Which classic author do you dislike the most?

Or, to the contrary, which one do you like the least. Define "classic author" however you want.

More interested in hearing about writers who you have a personal "issue" with than writers who you think are unimpressive or overrated.

sorry, not "to the contrary". should have said "alternatively". was leaving a door open for boring people who like every famous author.

I feel like this is always going to be Woolf for me, and I feel like that kind of makes me a dick.

cf ILX passim

It's not so much that I dislike Faulkner as that I can never get far enough into his books to see anything I like. I bounce off his prose within a few paragraphs.

have you read Absalom! Absalom!?

disclosure: i like faulkner, but that one is the only one i experienced as absorptive.

I used to agree w/ you about Woolf, thomp, but I came around via Dalloway. I think Joseph Conrad and Henry James are possibly the worst.

there's a set of writers who are usually roped into the literary canon who i don't rate as writers but

For amusement he tried by looking ahead to decide whether the muddy object he saw lying on the water’s edge was a log of wood or an alligator. Only very soon he had to give that up. No fun in it. Always alligator.

Heart of Darkness? That sentence is the lone log of wood in the whole dang novel. Just can't make myself try again.

I haven't read Absalom! Absalom!, for the simple reason that I've never managed to read more than a few pages of Faulkner and Absalom! Absalom! is much longer than that. I am neither proud of, nor ashamed of this fact. It is simply the truth.

two authors i've grappled with and ultimately come down, i think, against are dostoevsky and david foster wallace. they are both crude moralists in disguise. i also detect a streak of misanthropy in their work that they paper over with bromides about universal sympathy etc, which i find really off putting. maybe i should read infinite jest first, but in oblivion and brief interviews with hideous men, the characters aren't people so much as examples of social rot or the hideousness of existence. i have more time for the essays.

david foster wallace indeed sucks but i don't think any grownups actually consider him "classic"

i dont rate dostoevsky over tolstoy et al but i think that conflict between what he seems to to think he's doing vs the moralism is a big part of the attraction. he's a fundamentalist and probably not a great dinner companion but there's a vividness to what he's doing that puts him in that rare class of writers who are something like a visceral experience.

sorry, the conflict being what he seems to think he's doing (the moralism) vs what reading his novels actually feels like.

i mean, i know you didn't mean to class him with DFW but....just that comparison shows what leagues he's operating in.

I have only read Pamela but I feel like that alone is enough to say RICHARDSON. I can't even imagine the discipline of the modern day reader who successfully finishes Clarissa. Or even starts it.

infinite jest has a lot more humanity than anything i've read among wallace's short stories fwiw

I personally have not made it through any Hawthorne other than "The Minister's Black Veil." but im still willing to blame myself at this point.

as i lay dying

dandelion wine

sun also rises

cannery row

umm I dunno I am having high school flashbacks and forgot this is author not book

authors: jane smiley and um have to leave for class now

henry james. tried a bunch of different stuff and could never break through.

also the quentin chapter of sound and the fury is probably my favorite passage in any book but ive never made much progress in any other faulkner

i dont rate dostoevsky over tolstoy et al but i think that conflict between what he seems to to think he's doing vs the moralism is a big part of the attraction. he's a fundamentalist and probably not a great dinner companion but there's a vividness to what he's doing that puts him in that rare class of writers who are something like a visceral experience.

― ryan, Sunday, November 16, 2014 8:24 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this works as a description of gogol for me. dostoevsky doesn't really transcend the pedantry to me. he's "visceral," and memorable, but i think that this stuff is successfully mobilized in the service of his agenda, and not a separate element. i wouldn't, like nabokov, claim he isn't a special author. but i dislike his books.

oh boy, two henry james mentions before alfred even opens the thread

quincie, the sun also rises is one of my favorite novels. brett's entrance ("oh darling, i've been so miserable") bill's whole laconic steez ("must be swell being a steer")...there's just so much there. haven't read much other hemingway, though

^^^ would fistfight all these Woolf haters

off the top of my head, I don't think I hate any classic authors--my reverence for literature is just too great, I can find something to value in almost any book, even if it's just "this was important for a certain class of people at a certain historical moment"

... with that said, the Beats have a lot to answer for

I tried and failed to get into several DH Lawrence novels. That's probably the only 'classic' writer that I've really made a honest effort to read more than one of their books, and it was just like a brick wall of boredom.

I should clarify that I have tried&failed to read LOADS of classic books, but never so many by the same person. Apparently if I don't like one of your books, I'm not going to try another.

oh dang, DH Lawrence is a good one

What's that book about that, Out of Sheer Rage?

henry james ruined books

Dickens
Vonnegut
Updike

i like henry james. cuz he's so fucked up. i dunno, you either follow him down his strange path or you drown. it's completely understandable that people would avoid him though. he can be really hard to enjoy. and books are fun to enjoy. but the bizarre sentences intrigue me.

it's possible i have a hard time with nabokov for the same reasons that james haterz hate james. i drift when i read him. i re-read the same sentences 20 times. lack of enjoyment. i like some of the early books though. i kinda hate Scrabble though. and word games in general.

but for me the big one is pynchon. just have 0% tolerance for some reason. like having to read a zappa record i don't like. smart dude. no doubt. but not funny to me and not compelling enough for me to put in the effort. and i can just read roth or elkin or bellow instead cuz they were just as smart and way funnier. (pynchon humor reminds me of male nerd sci-fi writer humor, but i can take the sci-fi groaners. they are more endearing to me? i dunno.)

i can't read DFW fiction at all. i liked a couple of the essays. i can't read a lot of those guys though. that whole crowd. they bore the hell out of me. so did soundgarden and pearl jam. i don't know WHO people will be reading from that time period in a hundred years. a total mystery to me. late 80's to early Y2K american writers. i doubt it will be lethem and franzen though.

and, yeah, the beats...you would have to pay me to read them. i tried in high school and even then it was such a chore. genet too. zzzzzzz............i love grove press, but how many unread genet and rechy books have i bought over the years? the covers are so nice though....

i wanna read more trollope and hardy. if i can ever stop reading crime and sci-fi paperbacks.

dickens is fun!

oh yeah updike. can't read him either. so tedious. richard ford is truly the son of updike. both make me zzzzzzzzzzz............

nobody reads mailer anymore. will be totally forgotten in 5 or 10 more years.

'the essays are okay and i haven't read infinite jest' isn't really being 'against' dfw, imo. disclosure: i haven't read infinite jest either.

man I've tried with Dickens.

I don't much like Nabokov. It's not his fault though that he's often cited by people who think his bejeweled prose is the gold standard for novelists.

xp i should have said that some of the essays are OK. the one about dostoevsky where he talks about how in 21st century we need novelists to stop playing verbal games and teach us How To Live seemed hostile to the idea of art as i understand it and i despise that point of view. also the one about how we need to reject irony, which he thinks television invented, is pretty dreadful.

i sort of like that kenyon speech though, even though it puts forth some of the same ideas. probably because universal compassion is something i like, i just don't think that literature should be held responsible for shaping the culture in that direction

Kerouac def on my ugh list.

aw i love nabokov's prose. his love of the english language is so fervid

I've gotten in discussions where people say, "You love Cheever but not Updike?! Why?" All I cay say is, "Cheever was weird, Updike was prolific."

sadly nabokov does hate orwell, one of my other favorite writers, though. which totally makes sense, since nabokov was so against literature "meaning" anything (or at least readers reading with that purpose in mind) while for orwell his writing -- and, he'd argue, all writing -- was nothing if not overtly political

i always found dostoevsky HIGHLY entertaining. you know, like a page-turner. very exciting to me when i was younger. but i haven't read him in years.

in general, i find all the great russians pretty great.

More people need to read Turgenev! He always gets shut out.

alfred knows how i feel about "first love"

xp oh i don't deny dostoevsky's exciting to read, scott. but there's something rotten at the center of it. his books leave me feeling bad.

gogol, tolstoy, and chekhov are three of my all time favorites. pushkin too -- i don't buy that he is untranslatable. dostoevsky is the only russian author i dislike.

really, all the turgenev i've read has been outstanding. even the comparatively minor on the eve is pretty devastating

And, hey, Harry James loved Turgenev too.

lol my first thought was faulkner

i dislike roberto bolaño.  

i dislike salman rushdie.

i remember being extremely put off by alexander pope when i studied him in college.

