the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

scott, Becket's early novels are like early, funny Woody Allen

based on the one dennis cooper i have read dennis cooper is also a really good comparison. one of the pull quotes on taipei exhumes rudolph wurlitzer , which is a name i never expected to see used as a term of praise

alfred that is such a fucking lie

Lol Murphy is so bleak

when is carles coming out with a "novel"?

going a little OT, this is my fave piece ever about beckett:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/488027

i would enjoy reading that if it were possible for someone to possibly mail me a pdf

camus wrote the stranger tao lin was on the cover of the stranger beckett is a stranger to someone who doesnt know him hemingway shot himself in the head

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, July 8, 2013 11:47 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

and they were drinking from a fountain that was pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain

I would like one too

lol I like wurlitzer

i have a pdf copy on my hard drive. webmail me yr email addy and i'll send it.

Lol Murphy is so bleak

― Treeship

which is what makes it so damn funny

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 ...

tao lin is kinda like beckett narrowed and turned inwards

tao lin's writing did take on a pretty interesting quality when he started writing in ascii and translating it back into english

tao lin is kind of like the opposite of hemingway

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

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...

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.

where does one start w/beckett

tlooth is the best harry mathews

but, imo, just read roussel's locus solus

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

Murphy and Watt, crut

idk but why not something short like krapp's last tape

nabisco used to rep for cigarettes, the more "mature" and soap opera-y mathews, but I could never get into it

actual lolz

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

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

"Dante and the Lobster" yo

there are books that I just cannot read cigarettes is one of them

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

no one here reads books its ok

i know i don't read books much either tbh

just look at words and pictures

unreading

oh god, everything needs examining. i'm sure there's for it. i still find the phrase and concept useful in everyday conversation.

beautiful prose = perfect pop music

unread lunch

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.

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

no one there reads books either

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

oh yeah. I meant that I'm suspicious of both terms.

what's the problem - that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? do we really need to interrogate this particular aesthetic cliche?

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

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.

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.

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 the
horrors 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.

"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.

camus is a page-turner!

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,

I haven't! Looks good though.