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

lol, i still retain a mild neutrality towards Whoops, based on knowing less then than i do now (but then i guess that is in part due to Whoops), and being a lot less tolerant of the 'lanchester summarises' mode and manner these days.

ble an operator to fix the system. modern day haptics also come into it and help illustrate what i mean, perhaps - due to latency in the system a particular issue for some of our operators was that status changes after an on screen button press on the control surface did not appear rapidly enough after that button press, which led to people pressing the on screen button multiple times, even though the initial command was being acted upon.

Of course you could say, "Everybody is an operator," but---

Already, the day felt long. When he looked back at his screen, it was 14:27. He wished, now, that he had gone out at lunchtime and walked as far as the canal. He could have sat on one of the benches there for a while and watched the swans and the cygnets gobbling up the crusts and other bits and pieces people threw down for them on the water. Not meaning to, he closed the budget-distribution file he’d been working on without saving it. A flash of something not unlike contempt charged through him then, and he got up and walked down the corridor to the men’s room, where there was no one, and pushed into a stall. For a while he sat looking at the back of the door, on which nothing was written or scrawled. When he felt a bit steadier, he went to the basin and splashed water on his face, and slowly dried his face and hands on the paper towel that fed, automatically, from the dispenser.

On the way back to his desk, he stopped for a coffee, pressed the Americano option on the machine, and waited for it to spill down into the cup.

I was going to defend that until I got to "budget-distribution file"

I'd be interested to know what you felt was defensible up until that point. I feel the whole thing is turgid inanity.

"crusts and other bits and pieces" although innocuous looking, for long time lanchester heads, indicates the open-ended material leakage of his prose... what other bits and pieces? not crusts? the crumb too? or.... specifically bought bird food As We're Told... bits and pieces sounds like people are ransacking their sheds.

i'm with plax here, i think, you might defend the first sentences as a fusion of style and content, but it toils so.

budget-distribution file is pure chef kiss of course. absolute a-grade, inject-it-into-my-veins lanchester.

i'm actually going to allow something here. 'where there was no-one' + 'on which nothing was written' ('or scrawled' lol) and the automatic towel dispenser + the Americano option on the machine, feels like he may be trying to do something. but who knows, he walks round like a sims character.

in fusion of style and content news: "already, the day felt long" <-- already the sentence felt long (yes it's that comma)

yes, it's remarkable how tired you feel just a few words in.

https://i.makeagif.com/media/10-30-2013/QwrC28.gif

yes, you get three words in and lean back in your easy chair and think 'christ is it time for a drink yet. no i see it's only 9:10am'

It was the twin 'where there was no one' and 'on which nothing was scrawled' that finally made me throw up my hands.

i did wonder if he was going for a bit of poetic balance there ('empty' is probably a better phrase for the toilet).

but now i'm laughing at ever going into the 'men's room' (? oddly american turn of phrase?) and thinking 'there is no one'.

i feel i should point out i was drunk when i first read this

Sorry, the bit I posted is not written by the man himself, I just felt it was absolute textbook Lanchester. The towel dispenser is the low point for me.

I also hate the comma after already.

it’s an extremely enjoyable paragraph. as so often with JL it contains multitudes. i found myself on the somewhat catechistic train of thought, hopelessly banal: “JL is a very bad writer. In the same way that some are very good writers, he is very bad at it. He cannot do it. Even where he thinks he is doing something (and i think he must think this) it does not then pass the test of *why* he thinks this is something he should do. *Why*.”

And you end up going round again, like Michael Finnegan… “Because he is a very bad writer.” etc

You can compound it with questions like “*why* do they let him? *Why* do they pay for him to do it? Does he think he is in some way good? When he’s finished a work, does he feel, like Nabokov, satisfied as if he had laid an egg? *What* do people say after they’ve read something by him? Do they feel their store of imaginative exploration has in some way been replenished? *Why*

You are aware that it’s a form of mediocrity so intense that it is worse than the merely very bad.

There is something Widmerpool like about it all (from Dance to the Music of Time). The stolid successful progression of lack of talent. It perhaps is related inversely to the same energies and demons that occasionally take great talents from us early.

xpost oh.

who is this epigone.

it is very characteristic.

has he taken on a disciple?

brought them into his workshop of dreams?

I just looked it up on my laptop via the internet search engine and discovered it to be Claire K33gan.

I am being mean but the top quote from CK says 'I can't explain my work. I just write stories'.

“I can't explain my work. I just sit down at my study desk, switch on my laptop, open up the word processing programme that the laptop came with and write stories“

<3

it’s interesting to consider why they’re v similar. one aspect of manchester’s prose is the sense that he’s imagining himself walking or going through the process as it happens, so that his sentences and the thought of his prose is also organised in this way. the sentences sort of discover what’s happening at the same time the writer and relevant character does.

the same things going on here. they are a mere stenographer for the minimal levels of empathetic imagination going on. there’s no sense of organisation or art to it.

i’ve never read any keegan, so this may be unfair - after all deploying a style like that in a v limited way within a wider context may have some meaning or purpose. rather than just being how you write.

xpost

lol mark s.