for a reader.

It feels plausible as an example of how ideas are spread through these mechanisms and tones via the office, still heavily male places.

I realise I'm stating the bleeding obvious here, but I'm not sure there's anything too handwavy here, tho obviously we may approach these things differently. brb got an efficiency meeting...

(xp)
one of my favourite books of recent years too – Fizzles otm – imo the way it holds its tone (& something more than fascination, but not quite enchantment, w/ the language of self-improvement/management) and the ice in the way it works through its premise doesn't really let it settle into an easy satirical aboutness. I think… it might start in a place where reader & dewitt are in satire-complicity, but it pushes on past that. I should reread it though. It's been a while.

it might start in a place where reader & dewitt are in satire-complicity, but it pushes on past that. I should reread it though

Yes this exactly. Enchantment is a great word to use.

right - & 'seductive' seems right to me as well – so that you're tempted by 'this is turning out ok & he means well & he's offering a quality service'

I just don't know if I buy this, guys

so what you're claiming is seductive is, e.g., when in the penultimate section the protagonist has competitors who bring in much of the freight attached to sex work that, by the terms of the fictional universe as defined by the shape of the narrative thus far, the protag. has avoided, the reader is to think "well, at least my guy is better than those guys", and then catch themself thinking that and think no, wait, my guy is also morally repulsive?

because I just don't think this works -- by the terms of the fictional u. as defined by the shape of the n. , the protagonist just kind of _is_ morally superior, because in the f. u. as d. by the s. of the n., there just aren't real negative consequences that wd let us argue otherwise

So import! The f u is is insufficient and knows it. You must change yr life etc.

that was too brief – drunk, phone-posting on train
Still drunk posting before sleep but
imo it does work– re the f. u. as d. by the s. of the n, really, there's our world pressing in on it so the seduction/repulsion means something (rambling but maybe it's a mimicking too-close f u that doesn't let you get a read exactly on how it sits in relation to ours?)
actually I am best to come back to this tomorrow but in the meantime straight q – what contemporary satires (and I'm not 100% using satire for lightning rods tbh) work, do you think, or get out of the complicity trap?

there is this book by john lanchester, you may have heard of it

i have no idea actually; I can't think of anything ive read from the past decade that I wd call satire and I just don't know if I believe it's a thing

it's a thing, but I can't think of any formal satire that's been written recently.

eyebrows may be raised at this, but I think probably Brass Eye has come closest.

wd definitely reiterate woof's point about LR not really being a 'satire' but in terms of understanding the 'assumptions'.

For satire where fu is d by s of n, there's a necessary u(fu is d by s of n) interpretative function. Satire in it one of its formal versions is the sum of everything it reviles and does not explicitly contain its critique (that would not be aesthetically of formally approrpriate).

This approach can produce some uncertainty about stuff like *that Lanchester novel*!

wd definitely reiterate woof's point about LR not really being a 'satire' but in terms of understanding the 'assumptions' *it's useful* that should have been.

the rest of it makes perfect sense. who doesn't enjoy trying to reduce aesthetics to equations? come on.

tho I realise now the q of n in satire is complicated, another area where HdW differs from formal satire. (LR narrative is a reverie of folly.)

(and "formal satire" because there's a lot of stuff that has elements of satire or which can be termed satirical which differs from the Satire that sits with Tragedy and Comedy, like Thersites next to Agamemmnon and Odysseus. It has aesthetic characteristics by which it can be identified and which hobble it aesthetically - very static, episodic narrative structure, inherently conservative, full of horrible things, self destructive, intolerant, formally antagonistic to change/mutability.)

tom mccarthy is not "funny" but he is not "humorless" either

^

idk: I feel like 'c' is getting there

or like 'wit' might be a concept worth applying and/or reviving

p funny writing a 33⅓ about 'history repeating' by the propellerheads tbf

2. The Fall - Live at the Witch Trials
The Fall come as much from a literary tradition that goes back to the text-sampling experiments of Eliot and Pound as they do from a strict musical one. This album has “Repetition” on it - a track very close to my heart.

Tom, Tom, Tom - Repetition is *not* on LATWT - it's a b side to Bingo Masters Break-Out - and you'd probably be better off with Hotel Bloedel off Perverted by Language imho.

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/596

gross. also I thought for a second you were addressing me; I was confused.

ah yes. I've wondered about "wit" before, whether it has validity as an identifiable thing in contemporary lit and if it does whether it's desirable.

used these days it has an almost contemptuous sound to it - "yes, very witty"/clever but not funny - which is not far enough from the 18th C English sense to return to that.

wit as separate from being funny also brings forth unwelcome visions of the unfunny - David Mitchell (com) & Stephen Fry - doing "audiences with" - not good enough at any specific part of what they do to be worthwhile for that alone, so indulging in a mélange of geniality for which people are expected to fork out.

isn't funny meant to be specifically the specific thing that david mitchell does

man i can't get over how embarrassing that dusted mag thing is

it's not great is it.

i kind of want to poll which is the worst

6. Paul Celan - Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory)
All Celan's poetry is about transmission and violence and the virtual impossibility of the speech act itself after something as ineffable as the Holocaust, which he himself survived. This collection contains “Todesfuge” (Deathfugue), a poem so packed with violence that its surface cracks and erupts as the lines break down, reprise themselves, repeat again, like a stuck record. It was read recently in the German Reichstag, a conciliatory symbolic gesture that didn't go far enough by half: they should have blared it out over loudspeakers as the building burnt to the ground - again.

ineffable huh

well i mean personally i wouldn't eff with it

TS: DJ Q vs The Holocaust.

what is that celan thing about why is it

His list does not include much music.
Maybe it wasn't supposed to be a list of music?
I'm not sure.

I've a sneaking suspicion he made the best of a bad job and knows a lot more about lit and specific areas of lit - there is absolutely nothing wrong with that from a creative pov of course, but you can expose yourself a bit. the unsophisticated glibness is less easy to explain bit again I don't think this matters from a creative standpoint.

fwiw as if the above defensiveness hadn't said it already I'm still a fan and am v much looking fwd to the new book.

suggestion: if he doesn't know much about music he shouldn't say things like 'this is the best album ever' and 'the Shakespeare of rock & roll' -- he should just say 'I don't know that much about music, but I do like this one! It sounds nice to me and I find this thing quite interesting about it'.

