/lit/ - Literature

>repostin for critique
Any thoughts on Phantom Tollbooth? How's the dialogue? Were things too sudden? confusing? Was Josh too sympathetic/antipathetic? Do you hate crickets too?

Also, I'm going to do up a list of all the current suggestions for pieces to include in the best-of (including stuff discussed in the threads). Hopefully I'll compile that this weekend and have it up as a Google Doc so anons can comment.

>>20898602
Editor is MIA, so sadly nobody has eyes on the submission bin right now (it's only editor who has access to the email). Me and the other anons are just doing a best-of, which editor is so far uninvolved in. Anyway, agreed on Dog Killer, I really liked that one.

Phantom Tollbooth, &amp issue 011. Deep-seated hatred of crickets, title theft, roadtrippin', inter-species violence.

>>20891514
>>20891567
What were your thoughts on Phantom Tollbooth? I struggled with the dialogue and I don't think I was ever happy with it despite re-working things a few times over. Also didn't know where I was going with it apart from trying to take the pic and title in >>20891595 as inspiration, which seemed to say something about dread and ennui. When I first posted the thing (pre-&amp) I got comments on the hatred of Josh being weird and abrupt, and his characterisation as confusing. (I realised I just hate crickets, which is what I figured he was. See "Author's note" which makes me cringe now.)

>>20893691
Nothing in Naked Lunch felt concrete enough for me to see it as a description of anything as literal as drug subculture, and even in the realm of the addiction mindset it's a portrayal that you'll see often enough elsewhere: you want it so bad you do anything for it, you want it without realising it, you always go back to it, you always have it [addiction] in you. Maybe that's just because discussion of the internals of addiction has become much more prevalent since Naked Lunch's time. I saw it more as a slice of the depravity that addiction brings on, and not as some horrible descent but as what all of reality becomes--it's not about falling into addiction and the woes of such, but about the world as it is in the throes of "junk" and the following junk-in-absentia. Of course, more than that it's a comedy--everything is sick and depraved, but that's just what the world is in Naked Lunch. My reading it was prompted by an alcoholic friend describing his withdrawal symptoms as being like Naked Lunch, so I may have gone in with a similar mindset of trying to find an "experience" in it. Dunno what I'm getting at, but to bring it back around I'll say it's about something more mental than anything as broad as subculture ("mindset", as you said, might be right). Since the whole world of Naked Lunch is just "as it is" and taken as such, it made me look at how I treat the world, how I might be numbed and climatised to depravity around me.

American Psycho to me was much more about isolation. Bateman is batshit and things reach a level beyond one-to-one relating to the guy (I don't want to be one of those edgy fuckers with a ">literally me" shtick but:) but the extremes put some common problems into a clearer light, e.g., isolation, inability to relate to others, commodification of ideals and character, speaking but not being heard. And it's extreme enough for it to be absurd (including the idea of the favourably conspiratorial world Bateman lives in). I don't think the book would have been as funny if I couldn't relate to Bateman, so I don't mean to paint relatabilty as some strictly dour or sad thing. Though Bateman's final moments with his secretary on the date made put the book down and wallow for the night.