"Let us imagine a man whose wealth is equalled only by his indifference to what wealth generally brings, a man of exceptional arrogance who wishes to fix, to describe, and to exhaust not the whole world – merely to state such an ambition is enough to invalidate it – but a constituted fragment of the world: in the face of the inextricable incoherence of things, he will set out to execute a (necessarily limited) programme right the way through, in all its irreducible, intact entirety."

from Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec

"... haunting, cold, but wearing an entirely human expression that was practically aglow with the blinding certainty of its absolute power which promised new and supremely inventive forms of ruthlessness; that it was he who was directing each and every movement of this irresistible march, including Valuska's own trials and tribulations as he stumbled down the desperate stations of complete collapse, though something in his manner suggested that the brutally instructive drama he unfolded before Valuska, while dragging him along by the arm, was in some way intended to serve as a form of cure, a cure that entailed a certain amount of necesary suffering (no gain without pain), and that this was a situation he was clearly enjoying. Valuska stared at that face, and as he examined it he began to understand that the 'hauntingly cold' expression he found on it was growing ever less enigmatic, since the ruthless mask might only be the unforgiving mirror of something that he, in his thirty-five years of muddle and sickliness, had perhaps been incapable of seeing..."

from The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai

If you're attending Frieze Art Fair in London this week, you can hear me talking about some of the art as part of Cecile B Evans' audio guide installation. And if you pick up a copy of the magazine, you can find my satirical piece "Permissions". I have just moved to Istanbul for the autumn, although in a couple of weeks I will be appearing at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.

'As a stepchild of the Factory, I am certain of one thing: images can change the world. I have seen it happen. I have experienced the "Before and After," as Andy might say, so I know that images can alter the visual construction of the reality that we all inhabit. They can revise the expectations we bring to that reality and the priorities we impose upon it. I know, further, that these alterations can entail profound social and political ramifications. So even though I am an art critic now and occupationally addicted to the anxiety of change, I cannot forget that there should be more to it than that. There is change, and there is change. When change takes on the innervating aspect of Brownian agitation nothing is really changing. When the "difficulty" of the images one writes about stops being an occasion to upgrade the efficacy of one's critical practice, when this difficulty becomes rote and repetitive, no more than a demand to practice criticism as preached, there are obviously forces in play that resist change and refinement. Under these conditions, one can become a bit contemplative about the business of connecting the dots with regard to art objects that present themselves as strategized invitations to cite the talismanic theoretical texts that inspired them in the first place.

'In fact, when change stops generating anxiety by challenging one's language of value, when works of art become simple occasions for fashionable écrits morts, one cannot suppress a growing sensitivity to those aspects of contemporary image-making that do not change and, by not changing, make substantial and more anxious change less likely. For myself, I have become increasingly amazed and dismayed at the persistence of dated modernist conventions concerning the canonical status of "flatness" and the inconsequences of "beauty" in twentieth-century painting. In my view, the linguistic properties implicit in the "negativity" of illusionistic space" – its metaphorical "absence" – and the rhetorical properties latent in our largely unarticulated concept of beauty should more than outweigh whatever academic reservations might still accrue to them.

'It was, after all, the invention of illusionistic space that bestowed upon the visual language of European culture the attributes of "negativity" and "remote tense," which are generally taken to distinguish human language from the languages of animals. These properties make it possible for us to lie, to imagine convincingly in our speech, to to assert what we are denying, and to construct narrative memory by displacing the locus of our assertions into a past or a future – into a conditional or subjunctive reality. For four centuries visual culture in the West possessed these options and exploited them. Today we are content to slither through the flatland of Baudelarian modernity, trapped like cocker spaniels in the eternal, positive presentness of a terrain so visually impoverished that we cannot even lie to an effect in its language of images – nor imagine with any authority – nor even remember.'

from The Invisible Dragon by Dave Hickey

"Under JFK's administration of the so-called 'best and the brightest', a number of academics and business directors were promoted to executive power. With [Robert] McNamara as secretary of defence, technocratic management theory became the ubiquitous language for all military matters in the Pentagon during the 1960s. Guided by theoretical 'models', systems analysis, operational research, 'game theory' and numbers-driven management, McNamara's group of 'whizz kids' believed war was a rational business of projected costs, benefits and kill-rations, and that if only these could be maximized, war could be won. Although the Pentagon under McNamara put much effort into modelling, and then fighting, according to these models, the Vietnamese guerrillas refused to act as 'efficient consumers' in the Pentagon's market economy, or as the 'rational opponents' in the 'game theories' of RAND - indeed, opinion has it that this approach led to the unnecessary prolongation of the Vietnam war."

