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 never quite got on with Carter either (and I like lots of writers the pinefox doesn't) (and vice versa). Keep meaning to give her a more serious try; keep losing interest when I go back (Nights at the Circus is the one I pick up -- someone I was fond of long ago always said it was her favourite book, and (even tho I haven't seen this person for abt 15 years) I want to work out why.

I started Whoops! but (again)* didn't get very far -- and some of the reasons Capital is bad (as per this superb thread) also apply. JL seemed to spend a lot of time over-carefully explaining fairly simple things I already understood and then nervelessly sweeping past stuff that really needed dwelling or on getting inside. (I have a close friend who used to be a banker who agrees about this; and talking to him about the sector makes me think that Lanchester's dad's connections and understanding may well not actually give as much purchase on the finance&trading world of the early 00s as you'd expect; that banking had in some key way slipped into a new phase, and that this was what needed exploring…)

*In many ways I am the world's most distractable person when it comes to reading, probably because proofing has been my day-job for such a long time.

Greil Marcus raves about the Ice Age in Lipstick Traces, like it was some protopunk prophesy, which I always thought was odd. This seems bonkerz:

Nowhere have I found the full weight of this burden assumed with such honesty and feeling as in The Ice Age. It is a rich book, full of characters that come to life in a page and grow throughout the novel—a building contractor in the Sixties who bids to escape his class and in the Seventies finds himself in prison for fraud; a spoiled, angry teenager eager for oblivion; a classics professor retreating not only from the present but from all signs of life in the past. But its richness is not really in its plot, which centers on two people in their late 30s, Alison Murray and Anthony Keating, who are trying to build a relationship in the midst of personal disasters and public decay. The richness of the novel has to do with the way Drabble connects the private lives of her characters to the public miasma they are forced to share.

https://greilmarcus.net/2016/06/07/undercover-johnny-rottens-soul-sister-102077/

the richness of the novel has to do with the sausage

(i have not read it)

but that marcus review always struck me as a reach, given that my mum loved margaret drabble and was not a noted aficionado of post-punk style anomie

Yes bonkerz is the mot juste.
This is absurd, just as Mark S says.
One can hardly think of two writers further apart.

I suppose the explanation is

a) MD was focused on 60s-70s, a period dear to GM

b) MD was writing about 'miasma' of contemporary history, confirming GM's sense of 'art as political statement'

c) above all, crucially, MD is English and GM perhaps has a tin ear across this cultural divide -- so he imagines that MD is the English Pynchon or Gaddis or perhaps Richard Yates -- as though I were to imagine that Garrison Keillor was the US Irvine Welsh. It is surely related to the fact that Americans take Nick Hornby seriously, and take G Dyer and Z Smith (who can both be very good) more seriously than we do.

Next week: Camilla Paglia on the Orphic power of Pamela Hansford Johnson.

Having read a handful of Carter novels I am doubtful that the novel is where she does best. Her last novel, always wildly praised, is particularly bad -- perhaps in part because she was ill when writing it.

Her approach to narrative can fall in with a general tendency of chortling garrulousness that I find generally a very bad thing for fiction - as in Rushdie and even, to some extent, one of the big problems with Finnegans Wake.

When she writes differently, more starkly for instance, she can be a bit better, but she is still often surprisingly cackhanded in basic ways.

I think for me her essays might be the best work. She was a pretty important commentator on style, gender, politics, linking these things together; that work seems to have some historical importance.

But I don't know the early Bristol-based novels and maybe they have something better to recommend them.

Next week: Camilla Paglia on the Orphic power of Pamela Hansford Johnson

tbf i wd read the fuck of that (once)

out of that

I wonder if people would bother to equate them at all were it not for Joe Strummer using the phrase "the ice age" in London Calling.

oddly enough big audio dynamite is named after a novel by a.s.byatt

someone on the thread i linked to said they skimmed an interview with JL in which he said his dad was a banker -- that's all the lead i have, it may be nonsense, he may be self-taught

basically if someone is not bothering to explore or explain the bits i think need explaining then i stop reading them -- i agree this is not the same as "knowing nothing" but for my purposes it is the same as "not knowing enough", since the bits i need to learn about are the bits not yet being explained properly

i could go back and reread whoops! and report to you exactly what those are but it seems a bit pointless, as you're obviously happy with what you're getting

oops

Ilxor poster oops?

only he can save me now

Taking on Facebook

a piece, in this week's New Yorker, unfurls with an almost fantastically Lanchesterian overexplanation of the term STEM: "Science and technology: we tend to think of them as siblings, perhaps even as twins, as parts of STEM (for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”)"

i cannot think of way to improve on this sentence as platonic lanchester

Reading this thread for the first time was a fantastic way to spend the evening, thank you.

