Why the fuck haven't you read this yet

Edgy.

/thread

stop paying so much goddamn attention.

No, that's me.

>that quote
>almost verbatim gassposter

gassposter is michael silverblatt confirmed?

no that's me

You really can't go into one without the other. Gass was one of the judges who gave J R the national book award and they later became friends.

I have read many passages of his work. He is a bad writer: he should have invested his energy in some other occupation. If you can’t be either clear and simple like a Tolstoy, Chekhov, Borges or a Homer, neither beautifully poetic and exuberant like Shakespeare, Neruda, Proust and Nabokov, if you can only produce some prose garbage that is the equivalent of cubism and modern-art condescend in enormous paragraphs, then writing is not for you.

>why the fuck haven't you read this yet

Why would I waste my time with this guy and his egocentrism when I can read the plays of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, or (to quote some modern books) the wonderful Memoirs of Hadrian, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, or The Death of Virgil, the short-stories of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro?

Why don’t re-read Proust and Tolstoy? Why don’t start Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot”, that I still haven’t read?

Gaddis is a failed artist, neither elegant nor exuberant. It’s like some sort of conjunction of all the failures and deficiencies in James Joyce work, but without the redeeming qualities.

lmao raymond carver

>equivalent of modern art

lol. It literally is "modern art". Perhaps you've heard of the terms "modernism" and "post-modern". You seem awfully stupid user. Perhaps you should refrain from passing any artistic judgments.

I just ordered a copy of this bad boy. I already have a first edition of the paperback (simultaneous print runs) that I bought when it was out of print. Now that it's back and cheap, I picked up a beater copy to read/annotate starting Monday. Wish me luck!

To me modern is anything produced on our own epoch: Alice Munro is modern, for example.

As for Gaddis and his school of writing: it is trash. You should take care before calling people stupid when you are forcing yourself to read bad “literature” only to show off or in order to be a man of your time.

Gaddis is not respected by the great public and not even for readers and the majority of writers. He played the game and lost. It is your problem if you want to waste your time with the product of talentless minds.

This is just untrue. Such a weird post.

stop joking around. have you read his books? how could anyone call the recognitions talentless. he you seen how stuffed it is with knowledge lol

Wew lad. Never post on this board again.

Nope. Alice Munro is contemporary. Art terminology doesn't always just follow the dictionary definition of the words, bub.

Postmodern literature is a nest of untalented crows. They produce boring, confuse, unpoetic books, and everybody knows that (even themselves), although there seems to be a taboo that controls people’s tongue, something like: “I better not say that this book is bad; they might thing I am stupid or uncultured”. Thankfully, the world is coming out of it, slowly awakening from this nightmare, as it is coming out of modernist art. Elegance is returning to writing and, in the field of plastic arts, there are countless ateliers opening in the world and reviving the old multi-secular knowledge of drawing, painting and sculpting.

More and more people are having the courage to point out and say: “The emperor has no clothes”.

The ultimate test will be, as always, that of time. But for now it suffices to say that most postmodern books are tedious and unpleasant, a sort of angry buzz of people who would love to write like Shakespeare but can only produce verbal rubble piles which, among themselves, is called "poetic".

The fact is: it is easier to write enormous and unorganized books, uninteresting books, than to actually write great poetry, or great characters or great dialogues. It is easier to write the unreadable mountain of trash, and many untalented people, who were socially awkward and read a lot during their teens, decide to become themselves writers, but that despite of the fact that they are not gifted or are willing to endure the several years of learning. The same with painting and sculpture.

No wonder many of you people praise Gaddis: one only needs to look at the trash that is presented at most critic threads. It is a caress to your egos to call “work of genius” the same kind of trash that you can produce with your small talent and lazy work ethic.

>(to quote some modern books) the wonderful Memoirs of Hadrian, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, or The Death of Virgil, the short-stories of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro?

Except for Broch, you have the taste of a 17 year old tumblr girl. You don't know shit, faggot. Stop trying so hard.

>Neruda

Top kek

“From the moment that art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art. "The 'refined,' the rich, the professional 'do-nothings', the distillers of quintessence desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my mind. "The less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequent affluence. Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. "But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown--a mountebank. "I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.”
- Pablo Picasso - 1952, In Art/The Artist

You have already lost. You will never produce anything meaningful in art.

I think you are the pleb here, m8

you're on Veeky Forums
don't forget

GASS BUMP

Where can I find a copy? Or a mobi file of it.

will it make me feel the way 2888 did? :(

How did that make you feel?

thrust for life...

Well, jokes on you Gaddis had a regular job for most of his life, can't remember doing what now though.

He was a fact checker for The New Yorker in the 50s, later worked in PR and advertising departments at various companies, some US government projects, and taught at a few colleges in the 60s and 70s.

