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

have you read Scruton's work?

that is a very racist paragraph to have its racism go unhighlighted on a forum that discerns and complains about the most minor racisms at tedious length

not complaining tho, this is ilb after all and the esthetic bankruptcy is more striking

It somehow manages to be racist, self-contradictory and incomprehensible all at once.

oh it was a paragraph where everything was intended to be highlighted. in fact i got the same vertiginous feeling of mystifying non-reality that capital produced, more quickly expressed by going "what the fuck are you talking about?"

but yes "multicultural and disintegrating" is egregious, the sort of heedless stuff men like scruton start letting fly with when they're well into their "barmy racist" phase.

still trying to understand that vast airport terminal tho? tourists? architecture? wtf is he on about?

(incidentally the fact that scruton can apparently like this book, assuming it's not just belated back-rubbing, and do his racist academic thing indicates how badly, how patronisingly, lanchester does all his "diversity of characters")

"erudite" indeed. a word with absolutely no pertinence whatsoever.

surely it's a philosophical exercise in writing a paragraph in which no sentence bears any resemblance to reality.

what Matt said.

and c#m, yep, i almost feel admiration. as if it were some oulipo game.

airport terminal = carousel of rootless cosmopolitans

and yes fizzles i didnt intend to upbraid anyone, its just that sometimes its quite refreshing in an unpleasant way to see a barely cloaked virulent xenophobia in plain sight and nor cribbed from the facebook page of a 73 yr old rogue ukip activist or what have you

I think the vast airport terminal is intended to be a dismissive descriptor of the effect of multiculturalism. It's "capitalism may be a dead concept" that I don't understand.

Also the London we see in Capital is the opposite of decaying, if anything it's sprucing itself to death.

Make no mistake that Lanchester's portrayal of non-white/non-British characters is condescendingly dire though.

yep, ok. what an inept tool. get a brain scrutans. xpost.

nort

i think Scruton tends towards "end of history" bullshit so when he says "capitalism is a dead concept" he means "we're all capitalists now hooray!"

i can explain... well give a bit of context here, it's from that grim unrewarding feast that is the TLS Books of the Year:

I object to the French habit of describing everything around us as an expression of "capitalism". But in L'Esthetisation du monde: Vivre a l'age du capitalisme artiste (Gallimard), Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy make wonderful use of their powers of observation to show us the world of fetishes and baubles in which we live, no longer fulfilled by our desires but mystified by them.

One of those things if it's ever been true has always been true, rather than being characteristic of any age and certainly not as part of bogus narratives of humanistic decline. lol 'French habit'. Twit.

Amazing how many people couldn't actually choose a book 'of the year' by the way. <3 the way Joyce Carol Oates just sent a list tho with no gloss whatsoever tho.

Jesus. King Thotho the First.

lol in the Adrian Mole books Sue Townsend named the psychotic authoritarian headmaster of Neil Armstrong Comprehensive after Scruton

We shouldn't get carried away: 1.2 billion absolutely poor people is still 1.2 billion too many

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/05/poverty-uk-better-calling-it-inequality/print

in order to avoid getting carried away, JL suggests a modest proposal...

how many should there be though?

if there were none at all, there would be no incentives to betterment

it's an odd article. he's usually really good at these but he seems to spend all of it fighting quite hard at defining poverty v inequality, which is really just clearing up a confusion. but he somehow manages to define away poverty (and starvation) completely, and ends up dropping that glib turd of a last paragraph.

the whole thing is trash, as if he had a heavy lunch and good bottle of burgundy and then a guardian amanuensis came along at 3pm and gave him some data printouts on poverty from the world bank and recorded about 15 minutes of lanchester slowly trying to digest what, if anything, they might mean, and then condensed it into an article

The prospect is one of a society such as the one we live in, only more so.

I laughed at that thinking you had nicely summarised what made the article bad. then I flicked back to the article and saw that's wrote he wrote.

that's wrote he what obv.

still he validates it all by saying piketty.

only morsel

a kind of simulation, except more so than the real thing ever was

one of a society such as the one. only more so.

kind of want to excelsior john lanchester for that

Nobody, in the Beveridge sense of the term, is lacking the means of subsistence: nobody is "poor".

