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

... specifically what? i can sort of believe that, i guess, but all i've read is his review of josopovici's new book and his book on hergé, neither of which quite fit that bill; also his philosophical manifesto bullcrap, which eh

i have been carrying around a copy of 'men in space' but i have started reading three or four other books in various places instead of reading it

"his review of josopovici's new book" -- yeah, this. and i think there was s.thing in the new statesman

Here is a review I wrote of Remainder, the first paragraph of which I've reproduced here:

In Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, a man suffers a traumatic injury and adopts an unusual method of recovery: a quest for authenticity. He builds enormous sets and hires actors to resurrect his life from before the accident, careful that his stagecraft not only mimics but recreates his previous more perfect life. The narrator’s form of therapy, in other words, is nostalgia, a way to reach back to a time when his life still felt whole and authentic. Yet as the narrator grows more and more obsessed with living only in these flawless moments, Remainder suggests that our fixation with authenticity may be itself a trauma. It describes the truth of representations and stars a man who erects his memories as gigantic art pieces and finds himself frustrated by how simulations can only stand-in for reality. Think here of postmodern metafictional novels and their precursor Beckett, whose plays also resemble art installations; like Krapp’s Last Tape, Remainder is a non-stop quotation of stark repetitions. But Remainder is also about another more political conception of “truth”—being true to one’s own self. Sharing some territory with the works of David Foster Wallace, Daniel Clowes, and Alexander Payne, Remainder is a story about how modern life corrodes the self’s ability to live a “right” life.

i have now read men in space

Any good?

it has a really awful blurb explaining that the characters are "negotiating all kinds of space - social, emotional, physical" (not exactly phrased that way, but just as bad.) which, hey, thanks for that.

it is pretty good though. (sorry, xpost.)

it's very pynchonesque. in the way the cast are handled, and in a lot of turns of phrase, and in a lot of sentences about concrete things that turn out to be abstract things, or vice versa.

which i think a bunch of people thought this was written before remainder, on those grounds -- that it wouldn't make sense for a voice as strongly felt as in his first novel to then fall back to another person's style in his second. but if c is like this, as well, than maybe that is what happened.

Cheers, thomp, will probably give it a go at some point, although I'm all McCarthy'd out at the moment. Argh I hate blurbs like that - movie descriptions often particularly culpable. Yes, I am only a member of the public and you are a top film student who understands these things thx.

xpost, I think it was his first work, but published after? I think probably the idea was so strong in Remainder that it helped define the voice to an extent that isn't the case in C (or from the sounds of it Men in Space).

i am in the home stretch of this right now & am only posting to say that the phrase 'a kind of simulation better than the real thing ever was' appeared to me hugely more powerful from having seen it on Site New Answers so many times. like reading a john donne sermon and finding 'ask not for whom' in its native place for the first time.

btw i liked it. i liked the authorial perverseness-- the way that people never seemed to be described (except i guess the nurse at the spa and that for obv reasons) while places might be excessively (the description of the house right at the beginning pissed me off tbh but thankfully that seemed restricted to learmont-pov); the way that all these modernist symbols are written of with such unmodernist style. The allusions and repetitions didn't feel belaboured, either, you registered them and kept moving rather than having to sit through an explanation. There was a lack of hysteria that I liked. When you're calling up the ghost of Wyndham Lewis or Marinetti or Blavatsky (or even even Evelyn Waugh who is secretly there in all writing abt the 20s even if only in my heart) it is hugely refreshing to have something that does not use hysteria as a tool.

i had a 'wait is that a quote from something' moment

well chosen phrase for thread imo. i spent a long time convinced it was somewhere in 'remainder' even though i had read remainder and it is not to be found in there

xpost

yeah i had assumed it was a ref to remainder, because all i've read about remainder (yes yes i need to read remainder, i know) suggests toward it. but no!

glad people like the quote - chose it as a connecting point between Remainder and C.

