David Foster Wallace vs. Thomas Pynchon

- 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

what the fuck is this poll even

i mean, i love DFW but Pynchon is just beyond
i guess also beyond polls

pynchon def scrambles my brain more

i would def vote for delillo under other, or barthelme tho i dont know if he really fits w/these dudes, not that franzen or ellis do either

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

― lag∞n, Thursday, September 6, 2012 2:55 PM (7 minutes ago)

otm, i feel the same way. and i think the "a great undying love of humanity" stuff that so often goes along with this genre often feels more like a self-aggrandizing and sentimental affectation than legit affection.

DFW clearly has an honest love and sympathy for his fellow saddos and addicts

ya i def agree that wallace is more emotional nuanced

y'all are such harsh cultural critics

who is the most humanist forumer

the...humanest....if you will

y'all are markov chains afaict

books, huh

*throws garbage* go back to yr blog, max

i voted for thomas pynchon. i really liked the ny trilogy when i read it but i havent read any other auster. BEE is a hilarious troll

i tried to read a lot of women authors this year,

= "Watched Girls"

burn

def. doing this guy writers v lady writers poll

fwiw i meant it in a appeals to guys more than a are guys way, and guys as a subset of males who are not always necessarily male

guyville

have fun with that poll!

Don't really understand how you could read Infinite Jest and not see the author's sympathy towards humanity. Pynchon gets more interested at it as his career progresses - both Mason & Dixon and Against The Day in particular.

Franzen writes more obviously recognisable 'human beings' but god does he find it difficult to disguise his contempt for them.

i've been meaning to read the first two franzens for a while, but on the other hand i haven't

Pynchon pretty easily, with 'Gaddis or something', just Gaddis in fact, 2nd. Not much bothered by the rest, but I like easter ellis - good at surface, & usually pulls off something interesting.

Pynchon ranking for me:
gr ≥ m&d > Lot 49 > IV > Vineland > ATD > V

Liked how 'genre fiction' ws discussed alongside this stuff.

I should re-read GR; JR is one book I feel like reading in the first place. But its just a kind of liberal satire. Sure its amazing on one level, but wonder if it amounts to much in the end? Feels like it would be talking to the converted.

Couldn't read Barth, or re-read Barthelme again or DFW...just doesn't interest me. Possibly because I feel way too old, and there is a cut-off point.

Somebody else is what I'd go for = Jim Thompson, if you read 10-15 of his pulps together its probably a bigger achievement than what most of this crowd have managed.

the ways in which the pleasures of reading 2000 pages of related genre fiction approach those of reading encylopedic novels is something under-discussed actually

I'd go Wallace (by whom I believe I have read everything), Pynchon (Vineland [<333], GR, Lot 49, half each of M&D & V.), Franzen (The Corrections, a NYer article), Ellis (Less Than Zero, the movie American Psycho). I admit this is ... idiosyncratic. Guess I should read The Recognitions, huh.

I've never read Barth; it seems like it'd be pointless after having read "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way." Maybe I'm wrong. Did like the bits of Coover I've read, though.

thompson is great, but he's a bit like PKD - wrote too much, wrote some very bad books, didn't have the luxury of refining and polishing even his very best work. the fact that there was nearly a twenty year gap between The Recognitions and JR suggests that wasn't such a problem for Gaddis :-)

And I'm not sure LIBERAL satire is totally fair or accurate - outside of his fiction, Gaddis seemed to be a real cultural conservative (ie none of that avant-garde shit for him) and his later books share some of the same curdled misanthropy with the Bellow (a Gaddis admirer) of The Dean's December etc

Yeah I know Jim wrote thrash (in a bad way) but some of his best bks have such concentrated power and hold on my mind. Know its not too polished but I don't know if polishing would really help -- the conditions under which this stuff was written under created disadvantages as well as advantages too.

Sorry about that stuff re: JR, upthread. Comes from some of the bits I've read about it (maybe on ilx, was years ago, can't remember). Really like misanthropic writing (Celine, Bernhard, Jelinek) so if its in that vein sign me up (would borrow it today but I think someone has nicked a copy of this from my local library *sigh*)

Also I'd be interested in reading Slow Learner.

One more for the somebody else = Hubert Selby.