Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays

by Tom McCarthy

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish is Tom McCarthy s own selection of the best of the essays he has published over more than a decade in such places as The Believer and the London Review of Books. It includes essays on writers, of course (Laurence Sterne, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and Kathy Acker among them), but also on Gerhard Richter, David Lynch, and Sonic Youth and all of them are written with the same stylish and provocative flare that made McCarthy's Remainder such a hit. This is an indispensable introduction to the mind and work of one of today s most brilliant and controversial novelists."

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Art, Literature, Criticism, Literary Criticism

276 pages, Paperback

First published May 9, 2017

About the author

Tom McCarthy — “English fiction’s new laureate of disappointment” (Time Out, September 2007) — is a writer and artist. He was born in 1969 and lives in a tower-block in London. Tom grew up in Greenwich, south London, and studied English at New College, Oxford. After a couple of years in Prague in the early 1990s, he lived in Amsterdam as literary editor of the local Time Out, and later worked in British television as well as co-editing Mute magazine.

His debut novel Remainder was first published in November 2005 by Paris-based art press Metronome. After becoming a cult hit championed first by British webzines (it was 3:AM Magazine’s Book of the Year for 2005) and then by the literary press, Remainder was republished by Alma Books in the UK (2006) and Vintage in the US (2007). A French version is to be followed by editions in Japanese, Korean, Greek, Spanish and Croatian.

A work of literary criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006. It also came out in France and an American edition is in the offing.

Tom’s second novel, Men in Space came out in 2007.

He has published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and Contemporary Magazine, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press) and The Milgram Experiment (Jan van Eyck Press). His story, “Kool Thing, Or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst” appeared in The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail) in 2008.

His ongoing project the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through publications, proclamations, denunciations and live events, has been described by Untitled Magazine as ‘the most comprehensive total art work we have seen in years’ and by Art Monthly as ‘a platform for fantastically mobile thinking’. In 2003 the INS broke into the BBC website and inserted propaganda into its source-code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the ICA from which more than forty ‘agents’ generated non-stop poem-codes which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world.

Tom has also tutored and lectured at various institutions including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins School of Art, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College and Southern California Institute of Architecture. He recently taught a course on ‘Catastrophe’ with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium.

Reviews

[Adam Dalva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tom McCarthy is one of my favorite novelists (REMAINDER and SATIN ISLAND are both such engaging, cerebral works), and perhaps I went into the galley of this essay collection a bit too excited. I found it in a used bookstore - which itself is interesting and quite McCarthyish, a used version of a book that's not out yet that was probably given away by someone who should have kept it is just his bailiwick- though TYPEWRITERS ETC. isn't coming out for a couple of months, and I was overwhelmed by the list of topics, with features so many of my favorite things: On Kawara; James Joyce; Gerhard Richter; Jean-Phillipe Toussaint; Tristram Shandy.

Two problems: this is the kind of collection that features essays that work better on their own - when written over a ten year span, no problem, but when put together the narrowness becomes frustrating. McCarthy loves Rimbaud and Perec, which is rad, but they recur often enough to feel shoehorned. One almost comes to expect a Rimbaud turn. The sequencing of the collection could have helped (two Zidane essays in a row, for example), but it's jarring. There is a sort of short story about Patty Hearst that is fairly disastrous as well, for such a good writer, and wasn't needed.

