ITT: Overrated authors. Pic related.

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Anonymous Sat May 22 22:10:55 2010 No.700935 [Reply] [Original]

ITT: Overrated authors.

Pic related.

>>	Anonymous Sat May 22 22:11:55 2010 No.700940 Teddy Roosevelt was an author?

>>	Anonymous Sat May 22 22:13:55 2010 No.700948 in b4 everything /lit/ read in high school

>>	Anonymous Sat May 22 22:18:55 2010 No.700963 MARTIN FUCKING AMIS I DO NOT GET IT, I JUST DO NOT GET IT. WHY DO THEY KEEP PUBLISHING HIS FUCKING WORK. WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP READING IT?

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 01:10:55 2010 No.701449 >>700940 It's Arthur Conan Doyle, you jackass.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 01:17:55 2010 No.701468 >>701449 That's SIR Arthur Conan Doyle to you, you empty-headed rapscallion!

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 01:19:55 2010 No.701475 dan brown michel criton

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 01:19:55 2010 No.701476 >>700963 Time's Arrow was good. I haven't read anything else though.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 01:32:55 2010 No.701502 >>701475 I don't think anybody rates those authors highly.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 01:35:55 2010 No.701515 In b4 cormac mccarthy

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 01:51:55 2010 No.701551 inb4 palahniuk WOOOOO

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 02:05:55 2010 No.701594 i have always found doyles writing quite engaging

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 02:13:55 2010 No.701625 David Foster Wallace

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 02:14:55 2010 No.701630 Edgar Allen Poe

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 02:14:55 2010 No.701633 that murakami guy? all magical and what not?

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 02:15:55 2010 No.701634 >>701502 Yeah except for maybe the millions of people who read their goddamn books

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 02:16:55 2010 No.701636 Sylvia Plath is a mediocre poet

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 02:45:55 2010 No.701719 >>701630 How? He created the detective novel.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 03:44:55 2010 No.701869 Shakespeare

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 03:45:55 2010 No.701873 Stephen King, Jack Kerouac, and Will Christopher Baer

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 03:49:55 2010 No.701881 JD Salinger Emily Dickinson

>>	Stagolee !0Pey/QLK3E Sun May 23 03:49:55 2010 No.701883 nabokov

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 03:49:55 2010 No.701884 If you guys really think Plath, Shakespeare, and Kerouac were overrated, you have a lot to learn.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 03:53:55 2010 No.701895 >>701884 Plath and Kerouac are seriously overrated. I agree on Shakespeare, though.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 03:57:55 2010 No.701907 Shakespeare is overrated by some people. Some people are like "ZOMG I cannot believe you don't like Timon Of Athens it's the greatest play ever because it is by SHAKESPEARE." Those people are dicks.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 04:01:55 2010 No.701926 >>701884 I'm not saying that Shakespeare was less than brilliant, just that he's overrated as the greatest writer of all time. There were other plays written in his era that were just as good as his work, if not better.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 04:35:55 2010 No.702019 Jodi Piccoult and J.K. Rowling

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 04:38:55 2010 No.702023 >>700935 Wilford Brimley was an author? I thought he just had diabeetus...

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 12:52:55 2010 No.702815 bumpo

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 12:54:55 2010 No.702819 >>701594 To be fair, he made some damn good characters and situations. But a lot of it is very formulaic. How many Sherlock Holmes stories are about finding the "document"?

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 12:55:55 2010 No.702822 >>701719 He's too wordy.

noko Sun May 23 13:30:55 2010 No.702904

>>701633

Murakami is actually pretty good once you get a little bit in to it. Read Norweigan Wood, Kafka on the Shore, Sputnik Darling and Wind-up Bird Chronicles and they were all pretty good (with the exception of sputnik darling which was quite flat). They're quite enjoyable once you get over the whole not-fancyshmancy image he has because he's still not danielle steel and stephen king. Great influences too: Mann, Boris Vian, Fitzgerald etc.

Try them again with an open mind, you'll be surprised.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 13:40:55 2010 No.702930 Stephenie Meyer, bitch can't write worth shit.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 13:52:55 2010 No.702952 File: 25 KB, 331x500, the-alchemist2.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] When I meet a person who likes this I have incredible urge to punch the shit out of them.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 13:55:55 2010 No.702957 >>702904 I agree about Haruki Murakami, but there is that other Murakami, could it be he was talking about him?

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 14:06:55 2010 No.702982 File: 143 KB, 375x500, hipsterpatia.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>702904 I tried, I really did. I still think that he writes about silly, pretentious hipster children for silly, pretentious hipster children

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 14:19:55 2010 No.703018 File: 56 KB, 312x312, puke.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] I wanted to inb4 Stephen King but >>701873 got there first pic related. also a good lol@ >>702023

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 14:32:55 2010 No.703038 >>702822 He was a romantic writer. What the fuck did you expect?

Anonymous Sun May 23 14:36:55 2010 No.703048

>>702952

It's a harmless book. Despite your qualms with it, the story is aiming to help give people some perspective on life. You may not have enjoyed it, but you should be able to respect the benefit people take away from it and incorporate into bettering their own lives.

noko Sun May 23 14:44:55 2010 No.703073

>>702982

Don't really agree about the "silly pretentious hipster children"-part though, since Norweigan Wood is a best seller among middle-age housewives in China.

But a great book happens in the head of the reader so no book can appeal to everyone. Just wanted to state my opinion.

Anonymous Sun May 23 14:46:55 2010 No.703077

>>703048
I know, I try to, but the best I can come up with is arrogance towards them. The thing that bothers me the most is that it seems they still don't get it.

>>702982
For me his novels are like water, no taste, no color, but it feels a soothing and refreshing feeling.

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:12:55 2010 No.703156

>>MARTIN FUCKING AMIS
Correct. He's overrated because his dad was Kingsley fucking Amis, and you'd have to go into a detailed history of Colonel Blimpery from the Vicar of Bray to Christopher fucking Hitchens to remember why Kingsley Amis was overrated before his own son was. They're both minor.

>>SIR Arthur Conan Doyle

Incorrect. Conan Doyle is underrated, considering that Sherlock Holmes is a meme that won't die. Now he's punk for having battled drug addiction and survived, just like Robert Downey Jr. I never thought I'd live to see a punk Sherlock Holmes, but whatever, it makes sense that he doesn't seem to have any sexual urges whatsoever, except for Irene Adler, and even then he just wants a photo. In other words, he's like a /b/tard savant....all logic and reason, and the only sex required is fapping, I assume, unless he's on coke again.

>>dan brown, michel criton

Spell it right: Crichton. And these belong to the history of pop culture, not authorship.

>>In b4 cormac mccarthy

Vexing case. Sometimes sublime, sometimes just nonsense. So he's overrated by (say) Harold Bloom, largely because Harold Bloom doesn't know a Western if it bites him on the ass, and in the case of Blood Meridian the Big White Whale is Judge Holden himself, and his creepy lack of empathy and possible pederasty.

>>	jkz Sun May 23 15:16:11 2010 No.703169 http://www.e-castig.com/index.php?r=Q1SES BEAUTIFUL girls and women .. boys and men ... for every age! XXX illegal preteens!

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:16:55 2010 No.703168

>>inb4 palahniuk

Totally overrated, but fascinating because he shows that a gay author can reach a wide straight readership by being kind of punk, and expressing an attitude without having any literary merit or wit. Laura Miller can suck my balls for comparing him to Byron in poseurship: Byron outgrew being a poseur and wrote "Don Juan" and "The Vision of Judgment". Let's see if Palahniuk can write something as funny as Oscar Wilde. That would be a truly punk gesture for him at this point, since his only laughs are bitter self-defeating jokes about feeling unmanned (what ties together punk and queer sensibilities).

>>David Foster Wallace

Updike said, with a book as long as Infinite Jest, you have to ask: why? Wouldn't it be the same book if it was the length of Lot 49? It would be a better book, in fact. Foster Wallace wrote it on dexedrine, that's why it's so fucking long. Then he basically toiled up the wrong road to finding religion by getting obsessed with the "Higher Power" that addicts believe in. Do the fricking math. That's his only value...a contribution to the theory of addiction, rather than an actual novelist with a sense of humor and style (like Pynchon, his admitted model)

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:19:55 2010 No.703177

>>Edgar Allen Poe

Allan, spell it right. Henry James was right that enthusiasm for Poe's poetry was "an affair of adolescence" but there's a lot to be said for the influential nature of his dealing with the uncanny. In other words, you can sneer at Poe if you're willing to sneer at Kafka too, which most literary snobs are not willing to do. Same combination of terror and just plain amusement / silliness. Try reading Eureka to see Poe in a manic phase, when the laughs are gone and he thinks he's a scientist. It reads like a joke.

>>Sylvia Plath is a mediocre poet

And that's why she killed herself. To prove that she was as big as her grotesque rhetorical overstatements. Who the fuck compares having a 103-degree fever to Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Only a paranoid, a hysteric, or somebody who is constantly feeling like she's not being taken seriously as a writer because she's a woman. The Bell Jar is good and self-aware enough to show that she can actually write, if she puts her mind to it. But "Daddy" or "Lady Lazarus" are just an emotionally manipulative attempt to extort amazement from the reader at how fucked-up she is. Embittered at always being the girl who wrote for "Seventeen", she turned herself into the original suicide girl, pretty much. She's fashionable. So was Felicia Hemans, once.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:21:55 2010 No.703184 J. Lethem, M. Chabon... D. Foster Wallace better than those two but overrated via an heroing....

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:24:55 2010 No.703189

>>Shakespeare

Not overrated. But what critics say about his work is an index of things not worth saying about his work. You're better off seeing a performance or acting in one of his plays than reading any critical writing on his work, honestly.

>>Stephen King,

Like Poe, finding a perfect way of expressing America's gothic fears for a mass audience is not an easy thing to do. He's like Dickens. A storyteller whose work is full of American anxieties repressed and re-emerging in the forms of terror and gothic.

>>Jack Kerouac,

Totally overrated. Try considering how he ended up if you're such a fan of "On the Road". He ended up an obnoxious right-wing drunk living in his mom's house in Florida, and subscribing to William F Buckley's "The National Review". In other words, a young radical who ages into an old reactionary bore, like Chris Hitchens or Celine. but without Celine's sense of literary style, his flair for being reactionary and anti-Zola to the point of making anti-Dreyfusard antisemitism into a mode of radically vicious satire. Or was it satire? It's just anger over the folly of WW1, with no real way of expressing itself.

>>and Will Christopher Baer

Never heard of him, so will withhold summary judgment.

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:26:55 2010 No.703196

>>702957

Doubt it, Haruki is the one with the taste for surreal/magical stories, while the other Murakami (Ryu?) is, as far as I've understood, more prone to writing gore & horror related stories, like Audition (Which I presume was the book Takashi Miike later adapted to film with the same name) and some book about the Japanese phenomenon of people abandoning their babies to coin lockers in the 70s or something like that.

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:27:55 2010 No.703198

>>that murakami guy?
Yes overrated. Like Japanese films, it LOOKS like a novel but there's really no content. It's pure imitation of American or European models without anything inside, like a replicant out of Philip K Dick.

>>JD Salinger

Worth reading, but Holden Caulfield is not exactly Huck Finn, and if you think I'm going to read Seymour: An Introduction you really must think I care more about Zen Buddhism than any Zen Buddhist should.

>>Emily Dickinson

Not overrated. But badly understood. How can people still not see that her poems are all written during the Civil War, and are in some way a reaction to the bloodshed, and a better reaction than Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps, because Emily knew New England hypocrisy, cant, and small-mindedness better than Walt would ever know.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:29:55 2010 No.703204 who invited the ultimate critic to this party?

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:31:55 2010 No.703210

>>nabokov
Only overrated if you agree with his own insane self-assessment that Ada is better than Lolita or Pale Fire. Thinking Ada is his best work is like thinking Brodsky's poems in English are better than his Russian poems.

>>I cannot believe you don't like Timon Of Athens

I cannot. But I'm Professor Charles X Kinbote, and I translated that particular play into Zemblan, just like Nabokov translated Lewis Carroll and got overly involved in word games and strange loops after he started writing in English.

>>Jodi Piccoult and
Never bothered reading her, will withhold comment. I didn't know anybody made great claims for her.

>> J.K. Rowling
Oh, she's nothing great. But comparing her with Stephenie Meyer will tell you a lot about how American and English women differ when they write overly long novels. Rowling writes as though she's doing fucking Bleak House rewritten as 5 Go Magical in Dorset. Meyer writes as though Virginia Woolf's teenage diaries had been about her crush on a handsome vampire named Morgan Forster who would never love him back. Only without Woolf's grasp of English prose.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:34:55 2010 No.703213 >>703156 >>703168 >>703177 >>703189 whoever wrote this nonsense is a pathetic joke, i won't be more specific because that would require extensive history of how minor his opinions are

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:38:55 2010 No.703222 File: 37 KB, 485x322, llewelyn moss.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>703156 >>703168 >>703177 >>703189 >>703198 >>703210 "Who's that guy supposed to be? The ultimate badass?"

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:39:55 2010 No.703228 >>703198 >It's pure imitation of American or European models without anything inside This is fucking retarded. You probably wouldn't be able to discern a work as culturally Japanese if it slapped you in the face with its dick while screaming KAMIKAZE.

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:40:55 2010 No.703229

>>Wilford Brimley was an author?

He is the distinguished author of "Retardation: A Celebration", which you should listen to on audiobook.

>>J. Lethem,

Early work is underrated. Recent work is blah. But check out his first book of short stories. He works better in that format than he does in endlessly long navelgazing novels, like his most recent, which assumes that the only people who read books live in Brooklyn and feel about Brooklyn the way that Walt Whitman (who lived in fucking Brooklyn) felt about all fucking humanity. He's a tragedy of the decline of America's own ability to keep a serious literary culture afloat, especially in today's Manhattan.

>>M. Chabon...

