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

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.

ah yes. I've wondered about "wit" before, whether it has validity as an identifiable thing in contemporary lit and if it does whether it's desirable.

used these days it has an almost contemptuous sound to it - "yes, very witty"/clever but not funny - which is not far enough from the 18th C English sense to return to that.

wit as separate from being funny also brings forth unwelcome visions of the unfunny - David Mitchell (com) & Stephen Fry - doing "audiences with" - not good enough at any specific part of what they do to be worthwhile for that alone, so indulging in a mélange of geniality for which people are expected to fork out.

isn't funny meant to be specifically the specific thing that david mitchell does

man i can't get over how embarrassing that dusted mag thing is

it's not great is it.

i kind of want to poll which is the worst

6. Paul Celan - Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory)
All Celan's poetry is about transmission and violence and the virtual impossibility of the speech act itself after something as ineffable as the Holocaust, which he himself survived. This collection contains “Todesfuge” (Deathfugue), a poem so packed with violence that its surface cracks and erupts as the lines break down, reprise themselves, repeat again, like a stuck record. It was read recently in the German Reichstag, a conciliatory symbolic gesture that didn't go far enough by half: they should have blared it out over loudspeakers as the building burnt to the ground - again.

ineffable huh

well i mean personally i wouldn't eff with it

TS: DJ Q vs The Holocaust.

what is that celan thing about why is it

His list does not include much music.
Maybe it wasn't supposed to be a list of music?
I'm not sure.

I've a sneaking suspicion he made the best of a bad job and knows a lot more about lit and specific areas of lit - there is absolutely nothing wrong with that from a creative pov of course, but you can expose yourself a bit. the unsophisticated glibness is less easy to explain bit again I don't think this matters from a creative standpoint.

fwiw as if the above defensiveness hadn't said it already I'm still a fan and am v much looking fwd to the new book.

suggestion: if he doesn't know much about music he shouldn't say things like 'this is the best album ever' and 'the Shakespeare of rock & roll' -- he should just say 'I don't know that much about music, but I do like this one! It sounds nice to me and I find this thing quite interesting about it'.

That's pretty much what I would do with painting, sculpture, possibly even drama.

84 pages into C and enjoying it (and McCarthy's brilliant literary sadism) very well - it's heating up all right

However, there are not one but TWO entomological fuckups inside the first 30 pages that even an amateur nature-lover like myself might find offputting. First of all, I present the following extract:

Serge watches it for a while, then takes the phial and presses it down across the insect's body, using its rim to slice apart the bridge where thorax meets abdomen. The wasp's legs continue their treading and its mandible its drawing even after they're no longer joined.

Thomas, Thomas. If you slice an insect's abdomen from its thorax, you do not separate head from legs, as legs are affixed to thorax rather than abdomen. Were you not paying attention in Year 7 Biology?

And then there's this hilariously redundant, almost Lanchesterian tic:

The moths are females of the phylum Arthropoda: Bombyx mori.

This is self-evidently cretinous, but I shall explain nonetheless: every single poxy moth, every insect, every crustacean and every arachnid on this Earth is in the phylum Arthropoda. I thank you for your time.

Still a cracking read, like.

lj do you have general entomology expertise bc i have a lot of bug-related questions

let's make like butterflies and wing it: the entomology thread

phylum is the sort of darkly resonant word more authors should use, even speciously

like the young Pynchon with 'tendrils'

have finished parts 1 and 2 of C now - it's a good book but I think it might overegg the world-as-connections-fusing-to-an-organic-mechanical-system thing a bit, although parts of this process are fairly breathtaking

more worryingly, both parts have ended really tritely. think McCarthy benefits from brevity, being only able to end it all once, like Remainder, which so far is a superior work with a wonderful closing arc. the second part of C built to numerous self-as-nodal-point epiphanies and then kept going, the effect diminishing, until a saved-by-the-bell finale that felt like an anticlimax. i'm sure this was the author's design, but it wasn't the right sort of anticlimax - it was too decisive, too certain, on the end of a sequence that felt somewhat improvisational and langorous

ending part 1 with that terribly-handled fist-in-mouth sex scene also ruined what had been possibly the best passage of the book, the extended chapter about the spa

not sure. maybe parts 3 and 4 will turn it around

c is very good, if minor, it's not close to remainder

his first novel is juvenilia

don't get me wrong I'm reading it hungrily & it rewards. once more the best thing about McCarthy is his nasty streak, his pure & sly sadism towards sentiment, his constant subversion of the emotional

or the incorporation of the emotional within the context of large & uncaring engines which operate independently of it & demand anschluss at best, obliteration at worst. he's dealing with terrifying forces & showing how easy it is to side with them

men in space > c, i reckon

yeah i quite liked men in space

glad i continued with 'c' - the end of part 3 is the first sustained bravura sequence - a sort of demolition job on pynchon's dalliances with the paranormal, sachsa & so forth - a callous yet perfectly logical action wrought upon the ephemeral by the technological. was gripped.

mccarthy's treatment of women is absolutely lousy & makes gravity's rainbow look like a feminist manifesto

on balance, i'll finish it

10 pages from the end of C and sincerely disliking it, its protagonist's assured & priapic nihilism (as opposed to the fascinated mania of Remainder's narrator) - this is an embarrassment. When Slothrop fucked almost every woman he came across, it was part of his - our - tragedy; when Serge does it, it's empty, cheap, set up merely to make a muddled point about the transience & illusory nature of *connection*, and worst of all it is climactic not in an erotic sense but as part of the narrative - it adds some kind of rhetorical punch to a list of cute observations about occluded realities.

