/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14490244]

>best novel since jr
>only novel not guilty of reddit spacing
>/lit/ hasn't heard of it because they're idiots
2019 in review

[Anonymous No.14490250]

>>14490244
>/lit/ hasn't heard of it because they're idiots
What the fuck are you talking about, there was at least a thread a day about this book a couple months ago. Thanks for another one for old times sake, newfag. Sage.

[Anonymous No.14490259]

>the fact that
>the fact that
>the fact that

Not only does she use a stream of consciousness style that was already kitsch by the 1950s, badly dated to Joyce's modernism and to a few postmodern American writers who she seems not to have read, she whored herself out to "internet journalists" for months because of it, loudly proclaiming how brave she is to be a WOMAN writing AVANT GARDE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Even though the main reason she is getting published is not that she's brave, but because she is well connected in the industry and could probably have published a list of descriptions of her menstrual clots.

She clearly got in too deep with this pretentious, kitsch project, finished it because she wanted to have something to show for the wasted effort, and then puffed it up in the media using sympathetic friends.

She's also a fat, venal old kike who uses pictures of herself from when she was 25yo in interviews even though she's 65yo. Sage this kitsch garbage. Kitsch is the opposite of /lit/. At least genre fiction is naively sincere. This is deliberate, "look at me I'm avant garde ;-)" kitsch written by someone with no knowledge of the history of her own metier, and no shame over using nepotism to get press coverage. Lucy Ellmann can suck my fucking cock, both her real 65 year old fat self and the 25 year old (still ugly) self whose picture she uses in interviews.

[Anonymous No.14490268]

>>14490259
>kitsch is the opposite of /lit/

[Anonymous No.14490270]

>>14490259
>a list of descriptions of her menstrual clots.
That's my favorite section of Ducks, Newburyport

[Anonymous No.14490283]

>>14490259
>Cant appreciate neo kitsch

Pleb

[Anonymous No.14490315]

>>14490259
Want to know how I know this book is great...?

[Anonymous No.14490347]

Go shill your book somewhere else Lucy

[Anonymous No.14490405]

>>14490244
Love her!

[Anonymous No.14490451]

>>14490244
>only novel not guilty of reddit spacing
So she copied Bernhard's single paragraph gimmick? How novel!

[Anonymous No.14490501]

>Whole book consists of a single sentence.
Last month, in this thread, nobody could even tell me what the verb was.

[Anonymous No.14490511]

>>14490244
I rather enjoyed JR, despite the non-delineated speech gimmick.
This strikes me as someone trying too hard to be 'crazy lol so random', but even if it isn't it hurts my eyes too much to even seek out any enjoyment/insight it contains. I'd rather read that 14,000 page fantasy novel about little girls by that janitor.

[Anonymous No.14490553]

>>14490501
the fact that you want to know the verb, the fact that there is essentially no verb because every new clause starts with "the fact that," the fact that this turns every sentence into a dependent clause, the fact that any editor would say "this dependent clause might as well be an independent clause," the fact that she didn't put in the bare minimum effort to make the book technically competent but instead did this "the fact that" thing for hundreds of pages instead, the fact that anybody on /lit/ could do this, the fact that the only thing stopping the average /lit/ user from being published in a stream of consciousness book like this one is that they aren't already a published author with an established name, the fact that being so published in the first place is more based on luck and politics and who you know in the industry than anything to do with talent, the fact that /lit/ and other 4chan boards occasionally have sparking moments of true wit or interesting insight but they will never be published while this hunk of garbage is, the fact that 4chan posters who semi-regularly produce those sparkling moments have probably thought to themselves that they should try to write a book for real some day, the fact that what holds those posters back from writing a real book is probably that they feel daunted by the minimum threshold of technical competence required for something to qualify as a real book, the fact that they probably meet and exceed that standard more than they think, the fact that modesty and self-respect hold them back from honing their artistic creations anyway, the fact that ellman has no such modesty or self-respect, the fact that ellman falls far short of the benchmark of technical competence most /lit/ users with aspirations of writing a book would probably assume is standard in the industry, the fact that she was published anyway, the fact that recognition in our epoch has been completely severed from any metric of real quality or effort, the fact that it's completely random who gets published and why, the fact that a great many people who want to create art and interact with their zeitgeist don't know where to start, the fact that the mere will to start was sufficient in most preceding eras, the fact that it's no longer sufficient because the ratio of signal to white noise has tipped so much in the direction of white noise that a piece of shit like lucy ellman can get published, the fact that getting published not only means your book is published but that you get to self-style as a "literary figure" and "public intellectual," the fact that this further dilutes any incentive to artistic creation by twisting it into hedonistic masturbatory narcissism, the fact that the potential energy of this masturbatory narcissism then spawns whole industries of agents and image consultants who institutionalize it as normal, the fact that we are living in an age of formless chaos with no sign of impending rupture

