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

molloy, malone dies and just one more thing

― mark s, Tuesday, 18 December 2018 11:19 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^very slept on btw

can you edit for "idiotic but not technically factually incorrect" opinions?

of course you can, you send the copy smartly back to the writer with a big red ring in felt-tip on it, and say "this is *sort* of correct, but some of our readers will bridle at it and bring up counter-examples, can you tighten and redraft to tackle this issue so we look less idiotic plz?"

i should stop seething but without remembering all the plot lines Middlemarch is *literally* about how middle class patriarchy crushes you so y'know

does the "canon" have a terminal date? it's an even more risible line if you're allowed to venture into the 20th century. excluding drama also feels like a cheat to avoid mentioning Shakespeare ffs but at least he's clear about doing so

from a lit crit nerd point of view a bunch of the writers he names, especially Dickens, haven't been regarded as central to the canon by 20th C big dogs like F.R. Leavis

Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope all considered second tier by mainstream critics at some point

i think leavis changed his mind on dickens? also i feel that the leavis version of the canon has not gone uncontested among critics since at least the bust-up with eliot at scrutiny (also i read FRL's book on lawrence a couple of years ago and it FUCKING SUCKS)

checking up on the dates of this i digressively discovered that there is an a.s.byatt character called BLACKADDER

oh i agree Leavis's opinions on the canon were for shit but not uninfluential and again i suspect Lanchester is oblivious to any of this stuff. and Lawrence is a godawful prose writer. some of the poetry i can live with.

actually pinch of salt, the last time i *tried* with Lawrence i couldn't do it to myself but it's not like my opinions are set in stone.

yeah what grates about Lanchester, always, is the real sense that he's talking from glib ignorance.

i find it so weird JL's become the LRB's golden boy! so much of it feels like stuff they shd just be writhing away from

i think lawrence is interesting exactly bcz he's so obviously talented and obviously insightful and obviously very problematic, and just so complicatedly on the move through various social and cultural layers and issues -- but FRL just finds 5139847519879384759 ways bang on abt him being "virile and morally taut" or whatever)

His argument makes even less sense wrt Wuthering Heights than it does with Middlemarch.

WH is more obviously tragic but Middlemarch is existentially bleak af imo, they both give him the lie tho

i mean at least Heathcliff and Cathy kind of get to have passion, Middlemarch is about the impossibility of passion under capitalism

now i want to know if there any any pop songs based on maigret or simenon

https://genius.com/Saian-supa-crew-la-preuve-par-3-lyrics

how peculiar. i assumed the sentence would end something like, let me summon my inner review of books syntactician, ‘a view of the world in which the act of coitus is removed entirely from romantic love and in which death is for the most part sanitized and picturesque’

ilxors will be delighted that he has now written a whole collection of ghost stories to go with that one from the LRB
https://s3.amazonaws.com/netgalley-covers/cover198036-large.png

the horror

What if reality but too much

I'm confused to see that this thread is 8 years old.

Even if you have genuinely creepy ideas, writing a good ghost story is a big technical challenge. It requires a level of command over pacing, atmosphere, tension, plus the element of surprise. Nothing I have read of Lanchester's writing suggests he is capable of any of that.

im sorry im really looking forward to this feast i will give a stinky review for clout and become the new james wood

At precisely 00.00 on the 9th of December, John Lanchester witnessed a pale, hooked hand appear out of the Måbli two-door wardrobe which he had bought the previous year in a sale at the Eastgate branch of Ikea. It had been a strange week, full of ouija boards, floating hourglasses, creaking floorboards, eerie knocks, ghoulish voices, figures appearing at windows, blood-curdling screams, flaming death-skulls, vampire bites, zombie pandemics, creepy Victorian dollsand killer clowns. And it was only Tuesday.

I was going to make a point about how Doglatin's list is actually too good to be believably Lanchestrian, remembering that I'd C&Ped one of his terrible, terrible lists upthread, but then I saw a subsequent post and realised I had entirely forgotten there's an entire paragraph in Capital where one of the characters muses in detail about 'My Humps' by the Black Eyed Peas and dear lord. Just this overwhelming sense that Lanchester has no feel for what aspects of mainstream culture are interesting or realistic and just throws in anything he can possibly think of, hoping people will see this gigantic pile-up of the mundane and mistake it for social realism.

A few messages down from here:

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

Also, "the African bar in Stockwell".

you step away from ilx for five minutes.

there’s several things here.
* ghost stories are finally and stylistically quite demanding
* your story has to tacitly be aware of/acknowledge/comprehend the aggregated history of ghost stories
* you need to understand where ghosts live in the contemporary material world - what’s their environmental niche

2 + 3 there transact with each other - the classic environmental niche for the ghosts in English ghost stories is v heavily determined by the Victorian settings - the channels and conduits you set up to manage that are crucial. (and of course it needn’t be UK ghost stories).

i suppose that’s nothing more than saying you need to be able to manage genre without falling into pastiche or hamfisted smushing together of common tropes (lanchester will do both of these things)

he’s also conspicuously bad at depicting the material world, constructing it, understanding it, so how he’ll be able to spot where ghosts live in the contemporary world, and construct an immaterial word to go along with the material is terrifying to consider.

this is going to be straight up garbage.

