dudes who get a bad rap for being beloved by high school/college students

bukowski
salinger
sartre

Dave Matthews

not a dude but ayn rand

also that is a deservedly bad rap imo

dudes is gender neutral in this case

i dont think high school/college kids like dmb anymore, hes like a mid-20s former-frat guy think now

*thing

b marley

Chomsky

what college student still reads Sartre for pleasure?

sartre fair enough

high school/college students

xxpost I read The Flies and Dirty Hands sorta for pleasure last year when I was taking a class on Nietzsche

nietzsche sort of falls into this category too but not as much as sartre does

jim morrison

Do high schoolers still worship Jim Morrison? Back in the early 90s, it seemed like everybody I knew had a copy of his "poetry" books.

Hesse?

lol i doubt if anyone in my high school ever heard of sartre

ya, ilxor eazy has confirmed that college kids still have jim morrison and reservoir dogs posters in their dorm rooms.

i was thinking hesse. kerouac?

Hesse?

― Dr Morbius, Friday, December 12, 2008 10:14 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^ yes!! meant to put him in the first post

orff (for carmina burana)

kerouac too

I think you dudes are vastly overestimating the degree to which most college students are actually interested in philosophy and literature

is this "deserved bad rap" or "undeserved bad rap"?

Sartre's bad rap is well deserved for his intellectual failings but he's a passable playwright and 'Le Mur' is actually a very good short story collection.

ralph nader?

its just "bad rap" where the belovedness by young ppl tends to be central to quick n dirty putdowns

for example--i like salinger, dislike sartre, hate rand--but if im lookin to get a quick lazy zing in against any one of them its going to be "crap that high schoolers love" or wv

tarantino

ya good one... i guess the other bit is that these are ppl producing specifically for older audiences so like... harry potter or whatever doesnt count

salinger sucks

whoever wrote that book 'the diceman'.

Dane Cook

thank you whiney g weingarten

i think dane cook doesnt count quite as much since hes basically targeting a college audience

naomi klein

fight club dude

noam chomsky

The Beatles.

radiohead

Wow, that's spooky, I was just typing "Noam Chomsky" (xxp)

Chuck Klosterman

you are both 45 minutes late with chomsky. but it is fun to say chomsky over and over. chomsky. chomsky.

People Who Make Trance Music

another way of putting this is maybe "stuff that you wouldnt think twice if a college kid was reading it but might judge an older person for reading or listening to or whatever"

you are both 45 minutes late with chomsky

haha i thought this was some sort of double-edged joke about how we are too old to understand students nowadays. i ctrl+f'ed for "noam" and didn't find it :(

public enemy (at least in my hs/college years)

cornel west

thread inspired btw by seeing a guy in his mid-30s reading a bukowski book on the path train and having a kneejerk judgment response

Isn't Naomi Klein eclipsing Chomsky?

haha there was a big profile of her in the nyer highlighting how much college kids love her

do hs/college kids love Kerouac anymore? My (college) students don't seem to read much these days so I have no idea.

that omnivore's dilemna guy is way hott too now.

most of this was otm when i was in hs/college (the '90s)

xpost ooh pollan is a good one

Do high schoolers still worship Jim Morrison? Back in the early 90s, it seemed like everybody I knew had a copy of his "poetry" books.

I predict that Kurt Cobain will soon take over this slot - I've see tons of kids with long-ish hair and Nirvana shirts who seem to be treating him the same way a past generation turned into DOORS FANS.

that weed dealer who wrote a book.

if any of you guys were to write a hipster gardening book you would be $$$$$$$$$

u know i dont think it really even matters that 14-22 y/os actually technically love these dudes so much as these dudes rep is at least in part 'hs/college thing'

lol i started this thread and becoming predictably butthurt when ppl mention dudes who i like a lot

any weed dealer

George Wendt

cornel west otm
rhcp

i actually disagree abt pollan tho since his appeal seems so widespread to me that i wouldnt ever be like "40 yr old dude why are you reading omnivores dilemma thats shit that we got over in college!"

yeah i would put him in a special "dudes who have squarely middlebrow appeal" but highbrow people give him props too!

do hs/college kids love Kerouac anymore? My (college) students don't seem to read much these days so I have no idea.

― Euler, Friday, December 12, 2008 3:37 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Barack Obama.

everyone mentioned in this thread except like 3 dudes totally deserve the "rap" therefor not "bad" see

i was wondering how long it would take for someone to say obama

63 minutes

Do high schoolers still worship Jim Morrison? Back in the early 90s, it seemed like everybody I knew had a copy of his "poetry" books.

I know an hs teacher who dreads teaching juniors; "They all suddenly discover the fucking Doors."

Papa John

this is a difft category than 'middlebrow appeal' tho, to me this is a really specific phenomenon separate from general "white ppl love this"--im having trouble articulating it, its like those authors that you really associate with high school and college (regardless of whether hs/college kids read them) and that you dont see many ppl over the age of 20 reading--bukowskit, sartre, hesse, salinger and to some extent rand and kerouac are like the perfect example of this... i dont really see pollan as the same thing

Born in 1948, Larry Harvey grew up on a small farm on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. In the late 1970's he moved to San Francisco, and soon discovered the city's thriving underground art scene. In 1986 he founded Burning Man at a local beach, and has guided its progress ever since. Larry likes the word "prodigious." "Primal" would run a close second. "Looming" and "vast" would doubtless place. He has, by his own admission, a grandiose imagination. This is tempered by a love of people and a keen appreciation of their characters, capacities and creative ideas. In his role as spokesperson for the Project, he is known for his hat. The famous Stetson, a pearl gray 7 3/8" Open Road, seldom leaves his head. It is worn, he tells us, in remembrance of his father, who wore the original.

kurt vonnegut

William S. Burroughs?

vonnegut is pretty good

I don't really get a lot of the names bandied about on this thread. I don't doubt that Cornel West appeals to some academic-minded students, and I don't doubt that he gets a bad rap in some quarters, but I don't see how the two are related at all. I don't watch Cornel West on Tavis and think "oh God, that guy that college kids like."