[Anonymous No.14490561]

Honestly this book is great. I had almost fallen for the "there is no good books anymore" meme

[Anonymous No.14490565]

The fact that so many books still name the Beatles as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art.

[Anonymous No.14490604]

>>14490511
audibly groaned a few sentences in, this needs to fuck off

[Anonymous No.14490606]

quack!

[Anonymous No.14490612]

[Anonymous No.14490753]

>>14490553
>didn’t read it

[Anonymous No.14490773]

>best novel since jr

[Anonymous No.14490801]

>>14490244
Legitimately one of the worst things I've attempted to read, I regret pirating it

[Anonymous No.14490883]

>>14490773
Yeah, when did JR even come out? 1980 or something, We have had blood meridian, mason dixon, IJ etc. since then.

[Anonymous No.14490956]

>>14490244
>JR
sorry for the opinion but JR wasn’t even that good. It was a bunch of whacky jokes with really hamfisted symbolism and jejeune ruminations
What did I miss?

[Anonymous No.14490966]

>>14490883
1975, and yes we've had better shit.

[Anonymous No.14491011]

>>14490511
I messed up the image by repeating pages a bunch of times. Doesn't really matter as no one noticed, but here is a fixed version of the first few pages in case anyone is actually curious about reading this crap.

[Anonymous No.14491033]

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST
imagine reading this

[Anonymous No.14491034]

>>14490956
Reread it.

[Anonymous No.14491193]

What does /lit/ think of this review of JR?

https://medium.com/@differengenera/the-formal-constraints-of-william-gaddis-jr-f0153308e347

[Anonymous No.14491256]

I'm reading it at the moment and enjoying it.
I like the bits about the mountain lion

[Anonymous No.14491265]

>>14490244
There are like two women whose books I’ll ever read and this woman is neither of them.

[Anonymous No.14491323]

>>14491193
I was mostly with it until:
>If we were to take Jonathan Franzen at his word (never wise) and regard Gaddis as the primary architect behind a particular kind of bleakly comic, imperial postwar Amerian novel-writing, we can see in Gaddis the roots of much of the misogyny which characterises the writings of David Foster Wallace, Robert Coover etc. No matter how radical the epistemological critiques of these authors, or the sophistication of their understanding of systems, their writing indulges time and time again the male gaze.

Sometimes the dialogue really works, when there are 4 or 5 voices having 2 or 3 conversations over each other, other times it's just extremely clunky and it's just making too much work for the reader. Clarity is lost for a style which is not always useful. I thought the characters were much more than 2 dimensional.

[Anonymous No.14491333]

>>14490604
> I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.
>I am a dumbfuck.

[Anonymous No.14491417]

>>14491323
>male gaze
Damn those men and they’re ability to see! Why can’t they just stop looking at things, the way women do, always bumping into street lights and tripping over dogs: truly the wisest of the 8,000 known genders

[Anonymous No.14491451]

>>14491417
>strawmen:idiots::windmills:Quixote
Learn to differentiate between “their” and “they’re” before you comment on eyesight.

