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

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.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/aa/Norm_Peterson_Cheers_Motion_Picture.png

Besides, although i did not have great expectations, I had Great Expectations.

-_- x 1000

ha ha, i can't stop re-reading that previous paragraph.

what if kindle, but count magnus

I had a choice of panel sessions on a range of unappealing topics <- these very much don't exist do they? i mean i'm very glad Lanchester didn't exert himself to list them, but these are simply pasteboard words.

...unplugged my earpiece from the radio that was carrying the translation

classic lanchester

wait is it choice OF or choice BETWEEN? RUMBLED fizzles you are just making these up i knew it

I am starting to experience some measure of suspense

ok elephant in the room

- norms! -

so totally freed from context the effect is like someone random coming up to you in the street suddenly and shouting norms! at you. it takes you a while to settle down and realise he means 'social norms' but some time did pass while i considered whether he meant some sort of weird insult ('normies!'). and it's so free from meaning (you do kind of need 'social' there), that briefly a set of beings like the moomins came into my head, sort of shapeless furless balls of grey.

lol i thought it meant "normal" like adorbs means adorable

i noticed you have skated right past my question about because vs of

he's seems to have set himself a weird double-task: on one hand, he's made the narrator a pompous idiot, on the other, he wants to guy -- if more gently than sokal -- this kind of conference and paper

but of course if CANON [insert hungarian name here]'S APP BOOK is a thing, then the werewolves&ghosts paper is on the right track after all -- so all yr really poking fun it is poor (as in mannered) approach to language, which erm

oh wait, you're right! ha ha. fizzles rewrites lanchester rewrites dickens.

i'm typing from the paper copy rather than doing the sensible thing, which using the shortcut keys on my portable laptop to copy and paste sections of text from the original website of a literary journal where the story had been published.

CORRECTION:

I had a choice between panel sessions on a range of unappealing topics

choice between ... on a range...? lanchester i'm saving your ass here, you'd better come thank me when i'm done. (tho choice between ... a range isn't really disastrous i guess).

mark s otm.

tho i wd say that mocking the narrator and that which the narrator mocks is legit, it just takes a load more skill, and a much much better choice of targets. i mean actual targets rather than just stuff that's skimmed in op-eds.

if they were all unappealing why is the one he (randomly) chose a mistake? or is this foreshadowing of some kind?

Dickens's knowledge of the processes of ageing and dementia was, obviously, not scientifically modern, but to a surprising extent he still had an evidentiary basis for some of his fictionalised account. Cf the narcoleptic boy in The Pickwick Papers. Obviously a fully modern knowledge of these areas would have made Dickens a more complete writer.

did JL just leave a draft note to himself in there?

[insert effective sentence here]

i don't think it's foreshadowing. he also somehow conveys (I think via 'turned out to be called') that the one he randomly went into wasn't one of the ones in the 'range of unappealing topics' that he looked at earlier.

if that does turn out to be foreshadowing, then you might almost suggest some authorial subtlety there.

i don't think it's foreshadowing.

ha ha yes exactly.

there's a huge bit of Lanchestered Great Expectations coming up.

just to pause for a moment, as with Capital, it's extraordinary how badly proportioned his writing is. perhaps it's to do with those pasteboard words earlier. he labours through everything that comes into his mind, so you have huge chunks of stuff. his lack of economy is in fact a lack of ability to use or rely on inference. if it's in his head, it's going down. nothing is purposefully left out.

i remember in Capital plot points or subjects would just be dropped and picked up without any meaning much later on. I remember Matt DC saying that the book doesn't end, it just sort of stops.

between / a range is typical of his problems in that it acts like a pebble throwing your bike slightly off course; by the time you reach the end of the graf the cumulative effect has wrapped the bike completely around your neck

ok, deep breath.

Pip had made his visit to Miss Havisham and was leaving her premises after being frightened boy Estalla's cruel game with an effigy. It had woken superstitious feelings in him, which Dickens, if my memory served (it usually does), cleverly renders vivid without endorsing any nonsense of their supernatural origin.

Nothing less than the frosty light of the cheerful sky, the sight of people passing beyond the bars of the courtyard gate, and the reviving influence of the rest of the bread and meat and beer, would have brought me round. Even with those aids, I might not have come to myself as soon as I did, but that I saw Estella approaching with the keys, to let me out. She would have some fair reason for looking down upon me, I thought, if she saw me frightened; and she would have no fair reason.

She gave me a triumphant glance in passing me, as if she rejoiced that my hands were so coarse and my boots were so thick, and she opened the gate, and stood holding it. I was passing out without looking at her, when she touched me with a taunting hand.

‘Why don’t you cry?’

‘Because I don’t want to.’

‘You do,’ said she. ‘You have been crying till you are half blind, and you are near crying again now.’

She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon me. I went straight to Mr Pumblechook’s, and was immensely relieved to find him not at home. So, leaving word with the shopman on what day I was wanted at Miss Havisham’s again, I set off on the four-mile walk to our forge; pondering, as I went along, on all I had seen, and deeply revolving that I was a common labouring-boy; that my hands were coarse; that my boots were thick; that I had fallen into a despicable habit of calling knaves Jacks; that I was much more ignorant than I had considered myself last night, and generally that I was in a low-lived bad way.