in some ways think the obsession with that which is residual in 'reality', that which remains after the simulation and is issimulable, is more of a connecting obsession, (rather'n it being 'better than the real thing') but also ended up liking the quote as a sort of McCarthian definition of fiction/art.

also glad you liked C, c#m - find myself getting a bit tired of feeling defensive about the book, cos although it's not a masterpiece I do think it's quite interesting (in a good way - like cricket ahem - rather than as a euphemism for 'dull'), and I'm not sure any sort of it's great!/it's crap! conversation serves it v well.

writing this in the pub, Probs not making much sense.

xpost

i just finished C, which came out in paperback last week.

i really liked it! which is probably to be expected.

its hard to talk about it without thinking of pynchon: the deadpan comedy (tho pynchon's much funnier), the "world war adventures," the thematic obsessions with communication, translation, mapping, modeling, 'modernism,' etc.

hes much colder than pynchon tho, and less of a show-off; pynchon's novels are mostly shaggy-dog stories, late-night dorm-room "whatever happens happens" kinds of bullshit sessions; this is more mechanical and plotted. you dont get the sense that mccarthy writes 1/3 of the book stoned the way you do with pynchon.

i havent heard the egan thing that lamp talks about in the second post (and i need some more time to marinate on the book) but i wonder if she's not getting at what i liked about it--the kind laying-bare of mccarthys elaborately fashioned network of ideas.

i suppose for some people it might even be too "obvious"? or "trying too hard"? i didnt much care; it was trying at things im interested in.

and yes i agree with everyone that the first half is much stronger than the second, and even if it picked up a bit in the egypt section it was starting to get very on the nose at that point.

now read remainder

hi, i did

read it again

and again

i think the most interesting thing about 'remainder' is that its become such a cultural touchstone

it has?

burn

*shrugs*

?

it probably has attained some sort of afterlife that 'c', or perhaps anything else he writes, is unlikely to

this is p empty-headed and flimsy but i guess i feel like its becoming/has become 'the infinite jest of the oughts' with all that implies about its critical status/readership/'importance'

you think really? we hang out in different crowds

lamp do you work in publishing? or are you retired or what? i can never remember

carbonizay

i have no idea what that means?

max, yeah, i feel like thats true, or at least becoming true. i think zadie smith's essay about 'remainder' and 'netherland' was p impt in helping to develop its reputation as a novel thats capital-i important but i also think the whole backstory to it, the types of ppl i know who have read and really admire it, idk, i just think its sorta slotting into that 'space' in the discourse.

i think nabisco and pinefox touch on this a little itt where they/we discuss that zadie smith essay btw

do you have a link to that thread? one reason i am/was skeptical of 'remainder' being the 'infinite jest of the aughts' is that (id thought) ilx hadnt discussed it very much! the thing is i dont hang out with many people who are 'into' literature/literary culture so i guess it wouldnt surprise me if i had just missed out on the remainder phenom

btw one reason it baffles me to hear you say that (and one reason i am baffled by ZS's contention that remainder is/was "the future of the novel") is that it seems so pointed _not_ avant-garde. arguably its theoretical concerns are "post-modern" (but even those specific concerns are like 30-80 years old [thinking here of, sorry to drop names, baudrillard and deleuze and before him even heidegger, at least in the case of remainder]) but its tone and style are so... modernist! it feels like hunger or one of the other thousands of novels about a loner slowly going mad, but, set in 2001! or something

same thing with C, which similarly isnt doing anything "new" or "avant-garde" stylistically, technically, thematically, philosophically. arguably.

whereas, sorry, didnt infinite jest (also arguably) set a "tone" for a whole generation of writers, v. that maud newtorn nyt mag piece from a few weeks ago?