The New Yorker piece is indeed feeble:

Walter Benjamin, the great German Jewish cultural critic, who committed suicide while trying to escape Nazi-controlled Europe, said that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” He meant that every complicated and beautiful thing humanity ever made has, if you look at it long enough, a shadow, a history of oppression. As a matter of plain historical fact, that seems right. It was a long and traumatic journey from the invention of writing to your book club’s discussion of Jodi Picoult’s latest.

thank fuck somebody was able to mansplain what Benjamin wrote

it is with a certain amount of shame that i have to tell you that for well over a week now i have been aware that john lanchester has had published in the latest issue of the london review of books a short story by the name of 'Coffin Liquor'.

Since then I have done all I could to avoid reading it: I assiduously read other articles in the issue even one on Gordon Brown to tell myself that i had extracted all the worth that was to be had from it, I folded it and put it on the lower magazine shelf of the front-room table, eventually I removed the paper from the front room entirely, throwing it idly in a place i hoped i would forget, so like unpaid debts and avoided chores it has sat at the back of mind like an oppressive shadow.

Finally, and as 2017 draws to an inauspicious close, I feel it's time to start as i mean to go on, aware that if 2018 is going to be anything like an improvement on the scorched earth and wreckage of 2017, I must show the same sort of indefatigable spirit John Lanchester seems to be able to show.

So I'm going to read it LIVE on ILX now.

I should say that I have no intent of deliberately guying lanchester, or mocking where mockery has not been earned. I'm not expecting fireworks, but equally it seems only reasonable to allow the possibility that it might be an unexceptionable piece of prose.

i will approach with the purest of intentions.

just going to make a cup of tea.

*settles in*

It was a darkening afternoon on the last day of the year 2017 A.D. and Noodle Vague sat down in his mother's living room and began reading the internet browsing program on his Toshiba Satellite laptop computer to discover what the celebrated London author John Lanchester had been up to lately.

great.

Coffin Liquor, by John Lanchester.

Monday

lol

I realised things had gone wrong as soon as I arrived at my hotel. The receptionist spoke no English. Only when I showed them my passport did they seem to accept, with reluctance, that I had a booking. I was given a key and took my own bag upstairs. the room was a cramped, over furnished space with thin brown walls. On the desk was an envelope of conference materials including a laminated pass on a lanyard and a printed programme.

now i have to confess that my flatmate and friend, aware of the strong feelings lanchester provokes in me, had already read me this paragraph out loud before I had to ask him to stop. but we both noted that, although we both use hotels in our separate work very frequently, we have never ever encountered a receptionist who didn't speak English.

I do remember a place in Italy about twenty years ago, which was more of a boarding house, where the late night receptionist didn't speak any English, and where there was a gunshot in the middle of the night and loud shouting. But it wasn't the sort of place that would host a conference.

I note warily the Lanchester signature of non-specific descriptions of material contents, 'Laminated pass on a lanyard.'

i mean basically it already feels like one of those stories that once memorably caused a friend of mine to say to someone after they'd finished, 'I'm sorry I don't believe a word of it.' (Again, as I think I said upthread, he has a habit of making you exclaim 'No, they didn't, no you weren't, no it *wasn't*.')

Ok, he's at a conference that he feels he's been misled into attending.

The first talk on the first morning was titled 'What String Theorists Can Learn from Vlad the Impaler: Narrative, Belief and the Immanence of the Imperceptible'. The other events were given similar names and had the same preposterous emphasis on the idea of an engagement or 'conversation' between areas that are manifestly questions of proof and fact, on the one hand, and, on the other side, a degenerate mass of of whiffle and nonsense.

