new novels and why they suck and whatever

anyone ever read anything by Lissa McLaughlin? i got a copy of her short story collection Troubled By His Complexion at the store and it looks really good. and weird. put out by tiny Burning Deck of Providence RI. so, probably kinda hard to come by. plus, it came out in 1988 and has probably been out of print since then. see, random. i like random. i like having never heard of someone and then a book just falls into my hands.

Also: there are a few posters that have actually come through ILX from ILB.

That's me! Not that I am such a prolific ilxor but ILB was my introduction to the place. And remains one of the best spots for online book discussion that I've come across.

in a world where there is site new answers, does it really matter if a thread's on ilb or ile? (i guess sometimes i might not post to 'what are you reading' because i feel like my tastes in reading material might be pedestrian compared to highfalutin' ilb'ers, but that's about me and not ilb so w/e)

i have this loose plan to read more post-2000 books this year, so this thread is a delight for all its new places to find out about things to read! but already it feels like too many - now i have read a chunk of different book blogs the amount of fantastic choice available to me has become dizzyingly wide again.

I was reading some Barthelme short stories recently, and started thinking sadly that no-one else could make the experiments he makes, because it would be obvious that Barthelme had done it already, they'd just be biting his style. That any original way of doing non-traditional narrative would be... good for only one use, as it were. Does that make sense?

(as a child i was afraid of what would happen when all the available combinations of notes were exhausted and the world ran out of tunes.)

(or at least the idea haunted me. i don't know that i was worried about its social consequences or anything. anyway: maybe my worry about non-traditional narrative techniques is just that same idee fixe)

i like having never heard of someone and then a book just falls into my hands.

For me this is "Shamp of the City-Solo," by Jaimy Gordon. Unlike anything else I have seen. I am mostly moved by "traditional" narrative I guess but "Shamp" and the B Marcus book are two "experimental" works that I think anyone who cares about prose must bow to.

Here's a little:

Beyond us the Sump rolled mosquito-flecked in its trench. Behind lay a long stretch of acid pine barren, creased with superhighway, pocked with gas station. Lest they fall upon it, swarms of raindrops clung tremulously to the air.

This is an effing great "lest." Not an easy word to deploy gracefully.

But this is not new, obv., it is 1974 (though I think JG is still at it.)

motorman by david ohle is sort of on the same tip. ben marcus wrote the intro for 2004 edition. came out originally in '72 though

I was reading some Barthelme short stories recently, and started thinking sadly that no-one else could make the experiments he makes, because it would be obvious that Barthelme had done it already, they'd just be biting his style. That any original way of doing non-traditional narrative would be... good for only one use, as it were. Does that make sense?

It does, except if you're good, you can make it work. E.G. I think you would naturally say the same about Ben Marcus, but then Matthew Derby comes along and writes a terrific book which on the one hand is plainly in the wake of Marcus but is really its own thing, not just a pale copy. As for Barthelme himself, I think a TINGE of him at least seeps into tons of people -- e.g. is there Gary Lutz without Barthelme? Is there Miranda July without Barthelme? (ok, I like Miranda July, maybe you don't.) D F Wallace's "Brief Interviews w/ Hideous Men" is in the Q-and-A format that I associate with Barthelme (though I don't know for sure he invented it.) Just saying, NOBODY is such a thorough experimenter that they work through all possible consequences of the experiment!

(Wallace is an interesting case, actually -- his prose style is VERY hard to take things from without imitating it outright. Not sure if I can think of someone who's doing it. But he's so widely read that surely there are examples.)

no one is sui generis anyways. hard to imagine barthelme without james thurber, his predecessor as house absurdist at the new yorker, and earlier slapstic black humorists like nathaneal west and i guess mark twain. hell some of lucian's dialogues from waaaay back in the day read like barthelme set pieces

What's proprietary about what Barthelme does in terms of experiments? I'll grant you there's a sensibility that would be worth appropriating if you wanted to get published in the same spheres as Barthelme, but if anything, I get the sense that being less playful would take you farther.
Outside of nesting footnotes, DFW strikes me as a very neutral writer -- what signature moves does he do that someone wanting to tackle similar material ought to avoid in order to draw comparisons?

he's a very explicit writer

everything is named

and but so

yah srsly it's not just abt the footnotes

If I were going to boil down DFW to his essentials, the thing that pops out as common to everything he writes is tackling a usually ridiculous or absurd subject and taking it seriously, exploring every possible avenue. But this is the same M.O. of pretty much every stand-up comedian. So what I'm left with are the quirks -- and other than the footnotes I'm having a hard time ID'ing anything.

pay attention to the way he diagrams everything out, makes the connections between things 100% obvious. it's very nabisco-like.

