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

But Mark S's post also reminds me of a ridiculous para about 'mirror-gazer'. Here Lanchester starts on a metaphor and completely loses his way; the metaphor doesn't do what he wants it to do at all, and quite distracts from, rather than confirms, his argument, such as it is.

LRB recently landed in my inbox: "John Lanchester almost gets stuck at Suez".

Admitidely an amusing mental image.

was probably trying to write a sentence.

re Condition of England novels:

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/04/you-can-never-go-home-anymore

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/03/perfidious-albion-sam-byers-review

Come back John Lanchester all is forgiven.

― Matt DC, Monday, 27 August 2018 13:20 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm reading this guy's new book after seeing juliet jacques being enthusiastic about it sadly its not very good and quite lanchestery

or maybe like an episode of black fucking mirror

i think its not helping that i recently read a joy williams book that covers some quite similar things but is startling and hypnotic and this feels so ploddingly mediocre in comparison. it reminds me of this thing she says in a paris review interview where she's talking about boring 'issues' writing. i keep thinking about how derrida talks about the irreducible excess of language but there doesn't seem to be any of that here, everything is so easily parsible (this is how i think of lanchester too, very mechanical analogies, nothing volatile within the writing or reading of it)

I read and really liked Perfidious Albion, did you read that one plax?

no i just heard about this on suite 212 and thought it would be fun to read something 'new'

The author is 31

I would like to read this tbh but I suspect if you didn’t like this you might not like Perfidious Albion, which was mostly quite appealingly clear in what it set out to do but the characters were a bit lacking

there's lots of stuff that's depressing me about this book. it was supported by arts council money. like given his last book was a big success seemingly, why aren't faber and faber who are publishing this one not just paying him well? there's something really depressing about this, like i'm keenly aware of how difficult it must be to get to write a novel 'these days' but this is so uninspiring and plodding. nobody has said anything so far that was not expository and usually in the service of making some aspect of the plot that was already clear MUCH CLEARER.

Lots of paragraphs like:

"the particular room in which I found myself contained two men. The desk between us was less a working surface than a barrier, stretching from wall to wall and bolted at both ends, meaning I had to enter through a separate door and hallway. It was a neat statement, I thought: the clearest signifier of bureaucracy, repurposed as a blunt communication of division: the men across from me were protected: I was held at bay."

I feel like this paragraph could do without the narrator interpreting the scene for us in such an obvious way. there's a lot of this iron grip stuff, where we get a fairly obvious metaphor and then its laboriously parsed. (I literally picked this paragraph at random now) I wouldn't have minded so much if the interpretation was something surprising like a conveyor belt of bearing statuary of martyrs in agony or something to be limboed under or

its like why live in the imagination of this person if their interior world is so uncluttered with unruly associations

"The room contained two men. The desk between us stretched from wall to wall and was bolted at both ends. I had to enter through a separate door and hallway."

i have an offer of editing work i will not be taking: based on just the first sample page i was describing it as a just-about-adequate translation of a da vinci code knock-off in the manner of tom sharpe, but further examination reminds me powerfully of you-know-who (in its handling of technology in particular)

apologies to all who love the thread but i will still not be taking it

What if they drove a truck of money to your house?

sir this is a SOW'S EAR for the task of making it into a SILK PURSE i charge ONE MILLION DOLLARS *doctor evil gesture*

Couldn't you 'edit' it into something better?

yes!

for ONE MILLION DOLLARS *doctor evil gesture*

Will Zimbabwean dollars suffice?
(£2000 to save anyone else checking)

The thought of Dan Brown meets Tom Sharpe is baneful in the extreme btw

never got round to writing up my review of the very bad ghost story book, and just now discovered while looking back thru old NYRBs that it got a full-on rave write-up from some idiot:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/01/john-lanchester-reality-selfies-from-hell/

so far i have only skimmed as i am busy today, saving the hate-read for later lol

Handy reminder at the beginning there to never read Martin Amis either.

never got round to writing up my review of the very bad ghost story book, and just now discovered while looking back thru old NYRBs that it got a full-on rave write-up from some idiot:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/01/john-lanchester-reality-selfies-from-hell🕸/

so far i have only skimmed as i am busy today, saving the hate-read for later lol

there was at least one -- possibly two -- published in the new yorker iirc!

where was the second-best underpants story to be found? or was it just that (opening) paragraph?

oh god. no. i don’t know. i don’t want to know.

i looked up my notes:

Signal first published in the New Yorker
Coffin Liquor and Reality first published in the LRB (the latter as Love Island)
We Happy Few first published in Esquire

that's four out of the eight stories given this hens-teeth level affirmation!

