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

Basically my line on this is that technology represents new framing devices and so can be a vehicle for haunting, but the natural environmental niche for haunting and ghosts is most definitely not technology, probably for atmospheric and genre reasons as much as anything else. Kipling is an exception as usual, eg in his excellent short story The End of the Passage, where he uses the then novel Kodak camera to convey a haunting.

(I mean he was amazing at the use of technology to explore the metaphysical (that extraordinary short story The Eye of Allah, combining inter religious love, the microscope, medieval monasticism, and germ theory for example).)

Speaking of unbearable pomposity, my thinking a while ago on The End of the Passage:

I have said that ghosts do not like the light. This is because, although they have a fondness for apparition and animation, they do not like being seen. The eye is the sense organ of light, and is the vehicle of that reason that comes from observation, which we call science, and is the symbol of the movement that promotes that reason, the Enlightenment.

Ghosts never appear in well-lit laboratories, are notoriously chary of experimental conditions, in the light of science they become ‘phenomena’, their trappings bed sheets, paste-board masks, projections of psychological megrims and disorder. They may look unconvincing or gimcrack, even becoming subjects not of fear but (disastrously for their ability to frighten) of mockery, laughter and scorn.

The eye is also the most sedulously duplicitous of the sense organs, its world so detailed and convincing, so seemingly incapable of modification, that we call its representations reality. This is the world we exist in, and its light is the light by which we read. In order to have a successful ghost story, the ineluctable modality of the visual must be eluded, the rules of reason modified.

Or you can do what Rudyard Kipling did in The End of the Passage – take the very instruments of observational rationalism, the camera and the eye, and make them the vessels of the terror that they are supposed to dissolve, producing an ocular ghost story.

> ‘T’isn’t in medical science.’

> ‘What?’

> ‘Things in a dead man’s eye.’

The End of the Passage – Rudyard Kipling

...

Spurstow asks another of the men, Mottram, to look into Hummil’s eyes.

Mottram leaned over his shoulder and looked intently.

> ‘I see nothing except some gray blurs in the pupil. There can be nothing there, you know.’

Despite Mottram’s insistence, Spurstow decides to take a photograph of the eyes with a Kodak camera, but destroys the pictures without showing them to anyone else.

> ‘It was impossible, of course. You needn’t look, Mottram. I’ve torn up the films. There was nothing there. It was impossible.’

> ‘That,’ said Lowndes, very distinctly, watching the shaking hand striving to relight the pipe, ‘is a damned lie.’

The eye is no longer the vessel of reason, and has become like the sarcophagus that contains Count Magnus, a vessel of mortal fear, unopenable, and sealed by more than padlocks.

mark s can say this better than i’m about to, but recording technology of all kinds has been associated with the supernatural since the beginning. what are photos anyway but a kind of embalming of a dead moment? and edison of course believing - or feigning to believe - that he could use phonograph technology to speak to the dead. there’s a rich history there. and then you think of movies like the conversation, or blade runner, where new information gets somehow magicked up from within the unseen heart of an artifact as a consequence of applied concentration by the protagonist, acting like a medium. (a medium! aha - no - let me not go down that road perhaps)

yes of course, very good point - odds and ends of voices coming out of nowhere (there's a really good Machen short story on this). recording technology - the aural - is really significant isn't it. I thought Berberian Sound Studio did this very well, and it was either a Tony Herrington or Mark S piece on The Fall in The Wire that really bought this to my mind back when i was a teenager.

Wasn't Marconi trying to contact the dead by his early investigations into wireless technology. I remember reading that a while back.

I’m pretty rusty on the details of all this, and it’s become more of an internet crypto-truism since I last picked through it but yes, this deliberately credulous and somewhat suspect net essay sets out the main beats — at various times, tech pioneers Edison, Bell, Lodge and Marconi all apparently flirted with the notion that a machine would be built which could contact the dead: as ever it takes it back to the Fox sisters, presumed charlatans since they were bullied into confessions they immediately recanted, and links the spirit-knocking that they traded in to morse code (because tapping had become an excellent way to transmit messages across distance. Needs more Tesla imo.

