guy writers vs lady writers poll

martin amis definitely fancies himself but i don't think that needs to take a dative object at all really

i think kerouac is at the centre of one particular canon of WRITING FOR MEN though it's not the same as the 'encyclopedic types about whom neckbearded undergraduates have deep thoughts' definition of 'guy writers' from the other thread.

noodle vague i have spent a lot of idle moments today trying to answer your question, the best i could come up with was 'maybe david sedaris'

lydia davis

George Eliot

yeah i wd say later Eliot and a lot of A.S. Byatt have guyesque tendencies but in thinking this it makes me think that, say, Pynchon cd be seen as working in a lady tradition.

then i realised this is really unhelpful and hurts my head.

William Faulkner - "Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met."

Tony Parsons = guy who wants to "write" like a lady for guys but only so he can show the ladies what a guy he is

if eliot is a guy writer it simplifies the line of descent to franzen i guess. i think here be dragons in trying to translate this (terrible) model outside of the publishing context of the last fifty years or so

(did you know gilbert and er gubar? started writing a twentieth-century follow-up to 'the madwoman in the attic' which was meant to be one volume, it ended up three books and approximately two million pages long)

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2011/6/2/1306976114500/VS-Naipaul-007.jpg

For all my ladies out there!!!

w.h. auden on the publication of look, stranger! without his final imprimatur (busy touring iceland w/ their money iirc): "Faber invented a bloody title while I was away without telling me. It sounds like the work of a vegetarian lady novelist."

auden not holding much truck with the ladies shocker

coding gay writers like james and auden as 'female' obv v problematic, but i'm sure p commonplace within/without the publishing industry/critical discourse of the time (and maybe still to some extent today?)

x-post

I think maybe Muriel Spark has a guyish streak (for the 'having serious thoughts @ university' reading of guy)

but yeah this makes my head hurt (+ I have hangover), getting totally lost in Henry Green as guy-recoder of lady traditions.

The release of a new Roth or Pynchon is usually accompanied by a tedious, halfwitted and self-congratulatory Radio Four/Newsnight Review discussion on Why Women Don't Try And Write 'Great American Novels', or 'State of the Nation' novels for that matter. It's a discussion that you didn't hear much of around the release of, say, Lorrie Moore's last book.

I like Alan Warner as a contemporary lady writer, or at least one who is able to write about young girls in a way that doesn't come across as either creepy, paternalistic or out of touch.

woof i had that same thought about muriel spark five minutes ago!!

(most of the women that come to mind when i try and put them into the 'guy writer' slot really kind of expose the shittiness of the model, which is what i'd hope/expect: but ha ha my other ideas included hannah arendt and gertrude stein so er whatever)

matt yeah one of the things i thought about posting (but, you know, no marc loi) wz that one of the models of 'guy writer' i'm talking about here is stuff that just codes as 'Writer' in various places -- i don't know if i've seen many pieces so explicit as to say 'why don't women write great american novels', though

i recommend michelle dean's piece on sheila heti in slate i think. (heti probably another troubling borderline case but er she hasn't been published here yet and that is my excuse for not reading her)

also good:

http://aussiespecficinfocus.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/russ-suppress.jpg

think maybe Muriel Spark has a guyish streak (for the 'having serious thoughts @ university' reading of guy)

ditto iris murdoch

yeah in sf there def seems to be the sense that 'hard science' = masculine. Cld make the case that Le Guin is as hermaphraditic(?) as some of her characters, in that she trades in BIG political/philosophical ideas while at the same time eschewing techno babble and concentrating on character/inner space

massive xposts but re Auden, I don't think his work has ever easily coded female - the british stuff at least has a boy's own/prep-school fascination with (& mimicry or parody of) man-of-action masculinity, plus he was visiting wars etc. It's definitely a version of queer but I don't think it easily maps to female traditions. (Though maybe effeminacy accusations would come through after he left for America? Lots of people in UK seemed to take that as unforgivable cowardice.)

a boy's own/prep-school fascination with (& mimicry or parody of) man-of-action masculinity

yes, this! i'd never thought through how much of a current of this there was. (been flicking through 'the english auden' a lot lately, i put it down yesterday thinking 'i will definitely have a proper go at the orators before i go to bed' but then i just ended up watching the x-files)

there are probably lines in his faux-don juan thing from the iceland book that, y'know, speak to this issue

The Orators is the masterpiece of that strain in Auden imo. You should read it! It's great.

