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

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-

See what you did there

C++

yeah its actually more like a D but felt the joke was *just* worth making.

in the darkness of his lair a wizard schemes

Just finished Remainder and thought it was good

But also seemed like the kind of book somebody who was really into Inception would like

Reviews I've seen for this so far have tended to be about how much does the reviewer like the French theory they were exposed to when they went to uni not about the book.

the french theory is frankly token here. it's *really* conventional and fails badly on that conventional level.

:-/ i haven't read it yet but my gf started and abandoned it already

sometimes writers are best when they're not allowed to indulge themselves

Bring back socialist realism.

I've been thinking and I think Remainder is just like a more literary version of Fight Club

Ok bye

fight club meets synecdoche new york on BEER

which book are you guys talking about? i just bought "c"

this'll be a bit incoherent cos i've been piecing it together in a rush at work:

so, this book was very bad and I almost threw it down in irritation a couple of times. feel analysis is dignifying it with too much attention (yes I feel jilted). I'm p certain much of it is a book about not being able to write a book, and the book that it's about not being able to write is this book.

its a continuation of one of aesthetic areas of the end of C - that there's a black substance that underlies all existence. this presumably a form of the chain of being theory, with a protean black corruption underlying all (Thomas Vaughan - "beneath all degrees of sense there is a certain horrible, inexpressible darkness. The magicians call it tenebrae activae"). In C, where one of the main notions is that which lasts of us after death is the physical, or rather what we call 'spiritual' is in fact our physical mode, this black substance represents the medium through which things are translated into other things.

The subsequent essays of varying quality have suggested that he sees this base medium as the place where a base code is reconfigured.

Satin Island takes that and converts it in numerous ways rendered meaningless through their variety - it's the shapeless electronic 'plasma' in which images and communications form on computer screens, it's cancer, it's rubber, it's the primal element of the world that accumulates over time, and it is - the main point in the book this - oil, insidiously spilling into the ocean, its polymers the base for plastics. In other words this black stuff is the base material manifestation of humankind. The point is made that it doesn't mix with water, and thus represents material differentiation - that which is created into the world. there's perhaps a ballardian sense in which it is transformative in a topopgraphical and psychological way, but frankly i've already given far too much definition to things that are only hazily tossed out and are more or less meaningless unless the book is able to make them so, which it isn't.

Hazily tossed out? That in itself lacks clarity: that haziness is a result of poor narrative voice, a strong whiff of wikipedia, an inability to convert detail of subject matter into metaphor that - why? he doesn't know enough about the detail? In fact if one thing characterises this book it's that TMcC doesn't know what he's writing about.

The narrative voice: He's an unreliable narrator ('Call me U' -_-) with the cop-out author-proxy job of a 'corporate ethnologist'. I mean, corporate ethnologist is a job, I know a couple, but he doesn't really bother with what they actually do, apart from in one paragraph, which looks like a cut and paste from an email from someone he asked. So I'm just assuming he felt this 'job' allowed him to be a sort of embedded author, as journalists are embedded in military units, with something of the same relationship - his hazy asseverations about offices and the world of work and corporate life are well meant, but will cause for anyone. The voice is so incompetent that you assume it's an unreliable narrator, but there's no double strand of irony to play the voice off against. It just reads like a more purposeless version of TMcC's essay writing.

The narrator is deliberately incurious and vague on detail. Vagueness seems to be one of the 'rules' that the novel sets itself, but of course it's not a rule because there's no constraint, it allows for an inartistic flatulence. Obviously TMcC's books have always been characterised by an affectless approach to the world, with only an attenuated sense of perceptual association of cause and effect. With the background perceptual noise tuned up, conceptual processing is dialed down. Mathematical rules and physical laws tend to provide ontological structure. It's part, I'm assuming, of creating a zone of code reconfiguration.

But Remainder had an obsessive narrator - that was the *point*. C, at least in its good parts, used unusual elements next to each other - the imaginative landscape was odd, and the play between the 'real' world, and the mythological and scientific elemental, through prose that loosened its concern with the 'ineluctable reality of the visual,' was strange and interesting. I mean, he's always been a bit of an awkward writer - part of the point of Remainder again, and the lumpiness in 'C' worked to a degree.