That's ok. People who met Alexander Pope irl were often put off by him, too.

i've only read one ernest hemingway & didn't dislike it at the time but in retrospect i fear he is disgusting

IMO the whole heroic couplets emulation thing and 'cave of the spleen' & c is culturally super foreign enough to be crazy diggable. Tho I would never have read him for fun. xp

lolj

faulkner def
everytime I try to read him i feel like i'm having a stroke so he is at the top of my NOPE pile

vonnegut
i like reading interviews with him & he seems like a chill dude but his books have some weird appeal for other ppl that I just do not get. i get annoyed when ppl try to make me get him, as though I'm not reading him correctly

pynchon
pretty much the same thing
yall have fun, i''m out.

RIP big guy but Gabriel García Márquez

back when i was in thrall to VN i was v much for tolstoy over dusty, for the reasons treeship gives: theses are antithetical to art. the last couple years this has changed; i won't bore everyone by posting about demons again but i started to feel that dostoevsky's people are so passionate and insane that they throw all kinds of sparks off each other that are hardly part of the neat xtian schema: demons and notes from underground (need to reread c+p and bros-k, which i last read when i was in high school and thought theses were the point of art) raise impossible tugging questions about people and their character and their happiness that cannot be fully resolved even with jesus, and i think D knows this. midway through a reread of anna karenina right now actually, to check where i stand, and i think i'm still w leo, the greatest omniscience ever, but it's a lot closer than it used to be. (worth noting that nothing in dostoevsky is more didactic than levin and his goddam wheat. gorky claims somewhere that when tolstoy dragged him out into the fields to achieve grace through labor, the peasants rolled their eyes at each other behind the count's back.)

anyway, cormac mccarthy.

that is, in the same way that in tolstoy there's always the friction between his vegetarian-saint's conviction that art should morally instruct and the talent+instinct+lust that makes him just wanna think of different ways to describe anna's neck for 500 pages, in dostoevsky there's friction between a similar conviction and the total bewildered insanity of all the different voices in his head. in tolstoy's case this friction is my favorite part. need to do some more investigation of it re dusty.

all american authors. can't think of a single one i really like.

http://shannonsweetvalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/svh048.jpg

http://cb.pbsstatic.com/l/69/5169/9780823405169.jpg

real talk tho: america can coast until it falls imo because it won the novel before the first hundred years were out
http://www.skipjackmarinegallery.com/mm5/graphics/00000001/12215_white_sperm_whale_Greg_Pezzoni__marine_carving_reg.jpg

(just wanted to jog the memories of the 50% of people in any room who hate that book to death)

Hesse, total snooze

Updike, tho I really enjoyed Nicholson Baker's U & I

Dislike the Jane Austen industry too

But Austen herself is actually ok?

I don't think DFW, Bolano and Rushdie are in the canon just yet. I reckon we need to define this a bit more, maybe as authors that are in the conversation a long period after they've been published. They should be in it especially if they come back after being published and fallen out of favour/forgotten.

Anyway I have problems with half of the canon.

But I'm good at avoiding it -- I know what I likes etc.

I tried and failed to get into several DH Lawrence novels. That's probably the only 'classic' writer that I've really made a honest effort to read more than one of their books, and it was just like a brick wall of boredom.

― franny glasshole (franny glass), Monday, 17 November 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Try the short stories and a selection of his poetry.

henry fielding
modernists

j/k because i love woolf but ugh modernism

dh lawrence def but i refuse to accept that he even has classic status

i want to say hemingway but the writing is too good :/

t.s. eliot (except for prufrock)

Lawrence is in the canon, he has not been out of the conversation :-)

More people need to read Turgenev! He always gets shut out.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 17 November 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My favourite of the 'classic' Russians. He is read, maybe not as talked about (not so lol contemporary).

I have only read Pamela but I feel like that alone is enough to say RICHARDSON. I can't even imagine the discipline of the modern day reader who successfully finishes Clarissa. Or even starts it.

a undergraduate term doing 1740-1830 was based on Clarissa (and The Prelude), so it was imposed on me… it was a strange reading experience, intense but not pleasant – she is trapped! you are trapped! There's a bit of me that still feels bound to him – like I was quite excited to find a complete Charles Grandison for kindle, so it's sitting there but I cannot really imagine reading it (though I think it would be interesting, for that academic sense of 'interesting', ie 'there's stuff to say about this but it's making me feel physically ill staring at these boring boring pages'). So he'd be a pick if it weren't for a Stockholm Syndrome reading experience.

Anyway, Defoe, Bunyan, Henry James (+ quite a lot of Victorian discursive prose).

If you took the old narrow poetry canon, ie the usual 2 dozen dead white m., then Spenser would be at the bottom for me.

Dickens and Hardy, I think because I don't care at all about Britain so the setting is off-putting. but people I admire vouch for Hardy so I should give it another go. I love Courbet, so maybe I should try to read Hardy like I regard Courbet's works, or else I should just read Zola.

xp to self

I've got v mixed feelings about Orwell, but I'm going to throw him in so that I can make a set of tiresome English allegorists w/ Spenser and Bunyan.

it's interesting to me reading non-Brits' opinions of British writers. you're mainly all wrong, but it's interesting to me.

Lawrence is maybe the only literary big dog i find nigh unbearable.

except the poems and short stuff.

Not to be all save-a-mid-century-hipster, but I think the beats are at the receiving end of an academic intellectualist snobbery. A professor cabal. There are a few babies in the bathwater, even if the balance of it is tepid. Ferlinghetti + some of the mid-career Kerouac I would stand for in the same way I'd stand for Salinger or Kesey.

I love Hardy so much that I even read one of his minor forgotten novels last year (Two on a Tower eh)

i want to say hemingway but the writing is too good :/

― horseshoe

try For Whom the Bell Tolls

still a few of the minor hardys i've never read, but have read his early attempt at the sensation novel. not very good.

I m struggling through Hardy's poetry at the mo.

Had to read Return of the Native at school, turned me into a Hardy-hater for life (""Everything human in the book strikes us as factitious and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs." - Henry James on Far From the Madding Crowd)

xpost: with the poetry i guess i jumped in at the deep end with the dynasts (actually remember enjoying large chunks of it) but have only dipped into the complete poems now and then. think ezra pound was a fan of the shorter poems, no?

David Mitchell - "Hey I know this neat trick with a million dimensions and story-lines and concentric realities and multiverses and can get everything to get tied together in the end after a loooong long ass book..." ugh. I really can't stomach this shtick.

Always thought Eco and Rhusdie were highly overrated to, but 'dislike' is a bit too strong a term.

Mitchell isn't a classic author tbf

True.

do we have a thread where we talk about the import of setting to our appreciation of novels? like I get this is a Lit 101 topic but I'd like to read people's views on this, because it seems to matter a lot to me.

As in "set & setting"?

I just mean where the novels take place?

Can't really imagine being more or less interested in one fictionally depicted country over another. All countries can be interesting in the right author's hands.

Yes, weird that it would matter to anyone.

"all countries can be interesting in the right author's hands"---well, maybe, but maybe not *as* interesting as another country is in another author's hands. but I guess this is what you can't imagine? seems weird to me that it *wouldn't* matter!

i'm interested (and non-judgemental!)

what settings do you like/avoid, dude?

I don't like books set in Britain or the American Northeast, any era (save New York which I can tolerate). There are exceptions for Britain: I adore Wuthering Heights and To The Lighthouse. (Can't think of any American Northeast exceptions.) this is gonna sound terrible but I find British place names really grating, all those Stakeford at Arse and so on. I'm a native English speaker but those sorts of names, where I grew up (in the suburban American south) are McMansion subdivision types of names, loathsome looking places, and the association is hard to break. It's so superficial! & I bet Stakeford at Arse is a great place, very friendly, jolly pubs etc. but the aura for me is boring.

weird! then again, i can't stand the name Nicola in a novel for some reason...it just seems like such a novel-y name. also, i couldn't stand the name Tietjens in Parade's End. i don't know why... we all have our things, i guess...

What kills my interest with any setting is local-color exposition detached from a character's perceptions or actions. If the writer can provide some physical realism without sounding like a guide book, I'll usually keep reading regardless of setting.

The original post is a tough question. Some classic authors I find boring, but my tolerance for that kind of boredom is pretty high.

One novel that has thwarted multiple attempts over 40 years or so is Frankenstein. As a teenager I bailed on the book as soon as the lack of monster action became apparent. As an old dude with deeper interest in the Gothic, Romanticism, Milton, feminism, the history of science, narrative theory, etc., I still can't get with it. This book should push all kinds of buttons for me, but so far I have found it impossible to enjoy.

I can't go with Woolf, because of "A Room of One's Own". James is one I find unintuitive and mostly unrewarding, but he's a humbling writer.