That's pretty much what I would do with painting, sculpture, possibly even drama.

84 pages into C and enjoying it (and McCarthy's brilliant literary sadism) very well - it's heating up all right

However, there are not one but TWO entomological fuckups inside the first 30 pages that even an amateur nature-lover like myself might find offputting. First of all, I present the following extract:

Serge watches it for a while, then takes the phial and presses it down across the insect's body, using its rim to slice apart the bridge where thorax meets abdomen. The wasp's legs continue their treading and its mandible its drawing even after they're no longer joined.

Thomas, Thomas. If you slice an insect's abdomen from its thorax, you do not separate head from legs, as legs are affixed to thorax rather than abdomen. Were you not paying attention in Year 7 Biology?

And then there's this hilariously redundant, almost Lanchesterian tic:

The moths are females of the phylum Arthropoda: Bombyx mori.

This is self-evidently cretinous, but I shall explain nonetheless: every single poxy moth, every insect, every crustacean and every arachnid on this Earth is in the phylum Arthropoda. I thank you for your time.

Still a cracking read, like.

lj do you have general entomology expertise bc i have a lot of bug-related questions

let's make like butterflies and wing it: the entomology thread

phylum is the sort of darkly resonant word more authors should use, even speciously

like the young Pynchon with 'tendrils'

have finished parts 1 and 2 of C now - it's a good book but I think it might overegg the world-as-connections-fusing-to-an-organic-mechanical-system thing a bit, although parts of this process are fairly breathtaking

more worryingly, both parts have ended really tritely. think McCarthy benefits from brevity, being only able to end it all once, like Remainder, which so far is a superior work with a wonderful closing arc. the second part of C built to numerous self-as-nodal-point epiphanies and then kept going, the effect diminishing, until a saved-by-the-bell finale that felt like an anticlimax. i'm sure this was the author's design, but it wasn't the right sort of anticlimax - it was too decisive, too certain, on the end of a sequence that felt somewhat improvisational and langorous

ending part 1 with that terribly-handled fist-in-mouth sex scene also ruined what had been possibly the best passage of the book, the extended chapter about the spa

not sure. maybe parts 3 and 4 will turn it around

c is very good, if minor, it's not close to remainder

his first novel is juvenilia

don't get me wrong I'm reading it hungrily & it rewards. once more the best thing about McCarthy is his nasty streak, his pure & sly sadism towards sentiment, his constant subversion of the emotional

or the incorporation of the emotional within the context of large & uncaring engines which operate independently of it & demand anschluss at best, obliteration at worst. he's dealing with terrifying forces & showing how easy it is to side with them

men in space > c, i reckon

yeah i quite liked men in space

glad i continued with 'c' - the end of part 3 is the first sustained bravura sequence - a sort of demolition job on pynchon's dalliances with the paranormal, sachsa & so forth - a callous yet perfectly logical action wrought upon the ephemeral by the technological. was gripped.

mccarthy's treatment of women is absolutely lousy & makes gravity's rainbow look like a feminist manifesto

on balance, i'll finish it

10 pages from the end of C and sincerely disliking it, its protagonist's assured & priapic nihilism (as opposed to the fascinated mania of Remainder's narrator) - this is an embarrassment. When Slothrop fucked almost every woman he came across, it was part of his - our - tragedy; when Serge does it, it's empty, cheap, set up merely to make a muddled point about the transience & illusory nature of *connection*, and worst of all it is climactic not in an erotic sense but as part of the narrative - it adds some kind of rhetorical punch to a list of cute observations about occluded realities.

Also, his writing isn't very good here.

I'll finish it, but I'm starting to think that Remainder was a fluke. Not just that, though - it was more disciplined, focused - and its epiphanies were not logistical but philosophical - it extrapolated from the logistical far more convincingly than this.

if u want to get mccarthy dont read it via pynchon

I know but here there are parallels; Remainder is his own thing

obviously it is all the fiction of bastard expedience trumping romanticism but done so much more badly here

the parallels that exist are mostly just the war setting and certain thematic recurrences, his acknowledged formal precursors and the subjects of his most demonstrable fanboy adulation were mostly writing in french in the middle of the last century

even if one were to use that sort of 'when x does this' 'when y does this' compare&contrast exercise in reference to an anxiety of influence relationship as pronounced as say beethoven/brahms it isn't clear that it would serve any useful analytic purpose other than collapsing the predecessor into some sort of inadvertent prototype

fair enough

I am simply not sure I like the rhythms of C very much, the telegraphed & studied anticlimax of each movement, the mass of observations that are somehow meant to convey gravity in their accretive juxtaposition but which don't rly cohere

also he's going for Autechrean synaesthesia at points and yet his word choices betray this

i do not think that is accurate

Tom-McCarthty-Emprers-New-Clothes-Confield-Slothrop-Tryhard-Synaesthetic-Sorry-This-Is-Just-How-Feel.html

'the emptiness of space as space surrounds and envelops us'

I'll finish it, but I'm starting to think that Remainder was a fluke.

don't think this is the right way of putting it, it's a novel delivering a single idea, not something to be repeated - that would be like Perec going, right I've done 'e', now to do 'a'.

i started writing about C, but had a quick look at the thread and realised that there are good posts about it from woof, c#major and me inter alia, so no need to restate.

Margaret Atwood, THE EDIBLE WOMAN

is what I am reading. I posted this fact to the wrong thread.

I would rather read her than TMC though.

ok the end is fun & well-written. p sure i can & have done better when it comes to numinous psychedelic epiphanies tho :P

that's some beast talk tbf

mccarthy's not rly at home turning up the purple jets tho, way more effective when understated, sardonic, removed

new one coming out - http://www.vulture.com/2015/02/tom-mccarthy-goes-to-ted.html

the readable avantgarde

Whatever you make of Tom McCarthy’s mind-bending metafictions, the author one critic anointed “a young and British Thomas Pynchon”

imago doesn't seem to think so and his judgement on these matters is final.

new one sounds promising tbf

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/tom-mccarthy/writing-machines

We didn't discuss this ^ did we?