Also I was not aware that Michael Pollan was "beloved by high school/college students" nor that he even has a bad rap. But I don't spend a lot of time around the 21-and-under set.

Chuck Palahniuk. One of my best chums wrote his thesis on him – still haven't read it, or Palahniuk.

scott said chuck already

palahniuk def falls into this category tho

so you haven't read yr chums thesis nor have you read the thread--shame on you

yeah, i don't think that pollan gets a bad rap. just noting that that book is hott with college kids and 20 somethings.

i think chuck and kerouac and salinger are the best examples. bukowski, too.

This is all seems quite male-dominated

omnivore becoming one of those must read books for young people (and older people too). or young and old libs anyway. like people's history in the past. or bury my heart. or silent spring.

collegehumor.com

Sylvia Plath
Anne Sexton

ani difranco
sylvia plath

xpost!

To be clear about the question, is it because the dude is arguably bad that he gets the bad rap and hs/coll students are too callow not to fall prey to his allure or is it that the dude is arguably good but gets a bad rap 'cause people get into them when they're young and annoying? It's not the same thing.

no, its not, but we can do both!

I thought we were!

i think say bukowski falls into the first category and salinger falls into the second... but theyre both def dudes whose rep is "high shool authors"

ya i think we are too

yeah my litmus test for this is if i would mentally lol at an adult for being way into one of these dudes, ie not radiohead or pollan etc.

Tracy Jordan

"stuff college kids like"

ya thats the right kind of test jordan, i think i said upthread if you saw someone reading these dudes you would probably judge them

ani / plath otm

I was gonna say allen ginsburg but we might as well just say the beats and get burroughs/kerouac/corso et al in one shot

salvador dali
mc escher

don't trust a kerouac fan over 30...

Max, if it makes you feel any better, I understand exactly what you're trying to do with this thread and I wouldn't be able to articulate it either.

its a little bit more specific than that icey

noam chomsky

Tracy Jordan

tracy jordan is not a real dude

"stuff college kids like that no one else does"

'Cause ragging on Nietzsche just 'cause kids first run into him in hs or college isn't really a critique of his work at all, it's a critique of society and pedagogy and publishing, etc., and a pretty dull one at that and i don't care if you don't learn about Rand until you're 40, she's still an insufferably lame thinker and dull writer. Kerouac, otoh, is one of the authors one really SHOULD read when you're young, like Salinger.

carrot top

x-post

I agree with the premise of the thread. What grown ass adult would ever cop to loving Salinger or Bukowski? I think Borroughs belongs in the "post-college" category ... best appreciated after getting a degree in literature but still having that "I'm young and totally unbent!" perspective.

Kerouac, otoh, is one of the authors one really SHOULD read when you're young, like Salinger.

yeah. also Thomas Wolfe, though i think he is less beloved now than say 30 years ago

yay burt's here

thomas wolfe too. you should read him when you are young.

ya nietzsche is tricky, i dont think hes nearly as good an example as sartre, but almost

hahaha x-post!

high fives scott

Elizabeth Wurtzel

cliff notes

if some 40 year old told me they were reading some sylvia plath I'd totally be thinking "aren't you a little old for that?"

she is awesome but there's a time and place for everything

Can we merge this thread with the 'Indie electro": the worst genre ever?' - they have a lot in common.

Jean Baudrillard

OTM^^^

nietzsche has a longer shelf life but still... this is a major plot point in little miss sunshine and it wouldn't be the same if the dude was reading heidegger or hegel

also, lacan/derrida

Foucault, Debord, etc...

a fair few lecturers like baudrillard/lacan/derrida etc.

xpost

and them and zizek

I wish Henry James was beloved by college students.

Edward, props to a kid who COULD read Hegel.

Ha ha, Alfred, I read 'The Ambassadors' in hs for fun.

so basically reading philosophy is "lol college"?

how many people read philosophy outside of college?

haha i way disagree w/ you guys about those french philosophers--i mean yes they count in the same way ntz does, i think certain readings of ntz or foucault or derrida, and that undergrad fanaticism about it, are def'ly confined to college--but these guys are major figures in academia while sartre for ex. isnt

yeah, you see a kid reading nietzsche = been there little man you'll work through it, you see a kid reading hegel = whoa respeck knuckles

xp to michael

I wish reading philosophy were lol college.

that's mean to sartre. he invented the whole celeb french philosopher thing that those dudes inherited. sure he is not a 'major figure' insofar as he's been superseded. but they will be too, if they haven't already been. (i'm coming at this from a pov that he is nowhere near as campus-big now as he was 40-50 years ago.)

xpost to max

yeah i mean don't you have to read those philosophy dudes in philopsophy 101? you certainly don't read kerouac/salinger in lol college class

i've never tried to read hegel. i tried to read kant once. i didn't last long.

sartres been largely superseded cause hes just not that smart--it will be a lot more difficult to supersede derrida & foucault (at the very least), who have already had two-three more decades of staying power and whose work tends to have a lot more 'depth' or wv than sartres does

how many people read philosophy outside of college?