to me its less about what 'remainder' actually accomplishes or even aims to accomplish and more the critical or popular narrative around it which marks it out as especially idiosyncratic and ambitious and 'difficult'. like read some of the early reviews for 'C' and youll see what i mean, this sense that mccarthy is potentially the standard-bearer for this 'non-narrative' tradition & for the '21st c. mind' or s.thing

again i dont theres really anything remarkably contemporary in the way 'remainder' grapples with ennui or lack of identity/rootlessness or w/e in the same way that dfw taps into new ways of writing 'being/thinking/understanding' w/ infinite jest and maybe ppl like egan or smith wld say that im misinterpreting their praise for the novel. i do think that there in order to develop a kind of cult of influence some time in the wilderness helps, its too early to say whether mccarthy will have much influence. i mean hes less imitable (and distinctive) than dfw, certainly

As far as I can tell it's the clear and vocal engagement with Continental modernism and criticism that makes him marketably distinct.

As I think woof said upthread many critics noted, after Remainder, how conventional C felt. People were expecting him to go one way and he didn't.

If you believe in the search for an authorial voice, then I think the assurance of Remainder, which was the consequence of having a strong idea, led people to believe he had a strong voice that wd persist in future works.

C showed that he's still searching for it. He's clearly interested in continental thought and writing, but in C this wasn't represented with a single strong idea but in engagement with a number of ideas. The voice as a consequence became more diffuse - occasionally felt like it was the victim of its content in fact. This was confusing, partly because he was still talking about Freud, Blanchot - he is still the same! - and partly maybe because of the pre-modernism setting, with its wafts of Kipling (as I said elsewhere, everyone who reads C should read Kipling's short story Wireless). Getting nommed for the Booker, presumably on the basis of Remainder, possibly confused things further.

I think - I hope - the search will be interesting, because it feels good to have someone interested in these things on the block and being creative, but I think he might end up a very different sort of writer than using Remainder as a compass might suggest.

the notion that a concern for the great writers of the last dozen or so decades from the rest of europe is enough to make an english writer distinct is infinitely dispiriting and probably true

I guess I am sort of skeptical of the claim that McCarthy is more clearly or vocally engaging w/ "Continental modernism"/post-structuralism/what have you than--say--Kundera, Ballard, Murakami, Eco, Sam Delaney, etc. (And that's without getting into "postmodern" Americans like Pynchon & DeLillo, who are surely influenced by French thought though maybe in a more diffuse and indirect way.)

I'm not sure that either of you are necessarily making the claim I'm disputing here, though, so maybe this thread isn't the place to argue it.

I do agree with what's being said about C feeling less unique or special than Remainder (though no less smart)--as you allude to he's best (so it seems) when he can really bear down on a single, fairly narrow concept and wring it for all it's worth; C ends up being this gorgeous patchwork of ideas but in the end you miss out on the kind of gripping, k-hole focus of Remainder.

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/3716/gbg1.jpg

re-read Lamp's post and want to rephrase what I said slightly. It's Remainder that made him marketably distinct, the voice of Continental philosophy in the Great British Lit Media came after, then despite the Booker thing, the marketability of Remainder didn't carry on into C so all that's left is voice of Cont. Phil. in GBLM.

continental philosophy is carrying too much weight here possibly, but it's what drives his writing away from Lit. Fic. realist tradition and gives it its distinctive tang/æsthetic.

Suspect you're right, nakh, and if my rephrasing is more accurate in terms of reduced profile marketability on the back of the confusing C even that my be overstating the case.

max - I think Ballard is a good call - or was, crucially. But his role as science fiction writer and his dreams of futurity possibly allowed critics to approach him or for him to be assimilated in a slightly different way. JGB's non-fic prose important here.

The other authors I'm foggier on tbh, but none of them quite feel right in this role - tho I admit that may be because of the focus on Eng writers in Eng media here. Don't quite get the desire for hardcore stylistic experimentation (Beckett influence?). DFW probably close here, but I've only read some of IF and too many people here are too good on him for it to feel anything other than fatuous passing comment.

Yeah, I don't really know what I'm arguing at this point since I'm admittedly not very up on American literary culture let alone British literary culture, and it seems to me that an author could occupy a certain "role" without being the first or only author to do the things necessary to assume that role.

