Words! Words! Words!: Autumn 2012 'What do you read, my lord?' thread

someone said that directly? kinda find that hard to believe. i can see someone saying "you need to work on your dialogue," or something along those lines, but i've never heard those two ideas being connected.

and i've been in lots of workshops, too.

I live in South Florida. Making characters life-like by dropping, say, Cuban slang into dialogue was a refrain at our creative writing department.

i can believe someone saying work on your slang to make it sound more authentic which is one thing, but never add slang to this to make it seem more lifelike, which is another thing entirely.

and yeah it's a good intention that often doesn't work; the dialogue often sounds even more stilted.

well, even so, it's still a weird critique. people code switch all the time, why not add that to fiction?

i guess what we are dancing around is the large point of: most writers in workshops suck at dialog? i can get behind that.

No lie: I had to look up "code switch." We just call it Spanglish here lol

D. K. Goodwin's Team of Rivals

t Alfred: I get where yr coming from about the slang—those constant N-bombs from the narrator were initially offputting but then I thought, maybe this is how (some) Dominicans actually talk? struck me as kind of an awkward first-generation overcompensation thing, which seemed plausible in context.

I would need to reread to confirm this (and maybe compare with the stories in Drown?), but I never got the impression that the slang in Oscar Wao was a crutch; just one component of Diaz's style, which impressed me as a likably vulgar (in all senses of the word) variant on DFW-style postmodern irony.

Currently reading "At Mrs Lippincote's" which has started very well. Recent reads include "The Folks That Live On The Hill" (Amis), decent but a bit disappointing. I think it may be the only one of his mainstream novels I hadn't read and I expected it to be better. Also "Tigers in Red Weather'" seduced by the Stevens quotation but it was not much better than stock airport fare. Been sporadically re-reading chunks of Ulysses.

"At Mrs Lippincote's": looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove this book

thought oscar wao was arch as hell

Yes Mrs Lippincote great so far. With it being Taylor's first it I thought might be a bit thin, but the hit rate of really great observational sentences in the first few chapters is better than in any other book of hers I've read. It surprised me a bit because I don't normally think of her as that kind of writer. She also seems to be giving freer reign to a sardonic streak that's always there in her work but maybe she felt she ought to tone down a little later on.

Too bad about Tigers. On the other hand, it justifies my decision to leave it on the shelf so yay.

i love at mrs. lippincote's too. that's a great one. but i've never really read a book of hers that i didn't like.

i started reading another book by...lee child. i've really gone around the bend. but they are like candy. my dad gave me one for my birthday and i have some of the paperbacks that someone left at the store. i haven't read shoot-em-up/crime/thrillers since i used to read andrew vachss books years ago. kinda similar in some ways. same deadpan/fatalism thing. maybe it helps that lee child is british. he's not a bad writer. and he is definitely good at getting the suspense going in a big way until the final showdown. anyway, they are entertaining and the first honest to gosh modern NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER author i have read in forever. i think i'm becoming a survivalist in my old age. probably gonna start hoarding supplies in the basement soon. between these books and watching season two of the walking dead i've been thinking about exit strategies a lot.

so sad for reacher fans that tom cruise is playing him in the movie. so weird. reacher being 6 foot five and the hugest person alive in the books.

what other crime/thriller etc writers/books does your dad like? Been meaning to ask you that.

elmore leonard. james lee burke. i think he likes michael connelly okay. stephen dobyns. actually, he got me into dobyns too. who i really ended up liking for his poetry! he's a great poet. he lives up where my folks live near saratoga. his mystery books are set there. i think he likes hiaasen too. oh and he really really liked lisa scottoline for a long time. don't know if he still reads her though. and there is a guy who lives up the road from ME and i'm blanking on his name...archer mayor! writes about brattleboro. i should read those for the local color. probably lots of trips to greenfield. oh and i think he reads the john sandford books. think i've seen those at his place.

so i guess world-weary/no-nonsense with a sentimental streak. guess that could describe a lot of crime people. he's not big on csi type procedural stuff. just dudes looking for clues and kicking ass. aging jazz fans. clint types.

I wonder if he would like Teresa Carpenter's nonfiction Missing Beauty? Really well-paced, dense, clear, urban Mass social mapping, how this wayward former high school big girl on campus encounters her nerdcore equivalent (prodigy who discovers just how many science degrees per square inch are to be found in urban Mass[he already knew how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall]). Think Carpenter won the Pulitzer for that one, but it's pretty good anyway.