Here the prose wobbles in undifferentiated fashion between the unexamined cliche ('perenially attractive staff who manned the reception desk'), old-style literary word order (for the narrator and his fluting rhetoricisms), and his aspergersy unmetred modernism (not strictly unmetred of course - but flat, sentences of equal length - instruction manual style). Again, the lack of ironic counterpoint and lack of differentiation means that 'perenially attractive staff' in no way appears to be intended comically.

Again, i know his method tends to the attenuated, but there are what I feel safe in saying some plain Lanchesterisms here, unexcused by legitimate method:

That Friday, when I went up to see him, he greeted me, without removing his gaze from the hand-held into which he was typing a message, with a question.

The book roams across its chosen areas without differentiation - extending the attenuation of material reality in previous books to subject matter - as if this is the same as the sort of associational enlightenment that you might get in yer Claude Magrises or William Sebalds of the world. It's not. It looks haphazard and silly, and ill-informed. He perceives a world of figures here but not the form of what he should attend.

In this light, his metaphor is worth examining briefly - analysis of the technological and corporate environmental and mental spaces quickly slips into romantic/gothic style metaphors - oriental cities, crumbled towers. I was hoping one of Tom McCarthy's general aims as a writer was to create an aesthetic space that undermined and attacked this sort of writing - generating a new metaphorical landscape. this is painfully conventional - dragging the curious and modern (marketing, coporatism, a flattening of the difference between 'real' world and a 'virtual' world) into old lit manners and images.

There's a classic Martin Amis style diffusion of detail in a metaphor (Amis hangs fairly heavily over this book). To give an example, where he is describing the air conditioning system:

Other, vaguer voices hovered in the general noise - or if not voices, at least patterns, with their ridges and their troughs, their repetition frequencies, their cadences and codas.

It's the way the specific detail (the air-conditioning noises) is transformed into the generically musical rather than the specifically musical. Something of the subject needs to inform the metaphor drawn from it. Here the words are used only to balance sentence sound. They are not precise. Working the other way, making music which takes the specific noises of industry and internal plumbing, produces something exotic - the Stockhausen sense of deriving music from communication wavelengths. TMcC produces something generic.

The central vehicle of anthropology is delivered almost exclusively through meditations on Claude LS and cargo cults. (The whole book feels out of date in fact - the narrator has a big pinboard full of notes. Has he not got Ever-note on his hand-held?) He has no idea how anthropology and ethnology is used commercially (apart from a brief, more or less accurate section, presumably given to him by someone who does the job). You're much much better off going to Tom Ewing's Blackbeard Blog if you want to get a sense of modern marketing. In fact the book generally had the curious effect of making every single cultural artefact encountered since seem like it was doing a better version of what TMcC was trying to do. Even the most nugatory of tweets seemed to carry a symbolic effect greater than Satin Island's undernourished explanations.

There's a 'Project' that he's working on - it's kept symbolic and abstract, so this is the post-industrial device of the 'corporation' as a form of secular governing system, in a loose-ish tradition I have in my head that includes Melville's Barlteby, Kafka, PKD.

So some of this book is about the processes of corporations and offices, and the basic problem here, as elsewhere in the book, is that TMc doesn't seem to have a clue what goes on. He has no idea about the aesthetic of offices for a start. I think the 'how' of things are achieved in the modern world - the project delivery mechanisms, the trackers and methodologies - are fascinating. It's the bureaucratic form of a demi-urge - how do we bring things bigger than us into being? Tom McCarthy seems interested in this but without any of the detail that makes it interesting.

Allow him *all* his latitudes. Say, 'Ok, this is a book about how our processing runs out of things to input, and therefore its mode is that of a lenten intellect. It is a book about how there is no code in the objects we process, only in their disintegration and reintegration into black plasma, which in fact contains the true code. Therefore this book is also about the inability to find truth in our human impedimenta. It's about a lazy mind unable to find meaning. It does its job.' Say you allow him all that, there's still the problem that the proportions of content (oil, dying parachutists, cancer, anthropology) are all out of whack. It's like a conventional domestic object so badly made that it can't stay upright.