(Also I was kind of fudging it with Kundera and Murakami who are clearly well-versed in continental philosophy but don't approach in the same kind of direct way as McCarthy [I remember kind of raising my eyebrows at McCarthy's use of a couple formulations that are common ways of translating Heideggerian concepts--he cals radio a "gathering-together" for example]; rather, they're kind of... "existentialist" authors? I can't think of a better way to put it. But as you point out nominating non-British or non English-language authors is maybe missing the point.)

nakh_gamaliel otm - part of Remainder's unusualness is that it didn't feel like anything else in the British literary scene - partly the continental theory, partly that 'k-hole focus'.

You definitely can put together a list of British novelists who like or fit with continental theory in a various ways - Ballard, maybe Christopher Priest, and quite a few more from the SF scene; old-school experimental world (Christine Brooke Rose?); and a grab-bag of marginal names (Stewart Home) - but Remainder has a focus that's like early Ballard or Priest, with no genre taint (literary!) + a flat realist front (accessible!).

also on his reception here: he understands establishment game (good school + New College) & can play it better than hard undergrounders I think. and that presentability is outside the work, but a factor – brit lit scene always reassured by having a well-educated serious white male somewhere about the place.

nakh_gamaliel otm

seem to have created hybrid poster, nultifications of le queux novels ahoy.

I guess I am sort of skeptical of the claim that McCarthy is more clearly or vocally engaging w/ "Continental modernism"/post-structuralism/what have you than--say--Kundera, Ballard, Murakami, Eco, Sam Delaney, etc.

Yes I think as others have said its really unusual for any British writers to say something like 'french writing isn't gobbledygook REALLY' w/out getting laughed out of town and getting buried in their underground bunker, so he gets the token experimental guy treatment instead.

Don't know how comparable he is to BS Johnson (?)

Gilbert Adair. He should be on the list of British french-difficult-things-likers too.

I think as others have said its really unusual for any British writers to say something like 'french writing isn't gobbledygook REALLY'

would add that another approach, increasingly common, is a kind of defanging/habilitation, ie 'they're saying something quite nice and sensible really'. Might be as theorists become historical figures (no-one's angry at Barthes any more, right?), might be just the the literary caste all got comfortable with cont phil at uni.

actually I stopped and thought about it and it isn't really the theory that makes remainder odd, more the plain voice & descriptive intensity - finds a technique to manage the ideas without declamation, namedropping etc.

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.

I'm sure it makes sense to you, Fizzles! :D

For me, I think it's either beyond me or perhaps the message is so simple ('writing can imagine alternate realities' or something) that we already know it. Probably it's just beyond me.

SO I ended up picking up his latest, The Making of Incarnation, despite being embarrassed by his most recent piece in the LRB, and thinking Satin Island was crap.

uneven doesn't cover it. so, more or less at random - I'm only two chapters in:

the 'prolegomena' (yes, ok, just) is fine, and more than fine in bits. it's about the Versuchsanstal für Wasserbau und Schiffbau (Research Institute for Hydraulic Engineering and Shipbuilding), which it turns out does actually exist:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/Berlin-tiergarten_vws_20050404_291.jpg/1920px-Berlin-tiergarten_vws_20050404_291.jpg

the fact of its actual existence means that what is really just documentary reporting is rendered into Tom McCarthy's particular prose diction and... well, i think it makes that diction look a bit silly. Take the very first sentence of the book:

From the S-Bahn, through shuttling latticework of tree branch and bridge truss, you glimpse it just below Tiergarten as you travel east-to-west, or west-to-east: a five-storey blue hulk.

Why not 'through *a* shuttling latticework of tree *branches* and bridge *trusses*'? Well presumably because McCarthy is trying to establish a form of poetic cadence across both reportage and the content that won't fit in there so well. Only I'm really not sure this is the *right* cadence for what he's trying to do. It feels underexamined and inherited from other forms of 'literariness'.

