Calvino, Murakami, Pynchon, and Dick battle it out for the title of Official Favorite Author of ILX

All told, a bit predictable: like a grad student praising Derrida...

I tried to read the crying of Lot 49, but the print was way too small, so I gave up. Calvino, he wrote a book about an umbrella guy, yeah? I gave up after 10 pages.

I hate the Pomo/mod- classification. What makes an author modernist and another a postmodernist has never been clarified (discussions of this on ILX are muddled). I reckon Pynchon could have easily been classified as a modernist had GR come out pre-war (it seems to be really abt the date of publication).

I've read abt 25-30 dick books. Most of them are fantastic.
Pynchon= GR and crying lot of 49 (a counterpart to 'three stigmata...'). Both authors are v enjoyable. will read the best of this stuff again for certain and can't decide what is better here.

like i said on the other thread: calvino's 'Don giovanni' has some great pieces but 'marcovald' was twee-ish. Perec might be better at this ('life...' is one of the best things i read all year). Read one Murakami, which i enjoyed ('wind-up bird...'). Haven't felt like reading more but prob will.

I'm a nonfictionist, however (everyone is surprised again) if I had to pick some authors I'd say Lethem, Stephenson and Robbins, certianly not those four up there. Dick's good but he's not great. And DEFINITELY not Eco.

I like Amis, Ellis and Houellebecq.

I guess it'd be asking too much to want Henry James to be ILX's favorite writer, but...surely we can do better than those four, no?

Also, I am reading this comprehensive history of american architecture right now. It is good.

Also, next I think I'll read the Collette biography. Or cColette or whatever.

Also, I am drunk.
Hi.

Pynchon isn't all that great, Calvino's a little better. I still have to read some Murakami.

I think that as of Vintage Murakami's publication this coming ... January? ... all of the New Yorker Murakami will have been published in book form, but I could be forgetting something.

But that's how I think of Pynchon! (Even though I like him.) Which I guess is why I have the association.

the Fantes, David Gates, etc.

This says nothing about me whatsoever.

NA loves Pynchon!

(Oooh, snap!)

(Motherfucker! Xpost!)

Yeah, I think it's pretty accurate for that, and that it should be clear there wouldn't be any such thing as "the ILE consensus on best author." These four are probably a large part of the common ground; authors most of the posters-on-book-threads have read and have things to say about.

Murakami's the only one of them I'd put in my favorite authors, although he's sort of in a special category with Twain and Fitzgerald as far as that goes. Calvino's If on a winter's night would be among my favorite books, but none of the other things I've read by him have been the same kind of fun so far (which makes sense, given the book).

About Donald Antrim, though-he gets compared to Calvino a lot and has a few fans on this board, namely myself, Gareth, and nabisco.

(Everyone else got a dick joke, I wanted one too.)

I'm going to go check out Antrim on Amazon.com; what titles should I click on first?

I like all of them (only three at present), but I guess The Verificationist and The Hundred Brothers are the strongest.

This is by definition untrue. Most pseduo-experimental books are formulaic, but not truly experimental ones.

(there's a famous "not getting it" quote from stockhausen which i can't exactly remember, where he says "Of course the improvisation in jazz is not truly improvisation, as many patterns appear again and again"

you can have formula at the level of the word, the phrase, the sentence, the passage, the paragraph, the section, the chapter, the book or the work (last two may be the same thing, and obv there are other possible "lengths" you cd set yr analysis to examine): you can be experimental w.conventions at any and all of these levels ("all" is fairly unusual), but as often as not the power of a work depends on the crackle generated between freedom and/or invention at one level versus familiarity and/or formula at another

it's true that genre is sometimes treated by timid or cynical writers as a kind of prison ("if i don't stick to these rules no one will read/pay me") but it can just as well be treated as a liberating climbing frame, and now and then is

(eg you don't get good sentences in philip k dick, especially, but that's not what you'd read him for)

it's true that genre is sometimes treated by timid or cynical writers as a kind of prison ("if i don't stick to these rules no one will read/pay me") but it can just as well be treated as a liberating climbing frame, and now and then is

This is an industrial fact about the publishing industry, the really churned out stuff. The real pulp (which doesn't exist quite today). The stuff no-one remembers.