Creeps me out. Isn't he gay? Doesn't he write about being gay an awful lot? And don't you think he and Ayelet Waldman protest too much when they write matching his-and-hers books about how perfectly goddamned delightful it is to be married to each other and have such a wonderful healthy sex life? If they fuck as often as she claims, I don't see how he finds the time to read all those comic books or fantasize about having sex with boys like James Leer, at a vicarious distance. Chabon is like a Jewish pop-culture Thomas Mann. Maybe he's just bi. Who the fuck knows, I just know he lost me with that Sherlock Holmes travesty he pretended like was a serious contribution to the literature on the Holocaust. Give me a fricking break.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:40:55 2010 No.703232 File: 56 KB, 340x450, franz-kafka.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] pic related tired of everyone sucking his dead rotting dick.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:41:55 2010 No.703235 >>703228 weeaboo detected.

>>	znovgod32 Sun May 23 15:42:11 2010 No.703236 http://www.e-castig.com/index.php?r=F1TMn BEAUTIFUL girls and women .. boys and men ... for every age! XXX illegal preteens! Slim & Fat we got them all!

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:44:55 2010 No.703244

>>who invited the ultimate critic to this party?

I'm Mary McCarthy, and I'm doing this to prove to Harold Bloom that anybody can write with the critical self-assurance of Dr Samuel Johnson, if HE would but abandon HIS mind to it. I'm fucking Mary McCarthy. And I am a better critic than Harold Bloom, and you people just don't realize it.

And if I can stand myself, then by God you'd better. There, finished posting in an epic thread by considering my own work. I'm still a better critic than Bloom or Sainte-Beuve, and a better bitch than Lillian Hellman, AND I probably would have been (as I said to Gore Vidal once) a better general than Joan of Arc.

I am Mary fucking McCarthy. That's why I write with the self-assuredness of Bloom but the bitterness of a woman fighting against a male-dominated literary world. Now ask me to tell you my joke about Lorin Stein's penis.

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:45:55 2010 No.703250

>>You probably wouldn't be able to discern a work as culturally Japanese

Try Mishima Yukio's "Confessions of a Mask" for a deep insight into how fascism operated in Japan in the 20th century. Beyond that, what more do you want as proof that Japanese culture is screwy? Watch "Princess Mononoke" and compare it with a Disney movie. They don't put climaxes in the right place, they don't have a Western grasp of narrative. It's just different for them, in the same way that the Chinese---who speak a pitch-inflected (and therefore musical) language---claim that all Western music sounds to them like military marches. Compare a Beijing opera to "Die Zauberflöte" and you'll get the same sense why Japanese or Chinese culture are both just DIFFERENT, in the way that they regard writing as an art form. Why? Calligraphy, ideograms, and pitch-inflection (In the case of China). Besides, Japan has a cultural history of borrowing innovations from China and other cultures as long as my arm. Why else do they have a word for "You're Welcome" that's a Portuguese loan-word.

Suck my cock. And I'm Mary fucking McCarthy, I don't even have one, and yet my cock is still bigger than yours. Just like Hedda Gabler was more man than you'll ever be and more woman than you'll ever have in one tidy package, you weeaboo moron. You're like a White Knight riding to save Cio-Cio-San from Pinkerton. Grow up.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:47:55 2010 No.703258 i think we have all be owned

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:48:55 2010 No.703266 >>703244 sooo.... you are a dead bitch?

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:50:55 2010 No.703273

>>"Who's that guy supposed to be? The ultimate badass?"

What made you think I was a guy? Don't be so fucking sexist. I'm your worst nightmare.

>>i won't be more specific because that would require extensive history of how minor his opinions are

Again, as Congreve put it, "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned". HIS opinions? Suck my dick. I'm Mary McCarthy and I'm a bigger, more judgmental bitch than you'll ever see in your life, AND I'm smarter than you.

Incidentally, do you recall Dr Johnson's learned critical opinion on Congreve's "Incognita"? I DO. You don't, so look it up and tell Harold Bloom that the same could be applied to his EXCELLENT fantasy novel, The Flight To Lucifer. Tell him it read to me like Ursula K LeGuin and Cynthia Ozick locked in furious thigh-shuddering soixante-neuf in a nightmare he's having, in which Nathanael West is directing Harold Bloom in a film adaptation of "Leather Goddesses of Phobos".

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:50:55 2010 No.703274 ITT: the critics soul as an artist under chanism

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:53:55 2010 No.703281

>>sooo.... you are a dead bitch?

No, I'm just the Bawksy of /lit/, I hope. Any woman who knows as much about literature as I do, and who can outargue any of the blowhards who post here regularly, should DEFINITELY be something that you all can fap to. And I don't even have to show my face. I'll just tell you that I had a Catholic girlhood, and so you know I've been waiting for the right boy. And he has to know as much about literature as Edmund Wilson did to get my attention.

So don't fuck with me, fellas, this ain't my first time at the rodeo. As Joan Crawford once said.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:53:55 2010 No.703282 >>703273 > >>"Who's that guy supposed to be? The ultimate badass?" > What made you think I was a guy? Don't be so fucking sexist. I'm your worst nightmare. kind of missing the point made

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:54:55 2010 No.703283 Max Weber

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:55:55 2010 No.703288
File: 31 KB, 260x396, Seattle_Mary_McCarthy_1929.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>ITT: the critics soul as an artist under chanism

Professor Charles X Kinbote's article on "The Wildean Truth of Masks and the Posthumous Work of Mary McCarthy on 4chan" (with special reference to McCarthy's relations with Jarrell) is precisely apposite to the discussion of what is going on in this thread now.

Boys, I believe you have been pwned.

Hail me, Mary McCarthy, as the New Queen of /lit/!

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:56:55 2010 No.703294

>>703281
You being fapable would imply that visual stimulation is actually suspended in the realm of /lit/ and that we timid internet tough-guys aren't rather intimidated by your squawking instead of being turned on.

Both is not the case.

Thanks for doing the rodeo-clown for us, though.

Anonymous Sun May 23 15:57:55 2010 No.703297

>>Max Weber

You're asking me to critique the Protestant Ethic and its relation to the Spirit of Capitalism? Try reading Das Kapital and UNDERSTANDING it as a deep nostalgia for medieval feudalism under one Holy Roman Empire. Then try considering how reactionary a Catholic can be under the right conditions (cf Cioran's essay on Joseph de Maistre). Then realize you've been misreading Marx all along: he was aspiring to the conditions of medieval egalitarianism, such as it was, in the same way as the Pre-Raphaelites.

She shoots, she scores! Next? Au suivant?

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 15:58:55 2010 No.703300 >>703283 I thought about insulting you, but I dont even bother. You are just wrong on several levels (even though I admit he has gotten a little too much praise and is idolized by most). He is not primarily an author but a sociologist (economist).

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:00:55 2010 No.703311

>>Thanks for doing the rodeo-clown for us, though.

Glenn Beck is a rodeo-clown, darling. And clearly most of your fapping is done while staring into a bathroom mirror, so I can't imagine what visual stimulation you expected me to provide, apart from a woman who is able to mirror precisely the kind of inane, who's-better criticism that only men are capable of coming up with. I don't know if it's art, but I know what's well-written and worth reading. I was the first person to bother to work out what Pale Fire was even ABOUT, you fools. In other words, I was the kind of girl that Nabokov fapped to. What are you fapping to?

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:01:55 2010 No.703314 >>703297 lol... that was just as amusing as it was wrong.

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:01:55 2010 No.703315

>>703250
What the fuck does that have to do with Murakami imitating the Western novel? You're not arguing the point because you can't. And I'd take Murakami's worst postmodern shenanigans over Mishima listing his fucked up fetishes any day: "OHHH I'M SO JAPANESE, I WANT TO CUT UP BODIES WHILE MASTURBATING TO MY ARMPITS." And geez, the "all of the Japanese culture is Chinese anyway" card? I guess I'm a goddam European, because the USA has only existed for 200 years without any real cultural isolation.

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:02:55 2010 No.703319

>>He is not primarily an author but a sociologist (economist).

Yes, which is why I considered him from the standpoint of an author---who, being artists, are fascinated by the irrational element of human behavior---and not as an economist, who pretend that human behavior is rational and then misleading us. Social science? It's not even dismal science. Let Ayn Rand give you an Invisible Hand-Job if you are really more interested in economics than art.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:02:55 2010 No.703321 > I'm Professor Charles X Kinbote

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:02:55 2010 No.703323 >>703311 I am fapping to myself in the mirror, mostly. Its not the bathroom mirror, though. I have a really big one right in the bedroom.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:04:55 2010 No.703327 >>703297 Excuse me? You just missed the basket, lady. I don't care if you're an academic.

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:04:55 2010 No.703329

>>lol... that was just as amusing as it was wrong.

I went to Hanoi to form my own opinions about the Viet Nam conflict. Where do you get your political opinions? Oliver Stone movies? Free Republic dot com? Ayn Rand? Why are we talking about economics on a /lit/ board. If you're asking about the literary quality of Max Weber's sociological work, I'd say he's about as readable as Mannheim or Durkheim or other such eminent prose stylists. As Mark Twain might say: chloroform in print.

God I've had better arguments with my mother than with you boys.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:05:55 2010 No.703336 >>703319 there is hardly any point arguing about the "artistical" value of Max Weber with me. What do you make of Walter Benjamin then?

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:06:55 2010 No.703338

>>Excuse me? You just missed the basket, lady. I don't care if you're an academic.

Excuse me? Did you really think Mary McCarthy was an academic? No. She was just a Mean Girl who read Jonathan Swift. And finds you to be as useful as the rest of the Academy of Lagado, whatever you happen to be studying. Economics? Don't your parents say to you: "If you like economics and sociology, why don't you have money or friends? What are you even doing on 4chan all the time?"

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:07:55 2010 No.703341 Oh, wow. Who knew Mary McCarthy was so hot?

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:08:55 2010 No.703343 >>703341 she was? I always preferred Hannah Arendt. She knew her place at least, fucking with a guy who wanted her race extinguished.

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:09:55 2010 No.703345

>>What do you make of Walter Benjamin then?

Meh. Susan Sontag overrated him. I like his notion that a work of criticism could be written entirely from quotations from other writers placed in the right order. But you'd have to be sure people actually know how to read for that to work. Wilde in "The Critic as Artist" is standing at the end of the road Benjamin was stumbling down, just as William James and American Pragmatism stand at the end of the road Derrida was stumbling down (to paraphrase a decent observation made by Richard Rorty).

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:10:55 2010 No.703348 I think the lady is getting her references confused in last couple of posts, but its still a lot of fun. Epic thread!

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:11:55 2010 No.703349

>>I always preferred Hannah Arendt. She knew her place at least, fucking with a guy who wanted her race extinguished.

Puhleeze. That's very Liebestod of Ms Arendt, when you think about it, but at the end of the day she did have a face like a Matjes herring. And I looked like, well, myself. Mary McCarthy. I *was* hot. Why do you think I had such difficulty getting men to take me seriously as an intellectual equal? At least Elizabeth Bishop had the luck of being a lesbian. And I did say that, of all the art produced in the 20th century, I would most have wished to have written Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. (Because I am Mary McCarthy, after all. Fapping yet?)

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:13:55 2010 No.703358

>>I think the lady is getting her references confused in last couple of posts, but its still a lot of fun.

I don't like crap games with Barons and Earls,
Won't go to Harlem dressed in ermine and pearls,
Won't dish the dirt with the rest of the girls....
That's why this lady is a tramp.

:D

I said tramp, 4chan. Not trap. Don't get nervous, boys.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:14:55 2010 No.703362 >>703345 who cares about what susan sonntag thought about him. And way to ignore his system of aeshetics in your namedropping.

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:16:55 2010 No.703368

>>who cares about what susan sonntag thought about him. And way to ignore his system of aeshetics in your namedropping.

If you want to talk about why Walter Benjamin is still famous enough to be worth discussing, you have to talk about Susan Sontag's efforts to publicize his work.

If you want to talk about Marxist aesthetics with reference to Walter Benjamin, tell me what he would have made of Soviet Realism. Then read my novel "The Groves of Academe" to see what I thought of Marxisant poseurship among academic culture in generally, because anything I'd have to say about Benjamin is in that novel of mine, which I doubt you've read, too busy fapping to mechanical reproductions of hentai imagery online, I guess. But is it a work of art? You tell me.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:18:55 2010 No.703371 why does reading this feel like the time I was forced to watch "Sex In The City - The Movie"? oh yeah, right, because it was an almost castrating experience. Also, as usually with watching movies, it was asymmetrically channelled communication.

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:23:55 2010 No.703378

> If you want to talk about why Walter Benjamin is still famous enough to be worth discussing, you have to talk about Susan Sontag's efforts to publicize his work.

lol, no. not here on the other side of the pond at least.

And I dont want to talk marxist aesthetics. And not "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit". That text is just as overrated and misunderstood as Simmels "Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben". Its also way to short to be of any significance, really.

Benjamins Aesthetics is mostly found in his work about Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften. But I guess thats not on the wiki-page.

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:25:55 2010 No.703382

>>why does reading this feel like the time I was forced to watch "Sex In The City - The Movie"?

Because you're paranoid that this is a drag act. Like "Sex and the City" a gay man's fantasy about how fabulous it would be to be a good looking woman. How fabulous and how....shallow. What if you were a good looking woman and a genius? What if Giselle Bundchen wrote better Portuguese prose than Clarice Lispector? Nobody would believe it. Especially not in Brazil, where Elizabeth Bishop lived for so long.

>>oh yeah, right, because it was an almost castrating experience.

Almost doesn't count, so therefore you can count your feeling as one of "delight", as Edmund Burke describes it in his essay on The Sublime and The Beautiful.

>>Also, as usually with watching movies, it was asymmetrically channelled communication.

You're not watching a movie. You're reading postings on a messageboard. From an attractive intelligent woman who is long dead.

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:26:55 2010 No.703383

>>703345
It's the Artist as Critic. It was Arendt and Adorno who preserved and published WB. Sontag, hot as she was, simply popularised his ideas and the ideas of Barthes and other Europeans for the American market. Similar, in her way, to yours, in yours Ms. M.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:27:55 2010 No.703384 >>703368 You have obviously never read his works about the "passage".

