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

wtf is that?

oh it’s lanchester. sorry i forgot that thread i was in.

you couldn’t make this stuff up. (unless you’re lanchester i guess)

that hob in detail

https://gruesomemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/02/DeDw08PVAAAjksO.jpg

I've had a difficult day but getting to the end of that paragraph nearly broke me. I had a sense of where it was going early on and could parse his rhetorical process, but still had a sense of dragging myself from word to word, sentence to sentence.

brb having at lanchester w/ a spiraliser

"but our subject is the writer’s stuff" wasn't even the first rock in the path. I had to back up and read it a couple of times. "Our subject (the Conservative government, and how it affected writers 40 years ago) is the stuff of literature." Obviously not, really, but there was a whisper of that. No, the first obstacle was that I was picturing a writer, with a small laptop, sitting in a modern kitchen, maybe playing with her phone, looking at Instagram. And then I was asked to set it 40 years ago! OK, erase the scene. Start again. A typewriter. Some notebooks. The Conservatives are in power... I start trying to line up the dates. Major? Thatcher? Wait, the sentence isn't over yet! Our subject....... is the writer's stuff. Okay, erase all those thoughts about Major and Thatcher. Concentrate on the objects in the room. Helpfully, they are ploddingly enumerated. But now we're fast-forwarding, back to the present. I've barely had time to register anything but it's okay, we're in the hands of the great Lanchester. The room is... shinier? The writer is shinier? Is that what 40 years does to you? Is he talking about being bald? Why would the kitchen be shinier? The writer has a cleaner now that she (or he, if bald, probably) is successful? Or are modern kitchens just shinier in general? Not sure about that, really. Formica and chrome were bigger back then, surely. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is, that, well, the point is that things have not really changed that much. A typewriter is basically a Macbook. Right? So here we are. The same as it always was.

he's back baby

omg that para is a+.

genuinely feel he’s breaking new ground here.

age old and forty years ago.

to another side. also in the room (that last pure classic lanchester - one of his finest modes)

a master at lists this is one of his finer examples, suffering from some sort of ontological saccade:
fridge, oven, hob, toaster, car keys, vacuum cleaner

it’s the oven/hob bit. but also appliances and temporary objects. so good.

now fast forward, forty years ago, forty years later

got it. his sweet structural economy of style in muscular evidence here.

why is the writer a little shinier. alcoholic sweats? i assume he means baldness but unclear. ofc.

the stuff in the room is more or less the same

jack it into my veins.

There are some excellent clunkers in the rest of the piece too but I don’t have it to hand

Just look for the paragraph in parentheses

and ofc the last sentence just a beautiful conclusion, oddly balanced, lumberingly sonorous in style, empty in meaning. the philosophical style of the bins being collected.

tracer otm.

i was concerned he might have lost it but this is masterly.

_the stuff in the room is more or less the same_

jack it into my veins.

One big thing, however, is different. In 1983, that kitchen contained just a handful of transistors, all of which lived in the – there’s a clue in the name – transistor radio.

makes u think

Do people keep keys and vaccuum cleaners in the kitchen? Keys - by the door or in a coat pocket. Vacuum - usually hidden somewhere, maybe in the kitchen, but certainly not visible.

I notice we are both "picturing" and "fast-forwarding".

"Also in the room are a fridge" - I love that, just by itself

i assumed it was a very small flat, maybe not one-room (bcz he says "kitchen") but at most three

he makes no shift to clarify this tho, as ever forcing the reader to serve between different iterations of interpretation

On the table is a typewriter; to one side is a radio, to another is a phone; also in the room are a fridge, an oven, a hob, a toaster, a set of car keys and a vacuum cleaner.

but which ways are the exits

Admire the fearlessness of the title. Why not

I want to hear this para read aloud in that sunny Tiktok voice

haha yes

oven hob hob oven oven hob hob oven oven hob hob oven oven hob hob oven I don't understand:

* he looked around and thought 'well there's the oven… but wait the hob isn't technically an oven' but forgot the word cooker
* he needs to draw attention to the hob because ovens haven't changed and he wants you to think oh yeah maybe it's an induction they wouldn't have had that back then
* it's important that it's a separate hob, somewhere other than above the oven, like it was once a 2-ring electric burner running off a socket idk
* he's just listing words, sheer idiot say-what-you-see
?

it's a one-room bathroom-kitchenette with a bed and an oven AND AN AGA

I mean for all this I did enjoy the article, maybe anyone could have written it - but then we wouldn't have the lulz.

Something about the cadence of the excerpt has been nagging at me, and I just realised how much it sounds like "early text adventure"

On the table is a typewriter; to one side is a radio, to another is a phone; also in the room are a fridge, an oven, a hob, a toaster, a set of car keys and a vacuum cleaner.

>> Turn on vaccuum cleaner

You can't do that

>> Go south

lmao

perfect

but which ways are the exits

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, March 22, 2023 6:12 AM bookmarkflaglink

'early text adventure' incredible and otm observation. lanchester's worlds need to be navigated, so much of the navigational challenge is due to the opacity of meaning in the depicted world ie it's implied the objects described have meaning, but the meaning is unclear at this stage of the adventure, and you're presented with a reductive rebus (ie nothing exists outside the depiction and its related conundrums). i need to go back and re-read with this lens.

