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

did you ever get on with magris

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWDc22Cobwo

yeah i like magris - i have a problem with the diffuseness that associational writing brings to the categories of the world. Ontology - quite easily defined as 'what is there' - becomes 'what my investigations reveal'. It's the inverse of 'nothing will bring nothing' - 'everything will give evereything'. it feels like writers makes it too easy sometimes. if you want to do that everything thing, do finnegans wake.

lol thats meaningless pissed shit.

http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19940713-0

Mark McGurl with some interesting observations on on TMcC here - http://www.publicbooks.org/fiction/the-novels-forking-path

not entirely with all that article - is "experimental fiction that works" rare? looks suspiciously like they're asking experimental fiction to work according to non-experimental standards.

but he's right about a lot of satin island. this is an appalling piece of writing:

We see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen. When the shapeless plasma takes on form and resolution, like a fish approaching us through murky waters or an image looming into view from noxious liquid in a darkroom, when it begins to coalesce into a figure that’s discernible, if ciphered, we can say: This is it, stirring, looming, even if it isn’t really, if it’s all just ink-blots.

the overused Pauline quote, the subsequent inability to counterpoint the biblical cadences, the quick rendering of technological modernity into hackneyed "fish coming out of dark waters" and "ink blots" all add up to a seriously uninspired, underworked example of satin island's style and content.

oh and a+ find nakh.

The description of a Sebald/Cole personalized and lyricized encounter with theory resonated for me, particularly in recent TMcC essays. I think you're spot on that experimental fiction that 'works' is a conveniently moving target in the essay.

Remainder adaptation is pretty good then

not quite better than the real thing ever was but not far off

Have this. Might start it tonight.

https://www.nyrb.com/products/typewriters-bombs-jellyfish?variant=29933062407

things that make u go hmm. be interested to hear how you find it, gom.

At least a couple of his LRB essays, which will be in this book, are dreadful.

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.