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

Amis also had a couple of Zbigniews in I think London Fields.

McEwan's Saturday is clunky-as-hell but basically alright.

Is there any detailed exposition of what bankers actually do, other than having three computer screens? Ian McEwan, even if being tedious, would always have some of this to redeem it.

― Ismael Klata, Friday, 9 March 2012 12:19 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There isn't, perhaps surprisingly. There's some rather awkward handwaving towards types of trading, and bankery things, to indicate he knows what he's talking about (which he does), but it's kept at a minimum, I suspect because Lanchester feared (prob rightly) that going too much into it would a)be disproportionate b)reveal that he knows rather less about the working detail of everyone else.

I think a fictional account of a banker by Lanchester, or a group of bankers, would have been far more interesting than this 'terrorist', 'immigrant', 'old lady', 'young artist' media stereotype bollocks.

Things where you can tell Lanchester feels more comfortable:

Talking about football (this isn't good, but it doesn't feel RONG).
Bringing up small children (this isn't funny, but " " " ")

er 'of a banker or a group of bankers by Lanchester' not 'by Lanchester or group of bankers' obv.

xp

aesthetic saturday objections aside, I think a state-of-the-nation has to be significantly longer than that, 400pp minimum.

Heh, I like the idea of a group of bankers writing as Luther Blisset.

is Hensher's Northern Clemency in this vein? Anyone read that?

Wasn't Amis' new book originally going to be called The State Of England? A better title than Lionel Asbo, anyway.

I enjoyed Theo Tait putting the boot into Ali Smith's last, vaguely S-o-E book: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n02/theo-tait/the-absolute-end - doesn't happen often enough, presumably because of the very small world of London publishing. Read the kindle sample of the Lanchester and couldn't believe how slack it was, yet I haven't read a bad, or even mixed, review yet.

Have the feeling this is going to belong on this thread soon:

http://fivedials.com/images/672.jpg

private eye gave captial a stinky review, fwiw

x-post

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, 8 March 2012 14:25 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am actually looking forward to Lionel Asbo.

xp

I also saw a mixed somewhere serious, but can't remember where.

How about a state-of-the-nation novel not set in London? Is there such a thing?

oh, theo tait again, Guardian.

If the Northern Clemency is that sort of thing, it seems to be Sheffield-based. But I think most SoN-type novels would try to do London a bit maybe? At least have one character moving/working there?

Actually, I may be imagining it, but is there something of Adam Curtis's faux-humdrum tone to some of those opening sentences up top? Like how all his BBC blogs begin with sentences like "One September night in 1945 three British mathematicians and astronomers went to see a new film at a cinema in Cambridge". I can almost hear Curtis reading the one about Petunia Howe.

i was a fan of What a Carve Up when i read it but when i've flicked through it since i thing i was mostly wrong, and the clumsiness i excused as Dickensian at the time just reads like clumsiness to me now.

interesting to think of Middlemarch as a state-of-the-nation novel because of course it's addressing "middle England" before the fact, at a time when it was far from central to English notions of England maybe?

iirc Lanchester has too many friends in the journalism trade to get many bad reviews?

Wasn't Amis' new book originally going to be called The State Of England? A better title than Lionel Asbo, anyway

Should have just gone the whole hog with 'I Hate The Fucking Proles'.

don't think he realises his dad was sometimes joking

I quite enjoyed that Ali Smith book as I was reading it but some of its sympathetic characters are more annoying than its unsympathetic characters and it descends into caricature rather a lot. Also it doesn't really go anywhere.

oh, theo tait again, Guardian.

― woof, Friday, 9 March 2012 13:07 (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Actually it was a good sandwich," runs a typical sentence

Good job the review has forewarned me of this particular sentence, otherwise I might have hurled the book across the room.

That review is spot on about the 'drone' of the prose. Also:

And there's a lot of slightly lazy repetition: "Parker, the boy she had been going out with ever since they kissed at a sixth-form dance on a hot June night back at sixth-form college."

