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

… 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.

HNY! The LRB should publish a collated version of your Coffin Liquor analysis

re lost hearts: yes, it's a move he later got much better at, quilting together the layers of documentation and shifting angles of observer perception so that you weren't muddled the way you are a bit here (viz how does 22-yr-old stephen know or care about all this boring grown-up architectural detail, which is key to MRJ's version of the gothic pathetic-fallacy lens) (ans = he doesn't, someone grown-up -- possibly one of MRJ's beloved guidebooks, has supplied this element, but it's just been C/Ped instead of given proper attribution) (the list of necromantical titles later in the story is also quite proto-lovecraftian: tho a *far* more convincing act of forgery than mr mad fkn arab)

(i notice in the FT piece on it that tom ewing says it's an early story, which it is, that MRJ came somewhat to dislike: i don't know where he knows this from though)

the LRB should publish this whole thread! alan bennett retire bitch

(actually i like alan bennett and the ironic use of twitter bitch-memes shd be avoided if at all possible)

"MRJ was dissatisfied with the tale and only included it in GSA at the request of his publisher, who wished to make the book larger," according to Joshi. Not that that gets us anywhere.

The 'ascertain' is bloody weird. Also the later "Two incidents that occurred about this time made an impression upon Stephen's mind." Also "On the table in Mr. Abney's study certain papers were found which explained the situation to Stephen Elliott when he was of an age to understand them." All of these seem to transgress the line between the implied narrator and the omniscient authorial in ways I'm not keen on.

-

I wasn't dissatisfied with the architectural detail per se ('and Stephen sees this how' is probably reading James by the standards of the generation after his own) but having the context made weird for me made me think about the weirdness of this kind of fictional knowledge in general.

On reading this passage I am asked to conceive of 'a stone-pillared porch etc.' I do not know what 'the purer classical style of 1790' looks like. There is no way that I can get back from this nominally ekphratic exercise to a visual image. And yet the knowledge that this porch is built in this style is still capable of doing some kind of work towards my construction of the fictional scene.

(actually i like alan bennett and the ironic use of twitter bitch-memes shd be avoided if at all possible)

I guess it's related to my long-running epistemelogical query, viz., what is going on in the reader's head when they read this squib of John M. Ford's:

I don’t recommend playing with God. It isn’t that he cheats, exactly. But the other night we were in the middle of a game, I was about thirty points up, and He emptied out his rack. ZWEEGHB. Double word score and the fifty-point bonus.
“Zweeghb?” I said.

“Is that a challenge?”

“Well…”

“Look outside,” He said. So I did. Sure enough, there was a zweeghb out there, eating the rosebushes, like Thurber’s unicorn.

But none of this will help us get to the bottom of the badness of John Lanchester.

it was, as far as i can ascertain, a quarter of four on the afternoon of the fifth of September in the year 1811 that a post-chaise made perhaps a decade by bindle and sons of norwich drew up before the door of aswarby hall, in the heart of the east central english country of lincol

("ascertain" is indicative of the ethos of the narrator james is presenting us with, that he is tolerably certain that everything that follows is true -- and this certainty rests on, within reasonable limits, a measure of fact-checking)

i didn’t get round to this and went and saw an ingmar bergman film for light relief instead.

winter light relief

but i’m delighted to say i have two more days before i go back to work so will continue tmrw.

indeed. xpost

faster you fucker!

(actually i like alan bennett and the ironic use of twitter bitch-memes shd be avoided if at all possible)

I actually misclicked the link for Bennett's diary in this LRB and got the Lanchester story by accident. It even started 'Monday', so it took me a sentence or two of going 'WTF?' before I worked out what I had done.

Lol James

Here for the retire bitch memes those are good!

I love this thread. Thank you, Fizzles.

ha ha james m.

and thanks tokyo r - it's a pleasure.

and I realised that as i was walking around the park the other day. it *is* a pleasure. lanchester's prose exerts a weird fascination. i remembered william empson's good question about whether we saw Shakespeare as great because of the amount that had been written about him. we've stared so much at him, and written about him and considered him so much that he seems everything. No, concluded Empson, because other writers would not be able to sustain that level of interest. We've been able to write so much about him because his writing has proved inexhaustible by time or changing attitudes.

in Lanchester, as i said upthread, you can pick at specific problems of syntax and style in Lanchester, and then realise you need to extend the problem of syntax to general manner, and then on to general approach, and then to the whole point of fiction, and ultimately the representation of the world itself. there is that connection between the failure of syntax and the act of imagining in lanchester that makes it fascinating, a connection of the microcosm and macrocosm.

this made me realise that lanchester has something he shares with empson's analysis of shakespeare - he is inexhaustibly bad. does this mean in some sense, in an aesthetic of badness, he is

good?