Only read parts of this. I think its that name dropping of Barthes, Marx, Derrida, 'ghost' etc. that is just so off-putting. Maybe someone should commission a piece from him with contraints (Ouliapian yeah). I think he starts off by saying: the 19th century realists wrote that stuff but also wrote things that were weird (Bouvard et Pécuchet) and the middlebrow idiots writing today have ignored this, and I want to rescue these things.

The real, McCarthy seems to be saying, is easy - what about its mechanics, for this must weigh upon the fibre of every line of the writing? So it leads to:

The same real – the Holocaust in particular – impinges on all of Beckett’s work, whose unnameables and catastrophes convey the horror and unspeakability of this event to which they never refer far more profoundly than the directly representational writing of, say, Primo Levi.

idk where to go, its like that dusted interview where thomp quote the bit on Celan. I don't think you can reduce Beckett like this and paste 'representational' on Levi when his writing was actually powerful to me (and I'm talking about The Periodic Table here). I haven't read either in a long time.

I suppose I am not sure about this wacky races set-up: team modernism, team realism, or lets make 'em up: the 'absence' team, the merely 'hidden' team. Just a system where all you end up is Joyce, Burroughs, Bataile, Trocchi. Maybe the LRB audience need to get acquainted with Trocchi..

that's otm, i think. He's got a autopilot or by-numbers mode that's a bit frustrating to me - & you know + name the co-ordinates – Joyce, Beckett, Bataille, Blanchot, Burroughs, some theory. The tastes coincide quite closely with my own, and I think he can go up a gear or two when he focuses a bit (I enjoyed the Joyce article before this), but when he's just doing this it's v flat, slightly mechanical and actually seems stuck fighting an old war - the spirited anti-realism, the contra-Franzen push, is quite early noughties – I think we're in a diff space atm. (He's been using that real/fake rose thing from Ada for a long time.)

(I cannot resist even though it is unfair: racoon tanuki of modernism.)

I'll buy and read the new one definitely – I did not like that article but I am still basically on his side. (even though his fixedness about sides is a problem in the article)

13. places and spaces thats where the chase is (3, 8)

Maybe someone should commission a piece from him with contraints

no dropping names that start with b, c or d.

no dropping names that start with a vowel or consonant

lrb article got a brief mention here:'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

Pitting Beckett against Levi in that fashion just seems rong: downplaying Levi as some kind of naive realist (!) makes one wonder exactly who is being naive, and it appears to arise from the mix and match /contrast and compare template that has given us such gems as the legendary NY Times Arts and Leisure article, "The Byrds and Marvin Gaye, Two Artists With Recent Box Sets, So Different In Some Ways, And Yet So Alike In Others."

I'll buy and read the new one definitely

How can you have confidence that it could be any good after reading some of these articles?

Thought I'd at least give Remainder a go one day. I'll keep telling myself its from the early days.

I'm not confident, but Remainder and bits of C are great, which is enough for me. I can forgive some 2nd gear journalism

^

still v interested in what he's doing.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/07/tom-mccarthy-death-writing-james-joyce-working-google

While “official” fiction has retreated into comforting nostalgia about kings and queens, or supposed tales of the contemporary rendered in an equally nostalgic mode of unexamined realism, it is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones.

Has he done a day's work in his life in these companies?

wiki says no:

He lived in Prague where he worked as a nude model and in an American bar, Berlin where he worked in an Irish pub, and Amsterdam where he worked in a restaurant kitchen and reviewed books for the local edition of Time Out magazine.

What have these groups of people come up with? You can imagine that "funky architectural companies" have come up with er, funky architecture. All he goes on about is writers - Kafka, Beckett, Mallarme, Joyce - and anthropology (they sound like good writers on a sentence by sentence level).

Anyway from a skim I quite liked parts of this, been meaning to read Tristes Tropiques for a long time.

if that's a wolf hall burn, he's doing himself a disservice. the whole paragraph is n-particularly-agl.

Because he misspelled "Mantel"?

I still find his hectoring a little offputting, sorry.

Yes of course it was an attack on Mantel.

I wonder what is operating in a lot of these pieces. I think most writing with a highly self-conscious experimental bent like his has very narrow concerns but then you read some of this stuff and he is really fighting against that.

He is sketching a post office fiction with that para, just coming in as a temp and test it out.

I'll still defend his fiction (and some of the non-fiction writing), but that is a particularly stupid article. I loathe the 'if genius x were around today they would be neuromancer jazz hands y' formula.

Couple of clay-footed people behind me in the Blake exhibition the other day said with great authority, 'Of course, if Blake was around today he'd be a computer programme.'

no he really fucking wouldn't. i'm going to hazard that his attitude to material enslavement of promethean fires would probably extend to computer programming. (this statement i expect as much the result of an ignorance of computer programming as somehow 'visionary' or 'mystical' as of Blake).

TM seems to be hovering slightly between articulately configuring immaterial concepts (such as 'money' as a concept) as places of communication between material form and artistic forms, and rather plain-man observations about The Future Now.

Still looking forward to Satin Island. Terrible reviews.

Blake reborn, depressed about his etsy shop's sales

Can't see Blake coding, it's clearly Urizen's work.

struggling to get through that McCarthy article, will finish it on the commute.

Can't see Blake coding, it's clearly Urizen's work.

struggling to get through that McCarthy article, will finish it on the commute.

exactly. and obv "computer programmer" rather than "programme" in my post.

i wonder if mb they were after something like, a comparison of his authority as printmaker-distributor of his own work, it seems to have possibilities. blake as michael brough. rather than in a corporate environment.

idk, it seems a bit redundant - he could still just be a printmaker-distributor of his own work. There are various ways I could picture him online, but it's hard to see him apart from material craft - the abstractions of code just don't fit well him imo.

god, now i'm thinking he could be a modder. or creating his system through machinima.

this book is crap.