Oliver Lodge is the best catch here, tbh: he was a theoretical physicist as well as an inventor (the “coherer” was an essential item in getting early radio to work), and he had as good a grasp of the various established-science wave theories (sound, electricity and magnetism) as anyone on earth. The phrases “thought wave” and “brain wave” aren’t accidental — they were notions proposed to explain an evidently existing phenomenon (thinking lol, it DOES exist, it DOES) which was not then well explained. If it’s a wave then it travels. If iut travels through the body — perhaps via the electric impulses also known to control the body — then perhaps it can travel beyond? And be measured and translated? As speculation goes, this was not bad or goofy science! Electricity is evolved, and some of the aspects not explained then are not explained now.

Tracer shies from the ”medium” pun — but it’s not a pun, it’s the same word being used in the same way. The tranced-up medium in a spiritualist seance was an element in a an embodied technology (the receiver or the coherer or what have you) by which the spirit guide on the other side (effectively the telephone exchange operative, often a native american presumably since so many of these were newly dead courtesy philip sheridan etc) connected the loved one to the bereaved.

Bell, Lodge and Marconi were all on working machines that translated sound waves to electricity and back (a telephone is an early microphone attached to an early speaker) — at first (telephones) using wires, latterly (radio) doing without. The realisation that radio could be recived at enormous distance without a connecting machinery simply amplified the speculation that thought waves or brain waves might work this way too.

But the dead? The dead are the dead! Not if you’re a Christian, which everyone involved was (even a bullshit artist like Edison). If science is true and Christian belief is true, then each must support and”prove:” the other! and In the 19th century, scientific proof was very often a matter of fashioning a technology whose working was in effect a proof. Soon and inevitably the technology that linked the eternal spirit on that (to be hoped) blessed side to this mortal side was there for the grasping. Surely?

In Europe, America and the wider world, the second half of the 19th centiry and the first of the 20th were years of immense woe and loss. Industrially powered wars, ruthless colonialexploitation, death on unprecedented new scales: the need for solace was vast and entirely genuine. Millions flirted with the comforts spiritualism seemed to offer, and no surprise. People wanted desperately to know that those taken far too early were doing OK! Ideally in a better place, this one place was horrible.

Scientists and practical men — materialists of a very specific mien aren’t immune to loss and yearning, or to being fooled once they step outside their zones of expertise. The great scourge of the seance was Houdini, escapologist and practiced prestidigator, who literally recognised half the technical conjurors’ tricks being deployed, and the shrewd technique that went into levitation, ectoplasm, and so on. He knew that carney culture was about fleecing dopes even when it’s mostly benign.

As extremely practical men, Bell, Edison and Marconi were all half carney men themselves: funding their research via self-promotion and promises. Edison in particular was two parts circus barker and idea thief and three parts brilliant business operative to one part genuine inventor, always talking all kinds of bollocks to keep the ball rolling. If he said his technology could talk to ghosts, he was definitely eyeing your wallet. I hadn’t till now known that Marconi also had interests in this direction, as stevolende suggests — the article I linked says yes with qualifications, which I think I’d amplify.

In different ways, Bell and Lodge seem the best match for the image that article sketches: Lodge as a hugely important forward-looking scientific and speculative theorist. Bell was fascinated by the social dimensions of the technologisation of communication (the article claims his assistant Thomas Watson was a spiritualist, though I think this was much later in life, not while he was working on the telephone — in old age he became an adherent of Meher Baba! iirc he was quite sceptical that telephony could be achieved, tho i may be misremembering this…)

Telegraph, telephony, telepathy — the point was a fancy greek word including tele-, the prefix meaning “far”, to indicate that action at a distance was a scientific reality. This realisation was a massively disorientating paradigm shift in materialist scientific assumption, and explaining its possibility is the basis for much of the most brain-busting stuff in 20th century physics.

lol "booming post" aka tl;dr sorry fizzles, sorry mr lanchester

(ok i also meant to put in something abt trances, mesmer and "animal magnetism" but that can probably wait)

i am not the booming post; i come to bear witness to the booming post

confession is not absolution. you cannot escape the

BOOMING (and extremely interesting) POST, MARK

make sure it doesn’t happen again.

