[ 3 / biz / cgl / ck / diy / fa / ic / jp / lit / sci / vr / vt ] [ index / top / reports ] [ become a patron ] [ status ]
2023-11: Warosu is now out of extended maintenance.

/lit/ - Literature


View post   

File: 11 KB, 250x217, 9b31099e17a22235e338987f0dc54d10._SL250_.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5853756 No.5853756 [Reply] [Original]

This is a picture of John Dolan. He is my favorite writer, and odds are that most of the people reading this haven't heard of him until just now.

He is, imho, the funniest writer alive, and yet is languishing in poverty, teaching english as a second language in the middle east. He rarely writes any more because every place he's had a regular column at has gone under. Right now he's at -- god -- the Pando Daily, a fucking silicon valley rag.

Greatest hits:
>A million pieces of shit - a review of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, where he calls bullshit because John Dolan has actually done the drugs
http://exiledonline.com/a-million-pieces-of-shit/

>People Start to Die - A shortish piece on death and some damn clear writing on the subject
http://exiledonline.com/people-start-to-die/

>Fear and Anxiety in the Speed Lab: My Disastrous Attempt at Meth-Making - Long (5 part!) but brilliant story of how John Dolan lost money cooking meth in Berkeley in the 80's
http://www.alternet.org/story/135948/fear_and_anxiety_in_the_speed_lab%3A_my_disastrous_attempt_at_meth-making

I'm sad every time I think about this guy being poor when he's so fucking good and a better writer than anybody here. If I won the lotto, I would send him enough that he could write all the time for the benefit of humankind.

If you want confirmation we live a cruel and mean world, read this guy's stuff and consider that hacks like David "fuck the poor" Brooks are making bank while this guy is barely surviving in the Middle East.

>> No.5853772

>>5853756
>A million pieces of shit
LOL!

>> No.5853802

>>5853772
read the article brah

>> No.5853809
File: 453 KB, 1088x1920, overly amused.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5853809

>>5853756
nobody teaches ESL in the middle east without wanting to teach ESL in the middle east
>he's fine

>> No.5853811

>>5853802
I will, as soon as my sides return from orbit from laughing so hard at the title.

>> No.5853833

>>5853809
I'd like to believe that

>> No.5853844

>>5853811
glad that landed with you

>> No.5853872

Bumping for the fame of a genius

>> No.5853892

>>5853756
Sorry man but drug fueled fiction only gets cash money if you are young and alienated. Old people just can't get a foot in the door. No one wants grandpa sitting next to them at the E cookout.

>> No.5853900

>>5853756
I tried reading the first two but they seemed very long winded and tedious. Perhaps I'm just in the wrong frame of mind since I'm on 4chan right now.

>> No.5853937

>>5853900
yeah take an adderall jerkwad

>> No.5853965

>>5853756
>http://exiledonline.com/a-million-pieces-of-shit/

>But then Frey is no expert observer, as he proves in one of the funniest scenes from his nature walks, when he meets a “fat otter”: “There is an island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me.”

Now, can anyone tell me what a “fat otter with a flat, armored tail” actually is? That’s right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the “large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch” would be? Yes indeed: a beaver dam!

My fucking sides

>> No.5854030

>>5853965
and David "oh my heavens I used to take crystal" Sedaris is getting rich. There's no justice on this miserable little planet

>> No.5854444

>>5853756
reading the james frey snark. it's good shit.

i tried to google him to find more info but there's more john dolans. he needs to use his middle initial to differentiate himself. does he have a twitter?

pando daily isn't that bad.