Outside of nesting footnotes, DFW strikes me as a very neutral writer -- what signature moves does he do that someone wanting to tackle similar material ought to avoid in order to draw comparisons?

there are lots of little surface things that read as dfw-y to me..."and but so", certain uses of technical language, perfect pitch descriptions of non-musical sounds, lots of little signature phrases, etc.

"the way he diagrams everything out, makes the connections between things 100% obvious. it's very nabisco-like."
Is that a quirk, though? Isn't that what clear writing is supposed to do?

it becomes a style in and of itself, imo, the way DFW does it - he reads to me noticeably different than other non-fiction writers.

pay attention to the way he diagrams everything out, makes the connections between things 100% obvious. it's very nabisco-like.

it's the other way around, imho.

just yesterday i read this passage by wyatt mason about DFW's style (quoted on conversationalreading, linked from this very thread):

The mix of registers here is typical of Wallace: intensifiers and qualifiers that ordinarily suggest sloppy writing and thinking (“unbelievably”; “really” used three times in the space of a dozen words; “something like that”) coexisting with the correct use of the subjunctive mood (“as though the driver were”). The precision of the subjunctive—which literate people bother with less and less, the simple past tense increasingly and diminishingly employed in its place—is never arbitrary, and its presence suggests that if attention is being paid to a matter of higher-order usage, similar intention lurks behind the clutter of qualifiers. For although one could edit them out of the passage above to the end of producing leaner prose—

I felt sorry for him. It was irrational, but I felt as though the driver were me. I wasn’t just sorry for him, I was sorry as him.

—the edit removes more than “flab”: it discards the furniture of real speech, which includes the routine repetitions and qualifications that cushion conversation. Wallace was seeking to write prose that had all the features of common speech.

that mix of precise and sloppy is key, i think.

sorry, 'the passage above' being this:

I felt unbelievably sorry for him and of course the Bad Thing very kindly filtered this sadness for me and made it a lot worse. It was weird and irrational but all of a sudden I felt really strongly as though the bus driver were really ”me“. I really felt that way. So I felt just like he must have felt, and it was awful. I wasn’t just sorry for him, I was sorry ”as“ him, or something like that.

pay attention to the way he diagrams everything out, makes the connections between things 100% obvious. it's very nabisco-like.

it's the other way around, imho.

― Mr. Que, Tuesday, June 29, 2010 12:00 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

well yeah I didn't want to accuse nabisco of anything haha

'"and but so", certain uses of technical language, perfect pitch descriptions of non-musical sounds, lots of little signature phrases'

-I've never noticed the "and but so" thing -- but it must be a thing! : http://www.andbutso-austin.com/
-The technical language comes from his math background, I guess, and there's lots of writers (usually med school dropouts?) who bring some arcana to their prose, or more often than not, fake it, so that doesn't strike me as a quirk peculiar to DFW (though maybe the combination of tennis and math metaphors?)
-"perfect pitch descriptions of non-musical sounds" strikes me as a necessary skill of anyone transposing non-verbal sensations into words.
-"lots of little signature phrases" -- the one thing I noticed and copied is a tendency to use abbreviations like w/r/t because this is really useful! so I feel its utility outweighs its origin -- like manute bol coining "my bad"

polysyllabism

the refusal to deal with (x) unless one has free rein to deal with (x.i), (x.ii) ... (x.x) as well

that last on the level of syntax as well as subject

yeah if i associate dfw's prose style with any one particular thing it's the effects -- emotional as well as formal/experimental -- that he can get with one of those sentences that winds in and out of three or four different kinds of diction, from high-academe philosopher to burnout. i think it's why, at least in inf jest and the later stories, he was able to do a lot of high-end experimenting without making me go "agh no," cuz each burst of jargon-ish complexity was cut (or enriched) by the "so anyway really"s and the swerves into just-this-close-to-sentiment stuff. i think of those pages during the don g. in hospital sequence where there's just reams of almost absurdly specific and very precise descriptions of medical equipment and hospital atmosphere and then he'll just drop some heartwrenching free-indirectish thing in don's brain voice (which is the precise opposite of "very precise") about the physical pain or his childhood or whatever.

