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

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

lol i'm never quite sure how much to observe social media boundaries. I am getting left behind like J0hn Lanch¯\_(ツ)_/¯ster.

are u re-reading capital.

i will never read capital

A contra-Lanchester reflection: compared to other things, technology is not spectral or haunted.

It might just qualify as 'uncanny' in that it sometimes allows people do to unusual things they couldn't do before.

a contra-pinefox reflection: maybe only technology can be haunted

It is a mystery.

Basically my line on this is that technology represents new framing devices and so can be a vehicle for haunting, but the natural environmental niche for haunting and ghosts is most definitely not technology, probably for atmospheric and genre reasons as much as anything else. Kipling is an exception as usual, eg in his excellent short story The End of the Passage, where he uses the then novel Kodak camera to convey a haunting.

(I mean he was amazing at the use of technology to explore the metaphysical (that extraordinary short story The Eye of Allah, combining inter religious love, the microscope, medieval monasticism, and germ theory for example).)

Speaking of unbearable pomposity, my thinking a while ago on The End of the Passage:

I have said that ghosts do not like the light. This is because, although they have a fondness for apparition and animation, they do not like being seen. The eye is the sense organ of light, and is the vehicle of that reason that comes from observation, which we call science, and is the symbol of the movement that promotes that reason, the Enlightenment.

Ghosts never appear in well-lit laboratories, are notoriously chary of experimental conditions, in the light of science they become ‘phenomena’, their trappings bed sheets, paste-board masks, projections of psychological megrims and disorder. They may look unconvincing or gimcrack, even becoming subjects not of fear but (disastrously for their ability to frighten) of mockery, laughter and scorn.

The eye is also the most sedulously duplicitous of the sense organs, its world so detailed and convincing, so seemingly incapable of modification, that we call its representations reality. This is the world we exist in, and its light is the light by which we read. In order to have a successful ghost story, the ineluctable modality of the visual must be eluded, the rules of reason modified.

Or you can do what Rudyard Kipling did in The End of the Passage – take the very instruments of observational rationalism, the camera and the eye, and make them the vessels of the terror that they are supposed to dissolve, producing an ocular ghost story.

> ‘T’isn’t in medical science.’

> ‘What?’

> ‘Things in a dead man’s eye.’

The End of the Passage – Rudyard Kipling

...

Spurstow asks another of the men, Mottram, to look into Hummil’s eyes.

Mottram leaned over his shoulder and looked intently.

> ‘I see nothing except some gray blurs in the pupil. There can be nothing there, you know.’

Despite Mottram’s insistence, Spurstow decides to take a photograph of the eyes with a Kodak camera, but destroys the pictures without showing them to anyone else.

> ‘It was impossible, of course. You needn’t look, Mottram. I’ve torn up the films. There was nothing there. It was impossible.’

> ‘That,’ said Lowndes, very distinctly, watching the shaking hand striving to relight the pipe, ‘is a damned lie.’

The eye is no longer the vessel of reason, and has become like the sarcophagus that contains Count Magnus, a vessel of mortal fear, unopenable, and sealed by more than padlocks.

mark s can say this better than i’m about to, but recording technology of all kinds has been associated with the supernatural since the beginning. what are photos anyway but a kind of embalming of a dead moment? and edison of course believing - or feigning to believe - that he could use phonograph technology to speak to the dead. there’s a rich history there. and then you think of movies like the conversation, or blade runner, where new information gets somehow magicked up from within the unseen heart of an artifact as a consequence of applied concentration by the protagonist, acting like a medium. (a medium! aha - no - let me not go down that road perhaps)

yes of course, very good point - odds and ends of voices coming out of nowhere (there's a really good Machen short story on this). recording technology - the aural - is really significant isn't it. I thought Berberian Sound Studio did this very well, and it was either a Tony Herrington or Mark S piece on The Fall in The Wire that really bought this to my mind back when i was a teenager.

Wasn't Marconi trying to contact the dead by his early investigations into wireless technology. I remember reading that a while back.

I’m pretty rusty on the details of all this, and it’s become more of an internet crypto-truism since I last picked through it but yes, this deliberately credulous and somewhat suspect net essay sets out the main beats — at various times, tech pioneers Edison, Bell, Lodge and Marconi all apparently flirted with the notion that a machine would be built which could contact the dead: as ever it takes it back to the Fox sisters, presumed charlatans since they were bullied into confessions they immediately recanted, and links the spirit-knocking that they traded in to morse code (because tapping had become an excellent way to transmit messages across distance. Needs more Tesla imo.

Oliver Lodge is the best catch here, tbh: he was a theoretical physicist as well as an inventor (the “coherer” was an essential item in getting early radio to work), and he had as good a grasp of the various established-science wave theories (sound, electricity and magnetism) as anyone on earth. The phrases “thought wave” and “brain wave” aren’t accidental — they were notions proposed to explain an evidently existing phenomenon (thinking lol, it DOES exist, it DOES) which was not then well explained. If it’s a wave then it travels. If iut travels through the body — perhaps via the electric impulses also known to control the body — then perhaps it can travel beyond? And be measured and translated? As speculation goes, this was not bad or goofy science! Electricity is evolved, and some of the aspects not explained then are not explained now.

Tracer shies from the ”medium” pun — but it’s not a pun, it’s the same word being used in the same way. The tranced-up medium in a spiritualist seance was an element in a an embodied technology (the receiver or the coherer or what have you) by which the spirit guide on the other side (effectively the telephone exchange operative, often a native american presumably since so many of these were newly dead courtesy philip sheridan etc) connected the loved one to the bereaved.

