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

ha ha, something's gone a bit wobbly here again:

I decided to take the opportunity for a little sightseeing. I had brought the guidebook and there was a selection of places of interest within convenient walking distance of the hotel. The closest was a famous church and graveyard of both architectural and historical consequence. I took some refreshment at a café in a side street and wandered through the paved lanes towards my intended destination. This is the medieval part of town. The buildings were close on either side; many of them had arcades for, according to the guidebook, the dual purpose of keeping off summer sun and winter rain.

That should be 'the buildings are close on either side'. also, 'my intended destination' and very much 'the dual purpose' are superfluous, and really cumbersome. this is pure lanchester. so laboured and cack-handed.

one of those passages where you feel a good editor would have edited it down to 0.

i'm going to get a an oatmeal cracker and some cheese. brb.

i've been rereading M.R. James over the last couple of weeks and i think i can hear him spinning from here

A decrepit stone arch ... opened onto an oblong patch of crammed, stacked graves. They were so densely pressed together that they seemed to be squeezing against one another, as only living things can. Some of them protruded sideways and upwards at erratic angles, like a mouthful of unstraightened teeth.

ok this is bad. 'as only living things can' is absurd, he means 'like living things', I think, if he means anything at all. taken as it is it implies graves are generically living things. the fact that he's trying to suggest malevolence, that these graves *are* living (when normally they are not) has as a consequence been confused.

that 'unstraightened teeth' is a balls up as well. for a start it's a f'ing cliche (but well, here we are). but also, 'unstraightened' is wrong. it should be 'crooked'. 'unstraightened' is very lol middle-class father perspective of dentristy. 'all crookedness is as yet unstraightened godliness.'

this incompetence with metaphor is also pure lanchester. he just simply doesn't understand how it works, frankly. it's incredible that he lacks a basic skill of imaginative writing.

of course these graves in this churchyard also show a fundamental lack of imagination, so we have a few problems here obv.

i mean i feel a bit bad, this is clearly meant to be a harmless festive bagatelle. but it's irritating.

an old woman in a shawl sat on a chair by the entrance to the graveyard.

-_-

i'm a little confused about the graves' stackedness? coffins, sure, but graves?

you're right, this is blasting away at fish in a little sandcastle bucket but he's getting paid and there are loads of writers who are good at this who he could copy from.

The church had strong historic associations with a monstrous feudal overlord of the town. The count had been a famous torturer, whose favourite practice was to exlinguate his victims (this being the leaflet's term for cutting out tongues, a neologism, I suspect)...

i feel like i'm on a long and arduous walk.

Count Magnus this is not.

and yes, he's manipulating cliches so his imagery is fucked. he hasn't actually tried to visualise what he's saying.

i mean it is remarkable how a little bit of picking apart destabilises the meaning of any of the words. it's a lanchester speciality.

we've given up on the comedy scientism now i take it

there's a stretch of very dull scientism, neither comedy nor parody, but just reiteration of a fairly standard rubric. I was going to pass over it, but since you asked:

He and a large number of his victims were buried in the graveyard outside. His activities supposedly continued after his death.

It goes without saying I was sceptical. I am familiar with the scientific explanation of this and similar narratives. A rash of deaths – their real cause inevitably viral or bacteriological – affects a place. Explanations are sought, and found in the arenas of legend and superstition and dream. A panic begins. Since the living are victims, the perpetrators must be found among the dead. Exhumations take place. Some bodies are found to have characteristics indicating postmortem existence – for instance, hair and fingernails that appear to have grown. In other cases the liquefaction of improperly preserved corpses leads to the creation of the substance known as 'coffin liquor'. As a result, in some crypts, coffins appear to have moved or burst. Supernatural phenomena are credited as the cause. Fear and superstition triumph over science, and myths are born.

lol

I went back out into the graveyard. The sky had clouded over, and full dark was imminent.

what the fucking fuck.

yeah you had to quote the bit with the title in it

I went to the place where the count had been tortured, partially dismembered, had his tongue cut out and then been thrown into a pit

bzzzzt! repetition.

also struggling with 'partially dismembered' - can't tell whether it's ok or not due to the temporary aneurysm reading lanchester gives you.

i did xpost. you suspect he read about coffin liquor and then a very dim wattage light bulb came on over his head.

