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

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

the parallels that exist are mostly just the war setting and certain thematic recurrences, his acknowledged formal precursors and the subjects of his most demonstrable fanboy adulation were mostly writing in french in the middle of the last century

even if one were to use that sort of 'when x does this' 'when y does this' compare&contrast exercise in reference to an anxiety of influence relationship as pronounced as say beethoven/brahms it isn't clear that it would serve any useful analytic purpose other than collapsing the predecessor into some sort of inadvertent prototype

fair enough

I am simply not sure I like the rhythms of C very much, the telegraphed & studied anticlimax of each movement, the mass of observations that are somehow meant to convey gravity in their accretive juxtaposition but which don't rly cohere

also he's going for Autechrean synaesthesia at points and yet his word choices betray this

i do not think that is accurate

Tom-McCarthty-Emprers-New-Clothes-Confield-Slothrop-Tryhard-Synaesthetic-Sorry-This-Is-Just-How-Feel.html

'the emptiness of space as space surrounds and envelops us'

I'll finish it, but I'm starting to think that Remainder was a fluke.

don't think this is the right way of putting it, it's a novel delivering a single idea, not something to be repeated - that would be like Perec going, right I've done 'e', now to do 'a'.

i started writing about C, but had a quick look at the thread and realised that there are good posts about it from woof, c#major and me inter alia, so no need to restate.

Margaret Atwood, THE EDIBLE WOMAN

is what I am reading. I posted this fact to the wrong thread.

I would rather read her than TMC though.

ok the end is fun & well-written. p sure i can & have done better when it comes to numinous psychedelic epiphanies tho :P

that's some beast talk tbf

mccarthy's not rly at home turning up the purple jets tho, way more effective when understated, sardonic, removed

new one coming out - http://www.vulture.com/2015/02/tom-mccarthy-goes-to-ted.html

the readable avantgarde

Whatever you make of Tom McCarthy’s mind-bending metafictions, the author one critic anointed “a young and British Thomas Pynchon”

imago doesn't seem to think so and his judgement on these matters is final.

new one sounds promising tbf

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/tom-mccarthy/writing-machines

We didn't discuss this ^ did we?

Only read parts of this. I think its that name dropping of Barthes, Marx, Derrida, 'ghost' etc. that is just so off-putting. Maybe someone should commission a piece from him with contraints (Ouliapian yeah). I think he starts off by saying: the 19th century realists wrote that stuff but also wrote things that were weird (Bouvard et Pécuchet) and the middlebrow idiots writing today have ignored this, and I want to rescue these things.

The real, McCarthy seems to be saying, is easy - what about its mechanics, for this must weigh upon the fibre of every line of the writing? So it leads to:

The same real – the Holocaust in particular – impinges on all of Beckett’s work, whose unnameables and catastrophes convey the horror and unspeakability of this event to which they never refer far more profoundly than the directly representational writing of, say, Primo Levi.

idk where to go, its like that dusted interview where thomp quote the bit on Celan. I don't think you can reduce Beckett like this and paste 'representational' on Levi when his writing was actually powerful to me (and I'm talking about The Periodic Table here). I haven't read either in a long time.

I suppose I am not sure about this wacky races set-up: team modernism, team realism, or lets make 'em up: the 'absence' team, the merely 'hidden' team. Just a system where all you end up is Joyce, Burroughs, Bataile, Trocchi. Maybe the LRB audience need to get acquainted with Trocchi..

that's otm, i think. He's got a autopilot or by-numbers mode that's a bit frustrating to me - & you know + name the co-ordinates – Joyce, Beckett, Bataille, Blanchot, Burroughs, some theory. The tastes coincide quite closely with my own, and I think he can go up a gear or two when he focuses a bit (I enjoyed the Joyce article before this), but when he's just doing this it's v flat, slightly mechanical and actually seems stuck fighting an old war - the spirited anti-realism, the contra-Franzen push, is quite early noughties – I think we're in a diff space atm. (He's been using that real/fake rose thing from Ada for a long time.)

(I cannot resist even though it is unfair: racoon tanuki of modernism.)

