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

some technical problems here and he's talking about david foster wallace lol

tory party donations struck him as an interesting way of thinking about ghosts.

wait am i going crazy

there is something genuinely uncanny about how in 2018 the tory party is being paid for by dead people and if that isn't an image of ghostliness what is?

loooool. what.

he's been wanting to write about zoom - contact that isn't contact. conversing with people who aren't there.

this guy is a moron.

he strikes me as profoundly complacent about frameworks for thinking. remarkably pompous.

technology - that dance about what it gives us and what it takes away.

THERE ARE SO MANY GOOD COMMENTATORS ON THIS. how extraordinarily entitled.

i keep thinking it's frozen, but it's just him thinking and going '..... but if you think about instagram.'

this man is a fraud.

this was what was behind the stories - technology and the internal, and that led him to thinking about technology and the uncanny.

interviewer now recalls his 'now famous essay on facebook'.

interviewer posits his non fiction writing has been about demiystification. and asks whether the last resort of writing about technology is to REMYSTIFY it.

nonsense question amirite.

lancho says there are 'cold light of day reasons to be scared of facebook'

yerman is v literal and unimaginative.

'i think of this book being quieter and more internal and there isn't much about social media'

'i'd still prefer to write about social media head on'

john, ALL your writing is head on.

oooh difference between non fiction and fiction.

non fiction depends on being INTERESTED in something out there. Finding something out and there being a story there. a chunk of reality out in the world that you can find out about and capture.

fiction is slightly more elusive? allusive? and internal... 'about stuff i can't quite explain why i'm interested' 'what is it about x? i don'/t know, it's on my mind'

john says 'you don't know what's going to connect when you sit down to write' lolzibub

you have to trust the thing, the thing that bothers you, the thing you can't get out of your mind.

what like how to write sentences.

he doesn't want to give away spoilers in the stories. some of the images in the stories wouldn't go away from in my head.

i haven't read them but i refuse to believe this.

i've always thought 'haunting' is an interesting metaphor. if there were an elephant in the room it would be terrifying.

'it's more like a slightly annoying thing that won't go away'

^ lol amirite

interviewer says parent child relationships seem to come up. interviewer asks whether this is fear or more abstract? is this tied up with being a parent and being worried about that.

i've just been served some mussels so there is a short interlude.

lanchester suggests henry james is very good on malignity. claims turn of the screw has a strong claim to be the best ghost story written in english.

Hilary Mantel believes in ghosts apparently.

henry james' books are full of evil but generally it doesn't reach the supernatural.

john really doesn't have an imaginative sense. he is a vague imitative critic.

john is struggling thoughtfully with the banality of his observations. i am eating mussels.

but yeah he's much happier talking about writing than being imaginative. v ponderously literal.

there's was a (p bad) lrb review by ferdie mount of an m.r.james collection making the exact same claim abt turn of the screw: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n02/ferdinand-mount/a-life-without-a-jolt

'do you remember modems? where's the cut off'

loooool. john doesn't know technology cut offs, this we know.

'perhaps that's true, maybe everyone is in the middle between different technologies'

'my children's generation use different media, facebook is for the aunts and uncles'

john, for someone supposed to be a tech thinker, you are miles behind the discourse, do something about it.

'in the future we'll all be in the middle'

OMFG john on your gravestone

he's now talking about VCRs.

this is all reassuringly john.

john's talking about how he has to reset timers if there's a power cut. the man is superannuated.

the interview says the stories can be mischievous and prompted by a roald dahlian comeuppance.

'i think instagram is bad for people on the whole'

Fizzles, thank you for your service.

'the ghost story is something somebody tells you. the first one i wrote i read to friends' lol

'ghost stories take you somewhere you aren't quite expecting'

utter banalities delivered as insight.

not exactly ironic or unfelt, but you can take them that way.

"he says he thinks what he's saying is the opposite of hilary mantel who both believe and is sincere about ghosts, but for him he sees them as a set of tools and metaphors, and you can believe or put inverted commas round them."

so yes, that is a problem, john.

they're going to read from coffin liquor for a bit, so i'm going to eat mussels. i hope they do the rau rau bit

O
M
G

he's doing the old woman bit!

please go rau rau

he just said 'exlinguate' with great pleasure.

of course this is really interesting because his intonation and reading must be at the centre of why his sentences are so bad.

the reaction of those friends he read to in full: also rau rau rau

oh no they want to talk about QAnon and Covid 19

lol xpost.

"the conscious spreading of mistruthes as the germ theory of disease."

this is v bad.

"post truth is a much darker thing than pre-truth"

"yes, i think that's truth"

this made me laugh out loud

'that's true' sorry.

are academics in your sights? asks the interviewer?