>Among matters of the heart and the soul, literary taste and distaste was a leitmotif of conversation between McCarthy and Britt. McCarthy was hard to please — or rather, very easy if one merely disregarded the bulk of popular literary output since the mid-20th century. He referred to Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, as “the goggle lady.” If one were, for whatever reason, to defend Oates for having written more than 60 novels, McCarthy’s dependable response was, “Yeah, that we know of.” He considered Don DeLillo no great shakes. He only began to speak of Saul Bellow as a very fine writer after he received the life-changing MacArthur Genius Grant from Saul Bellow. (After reading McCarthy benefactor Guy Davenport, it’s not therefore harebrained to wonder how much McCarthy could have really liked the novels of Guy Davenport.) Pynchon he found much ado about nothing, though Britt suspected he was perhaps jealous of the esteem Pynchon enjoyed for the scientific knowledge brandished in Gravity’s Rainbow, “knowledge” McCarthy found mostly utilitarian and otherwise nugatory. (Nothing like the quantum mechanics numinously undergirding Blood Meridian.) He once walked in on Britt reading Updike and stopped cold. His deafening silence spoke volumes, but he felt moved to speak anyway, “You’re not reading him, are you?” “No, I’m not,” said Britt, plainly reading him and now trying to find a way to play it off as if she hadn’t been. The only English translation of Homer that McCarthy recognized as legitimate was Chapman’s from the 16th century, the one Shakespeare had to hand. He never let praise of Proust pass unpantsed, even in the company of ladies. At one of the few literary parties McCarthy ever attended in New York in the 1990s, Norman Mailer lumbered up to him to pick a fight and McCarthy ignored him avuncularly. After all, McCarthy was the true heir and surpasser of Hemingway that Mailer failed to become. But McCarthy was nothing if not honest, and knew when on the fields of joyous contempt he’d been bettered, and so would say reverently of Christopher Hitchens, “No one can put someone down as beautifully as that man.”https://archive.md/pOgUA
>>25173957>Up till now, a mythopoeia has developed around the reclusive McCarthy’s disregard for contemporary fiction. For the last three decades of his life, he concerned himself with classics, history, the prose and equations of cutting-edge physics, and the exclusive company of non-writers and non-literary academics. His indifference was one of the only things he revealed about himself to the public, or as she still prefers to be called “Oprah”: America’s greatest living novelist didn’t give a farfegnugen for living novelists and their novels. From the outside looking in, one could board accurate trains of thought on the question of “Why?” by considering McCarthy’s style itself. It is an almost reactionary expression of modernism, thumbing its nose at all passing literary fashions, composing itself as if postmodernism, rules of commercial writing, and quotation marks had never been invented, their rumored existences not even worth looking into. He even snubbed the modernist plot eccentricities and disorientations of Joyce and Faulkner, while remaining in their linguistic bloodlines. But no one knew if there was something definitive in his sage souring. There was.>The consequential year is 1996.>Infinite Jest has just been published. It is a national story, and David Foster Wallace — a television addict who has filched his trademark glasses and bandana from John Corbett’s poetically waxing Gen-X disk jockey character Chris Stevens in CBS’s hit Northern Exposure (one of Britt’s favorite shows — is a demigod of literary celebrity, nay, a current affair. (People are so ensorcelled by Wallace that they even claim his face, which is plastered everywhere, is “handsome,” though it could simply be the subliminal effect of thinking they are looking at John Corbett.) McCarthy — a proud spurner of PR assignations and at the time still commercially obscure compared to what he would be in a decade — tells Britt that he wants to see what all the fuss is about. Not that he’s about to burn rubber to Borders for the book and sweat out the seconds waiting in line to pay for the damn thing and then crack it open in the parking lot and sit there till he runs out of gas. But at the time, he is still reading The New Yorker and other periodicals and cannot dodge the overindulgence. (He even has a subscription to W Magazine, though, in its feminine wisdom, it managed not to cover Jest.) Yes, McCarthy’s a curious cat, and we all know what is wont to go down between cats and their curiosity.
>>25173959>Britt doesn’t hear from McCarthy for several days. Almost a whole week of terrifying silence inches by. She’s worried sick about him by the time the phone finally rings. She races to it. It’s McCarthy alright, and he’s in a dark mood. Bleak and beleaguered, ornery. Britt’s rarely heard the love of her life so lowdown, perhaps not since she’d broken his heart a decade earlier. “Cormac, I can’t make out what you’re saying.” “I said: it’s drek. It’s drivel.” “Drek” and “drivel” being McCarthy’s lowest insults for writing, as opposed to his highest praise, “very fine writing.” He’s talking about Infinite Jest. For a polymath who read more than 10,000 books, it’s likely the worst reading experience of his life. “Lady, am I just that out of touch?” he asks. “How can people like this?” >Overindulgence in PR was a matter of course for unmemorable novels with big money behind them in the ’90s, and McCarthy was, as already mentioned, heroically out of touch with the literary fads that waylaid publishing. But he couldn’t grasp the scale of the national elation for Wallace. In a just world, it’s the hysteria he should have generated with the publication of Suttree, his 1979 novel and first masterpiece. It was a new, definitive low for the publishing-industrial complex. Infinite Jest was something of a literary psyop, and McCarthy’s intelligence was being insulted by it: the press, the prose, and the pose — the bandana crown. Everyone who could steady their fawning fingers over a keyboard was lining up to say, “Yes, I am a television addict too! How did he know!” and to hail Wallace as the megatalent America had been waiting for. Everyone else who had never read Gravity’s Rainbow and so couldn’t spot the shoddy simulacrum by the first use of the word “interface” was crowning Infinite Jest the greatest work of the 20th century, a novel pioneering a revolutionary form the way Ulysses had done before it. There hadn’t been such a coronation since The Naked and the Dead, and we know now what McCarthy thought of Mailer. The only thing to compare it to in modern memory is the Left-wing media blitz leading into the 2024 presidential election, and its claims that the demential Joe Biden was mentally sharper than he’d ever been despite having no clue where he was half the time and bearing the unmistakable rumple in his rump of the adult undergarment. As with Biden, people actually fell for the Wallace ruse. Cormac McCarthy would never read another new novel again, he told Britt. And he never did. He stopped paying attention to the literary world altogether. Infinite Jest was the last new novel McCarthy would ever read. The 1,104 pages that broke the literary lion’s back.
>how much McCarthy could have really liked the novels of Guy Davenport.lol imagine McCarthy reading Apples and Pears. Well then again he was a pedo…
Well, I don’t even like IJ either, in fact I even agree with him, but holy filtered. Fuck him, guy hated Proust. Plus >For a polymath who read more than 10,000 booksCormac was smart sure, but he wasn’t a polymath, who is this sucking his dick?
Gen X stabbed culture, millennials let it bleed out. zoomers are wandering around the ruins bobbing their heads and mumbling internet catch phrases.
