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/lit/ - Literature

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7132578 No.7132578 [Reply] [Original]

While you guys are busy whacking off Pynchon and Wallace, you're ignoring the writer who's singlehandedly written:

2 GRAVITY'S RAINBOWs
2 INFINITE JESTs
3 MASON & DIXONs

and a seven-volume philosophical treatise on violence.

That's all, take care.

>> No.7132582

>>7132578
Because he's a hack and a jew too

>> No.7132585

>>7132582
hes neither

>> No.7132590

But what about the memes?

>> No.7133130

I've been posting Rising Up & Rising Down thread here since forever. It's not my fault almost all of you here are about as interesting as a paperclip. I hardly ever post anymore, but this really got me. Good for you OP, you're doing God's work making this a better forum.

>> No.7133135

>>7133130

Billy settle down we just like talking about writers with self-control

>> No.7133153

>>7133135
No you don't. You haven't read a word of Vollmann.

>> No.7133158

>>7133130

Someone on /lit/ rec'd the Atlas to me years ago and I didn't follow up on it immediately because amazon fucked up my order but when I finally did read it I was really pleased. One of my favourite collections of stories. Europe Central was also really impressive.

>> No.7133189

>>7133153

Yes I most certainly have. I read "Whores for Gloria" and "An Afghanistan Picture Show" years ago. Both were certainly fine but his turning out tens of thousands of pages of material in just a few years always struck me as being juuust a tad self-indulgent

>> No.7133204

>>7133189
Those are minor Vollmann. Try The Royal Family, Fathers and Crows, or Europe Central.

>> No.7133210

>>7133204

It makes sense because they were early works. I'll add those three on my ever-growing book backlog. He seems like a nice man, too, based on interviews I read with him

>> No.7133249

>>7132578
that guy wrote an afterword in Journey to the End of the Night that started with "Fuck you reader". Thats all I need to know about him

>> No.7133271

>>7133249
Yep hes awesome.

>> No.7133279

>>7132578
But OP, he's really really ugly.

>> No.7133296

he looks like the kind of guy that would smash your windows and steal all the mushrooms in your fridge

>> No.7133309

>>7132578
do his books really need to be 1000 pages long?
are they well edited?
i feel like i would want to kill this motherfucker

>> No.7133372

Where can you get the complete 7 volume Rising Up and Rising Down without paying ridiculous amounts of money?

>> No.7133452

If there were an easy way to buy it cheaply, then it wouldn't be worth a lot of money. If you're in college, you can probably find it in the library.

>> No.7133761

>>7133372
the houses of people who paid ridiculous amounts of money

>> No.7134837

>>7132578
His nonfiction is consistently excellent, some of it even masterful. Poor People is one of the finest pieces of reportage you'll ever read. I look forward to spending a summer on an original print of RURD.

His fiction is unreadable.

>> No.7134844

>>7134837
The National Book Award judges didn't think so.

>> No.7134861

>>7134844

The national book award judges just awarded a maudlin and bad book about combat the 2014 award which started with the lines

"We shot dogs. Not by accident; we did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I'm a dog person, and so I thought about that a lot. "

The National Book Award hasn't been good for fiction for a good few decades. It's never been good for poetry.

>> No.7134954

>>7134861
Looking at the winners of the National Book Award for Poetry up to the '80s, most of them are very highly regarded now and considered among the best of their times.

>> No.7134984

>>7132578
>>7133279
I'm going to have to admit: I'm holding off on reading him because he looks like a conspirationist gun-nut scrounger.

>> No.7134991

>>7134984
That's seriously exactly what he looks like. Wonder if he's a libertarian.

>> No.7135002
File: 14 KB, 200x266, vollmann3.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7135002

>>7134991
Something tells me he might be.

>> No.7135101

I own Europe Central because I found a copy in a used bookstore for $2.

Convince me to read it.

>> No.7135109

>>7134954

only good names awarded one:

> Wallace Stevens
> W. H. Auden
> A. R. Ammons
> James Merrill
> John Ashbery
> W. S. Merwin

rest are mediocre or bad

compare that to the fiction which had really good names

>> No.7135160

>>7135109
William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop are not mediocre. Sounds like you're just repeating the standard Harold Bloom list

>> No.7135235

>>7134844
Appeal to authority does not constitute an argument.

That said, I just read a few reviews and I'll consider picking up Europe Central, sure. Both of the Seven Dreams I tried were simply inexcusable.

>> No.7135239
File: 105 KB, 1047x1575, MS-Clippy[1].jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7135239

>>7133130
fuck you bitch nigga

>> No.7135272
File: 26 KB, 400x519, scoobydoo.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7135272

>>7133761
> I didn't steal the full 7 volume original print of RURD from my undergraduate institution

WHY

>> No.7135288

>>7132578
>While you guys are busy whacking off Pynchon and Wallace, you're ignoring the writer who's singlehandedly written:
>2 GRAVITY'S RAINBOWs
>2 INFINITE JESTs
>3 MASON & DIXONs

Yeah, no. Go fuck yourself.

>> No.7135291

>>7135160

no, they're bad. I was referring to certain others like Aiken as the mediocre poets. the ones you listed are just straight-out bad.

>> No.7135300

>>7132578

>churn out multiple 1k+-page books
>surprised nobody reads you
>go on /lit/ board and try to interest the youth

go to sleep vollman

>> No.7135309
File: 89 KB, 758x591, 1401653553715.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7135309

I tried "You Bright and Risen Angels" because the premise sounded excellent, but I couldn't even start it. The beginning of the novel was so bizarre and disconnected that my eyes glazed over after about two paragraphs. I probably didn't give it a fair shot or maybe I'm just too dumb but I don't see myself trying him again for at least a year or two.