I've heard good things about the book Chip Wars, and have got it on my long long list of unread books. But the only heckin way i'm reading this is for the lulz.

Lanchester has written a book called CHIP WARS?

I too like Chuck Tatum's observation, as I still remember the computer game THE HOBBIT.

He's written a review of Chip War by Chris Miller.

sorry for the (entertaining) confusion.

is chip wars like tek wars

It's curious that people have so lambasted that notorious first paragraph, as I have now opened the issue and found that the subsequent paragraphs are worse.

Lanchester introduces 'the vacuum tube', which he implies can perform mathematical tasks. How? I don't comprehend.

He repeatedly refers to transistors. He tells us that his computer contains a microchip that contains 20,000,000,000 transistors. How many is that? 20 billion? That seems to suggest that these transistors must be very small - smaller than the eye can see. Is that the case? What kind of object are they?

What is a transistor? I have no idea. Lanchester refers to them again and again, but doesn't tell me what they are, nor how an item can contain 20,000,000,000 of them.

Also involved are semiconductors. They are some kind of 'material'. They 'both do and don't' conduct electricity. When? Why?

I think Lanchester is mainly aiming to tell a human-level story of business, which is relatively comprehensible to a human. But he wants to bolster his credibility, as a scientific sort of thinker, by citing these technical items and substances. But that doesn't help, because he doesn't tell us what they are, or his descriptions and definitions mystify more than they illuminate.

i guess i have a better basic understanding of these things but i wouldn't really expect more than those high level details in a book review - if you want to know more, read the book! isn't it common knowledge that transistors are incredibly, ridiculously, inconceivably small?

though the one extract from the book that explains the vacuum tube makes it sound just like a light bulb - a filament inside a glass bulb that can be switched on and off. it misses the crucial detail that it can be switched on and off with another electrical signal - though why that is important requires further explanation.

Ledge: I agree that it's always feasible to say "if you want to know X, look it up". I could have looked up "semiconductor" instead of writing that post - though I still probably wouldn't have understood it well.

"If you want to know more, read the book", I don't exactly agree with - the book is £20, 431pp, and it wouldn't particularly occur to me to go out and get it, or find time to read it. Whether it explains those items better than Lanchester, I don't know - I suspect it does.

My own sense is that if you're writing a lengthy article as Lanchester is, you shouldn't be leaving things for readers to look up elsewhere, but explaining them in the course of your own article.

"isn't it common knowledge that transistors are incredibly, ridiculously, inconceivably small?" It may be known to many people. It's not known to me. The only think I have ever known about them is that radios used them, so I imagined that they were the size of ... a battery, I suppose. Whatever they are. Lanchester doesn't say.

my complaint abt his economic writing is not that he doesn't understand it, it's that he's not at all good at conveying -- to ppl who want to know! -- which bits matter and how it works, and often as he approaches of such a demand he instead loops off in some comfortably digressive and not very illuminating anecdote: i take PF's point here to be "spend less time on (clumsily) evoking an 80s bedsit with lists of details and more time getting at the (relevant!) specifics of e.g. vacuum tubes and transistors, and the haptic specifics if this helps" (he talks a lot abt gordon moore, whose "law" -- abt the constantly doubling capacity to do stuff -- is deeply tied into the now-stupefying smallness of the present-day transistor, bcz the smaller they are the more of them you can cram in and thus the more it can do in more complicated ways)

(haptics notoriously doesn't apply in economics, yards of linen notwithstanding, which may actually be one of the big barriers to its easy assimilation) (i only just thought of this, maybe i shd go back and recast all my contributions to the econ-speak thread in light of this)

(haptics in artspeak means relevant to the specifics of touch rather than vision; it became a v common word in crafts criticism abt 20 years ago which is why i'm allowed to use it in that now-fading sense; as it's transferred to electronics and balllooned it tends to refer to the possibilities being realised with e.g. touch screens and such)

as with economics so with modern technology: any short essay is having to judge what the semi-informed reader needs to proceed, and this will require a balance of history and technical explication

there are people who are good at this, back when i was strongly embarked on my history of music and technology it was the issue i thought most about and worked hardest on: well that project silted up for various reasons (i plan to revive it tho!) and now instead we get lanch being really not at all good at it (but somehow at the same time good at persuading the right readers and reviewers that he's GREAT at it)

(in conclusion it's my fault)

"Any short essay" - agree.

This isn't a short essay!

Paragraph 2: he tells us that in 2023, all these items use microchips:

ovens, fridges, vacuums (= vacuum cleaner?), car keys, radios, speakers.

Note that 'speakers' are an item he's just added to the list and were not part of his original scenario, while fridge and toaster have mysteriously disappeared!

I definitely believe that current, high-end versions of these things are very electronic and sophisticated.

I am unsure that every instance of them, including those that I have in my home, are.

Does my oven contain a microchip? Quite doubtful. It seems to be quite a mechanical device. I turn a dial and it starts making a noise and generating heat. It doesn't seem very electronic.

Same for the toaster, actually.

In short, I'm not sure that Lanchester's view of 'now' as against 'then' is very precise.

Does your oven have a digital clock?

this very simple looking toaster has chips: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/other-gadgets/electric-toaster-pictures.htm

you're probably right about the speakers!