>>25173972Boomers provided the impetus
>>25173957>nugatory>numinously undergirding>unpantsedPerformative use of the dictionary undone by a reversion to the mean of schoolyard insults done “ironically”.
>>25173970He also "hated" Pale Fire, but according to his friend Dennis B. Francis he could quote huge sections of the book word for word. He saw just about every writer as competing for space in the canon, so he hated them for endangering his immortality.
>>25173985And yet, he’s, as Nabokov would say, not quite first rate, not first rate enough to tower among those he championed like Joyce and Faulkner.Not to say he’s bad, he just doesn’t have a style to call truly his own I feel.>>25173982>>nugatoryAt least it wasn’t floccinaucinihilipilificated
>>25173993>he just doesn’t have a style to call truly his own I feelThe Passenger comes closest to a fully original style, but it's very flawed. He couldn't shake his Faulkner influence. So yes, he remains outside the Central Canon forever, never to join the likes of Homer or Shakespeare at God's table.
>>25174003God’s thirdbest bed at the very most.The Crossing was good though.
>>25174003Damn, who else is there? I’d love to see what they talk about.
Based DFW oneshotting some Diddy aah blud
>>25173957TLDR: genreslop writer gets filtered by serious literature
Vincenzo Barney spends too much time on /lit/.
>>25174021It literally amounts to this when you think about it. And I don’t even like DFW. I’d still take him over charity shop Faulkner but for manchildren
>>25174049ESL?
>>25174058No, what? Are you upset that I called DFW better than your beloved corncob?
>>25174003I haven't read The Passenger yet but I'm interested in it. From what I've heard it's Corncob doing his own take on Pinecone which is funny because apparently he hates him
>>25174069I think McCarthy hates anyone born after 1900 anyway. I actually think that he was just tsundere for them though.
>>25174021>IJ>serious literature
>>25173993>he just doesn’t have a style to call truly his own I feel.This is complete bs. Mccarthy has a more individual style than either Faulkner or Joyce. The kind you immediately recognize after reading one sentence>>25174003Faulkner was an unapologetic Conrad imitator. Mccarthy abandoned him starting with BM. You'd know if you had read him
>>25174134This post is retarded
>>25174058Obviously >>25174069It's nothing like pynchon. But unfortunately the whole reddit narrative is destroyed by shitty postmodern shitters not having read anything else
>>25174135It's 100% true. Unlike Mccarthy, Faulkner is copying Conrad wholesale. You cannot tell the passages apart.>>25173993
>>25173993Who is Nabokov to judge? What did he write beside Proustian fanfiction?
>>25173993>he just doesn’t have a style to call truly his own I feel.Who does? It's just a case of people being not literate enough to delve into the sources of all the 100 year old modernists reddit/lit champions; and being generally ill-natured towards more contemporary writers>>25174003You think The Border trilogy is Faulknerian? If you are setting the bar so low, Faulkner would be imitating Dorothy, Richardson, Woolf, Joyce, Sherwood Anderson and Proust in equal parts, and those are just writers published within 20 years of him.
>>25173957This article should have been 4 paragraphs
>>25174151Of course derivation is a staple of good literature, and anyone who reads should know. But it’s how one uses these influences as a means to employ their own idiosyncratic approach to writing. You can see a lot of Rabelais, Sterne, Carroll and even though he may never have read him, I feel even Lautreamont to a small extent can be found in Joyce. But you can still distinguish his style from theirs easily. I think McCarthy owes a lot to Faulkner but he’s still has a more distinctive style than most other latter 20th century authors
>>25174156Prolix is sometimes quite nice to read, and flowing. Here it’s just ostentatious “drek” to use the spelling in this article.
>>25174168Wait till you read the romantic Irish poets. I love Joyce but nearly everything in his style in straight downstream from his wide readings. You did not even mention Falubert. Ulysses wouldn't exist had Flaubert concluded his final project intended with Beuvard and pecuchet.Not to forget, Edward Dujardin. Joyce's use of stream of consciousness, perhaps his biggest contribution to modern literature is just a slightly tweaked version of what Dujardin was doing.https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26648/pg26648-images.html(Use google translate. All of Bloom is here)Mccarthy in his western novels and thereafter doesn't owe much to Faulkner. You can skim read them and still tell them apart just from the differences in syntax alone. Neither Joyce and Faulkner have that level of individuality. I can tell you an exact combination of technical details that only Mccarthy uses, without even taking into account nuances like tone, intention and narrative. Faulkner doesn't have that. Faulknerian is a nebulous term for gothic southern prose with 10 dollar words, a combination that has existed since gothic has been around.Who are the other authors that are more recognizable than Mccarthy in single sentences or passages? Can a lay reader who has only ever read a page from them tell them apart if presented with a random sample from their works? My list is smaller than 10 writers, including other languages. In English, Mccarthy might be the most distinctive stylist since Thomas Browne. You guys don't care about style enough to take this seriously but I do. Superficiality abounds here.
>>25173957Didn't expect Hitchens on that list.
>>25174205Mccarthy has been an atheist for most of his life. Only here do people push him as some EVROPA defending Christian nationalist.
>>25174197>Who are the other authors that are more recognizable than Mccarthy in single sentences or passages?Milton. His poetry was most sui generis.
>>25174231Well if you are extending it to poets there have been quite a few.E.E. cummings for one
"if they gave him an enema they could bury him in a matchbox" will always have a rent-controlled apartment in my mind
>He even has a subscription to W Magazine, though, in its feminine wisdom, it managed not to cover JestMcCarthy a feminist?
>>25173960>“Lady, am I just that out of touch?” he asks. “How can people like this?”Literally me
>>25174252More like agp repper (The Passenger in that sense is a wish-fulfillment fantasy).
>>25173959>>25173960This is so poorly written.
>>25174197>Who are the other authors that are more recognizable than Mccarthy in single sentences or passages?scott
>>25174447No
>>25173972fr fr no cap
>>25173972and alphas will fuck its still-warm body, like the comanche in that scene in "blood meridian"
>>25173960>“Lady, am I just that out of touch?”Yes.
>>25174134>Mccarthy has a more individual style than either Faulkner or Joyce
>>25174596Nice gif. Zero rebuttal.
>>25174601nta, and i'll give you that mccarthy has a very distinct style, but i don't think it's as distinct in BM as it is in "the road." whereas the style of "ulysses" is so idiosyncratic that one "psychologist" thought the author a schizophrenic
>>25174601It’s a lofty claim my friend and your bias towards mccarthy shows. He mimicked the style of a great many more writers than those you seek to defame by saying they were lacking in uniqueness in comparison to him.
>>25173957To be fair IJ is garbage and would make me lose faith in contemporary lit too if it's touted as the newest masterpiece.
>>25174601read chapter 6 of absalom, absalom or chapter 14 of ulysses, those sections have more individuality than entire mccarthy novels
I honestly just hate McCarthy threads on this board now. Impossible to talk about his work without retards shitflinging and retards shitflinging about the shitflinging. Nothing ever constructive or interesting. Just DAE faulkner? DAE? da judge?? what if the judge raped his sister phoebe???? Same with Dosto. Its all so tiresome. This board is shit. I hope you guys explode violently.
