David Foster Wallace vs. Thomas Pynchon

It could be worse. You could be the lone vote for BEE.

i don't think dfw is an embarrassing answer - pale king as good as anything i've read in contemp english literature

i'd vote for robert downey jr in the afterschoolspecial version of less than zero

naguib mahfouz

x-post lol the movie version is so bad it's good material in my book

lots of sex with clothes on in that. Nicholson Baker was taking notes.

naguib mahfouz

will stab anyone who has anything bad to say about this guy you've been warned

i only read palace walk and have basically forgotten it but i think i liked it. i have a copy of palace of desire but i'd have to restart. even if it Doesn't Really Matter i'd still have to restart.

oh no wait i had to read midaq alley in a middle eastern history class. that i liked a lot. "the cripple-maker."

i haven't read any literature in awhile. i started wolf hall a few weeks and it was really really good but my literature gland is kinda weak these days. i prefer reading challopy philosophy

everyone I know who says they don't read has read wolf hall and they have nothing but good things to say

Gaddis

― Mr. Que, Thursday, 6 September 2012 18:07 (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's really good. i had read the memoir (giving up the ghost) and beyond black and enjoyed both, but wolf hall she's at the height of her game

Mahfouz is amazing - early stuff is very Proustian in scope and tone, then he got more into this extended allegorical/magical realist sort of style, and by the end he had distilled even that style down to stories/sequences that were more like aphorisms or anecdotes. incredible breadth and depth to his body of work.

i did try reading some mieville a year or so ago when everyone said it would be my thing. pretty mediocre i thought :/

i liked the crying of lot 49. it was short. i liked lost in the funhouse for similar reasons. plus funny. i liked david foster wallace when he was writing sort stories and magazine articles. these three belong together, like the items in a sensible candy bar. franzen i know nothing about, except that i bailed on the corrections. it was not at all short. brett easter eggis i don't really like, but at least find "readable". i.e., undemanding, thus possessed of an admirable humility. luna park reminded me of my father and made me almost-cry, and is, with wallace's "westward the course of empire takes its way", the only thing i've ever found emotionally resonant by any of these authors.

so barth. funny wins.

i did try reading some mieville a year or so ago when everyone said it would be my thing. pretty mediocre i thought :/

plus boring

that you're a barth fan makes me like u so much more, contend

robert coover, w/ the poss exception of gaddis, is better than any of these other dudes

naguib mahfouz

will stab anyone who has anything bad to say about this guy you've been warned

― stop swearing and start windmilling (Shakey Mo Collier)

adrift on the nile is one of the best books i've ever read

coover! i read his babysitter story when i was in junior high and found it super titillating

Oh man, I gotta get Spiralli in here - he loves Mieville.

pynchon over barth over dfw w/ ellis far behind. gaddis or delillo or barthelme would all slot in right behind pynchon in some order for me. never read franzen - impression was more epic, less funny updike: any accuracy to this? joyce, austen over the lot.

wait Mieville is like a shitty fantasy/sci-fi writer how did he get dumped in here...?

if we're including genre dudes then I'm voting Moorcock duh

would rather read any of these ppl (except ellis) than jane austen.

early franzen owes some debt to pynchon and puts him a lot closer to foster wallace that queasy intensity &c but later franzen is like bad george eliot mostly i guess

would rather read any of these ppl except ellis than jane austen

moorcock otm

donald barthelme once said "anybody can write a beautiful sentence." mieville disproves that one.

Melville, Euegen O'Neill: clumsy geniuses.

Which of these authors' works look the coolest when you're holding them at an awkwardly show-offy angle in front of your face while riding the train?

depends who's watching

delaney seems the closest sf author to these other dudes (tho' yeah, there are def bits of moorcock quite similar to pynchon, esp), but Limbo by bernard wolfe deserves to be much better known imho:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Wolfe

lamp calling him 'foster wallace' like it's all one long surname is hilarious but maybe he's doing that on purpose to rankle dfw stans

I call him wally

Davey Fo Wallier

a new urban townhome development in elegant fowa

next to the alexander wang flagship

fosty

De gustibus non disputandum est

but polling is ok

Pynchon.

i liked david foster wallace when he was writing sort stories and magazine articles...i bailed on the corrections.

same w/me. but long books per se don't bother me, i read gravity's rainbow fitfully over the course of year, glad i did. but i sorta gave up on pynchon after vineland, still have that copy of mason/dixon sitting uncracked on the shelf. haven't kept up w/pynchon. his latest sounds dopey. franzen seems like a well-intentioned windbag, his new yorker essay on dfw was heartfelt but reading it was like chasing a shaggy dog.

joyce, austen over the lot.

― balls, Thursday, 6 September 2012 18:41 (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha c'mon

in that case i am having a write-in vote for william shakespeare, geoffrey chaucer, and virgil

ha! xp!

(adjusts pince nez)

Shakespeare, my dears, Shakespeare!

i might have shared this non-anecdote before but this anthropologist girl i know who doesn't read that much was drunk the other day and really effusive about how great this author she'd started reading was, who was called david foster wallace, and he's so good, he's amazing, have you heard of him

i post this not to make fun of her but because it brought home to me that there are people who found their lives on totally different assumptions to mine

hey John Barth - I read Giles Goat Boy so long ago I can't remember much about it

this summer I read Conversation In The Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa, that was 600+ page novel that managed to be epic: complex in terms of plot and characters yet concise in the prose dept. even in translation, w/Llosa you really hear the rhythm and cadence of Spanish speakers. I think Franzen could learn a lot from him.

xpost what assumptions are those? seems like she's just not a part of the same discourses as yourself (irl or internet)

same w/me. but long books per se don't bother me, i read gravity's rainbow fitfully over the course of year, glad i did. but i sorta gave up on pynchon after vineland, still have that copy of mason/dixon sitting uncracked on the shelf. haven't kept up w/pynchon. his latest sounds dopey. franzen seems like a well-intentioned windbag, his new yorker essay on dfw was heartfelt but reading it was like chasing a shaggy dog.

― (REAL NAME) (m coleman)

lol, every word of this is true for me, too. glad i read gravity's rainbow (and V.), less glad i read vineland, quickly gave up on mason/dixon, haven't looked back.

V. is alltime

xpost what assumptions are those? seems like she's just not a part of the same discourses as yourself (irl or internet)

― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Thursday, 6 September 2012 19:50 (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that was the joke i was going for, yeah

As far as IV, there's not deep kurious korrespondances going on, but I find that a relief. I think the writing just as such is just very high quality and mature, and I find a lot of resonance and connection with the themes, which feel very developed. AtD and IV are two very good brackets w/r/t to Pynchon's vision of the 20th century and the radical tradition, like whence it springs and the big scooby mystery of where it went. They're both very heartfelt.

j. -- yeah, that triangle was the one part that i thought really dragged, but i've seen enough people say they enjoyed it to figure i'm still missing something essential. When it was about anything in europe except the triangle itself, I found it pretty enjoyable just in terms of setting a broad intellectual and political context. I've got a copy of A Rebours that I intend to finish before I tackle that section again, since I've heard it helps situate that section. There's probably a bunch of other various genre stuff I'm not familiar with that would also help it "click".