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/lit/ - Literature

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11049841 No.11049841 [Reply] [Original]

Pick one, let the others die alonng with all their work.

>> No.11049848

McCarthy
The Irish are alright. Fuck the Jews, Dagos and the hippies with their reefers.

>> No.11049849

>>11049841
I pick the Pinecone.

>> No.11049852

>>11049841
Roth > McCarthy > DeLillo > Pynchon

>> No.11049854

>>11049841
I pick Mister Pynchon, because he is a fellow anon.

>> No.11049868

>>11049841
1. Cormac
2. Tommy
3. Donnie
4. Phil

>> No.11049872

>>11049841
>Pynchon
Worst writer to ever be published
>Delillo
non-entity
>McCarthy
glorified fanfiction writer
I choose to kill OP

>> No.11049907

>>11049841
McCarthy: Great. A favorite. Magnificently poetical and original.
DeLillo: A non-entity, means absolutely nothing to me.
Roth: Second-rate. Utterly irrelevant even for American standards.
Pynchon: A favorite. How freely one breathes in his marvelous narratives! Lucidity of thought, purity of poetry. A man of infinite talent.

>> No.11049912

>>11049872
You should just kys.

>> No.11049933

>>11049907
heya Tom

>> No.11049965

>>11049907
Tom you sounded much more generous to DeLillo on the other thread!

>> No.11049972

>>11049841

Do I have to let one survive?

>> No.11049975

>>11049841
Pynchon>>Tortilla>>>>>>>>DeLillo>(((Roth)))

>> No.11049976

>>11049841
Roth is definitely the worst of the four. Portnot’s complaint is hilarious, but after that... nothing. I haven’t read DeLillo yet. McCarthy can be good but sometimes I see the cracks and shortcomings. Pynchon is the best unless DeLillo is better.

>> No.11049977

>>11049841
Robert Coover.

>> No.11049981

1. Tom
2. Corm
3. Don

[POWER GAP]

4. Phil

>> No.11050013

>>11049907
good post

>> No.11050028

>>11049907
whens the next book coming, tom?

>> No.11050032
File: 112 KB, 1036x1200, 4a0[1].jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
11050032

>>11049841
Pinchy boi of course. I've read almost everything all of these guys have written and I can say for sure that none of them are even close to Pinch Awns level. I don't even know why you mentioned Roth, he honestly doesn't even deserve to be mentioned alongside the other three. DeLillo is just so so. Every now and then he has these flashes of genius and genuine artistry but those are few and far between, easily lost between the rest of his cumbersome writing. McCarthy is above DeLilo but he still doesn't touch Pine Cone. He's a bit overrated imo. To me he just seems like a more poetic Stephen King really. His work is far too self indulgent and his writing is far too experimental. There are times where his obtuse way of writing works and conveys the message better than using a conventional mode of writing would have but again, like DeLilo, those moments are few and far between. The rest of the time his odd choices just obfuscate the heart of his work.

Pin Chan is genuinely on another level than these guys. I don't think people have realized the true extent of his artistic mastery of the medium yet but I have faith that in the next hundred or so years, he will be one of the few contemporary writers who is still remembered. I'd recommend everyone here consume as much as his work as possible; my own writing has been greatly improved just by reading his works. You can't go wrong with any of his books and they're all masterpieces in their own right, something you can't say for the others. They've all written a couple bad books but the Pinchy fellow has been hitting non stop homeruns.

>> No.11050034

>>11049841
Corncob

>> No.11050048

>>11050032
I read Pynchon and now my writing is full of goofs and gags. Thanks Tom

>> No.11050051

>>11049972
lol yes

>> No.11050076

>>11049912
Not gonna do it!

>> No.11050083

>>11050013
No it's not you Nabokov-LARPer loving fag. This board is pitiful.

>> No.11050172

>>11049852
roth writes the same book every time

>> No.11050224

>>11050076
thats too bad! you selfish bastard!