But my rating feels unfair, because this collection has major high points. An essay called "Recessional" is as good a treatment of MAGIC MOUNTAIN as I have found; the jellyfish essay is absolutely wonderful and works with Flaubert and Balzac and Freud in marvelous conjunction; the art writing is uniformly intelligent; the Toussaint piece helped me understand one of my favorite authors better. A lot of these essays, when suspended outside the collection, would be five stars. I'd buy the book for individual essays, if McCarthy is writing about something that already interests you. If you have the luxury of diving in and out, you'll be thrilled. He's not the sort of writer who will easily convince you to read something, but these essays work as an amazing supplement.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

If any of the following apply:

you're suffering a reading lull;

you fancy reading something original about Joyce, Lynch, Richter, Kafka or Kathy Acker;

you're intrigued by lines like 'The most noble and heroic thing to be in this life, or perhaps in any other, is the dodgem jockey,' or paragraphs such as 'TRY TO SAY NOW. I mean, now: try to say it. Not just to say it, but to mean it too. To truly mean it: mean it in the sense of it being true. It’s just not possible. No sooner has the word been formed—a peristaltic movement that breaks down into a grinding of the tongue against the wet and gummy place where palate and incisors meet, a corresponding dropping of the lower jaw, contraction of the cheeks, and curling outward of the lips (a scornful gesture, as though they, the lips, were sneering at the very content they’re delivering)—no sooner has this word been manufactured and expelled than it’s already late and, in its lateness, false: as its sound rises to your ears, it’s not now anymore.';

then I can wholeheartedly recommend this exceptional collection of essays, which isn't afraid to deal in knotty discursions, and is fairly sniffy about the prospect that you might quail at their profusion. Most of these pieces go out on an intellectual limb - especially the one about Lynch and prostheses - but are, almost without exception, thrilling examples of erudite infectiousness. You'll want to read or re-read Thomas Mann, Lawrence Sterne and Joseph Conrad. You'll accept at face value the link between Conrad and MC Hammer. You'll buy without any quibble the idea that Kafka foresaw absolutely everything, including the future (which is already here, waiting to be written about).

'ONE OF BLOOM’S mooted entrepreneurial schemes involves selling human waste on an industrial scale. The passage from excrement to money is one that my own Joycean career has followed, albeit in reverse. After Trieste, Sam Slote, a standing member of the Great Council of All Things Joycean, invited me to the next symposium, to be held in Dublin in 2004—Bloomsday’s centenary. What would you like to talk about? he asked. Oh, I don’t know, I told him. Joyce ’n shit. Joyce and shit? he repeated. That’s good—really good. He was serious—and with reason: Joyce’s work is mired in excremental language, excremental imagery: waterclosets, commodes, sewers, “clotted hinderparts,” “soiled goods” and “slopperish matter,” “nappy spattees,” “pip poo pat” of “bulgar . . . bowels” and so on. There may be, as I suggested, something eschatological about the Joyce-event, but this comes coated in a straight-up scatology so vulgar it would make Beavis and Butthead blush.'

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Britain’s leading intellectuals and most European of novelists, Tom McCarthy, rocks up with fifteen scintillating and challenging essays on topics as mouthwatering as Ulysses, Tristram Shandy, the cultural significance of dodgem jockeys, existing in the epicentre of London’s weather, and David Lynch. McCarthy writes in an engaging and ice-cool manner, beckoning the reader into his eclectic discourses before unleashing his tremendous talent for the weaving of complex theoretical concepts (of a literary nature), allusions from a swathe of avant-garde, European, and classic literature, the art and cinematic worlds, always prodding the reader into deeper thought within every stylish paragraph. One suspects that these fifteen pieces are a fraction of the omnivorious author’s preoccupations, and that McCarthy could wax on a myriad of authors, artists, and oddballs, and the results would be as stimulating as those presented here. A rewarding mental workout.

[emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Letter is a mise-en-scène of that regressive, quivering movement or moment of burrow-formation, and, as such, catastrophically fuckuptive though it may be, enacts the primal scene and very possibility of a literary body that (with the exception perhaps only of Joyce’s) would turn out to be the most extraordinary—and, ultra-paradoxically, extraordinarily successful—of the twentieth century.

So underrated, and so under-read. It's fucking brilliant. I think I might even round it off to a 5* later. RTC later.

Zinedine Zidane, Gerhard Richter, and Kathy Acker. Other readers have their favourite essays covering other matters, but for me these are my top-three.

