a kind of simulation but better than the real thing ever was - the Tom McCarthy thread

fizzles, what did you make of lightning rods

loved it. great control of ironic tone and treatment. ease of execution conceals the savagery.

the last samurai had a more or less conventional plot structure, with very strong innovative content (language, learning). with LR that innovative content becomes the structure. using non literary models like statistics as the scaffold for her writing makes it feel fresh (yes, new, but also fresh in the sense of impertinent).

her new work looks like it's going to have Wordpress stats as a fairly central narrative engine, which is why I'm belabouring this point perhaps more than a single novel gives reason to. her knowledge of programming and maths means these can be used not metaphorically but as mechanisms within the writing.

I think these areas are important, to bald about it; new landscapes that should be artistically explored, partly for aesthetic reasons (freshness), partly because they are areas that are underattended to in literature. I don't see anyone else better equipped to work in them than HdW.

take Pynchon's Bleeding Edge - that dealt with coding and the early days of websites and the first dotcom boom. by and large this tech is used metaphorically. the deep net and dark web are visualised spatially - old netherworld and underworld tropes. this space represents a portal to Pynchon-like aesthetic possibilities but the laws that govern them are not the actual laws that govern them, but metaphorical laws, or laws of aesthetics.

HdW uses the laws of what she's studying to give her books their content and shape. they are not metaphorically intended, tho she gets a lot of freedom to do so if she wants, because that's not their sole use.

this isn't to say she isn't literary - it takes an enormous amount of literary skill to do this I think. lightning rods was a high wire act with tone that's almost swiftian. it's not exactly - the lacerations are less obviously savage, but the constant and inventive exploitation of the gap between what's said and what's meant, and the tying of nooses from the rope of your opponents language, is the same.

she's the contemporary writer I'm most excited about.

TMcC is dangerously close in some ways - dangerous in the sense when you learn a foreign language some English looking words are dangerous - he can look the same but the fundamentals are different. so he'll use the recursive mechanism in remainder as a narrative tool, not as a metaphor, but it is the theoretical or philosophical notion he's interested in exploring - and the humour in the practical application of theory (so yeah I guess there is humour there really). more meaningfully perhaps, he's interested in the detailed mechanisms of radio or the structures of insects in C, but as aesthetic bric-a-brac, rather than, say, as Kipling used the Kodak camera, microscope, lighthouse or steam engine - interested in how their mechanisms could affect the form of what he was trying to do, how they shape the emotional content.

written this on the tube, so am expecting a bunch of wtf are u on about fizz - if that's the case I'll try a more textually based treatment of the above when I get home and have a drink in my hand

I am (by total chance) starting on Lightning Rods next week so I'll read with some of your thinking in mind. Really appreciate your thoughts on it.

wondering, now, if i can be said to have massively misread lightning rods. i thought it made a lot of problematic assumptions in a hand-wavey sort of way (like, the reader is probably too smart to buy the account of male vs female sexual motivation contained therein, but the reader will assume the author is also too smart to do same, so it doesn't matter) which kind of curdled it as satire for me

i'll pick it up again thomp. iirc it's about how an absurd, morally repugnant idea that is able to successfully develop, transforming the workplace of a nation, and this transformation (in terms of literary credibility) is managed several ways:

1) The use of statistics as a 'morally neutral' engine of change in society today.
2) The particular keenness in offices for this sort of evaluative mechanism. It's a cross between notions of managerial competency and also what I saw described elsewhere as 'the politics of what works'.
3) The narrative tone being of an innocent on an exciting voyage of discovery - learning the ways of business, accumulating money. It's a seductive tone for a reader.

It feels plausible as an example of how ideas are spread through these mechanisms and tones via the office, still heavily male places.

I realise I'm stating the bleeding obvious here, but I'm not sure there's anything too handwavy here, tho obviously we may approach these things differently. brb got an efficiency meeting...

(xp)
one of my favourite books of recent years too – Fizzles otm – imo the way it holds its tone (& something more than fascination, but not quite enchantment, w/ the language of self-improvement/management) and the ice in the way it works through its premise doesn't really let it settle into an easy satirical aboutness. I think… it might start in a place where reader & dewitt are in satire-complicity, but it pushes on past that. I should reread it though. It's been a while.

it might start in a place where reader & dewitt are in satire-complicity, but it pushes on past that. I should reread it though

Yes this exactly. Enchantment is a great word to use.

right - & 'seductive' seems right to me as well – so that you're tempted by 'this is turning out ok & he means well & he's offering a quality service'