i have reached the middle of whoops! and actally it is NOT at all as bad as the opening two chapters, long stretches of reasonably clear summary of events -- it's only when he reaches out of this narrative for quick explanatory stabilisation that you glimpse some of the ghastly bouvard&pecuchet level jibrish that are his touchstone lodestar and ground zero

a mode more like his essays on christie and simenon as dissected above

(apologies all i've been derailed by life on this review: actual work and job applications and other projects with more pressing deadlines)

rereading stuff for mind-focusing purposes i just re-encountered this glorious question from ilxor calumerio: "why do we need to be reassured as to smitty's cum-spotting bona fides?"

he so doesn't deserve readers like those in this thread

Who is publishing your review of the short stories?

at the moment it seem i will be self-publishing on the funding platform patreon

This is the most elaborate and unremunerative long con I have ever heard of.

ffs

What is, James M? The Patreon thing (haven't seen it) or Lanchester's book (ditto really) or -- ?

This is the most elaborate and unremunerative long con I have ever heard of.

It was a joke about this whole years-long thread being a setup to get patreon $. It fell flat.

oh lol, i thought it was a joke about lanchester’s whole grift being a long con or deep trolling of this thread. to what mystical or hermetic end who knows. i have considered it.

He was on R4 earlier. God knows what the pitiful wanker was talking about, my already deficient brain shut down after about roughly something like 10 seconds of listening to him.

The collection is £0.99 on Kindle at the moment, if anyone is brave enough to read it.

i bought it the other day simultaneously thinking, i would pay no more than 99p and also wow what a bargain for such entertainment.

"there’s an odd sort of everyman quality to this epistemic problem, or problem of philosophical scepticism. but also it’s lanchester. so it’s v visible. it’ll oddly godlike being a reader in lanchester’s world. you see e hopeless innocent fallibility. and it’s v irritating."

this is one of the best things i've ever read posted on ilx lol. the lrb podcast where they paired him with patricia lockwood was chefs kiss. i think the moment where he was like "there's wine enthusiast blogs lol" has already been reported with alarm somewhere on this or the lrb thread.

btw my bf read capital about five years ago and it basically made him quit reading contemporary fiction and since than he hasn't read any fiction written after 1900.

bf otm

i know but he does annoying things like read every zola novel in a year and literally months later say he doesn't really remember anything about them

lol maybe that's Zola's fault?

oh great yr on his side

I'm trying to read Zola now and it's like I'm the one who's working in a coalmine.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51SQ7DVPV6L._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

the lrb podcast where they paired him with patricia lockwood was chefs kiss.

lol this was amazing.

Surprised this hasn't been picked up here. It's very ripe for ILB's view.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/21/john-lanchester-i-started-writing-capital-in-2006-assuming-a-crash-was-about-to-happen

There were two big differences in my writing process when I worked on Capital. The first was that I drafted it on a computer. With my previous novels I wrote the first draft in longhand, on index cards. For my first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, I tried typing out those cards, but I started to come down with carpal tunnel syndrome. I switched to reading out the longhand version into tapes, which I then sent off to be typed up. (Startlingly expensive, by the way.)

Reading the book out loud, I’d hear all sorts of things that I wanted to change, so I’d end up with a second draft just through that process. The finished typescript would come back within days. Then I’d leave it in a drawer until I felt ready to do the editing and revising. Editing is more fun than writing because you know you have a whole book there, you just have to chisel it out of the ice. I followed that process for my first four books.

Capital was different because I knew it was going to be longer and have multiple narrative strands, and I needed to be able to see the whole thing from a top-down, aerial perspective. I used the word processing program Scrivener and it was very helpful in juggling a novel of that sort.

Once I’d finished a draft, that was when the next big difference kicked in. I need a few months after finishing a novel before I can see it sufficiently clearly to assess it, think about structural changes, and begin the process of revision. I’d always had fantasies that I would use those few months constructively: learn German, train for a charity 10k, take up tai chi. Instead what I usually did was look out of the window and then realise with a jolt that three months had gone past.