>> No.5854471

>>5854444
Glad you're enjoying it. If I can't pay the dude to quit his job and write, i'm glad i can at least spread the gospel

He's also the War Nerd, and his seldom updated twitter is https://twitter.com/thewarnerd

More greatest hits
The Case For Nuclear Winter
>http://exiledonline.com/feature-story-the-case-for-nuclear-winter/

Lord Byron
>http://exiledonline.com/lord-byron-the-exiles-patron-saint/
>"That’s the formula Byron worked out for beating the Victorians: keep it low and funny, never flinch, and never stop kicking as hard as you can. "

W. H. AUDEN: THE WORST FAMOUS POET OF THE 20TH CENTURY
http://exiledonline.com/w-h-auden-the-worst-famous-poet-of-the-20th-century/

>> No.5854487

>>5853756
Read the first link. Mediocre, tone too arrogant for skill-level. Not gonna make it. Rightly so. Will not read again.

>> No.5854491

>>5854471
>http://exiledonline.com/w-h-auden-the-worst-famous-poet-of-the-20th-century
Dolan doesn't know what he is talking about.

>> No.5854503

>>5854487
He was born in 1955. If he was gonna make it, he would have already

>> No.5854507

>exiledonline.com

Nope.

>> No.5854510

>>5854487
you probly call scratch bammer.

>> No.5854513

>>5854491
>>http://exiledonline.com/w-h-auden-the-worst-famous-poet-of-the-20th-century

Glad you got your jimmies rustled

>> No.5854523

His prose is too boring and full of useless babble. Fuck him.

Also, why didn't he chose good Auden poems to analyze? He's a hack.

>> No.5854524

>>5854507
What's the problem with that?

>> No.5854526

>>5854513
I don't even enjoy Auden, but I can recognize talent. Dolan doesn't understand Auden or maybe it's satire and I don't get it.

>> No.5854527

>>5854471

Dolan's formal criticism of the Yeats stanza is shallow shit. The lie/poetry eye-rhyme is meant to enact the subject of the line, Yeats being "emptied" of his "poetry." He has become uncoupled from the world, by laying he can no longer rhyme with it.

Auden's decision to use neither Yeats or William Butler Yeats underscores the theme of the poem, that is is the man, and not the implied author of the poems, or the figure, Yeats and William Butler Years so to speak, who's being "laid to rest."

I don't see how the rest of the structure is "maudlin" as it's just trochaic heptameter with a nice iambic reversal on the fourth line. There's a feminine ending brought out by the non (really, eye) rhyme of poetry, that's like the exhalation of breath.

And seriously, the elegy is a "debased genre?" How can a genre be "debased" to begin with?

>> No.5854530

ha, he's my friend's uncle

>> No.5854537

>>5854491
Here, this will probably make you mad, too
http://exiledonline.com/jonathan-franzen-will-rim-bobos-for-book-of-the-month-fame/

Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, billed as a masterpiece, is a worthless fraud, a hopelessly trite story gaudied up with tedious overwriting. The overwriting is meant to conceal the fact that this novel is a simple mix of three of the most hackneyed storylines in American fiction:

>The picaresque adventures of a feckless male academic, borrowed from DeLillo;
>The sentimental tale of the decay and death of one’s parents as in Dave Eggers’s “masterpiece”;
>The old, old plot device of the family Christmas reunion to bring the centrifugal parents and kids back together again against all odds, as in every sentimental John Hughes movie ever made and about a thousand more before him.

That, folks, is all there is to this mess: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation meets dying-parents memoir meets Manhattanite satire Lite. God help me, but that’s it!

>> No.5854545

>>5854530
Crazy! Stories, stories, stories, please.

>> No.5854566

>>5854527
by being debased by people and stuff, idiot.

>> No.5854568

>>5854527
>I don't see how the rest of the structure is "maudlin" as it's just trochaic heptameter with a nice iambic reversal on the fourth line. There's a feminine ending brought out by the non (really, eye) rhyme of poetry, that's like the exhalation of breath.

Is Auden doing this for effect
to mimic the exhalation of breath
or are you just trying to protect
a poet who can't fucking rhyme?

>> No.5854578

>>5854491
Harold Bloom also recognizes W. H. Auden as a less-than-stellar poet so the guy this thread is about is right

>> No.5854594

>>5854523
Criticizing something like In Praise of Limestone would take too much work as it's one of the most thoroughly analyzed poems of the past 60 years and he'd have to respond to every defense of it.

