"makes me feel like a zombie": dislocation, dissociation, disengagement

and it does remind me of dennis cooper in a way. cuzza the drugs and deadpan kids and boredom and yeah after awhile you go zzzzzz....and YET i still respect dennis cooper. and john rechy too. and genet too come to think of it. another gay writer i have trouble reading after about 30 or 40 pages cuz i get numbed. i have no idea if this guy is gay. but that deadpan thing...wait, is genet deadpan? see, i never got far enough into his books...think its just the grove press connection. i wanted to read all those books when i was a kid cuz they were "transgressive" and shocking but mostly i fell asleep. burroughs definitely made me fall asleep. de sade. all the biggies. selby i could hang with cuzza the breathless thing. carried you along. and james purdy could do deadpan, transgressive, AND experimental, but i was drawn to him more cuzza his baroque flourishes. i think i need baroque furniture to sit on if i'm going somewhere heavy. minimalism just makes me not care. i will check out taipei if i see it in a store though. it does sound kinda interesting.

― scott seward, Monday, July 8, 2013 4:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

beckett too. i can't read him. makes me feel like a zombie. those longass novels. stein too. i really should give genet another shot. right? people love him. or they used to.

― scott seward, Monday, July 8, 2013 4:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I get exactly what scott's saying here, but I love those authors (the ones that I've read). What's the appeal of these kinds of books?

I think kafka and frances newman should be mentioned itt

The only thing I could think of was Gravity's Rainbow which I found is easier to read in a sort of hi-speed trance

there's high excitement to be found in a beckett narrator's epic attempts to walk from point A to point B or to make his defective body operate a bicycle or to lay out his reasons for suspecting his housekeeper but declining to punish her.

the printing in some of the older grove editions (retained in recent re-prints) is itself kind of hard to read, for me. he can be easier to take when the page is a little lighter, takes some of the burden off the fifty-page paragraphs.

joan didion's 'play it as it lays' def. fits this criteria as well, which i loved. i guess the deadpan manner kinda emphasises the numbness brought on by the horror and trauma undured by the protagonists?

*endured

i did enjoy play it as it lays when i was a teen. and speedboat.

i liked this picture of her probably more than the book. had it on my wall for a long time.

http://www.harpersbooks.com/pictures/17084_bback.jpg

That photo of joan didion is alltime iconic. The year of magical thinking is a major book for me. I think the conscious restraint of the style allows her to write about grieving without seeimg either clinical or melodramatic and that's a nice trick.

that's the copy of 'play it as it lays' i have too -- read it on a particularly miserable overnight flight once and it was oddly fitting. still one of the best and most accurate depictions in depression in literature, i think.

of depression, rather.

'For Christ's sake turn off that light!'

I got out in a hurry. 'Night, Donna,' I said.

She nodded.

I left her staring at the dash and went to my car. I saw her move over behind the wheel. Then she just sat there without doing anything. She looked at me. I waved. She didn't wave back. So I started the car and turned on the headlights. I slipped it in gear and fed it the gas. Donna would get herself home OK.

In the kitchen I poured scotch, drank some of it, and took the glass into the bathroom. I brushed my teeth. Then I pulled open a drawer. Patti yelled something from the bedroom that I couldn't understand. She opened the bathroom door. She was still dressed. She'd fallen asleep with her clothes on.

'What time is it?' she screamed. 'I've overslept! Jesus, oh my God! You've let me oversleep, goddamn you!'

She was wild. She stood in the doorway with her clothes on. She could have been fixing to go to work. But there was no sample case, no vitamins. She was having a bad dream, that's all. She began shaking her head back and forth.

I couldn't take any more tonight. 'Go back to sleep, honey. I'm looking for something,' I said. I knocked stuff out of the medicine cabinet. Things rolled into the sink. 'Where's the aspirin?' I said. I knocked down more things. I didn't care. 'Goddamn it,' I said. Things kept falling.

huh, would never have thought of carver as an example of this. He's minimalist but I don't get the ~feeling~ outlined above from him. Now richard ford on the other hand I could see.