The story was graphically, too graphically, told on the leaflet, which interspersed genuine information with fantasy about the count's supposed supernatural manifestations. Without the leaflet one would have known nothing of this.

a) can i read the leaflet plz
b) that last sentence - well no, i mean, what? it reminds me of trying to read quite simple things when hungover. you find yourself thinking 'hang on, does that make sense or not?'

ok i suppose this bit is important, grinding as it is:

It was this thought that gave me my brilliant idea. I could choose not to be in the conference by not being there, but perhaps i could also choose not to be at the conference even while i was there. I could go into a form of internal exile. The medium for doing so was simple: the translator's earpiece. One was supposed to plug these into a small radio, not much larger than a box of matches, and listen to the approved feed of the conference. But there was nothing to stop one from plugging the earpiece into a different device, a smartphone, say, and, instead of listening to sociological flummery about canon formation and the structure of myth, hear something interesting and intelligent.

i mean he's basically talking about plugging headphones in here isn't he? also he doesn't mean 'translator's earpiece', a confusing perhaps semi-legitimate piece of compression. i'm ignoring the last bit. even as a piece of narratorial colour, it's tiring and shit. your unreliable narrator is still a character ffs, and this is dire, very in the mould of Capital characters.

An excellent plan. I took out my mobile and opened the Audible app.

Yes! Back of the net.

A number of audiobooks were on offer at a special price

Aaah, it's like relaxing into a warm bath.

lol

what if his intentions were tier-2 satire all along

what if john lanchester has always been a shitposter

well in a sense he's coming home - The Debt to Pleasure was all about the unreliable narrator. I mean i thought it was ok when I read it, but i was also 16 or so, and given the conspicuous shitness of this, i'm wondering if wasn't very good after all.

again, i worry i'm loading too much on it - if i just read through it in a spare moment it would be relatively unobjectionable. but there are so many questions you find yourself asking that your entire notion of what fiction is, what it consists of, starts coming undone.

i'm going to get a beer, and do a bit more, but i think this is going to need to extend into two sessions tbh. liveblogging reading lanchester turns out to be more time consuming than anticipated.

why the fuck am i doing this.

i wonder if it would be worth reading 'one of the classics' with a similar semantic regard...lanchester lends himself very well to this sort of deconstruction, mind - it might end up being arduous in a different sense

i'm currently reading 'decline and fall' - my first waugh, amazingly - and ofc finding it hilarious & true - and while he is no grand stylist he has a comic terseness - the notes you don't play etc - that bulwarks himself against such prying. trying to think of published satire that overreaches quite like lanchester - it's hard

i usually try to pay this level of attention to at least part of what i read. i remember doing it with Jane Austen, and you could take so much on a semantic level (i mean obviously she was a genius at it) that applied in a complex way to the book as a whole). likewise george eliot

I mean doing it with Lovecraft, for instance, might produce something unsympathetic and comical, which would ignore the substantial value of the thing as a whole.

with Capital, i just remember being incredulous, that it was impossible to ignore the semantic cackhandedness and failures of writing and intelligence. it draws attention to itself.

I must admit i sat down to this reading with a certain amount of 'let's take the piss out of lanchester' in my mind, but actually i find myself becoming irritated and surprised again at the sheer badness. And as NV said, he's getting paid for this shit. People are waving it through.

i would say waugh was a great stylist (unless by grand you mean in the style of 'grand novels', which, no, he definitely isn't). as someone once pointed out he could write an entire page of dialogue without any indication of who was speaking or how, and you would be able to follow it all the way through, both who was saying what and in what tone. Often the bits of speech would only be two or three words long.

Decline and Fall is a masterpiece of style I think. I mean, again, I'm not expecting Lanchester to be that, but its the egregiousness of his failure that is so galling.

i'm still sitting here mulling over 'and full dark was imminent'.

maybe it was immanent

lol.

hold up, NV:

My mood called for something not-modern, something substantial; if the conference was to be the epic waste of time it promised to be, I would at least come back with some happy memory to show for it. Winter. Dickens. Yes. My finger hovered for a moment over A Christmas Carol, but although this would have been seasonally appropriate, I dislike the narrative apparatus of that particular tale. I have no interest whatsoever in the supernatural or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud.

also this is very bad.

'a happy memory', or 'some happy memories', not 'some happy memory' you twat. that's not just a point of grammatical order, but sounds so silly as to be comical. again.

also yes yes we get it about the narrator's feelings about magic ffs.

Winter. Dickens. Yes.

Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their claims.

do you think we could work up a fatwah on lanchester?

yes i did mean 'in the style of grand novels' - waugh was obviously in full control but not given to flights of verbiage. apologies for not making that clearer

no what3words results for winter.dickens.yes, and yet

https://map.what3words.com/winter.chickens.keys

what's your game lanchester

it takes a powerful writer to make me feel sympathetic towards Dawkins tbf to the boy Lanchester

i think I'm going to need a break. the next (long) bit where he attempts to download Great Expectations to his phone while in the church is so bad that it's defeating me.