You're right that one shd not INSIST on difference. I'll say there's an interzone between the two, between Joyce and 'Created by' Clancy, but for language to operate there must at some point be acknowledged differences between things - if we've been shown that these ought not be taken too far, no-one has managed to get rid of difference entirely.

ie TS: "something specific lots of us agree is great" vs "something vague except for its by-definition badness"

this suggests you are less confident in yr thesis than might appear on the surface

(antonioni can eat a dick versus any western ever as far as i'm concerned, in re piffling content-free lameness AND "formula" - ie his formula = HIS FILMS ARE NO GOOD - but that's just taste, possibly)

Not really: 'free' has ended up as being a branch of 'experimental' music but it is a continuum, part of the history of jazz and not something separate from it. Ayler would have played differently in the 1930s. Ornette et al were working on different concepts but its still in the spirit of it.

yeah sure there is some 'free' stuff i don't like but that may be to do with execution or other factors. It may fall into certain conventions too but isn't that the same for most music.

When Parker or Monk first released recs, or when ellington did something different, its has been seen in some quarters as 'not jazz' (that's what i got from reading around and also from watching that doc on jazz a couple of years ago).

(antonioni can eat a dick versus any western ever as far as i'm concerned, in re piffling content-free lameness AND "formula" - ie his formula = HIS FILMS ARE NO GOOD - but that's just taste, possibly)

Obviously!! In that I haven't read half the stuff here, including unremembered genreists - Dick and Chandler are genreists, but, within the publishing industry, better treated than others. My lack of confidence has nothing to do with the argument.

But anyway, I like Antonioni AND Westerns (and I'd rather read 'The Big Sleep' than Joyce this evening); I don't think there's anything content-free about his stuff - so nerr. He has a formula, or his style hardened into one (but he was pushing film form in a way Hawks never did, surely?), but the point I was making was not genre=bad, experimental=good, nor was it that the two are totally different, absolutely incompatible.

I was just that saying there's no difference at all is just as unhelpful. And that was why I was being hyperbolic.

Enrique would you say there is non-genre music?

I'm not qualified to say, but I think some music is more generic than other music.

Oh, STANISLAW LEM. Gray's "10 stories" reminded me of Lem's Perfect Vacuum/ Cyberiad stuff.

This is by definition untrue. Most pseduo-experimental books are formulaic, but not truly experimental ones.

That's just not how the term is used. Experimental literature isn't necessarily an experiment in and of itself, it's just working in a tradition that has been called "experimental" literature, focusing on a set of tools that have been ignored by the mainstream, and often working for different aims than mainstream writing. But literature is not science and these are not actual experiments!

I mean, to repeat the example I used earlier: "This Is Not A Novel" by David Markson is clearly an "experimental" novel, even though the experiment is largely the exact same one he did in his novel "Reader's Block". If you're arguing that, because it is familiar, it's not really an "experimental" novel, then what is it?

*pronounce first syllable all frenchified, second one like as in Johnsons ha ha get it oh dear well never mind.

Yes, sort of, but qualitatively different than the goals of pulp writers. I'm trying not to use evaluative language here, note. I love classic Hollywood more than any installation/gallery film.

Are we just using "genre" in a different way?

I doubt those that swear they write for art's sake intend to fit some imaginary box.

That said, I'm not sure that's how Enrique is using the word.

This doesn't mean that experimental writing isn't a genre, but it's true that it isn't genre writing in that limited sense.

But that doesn't mean that experimental writing isn't a genre -- doesn't have rules as codified (and as likely to be broken) as those of "genre writing" genres, such as mysteries, isn't riddled with its own cliches and its own traditions, etc.

Yes, probably, I'm speaking in terms of the publishing industry, and I think that, even if modernist novels are lumpable-innable together, that doesn't make them a genre in the same way that detectives novels are.

I've only read The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera but it was amazing. I read the UK edition and I heard (from my uber knowledgeable English professor) the American translations are not so good.

I haven't read the others, but I've heard good things about Dick's Ubik and Murakami's Norwegian Wood and the Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

Of these four authors, though, I'll have to take Mr. Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow is just so staggering an accomplishment its only peers in my mind are The Silmarillion, Invisible Man, At Swim-Two Birds, The Waves, Ulysses, Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, and Gargantua & Pantagruel. Just an absolute celebration of human verbal and narrative genius. And coming after a perfect little novel like Crying of Lot 48, too.

Calvino is an amazing writer, but I've only ever read his shorts--Invisible Cities, Cosmicomics, and a posthumous odds & sods collection. It's hard to compare those little pieces, as delightful, compelling, and assured as they are, with a colossal epic like Gravity's Rainbow.

The only Murakami I've read is his story in last month's Harper's. It was quite good, but of course not enough to go on.