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:27:55 2010 No.703386

>>Benjamins Aesthetics is mostly found in his work about Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften.

Yes, and when you base your aesthetics on a chemistry textbook written by a pseudo-scientist who also wrote stirring anthems to the Ewig-Weibliche, you might as well just agree---like Goethe---to let the voice of that Ewig-Weibliche draw you away from your own elective affinities, which clearly draw you closer to men than to intelligent women. It's a European disease, frankly. I attribute it to sexist attitudes in German gymnasia. Tonio Kroeger would have been a stronger man if he'd been date-raped by Rosa Luxembourg, that's what I say to your Benjaminian posturing.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:29:55 2010 No.703388 > You're not watching a movie. You're reading postings on a messageboard. From an attractive intelligent woman who is long dead. if thats not asymmetric communication

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:29:55 2010 No.703389

>>Similar, in her way, to yours, in yours Ms. M.

I popularized Nabokov and Elizabeth Bishop. Susan Sontag popularized Benjamin and Robert Walser and Nikolai Leskov. Who had better taste? That's all I care about. The only criterion by which to judge aesthetic matters is a criterion of taste. So tell me? Is it a better sign of literary judgment to find Pale Fire and the poems of Elizabeth Bishop more worthy of praise from a critic than minor Mitteleuropan scribblers whom one exhumes when one is trying a little too hard (as Sontag always was) to impress the Rabbi, like Barbra Streisand in "Yentl"?

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:31:55 2010 No.703395

>>if thats not asymmetric communication

What would make it symmetrical? Telling you my real name because I'm obviously not Mary McCarthy?

Okay, I'm an anonymous spiritualist medium who believes herself to be the reincarnation of Mme Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who is currently channelling the ghost of Mary McCarthy.

How's your epistemology now, big boy? I will remind you what WB Yeats himself said of Mme Blavatsky: "Of course she gets up spurious miracles, but what else is a woman of genius to do in the 19th century?"

What is a woman of genius to do in the 21st for that matter? Troll the boy geniuses of 4chan.

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:35:55 2010 No.703401

Sigmund Freud.

Here I said it. This is circling way too much around guys who were philosophers or scientists. Siggi, if anything at all, was a writer who felt ashamed to just do it and therefore made his empirical data up. Also, every second text is basically literary critique. Or rather praise.

Get at it, Mrs. McCarthy.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:35:55 2010 No.703402 Here endeth the lesson. Somebody tell the Paris Review that Mary McCarthy has come back from the dead. Bye, boys!

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:36:55 2010 No.703405 >>Sigmund Freud. Okay, fine, I'll give you Freud, but give me a second because it's a doozy. Then I have to go make Sunday dinner.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:36:55 2010 No.703406 I feel raped. In a good way.

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:36:55 2010 No.703408

>>703389
You're a great reader, but you're betrayed by your Americunt education. Sontag wins hands down in your comparison. Bishop? Please, she can't hold a tremendous fish to Wallace Stevens. True Nabakov's best book, Pnin, is a campus novel and that turns you on, but still you really think he's the best of the best? Try some Faulkner out. Or Flann O'Brien. or Patricia Highsmith... Anything good is more pleasurable to read.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:39:55 2010 No.703418 >>703408 I am afraid you took too long, buddy. But lets just pretend, for future reference, that this was a guy all along. So, after that has been agreed upon, we can stand still proud as the true il/lit/erates we are.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:40:55 2010 No.703419 WUT? WHAT IS THIS? WOMEN CANT INTO INTERNET!

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:41:55 2010 No.703423

>>Sigmund Freud.

Carroll says in the Alice books, "it's a queer sort of memory that doesn't work backwards." Read Freud's career backwards. In other words, read him as a Jewish Heresiarch. He starts life as a doctor, takes the Hippocratic Oath, and swears by all those pagan gods. Then he starts cutting open eels (Linnean classification: anguilla anguilla) looking for their testes. You don't need an advanced degree in Freudian horseshit to know a phallic symbol when you see one. Freud was "acting out"--the way he claimed female hysterics do--but he was acting out his own understanding of Judaism in a climate where Jews would soon be rushed off to death camps. In other words, the ultimate Apikoros, you'd say in Hebrew, or in Yiddish. But Freud's castration complex is merely the circumcision complex of Isaac considered in the Akedah (feel free to adduce your Kierkegaardian fear and trembling if you like), and the incest-obsession, and the Oedipus nonsense, comes from the fact that Freud's Judaism--as Margaret Mead or any anthropologist could tell you--was (a) matrilineal, (b) patriarchal, and (c) endogamous. In other words, HE was the one obsessed with fucking his own mother, and then he foists that nonsense off on the world and calls it science. Why? Dunno, a Hamlet complex, or just a response to complicated conditions of being a secular assimilated Jew in Austria, at the very moment when Austria is about to be assimilated by Anschluss, and the Jews are about to be declared personae non gratae. The problem is taking Freud seriously as any kind of scientist. He's a Jewish religious writer, but his conclusions seem self-evident to those who consider themselves Jews, and terrifying to those who aren't part of a patriarchal matrilineal endogamous minority-group.

Howzat? You like?

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:43:55 2010 No.703431 >>703232 >>703232 >>703232 >>703232 Fuck you. He's a genius. I know he's got some daddy issues, but you've obviously read nothing else by Kafka than the standard kanono.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:45:55 2010 No.703434 >>703423 to be honest: the other ones were better. Sartre could have written that when he was in a bad mood. Well, he did actually write his screenplay about Freuds life like that. Kinda disappointed.

Anonymous Sun May 23 16:45:55 2010 No.703435

>>Pnin

Anybody who thinks that is Nabokov's best novel clearly is just in love with brevity. Nabokov fell in love with the English language, my friend. The proof is in Lolita and Pale Fire, not in Pnin, which is a sad little tale about an inadvertent exile, mistaken for comedy.

>>Try some Faulkner out.

"Eternal truths and verities of the human heart" in his Nobel acceptance speech? Try some pleonasm out. Or just admit that drinking that much affects your brain eventually.

>>Or Flann O'Brien

I am a devoted fan of Myles na Goppeleen. I even have seen a stage production of the Colleen Bawn to know where he got his Stage-Oirish nom-de-guerre. I saw it at the National Theatre in London circa 1998. As you know, I got my start as a drama critic for the Partisan Review. I being Mary McCarthy, of course. Dwight MacDonald, there was a real intellectual....

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:46:55 2010 No.703437 >>703431 > implying he did not write so little that his whole ouvre isnt considered the standard canon

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:46:55 2010 No.703438 Susan Sontag She writes well when she writes about nothing, and movies. Trip to Hanoi was the most awful essay I've ever read.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:51:55 2010 No.703444 this thread has protagonists like a bad Auchincloss story. Which could be any of them.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:53:55 2010 No.703447 >>703437 little you know

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 16:57:55 2010 No.703458 >>703447 I read everything that is published. Its about 3000 pages. (got them sitting on my shelf right here. including correspondence. In german, so it might even be a little less in english) thats like two dostoyevsky novels.

Anonymous Sun May 23 17:00:55 2010 No.703462

>>703431

I, Mary McCarthy, didn't dismiss Kafka, I just warned you not to dismiss Poe if you DON'T dismiss Kafka.

I dont dismiss Kafka but I think he should be read in the spirit Philip Roth described, seeing Das Schloss as a movie starring the Marx Brothers, with Groucho as Josef K being awakened in bed by Chico and Harpo.

Also: Kafka is like living in a world where the only interesting thing is your worst nightmare. That's basically what his writing is all about. The inner life of an assimilated German-speaking Czech Jew, on the cusp of seeing the Sudetenland handed to a mad Austrian by that classic of English-style statesmanship (I speak as a true Irishwoman here) Neville Chamberlain.

Anonymous Sun May 23 17:02:55 2010 No.703468

Okay, dinnertime. I won't even bother to respond to someone sniping about Hugh Auchincloss, because who's even heard of Hugh Auchincloss? John O'Hara and John Marquand, I guess. And the man in the grey flannel suit, presumed extinct, except on TV's "Mad Men".

Later, boys.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 17:11:55 2010 No.703485 >>703468 I heard about Hugh Auchincloss. Me, the sniper. Who has a solitary tear rolling down his cheek. Also, trustfunds (to stay with the Auchincloss theme)

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 17:32:55 2010 No.703558 Joseph Conrad.

Anonymous Sun May 23 17:49:55 2010 No.703610

>>703468

Anyone else in here willing to admit that, despite the problematic impossibility of the medium, they find themselves strangely attracted to this Mary McCarthy.

Though, to be honest, I'm not sure if I'm more attracted to her of the whole delicious menagerie of experiences she provides. I mean, I'm a few years removed from academia, but I've definitely read most of what she's read - at the very least I'm familiar with her name droppings (p.s. wasn't terribly impressed with Bishop, but again, I'm not sure if this is a postmortem channeling of persona or the poster's actual opinion, but the whole point, the intellectually arousing idea to me, is that it doesn't matter), but at this point in time, her familiarity with the subject matter is more readily available than my own. This alone I find compelling, as I've rarely come across one who is better read outside of academia.

Anonymous Sun May 23 17:49:55 2010 No.703611

>>703610

cont

But of course, I find the illusory nature of the medium more interesting than Mary herself, I believe. This is an interesting site (lolpun) of identity construction. Mary is playing with this idea, constructing an obviously false identity alongside our own less obviously constructed identities within our posts. Her pastiche was unusually consistent and well-executed, especially for a non-namefag here. The conflation of traditionally academic criticism with puerile name-dropping (which those in academic *never* do), name calling and schoolyard bravado is strangely compelling to me, probably because, on this (as the earlier poster pointed out) asymmetrical medium which she created when she hijacked the thread, I most likely couldn't hold serve against her. I'm not sure if this is because she actually is intelligent, or because she had ready access to google or simply another asocial academic getting her jollies at the expense of a generally underaged b& audience. Whichever. Bottom line, I've enjoyed it, and would play again had I arrived more punctually to the party. But that's the point. One can't, because of the ephemeral nature of the post, of the site - this could have never happened before the advent of the internet. I suppose the uniqueness of the experience fascinates me. Am I alone in this?

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 17:54:55 2010 No.703624 Wait a minute, you guys. I just looked it up, and...Mary McCarthy has been dead for years!

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 17:56:55 2010 No.703635 File: 88 KB, 480x547, what_has_science_done.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>703624

Anonymous Sun May 23 18:30:55 2010 No.703721

>>703610
>>703611
dude, give up...

you would have been no match for her, you pompous dick...
actually, nobody would have, that was the concept.

Don't kid yourself guys, this was more a performance than a discussion.
SOmeone handed out asses to us (given that we exposed out asses in the first place).
Its not so much about what was said as how it was said, there I agree. Factual content was not as impressive as the way it was presented.

On a different note: did you guys realize how quickly a thread about "overrated authors" turned into something that had a distinctively agressive vibe to it, even though it was not contradicting most of what was said?

Think about it. This was a demonstration of style, not of scholarship.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 18:32:55 2010 No.703723 >>703721 actually, I apologize for whatever faults you find with this comment (I found a couple myself). I should have been sleeping long ago. Nevermind.

Anonymous Sun May 23 18:33:55 2010 No.703724

>>703610
>>703611
>>703624
>>703635

I am so delighted by these responses that I (Mary McCarthy, natch) checked back after dinner, and I've decided to respond. Here's how I'd like you to think of me: as a Turing Test conducted by Ada Lovelace Byron. Ada was schooled to be as rigorously mathematical as she could, to keep her from succumbing to those mad passions which consumed her father. Alan Turing just couldn't understand why the fact that he played a "feminine" role sexually made him different from any other man. See Turing as a sort of Wittgenstein here. His sense of alienation comes from a deep recognition---I'd like to say, in a kind of "two cheers for feminism" way, or more likely a "three cheers for Mary McCarthy" kind of way---that women can be intellectually equal to men, can dash off withering summary judgments on writers' entire careers as briskly as Harold Bloom (or Edmund Wilson) can ever do, BUT....it is different for girls.

[Will explain in next post, since I don't want to exceed field length, or whatever it says.]

Anonymous Sun May 23 18:41:55 2010 No.703744

It's different for girls because girls are warned not to behave like a bitch. In other words, imagine you were a very pretty girl at a very distinguished university. What if you got the feeling that you were only being offered praise because you were pretty, not because you were talented? Well then, you turn into Naomi Wolf with Harold Bloom's boneless hand on her thigh. Now I'm not saying that Naomi isn't (as they said of Anita Hill back in '92) a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty: she did claim to have a vision of Jesus H Christ in an interview with a newspaper in Canada. In other words, she's still trying to shock Harold Bloom with her rebellious response to the fact that he only offered to read her poetry because he wanted to grope her. He didn't think she was any better at writing poetry than Mary McCarthy would have.

The difference here is: a woman is judged by other women on her looks AND her level of aggression. But if a woman is attractive---Naomi Wolf, if that's your type (I hope it isn't), or Mary McCarthy if that's your type, or myself, who likes this site because I can remain faceless and be bitchy about whatever writers I want---then it's going to be hard to get men to take her seriously as a talent. Unless she's a nun or a cripple or something. Was Flannery O'Connor "hot"? I dunno. As Dr Gregory House would undoubtedly tell /b/, Flannery O'Connor had lupus (if not Naomi Lupus) and died tragically young. So you can find her brilliant and amazing, but you're not likely to fap to Flannery O'Connor. Also, she was not a bitch. Good southern manners there.

[again, more to follow]

Anonymous Sun May 23 18:45:55 2010 No.703752

if that was all that were supposed to be demonstrated here, I am dissappointed.

Because it certainly won't change the ones that don't know or don't care and the ones that agree, well, they agreed before this.