[Anonymous No.14491463]

>>14491451
Oh Lucy fuming now lmfao senpai

[Anonymous No.14491465]

>>14491463
no u

[Anonymous No.14491662]

>>14491323
>Much more than 2 dimensional
What?

[Anonymous No.14491672]

>>14490553
beautiful work, anon. you are an angel sent to help those spending time here. I read this, and >>14490753 lost, although they likely read it and disliked it, or could only make it thirty words in and had to fap. you are too good for this shitty fertilizer cellar club. thank you for composing this in the face of such awful things. may the muses sparkle your blankest pages with something that astonishes you, anon

[Anonymous No.14491680]

>>14490405
Hahaha is this real

[Anonymous No.14491790]

>>14490347
Who is shilling? Do you also believe there’s some great conspiracy of English teachers to foist Shakespeare on us? Nobody is shilling Jordan Peterson, they’re just idiots.

>>14490451
What’s novelty got to do with anything? Ducks, Newburyport isn’t a typographic “trick” (what it would mean for a novel to deceive you in the first place pretty unclear) and it certainly isn’t “copied from Bernhard.”

>>14491033
No need to imagine. I did read it. It’s just a novel. Whatever your ultimate conclusion regarding the book’s merits, you won’t die from the 12 hours or so it takes you to read it. What’s harder to imagine is being this terrified of a book.

>>14490553
This simply isn’t true. The extended-list single sentence in Ducks isn’t a gimmick any more than the unusual typography in a Cummings poem or in Finnegans Wake. It serves a literary function and serves if deftly.

It’s a very good book.

[Anonymous No.14492182]

>>14491680
Makes more $$ than you do

[Anonymous No.14492183]

/lit/ only talks about meme books

[Anonymous No.14492324]

>>14491790
>just click buy!

[Anonymous No.14492368]

>>14492324
You think she’s here on /lit/ trying to rebuild the male psyche through Blackmail, Humiliation and Edging play?

But wait, what’s this about “keeping my condo extra clean?” A false-flag Peterson shill maybe? Or a triple-cross where Peterson is actually subtly pushing men into domestic roles traditionally occupied by women in some twisted libcuck-femdom-demtard-postmodern-neomarxist plot?

[Anonymous No.14492699]

>>14490244
>female author
dropped

[Anonymous No.14492709]

Ok, so I get it’s a flashpoint in internet culture war, but is it a good book?

[Anonymous No.14493111]

>>14490259
based and factpilled

[Anonymous No.14493203]

>>14490244
>written by a woman
>written by a literal boomer
>critically acclaimed
>nonsensical "quirky XDD" title
>minimalist cover design
holy shit anyone who reads this should be shot on sight.

[Anonymous No.14493216]

>>14493203
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rIy_RXX_VLE
It works every time.

[Anonymous No.14493282]

>>14491193
Literally every reference in the review comes from the first 25 pages. Most of the themes he points out too are heavily frontloaded. It’s like reading /lit/ talk about bananas...

[Anonymous No.14494473]

Ducks wins the worst meme book of 2019. Shilled endlessly, total trash

[Anonymous No.14494503]

>>14493203
nice job, not a single relevant point of critique. pathetically desperate attempt to fit in. go be underage somewhere else

[Anonymous No.14494522]

>>14494503
>Shoo shoo incels!

[Anonymous No.14494613]

>>14494473
was the kindergarten odyssey from 2018?

[Anonymous No.14495013]

some points:
-The verb is "doesn't", I suppose
-Last page contains echoes
-Emoji is used throughout

[Anonymous No.14495015]

>>14494522
basically yeah

[Anonymous No.14495021]

-Has a paragraph before the sentence starts
-the sentence is still divided into sections typographically

[Anonymous No.14495047]

>>14491011
This book should come with a spork to hold while you read it

[Anonymous No.14495361]

>>14495047
fucking kek

[Anonymous No.14495386]

>>14495013
>>14495021
All wrong.