>> No.5854609

>>5854568

If your verse is supposed to be a satirical refutation, all you've done is demonstrate you don't understand what a feminine ending is. They have, historically, been used to indicate deflation, sadness, etc, like the minor key.

Also him not being able to rhyme is very different than him intentionally choosing an eye rhyme. I could also point out that it (might) be a rhyme if you're mimic-ing Yeats' reading voice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2FT4_UUa4I

Too much productive ambiguity going on there for your likes, though.

>>5854566
A genre is a cluster of resemblances between texts. Unless the genre is something used to gather bad poems together, like doggerel, or you want to say the whole genre is bad for critical reasons, like modernist verse if you're Yvor Winters, for then it can't really be degenerate. It just has bad practitioners. Saying the elegy is "degenerate" is ridiculous because it is a central genre. It's tantamount to rejecting the pastoral, the poem of place, or the sonnet.

>> No.5854611

>>5854527
And there's another thing he's wrong about, in that YEats does in fact refer to himself as "William Yeats," such as in the poem "To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee"

>> No.5854616

>>5854537
I haven't read Franken or even heard of him. I'll check it out though.

>> No.5854617

>>5854611
Great catch!


TO BE CARVED ON A STONE AT THOOR BALLYLEE

I, the poet William Yeats,
With old mill boards and sea-green slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower for my wife George;
And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again.

Here it is.

Looks like Auden was referencing one of Yeats' own epitaphic poems. The use is intimate, in the manner I was describing, too.

>> No.5854635

>>5854609
>all you've done is demonstrate you don't understand what a feminine ending is. They have, historically, been used to indicate deflation, sadness, etc, like the minor key.
Even freaking Shakespeare used this in the most famous sequence of words ever put on paper

>> No.5854645

>>5854609
confirmed for degenerate post

>> No.5854652

The War Nerd is pretty damn popular as far as those kinds of blogs go.

If I've heard of him then he can't be that obscure or irrelevant.

>> No.5854671

>>5854652
He's doing worse than David Brooks, which is a damn shame

>> No.5854679

>>5854537
This is a good book review though

>> No.5854696

If you want to read something by Dolan that's more appreciative of recent fiction, then check out this review of Burning Babies by Noah Cicero (famous "alt lit" writer): http://exiledonline.com/book-review-whoa-fiction-i-can-praise/

>> No.5854717

>>5854696
>Burning Babies by Noah Cicero
I thought that book was never released

Also here are some of his other positive reviews

http://exiledonline.com/exile-classic-a-hero-of-our-time-hunter-s-thompson-1937-2005/

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6569&IBLOCK_ID=35

the second one is behind a paywall, but literally all you have to do is press f12 and delete the overlay with developer tools or if you're on mobile just disable javascript

>> No.5854719

okay imma back off the circlejerk for a minute and watch some neon genesis now that the gf is back, but here's one to get jimmies rustled: his defense of antidepressants

>> No.5854722

Oh the link
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/war-again-antidepressents/

>> No.5854731

>>5854719
Why on Earth would you watch something like that with your girlfriend???

>> No.5854743

>>5854731
It's good if you don't try to read into it and just appreciate it for being visually beautiful. I can't stand the poor Shinji psyhobabble and the meaningless religious imagery, but again, it is very very pretty

>> No.5854759

>>5854722
This is a good essay

>> No.5854766

>>5854743
Yeah Anno is a talented director but there are better animes IMO and also that one YouTube compilation video of all the weird stereotypical "anime" scenes in the show "This Is How Normal People See Anime" or whatever

>> No.5854810

>>5854759
It's one of my favorites. FWIW, he became a much better writer after he got on antidepressants.