(Reality = "second-hand sleeping shorts")

or more accurately second-best sleeping shorts lol

You never know what riches these thread revives will provide.

As Mark S implies: Lanchester can publish anything, because of who he is, now.

Standards don't really apply.

In principle, FWIW, an academic journal would or should not be like this, if it operated double blind peer review. But these papers can't even pretend to have such standards.

has anyone ever published fiction on the double blind peer review principle? it seems a bit unlikely (not least since anyone involved would immediately know who the writer was)

As Mark S implies: Lanchester can publish anything, because of who he is, now.

how would you characterise who he is, now? not an avatar of literary fiction, surely? more, a well-embedded member of the literary journal establishment?

Yes - but one who started out as quite an acclaimed novelist, and does publish fiction often nowadays eg: CAPITAL, THE WALL.

I don't think he's regarded as a great writer but he is clearly an insider.

Colm Toibin is similar except that he is regarded as a great writer - wrongly, I'd tend to say.

yes ok. i think i agree. i don’t really think anyone with any sort of faculty for thought or reading can rate lanchester, which must say something about the countervailing power of his lit establishment network?

or the quality of lit establishment critical capabilities. despite cynicism i feel it would be wrong to snarkily assume the latter - as usual i prefer corruption to imbecility as an explanation, though the capability of not wanting to offend people in your network resulting in the stupefaction of your critical faculties probably plays a part.

From the current LRB:

Picture​ the following age-old scene: a writer sitting at a kitchen table, pretending to work. Set it forty years ago. The Conservatives are in power and everything is broken, but our subject is the writer’s stuff. 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. Now fast-forward to the same scene forty years later. The Conservatives are in power again and everything is broken again; the room (and perhaps the writer) is a little shinier, but the stuff in the room is more or less the same. At least, it serves the same functions, if you swap laptop for typewriter, mobile for landline, Dyson for Hoover.

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!

I don't think my oven has a digital clock. It has a dial that turns round to make it heat up.

<3 but I did just remember Those round things that are in the middle of car tires and often seem to fall off, what's their purpose?

I mistyped in saying 'fridge and toaster have disappeared' from Lanchester's list, from para 1 to para 2 -- I meant HOB and toaster.

Odd as I think my hob *does* seem quite electronic.

The problems continue.

At p.2, para 2, of the article Lanchester tells us about a shift from one kind of 'chip' to another. Possibly this second kind is the 'microchip' - I'm not sure. He doesn't say so here, though that term is surely central to his review.

What is a 'chip'? He describes it visually here, which is a start. But what is it, what does it do? He doesn't say.

Further on p.2 Lanchester explains that US bombing used to be very inaccurate, then they used electronic chips, and it became accurate.

Why?

He leaves this totally unexplained. What is the relation between electronic chips and bombs? This is central to what he's saying, yet he gives no explanation of it whatever. Instead he ventures into a typically irrelevant, self-serving digression about TOP GUN - quite characteristic.

Another bad sentence, qua sentence, I think, later arrives: 'If the first important beneficiary [...] was the military, the second was the rest of us'.

So the second important beneficiary was ... everyone except those already covered by the the first important beneficiary? Isn't that so all-inclusive as barely to count as a proposition?

Maybe he’s leaving out unimportant beneficiaries. “Them,” perhaps. Or snakes.

The further I get in this article, the less I see the relevance of its much-derided opening.

All chips are microchips. It’s fair to lambast Lanchester but it’s akso fair to assume readers have some awareness of the world post 1945.

I've heard good things about the book Chip Wars

Ideally to be read in conjunction with a history of the Cod War.

