New Yorker magazine alert thread

i like brody too. even given his fanboyism, i love that somebody would name a movie as ornery and flawed as jlg's king lear as the greatest of all time. i feel like he's playing a very long game waiting for one of the regular back of book crits to quit/die.

anyone read last week's piece on genre fiction?

Yes, I thought it was a bit flat. More of a history of highbrow authors who liked detective fiction than the how-we-read-now essay it seemed to be billed as. Couldn't help thinking what James Wood or Louis Menand might have done with that theme.

raw milk essay was great though. & the genre thing was a little flat, yeah - maybe in being too rigorously a history of anecdotes relating to it without really plumbing what it's like to read.

i like brody a bunch, though disagree with him pretty often. not that ive seen moonrise kingdom yet, but tbh it isn't that kind of thing that i'd really take issue with - it's nice that he's got a clutch of new filmmakers (like he really, kinda inexplicably repped hard for somewhere) who he's into as zealously as he is the old guys, it's more when he's finding gold in something new & obscure that's weird.

thought bruce sterling on sci fi was nice

I think because Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson are such easy targets, especially on ILX, as ambassadors of a mannered, moneyed faux-indie aesthetic, I like Brody's enthusiasm for them more.

i did like how the raw milk essay started off as having me being all "how OUTRAGEOUS that they are targeting these people" and by the end i was like "jesus, lock all these fools up before they feed more poisonous milk to babies"

It's my favourite kind of New Yorker food writing. Spare me the long profiles of the hot young chefs who have redefined Southern/Russian/Szechuan cuisine - show me the screwy libertarians who only eat roadkill. The story a while back about eating insects was fantastic.

Highlight of this piece was the phrase "freedom milk". In the UK you can buy raw milk at farmers' markets, no bother, but I haven't been tempted to sample it yet. Maybe it tastes even sweeter if there's a risk of the feds raiding your farm.

found most of the sci-fi stuff in the new issue pretty dull. i liked colson whitehead and karen russell's pieces but wasn't blown away by either. however, the sam lipsyte short story was fantastic.

pretty much every sci-fi personal history piece was exactly the same.

any reason why none of the fiction in the sci-fi issue was written by a sci-fi writer?

those fuckers

i haven't read it. just the list of fiction authors.

I am officially dreading 'new yorker sci-fi issue'

lethem is a sci-fi writer, or a former sci-fi writer at least

he sucks though

he is so totally not a sci-fi writer.

i don't know if you're using some weird purist definition of sci-fi but:

Lethem’s first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, is a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque detective story, which includes talking kangaroos, radical futuristic versions of the drug scene, and cryogenic prisons.
...
He followed Gun, with Occasional Music in 1995 with Amnesia Moon. Partially inspired by Lethem's experiences hitchhiking cross-country,[8] this second novel uses a road narrative to explore a multi-post-apocalyptic future landscape rife with perception tricks. After publishing many of his early stories in a 1996 collection (The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye), Lethem's third novel, As She Climbed Across the Table, was published in 1997. The novel takes as its starting point a physics researcher who falls in love with an artificially generated spatial anomaly called "Lack", for whom she spurns her previous partner. Her ex-partner's comic struggle with this rejection, and with the anomaly constitute the majority of the narrative.
...
His next book, published after his return to Brooklyn, was Girl in Landscape. In the novel, a young girl must endure puberty while also having to face a strange and new world populated by aliens known as Archbuilders.

he is an urban fabulist in the tradition of borges and calvino! i made that up. i've glanced at his pre-whatever he does now books and i never wanted to read them. same with the corrections dude's "sci-fi" books. nobody needs to read that stuff. its like telling a crime fiction fan to read motherless brooklyn. they would laugh and then set that book on fire.

crappy genre fiction fanboys be not proud

ok so you're using some weird purist definition of sci-fi

in that case, i don't know why you would expect the new yorker to publish what you consider to be sci-fi

no flogging your shit to Analog for a nickel a word, no credibility

^^^

he talks about his inspiration at length here:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/228/the-art-of-fiction-no-177-jonathan-lethem

and he mentions borges and calvino. it's all good. PoMo pastiche is cool. whatevs. no bigs. i was a kathy acker fan back in the day. can't read burroughs to save my life though. or pynchon.

it is a bit weird for them to do a scifi issue with only 'literary' writers, i mean, not weird, it is the new yorker, but it would be cooler if they asked ben bova or something (never actually read anything by that guy) to do a story

lethem is a sci-fi writer, or a former sci-fi writer at least

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, May 29, 2012 5:54 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

RONG

oh cool now this thread is about authenticity

nerds are the worst

im staying out of that argument but i do think it would be cool if they went pulpy.

we all loved blade runner.

who would've thought the new yorker thread would get mired in arguments about writing and class distinction

lol at "mired" - it's been like 20 posts over an hour

plus hardboiled scifi could have been its own genre before lethem got to it. don't know when the first scifi detective story hit the racks but it was before he was born.

http://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/iss/400w/24/370241/1034517.jpg

anyways read the sam lipsyte story, it's not sci-fi at all but it's great

confession: i never actually read nyer fiction

i almost never do either but i like lipsyte a lot so i read this one, it's not very "nyer fiction" in style, it's absurd and funny and has lots of swearing

me three

lethem makes new scientist's top ten list:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/04/top-10-greatest-science-fiction-detective-novels.html

lol at "mired" - it's been like 20 posts over an hour

i read it when its lorrie moore or alice munro. that's about it for the most part.

or saunders

col.?

n

geo.

posts about how long a thread is, how many comments are filling it, the kinds of comments being posted, how frequently things are being posted, the quality of what is being posted, etc --> these are the sounds of ilx clearing its own throat. (nb i do not exempt this comment from this generalization.)

*moves bookmark*

i read it when its lorrie moore or alice munro. that's about it for the most part.

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012

thirded. I will read the Lipsyte story though.

I don't care if you're white black or a fucking bum off of the streets. If you write about shooting aliens, flying ships, wearing spacesuits, drinking hennessy, and whatever else, I'll buy your book. If you write about the economy and how its hurts off-world workers, fuck you. If you write about your telekenisis or some equally retarded nerd shit, fuck you. That basically how I break it down to an extent.