This is another one of my favorites. It's the second of two about getting fired from a neocon run university in Iraq. He wrote the second one after his former employer tried to slander him. In response, Dolan writes the character assassination equivalent of kicking someone in the mouth until their teeth fall out. "So listen up, Agresto: here’s how you do it. I’m a teacher, so I’ll do the James Edward Olmos thing and teach Agresto how to write invective. I’ll just pick a name at random—John Agresto. Sounds pretty horrible already, don’t it?"

http://exiledonline.com/mugged-by-mediocrity-dr-dolan-schools-neocon-imbecile-john-agresto-in-the-art-of-character-assassination/

Part one is here:
http://exiledonline.com/neocon-like-me-how-i-spent-a-year-in-iraq-teaching-with-the-bush-cheney-crazies/

>> No.5854815

>>5854766
Is this what you're referring to? It was purty funny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpaK7w5Fl9I

Most anime is too fuckin chatty for me. I liked Sailor Moon more than DBZ when I was a kid because at least on Sailor Moon you could count on babes and regular action violence. DBZ was all Goku and Freeza talking about how much they were gonna kick each other's ass and then never getting down to business. Drove me nuts.

>> No.5854818

>>5854815
No the one I'm talking about is just Eva and is a compilation of all the fanservice scenes of underage characters and the boys talking about the girls panties and stuff, also I don't care what cartoons you watched as a kid

>> No.5854822
File: 9 KB, 150x150, image.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5854822

>>5854815
>Most anime is too fuckin chatty for me. I liked Sailor Moon more than DBZ when I was a kid because at least on Sailor Moon you could count on babes and regular action violence. DBZ was all Goku and Freeza talking about how much they were gonna kick each other's ass and then never getting down to business

Dude, I feel you.

>> No.5854825

If I'm ever somehow forced by some cruel twist of fate into watching an anime with my girlfriend then it's going to be a Ghibli or maybe a Hosoda film and nothing else

>> No.5854826

>>5854822
Nobody didn't wank it to Sailor Jupiter, ya know?

>> No.5854828

>>5853965
jesus christ, what a fucking nerd

>> No.5854829

>>5854825
>"FUCKEN ANIME IS TOTAL PLEBCORE I'M NEVER WATCHING THAT TRASH"
>Drops two names in anime unknown to casual fan

>> No.5854834

>>5854829
They make good animes taht regular people can enjoy though

>> No.5854839

>>5854829
Also their films are very popular and shown at a lot of festivals worldwide, and are completely unlike the gross shit shown on TV the Japanese themselves are so ashamed of they shove them into extremely late weeknight slots

>> No.5854840

Go to bed, John Dolan.

>> No.5854843

>>5854840
Yeah I wish that bitch would stop shilling his shitty analyses of genocides in Uganda or whatever, this is a board about LITERATURE

>> No.5854849

>>5854843
I remember thinking his shit about Mali sounded dead on, but I dunno enough about Africa to say whether or not that's true

http://www.reddit.com/r/Foodforthought/comments/16vpi9/the_war_nerd_theres_something_about_mali/

>> No.5854872

>>5854849
Then maybe you should shut up about it, also why did you link to a reddit thread and not the article itself

>> No.5854878

>>5854843
>bitch
Nice backwater vocabulary, man, but by the way: yes, this board is about literature, and not politics, and not about your pathetic, first world conscience-stroking. I don't care, or want, to have an opinion about Ugandan genocides; at least not so long as my first occupation is as a writer - unlike this Dolan character - of fiction. He produced an original analysis of a cold case? Tremendous: so he worked a by then-esoteric political event to asperse his competitors. I'm imagining that's what it is: he combs the dialogue around the event for traces of racism then exclaims, 'I'm more liberal than you!' Gosh, and don't you just feel so much more liberal, and globalised, for having read it? Of course you do - that's why you create such threads as these, so dripping with superiority; because the whole point of reading such fucks as Dolan is that they help you feel superior. It looks to me as though he's swinging indiscriminately at everyone in reach: utter disgust for religion, his family, society in general, really, and marketing his drug addiction? He's a prostitutional, enfant terrible wannabe: badly behaved, under-breastfed, and not literature. Mods, mods, mods, mods.

