wurlitzer's okay but i never bothered finishing either of the ones i read, i just think "this guy is like the new rudy wurlitzer!" is just ...
― i better not get any (thomp), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:01 (ten years ago) link
tao lin is kinda like beckett narrowed and turned inwards
― Lamp, Monday, 8 July 2013 16:02 (ten years ago) link
tao lin's writing did take on a pretty interesting quality when he started writing in ascii and translating it back into english
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:03 (ten years ago) link
tao lin is kind of like the opposite of hemingway
― i better not get any (thomp), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:05 (ten years ago) link
mainly tao lin is kind of like only being able to remember adjectives by consciously striving for them. meanwhile 'is that all there is' plays on a permanent loop in your head
― i better not get any (thomp), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:06 (ten years ago) link
one thing camus, hemingway + beckett do that i don't see in lin is write really beautiful prose
otm, though that does tend to support treeship's point. if we accept that writing in a deliberately deadened, empty, faux-blogpost manner is a worthwhile experiment. i mean, i suppose it could be, if the end result were interesting...
― twerking for obvious reasons (contenderizer), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:09 (ten years ago) link
i bought 6 books by harry mathews a couple months ago and i swear i'm gonna read them cuz i think i need that kind of inspiration in my life right now. i'm not afeared of "difficult". just so you know. though tedious different than difficult.
― scott seward, Monday, 8 July 2013 16:10 (ten years ago) link
where does one start w/beckett
― molly ratchet (crüt), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:11 (ten years ago) link
tlooth is the best harry mathews
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:12 (ten years ago) link
but, imo, just read roussel's locus solus
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:13 (ten years ago) link
mathews short shit and poetry is good sometimes though, country cooking in central france is great
nabisco used to rep for cigarettes, the more "mature" and soap opera-y mathews, but I could never get into it
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:14 (ten years ago) link
Murphy and Watt, crut
― first I think it's time I kick a little verse! (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:15 (ten years ago) link
idk but why not something short like krapp's last tape
― markers, Monday, 8 July 2013 16:16 (ten years ago) link
actual lolz
― Lamp, Monday, 8 July 2013 16:19 (ten years ago) link
alfred, you ever read this guy? insanely labyrinthian stuff and this book has tons of film stuff in it too:
http://books.google.com/books?id=jor0nug4FSAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
― scott seward, Monday, 8 July 2013 16:20 (ten years ago) link
crut the 'trilogy' is the best work but also not a trilogy, the prose from 'murphy' onwards all reflects in and back on itself
there are four novellas frequently published together or in the collected short works, 'first love', 'the expelled' and er two others. those do a good job of establishing the style of the longer prose work (i think better to jump right in with 'molloy' or 'malone dies' than start w/ murphy or watt) though they feel not self-complete. but if reading them doesn't make you want to read more then maybe you don't want to read more.
if you like reading plays (ehhh) 'endgame' is the funniest
― i better not get any (thomp), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:21 (ten years ago) link
"Dante and the Lobster" yo
― first I think it's time I kick a little verse! (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:22 (ten years ago) link
there are books that I just cannot read cigarettes is one of them
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:22 (ten years ago) link
this beautiful prose thing is bugging me but like, if you honestly believe 'beautiful prose' is a non-problematic concept that needs no examining then you're probably not smart enough to read books
― i better not get any (thomp), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:23 (ten years ago) link
no one here reads books its ok
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:23 (ten years ago) link
i know i don't read books much either tbh
― i better not get any (thomp), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:25 (ten years ago) link
just look at words and pictures
unreading
― Lamp, Monday, 8 July 2013 16:25 (ten years ago) link
oh god, everything needs examining. i'm sure there's for it. i still find the phrase and concept useful in everyday conversation.
― twerking for obvious reasons (contenderizer), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:25 (ten years ago) link
beautiful prose = perfect pop music
― first I think it's time I kick a little verse! (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:26 (ten years ago) link
unread lunch
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:26 (ten years ago) link
i got really bad at reading fiction over the last couple years. i'm maybe averaging 1-3 fiction books a year. i got a little burnt out.
― Mordy , Monday, 8 July 2013 16:26 (ten years ago) link
alfred i don't know if this is what you're getting at but you know how people will use 'perfect pop music' to refer to, like, teenage fanclub or something
― i better not get any (thomp), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:27 (ten years ago) link
no one there reads books either
― Lamp, Monday, 8 July 2013 16:27 (ten years ago) link
oh yeah. I meant that I'm suspicious of both terms.
― first I think it's time I kick a little verse! (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:28 (ten years ago) link
what's the problem - that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? do we really need to interrogate this particular aesthetic cliche?
― Mordy , Monday, 8 July 2013 16:32 (ten years ago) link
xpost
rudolph wurlitzer , which is a name i never expected to see used as a term of praise
― i better not get any (thomp), Monday, July 8, 2013 3:53 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
wrote 2 or 3 great screenplays, 1 or 2 halfway dece novels, there are much more undeserving names to be wielded as praiseblurbs, imho
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 8 July 2013 16:33 (ten years ago) link
In re "beautiful prose," Camus is my default answer for favorite writer, but I have seen his prose characterized as wooden. Which I can understand, because he had his own deliberate flatness.
I haven't read Tao Lin and all this discussion makes me not sure whether I want to, but stylistic flatness is not an automatic disqualifier for great writing. All in how you use it.