Even though in his collection of essays, McCarthy ultimately praised Toussaint for his writing/thoughts on 'the iconic event' in his 'essay', 'La Mélancolie de Zidane', after reading McCarthy's essay on said 'event', I think his is more 'superior' and elegantly composed in every way. I had wanted to rate Toussaint's book higher, but now I can't do that (which I'll probably elaborate later in that review, but for starters, I don't get why he felt it necessary to talk about his personal 'fascination' with regards to (Japanese) girls (in Japan) going to watch the World Cup; and he also doesn't mention Park Ji-Sung at all even though his performance was fucking spectacular in the specific WCs he mentioned? Basically, I think it's fucked up that he sort of romanticised, or rather exoticised the entire thing). Anyway, McCarthy's essay(s) on Zizou made Toussaint's look absolutely subpar.

'If it’s violence that makes space meaningful, then Zidane’s act was the event par excellence. —an embodiment of raw, animal consciousness in space, aware only of “le sentiment d’être là, simplement là.”]'

'The alphabet’s last letters, fourfolded: this, in his final game, would be Zidane’s last, wordless word, his abnegation or abdication of his craft, laying-down or breaking of his pencil. His way of saying Nothing. Its utterance effects a sudden (and, for the hundreds of millions watching, for the game itself, catastrophic) withdrawal from the event-space that very craft has animated or brought to life in the first place. The space remains, traumatised, amputated, drawing its entire reserve (or deficit) of meaning from the presence that has just vacated it (who cares about the penalty shootout that followed? will anyone even remember who won the match in ten years time?). We see the script being typed out in the Liga game, as Zidane disappears, like Breughel’s crowd, into the field-voiding or evacuating tunnel with three minutes left on the clock.'

'Everything “first-hand” or “pure” is de-naturalised; even Zidane’s most intimate gesture, his personal tic of scraping his foot against the grass, plays out as a kind of glitch on a CD or buffer on a livestream; it catches any fluid motion, makes it stutter, stops it happening even as it’s happening. “As a child,” Zidane’s text-over tells us in a near-perfect paraphrase of Gray’s, “I had a running commentary in my head, when I was playing. It wasn’t really my own voice; it was the voice of Pierre Cangioni, a television anchor from the 1970s. Every time I heard his voice I would run towards the TV, as close as I could get, for as long as I could. It wasn’t that his words were so important; but the tone, the accent, the atmosphere, was everything.” For him, media is not an experience's goal or endpoint, but rather its precondition, where it all begins. From that base or given, you construct your own “story” by channel-mixing inputs.—Describing the crowd’s sounds—general noise, the shifting of a chair, a cough, a whisper—Zidane surmises: “you can almost decide for yourself what you want to hear.” Agency is editing.'

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contains the most insightful essay I've read about Kathy Acker's writing, her radical techniques and subversive effects. Plus excellent pieces on Tristam Shandy, Gerhardt Richter, and Ed Ruscha. Haunted throughout by the ghost of Mallarme.

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was my hope that a book of essays covering writers the likes of Laurence Sterne, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and Kathy Acker, as well as McCarthy's thoughts on Patty Hearst, David Lynch, and Sonic Youth would interest me to no end. But I was wrong. Rarely did I felt engaged, and all through the text a numbing affect came over me which I attributed to my own lack of intellectual prowess. If this collection was a work of genius, it was lost on me and can be added to my list of bad choices for 2017.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb collection of somewhat 'literary' essays. I never read Tom McCarthy's fiction, but will now do so, due to this excellent book of essays. His essay on Gerhard Richter is profound, and he has an excellent style of writing with respect to the visual arts. The same can go for his piece on David Lynch. Always intelligent, thought-provoking, and more important, fun to read.