>> No.5854880

>>5854872
Yeah I fucked up

>> No.5854881

I fucking loved this guys pieces on Million Little Lies, but I never knew he did more. Thanks, OP.

>> No.5854884

>>5854878
I'm glad you spen an hour and a half writing that Anonymous, it's a very unique and enlightening insight

>> No.5854930

>Put down my copy of The Gate
>So I can read about meth labs instead
No thanks

>> No.5854963

>>5854878
You've given me some to think about. Thanks

>> No.5854981

>>5854524
It's a site for edgy tryhards.

>> No.5854986
File: 125 KB, 480x366, 1415217016449.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5854986

>>5854822

>> No.5854995

>>5854981
Then 4chan shoudl love it

>> No.5855068

>bush whining in the very first paragraph

dropped hard

>> No.5855166

>>5853756
>http://exiledonline.com/jonathan-franzen-will-rim-bobos-for-book-of-the-month-fame/
I would like to read Dolan take down DFW!

>> No.5855203

>>5855166
http://exiledonline.com/david-foster-wallace-portrait-of-an-infinitely-limited-mind/
>implying every exiledonline writer is not Dolan under a pseudonym

>> No.5855239

reads like a more pretentious maddox

>> No.5855296

>>5855203
I'm pretty darn sure Mark Ames and Yasha Levine aren't Dolan pseudonyms

>> No.5855301

>>5855239
I like Maddox.

>> No.5855334

>>5855296
>pretty darn sure
Get back to me when you're 100%.

>> No.5855341

>>5855334
Well, I've seen them on the television news in youtube videos, both at the same time in fact, and neither one looks like the guy in the OP pic.

>> No.5855359

>>5855301
So did I in 2002.

>> No.5855366

>>5855359
I think his Youtube videos are funny, well-made and frequently correct

>> No.5855536

Just google this bastard. Like the fourth link says :
John Dolan: Academic Fraud.
Read it. Can't post it because 4chin is dumb.

>> No.5855542

>>5855301
that's too bad

>> No.5855668

>>5855542
He always has good points that I just can't seem to refute!

>> No.5855673

>>5855536
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/19/john-dolan-homeless-addict-to-artist-and-author

man I never knew he had such a tough life

>> No.5855681

John Dolan fucking rules. Everybody read his poetry, it fucking owns.

Also, the piece he did on crows (published under obvious pseud 'Ace Korakes'): http://exiledonline.com/to-the-crows/

(didn't read thread btw, i can only assume you pantywaists are talking about some Real Dumb Shit)

>> No.5855691

>>5855681
Most of it's talking about how he's wrong about Auden

>> No.5855696

>>5855691
Oh

Well, I agree with most of what he says about Auden, but I am prepared to ascribe that to a totally irrational hatred of Auden that he (Dolan) happens to share.

>> No.5855712

>>5855673
type in john dolan writer and it's the second link.

>> No.5855719

>>5855536
I looked this up and the only parts of it worth reading are the parts where it quotes Dolan

>George Bush is “slow witted, human-flesh-consuming,” his minions stand before mirrors “as the pus streams down their drooling, rotting faces,” “their desire to consume human flesh is relentless.”

>Here’s his description of his desire to throw a vial of smallpox at Judith Miller: “Let the pox eat away her face, and then stop it before it kills her. She'll have plenty of time to think about journalistic responsibility every time she puts her Khiels' seaweed mask on...and peels it off with yet another layer of her rotting pox-infested facial flesh.”

>> No.5855725

>>5855691
Oh yeah and I forgot the important tangent about anime

>> No.5856378

>>5855719
Read mugged by mediocrity, Dolans response.

>> No.5856383
File: 5 KB, 444x414, Dolan_original[1].gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5856383

Dolan?

>> No.5856669

>>5855673
>http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/19/john-dolan-homeless-addict-to-artist-and-author

That's another Dolan. He uses drugs but never bitched out about it

>> No.5857044

>>5853892

I'll sit next to grandpa if no one else will...