This! Who on earth let this sort of thing through? It's like the weird repetition of the business about the skips and builders in the first chapter and the 'Transport for London card charging device'.

There was an interview I skimmed through that did say L's dad was banker. But so what? Isn't part of the 'story' how the system almost took on a life of its own and no one really has any control/understanding?

Part of the reason why I never got round to Whoops! anyway was that all of a sudden this novelist that is never on your radar acquires an interest over these topical matters - except that in this case, as I've said, my impression is that even the so-called experts are no experts when it comes to the financial system, so what chance does this guy have? The other reason is that unemployed/laid-off bankers started writing a mountain of these so cynicism set in.

Related but separate thing is you have other novelists I think I'd hate - Geoff Dyer and Adam Mars-Jones writing bks on things I really like: on Stalker and Late Spring, whereas I would like to see these being written by film writers that would bring wider knowledge on Japanese and Russian cinema instead of what I think it would be (= too many boring personal reflections...its for the fans you know). Its depressing that this might be the only way for bks to get published on really interesting films/topics and this seems like the only way to get any shelf-space/coverage.

I guess they've done their 'research', ffs.

'the system' took control -- this is SF material of course, fuck 'station of the nation' bullshit.

otm.

iirc Lanchester has too many friends in the journalism trade to get many bad reviews?

yes, I get the impression he's well-liked; also bad reviews aren't really done that much anymore (there was some fuss about this recently, maybe centred around that hatchet-job award?). The notable thing is how much attention it's getting - I got the impression that Lanchester was slipping into the terminal midlist zone before this, releasing also-reviewed, diminishing-returns novels every few years. Now he's a hit! I guess that's partly Whoops!, partly a canny topic, partly a very quiet literary spring in the uk, partly book-page need to have some literary middle-aged men to take seriously.

Actually, I may be imagining it, but is there something of Adam Curtis's faux-humdrum tone to some of those opening sentences up top? Like how all his BBC blogs begin with sentences like "One September night in 1945 three British mathematicians and astronomers went to see a new film at a cinema in Cambridge". I can almost hear Curtis reading the one about Petunia Howe.

― Stevie T, Friday, 9 March 2012 13:13 (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is a little bit. But I think the thing that annoys me about these specific sentences is the way he smuggles in other information. The 'brisk clip', and another one where after the usual time and season bollocks, Lanchester puts in a 'slightly out of breath'. I wouldn't mind so much if it was as formulaic as Adam Curtis' 'I'm going to tell you the story of x. It's a remarkable story that involves x,y,z,π and ك'.'

Idk, should this be changed into a 'State of the Nation' novel thread? Change title one of these maybe?

'Actually it was a good sandwich' - State of the Nation novels and what is in them

'fuck 'station of the nation' bullshit'

'I am actually looking forward to Lionel Asbo'

'Why isn't there a racist taxi driver? I demand a racist taxi driver'

'I also saw a mixed somewhere serious'

'i'm assuming the copies i saw in waterstones were some britain-wide conspiracy'

'wonky textspeak'

' I guess it looks like what broadsheet journalism likes to believe novels are'

ah, 'I also saw a mixed review somewhere serious'.

I dunno, enjoying the title as it stands, above all "that the computer had come with"

yeah, tangential is good.

first rule of a station-of-the-nation novel shd be "try not to look like you're writing a state-of-the-nation novel"

if it says 'state of the nation' it might derail into Franzen discussion or something equally disheartening. I think Lanchester liveblogging + digression works.

this is kinda like Steig Larsson's style iirc

Even the bad broadsheet review is kind of depressing in what it gives away. "Lanchester has a decent stab at describing what it must be like to run a corner shop," says the Guardian. "What it must be like," oh come on.

I am kind of disappointed how many people doing postgrad literature degrees at Oxford lack the basic interpretive skills to recognise that Freedom is a bad novel, I want to try them on this one

xpost haha franzen oops

The differences between the American and British contexts for this are halfway instructive, I don't know.

