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

http://pastebin.com/cfSuQfB7

http://i.imgur.com/A1Mnk5f.gif

article seemed a bit pointless (tho again I didn't make it all the way thru, that sums me up right now).

but I'm still looking forward to the book - first third of C was superb, tho I thought it fell apart badly after that. and he still feels likely to do something interesting, wants to use European models, go into untracked spaces. I'm p excited.

the essay is worth reading in full, there are some interesting paragraphs and some paragraphs that seem to have been written by k-punk circa 2006

picked this up again on your recommendation - thanks nakh - and because i found it still folded over where I'd left it in the mess of papers on my desk. worth doing. i'd stopped towards the end of the description of Ulysses, which felt like oldish ground - language, shit; you can see how engaged i was when i read it initially - reconfigured by McCarthy's interests: the black stain of ink and celluloid, the transformation through death of flesh (I mentioned this with regard to C in the first post: that for McCarthy 'substance holds the key to existence, not spirit, that what lives after death is not the soul, but the body").

but i was wondering 'how is this about what?'

if i'd read a bit further, i'd've seen him reclassify déclassé into the notion of a sort of mundane alkahest, describe the notion of speculative systems that require the deferral of expression, and a vision of the importance of understanding material reality as information. these are fine as riffs on Ulysses, but as or more interesting to me as the articulation of McCarthy's creative mechanics. I was going to mention in the post above, after 'European [sic] models' and 'untracked spaces', the way he'll apply non-adjacent sets of information to each other, which at a very simplified level can be described as taking Continental theoretical models and applying them to a Brixton road junction, or theories of transformation of information to pre-WW1 radio.

I've been about to take down again, as I was writing a long thing on Dartmoor, which I visited a few weeks ago and which was originally intended for the Real England thread, but has become too long, too not about Real England, heavily weighed down by a laborious groping towards half-understood Spinozan monism. but amidst that there was something about the practical expression of science and Dartmoor, which is undoubtedly a thing for that landscape (peculiarly underexpressed, but where expressed vividly expressed). And whenever i started thinking about it, I started thinking about C again, because the excellence of the first third or so is least in part the particular flavour of the application of a French theoretical scalpel to that Edwardian landscape of Kipling. The flavour is curious because in fact Kipling is not so far from the dishumanised abstraction of people into material information.

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.

It hardly needs saying that I love all this stuff.

I'm assuming from the cover that the new book is designed to put close registers of different types of literary work or exposition next to each other, but I must admit I'm slightly uneasy about the tone of this sort of venture, tho also pathologically drawn to the false essay, the fake testament, the synthetic historical artefact etc.

still, yes, EXCITED.

day off today, thank xt, wish i had more of these things as tend to plunge headfirst into all sorts of stuff i haven't got time for at the moment with the inevitable result that my efforts peter our into incoherence.

I always like Fizzles, online and in person, and admire and appreciate his posts greatly, but on this one occasion I didn't understand much of what he just said.

thanks pinefox, and I always see you as one of the great policers of literary sense (in a manner that I realise is infuriating to many, but which I find congenial and amusing I have to say)

so I went back and checked and really I can see that I just splurged some disconnected thoughts into a post - always seem to be rushing these days, and I was aware if I spent any more time typing I'd miss this train I've got to catch. I'll try and unpack into sensible language when I'm on the train.

right, let's try this again:

1st. thanks to nakh for getting me to finish off the essay which, as it turns out, I hadn't really engaged with the finer details of properly anyway.

2nd. my first impression had been of an essay that claimed to be talking about a specific problem - the problem of how and what to write after Ulysses - but which nevertheless fairly immediately went into a critical description of Ulysses, much of which I had heard before, in different forms. Loosely described - a dangerous enterprise with the pinefox, particular when it comes to Ulysses, but necessary for the sake of emphasis and brevity - loosely described, I say, it was an approach to Ulysses which emphasised its bodily aspects, particularly the baser types, and its totally transformative use of language as a central subject and mechanism. These approaches tend, if I'm remembering rightly, to emphasise how Ulysses stands in distinction to modernism as much as (if not more than) being a part of it. I appreciate that almost any critical evaluation could hardly avoid either of these, particularly the element of language. My synopsis was glib to indicate my original rather uninspired reading of McCarthy's essay.

