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

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"

lol "television news programmes" is pitch perfect.

So annoying they got Toby Jones involved in this. Gotta eat I suppose.

is there any way this would function better as a TV show given the absence of Lanchester's deathless prose? it's not like I'm gonna read any version other than Fizzles's

The plot, especially the main 'mystery' is so tedious and uncompelling that I can't imagine it working on TV.

well yes, I do feel either that NV, or that tv, possibly even reasonably decent tv, kind of sops up and neutralises in the visual field much of lanchester's spectacular redundancy, which made reading Capital the equivalent of a sort of literary carpal tunnel syndrome.

the fatuous-to-the-point-of-surreal characters can get dialled down by actors and a sort of automatic validity conveyed, again, by the visual.

it feels like the badness of the prose would have to be replaced by multiple badnesses elsewhere, committed by multiple people, and surely not everything can be that bad.

xpost and yeah, the plot in Capital, such as it was, was utterly mystifying: only periodically present, totally devoid of meaning other than as a completely buggered tool cackhandedly used by Lanchester to bring about the apparently difficult or abstract concepts "beginning" and "end".

rereading this thread before Sunday gets started. definitely a Top ILB Moment. anyway I see woof called this:

Feel like this is going to be a MAJOR NEW DRAMA on BBC1 at some point.

― woof, Friday, March 9, 2012 12:22 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A copy of this is now lying around in the office (nearly burst out laughing when I saw it), a manager has caught this on tv and has decided to read the book.

I am going to try and keep my fucking mouth shut.

It's when you flick through and you read the first line of each chapter, one after the other, as I did at the weekend, that you realise quite how terrible this book is, that nothing in this thread is even an exaggeration.

I did enjoy Fragrant Harbour and The Debt to Pleasure, but yeah this one is garbage, and plotless garbage at that

"On the same evening, while Anthony was brooding over the Investment Review and Alison over her daughter, Len Wincobank was lying on his dormitory bed in Block D and listening to the radio. On the walls around him, naked girls in various rude attitudes winked at him and offered themselves to him, thrusting out handsome bums and eccentrically large tits"

That's from Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age. Always nice to spot a bit of proto-Lanchester in the wild.

Len Wincobank is a white collar criminal, by the way. The book was quite prescient until I reached this chapter, which is awful.

Handsome Bums are a mix between The Stone Roses and Primal Scream with the swagger of Oasis

had to be done

By half past eight, on this same long November evening, Anthony Keating had finished his sausages, idled away half an hour with a cup of coffee, switched the radio on and off several times, and done some thinking.

I wonder if Lanchester is even conscious of the extent to which he has ripped this book off, right down to its every plodding cadence.

he might be - it might even be an explanation. i haven't read the ice age. is there any aspect of it that might make a sane person sit up and say "hey this is *good*, i shd *do* something with this"?

it doesn't sound like it.

I have read the successor to THE ICE AGE which is called THE RADIANT WAY. It is in this mode.

In a way I think it is extremely prescient of post-Thatcherite Britain. But we are conditioned now to think of the late 60s and early 70s as this very innocent, social democratic, vaguely utopian time rather than an explosion of venality and greed that came crashing to a halt, which is how Drabble, writing in the late 70s, sees it. And that's interesting from my perspective in a way that, say, Capital isn't.

You also get the sense that Drabble had been regularly reading the FT and the Economist and decided to base a novel around what she was reading, which so far happens at the expense of character. At one point an unnamed economist literally sits at a breakfast table pondering inflation. But if you were John Lanchester then I can easily imagine you putting the book down and thinking "yes, this is what literature should aspire to!"

By the way I should really post that entire quote in its own right for all its Lanchestrian awkwardness:

"By half past eight, on this same long November evening, Anthony Keating had finished his sausages, idled away half an hour with a cup of coffee, switched the radio on and off several times, and done some thinking. He thought about the nature of property, and why it was that some people considered the owning of property particularly wicked: why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage, a bicycle, a secondhand fur coat, or a colour television set?"

I've just come to this straight from reading Angela Carter, who really does write some sublime sentences, and on a pure prose level it's like following up Mozart with a Chumbawumba chaser.

why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage

Can picture Keith Joseph saying that at the 1974 Tory Conference.