new novels and why they suck and whatever

"sip a little weed"

i really love that movie

the book is pretty funny too

ha, I was about to xpost with the Wonder Boys one. (It also had a more broadly funny title than Chabon for the guy's big book -- "The Arsonist's Daughter.")

that movie also gets my personal award for Most Verging-on-Realistic Writing-Workshop Scene in a Motion Picture, although I can't remember any other nominees apart from Kicking and Screaming and Storytelling

"I mean, Jesus, what is it with you Catholics?"

also only movie in which michael douglas has ever been charming and lovable

Wall Street 2 looks pretty good

Audience members actually walked out OUTRAGED when we saw Tobey Maguire and RDJ in bed.

why hasn't anyone made a tv show about a writing workshop
make it like scrubs or something

or glee or whatever people watch

make it like mad men

mad pen

with Frances McDormand as the professor.

you shouldn't be giving this idea away on the internet imo

"the night was sultry"

I have other ideas tho

and when people read a story out loud to the workshop or whatever have a guest director come in and direct a short film or something

my other idea is a war movie w/ big stars where people actually die

those are my ideas for hollywood

haha. would watch mad pen fwiw

"I mean, Jesus, what is it with you Catholics?"

i once THOUGHT something like this in a poetry workshop, although it was a little more like "OMG, do you want to get laid or don't you? how many poems will it take to decide? just pick one" after a long run of conflicted poems about, I dunno, the temptation and taboo of totally normal heterosexual desire

i apologize for not having been more empathetic/imaginative in terms of different cultural/religious backgrounds but geez, hop on the dude or don't

i love that line because the girl answers her own question before she even asks it!

my other idea is a war movie w/ big stars where people actually die

lol

How bout a real war in which the big movie stars die.

I was being serious about the "endless descriptions of horses" thing, honestly! Had no idea it was some kind of common trope.

I did like All the Pretty Horses tho. Not as much as Blood Meridien (which I already ref'd upthread I see)

But yeah a novel-length meditation on the erotic natures of horses and prostitutes = um, no thanks

you do realize that you just sold, like, 50 more copies of the book with that description. this is ilx after all.

lol

ATTN: SHAKEY MO COLLIER

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/08/in-search-of-historys-most-innovative-fiction-colin-marshall-talks-to-historian-of-the-novel-steven-.html

^^ You may be interested in this guy, Steven Moore, who is assembling an "alternate history" of the novel, tracing the parts that fit outside whatever standard "modern novel" format we've been talking about here. Plus attempting to "defend" modern experimental/non-standard literature against whoever is allegedly attacking it. (I don't know who's attacking it, besides that one Franzen article, but defense is pretty great anyway.) He's only up through 1600, though.

There are a few things in the interview above that strike me as either total headscratchers or possibly even dumb, but I like the project. His take in this interview feels sort of like the one Barth had toward the end of the 70s, which sounded right to me back when I was grumpy about the "modern novel" -- basically the history of long written works has/had contained loads of things that looked nothing like the narrow format of the "modern novel." (I think the problem with projecting that onto modern "experimental fiction," though, is that I'm not sure how much today's experimental fiction looks like the long wide history of writing, either; a lot of it feels more trapped in a specific environment than more conventional novels.)

Like, just for one example of something that makes me scratch my head:

The avant-garde novel that Joyce allegedly invented has always been a property. There's crazy, avant-garde, weird, experimental novels going back almost to the very beginning.

1. Do people really disagree with this? Are there people who genuinely assert that Joyce/modernism invented the avant-garde novel? Isn't it really commonplace for people to point out, at the very least, how Cervantes or the Tale of Genji or Sterne already did every clever modern/postmodern thing you could dream of? I don't get who's being corrected on this front.

2. Maybe this is the reason he says "almost," but isn't it a given that the very first items in a new form will be crazy, avant-garde, weird, and experimental? They can't help it; there are no existing conventions to compare against, so the statement is sort of trivial. On some level you could say this means that the novelistic conventions that followed were the inventive/experimental ones.

hee, i linked that a while ago, it looks rad

also Shakey this book seems like it would have a lot of good things to read (though not new stuff at all)

http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=9390

― Mr. Que, Friday, July 9, 2010 10:45 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hmmm, link appears to be down, but yeah i want to read the book

Do people really disagree with this?

only stupid people

or people who are being slightly reductionist to make a point. i think the larger point Moore is trying to make is that avant garde novels (besides the obvious Ulysses, Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick) don't get half the attention that mainstream, run of the mill novels do.