3. Even in that first, somewhat descriptive part of the essay, McCarthy's approach contains elements of his aesthetic. He dwells somewhat on ink and celluloid stains - I can't remember in what context i am now on the train - which reminded me of C. He also talks about the way mundane materials are persistently transformed in terms of their excresence, and that there is a sense of morbidity about this - he quotes Joyce describing cheese as the corpse of milk. This reminded me of C as well, as I seemed to recollect that something I had thought distinctive about that novel was that it considered death to be a productively transforming process. I had a look at my first impressions, at the top of this thread, and was pleased to find a handy statement I had made in respect of this subject, that for McCarthy in C, "substance holds the key to existence, not spirit, that what lives after death is not the soul, but the body". I felt mildly pleased that my intuition from reading C was to a certain extent born out by McCarthy's essay. One of the notions that McCarthy uses to examine these processes is of things becoming déclassé - a term used by Bataille to mean here 'sinking in essential status', a de-grading of mundane materials.

4. I gave up reading because I couldn't really see what the whole point of McCarthy's essay was. I flippantly described this as 'wondering "how is this about what?"'. This was deliberately but unhelpfully cryptic.

5. On reading further, I discovered that soon after the point I'd given up (intending to return of course) McCarthy did start talking about the problem of writing after Ulysses. I'll add here that he doesn't do so in that fatuous 'all literature is impossible after this point' but by looking at what such a total approach to language (language as character, language as mechanism, language as motivating force) means for those, including Joyce, wishing to write after Ulysses.

6. He approaches this main theme by reconfiguring déclassé to mean something which is able to declassify concepts and things, in other words removing their boundaries, so that they are able to exist next to each other and communicate with each other (in my mind I may have used the simplifying phrase 'conceptual collage'). He likes this to hacking via a phrase from A Hacker's Manifesto:

to hack is

to produce the plane upon which different things may enter into relation

'to open grounds of possibility for the new creative event' he adds.

(Incidentally this bit caused me to raise my eyebrow somewhat.'lol McCarthy' was what *that* meant - why bring hacking into it? It's the sort of gimmick you allow a writer because it's typical of them, tho here there is perhaps a *little* too much rhetorical weight on this lightly deployed association with 'hacking'. nm.)

To reprise, by removing the categories of material, it enables the creative artist to have them jostle fruitfully next to each other. Here things get *very* confusing, because I start describing this declassification, which McCarthy also typically calls 'decoding', in terms of 'information'. I did this because I feel that is indeed McCarthy's universal solvent - the mechanic by which he achieves declassification. I use the unhelpful term 'alkahest' tho not before checking that, according to Philalethes, alkahest dissolves only composed material into their constituent, elemental parts, which was appropriate. That was from Wikipedia. Still, the term was unhelpful. I admit I wanted to use an alchemical term. They're fun.

7. There's a bit here about applying 'nonadjacent sets of information' to each other. This was *extremely* unhelpful. What I meant on a quite simple level is that he'll apply concepts to scenarios not traditionally associated with those concepts and that this is part of his significant appeal. That is to say, he'll take Continental philosophy, which outside Ballard has not traditionally been part of the aesthetic approach of UK writers, and apply it to typically English scenes (I'm talking about Remainder and C here. However, I also wanted to frame that in terms of that transformative decoding/declassification mechanism he talks about. This was partly because I had in mind his new book, Satin Island, which suggests on its cover that its going to play with the boundary categorisation of different literary forms. I feel this is a difficult thing to do because I feel the closer in nature the things are (here different types of writing, distinguished by register) the more difficult it is to play successfully with destroying their boundaries. It was also because I'm still trying to assess what I like about the early parts of C. I think part of its peculiar flavour comes from the fact that the two elements that are combined (a mid-to-late 20thC understanding of coding and information & pre-WW1 20thC writing, particularly Kipling) are deliberately not too far from one another in some ways. His recoding-to-combine with things that are actually already quite close is perhaps partly embodied by the quote from Timon about how gold solders 'close impossibilities' (another theme in theessay is how the 'economic register' is itself a system or plane in or on which things can be encoded so they uncharacterisitically combine). It's possible to understand the notion of 'close impossibilities' in broader terms - close theories are often incompatible because they may disagree over shared details, but wildly divergent or distant theories can be compatible.

8. I've been thinking about C quite a bit because its presentation of how quite organic or spiritual transitions as from life to death, can also be understood in terms of the encoding and decoding of information in a scientific sense, and this seemed to me to apply somewhat to something I was trying to put together about a visit to Dartmoor. Then I burble on a bit about why I was having difficulty completing it, somewhat disingenuously as the truth is I haven't had time to spend on it.

Hope that's a bit clearer?

Thanks for your efforts Fizzles.

I hope that you are enjoying this latest intellectual adventure.

I will read the TM essay and then I will have a better idea of what he says and whether I like it.

Your use of the recondite word 'alkahest' was one of the things that confused me most, in the first instance.

Fizzles - on your account I read TM's LRB article last night. I disliked it greatly. I could say more but perhaps that is more than enough.

ah. have you read any of his novels?

I'm a frayed knot.