Pavese - Devil in the Hills. One of my favourite writers these days - on this one he has displays a truly beautiful and detailed descriptions of nature and the hills (an area he grew up in). Two things: 1) they often strain toward what you think as repetition and yet he comes up with a killer variation -- an acute observation from a different angle, really five degrees not 180; and 2) sometimes he'll repeat an action being performed, say, the way the sun keeps baking bodies, but he'll layer it with their actions -- steadily and assuredly corrupt actions, destructive actions around drink and drugs and relationships -- that gives all of these descriptions something meaningfully savage, not just an exercise in nature documentary. The misogny sprinkled gives it a power, a dark energy will repulse and yet keep drawing you inn too, especially if you've read his diaries where he has these awful affairs, all of whom ended in failure gving rise to periods of intense self-loathing (though it wsn't just because of this).

Hammett - Red Harvest. The drinking that goes on in these bks was noted at a FAP (over a drink of course). Again its about more of a law-breaking corruption, not as arresting as Pavese's (can't help to compare as I happen to have read one book after the other) so I kept focused on the bits around drinking.

Pauline Reage - The Story of O (and no I didn't know Sylvie Kristel passed away a few days ago) (the film version of this and Emmanuelle ws made by the same guy)

I'm about halfway through The Pale King and it makes me sad to think DFW had this stuff pushed out in the world while it was still a foetus. Also, it reminds me that he was a better stylist than sociologist. His extended analyses of Big Social Trends are unfortunately sophomoric.

The setup in the introduction about how DFW was boldly tackling the theme of boredom just doesn't fit the book I am reading. But it would be unfair to judge DFW by this uneven mess. Publishing this was all about squeezing some final dollars out of a popular author.

do you think? i think there was a legitimate demand for it and he wanted it published in some state or another

by comparison

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/2e/Although_Of_Course.jpg/250px-Although_Of_Course.jpg

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/2010/12/1_123125_123050_2240796_2277115_101220_cb_fatetimeandlanguage_tn.jpg

http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/thisiswater.jpg

i'm not sure what the idea that 'he wanted it published' is based on, but if he did, then so be it. there it is.

i believe he arranged some of it into a preliminary order with a note giving his family dispensation to arrange for its publication. i guess that's not quite the same as "he wanted it published."

just dudes looking for clues and kicking ass. aging jazz fans. clint types.

there is of course a crime-solving jazzbo series:

http://www.billmoodyjazz.com/books.html

x-posting back to junot diaz, last week some co-workers were discussing oscar wao so i chimed in w/"read feast of the goat." they never heard of vargas llosa, of course. diaz is GREAT at capturing contemporary voices and attitudes, to my anglo ears at least, but in a way i think he would be a better non-fiction writer a nuevo journalist if you will.

man "this is water" was gross

it'd be OK as an 'inspirational' tumblr piece that all my friends linked to on fb but i am genuinely baffled by ppl who look up to DFW as some kind of lovable saint who had deep wisdom to impart. this is a guy who was thoughtful enough to organize his last manuscript for posthumous publication but not thoughtful enough to commit suicide in a place where his wife wouldn't be the first to stumble on his body.

I've enjoyed some Wallace but never understood the reverence. The philosophical po-mo bullshit cluttering up much of his non-fiction, the bandana, the self-help book obsession...

the bandana is kind of a deal breaker. i have already talked about him enough on this thread! and i never talk about him. i think it was this thread. none of the guys i lump together with him (in my head) thrill me. lethem, dfw, moody, franzen. that whole crowd. at least chabon wrote the mysteries of pittsburgh (haven't read it since it came out but i really liked it. and a short story collection of his. and the movie of wonder boys.)

October issue of Smithsonian sports a rich chunk of Henry Wiencek's new Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. First part of the title is shared with an erotic fiction, yep appropriately so. The mountain is Monticello, the mansion, garden and some of the farm topping a small town of enterprises, with some white craftsmen and whip-smart overseers, but basically dependent on the labor of slaves, mostly related to each other, many to the master. Some of then are meant to be upwardly mobile in this little world, so not to be "degraded in their own regard" by the whip, but any case, as J.confides, "It is not their labor, but their increase" which generates the most profit (incl.collateral), so keep those babies coming. Suppressed, played down, recently unearthed docs all help to paint quite the vivid picture, but no bog of details. Jefferson was "the pioneer of monetizing slaves, just as he pioneered the industrialization and diversification of slavery."

in fairness to DFW (who i love), nothing he wrote or did offends me as much as the book review franzen did where he contended that male writers who wrote from the POV of female characters did so because they felt 'smallened' and less than fully male.

i can't think of any great living american lit fic writers who aren't ancient. i love lorrie moore (even though her last book sucked and i try not to think about it cuz it makes me wince when i do) but she's just really good and i find her entertaining. don't know if she's a "great" fiction writer. however you would define that. she has written some great short stories. anne beatty in her prime was probably better? i should re-read anne's old books (i gave up on her later stuff).

