Your Favorite Post-Modern Douchebag Writer

Dear everyone who thinks Infinite Jest is so fucking funny,

I want to punch you in the nose. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Love, Elmo
-- elmo argonaut, Tuesday, March 6, 2007 4:27 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

Seriously, it is like a New Yorker cartoon amplified a billion times.
-- elmo argonaut, Tuesday, March 6, 2007 4:30 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

i don't really think it's that funny, except in certain parts. otherwise, it's more sad and biting than anything else.
-- the table is the table, Tuesday, March 6, 2007 4:34 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

so so so RONG

Right? Laugh out loud in parts. Also, I have no issue with proclaiming: IJ = best novel I ever read.

I appreciate Pynchon, and he's fighting the good fight, but I just don't know whether his stuff is for me. Diff'rent strokes.

I've only read one book by any of these authors and found it so aggressively off-putting that I have no interest in pursuing any of them. (For those curious, the book was V.)

Je ne regrette rien!

letting V put you off ever reading any Don DeLillo is pretty off the wall, but to each his own I guess

V. is kinda. . .mehhhhh. Pretty unenjoyable Pynchon, for me. I've read everything by him except Vineland and the new one and not much of it has stuck with me. I have no desire to look at it ever again. Maybe Mason and Dixon, but that's it. Actually, I think I tried to re-read V. a few years ago and just stopped. The Crying of Lot 49 is a good entry level Pynchon, I think.

The correct answer for me, in this thread, is William Gaddis.

Yeah Dan, you should read White Noise. I know it's one of those books people are ga-ga over, to the point of it being obnoxious, but it's definitely better than anything I've read by DFW.

full disclosure, V is my least favorite Pynchon (that I've read.) xp

yeah, DeLillo is enjoyable, easy to read, interesting, etc.

oh god mr que OTM

i've tried reading "Carpenter's Gothic" and "A Frolic of His Own" and gotten no more than halfway in either. AFOHO is particularly annoying with it's extended dramatic excerpts; I get the impression you're not even supposed to read them, that they're just a tedious running joke. xp again

where do you start with Gaddis, just dive right in w/ The Recognitions? - xposts

As mentioned a couple of days ago, I have a tattoo inspired by a passage from "V." so I think you are all insane and the thread results are AOK.

Is it from the smug part, the racist part, or the needlessly incomprehensible part?

ian I think you said "que otm" and then started making the opposite case, lol

Gaddis is sort of not (enjoyable, easy), but The Recognitions is pretty killer even when it's sophomoric and yes the place to start with Gaddis.

Also Dan for god's sake passing on SAUNDERS b/c you didn't like V.?? It's like skipping Barthelme because you couldn't finish Portrait Of A Lady...

oh i dunno, i thought the answer to "favorite douchebag" implied that he disliked him oops.

oh ian i meant gaddis was my favorite post modern writer, is that what you meant? probably not, ha.

AFOHO and CG are both like, sort of second rate Gaddis? Sort of his V. equivalent. Neither one, I think, are as good as The Recognitions or JR which are both very very awesome. They take a while to click, but once you do, he's really funny and great. But it takes like a hundred pages or so to warm up to him, I think.

many many xposts

V is the worst of Pynchon's big novels (the South African section in particular is one of the most unpleasant things I've ever read) but it does contain his best joke.

ooh ooh which one? "because without it you'd be dead"?

where do you start with Gaddis, just dive right in w/ The Recognitions?

yeah, i would just jump right in. it takes awhile but it's worth it. this sounds totally stupid, but i enjoyed the Recognitions the second time I read it a LOT more than the first. But LOL, I realize how stupid that sounds when it's a huge-ass book. but he really is great!

the South African section in particular is one of the most unpleasant things I've ever read

SO FUCKING OTM

Needlessly incomprehensible, naturally!

By 'the racist part' do you mean the anticolonialist part? Because I don't think Pynchon neccesarily shares all the views of all of his characters.

xposts - yes it would seem you did and I think the unpleasantness of it is the whole damn point.

xpost

DieWeltistalleswasderFallist?

(both a little collegehumorcirca1950ish but grebt nonethelesss)

Rogermexico - the boy with the golden screw where his navel should be.

I'm a man of simple pleasures.

also oilyrags otm here V. is pretty strenuously anticolonialist and antiracist (and Pynchon will continue the antiracist project in Gravity's Rainbow), but since his technique is descriptive rather than prescriptive that means it can also get pretty hard to look at.

Matt, you never know what might be holding you ass in place, hm?

It's not that I think Pynchon shares the views of his characters as much as it is that entire sequence so unbelievably offensive to me that its point was completely swamped, kind of like a more visceral version of the reaction I had to the original "Funny Games".

my favorite Pynchon gag is when Slothrop's harmonica falls into the toilet in GR and he crawls in after it.

also between the jewish stereotypes and Dahoud The Gargantuan Negro it can be pretty hard to tell he doesn't mean it early on

(Dan the comparison to Funny Games is really well-taken, even if Pynchon's not as obnoxiously DO YOU SEE)

btw, HAPPY 71st BDAY THOMAS PYNCHON!

so has DeLillo done anything good since Underworld or has he just lost it?

Cosmopolis --> read the jacket copy, thought "this sounds terrible"
Body Artist --> zzzz
the 9/11 one (Falling Man?) --> ???

WOOOOOOOOOOO!

out of all these huge books I think I'd get the most out of re-reading Gravity's Rainbow .... but somehow I don't see that happening. maybe someday.

FWIW, i haven't read any Vollman. Where does I start?

Every review I read of the Falling Man thought it was pretty poor. I can't think of many subjects I want to read DeLillo tackle less. 9/11 would probably bring out the worst in DeLillo and at his worst he can be overwraught and cliche-ridden.

Mason & Dixon is probably Pynchon's most overtly angry anti-racist/anti-colonist book - I mean it starts with them rollicking around South Africa with barely a care in the world and ends with, among other things, Dixon beating the living shit out of an American slave-owner, not to mention all the native American stuff in there.

I liked Falling Man better than the last two, but that ain't saying much.

so has DeLillo done anything good since Underworld or has he just lost it?

yeah, i tried to read the body artist? zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.i guess he's lost it? maybe he'll come back with something good.

*than the PREVIOUS two, I mean

Also, my opinion of Cosmopolis is based on reading the first 10 pages and then throwing the book across the room, so maybe it gets better.

9/11 would probably bring out the worst in DeLillo and at his worst he can be overwraught and cliche-ridden.

yep I think that's OTM. I didn't like the chapter that ran in the New Yorker as a short story so I tended to believe the bad reviews ....