Calvino, Murakami, Pynchon, and Dick battle it out for the title of Official Favorite Author of ILX

All told, a bit predictable: like a grad student praising Derrida...

I tried to read the crying of Lot 49, but the print was way too small, so I gave up. Calvino, he wrote a book about an umbrella guy, yeah? I gave up after 10 pages.

I hate the Pomo/mod- classification. What makes an author modernist and another a postmodernist has never been clarified (discussions of this on ILX are muddled). I reckon Pynchon could have easily been classified as a modernist had GR come out pre-war (it seems to be really abt the date of publication).

I've read abt 25-30 dick books. Most of them are fantastic.
Pynchon= GR and crying lot of 49 (a counterpart to 'three stigmata...'). Both authors are v enjoyable. will read the best of this stuff again for certain and can't decide what is better here.

like i said on the other thread: calvino's 'Don giovanni' has some great pieces but 'marcovald' was twee-ish. Perec might be better at this ('life...' is one of the best things i read all year). Read one Murakami, which i enjoyed ('wind-up bird...'). Haven't felt like reading more but prob will.

I'm a nonfictionist, however (everyone is surprised again) if I had to pick some authors I'd say Lethem, Stephenson and Robbins, certianly not those four up there. Dick's good but he's not great. And DEFINITELY not Eco.

I like Amis, Ellis and Houellebecq.

I guess it'd be asking too much to want Henry James to be ILX's favorite writer, but...surely we can do better than those four, no?

Also, I am reading this comprehensive history of american architecture right now. It is good.

Also, next I think I'll read the Collette biography. Or cColette or whatever.

Also, I am drunk.
Hi.

Pynchon isn't all that great, Calvino's a little better. I still have to read some Murakami.

I think that as of Vintage Murakami's publication this coming ... January? ... all of the New Yorker Murakami will have been published in book form, but I could be forgetting something.

But that's how I think of Pynchon! (Even though I like him.) Which I guess is why I have the association.

the Fantes, David Gates, etc.

This says nothing about me whatsoever.

NA loves Pynchon!

(Oooh, snap!)

(Motherfucker! Xpost!)

Yeah, I think it's pretty accurate for that, and that it should be clear there wouldn't be any such thing as "the ILE consensus on best author." These four are probably a large part of the common ground; authors most of the posters-on-book-threads have read and have things to say about.

Murakami's the only one of them I'd put in my favorite authors, although he's sort of in a special category with Twain and Fitzgerald as far as that goes. Calvino's If on a winter's night would be among my favorite books, but none of the other things I've read by him have been the same kind of fun so far (which makes sense, given the book).

About Donald Antrim, though-he gets compared to Calvino a lot and has a few fans on this board, namely myself, Gareth, and nabisco.

(Everyone else got a dick joke, I wanted one too.)

I'm going to go check out Antrim on Amazon.com; what titles should I click on first?

I like all of them (only three at present), but I guess The Verificationist and The Hundred Brothers are the strongest.

Calvino - 42 results found
Murakami - 96 results found
Pynchon - 100 results found
Dick - The server is 660.66666% too busy right now

We totally need a statscock for namechecked authors, movies, etc.

(No we don't.)

(No I'm not.)

Of these four I'd pick Pynchon because I think he's the most obviously interesting writer from a language perspective although his plots could use help (admittedly they are almost secondary) and he sometimes has a juvenile sense of humor. Dick I haven't really read enough of but always had the impression that his output was diluted by a number of bad novels. I really only read Androids and Valis/Albemuth though. Calvino is good but a one trick pony. Murakami always seems like he'll be good but I think the translations must be shit because they (Wonderland, Sheep Chase) read like high school attempts at cool lit. Also Wonderland commits the VAnilla Sky sin of bringing in a character to explain the incredibly obvious plot to you like you're an idiot.

My favorite contemporary writer is Brian Evenson.

And you've never seen it again?

*weeps*

S. FREUD: Hello Harukai.

Dick sorta paved the way for Pynchon for me, but reading his stuff now I've lost the "whoa" rush.

Calvino can me great fun.

Murakami can be... interesting.

Funny, that's the feeling I've gotten off of everything I've read about him. Never actually read him though, so what do I know. I guess I like/have read Calvino the most off the list, but I like Henry James and W.G. Sebald better than any of them. It's high time I got into Dick, I've only read 'The Unteleported Man' (which I don't remember) and one of his late "proper" novels, whatever it was called.

Ya punk. Good call on Stephenson, though. Except, as Matt Maxwell notes, he can't actually END a book to save his life.

I've always wanted to like Pynchon more, but I've had a hard time with him. I read Lot 49 a long time ago in kind of a blur, and I read half of V recently but it dragged too much for me to get swept up in it.