>>25174632No arguments again. You just don't like McCarthy so you're speaking out of your ass>mimicking stylesJoyce is the ultimate example of this. There is not one original style in Ulysses. Everything is a satirical or parodic version of some older style
>>25174699McCarthy glazers WILL be mocked and shamed off this board. As your post shows the process has already begun.
>>25174683>>25174596More bullshit.Oxen of the sun is literally Joyce imitating older English styles. I don't think you understand the word "individuality".Faulkner's prose is literally just long-winded Conrad, and I am not even insulting him. It's literally what it is even down to syntax. You can't knock down McCarthy when you're standards for uniqueness are so fucking low.
>>25174699i like dostoyevsky and mccarthy but their fans lately are uppity and obnoxious so i dont mind bullying them. and when it comes to writers from those countries, i infinitely prefer bely and melville.
>>25174707why the hell should anyone take you seriously when you don't know how to use the word "literally" properly or have reddit-tourist spacing? you clearly don't belong here and you clearly don't fit in. go back. now.
>>25174713>go back. now.No.:)
>>25174713>newfag seetheLearn how styles work before you get butthurt about your favorites just being imitators.
>>25174708No one has been more uppity and obnoxious than Joyce and Faulkner fans for a long time. These retards genuinely think that those two were unicorns that suddenly appeared with books no one else could write when they were rather standard for the modernist turn that was happening since the 1910s. Only because they haven't read any of their influences. Ulysses stood apart because it epitomized all the excesses of modernism, but even then the idea for that sort of novel was already around since Flaubert's time 50 years ago.
>>25174721>No one has been more uppity and obnoxious than Joyce and Faulkner fans for a long timewhat part of "lately" is too hard to comprehend. did you steal your high school diploma
>McCarthy>DFWIf the jannies had any balls or taste posting threads about either of these hacks would result in a rangeban.
>>25174725if jannies had any balls they wouldnt be jannies, pic related
>>25174614One can argue that short of Sirens, the prose style in Ulysses never reaches that same level of distinctiveness that Mccarthy's style in Blood meridian does. Even if Mccarthy's style is monomaniacal and doesn't contain the same level of variety as Ulysses does.
>Pynchon he found much ado about nothing, though Britt suspected he was perhaps jealous of the esteem Pynchon enjoyed for the scientific knowledge brandished in Gravity’s Rainbow, “knowledge” McCarthy found mostly utilitarian and otherwise nugatory. (Nothing like the quantum mechanics numinously undergirding Blood Meridian.)It seems that my success has once again led to some controversy
>>25174724I took that in account, newfag retard. Go to anyone of the 15 Joyce threads we have had in the last 3 weeks and check for yourself. I stopped visiting them even though I like Joyce well enough. Too many 15 year olds.
>He only began to speak of Saul Bellow as a very fine writer after he received the life-changing MacArthur Genius Grant from Saul Bellow.Greedy.>Britt suspected he was perhaps jealous of the esteem Pynchon enjoyed for the scientific knowledge brandished in Gravity’s RainbowEnvy.
>>25174714>dodges the questionI accept your concession
>>25174733This was in the 90s. McCarthy was more successful than pynchon by that time. It sounds more like disdain for him and postmodernism than jealousy.
>>25174205McCarthy, Lawrence Krauss and Christopher Hitchens probably all went to the same atheist pedo parties
>>25174735>15 year oldsahh yes of course, all those high schoolers reading FW and not No Country because of the popular action-packed movie adaptation, right. airtight argument.
>>25174742>Lawrence Kraussgod i hate that guy and i'm not even an anti-Semite
>>25174743Visit the threads. Obnoxious 18 year olds are much more likely to base their entire personality off of Ulysses than Ncfom (which they would deem too edgy and ""nihilistic"" for their modern, sophisticated and self aware temperament)
>>25174707the problem with this argument is that conrad was esl and it shows. it gives his prose arguably/admittedly a bit of uniqueness because of this but it often feels wooden and flavorless at times as a result. it makes his work more interesting to analyze and think about after the fact, but less interesting to actually engage with directly imo. nabokov has the same problem. anyway, syntactically they're similar so you're right about that, but faulkner's diction, rhythm, tone and POV methods are utilized much better. even the way faulkner interjects the n-word in his work has more spark and friction than conrad.
>>25174749>you're 18no you. see, i too can argue like an intellectual
>>25174749Now you’re just acting aloof. We both like McCarthy and Joyce. But I mean, I have a 16 year old brother who loves the shit out of Blood Meridian and The Road. And I lent him Dubliners, he was instantly filtered.
>>25173957>Joyce Carol Oates aka "GOGGLES"Halfway through. The number of canonical and contemporary author killshots (and the whole opening conceit of Infinite Jest getting published today) are hilarious.>>25173993>those he championed like Joyce and Faulkner.First counterfactual, second incidental with is editors. What Emerson required of American Literature (to stop aping Europeans), he just got it done.
>>25174713It's literally true. Can you really say Faulkner couldn't have written these passages?>Singleton stood at the door with his face to the light and his back to the darkness. And alone in the dim emptiness of the sleeping forecastle he appeared bigger, colossal, very old; old as Father Time himself, who should have come there into this place as quiet as a sepulchre to contemplate with patient eyes the short victory of sleep, the consoler. Yet he was only a child of time, a lonely relic of a devoured and forgotten generation. He stood, still strong, as ever unthinking; a ready man with a vast empty past and with no future, with his childlike impulses and his man’s passions already dead within his tattooed breast. The men who could understand his silence were gone — those men who knew how to exist beyond the pale of life and within sight of eternity. They had been strong, as those are strong who know neither doubts nor hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted, unruly and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent those men as whining over every mouthful of their food; as going about their work in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew toil, privation, violence, debauchery — but knew not fear, and had no desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to inspire; voiceless men — but men enough to scorn in their hearts the sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate>Till then he had been standing meditative and unthinking, reposeful and hopeless, with a face grim and blank — a sixty-year-old child of the mysterious sea. The thoughts of all his lifetime could have been expressed in six words, but the stir of those things that were as much part of his existence as his beating heart called up a gleam of alert understanding upon the sternness of his aged face. The flame of the lamp swayed, and the old man, with knitted and bushy eyebrows, stood over the brake, watchful and motionless in the wild saraband of dancing shadows. Then the ship, obedient to the call of her anchor, forged ahead slightly and eased the strain. The cable relieved, hung down, and after swaying imperceptibly to and fro dropped with a loud tap on the hard wood planks. Singleton seized the high lever, and, by a violent throw forward of his body, wrung out another half-turn from the brake. He recovered himself, breathed largely, and remained for a while glaring down at the powerful and compact engine that squatted on the deck at his feet like some quiet monster — a creature amazing and tame.
