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 got this far before snorting outright: "As with a mirror-gazer, we have a tendency to want everything to be about us."

(meaning i managed to clamber through his forced outrage at homo floresiensis being termed the "hobbit" without throwing my LRB across the room)

leaving the rest for later as i actually have paid work to get on with today

ok i lied i read a bit further and came to this and now i can't stop laughing:

(In the case of H. floresiensis, Indonesia’s leading palaeoanthropologist took the first skeleton away for himself, kept it for a period of months, and returned it severely damaged.)

another day volunteering at the betsy ross museum. everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag. buddy, they wont even let me fuck it

— wint (@dril) February 20, 2012

The Lanchester neanderthal piece is not great. As Mark says: forced outrage at 'hobbit'; he says he feels much more distant from neanderthals than the neolithic tribes in britain and ireland 'but that's bollocks' - no need for profanity John, and it's not bollocks, the neanderthals were 30-40,000 years before the neolithic tribes and a different species. And wtf is this: lithics – the sciencey word for stone artefacts, used in preference to ‘tools’? 'Sciencey'? And yes it's used in preference to 'tools' because that could mean anything from a stick for getting termites out of a tree to a cordless power drill.

jesus.

Excellent post from Ledge!

At last someone takes on Lanchester's unnecessary, offensive (and here just misleading / mistaken) use of obscenity in print and his charmless colloquialism!

i class his charmless colloquialisms as 'blokey simplification' to make something sound unthreatening. and as you say, here mistaken. i think it's possibly more insidious than it looks, as it belongs, effectively to the world of Boris Johnson, and male workplaces where people (often middle-aged white men) feel threatened by difference, and need reassuring about it in comforting language.

its also the notion that you (a pleb) need this 'blokey simplification' to ease you into this concept that I (Lanchester) understand perfectly well

I can see how he might have got that notion with some of his financial pieces, where there might have been some particularly recondite concepts in need of simplification, blokey or otherwise; the worst bits in this piece read like they're written for ten year olds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emvySA1-3t8

lol, greatest 4th wall breakage

it's not even a good explanation of what commodities are

in the directors cut they spend half an hour arguing about the grundrisse

I've read it again (why?) and where he says "but that's bollocks", I think he's talking about the sense that the Neanderthals lived more remotely, "their very existence ... seems contingent and marginal" - and it's bollocks because we only find their remains in remote sites because those are the only places where remains survive and haven't been "built over or crushed underfoot". But it's right on the heels of talking about the emotional and empathic distance of the Neolithic tribes. And I think that's ok, going from emotional to physical distance, he's talking about his own immediate thought process and the 'bollocks' is a more considered judgment on that process. But that reversal muddies the fact that they were very different - distant - from us and our neolithic ancestors.

what a lot of time to waste on this.

he has a knack of making you waste time on his sentences.

a real sweet spot where you epistemological satisfaction is permanently deferred despite it seeming in reach initially. It's very subtle.

I have the sinking feeling that JL is currently in the process of writing the Great British Covid Novel.

oh no why did you have to say that.

it will be full of people interpreting epidemiological data in their heads; bin men surprisingly familiar with the lancet.

LADS LADS LADS

CHRISTMAS UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE

IT'S OUR HERO

lolol. i will need to give this a festive viewing.

Thank god for iplayer! Please say one of the answers was rău rău.

Without spoiling I am afraid that no, that was not one of the answers

I have to say it was difficult to square the avuncular type on UC with the almost mythic figure evoked on this thread

this is not to excuse his crimes

when you're in deep, his avuncularity becomes part of his criminal method.

his general knowledge was still woeful even if he was the least worst of a bad lot

also he gave off that misplaced confidence in his own lack of knowledge vibe a lot

its normally really hard right? these questions are weirdly easy, like easier than most quiz shows

im not even good at this kind of thing and im getting more than they are

the Christmas "celeb" ones always feel a lot easier than the regular show, and with good reason, cos look how badly they do even at this level

i know that your knowledge becomes professionally more constrained as you get older but the easiness of the xmas university challenge and the poorness of the performances always make me wonder about the hinterland of these avatars of public life.

exactly, and i don't get the impression they're feigning ignorance out of some sense of modesty

come on, when even intellectual nobodies like this lad are constantly shitting out takes like this with no effect on earnings or security of work

The shitposters who start frothing everytime I tweet really make me laugh, I have to admit.
I've been discussing politics on forums for 25 years. You're just kids. I've seen it all. Save yourself some time and fuck off to 4chan.

— Sunny Hundal (@sunny_hundal) December 22, 2020

For sheer Lanchester thread completism I post here my comment from LRB thread:

--
Started on LRB 17.12.2021, reading Lanchester on Neanderthals. This has been discussed before - perhaps by Fizzles the Neanderthal? - so I will be brief:

Lanchester can communicate. He can inform - including, I suppose, about subjects that are quite technical. I suppose this is a skill.

But I hate his ready recourse to vulgarity and how the LRB lets him get away with this (or, presumably, anything).

And this article heavily includes a bad feature: positing 'what you think you know' and then saying it's wrong, without any evidence that his reader does think it.