I've purposefully avoided Calvino because I know this dude whose two favorite books are probably If On a Winter's Night a Traveler and Infinite Jest, and whenever he talks about them, I get the impression that he likes them because they're so dense and heady and they make him feel smart in this annoyingly pretentious way. (I've given Infinite Jest more of a chance because I like other Wallace, but it does annoy me, too, and I've therefore only read 100 pages.)

I guess I've never really felt like reading Dick. Probably because of the silly taboo against genre writers. (One step closer to Piers Anthony!) But the more I read about him, the more I get the sense I might like him...

though if we are talking ilx popular, then i'd just replace dick with either auster or houellebecq. but what of bulgakov and kafka? sinclair?

Good point, I spose I mean unfashionable authors, or even unPC authors, which is tricky territory.

Kundera is still quite hep if this Adam Thirlwell bloke is anything to go by. Examples of good unPC writers: Borges, Waugh. Unfashionable writer: Julian Barnes (also hasn't done anything good for a long time).

if I had to pick some authors I'd say Lethem, Stephenson and Robbins, certianly not those four up there

Er, who? This'll come across thick but: who? RL Stephenson? What do they write about?

Pynchon - Lot 49 was really good, but I've never been able to get all the way through any of this other novels.

Dick - I've never got through more than 5 pages of ANY of his novels.

Calvino - I've never read, so I can't comment.

I've read several Murakami novels, and found them utterly engaging and thought-provoking. The plots were obscure, yet compelling enough to keep me reading them.

(I mean, the novelist I've been reading the most of lately has been Margaret Atwood - has there been a thread about her? Actually, I think there has been after Oryx and Crake (which I haven't read yet))

I've only read a few things, but he seems to be pretty great. My favorite contemporary writer is, predictably, Gary Lutz.

Is Houllebecq that popular here? Atomised got talked about alot, but I don't remember that talk being overwhelmingly positive.

Oh, and TOVE JANSSON, people!

''though if we are talking ilx popular, then i'd just replace dick with either auster or houellebecq. but what of bulgakov and kafka? sinclair?''

well the reason I said these three (murakami, dick, pynchon) were popular among ILX folk is no of threads and posts and so on. Auster etc are nowhere near that (or have i completely missed something here).

Kafka is someone I always enjoyed. Have bought a couple of sinclair novels and will read (or try) but he only had one thread and some ppl couldn't get much out of his fiction though 'lights out...' is admired.

Ballard: Read one, read 'em all?

TS: ideas vs style

(Not a necessary oppostion, and yes Ballard has *a* style, but...)

Haha I read upthread to see a mention of "Eco", which I read as "Ecco" as in "The Dolphin". B-b-but it's spelt with 2 "c"'s didn't anyone read Sega Force back in the day OHHHHHH...

Er, who? This'll come across thick but: who? RL Stephenson? What do they write about?

Jonathan Lethem ("Motherless Brooklyn"), Neal Stephenson ("Snow Crash") and, I guess, Tom Robbins ("Jitterbug Perfume"?). I meant to read the first, love the second, and have never heard of the third.

Stephenson also wrote Cryptonomicon, which is sprawling and enormous and filled with ideas, which leads people to compare him to Pynchon. Snow Crash is the better book though, a perfect neat artifact of cool in that "got the cash, feeling flash, in Leicester Square" sense.

Ben Marcus's one book beats anything thus mentioned (possibly excepting Snow Crash).

how abt both?

Ben Marcus's one book beats anything thus mentioned (possibly excepting Snow Crash).

Adoring the St Et ref, but am terrified that book by someone I've never heard of ever evah is better than Henry Green (or indeed James, Waugh, Borges, Ballard - well known writers). Bio? Themes? Is he scifi?

''TS: ideas vs style''
how abt both?

I said that they weren't necessarily opposed, but that for my money they sometimes are in the Sinclair/Ballard axis. I said JGB has *a* style of coruse, but...

(Also, my original picks for the battle were Murakami and Pynchon, and then Julio added Calvino and Dick, which is weird because those are the two that I prefer.)

as i recall on the 'reading' thread you said: Murakami, calvino and then i put in pynchon and dick but anyway...

ILX authors I've read and find boring: Murakami, Auster, Tolkien

even his newspaper
stuff as Myles na GCopaleen
is off the hizzo

Lanark brilliant,
"White Dog" is Borges-worthy;
what else should I read?

