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

oh god. fortunately i’ve got a lot of other things to do so i can’t listen to this.

what have you got to do tonight man go for it.

i mean can i just

On Sunday morning at his flat, Usman opened up his laptop and took out his 3G mobile to do a bit of net-surfing.

and

Mill took his desktop PC out of sleep and navigated to the web page.

net-surfing <3

what have you got to do tonight man go for it.

rau! rau!

'Navigated to the web page'

rau!

Imagine the mileage to be got from describing all the noises and steps of using a dial-up modem

I only just saw Fizzles' critique of JL's new novel's first page.

Excellent.

I ended up listening to that The State Of podcast. I almost felt sorry for JL, maundering on about wine drinking podcasts - “they even have meet-ups” - and being patronising to Lockwood - “it’s a very nerdy podcast where they talk about soil types (LAUGHTER)... which sounds like a joke but it’s true” [everyone goes no shit john] while she effortlessly covers being Extremely Online.

Also lol so middle aged. “They even have videos of people eating really hot chillis, have you seen those?” The bit where he says but i suppose you have to be worried about the mob-like pack mentality. i feel bad because he’s clearly the wrong person for the job here - extremely offline - and i don’t want to dunk him too much. tho hearing lockwood use language like edgelords to an audible blankness made me laugh.

lol at when she says to that pack mentality bit “well i think the people who worry most about that tend to be older people”.

to ignore that for the moment lockwood also manages to say a lot more about the internet than lanchester even from the ponderous letters approach. he’s terrible on facebook. he’s vague about the business model. he says if only facebook charged $20 per user of facebook they wouldn’t need to do all the algorithmic stuff. omfg. “it’s probably our fault - we prefer having everything for free than pay for it”.

Lockwood is 36 so only really young by LRB standards.

Last night I remembered that JL wrote a big retrospective on Marx for the LRB and how it contained this argument, which I now see is the very beginning:

In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist. He didn’t think that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from experience, ‘data points’ as scientists call them, and then assembling a picture of reality from the fragments you’ve accumulated. Since this is what most of us think we’re doing most of the time it marks a fundamental break between Marx and what we call common sense, a notion that was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular political and class order turns its construction of reality into an apparently neutral set of ideas which are then taken as givens of the natural order. Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production.

I, on the other hand, am an empiricist. That’s not so much because I think Marx was wrong about the distorting effect of underlying ideological pressures; it’s because I don’t think it’s possible to have a vantage point free of those pressures, so you have a duty to do the best with what you can see, and especially not to shirk from looking at data which are uncomfortable and/or contradictory. But this is a profound difference between Marx and my way of talking about Marx, which he would have regarded as being philosophically and politically entirely invalid.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n07/john-lanchester/marx-at-193

I reflected (without looking up the above) that there was something dubious about this. Now that I read it again, it seems even worse than I remembered.

JL is virtually saying that Marx is uninterested in facts, data or accurate statements based on evidence. In faux-naif, passive-aggressive mode he says that he, JL, humbly does believe in these things. To which his audience is then supposed to think: Don't worry, John, so do we!

v busy today obv (second and i hope final day of big book send-out!) but i very much want to come back and dig into this at some point

I now feel surprised that I accepted this JL argument about Marx as possibly OK at the time. It now looks deeply tendentious, self-serving and misleading, and not even very intelligent or cogent on its own terms.

There is a gross amount of ego in that "I, on the other hand..."

I, on the other hand, refuse to believe that John Empirical Lanchester would fall prey to ego

Chuck OT<atu>M.

lol i am again very busy and still want -- and need -- to come back and dig into this at some point

I actually enjoyed Lanchester's Simenon article in the latest LRB but there are a couple of good moments that made me think of this thread (not for the prose so much as the weird intrusion of oops, tripped over a kerb! Lanchester).

1) Weather used, powerfully - who knew?

The second bunch of Maigret novels have a more relaxed and expansive feel than the first cluster. At times the landscape itself is sunnier. (This is a powerful technique in fiction, more so than readers consciously notice. Christopher Sykes once asked his good friend Evelyn Waugh how it was that one of his earlier novels, apparently light and humorous, had an undertow of melancholy. Waugh said he had done it by keeping the weather in the book grey and rainy.)

2) Uh, really?

The reader whose idea of the novel is formed by the English canon may at some stage start to read books in the French tradition. At that point, it may suddenly seem that everything one has previously read has essentially been children’s literature. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, even Austen and Eliot, are all wonderful writers, but their work is founded in wish fulfilment, happy endings and love conquering all.

jfc

that doesn't preclude you enjoying the article, of course, but what a maroon

Innit though. So weird and clumsy.

makes me doubt he's ever read Eliot for one thing

The French adored George Eliot's novels.