Umm...I don't know. Classic authors always end up thwarting my initial distaste.

henry james is kinda like jandek. read him late at night after a long day and he will put you in a trance and you'll be like dude what the hell did i just read? he's in his own weird room of a world.

i agree. he's good. i especially like the turn of the screw and that weird one about the guy who comes back from england and finds this parallel ghost version of himself living in the new york townhouse he owned but hadn't been inhabiting.

with James I always tell people, "Start with the early stuff." His reputation for ponderousness -- incorrect mostly -- starts after 1896.

he was a punching bag for some pretty respectable names, like virginia woolf. i think that's why readers feel validated in hating him.

(which is something i support (hating i mean). i think it's more fun to engage with the canon when you don't approach it reverently)

Woolf liked him! She wrote a laudatory essay on his ghost stories.

Besides, he bounced her on his knee when she was a girl.

oh wait. let me look this up. i thought i read a quote from her once where she said his books were like flavored water or something.

http://can-red-lec.library.dal.ca/Arts/reading/recorddetails2.php?id=17800

he was a punching bag for some pretty respectable names, like virginia woolf. i think that's why readers feel validated in hating him.

People actually care what Virginia Woolf thought of him?

wait I just realized that upthread I posted books that changed my life on the which classic author do you dislike most thread. oops.

yeah, only got 50pp into Mrs Dalloway myself.

oh i don't deny dostoevsky's exciting to read, scott. but there's something rotten at the center of it.

I think that might be... humanity?

quincie - I was confused by that.

re: Jane Smiley. I like her series on the novel (had some interesting choices). Did about 10 pieces if you look about:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/apr/01/featuresreviews.guardianreview27

(Oops, missed the classic bit: was going to say Hitchens and Janet Malcolm, but hopefully they're not in the canon yet). For me, reading copy means that everything is copy, so if I don't like something (or even if I do, sometimes) I nose along the lines muttering, "Push this graf to there, take out that bit, take out this guy, say it like this." If I really like it, though, I'm much less likely to do line-edits, I just ride along with an eye on overall development of characters, themes, plot, pretty much in that order (don't care about spoilers; the how interests me more than the what, and most things don't end well).
Most canonized authors have had actual editors, something you can't take for granted any more; sometimes the editors went too far, but the Library of America etc. adjusts for that. Good translators help too; I really got into Magarshack's verion of The Idiot. So I find less and less need to edit 19th/early 20th Centurty classics, the further we get from that era (farewell to the valiant efforts of Constance Garnett and good old H.T. Porter-Lowe).
What I'd really like (mostly for contemporary/modern Big Wigs) is an ereader with cut-and-paste---don't suppose there is such a thing yet???

Would also be helpful because read lots of short story collections, liking maybe 60% of most, if only could make own! For personal use only, of course.

henry james is kinda like jandek

lol

oh man, I forgot about Theodore Dreiser. Slog city. And I know Albert and others will probably disagree, but Middlemarch (and Eliot) is so unappealing to me. Which is weird, Cus I love Gissing, Trollope, Gaskell.

i dunno if he's considered a capital-c classic yet but cormac mccarthy would probably get my vote. i've read 'blood meridian' and i respect it but boy do i not enjoy being in his universe. feel similarly about john updike.

great post scott seward!

>>> but for me the big one is pynchon. just have 0% tolerance for some reason. like having to read a zappa record i don't like. smart dude. no doubt. but not funny to me and not compelling enough for me to put in the effort. and i can just read roth or elkin or bellow instead cuz they were just as smart and way funnier. (pynchon humor reminds me of male nerd sci-fi writer humor, but i can take the sci-fi groaners. they are more endearing to me? i dunno.)

i can't read DFW fiction at all. i liked a couple of the essays. i can't read a lot of those guys though. that whole crowd. they bore the hell out of me. so did soundgarden and pearl jam. <<<

Yes !!!

Otherwise: Lawrence, Proust, Waugh.

i would've mentioned pynchon, but i do love "lot 49" and i always feel strangely guilty for not enjoying him more.

i've never made it through any of lawrence's novels, but i've read some scattered essays, travel writing, etc., and they were all very funny and memorable, with a very strong and original voice.

J.D, you'll love Sea and Sardinia and Etruscan Places

i think 'mornings in mexico' is the one i've read. i'll put those on my list, thanks!

glad someone else put mccarthy.

i'm happy to throw orwell's fiction under the bus but not parting with the essays or with homage to catalonia, which isn't to say i agree w him all the time.

i like a handful of dust at least a little for the insane turn but i think i agree about waugh. even scoop or decline and fall i'd rather read wodehouse or saki (not a contemporary but rather the same twits) depending on whether i want nicer or crueller. which is to say nothing of scoop's africa.

pynchon is the writer i like where it's the easiest to understand why people wouldn't like him. not in a condescending yr-not-on-my-level way; just that i get why someone would have no patience for this. not the silly jokes or songs or names so much as the endless picaresques and the symbol systems that are deeper than the characters (or arguably than the Ideas). is nabokov on record saying anything about him? (besides his middling grades?) despite his relative indiscipline he seems a v nabokovian writer: thrilling patterns, beautiful adjectives, secretly a little glib. i like both of them lots.

beautiful verbs more accurate maybe.

a lot of writers i love have developed these sort of obnoxious, barnacle-like cults that i have to sort of block out if i want to keep loving them. a lot of really terrible ppl were quoting orwell constantly around the time of 9/11 and the iraq war to justify their bloodlust, and waugh and wodehouse both seem to be beloved of a certain kind of pompous conservative twit. (waugh at least actually was one of those himself; wodehouse seems like a basically apolitical innocent.) nabokov seems like a cult unto himself, what with his endless pronouncements about which authors should be shunned. i'd be horrified if someone actually avoided reading thomas mann or camus because nabokov disapproved of them, but his absurdly over-the-top disdain is kind of lovable.

Wodehouse flirted with fascism, like lots of his contemporaries.

inappropriately frothy radio broadcasts aside, don't think the creator (or rather transmuter from mosley) of roderick spode flirted w fascism

I think Nabokov was asked about Pynchon and he said he never read him.

otoh I was pleased when Nabokov "The Happiest I've Been," one of the few Updike things I can tolerate.

*Nabokov liked

xpost: with the poetry i guess i jumped in at the deep end with the dynasts (actually remember enjoying large chunks of it) but have only dipped into the complete poems now and then. think ezra pound was a fan of the shorter poems, no?

― no lime tangier, Monday, November 17, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have a selected and a few from The Dynasts are selected toward the end, so I'll jump in at that. Thanks.

Read the poems he published b/w 1912 and 1913 after the death of his first wife, whom he hate-loved:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

Otherwise: Lawrence, Proust, Waugh.

― the pinefox, Monday, November 17, 2014 9:06 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh no u didn't.

eh, if you read about the circumstances surrounding wodehouse's broadcasts from germany it's hard to convict him of anything more than extreme fish-out-of-water denseness. the sad-tragic thing is, he did just what bertie wooster would've done.

this little tidbit appeared in the new yorker a few years ago. the punchline is exquisite:

Of special interest to readers of this magazine might be Vladimir Nabokov’s copy of “Fifty-five Short Stories from The New Yorker, 1940-1950.” Nabokov’s handwriting (in English) was small and fluid and precise; in books that he took exception to, such as a translation of “Madame Bovary” by Eleanor Marx Aveling, his correcting marginalia climbed all over the paragraphs like the tendrils of a strangler fig. Nabokov was also a professor of literature, and in his copy of the New Yorker anthology he gave every story a letter grade. The way he wrote each grade in the table of contents next to the story’s title carried the authority of one who expects that hearts will soar or plummet at the sight of his boldly printed capital. Many of the stories did not fare too well, and would not have got their authors into a selective university. Top marks went to Jessamyn West’s “The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner” (A-) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (A). Prof. Nabokov awarded only two stories in the anthology an A+: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” by J. D. Salinger, and “Colette,” by Vladimir Nabokov.

haven't read the jessamyn west but those other grades are all otm

<3 Alfred I love that one! I wrote a paper about that series of poems in grass school. They destroy me.

looooool grad school

horseshoe stoned in the stacks

I should have been! dlh, I would have added cormac mccarthy to my list, but I've never read him. I just know he's not my bag.

i have read more than that but less than someone would probably consider sufficient to judge

he's a sack of horse shit

I liked BM and The Road but ugh he's the Christopher Nolan of modern novelists.

dang

the thought of trying to tackle another mccarthy novel just makes me feel queasy. i feel like i'd get more out of louis l'amour.

i mean i would've thought he rated at least haneke or a chan woo park

if McCarthy were him he'd be Louis L'Love is Like a Violent Rupturing From the Center of the Earth, Coursing and Breaking Against The Walls.

epic & way-harsh haneke burn imo

great Hardy poem, Alfred; I've read only a small selection of his verse, somehow not including that one

the change of rhythm for that last stanza kills me

otm!