It may well be, but this formulation of yours

if genius x were around today they would be neuromancer jazz hands y'

:)

thomp's brough comparison is quite nice - brough as frame-breaker. but yeah you don't quite get the expression of labour and energy of an entire cosmic system being created in the fashion of a demiurge, unless thats in his next game.

brough/mccarthy has some genuine mileage - particularly Corrypt - with brough coming out some way ahead if Satin Island is anything to go by.

only a third thru but yeah this is intellectually listless at best. C-

See what you did there

C++

yeah its actually more like a D but felt the joke was *just* worth making.

in the darkness of his lair a wizard schemes

Just finished Remainder and thought it was good

But also seemed like the kind of book somebody who was really into Inception would like

Reviews I've seen for this so far have tended to be about how much does the reviewer like the French theory they were exposed to when they went to uni not about the book.

the french theory is frankly token here. it's *really* conventional and fails badly on that conventional level.

:-/ i haven't read it yet but my gf started and abandoned it already

sometimes writers are best when they're not allowed to indulge themselves

Bring back socialist realism.

I've been thinking and I think Remainder is just like a more literary version of Fight Club

Ok bye

fight club meets synecdoche new york on BEER

which book are you guys talking about? i just bought "c"

this'll be a bit incoherent cos i've been piecing it together in a rush at work:

so, this book was very bad and I almost threw it down in irritation a couple of times. feel analysis is dignifying it with too much attention (yes I feel jilted). I'm p certain much of it is a book about not being able to write a book, and the book that it's about not being able to write is this book.

its a continuation of one of aesthetic areas of the end of C - that there's a black substance that underlies all existence. this presumably a form of the chain of being theory, with a protean black corruption underlying all (Thomas Vaughan - "beneath all degrees of sense there is a certain horrible, inexpressible darkness. The magicians call it tenebrae activae"). In C, where one of the main notions is that which lasts of us after death is the physical, or rather what we call 'spiritual' is in fact our physical mode, this black substance represents the medium through which things are translated into other things.

The subsequent essays of varying quality have suggested that he sees this base medium as the place where a base code is reconfigured.

Satin Island takes that and converts it in numerous ways rendered meaningless through their variety - it's the shapeless electronic 'plasma' in which images and communications form on computer screens, it's cancer, it's rubber, it's the primal element of the world that accumulates over time, and it is - the main point in the book this - oil, insidiously spilling into the ocean, its polymers the base for plastics. In other words this black stuff is the base material manifestation of humankind. The point is made that it doesn't mix with water, and thus represents material differentiation - that which is created into the world. there's perhaps a ballardian sense in which it is transformative in a topopgraphical and psychological way, but frankly i've already given far too much definition to things that are only hazily tossed out and are more or less meaningless unless the book is able to make them so, which it isn't.

Hazily tossed out? That in itself lacks clarity: that haziness is a result of poor narrative voice, a strong whiff of wikipedia, an inability to convert detail of subject matter into metaphor that - why? he doesn't know enough about the detail? In fact if one thing characterises this book it's that TMcC doesn't know what he's writing about.

The narrative voice: He's an unreliable narrator ('Call me U' -_-) with the cop-out author-proxy job of a 'corporate ethnologist'. I mean, corporate ethnologist is a job, I know a couple, but he doesn't really bother with what they actually do, apart from in one paragraph, which looks like a cut and paste from an email from someone he asked. So I'm just assuming he felt this 'job' allowed him to be a sort of embedded author, as journalists are embedded in military units, with something of the same relationship - his hazy asseverations about offices and the world of work and corporate life are well meant, but will cause for anyone. The voice is so incompetent that you assume it's an unreliable narrator, but there's no double strand of irony to play the voice off against. It just reads like a more purposeless version of TMcC's essay writing.

The narrator is deliberately incurious and vague on detail. Vagueness seems to be one of the 'rules' that the novel sets itself, but of course it's not a rule because there's no constraint, it allows for an inartistic flatulence. Obviously TMcC's books have always been characterised by an affectless approach to the world, with only an attenuated sense of perceptual association of cause and effect. With the background perceptual noise tuned up, conceptual processing is dialed down. Mathematical rules and physical laws tend to provide ontological structure. It's part, I'm assuming, of creating a zone of code reconfiguration.

But Remainder had an obsessive narrator - that was the *point*. C, at least in its good parts, used unusual elements next to each other - the imaginative landscape was odd, and the play between the 'real' world, and the mythological and scientific elemental, through prose that loosened its concern with the 'ineluctable reality of the visual,' was strange and interesting. I mean, he's always been a bit of an awkward writer - part of the point of Remainder again, and the lumpiness in 'C' worked to a degree.

Here the prose wobbles in undifferentiated fashion between the unexamined cliche ('perenially attractive staff who manned the reception desk'), old-style literary word order (for the narrator and his fluting rhetoricisms), and his aspergersy unmetred modernism (not strictly unmetred of course - but flat, sentences of equal length - instruction manual style). Again, the lack of ironic counterpoint and lack of differentiation means that 'perenially attractive staff' in no way appears to be intended comically.

Again, i know his method tends to the attenuated, but there are what I feel safe in saying some plain Lanchesterisms here, unexcused by legitimate method:

That Friday, when I went up to see him, he greeted me, without removing his gaze from the hand-held into which he was typing a message, with a question.

The book roams across its chosen areas without differentiation - extending the attenuation of material reality in previous books to subject matter - as if this is the same as the sort of associational enlightenment that you might get in yer Claude Magrises or William Sebalds of the world. It's not. It looks haphazard and silly, and ill-informed. He perceives a world of figures here but not the form of what he should attend.

In this light, his metaphor is worth examining briefly - analysis of the technological and corporate environmental and mental spaces quickly slips into romantic/gothic style metaphors - oriental cities, crumbled towers. I was hoping one of Tom McCarthy's general aims as a writer was to create an aesthetic space that undermined and attacked this sort of writing - generating a new metaphorical landscape. this is painfully conventional - dragging the curious and modern (marketing, coporatism, a flattening of the difference between 'real' world and a 'virtual' world) into old lit manners and images.