I read some Muriel Spark after (Mandelbaum Gate, and it was like being one of those house cats that goes outside for the first time.

http://cdn77.sadanduseless.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/cat-reaction14.jpg

In fact fairly early on there's a sentence that pretty much sums up much of what Satin Island is trying to do:

All it meant was that her habits of mind were inadquate to cope with the whole of her experience, and thus Barbara Vaughan was in a state of conflict, like practically everyone else, in some mode or another.

short version. it's not v well written. i preferred pattern recognition.

booming post, fizzles.

cheers etc. oh and TMcC here:

But it all works its way back into the work. Satin Island is, to some extent, a book about a restless struggle with the impossibility of writing the Book.

think I'd prefer this book rather than the Book tbf.

a+ cat photo deployment, laughed out loud

I'm glad I have Fizzles to explain to me why John Lanchester and Tom McCarthy are so bad.

These are serious, intelligent, considered judgements I can rely on when I hear other people carelessly talking them up.

thanks pf, tho i have to say my review was more disappointment that it didn't live up to expectations set by his other fiction.

and apologies - quickly skimming my hastily put together screed i see that some of the sentences don't.

did you ever get on with magris

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWDc22Cobwo

yeah i like magris - i have a problem with the diffuseness that associational writing brings to the categories of the world. Ontology - quite easily defined as 'what is there' - becomes 'what my investigations reveal'. It's the inverse of 'nothing will bring nothing' - 'everything will give evereything'. it feels like writers makes it too easy sometimes. if you want to do that everything thing, do finnegans wake.

lol thats meaningless pissed shit.

http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19940713-0

Mark McGurl with some interesting observations on on TMcC here - http://www.publicbooks.org/fiction/the-novels-forking-path

not entirely with all that article - is "experimental fiction that works" rare? looks suspiciously like they're asking experimental fiction to work according to non-experimental standards.

but he's right about a lot of satin island. this is an appalling piece of writing:

We see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen. When the shapeless plasma takes on form and resolution, like a fish approaching us through murky waters or an image looming into view from noxious liquid in a darkroom, when it begins to coalesce into a figure that’s discernible, if ciphered, we can say: This is it, stirring, looming, even if it isn’t really, if it’s all just ink-blots.

the overused Pauline quote, the subsequent inability to counterpoint the biblical cadences, the quick rendering of technological modernity into hackneyed "fish coming out of dark waters" and "ink blots" all add up to a seriously uninspired, underworked example of satin island's style and content.

oh and a+ find nakh.

The description of a Sebald/Cole personalized and lyricized encounter with theory resonated for me, particularly in recent TMcC essays. I think you're spot on that experimental fiction that 'works' is a conveniently moving target in the essay.

Remainder adaptation is pretty good then

not quite better than the real thing ever was but not far off

Have this. Might start it tonight.

https://www.nyrb.com/products/typewriters-bombs-jellyfish?variant=29933062407

things that make u go hmm. be interested to hear how you find it, gom.

At least a couple of his LRB essays, which will be in this book, are dreadful.

I'm pretty convinced Remainder was a happy accident, given how abysmal C was

Also, did anyone else see the Remainder film?

no, i didn't really feel v compelled to tbh.

by the way pinefox there's a post upthread where you say you weren't able to understand a post i'd made. i read the post again and literally i did not have the first clue what the hell i was on about. couldn't make head nor tail of it. i found this reassuring.

Thank you Fizzles! Glad we agree :D

"It's that hacking of literary register to find a single plane where close impossibilities forge a landscape. The alkahest is the code of information, variously understood and manipulated via fantasy into something that looks very like materially embodied reality."

!! :P

i think i know what i'm on about there, but it's much easier to say differently. in both C and Satin Island (badly, boringly), he updates the old notion of a sort of black and formless crudely sentient and primal darkness. This is what our organic forms descend into on death (and it is a physical or material condition). For McCarthy it has the capacity to preserve information/data in it as well, for reconfiguring material reality again. It is also oil and oil derivatives like plastics, and celluloid etc.

Out of this you can create things, including alternate realities. 'Hacking of the literary register' was a bad way of saying, these can be... nope, gone again. Broadly though, because it's so protean you can create worlds from things that have no real connections. It implies at base an inherent fungibility.

Now of course none of this makes him 'good' or 'bad' particularly (he is both - Remainder and parts of C are good, Satin Island is very bad, and his essays are extremely variable). But it does seem to be his central subject matter.

There. You are going to tell me that it doesn't make sense again, I know it. Still, I think it's right. This isn't about simulation, in this case, tho that is clearly his other obsession and probably linked somewhere. It's been a while since I've read any of his stuff.