"Beeny Cliff":

O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free –
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.

The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away
In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.

A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,
And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,
And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.

- Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,
And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,
And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is - elsewhere - whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.

I like the sound of that NEW YORKER anthology.

JD we have always had things in common - I love CL49 too.

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED is abominable but I don't know how Waugh's other work compares.

I suppose Getrtude Stein is an obvious name, probably already mentioned. On the whole I don't like her.

Scoop, Decline and Fall, The Loved One -- among the funniest novels of the twentieth century.

otm, and as satire i like brideshead

i dislike william gaddis

i don't like roald dahl very much.

even tho i've read them all 8924379253252 times like everyone else. i like danny the champion of the world a lot and the witches spooked me good as a kid and it's hard to deny charlie. the other stuff grates on me.

i mean talk abt a moralist lol

Alfred thanks - I'll give the 12-13 poems a read later.

Don't hate Faulkner, but like others here I just can't get into him. Always happy to read about his disastrous Hollywood experiences, though.

I DO hate Kerouac and Ginsberg, though, what a pair of overrated dickheads. Poor personal hygiene, too.

I've had trouble getting into Updike and Cheever but am willing to give them another chance.

Don't like Vonnegut at all. Never really liked him but an afternoon spent helping a relative fix a house while they played an audiobook of Ethan Hawke reading Slaughterhouse Five on a boombox kinda finished him off forever.

raymond carver

i loved carver in the 80's. but i do remember thinking when i first started reading richard yates: sheesh, what the hell was the big deal with carver!?

made carver seem precious.

i still find carver enjoyable though. the bits i read here and there. i still have his books. in case i need to read them again.

author's reputations during their lifetimes and for a decade or two afterward get heavily mixed up with literary politics and their standing within different coteries. it all gets better sorted out once everyone concerned is dead and buried.

Gertrude Stein is another deeply annoying writer. Even the title of Tender Buttons makes me want to punch her.

Fine if you're on ILM. If not not.

Eh?

broadcast ref? i like 'em both.

gertrude stein >>>>>> hemingway anyway...

Gertrude Stein is another deeply annoying writer. Even the title of Tender Buttons makes me want to punch her.

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison)

Do that, ornamental cabbage, and you'll be in the next Alice B. Toklas cookbook.

i haven't lasted long when i have tried to read stein. same with beckett. nobody makes you feel bad for not reading those two anymore though. they are pretty much scholar-only reading at this late date. except for Godot which they do in middle school now i think.

"Godot" is middle school reading here in France! along with Ionesco and Cocteau and Céline ! strange world out there

only one i can think of is vonnegut.

i had no idea about vonnegut! i thought he was beloved. i haven't read a lot of his books. breakfast of champions was an eye-opener when i was a little kid. along with fear of flying. my parents didn't give a shit what i read.

Harrison Bergeron definitely stuck with me when i was a kid. i was in a school program called Great Books in the 70's. a program where smart bookish kids were completely separated from their peers and talked about short stories in a separate room while the rest of the class had to do stupid math or whatever in the regular classroom. my first glimpse of elitism. anyway, we read that one. also, speaking of Lawrence, we read The Rocking-Horse Winner which also freaked me out. although my future world-view was probably shaped entirely by To Build A Fire.

jack london was a supreme writer of terse adversity fiction, one of the best

I can't deal with Jane Austen. Everybody I respect thinks she's the business, I just...I cannot relate in any way to how people are with each other in her stuff. Eliot, no problem. Hardy I can really feel. Austen...I just start itching for somebody to say "look, I'm tired, I can't be speaking ceremoniously all the damn time"

Beckett's novels are fun! Try Murphy, scott.

am reading a jean rhys rn and it's absolutely fucken incredible

dare i say it leaves a rather charred hole in the space jane austen used to be, notwithstanding a hundred years' more collective wisdom in her favour

I love good morning, midnight even though it's rough.

The ending...

that is the one I'm reading. 40 pages in and she's said more smart things about how society, anxiety and insobriety work than most novels I've read combined

Jean Rhys is incredible, but I don't see her work as necessarily directly competing with Austen's: the threat of penury and a marginal existence haunts many of Austen's protagonists, but Rhys seems to start from the assumption that the marriage plot is no longer operative, and then just keeps exploring the tension between unbearable isolation and abject dependence on others.
xp

to build a fire is the only story school ever made me read that i remember. i remember the chairs and the room tone and everything.

i haven't lasted long when i have tried to read stein. same with beckett. nobody makes you feel bad for not reading those two anymore though. they are pretty much scholar-only reading at this late date. except for Godot which they do in middle school now i think.

coincidentally the only two authors whose prose has caused me migraines. love beckett's fiction from the beginning to the end, but have always felt lukewarm about the plays (never actually seen them performed though, so...)

Now that I think about it, Waiting for Godot is definitely in the "books that changed your life" pile for me. I read that play over and over in high school. Discovering absurdism was a big deal.

my ninth grade English teacher read "To Build a Fire" aloud. Chekhov's "The Bet" too.

"Ward Six"! So sick. Lenin read it and said, "No more Mr. Nice Guy."

It's gonna be hard to up the ante now that Proust and Austen have been mentioned. Dante haters, this is your cue.

dare i say it leaves a rather charred hole in the space jane austen used to be, notwithstanding a hundred years' more collective wisdom in her favour

― imago, Thursday, November 20, 2014 12:40 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what does this mean? i mean, i'm mad. but also, i don't understand.

just feels way more honest & perceptive abt how ppl rly treat each other

it has a very modern (and fragmentary) moral sensibility tho so the comparison is perhaps unfair on austen. just reverberates with me more profoundly

not to diss austen too much tho - she read ppl well and wrote a good yarn. idk

they seem like weird authors to compare unless it's because they're both chicks?

austen is the greatest writer in history; she can take your disses.

austen seems to reach for cliché and a sort of mannered temperance even when plumbing the internal worlds of her characters, maybe

I know this is part of the idea but a bit more emotive contrast? her books were never 'controversial', were they. she liked straightforward resolutions, even if they were subversive.

not read enough writing by women and am keenly aware that comparing the two will elicit criticism but reading rhys I did think of austen, as part of the feminist lineage of telling the female experience within a deeply male-dominated literary form

ok we're on terribly dangerous ground here so I'm splitting, everyone otm

it's okay i was baiting you.

Yelling at Dudes about Austen is not just the title of my memoir it's a way of life

I think the question posed itt is difficult for me because I tend not to spend much time with canonical artists whose work I find boring or pernicious. I mean, someone like Norman Mailer is a joke to me, but why even bother engaging with his work when there are so many more interesting writers to talk about? (To be fair, polemical contrasts can sometimes be rhetorically useful, as when Adorno organized Philosophy of New Music around the differences between Schoenberg and Stravinsky.)

reading Harlot's Ghost after years of Wodehouse and Cold War histories helped my appreciation.

it seems strange to argue that austen was "reaching for cliche," ppl had been writing novels in the modern sense for less than a century when she started writing so it's not like she had a lot of cliches to draw on. apparently richardson was the writer who influenced her most but her work seems very different to me.

....Though if you're doing literary or cultural history you also have to deal with artworks that you find objectionable or tedious, of course.
xp

Alfred, I haven't read Harlot's Ghost so I can't judge it, but I do have some affection for Armies of the Night and especially for Baldwin's exquisite deflation of Mailer in "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy."

Also, all the Austen skeptics should read D.A. Miller's Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style.

i had trouble answering the question because i'm probably too generous even to writers i instinctively hate; i always find myself wanting to give them a second chance. i think there's value to be found even in writers who aren't necessarily good all the time, or even most of the time -- i've read a lot of mailer and 'boring and pernicious' describes a lot of his work, but there's stabs of beauty and insight that seem utterly unique to him, that no other writer could have come up with. i reread 'miami and the siege of chicago' a few months ago and there are passages in there that still stay with me.

Yeah, to be sure, I try to proceed from a position of generosity or at least curiosity, and the question in this thread is also difficult because most of the authors whose work I actually unreservedly hate and find wholly destructive (like Ayn Rand or Janice Raymond or Giovanni Gentile) aren't really considered "classic".