― scott seward, Friday, December 12, 2008 10:12 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i don't, but if i saw a chick reading derrida or whatever i wouldn't be like "lol u immature" in the same way as ayn rand or jim morrison poetry or whatever. maybe this is just the difference between high school infatuations and college infatuations though.

max, I'm just saying that their bad rap comes from the fact that college kids, some of whom only barely understand them, seem un-shut-up-able at a certain point during college about post-structuralists and their ilk.

yeah that i totally believe, see for example, me

I think being into some of these philosophers is kind of lol college because part of it's college kids being pretentious about how they're really into philosophy, and part of it's how a lot of these philosophers inspire the kind of deep epiphanies college kids are prone to have, like "omg this book is blowing my mind about SOCIETY."

I know quite a few philosophy types, none of whom would be seen dead reading Derrida or Foucault or French philosophy in general

i read sartre novels in high school. i liked them. the age of reason....um, and a couple others. nausea, maybe. i would never read him now.

thanks tom case closed

"sartres been largely superseded cause hes just not that smart--it will be a lot more difficult to supersede derrida & foucault (at the very least), who have already had two-three more decades of staying power and whose work tends to have a lot more 'depth' or wv than sartres does"

doubt most of this -- it's kind of subjective, but put it this way: i don't think the legions of derrida and foucault readers out there are smarter or more depthy than the sartre stans of yore.

lol, deleuze & guattari

(though i'd prob assume the person reading it was a postgrad student rather than an undergrad)

speaking of little man, wilhelm reich would be my own personal example of this

I read 'Le Mur' every five or six years to remember what it was I ever saw in Sartre. I still really enjoy it. Age of Reason, Paths of Liberty, etc., are a bit dull.

thanks tom case closed

Just sayin' like, they are sneered at by people with bigger brains than mine

no i agree with that ignition! but youll note that sartres moment in the academic spotlight was what, a decade? whereas foucault & derrida have a lot more academic staying power--in terms of stans obv, college kids will always find someone new who they can quote to blow ppls minds

the dude that brought the keg to yr party in the woods

anyway as much as i love these philosophy j/o seshs were getting kind of off topic

What about Borges or Kundera or Nabokov? I don't know if they get much of bad rap but if they did, it might stem from youthful logorrhea

"but youll note that sartres moment in the academic spotlight was what, a decade? "

not sure. depends where! i think in france it was longer than a decade -- and also he was more of an active public figure in that time, signing manifestos and intervening in debates.

whereas foucault has been noticeably reticent in recent years.

controps:

hunter s thompson (at least fear + loathing in las vegas)

tracy jordan is not a real dude

Yes, Jordan, there is a Tracy Jordan. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Tracy Jordan! It would be as dreary as if there were no Jordans. There would be no child-like faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

i was thinking of reading american psycho. i've never read it. part of me wouldn't want to be seen in public reading it. i feel funny when i play the grateful dead at home too. i think people are gonna walk past my house and say lol deadhead. i would feel this way about bob marley too if i ever played bob marley at home. reggae in general just reminds me of college kids. that and drum & bass.

I know what this thread is getting at, I was one of these assholes. In hs I read Sartre, Salinger, Kerouac and the Beats, Nietzsche, Eco, lol Rand. But I'd rep for all of them still except for Rand, and would rep hardcore for Kerouac and Nietzsche.

Kundera yes the other two no

thank u nicole

man how did we go so long without these

FREUD
MARX

zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

HST is spot-on for this. i was def a dude who read and annotated and cited in totally unrelated papers his collected letters. cringe

does anyone read castaneda anymore?

i want more chicks to post on this thread--i think there is a v. distinct dude version of this that tends to love hypermasculine individualists like bukowski, sartre, ntz... wondering if theres a babe equivalent beyond plath

What about books like The Master and Margarita and The Alchemist?

marijuana

anyway as much as i love these philosophy j/o seshs were getting kind of off topic

philosophy j/o seshs seem pretty on-topic?

good point nicole

xp

margaret atwood?

Ha, Scott, I was just thinking of Castaneda.

i was gonna bring up zen and the motorcycle too. i can't believe kids would still be reading that. they are probably reading that lost in alaska alexander supertramp book instead.

The moral of this thread is basically don't ever be seen reading any book outside your home.

no, they definitely are. had a college-age friend of the fam bring up Zen and the Art... over thanksgiving.

that tends to love hypermasculine individualists

Hemingway? To his credit, he led me to Fitzgerald and I'm eternally glad of it.

lol my friend who is questing across america right now is a big castaneda fan

Jaymc, M&M doesn't have a bad rap. It's universally adored, I thought.

don't ever be seen reading any book outside your home.

^^^ something actually beloved by high school/college students

fitz doesn't seem to have a bad rap--hemingway yes but that's mostly because he seems a little overrated?

see I love the youthful enthusiasm for these books: there should be no shame in most of these (save Rand).

yeah, I just heard somebody on NPR this week talking about zen + taomm

I almost got lucky with a rather coquettish and cute blonde, once, but after I noticed she had both Castaneda and Rand on her rather sparse bookshelves, I suddenly remembered a pressing appt elsewhere.

god i loved ayn rand in high school. not ashamed to admit that. how could i not love her? i was so obviously better than everyone else. never could read we, the living though ("petrograd smelt of carbolic acid" is, i believe, the first sentence though. "who is john galt" being atlas shrugged first sentence. and "howard rourke laughed" being fountainhead first sentence. i think. it has been ages.). or anthem. i had my limits. read atlas shrugged, like, 3 times. i read the stand three times too though back then.

hunter s thompson? I saw the trailer for the film about him today and it was kinda offputting how it was marketed like he was a can of pepsi.

yeah is stephen king on this list or no?

let that be a lesson to coquettish and cute blondes everywhere

xp

how about kafka?

more importantly, calling things kafkaesque

Bret Easton Ellis kinda popular with a certain subset of HS/College ladies. At least in my experience.

