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

lanchester deeply agrees with china mieville.

john's brain buffers from time to time.

young, shiny faced, dyed blond slicked back hair. probably brighter than he's coming across. trying to put thinking into this is hard.

i do actually think john lanchester is a bellend.

do you think everyone has a unique experience of social media because of the algorithms.

'this is a super interesting point'

'i believe this has broken the notion of the agora, the greek democratic space'

this is a good example of pompous public school language used with very low levels of intelligence. JL is Jacob Rees Mogg. What happened to him?

the algorithm is producing your own personal version of reality.

that is disastrously stupid.

MY QUESTION

'thanks for asking that fizzles'

'it was more fun writing short stories than writing novels'

'i end up hating novels, i end up hating it, and you have to manage your emotions'

'i've always been certain i've written the wrong book, of the competing ideas i have i pick the dud, i commit to these infinitely shit ideas. short stories were fun to write'.

'the first couple i wrote slightly quicker than i normally do'

lol

draft, revision, editing.

'the main thing that was different, i sit with the idea for long, and i want to be sure it's right, because i know i will hate it. i have to work out the big structural things in a novel. the short stories came more unprompted, they come more quickly. coffin liquor came from being shown around the garden museum. as soon as i heard the phrase coffin liquor i thought 'i've got to use that'.'

'i used to write very bad poetry, mercifully all lost'

'it would come to you, you couldn't sit down, it would come to you, the short stories were like that. the process of a novel didn't happen like that. like the selfie stick.'

'i can't quite explain about it. there's an implied connection with the audience about it, ghost stories have a frame, i don't think about an audience with a novel, i think about an object i'm trying to make, and this was more like having a person in mind.'

sorry, his hair isn't dyed blonde. it's just fair.

THAT'S IT.

all done.

pleasingly this is clearly the same person who wrote all that bad prose.

I feel like he didn’t really answer your q... and yet, really did

it's the conceptual artist-actor "smitty" and this is his greatest coup

a machine hidden in the spine of all the books he's sold now activates and shreds them as they sit in yr very homes

Fizzles, thank you.

Damn Fizzles, this was glorious.

had to explain to my daughter who Lanchester is cos i kept laughing at this livestream

I asked you to fuck off in another thread, NV. It applies everywhere.

lol James i have no idea what my drunken comment was about the other night, which doesn't excuse it but means i don't know if i was jibing at what you'd said because i've certainly got no ongoing grudge against you as far as i can recall

anyway i can certainly fuck off in terms of interacting with you, if you like, but if you think i'm going to not post where i feel like it well don't be daft

actually there was meant to be a "sorry" in there but i kinda circled round it, so: sorry about that other comment.

No, I apologise too, I'm having a bad day and that was uncalled for.

no problem, hope your day gets better.

Double buzz there: Fizzles' miraculous ongoing Lancho meta-commentary and ^that reconciliation.

so i had to disappear quick sharp to finish the excellent mussels and generally make up for ignoring my gf in order to type stuff here and say 'god you're a twat' at the live feed for an hour. just corralling some of the observations above:

so it's clear that he basically is a literal review-essay thinking who thinks he is also... an artist i guess?
i think the point is that he approaches everything, fictional and non fictional writing, thinking even, utterly literally. this isn't just a john thing, it's a black mirror thing, what if selfie sticks but. but there's no belief or sincerity there.
the way he sees ghosts as a tool, a metaphor, as having inverted commas around them. john, those inverted commas are putting them into your essay world. you have no real idea about haunting, ghosts or anything to do with the world of the imagination. your quote marks are incredibly trivialising (I think his role is basically a trivialiser - the title of whoops ought to have alerted us... well, me anyway.
he is terribly, embarrassingly unaware of up-to-date thinking, commentary, and frameworks for thinking on concepts such as. technology, social media
i think both of those last two points basically leave him with a fairly outdated, weak and unimaginative intellect trying to reinvent the wheel, which results in him working towards such painful insights as:

• the conscious spreading of mistruthes as the germ theory of disease (and that people didn't have a concept for this or way of expressing this *before* germ theory of disease was discovered
• the algorithm is producing your own personal version of reality (my observation here was that he really didn't have a sense of what an algorithm was, which is weird because i'm pretty sure he's written about them, superficially, but not RONG-ly).
• it's really interesting but i was just reading today about how some people refer to a k-shaped economic recovery from covid, and i find that concept fascinating, these different shapes.'
• 'post truth is a much darker thing than pre truth' : |

this livestream was actually the first time i've got really angry with yerman, because most of the time i'm just wondering how someone writes such bad sentences and misreads and misrepresents the world so spectacularly and still gets to sell books and get regarded as literature. but his pompous manner is really galling and incredibly undeserved.

the 'concept of the agora' moment was quite illuminating i thought, he was bringing public school hi-falutin language to basic levels of ignorance, which I think some people, including him, see as intelligent?

i had more thorts in the shower this morning, but have forgotten them. will be back if i remember.

<3 NV and JM both.

i mean there's a ghost story right there in the time-settings of the internet of things

ffs haunted chastity belts lol!

and also not necessarily lol

ok, we've all been gleefully ragging on this but there's something genuinely disturbing in @PenTestPartners's blog post: https://t.co/ti5cVL2000 the map they made of a random sample of users shows a small concentration in what looks like northern Xinjiang https://t.co/FGDHAP4wEa

— Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) October 6, 2020

ha ha yes i saw that the other day. john will be telling us about it as a new and significant development that he's just read about in a few years time and be telling us that in some very real way IoT is a prophylactic.

what if sex but too much

is a direction i at once urgently want him to take and very much don't want him to take also

v john lanchester insightful image imo

pic.twitter.com/1YIkG19NUR

— [👁 ˍゝ👁 ] (@kpIusm) October 7, 2020

JL doing research for his next short story idea.