(that lrb story will be a good example - graft some bad modern world signifiers (the podcast app he had downloaded onto his mobile device) and graft it onto some badly realised old ghost story template, and write it badly)

“These are stories of selfie sticks with demonic powers”

fu lanchester.

gigantic pile-up of the mundane and mistake it for social realism

otmfm

Is that selfie stick quote real?

Is that selfie stick quote real?

God this is gonna be funny

tbf the topping up card device machine in capital was unsettlingly weird.

a haunted selfie stick. oh man I need to read this shit

As he stared languidly out the window of the bendy-bus, John remarked to himself how he had never previously noticed a disembodied voice murmuring 'Get In the Sea' halfway through his lovingly-crafted 'Greatest Dabbing Anthems' playlist...

"as you sit there with your flat white"

sipping your croissant

Right, this should probably result in my being thrown down a well (as he fell, his mind noticed the bricks were different colours and he reached for his phone and the camera app he used to record the things he noticed...) but.

I pretty much re-read this whole thread last night and as I was falling asleep I had a pretty detailed recollection of being on a bus in Perth, reading Beckett's 'Dante and the Lobster' from an Evergreen Review collection I'd found in a hostel. In the grip of hypnagogic fancy, I remembered the mundanity and the odd rhythms and somehow it all made sense: Beckett and Lanchester. I've looked at the opening this morning and, god help me, there is something in there. I leave this here as possibly my last will and testament.

He leaned back in his chair to feel his mind subside and the itch of this mean quodlibet die down. Nothing could be done until his mind got better and was still, which gradually it did and was. Then he ventured to consider what he had to do next. There was always something that one had to do next. Three large obligations presented themselves. First lunch, then the lobster, then the Italian lesson. That would do to be going on with. After the Italian lesson he had no very clear idea. No doubt some niggling curriculum had been drawn up by someone for the late afternoon and evening, but he did not know what. In any case it did not matter. What did matter was: one, lunch; two, the lobster; three, the Italian lesson. That was more than enough to be going on with.

Editors notes: Chinaski is now my patient. He wanders the halls of the institute, belching 'quodlibet!' at anyone who will listen. Nothing can be done with him until his mind gets better.

No doubt some niggling curriculum had been drawn up by someone for the late afternoon and evening

'someone' = Lanchester

given the symbology I'm pretty sure that makes Lanchester literally the devil iirc

I reread this thread as well last night and, having read subsequent Angela Carter novels, I now understand what the Pinefox was getting at about the onset of hackiness in her prose. I'm sure her earliest novels weren't as badly written as 'Heroes and Villains' was.

That's nice to hear!

Right, this should probably result in my being thrown down a well (as he fell, his mind noticed the bricks were different colours and he reached for his phone and the camera app he used to record the things he noticed...) but.

I pretty much re-read this whole thread last night and as I was falling asleep I had a pretty detailed recollection of being on a bus in Perth, reading Beckett's 'Dante and the Lobster' from an Evergreen Review collection I'd found in a hostel. In the grip of hypnagogic fancy, I remembered the mundanity and the odd rhythms and somehow it all made sense: Beckett and Lanchester. I've looked at the opening this morning and, god help me, there is /something in there/. I leave this here as possibly my last will and testament.

_He leaned back in his chair to feel his mind subside and the itch of this mean quodlibet die down. Nothing could be done until his mind got better and was still, which gradually it did and was. Then he ventured to consider what he had to do next. There was always something that one had to do next. Three large obligations presented themselves. First lunch, then the lobster, then the Italian lesson. That would do to be going on with. After the Italian lesson he had no very clear idea. No doubt some niggling curriculum had been drawn up by someone for the late afternoon and evening, but he did not know what. In any case it did not matter. What did matter was: one, lunch; two, the lobster; three, the Italian lesson. That was more than enough to be going on with._


Editors notes: Chinaski is now my patient. He wanders the halls of the institute, belching 'quodlibet!' at anyone who will listen. Nothing can be done with him until his mind gets better.

was good you posted that chinaski, because i do think the important thing to bear in mind when reading or about to read lanchester is “hey this might be good” or “maybe i’m just not seeing what makes him good”. it makes it all the better when you gradually have to admit to yourself that despite your tolerance and forced withholding of judgment you are finally forced to admit to yourself no really this is very bad.

"as you sit there with your flat white"

it heartens me that we're all routinely reading this entire thread

it's Lanchester's most important contribution to literature tbf

I would like to state that I meant no harm to Beckett in that comparison! It was more looking for a lineage - something that Lanchester might have read and seized on as a 'style'. A style that he eviscerated, left dead for years and then bunged in the microwave when the time came. We are left to marvel at his excreta; indeed we are his avid, attentive grooms of the stool.

Without rereading his long-ago first novel, The Debt to Pleasure (which I remember really liking!), memory tells me it was deeply in debt to Nabokov, especially his erudite psychopath narrators like Humbert Humbert.

Yes, likewise read and enjoyed it years ago, and Nabokov was the obvious model.

tho as you say, Nabokov as mendacious, self-obsessed narrator rather than, say, his aesthetic games or specific approaches to language.