David Foster Wallace vs. Thomas Pynchon

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

tbh its something that ive been thinking abt recently cause i like a lot of said guy writers but im somewhat disturbed by the level of their emotional alienation

iirc sontag breaks it down much better than me in the intro to "summer in baden-baden" which was influential to me in my reading of d

i don't know man, maybe there's nihilist and humanist readers, i think in wallace and especially pynchon there's actually a great undying love of humanity

unfailing maybe

like the orgy scene in gravity's rainbow, unstinting admiration for the riot of all life's, uh, combinations

where's delillo

wallace is def more into the idea of liking the world but then of course wrote extensively abt his problems pulling that off - pychons characters never really felt like people particularly to me tho ive only read like one and a half of his books