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

of course this is really interesting because his intonation and reading must be at the centre of why his sentences are so bad.

the reaction of those friends he read to in full: also rau rau rau

oh no they want to talk about QAnon and Covid 19

lol xpost.

"the conscious spreading of mistruthes as the germ theory of disease."

this is v bad.

"post truth is a much darker thing than pre-truth"

"yes, i think that's truth"

this made me laugh out loud

'that's true' sorry.

are academics in your sights? asks the interviewer?

he just said 'exlinguate' with great pleasure.

― Fizzles, Wednesday, 7 October 2020 bookmarkflaglink

glad you are enjoying yourself

MR James is the genius of the clash between someone who thinks he knows everything and the world where explanations don't fit.

John wonders whether it's implicit in the form - a confrontation between the impulse to explain and things that can't be explained.

Yes ok, but by god this is 101 delivered as great intellect.

'there's a wonderful line in... (one of the stories' says the interviewer. outright lies.

oh it turns out lancho borrowed this from someone he knows.

borrowed.

he frowns a lot when thinking and saying 'i haven't really thought this through about ghost stories'

a warning to the totally incurious

interviewer: 'for 80% of the time you're describing reality, the unreality of reality. is the supernatural dimension not an afterthought but a chance to explore that 80%'

JL: 'well the thing is i wanted these to be re-readable'

massive lol here.

'You have to watch it with the supernatural, the revelation of the supernatural component, the touch needs to be as light as possible before it delivers its punch'

lol big touch for a light man.

"the stories have to be about the texture of modern life in general

it's about getting quotidian life in it.

the spooky things are realer if the rest of the setting is real too."

SOLID GOLD

interview just referred to the subtleties in his writing.

think interviewer just referred to @Aelkus tweet.

lanchester says you can't outdo contemporary reality for outlandish things happening, citing philip roth.

how do you write satire in a time like this RITE

While you're on, could you ask Lancho to ask the LRB to stop fucking emailing me 9 times a week? You could frame it as a 'I think the servers are haunted lol'. Thx.

i've asked a questiohn

lol china ski

a lot of talk about the social concepts, but i was wondering if i could ask a question about the writing: what’s your draft,revision, editing process (slightly comes from a comment by mike mccormack who said the excellent quality of irish writing at the moment was to do with the excellent quality of editors)

it's difficult to ask lancho good questions because his speciality isn't anything really.

all his thinking is underpinned by milquetoast inexpert opinions about stuff that many others have talked about better. this includes his imaginative thinking.

my GOD man. he's just heard about a k shaped recovery.

this man is a dullard.

he must just spend most of his day sitting in a moronic self-satisfied stupor.

what if his speciality is,,, everything

'i've long thought there would be a populist backlash and i didn't realise it would come from the right, and surely at some point you'd've thought by reversion to the mean, the pushback from the left and social democracy, from actually common sense, why in a democratic system would you have a system where most people lose out'

why john why. feeling his way to sensiblism with slow wondering steps.

he's working on a tv adaptation of the wall. INTERVIEWER: i wonder if in a brechtian sense you are more likely to write within i won't say mainstream but larger audience reaching formats.

too many broken lols in the world, there's too many lols have been broken in two.

climate change is all encompassing, global and catastrophic apparently. 'it's difficult to get your head around'

'personally i find climate denial very easy to understand, why wouldn't you deny it'

realtime Lanchester sentence there.

who is the interviewere btw

lanchester deeply agrees with china mieville.

john's brain buffers from time to time.

young, shiny faced, dyed blond slicked back hair. probably brighter than he's coming across. trying to put thinking into this is hard.

i do actually think john lanchester is a bellend.

do you think everyone has a unique experience of social media because of the algorithms.

'this is a super interesting point'

'i believe this has broken the notion of the agora, the greek democratic space'

this is a good example of pompous public school language used with very low levels of intelligence. JL is Jacob Rees Mogg. What happened to him?

the algorithm is producing your own personal version of reality.

that is disastrously stupid.

MY QUESTION

'thanks for asking that fizzles'

'it was more fun writing short stories than writing novels'

'i end up hating novels, i end up hating it, and you have to manage your emotions'

'i've always been certain i've written the wrong book, of the competing ideas i have i pick the dud, i commit to these infinitely shit ideas. short stories were fun to write'.

'the first couple i wrote slightly quicker than i normally do'

lol

draft, revision, editing.

'the main thing that was different, i sit with the idea for long, and i want to be sure it's right, because i know i will hate it. i have to work out the big structural things in a novel. the short stories came more unprompted, they come more quickly. coffin liquor came from being shown around the garden museum. as soon as i heard the phrase coffin liquor i thought 'i've got to use that'.'

'i used to write very bad poetry, mercifully all lost'

'it would come to you, you couldn't sit down, it would come to you, the short stories were like that. the process of a novel didn't happen like that. like the selfie stick.'

'i can't quite explain about it. there's an implied connection with the audience about it, ghost stories have a frame, i don't think about an audience with a novel, i think about an object i'm trying to make, and this was more like having a person in mind.'

sorry, his hair isn't dyed blonde. it's just fair.

THAT'S IT.

all done.

pleasingly this is clearly the same person who wrote all that bad prose.

I feel like he didn’t really answer your q... and yet, really did