James Morrison: I agree that any article needs to assume that potential readers already know certain things. It can't explain everything.

This *particular* article is about microchips - and, by extension, I think, transistors, semiconductors and such like. As such, it would be a good idea for the article to explain those items.

On the other hand, I don't think this article has a responsibility to explain the Vietnam War. It mentions that war, but that's not what it's about.

I wasn't sure that you could write a brief enough explanation of semiconductors and transistors to fit into such an article so I had a go:

Silicon by itself is not a conductor,  but you can 'dope' it with other elements to improve its conductivity - hence semiconductor. The doping can be done in two different ways, n-type and p-type. By themselves each of these types is only a moderate conductor but if you put them together you get interesting properties. Electricity will only flow from the n-type to the p-type, permitting current in only one direction. As an electrical component this is called a diode. If you put three layers together in a sandwich, npn or pnp, you'd think that no current could flow, and you'd be right - unless you apply a small current to the central layer, then current can flow through the whole sandwich. This is a basic transistor, the micro electronic equivalent of the vacuum tube or valve, where one electrical current can be turned on or off by another.

Furthermore, because transistors are switches that use one flow of current to control another, you can wire them into each other. By doing so you can create logic gates, which can for example produce an output current if two input currents are on (AND), if either input current is on (OR), or an output current if there is no input and vice versa (NOT). If you take an output current to be a 1 and no current to be a 0 then you can wire up logic gates in such a way as to perform binary arithmetic. And binary arithmetic is ultimately all that computers do.

Thanks Ledge for producing these descriptions.

Do you work in computer construction?

This reminds me that 10 years ago I tried to understand electricity. I think I learned that it had something to do with magnets - that electricity was generated between magnets. Unsure why, and perhaps that's not even true.

It is hard to see how human beings would discover electricity.

the usual explanation is that electricity was first observed as static electricity, as generated by rubbing amber (greek: elektrum) against cloth

the relationship between electric current and magnetism: if you pass a conducting metal through a magnetic field (viz basically past some magnets) it generates an electric current: this is because magnetism is the consequence of an excess of electrons moving towards a zone that lacks electrons, and the moving magnet (oversimplification alaert) "drags" the electrons in the conducting metal so that they push against other electrons and cause a current, like a river of electrons. magnets are made of high-resistance metals where the excess of electrons are gathered at one end and and the lack of them at the other; a conducting metal is a substance in which electrons move fairly easily (metals such as copper; also water, as a non-metallic conductor).

^^ a great deal of technology from the mid-19th century onwards uses this mechanism (often the magnets are caused to spin around wires in which you need a current)

the "field" is the larger region affected by the magnet (there's a mathematical definition, but i won't risk embarking on that)
"resistance" is (in this instance) a material quality of the substance that slows electrons down

actual real scientists can step in and slap me around when i start talking nonsense here

you can also generate electricity from potatoes.

I work in i.t. but strictly software. I've read about this stuff before but forgot it all so had to crib it again from various how stuff works articles.

magnets are made of high-resistance metals where the excess of electrons are gathered at one end and and the lack of them at the other

Isn't it that the magnetic field of all the magnet's atoms or molecules are lined up in the same direction?

Tatoes being full of water, I guess

salty water yes

xp lol probably

yes haha my "static electricity" theory of how magnets work is not in fact correct

(to be fair to me it is nearly 50 years since i learned this stuff; to be fair to the readers may be i shd look stuff up and check before i speak)

there was program on the radio where some boffin said magnets are sort of magic because they shouldn't actually work by the laws of metaphysics or summat like that.

lol I'm just remembering being taught Fleming's right-hand rule or the gener-righter method as our tutor called it during my electrical apprenticeship. Very handy thing to know, can barely remember a bloody thing about it.

Was this boffin a member of the Insane Clown Posse?

lol, quite possibly was

I wonder whether John Lanchester knows or understands these things.