This friction is there through most of this first section, but then there is the first of a couple of moments so far where you feel what he's doing thicken and intensify - in this case how the vectors of water affect the physical model of oil rigs and boats and cities in the hydraulic tank: 'Computer modelling won't show you everything. Sometimes you have to actually *do* it, make a little world, get down amidst dumb objects and their messiness.' What is notable about these sections is that the force literary cadence is far less present and noticeable.

Remainder worked very well because the central character's desire to recreate a simulated world was entirely cognate with the writer's task - the authorial/narrative voice was very much unified with the actions and thoughts of this character v much on an obsessive part of the spectrum. that's not the case here.

anyway, prolegomena, C+: hasn't caused me to throw the book down, colour me mildly interested enough to carry on reading.

which is more than can be said for the first chapter. this throws us back into the '80s, and a school bus trip of 10 year olds to the Tate. Fine.

Across the side of one (bus) someone has finger-scrawled the word *Fuck*; beneath this, somebody (the same person perhaps) has written *Thatcher*; but this name has since been scored through, substituted by *GLC Commies* – which, in turn, has been struck out and replaced with *You*.

My immediate response to this was 'no'. I think it was 'GLC Commies' that was the immediate cause (tho I had registered that i didn't like 'finger-scrawled'). It just didn't sit right as van-dust graffiti. Then I realised that 'Fuck You' was also problematic. Now, I hope someone older and wiser can correct me if i'm wrong, but I don't really feel Fuck You entered into British vernacular from the US until later than the '80s? Fuck off was pretty standard, and fuck you sounded wrong and american, and not right here.

then they get to the tate after some uneven description of the bus trip (some bits good, some bits... not so good).

... his voice seems to rise from the the whorled depths of the staircase down which the floor's two-tone mosaic disappears.

again, ready to be corrected here, but that's a description of the entrance and 'rotunda', which wasn't rennovated until 2013 and according to my recollection of the Tate back then, wasn't a feature in the 80s.

so anyway, so far so subeditor.

scene drifts momentarily to peckham swimming baths a couple of weeks earlier, when the main character in this chapter, Markie, and his friend are getting changed and realise they're in a changing room next to some girls and peer under the cubicle to take a look.

They had to press their cheeks right to the quartz-and-granite slab to reach the vantage point: from there ... they saw two sets of bare legs towering above them like the trunks of redwood trees, paralllels playing perspectival tricks by narrwing *and* widening out into thighs before converging, at what should have been infinity but was in truth a mere two feet away, into unfoliaged waist canopies...

never mind the 'redwood tree' set-up, 'unfoliaged waist canopies' in this context is one of the very worst things i have ever seen committed to print. i feel bad about even reproducing it here, but its so unutterably awful it needs to have witness.

absolutely not, no, was my immediate response and i very nearly put the book down there and then.

oddly, the chapter very much improves later - again, something of an intensity as McCarthy moves onto his area of obsession - that is to say the orientation and relative positioning of things to each other in time, space and simulation. this is often managed in quite a dull way, with the description of how lines connect - A to B to C - objects with each other. The inevitability of geometric vectors across time. This was where McCarthy headed in the latter, much less successful half of C and there are ofc elements of Gravity's Rainbow in this obsession. Beckett's use of geometric intersection in the Trilogy is much more successful ofc, but McCarthy's own obsession here means it produces a different style and motive of interest that make sections of the book outside these particular occasions seem bad and unnecessary, stylistically gauche and pointless.

so that's one obsession, another is that inanimate objects - like the models of the city in the hyrdraulic tank, and a bird in a picture in the tate - are aware of and somehow will their own destruction, through a glitch in cause and effect caused by replays and simulations. i guess this is a perverted form of immanence in his world. here i think McCarthy gets closer to genuine points of interest in his writing. in the first, very good, section of C this took the form of constructing a metaphysics for how what survives of us after we die is communicated physically rather than spiritually.

unfortunately i think the fundamental problem is that outside Remainder the mode he picks for this is all wrong. his style needs to be radically different from what feels like very baggy writing generally inappropriate to precision.

anyway, i'm going to carry on.