Good not Bad: A dialectical approach to the imaginative prose of John Lanchester.

of course it doesn't. he's awful.

right, last day of the holiday for me, I must spend it wisely. i've got a full pot of tea, a bowl of porridge, and Obnox on the stereo. Let's do this.

what stopped me in my tracks last time was a long-is passage about him trying to download Great Expectations to his Audible app over his data plan in a church crypt, while the old woman with the shawl shouted rău rău rău at him.

one problem with this sort of live blogging version of close reading is that it's bad for judging tempo, plus the column format of the LRB means that sections can look longer than they are, and in lanchester's case that means the badness seems to go on for longer than it actually is. and it's not even amusingly bad, it's just, ugh, it's just dreck:

The implication was that she was objecting to my using my mobile at that particular site, where as it happened the data signal was helpfully strong. I decided to make light of the situation.

'Nothing wrong with my data plan, madam!' I said. 'It's covered under my UK allowance!' Which in fact happened to be true. If it had been otherwise I would have waited until I was on wifi before downloading the book. One can run up very substantial data bills otherwise. But my levity did nothing to appease the hag.

'Rău, rău!' she kept shouting. And then, stretching for what little English she knew: 'No! Very bad!'

I am always polite and reasonable, even when provoked.

'You are a silly, silly woman,' I said to her. 'Go away.' My words had no effect, but the download was soon complete.

no fascination here, just something akin to embarrassment at someone taking a shit on the literary table. and i don't mean, you know, sullying the memory of Henry James or Jane Austen, but someone smearing their shit over anyone whose put their thoughts and imagination down to some effect.

If it had been otherwise I would have waited until I was on wifi before downloading the book. One can run up very substantial data bills otherwise.

picturing Martin Freeman as the narrator is not improving this

now convinced Lanchester was watching tv while he pooped this out

to make a point i made earlier, your unreliable narrator is still a character. the only person i have ever heard talk like this was a man called Giles who used to run the English Language section at Foyles (still works there I believe) and would bawl things at customers like 'DON'T START TRYING TO TAKE THE INITIATIVE, SIR'. that's the closest real world analogue to this mess of uninterested unobserved thoughts.

think he may have been pooping while he pooped this out.

i never really liked Virginia Woolf's dictum of writing being 'the right words in the right order', but tbf Lanchester does a lot of the wrong words in the wrong order:

The old woman from the entrance had, without my noticing, come towards me while I was looking at my phone, and was now standing in front of me, bent-backed and gasping with effort, waving the stick on which she had been leaning.

because he's done 'come towards me' and 'now standing in front of me' without reference to the stick, at the end of the sentence he has to describe the ludicrous 'waving the stick on which she had been leaning'. you definitely want to finish that sentence, if you want to finish it at all, with 'waving her stick'. Of *course* she was leaning on the stick - I understand the rudiments of observable life, John. But no, you get thrown back with a bump to the beginning of the sentence, and asked to reimagine that which you have already imagined.

So regularly the fundamental failure of his prose is that you have to read it twice or even more to work out what he means.

Paradoxically this is a consequence, as above, of him leaving nothing to chance. In a sort of ironic conceptual pun on the form of his output against the content - he has no economy.

Wednesday

*Wakes up with a start* Oh yes, christ, yes ok.

I've just scanned down the next column and i'm genuinely struggling to do this. Enormous fatigue. But then I've seen what's coming and you haven't. new vistas.

to misquote MES misquoting lovecraft:

the most merciful thing in the world is man's inability to correlate all of his mind's contents. but Lanchester one day, some say it is already upon us, will eventually open up such terrifying
vistas of reality that we will either go mad from the revelation or flee into blissful sleep, peace and safety of another new dark age

As I have already said, the fact that this story has no supernatural component was one off my reasons for downloading it. It was therefore with consternation that, on starting the Audible app, I found my recollection to be inaccurate. Anyone who has read the passage Pip encounters Magwitch in the graveyard for the first time will remember it, but there were aspects that I had not accurately recalled.