>> No.11050230

>>11050083
you're a nipple

>> No.11050255

>>11050032
this

>> No.11050299
File: 21 KB, 610x324, WolfeSenpai.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
11050299

It's good that you left out the current undisputed GOAT, otherwise it wouldn't be a fair fight.

>> No.11050306

>>11050172
more like bellow

>> No.11050478

>>11049981
seconding this

>> No.11050485

>>11050299
literally how is it possible to be this autistic

>> No.11050506

>>11049841

Pinecone is up there with Melville, Faulkner and Papa as the greatest American novelists. Roth and DeLillo are outstanding in their own ways, so they would be second and third, respectively. McCarthy's a distant fourth; I would say he's a slightly more artsy Larry McMurtry.

>> No.11050521

I think all four of the authors have pros and cons.

>>11049977
correct, did you buy his newest book?

>> No.11050529

To everyone in this thread underrating Roth: Roth isn’t that bad, just different. He’s a better psychological writer/writer of characters than any of the other 3, although I find the other 3 more aesthetic and ambitious otherwise, as most of you probably also do. They’re in totally different traditions though, other three are more in an ambitious high modernist style, Roth more of an old-timey realist compared to them, but good for what he’s doing.

>> No.11050693

>>11049841
pynch all the way

>> No.11050731

Gass

>> No.11050846

Pynchon is the only one worth having his name remembered five hundred years from now.

GR, as the decades go by, becomes more and more erudite in its distillation of our crazy reality.

>> No.11050851

>>11050846
You don't think the references in it will make it age badly?

>> No.11050858

>>11049907
How are ya holding up these days Tom

>> No.11050867

>>11050851
Nah... people thought Shakespeare's plays were relatively lowbrow with some of the humour.

It'll all be seen as just indicators of the work's time.... which is exactly the real purpose of canonical reading imo.

>> No.11050921

>>11050529
is Sabbath's Theater a good place to start?

>> No.11050943

>>11049841
Pynchon > later Roth > McCarthy > Don "hey guys I just figured out on my own that capitalism is bad" Delillo > early Roth

>> No.11050968

>>11050921
Just jump right into American Pastoral

>> No.11051001

easy choice. Not a dilemma in any sense. outcome is win-win

>> No.11051157

>>11051001
it's not an easy choice, if you choose roth or delillo you lose gravity's rainbow and blood meridian.

>> No.11051194

>>11051157
>you lose blood meridian.
Oh man can I un-pick McCarthy again

>> No.11051199

>>11051194
why, anon?

>> No.11051204

>/lit/ thinks pinecone posts here

retards

>> No.11051235

>McCarthy: For people with a God complex and take themselves too seriously. Probably naive and are dismissive of other good thinkers/writers because they aren't writing about existential issues. His readers probably have better taste in other art than the other three.

>DeLillo: for people who only read books written after 1945. His readers are more of the type to see the value in conceptual art and find it interesting. Walks a fine line between extremely fascinating philosophical connections and completely embarrassing propositions. His later and more serious work is much better. Anyone who thinks his work is about capitalism or something is not intelligent enough to appreciate his work and realize that each book is an examination of American language usage.

>Pynchon: The best writer out of the four as far as balance and storytelling are concerned. Has an astonishing imagination. Biggest shortcoming is the inability to write about people of his own time and the struggles that come with being a human; his historical sense is strong enough to overcome this weakness however. He will genuinely educate you while reading one of his books even though his works may be too aestheticized.

>DFW: the least concerned with aesthetics out of the four even though his works are extremely refined and take many cues from serious and popular art forms. His strength lies in explicating human psychology and redefining the American self after it had gone out of fashion. His work can become tedious as his fiction is probably as essayistic as it can get. This is not necessarily a weakness however, no fiction writer has gone to the length DFW has to help the literary middle class to help strip them of their pretensions and re-conceptualize their received ideas. Biggest weakness is his propensity to overtreat his subject which gets in the way of the truth of the work. Also writes characters who are sometimes too sentimental to be believable.