Bell, Lodge and Marconi were all on working machines that translated sound waves to electricity and back (a telephone is an early microphone attached to an early speaker) — at first (telephones) using wires, latterly (radio) doing without. The realisation that radio could be recived at enormous distance without a connecting machinery simply amplified the speculation that thought waves or brain waves might work this way too.

But the dead? The dead are the dead! Not if you’re a Christian, which everyone involved was (even a bullshit artist like Edison). If science is true and Christian belief is true, then each must support and”prove:” the other! and In the 19th century, scientific proof was very often a matter of fashioning a technology whose working was in effect a proof. Soon and inevitably the technology that linked the eternal spirit on that (to be hoped) blessed side to this mortal side was there for the grasping. Surely?

In Europe, America and the wider world, the second half of the 19th centiry and the first of the 20th were years of immense woe and loss. Industrially powered wars, ruthless colonialexploitation, death on unprecedented new scales: the need for solace was vast and entirely genuine. Millions flirted with the comforts spiritualism seemed to offer, and no surprise. People wanted desperately to know that those taken far too early were doing OK! Ideally in a better place, this one place was horrible.

Scientists and practical men — materialists of a very specific mien aren’t immune to loss and yearning, or to being fooled once they step outside their zones of expertise. The great scourge of the seance was Houdini, escapologist and practiced prestidigator, who literally recognised half the technical conjurors’ tricks being deployed, and the shrewd technique that went into levitation, ectoplasm, and so on. He knew that carney culture was about fleecing dopes even when it’s mostly benign.

As extremely practical men, Bell, Edison and Marconi were all half carney men themselves: funding their research via self-promotion and promises. Edison in particular was two parts circus barker and idea thief and three parts brilliant business operative to one part genuine inventor, always talking all kinds of bollocks to keep the ball rolling. If he said his technology could talk to ghosts, he was definitely eyeing your wallet. I hadn’t till now known that Marconi also had interests in this direction, as stevolende suggests — the article I linked says yes with qualifications, which I think I’d amplify.

In different ways, Bell and Lodge seem the best match for the image that article sketches: Lodge as a hugely important forward-looking scientific and speculative theorist. Bell was fascinated by the social dimensions of the technologisation of communication (the article claims his assistant Thomas Watson was a spiritualist, though I think this was much later in life, not while he was working on the telephone — in old age he became an adherent of Meher Baba! iirc he was quite sceptical that telephony could be achieved, tho i may be misremembering this…)

Telegraph, telephony, telepathy — the point was a fancy greek word including tele-, the prefix meaning “far”, to indicate that action at a distance was a scientific reality. This realisation was a massively disorientating paradigm shift in materialist scientific assumption, and explaining its possibility is the basis for much of the most brain-busting stuff in 20th century physics.

lol "booming post" aka tl;dr sorry fizzles, sorry mr lanchester

(ok i also meant to put in something abt trances, mesmer and "animal magnetism" but that can probably wait)

i am not the booming post; i come to bear witness to the booming post

confession is not absolution. you cannot escape the

BOOMING (and extremely interesting) POST, MARK

make sure it doesn’t happen again.

i have reached the middle of whoops! and actally it is NOT at all as bad as the opening two chapters, long stretches of reasonably clear summary of events -- it's only when he reaches out of this narrative for quick explanatory stabilisation that you glimpse some of the ghastly bouvard&pecuchet level jibrish that are his touchstone lodestar and ground zero

a mode more like his essays on christie and simenon as dissected above

(apologies all i've been derailed by life on this review: actual work and job applications and other projects with more pressing deadlines)

rereading stuff for mind-focusing purposes i just re-encountered this glorious question from ilxor calumerio: "why do we need to be reassured as to smitty's cum-spotting bona fides?"

he so doesn't deserve readers like those in this thread

Who is publishing your review of the short stories?

at the moment it seem i will be self-publishing on the funding platform patreon

This is the most elaborate and unremunerative long con I have ever heard of.

ffs

What is, James M? The Patreon thing (haven't seen it) or Lanchester's book (ditto really) or -- ?

This is the most elaborate and unremunerative long con I have ever heard of.

It was a joke about this whole years-long thread being a setup to get patreon $. It fell flat.

oh lol, i thought it was a joke about lanchester’s whole grift being a long con or deep trolling of this thread. to what mystical or hermetic end who knows. i have considered it.

He was on R4 earlier. God knows what the pitiful wanker was talking about, my already deficient brain shut down after about roughly something like 10 seconds of listening to him.

The collection is £0.99 on Kindle at the moment, if anyone is brave enough to read it.

i bought it the other day simultaneously thinking, i would pay no more than 99p and also wow what a bargain for such entertainment.

"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."

this is one of the best things i've ever read posted on ilx lol. the lrb podcast where they paired him with patricia lockwood was chefs kiss. i think the moment where he was like "there's wine enthusiast blogs lol" has already been reported with alarm somewhere on this or the lrb thread.

btw my bf read capital about five years ago and it basically made him quit reading contemporary fiction and since than he hasn't read any fiction written after 1900.

bf otm

i know but he does annoying things like read every zola novel in a year and literally months later say he doesn't really remember anything about them

lol maybe that's Zola's fault?

oh great yr on his side

I'm trying to read Zola now and it's like I'm the one who's working in a coalmine.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51SQ7DVPV6L._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

the lrb podcast where they paired him with patricia lockwood was chefs kiss.

lol this was amazing.