The problem as a writer, very specifically, is the difference between knowing/understanding and making it clear to an audience that doesn't

^^^

(and it's an issue i've been obsessed with probably since i was editor at wire: how to translate and transmit the inner workings of music and music theory as they impact on what players do, the key issue at that magazine; and latterly in no particular order and as a more general conundrum for general-topic magazines, critical theory, economics, electronics and the levels of science where it's more than just just-so-stories about marble runs)

(the spillover into this thread being that lanchester has somehow been appointed the LRB's popular explainer of certain topics -- economics and finance, "the internet", now microchips and computers) and in my estimation he approaches this task quite wrongly (and as pertinently his line-editors are not allowed to scream at him bcz he's too high up the editorial order to have to listen)

Yeah it's clearly a difficult job - maybe elements of it are near impossible - but it's the job. If you don't make at least a thrust at achieving those goals then by definition you're terrible at your job

my favourite editors have always been the ones who stubbornly say "no mark i don't understand what you're getting at here" and make me dig out the idea some more

it's an aspect of editing i'm not terrific at myself bcz i'm too vain: i can very easily kid myself (re someone else's prose) that i *do* get it

mark, can you think of a really good example of writing about "the inner workings of music and music theory as they impact on what players do"?

I really enjoy reading that type of thing, and I think it must be a pretty tricky balance to write about ...

anything by charles rosen (but he only writes about classical music)

max harrison on jazz tho many find him stylistically dry and old-school

i remember really enjoying robert walser's running with the devil: power, gender, and madness in heavy metal music -- tho it's 30-odd yrs since i read a borrowed copy and gave it back and i don't know if the power/gender stuff wd hold up well now (it seemed important and new and i was probably giving it loads of unlearned leeway)

i will try and scare up some other titles, maybe when more of my books are out of boxes (really i shd be unpacking and not discussing john fkn lanchester)

s/b unEARNED leeway

Thanks so much!
I will check 'em out... maybe start a new thread if I get really inspired...

"lanchester has somehow been appointed the LRB's popular explainer of certain topics"

Yes - Mark S OTM here. It's because Lanchester has this role, and thinks he's good at it, that he's fair game when he doesn't execute it properly.

Did a double take at Robert Walser heavy metal book but of course it’s a different guy

The top gun para in this article, oof marone - he is very bad at humour/bathos, unsurprisingly since he is fully tone deaf

Yeah, first google for R Walser was a little confusing, but now I've discovered two intersting writers off one recommendation....

Lanchester at end of 2nd page:

'American workers were expensive, not least because - boo! - they tended to belong to unions'.

Was that interjection necessary?

I imagine -- though it's not clear! -- that he's ventriloquising the opinion of the implausibly named "Charlie Sporck" (inventor of novel plastic cutlery iirc), and trying to do so in a spiffy and economical one-word manner. Once again the subs should be pulling him up and pointing out this ambiguity: "John, who is thinking this? Be clearer!"

Isn't it clear that the bargaining power of workers in chip factories meant that wages and conditions would decrease the profitability and therefore this was the drive toward manufacturing moving to East Asia, where (as the piece says) the majority of the chips are made?

the presence of the word "boo!" is extraneous to that point tho

The meaning of the sentence is clear enough. That's why I say the 'boo!' is unnecessary. The statement would be complete, and presumably accurate, without it. The 'ventriloquism' that Mark S quite accurately identifies is not needed, and is delivered in an infantile way that an article in the LRB should not require.

This infantile quality is, I realise, a feature of Lanchester. It doesn't generally feature in the LRB, though Runciman and Burrow have their own bad blokeish qualities.

Ah ok, sorry I am just catching up with the piece and the various complaints about this piece...which I am reading just now.

Finished most of it.

I can see why we all started on that first para because it doesn't come off in terms of setting the scene..."the writer's stuff" is pompous. It mentions the Tories to no effect (they didn't have any) to then go through a history of a technology that starts much before the 70s. Very clunky.

I get that I'd like to be conveyed the inner workings of music if I pick and regularly read about different types of music in a music magazine every month for years on end, as an avid consumer and enjoyer of music!