Val Cunningham's British Writers of the Thirties is good on this stuff in Auden + co iirc.

i will have a look for it. has anyone ever written a decent book specifically on the remit of the auden crowd?

a shilling life will give you all the facts

Cunningham's the sharpest critic I've read on them, but that book's got a very wide range - bombs around over just about everything published in the thirties. Haven't read anything else that stuck with me, but have never looked at much 2ndary or biographical stuff on them.

anyway it occurs to me i have a much better grasp of what i mean by 'guy writers' (they're those writers whom guys read to further their self-definition and self-presentation as being the kind of guys who read those guy writers) (see also: macho vegans) than i do 'lady writers'

― thomp, Friday, September 7, 2012 10:52 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

See, I totally didn't even get what you were getting at, I thought it was just an odd way of expressing 'male' and 'female'. This is what happens when you start a thread with no explanation and expect people to read your mind. Answer is still option three, anyway.

Joyce Johnson

Wait, this is a real person and not just a fantasised female synthesis of the two greatest authors?

take it we're talking b.s. rather than pamela hansford

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m781ngeaWX1ry39wso1_500.jpg

this is a pic of 'the real' joyce johnson w/ JK, fact that she always seems to be in the background of their pics together really speaks volumes

"guyish streak" what the hell does this mean

xposts - what, samuel johnson and joyce carol oates?

anyway, apologies. i was shooting for mild eye-rolling more than i was serious offense. -- it's spinning out of some posts of lagoon's on the dfw thread from yesterday, sort of.

Oh no, don't worry, mild eye-rolling was what I did. Was that the DFW vs Pynchon thread? Didn't really read that properly as I'm not that interested in the dude and although I like what Pynchon I've read it's not enough to have a particularly good debate.

The debate it's thrown up is interesting enough that talking about the phrasing of an intentionally dumb opening question hardly feels relevant.

Oh no, don't worry, mild eye-rolling was what I did. Was that the DFW vs Pynchon thread? Didn't really read that properly as I'm not that interested in the dude and although I like what Pynchon I've read it's not enough to have a particularly good debate.

― emil.y, Friday, 7 September 2012 13:45 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

good, my work here is done -- and the dfw vs pynchon thread was pretty good, actually, everyone managed to largely avoid actually talking about the topic question. (ha remember in the early days pynchon was The Author Everyone On ILE Read, i forgot about that)

"guyish streak" what the hell does this mean

― ms fotheringham (Crabbits), Friday, 7 September 2012 13:32 (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that spark's work shares a tendency with a lot of the ppl we're (i'm?) calling 'guy writers', which i haven't actually managed to isolate yet -- the implied author of the work as grand arranger/artificer, an alien intelligence of a level profoundly superior to any character within, watching their meanderings from lunar distances

http://starsmedia.ign.com/stars/image/object/923/923819/the-watcher_marvel_pictureboxart_160w.jpg

See, I think I can grok a 'guyish' strain of writing, but I'm incredibly wary of doing so in a way that even hints at a gender essentialism. I can look at past writers in their cultural situation and say "yep, those writers were guy's guys", but... it's about cultural performance, which is malleable. Female writers who write with an omnipotent detached authorial voice are not writing in a masculine way, they're writing in a way that men have previously dominated (if such an assertion is even true, which I'm also somewhat doubtful about).

By that criterion Austen and Eliot count over Roth, whose author-narrators are basically incapable of developing any distance from the action or characters. Works for someone like Updike though.