I was halfway home, with my spirits thus troubled, before I began to sense a presence behind me. I was possessed with a growing feeling of unease. The woes I had experienced that day made me reluctant to embrace a new source of disturbance but I could not shake off a desire to turn and look. My weariness was forgotten in a sudden surge of anxious energy. I turned my head and for a moment thought that my impression of being followed was nothing but the work of my imagination, still troubled by the encounter at Miss Havisham’s. Then, with a growing feeling of horror, I realised that my initial apprehensions were not mistaken. There was indeed a figure following me, a shape I had not seen at first glance because I was looking for a man standing or walking. This was neither standing nor walking, nor, perhaps, was it a man. At a distance of perhaps a hundred yards a shape was slithering towards me along the ground. It was moving with the propulsion of its arms, assisted by convulsions of its torso. It was neither crawling nor walking because it appeared to have no legs. Its face was largely shapeless but its mouth was open and it appeared to be exhaling, or hissing, with all the force in its lungs.

I turned and ran.

I like the spark notes start that looks like it's just been converted from something like this:

Pip makes his visit to Miss Havisham and is leaving her premises after being frightened by Estalla's cruel game with an effigy.

(also correction 'by' for 'boy')

again, not too much that's exceptionable in that,

'made me reluctant to embrace a new source of disturbance' is a little odd, and 'slithering' seems odd but i can't quite work out why. feels out of place.

there's a famous e.b.white explanation of a technically unnecessary comma in a new yorker short story sentence: "that's there to allow them to pull the chair out and sit down" or something like that

in other words, sentence content and rhythm as an analogue for the action described: with the old lady leaning on the stick before she comes towards him, or here with the mechanism of his random selection (which i take -- after some thought -- to mean he chooses a room at random, without confirming in advance which of the unappealing panels is to occur within, so topic is pot luck), he requires you to push your reading mind through a confused and confusing version of a REALLY SIMPLE activity, like approaching someone, or going into a room

x-post i guess, though merely an hommage to the master

i mean tbf to lanchester - writers do other writers is *hard*. you can always spot something. it's an interesting sub-genre, and it can tell you a fair bit about both writers i think.

he requires you to push your reading mind through a confused and confusing version of a REALLY SIMPLE activity, like approaching someone, or going into a room

^ v much otm. this feels like this is one of those observations that needs to be collected as part of a set of conclusions.

This was neither standing nor walking, nor, perhaps, was it a man

bad not good

not sure what makes me uneasy about this lovecraftian use of slither, which i take it after a quick look at the OED comes from its usage wrt to reptiles, which dates from the 1830s and so is legit.

interesting to see some of its non-unpleasant uses:

2. intr. To walk in a sliding manner; to slip along or away.

1848 A. H. Clough Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich iv. 176 The streets of the dissolute city, Where dressy girls slithering-by upon pavements give sign for accosting.
1857 C. Kingsley Two Years Ago III. 183 Gay girls slithered past him, looked round at him, but in vain.
1894 H. Caine Manxman 36 Philip slithered softly through the dairy door.

oh god, i paused briefly at that 'it was none of the things that it might have been' and the 'nor, perhaps' construction before passing it over. but you singling it out like that has had the true lanchester effect of me laughing going away, and then coming back to it like i've been hypnotised, and laughing some more, and then my heart starts to beat quite fast through a mixture of irritation and excitement as I realise it's yet another sentence which is a sort of semantic 'undoing' of understanding or thought.

This passage made a very disagreeable impression on me

sez teh narrator after that excerpt. and on that note, i'm going to go and catch the two remaining rooms of the Kabakov exhibition i didn't see last week.

it's the key to yr slithering problem i think

fake dickens has just expressed the calibrated doubt that this is a man, but simultaneously knows it DEFINITELY CAN'T BE A MAN bcz SLITHERING!*

hence the "perhaps" is misplaced (i suspect it's there for more for rhythm-of-uncertainity than semantics anyway -- i.e. he's trying to do "penwiper? no such thing in the house! a rat?" etc, the dawning of doubt… but as ever he gets it all in the wrong order

*with all due respect to the examples quoted (all i think semi-satirical observation-description, of movement in skirts, or of a reptile-type person)

Thread is doing so much to get me out of bed in the morning these horrific first days back at work, thanking all of u but most of all mr lancs, without whose taper we shadows would have no music to dance

xpost

yep, you've nailed the slithering problem.

tho i'm not sure about the semi-satirical/reptilian use in those examples - there are enough older uses of slither which are not to do with reptiles but to do with non-reptilian motion. however it's never *graceful* motion, so while the reptilian aspect *may* not be present, it's hard to see how there isn't some sort of satiric intent.

yes, thanks John, for this winter sustenance you have provided.

the proportions of this analysis to the actual story remind me of VS Pritchett's observation about Wyndham Lewis, that he used an atom bomb to destroy a coconut shy.

Are we meant to be in Romania or is the spooky old Romanian woman somewhere in Central Europe stock antiziganism?

yes it's romania: vlad the impaler is mentioned in the first para

Aha!

reptile is via late latin/old french, and before it got locked into scientific taxonomy meant any creature that creeps or crawls (hazlitt calls a spider a "little reptile")

i somewhat took its use of women to be a reference to long skirts where you can't see the walking legs (as you might say gliding except with possibly sinister purpose? saurely these ladies are entirely respectable in intent, but the word raises doubts)

i said hungary upthread bcz i'm an idiot

reptile is via late latin/old french, and before it got locked into scientific taxonomy meant any creature that creeps or crawls (hazlitt calls a spider a "little reptile")

i somewhat took its use of women to be a reference to long skirts where you can't see the walking legs (as you might say gliding except with possibly sinister purpose? saurely these ladies are entirely respectable in intent, but the word raises doubts)

lol saurely