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/28/man-starved-to-death-after-benefits-cut

yeah, that's what really fucked me off about it. of course proper subsistence/starvation poverty exists. just because the poverty you start talking about is calculated relatively it doesn't mean the other lower-than-subsistence level doesn't exist. ffs.

nakh has already nailed the tone but i'm always just a tiny bit gratified in my deepest class prejudices - I KNOW THIS IS BAD - when i get a reminder that these glib cunts still roam the liberal thoughtscape sweetly ignorant of the lives of millions of the people they like to pontificate about

Just wanted to say thanks for this thread, I laughed out several times and now I'm sorely tempted to read the thing, it sounds hilarious.

this thread is not only hilarious it's a public service: that hulking hardback of Capital somebody gave us this summer will remain on the shelf.

Taken from his piece on automation

And it’s not just manual labour. Consider this report from the Associated Press:

CUPERTINO, Calif. (AP) Apple Inc. (AAPL) on Tuesday reported fiscal first-quarter net income of $18.02 billion.

The Cupertino, California-based company said it had profit of $3.06 per share.

The results surpassed Wall Street expectations … The maker of iPhones, iPads and other products posted revenue of $74.6 billion in the period, also exceeding Street forecasts. Analysts expected $67.38 billion.

For the current quarter ending in March, Apple said it expects revenue in the range of $52 billion to $55 billion. Analysts surveyed by Zacks had expected revenue of $53.65 billion.

Apple shares have declined 1 per cent since the beginning of the year, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 index has declined slightly more than 1 per cent. In the final minutes of trading on Tuesday, shares hit $109.14, an increase of 39 per cent in the last 12 months.

We’ll be returning to the content of that news story in a moment. For now, the fact to concentrate on is that it wasn’t written by a human being. This has been a joke or riff for so long – such and such ‘reads like it was written by a computer’ – that it’s difficult to get one’s head around the fact that computer-generated news has become a reality. A company called Automated Insights owns the software which wrote that AP story. Automated Insights specialises in generating automatic reports on company earnings: it takes the raw data and turns them into a news piece. The prose is not Updikean, but it’s better than E.L. James, and it gets the job done

Joke is too easy, given the excerpts on this thread..

Jay-Z sat down at his compaq presario desktop station, opened up his tidal web client, cracked his knuckles, and went to work on adding those tracks

― And let’s say a new Hozier comes along, and Spotify outbids you (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, April 1, 2015 8:29 PM (Yesterday)

So although Farage is an idiot, he also isn’t.

if there were ever a case for seo retrofitting ilx threads, then it would be getting some heat for this thread (which surely represents the longest sustained treatment of his work he is ever likely to receieve).......that there might be just one prominent page where this nudnik's eminent uselessness was attested to

i was just coming here to link Lanchester's Election Diary

which is, disappointingly, not that bad?

yes, it's not terrible - but he's pretty good at that sort of thing I think. I find I nurse a perverted desire for him to write more fiction.

er..http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/nov/24/capital-complicated-portrait-london-john-lanchester

Wanted Fizzles to liveblog the TV prog

This might be an apposite time to start my long-delayed 'Rewrite classic openings in the style of John Lanchester' thread.

"Call me Ishmael", said Ishmael as he was woken at 6.30am by his Precision LCD Radio Controlled Clock, purchased for £19.99 from Argos.

21 year-old medical student Malachi "Buck" Mulligan walked up the stairs to the roof terrace of his 1800s Martello Tower apartment holding a bowl of shaving foam and his Gillette Fusion ProGlide with NEW Flexball Technology Manual Razor. He reminded his friend, 20 year-old fellow medical student Stephen Dedalus, of one of those priests that frequently appeared as the perpetrator of some sexual scandal on the television news programmes.

frightened to go near the tv version. however already *v much* enjoying "openings in the style of"