(xpost)

http://harpers.org/archive/1998/06/0059591

See, I think I can grok a 'guyish' strain of writing, but I'm incredibly wary of doing so in a way that even hints at a gender essentialism. I can look at past writers in their cultural situation and say "yep, those writers were guy's guys", but... it's about cultural performance, which is malleable. Female writers who write with an omnipotent detached authorial voice are not writing in a masculine way, they're writing in a way that men have previously dominated (if such an assertion is even true, which I'm also somewhat doubtful about).

this is what i want to talk about, but the trainspotting aspects of it are easier to get into at work --

it's about cultural performance, which is malleable

emil.y, i'm not quite sure what you mean by this - is it, the way that certain writers - and certain traits - are perceived at the time that they're writing, or after their historical moment? or the way that writers might perceive their own work, and their own audience and its expectations? is 'cultural performance' different from 'cultural production'?

so there's this strain of 'guy writing' that i wd. say includes henry miller, ernest hemingway, bukowski, kerouac: shared characteristics, a commitment to lived experience and emotion-in-process, with a particular importance laid on Important Things Like Sex And Death, usu. presented in a somewhat self-celebratory way

(forerunners: d.h. lawrence? 19th-c. adventure fiction?)

but the sorts of 'guy writers' lagoon was talking about in the other thread were americans in the encyclopedic-comedy line: delillo, pynchon, wallace. it's interesting how a lot of the surface stuff that's in guy-1 writers is operating at some distance or faked ironic remove in guy-2 writers, think of coover on sex, or how many delillo books have an Oh My Fuckin' God There's a Gun Meaningful Things Are Happening moment

i think its possible that the brain-in-vat-implied-author as model for Meaningful (straight white male) Writing is in part a reaction to a shift in perception that occurs in the sixties, where a commitment to lived experience, emotional meaning becomes coded as female (this has both progressive & non-progressive aspects)

what ted hughes does to the manuscript of ariel is totally germane here

shared characteristics, a commitment to lived experience and emotion-in-process, with a particular importance laid on Important Things Like Sex And Death, usu. presented in a somewhat self-celebratory way

this is all fiction writing, though, not just male authors!

knew that was coming

xxp
Mailer might fit as a mediator between guy1/guy2 there?

Guy1 also collapsing into (New?) Journalism maybe.

smart guy writers vs tough guy writers but both give the impression of being the only ones who really get it

anyway i voted for lady writers

cuz i like alice munro so much mostly

adjectives, those are good

alice munro is who i'm picturing when i say lady writer i guess also elizabeth taylor and sheila heti

I'm picturing Elizabeth Taylor and Penelope Fitzgerald.

did you like that sheila heti novel? i dont really have interesting thoughts about it but i sure do have thoughts about it

i think the worst part of smart guy writers is the part where the just want to be tom clancy, although there are a lot of worst parts

i can only picture florence craye

knew that was coming

― thomp, Friday, September 7, 2012 2:40 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh, what do you expect?

i haven't read it yet but i like the idea of it i guess

xp

emil.y, i'm not quite sure what you mean by this - is it, the way that certain writers - and certain traits - are perceived at the time that they're writing, or after their historical moment? or the way that writers might perceive their own work, and their own audience and its expectations? is 'cultural performance' different from 'cultural production'?

Cultural performance is more Lived Maleness (and following on, the Written Maleness of these authors). Cultural production is more an activity than a mode of being, perhaps? My thoughts are tied to perception, certainly, but it is more to do with the socialisation into what is and is not a 'guyish' way of being (perception and performativity), as opposed to an essentialist view of masculinity.

Still not grasping what is meant by 'lady writers', I have to say, but I've only read Munro out of the Munro/Heti/Taylor/Craye mentions...

Also still rolling my eyes somewhat.

Still not grasping what is meant by 'lady writers',

OTM

Usual boring binary that get thrown around is big ideas vs intimacy and subtle detail.

that's kinda bullshit

It's total bullshit but it's amazing how regularly you see it trotted out.

here's a crazy suggestion: women writers don't write any differently than male writers, but we read women writers differently than male writers. like i think these ideas are about readers, not writers.