I'm not sure that's his point -- novel for novel, it would be demonstrably untrue, and he says so later in the interview, when explaining things like Franzen being against the experimental/avant-garde:

There's an unstated resentment: these books get the critical attention, these are the books people write dissertations about.

That's critical/highbrow attention, yes, but for a while now there's been no real ongoing pool of "attention" for novels beyond that -- there are always more conventional/mainstream novels than super-inventive ones, but that was every bit as true the day they published Ulysses as it is now, and the culture doesn't tend to remember the conventional things "everyone" was reading. (Or not all of them, anyway: we on this thread could probably name the authors in the critical history of novels from 1950-now, but would have a harder time naming the literary authors that were on "everyone's" bookshelves, you know?)

interesting article (still getting through it). While I'm largely sympathetic to this dude's goals, can't say I agree with this:

I'm not really into the plot. For conventional fiction, when you read a novel, the first thing someone asks is, "Oh, what's it about?" I really don't care what a book is about. I'm interested more in the artistry. What's the language like? What technical devices are going on? I compare this to ballet and opera. When you go see and opera or ballet based on Romeo and Juliet, you're not going for the story. You already know the story. You're going for the artistic performance: the dancers' abilities, the singers' abilities. When I read a novel, that's pretty much what I'm going for: metaphoric language, imagery, interesting structural devices, humor. That's something I appreciate in a novel; that's why I use it myself. I'm going for the artistry, not for the story.

I DO care what books are about, priveleging form over content in this rather literal/heavyhanded way seems strange to me, don't think many readers would agree with him either.

I'm not sure that's his point -- novel for novel, it would be demonstrably untrue, and he says so later in the interview, when explaining things like Franzen being against the experimental/avant-garde:

It is exactly his point, right here:

Yeah, that's the whole thing! Only a handful of us like that stuff.

That's critical/highbrow attention, yes, but for a while now there's been no real ongoing pool of "attention" for novels beyond that -- there are always more conventional/mainstream novels than super-inventive ones, but that was every bit as true the day they published Ulysses as it is now, and the culture doesn't tend to remember the conventional things "everyone" was reading.

??? The part in bold seems to be wrong to me--there's a huge amount of attention for novels. Oprah's Book Club for example. Are you saying that people don't read novels at all, or don't read avant garde stuff?

Also, I kind of disagree with you Shakey. Sometimes I read for plot, but sometimes I read for language and other stuff. Like, I read Moby-Dick because of the artistry involved, not because it's a book about a dude chasing a whale.

hey so i read a victor pelevin's 'the sacred book of the werewolf' this weekend and i did NOT feel it, really at all--or i should say, it was pretty engaging and a quick read but all of the philosophizing and koans and theologizing in it were just majorly barfy. anyway my question is, to shakey, or whoever is a pelevin fan: should i try again, or is it all basically like sacred book of the werewolf?

the zen theologizing is the common thread through all his books. otherwise they're all pretty different.

Also, I kind of disagree with you Shakey. Sometimes I read for plot, but sometimes I read for language and other stuff. Like, I read Moby-Dick because of the artistry involved, not because it's a book about a dude chasing a whale.

right, I guess I was more disagreeing with him because he makes it sound like it's an either/or issue, and it isn't really.

barf, i wanted to take a shower after the last 30 pages. i was kind of bummed too because it started out really fun and i like i said it was a super engaging read.

are you just allergic to zen buddhism or something

no it just felt sloppy. i dont really like it when an authors personal philosophy/theology bleeds out into the text in that obvious way.

thats my own hangup obv

how would you feel about replacing the last 30 pages with some sexy descriptions of horses

sounds like something that would drive me batty as well

xpost: lol

i think the sexy descriptions of foxes and wolves were enough tbh

it's not my favorite of his, and it's definitely more sexual (and perhaps sillier?) than his other novels. but I still really enjoyed it, I never really had a sense of where it was going/what was going to happen, and that's something I always appreciate. It was significantly better than the last thing I read of his, which I would also consider his worst, the Helmet of Horror (which is written as a - wait for it - chatroom dialogue transcription. about a bunch of people trapped in maze waiting for a monster to kill them)

I like the budget-conscious efficiency of that idea!

i appreciated having a REACTION to it which is more than i can say about a lot of books ive read this year