from Hollow Land by Eyal Weizman

"Spying and writing have always gone together. In Britain, where the modern intelligence agency was born, intellectuals moved smoothly back and forth between secret government service and the literary life, some, like journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, even spending the morning at the typewriter before consulting with MI6 after lunch. Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré: all placed their powers of observation and divination at the disposal of the British secret state while mining their experience of intelligence work in their fiction. It was not just a case of satisfying the reading public's apparently insatiable appetite for the espionage novel. There seemed to be some basic connection between the roles of writer and spy: both were iconic, even heroic, figures in modern culture, necessarily detached from ordinary society, yet gifted – cursed, perhaps – with unique insight into the darkest realms of human existence. 'I, from very early, lived a secret life, an inward life,' Le Carré once told an interviewer. 'I seemed to go about in disguise.'

"In this respect, the spies of the CIA were no different from their British counterparts. Indeed, the 'man of letters' was, if anything, even more conspicuous a figure in the upper echelons of the American secret service than in MI6. During World War II, Norman Holmes Pearson, a noted Yale professor of literature and editor, with WH Auden, of the five-volume Viking Poets of the English Language, ran 'X-2', the London-based counterespionage branch of the Office of Strategic Services. After the war, when the OSS was resurrected as the CIA, the task of counterintelligence – protecting one's secrets from the theft by rival agencies – was inherited by another 'Yalie', James Jesus Angleton, whose obsession with hunting for 'moles' later came to verge on paranoia. A founding editor of the influential 'little magazine' Furioso and friend of Ezra Pound, Angleton (who inspired the 'complex and convoluted' character of Hugh Montague in Norman Mailer's CIA novel Harlot's Ghost) was known, among his many other code- and nicknames, as 'the Poet'. One of Angleton's several protégés in the Agency, Cord Meyer, had edited the Yale Lit and published several short stories in the Atlantic Monthly before becoming a spy. He used his position as Deputy Chief, then Chief, of the International Organisations Division to recruit to the CIA a number of young critics and poets associated with John Crowe Ransom's Kenyon Review, house organ of the New Criticism, a rigorously formalistic method of reading literary texts."

from The Mighty Wurlitzer by Hugh Wilford

The new issue of Cabinet magazine includes 'Law and Odour', my essay on the uses of synthetic bad smells in the security industries. I'm excited to be in the company of writers including Eyal Weizman, whose fascinating book Hollow Land I am reading at the moment.

Two observations on logical atomism and paranoia that I happened to come across today

From Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia:

"With scientific explanation of particular facts, the usual practice is to consider some conjunctions of explained facts as not requiring separate explanation, but as being explained by the conjunctions of the explanations of the conjuncts. (If E₁ explains e₁ and E₂ explains e₂ then E₁E₂ explains e₁e₂.) If we required that any two conjuncts and any n-place conjunction had to be explained in some unified fashion, and not merely by the conjunction of separate and disparate explanations, then we would be driven to reject most of the usual explanations and to search for an underlying pattern to explain what appear to be separate facts. (Scientists, of course, often do offer a unified explanation of apparently separate facts.) It would be well worth exploring the interesting consequences of refusing to treat, even in the first instance, any two facts as legitimately separable, as having separate explanations whose conjunction is all there is to the explanation of them. What would our theories of the world look like if we required unified explanations of all conjunctions? Perhaps an extrapolation of how the world looks to paranoid persons. Or, to put it undisparagingly, the way it appears to persons having certain sorts of dope experiences. (For example, the way it sometimes appears to me after smoking marijuana.) Such a vision of the world differs fundamentally from the way we normally look at it; it is surprising at first that a simple condition on the adequacy of explanations of conjunctions leads to it, until we realize that such a condition of adequacy must lead to a view of the world as deeply and wholly patterned."

From David Foster Wallace's review of David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress:

"Now, technically, the Russellian logic that comprises language's Big Picture consists all & only of 3 things: simple logical connectives like 'and,' 'or' & 'not'; propositions or 'statements': & a view of these statements as 'atomic,' meaning that the truth or falsity of a complex statement like 'Ludwig is affable and Bertrand is well-dressed' depends entirely on the truth value of its constituent atomic propositions— the prenominate molecular proposition is true if & only if it is true that Ludwig is friendly and it is true that Bertrand is dapper. The atomic propositions that are language's building blocks are, for both Russell and Wittgenstein, 'logically independent' of one another: they do not affect one another's truth values, only the values of those logical molecules in which they're conjoined— eg, 'L is cheerful or B is well-heeled,' 'It is not the case that if B is wealthy then L is cheerful,' etc. Except here's the kicker: since language is the world's 'mirror,' the world is metaphysically composed only & entirely of those 'facts' that statements in the language stand for. In other words— the words of the Tractatus's first & foremost line— the world is everything that is the case; the world is nothing but a huge mass of data, of logically discrete facts that have no intrinsic connection to one another. Cf the Tractatus 1.2: 'The world falls apart into facts . . .' 1.2.1 'Any one [fact] can either be the case, or not be the case, and everything else remains the same.'