...And then when you try to talk about "classic" authors whose work drew on or reinforced or, more rarely, formulated exploitative or dehumanizing ideologies, it can be difficult to say what kind of historical agency their texts had in relation to those ideologies and the practices and institutions undergirding them. But just repeating "poetry makes nothing happen" doesn't seem adequate, either. (I'm thinking about this while trying to write about Pound and Wyndham Lewis, who in many ways were severely flawed people with terrible politics, who also produced really interesting and complex work that often nonetheless presupposes and articulates their terrible politics, sometimes in historically symptomatic ways.)

does anyone still read ezra pound? outside of a college campus? i don't think anyone does.

I mean, lots of poets and poetry-adjacent people do, but they do tend to cluster around campuses because of the way the current structure of something like patronage for poets depends on the university system.

i know i say stuff like that a lot, but i am curious about what "classic" stuff is alive outside of scholarship/academia. austen is alive, joyce is. t.s. eliot too, i'd say. but pound seems like a classic i-had-to-read-that-in-school kinda guy. i could be completely wrong.

A lot of the people I hang out with are writers or grad students or more or less bitter exiles from academia, so I'm not really the best person to answer that.

I read Carpenter's huge bio two months ago, in part to get a handle on the 20th century eminence behind so many careers. Turns out my first impressions were correct: a warmhearted ignorant fellow clinging to the detritus of an incomplete education who wrote about a dozen beautiful poems of unsurpassed precision and delicacy and that's it

imo, Ezra Pound is still read, but his outside-of-academia audience will always be pretty small and specialized. Without his inclusion in the academic canon he'd be more akin to Zukofsky.

like, i really think that mailer is on his way out. at least for the foreseeable future. people just don't read him much anymore. young people wouldn't go near him at all. they would be much more likely to read james baldwin. (since someone mentioned baldwin...)

(i just notice what people talk about or write about. and i have sold books to people. you notice things...)

Baldwin's novels are read as much or more than the essays, which is a pity. The novels are at best OK and the essays are godhead.

mailer doesn't really have a single universally acknowledged classic that you can point someone to and say 'read that one.' even if you collected his best essays i'm not sure he'd come across as well to a 21st century reader as baldwin does. he seems very much of his time, and a lot of the things he cared about and wrote about, and a lot of the stances he took on those things, seem weird and alien to us. (i've never read his stuff on feminism and don't really want to.) the late '60s political journalism holds up very well imo, probably because american politics hasn't changed as much as the other things he wrote about.

is there a single best collection of baldwin's essays to get? or should i just spring for the library of america book?

The Price of the Ticket

but used Vintage editions of The Fire Next Time, Notes From..., etc are plentiful.

i read pound (yet to crack open the cantos) and my university experience was brief to the point of non-existent, but then i'm a sucker for the modernists. reminds me that my parents knew his granddaughter in the seventies and she was very reluctant to discuss him, apparently.

quite a few people listed here i read avidly in my teens that i can't imagine wanting to reread now: lawrence, mailer, orwell and (even if not mentioned) henry miller. though miller's enthusiasms for other writers did point me to a lot of great stuff.

I think The Price of the Ticket is out of print, but everything in it is in the LoA book (which collects all the major non-fiction except for Evidence of Things Not Seen), and, as Albert says, the Vintage paperbacks are easy to find used. Notes of a Native Son is probably the best place to start, but all of Baldwin's essays are essential. (I would be fine with this turning into a thread in which we praise James Baldwin tbqh.)
xp

My favorite Baldwin is The Devil Finds Work, in which he records the harrowing experience of being a black intellectual watching Hollywood film.

That one is truly delightful (maybe my favorite book on constructions of race in American film), and the passages on Joan Crawford are fascinating to read together with the movie-house scene in Go Tell it on the Mountain.

I think Baldwin's work benefits from being read sequentially, though, particularly to see the way the referent of Baldwin's "we" and his relationship to liberalism shift over the course of the sixties, so the LoA collection helps with that.

Seems like Pound's editing of The Waste Land might be his most significant work, as far as most readers are concerned.
Agree that Mailer's writing on politics (especially his observations of conventions, and more participatory role in Armies of the Night holds up well, and remains (all too) relevant---ditto, maybe, Harlot's Ghost, Oswald's Tale, and The Executioner's Song, but I haven't read those (the last one made for a sometimes astonishing movie, though: Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmore, especially with the broken body english stagger, is someone I can't forget).

I think much of THE CANTOS is terrible
and hence very overrated by academics and perhaps others
a few bits of it are surprisingly well written
I don't agree that his poems are unsurpassed for precision and delicacy

I have read THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT and I liked it or like it, a lot?

It's hard for me to think of a classic author I strongly dislike. There are plenty I've never read, and plenty that don't seem appealing enough for me to want to read, but few that I've disliked yet kept reading enough of to develop a particularly strong dislike for.

am i totally missing out by never reading eco or naipaul or rushdie? i don't know why those three pop into my head the way i do. i've certainly looked at their books enough of the years and i never want to read them....

you'll almost certainly be fine

Of that trio, I've only read one Eco book a long, long time ago which I don't remember much about, and more recently, one of Naipaul's non-fiction books Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, which I thought was pretty decent, like 3 and a half stars maybe?

The Name of The Rose is glorious and hugely entertaining.

Naipaul's travel lit is good if blinkered: the minority educated by British elite understanding cultures he was taught to condescend to.

Read SHIVA Naipaul--a better writer than his brother, and also not a shit, unlike his brother

Scott Seward you have done well not to bother with Rushdie, carry on!

Like a few here I am not sure this thread is v useful, but hey I am posting on it so part of that.

I quite like to read Naipul. Lots of v good writers who conduct themselves terribly.

PF's equation of: terrible = overrated by academics is a good one.

Anyway my library order of selections from Ezra Pound's poetry came through just yesterday. Looks v well produced, with a thorough intro and annotations.

Rushdie is (these days) the author of a classic, rather than a classic author (and the same may be true for Eco).

I love Paul Theroux's memoir about Naipaul - one total shit writing about another, total popcorn.jpg time.

I loved Foucault's Pendulum in high school, which may make your point.

Rushdie's got some good stuff but man did his style really curdle into something nauseating. Naipul is awful (read narayan instead). Never bothered w eco.

sometimes I wish I didn't think pynchon was trash, but I find his work completely unreadable

and here i thought i was the only pynchon-hater here. i always kinda figured he was an ILX god of sorts!

For some reason I've finished three of his novels and didn't get a single thing from any of them. Maybe I'm too stupid for them but I spent most of my time thinking - "what's funny about that?"

Pynchon's books are basically vehicles for his peculiar sensibilities. He gleefully distorts everything he writes about into grotesques. He glories in the fact that his sense of language, sense of humor, & sense of society stand well outside of normal and he takes this abnormality as a sign of his superior insight.

A little of that goes a long way with me, but Pynchon and his fans apparently prefer this attitude in massive doses. It's all a matter of taste. Like Earl Grey tea.

Pynchon one of the few writers who (i) bother to write about pop and stuff around the margins and (ii) does so convincingly.

Would like to believe,xyzzzz__,but I'm more inclined to Aimless's take.

Why would you do 'grotesque' in a low key way. A world without Rabelais isn't one I'd want to live in.

He gleefully distorts everything he writes about into grotesques.

so he's a realist.

get a feeling that a lot of the pynchon-dislikers are approaching him in an arms-crossed "ok make me laugh funny guy" type of way.

You see I don't even like to admit I don't like this guy anymore because these kind of accusations come of shaking my head at this "bracing dose of reality leavened with humor" that is neither bracing, real, nor humorous. Discuss amongst yourselves, I'm getting verklempt. See also Frank Zappa or Howard Stern.

sad to hear you literally have no sense of humor

get a feeling that a lot of the pynchon-dislikers are approaching him in an arms-crossed "ok make me laugh funny guy" type of way.

― ryan, Saturday, 22 November 2014 23:55 (Yesterday) Permalink

Nah I always approach his work wanting to like it and always put it down because there's nothing there for me

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/literally.png

Those three dudes have incredible work ethics, I'll grant them that

god xkcd is reliably worthless

why does it exist

why do people look at it on purpose

You should have said it is literally worthless.

"He glories in the fact that his sense of language, sense of humor, & sense of society stand well outside of normal and he takes this abnormality as a sign of his superior insight."

He is the Sun City Girls.

omg

i started reading V and i had, like, 50 pages to go and i just stopped reading. this was years ago. seemed pointless to continue. i totally went into it without any arms folded or anything. i felt like i had wasted my time. i could have been reading robert bloch or something. would have had a much better time.

I read exactly 45 more pages than you did.

Think there is a third ilxor who stopped shortly before the finish. DJP, maybe but I can't be sure.

