paul beatty.

"German bars don't have happy hours. They have hubris hours. There is no designated time for hubris hour. It happens unexpectedly and without warning."

is this the white boy shuffle dude? i read that a few years ago. i remember it being pretty great!

The thunderclap of an Art Blakey rim shot would've scattered the song into nothingness, leaving nothing but muted airs and some unresolved psychosexual issues with Mother Africa.

― the HOOS from the hilarious internet connection (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver)

i.e. UGH

I weep for the children, who will read this man and suffer.

My brother loves this guy. Have never read him, but I keep thinking he's a white "urban" writer instead of a black writer because of the title of his best-known book.

accusing someone of having sexual hangups over a continent is funny, to me

so this is the new paul beatty:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51VXz3jN+QL._SS500_.jpg

for those unfamiliar with the guy, he's a poet who wrote 'the white boy shuffle', which is kind of amazing as a debut novel, i think; it's about a middle class black kid who ends up the leader of a suicide cult in the attempt to deal with his authenticity issues. cultural assumptions/hangups on black authenticity are sort of the central motor of his writing: slumberland's first page has the ghost of Langston Hughes opening his mouth wide "to lick and suck some Harlem rapscallion's prodiguous member in what is, after all, the real oral tradition"

it's about a crate-digger DJ who moves to cold war Berlin in order to search for a long-missing free jazz musician

one of the characters is a spoof on billy bang, which is probably a first, novel-wise

not that i'm uninterested in authenticity issues, but these days i kinda cringe when i come upon a "jazz scene" in almost any fiction, and the part you quoted in the other thread was pretty bad.

what about just music scenes? do they normally come over any better?

good point, they don't. i guess i just encounter more jazz scenes than anything in the books i read (trying to come up other music scenes and the only thing i keep thinking of is the last lethem book). sounds like a new thread to me.

(i mean, i think music showing up in novels is something that is almost-never-to-never done well: if yr people are big on one bit of music, how do you deal with the other ninety-nine bits of music they have been big on that impact upon it, without i) having your people spend the whole time talking about damn records ii) just being really embarrassing iii) the thing of just really obviously not knowing anything at all iv) the sort of reality gap involved in "and then such-and-such played a really fantastic solo"

the move beatty makes in this is in making it about an impossibly perfect piece of music—two, in fact—which level of abstraction actually works: if you say 'this guy is really fuckin' great in way that someone real is' you get the reality gap problem, the no-he-isn't-he's-as-good-as-his-description problem; if you say 'this guy is good in a way that only a fictional character could be' you escape that trap. unfortunately at the end there's a long bit on the guy's comeback concert which is just dreadful, jumps headfirst back into that trap and stays there.)

xpost there—hanh, i deleted mention of the lethem book as my example

that's a really unparseable sentence. there was a bit in that post where i talked about lethem's two most recent, as examples of 'works' and 'doesn't work'; then i deleted it.

he has named his book after an indie rock label

also after a furniture manufacture company

and a blog and/or villa rental agency

guys i think it may not be too much of a stretch to assume a book set in berlin called 'slumberland' and featuring a bar called 'slumberland' is actually named for <a href=;the actual bar 'slumberland' in berlin</a>

i may be wrong though, maybe it is slumberland, home of 'crystal stilts', 'bricolage', and 'sexy kids'

THE SELLOUT. Satire. Outrageous. Challenging. Wit. Talent.

At times it curiously reminded me of THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE with its sense of place, urban community.

The one thing I'm more dubious about is the regular recourse to the Pynchonian wacky set-piece where lots of people simultaneously do daft things while making supposed wisecracks. Reading this novel has made me reflect that this thing I don't like about Pynchon is perhaps not as specifically Pynchonian as I tend to think.

Come to think of it, some of Dos Passos's USA Trilogy has pre-Pynchonian elements: the business men, the arts-media-military-merchant-marine partiers---at home and abroad, before-during-after-the-War (Great War in this case) the civilian government workers, radicals, homeless, even more randos---also capsule lives of the great, which can steal the stage from his fictional characters---the author can seem like a higher-energy P., getting maybe that cynical toward the end, but no hipster-Calvinist agenda for D P, thank Frank (although he did become very right wing later).
In between the younger JDP and TP, Invisible Man ( all set in the[maybe late 20s and?]30s, I think, but published in early 50s) does the antic thing better, in part because not over and over and over, like these other two, but they'd prob say repetition is a big part of the way of living they are depicting.
xxpost re music scenes in novels, the descriptions of immersive jazz experiences--certainly for the narrator; although the musicians are bearing down, they're also pros, no doubt making their real money, such as it isl on the road, same as it ever was for most---so, though they might regard a stunning experience for eyewitness and his reader as yeah, a pretty good night, for them it is also, like, Tuesday--er, I'm referring to the descriptions of gigs in On The Road. I'll never think of Slim Galliard the same way again. (Think at least some of these were published as "Jazz and the Beat Generation," before the novel.)
Also the musical experiences in In Search of Lost Time.

Must admit I haven't read U.S.A., but sounds like it must be quite different from the earlier MANHATTAN TRANSFER which is not zanily Pynchonesque at all.

USA isn't zany in the slightest but it is Pynchonian in the way it scatters its characters across the world and leaves them at the mercy of historical forces. Obviously the Pynchon novels that go hardest on this (especially Against The Day) are more likely to be channeling Dos Passos than the other way round.

FWIW I don't find The Sellout Pynchonian either but they both share a love for a sort of screwball comedy caper that precedes both of them.