Ben Marcus has two books, although one of them is a short story collection (the Age of Wire and String; the novel is Notable American Women, I think). As for it not being as good as Snowcrash: well, they're attempting entirely different things. Marcus is an experimental fictionalist, Stephenson is a glorified genre writer (although he consciously, I think, has tried to move away from that). I like the ideas of Snowcrash but think the writing is embarassing and the ending is stupid and the pizza delivery thing is lame. The Diamond Age really impressed me and I haven't been able to read the other two because they're too big to carry on the train. Sentence for sentence William Gibson is still the master of that stuff, I love his writing, although plotwise he's fallen off alot and suffers from sequelitis ("why finish a story in one book when I can drag it out over three?")

Well the function of language is to help us know the difference between things, and there is a big difference, face it, between a run of the mill policier, which even its author will admit is being written according to a format, and a book by James Joyce.

They are two different things. Yes, there might be some crossover, but not enough to dissovle the boundary.

It was Jonathan Coe talking about the effect it had on him that made me finally borrow it off my sister.

I've got some short stories of his that I still haven't read because I am crap and also don't tend to like short stories much. I'm saving Lanark up for something.

Incredibly OTM. Sorry, Enrique, but this is the kind of segregation of literature I have thoroughly hated.

But so is much of the literature seen to be 'experimental'! See, that's the thing -- it's one genre with its own particular visions and constraints placing itself above another. A total mug's game.

So I put on some Mozart, or maybe a Beatles LP, and made some pasta with scallops and drank two beers while it cooked. Then the phone rang.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/10/19/pynchon_and_homer/

Holy shit!

Yeah, exactly. I hate when people use "author" as though it only refers to novelists.

-- Spencer Chow (spencercho...), October 21st, 2003.

Now that is one of the most... interesting top-three lists I've seen. Er... risking bait for a repeat of my pere-fils tirade, I ask: which Amis?

A man was spreading powder all over the road when a policeman came along and said. "What are you doing?"

"Spreading elephant poison to get rid of the elephants," said the man.

"But there aren't any elephants around here," pointed out the policeman.

"I know," said the man. "Works well, doesn't it?

"ev. i. dence.
-- Haikunym (zinogu...), October 23rd, 2003."

Wodehouse vs Eggers

Julian Barnes vs Kathy Acker

Alexandre Jardin and Amelie Nothomb vs Georges Perec

Daniel Buckman vs perzinesters who find it cute to refuse to learn to spell

OK

obviously when you question la sterzinger you are answered with more questions. or have to hit google again. ah well.

with the folks who write
'zines' other than to make a point
that I just don't get?

but their plotlines seem
hardly 'non-pretentious' ann--
you just hate perec?

in general I
agree kinda that "the New"
isn't just "the Best"

but there have been some
(Cortazar, Borges, Donald
Barthelme) who WERE

Barthelme: delicious.

Was an author who does something really unique TRYING to do so? I don't think so. Zennis, anyone?

o'brien or dante
or soyinka or [this list
edited for space]

pretention is good
sometimes, sick cow makes new path,
if nobody tried

anything new we'd
still be back with beowulf
(a 'zine, after all)

oh and re: perec:
you must have some freaky-ass
van stories. do tell.

ACtually, I don't have any real stinky Steely Dan stories. Perec just reminds me of such a scene in this incredibly bad short story I wrote while I was just learning to write them.

REFER to old saw about the millionth page.
If you get a book deal before you write it -- you never get there.
You just keep screaming "LOOK! OVER THERE! A METANARRATOR! HOPA!"

This is by definition untrue. Most pseduo-experimental books are formulaic, but not truly experimental ones.

(there's a famous "not getting it" quote from stockhausen which i can't exactly remember, where he says "Of course the improvisation in jazz is not truly improvisation, as many patterns appear again and again"

you can have formula at the level of the word, the phrase, the sentence, the passage, the paragraph, the section, the chapter, the book or the work (last two may be the same thing, and obv there are other possible "lengths" you cd set yr analysis to examine): you can be experimental w.conventions at any and all of these levels ("all" is fairly unusual), but as often as not the power of a work depends on the crackle generated between freedom and/or invention at one level versus familiarity and/or formula at another

it's true that genre is sometimes treated by timid or cynical writers as a kind of prison ("if i don't stick to these rules no one will read/pay me") but it can just as well be treated as a liberating climbing frame, and now and then is

(eg you don't get good sentences in philip k dick, especially, but that's not what you'd read him for)

it's true that genre is sometimes treated by timid or cynical writers as a kind of prison ("if i don't stick to these rules no one will read/pay me") but it can just as well be treated as a liberating climbing frame, and now and then is

This is an industrial fact about the publishing industry, the really churned out stuff. The real pulp (which doesn't exist quite today). The stuff no-one remembers.