Its all idle sophistry and one-way eristics after all.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 18:46:55 2010 No.703756 >>703744 >implying Naomi Wolf was telling the truth about Bloom >implying anyone believes her Negro please

Anonymous Sun May 23 18:47:55 2010 No.703759

However, I---Mary McCarthy---was a bitch. I am a bit of a bitch, too, IRL or in my own head, especially about academia and literary culture in general, but I would never show this face in public. The fact that I can't has something to do with how feminism should or should not be taken seriously. In other words, Mary McCarthy was lucky she died before the world's feminism thread got hijacked by the likes of Andrea Dworkin---in other words, sounding like what Harold Bloom might call a "school of resentment"....

See, here's the joke. Because women and men still expect women to be less aggressive---sexually, rhetorically---it gets hard to be a woman at a good university. Look at how easily Prof Beard gets laid with the undergrad in Ian McEwan's "Solar". He memorizes a few lines of Milton and he's in like flynn. Why? Because it IS that easy for men: they become attractive based on their reputation. Do you think Naomi Wolf would have suffered herself to be groped by somebody her own age who looked like Harold Bloom?

Whereas if Mary McCarthy were alive, she'd read Ian McEwan's "Solar" and say---"Amazing, the man has studied absolutely everything about quantum physics, apart from (apparently) astronomy, otherwise he'd know how hilarious it is to entitle a novel about global warming SOLAR and not once mention the Maunder Minimum in the entire fucking text."

But how does Mary McCarthy know about the Maunder Minimum? How did Ada Lovelace Byron come up with a hypothetical computer program before "hackers" became synonymous with the sterotypical /b/tards? Because women CAN be as good at science if men would let them be. Why else did Larry Summers get sacked as President of Harvard?

Anonymous Sun May 23 18:50:55 2010 No.703762
File: 11 KB, 160x200, mccarthy.2.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Unless, of course, I Mary McCarthy am actually a witch, or something like that. (Freddy Raphael implied as much in his attempt at a posthumous takedown of my career.) And it's a halfway decent theory, considering that the current President of Harvard U is some chick named "Dr Faust".

Anyway, 2 cheers for feminism, or 3 cheers for fapping to the idea of Mary McCarthy back from the dead and reviewing the likes of her namesake Cormac---let alone Michael Chabon or Sigmund Freud---in her characteristic take-no-prisoners style. I was trying it on, the way little girls try on their mothers' clothes and have tea-parties, acting out mannerly behavior that no woman really ever exhibits.

So that's all I have to say. And btw: Josef Conrad. The style, please. Read "The Feast" by Sir Max Beerbohm for an accurate takedown of everything that's best AND worst in Conrad. Sometimes imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, other times it's the deepest form of criticism. Or maybe I'm really Mary McCarthy. In which case, thank you, Dr Faust, for striking an important step for women's equality in American academia.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 18:55:55 2010 No.703774 ok, back on topic: overrated authors. Mary McCarthy, totally overrated...

Anonymous Sun May 23 18:57:55 2010 No.703777

>implying Naomi Wolf was telling the truth about Bloom
>implying anyone believes her
>Negro please

Mary McCarthy admires your appropriation of the rhetoric of---is it Bunk, or Lester Freamon? But she responds with a quote from "Purlie Victorious" by the late Ossie Davis (who made a wonderful JFK in "Bubba Ho-Tep")---"Son, you a disgrace to the negro profession."

Of course nobody believes Naomi Wolf. Did they believe her when she said she met JESUS?

http://gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com/2006/02/naomi-wolf-encounters-jesus.html

Of course not. She is acting out. But it's tough to be considered intelligent when you're pretty. The simple fact is, Naomi WOlf isn't intelligent. How can you tell? Because she actually thought Harold Bloom wanted to read her poetry. She is guilty of both vanity AND ignorance. Mary McCarthy shunned the latter that she might be forgiven a bit of the former.

I think if Naomi Wolf REALLY wanted to damage Bloom's reputation, she would have gone all the way and described a hot torrid affair with him. Since doing that would require, presumably, a lot of imagination and a lot of literary ability, neither of which she has....

VALLEY OF THE BLOOMS, by Naomi Wolf.

Stately plump Harold Bloom watched Naomi's underpants softly falling, falling softly, about her ankles. Boy, he thought, when she was good she was like the Monkey in Portnoy's Complaint. But when she was BAD....she was even better. Just like Mary McCarthy...

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:09:55 2010 No.703811

>>Mary McCarthy, totally overrated...

Oh, "The Oasis" is pretty funny. "The Groves of Academe" fascinating if you're interested in a satire on academics and political reality. "The Group" is amazing if you were a Vassar girl of Mary's vintage. Her criticism stands up, though. The sad truth is that she wrote in an era when political discussion was more important than anything else. And so to prove her high seriousness, she had to address politics constantly in everything she did. Which makes her---alas---historically important more than an actual must-read. But it's her tone---lofty, refusing to concede frustration at being an attractive woman in what Terry Southern called "the Quality Lit game", but thus being trapped in dealing with the Grandest of All Subjects, the Horrors of 20th Century Politics----that I'm trying to capture. Her politics were intelligent, but she was constantly still proving that if a woman like her existed, it wasn't a mistake to give women the right to vote. In Switzerland they withheld it till the 80s. Think of that. Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote in a country where women still couldn't vote. I wonder if that will make feminists re-assess "The Visit"? I don't care. I've done my part for feminism in this thread, now I'd rather get back to bitching about overrated writers. I spoke up in Mary's voice because I think she's currently underrated. Who's the most overrated writer currently on college syllabi? or mentioned in this thread? Answer after the break....

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:10:55 2010 No.703819
File: 175 KB, 440x550, 167.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Most overrated ITT? Probably Martin Amis. He has a job based on the fact that his dad had the same job. In other words, British nepotism.

In America, you can buy your way in, the way that overprivileged kids do at Ivy League Universities all the time, or the way Hugh Auchincloss did.

Incidentally, he did NOT have a chip on his shoulder the way that John O'Hara did, and it was flip of me to throw them in the same bag, because they would NEVER have thrown themselves in the same bag. John O'Hara was a fighting Irishman from Pottsville PA and he never let you forget it. Auchincloss was just doing what a WASP gentleman of leisure and culture would do....a less rarefied Logan Pearsall Smith. (Remembered now mostly as the guy who gave Cyril Connolly a job....Cyril Connolly remembered now mostly as "the guy who writes the letter in the second half of McEwan's Atonement"....mais ou sont les neiges d'antan? Hélas...)

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 19:11:55 2010 No.703820 Adolf Hitler

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:13:55 2010 No.703825

>>if that was all that were supposed to be demonstrated here, I am dissappointed.

No, all that I was demonstrating was working up to getting somebody to write a letter to Ian McEwan to tell him the Ghost of Mary McCarthy is entitling her review of his latest novel "McEwan's SOLAR: Maunder Minima, and Maximal Maunderings".

If anybody knows Ian McEwan, please pass this along. Tell him it comes courtesy of a spiritualist medium provided by Craig Raine's dad, if you want to make it seem more like Madame Blavatsky.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 19:14:55 2010 No.703831 huh, what is this? I never heard any of these bandnames, whats going on here...

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 19:17:55 2010 No.703838 File: 47 KB, 383x482, james.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] This troll

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:20:55 2010 No.703843

>>Adolf Hitler

The interesting thing about "Mein Kampf" is what he doesn't say. The rhetoric about Jews seems fairly boilerplate for antisemitic idées reçues of his own place and time. Nowhere near as vicious, frankly, as Otto Weininger, when considered in certain ways. What's terrifying about Hitler is that he writes such a banal book and then goes on to actually kill 6 million Jews. But he also killed 600,000 homosexuals and "Mein Kampf" has even less than Weininger to say on the subject of homosexuals. So there, that's a literary approach to Hitler, if you actually want one. You're just trolling. To prove to you that in the most important way I am not just trolling, I took you seriously and gave you an answer, in which you can understand what's troubling about Hitler's rhetoric is that it's so mediocre it's hard to believe he actually went through with mass murder. And he didnt just mass-murder Jews. But anybody who says "He killed fewer gypsies / faggots than he killed Jews" is engaged in what Shelley would call pernicious casuistry. What's the difference between killing 600 thousand and 6 million people, just for being who or what they are? Anybody who thinks there is a difference either works in real estate, or thinks they understand the nature of prejudice. Which---Mary McCarthy cannot resist adding--is why you can read the entirety of "TS Eliot and Prejudice" by Christopher Ricks and find only one reference to the fact (I'd say "apeneck Sweeney" makes it a fact, cf Curtis "Apes and Angels" passim) that Eliot disliked the Irish every bit as much as he disliked Jews. The only person to mention this? Ricks quotes her. Helen Vendler, née Hennessy.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 19:22:55 2010 No.703849 Bravo. This is how you make art out of 4chan.

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:25:55 2010 No.703855

>>703849
you mean this is how you make 4chan a one man (woman) show...

... imagine keeping this up for days, it would turn into a fucking magic 8-ball you shake and something unintelligible comes out, occasionally repeating itself.

Nothing against the entertaining modus operandi of the late Mrs McCarthy in general, though.

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:26:55 2010 No.703861

>>This troll

Oh, Jimmy Joyce he is my darling / from late at night to early morning.

Did you ever notice how---to get the English to take an Irish novelist seriously---he has to title his novel with the name of the character with the longest single filibuster in Shakespeare's work, and then publish it in Paris at "Shakespeare & Co."? That's a lot of effort to be taken seriously as a novelist, especially when your novel is intended to demonstrate that the subject matter is hardly the point, it's the stylistic facility.

Also, if you read Gifford's notes on Ulysses carefully, you might notice that Leopold Bloom is technically NOT a Jew---his mother is not Jewish---whereas Molly Bloom technically IS a Jew. Her mother from Gibraltar, Lunita Laredo, is identified as Jewish in the last chapter. Does this change how we read the book? Everybody--including Harold Bloom, although recently reviewing Antony Julius in the NYT he described Leopold's Jewishness as "problematic"---thinks of Leopold Bloom as "a Jew" and Molly Bloom as, well, Molly Bloom. To a patriarchal rabbi of the old school, it's the opposite way round. Joyce loved paradoxes.

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:26:55 2010 No.703862

>>703762

>"The Feast" by Sir Max Beerbohm

Man, so I just read this. It's very piercing at times - after all I remember the sun in 'The Nigger of the Narcissus' peeping up over the horizon like its counterpart in 'The Teletubbies' - but it really only applies to quite early Conrad. By 'The Secret Agent' the bastard's hit his stride so hard it's rubbing its arse as it storms fitfully (and self-consciously) up into literary history. Beyond that point I can't think of a decent criticism to be laid against him - not even (albeit almost) that he is too serious.

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:29:55 2010 No.703869

>>the late Mrs McCarthy in general, though.

The late MISS McCarthy, thank you very much. Or you can say Ms McCarthy, if a woman's marital status is important to you in any way. Didn't Linda Fiorentino in "The Last Seduction" say that a woman loses 70 percent of her authority when people know who she's sleeping with? Mary was married to Edmund Wilson---who locked her in a room and told her to write a novel---but she NEVER was "Mrs Wilson" or "Mrs anybody". She was Mary fucking McCarthy all her life. She kept the name she was born with. Why should she change it? Men didn't, unless they became Pope. Then somebody named Breakspeare suddenly gets to change his name to "Pope Adrian IV", whereupon he issues the Papal Bull Laudabiliter and grants Ireland to the English crown. Thus began 800 years of troubles, with the further irony that Ireland only became MORE devoted to the Papacy that handed them to England in the reign of Henry II. Jimmy Joyce knew all this. All of it's mentioned in Ulysses, here and there. Another reason why he's an interesting writer. Taste for paradox, as I said.

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:36:55 2010 No.703903

>>Beyond that point I can't think of a decent criticism to be laid against him - not even (albeit almost) that he is too serious.

Okay, well, Beerbohm makes the stylistic points I wanted to make, and you've given a fair response to Beerbohm. In which case, let's say that---for the sake of argument---I wanted to drag meaningless politics back into a literary discussion, the way Mary McCarthy might.

Do you think Conrad is one of the greatest English writers of the novel? Or one of the greatest Polish writers of all time? In other words, what ultimately fascinates me about Conrad is his expatriate status. Is it possible he's able to be so astute about colonialism (e.g.) because he comes from a country whose political identity in the 19th century is so utterly maddening that Poland can be called "the Christ among Nations" quite seriously by politicians, at the same time that Alfred Jarry thinks of it as the reign of King Ubu? In other words, I wonder if Conrad's own art hinges on the fact that he made, or was forced to make, himself into an English writer. In the same way that Henry James did, with the same occasional laboriousness of style, which comes with the territory when you are trying to prove to a small island full of Englishmen that you can be as English as the next fecking Irishman (the way Jimmy Joyce did, if you find his style laborious rather than delightful).

Sorry, Mary McCarthy has a bit of a crush on Jimmy Joyce, but that's because they had a similar chip on their shoulder. It's called "Irish Catholic is English for Otherness". Except Mary in reality didn't care much for Joyce, because she noticed that the Artist as a Young Man never had a Catholic Girlhood (her own best work, and it's a memoir, and I didn't even mention it in the summary of her criticism or fiction. But if anybody reads Mary McCarthy these days, it's to get a sense of what it would be like if Stephen Dedalus were Stephanie Dedalus.)

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 19:38:55 2010 No.703908 >>703611 >Am I alone in this? Certainly not. Personally, I want to sleep with Mary, but I feel I'm not good enough for her.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 19:40:55 2010 No.703919 >>703869 everybody knows that englishmen should not advance on to the papal throne. THats why he was the last and only one.

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:42:55 2010 No.703927

>>Certainly not. Personally, I want to sleep with Mary, but I feel I'm not good enough for her.

The real Mary McCarthy was too proud for a sympathy fuck. Whereas I'm a girl posting on 4chan. I'd probably go for it and not even think of it as a sympathy fuck, if you were willing to make fun of overrated writers with me. (Like Yeats, "come let us mock at the great", or rather, let us mock at the great before we come. Ahem.)