>>25174763you literally dont know how to use the word literally
>>25174197>I love Joyce but nearly everything in his style in straight downstream fromWagner, in which case Joyce was more retrograde than futurist, even with Finnegan's/
>>25174771is that book good? seems interesting?
>>25174763Too many commas and not enough words sending me to the dictionary. Any other questions?
>>25174757Personally, I could never tell that he was ESL from reading him and even if that is true, you really have to look for it to know. Disagree about diction and tone, Faulkner borrows both heavily from Conrad>>25174763The main difference that I can notice is obviously in the type of books they write. Conrad's novels are adventure novels in some sense (ironically closer to McCarthy here than Faulkner) while Faulkner is a full blown modernist with polyphonic narratives. Faulkner also has some southern diction and is almost always gloomy and ominous, while Conrad can be a bit performative and romantic to break up the gothic portentousness
>>25174355It's (still) satirizing Wallace's stunted male academese from the opening.
>>25174766Have you read Faulkner?>>25174778>too many commasYou definitely haven't >not enough words sending me to the dictionaryHugely overstated for Faulkner imo. Relatively speaking, McCarthy and Joyce are an order of magnitude bigger spammers of thesaurus.
>>25174779>I could never tell that he was ESLSkill issue, it's something that is frequently noted about his work, just like with Nabby. People do disagree on whether it's a good or bad thing or whether it's even relevant at all I admit, but it's not unobvious to native speakers.
>>2517397267
>>25174790But where do you draw the line for affectation and ESLness? Native speakers would almost always at first glance think of McCarthy's prose as ESL as well.
>>25173957>Infinite Jest was something of a literary psyop, and McCarthy’s intelligence was being insulted by it: the press, the prose, and the pose — the bandana crown. Everyone who could steady their fawning fingers over a keyboard was lining up to say, “Yes, I am a television addict too! How did he know!” and to hail Wallace as the megatalent America had been waiting for. Everyone else who had never read Gravity’s Rainbow and so couldn’t spot the shoddy simulacrum by the first use of the word “interface” was crowning Infinite Jest the greatest work of the 20th century, a novel pioneering a revolutionary form the way Ulysses had done before it. There hadn’t been such a coronation since The Naked and the Dead, and we know now what McCarthy thought of Mailer. Operation Mockingbird spade, for which we have industrial ritual slaughter nonce spookesses like picrel to thank. Absolute Jelq was AstroTurf.
>>25174787>anyone who disagrees with me is lying
>>25174763For comparisons sake, here is Faulkner:>He was using a bed, one chair, a bureau on which he had spread a towel and upon which lay his brushes, his watch, his pipe and tobacco pouch, and, propped against a book, a photograph of his step-daughter, Little Belle. Upon the glazed surface a highlight lay. He shifted the photograph until the face came clear. He stood before it, looking at the sweet, inscrutable face which looked in turn at something just beyond his shoulder, out of the dead cardboard. He was thinking of the grape arbor in Kinston, of summer twilight and the murmur of voices darkening into silence as he approached, who meant them, her, no harm; who meant her less than harm, good God; darkening into the pale whisper of her white dress, of the delicate and urgent mammalian whisper of that curious small flesh which he had not begot and in which appeared to be vatted delicately some seething sympathy with the blossoming grape.>He moved, suddenly. As of its own accord the photograph had shifted, slipping a little from its precarious balancing against the book. The image blurred into the highlight, like something familiar seen beneath disturbed though clear water; he looked at the familiar image with a kind of quiet horror and despair, at a face suddenly older in sin than he would ever be, a face more blurred than sweet, at eyes more secret than soft. In reaching for it, he knocked it flat; whereupon once more the face mused tenderly behind the rigid travesty of the painted mouth, contemplating something beyond his shoulder. He lay in bed, dressed, with the light burning, until he heard the court-house clock strike three. Then he left the house, putting his watch and his tobacco pouch into his pocket.
>>25174800You didn't disagree. You just posted useless strings of words which is all you have been doing since the start.
>>25174814nta, you're just clearly a disingenuous retard shitting out baseless assumptions after another
>>25174778>Faulkner >too many commas
>>25173957>The editor should not, as Nabokov pointed out in the afterword to Lolita, mistake themselves for your muse. Line Editors are plastic surgeons, if they could directly lengthen your telomeres. Developmental Editors don't have the chops to serve as them (or a writer), and as wet-LLMs have displaced Line Editors to the literary detriment of all; no one knows what the fuck they are doing aside corporate struggle sessions and bean counting ... a kingmaker like Ezra Pound, or H. L. Mencken is unthinkable today. You can't worship Shakespeare and Mammon.
>>25174823Those aren't Faulkner excerpts.
>>25174834Buying books =/= reading books. All look to be in immaculate shape, too. As expected of someone who buys books to show off.
>>25174827No, you're implying that one of the biggest punctuation spammers in American literature did not use commas abundantly.
>>25174798>But where do you draw the line for affectation and ESLness?I don't know how to explain it, it's just something I can sense and intuit, like listening to someone speak English but they have a noticeable but not too thick accent. I also haven't read him in years. Its like his sentences are written with these midway self-aware second guesses or something. A lot of people say his Polish grammar/syntax sneaks into his writing often but I don't know anything about Polish so I can't comment on that personally.>Native speakers would almost always at first glance think of McCarthy's prose as ESL as well.I've never come across this. I'm guessing BM makes people think maybe Spanish was his first language or something.
>>25174844>immaculate shapeYou can clearly see coffee stains on TSATF you absolute retard. I know people on here like to grasp at straws but your desperation is a new level of pathetic faggotry. Concession accepted, btw.
>>25174844You're a greedy little (you)pig, aren't you? Just one (you) isn't enough.
>>25174852I understand. At least someone else here have read Conrad beyond his high school novel.>>25174858Maybe you should read it instead of using it as a coffee stand.
>>25174844you must be brown if you consider those to be "immaculate" lmao
>>25174851
>>25174886It is hip not to use them in stream of consciousness. Faulkner spammed the hell out of them in his third person narration. See Absalom, Absalom!
>>25174892>punctuation isn't used in stream of consciousness>for evidence, see his hardest book, notorious for being almost entirely written in stream of consciousnessI accept your concession.
>>25174886oh, i had forgotten mccarthy ripped off "sound and the fury" to write "the road"
>>25174898Most definitely, TSAFT is one of his all-time favorites, it's not even funny how similar the two are at times.
>>25174898so much for muh individuality lmao
>>25174898>>25174903>>25174907Are you guys retarded? How is any of that similar to this?>A stagnant bilge along the lower bulkhead filled with wet papers and trash. A sour smell over everything. Damp and clammy. He thought the boat had been ransacked but it was the sea that had done it. There was a mahogany table in the middle of the saloon with hinged fiddles. The locker doors hanging open into the room and all the brasswork a dull green. He went through to the forward cabins. Past the galley. Flour and coffee in the floor and canned goods half crushed and rusting. A head with a stainless steel toilet and sink. The weak sea light fell through the clerestory portholes. Gear scattered everywhere. A mae west floating in the seepage.Did you just look at the lack of punctuation and think they are the same. This is the level of faulknerfags? Lel.