The guy is my hero.
I want to be just like him.

It's your mother, fag.

I don't see why you would. He was a great writer, sure, but he also didn't meet his father until he was in his 20s, spent years at jobs he hated to support his wife (who divorced him) and kids, ended up getting another divorce, was strapped for cash during most of his life, and only briefly attained recognition.

It's not an enviable life by any means.

It's too hard to read. JR makes Raymond Carver read like a Bernstein Bears book

I'm not being mean but their is nothing challenging about a Raymond Carver book. I really like him, comfy lit.

how the fuck is it hard to read. I'm reading the right now. this book is just talking. are you fucking retarded. you can't read dialogue? they say people's names all the time. how fucking stupid can you be.

How is it hard? I read it in just under two weeks. It's a lot more straightforward than The Recognitions Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses.

this board is fucking terrified of gaddis. they think they aren't smart enough or some shit. it's pretty funny.

first post itt but i have to say that you are trying super hard right now. and i've read gaddis so don't try that card. you are being an ass about it.

It's a terrible mindset. With reading, it's best not to put the pussy on a pedestal.

are you a gaddis bitch toooo?

They got memed the fuck out by his reputation. The Recognitions is his hardest book and it's still not insanely difficult or anything. He just doesn't spell out every last detail like most current authors and many of his contemporaries.

>clear and simple
>Borges

Because I'm reading A Frolic of His Own first.
Because Gaddis is still worth talking about.

Agree with the above guy trashing pomo.

It's not that Pynchon or gaddis can't write good stuff. It's that they surround everything in boring shit. And you guys won't admit it.

Also stop this pathetic meme of thinking books are humourous. I've read a lot of books and 2 hours on Veeky Forums brings more laughter than a lifetime of books

Frolic is somewhat more amusing in the context of already having read J R though. It's sort of like J R but with the 'murrican legal system rather than business. There's even a callback to an event from J R fairly early on.

Maximalism is fucking horrible, I agree.
Your last thought is too silly to address any further.

>2 hours on Veeky Forums brings more laughter than a lifetime of books

That's called Autism, I'm afraid.

>The Recognitions is his hardest book
Not even close, but it's certainly his best.

Yes.

>Maximalism is fucking horrible
Certainly not. It's just a different way to communicate.

These words hit me hard. They make me want to recite a Kanye West lyric; you know which one.

It's called the Mere Exposure Effect, yo.

I find something entirely insincere about this. I'm not sure if I think it's myopic or banal or whatever. I just don't believe he feels that way about his work. Rather, I believe he felt that from time to time, it's a commonality among most artists, but I doubt very much this was the dominating mind.

I disagree, but I certainly see why you feel that way. If you don't mind answering, are you American?

How can you find Gaddis unpoetic?

J R and Frolic might be "harder" if you have a terrible attention span or your short term memory is shot, but those aren't real considerations.

He downplays his achievements, but I think that comes as a natural corollary to being considered "one of the greats." While art was once seen as a craft of the utmost technical prowess, it has now become the pitch for the "intellectual charlatan," by which I really think PP means: technical feats have for the most part been all done, now it's time for concepts to take the main-stage of art itself. Really, I think this whole passage is merely a humble-brag, hence your deeming it rightfully insincere.

Who else here /skipped the dialogue/?

Stop looking at one dimension, and stop projecting yourself onto "the world."

You could "read" it in one sitting if you do that.

someone didn't get Borges :)

I agree with you re: those anons.

Gaddis said JR was his hardest book to read because it asked so much from the reader. That said, he did also say that after getting used to it, the reader should read it pretty quickly, letting the dialog flow naturally. He said that was preferable to reading every line carefully to make sure you didn't miss anything. Part of life is missing things.

See his Paris Review interview for the source of all that.

200pgs in and I am loving it. For anyone intimidated by Gaddis, read the introduction for A Rush to Second Place. It outlines what Gaddis was obsessed with and how he relayed it into his writing, with that in mind its so much easier.

That quote is fake. Giovanni Papini

I'm on page 100. it's fucking hilarious. the kids on the school trip were killing me.

They're trying to present history in a way that's not mainstream. Middle-brow plebs resent this and want to be spoon-fed.

There's no reason why you can't enjoy both po-mo and 'realism.'

the whole scene with Gibbs teaching entropy was golden

Wait until you get to the penis scene.
I don't want to spoil anything, but Gaddis was Jewish.

He said that as more of a concession to his critics than anything. If you read his letters, you can see how exasperated he is by the fact that small town/ small publication reviewers have absolutely no problem reading and having fun with it, but big city/ big publication ones talk about how "challenging" or unreadable it is.