[Goodreeds User · Rating 5 out of 5]

much to think about

[Danny Mason · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the essays about things that I was already interested in, but I struggled with the ones that I didn't know much about already due to McCarthy's tendency to jump in at the deep end and not pause for explanation. That being said, McCarthy writes so well that even when I wasn't engaged with the content I wasn't finding it an unpleasant read, and at their best these essays are both beautifully written and hugely insightful.

[Clara · Rating 3 out of 5]

tom mccarthy is pretentious in such a specifically funny way that he almost makes me care about freudian readings of kafka and joyce. I liked the first half of the collection more than the second half, though that may have just been fatigue. not nearly as fun as his tintin collection, and disappointingly scant on the jellyfish.

[Frankie]

dnf after ~4ish essays, i simply do not care.

[Tobias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smart essays on art, lit, and more.

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoroughly brilliant, wide-ranging essay collection -- like a long, meandering conversation with an extremely erudite and enthusiastic friend.

[Roz · Rating 1 out of 5]

A book of essays as ponderous as they are pretentious, I found Tom McCarthy's new collection not only underwhelming, but a collection that spoke down to readers and seemed mostly to serve McCarthy's ego.

Harsh? Maybe. But McCarthy is the kind of writer who casually lets you know the contents of his bookshelf. Essays regularly namedrop a wide variety of highbrow authors - Gilles Deleuze, Freud, Derrida, etc - while also casually letting readers know he had to google who musician Rick James was. Little slips like this, which recur throughout his essays, give his essays a feeling that he doesn't just know better than the reader, he also doesn't subscribe to what he considers lowbrow culture.

False binaries like that - a divide between the thesis highbrow and anththesis low - are reflected in his dialectic, where his synthesis is a focus on the middlebrow. When he writes of works by people like David Lynch, the novels of Thomas Pynchon or photographs by Ed Ruscha, it feels like he's intentionally referencing stuff just popular enough he can attempt to address culture, but without actually engaging it. Essentially: have his cake, and eat it too.

It's tempting to compare his work to similar collections by David Foster Wallace or Chuck Klosterman, who sort of cover the same ground from a different perspective: American, not British. But there's something more, too. For all their faults, Klosterman and Wallace never speak down to readers, but always try to come across like one of them. DFW may have been the kind of kid who read dictionaries, but he also had a sense of humour. McCarthy's kind of jokes are when he transliterates a dirty pun, the sort of thing most people couldn't do on their own.

I'm marking this Did Not Finish, not because I didn't read the whole thing, but because almost to a page I found each essay unbearable. I'd skip to the next, where more of the same was awaiting me. It's a bummer: I generally like what the NYRB publishes, but this is the kind of lit-crit that people think of when they explain why they don't read those magazines.

[Brooke Salaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had previously read McCarthy’s Remainder and was interested in discovering more about the sensibility at work. As could be predicted, he is well-steeped in postmodern theory and some of this collection was beyond my powers of comprehension. However, I did find some of it graspable and intriguing and he obviously possesses a powerful intellect. I enjoyed some of the anecdotes. like the description of the creation of Ed Ruscha’s series of photographs “Royal Road Test” and then the disclaimer that no one really knows if the story may be apocryphal, of the road trip on Hwy 15 between Vegas and L.A. and the fatefully tossed Royal typewriter by the blocked writer and the subsequent crime scene photos. He has a piece on Joyce’s Ulysses and one on Kathy Acker. He embraces a messy authenticity of expression over the more staid sequential narrative that he demonstrates the term “realism” has been falsely applied to. He provocatively compares the act of writing with a form of violence. A window into the workings of a keen mind.

[Ugh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I made the mistake of buying this even though I gave up on one of McCarthy's novels, C. I couldn't resist the title. But I found it pretentious and obscure to the point that I'm not convinced it ever actually says much. It frequently says shit like:

"The book, then, "total expansion of the letter", would harness the letter's "mobility", and in its "spaciousness" establish "some nameless system of relationships"."