>>25174903>>25174907>faulknerfags so wound up they are babbling randomly nowKek. The sound and the fury is a derivative work. He didn't even wait for his source to be dead, immediately copied his contemporary shamelessly then denied it>"When asked about the influence of Joyce on his own writing during the early years of his fame, following the publication of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner tended to be understandably evasive. In a 1932 interview with Henry Nash Smith, for example, Faulkner claimed, in fact, that he had never read Ulysses, invoking instead a vague aural source for his knowledge of Joycean methods: ” ‘ You know,’ he smiled, ‘sometimes I think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact. I had heard of Joyce, of course,’ he went on. ‘Some one told me about what he was doing, and it is possible that I was influenced by what I heard’ ” (LIG 30). In a moment of irony that may not have been lost on the interviewer, Faulkner reached over to his table and handed Smith a 1924 edition of the book. . . By 1947, Faulkner hardly needed to be so coy, telling an English class at the University of Mississippi that Joyce was “the father of modern literature” (1974 FAB 1230). By 1957, Faulkner’s pronouncements on Joyce had become fully classical: “James Joyce was one of the great men of my time. He was electrocuted by the divine fire”
>>25174907Aww are you butthurt that your favorite writer is a cheap copy of better writers?
Why must EVERY thread turn into this? The author in the subject gets shat on, and then another author that isn’t too dissimilar gets assblasted too. That Gaddis thread had it with Pynchon.
>>25174939because mccarthy readers are autistic manchildren, we've been over this
>Faulkner>Won the Nobel and used the n word a gorillion times>McCarthy>Went on OprahNever read either but I know which one is cooler and which one is for low-t fags
>>25174939Insecure faulknerfags when someone starts counting receipts. It's ridiculous to call him a great writer when he was copying better writers not even 20 years his senior.
>>2517397280s television, which was the beginning of the end was, like all other's world-ending plagues, a boomer product.Gen X, much like millennials, Gen Z's and Gen alphas, were kids when it started. And once they start feeding you slop as a kid (be it 80s slop, 90s slop, internet slop or tiktok slop), it's incredibly difficult to pick yourself up.But boomers are to blame, as always. The others just produced versions of what they were fed, i.e. increasingly bastardized and inbred reproduction of the archetypical TV boomerslop.It's mass media as a whole, by making pop culture ubiquitous and inescapable, that doomed "high" art.
>>25174918>>25174929Copy pasting from online sources =/= reading books.
>>25174939You mean tribalism? Blame the /v/ tourists pretending to be erudite even though they just started reading like 5 years ago during Covid lockdowns.
>>25174951I’m trying to not involve myself in this firefight, and I’m impartial. But McCarthy wasn’t afraid to use nigger now and again.
>>25174951You have to be 18 to use this website.
>>25174898>>25174903>>25174907>Faulkner fans have mentally gymnasted their way into thinking that The Road of all fucking books is FaulknerianLmao. This is just straight up delusion. It's your mistake that you turned Faulkner into an idol in your heads without ever having read Conrad.
>>25174951not only did he win the nobel, he won with only one nomination, a rare gigachad achievement
>>25174964i figured but did he use it a literal GORILLION times?>>25174966but then i'll have outgrown writers like DFW and mccarthy, what then?
>>25174962God forbid people just enjoy different authors for different reasons and their talents or technique most unique to them as opposed to bringing one down to exalt another. Even crazier when you consider the fact that many of these authors generally respected each other’s work. It’s like they’re talking about their favourite boxer, or as you implied, video games.
>>25174959Speak for yourself. I am not the one who thinks that McCarthy’s most minimalistic book is similar to faulkner just because I am mad at him.>>25174976>underage already sides with faulkner without ever having read himThe entire story of this thread btw lol.
>>25174954>It's ridiculous to call him a great writerI guess Cornball McCorncab is ridiculous, then, considering he was one of his all-time biggest fans.
/lit/ has basically turned on McCarthy cause he became reddit mainstream.
>>25174987>cormac turning his back on modern novels: LE GOOD>anyone else turning their back on modern novels: LE BAD
>>25174984Writers always have had questionable taste. See Borges. It also then stands to reason that McCarthy’s best work was written when he flushed any semblance of faulkner out of his system. That was what was worsening the early novels (his first one being the worst ironically)
>>25174983you sound mad
>>25174987More specifically Blood Meridian became reddit. It was originally the cool semi-hidden masterpiece while The Road and No Country got all the mainstream attention.
>>25174994>said he, seething
>>25174992nine times outta ten i'm trusting their taste over literal whos
>>25174987I still enjoy McCarthy, and Dostoevsky. It matters not what a bunch of reddit faggots and tiktok performative retard zoomers think, good on them I guess.>>25174999That’s why it’s okay (or something) to like The Crossing and Suttree here.
>>25173957>Guy heavily inspired by Modernism doesn't like PostmodernismMakes sense to me
>>25174898I will have you know that short, clipped and alternating dialogue is a Hemingway thing. So even here Faulkner might have been "copying" from his rival.
>>25175003I have seen more of "Suttree was actually his best novel" posting lol.
>>25175008Even reditturds are acting contrarian now
>>25175000still sounds mad
>>25175004Where do you think the postmodernists came from?
>>25175011Back to your homework
>>25175018Continental Europe? Or is this a trick question?
>>25175018The post office
>>25175006TSAFT came out in 1929 and sources always say Faulkner started reading Hemingway in the '30s
>>25175027And as we can see from posts in this thread, Faulkner was the idol of truth amirite? They both had a common mentor in Sherwood Anderson.
>>25175031I don't know what you're accusing me of or what you think I'm suggesting, I'm just pointing out that book probably predates the Hemingway influence if any at all, maybe As I Lay Dying is a better example, I remember that book having simpler diction and short chapters
>>25175031>Sherwood AndersonSuch a great writer, and Winesburg, Ohio is a classic. Vastly underrated. As someone who just entered this thread, it pains me to see his name being brought up by someone talking about literature in this kind of manner. Hope you use your knowledge to discuss literature in a much more intellectual manner worthy of Sherwood Anderson rather than in the way you and your fellow debater are currently engaging in. That's all from me. You can continue your arguing.
>>25175047Anderson was good but later academia has always regarded him a weak novelist.
>>25175046I am not accusing you of anything. Faulkner was not influenced by Hemingway in anyway. One short conversation being reminiscent is hardly a proof of influence when this isn't some particularly novel thing that couldn't happen in real life. Hemingway himself took it from hard-boiled noir writers.