But why though

well, cos i’m interested in some of his central ideas. there’s also at this early stage a sort of “which way will it fall” fascination.

My immediate response to this was 'no'. I think it was 'GLC Commies' that was the immediate cause (tho I had registered that i didn't like 'finger-scrawled'). It just didn't sit right as van-dust graffiti. Then I realised that 'Fuck You' was also problematic. Now, I hope someone older and wiser can correct me if i'm wrong, but I don't really feel Fuck You entered into British vernacular from the US until later than the '80s? Fuck off was pretty standard, and fuck you sounded wrong and american, and not right here.

Good critique, Fizzles.

In what way can you 'finger-scrawl' something on a van? In the dust? If no dust, then you could use your fingernail - and it would come off badly.

'GLC Commies' is all wrong - that diction wasn't used, and there's surely the simpler issue that someone engaged in scrawling on a van isn't going to be McCarthyite (Joseph, not Tom) in that way. It's ridiculous.

Your observation on 'Fuck you' also looks sound to me.

Your criticism of the changing-room scene looks sound.

his area of obsession - that is to say the orientation and relative positioning of things to each other in time, space and simulation

I don't understand how this is interesting. 'Things occupy different places in space'. 'Things move through to space, and their spatial relations to each other therefore change'. Those statements are true. I don't see them as, in themselves, an interesting theme.

I don't like this writer, and won't read him if I can avoid it. Perhaps I should be glad you're doing it for us.

I don't like this writer, and won't read him if I can avoid it. Perhaps I should be glad you're doing it for us.

i live to serve.

I think you're right on the GLC Commies, though the stronger reaction is against the diction. on the question of politics, i do find myself asking *why* that doesn't seem right (I agree it doesn't), and find myself wondering what it is that isn't conducive to right wing opinions in the dust scrawling classes. one option is that vehement phatic expressions of anti left sentiment are relatively new? that doesn't quite work for me. I think it's probably more because GLC Commies suggests a sort of structural analysis, rather than directed against a hate figure like Thatcher. But then fuck the tories is ofc perfectly plausible. Anyway. Not sure why.

On the things occupy different places in space, I'd agree with you that's not intrinsically interesting, though I would ask what it is in Beckett (or even possibly the Ithaca section in Ulysses), where the relentless depiction of objects, their relation and interrelation, is of interest? I feel you will be able to answer this!

More generally this book is about how we consittute our simulations, in this case a film (Incarnation) with the modern technologies available.

This twitter thread on copywrighting motion capture is very relevant to the book's subject matter:

Jet Li on the ethical reasons why he rejected the role of Seraph in the Matrix movies. Li clearly saw the direction Hollywood was headed. pic.twitter.com/P5mhvZ3AOr

— Minovsky (@MinovskyArticle) December 26, 2021

He plays around with this - eg where motion capture posits points of dynamism that exist *outside* or in a theoretical position

The problem is, it's dull, because there's very little psychological engagement or dramatic tension to show why any of this matters or why it might be interesting. It's descriptions of people talking about and using motion capture, or cataloguing histories of iterated movements in industry. None of these things are without interest as subjects of course, but as fiction, McCarthy has done a bad job here.

he's always been interested in defining co-ordinate space - what does it mean to say 'x marks the spot'? In this novel via descirptions of how motion capture technology works, he's saying that 'the marked position's not the final goal. It's not the spot you want' - the true root of 'solving' the kinetic problem of the human body exists at a conjectured spot. I guess a version of this might 'the archimedean point' or those paintings by Saenredam, where the vanishing point exists outside the picture frame.

again, to come to your point, why is any of this interesting? well, i do think he's *trying* (not successfully - he just sort of throws techbnology descriptions at the reader) to do something I am interested in, which is to explore what constitutes aesthetic comprehension of digital spaces and simulations. and i'm afraid i'm going to have to let that rather opaque observation hanging, because i want to try and put some thoughts together about that anyway!

lol proofing, christ.