70's edition:

alan watts
richard brautigan

kids still reading sufi mystic poet rumi these days? i used to dig him.

has anyone brought up kafka? cuz he is someone who might be smeared with the youth/college brush. and it WOULD be a bad rap to dismiss him as lol high school/college lit. cuz he was genius. same with camus really.

kafka x-post

stephen king is beloved by EVERYONE

Brautigan, yes. Not Kafka though.

how about Gabriel Garcia Marquez? maybe??

one of my classmates is sufi!

Harold Bloom

stfui

Trent Reznor

aww

saul williams

slam poetry

dystopian lit like 1984 and brave new world

do college kiddos read Harold Bloom???

Scott, I loved Atlas in HS too, and also read lots of Michener so I assume that basically I was trying to find books that took me more than 1 day to finish.

Have never read any other person mentioned in this thread, and now it's too late to drum up youthful enthusiasm for any of them.

His Modern Critical Views have lots of short, dandy essays for those students who want more than Wikipedia.

(xpost)

Wait that's not true, I read Stephen King. More than just HS students like him, actually it's probably cooler to like him as an adult -- I think somewhere in college you feel "above" King and only later can admit to the guilty storytelling pleasure.

i want more chicks to post on this thread--i think there is a v. distinct dude version of this that tends to love hypermasculine individualists like bukowski, sartre, ntz... wondering if theres a babe equivalent beyond plath

lots of girls i know had de beauvoir books on their shelves...it feels like some obvious answers here are on the tip of my tongue.

i still love bret easton ellis.

I think you dudes are vastly overestimating the degree to which most college students are actually interested in philosophy and literature

― With a little bit of gold and a Peja (bernard snowy), Friday, December 12, 2008 7:18 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Jaymc, M&M doesn't have a bad rap. It's universally adored, I thought.

I guess so. It just seems like something college kids get really into. I've never read it.

I didn't discover Bulgakov til well after my stroll through the groves of academe were over. You should try him, though, esp. M&M.

I just read M&M this summer. it was great! but I also think Harold Bloom is pretty great--you can't deny he's a smart guy

we need more women on this thread so that they can confirm my hypothesis: ladies love kundera. (and tom robbins. and marquez.)

I think you dudes are vastly overestimating the degree to which most college students are actually interested in philosophy and literature

― With a little bit of gold and a Peja (bernard snowy), Friday, December 12, 2008 7:18 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

― cool app (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, December 12, 2008 11:45 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

u know i dont think it really even matters that 14-22 y/os actually technically love these dudes so much as these dudes rep is at least in part 'hs/college thing'

― beyonc'e (max), Friday, December 12, 2008 10:39 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol @ kafkaxpost

i haven't read a stephen king book in years, but i'm kinda craving his new short story collection for some reason.

I read Crowley's "Diary of a Drug Fiend" in college so him. Amok press?

jurassic 5

(dated joke but worth doing)

Scott OTM wrt Tom Robbins.

not really

xp

Okay that was hyperbolic, I've read some Salinger and an Anne Sexton poem about how much she loves her children. Or something?

xp oh god I did read Tom Robbins. Cannot confirm hypothesis re Kundera as I never read any even though I sort of wanted to b/c a boy I liked read him.

anarchist cookbook

timothy leary & baba ram dass

What's funny about a lot of these people, even the ones I hold in high esteem, is that when I read one book I liked by them back in the day, I read pretty much every other thing they wrote. Fitzgerald, Marquez, Kundera, Bulgakov...

How about Adrienne Rich?

She crossed my mind, but I think she's generally well respected too, right?

Don't all girls who major in English get really into...

http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/14660000/14664919.JPG

You know, almost everything in this thread I was aware of from other people/working in a bookstore, but my opinion was always: "These are 'hard' books that smart people read." And so I read something else.

i've never even heard of that, jaymc!

Jaymc, re: Rich

Amongst people in the know, yes, but I knew lots of artsy chicks in college who seemed to love being caught reading her and it made me very suspicious of her work.

Laurel, isn't that the same justification you used for not voting?

i haven't read a stephen king book in years, but i'm kinda craving his new short story collection for some reason.

I had the same reaction, probably cause in retrospect night shift/skeleton crew are the best books he wrote. I can't see myself seriously sitting down and reading cujo or salem's lot but I would read one of the short story anthologies no prob.

haha jmc, my gf still has that and 'herland' on her bookshelf xxps

Night Shift was excellent.

"How about Adrienne Rich?"

neruda, dude!

scott beat me to tom robbins

i still like kundera

i...i have never read a whole stephen king book. i feel like i have, though.

yellow wallpaper otm

jaymc otm re yellow wallpaper

also i don't think stephen king is a good example of this--people still love the guy. i was not OTM suggesting him

"Don't all girls who major in English get really into..."

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/055321330X.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Neruda, Yeats, Dylan Thomas...

Fell in love with them in hs, but i still love them. Does any one of them suffer from association with the youths?

playwright edition:
arthur miller
tennessee williams
sam shephard maybe?

Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.

okay these have to be joke posts now, right?

and maybe Bruckner, too, eh jaymc?

Rimbaud

No idea who Bruckner is.

whoever said escher and dali upthread was on-point

tennessee williams tooooooooooootally, though i did read him in lol college

stephen king is a sidebar conversation here. I don't think he's particularly associated with an age group, but lotsa lit nerds grow out of him early.

sort of astonished that nobody's said Murakami yet, since I know of FOUR PEOPLE (including myself) who have read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is about five more than most of the stuff in this thread

it used to be so easy. don't hit on the girl reading...