>>25175053Okay that kinda clears things up. No idea what the "idol of truth" part is about though
Stephen King said Blood Meridian was one of his favorite novels
>>25174824Kek good post
>>25174699That's the law of 4chan. Once enough people like anything unironically the contrarian shitposters will flock to threads about it like flies to shit. It's best to avoid discussing your favorite things anywhere on this website because they will simply be defiled by mouthbreathers who got don't get it, it's the definition of pearls before swine. You're much better off only discussing relatively obscure works that you liked but aren't your favorite.
>>25175072There was a thread on the Cormac Society forum in which someone interviewed him, and Cormac said he thought well of Stephen King.
>>25175085Many of his books before ~2000 are good.
>>25175078There's a Gaddis and Pynchon thread that have seriously made me reconsider coming here. Just absolute trainwrecks. I'm sure I lost neurons reading through them, don't understand the idiots who would participate in them either. I had to go read some papers off orbit to cleanse my mind.
>>25175092Yes, I think The Stand uncut in particular is really solid writing.
>>25175093>papers off orbitwtf is orbit? or this some meme?
>>25173960>“I said: it’s drek. It’s drivel.”So, /lit/.
>>25174999>Blood Meridian became redditfuck you
I don’t usually read genreslop but I read Blood Meridian not long back and it was pretty good! Fun, if macabre adventure with a lot of nice descriptive scenery. It’s quite ekphratic
>>25174999>>25175003You faggots never liked this author. You're just retarded hipsters that only like what is "fringe" like a woman who is told how to dress, just like redditors like whatever it's mainstream, it's all facade to fit in. Every post you make on the matter it's worthless.
>>25175645least hysterical corncob fan
>>25175661What part of my post it's hysterical? It's true, and you don't have to read it with a yelling voice in your head if it hurts your feelings.
>>25174987Wendigoon and his consequences have been a disaster for literary discourse online
>>25175177Cormac is probably the best genre writer in the game, or at least tied with Wolfe. Pynchon has some good stories as well.
If McCarthy is so irrelevant, why do we keep talking about him?
>>25175824>LITERALLY raped a childShe was sixteen. Barely old enough to tie her own shoelaces, and he RAPED her. This is SICK.
>>25173957Really interesting article. Thanks for posting.
>>25173957sounds pretentious desu. of course he didn't like DFW, he got called out
>>25175831quintessential kike
>>25175665The fact that I said I like Corncob and yet you’re somehow convinced I don’t because I said I don’t care that reddit likes him does make you sound just a wee bit, a teeny little bit, a smidgen deranged.
>>25175939Actually the fact that he hates DFW is funny since DFW talked very positive about his writing.
>>25173972Kek, I'm saving this.
>>25176343DFW literally called him a top 3 contemporary writer in post-war America lmao. He'd have been destroyed learning this, were he alive.
>>25175047You write like a fag.
>>25174760How can anyone be filtered by Dubliners?
>>25175824holy fucking based
>>25175057He is saying that Faulkner may have been lying about only having read Hemingway in the 30s
>>25176553He’s a zoomer plotfaggot who doesn’t understand literature enough to distinguish good writing from bad writing. He considered BM an extremely difficult read, but it was like the second book he ever read.
Remember kids, Corncob believed in you>While I have emphasized the scoffer and the scold in McCarthy’s personality (traits he earned every right to disport at his leisure), McCarthy also had a heart. He knew young unpublished talent was out there, and he would express to Britt an empathetic sadness for young writers and how hard they must have it. The hoops they must jump through, the arbitrary and artless gatekeepers they must charm, and the credentials unnecessary and detractive to creativity that must be gathered in order to write well. Then the need to succeed immediately on a paltry advance or be set loose upon the zephyrs and find a new line of work. A Faustian journey of delousing stations that rewards writers only in relation to how willingly they relinquish originality and the ability to develop their talent naturally.
>>25176562It's possible your brother is only pretending to like McCarthy just to fit in with the snobbish mainstream.
This is funny. I think Mailer only went to him to pick a fight because he wanted validation. The seethe he would've caused had his opinions been public from the beginning...Updike was an admirer:>A movie has a few weeks to find its audience, and television shows flit by in an hour, but books physically endure, in public and private libraries, for generations. Buried reputations, like Melville’s, resurface in academia; avant-garde worthies such as Cormac McCarthy attain, late in life, bestseller lists and The Oprah Winfrey Show.Roth thought highly of him and was on the committee that chose him for lifetime achievement award. DeLillo spoke glowingly about feeling kinship with Blood meridian in one interview in the 90s (it was in a book of interviews with him, can't remember the name).Joyce carol oates had quite a few glowing tweets about him>now here is a purely literary, visionary, word-besotted artist. McCarthy may be quoted out of context beautifully & his imagination reduced to a few bleak passages, but over all he is a titan of literature fierce & indomitable as a tornado. that is art–accumulative, intransigentDFW worshipped him and DeLillo the most of post-war American writers.And he just unanimously shat on them. I remember him saying that Gore Vidal was the best essayist in America but he understood little about fiction.
>>25176567Nah I reckon probably he likes it, if only for superficial reasons like “the Judge is based lol” and likes quoting Glanton’s death scene. Ironic considering McCarthy isn’t exactly the chud people who read BM perceive him to be
maybe it's because i'm too young (30s...), but why should i spend any time working out this dense, irony poisoned avant-garde shit coming out of NY? why couldn't they tie their shit into a traditional narrative like most of the western canon?pretty sure DFW expected people to take weeks or months w/ his novel
>>25173957Pynchon, DeLillo, and DFW are much better writers than him. He comes across as jealous.
>>25176603>why do you do something new, instead of the same thing that's been done over and over?this is why you're not a successful artist
>>25176605I think all 4 of them are far too different stylistically to fairly compare.
>>25176607if you aren't posting @ me out of an artist commune you never stood a chance kid
>>25176603> why couldn't they tie their shit into a traditional narrative like most of the western canon?Because they're following in the traditions of the part of the western canon that YOU didn't read (Rabelais)
>>25176609And yet retards here lump them in together because 3/4 classify as postmodern. Shows what they know. DFW and Delillo have similar thematic elements.
>>25176614They're also both trash. Don't forget that similarity.
>>25176609>>25176614Literally all of them are brought up in the OP.
>>25176605>DFW betterLOL no
>>25176605>pynchon>dfw>better writers than McCarthy
I'm starting to suspect that no one on this board actually reads the books they talk about.
>>25176623Don't forget pynchon. Absolutely garbage writer
>>25176628lmao PYNCHED
>>25176634pynchon makes Asimov read like Cervantes
>>25176638uh huh
>>25176640Uh ye
>>25176626Then there's guys like me who read but don't talk about the books because everybody's mean and it's scary to talk to mean people
>>25176558That was my very first interpretation until I tried finding the "posts in this thread" that would somehow magically confirm this
>>25176727Him lying about not having read Ulysses>>25174929
>>25176658baste
>>25176748None of that is at all contradictory. Everything he said could have been true, none of it is mutually exclusive.
>>25176748Ulysses, that business again...
