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

so i uh thought it would be amusing to buy a ticket to this lrb zoom 'an evening with john lanchester' event. i hadn't realised that my partner, who I don't really see enough, would be round. so i've just explained to her that I need to sit on zoom for a while with a really bad writer because reasons, live-blogging it here? you have to make sacrifices for your art not you john.

also i've just had not much sleep over the last couple of nights, waking irrevocably at one, so i'm feeling a bit spaced. not sure what overall impact that will have on this, but i'm sure it will be POSITIVE.

oddly, there were two tiers of tickets. £5 and £10. there wasn't any clear differentiation. but if i don't get to ask QUESTIONS because i'm not in the £10 seats, I will be vexed. because i have questions.

obligatory quotation of peter reading's At the Reading

The sham-coy simper,
the complacency,
the frisson titters,
the sycophancy.

wait, i need to find my headphones

and my wine.

and download zoom.

oh it's not zoom. ok. we're good.

there was some uptempo waiting room music. that's now stopped. i'm just looking at a screen saying welcome to this event with John Lanchester lol and Sam Kinchin-Smith: Reality and Other Stories.

Wot do u know about reality, John? I am interested in this question.

i wonder if john is opening his laptop and navigating to his video conference application.

not sure if something has gone wrong. refreshed. i've got the up-tempo music again.ooooooh, i've got the chat open. here we go.

hello from seattle! hi!
hello from Decorah, Iowa.

hi!

Granada
Mexico City

wtf.

New Mexico!

have you started? no no one has started helen.

'just about to!' LRB

I

AM

STOKED

ankara!

john's capital speaks for all capitals.

Cardiff, that's better.

Norfolk

Have we started? No Helen, still no, we've all still got the up tempo music and opening slide.

Oxford, Sheffield.

Apparently we all miss the IRL shop events so much but we get to share with our friends all over.

really interested to see what international fans think of our john.

Nigel, no one cares you're from London.

it's frozen. this might be me.

some technical problems here and he's talking about david foster wallace lol

tory party donations struck him as an interesting way of thinking about ghosts.

wait am i going crazy

there is something genuinely uncanny about how in 2018 the tory party is being paid for by dead people and if that isn't an image of ghostliness what is?

loooool. what.

he's been wanting to write about zoom - contact that isn't contact. conversing with people who aren't there.

this guy is a moron.

he strikes me as profoundly complacent about frameworks for thinking. remarkably pompous.

technology - that dance about what it gives us and what it takes away.

THERE ARE SO MANY GOOD COMMENTATORS ON THIS. how extraordinarily entitled.

i keep thinking it's frozen, but it's just him thinking and going '..... but if you think about instagram.'

this man is a fraud.

this was what was behind the stories - technology and the internal, and that led him to thinking about technology and the uncanny.

interviewer now recalls his 'now famous essay on facebook'.

interviewer posits his non fiction writing has been about demiystification. and asks whether the last resort of writing about technology is to REMYSTIFY it.

nonsense question amirite.

lancho says there are 'cold light of day reasons to be scared of facebook'

yerman is v literal and unimaginative.

'i think of this book being quieter and more internal and there isn't much about social media'

'i'd still prefer to write about social media head on'

john, ALL your writing is head on.

oooh difference between non fiction and fiction.

non fiction depends on being INTERESTED in something out there. Finding something out and there being a story there. a chunk of reality out in the world that you can find out about and capture.

fiction is slightly more elusive? allusive? and internal... 'about stuff i can't quite explain why i'm interested' 'what is it about x? i don'/t know, it's on my mind'

john says 'you don't know what's going to connect when you sit down to write' lolzibub

you have to trust the thing, the thing that bothers you, the thing you can't get out of your mind.

what like how to write sentences.

he doesn't want to give away spoilers in the stories. some of the images in the stories wouldn't go away from in my head.

i haven't read them but i refuse to believe this.

i've always thought 'haunting' is an interesting metaphor. if there were an elephant in the room it would be terrifying.

'it's more like a slightly annoying thing that won't go away'

^ lol amirite

interviewer says parent child relationships seem to come up. interviewer asks whether this is fear or more abstract? is this tied up with being a parent and being worried about that.

i've just been served some mussels so there is a short interlude.

lanchester suggests henry james is very good on malignity. claims turn of the screw has a strong claim to be the best ghost story written in english.

Hilary Mantel believes in ghosts apparently.

henry james' books are full of evil but generally it doesn't reach the supernatural.

john really doesn't have an imaginative sense. he is a vague imitative critic.

john is struggling thoughtfully with the banality of his observations. i am eating mussels.

but yeah he's much happier talking about writing than being imaginative. v ponderously literal.

there's was a (p bad) lrb review by ferdie mount of an m.r.james collection making the exact same claim abt turn of the screw: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n02/ferdinand-mount/a-life-without-a-jolt

'do you remember modems? where's the cut off'