― something of an astrological coup (tipsy mothra), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:33 (ten years ago) link
Nevertheless, many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out and they and their families be spared. Thus they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits as yet. Plague was for them an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as unexpectedly as it had come. Alarmed, but far from desperate, they hadn't yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissue of their existence; when they forgot the lives that until now it had been given them to lead. In short, they were waiting for the turn of events.
camus can be a little prosaic but it has a sense of insight + urgency that makes it more than just affectless or wooden imo.
― Mordy , Monday, 8 July 2013 16:39 (ten years ago) link
i think this is beautiful prose:
In it Mathieu Marais, the chronicler, laments his lot; he says he has been cast into hell to languish without succor and without hope. Well, Mathieu Marais was blind! Never more intensely than today had he, Father Paneloux, felt the immanence of divine succor and Christian hope granted to all alike. He hoped against hope that, despite all thehorrors of these dark days, despite the groans of men and women in agony, our fellow citizens would offer up to heaven that one prayer which is truly Christian, a prayer of love. And God would see to the rest.
― Mordy , Monday, 8 July 2013 16:40 (ten years ago) link
"Wooden" is a sign of ineptness, no? He's putting words in the wrong places. Even with my schoolboy French I can never accuse Camus of woodenness.
― first I think it's time I kick a little verse! (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:40 (ten years ago) link
camus is a page-turner!
― scott seward, Monday, 8 July 2013 16:43 (ten years ago) link
― scott seward,
I haven't! Looks good though.
― first I think it's time I kick a little verse! (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:44 (ten years ago) link
-- i'm not sure 'x, y, and z write beautiful prose and a doesn't' is saying anything more meaningful than 'i like sentences by x y and z, considered in isolation, and not any by a'-- a fun thing is to read the descriptions of being high and partying in ny in 'taipei' and then go and see if you can still take the descriptions of being high and partying in paris in 'the sun also rises' seriously
― i better not get any (thomp), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:45 (ten years ago) link
anyway i'm going to go and finish taipei i think
seems weird to build an argument about the the aesthetic merits of an author's prose around works in translation
― twerking for obvious reasons (contenderizer), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:58 (ten years ago) link
xps, but to be clear, I love Camus' writing! I just know people who don't, and I can understand it turning people off.
― something of an astrological coup (tipsy mothra), Monday, 8 July 2013 16:59 (ten years ago) link
scott, Becket's early novels are like early, funny Woody Allen
― first I think it's time I kick a little verse! (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, July 8, 2013 11:52 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
any in particular you would recommend?
― flopson, Monday, 8 July 2013 19:17 (ten years ago) link
I can't be arsed with a writer who writes like he has thrown the towel in.
― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Tuesday, 9 July 2013 01:00 (ten years ago) link
good one
― 乒乓, Tuesday, 9 July 2013 01:41 (ten years ago) link
original
― i better not get any (thomp), Tuesday, 9 July 2013 01:59 (ten years ago) link
You forgot to put "thrown the towel in" in quotes xp
― Treeship, Tuesday, 9 July 2013 03:15 (ten years ago) link
Scott - Murphy's fun and clever and doesn't have lots and lots of pages detailing haemophiliac family lines for the sake of one impossibility (a thing I don't personally mind).
Guess I should read Tao Lin, but I suspect it would intensify feelings of weariness that i don't need intensifying right now.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 9 July 2013 19:31 (ten years ago) link
haha that's pretty much exactly how i feel about it. i picked it up at the bookstore the other day, read a paragraph and lold in recognition, then put it down thinking 'i really don't need this right now.'
― Matt P, Tuesday, 9 July 2013 19:37 (ten years ago) link
*i am drunk*
i re-read the whole thing today while waiting to be called for jury duty. this time i was struck by how paul's dissatisfaction with life leads him to accept some post-humanist, terrence mckenna type ideas about the singularity and the "computer at the end of the universe" that is just (to paul) a cosmic oneness and renders everything in our immediate experience irrelevant. to evade the burden of himself, he tries to seem himself as part of a larger system -- which makes sense -- but since he feels disconnected from other people this larger system is necessarily impersonal and cosmic. ironically, mysticism is just another kind of narcissism, and a cover for being careless with his time, his health, etc.... things in, as he says, "concrete reality." i thought this was a very convincing way to describe depression, and how by seeking out ways of thinking that seem to offer consolation we can just end up pulling ourselves further and further from our actual lives, which are always in a process of expiring and easy to miss. not that the book sees "living in the moment" as a kind of ideal to strive for -- it seems impossible, a fantasy, according to the novel, focused as it is on the way our experience of the world is always both actively and passively mediated -- but still, it is tragic that we are always missing out on life, as it is happening. paul doesn't think of his time with erin in taipei as positive until he watches video footage of that time months later. so it is through memory (finally i am getting to my point) that we lend meaning to our experience; our life is never lived until it is lived again. against this backdrop -- the idea of the vital importance of memory to experience -- the stuff about paul half-willingly disengaging himself from his own memories, which he describes as becoming harder to access with his increasing drug use takes on a much darker quality. it's not for nothing that near the very end of the book paul describes himself as feeling frightened by the degree to which he, at that point, felt he could understand the suicidal impulse, which had previously seemed abstract to him.
there is a lot of talk about tao lin being a generational writer, concerned with the internet, etc. but i think his real talent, now as always, has been his ability to write about depression, and the ways in which it distorts our understanding of the world. this book is great -- as opposed to his other novels being merely good -- because he seems to intuit, here, that "distortion" is always relative. drugs, depression, whatever, do change how we see the world, but not in a way that necessarily makes it less natural or accurate. what is a normal way of thinking anyway? how do we get back to it?
― Treeship, Wednesday, 10 July 2013 03:58 (ten years ago) link