With Capital, I finally did act on the intention. I started writing the book in early 2006 on the assumption that some form of crash was about to happen. When the crash did happen, it was much bigger and more systemic than anything I’d expected. I was following the story in real time, and by the time I finished the novel, in early 2009, I knew quite a lot about the credit crunch.

I was worried that when I went back to revise the book, I would end up including too much of that knowledge and wreck the story. You can do a lot in fiction, but you can’t explain complex subjects at length without killing the narrative. “As Nigel looked towards the lights of Canary Wharf in the distance, he struggled to remember the definition of a collateralised debt obligation.” I decided to take three months or so and write a nonfiction account of the credit crunch as a way of quarantining what I knew about the financial crisis. That book was Whoops!

I wrote that pretty quickly, but the publication process was all-consuming, and it was about 18 months before I got back to Capital. It was like reading someone else’s book, and I’ve never had such a clear sense of perspective when revising – at the start I was worried that I was so distant from it that I wouldn’t be able to finish it. I was absolutely certain I’d got the timing wrong and nobody would want to read it.

With my previous novels I wrote the first draft in longhand, on index cards.

'debt to pleasure' = would maybe have like to have been nabokov when it grew up[...]

― desperado, rough rider (thomp), Thursday, March 1, 2012 12:23 AM bookmarkflaglink

nailed it

I used the word processing program Scrivener and it was very helpful

lol i started an "oh no" joek here (bcz i also use scrivener and oh no) and then i spotted the better joek nested inside this quote viz "the word processing program scrivener"

i mean a sub editor might have injected those four explanatory words or DID THEY NOT NEED TO

I agree that that's very amusing, especially in light of this 8-year-old thread title.

(Though I actually think it's appropriate to include such information, in an article.)

“As Nigel looked towards the lights of Canary Wharf in the distance, he struggled to remember the definition of a collateralised debt obligation.” is surely a perfect Lanchesterian sentence!

no thats not real

“I’ve never had such a clear sense of perspective when revising” is just incredible.

Credit where it's due, this piece on Neanderthals seems enjoyable and unobjectionable to me.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n24/john-lanchester/twenty-types-of-human

i got this far before snorting outright: "As with a mirror-gazer, we have a tendency to want everything to be about us."

(meaning i managed to clamber through his forced outrage at homo floresiensis being termed the "hobbit" without throwing my LRB across the room)

leaving the rest for later as i actually have paid work to get on with today

ok i lied i read a bit further and came to this and now i can't stop laughing:

(In the case of H. floresiensis, Indonesia’s leading palaeoanthropologist took the first skeleton away for himself, kept it for a period of months, and returned it severely damaged.)

another day volunteering at the betsy ross museum. everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag. buddy, they wont even let me fuck it

— wint (@dril) February 20, 2012

The Lanchester neanderthal piece is not great. As Mark says: forced outrage at 'hobbit'; he says he feels much more distant from neanderthals than the neolithic tribes in britain and ireland 'but that's bollocks' - no need for profanity John, and it's not bollocks, the neanderthals were 30-40,000 years before the neolithic tribes and a different species. And wtf is this: lithics – the sciencey word for stone artefacts, used in preference to ‘tools’? 'Sciencey'? And yes it's used in preference to 'tools' because that could mean anything from a stick for getting termites out of a tree to a cordless power drill.

jesus.

Excellent post from Ledge!

At last someone takes on Lanchester's unnecessary, offensive (and here just misleading / mistaken) use of obscenity in print and his charmless colloquialism!

i class his charmless colloquialisms as 'blokey simplification' to make something sound unthreatening. and as you say, here mistaken. i think it's possibly more insidious than it looks, as it belongs, effectively to the world of Boris Johnson, and male workplaces where people (often middle-aged white men) feel threatened by difference, and need reassuring about it in comforting language.

its also the notion that you (a pleb) need this 'blokey simplification' to ease you into this concept that I (Lanchester) understand perfectly well

I can see how he might have got that notion with some of his financial pieces, where there might have been some particularly recondite concepts in need of simplification, blokey or otherwise; the worst bits in this piece read like they're written for ten year olds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emvySA1-3t8