I dont get the fanaticism about pynchon but the crying of lot 49 is really great. I read descriptions of gravity's rainbow tho and I just think no fucking way am I reading that. I read v and vineland too but they left no real impression on me. Inherent vice sounds promising tho. I'll probably get around to that at some point.

man I love you guys. Thanks for the courage to not finish what I won't start.

where is imago

pynchon occupies the same realm as vonnegut for me

idgi

I've only read V but I enjoyed most of it, some of it was pretty flat (particularly where he just crammed in some old stories he wrote into the middle of the thing). He has this zany vibrancy to his writing that I like a lot, and he puts scenes together in a really satisfying way for me. Like the part where it goes from this anarchic party scene with the Whole Sick Crew and it segues into this romantic soft focus scene with the prostitute ... the way they segue together had a really great sense of motion to it. It was like ... musical literature, which I thought was pretty cool.

I read and enjoyed both The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice but bailed on Gravity's Rainbow after a few hundred pages for I assume pretty much the same reasons everyone bails on Gravity's Rainbow. Went in expecting/hoping to like it.

the way they segue together had a really great sense of motion to it. It was like ... musical literature, which I thought was pretty cool.

yr talking abstract structural motion but P is not unrelatedly great with motion in general imo, can't think of a lot of writers as precise and vivid as him about movement, bodies in relation to each other, collisions, near misses, dancing, falling etc.. (ballistics.) a lot of slapstick in GR but also a lot of physical tension/suspense (usually at the same time): paragraphs that are lil harold lloyd movies. one of the few books i'd call "cinematic" as a compliment. (form here not only relating to but in lustful death struggle with content.)

(point is i think u would like GR moneyma$e)

I thought you liked SCG Scot.

'pop and stuff around the margins'

don't know what this means - pop is not marginal.

maybe in lit-fic tho

before postmodernity

I read that as 'pop and stuff, around the margins'

hr popnstuf

http://www.megaforcerecords.com/badbrains/ringtones/BadBrains--PhotoCredit--ElisaCasas1.jpg

I mean that P as someone that really is interested in everything and v few people are, even less of them happen to write novels.

B-b-but isn't that part of the problem, it is a thin line slippery slope from that to a connect the dots DO U SEE Conspiracy Theory Of Everything, the literary equivalent of World Music, which incorporates rhythms from all over the globe, only none of them are played correctly.

good thing slippery slope argts are fallacious, then, or we'd be in real trouble

Sure, but I'll just take a page out of Tommy P's and shore up my slippery slope, ahem "argument" by adding some ramps, chutes and ladders, crenellations, machicolations and defenestrations- do u see?

What I really mean to say is: I have no doubt that plenty of intelligent, discerning people- some of them even on this very thread- have gotten a lot out of reading TP's oeuvre, but there are plenty of other well-known dense, difficult books I never finished that I'd rather return to first- such as Tristam Shandy, which I was kind of channeling in that last post, or even Dhalgren.

Dr. Slop, not Slothrop

But so full is your head of these confounded works, that though my wife is this moment in the pains of labour, and you hear her cry out, yet nothing will serve you but to carry off the man-midwife.--Accoucheur,--if you please, quoth Dr. Slop.--With all my heart, replied my father, I don't care what they call you,--but I wish the whole science of fortification, with all its inventors, at the devil;--it has been the death of thousands,--and it will be mine in the end.--I would not, I would not, brother Toby, have my brains so full of saps, mines, blinds, gabions, pallisadoes, ravelins, half-moons, and such trumpery, to be proprietor of Namur, and of all the towns in Flanders with it.

against the day his best and most readable for my $, before/after GR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVHqTzyZ-oM

i disliked the 100 pages of 'dhalgren' i slogged through more than anything since reading 'pamela' in college.

Did you try Babel-17? That's sort of like his Crying of Lot 49.

the book crying of lot 49

yeah, i figure i should try another of his books before giving up on him, i did start with the longest and craziest one. also interested in 'nova.'

Nova pretty good, but maybe a little dated.

prior link reminded me of this classic: Random homework googler memorial thread

Delany is awful. He's certainly never written anything as good as Lot 49.

Have you ever read any of his critical writings, Shakey?

I worshiped Vonnegut when I was in high school, but he's not someone I often think about going back and re-reading. I did re-read "Slaughterhouse-Five" a couple of years ago and enjoyed it. Even if I don't see him as quite the transcendent genius I used to think of him as, I still think he's a distinctive and engaging stylist. Likewise I haven't read much Pynchon since college, but I used to be mad about him too. Perhaps I cringe a bit now because he's associated in my mind with a certain period of my younger days when I would mold my identity around things like what my favorite book was, and something like "Gravity's Rainbow" seemed like the ne plus ultra of mysterious and arcane knowingness, although truth be told, there was a lot of stuff I knew little about in those days. But that's probably not a good reason to dislike something.

The Pynchon = Zappa thing is amusing to me. I know what it could mean, sense of humour wise but I haven't really sat down with the records and books and thought through it much. I like how the fans of one and the other (in the UK) don't appear to mix.

As for Delaney, his autobiog is really great. Agree his books can be tough to get by with.

Love Pynchon h8 Zappa

But could imagine Pynchon liking Zappa unfortunately

And vice versa? Frank not much of a reader though, apparently.

He liked Tolkien the hippie scum :)

Thomas Pynchon...Terry Pratchett...the initials are no coincidence i tell you

samuel delany wrote a lot of normal/cool/entertaining sci-fi! basically, his 60's stuff.

The advice for etiquette and networking is timely at Thanksgiving. The etiquette books say it is courteous for guests to offer help. Then back off if help is not needed. It shows good manners to bring a small gift — maybe something that can be shared by the other guests, perhaps a bottle of wine or a box of chocolates. Spending too much is ostentatious.

Lingering after dinner should not be too long. One suggestion is to make your departure about five minutes before you think you should.

lol oops wrong thread

Not really. Next: remember to avoid subjects such as Pynchon and politics. Perhaps review the rolling holiday-get-together thread on ILE for reminders of perils for the incautious. Some friction is inevitable, so thread may also be useful for shock/desensitization. Renew tragic sense of life, also comic. (And what the hell was happening in 2007, think it was? Mass freak-outs on thread.)

lol, where is that thread again exactly?

Marilyn Haggerty's amazing Olive Garden review and the subsequent viral shitstorm

Good thread. Lawrence and Updike for me. I go back and forth on Pynchon and Hemingway. Loved The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea and A Moveable Feast but For Whom the Bell Tolls is driving me nuts. If I'd read that first I'd have gone no further.

I had to put it down last week after I tired of cleaning the vomit from the moist pages.

Thanks, Alfred. I meant home for holidays thread don mentioned. Know I've seen it, even posted on it. Believe was started by jbr.

Nope. Was thinking of pearls of wisdom from the thanksgiving dinner table which is decade old and basically dormant.

my thoughts on Delany (from a previous thread):

apart from this the other one I've read was Nova. Started Dhalgren, never finished. An example of the sloppiness I'm referring to - and hey maybe it is totally deliberate, but that only makes it even more irritating imho - is how he handles the expository passages in Babel 17 that provide background details on the universe the characters inhabit. There are allusions to a war, to Invaders/the Alliance, very early on and the reader isn't given any indication as to what the war is about, what the two conflicting sides are actually composed of (humans? aliens? robots?), and the story moves along fine without providing these details. The reader is led to believe that this is either inconsequential or will be revealed later, if it does actually merit any significance. But no, about 2/3rds through the book, completely disconnected from anything the characters are doing/discussing, he drops a couple paragraphs about how many star-faring races there are, and how long the war has been going on and then - hey, back to the plot! And I'm just like, WHY? This is so pointless and distracting, if you were gonna drop this kind of background info why didn't he do it up-front, instead of burying it in the middle, apropos of nothing, long after the reader has accepted that this stuff isn't important? This is shitty writing.

― You hurt me deeply. You hurt me deeply in my heart. (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, March 7, 2011 9:05 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so the copy of Babel 17 that I have also includes the tangentially-related novella "Empire Star" and, maybe against my better judgment, I thought what the hell I guess I should read this too, since I did think it was cool that Empire Star is referred to in Babel 17 as a novel written by one of the characters. But, y'know, 40 pages into it and it's littered with what seems to be Delany's trademark shitty prose:

"San Severina took him shopping in the open market and bought him a black velvet contour cloak whose patterns changed with the pressure of the light under which it was viewed."

Which is just a clumsily constructed sentence, the fact that light does not exert pressure notwithstanding. really do not get how this guy is so highly lauded.

― You hurt me deeply. You hurt me deeply in my heart. (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, March 11, 2011 8:20 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he seems to just drop techno-babble all over the place regardless of whether or not it has any bearing on the story or is given any explanation.

