David Foster Wallace vs. Thomas Pynchon

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

gravity's rainbow > vineland > against the day > mason & dixon > inherent vice> lot 49 > v.

i have that reversed entirely except gravity's 3rd best for me

let's poll it! okay let's not poll it

i would probably put slow learner on the left hand end somewhere, too

yeah, of the few i've read:

lot 49 > v. > gravity's rainbow > vineland > etc

george saunders

lot 49 is pynchons best imo

pynchon maybe over dfw? idk i love infinite jest so much that its hard to say

DFW is more personally affecting. Pynchon was more stylistically and compositionally groundbreaking. FRanzen was a big boring miniseries of a novel.

do people care about Barth anymore? I feel like they did maybe in the 70's, and then never again. Certainly when I was in my early 20's and into metafiction and pretentious I thought he was great but no-one really credited him at the time. Then DFW came around, and Coover got some traction, but Barth still seemed overlooked or relegated to the garage sales of university towns. Oddly just two hours ago, I bought a pristine first edition of Chimera at a bookstore for $10.

does it have tits on the cover

what about William Vollmann? Does anyone really care about him? I pretended to and tried to for a few years there and then I just gave up.

rising up, rising down is pretty good

I've always gotten Barth, Barthelme, and Barthes confused and can't say any of them left an impression on me

Vollmann did some good stuff, primarily his short story collections (Rainbow, Atlas) but his preoccupations with prostitutes and just general degradation got kinda tiresome for me after awhile