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/c1/c6505.jpg

or

http://www.equalitygiving.org/files/Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgender-Books/glbt-Books-Rubyfruit-Jungle.jpg

chris morris. he is still kinda overrated, tho.

yeah i think stephen king is like a gateway drug for young readers. they start reading his stuff and then start reading lots of other stuff--that's how it worked for me.

rimbaud yesssss

baudelaire

but seriously, Arthur Miller? I think you are confusing "gets a bad rap among the general public because students love him" with "gets a bad rap among students because they are forced to read him in high school when they would rather be playing Xbox"

i don't really think of murakami as lol college though

I want to go to a high school where the kids are reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Maybe in France?

does anyone still read:

http://www.gibsonbooks.com/shop_image/product/1570.jpg

he's not generally required reading nor really a sign of pretentiousness or "deepness". i guess the pretentiousness thing could be argued.

xp

"I want to go to a high school where the kids are reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire."

i was reading them in high school! i was a dandy.

lol I read The Prophet in high school b/c a girl I liked gave me it and suggested I read it. Then she turned me down for a date after I read it. Damn.

thoreau
rousseau

Jaymc, re: Rich

Amongst people in the know, yes, but I knew lots of artsy chicks in college who seemed to love being caught reading her and it made me very suspicious of her work.

Lesbians?

The goffs were particualrly rife with Baudelaire fans when I was in hs and way too many Jim Morrison fans read Rimbaud. I used to torment them by telling them he useless in translation.

Neruda, Yeats, Dylan Thomas...

Fell in love with them in hs, but i still love them. Does any one of them suffer from association with the youths?

Neruda possibly, but I'm not sure. Yeats and Thomas are definitely safe.

Also, the title of this thread made me think of my third year grad student friend who's dating a high school senior....

him: "but i'm still a student, so we've both never been out of the educational world, i don't have THAT much more life experience"

Maria, is his name Svengali?

him: "but i'm still a student, so we've both never been out of the educational world, i don't have THAT much more life experience"

lol, what's the exact age differential?

arthur miller = high school lit nerds get wowed by reading death of a salesmen or the crucible the first time, not really the general population

lotsa high school kids get into rimbaud / baudelaire via jim morrison or should I say via NO ONE HERE GETS OUT ALIVE which should probably be #2 or #3 post here

the litmus test for all these is: you see a 40 year old sitting in starbucks reading any of these, what do you think? a) wow, that person has awesome taste, b) really, still?, c) huh, must of gone back to college lol intro to lit

b

i think it's 8 years.

dude edward, i took one non-russian lit course in college ever, i still have lots of "classics" to read! just very slowly, interspersing them with fun books, so it will probably take me until age 40. i think what marks these books is some level of extremism and general unhappiness with the world as it is, like the ayn rand, salinger, & sartre suggestions above.

yeah, see, i haven't read a lot of these and now i'm gonna be all self-conscious about it

Come sit in the dim corner with me, Ev.

Edward as a corollary to your question, this is much of it, the contemporary starting points in the 'canon' and as such a person with a modicum of curiosty and a tatse for lit, will have read much of it, usually starting in high school.

i've only read like salinger and kerouac on this list

don't be self-conscious, a lot of these are really great

joyce
shakespeare
wordsworth
delillo
pynchon
sinclair
every good writer ever

eww @ the grad student/high school senior

louis what are you going on about

in my personal life the quintessential "college" age writer was Bataille. My freshman year, I started dating this girl who ended up being my longest relationship at 3 years ... and in the third week she gave me Story of the Eye. It's like a right of passage, I guess, going from innocence of highschool life to something darker, stranger, more sexual.

I can't imagine what it'd be like to read it again now.

It's a laugh a minute

some people have taken this thread too far, i mean nabokov's been mentioned ffs

and it's "country matters"/"handsome stranger", plz

I nearly forgot, I wrote something once about an encounter with a college kid who was into Brautigan and Hunter S. Thompson.

Me and one of my old flatmates used to open it at random and read passages and be on the floor in stitches (xxxp)

i am a bataille stan but will totally cop to his writings college-ness, the fiction in particular

Story of the Eye is a pretty funny book, which was apparently intentional.

I hope so

yeah i think we used up all the good ones in like the first 100 or so posts and now people are stretching

maybe need to think beyond authors to musicians, filmmakers, etc. there are plenty of those that haven't been mentioned yet

lol wes anderson

That guy that did Magnolia etc

andrew bujalski

u guys are out of touch

didn't read this thread btw

this thread is making me all defensive! for what it's worth, i would not be ashamed to read plath, kate chopin, de beauvoir, atwood, or the yellow wallpaper in public and i am no longer of lol college age. also, seriously, lay off salinger, people!

but i recognize the thing you're talking about, max.

i really, really, really don't think de beauvoir counts. really.

i would definitely be going for the girl who read bataille, lemmetellya. or even the girl reading kathy acker or dennis cooper.

i still read brautigan every once in a while. he's still a (sexist) hoot! the hawkline monster is sublime. maybe he does get a bad rap after all. he is more AND less than people say he is. kinda like bukowski too. i mean, post office and ham on rye are probably worth reading at any age.

wait aren't you secretly still a college student horshoe??????

oh man i thought i was up-to-date with the bujalski ref.

but wes anderson is more 20s-30s now fo sho.

shut up evan!

XD

hahah hs i was getting butthurt over michael pollan and derrida, but i actually meant to make this judgement neutral hence avoiding "deservedly" bad rap since i too am a salinger fan

btw i think the last 100 or so posts are stretching it in a big way

gilman and de beauvoir were both assigned in grad school classes of mine, true. plath easily could have been.

"That guy that did Magnolia etc"

if we are also talking high school then how about the guys who did saw, hostel, and all those transporter, shoot-em-up, etc movies too.

i really, really, really don't think de beauvoir counts. really.