>>14495361
PEN15 lel

[Anonymous No.14495446]

>>14490553
Thank you anon, you are an inspiration to us all.

[Anonymous No.14496219]

>>14491790
> Ducks, Newburyport
Go back to Goodreads

[Anonymous No.14496417]

>>14491011
Would be much better if she removed "the fact that." I don't know anybody who thinks like that. Feels less like a stream of consciousness, and more like a reminiscence of the thoughts of a day, loosely assembled, leaving out whatever seemed too disparate and which might give the impression of a person and not a character.

[Anonymous No.14496419]

>>14496219
Best stick to Lord of the Rings, champ.

[Anonymous No.14496487]

>>14496417
> But, umm, like, c’est une pipe...? What else could it be?

[Anonymous No.14496532]

>>14490501
Finished it last night, the verb is "bear"
>>14491790
>isn't a gimmick
I liked the book, but yes it's single-sentence structure is very much a gimmick, just like the endnotes in IJ are a gimmick

[Anonymous No.14496533]

>>14496419
I thought that was more a Goodreads thing?

[Anonymous No.14496599]

>>14496533
Too long for /lit/?

[Anonymous No.14496614]

>>14496532
DFW had a point and a purpose with his footnotes, this ducks kikeberryport shit is pointless, it's the equivalent of someone putting a racecar spoiler on their car because they think "that's what a cool car has" while not having any idea what a spoiler is or why it's called a spoiler

[Anonymous No.14496632]

>>14496487
>quality is passay

[Anonymous No.14496657]

>>14496614
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iKZTOXkD22c

[Anonymous No.14496660]

>>14495013
this is outright subversive

[Anonymous No.14496671]

>>14496657
>https://m..

[Anonymous No.14496680]

If this novel was was written by a man, /lit/ would be all over it

[Anonymous No.14496682]

>>14496680
If this novel were written by a man, nobody would ever have heard of it.

[Anonymous No.14496685]

>>14496671
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iKZTOXkD22c

[Anonymous No.14496692]

>>14496680

if your grandmother had a cock she'd be fucking your vice tight neg hole right now. instead it's your stepfather.
nigger.

[Anonymous No.14496706]

americans are disgusting

[Anonymous No.14496711]

>>14496706
This is a jew, anon. Unless you mean disgusting because we let jews like thus rule us, then yes that is correct.

[Anonymous No.14496732]

>>14496692
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2nhFH25JNgc

[Anonymous No.14496742]

>>14496732

could have played along and had a laugh but nah.
fucking tar baby. and i mean it this time

[Anonymous No.14496778]

>>14496742
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MFfGJD-eC6E

[Anonymous No.14496905]

>>14496778
>>14496732
>>14496692
>>14496711

IS THERE A NIGGER ON THIS BOARD??!!?!?!??!?!

[Anonymous No.14496909]

>>14496599
Not enough lemon madeleines.

[Anonymous No.14496976]

>>14496909
there are plenty in ducks

[Anonymous No.14496989]

>>14496905
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FGs7yliWpD4

[Anonymous No.14497018]

>>14491417
do you really not know what the male gaze is as a concept or are you just trying to make an unfunny joke

[Anonymous No.14497440]

I wish /lit/ actually would read it. Or I wish there were a place of people who actually did. It struck me as singularly impressive. Gass might critique it for its ear and reciteability (as he did Pynchon), but I think it’s an exemplar of his notion of the book as a container of consciousness - one that manages to communicate both the character and something of the author herself.

The criticisms of the style here seem facile. It’s in cumulative effect that it pays off. At least it seemed to me. But I’d be interested in some non incel type criticism from intelligent members of this board.

[Anonymous No.14497725]

>>14497440
Is it beautiful?

[Anonymous No.14497784]

What the fuck is reddit spacing

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.14497805]

>>14497784

To make the comment larger

In order to get attention


I’m guessing.