Thanks, Fizzles, for your extended thoughts.

I'm afraid your comments about objects in space lost me. I don't understand why this is an issue of interest. The motion-capture issue may be another matter. I know nothing about it.

though I would ask what it is in Beckett (or even possibly the Ithaca section in Ulysses), where the relentless depiction of objects, their relation and interrelation, is of interest?

This looks a worryingly hefty challenge. I think my short answer is that the relation of objects in space is not, as such, what's interesting about those texts, to me.

Most of us admire Beckett, but for me what counts about him would be other matters, like his grasp of finitude, mortality, death, and also his incredible control of language, including in black humour. The Beckett who makes diagrams of A, B, C and D moving around -- is not for me.

'Ithaca' is one of the best things I've ever read, and I concede that it has something to do with standing far back and seeing people 'in space' (even interstellar space) more than the rest of the book - an aesthetic effect, yes, but again, that doesn't seem to me the most interesting aspect of the episode, which is crammed with vast amounts of detail - historical, comic, poignant, poetic.

We strongly agree about the GLC graffiti issue. I think I might as a reader have just passed over it, whereas, as with Lanchester, you're very good at noticing things that are off. But with this, I might have picked up on it too. I was there at the time of the GLC, and this doesn't ring true at all.

i agree on the 'relation of objects in space' observations. i think it can be seen as a comic mode - the spasticity of the human body and the slapstick interrelation of things feel like a beckettian comic style, with an existential edge. And yes, the Ithaca section is much more than that - I mentioned it as I understand it was quite influential on Beckett, but you'll know more than me on that.

The McCarthy book itself has settled into a fairly adequate rhythm. It's really just a series of technical analyses, described in a fairly mediocre literary style. Lilian Gilbreth and here time and motion wireframes are a major theme:

https://miro.medium.com/max/638/1*ebDVK7NB8CVQocw23FFSrA.jpeg

He's beginning to suggest some sort of revelatory moment beyond these graphical reproductions and reconstructions of motion, but it's not clear if this is a major through line that will be resolved or speculation.

A lot of it reads like essays put into literary language. Still, he's expanding spaces and pushing at boundaries. It's just they're boundaries and spaces that have been described and pushed at elsewhere. There's an army drone-flying vet, who's never left the warehouse in his home country, retiring from the warzone with PTSD. One of the characters expresses surprise - 'warzone?' This way drone warfare causes problematises the notion of the 'theatre of war' has already been well explored.

Similarly, the rather feeble drone display in one section only sends you to youtube, and the remarkable light shows that have been a staple of Chinese light spectacles for a while and are being seen more elsewhere too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44KvHwRHb3A

The points when he plugs some emotional state into what's happening are better - characters fall into fugue states watching the analysis of motion taking place, so that they start throwing adjectives and metaphorical fancies at what they're seeing. Well, it's better than the v plain and stilted interactions between characters that feel almost transcribed.

Occasionally it works. Two of the characters are using skeletal analysis to try and assess the impact of non-progressive cerebral palsy on a child's motion. They go through the analysis, which starts getting processed, and McCarthy describes the machines winding 'their way back to dark secretes, mysteries of origin, her child's sad incunabula.'

'sad incunabula'. a book written before any level of analysable medicine is available. Something intrinsic, ancient and not available for processing. It's a reach, but I quite liked it. The fans of an aerodynamic testing tunnel starting up at a high pitch, 'soprano, an urgent and indefinitely long *fermata*, drawn from the fraught diaphragm of some mechanical Rhinemaiden' not so much.

It's all very odd, the book does seem to be tending towards some sort of alteration of the ideas its treating, and i'll be interested to see how that comes out. but frankly if McCarthy had submitted this to me i'd've said that it was all very interesting, but he should go away and rewrite it entirely, unrecognisable. At the moment it feels like a set of half-digested LRB essays.