I’ve never read anything of this guy’s but this thread title haunts the corners of my mind like a spectre, and the last time I was home I saw one of this guy’s books in my parent’s bedroom and had a visceral twist of disgust. So yeah, great liveblog.

just on the xinjiang bit, which i rather noiselessly glided over in my initial response – john lanchester's 'inverted commas' are uniquely ill-suited to understand grotesque expressions of evil, malevolence, power, and noticing how adaptations in the channels of information and networks of communication, and general telecommunications infrastructure have significantly changed those expressions and their mechanics (as in the grotesque example Alex Harrowell cites).

Wondered how accurate his observations were when he was on the talk during the local Arts Festival. Couldn't really remember who he was.
Now seeing at least one view of him.

Wonder how they pick who does the talks here.

xp there might be something in the deep-seated bourgeois worldview that makes it impossible to believe in grotesque evil

so i had to disappear quick sharp to finish the excellent mussels and generally make up for ignoring my gf in order to type stuff here and say 'god you're a twat' at the live feed for an hour.

Relateable content!

Good work as always, Fizzles.

Reading Fizzles' excellent summary of the night I wonder how common Lanchester is in uk lit ('literary' thinking, lack of imagination, lazy at homework, terrible at keeping up, pompous manner, entitled) or whether he is just a particular manifestation of a thing?

xp there might be something in the deep-seated bourgeois worldview that makes it impossible to believe in grotesque evil

― 1000 Scampo DJs (Noodle Vague), Friday, October 9, 2020 8:38 AM bookmarkflaglink

I think this is what I was reaching towards, NV, otm.

i am by NO means versed in present-day uk lit compared to any ilxors and ilbows but the two figures i have encountered personally (possibly oddities within it anyway?) could not be less like JL = t0by l!tt and n!cola b4rker

i also used to know someone who was in NA with will s3lf who said his stories there were very very funny and er s3lf-deprecating (couldn't work out how to avoid that sorry)

i am fonder of S3lf and his work than a lot of ilxors i suspect tho i haven't felt the urge to read him in a decade or more

yeah, one good aspect of LD has been looking into a bit more contemporary fiction, and even where I haven't really enjoyed something otherwise lauded (Angela Chadwick's XX for example), I've generally found writers seriously interested in their craft, and what is more achieving unusual and interesting things (I'm particularly referring to Jen Calleja, Eley Williams (short stories anyway) and Isabel Waidner. That isn't hugely representative, and I know personally one fairly successful writer who can outdo even Lanchester in terms of utter pomposity but is actually skilled and interested in his craft.

I just think the crucial thing here is... well, the shortcut for me anyway, is that John Lanchester isn't actually very bright. I don't worry about that in all sorts of spaces, and I think you can achieve a lot with dogged progression and tackling a subject, without a particular need for a ginormous bean, but he sort of positions himself as insightful. The other aspect is, to steal a phrase incorrectly from Wyndham Lewis, he is a man without Art. He just doesn't get the world of the imagination (and I think this goes for The Debt to Pleasure as much as it does his later painfully literal works).

So, the overall conundrum is that he's a really not very good writer, very securely lauded by one significant aspect of the critical world. I'm not sure that can be applied across UK lit.

LD = lockdown sorry.

i should say that for all this quite heartfelt slagging of the man - the livestream really did annoy the hell out of me - there remains something enduringly fascinating and irresolvable about the qualities of his badness, especially in his fictional prose.

in a conversation i was having elsewhere i said:

i do think intentionality is the sphinx-like mystery at the centre of lanchester. and although i keep offering benefit of doubt (he *can’t* have meant this surely? he *must* have *meant* to do this, but why? etc), in the end... well i find myself permanently deferring judgment so that there is no “in the end” i guess. i think one of the intriguing things, especially where it starts intersecting with systemic stuff like publishing, editing and reviewing, is that you start reflexively to doubt your own aesthetic judgment. not necessarily in totality, but on the sentence by sentence judgments. so that you find yourself going “is this... bad?”. then a bit later there’s almost relief at a really egregious sentence-logic turd, where you go “no ok this is definitely bad” and then you go allllll the way back round and say “but why? how was this allowed to happen?”

and that micro-doubt has a way of insidiously undermining the whole lanchester critique, so it feels almost a matter of faith and doubt.

for some reason i’m more angry about him than anyone else at the moment because when you ask the question, given the above, how did you get here? how did you earn this status? you realise he’s a really potent avatar of privelege. even more potent because he doesn’t seem to have the first clue this is the case (nothing has even penetrated the privelege to cause an inkling of self doubt or hypocritical defence mechanism, completely lack of awareness of the grift). you could argue his entire MO is wonderingly and moralistically probing at his own privelege, of which he is unaware. it’s like a truman show where lanchester is living inside a massive lanchester world. or a matrix where he’s looking at which pill to take, and one will show him the world outside lanchester and the other will allow him to stay innocently lanchester.

there’s an odd sort of everyman quality to this epistemic problem, or problem of philosophical scepticism. but also it’s lanchester. so it’s v visible. it’ll oddly godlike being a reader in lanchester’s world. you see e hopeless innocent fallibility. and it’s v irritating.



that is to say we all wonder to what extent we are able to get outside ourselves, but... and i can’t stress this enough..: especially john.

what if lanchester but too much.

as the other half of this "conversation elsewhere" lol i am curretly in the throes of finetuning my actualreal review of JL's actualreal collection of horror stories which i have actualreal read, compellingly obvious mere 4-word review notwithstanding (viz it's bad not good)

unlikely to complete b4 next week sadly, i have to reread a big sigh fvckton of stuff