Authors you will never read

fwiw my personal recommendation is not to bother. self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. he does a wonderful job of aping insight without ever reaching any actionable conclusions to his self-destructive ruminating... except, i suppose, for one.

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, 6 August 2020 14:32 (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the absolute fuck is this post

― imago, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

A reason to drop DFW was that piece on Federer which is a bit of a horror show. He is the one for the tried it in a lit mag corner.

But I also think the trend for dropping people for being white and male and middle class is good and funny work, and I'm here for it.

I have never read a Murakami novel, despite trying. Gotten about twenty pages in to a few of them and tossed them aside. Don't get the hype— writing seems flat?

Tbh, I've never read a lot of the supposed "greats" of literary fiction in English and don't plan on it. I find too much of it excruciatingly boring, as if many writers are writing novels the way they think they should be written instead of how they want to write them.

(I am speaking, of course, about mostly 20th century greats like Roth, Rushdie, etc)

my issue was with the 'actionable conclusions' and flippant suicide banter tbh

my experience of Murakami is that he has two English translators and I love the one and find the other dull and lacking in character

Yeah, I think I might have had bad luck! But oh well. There are too many books in this world that I am excited to read, and Murakami's don't make the list lol.

Re: DFW, I admire his non-fiction writing, tbh. Loved this essay when it first came out, have no idea whether it holds up: https://genius.com/David-foster-wallace-tense-present-democracy-english-and-the-wars-over-usage-annotated

Re: Stephen King— he's actually quite a good writer. The Shining in particular is an excellent book about alcoholism and cultures of misogyny...I often teach a story of his that was in the New Yorker about 20 years ago, "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away." It remains one of my favorite short stories of the past quarter century, at least.

Coldplay >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> J.K. Rowling

my issue was with the 'actionable conclusions' and flippant suicide banter tbh

― imago, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Disensitised to suicide banter ever since Hofmann laughed at Zweig's suicide note.

I find too much of it excruciatingly boring, as if many writers are writing novels the way they think they should be written instead of how they want to write them.

This is a fairly common gripe when you tend to favour poetry (or 'the poetic') over teleological narrative structures (we're in the same camp).

Which is perhaps why I'm really obsessed with Brossard right now— never have I read novels that read so much like poetry.

Hofmann on zweig is v good and the sort of thing that if I hadn’t already read some zweig might make him an author I will never read

So yes, agreed.

my issue was with the 'actionable conclusions' and flippant suicide banter tbh

― imago

fwiw "flippancy" wasn't the angle i was coming at it from

my engagement with the works of dfw is an important and deeply personal part of who i am

my post probably didn't make that apparent

But I also think the trend for dropping people for being white and male and middle class is good and funny work, and I'm here for it.

― xyzzzz__

i also don't recommend against dfw on the grounds that he is "white and male and middle class". the parts of his identity that were so destructive, to himself and to others, are not, i would argue, _intrinsic_ to the white, male, middle-class experience. i think it is important to disentangle the abuse paradigm, which was a paradigm that was, uh, _deeply embedded_ in dfw, from cis white maleness is valuable work and work that is worth doing; since those flaws are so abundant in dfw's work, he makes a good vehicle for the interrogation of that paradigm.

xps to table

A paradigmatic moment for me is when the narrator of Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies begins spinning the yarn of a man named Saposcat (etymologically: know-shit, or some such), presumably to alleviate his own boredom, by way of a thinly veiled parody of the 19th century realist novel. As one sentence pointlessly follows the other, it is repeatedly interrupted by the selfsame burst of self-commentary: 'What tedium'.

ty for clarifying rusho

Probably won't read this guy: https://newrepublic.com/article/158761/learned-worst-novelist-english-language

Ya thanks for the clarification, rushomancy. I was gonna post "well, I'm not gonna touch that!" but instead I actually decided not to touch that

I get what you're saying, extremely. This is why I don't fuck with Franzen (or Roth, and Coetzee is kind of a long shot) I think there is a particular position of defensiveness with these guys that doesn't really wash with me. Not that I don't adore the work of many many old white guys, just not this particular approach and I don't really have the faculties to actually nail down why

Or the reviewer (any relation to whiney?).

xp

Which is perhaps why I'm really obsessed with Brossard right now— never have I read novels that read so much like poetry.

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table)

I don't know if you've been discussing this elsewhere, but this intrigued me... do you mean Nicole Brossard (I'm guessing so but there are other authors with the surname)? Just skimming some descriptions of her work and it sounds quite up my street.

Yep, can confirm on table's behalf.

Re: old white dudes, I read Berryman's The Dream Songs and felt irritated but couldn't say why and then followed that up with an Anne Carson book ("Plainwater") that began with some translations of Mimnermos and there was one poem in there that made me go "ah see this is where Berryman should've aimed hisself toward and didn't":

A Sudden Unspeakable Sweat Floweth Down My Skin

He gazed, perhaps he blames.

Sweat. It's just sweat. But I do like to look at them.
Youth is a dream where I go every night
and wake with just this little jumping bunch of artieries
in my hand.
Hard, darling, to be sent behind their borders.
Carrying a stone in each eye

Quoting Plainwater is kinda cheating though. Nothing she's written since has left as much of a mark on me.

Is it completely invented? I've never been sure, I'm not a classics person so I never actually figured out (aside from looking at wikipedia to confirm the existence of her sources) if Carson just wrote that Mimnermos/Stesichorus shit herself or if it was actually translated from classical fragments

And come on her Sappho translations are god-like and every faggot loves Red

Carson's best book of literary work is "Short Talks." Nothing else matches it.

emil.y, I'd highly recommend Brossard. 'Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon' and 'Mauve Desert' are exquisite, and the deeper one goes the more weird and experimental she becomes.

