guy writers vs lady writers poll

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