David Foster Wallace vs. Thomas Pynchon

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.

I don't even think wallace was in conversation w/ pynchon, tho I could be dissuaded. Barth was much more what he was about (see westward empire, etc.) Like even treating pynchon as metafiction (or pomo, or much else) I think is v. point-missing. But I'm v. opinionated about the p.

i ask again: where was delillo?

(Hey, where's Bolano in this bitch?)Pynchon might well agree with everything in those two posts, Sterling: seems like he said he didn't want Crying published as a stand-alone, or maybe at all. I first saw it, or some of it, as (I think) "The World, The Flesh, and Mrs. Oedipa Maas," in an ancient library copy of Esquire. I liked it, ditto Slow Learner, though that's more for confirmed fans'compulsive collectors (some reviewers mentioned other, still-uncollected stories also worth reading). Non-headz may also dig his intro, expressing his frustration with his writing, sometimes mocking himself, and even when he likes something says it seems to have been done by elves, he doesn't remember writing it. I picked up the hipster detective novel, but quickly put it down: the opening pages seemed to squirm with self-consciousness, and maybe more frustration. I'll give it another shot someday. Meanwhile, hark the herald Thurn Und Taxis
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/MutedPosthorn.png

Oh yeah and this http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/dfw-week-did-infinite-jest-start-out-as-an-autobiography.html?mbid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true

the intro to 'slow learner' is one of my favorite things pynchon's ever written -- his semi-recent intro to '1984' is great too. i can't think of any writer i'd rather read an introduction by.

Lot 49 is Pynchon's worst, universally acknowledged by all true headz

Crazy talk. Lot 49 is grebt but requires repeated exposure. There's stuff in there it's not even possible to clock until you've read it through at least once.

oedipa maas is a really great character. i don't know how pynchon managed to make such a passive character so fully developed, idiosyncratic, and endearing.

for some reason i always picture her as looking like '60s era joan didion, probably because of the california thing and because pynchon describes her as wearing sunglasses.

that works just fine imo

"There's stuff in there it's not even possible to clock until you've read it through at least once." <-- this is hardly a striking statement about a pynchon book.

I think my fav pynchon moment lately is the scooby-doo callback in Inherent Vice, or the record store window. Just because they're fresher, I tend to think about them more often. But for real, both IV and Vineland are way better than lot 49 in the "slim, california counterculture" side of pynchon's work. I like IV and AtD so much now that I've sort of stopped trying to rep for Vineland, because there's just too much good stuff (which was unexpected, surprising, and wonderful) so it's not worth like making the case for the "one underdog book" or whatever. Still, thumbs down to Lot49. Even if there's deeper stuff going on, it's too easy for it to permit really shallow readings.

this is like dismissing Tool "because of their fans"

i mean, i agree that due to length it's the most frequently and (therefore?) poorly taught Pynchon, but i'm not going to hold that against it.

yeah, kinda like when I got back to "A Rose For Emily" in the context of the expanded Portable Faulkner (or the original, single-LP version of Jack Johnson, after the rest of The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, or the '75 double-LP Basement Tapes after the rest of A Tree With Roots). Initially, I had trouble adjusting to the overview. But I'll take Crying over A Rose any day (no Pynchon vs Faulkner thread please!)(oh alright) Mrs. Maas will always be the awesome older lady to me, no matter how old I get--no not like Mrs. Robinson, Mrs. M. is the good-hearted heroine, and not too xpost passive, she's on a quest!

"A Rose For Emily" really isn't up to most of The Portable though, and way over-anthologized and taught (although my English prof Mom incl a good video of it, with Anjelica Huston, I think)