Well worth reading trans poet and classics scholar Kay Gabriel on Carson: https://tripwirejournal.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/tw14gabrieloncarson.pdf

Thank you, table and pom. Definitely going on my list.

Also cool that a thread about authors you will never read has given me a new author to read!

Re: Carson, yeah, those Sappho translations are top-notch. I'll have to revisit Short Talks – I read it 15 years ago… As for Red, I distinctly got the feeling that it was Not for Me, but that's just my short-sightedness talking.

I loved Red as an undergrad. Re-read it a few years ago and was not very enthused.

But I also think the trend for dropping people for being white and male and middle class is good and funny work, and I'm here for it.

― xyzzzz__

i also don't recommend against dfw on the grounds that he is "white and male and middle class".

---

Part of the premise behind the thread is to make a sorta informed guess. Been around the block, the nose is pretty good etc. So I'm making a short cut and if I see a white and he's acting and talking a certain way I might dismiss it as that and move on. That's just how it's gonna go. It's about knowing when to think on and when not.

even if you are the most widely-read person in the world, there will be many, many more authors you haven't read and never will than those you have.

perhaps we could ask James Morrison to verify this for us since he qualifies in that category.

Whenever I see James Morrison's name I start singing

you are not alone in this

I start bellowing

Like I was Delmore Schwartz

From the piece I linked at the start of this thread:

Genius is a touchy term, with its overtones of great-white-maleness. It was her brother who was considered the family’s genius, Zambreno’s protagonist says, though she and her sister were just as “tiny, oversensitive, and intense” as he was. Then, in September of 2015, “a prominent writer of so-called autofiction, with a half-million-dollar advance on his last book, wins the so-called genius grant.” This is Ben Lerner, unnamed and pleasurably resented: “All day, friends contact me to complain. This writer’s name had become synonymous for the type of first-person narrative we also wrote, and yet no one found our struggles worthy of reward.” Zambreno’s protagonist is irked by her own lack of prestigious recognition—is it because she’s a woman?

That’s impossible to know, but impossible not to wonder. She’s also suspicious of what Lerner is doing, publishing a book (the novel “10:04,” which came out in the fall of 2014) that is set in the previous year: “How did this writer have the confidence to write his novel seemingly in real time, over a year?” While he has written his book, she is still consumed with making notes for hers.

re: Ben Lerner and Zambreno. I don't want to wonder? There is something downright repulsive about all of this especially since auto-fiction is a well worn out path (Genet, got it), but at this point I am sorta irritated about how easy this is to consume and read (and seemingly, to write). Like this class of people talking to themselves in a way you don't ever find it in music as much -- or more to the point if you did you could get hold of other voices somewhere else.

Read Atocha as a penetrating treaty on poetics, forget the rest. You’ll find it’s worth your time.

If Joss Whedon or Aaron Sorkin or Ken Loach ever has a book I wont read it.

Tony Parsons.

I used to write off the possibility of ever reading Roth, Mailer etc until I saw some intriguing reviews recently but realistically I'll probably never get around to them because there's always so many books about psychic amphibian overlords sucking each others buttholes.

I will try most things fantasy but Rowling is so low priority I will never reach her. Jim Butcher just doesn't seem like my kind of thing, I really don't like the supernatural detective format (even though some of my favorites have written in that genre). Most military SF like John Ringo will probably never get a go.

I certainly will never read another Shusaku endo book, his bloviating Catholicism was pretty tedious in the Samurai and I’ve since learnt he’s a massive racist so that’s two reasons to wish I’d never read that book and have no desire to read any others.

― American Fear of Scampos (Ed), Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Its more about not ever reading a writer's book in the first place, but if I had one of these its Julian Barnes. I read Flaubert's Parrot for the ILB book club and it was short and fine (maybe if it was longer it would not have been) and I cannot remember much about it now. Years later I read his piece on Lydia Davis' translation of Bovary and his displeasure at Davis' trolling amused me a lot!

xps = ok Pom, if I see it I'll give it a go.

there's always so many books about psychic amphibian overlords sucking each others buttholes.

Recommendations?

I know that kind of thing exists but I sadly haven't got around to it yet.

tfw you are strengthening up the brand

https://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01929/falk_1929983c.jpg

self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. 

I understand this position, and would heartily agree if it wasn't for the massive importance Knausgaard has for me. His writing his way through - not out of - shame was something I hadn't known I needed.

Maybe there are other writers who handle that everpresent, causeless suppression without falling for the "just a lonely guy thinking about things" trap that Knausgaard certainly does, open to suggestions. But there is a flavor to his work I have found unique so far.

I guess what I mean is - I know there is a massive literature of shame, I find Knausgaard's approach to it, in which it is the constant never-spoken background, uniquely speaks to me.

Knausgaard is one I won't touch with a ten-foot pole.

fwiw i haven't read knausgaard and wasn't talking about him

didn't read the new yorker article at the beginning of the thread either. tried reading it in private mode, the site told me i couldn't do that, i decided the article wasn't worth reading.

I bailed out on Karl Ove after volume 2. At this point in my life I can't do with a 1st draft anymore. But yeah its had enough of an impact on people, and I love Archipelago.

Since we are talking about him I want to mention that Linda Bostrom Knausgaard might be well worth reading, from the one short intense book of hers. More is being translated and I will look at picking it up.