David Foster Wallace vs. Thomas Pynchon

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.

rising up, rising down is pretty good

― O_o-O_O-o_O (jjjusten), Thursday, September 6, 2012 3:40 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did you for real read the whole thing? isn't it a million pages long

i didn't enjoy inherent vice, it seemed like a younger writer with a TP hardon decided to do a cross between lebowski and cheech and chong

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

A good poll would be 'human beings' vs. 'sentences.'

gad i need to sell my copy of rising up & rising down

iirc far and away the most legit thing nicholson baker ever wrote was a chilling tale of horror involving potatoes and soup

that's a good pun

rising up, rising down is pretty good

― O_o-O_O-o_O (jjjusten), Thursday, September 6, 2012 3:40 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did you for real read the whole thing? isn't it a million pages long

― catbus otm (gbx), Saturday, September 8, 2012 2:20 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Man getting ahold of the 7-volume McSweeney's edition of that would thrill me. I swear I saw it in a Border!s one time years ago.

On the other hand I'm still barely 10% done with Imperial

i have the abridged one-volume edition and i read it random-access. usually in the bathroom. i like it! but then something like 40% of it is about the bolsheviks.

Voted Ellis

Gaddis

― Mr. Que, Thursday, 6 September 2012 18:07 (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, September 6, 2012 1:26 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the only wrong answer to this is ellis. and franzen.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

voted pynchon, although I honestly only love him through GR, didn't like Vineland, couldn't finish Mason and Dixon, haven't bothered with the last two yet. I love all of DFW's output though, but you can't deny V and GR.

DeLillo 4 eva

On the other hand I'm still barely 10% done with Imperial

10% Imperial = 3 Imperial Bedrooms

voted Pynchon tho b/c I hate voting for the 'other' poll option

couldn't finish Mason and Dixon

I'm a huge DFW fan, so he got my vote, but, seriously, you need to finish Mason and Dixon. It just gets better and better as you go.

i woudl have to restart it to do that, since I started reading it in 1994 or something.

Oh, haha! It was really good though.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Disappointed I missed this poll. Sort of shocked that a poll was even possible. Pynchon head and shoulders above the rest. Gaddis is the only one who ever did anything close. Lot 49 is Pynchon's worst, universally acknowledged by all true headz.

auster is one-note, and miserable at it. ellis trumps him & franzen by a landslide. the problem is that ellis can write really well when he feels like it, but he just doesn't usually even try.