(i don't read a ton of new fiction though. there might be lots of people 50 and younger in this country who are great. the people who are the most acclaimed though never seem to do much for me.)

I spent most of early 2011 and this summer going through Ann Beattie's story collection. Of course they blur together. But her use of lacuna and timing of dialogue always leave me drawing breaths.

as for Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is kinda all time for me.

You know who's underrated? David Leavitt. I read the flawed but moving The Lost Language of Cranes two weeks ago and wondered if young gay fiction has lost his interest in plumbing familial relations (esp mother-son).

oh i didn't mean the commencement speech was gross; the commencement speech was fine, and had been fine for all the many years it had been freely available online. rushing it out as a little gift book w each sentence ludicrously isolated on a single page to maximize post-death profits was gross.

ended up buying The Feast of the Goat, I'm like halfway thru and enjoying it, but haven't really gotten 'hooked' yet... WE SHALL SEE

"The Princes: A Reconstruction" - essay in a recent Paris Review by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Fine work there.

And The Three Musketeers (300-some pages in) just barrels along heedlessly. Fun stuff.

the book review franzen did where he contended that male writers who wrote from the POV of female characters did so because they felt 'smallened' and less than fully male

haha, what?

i think 'this is water' is a pretty good commencement address because they requested famous author DFW and got member-of-alcoholics-anonymous DFW, sort of; the book form is gross as fuck. rivka galchen reviewing the bio in the nyt was pretty good re the desire to regard him as a moral teacher or whatever.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/books/review/d-t-maxs-biography-of-david-foster-wallace.html

finished Feast of the Goat—a tough one to get thru, that. favorite bit was the chapter following the one general through the hours immediately after the assassination, but it had many highlights.

I found the pairing with Oscar Wao (which I will probably reread now, at least in part) mutually illuminating, because they have such different focuses—every protagonist in Wao is some sort of alienated outcast loner, just reacting to the external machinery of 'society' and trying not to get crushed. Feast takes the broader/more distant view of 'society' as a totality with no outside, shot thru with class divisions, conflicts of interests, and decisions—it's also a lot drier and none of the characters are very interesting or likable; but I found myself getting invested nonetheless. I think it just might come down to the way that the narrative structure separating past and present starts to break down in the last 1/2 of the book—extended flashbacks taking over the present-day sequences, the harrowing final chapter, etc etc

have also started in on Joseph Brodsky's Watermark, which is basically just "witty writer reflects on his annual vacations to Venice", v.beautiful and calmative

Goat is one of the few novels that made me shut it after absorbing some of the villainy. I knew a little about the Trujillo dictatorship but NO IDEA he was this savage.

I've discovered Armistead Maupin! The serial form and reliance on coincidences dilutes the impact of many sequences, but dialogue and pace are impeccable This is as good as popular fiction gets.

rushing it out as a little gift book w each sentence ludicrously isolated on a single page to maximize post-death profits was gross.

FYI this is what happens when the book isn't long enough to prevent having to hand-carton at the bindery. NB I do not believe we published that thing.

Just now spotted Rebecca West's The New Meaning of Treason at the thrift store. Quickly skimmed, premise looks dubious: she says Pound and Lord Haw-Haw etc. are new cos ideological, not just sell-outs. But seems like anybody branded traitor has rationalizations: a higher loyalty; the money's just for expenses. Still, random grafs look pretty good, and I'm a fan of Mailer's journalism. Should I get this?

What other books of hers should I read?

Her Yugoslavia travel book Black Lamb Grey Falcon: as rich as anything by Mann or Musil.

about halfway through Wolf Flow: it's decent pulp. Obviously the title was intriguing, and there was something about the reviews that made me think it might be the literary equivalent of some of the batshit stuff that made the ILE horror movie rollout a few months ago (along with a lot of stuff that just missed out), but besides the premise--man beat almost to death is cured by evil water--it's fairly standard, like somewhere between Te Shining and a Jim Thompson thriller...