I mean the sentence I quoted is immediately preceded by this one:

"Having to admit that it was pretty simplex after all, Jo went down in the hole to turn over the boysh and rennedox the kibblebops."

RMDE look he made up some funny words.

I don't have a problem with authors who play with language, invent terminology, or write in a made-up dialect. Riddley Walker (which was rightfully nominated), for example, is really ingenious in the multiple layers of meaning that he embeds within the narrative via the narrator's dialect. And obviously making up terms for things, even silly terms (as is the case with Bester or some of PKD's stuff - lol "wubfur"), is part of the territory with sci-fi/fantasy. I just find the slapdash, almost careless way that Delany does it to be really irritating. He belabors defining certain terms - like "simplex", used above, and "multiplex" - and then drops a bunch of gobbledygook for no apparent reason other than that he maybe finds it amusing...? I dunno.

xp

― Master of Projection (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, March 11, 2011 11:34 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i've never tried to read dhalgren. i haven't read a lot of his stuff actually. even though i own a lot of it. mostly short stories. which i have liked. i've had problems with john brunner though. and i think stand on zanzibar is my pynchonian cross to bear. owned it for years and i look in it but i can't bring myself to read it. i actually stopped reading one of his earlier more normal novels last year too! was almost done with it a la pynchon. but brunner is only classic to sci-fi people. delany goes beyond that world. i do enjoy reading delany interviews a lot! i have a book of interviews and i read in it all the time. he's interesting.

I've read most of Dhalgren but didn't finish it. It's close to being something I'd love, if only he followed through on stuff instead of jumping around erratically (if only it were a normal book). He paints a vivid cityscape.

Brunner's got a couple classics - Sheep Look Up, Shockwave Rider, Jagged Orbit. Stand on Zanzibar is ok but kind of lacking imo.

Henry James is the writer I have to expend the most effort reading for the least reward.

I always though Theodore Dreiser was just plain bad, but I don't know if he counts as a "classic author"

Sister Carrie is great.

oh and in response to query upthread - no I haven't read any Delany crit/interviews. Would be open to that. It's his fiction I can't stand, but that's obviously a separate thing. I do recall reading some piece linked on this board about being a black sci-fi writer/receiving an award (from Asimov? I think?) or something, that was a good/instructive piece. He's obviously an interesting and unusual guy in the field.

dreiser is renowned for being the best bad writer. forget who said that first.

like, his novels really do add up to something great, but you have to climb a bad writing mountain to see that...

Yeah, he can be so pedestrian that he makes George W. Bush's prose look elegant.

personally not beckoned by bad writing mountains

I found The Bostonians an enormous slog and haven't been motivated to go back to Henry James since.

feel like henry james would be cool to read while baked idk

I know I keep repeating myself, but try James before 1880.

either that or read the turn of the screw. i read some cheap, pulpy looking paperback of it from the 60s so the fact that it was written in a strange, circuitous style didn't even register. it felt like what it was: a ghost story.

i love the fact that edmund wilson changed his mind several times throughout his life on whether or not the governess murdered the children. just a very memorable book.

henry james is actually really funny a lot of the time. i wonder if wodehouse was a fan.

http://cache.coverbrowser.com/image/dell-books/2188-1.jpg

mine isn't that one exactly but it's sort of like that.

sort of arcane, but i would recommend his correspondence with hendrik christen andersen if you can get a hold of it. andersen was this very handsome, insane sculptor with a grotesque neoclassical aesthetic and even more grotesque ambitions to design a utopian city. james was in love with him but also appalled by what he saw as his detachment from reality. andersen was attached to reality enough to use james's affection in order to gain access to wealthy patrons.

andersen's sculptures are among the ugliest ever made.

That could be a James story in itself.

lol

I'm more inclined than I once was to think that awkward prose can be compelling in spite of itself (I would never call Robert Walser a poor stylist, but his writing is fascinating for me in part because he so rarely seems in control of his language, which allows for a weird spontaneity in his figurative language and his narrative structures), but I really haven't developed patience for Dreiser's plodding. That frustrates me, because many of his concerns (e.g. class struggle, commodification, the limits of individual agency, the mixture of fascination and alienation consumer society evokes) seem vital to me, they just come sheathed so thickly in his incompetence as a stylist.
several xps

i think people tend to be prescriptive about prose style in ways they never word for other art forms

"Having to admit that it was pretty simplex after all, Jo went down in the hole to turn over the boysh and rennedox the kibblebops."

Pardon me, but that's "rennedox the kibblepobs."

Yeah, I don't know if that has to do more with the workshop system, with the way expectations about style get codified after Flaubert, or with the difficulty of not thinking about a writer's linguistic choices in the process of reading from moment to moment. At the same time that I want to find worth in a wide variety of prose styles (including styles like Stein's that explore copiousness rather than condensation), and try to ask whether a stylistic performance I find ugly is expressing something of which I'm not yet aware, my reaction to the stylists I dislike, such as Dreiser, feels like an allergy rather than a considered judgment. (I think a lot about prose style, in part because I tend to find my own writing too often tangled and either vague or pedantic.)
xp

i think people tend to be prescriptive about prose style in ways they never word for other art forms

― Treeship, Monday, November 24, 2014 8:20 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you never word

also treesh are you havin flashbacks to the lin wars of '13 or sth

re: James. Go for a short one like Washington Square, a couple of short stories, then build it up to Portrait of a Lady (love to re-read that next year). After that there is a short story called In the Cage that also made an impression.

Golden Bowl might be one for retirement. Unfortunately as pensions are on their way out as a thing I am not sure what I'm gonna do. Maybe get 1x belief in reincarnation and read it in another life.

The Golden Bowl will kill you if you try to go through it quickly: I'd suggest giving it an hour or so a day for however long it takes. xyzzzz___'s suggestions for starting with James are apt (I'm fond of "The Beast in the Jungle" and "The Author of Beltraffio" as places to start with his stories); my favorite work by James is his late fiction, but if you can't enjoy Portrait of a Lady you probably won't find The Ambassadors or The Golden Bowl tolerable, much less rewarding.

exciting interesting mysterious story by Henry James: 'The Jolly Corner'

^^^

i think it's like, one of the last things he published so it goes against alfred's pre 1880 advice

but still, very memorable and eerie story.

Oh no -- all I said was a tyro should start with stuff before 1880, and yeah, The Europeans and esp Washington Square are where.

For short stories I'll second the recs and add "A Light Man," "Madame de Mauves" (a long story really), "The Pension Beaurepas."

Recently tried to read The American, and found it enjoyable for a little while but eventually I just felt like "I don't care one way or the other about this character and I'm not sure you do either"

xxxpost James, this is the holiday tripwire thread I was referring to, I think (looks more fun than I remembered):
you're home for the holidays: irritating relatives, enforced sing-alongs, and furtive nips of liquour when bringing out the trash

The Golden Bowl will kill you if you try to go through it quickly: I'd suggest giving it an hour or so a day for however long it takes

Think I'd probably get through about 15 pages of The Golden Bowl in an hour. At 600 pages or so that's 40 days in the desert..

James sure brings out the defenders. The Aspern Papers is my go-to for (fairly) brief readability.

A lot of it is highly readable and Portrait of a Lady seemed to attain a fluency that you wouldn't think came from the author of those late works. There is plenty of material one could read w/out getting into that.

maybe Thomas Mann.

i don't hate him,and i do like parts of his work, just prefer other classics.

James sure brings out the defenders

Perhaps because, unlike some other allegedly 'difficult' authors, he is ultimately worth the trouble?

Probly. And as was already asked, when *is* somebody gonna slap Dante around? Hey Homer, where's Jethro?

lollollol

I always though Theodore Dreiser was just plain bad, but I don't know if he counts as a "classic author"

Dreiser's fascinating because he kind of can't write for shit but his insight into the thirst for power and reputation and money, and the ways people will act in the thrall of that thirst, is really intense. He's worth the effort in a way that James hasn't been for me. But I really struggle with East-coast-society scenes, they're like science fiction w/o the cool parts to me

i had to read An American Tragedy for a class a long time ago and found it pretty enthralling. i was probably the only one to actually finish it though.

Haven't read that, but enjoyed Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt. Jennie is a Carrie who stays in Chicago, as a strata of society gets real or more respectable. Some might find it way too slow, but to me there was deep focus and astute tracking, both undisturbed by editorial outbursts (Dreiser was a newspaper man for sure).

I can get into Edith Wharton's society scenes, no problem. I don't know what accounts for the difference between how I respond to her and how I respond to James. Some difference in instinctual attunement.