Yes - these statements are very bad.

The whole point of the end of MIDDLEMARCH is that it is downbeat, gradualist, meliorist but modest. The last word is 'tombs'.

Someone should tell him about Thomas Hardy some time.

Also I don't know why this should surprise anyone but it's nice to have confirmation in print that Lanchester has no sense of irony.

DC completely correct - Hardy is now seen as central to the English canon and 100% contradicts JL's statement.

I suspect you could even go further and find an argument that lots of French literature is more fantastical or wishful than English - say Dumas, Hugo, Jules Verne, though they're certainly not wholly representative. But the more you look at it the more of a fool JL looks, which is the main thing.

like...I was reading the plot synopsis of Silas Marner while teaching a comprehension on a passage from it yesterday. man suffers for that happy ending

i only just started reading this piece this morning (and already lol-hiccuped at chinaski's first quote)

a few days back a US musicwriter (never an ilxor i don't think tho i have met them IRL) (they seemed nice!) announced with anticipatory pleasure that they were setting this piece aside to read "like slipping into a warm bath" which very nearly caused me to jump into a tweetbeef before i remembered "let ppl like things" sometimes has a kindness to it -- is good reading ever a warm bath? no. BUT relaxing warm baths are likely needful in These Trying Times™ and who knows what griefs and stresses this writer is currently dealing with -- so no beef for them this week

on the other hand (in anticipation of beef to come) lol wtf

Warm beef bath

thought about doing a "best wish fulfilment ending" with Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch and Bleak House and Tess and etc etc but really why dignify Lanchester?

i wd happily write a nice tart letter-to-the-LRB abt it -- except of those four i have only completed bleak house (and that hurriedly in service of a film review)

also it was little dorrit not bleak house lol

it's such a non-reader's point anyway, "wish fulfilment". Jane Eyre marries Rochester, woooo what a romcom ending

more indications that no informed sub-editor gets to lay a hand on the copy of the star writer

(speaking as a less-informed sub-editor in this instance, but actually i wd probably have queried exactly these claims even tho i hadn't read these books) (if only to head off the exasperation of those LRB readers who have, which is surely at least some of them?)

i don't know, we were discussing this yesterday, can you edit for "idiotic but not technically factually incorrect" opinions?

if so i think the "wish fulfilment" bit would be the phrase to go for, if he was trying to say 19th Century French Realism was the dark and gritty lit of its day there is probably a less inaccurate way of being wrong about it

molloy, malone dies and just one more thing

― mark s, Tuesday, 18 December 2018 11:19 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^very slept on btw

can you edit for "idiotic but not technically factually incorrect" opinions?

of course you can, you send the copy smartly back to the writer with a big red ring in felt-tip on it, and say "this is *sort* of correct, but some of our readers will bridle at it and bring up counter-examples, can you tighten and redraft to tackle this issue so we look less idiotic plz?"

i should stop seething but without remembering all the plot lines Middlemarch is *literally* about how middle class patriarchy crushes you so y'know

does the "canon" have a terminal date? it's an even more risible line if you're allowed to venture into the 20th century. excluding drama also feels like a cheat to avoid mentioning Shakespeare ffs but at least he's clear about doing so

from a lit crit nerd point of view a bunch of the writers he names, especially Dickens, haven't been regarded as central to the canon by 20th C big dogs like F.R. Leavis

Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope all considered second tier by mainstream critics at some point

i think leavis changed his mind on dickens? also i feel that the leavis version of the canon has not gone uncontested among critics since at least the bust-up with eliot at scrutiny (also i read FRL's book on lawrence a couple of years ago and it FUCKING SUCKS)

checking up on the dates of this i digressively discovered that there is an a.s.byatt character called BLACKADDER

oh i agree Leavis's opinions on the canon were for shit but not uninfluential and again i suspect Lanchester is oblivious to any of this stuff. and Lawrence is a godawful prose writer. some of the poetry i can live with.

actually pinch of salt, the last time i *tried* with Lawrence i couldn't do it to myself but it's not like my opinions are set in stone.

yeah what grates about Lanchester, always, is the real sense that he's talking from glib ignorance.

i find it so weird JL's become the LRB's golden boy! so much of it feels like stuff they shd just be writhing away from

i think lawrence is interesting exactly bcz he's so obviously talented and obviously insightful and obviously very problematic, and just so complicatedly on the move through various social and cultural layers and issues -- but FRL just finds 5139847519879384759 ways bang on abt him being "virile and morally taut" or whatever)

His argument makes even less sense wrt Wuthering Heights than it does with Middlemarch.