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'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?

he just said 'exlinguate' with great pleasure.

― Fizzles, Wednesday, 7 October 2020 bookmarkflaglink

glad you are enjoying yourself

MR James is the genius of the clash between someone who thinks he knows everything and the world where explanations don't fit.

John wonders whether it's implicit in the form - a confrontation between the impulse to explain and things that can't be explained.

Yes ok, but by god this is 101 delivered as great intellect.

'there's a wonderful line in... (one of the stories' says the interviewer. outright lies.

oh it turns out lancho borrowed this from someone he knows.

borrowed.

he frowns a lot when thinking and saying 'i haven't really thought this through about ghost stories'

a warning to the totally incurious

interviewer: 'for 80% of the time you're describing reality, the unreality of reality. is the supernatural dimension not an afterthought but a chance to explore that 80%'

JL: 'well the thing is i wanted these to be re-readable'

massive lol here.

'You have to watch it with the supernatural, the revelation of the supernatural component, the touch needs to be as light as possible before it delivers its punch'

lol big touch for a light man.

"the stories have to be about the texture of modern life in general

it's about getting quotidian life in it.

the spooky things are realer if the rest of the setting is real too."

SOLID GOLD

interview just referred to the subtleties in his writing.

think interviewer just referred to @Aelkus tweet.

lanchester says you can't outdo contemporary reality for outlandish things happening, citing philip roth.

how do you write satire in a time like this RITE

While you're on, could you ask Lancho to ask the LRB to stop fucking emailing me 9 times a week? You could frame it as a 'I think the servers are haunted lol'. Thx.

i've asked a questiohn

lol china ski

a lot of talk about the social concepts, but i was wondering if i could ask a question about the writing: what’s your draft,revision, editing process (slightly comes from a comment by mike mccormack who said the excellent quality of irish writing at the moment was to do with the excellent quality of editors)

it's difficult to ask lancho good questions because his speciality isn't anything really.

all his thinking is underpinned by milquetoast inexpert opinions about stuff that many others have talked about better. this includes his imaginative thinking.

my GOD man. he's just heard about a k shaped recovery.

this man is a dullard.

he must just spend most of his day sitting in a moronic self-satisfied stupor.

what if his speciality is,,, everything

'i've long thought there would be a populist backlash and i didn't realise it would come from the right, and surely at some point you'd've thought by reversion to the mean, the pushback from the left and social democracy, from actually common sense, why in a democratic system would you have a system where most people lose out'

why john why. feeling his way to sensiblism with slow wondering steps.