>> No.11051251

>>11051235
>Roth
Also can I lmao @
>each book is an examination of American language usage

>> No.11051260

>>11051251
I havent read Roth so I wont comment on him. Laugh at whatever you want, but if you dont think it's true then you've seriously missed the point of DeLillo. If you think it is ham fisted it is like I said, he can walk a fine line.

>> No.11051279

>>11051260
Could you at least attempt to argue for what is a really vague aphorism?

>> No.11051286

>>11051235
can you expound your delillo theory?

>> No.11051299

>>11051235
DeLillo is just "capitalism is bad in muh Murica xD".

>each book is an examination of American language usage.

His days are counted then, he writes for the now.

>> No.11051372

>>11051279
>>11051286
It's pretty clear that in between Americana and End Zone he began reading Wittgenstein and was influenced him, hence why he cites him in a few of his books (end zone being the first time), and DeLillo is a writer who almost never cites anyone so anytime he does you know the influence has been genuine. With that being said, the lesson he took from Wittgenstein seems to be that language is in fact the way the world is understood rather than the medium by which it is understood (this is really simplified, hopefully I'm not being pedantic). You can see after Americana a writer devoted to studying the vocabulary of America whether it be the natural cadences of NYC as seen in books like Players and Americana, the objects of consumerist America as seen in White Noise, the language of mathematics and logic in Ratner's Star (as well as probably the most in depth treatment of language in his corpus; the book is almost entirely made up linguistic puzzles and connections between words and the alphabet and syntactic games), in addition to keeping track of every kind of word used in newspapers. This study of how language is used in America is obviously filtered through his sarcastic and ultra precise voice which I think can sometimes be so compressed that people tend to glide over it and miss the joke he is making about how ridiculous it all is. These gags kind of disappear as he got older but in a book like White Noise it is pretty clear that the precision that Jack is using is in service of making fun of how many cliches he partakes in and the "edginess" is very much the point. So what he ends up doing is using all the words that he sees being used in the culture and tries to see what it reveals about the people who use them and how they are able to change America's psychological state. The investigation in White Noise seems to find out where American people store their concept of death and the afterlife in a place that is polluted with information and organizational systems that attempt to distort that fact of life. He humorously and I believe sincerely uses the symbol of the supermarket for the spiritual center of America, with its eerily and brightly lit aisles and dependable and organized goods. It also happens to be the place where we all come together and wait in line, surrounded by all the conspiratorial nonsense in the magazine racks that place a thread in our world to follow, to keep track of. He's not saying that we need to go back to a different time or that there needs to be a revolution, but he's just documenting the way America was at that time. His books seem to investigate American mysticism more frequently as he got older, but I don't want to keep writing so I hope that I convinced you anyway.

>> No.11051464

>>11051372
>American mysticism
Is that even a thing?

>> No.11051471

>>11049841
OP here. It seems like Pynchon won. I'll get rid of the other three ;) Case closed.

>> No.11051482

>"jane austen is for women"
>"henry james is boring"
>"philip roth isn't the best american novelist of the second half of the twenty century"
what are some more ways to spot a philistine?

>> No.11051492

>>11051482
None of those views/opinions makes you a philistine.

>> No.11051524

>>11051482
>philip roth isn't the best american novelist of the second half of the twenty century.
that's not wrong

>> No.11051528

>>11051464
>They had too many fantasies. Right. But they were our fantasies, weren't they ultimately? The whole assortment. Our leaders simply lived them out. Our elected representatives. It's fitting, then, no more than fitting, and we were stone blind not to guess it. All we had to do was know our own dreams.

>The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers.[…]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

>> No.11051704

>>11049841

McElroy is the best of all of them.

>> No.11051905

>>11049907
Great.

>> No.11052912
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11052912

out of the 3 i've read.
Pynchon>>Delillo>>>>>>>>>>Mccarthy

>> No.11054006

>>11049868
this is objectively the correct answer