David Foster Wallace vs. Thomas Pynchon

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

i have been thinking abt some of the really lost dudes recently - anybody remember when mark leyner was going to bust literature wide open?

i liked bright and risen angels a lot

am in fairly close agreement w/ thomp's ranking eg

gravity's rainbow > vineland > mason & dixon > slow learner > against the day > inherent vice > the crying of lot 49 > v

gravity's rainbow seems to me far away and his best work - still the best invocation of london i've ever read - whereas v at times seems like self-parody

Barth: wrote novels
Barthelme: (donald) wrote mainly short stories
Barthelme: (f) his brother, wrote something else, dunno, never read them
Barthes: wrote criticism and not fiction

i read and enjoyed a Leyner book when i was like 12 and tend to think of it as the kind of thing that only self-impressed 12 year olds should really enjoy

guy writers

yeah I remember when the first leyner book came out. I was an inifiniately hot and intense dot. blah blah. now he writes like, humor books or something.

fred barthelme wrote (writes?) novels

barthes killed a bunch of authors. all of them actually.

all of vollmann's books have 'rising' or 'risen' or 'angel' in the title. I saw him read once, he brought a gun. also he was kind of a freak, not in a good way, in a creepy "i don't want to live on the same street as this guy' way.

DFW was really nice the two times I saw him read. Funny, engaging.

i think one is called europe something tbf to be even fairer i can imagine hes a p terrible person

what is this bullshit
Voted for somebody else

xpost
europe central

paul auster seemed a p big deal at one point, at least in the uk, but his stock seems to have fallen in recent years, at least in the uk

the prolegomena to vollmann's 'calculus of violence' thing is all about how beautiful this one knife he owns is, there are pictures

leyner had his first non-'humour' book in ages this year, all part of the whole back-to-the-late-80s-early-90s thing that's going on you know

auster is shite!!

Auster decided to devote his time to making shitty movies instead afaict. He had a good run tho.

sorry i mean but he is. there's a marketing component i guess, he seems made to exist in faber paperbacks. there was a guy who worked on him at my undergrad who had a picture of himself and paul auster in his office, auster looked real uncomfortable. i find it so weird that lydia davis married that, likewise sivi hustvedt (sp, probably)

BEE has been mercilessly tweet-slamming DFW all day

yes but are any of them any good

didn't leyner just come out with a new novel?

...

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llak0ehEAF1qbl75h.jpg

jordan, i am so sad you have me killfiled

I like Vollmann more than DFW, as far as maximalists with footnotes go.

i was looking for the interview where wallace goes in on ellis, salon have already dug it up -- http://www.salon.com/2012/09/06/bret_easton_ellis_hates_david_foster_wallace/

Also lump Vollmann and DFW together as authors of doorstop-sized books that, in the end, are collages of short chapters.

just had this weird sensation like someone is calling my name from a far-away room

xp

writer fights are so hilarious and sad, especially between guy writers

DFW: You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend “Psycho” as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.

Fucking all time

writer fights are so hilarious and sad, especially between guy writers

not if they take place on twitter

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/general-updates/bret-easton-ellis-on-dfw.html

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/general-updates/bret-easton-ellis-on-dfw-part-ii.html

(n.b. these are pretty boring links, it's ellis saying politely dismissive things in response to being asked the question.) i guess ellis feels like the statute of limitations is up, that or he's tweeting while high (this seems the saddest thing to do, in the 21st century)

ha xp

If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?

this is v otm tho ellis for sure dabbled in this himself

i mean WALLACE

not if they take place on twitter

― Lamp, Thursday, September 6, 2012 5:13 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if only dfw had lived to see the day rip

i always read a new paul auster novel because every one is like an REM album, "the best since x". and, like REM albums, they never measure up. NY Trilogy is his highpoint though, and Last Things and Music of Chance are really good. But everything since has been increasingnly frustrating and annoying. Book of Illusions and Oracle Night just let you down at the end. Man in the Dark was the fucking worst. Sunset Park looks good though. I'm sure I'll hate it if I read it though.

I want to re-read inifinite jest but I don't want anyone to see me doing it, so I guess I'll have to get an e-reader version.

'goon that interview is circa wallace's big turn to going all humanist and reading dostoyevsky and shit, in 1993

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100621780&extrasfile=A09F8296-B0D0-B086-B6A350F4F59FD1F7.html

leviathan was good, ny trilogy hella overrated just cause it was his most guy writer book