Also, his writing isn't very good here.

I'll finish it, but I'm starting to think that Remainder was a fluke. Not just that, though - it was more disciplined, focused - and its epiphanies were not logistical but philosophical - it extrapolated from the logistical far more convincingly than this.

if u want to get mccarthy dont read it via pynchon

I know but here there are parallels; Remainder is his own thing

obviously it is all the fiction of bastard expedience trumping romanticism but done so much more badly here

the parallels that exist are mostly just the war setting and certain thematic recurrences, his acknowledged formal precursors and the subjects of his most demonstrable fanboy adulation were mostly writing in french in the middle of the last century

even if one were to use that sort of 'when x does this' 'when y does this' compare&contrast exercise in reference to an anxiety of influence relationship as pronounced as say beethoven/brahms it isn't clear that it would serve any useful analytic purpose other than collapsing the predecessor into some sort of inadvertent prototype

fair enough

I am simply not sure I like the rhythms of C very much, the telegraphed & studied anticlimax of each movement, the mass of observations that are somehow meant to convey gravity in their accretive juxtaposition but which don't rly cohere

also he's going for Autechrean synaesthesia at points and yet his word choices betray this

i do not think that is accurate

Tom-McCarthty-Emprers-New-Clothes-Confield-Slothrop-Tryhard-Synaesthetic-Sorry-This-Is-Just-How-Feel.html

'the emptiness of space as space surrounds and envelops us'

I'll finish it, but I'm starting to think that Remainder was a fluke.

don't think this is the right way of putting it, it's a novel delivering a single idea, not something to be repeated - that would be like Perec going, right I've done 'e', now to do 'a'.

i started writing about C, but had a quick look at the thread and realised that there are good posts about it from woof, c#major and me inter alia, so no need to restate.

Margaret Atwood, THE EDIBLE WOMAN

is what I am reading. I posted this fact to the wrong thread.

I would rather read her than TMC though.

ok the end is fun & well-written. p sure i can & have done better when it comes to numinous psychedelic epiphanies tho :P

that's some beast talk tbf

mccarthy's not rly at home turning up the purple jets tho, way more effective when understated, sardonic, removed

new one coming out - http://www.vulture.com/2015/02/tom-mccarthy-goes-to-ted.html

the readable avantgarde

Whatever you make of Tom McCarthy’s mind-bending metafictions, the author one critic anointed “a young and British Thomas Pynchon”

imago doesn't seem to think so and his judgement on these matters is final.

new one sounds promising tbf

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/tom-mccarthy/writing-machines

We didn't discuss this ^ did we?

Only read parts of this. I think its that name dropping of Barthes, Marx, Derrida, 'ghost' etc. that is just so off-putting. Maybe someone should commission a piece from him with contraints (Ouliapian yeah). I think he starts off by saying: the 19th century realists wrote that stuff but also wrote things that were weird (Bouvard et Pécuchet) and the middlebrow idiots writing today have ignored this, and I want to rescue these things.

The real, McCarthy seems to be saying, is easy - what about its mechanics, for this must weigh upon the fibre of every line of the writing? So it leads to:

The same real – the Holocaust in particular – impinges on all of Beckett’s work, whose unnameables and catastrophes convey the horror and unspeakability of this event to which they never refer far more profoundly than the directly representational writing of, say, Primo Levi.

idk where to go, its like that dusted interview where thomp quote the bit on Celan. I don't think you can reduce Beckett like this and paste 'representational' on Levi when his writing was actually powerful to me (and I'm talking about The Periodic Table here). I haven't read either in a long time.

I suppose I am not sure about this wacky races set-up: team modernism, team realism, or lets make 'em up: the 'absence' team, the merely 'hidden' team. Just a system where all you end up is Joyce, Burroughs, Bataile, Trocchi. Maybe the LRB audience need to get acquainted with Trocchi..

that's otm, i think. He's got a autopilot or by-numbers mode that's a bit frustrating to me - & you know + name the co-ordinates – Joyce, Beckett, Bataille, Blanchot, Burroughs, some theory. The tastes coincide quite closely with my own, and I think he can go up a gear or two when he focuses a bit (I enjoyed the Joyce article before this), but when he's just doing this it's v flat, slightly mechanical and actually seems stuck fighting an old war - the spirited anti-realism, the contra-Franzen push, is quite early noughties – I think we're in a diff space atm. (He's been using that real/fake rose thing from Ada for a long time.)

(I cannot resist even though it is unfair: racoon tanuki of modernism.)

I'll buy and read the new one definitely – I did not like that article but I am still basically on his side. (even though his fixedness about sides is a problem in the article)

13. places and spaces thats where the chase is (3, 8)

Maybe someone should commission a piece from him with contraints

no dropping names that start with b, c or d.

no dropping names that start with a vowel or consonant