Aren't you the same piece of string who tried to post here yesterday?

sure he's part of a number of threads tbh.

anyway, regardless, wd be interested to know what your objections are, pinefox. I'm assuming from the Ulysses pov? for me Brian it was chiefly interesting for the understanding it gives to McCarthy's writing.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2687649/Top-Gear-fresh-controversy-staging-crash-scene-woman-died-horrific-head-collision.html

that is exquisite

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/ScreenShot2014-07-29at214505_zps04adaea2.png

who's that. my mate james doesn't like it either

Haven't read this guy really but the little I've sampled gives me the impression that he is humorless.

What does that link have to do with?

remainder is pretty good and fairly humorful

xpost i mainly posted it out of amusement the image of a person rage-finishing a book where they were 0/10ing on every page - bit like me with Capital i guess, and also partly because of the discrepancy between my reaction and theirs, tho that's wrong-headed I think - it's v much a 0/10 book.

Humour? Yeah, I don't think he's a funny writer - I think there's a wry humour at how much he pushes the concept in Remainder. Deadpan yes, but with no punchlines that's just tone.

His writing in C, even in the good bits, was positively cackhanded at times, in terms of the narrator/character/situation triangle, which through fairly miniscule tweaks of dramatic irony and minor dislocations tends to produce humour.

Of the small handful of modern writers I read, I only really see Helen deWitt as capable of a line that makes you laugh. David Mitchell isn't funny, tho there's an occasional straining that way, to his detriment.

Lorrie Moore?

Ken Dodd?

I'm glad to hear that TM is bad, Fizzles.
'rage-finishing' a book you hate would be like my experience with Gravity's Rainbow.

fizzles, what did you make of lightning rods

loved it. great control of ironic tone and treatment. ease of execution conceals the savagery.

the last samurai had a more or less conventional plot structure, with very strong innovative content (language, learning). with LR that innovative content becomes the structure. using non literary models like statistics as the scaffold for her writing makes it feel fresh (yes, new, but also fresh in the sense of impertinent).

her new work looks like it's going to have Wordpress stats as a fairly central narrative engine, which is why I'm belabouring this point perhaps more than a single novel gives reason to. her knowledge of programming and maths means these can be used not metaphorically but as mechanisms within the writing.

I think these areas are important, to bald about it; new landscapes that should be artistically explored, partly for aesthetic reasons (freshness), partly because they are areas that are underattended to in literature. I don't see anyone else better equipped to work in them than HdW.

take Pynchon's Bleeding Edge - that dealt with coding and the early days of websites and the first dotcom boom. by and large this tech is used metaphorically. the deep net and dark web are visualised spatially - old netherworld and underworld tropes. this space represents a portal to Pynchon-like aesthetic possibilities but the laws that govern them are not the actual laws that govern them, but metaphorical laws, or laws of aesthetics.

HdW uses the laws of what she's studying to give her books their content and shape. they are not metaphorically intended, tho she gets a lot of freedom to do so if she wants, because that's not their sole use.

this isn't to say she isn't literary - it takes an enormous amount of literary skill to do this I think. lightning rods was a high wire act with tone that's almost swiftian. it's not exactly - the lacerations are less obviously savage, but the constant and inventive exploitation of the gap between what's said and what's meant, and the tying of nooses from the rope of your opponents language, is the same.

she's the contemporary writer I'm most excited about.

TMcC is dangerously close in some ways - dangerous in the sense when you learn a foreign language some English looking words are dangerous - he can look the same but the fundamentals are different. so he'll use the recursive mechanism in remainder as a narrative tool, not as a metaphor, but it is the theoretical or philosophical notion he's interested in exploring - and the humour in the practical application of theory (so yeah I guess there is humour there really). more meaningfully perhaps, he's interested in the detailed mechanisms of radio or the structures of insects in C, but as aesthetic bric-a-brac, rather than, say, as Kipling used the Kodak camera, microscope, lighthouse or steam engine - interested in how their mechanisms could affect the form of what he was trying to do, how they shape the emotional content.

written this on the tube, so am expecting a bunch of wtf are u on about fizz - if that's the case I'll try a more textually based treatment of the above when I get home and have a drink in my hand

I am (by total chance) starting on Lightning Rods next week so I'll read with some of your thinking in mind. Really appreciate your thoughts on it.

wondering, now, if i can be said to have massively misread lightning rods. i thought it made a lot of problematic assumptions in a hand-wavey sort of way (like, the reader is probably too smart to buy the account of male vs female sexual motivation contained therein, but the reader will assume the author is also too smart to do same, so it doesn't matter) which kind of curdled it as satire for me

i'll pick it up again thomp. iirc it's about how an absurd, morally repugnant idea that is able to successfully develop, transforming the workplace of a nation, and this transformation (in terms of literary credibility) is managed several ways:

1) The use of statistics as a 'morally neutral' engine of change in society today.
2) The particular keenness in offices for this sort of evaluative mechanism. It's a cross between notions of managerial competency and also what I saw described elsewhere as 'the politics of what works'.
3) The narrative tone being of an innocent on an exciting voyage of discovery - learning the ways of business, accumulating money. It's a seductive tone for a reader.