If it had been otherwise I would have waited until I was on wifi before downloading the book.

also

'Rău!' she said, shouting, pointing at my phone and then at the grave. 'Rău, rău, rău!'

https://youtu.be/WQreH2QZ_zc

haha

… i woke up a year or so back mouthing the phrase "sarcophagous jelly"

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, February 25, 2006 12:49 AM (eleven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

>:(

oof. sorry for your loss. live long enough and you will live to see your dreams turned into laboured less good versions of themselves for the literary journal reading public.

i wonder if it would be worth reading 'one of the classics' with a similar semantic regard...

i've close-read a bunch of (since his shade is apparently being downloaded in vain) m. r. james on freaky trigger over the last few years and the most/worst you land on is odd lacunae in the plot -- sometimes actual errors, but just as often ambiguities, intended or otherwise, that deepen the story… but then james had a superb ear for mimicry, of a wide range of historical material (perhaps not working-class speech patterns lol), which served him well right down to the atomic level in his sentence-making. lanchester here is the epitome of "telling not showing" in the bad sense: basically bcz he has no such ear

au contraire, with the narrator he's doing an excellent job of mimicking a bad writer.

this story has prompted some jamesian close reading of my own so it's not all bad.

I was complaining to Fizzles about the semantic goofiness of the first paragraph of Lost Hearts just last week.

No 'I took out my mobile and opened the Audible app,' though.

He could use it to listen to the Capital novel.

no indication that the unreliable narrator is an actual masochist.

some of James's stories are weaker than others but i've never found much fault with his prose or his ability to sketch vividly and concisely.

coffin liquor in the front, coffin poker in the back

Came in late to this, glad there is more to come!

i wanted to expand on thomp's point about MR James. cos when you said that about Lost Hearts my immediate response was 'oh come on, it's MR James, the master, a writer in the rare (unique?) position of having perfected a genre!' And then I went and got Lost Hearts off the shelf and read the opening para and thought 'oh actually that is a bit weird.'

It was, as far as I can ascertain, in September of the year 1811 that a post-chaise drew up before the door of Aswarby Hall, in the heart of Lincolnshire. The little boy who was the only passenger in the chaise, and who jumped out as soon as it had stopped, looked about him with the keenest curiosity during the short interval that elapsed between the ringing of the bell and the opening of the hall door. He saw a tall, square, red-brick house, built in the reign of Anne; a stone-pillared porch had been added in the purer classical style of 1790; the windows of the house were many, tall and narrow, with small panes and thick white woodwork.

for me, the only *really* awkward bit there is 'it was, as far as I can ascertain' going into observed activity. Tho actually writing it down now, and reading it again, I think it's a legitimately telescoped transition from antiquary finding out about an unusual story into the detail of the story (sort of voiceover into actual filmed scene). iirc thomp you also took exception to the manner of delivering the architectural detail. that i minded less, i think it just goes with the MR James territory.

voices are: antiquary > into authorial narrative > 'what the boy saw when he looked at the house was this' (the boy did not think 'Queen Anne period house etc).

but examined closely i can see that it can feel a bit awkward.

i mean i'm not naturally a very editorially close reader, though as i said earlier, with Jane Austen, or with Swift especially, really close reading is very rewarding, as you separate out the layers of meaning and suggestion. But one of the reasons I've never really got on with Henry James is that i find the experience of reading him a bit pernickety. And yes I know I've got some cheek saying that here. But the thing is, and it relates to one of the wider fundamental questions about Lanchester, reading him forces you into it. You find yourself wading through the brambles, and then you become so tangled up you have to start hacking away at them.

and again, chatting with my flatmate yesterday, it comes back to the point about how the hell this gets published in the first place. I've met an editor from the LRB. He was intelligent, alive to nuance, and had just recently picked up Julian Barnes on a point of style.

My feeling is that any decent editor getting this story via the email app that comes with their desktop computer would immediately see all the problems, would find themselves heavily marking the first few paras before putting their pen down and going 'oh god'.

because, and i think this is unique in my reading experience - so well done, John, I guess - once you start trying to suggest tweaks, or tug at stray threads, you realise that its untweakably bad, that the whole fabric is coming undone. then you will find yourself scrawling 'rewrite this' and then you will realise that in fact no amount of rewriting will correct the problems, and normally of course you would reject it, but you can't because Lanchester is the LRB equivalent of unsackable, so you just end up writing FUCKING STET (sorry, stet) at the top of the page and waving it through.

I think this is because Lanchester's failures of style are often clearly linked to his failures of imagination (the graves thing that NV pointed out upthread, the structural incapacity with metaphor). he can't work out the semantics of his imagination because there is no imagination, no worked internal thought. it's just the manipulation of cliché and the setting out of hand-me-down images/concepts. It's the worst of the english middle-aged, middle class prematurely senescent male mentality: inherited, unexamined 'sense', a form of privilege that has to do nothing to earn attention.

this is seriously bad writing, and its badness is existential.

happy new year everyone : )

got to do some bits, try and sort out this hangover, go for a walk in the park etc, but will be picking up for another session later.