It brings to mind a line in the address on the liner notes of The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall: 'Forcedcomedy, Lancs.'

oh god he's a Sokal guy, of course he is

In short, I find I have been brought to this godforsaken country in Central Europe – I say godforsaken purely as a figure of speech – to attend a conference on the 'dialogue' (emetic term) between science and mythology under entirely false pretences. My views on this subject are well known.

ok, unreliable narrator. we must tread carefully. any pomposities or imbecilities of statement may not be the author's own. I do note the not all covert hostility, as in lol how funny this sort of thing is, to the notion of theory - let's make it look silly or small. This isn't a narratorial thing I think.

I get the feeling his dismissiveness may be intended to be of the same category as MR James' academics, and that there will be some supernatural happenings.

yes! of course. xpost.

Bah! I have to go out now.

and regardless of it being a signal of the unreliable narrator, i don't think how godforsaken is used there is at all good. either in it being used in the first place, or how it is then reversed into irony.

taking it literally i suppose this is more indication that this will be a supernatural story.

it will be here when you get back, tom.

oh yeah, i have just remembered what "Coffin Liquor" means

Tom trudged out into the overcast late-afternoon pallor of a London New Year's Eve

he phones the organiser.

'I have been lured here under a pretext,' I said. 'My understanding was that this event would be an opportunity to explain my ideas and to point out the ways in which other people's beliefs are wrong. I now find this is not the case.

Swift or Myles this is not.

ok so it's a very heavy-handed satire of a Sokal guy, i'll let you off for now M. Lanchester

fiver says the narrator turns out to be called Dichard Rawkins

ok, so we know now this will be supernatural and the narrator is intended to be unreliable and pompous. so this sort of thing is probably fine?

I slept poorly. The atmosphere of this room is oppressive. The furniture is heavy but the walls are thin. The building creaks as it settles. The heating is set high and cannot be turned down...

this bit is very capital tho:

Breakfast was dark bread and black jam. Not bad.

"Prof. Pritchard Hawkins to rezeption."

little bits of the lanchester gps approach to scene-setting appear:

The conference centre is a short walk away from the hotel, about four hundred metres.

bit of tense oddity that i'm not feeling in the previous bit - "slept...is...are...creaks"

it is p tense amirite!

He was succeeded by a female Eastern European sociologist in early middle age who had hair with a coloured streak in it and purple glasses. Also bangles

...

As I made my way out of the room I found myself standing in front of the female sociologist. Under the circumstances, I felt it incumbent on me to say something about her talk. In a professional context, as a point of principle, I do not permit myself to dissemble my views. At the same time I am always scrupulously polite.

'You are stupid,' I said.

Irony is a delicate business, and stating the bleeding obvious, that last excerpt is really ill-judged. it's not at all funny, and its rudeness and stupidity bleeds through to the reader imo. also irony is obv a two-edged sword, and the targets of the unreliable narrator here are no less targets of the text. so that 'sociologist with bangles' really isn't very astute or amusing. it's very unfair to lanchester to compare him to swift - it would be unfair on anyone really - but the language of irony and satire needs to be language on a hair-trigger. you should feel the tension of wit. this is slack and does violence to the intelligence of the reader.

it's also not something i would expect a human being to say to a stranger even in the context of academia, think he's been on Twitter too long

good point about the tenses, it was nagging at me as well.

The heating is set high and cannot be turned down, and when I opened a window I was greeted by intermittent carousing from the street outside. An uncomfortable night. Breakfast was dark bread and black jam. Not bad. A number of other guests were eating the meal on their own; I surmise that they too are conference attendees.

it's a mixture of past simple and present simple, which I think is ok for diary observations, which is how this is structured? 'surmise' is a bit wobbly there, as present simple is something either factual or that he is thinking while writing the diary. it should be 'surmised' or 'I think', but it's just about allowable as a piece of narratorial pomposity.

i mean this whole piece is pretty hoary tbh. cat person it is not.

The closest was a famous church and graveyard of both architectural and historical consequence.

i mean i don't really want to read these words even as parody.