"T. Pynchon, who has done in literature for paranoia what Sächer-Masoch did for whips, argues in his Gravity's Rainbow for why the paranoid delusion of complete & malevolent connection, whacko & unpleasant though it be, is preferable at least to its opposite — the conviction that nothing is connected to anything else & that nothing has anything intrinsically to do with you. Please see that this Pynchonian contraparanoia would be the appropriate metaphysic for any resident of the sort of world the Tractatus describes. And Markson's Kate lives in just such a world, while her objectless epistle 'mirrors' it perfectly, manages to capture the psychic flavor both of solipsism and of Wittgenstein in the simple & affectless but surreal prose & short aphoristic paragraphs that are also so distinctive of the Tractatus. Kate's textual obsession is simply to find connections between things, any strands that bind the historical facts & empirical data that are all her world comprises."

"... over the next two years Irwin did nothing but paint the same painting over and over again. How Irwin arrived at this notion of continual repetition is not completely clear, although it is interesting that here again he mentions [Giorgio] Morandi as an example. 'One of the extraordinary things about Morandi's achievements,' he asserts, 'is precisely the spareness of his means. It's always those same bottles on that same table. On a conceptual level, the subject remains constant. One could, I suppose, insist upon interpreting the relationship between various sets of bottles. But what Morandi did there was to take the same subject to the point of total boredom, to the point where there was no way you could – or he could, anyway – seriously any longer be involved with them as ideas or topics. I mean, through sheer reptition he entirely drained them of that kind of meaning: they lost that kind of indentification and became open elements within the painting dialogue he was having. And the remarkable thing was that although the content of those paintings, in the literate sense, stayed exactly the same, the paintings changed radically. I mean, each painting became a whole new delving into and development of the physical, perceptual relationships within the painting."

from Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler

Five more events I'm doing

Thursday 23rd August
Whiskey and Words at Rough Trade East with John Niven

Friday 7th September
The White Review at Foyles with Sam Riviere

Monday 10th September
The Book Stops Here at The Alley Cat with Suzy Joinson, Cathi Unsworth and Lauren Elkin

Wednesday 26th September
Mr B's in Bath

the first week of October
Istanbul Tanpinar Literary Festival

I find this fascinating:

"In chemistry, a racemic mixture, or racemate, is one that has equal amounts of left- and right-handed enantiomers of a chiral molecule... A racemate is optically inactive, meaning that there is no net rotation of plane-polarized light. Although the two enantiomers rotate plane-polarized light in opposite directions, the rotations cancel because they are present in equal amounts. In contrast to the two pure enantiomers, which have identical physical properties except for the direction of rotation of plane-polarized light, a racemate sometimes has different properties from either of the pure enantiomers. Different melting points are most common, but different solubilities and boiling points are also possible."

This is the post in which over the next few months I will compile some of the reviews of The Teleportation Accident

UK

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012

"Terrific... Brilliant... If there was ever any worry that he might have crammed all his ideas into his first book, the prize-winning Boxer, Beetle, this makes it clear he kept a secret bunker of his best ones aside." – Joe Dunthorne, The Guardian

"A hectic extravaganza... Pyrotechnical... violently clever... Impressive... funny... Frantically entertaining... Extraordinary ingenuity." – The Sunday Times

"Strange and brilliant... Blisteringly funny, witty and erudite... An excellent read." – Emma Hogan, The Daily Telegraph

"Hilarious... seriously intelligent and seriously funny at the same time." – Tim Martin, The Daily Telegraph

"A glorious, over-the-top production, crackling with inventive wit and seething with pitchy humour... A beguiling success... Ingenious... There is such an easy felicity in Beauman's writing and such a clever, engaging wit... that one feels he could write something as much fun every two years. The prospect of which makes me very, very happy indeed." - The Scotsman

"Just as crazily original [as Boxer, Beetle]... Beauman's writing is dazzlingly inventive; this has been longlisted for the Man Booker and I'd love it to win." – The Times

"Ingenious... Funny... Popping with ideas, fizzing with vitality, and great fun." – The Independent on Sunday

