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/lit/ - Literature

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5915511 No.5915511 [Reply] [Original]

soooo liking pynchon is cool but liking DFW isn't...
but they're kinda the same. they both write complex novels with strong themes that, at least in my mind, can seem really jarring beside moments of their "humor" that to me suggest they maybe should've just taken a step back and burned off their autism a bit.
Basically, they were both huge dorks. If you dont see that then im sorry youre one of "those" guys.

theres a reason theses guys relied on their editors.

and lol at this photo

>> No.5915514

>>5915511
>that photograph
Jesus fucking christ, i can't believe i put myself through 1000 or whatever the fuck pages of shit written by that human

>> No.5915519
File: 69 KB, 450x482, bustedtees.c166926d-43ae-419f-a819-b3e42902.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5915519

>> No.5915535

>>5915519
lol'd irl

>> No.5915566

>>5915511
both suck
pynchon is a faggot
no wonder he hides from the public
with a face like that as a young man, i'd hate too
at least dfw is done writing
with pynchon we gotta tolerate more of that shit until he drops so americans can jerk off and prop up his name like some goddamn pinnacle of the it writer of their time fuck pynchon
goddamn babbling retard thinks citing shit is clever; him, jj abrams, pt anderson, the lot of them
fuck that shit i'll go read wikipedia if i wanna learn about sodomy you know what i'm saying?

tl;dr both are faggots

>> No.5915567
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5915567

Pynchon is smooth and stylish whereas DFW strains and grates. Delillo has the same problem as DFW--it's all more or less good stuff but all butchered up and stuck together so gaudily.

When you read Pynchon, it's like you're listening to the symphony of a competent and confident composer.

With DFW and Delillo, just when it's getting good, they stop the whole works to go, "Is this okay? Do you like this? I hope this is okay," before resuming, all shaky and garish.

>> No.5915601

I like reading wikipedia too OP

>> No.5915605
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5915605

>>5915519

>> No.5915622

>>5915605
I appreciate it, anon.

I need to nab me a photoshopping machine from the town square.

>> No.5915624

>>5915511
>lol at this photo

It's the 90's, give them a fucking break.

>> No.5915633

>>5915511
doug_funnie.jpg

>> No.5915666

>>5915511
I could look at this picture forever. I'm unironically, sincerely in love with David Foster Wallace.

>> No.5915672
File: 107 KB, 1000x470, 1412869485016.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5915672

>>5915666
He looks quite kissable.

>> No.5915770

>>5915666
Oh, you devil.

>> No.5915791

>>5915666
I love him as much as anyone else Satan but he has got one of the worst fashion senses I've ever seen.

>> No.5915811

>>5915791
Nah man. His style of dressing says so much about him, is a perfect aesthetic representation of him even if it does not conform to social fashion standards. Jesus christ. I fucking love you DFW.

>> No.5915824

>>5915811
He's dead dog.

Sorry.

Hope you have a nice new year.

>> No.5915826

>>5915791
It sort of adds to the charm.

>> No.5915831

>>5915824
Such a bad time to find out!

>> No.5915846

>>5915511
He looks like an extra from Do The Right Thing

>> No.5915853

>>5915567
Like bad sex kinda

>> No.5915855

>>5915846
He had the talent of one, too.

>> No.5915994

>>5915855
ouch
oooph
dubs
pinecone/10

>> No.5916218

Except that Pynchon actually has beautiful musical prose. DFW is too fragmentary and analytical. He should have done more works like Forever Overhead.

>> No.5916227

>>5915567
hey now
leave Delillo out of this
he and Pynchon have nothing in common stylistically other than that DFW copied them both

>> No.5916303

>>5915567
yeah but DFW strains so that he can say something important which is not obvious or easy to put down, instead of being content to use sytlish, prose.

also protip: DFW often does use stylish prose

>> No.5916306

>>5915855
what does this mean? everyone in DTRT was a great actor

youlose/10

>> No.5916311

>>5915511
Protip
Nobody outside English speaking countries cares about either.

>> No.5916319

>>5916311
yeah, we already have joyce, pynchon and the more so dfw are rather little known

>> No.5916391

>>5916303
>implying that Pynchon does not deal with complex stuff.
>Pavlovian Behaviorism, Ouspenky, Poisson distributions, cold war Paranoia, Kabbalah...

>> No.5916399

>>5915511
>theres a reason theses guys relied on their editors.
really? both their novels are trash in need of heavy editing

>> No.5916407

>>5916311
that's because gravity's rainbow would be pretty impossible to translate to anything else...at least not without losing half of it

>> No.5916408

>>5916303
>>5916391
Pynchon does the exact same thing but makes it organic, readable, and a part of the larger work. DFW is too self-aware, insecure, and heavy-handed in his writing to do this.