However with semiconductors it's just one of those things -- like 99% of human endeavour -- where I'm looking for things like: how does this impact me now, how it might impact me in future and what role does this have in shaping the world. Even if I was told a bit more about the inner workings of semiconductors it wouldn't go anywhere, but if I'm told that this made the US military more effective at killing that's conveying impact. That the US also lost in Vietnam is something he says, something we know so it tells me semiconductor use wasn't decisive (in the way that some people know about the decoder machines invented by British scientists in WWII). My issue is he doesn't work through this (what if technology will not have as much impact as he thinks) and yeah, then goes into Top Gun aside for a bit of colour. To be lazy.

This is all to say that the piece was mostly fine, jokes and manner aside. The background is told as much in terms of the people who invented bcz people can relate to that a bit more? It tells you how the tech impacts on the personal and the politics around you, goes into geopolitics from the Cold War to East Asia and China. It gives another dimension to the conflict over Taiwan.

I'm not sure how telling me about the science of this tech improves it. Other things would tho'.

Lanchester is such a 6/10 guy.

Lanchester at end of 2nd page:

'American workers were expensive, not least because - boo! - they tended to belong to unions'.

Was that interjection necessary?

Think he's tryna give it some of that Patricia Lockwood pizazz the editors like.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/salad-chain-that-thought-it-was-a-tech-firm-looks-wilted-f2696360?st=1lko4n6ldd4sgjv

One thing I wanted Lanchester to explain was a line around VCs. I quite like him to give 6/10 explainers on that and private equity.

quick update

Chip War the book is very clear and well-organised btw. It may have been worth reading even if it poorly written - the technology is central to our epoch, and the geopolitical consequences significant and of the moment - but it's well handled and informative, and yes, covers semi-conductor technology etc as part of the history of the technology etc.

i don't think he's a particular favourite of ilx, but ezra klein's podcast is occasionally worth listening to, and his recent interview with the author covers the main topics at play.

more importantly, i wanted to pick up on mark's post about haptics and related matters. it's something that's been nagging away at me for a long while - in fact i was several times on the verge of starting a thread, called something like Soyface Wojak in the Stavanger Cloudweb: The Aesthetics of Computing as a catch all for this sort of thing from memetics to the material layer. but the haptics post reminded me of it, as have some recent issues at work.

Roughly the problem as i see it, or rather the set of related problems, is the separation between the tactile and material layer of computing (plastics, wires, screens) and our experience of using computers (representations of information extremely abstracted from the physical layer) mean it's very difficult for one to inform the other in the way that metaphor has traditionally allowed. that is to say we have always clothed our feelings and thoughts in the cloth of nature or that experienced in our ambulatory and perceptual life - it's the thorn, the crack in the teacup.

this can be seen in a number of ways, for example the use of the word 'cloud' to represent what are in fact huge data centres kept freezing cold, in icy landscapes or embedded in a former nuclear bunker at the base of a granite cliffed stavanger fjord, cooled by the icy waves. or to take another example, me having to do a powerpoint presentation on the application of machine learning to my particular area of work, and asking a technology colleague whether he had any visual representations of the technology at work - no, but some command line stuff running gave the right 'vibe'.

'early' representations, like William Gibson's Cyberpunk, or the Matrix dripping digits, are in some ways the best, when the abstracted layers were more visible, more tangible (just think of the sound of a modem) but are of course incredibly cliched and outdated now. it amused me to read lines in The Crying of Lot 49 in 1966 and think of how small a jump it was to the world of the Matrix (in itself, like Gibson, based on phone lines but digital):

For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

the hieroglyphic streets is perhaps right, like Calvino's Invisible Cities, architectural and social embodiments of algorithmic outcomes.

still, the point remains, the quality of aesthetic representation of modern computing seems thin and undernourished (please furnish me with counterexamples!).

ofc metaphorical schema (that is to say internally consistent - roses and lilies are always x and y) for abstract concepts have existed, but utlimately the appropriateness of their use for abstract concepts seems to me to relate to the fact that both abstract experience and 'natural' clothing both stem from God/creative being/s, or Nature or whatever points of motive authority you wish.

that layer - material and abstract - is somewhat separate, because abstracted, from the objects computing allows us to present and proliferate ie the aesthetics on and and presented on the internet (but not elsewhere). representations of things going wrong with the system, glitches, or grotesque collapses of aesthetics shown by many memes seem of particular interest, partly because they go against the grain of computing making it easier to do easier to do things you want - so do things that are ugly, or aesthetically worthless, or grotesque - and partly because they surface broken mechanics several layers down from what a common user will see.