Only regular users of the place


Would know about it.

I really wish people would shut up about the place

[Anonymous No.14497820]

>>14495013
did she really namedrop ulysses in her rip off ending of ulysses? what a fucking hack.

[Anonymous No.14498006]

>>14497725
I think so. Not in the same way as like the Faerie Queene or something, but if you consider novels like Gravity’s Rainbow or or Catch-22 beautiful, I definitely don’t see why Ducks wouldn’t be. It’s probably more “beautiful” than any of those over-heady books and likewise more beautiful than “Freedom” or whatever other sort of more domestic novel you might say its content resembles.

>>14497820
Obviously you’re joking, but for what it’s worth, the resemblance to Ulysses is a superficial comparison made by lazy critics. It really probably is closer to JR than Molly’s monologue, though I don’t know that it strongly resembles either.

[Anonymous No.14498304]

>>14498006
What makes it beautiful?

[Anonymous No.14498325]

>>14490259
>uses pictures of herself from when she was 25

She keeps one on her mantel

[Anonymous No.14498342]

>>14498304
that the ruling classes permitted us to read one of their own's most privy ramblings

[Anonymous No.14498366]

>>14490268
It is, try not to forget that ironyposters are ironic

[Anonymous No.14498394]

>>14491011
what the fuck is this shit

[Anonymous No.14498501]

>>14498304
Several things. It's a profound evocation of a particular type of person rendered in better detail, with more verisimilitude and in a different style than anything I've seen before. Obviously the novel typographically resembles Molly, but Molly's language is often inconsistent with her background and she isn't paid nearly so much attention as Ellmann has paid her narrator. Closer might be Joyce's portrait of Bloom, but it's a different sort of attention paid to Bloom (or Woolf to Dalloway or Faulkner to the 4 in Sound and Fury). I really haven't seen any other work like Ducks.

The form/style of that portrait are essential to its success. >>14490553 can write something ostensibly similar, but he couldn't use that style to accurately convey a /lit/ poster because as >>14496417 sort of pointed out, that style doesn't cohere with the forms of life actually used by a /lit/ poster. Likewise you could try to rewrite Molly's monologue using Ellmann's style, but the form betray its content and Molly would be poorly rendered. Far from a gimmick, the iterated "the fact that"s go a long way to conveying who the narrator is and what kind of life she leads. I think it might help readers to think of the novel less as a representation of a "stream of consciousness" (there are several tics that clearly show the text is not a "transcription" of an inner monologue) than an analysis of a language game.

I'd say the novel has many passages which achieve a more traditional poetic beauty (don't ask me to quote -- a side-effect of the typography is that it's hard to find specific passages), but looking for such passages sort of runs counter to the point. The poetic beauty of Ducks is more rhythmic, sustained over pages and pages. Looking for a specifically beautiful paragraph or line like you might in Melville or Coover is a little like looking for a particularly striking section in drone music. The same effect is achieved another way.

It might not bear on an analysis of beauty, but for what it's worth the novel is also remarkable for its sustained attention to subject matter that's frequently overlooked. I'm not primarily advocating for the novel on political grounds, but the hostility it creates here is pretty telling, I think. It's rich for a board that worships a novel that paints the ordinary travails of a Jewish accountant in epic brush strokes to so thoroughly dismiss Ellmann's book for having the same audacity to depict the banal.

[Anonymous No.14498551]

>>14498325
what in the sam hell

[Anonymous No.14498593]

>>14498325
Obviously a print-out put over the real photo by the photographer.

