/lit/ - Literature

>>23344781
>heightism autism
I was blessed during my teenage years almost never to think about this, mainly perhaps because I went to an all boys school and had no exposure to girls, then somehow around 2022, around the time I got my first gf and became aware of what women were attracted to, I started thinking about this aspect of male hierarchies a lot more. I'm 6 foot so I don't really have to worry, but I'm still constantly comparing myself and trying to stand up as straight as I can in public, a kind of Patrick Bateman-esque insecurity and envy of people who are 6'2, etc. This kind of autism seems like it's a major part of modern psyche from recent meme culture, definitely a sign of the times.
I think great writers tend, incidentally, to be more ectomorphs and taller, simply because in the past they would have come from aristocratic backgrounds or had better genetics, because height is also weakly correlated with intelligence, and because ectomorphs builds have been historically associated with sensitivity and introversion, etc. Not that it matters at all because there have been plenty of really great writers who are short and surely the height/weight of an author is one of the least interesting facts about any author and there have been plenty of all sizes.
>>23345352
Keats, Thomas Hardy, Alexander Pope, Faulkner, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Gaddis (pictured)

>>22709098
Incorrect.

>>22398222
>most attractive postmodernist
Probably but he's not exactly against much competition. I mean look at these dudes. Gaddis is doing his funny crouching here but perhaps purposefully to hide the fact that he is really not very tall in comparison to Barth, Barthelme and Vonnegut. None are admittedly as attractive as Gaddis but I can imagine they still had a lot of charm: Barth is the definition of an "egghead" and tried the best he could with hats and berets, Barthelme lacked a jawline but he favourably covered that with a beard, and Vonnegut looks surprisingly handsome in his young photos, less pristine than Gaddis but also less melancholy. Gass had a kind of dark, earthy attractiveness ("uglyhot" in modern parlance) which I personally think might appeal to more women than Gaddis' meek and boyish good looks, but he is not especially tall either, and obviously towards the end the Gassman lost that edgy charm and became something of a grotesque Pillsbury Doughboy. Wallace I expect would be the most objectively attractive to the largest number of women, and he was 6'2 (as tall as Vonnegut) and notorious for smashing artho pussy on book tours, but his insufferable personality makes him the most deeply unattractive of the bunch. Apparently Pynchon never had a problem scoring girlfriends when he was young, which I find very surprising, but who knows, maybe it's really what's on the inside that counts.

>>21598996
>The guy himself was pretty unlikable even by the standards of other writers.
Really? He seems like a pretty easy-going goofball.

>>21323046
This is Pynchon's response to an invitation from Donald Barthelme asking him to attend a "postmodernist dinner" alongside other writers like William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, and—weirdly enough—William H. Gass. The party took place in 1983 so this letter is probably from that time too, so this is long after Pynchon wrote V., TCoL49, and Gravity's Rainbow (and the whole kerfuffle that took place with that), and a year before he released Slow Learner. Pic rel is a photograph taken after the dinner

>>20734370
Yes. Even Pynchon was living in New York.

>>20201237
mogged

>>19194347

>>18346852
He's the worst postmodernist by far and a proto-redditor

Who is /lit/'s favorite postmodern author?

>Sharts in your path

What interests us is what we don’t see: the unapparent, the work that goes into a thing before it is broken. Consider William Gaddis crouched into the shape of a penguin, likely drunk in the late gray afternoon, a draft of Carpenter’s Gothic on his desk at home. Did he speak of Muriel as he ate, who in some other Village bar contemplated the first years of a love she’d come to think of as “a mere decade alcoholic haze?” What letters did he carry in his jacket, & from whom? & what of Pynchon’s absence, the unseen man who’d been accused of not existing? “Somewhere between coasts,” he’d written, if indeed it’d been his hand that signed the note. At dinner someone must’ve glanced across their meal at Gaddis & wondered, ‘Could he’ve pulled it off?’ In the photograph, Pilar & Shelly lean easily against the wall as their husbands shift weight from one heel to the other, positioning themselves to appear comfortable in the face of eternity. Consider them: the Gasses, Hawks & Coovers, Barthelmes & Abishes, Gaddis & Vonnegut, standing naked & old in front of their closets, selecting this white shirt, those gray slacks, the long black skirt draped like a shadow among its mates; how arbitrary is history. Just months before, Steven Moore suggested that Pynchon was “a pseudonym for Gaddis!” He’d called it a rumor, but still he’d said it. & then in April, Wanda Tinasky’d claimed, though she herself had been a prank, “the novels of William Gaddis & Thomas Pynchon were written by the same person.” Years later the typewriter on which the Tinasky letters were written would be discovered in the barn of a failed writer who’d killed his wife & then himself, but for now these letters added another layer to the myth of Pynchon’s living ghost. How many times had even Barthelme seen his friend in the flesh, or was this famous dinner organized to draw out the game, the man, & catch him in a snapshot for the world? Maybe Barthelme, too, had begun to pull the string—To what extent can any of us know our friends? Beside Vonnegut, who stands behind the rest as though on a horse, a point of light exerts itself from between a tuft of leaves. It is 1983 & Postmodernism has been supplanted by Minimalism. How appropriate then, that this single point of light be representative of the missing man, the shadow, the private eye.

What interests us is what we don’t see: the unapparent, the work that goes into a thing before it is broken. Consider William Gaddis, crouched into the shape of a penguin, likely drunk in the late gray afternoon, a draft of Carpenter’s Gothic on his desk at home. Did he speak of Muriel as he ate, who in some other Village bar contemplated the first years of a love she’d come to think of as “a mere decade alcoholic haze?” What letters did he carry in his jacket, & from whom? & what of Pynchon’s absence, the unseen man who’d been accused of not existing? “Somewhere between coasts,” he’d written, if indeed it’d been his hand that signed the note. At dinner someone must’ve glanced across their meal at Gaddis & wondered, could he’ve pulled it off? In the photograph, Pilar & Shelly lean easily against the wall as their husbands shift weight from one heel to the other, positioning themselves to appear comfortable in the face of eternity. Consider them: the Gasses, Hawks & Coovers, Barthelmes & Abishes, Gaddis & Vonnegut, standing naked & old in front of their closets, selecting this white shirt, those gray slacks, the long black skirt draped like a shadow among its mates; how arbitrary is history. Just months before, Steven Moore suggested that Pynchon was “a pseudonym for Gaddis!” He’d called it a rumor, but still he’d said it. & then in April, Wanda Tinasky’d claimed, though she herself had been a prank, “the novels of William Gaddis & Thomas Pynchon were written by the same person.” Years later the typewriter on which the Tinasky letters were written would be discovered in the barn of a failed writer who’d killed his wife & then himself, but for now these letters added another layer to the myth of Pynchon’s living ghost. How many times had even Barthelme seen his friend in the flesh, or was this famous dinner organized to draw out the game, the man, & catch him in a snapshot for the world? Maybe Barthelme, too, had begun to pull the string—To what extent can any of us know our friends? Beside Vonnegut, who stands behind the rest as though on a horse, a point of light exerts itself from between a tuft of leaves. It is 1983 & Postmodernism has been supplanted by Minimalism. How appropriate then, that this single point of light be representative of the missing man, the shadow, the private eye.