The problem is, I'd rather talk about books with boys than sleep with boys. And it's hard to find boys who are serious about books, not just memorizing a few facts here and there like Professor Beard in McEwan's "Solar", in order to get a book-crazed girl into bed.

So I'm saving myself---via metempsychosis--for James Joyce. Although I'm not sure how I feel about having all the farts fucked out of my arse. That's the problem with great writers----the minute you find out about their real lives, you stop being attracted to the writer, only to the work.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 19:46:55 2010 No.703940 what a waste of potential this is...

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:47:55 2010 No.703946

>>everybody knows that englishmen should not advance on to the papal throne. THats why he was the last and only one.

I dunno. I think Dick Dawkins has his eye on it, personally. Otherwise why does he act like he's infallible? I want to tell Dawkins that Douglas Adams appeared to me as a ghost, to tell him that---when he saw the aye-aye on Nosy Mangabey--it was a Darwinian religious experience. The lesser ape placed a curse on the greater one. But even that wouldn't frighten Dick Dawkins. He's not afraid of anybody---although he should be afraid of Mary. Not me, I'm referring to Mary Midgely, whom I wish would come out of retirement to comment on Dawkins's attempt to have the Pope arrested. Does Dawkins think you can actually have the proprietor of the Catholic Church---which is the second largest real estate owner in Manhattan---arrested for a sex scandal? Dawkins might be smarter than God---he certainly seems to think he is---but he's not more powerful than a man whose organization owns more of NYC than Donald Trump.

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:53:55 2010 No.703966

>>what a waste of potential this is...

Well then, why don't you tell me what you'd like to hear me talk about? What's of interest to YOU?

This is how girls have to relate to each other, btw, which is why I decided to try out my bitch persona on here, where it's mostly boys. It's called "letting off steam".

Or would it be a fulfillment of my potential if I talked about writers I think are NOT overrated? Because I think bashing people for their sincere creative efforts is an overrated pastime, ultimately, except then I remember that Martin Amis published "The Rachel Papers" and you didn't---despite the fact that it's not beyond the skill of any Englishman posting on /lit/, as far as I can see---because his dad was Kingsley Amis and yours wasn't?

Ah, but then again, I am American. I'm attempting to feel a class resentment that people in Britain rarely let themselves openly feel, on the principle that, well, if you're a poor Marxist you look envious, and if you're a wealthy Marxist you're a poseur. Whereas I think Wilde was right in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"....the real problem is that, while inequality exists, we constantly run the risk of having to consider the suffering that is entailed with poverty, and that makes you think about other people and their suffering, when you should be concentrating on yourself and having fun and (indeed) fulfilling your potential.

But yeah, I'm the only girl you know who's read and enjoyed Tristram Shandy and I'll give you a hand-shandy if you've actually read the whole thing. There's me offering a recommendation of a book I don't think is overrated, even if most people would find it even more pointless than Finnegans Wake.

Anonymous Sun May 23 19:59:55 2010 No.703996

>>703946

To be fair to Dawkins - not a project I spend much time on - he surely doesn't believe that the Pope will really be arrested. Instead he's trying to prove the point that he has been repeating for years - that religion and religious authorities are never held to the same standards of law and logic that anyone else is.

He has a point (oh, who am I kidding? I love to be fair to Dawkins). Michael Savage is on the UK's no-entry list but the Johnnypricker General isn't? Seriously? Never in human history have moral standards been applied equally without regard to practical power, but that doesn't damage the case.

I can't help but harbour an affection for Dawkins, if only because he is willing to match the religious in their iron-willed blue-balled certainty. That's nothing new - my parents grew up to be quite happy dismissing all religion as literal, actual insanity. But it makes me uneasy that my own generation, myself included, is instinctually more wary of such statements.

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:14:12 2010 No.704045 [DELETED]

> Or would it be a fulfillment of my potential if I talked about writers I think are NOT overrated?

that might be a start, actually. Even though I aknowledge that it is harder to entertain that way.
After all, giving a shit about something instead of shitting on it is contrary to the concept of "cool", which seems to be the most revered value of late.
Ironically this attitude of indifference towards something you really tried hard to excell in is both the most attractive attitude you can display and the most doubted one (usually by those who keep their coolness by contesting the one of others).

Exactly the same thing why libertarians argue against the state as long as it allows them to do so economically (talk about the tautology of rule-of-law).

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:14:55 2010 No.704047

>>701926
are there some plays by other authors that are better than some of Shakespeare's worst plays? yeah sure...marlowe of course, webster. but is the an author with a better single body of work than s? i don't really think so. also Shakespeare's best language is objectively some of the best written. His later plays really push the language to a breaking point.

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:19:55 2010 No.704064

>>I can't help but harbour an affection for Dawkins, if only because he is willing to match the religious in their iron-willed blue-balled certainty.

You've made a better case for a man I consider to be a tedious drum-beating egomaniac than even the Devil's Own Chaplain could. I just see Dawkins from a Harold Bloom-ish perspective. Does he really think he's a better Darwinist than the man who coined the term "agnostic"? I mean, is it an Oedipal struggle with Huxley that motivates him?

Or else, does he really think that "Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science" means that he believes the role of science is to attack the sincerely-held religious convictions of various people, who might perhaps hold those convictions because (here is me being more Rankian than Freudian, or maybe just Ernest-Becker-ish) they are afraid of death? Like Larkin says in "Aubade"?

If I really had the ear of Richard Dawkins, I would steer clear of God. I would ask him to consider my servant Professor Brian Josephson of Cambridge. Does every physicist in the UK gang up to attack Josephson because they're afraid he's mad? Or because they're envious that he's the only physicist in the UK who has a Nobel Prize? Because one way or the other, I think Josephson's defense of himself is an eloquent defense of a scientist who retains an open mind about stuff that I daresay Dawkins would consider to be arrant nonsense. I suspect Dawkins would explain that Josephson is just a lunatic whose best years as a scientist are way behind him. In which case: what does that make Dawkins? Because, honestly, I had a sort of crush on Stephen Jay Gould once upon a time, and he died like a hero rather than made it his business to piss on an area of life where maybe scientists should not tread, or at least not so heavily and hubristically as Dawkins adores doing.

Just my opinion, though. :D Thanks for giving me an intelligent response.

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:20:55 2010 No.704069

>>703903

Without meaning to labour the point: as far as stylistics go the main problem with Beerbohm's parody is that after the early novels I never lost track of C's syntax in the way that you're invited to in 'The Feast'. Is a pisstake supposed to exaggerate, or only illuminate? Either way, after the early novels, I never found Conrad's style labourious. Nevertheless, there's good foundation for the critical commonplace that his third-language prose has a 'strained' quality.

I think yes, it's Conrad's ideal of fidelity and hard labour feeding into a conscious attempt to become a Great Author. Clearly writing IS like hard work for him because he has such a hard time doing it, and nervous breakdowns were always around the corner. Conrad's Polishness is not something I've paid much attention to (though I've always planned to). But it seems to me that his expatriate status informs more than just his view of colonialism - I think it informs his whole technique.

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:21:55 2010 No.704072

In 'Amy Foster' (not his best, perhaps because it's too close to home) his common trope of alienated sense-impressions - of what whats-his-name-the-critic called delayed decoding and Beerbohm called "a young sapling tremulous, with a root of steel" - is applied to the perspective of an emigrant. The Yanko character goes about wondering (with implausible unworldliness) at great metal engines and floating houses called ships.

Conrad knows what it is for a whole nation's identity to be crushed, denied and ignored. That lies behind both his conviction that identity is constituted in the eyes of others, and his awareness of how easily it can be broken, distorted and captured without your consent. No surprise that he's very conscious of his critics.

Sometimes it's difficult to tell what he's trying to do when his author's notes always claim a faith in the capability of art to unite humanity that his books themselves deny. But yes, I think it's damned important that he builds an identity with work, with activity, the only way he believes it can be built. Possibly the high claims for art are part of some deliberate self-fashioning as an august man of letters. I'd judge him as an author whose expatriate experience is crucial, but ultimately as an English one. It seems only fair to reward his effort.

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:28:55 2010 No.704099

>>that might be a start, actually. Even though I aknowledge that it is harder to entertain that way.

Okay. I'll confess this. I really dig Thomas Lovell Beddoes. And most people have probably never heard of him. But most people on this board seem to have read The Crying of Lot 49 (which I have, and it's fun). But Pynchon does a parody of a Jacobean revenge play (in fits and starts) which makes you realize how weird and bizarre most Jacobean revenge plays really are. They're something that's just almost beyond my comprehension. The plot of The Duchess of Malfi might as well be the plot of a hentai manga scripted by Anais Nin, as far as I can tell. So if the plot is ludicrous, it's the language that must be interesting.

Well, that's what Beddoes thought. So he spent his entire life trying to write the greatest Jacobean revenge drama of all time, except he was 200 years out of date. Yet he succeeds. "Death's Jest-Book" is a fascinating brilliant read. It's better parody of a specific genre than Pynchon does, it's better poetry than a lot of Webster.

[more after jump]

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:30:55 2010 No.704102

http://books.google.com/books?id=kb5TQvUCB_0C&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=%22squats+on+a+toad-stoo
l+under+a+tree%22&source=bl&ots=-8RaG8WFZo&sig=vDCU_v9NQpmC6sFMCr7uAcmuLEQ&hl=en&amp
;ei=ccf5S57uEIH_8AahoZXDCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ6AEwA
A#v=onepage&q=%22squats%20on%20a%20toad-stool%20under%20a%20tree%22&f=false

That, for example. What other early 19th century writer in English can you possibly compare that to? Dickens at his most grotesque is never that lyrical or that absurd. Carroll at his most absurd is never that grotesque. So what kind of writer was Dr Beddoes? Insane? Or just sufficiently enamored of a very strange kind of beauty that he insisted on creating it himself (like Dr Frankenstein) even if there was no real audience for it, except the one writer in each generation who seems to get fascinated by Beddoes (Browning, Gosse, Strachey, Ezra Pound, Christopher Ricks or John Ashbery) because they realize.....well, whatever the fuck you call that, it's definitely poetry, and it's definitely art. But beyond that, it seems to be---like the New Dodo in that lyric I linked to---a successful attempt at necromancy, to revive the ghost of an extinct genre of literature, because you want to see another exciting example of it.

So, there's something I love. You don't have to read all "Death's Jest-Book". Just read that lyric. And tell me, assuming you didn't already know it, if you think that's the kind of poem more people should recommend, just for the sheer fuck-it-all weirdness of it, as art.

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:32:55 2010 No.704106

>>704064

Well, I barely know enough about this stuff to comment, and I'm going to bed, but...

(what an auspicious beginning. Talking about what I'm unqualified for? Maybe I'M Richard Dawkins, and let me tell you something about theology...)

I'll always be ready to admit that Dick's attack on religion is ill-founded, that it's not my kind of atheism, that it's arrogant and tiring and all the rest of it. But at the same time, whatever else, nobody can claim with a straight face that his attacks are unprovoked. You say he's leading campaigns into hinterlands that science should leave well alone but it's his response to the ongoing attempts of various fundamentalists to colonise areas that should be left to science. Every week some new book from a flowery soft-hearted Anglican who knows his theology appears in the pages of the Guardian literary review.

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:33:55 2010 No.704110

Every week whoever reviews it is missing the point. That kind of high-falutin' religion is irrelevant to Dawkins because he is attacking the real crazies and he is their mirror. We can all shake our heads, but his criticism is completely suited to the kind of simplistic faith which is big in America and ever-growing here. I've met so many former Baptists and conventional Christians who were utterly persuaded by Dwarkins. Maybe his critique is something ugly but necessary that needs to do its job and then be disposed of, like an arsenal after a war. Maybe he knows he's gone off the deep end and is hoping to produce a public sphere where he'll no longer be necessary (I think he's evidently motivated by some sense of duty). Maybe I'm completely wrong about him. After all, maybe you shouldn't build tanks in the first place.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 20:35:55 2010 No.704115 Toni Morrison - curious what the symbols and themes are? Don't worry, she'll cram them down your throat.

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:38:55 2010 No.704122

>>No surprise that he's very conscious of his critics.

I think that's a really lovely fair description of Conrad, and you've got me to take him a bit more seriously. TBH the Conrad story which always pops into my mind---when I read the Beerbohm parody---is "Falk", which again like "Amy Foster", is not his best. But there, Conrad seems to want to make the Swiftian point that sometimes white men can be cannibals too. And yet the way in which he has to reveal this is utterly melodramatic. ("Imagine to yourselves that I have eaten man." Yeah, so did I, at the senior prom. He tasted saltier than I was expecting.)

But I always wondered if there's political content there---the Falk Laws, which were part of the anti-Catholic part of Bismarck's Kulturkampf---well, it's part of Swift's point too, that it's very easy, if you want to get into theology, to claim that all Catholics are secretly cannibals, because of the doctrine of transubstantiation. In other words, I can't tell if I should be reading Conrad's "Falk" as a sort of political allegory about how Germans would gladly eat Poland, in the way "Modest Proposal" is more obviously the same sort of allegory, but still nervous about differences between Cat and Prod (of the sort that obsessed Joyce).

Interesting that your comment about Conrad and his critics makes me think again of James, similarly nervous about his critics, and of the way that James is not usually described as a "post-US-Civil-War writer" but could very well be. But we do him the decency of thinking of him as an English novelist because, like Conrad, that's what he tried so hard to be. Not somebody who came from a bloody country, but someone who came from a country filled with wonderful lunatic Swedenborgian parents who were open-minded about their children's education, like Henry James Sr.

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:39:55 2010 No.704124

>>703927

Okay, so I'm going to try to post a response to everything you posted after my initial response here...

I think the whole reason I'm so interested in this "performance" more so than your actual criticisms themselves is the constructive nature of the the identities re: 4chan.