Far from all of it is that bad, but often it gets that bad at the crux of a piece, leading me to believe that often there actually is no crux.

I folded down four pages, but one was a quote from Ballard, one from Kafka and a third from Freud. The annoying thing is that the essays are actually interesting in places, but McCarthy seems to have no interest in being easily understood. I don't mind having to work at something to understand it, but I do mind the writer deliberately making life hard. It's too short.

[Heather Scott Partington · Rating 4 out of 5]

To McCarthy, each story is formed from the baseness of the human condition, but silence conveys infinite opportunity. These essays, published previously in journals like The London Review of Books, dissect literature by Kafka, Joyce, Shakespeare and more; art by Gerhard Richter; even ambience, like the “white noise” of London’s weather...

Read more at The New York Times Book Review.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started reading this as a bit of light relief, and quite enjoyed it, even if much of it went right over my head, and reminded me why I initially was drawn to science rather than the arts. Enough points of reference that I did know something about for parts of it to work, and for the rest of it, well, I'll take the author's word on it. Also nudges me to finally get around to reading Tristram Shandy.
"Life: a gap, or slit, or pocket in which spinning bodies, held up, despite all odds, in a miasma of impossibility, careen for an indefinite interval across a tilted place before heading to the floor. Kerthunk."

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Tom McCarthy's fiction; and I really enjoyed Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish, the essays in the collection intelligently, creatively engaging a host of my favorite artists, literature and otherwise, e.g., Joyce, Sterne, Pynchon, Shakespeare, Beckett, Kafka, Richter, Mallarmé, Lynch, Toussaint, Robbe-Grillet, and more besides.

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Remainder is a work of genius (and the other novels are okay), but what surprised me most about Typewriters is how unoriginal and doctrinaire of a postmodernist McCarthy is; these essays don't contain anything of interest beyond what you would find in a typical postmodern/literary academic journal in the 1990s.

[Antonio Vena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bellissima raccolta di "discorsi", così sembrano e suonano. Per chi conosce i romanzi dell'autore vi ritrova passo passo la costruzione della sua poetica, gli essenziali, i temi degni d'interesse culturale. Per gli altri: il Tempo, Joyce, Mallarme eterno, fantasmi e rumori bianchi, DeLillo, il senso di Pynchon per il reale.
In qualche modo, almeno per me, imperdibile.

[Em Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Explains and remystifies text I already knew and also strangely even more so those I had not. Made me want to read and reread. Some were at the edge of my learning but that's an exciting place to be.

Main takeaway was that I need to up my reading game. I've spent too long wallowing in middlebrow complacency.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd read many of these when they were originally published. McCarthy is the rare risk-taking novelist who is not afraid of ideas forming his narrative. Here he writes about where those ideas generate.

[J Murnaghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The essays that serve as book introductions (on Tristram Shandy, Kafka's Letter to His Father, On Kawara) are straightforward, good. The numerous essays originally presented as public lectures are rambling, unsatisfying...

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

These are well written and engaging, but seem to land more on the end of demonstrating a vast readership of theory and literature on part of the author as opposed to aiming towards conveying anything of real substance. Sorry!

[Cory Primm · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found myself weighed down by Tom McCarthy's multifaceted variance, helping bring to my awareness Mallarme, Joyce, Kafka, Burroughs, Derrida, Ruscha, Tristam Shandy, Kathy Acker, Ruscha and countless others. He is an exceptional writer and offered me new points of view on cinematography, anticipatory modernism, art, philosophy and other interesting modes of thought.

[Clayton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very clever.

[Óscar Brox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solo por el texto sobre Sonic Youth, Patty Hearst y el anhelo de rebelión ya merece la pena su lectura. El resto de artículos, como mínimo, provocan no pocas ideas e impresiones del presente.

[Lukas Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Could’ve used more jellyfish. Note: not actually a fish.

[Themasalachaiblog · Rating 5 out of 5]

A new person?
Definitely I am.