>>14494473
The “shilled” argument seems popular, but it doesn’t make much sense. Ducks still didn’t make the Best-of-the-Year list at a lot of publications (notably neither the Atlantic nor Slate review it, two publications you’d think would jump at the chance to “shill” a “propaganda piece” about a middle-class, stay-at-Home housewife) and Ducks wasn’t published by Ellmann’s regular publisher (they refused) and was published by a small, independent publishing house that wouldn’t have the means to “shill.” If the argument is just that she did interviews or did press, you have a Gaddis-high standard that almost no authors meet (where do you think all the dumb meme pictures of DFW came from?) An objection to the fans of the book (I doubt many are feigning admiration for money) doesn’t make much sense either since idiots proselytize Infinite Jest and Moby Dick all the time too, despite at least the latter actually being good. The only thing left is the content of the interviews, but what was that about separating the author from the work?

[Anonymous No.14498706]

>>14490244
i would regret my whole life until my deathbed, if i ever spent time to read a 1000 page book written by a female, to think i could have replaced that time by reading the plentiful classics written by exuberant men, and realize i seriously replaced one of those books by a book written by a female, in 1000 pages of her voice. i could never live with such a regret knowing my life has that empty block of i didn't read enough because this 1 book

[Anonymous No.14498754]

>>14498593
if you weren't an outsider who came here just to shill this shit, you'd know how unnatural your posting about it seems, particularly your posting the same threads about it on an eerily regular schedule and bumping it with obvious samefags

[Anonymous No.14498756]

>>14498706
>1000 pages takes a significant chunk of time
Did you learn to read in your teens?

[Anonymous No.14498759]

>>14498756
no

[Anonymous No.14498794]

>>14498754
I haven’t samefagged except to continue this argument, and I visit /lit/ often. Not all posts are trite one-liners about the Greeks or bananas or diaries. In fact, I’m here attempting to contribute precisely the rare type of content that motivates me to visit this site - the one or two posters who got me to read the Tunnel, the handful who occasionally defend Zadie Smith, etc . Even if I were an “outsider,” what difference ought that make? Good books are good books.

[Anonymous No.14498819]

>>14491011
It feels like i'm being punished. Its not even outsider art or avant garde, its just dull milquetoast affected stream of consciousness. Like trying to eat a shipping container full of styrofoam.

[Anonymous No.14499080]

>>14496614
(i'm the anon u originally replied to)
Like I'm pretty sure I remember DFW saying in some interview, the "point" of IJ's endnotes is to further fracture the text and (in my opinion) call to attention the fact that the reader is actually reading a book. The constant flipping back to a "reference" section makes the reader feel like they're uncovering some sort of mystery, and a lot of the books drier/funnier jokes are in the endnotes, so the book as a whole is very entertaining if you're not an idiot. How appropriate for a book about entertainment.
I haven't read or heard any interviews with Ellman, but to me, DN's stream-of-consciousness essentially locks the reader into the narrator's mindset. The reader only sees things from the narrator's incredibly narrow point of view, which filters the "reality" of the book through a very subjective (and scared) lense. Also (unless the reader cheats by using notes or something) the rambling and distraction and random thoughts that are thrown in make it hard for the reader to remember a lot of details that are brought up again in later passages, mirroring the narrator's complaints of her own faulty memory. How appropriate for a book about paranoia and memory.
My jab about them both being gimmicks essentially comes from my feelings about postmodern literature in general - it deals with pretty complex, contemporary topics, and to make an effective point, a big postmodern novel kind of HAS to be gimmicky and "look-at-me-I'm-a-big-book-with-a-weird-twist"

[Anonymous No.14499590]

>>14498593
>Ducks wasn’t published by Ellmann’s regular publisher (they refused) and was published by a small, independent publishing house that wouldn’t have the means to “shill.”

This shows your ignorance. Small publishers rely much more heavily on artificially generated, unorthodox publicity methods. Their constraint is money. The DN posts that flooded /lit/ were nearly identical. They appeared about once every two days, and were pushed by an OP who has nothing original to say for the book. Nothing but overly enthusiastic, boilerplate praise. (See every email from every literary publicist for examples of this.) Those posts tooks nothing but minutes to start. They were not organic.

[Anonymous No.14499672]

>>14490259
you're making it sound pretty based tbqh famalam

also have sex