I'll buy and read the new one definitely – I did not like that article but I am still basically on his side. (even though his fixedness about sides is a problem in the article)

13. places and spaces thats where the chase is (3, 8)

Maybe someone should commission a piece from him with contraints

no dropping names that start with b, c or d.

no dropping names that start with a vowel or consonant

lrb article got a brief mention here:'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

Pitting Beckett against Levi in that fashion just seems rong: downplaying Levi as some kind of naive realist (!) makes one wonder exactly who is being naive, and it appears to arise from the mix and match /contrast and compare template that has given us such gems as the legendary NY Times Arts and Leisure article, "The Byrds and Marvin Gaye, Two Artists With Recent Box Sets, So Different In Some Ways, And Yet So Alike In Others."

I'll buy and read the new one definitely

How can you have confidence that it could be any good after reading some of these articles?

Thought I'd at least give Remainder a go one day. I'll keep telling myself its from the early days.

I'm not confident, but Remainder and bits of C are great, which is enough for me. I can forgive some 2nd gear journalism

^

still v interested in what he's doing.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/07/tom-mccarthy-death-writing-james-joyce-working-google

While “official” fiction has retreated into comforting nostalgia about kings and queens, or supposed tales of the contemporary rendered in an equally nostalgic mode of unexamined realism, it is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones.

Has he done a day's work in his life in these companies?

wiki says no:

He lived in Prague where he worked as a nude model and in an American bar, Berlin where he worked in an Irish pub, and Amsterdam where he worked in a restaurant kitchen and reviewed books for the local edition of Time Out magazine.

What have these groups of people come up with? You can imagine that "funky architectural companies" have come up with er, funky architecture. All he goes on about is writers - Kafka, Beckett, Mallarme, Joyce - and anthropology (they sound like good writers on a sentence by sentence level).

Anyway from a skim I quite liked parts of this, been meaning to read Tristes Tropiques for a long time.

if that's a wolf hall burn, he's doing himself a disservice. the whole paragraph is n-particularly-agl.

Because he misspelled "Mantel"?

I still find his hectoring a little offputting, sorry.

Yes of course it was an attack on Mantel.

I wonder what is operating in a lot of these pieces. I think most writing with a highly self-conscious experimental bent like his has very narrow concerns but then you read some of this stuff and he is really fighting against that.

He is sketching a post office fiction with that para, just coming in as a temp and test it out.

I'll still defend his fiction (and some of the non-fiction writing), but that is a particularly stupid article. I loathe the 'if genius x were around today they would be neuromancer jazz hands y' formula.

Couple of clay-footed people behind me in the Blake exhibition the other day said with great authority, 'Of course, if Blake was around today he'd be a computer programme.'

no he really fucking wouldn't. i'm going to hazard that his attitude to material enslavement of promethean fires would probably extend to computer programming. (this statement i expect as much the result of an ignorance of computer programming as somehow 'visionary' or 'mystical' as of Blake).

TM seems to be hovering slightly between articulately configuring immaterial concepts (such as 'money' as a concept) as places of communication between material form and artistic forms, and rather plain-man observations about The Future Now.

Still looking forward to Satin Island. Terrible reviews.

Blake reborn, depressed about his etsy shop's sales

Can't see Blake coding, it's clearly Urizen's work.

struggling to get through that McCarthy article, will finish it on the commute.

Can't see Blake coding, it's clearly Urizen's work.

struggling to get through that McCarthy article, will finish it on the commute.

exactly. and obv "computer programmer" rather than "programme" in my post.

i wonder if mb they were after something like, a comparison of his authority as printmaker-distributor of his own work, it seems to have possibilities. blake as michael brough. rather than in a corporate environment.

idk, it seems a bit redundant - he could still just be a printmaker-distributor of his own work. There are various ways I could picture him online, but it's hard to see him apart from material craft - the abstractions of code just don't fit well him imo.

god, now i'm thinking he could be a modder. or creating his system through machinima.

this book is crap.

It may well be, but this formulation of yours

if genius x were around today they would be neuromancer jazz hands y'

:)

thomp's brough comparison is quite nice - brough as frame-breaker. but yeah you don't quite get the expression of labour and energy of an entire cosmic system being created in the fashion of a demiurge, unless thats in his next game.

brough/mccarthy has some genuine mileage - particularly Corrypt - with brough coming out some way ahead if Satin Island is anything to go by.

only a third thru but yeah this is intellectually listless at best. C-