mcnamaratw

Maybe we agree, maybe we disagree. You got specific works and authors? That would help a lot.

Don’t be a d**k. Lots of literary fiction is perfectly readable for normal humans. Lots of what isn’t accessible is just not that enjoyable to anybody. I’m happy to debate … but only using specific examples. Authors and titles.

The example of noise music came up elsewhere in the discussion. It’s an important example. Most people won’t ever like it. You fill the pipeline with noise music, 99% of us will literally listen to anything else, or to nothing. I like a little bit of it, but in general I’m simply not going to acquire that taste.

“This is fundamental misunderstanding of literature”

No it is not. It is a central and vital part of literature.

Wound you like to have a friendly debate, each of us using quotations from any fiction writers we like?

Great example. It is absolutely a matter of taste. Sadly noise music doesn’t support a lot of full-time jobs compared to writing songs more or less the way the Beatles did. Which was all new and stuff, but not completely foreign to what Stephen Foster did.

We can try to reinvent writing, or we can focus on writing. But one may come at the expense of the other.

Then why is Kurt Vonnegut still so popular?

What is that stuff? Is Kurt Vonnegut that stuff?

Folks, downvoting the comment above is literally destroying what you claim to support.

Of course that’s punishing, though 75% may be closer than 90%. But I don’t buy it as the root cause. Where is the new Susanna Kaysen or Lionel Shriver or Laurie Moore or Barbara Kingsolver?

But that’s new. Until ca 1970-2000, people read literary fiction because it was high quality, much more than because it was unrelateable. O’Hara, Salinger, and Franzen were not writing about the outer edges of human experience.

That’s the old standby argument, and it may be right. I can’t really read John Barth or George Saunders the way I can read Richard Russo or Lionel Shriver or Kurt Vonnegut or Michael Chabon or Barbara Kingsolver. For me the experimental writers are very unpleasant to actually read. David Foster Wallace is just inside that frontier for me, and I can enjoy IJ. Bernard Malamud was pretty dark but I could hang in. But Paul Auster … I love what nonfiction writing I’ve seen, but the New York trilogy is so dark and Spartan it makes Joy Division look like disco.

Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really postmodern??

Not all of that is true. Who played with the un-updated CD version?

Sure. But inventing something better is not reinventing the wheel. Those are two completely different activities.

I’m sorry but you’re mistaken. The wheel was invented thousands of years ago.

Yeah. Ok. You want the fine print? Reinvent the wheel … for your own learning and fun. Or invent a different kind of wheel.

Don’t reinvent the wheel on a tight deadline while the rest of the team does useful work. Don’t reinvent the wheel and then expect to be rewarded or respected as if you had really invented something.