There's a classic Martin Amis style diffusion of detail in a metaphor (Amis hangs fairly heavily over this book). To give an example, where he is describing the air conditioning system:

Other, vaguer voices hovered in the general noise - or if not voices, at least patterns, with their ridges and their troughs, their repetition frequencies, their cadences and codas.

It's the way the specific detail (the air-conditioning noises) is transformed into the generically musical rather than the specifically musical. Something of the subject needs to inform the metaphor drawn from it. Here the words are used only to balance sentence sound. They are not precise. Working the other way, making music which takes the specific noises of industry and internal plumbing, produces something exotic - the Stockhausen sense of deriving music from communication wavelengths. TMcC produces something generic.

The central vehicle of anthropology is delivered almost exclusively through meditations on Claude LS and cargo cults. (The whole book feels out of date in fact - the narrator has a big pinboard full of notes. Has he not got Ever-note on his hand-held?) He has no idea how anthropology and ethnology is used commercially (apart from a brief, more or less accurate section, presumably given to him by someone who does the job). You're much much better off going to Tom Ewing's Blackbeard Blog if you want to get a sense of modern marketing. In fact the book generally had the curious effect of making every single cultural artefact encountered since seem like it was doing a better version of what TMcC was trying to do. Even the most nugatory of tweets seemed to carry a symbolic effect greater than Satin Island's undernourished explanations.

There's a 'Project' that he's working on - it's kept symbolic and abstract, so this is the post-industrial device of the 'corporation' as a form of secular governing system, in a loose-ish tradition I have in my head that includes Melville's Barlteby, Kafka, PKD.

So some of this book is about the processes of corporations and offices, and the basic problem here, as elsewhere in the book, is that TMc doesn't seem to have a clue what goes on. He has no idea about the aesthetic of offices for a start. I think the 'how' of things are achieved in the modern world - the project delivery mechanisms, the trackers and methodologies - are fascinating. It's the bureaucratic form of a demi-urge - how do we bring things bigger than us into being? Tom McCarthy seems interested in this but without any of the detail that makes it interesting.

Allow him *all* his latitudes. Say, 'Ok, this is a book about how our processing runs out of things to input, and therefore its mode is that of a lenten intellect. It is a book about how there is no code in the objects we process, only in their disintegration and reintegration into black plasma, which in fact contains the true code. Therefore this book is also about the inability to find truth in our human impedimenta. It's about a lazy mind unable to find meaning. It does its job.' Say you allow him all that, there's still the problem that the proportions of content (oil, dying parachutists, cancer, anthropology) are all out of whack. It's like a conventional domestic object so badly made that it can't stay upright.

I read some Muriel Spark after (Mandelbaum Gate, and it was like being one of those house cats that goes outside for the first time.

http://cdn77.sadanduseless.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/cat-reaction14.jpg

In fact fairly early on there's a sentence that pretty much sums up much of what Satin Island is trying to do:

All it meant was that her habits of mind were inadquate to cope with the whole of her experience, and thus Barbara Vaughan was in a state of conflict, like practically everyone else, in some mode or another.

short version. it's not v well written. i preferred pattern recognition.

booming post, fizzles.

cheers etc. oh and TMcC here:

But it all works its way back into the work. Satin Island is, to some extent, a book about a restless struggle with the impossibility of writing the Book.

think I'd prefer this book rather than the Book tbf.

a+ cat photo deployment, laughed out loud

I'm glad I have Fizzles to explain to me why John Lanchester and Tom McCarthy are so bad.

These are serious, intelligent, considered judgements I can rely on when I hear other people carelessly talking them up.

thanks pf, tho i have to say my review was more disappointment that it didn't live up to expectations set by his other fiction.

and apologies - quickly skimming my hastily put together screed i see that some of the sentences don't.

did you ever get on with magris

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWDc22Cobwo

yeah i like magris - i have a problem with the diffuseness that associational writing brings to the categories of the world. Ontology - quite easily defined as 'what is there' - becomes 'what my investigations reveal'. It's the inverse of 'nothing will bring nothing' - 'everything will give evereything'. it feels like writers makes it too easy sometimes. if you want to do that everything thing, do finnegans wake.

lol thats meaningless pissed shit.

http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19940713-0

Mark McGurl with some interesting observations on on TMcC here - http://www.publicbooks.org/fiction/the-novels-forking-path

not entirely with all that article - is "experimental fiction that works" rare? looks suspiciously like they're asking experimental fiction to work according to non-experimental standards.

but he's right about a lot of satin island. this is an appalling piece of writing:

We see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen. When the shapeless plasma takes on form and resolution, like a fish approaching us through murky waters or an image looming into view from noxious liquid in a darkroom, when it begins to coalesce into a figure that’s discernible, if ciphered, we can say: This is it, stirring, looming, even if it isn’t really, if it’s all just ink-blots.

the overused Pauline quote, the subsequent inability to counterpoint the biblical cadences, the quick rendering of technological modernity into hackneyed "fish coming out of dark waters" and "ink blots" all add up to a seriously uninspired, underworked example of satin island's style and content.

oh and a+ find nakh.

The description of a Sebald/Cole personalized and lyricized encounter with theory resonated for me, particularly in recent TMcC essays. I think you're spot on that experimental fiction that 'works' is a conveniently moving target in the essay.

Remainder adaptation is pretty good then

not quite better than the real thing ever was but not far off

Have this. Might start it tonight.

https://www.nyrb.com/products/typewriters-bombs-jellyfish?variant=29933062407

things that make u go hmm. be interested to hear how you find it, gom.

At least a couple of his LRB essays, which will be in this book, are dreadful.

I'm pretty convinced Remainder was a happy accident, given how abysmal C was

Also, did anyone else see the Remainder film?

no, i didn't really feel v compelled to tbh.

by the way pinefox there's a post upthread where you say you weren't able to understand a post i'd made. i read the post again and literally i did not have the first clue what the hell i was on about. couldn't make head nor tail of it. i found this reassuring.

