Your Favorite Post-Modern Douchebag Writer

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 ....

I just read this--I liked it a lot. Her style in this book reminded me of Delillo, or I thought it did and then, LOL I realized the book was set in the Delillo typeface. So maybe that influenced me.

http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781593761844-0

WHAT IS WRONGW YOU PEOPLE????

can you expand on that? maybe with some footnotes?

Has anyone here read Barth's End of the Road? I haven't met anyone else who has, and I've never recommended it. I just wanted to know if anyone else thinks that it's maybe the most overwhelmingly depressing thing written in the English language or if it's just me.

i dunno what could be more depressing than the diary of anne frank, quite honestly.

I read it for a philosophy class in college but remember practically nothing about it.

anyone have recommendations for William Gass? read and liked Omensetter's Luck but I've never run across anything else by him

i've only read The Floating Opera by Barth. Don't remember a thing about it.

i don't know that gass has much besides a handful of stories, novellas, and the two novels, the big one and the little one. and lots of essays. his recent essay called the sentence seeks a form or whatever was really awesome. i was going to try and tackle The Tunnel this summer. i liked the first section of Omensetter's Luck (the old guy at the auction) but it fell off after that for me.

I've only read Barth's Chimera and found it pretty annoying in a "wow, witness the birth of a whole strain of postmodern meta douchebaggery" sort of way

probably not really the birth but it's one of the earlier things I've read where the plot reads like charlie kaufmann, the author is a character in his own story etc etc

I've only read Cervantes' Don Quixote and found it pretty annoying in a "wow, witness the birth of a whole strain of postmodern meta douchebaggery" sort of way

probably not really the birth but it's one of the earlier things I've read where the plot reads like charlie kaufmann, the author is a character in his own story etc etc

zing

anyone have recommendations for William Gass? read and liked Omensetter's Luck but I've never run across anything else by him

-- dmr, Thursday, May 8, 2008 1:28 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

i just read in the heart of the heart of the country and loved it, see if u can find it

i picked up a collection of william gass essays and skipped through them a little while ago - now i can't remember the goddamn name - but it looked really really good.

i got 'the recognitions' from the library last year, but it just sat on my bedside table cuz i was too scared to read it... heard WAY too much stuff about its difficulty beforehand so now i'm completely intimidated.

in re: Gass, I read <i>The Tunnel</i>; I don't know if I can recommend the experience, but if the postmodern novel with loads of unpleasantry is what you go in for, it's as elegantly executed a version of that as I can imagine. some of the scenes in it will be with me forever. When Gass released his reading of the entire novel on something like half a dozen CDs I couldn't resist getting them though, felt like I sort of had to, having already invested so much time & effort on the book. The mp3s make for great airplane listeneing.

in re: DeLillo - I always find the "novelist who lost it narrative" kinda "hmm, is there more to this?" - it feels like it owes a fair amount to the way we parse rock and roll (where the band whose first album rules but whose work is in continual decline is a known trope), when the more common literary trope is or was "early work immature; middle period = height of powers; late period = maturity." I mean there's Wordsworth, who's generally conceded to have "lost it," but late novels of great writers are often the heavy hitters: Jude the Obscure, Middlemarch, Great Expectations, just off the top of my head; struggling to think of great-or-considered-really-good writers whose late work is thought of as having fallen drastically off. I mean, unless one's craft is "I am insanely inventive and always coming up with new! new! stuff," it seems to me that writers would reliably get better with practice. that said though I haven't read any recent DeLillo, once I'd done White Noise & Great Jones Street & Libra & Mao I figured I'd had about enough.

Underworld is great! definitely recommend that one.

struggling to think of great-or-considered-really-good writers whose late work is thought of as having fallen drastically off

maybe Updike? I don't really know what type of reviews he gets.

do people rep for Roth's late work?

I think Roth has a better rep right now as far as his older stuff goes versus Updike. dmr OTM, Updike's stuff has fallen way off. he got okay reviews for the first couple of these, i think mostly on his rep. but Terrorist got horrible reviews. Exit Ghost got some bad reviews, but American Pastoral, Sabbath's Theatre and The Plot Against America have gotten raves, nothing like Updike's had in years, IMHO.

(1996) In the Beauty of the Lilies
(1997) Toward the End of Time
(2000) Gertrude and Claudius
(2002) Seek My Face
(2004) Villages
(2006) Terrorist

compare this with Roth:

Sabbath's Theater (1995)
American Pastoral (1997)
I Married a Communist (1998)
The Human Stain (2000)
The Plot Against America (2004)
Everyman (2006)
Exit Ghost (2007)

someone on this board just wrote their doctoral thesis on roth, but i dont remember who. g00blar?

yup

Ask me about the work of Philip Roth