On haptics...

at work, the transition from hardware and serial interfaces to IP workflows, software defined channels, metadata driven automation, and 'control surfaces' for human operators leads to a difficulty for those operations. when something goes wrong it's hard to understand where it's gone wrong. that's usually because control surfaces are driven by metadata that assumes the successful processing of the orchestration or workflow. if it goes wrong, the metadata won't always be available to be represented to the user what's gone wrong. put another way, problems like this can't be resolved by the person operating the tools, but by a software engineer. there is something of the 'haptic' even if it's not quite touch, it's that the information in the system was near enough the surface to enable an operator to fix the system. modern day haptics also come into it and help illustrate what i mean, perhaps - due to latency in the system a particular issue for some of our operators was that status changes after an on screen button press on the control surface did not appear rapidly enough after that button press, which led to people pressing the on screen button multiple times, even though the initial command was being acted upon.

perhaps this is only another way of saying that in a software world, your operations are more likely to be DevOps environments (doing the building and support of the tools with traditional operations increasingly automated) - this is after all a transition period. but the drama being played out is a submerging of the mechanics of the world into a space difficult to be rendered via useful metaphor, and difficult to comprehend and understand so that we may adapt it.

these all seem interrelated, so some order is needed, some layers, and maybe the OSI model in itself isn't a bad place to start for examining the problem.

• metaphorical layer ('cloud', 'web' - the control layer if you like - how we represent the *processes* of computing and information flow, the data available to do so)
• material layers (cold data centres, mountains of chips and electronic waste in slums in Guiyu and Agbogbloshie, mining of precious metals) - how does the material layer inform the metaphorical and representative landscape
• representation (how we render the world of superprocessing, data and information flowsto make it *aesthetically* tangible) and loop back to the metaphorical layer

anyway, apologies for the digression, it just seemed an opportunity to get some of this down on a rainy bank holiday.

I love it :)

v low indeed even on the scale of things that are currently consequential but this (excerpted from twitter so the refuseniks can also enjoy):

Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth: John Lanchester don’t get really basic quantitative ideas hopelessly wrong challenge
[context: lanchester has written abt SBF-FTX in the LRB; @maxrothbarth is actually economically and financially literate and works in the fraud-reporting field]
Jay Owens @hautepop; Write us a pithy letter?
[context: as @hautepop was a Good Thing back in the blogging era; she is the new and evidently activist "readers' editor" at LRB, which I think is also quite likely a Good Thing]
Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth: If you look back through the archive you’ll see that of the three letters I’ve so far had published, two of them are variations on the theme “John Lanchester is wrong”, and I don’t want to come over as obsessive

!!

ps I vented a while ago to my sister abt how bad WHOOPS was and she said "look i read it and learned a lot from it, yr standards are too high bcz you already know too much" -- well this is not the worst put-down i have ever taken (and rivers/rothbarth knows way more than me; like actually what he is talking abt for example) but feedback noted for balance like

lol, i still retain a mild neutrality towards Whoops, based on knowing less then than i do now (but then i guess that is in part due to Whoops), and being a lot less tolerant of the 'lanchester summarises' mode and manner these days.

ble an operator to fix the system. modern day haptics also come into it and help illustrate what i mean, perhaps - due to latency in the system a particular issue for some of our operators was that status changes after an on screen button press on the control surface did not appear rapidly enough after that button press, which led to people pressing the on screen button multiple times, even though the initial command was being acted upon.

Of course you could say, "Everybody is an operator," but---

Already, the day felt long. When he looked back at his screen, it was 14:27. He wished, now, that he had gone out at lunchtime and walked as far as the canal. He could have sat on one of the benches there for a while and watched the swans and the cygnets gobbling up the crusts and other bits and pieces people threw down for them on the water. Not meaning to, he closed the budget-distribution file he’d been working on without saving it. A flash of something not unlike contempt charged through him then, and he got up and walked down the corridor to the men’s room, where there was no one, and pushed into a stall. For a while he sat looking at the back of the door, on which nothing was written or scrawled. When he felt a bit steadier, he went to the basin and splashed water on his face, and slowly dried his face and hands on the paper towel that fed, automatically, from the dispenser.