Thank you Fizzles! Glad we agree :D

"It's that hacking of literary register to find a single plane where close impossibilities forge a landscape. The alkahest is the code of information, variously understood and manipulated via fantasy into something that looks very like materially embodied reality."

!! :P

i think i know what i'm on about there, but it's much easier to say differently. in both C and Satin Island (badly, boringly), he updates the old notion of a sort of black and formless crudely sentient and primal darkness. This is what our organic forms descend into on death (and it is a physical or material condition). For McCarthy it has the capacity to preserve information/data in it as well, for reconfiguring material reality again. It is also oil and oil derivatives like plastics, and celluloid etc.

Out of this you can create things, including alternate realities. 'Hacking of the literary register' was a bad way of saying, these can be... nope, gone again. Broadly though, because it's so protean you can create worlds from things that have no real connections. It implies at base an inherent fungibility.

Now of course none of this makes him 'good' or 'bad' particularly (he is both - Remainder and parts of C are good, Satin Island is very bad, and his essays are extremely variable). But it does seem to be his central subject matter.

There. You are going to tell me that it doesn't make sense again, I know it. Still, I think it's right. This isn't about simulation, in this case, tho that is clearly his other obsession and probably linked somewhere. It's been a while since I've read any of his stuff.

I'm sure it makes sense to you, Fizzles! :D

For me, I think it's either beyond me or perhaps the message is so simple ('writing can imagine alternate realities' or something) that we already know it. Probably it's just beyond me.

SO I ended up picking up his latest, The Making of Incarnation, despite being embarrassed by his most recent piece in the LRB, and thinking Satin Island was crap.

uneven doesn't cover it. so, more or less at random - I'm only two chapters in:

the 'prolegomena' (yes, ok, just) is fine, and more than fine in bits. it's about the Versuchsanstal für Wasserbau und Schiffbau (Research Institute for Hydraulic Engineering and Shipbuilding), which it turns out does actually exist:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/Berlin-tiergarten_vws_20050404_291.jpg/1920px-Berlin-tiergarten_vws_20050404_291.jpg

the fact of its actual existence means that what is really just documentary reporting is rendered into Tom McCarthy's particular prose diction and... well, i think it makes that diction look a bit silly. Take the very first sentence of the book:

From the S-Bahn, through shuttling latticework of tree branch and bridge truss, you glimpse it just below Tiergarten as you travel east-to-west, or west-to-east: a five-storey blue hulk.

Why not 'through *a* shuttling latticework of tree *branches* and bridge *trusses*'? Well presumably because McCarthy is trying to establish a form of poetic cadence across both reportage and the content that won't fit in there so well. Only I'm really not sure this is the *right* cadence for what he's trying to do. It feels underexamined and inherited from other forms of 'literariness'.

This friction is there through most of this first section, but then there is the first of a couple of moments so far where you feel what he's doing thicken and intensify - in this case how the vectors of water affect the physical model of oil rigs and boats and cities in the hydraulic tank: 'Computer modelling won't show you everything. Sometimes you have to actually *do* it, make a little world, get down amidst dumb objects and their messiness.' What is notable about these sections is that the force literary cadence is far less present and noticeable.

Remainder worked very well because the central character's desire to recreate a simulated world was entirely cognate with the writer's task - the authorial/narrative voice was very much unified with the actions and thoughts of this character v much on an obsessive part of the spectrum. that's not the case here.

anyway, prolegomena, C+: hasn't caused me to throw the book down, colour me mildly interested enough to carry on reading.

which is more than can be said for the first chapter. this throws us back into the '80s, and a school bus trip of 10 year olds to the Tate. Fine.

Across the side of one (bus) someone has finger-scrawled the word *Fuck*; beneath this, somebody (the same person perhaps) has written *Thatcher*; but this name has since been scored through, substituted by *GLC Commies* – which, in turn, has been struck out and replaced with *You*.

My immediate response to this was 'no'. I think it was 'GLC Commies' that was the immediate cause (tho I had registered that i didn't like 'finger-scrawled'). It just didn't sit right as van-dust graffiti. Then I realised that 'Fuck You' was also problematic. Now, I hope someone older and wiser can correct me if i'm wrong, but I don't really feel Fuck You entered into British vernacular from the US until later than the '80s? Fuck off was pretty standard, and fuck you sounded wrong and american, and not right here.

then they get to the tate after some uneven description of the bus trip (some bits good, some bits... not so good).

... his voice seems to rise from the the whorled depths of the staircase down which the floor's two-tone mosaic disappears.

again, ready to be corrected here, but that's a description of the entrance and 'rotunda', which wasn't rennovated until 2013 and according to my recollection of the Tate back then, wasn't a feature in the 80s.

so anyway, so far so subeditor.

scene drifts momentarily to peckham swimming baths a couple of weeks earlier, when the main character in this chapter, Markie, and his friend are getting changed and realise they're in a changing room next to some girls and peer under the cubicle to take a look.

They had to press their cheeks right to the quartz-and-granite slab to reach the vantage point: from there ... they saw two sets of bare legs towering above them like the trunks of redwood trees, paralllels playing perspectival tricks by narrwing *and* widening out into thighs before converging, at what should have been infinity but was in truth a mere two feet away, into unfoliaged waist canopies...

never mind the 'redwood tree' set-up, 'unfoliaged waist canopies' in this context is one of the very worst things i have ever seen committed to print. i feel bad about even reproducing it here, but its so unutterably awful it needs to have witness.

absolutely not, no, was my immediate response and i very nearly put the book down there and then.

oddly, the chapter very much improves later - again, something of an intensity as McCarthy moves onto his area of obsession - that is to say the orientation and relative positioning of things to each other in time, space and simulation. this is often managed in quite a dull way, with the description of how lines connect - A to B to C - objects with each other. The inevitability of geometric vectors across time. This was where McCarthy headed in the latter, much less successful half of C and there are ofc elements of Gravity's Rainbow in this obsession. Beckett's use of geometric intersection in the Trilogy is much more successful ofc, but McCarthy's own obsession here means it produces a different style and motive of interest that make sections of the book outside these particular occasions seem bad and unnecessary, stylistically gauche and pointless.

so that's one obsession, another is that inanimate objects - like the models of the city in the hyrdraulic tank, and a bird in a picture in the tate - are aware of and somehow will their own destruction, through a glitch in cause and effect caused by replays and simulations. i guess this is a perverted form of immanence in his world. here i think McCarthy gets closer to genuine points of interest in his writing. in the first, very good, section of C this took the form of constructing a metaphysics for how what survives of us after we die is communicated physically rather than spiritually.

unfortunately i think the fundamental problem is that outside Remainder the mode he picks for this is all wrong. his style needs to be radically different from what feels like very baggy writing generally inappropriate to precision.

anyway, i'm going to carry on.

