/lit/ - Literature

>Besides Wallace, postmodern lit
Just stop using that word unless you're referring to 'The Postmodernists' in specific. Otherwise, it's a functionally useless term that only makes you look ignorant

>>7160416
It's actually a functionally useful term, because I have a good idea of what I mean and so do you, I'm sure.

I have read the first 200 pages or so, and flipped through parts of the rest.

It is an aggressively reader-hostile book. You get the feeling that Cohen honestly hates you and doesn't want you to read his book. This is because he hates writing narrative and he loves sprinkling in absurd words, e.g. "mogiagraphia" for "writer's block", and he doesn't even put complete sentences around them. Imagine a book written completely in hashtags and fake words and you'll be close. Most self-indulgent prose ever.

But yes, it is good nevertheless. The style is just clever enough to justify how tortured it is. It's as good as any literary take on the Internet that we've had so far. It's comparable to Bleeding Edge in a lot of ways.

Read it.

>>7160463
He isn't clever at all. His puns are groanworthy, and sometimes he thinks he can get away with it by admitting as much, but not so.

>>7160463
this is the book i'd least like to read

>>7160398
I enjoyed it but I can see why people are going to hate it: insufferable protagonist, the jargon, the protagonist's comments on women and minorities (quoted in a Gawker article so people could clutch their pearls). I don't think the comparisons to Wallace are apt, it's more like McElroy or Gass. There are genuinely funny parts (Moe is a brilliant character) but the excessive nature of the book is going to turn off anyone who can't handle reading passages like:

>We flamed the PARCy with emails, as like other avatars, as like the same avatars but registered with other services, batchelor but now @prodigy, cuddlemaven but now @Genie. We even went trolling for him among the dossy BBSes and subscribed to leetish listservs and wrote posts or comments or whatever they were called then to autogenerate and hex all the sysops down.

>>7160463
OP here. I'd be open to accepting your recommendation if you hadn't admitted to putting the book down yourself!

>>7160501

oh God this is terrible

>>7160501
I think I read in an interview that he was trying to write in a way that would be difficulty for machines to parse, which actually sounds kind of cool

>>7160557
>>7160751
The middle section of the book is hundreds of pages of tech autism

>Keep in mind this was a time of major seeding, major sowage. Sums were being strewn to the breezes, and reaped. But every firm had responded firmly the same. Profitability implausible. Not just for us but for any of our partners. Everything was still vertical then. Not horizontal but vertical. We would drive traffic away just when the wisdom was insisting on users being kept inportal or at least onsite. Domains had to be protected, hosts prioritized, content would never be mutual. The VCs still considered sites as like stores or casinos. Do not let them out, the users. Do not let them leave to consume or even peruse the products and/or services of competitors. But in our model coming would be going as like going would be coming. No difference ever countenanced, because we were just the conduit. Expose the users to all competitors because the exposure itself will be the shop of life, where users become their own products and/or services. That would be our gamble.

>The remediation outfits had hired only the worst programmers in the Valley, inferiors, ulteriors. But they had also hired the best PR staff in this language, and so in every language, virtuosos of suasion. They scared global conglomerates into retaining their y2Kludging services, they frightened the big clogged artery hearts of the big three producers. ABC, CBS, NBC. The PR wunderkinds billed by the assignment, but the coder poseurs were paid by the parameter. They made an Altoid, a Tic Tac, a mint. There has never been or will be again such a splenda syzygy of business and calendar. Opportunity costs opportunity.
>Point being, all that clock resetting zeroing quandary, if it affected any hardware it was only the mainframes, bulky IBM corrugated boxwork due for replacement regardless. For any software the update was only a flourish. A line. A line they took their time with. It would have been cheaper to begin from square one than to have hired nonentity hacks to nonsolve a nonproblem in a nonexistent timecrunch. If the nuclear warheads launched anyway, at least existence would have ended in the black.

>>7160398
From the excerpts I've seen it looks like a gimmicky internet themed Finnegans Wake knockoff. I haven't even finished the original so why would I bother with the imitation yet?

>>7160772
...this is actually awesome. I'm actually like, disappointed at it being good because there's no way I have the time to read this thing.

>>7160772
The plural of virtuoso is virtuosi RETARD. Wow this guy must be really unedcuated

It's good, but it makes you work, is the thing. More than any book I've read - more than anything by Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, e.g. - the prose and plot require concentration. Just keep going until you get into the tempo of it, and then it'll open worlds for you. Trust meeeeeeee

>>7160501
>hex all the sysops down.
Literature nerds shouldn't try to fake Internet nerd talk, it's embarrassing

>>7161690
>posts on /lit/
>doesn't have time to read a book
What the fuck are you talking about?

>>7160790
>I'm going to make stupid generalizations about a book I haven't read and then try and justify them

>>7161954
Go away Joshua

>>7160398
I'm into this stuff, but judging from excerpts and summary the book seems pretty bad

>>7160522

Oh, I'm still reading it. I didn't give up. I'm just reading it very closely.

>>7162255
Oh okay. Thought you meant you got to p. 200, "flipped through" the rest, and put it down.

>>7160772

>>7163319
lmao

>>7163325
I have to admit I thought it was kind of cool that he implemented chess symbols on like the 10th page of the book. Brought back memories of playing chess on my windows XP. But the rest of the tech jargon is just painful.

>a board that unironically likes pynchon is complaining about autism elsewhere
lel