I realize we're past the point in this discussion but, hey, I had to eat dinner as well. I got that you were trying on a persona, and that was my main source of interest - the psychology and intricacies of identity construction on an anonymous internet website. Especially when the constructed identity is Miss McCarthy, and the fun with not everyone getting it and getting trolled with some high brow trollery was good fun.

Coming back, I figured I'd get more of the same good fun, though I didn't figure I'd respond again as. But then when I saw that you were doing this from a feminist perspective and with a primarily feminist agenda, I was a little taken aback. Not from anything you've written per se, but rather the fact that I didn't initially find it so central to all of this, even though you had said as much in previous posts.

It was a little like Satre and de Beauvior - he goes off and takes a lot of amphetamines and writes B/N and makes his contribution to Continental philosophy and then Beauvior reminds him that he can't go around acting like he isn't defined by his culture and bodily identity and that women "suffer" existentially in a fundamentally different way than men do. Interesting, if absurd, little parallel I saw.

Regardless, I would like to see how I could fair against you in a more discursive format. I'm sure you'd dismantle my little intellectual cantrips but it sure would be fun trying...

But then, isn't the impossibility of it all part of the appeal?

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:41:16 2010 No.704130 [DELETED]

>>703966

>But yeah, I'm the only girl you know who's read and enjoyed Tristram Shandy and I'll give you a hand-shandy if you've actually read the whole thing.

Conradfag here; I'm not a girl and I'll take a rain check on finding out where you received your wound, but once I'd finished both Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, Sterne had swaggered up to the top of my brain where my favourite authors live, sat down next to Conrad (who smiled uncertainly) and looked around, beaming with content, making himself at home.

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:42:55 2010 No.704131

>>703966

>But yeah, I'm the only girl you know who's read and enjoyed Tristram Shandy and I'll give you a hand-shandy if you've actually read the whole thing.

Conradfag here; I'm not a girl and I'll take a rain check on finding out where you received your wound, but once I'd finished both Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, Sterne had swaggered up to the top of my brain where my favourite authors live, sat down next to Conrad (who smiled uncertainly) and looked around, beaming with content, making himself at home. So I wholeheartedly agree with you.

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:46:55 2010 No.704138

>>Every week some new book from a flowery soft-hearted Anglican who knows his theology appears in the pages of the Guardian literary review.

Tee hee. I had no idea. That contextualizes Dawkins a little better for me. I had always wondered how you could get so wound up about the COE when Eddie Izzard points out that, theologically speaking, it's pretty much offering people a choice between cake or death, and the people always choose cake. But if it's really that tedious and softminded, I can see why it would get up someone's nose.

The thing is, when you come from America, you're aware of religion mostly as a social force, and one that wields shame. So I don't understand religion in Britain because how can the COE shame anybody? They seem to bend over backward to INCLUDE everybody. Whereas in America, religion seems to have settled on ganging up on a convenient scapegoat---women who get abortions, gay men, Presidential Candidates who refuse to declare a belief in god---always already an easy target to begin with, and use that to frighten people into adhering more closely to religion as a result. I mean, what's interesting to me about religion is: isn't the hypocrisy built in? I doubt Obama or Hillary Clinton believe in the God of the Bible, frankly, but I find it fascinating that they have to go thru the ritual humiliation of paying homage to "Him" just for the privilege of running the country. If LaRochefoucauld thought hypocrisy was the hommage paid by vice to virtue, it strikes me that religious hypocrisy is always the hommage paid by unbelievers to a larger, imagined idea of consensus about something. Like: let's all agree to believe that after death is something nicer than being eaten by worms and beetles. This may not be true, but we can all agree it's a nicer belief, so now let's humiliate you into paying hommage to God before you can run for President.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 20:47:55 2010 No.704139 >>704115 But, she can carry a great plot

Anonymous Sun May 23 20:54:55 2010 No.704160

>>But then when I saw that you were doing this from a feminist perspective and with a primarily feminist agenda, I was a little taken aback

To be honest, I don't know how sincere I really was in revealing that as a sort of trump card. I just thought it might be an interesting point to try out in this forum, since it didn't seem like other women were posting. The simple fact is, I don't know any other women who have heard of Mary McCarthy. Mary McCarthy was important to my mother's generation of women, and was my grandmother's age.

And the simple fact is....I arrived at college and realized I couldn't stand any of the women who had tenure. In other words, I'm the least pro-woman feminist you'll ever meet, or I'm interested in how women can be women without trying to forge an academic consensus on what feminism even MEANS. As a student, I thought the women who did have tenure were all small-minded bitches who'd clearly gotten tenure not through genuine merit, but out of politicking or, I dunno. I almost wanted to say "who did they sleep with?" but realized this was a very ugly un-feminist thing to say, and mostly I write out of mystification. Why could I not identify with the women who were there to teach me in college? Was I a threat to them?

I'll say this....I did not go to Harvard, and I've always imagined Helen Vendler would probably take women seriously. Then again, when Helen Vendler took Jorie Graham seriously as a poet, Jorie Graham let it go to her head, and started writing as though she were versifying Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Jorie Graham got worse as a poet, and Helen Vendler was stuck having to say nice things about a female poet whom she basically discovered as a talented lyric alternative to someone like Adrienne Rich, who is all politics, and tediously so.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 20:57:55 2010 No.704170 ITT: tl;dr

Anonymous Sun May 23 21:01:55 2010 No.704185

>>704138

I should note that I left out something important by accident. I meant to say "Every week some new book from a flowery soft-hearted Anglican who knows his theology arguing against Dawkins (or the like) on flowery soft-hearted Anglican grounds". ie there is this costant chorus of "Dawkins doesn't understand theology" - "Richard Dawkins is missing the point - faith is more complicated and beautiful and subtle a phenomenon than he admits" - "my faith is really nice and I like gays" - well, that's all very well for you, you ponce, but do you really think Dawkins gives a portion of the shit for you that he does for the kind of religion that a guy I'm currently talking to on an internet forum identifies as most prevalent in America? And, moreover, do you really think you exert as much influence as them? Sorry, I've lost track of which fictional character I was addressing here, but the point is that perfectly reasonable attacks on Dawkins are very secondary to what he seems to accept as his political function.

Anonymous Sun May 23 21:02:55 2010 No.704190

>>Toni Morrison - curious what the symbols and themes are?

Okay, considering the level of casual brainless racism that gets churned out on /b/ daily, I am always really self-conscious about this but....I don't really like Toni Morrison. Mostly because I think her waffling between "magical realism or not" is cloying, and I"m not a fan of "magical realism" in the first place. And I feel like there's a kind of extortion that goes on: because the issues she wants to address are serious, and we want an answer, we sort of overrate her as a writer. In other words, I'm tempted to compare her---as I'm sure no white man would be permitted---to another woman writer: Harriet Beecher Stowe. But if I had ever said THAT in a class where Morrison was on the syllabus, I am sure that I would have stared at by my fellows like I was Ilse, She-Wolf of the SS. I can vent these opinions on here, and feel confident that you can judge these opinions and not regard me as some kind of genteel lady racist. I just, well, I don't dig Morrison's novels. I prefer Laurence Sterne. I don't want a book to extort my praise for its high-mindedness when it's not giving me any pleasure. I just keep quoting something I heard Derek Walcott say once in a Q&A when somebody asked him, basically, if it was possible to tell good writing from bad writing at all. He just sighed and said, "I know a Hallmark Card ain't Dante." Well, I feel like Toni Morrison ain't Jane Bowles. But I'm never going to make Jane Bowles anything more than a minority taste, no matter how loud I sing her praises. I look like a weird girl who admires another weird girl.

Anonymous Sun May 23 21:10:55 2010 No.704213

>>704160

Identity politics are tricky because of (what I perceive, as a white male) their simultaneous omnipresence and context-dependency. It's something that is always there, skulking in the background, but it can manifest itself in myriad ways depending on the situation. For example, I would feel my male-ness more saliently on a message board with primarily female respondents, perhaps similarly to how you do here?

I think that such politiking has value when it allows one to transcend established mores, but can also be dangerous in their tendency to codify differences and limit one's horizons to the point that feminists lose themselves in their own minutiae and end up full of ressentiment - making it, as you've seen it seems, completely counter-intuitive.

Also, if you haven't read much Beauvior, I would suggest it. Though I suspect you may have.

Anonymous Sun May 23 21:10:55 2010 No.704215

>>perfectly reasonable attacks on Dawkins are very secondary to what he seems to accept as his political function.

Okay, so that's interesting to me. In other words, he's not bothered by any native religiosity in Britain, really. That's what always mystifies me about him. I just can't see why the fight seems so personal to him, when he's mostly worried about theists who aren't British. But then again---not to sound like a bitch or anything---but if he had real balls wouldn't he have called the book "The Allah Delusion"? Or is it a profound statement on his part that he declines to do that, and become a martyr for science, or free speech, or.....well, at this point I'm not sure what Rushdie has been martyred to, now that the fatwa has been lifted, apart from pure celebrity.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 21:13:55 2010 No.704224 ahaha you two, you two :3

Anonymous Sun May 23 21:14:55 2010 No.704229

>>Also, if you haven't read much Beauvior, I would suggest it. Though I suspect you may have.

Only the Second Sex. But that's part of what I'm driving at, I suppose. When I arrived at college, that was considered passé by Professors of Women's Studies, and was on no reading lists at all. In other words, they were all looking for where to go next, and it was feminist writers that I could frankly make no sense out of (Irigaray, Wittig, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Spivak) and who I suspected were writing sheer nonsense on the basis that many men in history have written sheer nonsense and now it's our turn. This is not perhaps kind but it is accurate, at least about the strange identity-politics experience I had. The interesting or basic issues weren't discussed at all. The issues that were discussed seemed wholly manufactured, or so theoretical/jargon-laden that they might as well have been from Swift's Academy of Lagado.

Anonymous Sun May 23 21:19:55 2010 No.704253

>>ahaha you two, you two :3

If I'm being flirty it's only because he's in a different country, and I'm not worth flying someplace for to flirt in person, and can't really afford to fly anywhere myself.

If I'm getting turned on, I certainly wouldn't admit that when I'm trying to have a serious intellectual chat on 4chan, despite all the odds. But I'm still posting. :D

Anonymous Sun May 23 21:25:55 2010 No.704274

>>704229

Well, I mainly read Spivak in a po-co context, and she didn't seem entirely unhinged, but it was mainly as a supplemental reading and I don't remember it as much as I remember reading the actual literary texts.

I don't know that much about contemporary feminism I suppose, though I will say that jargon-laden nonsense seems to be very much en vogue and in line with greater contemporary philosophical discussions. Literary criticism is often disconcerting to me, and it's one of the main reasons I am hesitant to go back and get a doctorate in English

Anonymous Sun May 23 21:31:55 2010 No.704312

>>Well, I mainly read Spivak in a po-co context

Oh, okay. One of my best friends studied with her as an undergraduate. He's a gay man. One day we're talking and he tells me about the day the seminar begins with her saying "Today, I wish us to invaginate these texts." He calls me and says "Um, I admit I was made uncomfortable but do you know what that means? Like put a vagina INTO the text, or look inside the vagina of the text, or what?" I said "are you sure she said invaginate and not, like, investigate?" And he said, "Oh yes, she kept using the word like she just made it up." And I said, "well then, my suspicion--speaking purely as a woman---is that she probably DID just make it up, and was trying it out to see if she could pull it off without giggling."

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 21:32:55 2010 No.704317 >>701636 I think she's fucking incredible.

Anonymous Sun May 23 21:37:55 2010 No.704343

>>I think she's fucking incredible.

Well, I know I'm not really Mary McCarthy, but now I'm wondering if you really are Anne Sexton.

Fucking incredible? seriously. It's like she has to do some silly chore, like chop the vegetables for dinner and hits her thumb, and suddenly she's talking about Auschwitz. I'm exaggerating, but seriously, if you look at George Steiner saying she's profound for invoking the Holocaust, and Seamus Heaney saying she's basically shallow and sentimental, I trust Heaney.

Anonymous Sun May 23 21:38:55 2010 No.704350

thanx for doin' mah w'rk f'r me bois
>>701551
>>701625
>>701630
>>701883
>>701895
>>702019
>>702952
>>703232

And for emphasis: Kafka and post-Berlin Nabokov

and the ultimate: JORGE LUIS BORGES

Dullards act like this and a small cabal of other magical faggots constitute the best output from the Americas.
Borges is miiiiiiiiiieeeeerrrrrda!

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 21:40:55 2010 No.704361 >>704350 those dullards are correct

Anonymous Sun May 23 21:43:55 2010 No.704370

>>704312

Sokal would be impressed with that one. I think it's good to treat many of these critics with a good dose of skepticism. I feel like people like that simply get so removed from the general public and get swept into their parochial worlds which become self-perpetuating and then eventually fly right off the deep end. The true tragedy is that the whole project starts with the best of intentions. A lot of these critics would do well to spend a day in the cesspool that is /b/ just to jar them back out of their bubbles. Or better yet, they could substitute teach at a public school for a few weeks during their academic leave. They could learn a lot.

Anonymous Sun May 23 21:47:55 2010 No.704391

>>704350

To be fair, DFW's rep is a bit skewed because

a. he killed himself
b. he did it pretty recently

I've read IJ. It's not Gravity's Rainbow, and yeah, the first 200 pages have some uneven parts (i could've written more convincing ebonics), but it's not a bad read. I think that, once the afterglow of his suicide fades, he won't be so overrated.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 21:55:55 2010 No.704413 whose the guy who unbearable lightness of being? --yeah, that guy

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 21:59:55 2010 No.704430 Lovecraft. Fuck Cthululu. It's not scary.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 22:03:55 2010 No.704441 >>704430 NOT AS SCARY AS YOUR MOTHER'S HAIRY TWAT you mouth breathing son of a coward and a whore

Anonymous Sun May 23 22:07:55 2010 No.704458

>>unbearable lightness of being?