There is also a strange contradictory moment near the end when he says, in effect: 'Neanderthals are utterly different from us, so it's *amazing* to think that science shows that we are part-Neanderthal'. But surely this scientific finding would suggest that Neanderthals are *not* entirely different from us, and therefore it becomes less amazing. We need to think of them as part of our make-up rather than a strange 'other' - and if we do that, then it's not strange that they're part of our make-up?

Possibly these points were alreeady made by Fizzles and others.

Lastly, btw, Lanchester's article ends surprisingly badly, with a sentence that doesn't have a main verb. I understand that rhetorically we use such formulations all the time, especially in speech; but one would think that (especially from an ... experienced author) the last sentence of a quite long article would want to end on a resonant note, not an abbreviated one that feels off-key.
--

I now recall that these posts were very accurate:

The Lanchester neanderthal piece is not great. As Mark says: forced outrage at 'hobbit'; he says he feels much more distant from neanderthals than the neolithic tribes in britain and ireland 'but that's bollocks' - no need for profanity John, and it's not bollocks, the neanderthals were 30-40,000 years before the neolithic tribes and a different species. And wtf is this: lithics – the sciencey word for stone artefacts, used in preference to ‘tools’? 'Sciencey'? And yes it's used in preference to 'tools' because that could mean anything from a stick for getting termites out of a tree to a cordless power drill.

― ledge, Thursday, December 17, 2020 bookmarkflaglink

jesus.

― Fizzles, Thursday, December 17, 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Excellent post from Ledge!

At last someone takes on Lanchester's unnecessary, offensive (and here just misleading / mistaken) use of obscenity in print and his charmless colloquialism!

― the pinefox, Thursday, December 17, 2020 bookmarkflaglink

i class his charmless colloquialisms as 'blokey simplification' to make something sound unthreatening. and as you say, here mistaken. i think it's possibly more insidious than it looks, as it belongs, effectively to the world of Boris Johnson, and male workplaces where people (often middle-aged white men) feel threatened by difference, and need reassuring about it in comforting language.

― Fizzles, Thursday, December 17, 2020 bookmarkflaglink

its also the notion that you (a pleb) need this 'blokey simplification' to ease you into this concept that I (Lanchester) understand perfectly well

― plax (ico), Thursday, December 17, 2020

Pretty dreadful, indeed, when Lanchester talks about 'sciencey word'.

But Mark S's post also reminds me of a ridiculous para about 'mirror-gazer'. Here Lanchester starts on a metaphor and completely loses his way; the metaphor doesn't do what he wants it to do at all, and quite distracts from, rather than confirms, his argument, such as it is.

LRB recently landed in my inbox: "John Lanchester almost gets stuck at Suez".

Admitidely an amusing mental image.

was probably trying to write a sentence.

re Condition of England novels:

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/04/you-can-never-go-home-anymore

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/03/perfidious-albion-sam-byers-review

Come back John Lanchester all is forgiven.

― Matt DC, Monday, 27 August 2018 13:20 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm reading this guy's new book after seeing juliet jacques being enthusiastic about it sadly its not very good and quite lanchestery

or maybe like an episode of black fucking mirror

i think its not helping that i recently read a joy williams book that covers some quite similar things but is startling and hypnotic and this feels so ploddingly mediocre in comparison. it reminds me of this thing she says in a paris review interview where she's talking about boring 'issues' writing. i keep thinking about how derrida talks about the irreducible excess of language but there doesn't seem to be any of that here, everything is so easily parsible (this is how i think of lanchester too, very mechanical analogies, nothing volatile within the writing or reading of it)

I read and really liked Perfidious Albion, did you read that one plax?

no i just heard about this on suite 212 and thought it would be fun to read something 'new'

The author is 31

I would like to read this tbh but I suspect if you didn’t like this you might not like Perfidious Albion, which was mostly quite appealingly clear in what it set out to do but the characters were a bit lacking

there's lots of stuff that's depressing me about this book. it was supported by arts council money. like given his last book was a big success seemingly, why aren't faber and faber who are publishing this one not just paying him well? there's something really depressing about this, like i'm keenly aware of how difficult it must be to get to write a novel 'these days' but this is so uninspiring and plodding. nobody has said anything so far that was not expository and usually in the service of making some aspect of the plot that was already clear MUCH CLEARER.

Lots of paragraphs like:

"the particular room in which I found myself contained two men. The desk between us was less a working surface than a barrier, stretching from wall to wall and bolted at both ends, meaning I had to enter through a separate door and hallway. It was a neat statement, I thought: the clearest signifier of bureaucracy, repurposed as a blunt communication of division: the men across from me were protected: I was held at bay."

I feel like this paragraph could do without the narrator interpreting the scene for us in such an obvious way. there's a lot of this iron grip stuff, where we get a fairly obvious metaphor and then its laboriously parsed. (I literally picked this paragraph at random now) I wouldn't have minded so much if the interpretation was something surprising like a conveyor belt of bearing statuary of martyrs in agony or something to be limboed under or

its like why live in the imagination of this person if their interior world is so uncluttered with unruly associations

"The room contained two men. The desk between us stretched from wall to wall and was bolted at both ends. I had to enter through a separate door and hallway."