Why not? Apart from 'The Second Sex' she's not a great writer and it's generally in hs or college that one first reads her. It certainly was so for me.

of all the 50s existentialists de beauvoir counts the least if she counts at all

do lame dudes still rent "wild at heart" so they can get into their girlies' pants?

these were courses on "arrested development, girl-style"

xpost i guess i was reading max as meaning authors whose work becomes less relevant to the over-30 set, and i don't like the implications of de beauvoir's work being irrelevan to the over 30 set.

i don't really care about de beauvoir as an existentialist.

you guys are discussing this at an above-HS/college level

anais nin?

its not about relevancy, its mostly just about juding ppl over 22 who are really into this shit, for example, if ur 35 and cant stop talking about nausea: JUDGED, if ur 35 and cant stop talking about the second sex: probably not judged, unless youre totally unfamiliar w/ feminism otherwise

dude i saw reading bukowski on the path: JUDGED
guy i met applying to grad school on the back of a paper he wrote about hesse: JUDGED

okay i see what you mean. few 35 year olds would not be able to stop talking about the second sex, because that would be like talking endlessly about the vindication of the rights of woman. its ideas are assumed. sorry for bristling.

its coo, if u cant get butthurt about your favorite books what can you get butthurt about

What sucks about the real world is that you don't come across too many girls who have even heard of Bataille, let alone would have given you Story of the Eye at college age. North Brooklyn isn't much of a help considering both the natural born residents and the transplants have a big handicap when it comes to reading English.

(or French, though that's probably more common)

i dont think high school/college kids like dmb anymore, hes like a mid-20s former-frat guy think now

anecdotal evidence from younger relatives indicates the contrary - still quite big on campus is my understanding

your life is so hard burt

Damn straight. I guess that shit doesn't matter anymore anyway.

As a high school teacher, most of this thread is lol ridiculous. Does lil wayne count?

anais nin?

Yes. The porn it's OK for girls to like.

but this thread isn't really about HS students.

xpost to self

kmfdm, sex pistols, nofx, metallica, megadeth, ska, jam bands

not really sure how many times i need to say that this isnt really about what hs/college kids ACTUALLY IN REAL LIFE are reading in bulk but what books/authors have this reputation, deserved or not

delillo is sort of otm, i think? i remember a three year span when almost everyone i knew read white noise and talked about it a lot. also an author i love, so i don't mean it dismissively.

i think delillo has too much of a postgrad rep to really count--or maybe im still to young to reach the age where i learn that delillo sucks

some books/authors offer elements completely missed in the high school reading

somewhere there is a board of high schoolers listing things old dudes pat each other on the back for giving up on

delillo doesn't suck goddamnit i hate this thread!

i actually do know a lot of english grad students who are snooty about delillo but that's because they hate fun,

^^^i am one of these but i like donnie just fine

i also like (some of) salinger

evan's right. grad school has warped my reactions to this thread.

ee cummings?

are there dudes who get a good rep for being hated by high school students

I felt like I was kind of alone in my DeLillo fandom in college, but then a couple years after college it seemed like a bunch of people were reading White Noise.

if we carry on going down this path someone's gonna say "william carlos williams" and i will be forced to kill

t s eliot

xp But then someone gets to quote nabisco's poem about "this is just the memory card / that I saved over" and you'll feel all better.

in my one and only lit class during my one and only failed attempt at higher education the professor had us read The Names by Delillo, Slaves of New York, and Goodnight Moon.

(that's how i became a Delillo fan back in 1987/88.)

I'm kinda confused as to whose getting nominated because they are actually good/great but get a bad rap because of their most vocal audience (Burroughs, Nabokov, etc.), and people who deserve a bad rap because they are both bad and have an annoying audience (ie, Ayn Rand, Jim Morrison's poetry, most of Sartre)

delillo doesn't suck goddamnit i hate this thread!

― horseshoe, Friday, December 12, 2008 12:58 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

sorry delillo doesnt ACTUALLY suck just in the WAY THAT I AM TALKING ABOUT which isnt ACTUAL SUCKAGE u kno?

sorry max i am a basketcase, clearly. no one is allowed to talk about any books ever!

Jim Morrison's poetry would be a good handle

i think part of what bothers me about this reflex is it seems a little self-hating. like, "god, i remember when i read all that plath, teenage girls, ugh!" we were all teenage girls! plath is awesome!

if anyone suggests nabokov gets a bad rap again i will repost every ilx thread about nabokov in full to this thread

great thread max

way to freak everyone out on a friday

suggest nab

s it seems a little self-hating

...

i mean inasmuch as i recognize this impulse, which i totally do, i think it's a little self-hating!

show me a high school kid who's into delillo

I was actually never a teenage girl, contrary to some reports.

we were all teenage girls!

lol a "little" self-hating

If Nabokov ever gets a bad rap, it's for being a bit of an ivory tower, precious, egghead. Hs/Collge students often affect that pose imho.

A little? On ILX?? Noohh, I mean -- what?

should i start a compainion thread, "which author were you most butthurt/defensive about who showed up on the hs reading thread"?

that should clearly be my thread to start

Bold type looks funny on here. It's so...blockish.