"Very clever and charming... Gloriously bizarre." – The Sunday Telegraph

"Funny and startlingly inventive... Beauman is undoubtedly a writer of prodigious talent, and there are enough ideas and allusions and comic set pieces in this work... to fill myriad lesser novels." – The Financial Times

"Very funny... Glorious." – The Independent

"Super." – The Observer

"Stylistically radical... Virtuosic... An unquestionably brilliant novel, ribald and wise in equal measure... Witty and sometimes deeply moving." – Times Literary Supplement

"I love Ned Beauman’s novels, especially The Teleportation Accident, which is wonderfully inventive and vivid." – Philip Hensher, The Spectator

"Beauman is a writer of unceasing invention." – Metro

"I hugely enjoyed [it]... Deft and witty." – The Evening Standard

"If you care about contemporary fiction, you must read this." - Tatler

"Less than two years after his multi-award-winning debut 'Boxer, Beetle' Ned Beauman returns with another fizzing firework of a caper, featuring as many cracking escapades as its predecessor.. . His prose is wonderfully discursive and buzzes with originality... his bold characterisations, slapstick humour, slick similes and tangential subplots are sublime. A strong, smart follow-up that proves Beauman is more than comfortable with the hype he's created for himself." – Time Out

"One of the freshest, most exciting and darkly comic novels written in recent years... The definitive historical novel for people that detest the genre." – Dazed & Confused

"He's done it again... The verve of a young Amis... A great romp of a novel, delightful in its inventiveness" - Prospect

"Beauman excels at both the grand, jostling structure and the individual sentence. His similes are often inspired, his dialogue is frequently hilarious, and his ability to keep all the plates spinning, as the story dashes between years and continents with a large supporting cast, is very impressive... His imaginative dexterity doesn't fail him... [His] comic craft squares up admirably with those of Waugh and Wodehouse." – Literary Review

"Funny and deliciously deviant." – The List

"Boxer, Beetle was a wonderful, exuberant tale... and this is even better... Hugely enjoyable." – Word

"Remarkably clever" – Tom Sutcliffe, Saturday Review (Radio 4)

US

"A noirish sci-fi comedic novel worth shouting about... pyrotechnic... an impressive leap forward... a high-wire act... frequently hilarious... astonishingly intricate and ultimately satisfying... explosive humour... a singular novel — singularly clever, singularly audacious, singularly strange — from a singular, and almost recklessly gifted, young writer. This is not fiction for everyone. But for those who stick with it, it’s a wild and wonderful ride." – Time


Grade A. "Wildly inventive... Fiendishly clever... This fizzy novel is a great time machine all its own... Every generation gets the hipster satire it deserves. But this one's for every generation." – Entertainment Weekly

"Endlessly witty and furiously inventive... Consolidates the 27-year-old Beauman’s stature as a formidably accomplished writer... Beauman flaunts an almost indecently pleasurable way with words... Dazzling entertainment... Brilliantly clever." – Washington Post


"Gobsmackingly clever." – Vanity Fair

"Uproarious." – The New Yorker

"Brilliantly written... Prose so odd and marvelous that every few pages I had to stop and reread a passage." – NPR

"Inspired... Beauman has an unflagging imagination and an indefatigable gift for comedy. His overstuffed (in a good way) novel comprises memorable comic dialogue and hilarious set pieces." – Publisher's Weekly

Starred review. "Brilliant." – Booklist

"A fast-paced, witty and refreshingly rich tale." – Philadelphia City Paper

I wrote this piece for The Awl about whether I'm too much of an elitist. Which is ridiculous, by the way. Just because I believe that any man, woman or child who can't give a detailed account of the central arguments of Heidegger's Being and Time should be herded into a fleet of oil tankers and sent off to live in camps in the Arctic... Does that make me an elitist?

Maybe in Cameron's Britain.

Some UK events I'm doing this summer
The first one is next Tuesday and you should definitely come!

Tuesday 3rd July

with Nick Harkaway at the Lutyens and Rubinstein bookshop

Monday 9th July

with Dave Gorman and Nat Luurtsema at the Latitude Book Club at the Century Club

Saturday 14th July

at Latitude

Saturday 21st July

at Port Eliot

Thursday 26th July
at Waterstones Covent Garden

Tuesday 14th August

with Nick Harkaway again at the Edinburgh Book Festival

Interesting autoantonym: according to the OED, bleach now means "a bleaching liquor or powder" but it once also meant "any substance used for blacking; e.g. ink, soot, lamp-black, and esp. shoemakers' or curriers' black used for leather."