They don't have much in common though other than writing about rich people. Wharton is more sociological and more attuned to things (upholstery, architecture, dresses) than James; always with Wharton there's the paradox of men and women trying to realize themselves in a society with strict rules that they themselves wrote and by which they'd judge others. In James by contrast the problem is cruelty, and his characters' responses to it.

I love Wharton, by the way. For The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, sure, but also for her short stories and novellas, which are too often under-anthologized. I should also point out that Wharton could slip into a triteness of expression and banality that James was incapable of. She was a best seller through the end of her life, probably created the market for women's fiction in the early twentieth century, so those later novels, all of which I've tried reading, feel desperate.

btw the novel James most loved – and he was incapable of praising contemporaries – was The Reef, a variation on The Golden Bowl.

Golden Bowl might be one for retirement

haha, loved it in college.

story of my life: "The Beast in the Jungle."

yeah the last paragraph of that story is a knife in the spine.

wow that sounds great, what's a good collection of James' short stories/novellas?

oh they're probably all public domain anyway, never mind

"The Beast in the Jungle" is in just about every collection.

The Aspern Papers and The American both conceal a pretty good knifing in their last paras, but yeah The Beast stabs sharpest and deepest.

In my graduate years I wrote a long paper using reader response crit on a queer reading of "The Jolly Corner." James scholar live for this stuff.

love Henry James. at least from what i read (Portrait and Ambassadors)

i need more trollope in my life. also, if henry james makes you sad, read some e.f. benson. he'll cheer you up! he's great for high society AND ghost stories.

Benson lived in James' house in Rye after HJ died!

This thread has lots of good stuff in it, good job ILB.

congratulations threadstarter

Turned out much better than could have been expected, given the shaky premise

to come back to an author i discussed earlier, did you know that david foster wallace voted for reagan twice?

pretty sure he's not the only one

from the hudson review

Though born to a liberal academic family, occupied in a traditionally liberal line of work, and outspokenly critical of the second Bush presidency, Wallace was drawn to conservatism. In his recent biography of Wallace,[6] D. T. Max reveals that Wallace voted for Ronald Reagan and supported Ross Perot in 1992. Max has suggested in interviews that these stances were motivated in part by contrarianism, but Wallace’s essays evince a real interest in some of conservatism’s central principles, particularly its valorization of individual choice.

i guess in his 20s he didn't understand that "individual choice" was just a buzzword for market deregulation. seems like a pretty shallow thinker to me

these stances were motivated in part by contrarianism

as a fervent h.w. supporter at the age of 5 i can confirm this is a powerful force for kids born into a liberal family

a chicken in every pot

partly agree w treeship that dfw's political thinking was... well there just wasn't very much of it. in IJ and some of the essays (tv, cruise ship) his diagnosis of america is that its people have disappeared into the womblike isolation of addictive self-gratification and that this destroys compassion and community and civicmindedness. this is sufficiently abstract moralism that it can and is appealed to by the entire spectrum: for a reaganite this isolation is a moral failing resulting from the destruction done by the 60s to the values of our fathers; to me it is the consequence of a psychopathic economic ideology installed by the reaganites (and predecessors) themselves. dfw never went deep enough into the causes of the malaise to place himself politically; maybe this was on purpose; maybe he just wasn't a political thinker. that his criticisms of america can fit as neatly in elizabeth warren's mouth as reagan's means they're either total bullshit or deeply true. it also means tho that there is never any sense of history, of what happened to us, if something did (hi joseph heller) thus no ideas about how it might unhappen.

(except, ykno, love one another, a futile injunction towards something that seems completely out of reach but is also so obv the only answer that better thinkers than dfw are reduced to it too. like the magfields say, they keep it on a higher shelf.)

can we return to your supporting Poppy

we watched the returns in a hotel room and i was FURIOUS when clinton won

my dad took me into the booth w him when he voted and let me pull the lever and maintains to this day that I "voted for clinton" but i did not, i was dragooned by liberal fascists.

http://www.algemeiner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/George-H-W-Bush.jpg

thread drift alert

Not really. Henry James thought Teddy Roosevelt "the monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise."

great posts from dlh

(except, ykno, love one another, a futile injunction towards something that seems completely out of reach but is also so obv the only answer that better thinkers than dfw are reduced to it too.

yeah agree that this is something that can flip over into profundity or banality--and perhaps the difference only being the extent to which "love" is seen as something radical, even disorienting, or something comforting and placating. Love as sentiment (or sentimentality) vs love as infinite ethical duty etc.

guess what I'm trying to say--and just short of a defense of dfw moral banality since I haven't spent much time with his stuff--is that you run a risk writing that sort of thing which is unavoidable.

DFW says some pretty negative things about reagan in that mccain essay, i think. i haven't read that piece in a while but it seemed pretty sharp to me, especially from a guy who hadn't written much about politics in the past. i suspect he just didn't think about politics that hard for most of his early life. tbh i can relate since i was a pretty apolitical republican-supporter until my last year of high school.

i don't think i even care what any living american writer thinks about politics. if you live here you are no doubt lovin' the hot cronut action and streaming good wife and your writing probably reflects that. safe. homely. obsessed with self. americans just don't do indignation well at this late date. no matter who they voted for.

okay fine dfw no longer living. but still...

it's the turkey hangover talking...pay no attention to me...

streaming good wife!

>>> lovin' the hot cronut action and streaming good wife

??

topical cultural references used as shorthand. only works if you know the referents.

oh j.d. i forgot all abt that mccain essay! should reread altho i remember the gist of it being "mccain could be real. could he be real? would you believe him if he was real? would you believe me if i said he was real? can anyone believe anyone who says anyone is real in a world with tv commercials?" which is a line of questioning i am reasonably sympathetic to but not exactly down in the political nitty-gritty. (this circular handwringing also appears in "octet", where it's about what ryan was saying: the risk the writer runs. he's always worried you're not gonna take him and dostoevsky seriously because of tv.)

should mention that IJ makes a pretty clear monster out of Corporate America: the sponsored years, the moronic president (v cartoon-reagan actually), the gladiatorial football. it also makes efforts to go beyond affluent ennui+despair (prisoners of their desires) and into the realm of the actually exploited (prisoners of other people's--altho hal and the tennis kids are arguably this), but these sections and their narrative voices (black girl, nadsat-ish prostitute, injured workman in email forward) seem pretty generally regarded as the worst parts of the book. better is the ensemble at the halfway house.

sry to make this a dfw thread carry on.

(o treesh i think mentioned his distaste for oblivion, which i get: his best-crafted stories, the ones where he's most in control of his style, but also the work of a v sick person in a way you can rly feel and maybe does not reveal life so much as sickness.)

(tbf it is called oblivion.)

http://hex19.com/storage/article-images/skyrim_oblivion_speechcraft.png

David Foster Wallace recognized many real problems, especially the way consumerism has made it difficult for some people to see beyond their own desires. I also think he exaggerates the difficulty of doing this, of empathizing, and the degree to which our particular form of cynicism -- assuming everyone is a pure egotist and so, in a way, an enemy -- has come to dominate consciousness. I think this misanthropy is rooted in his depression and i empathize. However, when he drags out a concept like compassion and makes it seem like this totally forgotten virtue that might even be impossible today he sounds like a scold, and worse, disingenuous.

I think the early flirtation with conservatism is related to the Hobbesian distrust of the public that was always a major feature of his work.

Conservatism quite attractive to young men and women DFW's age in eighties tbh

Treeship's comments on DFW also basis of my take on Gravity's Rainbow, where TP's mixture of fatalism and idealism, creative exuberance and entrophic sense of entrophy, paranoid unease and fascination with the urges behind and results of conspiratorial thinkging, moralism and hipster games---all of which made for some pretty enjoyable fiction, enough so to get me through high school, anyway---really ran aground.
The opening is godhead, and there are other great set pieces, stairways to nowhere, which is his point, which he makes over and over and over. You're enjoying yourself because you seek distraction from Doom, from Accoutability, so here's another dead end, sinners. Time to float in the warfumes and rubble of truth and gibberish of portent for a while, then start over with some bad comedy, more punishment.

Although I'll probably re-read it and read the ones published since.

What got me through high school: short stories, among those very eventually collected in Slow Learner (great intro, with his very mixed feelings about his own writing; thought he was too tough on himself 'til I read GR), The Crying of Lot 49, and V. If you haven't read him yet, start with those three.

where you been, don? we are soooooo over pynchon on this thread.

Lol. Since he brought it up again, I wanted to add that I believe I read on M. John Harrison's blog that he loved V but found GR unreadable and that John Clute had the exact opposite opinion, fwiw.