Contrary to a very sad wave of public opinion, I think it's not at all pretentious to say you 'like' or 'enjoy' Beckett's plays, because they're dramatic and enjoyable, but the novels are definitely something I 'graduated' to and I don't think it would be honest to say I 'enjoyed' them. They were good. But enjoyment wasn't what was happening, something else was.

I find I don't get put off by absolute minimalism, but I do get put off by unnecessary material hanging around that should, qua 'minimalism', have been cut out.

and genet too come to think of it. another gay writer i have trouble reading after about 30 or 40 pages cuz i get numbed.

Sartre pompously said in praise of Genet 'Not all who would be are Narcissus', so I get the sense that at the time the sheer and total self-regard you get in Genet was something that hit people. This was before Glam, and before Pop.

burroughs definitely made me fall asleep

Naked Lunch is very difficult to read as a continuous narrative and arguably even its publication as a novel reifies it; all future editions of Naked Lunch should be published as holograms of his disgusting flat in Tangiers and you tip-toe in, reading the bits of paper lying around on the floor, trying not to wake him up

dis thread

But I very much recognise the reaction, and personally I get it from Sartre's novels. I don't know that he's attempting to be minimalist as such - I'm not sure he's even attempting anything at all in the way of aesthetics; I think he's taking time out of his busy schedule to explain his philosophy to us simple souls using the medium of fiction, which is secondary to philosophy but has its uses. Which is not an approach I have much time for.

The same is true for: Camus, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky.

I don't necessarily mind it when an author has some ideas he or she thinks are important, and discussing these ideas is the part of the purpose of the text. There's room for that and lots of good books do it. But these guys – no, no, no. When I read them they inspire only boredom, and when paying social calls the sight of their names on a series of glossy spines is enough to bring on the Disappointment of the Bookshelf.

who is ilx user cardamon, haver of opinions

ilx user thomp stepped into a faulty transporter beam which split him into two, all of his inner challops ending up in the sock puppet cardamon who escaped into the engine deck from which he started posting furiously /tldr /sttos

:)

whatever, dostoyevsky is way better than any of those people

i think scott has p cohesive aesthetic biases but it's p telling he refers to beckett's novels as "longass"

the second part of notes from underground -- when he pretends he is going to save the prostitute by marrying her and letting her live somewhere other than the brothel, but then rescinds on this offer, and insults her by giving her money to drive home the fact that she is, in fact, a prostitute -- is the most depressing thing i have ever read in my entire life. a major achievement, but i have been avoiding the brothers karamzov because i'm not sure i have the stomach for his writing, much as i love russian literature generally.

i did do my high school honors english thesis on crime and punishment, though. that is also a rough book.

i disagree forcefully with you cardamon about sartre, who i think is a much better novelist than philosopher. nausea is great.

camus is not boring either

it's true. for some reason i am really not a fan of the ending of the stranger though. mersault's rant to the priest, i think, was underwhelming to me... which may have been the point now that i think of it. i like nausea better than anything i've read by camus though, probably because roquentin's suffering is so unglamorous.

i have issues with that book too though. the idea that roquentin's issue -- that he feels alienated to the extent that the world itself, objects, begin to fracture and seem strange -- can be solved by a heroic force of creative will seems... not true. i think the solution to roquentin's issues is just to be less isolated, re-join the social, and allow himself to experience the world in a more sensuous rather than cerebral way. basically, i don't think the world is weird to us and that we, as individuals need to project meaning onto it. i think the world is inherently meaningful at least on the level of experience, which is a more heideggerian position than a sartrean one. this relates to the things i was saying about taipei, paul's epiphany, which rings truer for me than roquentin's.

as a novel i love nausea though and i understand why roquentin thinks the way he does. the stuff about reconnecting with the ex-girlfriend, annie, who resents him for not being able to understand things intuitively and live the rituals of daily life gracefully is incredible.