>> No.7135323

vollmann fuckin sucks lol dudes a hack his prose is awwwwwwwwful

>> No.7135342

I've settled on The Rainbow Stories as my introduction to Vollmann. Good choice?

>> No.7135409

>>7135291
Are there any other poets you would have preferred to have won?

>> No.7135431

>>7135409

yes, Alvin Feinman, but instead hacks of the Confessional era sucked up fame and he died with only a few hundred people reading his books, even though Aiken, Bloom, etc. praised him (rightly so) as a Great poet (capital G in case you didn't notice.) For years where there were no good candidates, they should have refrained from awarding a prize. Merwin should have won more than one award just like Ammons did. Adrienne Rich getting one is essentially an admit of defeat on their part.

>> No.7135445

>>7135431
Funny that you're praising an obscure poet like Feinman on Bloom's recommendation (I bought a collection of his poetry for that reason, myself) when you call Elizabeth Bishop bad, though I guess you're welcome to opinions of your own.

>> No.7135455

>>7135431
You should really revisit Bishop. She's very good, and pretty much the anti-confessional. It took me a couple of readings to enjoy anything other than "The Art of Losing."

I'm going to check out Alvin Feinman.

I dislike Rich as well, so trust we have similar taste.

>> No.7135469

>>7135445

What has Elizabeth Bishop produced that could even constitute as good poetry? Every single one of her poems I've read I find lackluster, forgettable, and way too post-Williams "conversational" in register. I'll comment on any poem of hers you'd like to post and explain why I think it's bad. If it's one I haven't read yet then I might start fresher in opinion.

As for Bloom's opinion, he recommended it, but I've read all of his poems closely and other than a few I found a bit weak, most of his work is incredibly solid and continues the fabulous path Crane started in 20th century poetry:

Stare at the sea, the sea is blind.
The sea gives back your theme--
The sea that is not like, that cannot lack
A thing___________________________
______--you have heard this sea intoned
To every shock of chaos and of calm,
As hough soul's torn two intellects
Would marry in that hollow heave
The harm they cannot fatalize, the thing
A stonier dumb charm would weave
Out of its own locked raging tides:
The sea holds nothing it can hide.

Teach the sea to sing, the soul
To drink its own imagining.

>>7135455

perhaps once I finish with my rereading of George Herbert and Donne. They're too good to step away from to retry a poet I've already grown to dislike.

>> No.7135978

>>7135101
so you all think this sucks, I guess?

>> No.7136094

Lots of people here committing the fallacy that says writers who are prolific must be pumping out unrefined junk. It may be soothing to the ego to think so, but even you know it's just a convenient thought.

>> No.7136112

Same way when we see news articles about child prodigies, we think, "Ah, but he'll probably be screwed up later in life or something." Just a way to assuage jealousy.

>> No.7136284

>>7136094
Or... just going from experience, that does tend to be the case. Any counter-example you can think of?

>>7136112
Here also, so-called child prodigies DO tend to have a hard time with the world beyond their parents' hold.

Prejudice always rooted in truth and so on

>> No.7136360

>>7136284
Sure, there are a few counterexamples. Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Dr. Johnson, Henry James. From our day, there's Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, and John Updike. I'm sure there's more, that's just off the top of my head. (Oh, and William T. Vollmann.)

>> No.7136462

>>7136360
Was Austen really that prolific? Also, you missed a couple of good examples like Balzac and especially Lope de Vega

>> No.7136484

>>7136462
No, nevermind, not really. She wasn't unprolific, though. Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma were published in 1813/14/15. She died not longer after, as she was hitting her stride. Could have been prolific had she survived.

>> No.7136496

>>7136484
Another good example is Saramago. After 1970, never went more than 3 years without publishing a book.

>> No.7136503

DeLillo published six novels in the '70s.

>> No.7136546

>>7133158
That was probably me. I've pimped The Atlas on here quite a bit.

>> No.7136582

>>7136462
Balzac and yes especially Lope de Vega are known to have produced much unremarkable work in their flurry

>> No.7136590

>>7136582
Well, Joyce Carol Oates is even worse!

>> No.7136609

Name an author who's never put out an unremarkable work.

>> No.7136613

>>7136609

William Langland

>> No.7136620
File: 34 KB, 490x736, pynchon speculative.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7136620

>>7136609
Me.

>> No.7136636

>>7136609
Homer

>> No.7136642

Three people who maybe don't exist.

>> No.7136645

>>7136642
lol

>> No.7136648

One of whom went dark for twenty years and then heralded his comeback with a slim disappointing wet fart of a novel that even today has few defenders.

>> No.7136657

>>7136648
Shortly before putting out his masterpiece, though

>> No.7136666
File: 618 KB, 376x282, gif.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7136666

>>7136657

>> No.7136672

>>7136620

This might actually be true but I never read the last two he wrote

>> No.7138655

>>7136360
Oates's prolificness has ruined her reputation. Most of what she publishes is trash.

>> No.7138989

>>7132578
From wikipedia:
>Vollmann identifies as a "hack journalist";
>In November 2003 (after many delays), his book Rising Up and Rising Down was published. It is a 3,300-page, heavily illustrated, seven-volume treatise on violence. It was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A single-volume condensed version was published at the end of the following year by Ecco Press. Vollmann justified the abridgment, saying, "I did it for the money."

He sounds lovely.