>> No.5916414

>>5916407
China did Finnegans Wake. I'm sure someone out there can do it.

>> No.5916426

>>5916408
>Pynchon does the exact same thing but makes it organic, readable
no. reading the maxwell's demon shit in tcol49 was cringeworthy and undergrad as fuck.

>> No.5916434

>>5916407
Pynchon writes in like 5 different languages in Gravity's Rainbow. He just randomly goes off into a latin hymn or some other language. He even references things that are best read in their own language like Martin Fierro. If you want a book that will grow as your appreciation of the universe around you grows, look no further than Gravity's Rainbow.

I feel like Germans would get a lot out of Gravity's Rainbow.

>> No.5917226

>>5915511

Anyone know what book he's got in his hand?

>> No.5917253

>>5916434

I've read the German translation. It's... well, I wouldn't say it's badly done, obviously they tried but some of it is just borderline untranslatable. I had to look it up on the internet to find out what he was doing in that "Kenosha Kid" section.

>> No.5917326

>>5915511
Come on at least be erudite if you're gonna talk shit. DFW only wrote two and a half novels, but wrote three or four short story collections and enough essays to fill four books. Infinite Jest isn't the end all be all of his work

>> No.5917334

>>5915511
>soooo liking pynchon is cool but liking DFW isn't...

Only if you're dumb enough to think /lit/ dictates cool/uncool.

In the wider world reading in general is uncool. Who cares? Read what you want.

>> No.5917350

>>5915567
What in the name of Christ are you talking about, you fucking autist.

>> No.5917375

i enjoy dfw but do not understand his hardcore fans. they give the impression that their first serious reading experience was IJ and like a girl whose virginity was taken by some dude on prom night cling to that first experience as something magical and transcendent. it's a fine book, 7.5-8.5/10. harold bloom doesn't like dfw but helen vendler does so you don't get a patrician critic's award for not reading him.

also, i think dfw was right that he and pynchon were not that similar. they are lumped together because in the american public media consciousness long big sprawling american novels with popularity jumped straight from GR to IJ, so the reviews all lumped them together.

>> No.5917383

>>5915567
that's not true at all about delillo. delillo is ridiculously composed and confident. i can not describe a single passage of his as "shaky." his writing is machined over and hammered out and muscular. this is his greatest feature as a stylist, his tremendous muscularity combined with a confidence that lets him do things (ex. describe an entire crowd's mindset both on the individual level of certain people, and the level of everyone at once, without ever losing the reader, doing things in basically every tense and perspective in one book, etc.) that most writers aren't capable of

btw i think pynchon is a greater writer than delillo by a far margin, but an inferior stylist, and i'd certainly say his writing is shakier and less confident.

>> No.5917402

>>5917350
>autist

this word means virtually nothing anymore

congrats, guys, you've misused it to complete meaninglessness

>> No.5917409

>>5917402
i agree with the usage because only an autist would so tone deaf to say that about delillo

>> No.5917541

>>5916218
He achieves that more natural, free-flowing style again in The Pale King. The opening chapter is quite beautiful. I think he was always capable of this kind of writing, but it just didn't fit his personal aesthetic.

>> No.5917542

>>5915567
Someone hasn't read Underworld.

>> No.5917550

>>5917375
I think that in a way DFW (at least from the mid-'90s onwards) defined himself as a writer in opposition to Pynchon, so even while he is dispositionally opposite to Pynchon, the influence of Pynchon still looms large in all of his work. Except for The Pale King, which seems as though it was finally free of that spectre.

>> No.5917554

>>5917334
>In the wider world reading in general is uncool.

In the USA reading is uncool. In the wider world, the USA is uncool.

>> No.5917643

>>5917375
>helen vendler does

>VENDLER: David Foster Wallace. I weep for his disappearance. I just read his biography, “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story” by D.T. Max. I’ve read Wallace’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” and just got “The Broom of the System.” I certainly haven’t read “Infinite Jest.” I don’t think I would read a thousand-page novel until I’m in a nursing home.

total pleb

>> No.5917650

>>5917643
if you know helen vendler you know it's because she probably spends about 4 pages writing about every sentence she reads

woman has squeezed lines of poetry for meaning more thoroughly than basically anyone else in history

>> No.5917669

>>5917650
>woman has squeezed lines of poetry for meaning more thoroughly than basically anyone else in history

haha, have you read bhagavat gita in a commented edition :3

http://www.asitis.com/1/1.html
http://www.bhagavad-gita.org/Gita/verse-01-01.html