As an aside I see that thrown around almost as much by sub-Julie Burchill types making a hamfisted point about male ego as much as I do by male readers being sniffy about girls.

fwiw in my initial formulation guy writers guy refers to the audience not the writer, and guy is not synonymous w/any sort of essential masculinity but rather a cultural subset, you know guys, stuff guys like - i feel like it was a p visionary term but this thread may be destroying its shot at canonization

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/00/Liz_Phair_-_Exile_in_Guyville.jpg/220px-Liz_Phair_-_Exile_in_Guyville.jpg

no you are a total visionary, totally, all the way, lagoon

thank you

oh craye isn't real she was one of bertie wooster's accidental fiances

there's a funny part in that SCENT OF A WOMAN'S INK article where there's a "blind taste-test" and you're supposed to guess which passage is by a woman and which by a man, but the one you're supposed to think is by a man is 1) so full of stereotypical man-indicators (blood, harshness, dialect) that it would clearly be trying to trick you even if it weren't 2) obviously by flannery o'connor

yah that's one of the reasons i posted it

pretty funny!

like thomp and lagoon i think it's true that the sprawling facetiousness in service of DeepThoughts that pynchon or wallace truck in can particularly appeal to... a certain type? and that that certain type, v generally, might also be into things like the huge detailed busy shallowly-characterized world of comic books or the large numbers in tool's time signatures or nietzsche or idk other things we associate with "guys" (which is why i half-joked in the other thread that i was embarrassed that my answer to the poll was DFW, although i guess in that sense all the other answers were just as embarrassing) but since we all know that girls like that stuff too and since setting up a dichotomy doesn't really work cuz we don't really know what "lady writers" would mean we should prob think of some other way to describe it unless we just really don't want to give james wood the satisfaction (what's being called "guy2" here is p much his "hysterical realism", right? "hysterical"!)

anyway i voted for option three but not out of any hostility to thomp; just cuz it was either that or abstention and i wanted to do my civic duty

norman mailer we can probably call a guy writer though.

i voted lady writers, just seemed like the write thing to do

I've been taking 'lady writer' fairly locally - meaning something like one strain of British mid-twentieth-century literary fiction - domestic, familial, thwarted passions, manners and embarrassment, affairs, late-blooming love, village/small town life - persephone prints a lot of it. I definitely think this idea of the lady novelist was a thing in British literary culture for a long time, & dismissed by dominant 'serious' male culture (but with exceptions - like Larkin and Amis stanning for Elizabeth taylor or Barbara Pym). Who else… Bowen, Joanna Trollope?

obvs I don't think this is some 'natural' state of affairs where women write books like this. men write books like that - it's p clearly the product of social gender roles, expectations, industry structure etc; and that the dichotomy collapses v quickly (which, as a provocative poll head I think it's designed to do?) - so idk Taylor's Angel isn't a 'lady novel' (and is quite meta, destructive of some of these traditions), and again (shit, I need to stop and do some work before 5.30) they're also existing in a british fiction world that includes Ann Quin, Anna Kavan, Christine Brooke-Rose, etc etc etc so I'm not sure what I'm saying.

Yeah, see, those last three are the sort of female writers I do actually bother to read. I don't really know what else goes on...

(Actually, by that I mean they're the sort of *writers* I bother to read. Though I have more of a history of reading guy literature in my teens, so I'm more confident with critiquing the mainstream of that culture.)

This thread shows the most action ILB has seen in many weeks. Kind of sad, really.

gay writers vs. guy writers

sky writers

that spark's work shares a tendency with a lot of the ppl we're (i'm?) calling 'guy writers'

See, Spark seems very female to me, in the sense of the way women are actually more likely to be coldly realistic than men when it comes to the big decisions, whereas men tend to jump in with a 'It'll be fine!' attitude (big generalisation here, I know); which is why, for example, men start waaaaay more businesses than women, but those businesses women start are waaaay more likely to succeed.

I am drunk, this may not make sense

Also, Jennifer Egan seems to have crossed into the blokey Franzen HER BOOK IS A BIG DEAL AND CAUSE FOR OP-ED PIECES territory

I am still drunk

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

too close.

well i guess that conclusively proves that guy writers are better

ill have to look into this fuck you