I just don't know if I buy this, guys

so what you're claiming is seductive is, e.g., when in the penultimate section the protagonist has competitors who bring in much of the freight attached to sex work that, by the terms of the fictional universe as defined by the shape of the narrative thus far, the protag. has avoided, the reader is to think "well, at least my guy is better than those guys", and then catch themself thinking that and think no, wait, my guy is also morally repulsive?

because I just don't think this works -- by the terms of the fictional u. as defined by the shape of the n. , the protagonist just kind of _is_ morally superior, because in the f. u. as d. by the s. of the n., there just aren't real negative consequences that wd let us argue otherwise

So import! The f u is is insufficient and knows it. You must change yr life etc.

that was too brief – drunk, phone-posting on train
Still drunk posting before sleep but
imo it does work– re the f. u. as d. by the s. of the n, really, there's our world pressing in on it so the seduction/repulsion means something (rambling but maybe it's a mimicking too-close f u that doesn't let you get a read exactly on how it sits in relation to ours?)
actually I am best to come back to this tomorrow but in the meantime straight q – what contemporary satires (and I'm not 100% using satire for lightning rods tbh) work, do you think, or get out of the complicity trap?

there is this book by john lanchester, you may have heard of it

i have no idea actually; I can't think of anything ive read from the past decade that I wd call satire and I just don't know if I believe it's a thing

it's a thing, but I can't think of any formal satire that's been written recently.

eyebrows may be raised at this, but I think probably Brass Eye has come closest.

wd definitely reiterate woof's point about LR not really being a 'satire' but in terms of understanding the 'assumptions'.

For satire where fu is d by s of n, there's a necessary u(fu is d by s of n) interpretative function. Satire in it one of its formal versions is the sum of everything it reviles and does not explicitly contain its critique (that would not be aesthetically of formally approrpriate).

This approach can produce some uncertainty about stuff like *that Lanchester novel*!

wd definitely reiterate woof's point about LR not really being a 'satire' but in terms of understanding the 'assumptions' *it's useful* that should have been.

the rest of it makes perfect sense. who doesn't enjoy trying to reduce aesthetics to equations? come on.

tho I realise now the q of n in satire is complicated, another area where HdW differs from formal satire. (LR narrative is a reverie of folly.)

(and "formal satire" because there's a lot of stuff that has elements of satire or which can be termed satirical which differs from the Satire that sits with Tragedy and Comedy, like Thersites next to Agamemmnon and Odysseus. It has aesthetic characteristics by which it can be identified and which hobble it aesthetically - very static, episodic narrative structure, inherently conservative, full of horrible things, self destructive, intolerant, formally antagonistic to change/mutability.)

tom mccarthy is not "funny" but he is not "humorless" either

^

idk: I feel like 'c' is getting there

or like 'wit' might be a concept worth applying and/or reviving

p funny writing a 33⅓ about 'history repeating' by the propellerheads tbf

2. The Fall - Live at the Witch Trials
The Fall come as much from a literary tradition that goes back to the text-sampling experiments of Eliot and Pound as they do from a strict musical one. This album has “Repetition” on it - a track very close to my heart.

Tom, Tom, Tom - Repetition is *not* on LATWT - it's a b side to Bingo Masters Break-Out - and you'd probably be better off with Hotel Bloedel off Perverted by Language imho.

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/596

gross. also I thought for a second you were addressing me; I was confused.

ah yes. I've wondered about "wit" before, whether it has validity as an identifiable thing in contemporary lit and if it does whether it's desirable.

used these days it has an almost contemptuous sound to it - "yes, very witty"/clever but not funny - which is not far enough from the 18th C English sense to return to that.

wit as separate from being funny also brings forth unwelcome visions of the unfunny - David Mitchell (com) & Stephen Fry - doing "audiences with" - not good enough at any specific part of what they do to be worthwhile for that alone, so indulging in a mélange of geniality for which people are expected to fork out.

isn't funny meant to be specifically the specific thing that david mitchell does

man i can't get over how embarrassing that dusted mag thing is

it's not great is it.

i kind of want to poll which is the worst

6. Paul Celan - Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory)
All Celan's poetry is about transmission and violence and the virtual impossibility of the speech act itself after something as ineffable as the Holocaust, which he himself survived. This collection contains “Todesfuge” (Deathfugue), a poem so packed with violence that its surface cracks and erupts as the lines break down, reprise themselves, repeat again, like a stuck record. It was read recently in the German Reichstag, a conciliatory symbolic gesture that didn't go far enough by half: they should have blared it out over loudspeakers as the building burnt to the ground - again.

ineffable huh

well i mean personally i wouldn't eff with it

TS: DJ Q vs The Holocaust.

what is that celan thing about why is it

His list does not include much music.
Maybe it wasn't supposed to be a list of music?
I'm not sure.