But why though

well, cos i’m interested in some of his central ideas. there’s also at this early stage a sort of “which way will it fall” fascination.

My immediate response to this was 'no'. I think it was 'GLC Commies' that was the immediate cause (tho I had registered that i didn't like 'finger-scrawled'). It just didn't sit right as van-dust graffiti. Then I realised that 'Fuck You' was also problematic. Now, I hope someone older and wiser can correct me if i'm wrong, but I don't really feel Fuck You entered into British vernacular from the US until later than the '80s? Fuck off was pretty standard, and fuck you sounded wrong and american, and not right here.

Good critique, Fizzles.

In what way can you 'finger-scrawl' something on a van? In the dust? If no dust, then you could use your fingernail - and it would come off badly.

'GLC Commies' is all wrong - that diction wasn't used, and there's surely the simpler issue that someone engaged in scrawling on a van isn't going to be McCarthyite (Joseph, not Tom) in that way. It's ridiculous.

Your observation on 'Fuck you' also looks sound to me.

Your criticism of the changing-room scene looks sound.

his area of obsession - that is to say the orientation and relative positioning of things to each other in time, space and simulation

I don't understand how this is interesting. 'Things occupy different places in space'. 'Things move through to space, and their spatial relations to each other therefore change'. Those statements are true. I don't see them as, in themselves, an interesting theme.

I don't like this writer, and won't read him if I can avoid it. Perhaps I should be glad you're doing it for us.

I don't like this writer, and won't read him if I can avoid it. Perhaps I should be glad you're doing it for us.

i live to serve.

I think you're right on the GLC Commies, though the stronger reaction is against the diction. on the question of politics, i do find myself asking *why* that doesn't seem right (I agree it doesn't), and find myself wondering what it is that isn't conducive to right wing opinions in the dust scrawling classes. one option is that vehement phatic expressions of anti left sentiment are relatively new? that doesn't quite work for me. I think it's probably more because GLC Commies suggests a sort of structural analysis, rather than directed against a hate figure like Thatcher. But then fuck the tories is ofc perfectly plausible. Anyway. Not sure why.

On the things occupy different places in space, I'd agree with you that's not intrinsically interesting, though I would ask what it is in Beckett (or even possibly the Ithaca section in Ulysses), where the relentless depiction of objects, their relation and interrelation, is of interest? I feel you will be able to answer this!

More generally this book is about how we consittute our simulations, in this case a film (Incarnation) with the modern technologies available.

This twitter thread on copywrighting motion capture is very relevant to the book's subject matter:

Jet Li on the ethical reasons why he rejected the role of Seraph in the Matrix movies. Li clearly saw the direction Hollywood was headed. pic.twitter.com/P5mhvZ3AOr

— Minovsky (@MinovskyArticle) December 26, 2021

He plays around with this - eg where motion capture posits points of dynamism that exist *outside* or in a theoretical position

The problem is, it's dull, because there's very little psychological engagement or dramatic tension to show why any of this matters or why it might be interesting. It's descriptions of people talking about and using motion capture, or cataloguing histories of iterated movements in industry. None of these things are without interest as subjects of course, but as fiction, McCarthy has done a bad job here.

he's always been interested in defining co-ordinate space - what does it mean to say 'x marks the spot'? In this novel via descirptions of how motion capture technology works, he's saying that 'the marked position's not the final goal. It's not the spot you want' - the true root of 'solving' the kinetic problem of the human body exists at a conjectured spot. I guess a version of this might 'the archimedean point' or those paintings by Saenredam, where the vanishing point exists outside the picture frame.

again, to come to your point, why is any of this interesting? well, i do think he's *trying* (not successfully - he just sort of throws techbnology descriptions at the reader) to do something I am interested in, which is to explore what constitutes aesthetic comprehension of digital spaces and simulations. and i'm afraid i'm going to have to let that rather opaque observation hanging, because i want to try and put some thoughts together about that anyway!

lol proofing, christ.

Thanks, Fizzles, for your extended thoughts.

I'm afraid your comments about objects in space lost me. I don't understand why this is an issue of interest. The motion-capture issue may be another matter. I know nothing about it.

though I would ask what it is in Beckett (or even possibly the Ithaca section in Ulysses), where the relentless depiction of objects, their relation and interrelation, is of interest?

This looks a worryingly hefty challenge. I think my short answer is that the relation of objects in space is not, as such, what's interesting about those texts, to me.

Most of us admire Beckett, but for me what counts about him would be other matters, like his grasp of finitude, mortality, death, and also his incredible control of language, including in black humour. The Beckett who makes diagrams of A, B, C and D moving around -- is not for me.

'Ithaca' is one of the best things I've ever read, and I concede that it has something to do with standing far back and seeing people 'in space' (even interstellar space) more than the rest of the book - an aesthetic effect, yes, but again, that doesn't seem to me the most interesting aspect of the episode, which is crammed with vast amounts of detail - historical, comic, poignant, poetic.

We strongly agree about the GLC graffiti issue. I think I might as a reader have just passed over it, whereas, as with Lanchester, you're very good at noticing things that are off. But with this, I might have picked up on it too. I was there at the time of the GLC, and this doesn't ring true at all.

i agree on the 'relation of objects in space' observations. i think it can be seen as a comic mode - the spasticity of the human body and the slapstick interrelation of things feel like a beckettian comic style, with an existential edge. And yes, the Ithaca section is much more than that - I mentioned it as I understand it was quite influential on Beckett, but you'll know more than me on that.

