Middlebrow authors

[Anonymous No.6864571]

ITT authors that epitomize middlebrow

Malcolm Gladwell very related

[Anonymous No.6864578]

[Anonymous No.6864597]

ye. thank ye. cold autistic dark.

[Anonymous No.6864607]

thread so good so far

[Anonymous No.6864617]

>>6864597
He's such a fucking hack.

[Anonymous No.6864725]

>>6864578
I don't even like his politics and that's jot true

[Anonymous No.6864749]

>>6864725
he is quoted as saying "If an eleven year old can't understand it then it's probably pretentious bullshit"

that seems like the definition of middlebrow to me.

[Anonymous No.6864766]

>>6864749
That's not middlebrow. Smart people are good at explaining difficult concepts in a clear way. Postmodern writers are not smart.

[Anonymous No.6864779]

>>6864766
you inner middleborw is showing

[Anonymous No.6864796]

>>6864597
>>6864617
This so very, very much.

Corncob McCorny is the worst.

[Anonymous No.6864828]

>>6864779
Pseudo-intellectual spotted

[Anonymous No.6865022]

Martin Amis.

[Anonymous No.6865024]

>>6864766
Except sometimes difficult concepts are just difficult.

I know how to use Stokes' Theorem, which is imho at least a lower highbrow thing to understand, and am able to visualise its meaning, but I can't think of how to explain it to a non-STEM person in a way that doesn't involve defining dozens of concepts in a simple way beforehand.

Vulgarisation should be easy to understand, the very etymology of the word comes from the latin referring to lesser people ; however being smart does not always imply being a good vulgarizer, especially when you're dealing with extremely abstract stuff.

[Anonymous No.6865035]

>>6864597
>he looked at the tortilla and thought about the tortilla and sat down and sat his hands on the table and scooted into the table and picked up the tortilla that lay on the table and put the tortilla in his mouth and looked at the table and thought about the tortilla and thought about the table and swallowed the tortilla and scooted out from the table and digested the tortilla and autistic darkness

[Anonymous No.6865043]

Ayy Lmao

[Anonymous No.6865059]

>>6865035
That sounds like Tao Lin ghostwriting a McCarthy book.

[Anonymous No.6865061]

>>6865022
You're joking right? He's not a "difficult" writer, but his books are by no means "middlebrow".

[Anonymous No.6865225]

Bernard Werber is a French writer whose books I used to love when I was in the french equivalent of middle school. When I started actually developing my own tastes and reading challenging material, I left them in the bookshelves next to Rabelais, Pergaud and Molière and remembered them as those cool philosophical fiction novels from my childhood.

A few months ago I looked him up again and realized he is doing extremely well, selling tons of the books he writes every year or so, and pretty popular, mostly among adults in their late twenties/thirties. I decided to buy his last novel, because surely it will be even better than it was as a kid, right?

It was utter garbage, a near-plagiarism of several PKD shorts glued together, in an atrocious prose. Adverbs everywhere, common knowledge trivia presented as deep philosophical parables for love and society and whatnot ; don't even get me started on the flat cliché characters.

In horror, I re-read some of the books I had praised so much to my friends only to discover I had grown up reading middlebrow shit for pseudo-intellectuals. I put them in a box in the attic, will probably sell them asap.

Oh well, at least I didn't grow up exclusively with him.

[Anonymous No.6865252]

>>6865024
Mathematics textbooks don't make use of self-indulgent obscurantism, though.

[Anonymous No.6865264]

>>6865024
>Except sometimes difficult concepts are just difficult.
I wasn't saying that this isn't true. Fellow mathfag here, obviously some concept require prior understanding, particularly in technical fields. But that's not covering up meaning because you have nothing important to say when you get to the point (re: postmodernism)

[Anonymous No.6865267]

>>6865043
who is this

[Anonymous No.6865293]

Tom Wolfe

[Anonymous No.6865300]

[Anonymous No.6865323]

>>6864571
>>6864578
>>6864607
>>6865043
>>6865300
>bottom of the barrel are middlebrow
Why the fuck do I come here?

[Anonymous No.6865326]

>>6865323
>Chomsky
>Salinger
>bottom of the barrel
Yeah you don't belong here.

[Anonymous No.6865461]

>>6865300
I've read Catcher in the Rye, thought it was alright. Heard some good things about his Glass family writings, read that Raise the Roof/Seymour. Raise the Roof was decent but Seymour was so incessantly self-absorbed that it was almost unbearable.

Should I even bother continuing? Did I just select the wrong stories?

[Anonymous No.6865478]

bolano delillo dfw carver garcia marquez all of the beats pynchon krasznahorkai flann obrien mishima walser balzac vollmann alasdair gray plato

[Anonymous No.6865511]

lower-middlebrow, reporting in.

[Anonymous No.6865518]

[Anonymous No.6865736]

Heraclitus

[Anonymous No.6865782]

>>6865326

Chomsky is bottom of the barrel? Salinger?

If you're the same sperg from the other thread you need to go back to /b/

[Anonymous No.6865793]

>>6865782

Sorry that was for >>6865323

Yes I mad

[Anonymous No.6865893]

>>6865736
nah boo ya blew it

[Anonymous No.6865897]

>>6865782
Salinger is mediocre as fuck. Maybe not bottom of the barrel but definitely nowhere near the top either.

[Anonymous No.6865908]

>>6865323

[Anonymous No.6865938]

>>6865024
>vulgar
>the very etymology of the word comes from the latin referring to lesser people
Nope. In Latin "vulgo" meant "among the common people" with no connotation of inferiority because this was just a specified usage of the word whose most basic meaning is "here and there." You even see Roman poets referring to "grapes 'vulgo' on the vine."

IF you're entering into a debate of intellect, I think there's nothing that reveals your pedestrianism more than misunderstanding Latin while still trying to hide behind it.

[Anonymous No.6865951]

>>6865461
Read "Franny and Zooey." Those are his best two stories, especially "Franny."

Next try "Nine Stories." You jumped from his YA to his most difficult ramblings, which is probably why you got turned off.

[Anonymous No.6866006]

>>6865938
Different anon than who you're responding to, but that's surely overstating it a bit, no? Vulgus does mean "crowd" or "throng", but surely that term as used by ancient oligarchs, timocrats, aristocrats, what have you, would have carried a connotation of what was contemptible insofar as it was common, yes?

[Anonymous No.6866033]

this is the worst type of fucking thread
>x is y
>no he isn't
>yes he is
>nu uh
>yu huh

and we all get to pretend to ourselves that we are discussing literature

[Anonymous No.6866037]

>>6864571
nah