various american speech tics incorporated into his prose, both in the essays where the 'i' is wallace and in third person indirect discourse (ick) in the stories. like handing a sentence a subject at the end of it (the sentence.) xpost

the tic i'd forgotten about (and could really do without) is one that really bugs me in that end section of IJ, the rendering of a lot of stuff that's coming via gately misspelled or spelled phonetically

-"perfect pitch descriptions of non-musical sounds" strikes me as a necessary skill of anyone transposing non-verbal sensations into words.

i meant literally saying "some unseen industrial equipment emitted a high b-flat whine" or something like that. it's a small tic but i've noticed other writers, who most definitely don't have perfect pitch, doing that and it seems just a touch bullshitty.

the tic i'd forgotten about (and could really do without) is one that really bugs me in that end section of IJ, the rendering of a lot of stuff that's coming via gately misspelled or spelled phonetically

does he do that anywhere other than IJ? it happens all over the book, as if the character were writing that segment, and it's the only thing that annoys me about it.

vuvuzelas b flat whine amirite xp

surely the "wardine" section is the rubicon for that particular tic, no?

(it also might be the worst thing he ever wrote and the only part i skip on re-reads even though i know it contains important info on future plot developments yadda yadda.)

xpost - i'm not sure, actually (if he does it anywhere else) - i mean, i think infinite jest is also the only place that he has non-educated narrators or central reflectors going on, you know?

it bugs me more in the last section where Don G only comes through indirectly: in the yrstruly bit the narration is so much closer to speech it doesn't seem so bad: though it still seems dumb, because it's not like Minty would write that way

it doesn't bother me much in the wardine section but that's mainly because i wasn't going to like that section much ever anyway (haha xpost again)

(it also might be the worst thing he ever wrote and the only part i skip on re-reads even though i know it contains important info on future plot developments yadda yadda.)

word, that was the only part that made me wonder if i should keep going, as in "really, dfw?"

rinse the lemonade (Jordan) wrote this on thread c/d: 'infinite jest' on board I Love Books on 05-Apr-2010

that was the only section in the whole book that made me go 'really, dfw?'

ANYTIME i think about writing "in dialect" in a story, i think of that second. and i am chastened.

i spent my lunchbreak complaining about this piece on tumblr: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/123378-infinite-gesturing-james-wood-takes-on-david-foster-wallace/P1

on reflection i should probably have just gotten some lunch

'i meant literally saying "some unseen industrial equipment emitted a high b-flat whine"'
OH! Sorry yeah I thought by "perfect pitch" you meant he was just awesome at it.

'that he can get with one of those sentences that winds in and out of three or four different kinds of diction, from high-academe philosopher to burnout.'
I feel though this is a generically useful skill (though one I tend to see more from stand-up comics).

'like handing a sentence a subject at the end of it (the sentence.)'
Is he doing that for clarity, or for impact like a rapper would strategically place a pun?

(strongo, are you writing fiction these days?)

(thomp, what's yr tumblr?)

like handing a sentence a subject at the end of it (the sentence.)'
Is he doing that for clarity, or for impact like a rapper would strategically place a pun?

― Philip Nunez

mm i dunno. here's a sentence that jumped out at me as amazing, last time through, which is also a very DFW sentence:

"Mrs. Avril Incandenza isn't crazy about the idea of Hal drinking, mostly because of the way his father had drunk, when alive, and reportedly his father's own father before him, in AZ and CA; but Hal's academic precocity, and especially his late competitive success on the junior circuit, make it clear that he's able to handle whatever modest amounts she's pretty sure he consumes -- there's no way someone can seriously abuse a substance and perform at top scholarly and athletic levels, the E.T.A. psych-counselor Dr. Rusk assures her, especially the high-level-athletic part -- and Avril feels it's important that a concerned but un-smothering single parent know when to let go somewhat and let the two high-functioning of her three sons make their own possible mistakes and learn from their own valid experience, no matter how much the secret worry about mistakes tears her own gizzard out, the mother's."

(jordan i am 'timocraticyouth'. are you on there?)

oh ok I think I can see the justification for clarifying that avril is thinking in abstract mother's gizzards rather than her own personal gizzard.

kinda sad this thread has devolved into DFW sentence analysis tbh

I enjoy reading what people have to say about wallace but cosign w/shakey mo, this thread was going in some interesting places (tho I was bummed when it looked like its main subject was gonna be oscar wao)

strongo has always been writing fiction, he's just been taking it more seriously over the last few years, much to the detriment of his free time (and also his hopes and dreams).