The McCarthy book itself has settled into a fairly adequate rhythm. It's really just a series of technical analyses, described in a fairly mediocre literary style. Lilian Gilbreth and here time and motion wireframes are a major theme:

https://miro.medium.com/max/638/1*ebDVK7NB8CVQocw23FFSrA.jpeg

He's beginning to suggest some sort of revelatory moment beyond these graphical reproductions and reconstructions of motion, but it's not clear if this is a major through line that will be resolved or speculation.

A lot of it reads like essays put into literary language. Still, he's expanding spaces and pushing at boundaries. It's just they're boundaries and spaces that have been described and pushed at elsewhere. There's an army drone-flying vet, who's never left the warehouse in his home country, retiring from the warzone with PTSD. One of the characters expresses surprise - 'warzone?' This way drone warfare causes problematises the notion of the 'theatre of war' has already been well explored.

Similarly, the rather feeble drone display in one section only sends you to youtube, and the remarkable light shows that have been a staple of Chinese light spectacles for a while and are being seen more elsewhere too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44KvHwRHb3A

The points when he plugs some emotional state into what's happening are better - characters fall into fugue states watching the analysis of motion taking place, so that they start throwing adjectives and metaphorical fancies at what they're seeing. Well, it's better than the v plain and stilted interactions between characters that feel almost transcribed.

Occasionally it works. Two of the characters are using skeletal analysis to try and assess the impact of non-progressive cerebral palsy on a child's motion. They go through the analysis, which starts getting processed, and McCarthy describes the machines winding 'their way back to dark secretes, mysteries of origin, her child's sad incunabula.'

'sad incunabula'. a book written before any level of analysable medicine is available. Something intrinsic, ancient and not available for processing. It's a reach, but I quite liked it. The fans of an aerodynamic testing tunnel starting up at a high pitch, 'soprano, an urgent and indefinitely long *fermata*, drawn from the fraught diaphragm of some mechanical Rhinemaiden' not so much.

It's all very odd, the book does seem to be tending towards some sort of alteration of the ideas its treating, and i'll be interested to see how that comes out. but frankly if McCarthy had submitted this to me i'd've said that it was all very interesting, but he should go away and rewrite it entirely, unrecognisable. At the moment it feels like a set of half-digested LRB essays.

If something like this is going to succeeded he needs to go madder, go stranger. Ada, or Adour or Against the Day, wildly unsatisfactory as they are in many ways, are models here.

A minor solecism, but irritating all the same: In a not-as-bad-as-it-sounds extended sequence looking at the wind-tunnel test of a bobsleigh there is that old literary cliche. A German is asked a question, to which he answer 'Ja, naturlich' before falling back into German. It's the old Poirot trick, where they are unable to translate the easiest phrases and words in their language, but speak fluent English for the rest, a recurrent tic in fiction, completely the opposite of real world behaviour, which while sort of understandable, is always irritating when you notice it.

https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article23246907.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200c/0_New-Years-celebrations.jpg

loooooool

'a kind of simulation but just embarrassing dogshit' - a thread of Captain Tom McCarthy walking round his front garden.

Fizzles: I don't understand your final point about the solecism.

I think I would not comprehend this book and not enjoy it.

sorry pinefox, it was a bit compressed. in agatha christie’s poirot books, to take an example, poirot is asked a question and will respond “ah, non, but the lady is not his wife, evidement?” etc. it’s only the commonest words and forms that he seems unable to speak in english. this is of course to give a flavour of the french, in words that many english speaking people will understand, but considered in terms of the character themselves it’s rather ridiculous.

This is like a weird cultural litmus test, he contextualises it as Poirot, I immediately think of Saison Marguerite.

certainly v common, and tbh im not sure i’m not thinking of the poirot tv adaptations rather than the books.

A German is asked a question, to which he answer 'Ja, naturlich' before falling back into German.

So did this mean:

A German is asked a question, to which he answer 'Ja, naturlich' before falling back into English.

?

he's got you there

Zugzwanged!

The latter. He is conversing in English generally in the section, to speakers of other languages.

oh and i picked up murder on the orient express last night and yes poirot does this all the time.

t-mac’s word order makes for some seriously gammy sentences. try this for size:

“if a crew member tries obsequiously to return her to her quarters…”

painfuly evading the splint infinitive leads to some serious mashing of the gears. just write “if an obsequious crew member tries to return her to her quarters” ffs. or at least if for some reason you feel some nuance is being lost (it’s not) put “obsequiously tries”. it really doesn’t matter. just not what you did put.

after the long section about the bobsleigh in the wind tunnel (not as bad as it sounds tho perhaps that is a v low bar), there is a long section where he describes what’s happening in the film. this is worse than it sounds even if that is also a low bar. the film seems not v good. and it’s made worse by little linguistic innovations mccarthy throws in to show science fiction is happening. a drink they’re transporting is called kwavit and he talks about them frolicking in their childhood in the *gzhiardini*. *do you see*. do more of it, to an extreme, or do much less of it, none at all in fact.

having to force my way through this bit. it’s utter drivel.

keen followers of this thread during its recent updates will be interested to know that i almost threw this book down in boredom and irritation but then thought of those who needed me to continue and so, shackleton like, i go on.

I'm glad to hear that it's bad.

on the last leg shackleton of his big anarctic journey shackleton encountered (a) an unbelievably vast rogue sea-wave which his little boat nevertheless weathered bcz they were master seamen and (b) this guy:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

(or so the famous footnotes claim, but imo they're a misdirection: it's obviously actually a reference to COUNT MAGNUS)

lol imagine the first sentence is written properly

keen followers of this thread during its recent updates will be interested to know that i almost threw this book down in boredom and irritation but then thought of those who needed me to continue and so, shackleton like, i go on.

TLS review has it about right:

The passage, like the novel that contains it, requires maximal engagement for minimal returns,

i’m gradually reaching the end of my desire to read this. it’s that point where you realise the possibility of redeeming some of the ideas presented is not likely to happen before the pages run out.

pinefox, i agree i do not think you would like this book.