'As I have already said' - yes you have, many many times already in this short story.

'on starting the Audible app' - what is this formulation? this 'on starting the' thing? you get it a lot in Capital too - 'on opening the email application that the computer had etc'. my grammar isn't wot it shd be. Also he could just say 'Audible' by now if he wanted to. i would understand what he meant with my memory. otoh maybe it's an attempt to convey 'the press of the new'. because although i said he's not doing 'cat person' in a way he is. he's trying to include the concepts of the modern world into 'i've now settled down into middle-aged complacency and am not now going to change until i die' man's mind. like seeing people peering over their glasses, holding a phone at arm's length, and poking at the screen with experimental aggression.

'but there were aspects that I had not accurately recalled' - noooooo, he's going to do Dickens isn't he?

here for this

yes he's going to do Dickens.

The passage concerned describes the moment when Magwitch leaves Pip:

At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms, – clasping himself, as if to hold himself together, – and limped towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.

When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a man whose legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for me. When I saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best use of my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms, and picking his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into the marshes here and there, for stepping-places when the rains were heavy or the tide was in. To my horror, I saw that the graves behind him were indeed unquiet. A form which resembled half a person was dragging itself out of the ground. The figure crawled not in the direction of the departed man, but towards me. It saw me look at it and stretched out its arms and made a wordless noise, which carried to me on the salt breeze. I turned again and ran until my legs could carry me no further.

lanchester bits in bold obv. nothing really too objectionable here - cautiously in the manner of MR James. but the twists and turns this 'ghost story' is taking are bloody laboured.

sorry all that bit apart from the first line is a block quote from Great Expectations obviously, apart from the Lanchester riff.

lol

mrj wd have condensed all this into a brief paragraph in "stories i have tried to write": …some of them I have actually written down, and they repose in a drawer somewhere. To borrow Sir Walter Scott's most frequent quotation, "Look on (them) again I dare not." They are not good enough…

i'm half tempted to shitpost this thread with the rest of the story. i've just read a long section where the narrator goes to an art gallery, and then in a cafe afterwards, a female art critic (female again - got a problem, John?) asks whether he enjoyed it, and he says he didn't like the fact artists choose to waste their time on subjects that aren't true, like Christ's crucifixion. it's quite long as there's quite of a lot of simplistic parody of academic speech and quite a lot of the narrator being implausibly stupid and wilfully ignorant.

this isn't satire obviously, but this sort of writing does share with satire one of its key areas of tension - that its content is that which it despises or seeks to mock or destroy. the content of satire is vice, presented into the most disgusting, ludicrous or grotesque way. in other words it is seeking to destroy its own content - it despises itself. the aesthetic qualities of satire are to be found in its wit, its imagination (usually visual) and the management of this central self-destructive tension via irony. in other words its a high-wire act that relies entirely on style and ability.

if the content is ill-delivered and boring, as it is here, then that is what the reader gets. there's no tension. the narrator is so ridiculous, such a figment, that Lanchester hasn't challenged himself at all, and there's no enjoyment for the reader.

he's just mocking something that's come out of his head, so as a reader you just, at best, shrug.

were it not for how bad it is in other ways of course.

just a christmas story in the lrb, it's just a christmas story in the lrb. breathe.

i've always liked that MR James quote. that whole short piece in fact, with its tantalising snippets of stories that didn't quite come together. maybe via some strange loop this story and the whole concept of john lanchester writing it is one of those never-to-be-seen stories that resides in MR James's desk.

Thursday

lol this is interminable.

omg this is great. a single paragraph just keeps coming at you with lanchester body blows:

The morning was divided into two parts. I had a choice between panel sessions on a range of unappealing topics and in the end went to one at random. This was a mistake, since the session turned out to be called 'Ghosts, Werewolves, Quarks and Other Unknowables'. A physicist gave me a short introduction to particle physics and then some literary scholars and anthropologists started in on their nonsense. I discreetly – norms! – unplugged my earpiece from the radio that was carrying the translation and plugged it instead into my mobile phone. I started the Audible app and was soon back with Pip and his unfortunate childhood on the Kent marshes.

on the ropes here.