You're right that one shd not INSIST on difference. I'll say there's an interzone between the two, between Joyce and 'Created by' Clancy, but for language to operate there must at some point be acknowledged differences between things - if we've been shown that these ought not be taken too far, no-one has managed to get rid of difference entirely.

ie TS: "something specific lots of us agree is great" vs "something vague except for its by-definition badness"

this suggests you are less confident in yr thesis than might appear on the surface

(antonioni can eat a dick versus any western ever as far as i'm concerned, in re piffling content-free lameness AND "formula" - ie his formula = HIS FILMS ARE NO GOOD - but that's just taste, possibly)

Not really: 'free' has ended up as being a branch of 'experimental' music but it is a continuum, part of the history of jazz and not something separate from it. Ayler would have played differently in the 1930s. Ornette et al were working on different concepts but its still in the spirit of it.

yeah sure there is some 'free' stuff i don't like but that may be to do with execution or other factors. It may fall into certain conventions too but isn't that the same for most music.

When Parker or Monk first released recs, or when ellington did something different, its has been seen in some quarters as 'not jazz' (that's what i got from reading around and also from watching that doc on jazz a couple of years ago).

(antonioni can eat a dick versus any western ever as far as i'm concerned, in re piffling content-free lameness AND "formula" - ie his formula = HIS FILMS ARE NO GOOD - but that's just taste, possibly)

Obviously!! In that I haven't read half the stuff here, including unremembered genreists - Dick and Chandler are genreists, but, within the publishing industry, better treated than others. My lack of confidence has nothing to do with the argument.

But anyway, I like Antonioni AND Westerns (and I'd rather read 'The Big Sleep' than Joyce this evening); I don't think there's anything content-free about his stuff - so nerr. He has a formula, or his style hardened into one (but he was pushing film form in a way Hawks never did, surely?), but the point I was making was not genre=bad, experimental=good, nor was it that the two are totally different, absolutely incompatible.

I was just that saying there's no difference at all is just as unhelpful. And that was why I was being hyperbolic.

Enrique would you say there is non-genre music?

I'm not qualified to say, but I think some music is more generic than other music.

Oh, STANISLAW LEM. Gray's "10 stories" reminded me of Lem's Perfect Vacuum/ Cyberiad stuff.

This is by definition untrue. Most pseduo-experimental books are formulaic, but not truly experimental ones.

That's just not how the term is used. Experimental literature isn't necessarily an experiment in and of itself, it's just working in a tradition that has been called "experimental" literature, focusing on a set of tools that have been ignored by the mainstream, and often working for different aims than mainstream writing. But literature is not science and these are not actual experiments!

I mean, to repeat the example I used earlier: "This Is Not A Novel" by David Markson is clearly an "experimental" novel, even though the experiment is largely the exact same one he did in his novel "Reader's Block". If you're arguing that, because it is familiar, it's not really an "experimental" novel, then what is it?

*pronounce first syllable all frenchified, second one like as in Johnsons ha ha get it oh dear well never mind.

Yes, sort of, but qualitatively different than the goals of pulp writers. I'm trying not to use evaluative language here, note. I love classic Hollywood more than any installation/gallery film.

Are we just using "genre" in a different way?

I doubt those that swear they write for art's sake intend to fit some imaginary box.

That said, I'm not sure that's how Enrique is using the word.

This doesn't mean that experimental writing isn't a genre, but it's true that it isn't genre writing in that limited sense.

But that doesn't mean that experimental writing isn't a genre -- doesn't have rules as codified (and as likely to be broken) as those of "genre writing" genres, such as mysteries, isn't riddled with its own cliches and its own traditions, etc.

Yes, probably, I'm speaking in terms of the publishing industry, and I think that, even if modernist novels are lumpable-innable together, that doesn't make them a genre in the same way that detectives novels are.

I've only read The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera but it was amazing. I read the UK edition and I heard (from my uber knowledgeable English professor) the American translations are not so good.

I haven't read the others, but I've heard good things about Dick's Ubik and Murakami's Norwegian Wood and the Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

Of these four authors, though, I'll have to take Mr. Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow is just so staggering an accomplishment its only peers in my mind are The Silmarillion, Invisible Man, At Swim-Two Birds, The Waves, Ulysses, Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, and Gargantua & Pantagruel. Just an absolute celebration of human verbal and narrative genius. And coming after a perfect little novel like Crying of Lot 48, too.

Calvino is an amazing writer, but I've only ever read his shorts--Invisible Cities, Cosmicomics, and a posthumous odds & sods collection. It's hard to compare those little pieces, as delightful, compelling, and assured as they are, with a colossal epic like Gravity's Rainbow.

The only Murakami I've read is his story in last month's Harper's. It was quite good, but of course not enough to go on.