I've a sneaking suspicion he made the best of a bad job and knows a lot more about lit and specific areas of lit - there is absolutely nothing wrong with that from a creative pov of course, but you can expose yourself a bit. the unsophisticated glibness is less easy to explain bit again I don't think this matters from a creative standpoint.

fwiw as if the above defensiveness hadn't said it already I'm still a fan and am v much looking fwd to the new book.

suggestion: if he doesn't know much about music he shouldn't say things like 'this is the best album ever' and 'the Shakespeare of rock & roll' -- he should just say 'I don't know that much about music, but I do like this one! It sounds nice to me and I find this thing quite interesting about it'.

That's pretty much what I would do with painting, sculpture, possibly even drama.

84 pages into C and enjoying it (and McCarthy's brilliant literary sadism) very well - it's heating up all right

However, there are not one but TWO entomological fuckups inside the first 30 pages that even an amateur nature-lover like myself might find offputting. First of all, I present the following extract:

Serge watches it for a while, then takes the phial and presses it down across the insect's body, using its rim to slice apart the bridge where thorax meets abdomen. The wasp's legs continue their treading and its mandible its drawing even after they're no longer joined.

Thomas, Thomas. If you slice an insect's abdomen from its thorax, you do not separate head from legs, as legs are affixed to thorax rather than abdomen. Were you not paying attention in Year 7 Biology?

And then there's this hilariously redundant, almost Lanchesterian tic:

The moths are females of the phylum Arthropoda: Bombyx mori.

This is self-evidently cretinous, but I shall explain nonetheless: every single poxy moth, every insect, every crustacean and every arachnid on this Earth is in the phylum Arthropoda. I thank you for your time.

Still a cracking read, like.

lj do you have general entomology expertise bc i have a lot of bug-related questions

let's make like butterflies and wing it: the entomology thread

phylum is the sort of darkly resonant word more authors should use, even speciously

like the young Pynchon with 'tendrils'

have finished parts 1 and 2 of C now - it's a good book but I think it might overegg the world-as-connections-fusing-to-an-organic-mechanical-system thing a bit, although parts of this process are fairly breathtaking

more worryingly, both parts have ended really tritely. think McCarthy benefits from brevity, being only able to end it all once, like Remainder, which so far is a superior work with a wonderful closing arc. the second part of C built to numerous self-as-nodal-point epiphanies and then kept going, the effect diminishing, until a saved-by-the-bell finale that felt like an anticlimax. i'm sure this was the author's design, but it wasn't the right sort of anticlimax - it was too decisive, too certain, on the end of a sequence that felt somewhat improvisational and langorous

ending part 1 with that terribly-handled fist-in-mouth sex scene also ruined what had been possibly the best passage of the book, the extended chapter about the spa

not sure. maybe parts 3 and 4 will turn it around

c is very good, if minor, it's not close to remainder

his first novel is juvenilia

don't get me wrong I'm reading it hungrily & it rewards. once more the best thing about McCarthy is his nasty streak, his pure & sly sadism towards sentiment, his constant subversion of the emotional

or the incorporation of the emotional within the context of large & uncaring engines which operate independently of it & demand anschluss at best, obliteration at worst. he's dealing with terrifying forces & showing how easy it is to side with them

men in space > c, i reckon

yeah i quite liked men in space

glad i continued with 'c' - the end of part 3 is the first sustained bravura sequence - a sort of demolition job on pynchon's dalliances with the paranormal, sachsa & so forth - a callous yet perfectly logical action wrought upon the ephemeral by the technological. was gripped.

mccarthy's treatment of women is absolutely lousy & makes gravity's rainbow look like a feminist manifesto

on balance, i'll finish it

10 pages from the end of C and sincerely disliking it, its protagonist's assured & priapic nihilism (as opposed to the fascinated mania of Remainder's narrator) - this is an embarrassment. When Slothrop fucked almost every woman he came across, it was part of his - our - tragedy; when Serge does it, it's empty, cheap, set up merely to make a muddled point about the transience & illusory nature of *connection*, and worst of all it is climactic not in an erotic sense but as part of the narrative - it adds some kind of rhetorical punch to a list of cute observations about occluded realities.

Also, his writing isn't very good here.

I'll finish it, but I'm starting to think that Remainder was a fluke. Not just that, though - it was more disciplined, focused - and its epiphanies were not logistical but philosophical - it extrapolated from the logistical far more convincingly than this.

if u want to get mccarthy dont read it via pynchon

I know but here there are parallels; Remainder is his own thing

obviously it is all the fiction of bastard expedience trumping romanticism but done so much more badly here