'John Lanchester came into existence because there was a novelist-shaped vacancy below the fold in one of the pull-out sections in the Sunday Telegraph'

Actually, the start of Capital reminded me a bit of the start of Fortress of Solitude, and how much better Lethem did the whole history of gentrification.

Are 'State Of The Nation' and 'The Great American Novel' the same thing? I've often wondered what the latter actually means.

less class isolation in American novelists perhaps?

great american novel had a specific coinage and critical freight at one time, i want to say fiedler but i suspect that is wrong

okay no, though fiedler does complain about 'our endemic fantasy of writing the G.A.N.' in 'love and death...' ; it made more sense when american fiction was a young and new thing, and the idea was that at some point there'd be american men of letters the equal of their european antecedents, or some other, new, interesting thing

now that english-language fiction basically is american fiction the term's usefulness is limited by comparison

State of the Nation ancestor is maybe Condition of England novel?

yeah but Lanchester is no Gaskell

The only author I've read who suceeds at the 'state of the nation' thing is Thomas Bernhard: his novels are ultimately about Austria (they may include Glenn Gould fan or Wittgenstein or whatever), but it only works if you are prepared to believe they are all closet Nazi types. That's him showing he is always at war and in opposition when he's writing...

But it tries to map a psyche onto a people...tries to give a sense of what a specific place might be really like. If that's what 'state of the nation' aims for, that is, don't think he would ever conciously attempt this bcz I reckon he'd think its bullshit literary claptrap.

All his novels are no more than 200 pages. However it is the same thing over and over again - all adds up. xxp

I suppose David Peace's GB sequence adds up to some kind of state of the nation novel? Peace is probably the anti-Lanchester really.

whatabout whatsername. elfride jelinek.

i think a lot of people have an ouevre that, when you look back on it all in a kind of retrospective arrangement, emerges as doing this, or appearing to do this

i don't think there's anything wrong with the ambition to write the Big Novel, to be honest. i don't know that that's the lanchester's failings - don't know in that i haven't read it, obviously, but also i mean: the flaws we're talking about could exist as easily in a novel that wasn't About Big Things; they'd just be markedly less bathetic

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/book/literary-treats-for-2012-7304502.html

John Lanchester publishes a 630-page whopper of a novel, Capital (March), which locates itself in one south London street where the properties have risen to more than £1million in value. It describes what it is to be a Londoner now, on a broad canvas that takes in a greedy banker with a greedier wife, a young African footballer, an edgy young artist, an illegal immigrant parking warden and a family of Muslim shopkeepers. The ambition is nothing less than Dickensian.

In September, Zadie Smith publishes her first fiction for seven years. Called NW, it is, as the postcode title suggests, set in her old patch of Brent. All she has disclosed about it so far is that it is about class, as it affects "a few people in north-west London" and that it's a "very, very small book".

Martin Amis looks to be playing to his strengths with his new novel Lionel Asbo (July), a satire on the scummy state of Britain. His anti-hero is a skinhead crim who wins £90million on the lottery while in prison, and spends it grossly. Other characters include a Katie Price lookalike called Threnody

In Skagboys (April), Irvine Welsh has written a prequel to his 1993 debut, Trainspotting, showing how Mark Renton et al first descended into heroin addiction in the Eighties. Even more keenly awaited will be Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel's sequel to her Tudor masterpiece, Wolf Hall, due in the autumn. It continues the story of Thomas Cromwell, focusing this time on the fall of Anne Boleyn.

Lionel Shriver's work in progress, said to be an assault on the culture of obesity in the States, is much anticipated.

fucking kill me.

Spring ILB bk club is set! :-)

I dunno, enjoying the title as it stands, above all "that the computer had come with"

― woof, Friday, March 9, 2012 9:53 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd like to try that word processing programme!

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.