It feels plausible as an example of how ideas are spread through these mechanisms and tones via the office, still heavily male places.

I realise I'm stating the bleeding obvious here, but I'm not sure there's anything too handwavy here, tho obviously we may approach these things differently. brb got an efficiency meeting...

(xp)
one of my favourite books of recent years too – Fizzles otm – imo the way it holds its tone (& something more than fascination, but not quite enchantment, w/ the language of self-improvement/management) and the ice in the way it works through its premise doesn't really let it settle into an easy satirical aboutness. I think… it might start in a place where reader & dewitt are in satire-complicity, but it pushes on past that. I should reread it though. It's been a while.

it might start in a place where reader & dewitt are in satire-complicity, but it pushes on past that. I should reread it though

Yes this exactly. Enchantment is a great word to use.

right - & 'seductive' seems right to me as well – so that you're tempted by 'this is turning out ok & he means well & he's offering a quality service'

I just don't know if I buy this, guys

so what you're claiming is seductive is, e.g., when in the penultimate section the protagonist has competitors who bring in much of the freight attached to sex work that, by the terms of the fictional universe as defined by the shape of the narrative thus far, the protag. has avoided, the reader is to think "well, at least my guy is better than those guys", and then catch themself thinking that and think no, wait, my guy is also morally repulsive?

because I just don't think this works -- by the terms of the fictional u. as defined by the shape of the n. , the protagonist just kind of _is_ morally superior, because in the f. u. as d. by the s. of the n., there just aren't real negative consequences that wd let us argue otherwise

So import! The f u is is insufficient and knows it. You must change yr life etc.

that was too brief – drunk, phone-posting on train
Still drunk posting before sleep but
imo it does work– re the f. u. as d. by the s. of the n, really, there's our world pressing in on it so the seduction/repulsion means something (rambling but maybe it's a mimicking too-close f u that doesn't let you get a read exactly on how it sits in relation to ours?)
actually I am best to come back to this tomorrow but in the meantime straight q – what contemporary satires (and I'm not 100% using satire for lightning rods tbh) work, do you think, or get out of the complicity trap?

there is this book by john lanchester, you may have heard of it

i have no idea actually; I can't think of anything ive read from the past decade that I wd call satire and I just don't know if I believe it's a thing

it's a thing, but I can't think of any formal satire that's been written recently.

eyebrows may be raised at this, but I think probably Brass Eye has come closest.

wd definitely reiterate woof's point about LR not really being a 'satire' but in terms of understanding the 'assumptions'.

For satire where fu is d by s of n, there's a necessary u(fu is d by s of n) interpretative function. Satire in it one of its formal versions is the sum of everything it reviles and does not explicitly contain its critique (that would not be aesthetically of formally approrpriate).

This approach can produce some uncertainty about stuff like *that Lanchester novel*!

wd definitely reiterate woof's point about LR not really being a 'satire' but in terms of understanding the 'assumptions' *it's useful* that should have been.

the rest of it makes perfect sense. who doesn't enjoy trying to reduce aesthetics to equations? come on.

tho I realise now the q of n in satire is complicated, another area where HdW differs from formal satire. (LR narrative is a reverie of folly.)

(and "formal satire" because there's a lot of stuff that has elements of satire or which can be termed satirical which differs from the Satire that sits with Tragedy and Comedy, like Thersites next to Agamemmnon and Odysseus. It has aesthetic characteristics by which it can be identified and which hobble it aesthetically - very static, episodic narrative structure, inherently conservative, full of horrible things, self destructive, intolerant, formally antagonistic to change/mutability.)

tom mccarthy is not "funny" but he is not "humorless" either

^

idk: I feel like 'c' is getting there

or like 'wit' might be a concept worth applying and/or reviving

p funny writing a 33⅓ about 'history repeating' by the propellerheads tbf

2. The Fall - Live at the Witch Trials
The Fall come as much from a literary tradition that goes back to the text-sampling experiments of Eliot and Pound as they do from a strict musical one. This album has “Repetition” on it - a track very close to my heart.

Tom, Tom, Tom - Repetition is *not* on LATWT - it's a b side to Bingo Masters Break-Out - and you'd probably be better off with Hotel Bloedel off Perverted by Language imho.

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/596

gross. also I thought for a second you were addressing me; I was confused.