"books about which i have no sense of perspective"

high school kids who are WAY INTO reading anything are generally A++++ (and then they find ilx and the decline sets in)

"if you tell me you hate delillo it's like you shat on my kitchen floor and punched out my mom"

btw HS this thread is also about chekkin yourself when you get this impulse n thinking... 'should i really be judging this dude for reading bukowski'

Avram Noam Chomsky

yeah, i can read that in your early posts, max! i know you love books; it's cool. i'm a crazy.

there are definitely categories of stuff on here, from "awful shit that only appeals to high schoolers" to "good stuff that gets an undeserved bad rap because people are forced to read it in hs/college". i'll leave it to nabisco to sort it all out.

part of the deal with this shit is that in hs / maybe college, people come to think of reading these books a mark of superiority, which is bullshit and later you come to recognize this; but then you judge others reading these as similarly trading in bullshit, and (often unjustly) dismiss the book as being bullshit.

you're forgetting good stuff that gets an undeserved bad rap because lol college kids are inclined to get deep with it and maybe take it too srsly for a minute but it's still actually good you know

Next up: Shit that gets a good rap 'cause you read it and fell in love with it before the age of ten.

star wars, pizza

and yeah this is totally self-loathing - I'm not gonna hold it against any college kid (much less a high school kid ffs - especially for most of the stuff mentioned!) for reading Salinger or Bukowski or Burroughs or Naomi Klein or Nietzsche whoever. Cuz I think those folks are for the most part decent writers who have something valuable to relate to a particularly youthful mindset, there's nothing wrong with that. I wish everybody read Debord and Vaneigem and Foucault at some point in their lives, you know? Personally I don't need to read it NOW, because um I've already read this stuff and I don't feel any real need to go back to them, but holding such reading habits against a younger generation seems stupid.

Now I will hold it against anybody who's reading Ayn Rand (lolz FUCK YOU Alan Greenspan) or listening to DMB or whatever. Because they suck.

It can be a little self-hating, I am an example of someone who was really into Ayn Rand at one point in HS and now I look back and laugh (disclaimer: I'm liberal! I'm even religious! I'm against everything she stands for!), but it shouldn't be self-hating when you're thinking about GOOD literature you used to like. (lol xpost)

Also, I don't think anything kids are forced to read in high school would count as "beloved" and be eligible for this thread, because everyone I knew in high school blew off anything we had to read (apart from "The Stranger," that had a lot of appeal in my English class, which makes it the one thing we read that DOES fit).

dude edward, i took one non-russian lit course in college ever, i still have lots of "classics" to read! just very slowly, interspersing them with fun books, so it will probably take me until age 40. i think what marks these books is some level of extremism and general unhappiness with the world as it is, like the ayn rand, salinger, & sartre suggestions above.

totally agree that there should be some degree of angsty-angst o this miserable world outlook that resonates with the kids.... which is why I wouldn't put joyce, shakespeare or delillo on my list

which is why I wouldn't put joyce, shakespeare or delillo on my list

mine wasn't a serious list, it was a howl of protest

bill hicks

apart from "The Stranger

Excellent choice. My French teacher lent it to me (first book I ever read in French) and I read it in French then English (to make sure I'd gotten it) then in French, again.

delillo is sort of otm, i think? i remember a three year span when almost everyone i knew read white noise and talked about it a lot.

see the difference is that the general book-reading population experienced this, not just high school or college age folks

i kind of want to read "a confederacy of dunces" because i never got around to it when i was a teenager but i feel a little embarrassed to buy it for reasons that are well summed up by this thread.

mine wasn't a serious list, it was a howl of protest

are you trying to appeal to high school/college students?

http://poetrydispatch.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/howl.jpg

haha i actually thought that when i posted

Confederacy of Dunces is a really funny book you should read it

J.D, snap out of it. At a certain point, one of the great things about being out of hs/college is no longer giving a fuck.

i'm in the same boat re: confederacy of dunces, except the only thing i'm embarassed about is not having read it already.

a lot of stuff is like, you "get it" even better when you're older, i think.

okay, i guess the white noise thing just happened while i was in lol college.

show me a high school kid who's into delillo

― kuntrie/hardrock-tributes (goole), Friday, 12 December 2008 18:08 (31 minutes ago)

I, too, would like to see this mythical beast.

are hs/college kids still into bill hicks?

I started CoD but I just couldn't get into it.

CoD is awesome and funny and great

bill hicks is a good one

CoD yes

I must be weird in that I never heard of Bill Hicks until after college.

It can be a little self-hating, I am an example of someone who was really into Ayn Rand at one point in HS and now I look back and laugh (disclaimer: I'm liberal! I'm even religious! I'm against everything she stands for!), but it shouldn't be self-hating when you're thinking about GOOD literature you used to like. (lol xpost)

hate's a strong word, this is more like being patronizing

there's good for your age and then there's good for any age and some of this stuff just resonates more when you're in the throes of hormonal surges and trying to figure out the meaning of life or understand your place in the world

I read lautreamont's maldoror this year and, though it was enjoyable, on some level I felt like I would've dug it a lot more when I was 18

I gave a book report on Sartre's "Nausea" in high school when I was 15.

Now I'm 37 years old and I just made my grad students read his "Outline for a Theory of the Emotions". Sometimes you never get over a first intellectual crush.

can't believe i forgot henry miller! i think i read everything he wrote by the time i was 21.

that's old school! i don't think he's widely beloved among the under-21 age groups nowadays.

scott u old lol

by rights I should be reading raymond carver or something else by grumpy old men with kids

henry miller is for shit.

I gave a book report on Sartre's "Nausea" in high school when I was 15.

man I hope the slipcover was BLACK

What about Huysmans?

henry miller turned me on to other stuff that i really ended up liking and that lasted longer in my life. i give him props for that. john cowper powys. jean giono. krisnamurti.

Huysmans is grad student shit. No kid knows what that is.

I did, burt.

Or maybe, speaking of Miller, Larry Durrel?