>>25176756The guy was stalking Joyce in 1925 in Paris. You seriously can't believe he hadn’t read Ulysses when TSATF has Joyce's fingerprints all over it.
Aww that’s a shame, or that’s cool, I suppose. It’s always fun to learn what writers thought about other writers; thanks for that little fact OP, maugre prolixity. You may now close the thread.
>>25176946lmao PYNCHED
>>25176955that's not even the quote
>>25175824Yeah I'm thinking based
Cormac was a bit of a tool.
>>25174707>literally>literally>literally
>>25178147Figuratively speaking, of course.
>>25178147you'd think this would be the ONE board on the site where retards could at least learn to use that word properly kek. nothing but high school drop outs around these parts.
>>25173957dude fuck you infinite jest is incredible you need to be a former methhead to truly get it tho speaking from personal experience. "it no longer delimits the hole." you need to also lowkey have homestuck autism (actual act 1 homestuck autism not fake shipper fujo autism) atleast as a zoomer. i read homestuck at 13 (ACTUALLY read it.) and now my favorite novel is infinite jest LOL. cormac has boomer autism instead of homestuck autism and thats why he doesnt get it.
>>25178582(same anon) when i first started reading IJ and i got to the "tap tap" scene thats when i knew. i was like holy fuck lol holy fuuuuck. for full transparency i'm 400 pages in now and i fucking adore it ive been reading it very slowly though just bc not alot of downtime
>>25175824this is completely irrelevant and nonsensical. i feel like youre implying that by reposting it as some sort of gotcha? when i think we all on 4chan as a collective generally agree with whatever point you're trying to make that moralizing an author is nonsense
>>25178147One could argue he’s literally illiterate
>>25178147>>25178621>>25178535>seething cucknerfagsRich coming from retards who can't tell one style from another
>>25178535Faulkner's prose is LITERALLY a Conrad rip-off though. The proof is in the thread. Your problem you can't read.
>Rajeesh is seething over his middlebrow reddit writer, McCuckathy, is being criticized Tale old ad time
>>25178636I’m not seething at all, I don’t care about Faulkner or mccarthy enough. I’m just saying you’re a terrible writer who should work on your syntax.
>>25178646>those proper noun capitalizationsSuuuure. Keep seething.
>>25178645You too should work on yours. This is dreadful
>>25178661Chalk it down to laziness. I wasn’t incorrectly utilising adverbs like you. Continue to cope that I’m somehow a faulknerfag.
>rajeesh samefaggingKek kwab kek
>>25178666>incorrectlyKys ESL
It appears my insouciance has led to both sides getting upset with me. That’s unfortunate.
>>25178669Mátate, frijolero.
>>25178672Would you prefer I said erroneously? Inaccurately? like a retard? Stupidly? Faggotly? Seethingly?
>>25178682NTA but I'd have said>inappropriately
>>25178682Don’t engage with Rajeesh. Half the posts ITT is him seething in his stilted English. He shows up in every McCuckathy thread
>crying about the modsHoly preddit personified. Go back to Wendigoon’s subreddit, bub
>>25178688You're one to talk about stilted English, beanerLol>>25178694They are the same person. If you insult the beaner, he deletes replies for "le racism" lmao.
>>25178701You are more upset than the Faulkner defenders here, it appears.
>>25178703That's not possible.
>>25178703>You're more upset than Cormac McCarthyHe's dead, of course I am.
>>25178639you don't know how to use the word "literally" and it makes you look like a seething manchild. no wonder you defend simplistic writing
why are so many mccarthy fans esl, i swear these threads pop up at least once a week these days. are higher IQ writers just too much for them to handle?
DFW was a medium IQ person who wrote medium IQ stories. McCarthy was a high IQ person who wrote medium IQ stories. Change my mind.
>>25178721The biggest McCarthy hater in the thread and on the board in general is a native spanish speaker>reply deletedThere's your proof lmao.
>>25178714Said the faggot faulknerfag who cannot see the blatant ripoff. I did not misuse the word, you're just too angry to admit that what i said was true.
>>25178724I can agree with that, I don’t really enjoy McCarthy’s stuff but he was definitely intelligent. It’s like Dostoevsky in that sense, an intelligent man who appeals to average readers.
>i did not misuse the wordyou literally did.
>>25178740All great writers appealed to readers all across the spectrum. You're projecting your own dislike for a fanbase onto an author's work. Ironically habitual of the average midwit
>>25178639>literally rip offso faulkner literally, physically ripped out pages from conrad with his own hands and put them into his books? learn how to speak english, deadbeat retard
>>25178777Figuratively based.
>>25178777Trips of Truth KEK
>>25178759>misuses the wordHypocrisy!>>25178777>>physically ripped off pages>this is the intelligence of the average FaulknerchudLMAO. You must be retarded if you're arguing for such pedantry unironically.https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rip-off
>>25178769>You're projecting your own dislike for a fanbase onto an author's workTo assume that I dislike a fanbase, only tells me that “average readers” is considered an insult to you. I’m saying their work is accessible enough to be enjoyed by a layperson. To be so presumptuous like you are, is a midwit trait.
>>25178807>>25178847no one likes you. we all think you're retarded. we all want you to kill yourself. even if we can't agree on faulkner vs dfw vs cormac, we all agree you are LITERALLY a faggot
>>25178847It seems you ironically don't have a good reading comprehension. That's not what the person you originally replied to was saying. Both Dosto and Cormac are feted by the most snobbish writers, that the general public also likes them don't imply that their works are meant only for those with medium IQ. Who is more popular among the normies than Shakespeare? Was he solely writing for the midwits as well? This reddit sort of passive aggression where something that isn't understood to you must clearly be a lack of intelligence is the cleanest mark of the midwit.
>>25178847Average readers was meant as an insult by you even if you will backpedal hard now. The cliched"Not that the writer is bad but his work must be middling because he attracts (what I think) the common denominators among readers." As if popularity can only ever be a mark of a mid work.If I ask you what you even know about McCarthy’s work, you'll go dead silent.>>25178863Stop samefagging, retard.
>>25174049If he started writing serious literature he wouldn't be able to write about the proles from the side of the proles.
>>25178847>To assume that I dislike a fanbaseEither you are trying for sophistication or you genuinely think everyone in this thread is an idiot. Have a consistent opinion.
>>25178724McCarthy was a high IQ person who wrote high IQ stories which are critiqued exclusively by low IQ persons
Everyone in this thread has profound mental retardation
>>25178881Faulkner made a career doing this, but I agree billy never wrote serious literature.
>>25178874>The cliched "Not that the writer is bad but his work must be middling because he attracts (what I think) the common denominators among readers." As if popularity can only ever be a mark of a mid work.You’re putting words in my mouth, I said what I said, you misinterpreted it. Also, I don’t really enjoy McCarthy’s stuff is what I said, not that he was bad. He’s a good, even great writer.>>25178885I really couldn’t care less what other people think of something, I was complimenting them on their accessibility and you’re all taking it as an insult, I couldn’t care less about how I’m perceived here, call me what you want. What I do care about is the misconstrued statement I made being cleared up.>>25178869No I know what he was saying, he was calling DFW and Cormac writers that appeal most to midwits. I say average as an edulcoration sure, what I mean by this is that IT can be enjoyed by everyone, scholars and hobbyists alike. He meant it as an insult probably, I didn’t.
