David Foster Wallace vs. Thomas Pynchon

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

thank you lamp btw for dusting off that vintage post of mine

u know youre in trouble when you look to dostoyevsky for humanism

i voted for daddy

lagoon that is crazy talk

It just cracks me up that Ellis made himself into a guy people talk about again, via twitter alone

guy writers vs lady writers poll

i always think ellis started writing for suicidegirls.com but then i remember that was palahniuk

Anything he tweets is pretty mild compared to, say, Houellebecq.

ellis writes about competitive polo for grantland.com

lagoon that is crazy talk

― the late great, Thursday, September 6, 2012 5:19 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i came here to guy write and talk crazy and im all out of guy writing

xxp fuck those bizarro fiction losers

i see what you mean if you're only talking about the idiot and notes from the underground

I mean, Stephen King called Nicholson Baker's Vox a "meaningless little finger paring." I'm sure any established writer has peers they find overrated. I like Ellis's tweets.

but what about the gambler, crime & punishment, brothers k, dream of ridiculous man, etc

if you cut brothers k off two pages earlier it's the most nihilistic shit imaginable

I meet ppl from time to time who are like I love literature I love brett easton ellis and I get all quiet and generally try not to make my face all crazy for a sec

I mean, his voice is cut from the cloth of Didion and Robbe-Grillet, so putting it out there as literature isn't the craziest idea.

I must've forgot about brett easton ellis' banana farm book

the other day i saw someone on a feminist blog complaining about what douchebags men were who put 'sex-positive' as a descriptor in their online dating profiles

anyway, nicholson baker

its true that in dostoyevskys middle period he has some under appreciated humanist works such as his short story i dont think theres something deeply fundamentally wrong w/just being alive, srsly, guys... guys and the unfinished novel i am trying really hard to write a single character thats not some sort of damaged misfit

<3 lagoooooooooon

I dont

*thinks dastardly thoughts*

I don't know if what BEE writes is "literature", but he, definitely writes books, with pages and sentences and paragraphs in them. I'll give him that.

btw anyone itt hating on barthelme is a complete idiot

Barthelme's Ellis parody.

xp

it's more than that though, in the gambler he expresses great sympathy for all people and their addictive vices. crime & punishment has the eternally faithful and forgiving sonya, as far as the nihilism in brothers k goes the small acts of human kindness and solidarity that permeate the family are imo prefiguring the humanism of french existentialists

- i am trying really hard to write a single character thats not some sort of damaged misfit -

this is a type of humanism in itself

a lurid cartoonish humanism

i liked the possessed or w/e its called in english

im not sure its 'humanist' tho

i mean i love dostoyevsky, guy can write like a motherfucker, but he in only the most convoluted generous reading a humanist

well i mean i thought the general agreement was that dostoyevsky seems all the time to be swinging between poles of 'god will fix it' 'god will fix it but we can live in a worthwhile way anyhow' 'no we're all fucked', okay you can't swing between three poles but yeah

like his relation to the possibility of a humanism comes from a place of negative capability, to suggest he had a 'humanist' 'program' would be off-base, but it's certainly not a completely irrelevant idea

all credit due lag00n has been killing it recently

like his relation to the possibility of a humanism comes from a place of negative capability

that's what i meant by the french existentialist ref

we are capable of kindness while facing the horror vacuui of life, that's humanism

poomanism

^^literature

we are capable of kindness while facing the horror vacuui of life, that's humanism

― the late great, Thursday, September 6, 2012 5:41 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh i think one thing that characterizes a lot of these guy writers is that the kindness is generally rather meager and futile in the face of the horror, a starving old lady feeds the last bread crust to her drowning grandchild, its often more sentimental and concerned w/symbolism than humanist imho

y so serious