post itt writers you think are bad

Bluets isn't bad as a book, though I think Gass did better with "On Being Blue." (I just really hate the Argonauts, tbqh).

I'm not sure I totally agree with fellow poet K4y G4briel, but any interested in Carson might be interested in this take: https://tripwirejournal.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/tw14gabrieloncarson.pdf

A Separate Peace really impressed me as a kid. It was taught in schools at the time. I was just realizing I was gay when I read it and its content to me felt like a beacon

I later had an amazing experience related to it - I got to meet its author John Knowles by chance, happening to sit next to him at the Alta Plaza bar in SF in the 80s. I told him how much it affected me as a child. He was taken aback but I thought it meant a lot to him, it made me feel good to be able to tell him that

it wasn't very good in retrospect but I will always love it

i have nothing specific against donald antrim but dude has written like 500 words per year for 30 years now

let's go buddy

Oh now I do have an opinion, I've railed against Antrim before on here somewhere.

My work emails nobody reads probably average 500 words and I write at least one of those a week.

read Shuggie Bain recently, had a hard time with it, seems like there is a trend for fiction like this that presents so much suffering, is it good?

thought Shuggie's eventual connection with another child like him redeemed it though

i have nothing specific against donald antrim but dude has written like 500 words per year for 30 years now

let's go buddy

yeah we're aware

ok this isn't quite what the thread is searching for, but

thomas friedman

Yeah he’s terrible.

saw him speak instead of going to an Art Brut show in 2006 ~~regret~~

guess I'll be the one to mention Richard Ford

such a monumental asshole that i would never even bother seeing if he had any merit

probably just boomer shit anyway

Nelson is a bourgeois striver who dismisses radical members of the working class for disagreeing with her shitty class, gender, and racial politics.
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Monday, February 15, 2021 7:26 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

what are her politics? did she vote for kamala in the primary or something

I assume Elizabeth Bruenig is a bad writer, assuming she’s actually a writer and not just a poster

Thanks for that Carson link, table, it was also my first time encountering the word "presentist", which I think will be useful in the future

flopson, tbh her politics are left of center from what I can tell, but her casual dismissal of a certain politic ("I'd never responded to comrade") and her negative portrayal and what I'd argue as verbal abuse of her trans partner made me think her politics are shit.

If people are interested in a writer who is thinking about identity formations, the inability of idpol to grasp the nuances of individual experience, etc., they would do better to read Denise Riley.

guess I'll be the one to mention Richard Ford

― swing out sister: live in new donk city (geoffreyess), Tuesday, 16 February 2021 05:17 (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ford's an interesting one. I enjoyed The Sportswriter but found what I think he was trying to convey as a happy ending (SPOILER: bloke takes up with a younger woman and tries to convince himself she's a good replacement for his wife) utterly depressing, which I don't think is what he was going for. If he was going for that response then well played I guess.

I didn't want to spam the thread with an old post but that kind of thing is exactly what I hated from Antrim.

what kind of thing

it should probably go w/o saying anyway that there's a difference btw "writing" and publishing

Middle-aged academics having mid-life crises and being horny for college student waitresses mostly iirc.

no, that's not the story unfortunately

saw him speak instead of going to an Art Brut show in 2006 ~~regret~~

― swing out sister: live in new donk city (geoffreyess), Monday, February 15, 2021 11:14 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I went to an Art Brut show in 2006, it was great, but it would have been even greater if I'd been skipping a Thomas Friedman lecture to go to it

ha, exactly!

i guess it’s a ymmv but i didn’t find nelsons portrayal of her husband negative at all

the world is brut

The paydirt of Argonauts for me was the part about sexuality of mothers/crones and anal penetration, I hadn't previously read anything that addressed it and found it educational/interesting

yes

still want to read 2666. Infinite Jest was interesting but I didn't think it was as cracked up as it was supposed to be

it was memorable though. I guess that matters more than whether or not something is good or bad

2666 is well worth it. The first section is the 'easiest' (or most like traditional literature) which makes it easy to get hooked before it all goes batshit.

I read a little bit of Infinite Jest each Christmas, think I'm up to ~180 pages so might be finished by the time I'm 60. It's a slog, for sure. Weirdly I polished off The Pale King in a couple of weeks and loved it, so I think DFW was definitely improving as a writer and starting to rein in his waffle tendencies.

By Night in Chile and Nazi Literature... serve as solid gateways. Try those.

I posted about it elsewhere, but 2666 rang false to me because it felt like a David Mitchell-style exercise in long-form pastiche, in this case, an homage to Flaubert. The clues are there in the first three chapters (I can't remember specifics, but I seem to remember many explicit Flaubert tips), and then Chapter Four is structured like Bouvard et Pecuchet. I think I need to read it again... I was perhaps too preoccupied with "judging the author's craft" (and skepticism re: posthumous acclaim) rather than letting myself be swept up by it all.

I think I also approached it like that and was a little bit hamstrung in the same way... Having said that I don't think he leveraged its population, scope, etc. for the typical advantages of an "epic"—what finally made it work for me (almost by attrition) is its repetitiveness, which after x pages began to sort of hypnotized me

But yeah there's maybe more to be gained by spending that time reading the two Alfred mentioned + The Third Reich and my favorite by far, Distant Star, that's a near-perfect novel.

That's an interesting take. I'm only mildly familiar with Flaubert so wouldn't have caught those references.

I can't imagine David Mitchell churning out something as harrowing and relentless as The Part About the Crimes. Though I'll admit the opening section has a certain David Nicholls/Nick Hornby-ness to it (which I read as Bolaño subverting his audience's expectations for weirdness by presenting a fairly straightforward love quadrangle), which makes the abrupt turn into all-out horror all the more shocking.

The underrated section of the novel imo is The Part About Fate, featuring one of the all-time best anticlimactic sports sentences.

I don't recall, what is it?

"The fight was short."

(Following an entire chapter revolving around a boxing match with pages and pages of build up and Fate meeting each of the fighters.)

Re your previous post, agreed that it is certainly not your typical epic. In fact he leaves the picaresque section till last in an inversion of the usual structure of multi-part epics.

The middle section is certainly repetitive, hypnotic and works through attrition. He is such a naturally gifted storyteller and 'whimsy spinner' (or rather finding the 'magical', for want of a better word, in everything) that I felt he was deliberately pushing himself to make something that no one could possibly interpret in that way.

ha xp

in boxing terms he is certainly "working the body" in the part about the crimes, you emerge from that softened up for the rest

this thread is making me more interested in reading Bolaño

I read Black Swan Green by David Mitchell and it didn’t seem like pastiche to me. Then listened to the audiobook of Cloud Atlas, which I can see people going either way on

Nathan J Robinson

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Friday, February 12, 2021 2:33 PM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink

nailed it

so otm

always bad

Maggie Nelson's new book is being destroyed.

i wrote about maggie nelson's new book https://t.co/sf4AbEvazl

— proud mom top (@andrealongchu) September 7, 2021

I don't know if her book is being destroyed in general but that review is anything but a destruction! I would call it a respectful and thoughtful disagreement.

In turn, I would say Chu is careful and thoughtful and lively and interesting as always, and I disagree with some things she says. Specifically, the idea that is is boring to go back to arguments that have been gone over again and again in certain circles -- I think part of being a pretty popular writer like Nelson is that she is writing for many readers who have NOT gone over those arguments again and again, who have never even heard of them! "How many people are going to pick up a book of essays by Maggie Nelson about theory and art who didn't already know about the Emmett Till painting and the controversy around it" -- actually, I would guess there are a lot!