This is embarassingly personal but. I've never really "gotten" him largely because lots of women spontaneously confess to me, for some reason, when talking about books, that this is the first book they ever masturbated to. So I read that hearing that it was a turn-on book and I read it and I was bored. My idea of a fun book to masturbate to is The Fermata by Nicholson Baker, if that interests anybody. But I did NOT like Vox. I thought it was stupid, and I thought it was even stupider when Monica Lewinsky gave a copy to Clinton to flirt. Like, that is what Nabokov calls POSHLOST. But then The Fermata sort of turned me on. Probably because it was more fantastic. In other words, i probably see "magical realism" as something you should be able to jill off to (as it were) and because I find this impossible to do with (say) Toni Morrison or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Tony Kushner, I don't find any of them to be erotic writers, or even interesting writers. In other words, magical realism without sex is like a mannerist painting without a gimmick. Anybody could write like this, if they just turn something "magical", in the way that every Stephen King book is about the banalities of life shot through with sudden fears that "this common thing from suburbia (your dog, your car, your husband, your biggest fan) which ought to be great suddenly turns out to be Pure Evil." Anybody can write that way if they just turn their brain off, and therefore if it's not sexually arousing to me (in the way that The Fermata strangely is, and the strangeness is part of the interest to me, since I suspect it of being POSHLOST but Nabokov says Molly Bloom is POSHLOST and if that's true, well, I'll take my stand with Molly on this)

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 22:08:55 2010 No.704462 This is the way the thread ends. This is the way the thread ends. This is the way the thread ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper./

Anonymous Sun May 23 22:09:55 2010 No.704464
File: 32 KB, 460x278, marymccarthy460.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

but for this reason I find The Unbearable Lightness of Being to be weirdly non-sexual, it was like watching a video of surgery, except sex. It was like a porn film being narrated by a world-weary Mitteleuropan, to me. Which isn't arousing. It looks like Philip Roth starring in a French nouvelle vague film. Zuckerman-le-Flambeur, if you will.

[Pic Related: It's Mary McCarthy as Mrs Robinson in Milan Kundera's remake of The Graduate, narrated as a world weary series of online postings....my work in progress, if you will.]

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 22:11:55 2010 No.704473 >>704441 U MAD

Anonymous Sun May 23 22:12:55 2010 No.704475

>>Lovecraft. Fuck Cthululu. It's not scary.

Cthulhu Rlyeh! I love him. But the weird thing is that I love him because I discovered him AFTER discovering Lord Dunsany, who is a huge influence on the early stuff like The Rats of Ulthar. Dunsany is an Irish Lord who is writing the same time as Yeats, but he writes a sort of ghostly Lewis Carroll type of tale.....it's like Maeterlinck, maybe. It's always set in some fantasy la-la land where the characters have weird magical events happening FOR NO REASON, like a Henry Darger painting almost. It's just....strange. And then Lovecraft sees that, it's not strange, it's actually kind of scary. And he sort of re-invents Gothic as a new kind of American genre. Something which is frightened of something huge and mindless and absolutely incomprehensible. I see Cthulhu as the metempsychotic revenge on Sigmund Freud for dissecting all those eels trying to castrate them (literally). Cthulhu is the Return of everything Sigmund Freud repressed.

Anonymous Sun May 23 22:30:55 2010 No.704521

>In other words, magical realism without sex is like a mannerist painting without a gimmick. Anybody could write like this, if they just turn something "magical", in the way that every Stephen King book is about the banalities of life shot through with sudden fears that "this common thing from suburbia (your dog, your car, your husband, your biggest fan) which ought to be great suddenly turns out to be Pure Evil."

Of course this isn't at all what happens in most magical realist works and certainly not in any of the well-regarded ones; there are no magical dishwashers in Marquez, people are raptured (like the Bible!), there are some floods (that too!), there's one story about an angel (maybe), and another about an enormous corpse, hair that grows after death (a popular urban myth based on an imperfect understanding of decay), and so most of the time it's reworking myth and history in a modern context but part of a long tradition going back to the earliest of literature. I can't really see where the mention of Morrison comes from at all but then I've only read Beloved, so maybe there's a story that instead of using magical realism for the reemergence of the horrors of slavery just makes a washing board say something comical.

Anonymous Sun May 23 22:50:55 2010 No.704565

>>I can't really see where the mention of Morrison comes from at all

I'm thinking mostly of Song of Solomon. That, to me, seems like an outright attempt to rip off Marquez on her part, I mean, she's stealing with both hands and then covering her tracks by saying it's just Zora Neale Hurston. Nonsense. Zora Neale Hurston is honest-to-god oral literature being heard and discovered, like in Wordsworth's ballads....he's trying to write songs the way that people still sing them up in the Lake District....Toni Morrison is being highbrow commercialistic, by doing Garcia Marquez as though she'd done the kind of field work Zora did as an anthropologist, whereas Toni never got her bougie ass out of an editor's desk at a publishing house. In other words, she reads to me as derivative, or as Holden Caulfield might say "phony", in a way Zora Neale Hurston never does. I quote Zora all the time: "the higher up the tree the monkey climb, the more you see the monkey's behind". Well, Toni's at the top of a very tall tree with her Nobel Prize. That's all Mary McCarthy has to say on the subject. Beloved for its attempt at High Seriousness is basically like gothic with generic white males as the villains. It's more like Push or Precious than Precious or Push actually is. Because it's attempting to pile all these horrors on one protagonist, the way that The Color Purple or Push does. If all that actually happened to one person, trust me, the book would actually be FUNNY. Like if Synge's "Riders to the Sea" had the mother actually watch all 7 of her sons die, one right after the other, rather than the careful set-up of this is the day the 7th died....it would be a farce if you played all 7 one after the other. It would be Beckett.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 23 23:06:55 2010 No.704616 >>704565 > rather than the careful set-up of this is the day the 7th died But this is almost exactly the set-up of Beloved--Beloved shows up and we're told what led up to this, intertwining with the main narrative, it doesn't come one after another.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 04:09:55 2010 No.705606 why is she such a bitch?

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 04:22:55 2010 No.705637 This entire thread is pretty amusing.

Anonymous Mon May 24 04:24:12 2010 No.705641 [DELETED]

>>700931

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>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 04:43:55 2010 No.705702 bump

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 04:51:55 2010 No.705741 Jack Kerouac isn't overrated, it's just that lots of assholes like him.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 04:56:55 2010 No.705756 >>705741 True. But On the Road is over-rated. Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Dr. Sax are amazing.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 05:01:55 2010 No.705769 >>705756 Tristessa is a beautiful book. His less edited book are much better and Tristessa actually was not edited at all.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 07:22:55 2010 No.706142 wtf is a "Mitteleuropan" supposed to be? thats wrong in about every conceivable language...

Anonymous Mon May 24 08:40:55 2010 No.706311

>>wtf is a "Mitteleuropan" supposed to be?

Mary McCarthy here. You're not familiar with the term?

http://www.yourdictionary.com/mittel-european

Mitteleuropa is a state of mind located somewhere east of the Maginot Line and south or possibly west of Nova Zembla, but definitely to the north of the famed Seacoast of Bohemia.

It includes such territories as the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, the Grand Duchy of Pfennig-Halbpfennig, Syldavia & Borduria, Florin & Guilder, Dawsbergen & Graustark (of which S.J. Perelman once wrote a grand reminiscence), Evallonia, Frobnia, Marshovia, the Principate of Karlsberg, and of course Ruritania.

When Woodrow Wilson became so passionate about the right of self-determination for small nations, it was Mitteleuropa he was thinking about. Ruritania is often taken as a term for Mitteleuropa generally, and this particularly enraged Wilson, which is why Freud's posthumous psychoanalysis of Woodrow Wilson makes for such an important work in Mitteleuropan Studies.

Famous Mitteleuropans include Count Dracula, Countess Marie Larisch, Imre Mádach, Ferenc Molnar, The Student Prince, The Merry Widow, and The Prisoner of Zenda. For more discussion on the de-facto capitol of Mitteleuropa---the famous city of Kakanien---please see Robert Musil's Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften.

Anonymous Mon May 24 08:58:55 2010 No.706341

Well, I am familiar with Mitteleuropa or Mitteleuropäer.
I was just making fun of you for using such an uneccessarily pretentious word where "middle-european" would have been sufficient.

And by the way, Mitteleuropa goes back to the 19th century, when Constantin Frantz proposed a federation of the german countries, poland and some other countries to counter the power of France and RUssia.
It was also used by the austrians to counter the plan of a "großdeutsche Lösung".

Thanks for churning out some punchlines though

Anonymous Mon May 24 08:59:12 2010 No.706343 [DELETED]

>>700932

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Anonymous Mon May 24 08:59:12 2010 No.706345 [DELETED]

>>700931

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Anonymous Mon May 24 08:59:55 2010 No.706344

>>706311
Back from the dead! Some things to think about: Poe's Eureka predicts big bang and other vanguard ideas of current science. Not at all the joke you think it is. See various NYT articles. Freud's Oedipus Complex from Totem and Taboo emerges from a discussion of "primitive" cultures and their relation to the modern. His dream book is way more important, as are the case studies. Question: What irish women writers do you recommend (except you)?

Anonymous Mon May 24 09:41:55 2010 No.706404

I was writing that letter about your review to Ian McEwan but it kind of turned into a rant about how much I don't give a shit about his angsty upper-middle-class over-educated English protagonists with half-arsed political commentary any more, and wish he'd just go back to writing about incest and child abduction with prose like a fading bruise sustained two weeks ago in a completely insignificant event non-dissimilar to the advent of "Antipodean Literature".

I am easily distracted it seems.

Anonymous Mon May 24 09:42:55 2010 No.706406

>>Poe's Eureka predicts big bang and other vanguard ideas of current science. Not at all the joke you think it is. See various NYT articles.

I didn't say it WAS a joke, I said it reads like a joke. Poe is one of those authors where I can never quite tell how sincere, or not, he actually is. And I find Eureka fascinating. It would seem to be written in what we call "mania" but there's no reason why it shouldn't be seen in light of Socrates in the Phaedrus: ta megista tôn agathôn hemin gignetai dia manias. In other words, I see no reason why Poe shouldn't be able to predict scientific advances (he earnestly dedicates the work to von Humboldt, after all) in a state of visionary mania---and anyway, Newton & Leibnitz on calculus, Darwin & Russel Wallace on natural selection....when are non-scientists allowed to suggest there's something uncanny happening? All I was really saying about Poe is that he stands there naked in Eureka the same way that Rabbie Burns does when he's not writing dialect poems---without the mask (of irony in Poe's case) it makes for a strange reading experience.

Anonymous Mon May 24 09:44:55 2010 No.706407

>>Question: What irish women writers do you recommend (except you)?

In terms of actual Ireland.....well, Elizabeth Bowen's fiction, definitely. Medbh McGuckian's poetry is also worth your time. I like Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill but have only read her in translation by other distinguished poets, so it's a weird case---I can't recommend her as readily as I would push McGuckian. Somerville & Ross are amazing in "The Real Charlotte" (which is wonderful) although they're best known for the nicer stories that were adapted for TV. And I suppose earlier when I made extravagant---or at least impassioned---claims on behalf of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, I probably ought to mention his aunt, Maria Edgeworth.

And don't forget Lady Gregory did a lot of work, including writing most of "Cathleen ni Houlihan" and letting Yeats take the credit, and translating the Cuchulainn cycle....I'm sure scholars have done newer translations, but hers are what I've read.

In terms of Irish-American women? Besides myself of course, well, Flannery O'Connor.

And I've always been fascinated by the fact that Howard O'Brien changed her name to Anne Rice and wrote vampire fiction, the same way that a bland Dublin bureaucrat once wrote Dracula. But Le Fanu got there first with Carmilla. Strange how vampires pop up out of the Irish tradition so regularly....I guess that's why Edward Cullen gets an Irish last name, and Angel gives Buffy a claddagh ring.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 09:46:12 2010 No.706419 File: 23 KB, 400x266, ApPK7HnWf3vxeyv3.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >521604

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 09:48:12 2010 No.706433 File: 26 KB, 400x266, jdRu4E8yqgotYDLs.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >670435

Anonymous Mon May 24 09:50:55 2010 No.706446

>>wish he'd just go back to writing about incest and child abduction with prose like a fading bruise

Those early McEwan stories are amazing, aren't they? First Love Last Rites, and the other one. Little black diamonds, with showoffy prose. And The Cement Garden is also amazing. It's Freudian gothic, with that particular hysteria the English have about paedophilia lurking. Although sometimes it's just strange. Freudian gothic is reductionist---he starts off as a wonderfully imaginative writer of fiction, with perfect icy prose.

But he's interesting to me because he gets so dull eventually, and I wonder: how does that happen? He goes from having a "gnat's orgasm" in his 6-year-old sister (like a /b/tard confession avant le lettre and in exquisite prose) to boring us with Saturday on Chesil Beach in Amsterdam. If he continues writing as badly as he did in Solar, it might suggest that (gulp) he thinks he's Nobel-able. That's the only thing that can explain his increasing tediousness to me, frankly.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 09:52:12 2010 No.706461 File: 24 KB, 300x450, gREBkOhbDkrqtCOz.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >420786

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 09:52:12 2010 No.706464 File: 31 KB, 350x449, gRVSncWiP8sK5iB1.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >842431

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 09:52:36 2010 No.706463 File: 26 KB, 500x339, bGioi8wb6CEdpULA.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >632175

Anonymous Mon May 24 09:53:55 2010 No.706466

>>the advent of "Antipodean Literature".

If you want Mary McCarthy's considered opinion...the problem with constructing Antipodean Literature is that you must face the difficult fact that Australia's greatest writer of all time technically did not exist. I refer, of course, to the Black Swan of Trespass himself....Ernest Lalor Malley.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 09:55:21 2010 No.706478 File: 17 KB, 351x236, 5kPkHCqnPvssq6No.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >564269

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 09:57:55 2010 No.706488 >>706407 Maybe the Irish connection has something to do with the Vampiric hold of the blood drinking Catholic church on Irish culture.... Very odd though. Interested in what you think is under-rated that has been published since 1990...