If something like this is going to succeeded he needs to go madder, go stranger. Ada, or Adour or Against the Day, wildly unsatisfactory as they are in many ways, are models here.

A minor solecism, but irritating all the same: In a not-as-bad-as-it-sounds extended sequence looking at the wind-tunnel test of a bobsleigh there is that old literary cliche. A German is asked a question, to which he answer 'Ja, naturlich' before falling back into German. It's the old Poirot trick, where they are unable to translate the easiest phrases and words in their language, but speak fluent English for the rest, a recurrent tic in fiction, completely the opposite of real world behaviour, which while sort of understandable, is always irritating when you notice it.

https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article23246907.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200c/0_New-Years-celebrations.jpg

loooooool

'a kind of simulation but just embarrassing dogshit' - a thread of Captain Tom McCarthy walking round his front garden.

Fizzles: I don't understand your final point about the solecism.

I think I would not comprehend this book and not enjoy it.

sorry pinefox, it was a bit compressed. in agatha christie’s poirot books, to take an example, poirot is asked a question and will respond “ah, non, but the lady is not his wife, evidement?” etc. it’s only the commonest words and forms that he seems unable to speak in english. this is of course to give a flavour of the french, in words that many english speaking people will understand, but considered in terms of the character themselves it’s rather ridiculous.

This is like a weird cultural litmus test, he contextualises it as Poirot, I immediately think of Saison Marguerite.

certainly v common, and tbh im not sure i’m not thinking of the poirot tv adaptations rather than the books.

A German is asked a question, to which he answer 'Ja, naturlich' before falling back into German.

So did this mean:

A German is asked a question, to which he answer 'Ja, naturlich' before falling back into English.

?

he's got you there

Zugzwanged!

The latter. He is conversing in English generally in the section, to speakers of other languages.

oh and i picked up murder on the orient express last night and yes poirot does this all the time.

t-mac’s word order makes for some seriously gammy sentences. try this for size:

“if a crew member tries obsequiously to return her to her quarters…”

painfuly evading the splint infinitive leads to some serious mashing of the gears. just write “if an obsequious crew member tries to return her to her quarters” ffs. or at least if for some reason you feel some nuance is being lost (it’s not) put “obsequiously tries”. it really doesn’t matter. just not what you did put.

after the long section about the bobsleigh in the wind tunnel (not as bad as it sounds tho perhaps that is a v low bar), there is a long section where he describes what’s happening in the film. this is worse than it sounds even if that is also a low bar. the film seems not v good. and it’s made worse by little linguistic innovations mccarthy throws in to show science fiction is happening. a drink they’re transporting is called kwavit and he talks about them frolicking in their childhood in the *gzhiardini*. *do you see*. do more of it, to an extreme, or do much less of it, none at all in fact.

having to force my way through this bit. it’s utter drivel.

keen followers of this thread during its recent updates will be interested to know that i almost threw this book down in boredom and irritation but then thought of those who needed me to continue and so, shackleton like, i go on.

I'm glad to hear that it's bad.

on the last leg shackleton of his big anarctic journey shackleton encountered (a) an unbelievably vast rogue sea-wave which his little boat nevertheless weathered bcz they were master seamen and (b) this guy:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

(or so the famous footnotes claim, but imo they're a misdirection: it's obviously actually a reference to COUNT MAGNUS)

lol imagine the first sentence is written properly

keen followers of this thread during its recent updates will be interested to know that i almost threw this book down in boredom and irritation but then thought of those who needed me to continue and so, shackleton like, i go on.

TLS review has it about right:

The passage, like the novel that contains it, requires maximal engagement for minimal returns,

i’m gradually reaching the end of my desire to read this. it’s that point where you realise the possibility of redeeming some of the ideas presented is not likely to happen before the pages run out.

pinefox, i agree i do not think you would like this book.