>>25178950So you agree you failed to understand what that poster was saying, right?
>>25178959Nah I’ll admit just twisted his words to fit my agenda though :)
>>25178807>https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rip-offno where in this link does it mention about anything being literally ripped. looks like you lose.
>>25178807>pedantry = providing an example of the word I misused being used correctly Okay if you say so.
The thought of McCarthy picking up IJ and physically launching the book away and recoiling in disgust after reading one sentence is insanely funny
>>25178636>REEEEEEEEEEAt least you didn't write "literally" again.
>>25179358>retard with his mental gymnastics >>25179370It's an example proving that you're retarded
>>25174791Remember when numbers were actually good? Like 420 or 69?
>>25180117Hey, it’s over now. And it’s clear you couldn’t reach an understanding, so leave it.>>25180110It is rather funny. Though I wonder, given his disdain for IJ and Proust, one could argue one of the things he’s opposed to is writing he deems prolix or digressive. But that can’t be the case when you consider who else he enjoys.
The last book he ever wrote was awful. He fell off anyway who cares.
>>25178912based
>>25178912Agreed, this includes me.
>>25180126It's clear you're a fag with no friends and such has been pointed out by multiple anons ITT, lol.
>>25180204>faulknerincel still seething
>>25180230NTA but I gotta admit, I just finished The Sound and The Fury for the first time, and I was severely underwhelmed. There were some things in it I liked, but you fags hype him up way too much. I much prefer Infinite Jest or any McCarthy novel over it.
These authors can be real primadonnas.
>>25174834god I love this board sometimes
>>25179370The dictionary literally says otherwise. Rip off is supposed to mean "shameless imitation", not ripping out physical pages like you were implying, unless it was a joke.
>>25180234>Infinite Jest
>>25178912the great literary minds of our generation are gathered here today
poop
>>25178912*Everyone on this board
>>25180388This is the avant-garde we've been looking for.
Faulknercels want us to believe that this is good writing>The train swung around the curve, the engine puffing with short, heavy blasts, and they passed smoothly from sight that way, with that quality about them of shabby and timeless patience, of static serenity: that blending of childlike and ready incompetence and paradoxical reliability that tends and protects them it loves out of all reason and robs them steadily and evades responsibility and obligations by means too barefaced to be called subterfuge even and is taken in theft or evasion with only that frank and spontaneous admiration for the victor which a gentleman feels for anyone who beats him in a fair contest, and withal a fond and unflagging tolerance for whitefolks' vagaries like that of a grandparent for unpredictable and troublesome children
>>25181171>smoothlyIs that and adverb? Tut, tut, tut. See me after class, little Billy.
>>25181171This is horrible but it's dishonest to pretend like McCarthy's writing is significantly different. He has the same rhythmic qualities, pretentious thesaurus insertions, overly specific descriptions, pseudoprofound connections, lack of grammar, etc.
>>25181197There are no thesaurus insertions here and McCarthy certainly doesn't waffle like this or about shit like this. He doesn't pretend to be the "le old wise man who knows the song of every le heart". McCarthy is performative, sure, but the language is distanced through antiquarianisms and poetic meter enough to be palatable. This is like bad Proust:>speaking of him as though he meant something more to her than the other people she knew, and seeming to establish between their two selves a sort of romantic bond that had made him smile. But at the age, already a little disillusioned, which Swann was approaching, at which one knows how to content oneself with being in love for the pleasure of it without requiring too much reciprocity, this closeness of two hearts, if it is no longer, as it was in one’s earliest youth, the goal towards which love necessarily tends, still remains linked to it by an association of ideas so strong that it may become the cause of love, if it occurs first. At an earlier time one dreamed of possessing the heart of the woman with whom one was in love; later, to feel that one possesses a woman’s heart may be enough to make one fall in love with her.
>>25173957>But McCarthy was nothing if not honest, and knew when on the fields of joyous contempt he’d been bettered, and so would say reverently of Christopher Hitchens, “No one can put someone down as beautifully as that man.”Are we really supposed to take this guy seriously?
If he really flung the book you know it was in a torment of jealousy. And then he hurried to scoop it up and swill down the rest of DFW's sparkling prose.
>>25182045No author would ever be jealous of DFW lad
>>25182052David Lipsky was. Famously.
>>25182053whom?
>>25182055Read a little, bubba, before you advance any more half-cocked overweening opinions on authors.
>>25173957>unc got filtered so hard he stopped reading:skull:
>>25182062who?
>>25174699>>25174708If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place." Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.
>>25174999>became redditIf both Blood Meridian and Project Hail Mary can be equally described as "reddit", that descriptor has lost any semantic meaningWhat you really mean is that BM became popular among young men on twitter around the late 2010s (no doubt spurred by the popular adaptations of The Road and NCFOM), college educated white women didn't like it and decreed it the new Infinite Jest read only by problematic performative white men, and now young male literary aspirants must denounce it as cringe and "reddit" because older guys like it, and booktok women won't like them if they don't.None of this discussion has anything to do with the book itself. Everyone denouncing McCarthy ITT is doing so because women they want to fuck think that he's cringe or problematic, and feel like they have to validate those beliefs to get a chance at glimpsing pussy.What Infinite Jest was, Blood Meridian is now, and yet another book shall become in the future. The wheel of Samsara grinds on as young men shape their opinions around what they think will get them fucked by college girls.
>>25182517It's reddit.
>>25182517This is the truest post in the thread and other anons will hate it because they're contrarians
>>25182517I kinda a little bit don’t really like it sorta because I’m just not into western fiction is all haha, no need to make a big song and dance about it. Sure, Cormac is a good writer, it doesn’t mean if I don’t like it it’s because I want to fuck a woman who finds the book problematic. You’re bound to find a group of people on reddit who enjoy anything, It’s a large (often insufferable) community after all. I never cared about what other people think of a book, if I like it, I like it; if I don’t, I don’t. >None of this discussion has anything to do with the book itself.I mean it’s not like OP was even talking about the book in the first place.
>>25182517>What Infinite Jest was, Blood Meridian is now, and yet another book shall become in the future. The wheel of Samsara grinds on as young men shape their opinions around what they think will get them fucked by college girlsYou write like a faggot.
>>25182819This is a bideo game?
>>25182833Foundry VTT. I’m running a campaign of Call of Cthulhu where players go on a haunted show of Bookworm. They find out about a new book that is becoming a worldwide bestseller, then they’re transported to another world where literary stock is slowly eroding reality. I will make it available publicly when I finish writing it up.
>>25182843Cool? Possibly.