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 10:00:12 2010 No.706499 File: 55 KB, 800x744, fwtef2syCJR75OMP.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >743419

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 10:03:12 2010 No.706513 File: 20 KB, 351x236, Bd2KR2fmgQPJ80XT.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >711115

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 10:04:55 2010 No.706518 >>706488 AFAIK, 'Transylvania' (beyond the forest) was a word originally applied to those regions of Tasmania which had not yet been 'cleared' by English colonists.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 10:07:12 2010 No.706535 File: 36 KB, 600x400, Gp56PscH46jnELOP.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >313946

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 10:07:12 2010 No.706536 File: 24 KB, 480x640, kBBPjyMBpBOoy60J.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >813296

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 10:10:12 2010 No.706552 File: 84 KB, 723x800, tUqdJic6knWs2ddv.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >174156

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 10:10:12 2010 No.706553 File: 45 KB, 700x467, XnfBHFvZAq4xkswa.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >522466

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 10:10:12 2010 No.706554 File: 22 KB, 400x266, bDekhbokHyDdf2FA.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >209581

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 10:12:12 2010 No.706568 File: 29 KB, 400x266, 7EK5AhrGX8tgE27V.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >468071

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 10:13:12 2010 No.706570 File: 26 KB, 400x266, q9YXfd49NVAtO5oH.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >859893

Anonymous Mon May 24 10:23:55 2010 No.706615

>>Interested in what you think is under-rated that has been published since 1990...

I'll just do Americans, how's that?

Fiction...these are people who've got high praise, but I don't think everyone understands that this stuff is the real deal. Lorrie Moore's short stories, consistently underrated. AM Homes underrated. Rachel Ingalls has been underrated for her whole career, except by Updike. John Wray underrated (well not by James Wood) but definitely should be read more. But the 3 women I listed have all become LESS interesting to me in their most recent works. If you don't know them, and want to check them out, look at the earlier stuff. Mrs Caliban, Birds of America, The End of Alice. Oh Marianne Wiggins has been underrated too and is technically American, isn't she? I'd throw in John Dollar.

Poetry...later work of Ashbery (Flow Chart, Girls on the Run) is underrated. Jorie Graham is underrated because nobody trusts Helen Vendler, but Graham in the early 90s is amazing. American poetry has been kind of snoozy in this time period. More people should read AR Ammons. James Merrill's nonfiction book in this time period was amazing. "A Different Person" I think it's called. All those writers are famous as far as poets go. It's hard to think of underrated poets because it's hard for me to get access to their work.

Drama: "Quills" & "Unwrap Your Candy" by Doug Wright, "US Drag" & "After Ashley" by Gina Gionfriddo, "Gaudeamus" by Peter Morris, , and LaChiusa's pastiche-opera of "The Wild Party" were the most underrated American drama I can think of in that time period. But all those writers received high praise for less interesting work (the film of Quills and I Am My Own Wife, Guardians, Becky Shaw, and La Chiusa's snoozy Medea opera all got much bigger praise for worse writing, which is the problem with American drama overall.

Then again, nobody reviews drama nowadays the way Mary McCarthy reviewed it for the Partisan Review.

Anonymous Mon May 24 10:36:55 2010 No.706629

>>AFAIK, 'Transylvania' (beyond the forest) was a word originally applied to those regions of Tasmania which had not yet been 'cleared' by English colonists.

That is amazing. If I were Gayatri Spivak---which of course I'm not---I'd be pushing somebody to write a dissertation on the Tasmanian Devil in popular culture representing an Irish Gothic Return of the Repressed which is called the Antipodes. After all, Les Murray is more Catholic than the Pope and Hutton Gibson combined, Dame Edna is more Everage than Queen Elizabeth II, and Peter Carey is a postpostmodern novelist avant le lettre. There, that's my theory of Antipodean Literature, to be delivered as a lecture by the ghost of the speaker of "Prize-Giving Speech", a truly Antipodean poem by New Zealand's National Return-of-the-Repressed Bard, the late and underrated James K Baxter.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 10:44:55 2010 No.706638 >>706629 funny how much you're relying on Freud here, who you dissed earlier. But women are flighty!

Anonymous Mon May 24 10:51:55 2010 No.706645

>>to be delivered as a lecture by the ghost of the speaker of "Prize-Giving Speech"

I forgot to mention, the ghost has been conjured up---Lovecraft or Dunsany style---by some very Angry Penguins who have summoned the ghost of Ernest Lalor Malley to vent the wroth of Pericles again, by ghost-writing a speech for the ghost of James K Baxter.

And now Maldoror himself is Maldororianly chanting hurlements en faveur de Ern Malley! Behold! The Antipodes! It looks like a Peter Jackson film and is full of Irish spirits chanting on Skull Island a passive-aggressive war-chant which sounds strangely like the Dropkick Murphys doing a cover-version of "Finnegans Wake" or "The Fields of Athenry". The Irish Return of the Repressed! The Far-Flung Antipodes! says Mary McCarthy, bitchily.

Anonymous Mon May 24 10:59:55 2010 No.706655

>>funny how much you're relying on Freud here, who you dissed earlier.

I dissed Freud because I think people ought to take more seriously what would seem to be the religious or Mosaic origins of Freud's own grand ambition. He was an heresiarch, after all. Or---as Nabokov loved to call him---der Wiener-Zauberer. The Viennese Wizard. Freud wasn't exactly a *respectable* doctor after all. He was the kind you'd invite to the *back door* in bourgeois Vienna, if you know what I mean. Almost an abortionist. I think one of the great ironies of Freudian thought is that more Freudians don't dare consider the thought that perhaps Jeffrey Masson was right, perhaps Freud was just like the current Pope (the former Cardinal Ratzinger, or Papa-Ratzi as I call him) covering up an epidemic of child abuse after all. There, that's Total Feminist Gothic, as Frederick Crews (author of "The Freud Wars") could tell you. There was a Freudian schism, incidentally, when Crews rejected Freud in such a big way, and Adam Philips was forced to contemplate the Akedah in the form of Harry Houdini, doing for pop culture what Freud tried to do to Da Vinci, which is....pin him down and find his testes, just like he did with all those poor defenseless anguillae anguillae, who are now chanting maldororianly for Freud's own return of the repressed, as they chant for his blood....sieg freud! sieg freud! vivat joyce! vivat joyce!

Anonymous Mon May 24 11:00:55 2010 No.706657

But I'm talking in terms of American Freudianism, or what remains of it, and I don't know where you're writing from. If you're writing from Academia then you're not really a Freudian, you're either a Bloomian or else merely a Fellow Traveller.

What interests me about Freud is what he missed, or how he doesn't always apply equally to writers who are wise enough to have noticed he's pretending to write about psychology but in the larger scheme of things is really "acting out" a kind of hysterical notion that he might be the long-promised Messiah of his new religion, the way Harry Houdini also did (but the Great Freudian Adam Philips somehow *totally fails* to notice, because he doesn't understand Freudianism as something fundamentally heresiarchical in character).

I can only hope Harold Bloom doesn't consider Mary McCarthy's opinions on these topics to be loshon hora in any way. He probably thinks all publicity is good publicity. Provided they bring a wide-angle lens, and shoot him like he's Zero Mostel starring in a big-budget Hollywood film of "The Last Analysis" by Saul Bellow.

Anonymous Mon May 24 11:12:55 2010 No.706673

ITT: the overly verbose expression of the traumatic experience of being academically fucked over by Harold Bloom

seriously, you americunts original sin was letting some oedipal douche (who never overcame being born into a language that constists mainly to the purpose of telling witty aphorisms and superstitios jokes) tell you stuff and then pretend you did not really care by reading his stupid canon anyways.

Anonymous Mon May 24 11:13:12 2010 No.706674

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Anonymous Mon May 24 11:33:55 2010 No.706697

>>ITT: the overly verbose expression of the traumatic experience of being academically fucked over by Harold Bloom

Balderdash. I am Mary McCarthy come from beyond the grave, to say about Freud and Freudianism precisely what Mary McCarthy would say about Freud and Freudianism. I was only answering a question. Harold Bloom and his "Western Canon" are a Latterday-Sanctification of Freud as somebody who actually knew what he was talking about. Nabokov had a much better sense of what Freud was up to, and it's expressed in "Lolita". There's a reason for John Ray Jr.'s blandly Freudian foreward to the book. "Lolita" is meant to resemble the actual pornography of the time, which had to demonstrate its redeeming social importance by tacking on a Foreword from a Freudian Voyeur who said that what is expressed in what follows is not actually glorified porn for men who contemplate fucking their own daughters.

The way Harold Bloom pretended to take an interest in Naomi Wolf's poetry, not unlike Professor Beard deciding to cheer himself up by getting laid with a girl undergrad in the most recent Ian McEwan novel. But I'm sure you'd dismiss that as rather lofty academic feminism on the part of Mary McCarthy. And perhaps it is.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 11:47:55 2010 No.706724 >>704430 Who says it was meant to be scary? He was trying to write dark weird stories, not horror. I agree Lovecraft has major flaws as a writer and is overrated by some people, but he was quite underrated during his lifetime.

Anonymous Mon May 24 11:52:55 2010 No.706731

I don't think any writer is overrated. Give all these writers credit for at least reaching an audience and finding some success in a nearly impossible business (writing has always been a difficult business).

If you feel their work doesn't live up to the praise then that's your problem.

Anonymous Mon May 24 12:06:55 2010 No.706756

>>706731
sooo, i guess you never raged about twilight then...
... or Pearl S. Buck (who was fucking bad in every instance, only zeitgeist and a develish pact could have made her get the nobel prize. thank god we now have a shortlist to prevent those viking fucks to award even more morons than they do already)

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 12:08:55 2010 No.706759 >>706731 The "success" is rammed down our throats. The writers too or the majority of them would join this chorus. Most are trolls themselves. Before you stop by 4chan again check out the Dunciad by A. Pope.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 12:14:55 2010 No.706784 >>706756 I would never read Twilight, but she's got to have at least some talent to appeal to that many people. Besides, getting a bunch of kids to read who normally wouldn't pick up a book makes her worthy of high praise.

Anonymous Mon May 24 12:23:55 2010 No.706799

>>you never raged about twilight then...
>>... or Pearl S. Buck

I think I discussed Twilight as Mormon Gothic, i.e, Stefenie Meyer's attempt to rewrite history by making a romance out of Marlowe's Edward II and Isabella in her own story of Edward and Isabella "Bella" Swan. She's nervous because she's a Mormon and Shakespeare might have done the ghey surprise buttsecks with Kitty Marlowe. That's what her books are about. They're teaching a generation of children whose ideas of reading largely come from teh internets what it's like to get to college and be a Mormon girl English major with a secret crush on Kitty Merlin, aka Edward The Second The Second, this time not ghey but willing to induct you into his strange deathless cult, not unlike that of Joseph Smith.

I've haven't said a word against Pearl S Buck lately. I just assume she sounds better in Swedish. Och jag talar inte Svenska. Verkligen? Du skojar!

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 12:26:55 2010 No.706810 >>706759 In what ways are most writers trolls?

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 12:29:55 2010 No.706818 >>704430 I came here to say fuck you

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 12:33:55 2010 No.706825 >>706818 Poe's "Balloon Hoax" -- Sylvia Plath's suicide -- Nabokov's so-called porn in Lolita are all troll-like... these are first 3 of authors mentioned above i noticed.

Anonymous Mon May 24 14:02:55 2010 No.707156

I'm still checking this thread, and I'm posting here every so often, to answer anybody's questions about who's underrated and overrated. I don't know how to identify this as a Turing Test for the ghost of Mary McCarthy, but that's what I am now.

Perhaps think of it as a Houdini seance, to be conducted live on television.

Call Gore Vidal. He could take the Turing Test to assess whether Mary McCarthy is alive and well and posting on teh internets.

Tell Gore Vidal that Mary McCarthy says: "The President of Harvard is a woman named Doctor Faust, Gore, and nobody bats an eye. Surely Mary McCarthy would come back from the grave to point this out to somebody. After all, Jeanne d'Arc was not merely a general, she was (as Nixon boasted falsely of his own mother) also a Saint. She could work miracles, Gore. So go tell the Vatican that Mary McCarthy wishes to ascribe this miracle of her resurrection as attributable to Ss Malachi and Joan of Arc, working side by side, in perpetual adoration of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Which is to say: myself."

I think the logic of that is fairly flawless. The person writing this must be Mary McCarthy. Who else would have those kind of balls to address Gore Vidal that way from the afterlife? Alice Roosevelt Longworth?

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 14:06:55 2010 No.707165 >>707156 Did you sleep with Patricia Highsmith?

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 14:07:55 2010 No.707167 File: 87 KB, 344x615, gore-vidal.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>707156 Did someone say Gore Vidal?

Anonymous Mon May 24 15:28:55 2010 No.707353

>>707165

No. She was a friend, though.

I think my admission that I wished to have been Elizabeth Bishop, to have written that work, is an admission that I always wished I could just be a Lesbian, the way that some Vassar girls just did. The way Patricia Highsmith just was. Anyway, I was a bitch to her, affecting never to have heard of Tom Ripley. Of course I had. If there's anybody out there who cares that much about Patricia Highsmith, tell them Mary McCarthy admits she was just being a bitch on that particular occasion, of course she had heard of Tom Ripley.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 15:34:55 2010 No.707380 >>707167 Harold Lang is fucking hot... I would totally let him(circa. 1947) fuck me.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 21:21:55 2010 No.709011 Ok thread needs 3 more requests to archive.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 21:23:55 2010 No.709019 >>701502 People who read sci-fi rate Michael Crichton pretty highly.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 24 21:25:55 2010 No.709026 Although it pains me a bit since I love The Hobbit and LOTR, Tolkien.

Anonymous Mon May 24 21:41:55 2010 No.709067

So "Mary", if you're still "here," I was one of the one's conversing with you last night...in a manner of speaking.

Anyhow, I wanted to know what you thought of Doris Lessing, because I was pretty into The Golden Notebook - could relate to the feminist discussion of yesterday mebbie?

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/lit/ - Literature