On the way back to his desk, he stopped for a coffee, pressed the Americano option on the machine, and waited for it to spill down into the cup.

I was going to defend that until I got to "budget-distribution file"

I'd be interested to know what you felt was defensible up until that point. I feel the whole thing is turgid inanity.

"crusts and other bits and pieces" although innocuous looking, for long time lanchester heads, indicates the open-ended material leakage of his prose... what other bits and pieces? not crusts? the crumb too? or.... specifically bought bird food As We're Told... bits and pieces sounds like people are ransacking their sheds.

i'm with plax here, i think, you might defend the first sentences as a fusion of style and content, but it toils so.

budget-distribution file is pure chef kiss of course. absolute a-grade, inject-it-into-my-veins lanchester.

i'm actually going to allow something here. 'where there was no-one' + 'on which nothing was written' ('or scrawled' lol) and the automatic towel dispenser + the Americano option on the machine, feels like he may be trying to do something. but who knows, he walks round like a sims character.

in fusion of style and content news: "already, the day felt long" <-- already the sentence felt long (yes it's that comma)

yes, it's remarkable how tired you feel just a few words in.

https://i.makeagif.com/media/10-30-2013/QwrC28.gif

yes, you get three words in and lean back in your easy chair and think 'christ is it time for a drink yet. no i see it's only 9:10am'

It was the twin 'where there was no one' and 'on which nothing was scrawled' that finally made me throw up my hands.

i did wonder if he was going for a bit of poetic balance there ('empty' is probably a better phrase for the toilet).

but now i'm laughing at ever going into the 'men's room' (? oddly american turn of phrase?) and thinking 'there is no one'.

i feel i should point out i was drunk when i first read this

Sorry, the bit I posted is not written by the man himself, I just felt it was absolute textbook Lanchester. The towel dispenser is the low point for me.

I also hate the comma after already.

it’s an extremely enjoyable paragraph. as so often with JL it contains multitudes. i found myself on the somewhat catechistic train of thought, hopelessly banal: “JL is a very bad writer. In the same way that some are very good writers, he is very bad at it. He cannot do it. Even where he thinks he is doing something (and i think he must think this) it does not then pass the test of *why* he thinks this is something he should do. *Why*.”

And you end up going round again, like Michael Finnegan… “Because he is a very bad writer.” etc

You can compound it with questions like “*why* do they let him? *Why* do they pay for him to do it? Does he think he is in some way good? When he’s finished a work, does he feel, like Nabokov, satisfied as if he had laid an egg? *What* do people say after they’ve read something by him? Do they feel their store of imaginative exploration has in some way been replenished? *Why*

You are aware that it’s a form of mediocrity so intense that it is worse than the merely very bad.

There is something Widmerpool like about it all (from Dance to the Music of Time). The stolid successful progression of lack of talent. It perhaps is related inversely to the same energies and demons that occasionally take great talents from us early.

xpost oh.

who is this epigone.

it is very characteristic.

has he taken on a disciple?

brought them into his workshop of dreams?

I just looked it up on my laptop via the internet search engine and discovered it to be Claire K33gan.

I am being mean but the top quote from CK says 'I can't explain my work. I just write stories'.

“I can't explain my work. I just sit down at my study desk, switch on my laptop, open up the word processing programme that the laptop came with and write stories“

<3

it’s interesting to consider why they’re v similar. one aspect of manchester’s prose is the sense that he’s imagining himself walking or going through the process as it happens, so that his sentences and the thought of his prose is also organised in this way. the sentences sort of discover what’s happening at the same time the writer and relevant character does.

the same things going on here. they are a mere stenographer for the minimal levels of empathetic imagination going on. there’s no sense of organisation or art to it.

i’ve never read any keegan, so this may be unfair - after all deploying a style like that in a v limited way within a wider context may have some meaning or purpose. rather than just being how you write.

xpost

lol mark s.