I think post-college ennui is a phase with its own literary choices. Like, Joy Division is good post-college ennui music. Lost in the world, don't know where you are, finally have responsibilities and stand on your own but it's like, new and scary and shit. etc. I'd put Baudelaire in there.

case in point, while googling for the cover of howl I came across this:

http://photos-e.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v191/210/16/1048050085/n1048050085_30098636_7648.jpg
Nothing inspires me more than listening to Ginsberg recite the footnote to howl each morning.
His words changed me forever. This photo is really important to me, and I hope that it captures a fraction of the power and insight provided by Mr. Ginsberg's holiness.

howl's a cool poem and everything but you generally don't see this kind of reaction when somebody reads it at 40. I assume this woman will look back one day and say lol college.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2401/1782727851_14ba6f75a5_b.jpg

my dissertation adviser will rep hard core for later Sartre (ie, The Critique of Dialectical Reason)...i've never had much time to read any of that. But he said he did a semester long course where they went page by page through Being and Nothingness with Frederic Jameson as the prof...so there's possibly something to it!

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2084/1784362672_0abd03e2dc_b.jpg

there's a "personal" category for this kind of thing and I feel you on the huysmans, michael. wilhelm reich's listen up little man was a big hit with me in high school too.

nobody else was reading huysmans or reich in high school (aside from super lit nerd friends) but their preciousness and blustery hyperbole are geared toward the adolescent mindstate.

on a related topic, what hipped me to bataille in high school was andrea dworkin's description of the story of the eye in her book pornography. feminist FAIL.

de sade?

"andrea dworkin turned me on to georges bataille" sounds so wrong

wow, didn't know dworkin was dead... RIP u crazy lady

look, andrea dworkin supports this thread from beyond the grave:
Dworkin began writing poetry and fiction in the sixth grade. Throughout high school, she read heavily, with encouragement from her parents. She was particularly influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Che Guevara, and the Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg.

her wikipedia article is a treasure trove

In the early 1980s she had a public row with her former friend Allen Ginsberg over his support for child pornography and pedophilia, in which Ginsberg said "The right wants to put me in jail," and Dworkin responded "Yes, they're very sentimental; I'd kill you."

high school heroes FITE

So what's appropriate to read -after- highschool and college? Middle brow NY Times bestseller crapola?

if any of you guys were to write a hipster gardening book you would be $$$$$$$$$

― scott seward, Friday, December 12, 2008 3:39 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

saw a review of a hipster in the city gardening guide in an issue of toronto's free weekly a few weeks back.

after college you should only read what oprah tells you to

So what's appropriate to read -after- highschool and college? Middle brow NY Times bestseller crapola?

milton. basically milton is the only thing.

spengler on dating

haha spengler or the nu-spengler

after college you should just only read blogs, duh

yes, no time for bulky books

also good are biographies of US vice-presidents

as long as they are in blog format

there's some thread around here where someone says that reading full-length biographies of presidents is the fatal sign that you've forever crossed the line into boring adulthood

if so i def crossed the line this year :(

I <3 nu-spengler

he's quite the prognosticator

Democratic candidate Barack Obama may spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected Senator Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential pick and lost a surefire path to victory. As Obama marches to defeat, John McCain has made the masterful choice of an Alaskan amazon with a steelworker spouse.

awz i thought i was a-1 nuspengler superfan on ilx

he is amazing and hilarious

nu-spengler is the ed anger of the blog ra

"So what's appropriate to read -after- highschool and college? Middle brow NY Times bestseller crapola?"

i post what i read on here:

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/NewAnswersControllerServlet?boardid=55

oops, i meant on here:

Fall 2008 is on it's way so please be kind to tell us what you read

blog era, that is

"nu-spengler is ed anger of the blog ra" is clearly a track from the new fall album

right now i'm reading bruce jay friedman. he rules.

In my high school/early college days, in the mid-to-late 90s, it was certainly hard to see the forest through the trees as a fairweather Tori Amos fan.

Same goes for Jeff Buckley, Belle & Sebastion, & probably lots more.

Not necessarily the "dude" himself, but I would say this about Joyce's Ulysses. I know b/c I was one of those English dork undergrads who became obsessed with it. There were several of us, and I'm sure we annoyed the fuck out of everyone else.

Ulysses - subject of 1,000,000 comically misguided & pretentious undergraduate theses.

there is nothing wrong with liking joyce!

or Ulysses, jesus people get a grip

haha you just fell for it

fuck this, i'm going to go work in a soup kitchen

write stream of consciousness about washing dishes

show me a high school kid who's into delillo

when i was in high school i asked the school librarian (who knew my tastes) what i would like and he recommended white noise. i liked it! although i think i rolled my eyes a few times at the obviousness of some of it.

xposts: Dude you totally missed my point. Personally, I think Joyce is rated just about right in the 20th Century cannon. He's like the MBV of modernist literature.

*canon

I was briefly entangled with a Milanese girl (she turned out to be a MSI supporter) who was reading a translation of Ulysses in Italian. I still can't even imagine doing how one would translate that book.

i think all joyce translators just smoke a lotta pot

jesus people?! On this board?

Even better would be a translated version of Finnegan's Wake. Shit, is that even allowed? Then again, we've all read lots of poetry in translation, so I guess so.

finnish finnegans wake

kish for crawsake. Omen. So sigh us. Grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the boord. Whase on the joint of a desh? Finfoefom the Fush. Whase be his baken head?

not the finnish translation, obv, I just love that paragraph. Anyway, we digress..

i want more chicks to post on this thread--i think there is a v. distinct dude version of this that tends to love hypermasculine individualists like bukowski, sartre, ntz... wondering if theres a babe equivalent beyond plath

i was reading the hypermasculine dude stuff in hs/lolcollege! there was a bit of plath/charlotte perkins gilman/margaret atwood. but i was never a stan about them.

*One last Joyce aside: I just realized that Finnegan's Wake reads like a compendium of Cocteau Twins "lyrics."

I think you have that the wrong way round

yeah, well, you know what I mean

yeah, i was more into the hypermasculine individualists too. also the dalai lama and christian apologetics, but i don't know if that's a more girly thing or a more me thing....