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>“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”
Joseph Conrad about D.H. Lawrence
>“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
William Faulkner about Ernest Hemingway
>“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
Oscar Wilde about Alexander Pope
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
Virginia Woolf about James Joyce
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Pretty much everything Nabokov ever said about most authors.
Nabokov criticisms were purely due to his stupid idea of aesthetics. He was treating those authors like his precious butterfly collection.
cosmoetica.com
Dan Schneider:
But let’s keep things simple. I am a poet. I am also a great poet. I am also a great poet who has written many great sonnets. I am therefore uniquely qualified to focus on & discuss them. Not that I could not provide exegesis of his plays- their dramatic vs. poetic content, etc.- but a sonnet’s very brevity lends it more easily to fruitful explication. & like it or not Shakespeare’s sonnets have the reputation as being the best in the biz. This is a fallacious claim, I believe, because very good arguments could be made for Petrarch’s, Spenser’s, Donne’s, Browning’s, Millay’s, Baudelaire’s, Rilke’s, Frost’s, Lowell’s, Berryman’s, & especially my own Omnisonnets all being better examples of the form’s felicitous engagement. I will now endeavor to point out some of the best & worst of the Bard’s sonnets; & explicate the merits & demerits of each.
Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac
“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
IIRC Nabokov always stayed classy though.
Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad
“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”
That's wonderful
DFW is the best example of a contemporary male writer lusting for a kind of awful greatness that he simply wasn’t able to achieve. A fraud.
>>“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
>William Faulkner about Ernest Hemingway
really makes me appreciate him instead of those hypocrites, he knows that the medium is simple but the message is brilliant
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. Did you read his last book? It’s all sauce-writing now, but he was good once. Before the sauce, or when he knew how to handle it."
t. Hemingway
i don't like when authors i like are mean about other authors i like
it feels like my parents fighting, i love you both ok
I know H. Bloom is not a writer but I found this today in his introduction to a book of criticism on Poe :
"Poe is an inescapable writer, but not a good one. He is, except perhaps for Mark Twain, the most popular of all American authors. The experience of reading Poe's stories out loud to oneself is not aesthetically very satisfying. [...]Having just reread four of his most famous stories, I find myself challenged to account for the gap between Poe's world-wide influence and the literary inadequacy of even his best work."
Well, he's not wrong. Poe's poems are dreadful.
this triggers me so much, he had said it's like he could write a good prose himself
>“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
absolutely SAVAGE
>Spenser's
Spenser's sonnets were dogshit, literally just as bland and generic as all the other sonnet sequences in the 16th century, plus the obligatory 'oooo look how different I've made everything, guess that makes it a Spenserian sonnet in Spenserian langauge in a Spenserian sonnet sequence hehe'
t. Based Flan
great answer
I like Faulkner and don't care for Hemingway, but what a stupid criticism. Not even worth going into detail why.
Is this guy pathological or something? Here's one of his sonnets """""better""""" than Shakespeare's:
STEVENS ON SAFARI
It can not ever change. What once was there
is still there because it will not be changed,
but something is changing. A feel for change
can be attained- yet not through change itself,
but rather without- through a change in view;
this pain beyond logic just rearranged,
like a leopard sneaking up into range,
of a young gazelle in ignorant health-
then the chase begins, the break from all things
thought as commonplace, yet hoped for as rare,
in a dutied life subsumed in a blue
besides color, or its recognition:
from a bower a glower, and the cat brings
forth the death of youth, this love of clear vision!
>male
>lusting
>awful greatness
He seems mad that Wallace didn't reciprocate his sadomasochistic gay crush on him.
look up his break and subsequent feud with edmund wilson
savage
"His writing is as awkward as his conduct with women."
Huxley on Kafka
No one can help admiring the richness of the country, and one is inclined to say that Timaeus was not only unacquainted with Africa but that he was childish and entirely deficient in judgement, and was still fettered by the ancient report handed down to us that the whole of Africa is sandy, dry, and unproductive. The same holds good regarding the animals. For the number of horses, oxen, sheep, and goats in the country is so large that I doubt if so many could be found in the rest of the world, because many of the African tribes make no use of cereals but live on the flesh of their cattle and among their cattle. Again, all are aware of the numbers and strength of the elephants, lions, and panthers in Africa, of the beauty of its buffaloes, and the size of its ostriches, creatures that do not exist at all in Europe while Africa is full of them. Timaeus has no information on this subject and seems of set purpose to tell the exact opposite of the actual facts.
"My heart truly goes out to those who have anxiously awaited this final installment of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I have read good books, and I have read bad, and I would rather nail my dick to the dining room table and then be sodomised by a baboon out of nowhere than read another one of his turgid sentences"
-Alice Munro
>Alice Munro
>"my dick"
If you're going to shitpost at least don't be so obviously illogical
chicks can have dicks, bro
She's Canadian, Einstein.
>"Oh no! Not another fucking elf!"
Hugo Dyson on LoTR
Ultraminimalism favored by too many C.Y. writers is deeply influenced by the aesthetic
norms of mass entertainment. Indeed, this fiction depends on what’s little more than a
crude inversion of these norms. Where television, especially its advertising, presents
everything in hyperbole, Ultraminimalism is deliberately flat, understated, “undersold.”
Where TV seeks everywhere to render its action either dramatic or melodramatic, to
move the viewer by displaying constant movement, the Minimalist describes an event
as one would an object, a geometric form in stasis; and he always does so from an emo-
tional remove of light years. Where television does and must aim always to please, the Catatonic writer hefts something of a finger at subject and reader alike: one has only toread a Bret Ellis sex scene (pick a page, any page) to realize that here pleasure is neither a subject nor an aim. My own aversion to Ultraminimalism, I think, stems from its
naive pretension. The Catatonic Bunch seem to feel that simply by inverting the values
imposed on us by television, commercial film, advertising, etc., they can automatically
achieve the aesthetic depth popular entertainment so conspicuously lacks. Really, of
course, the Ultraminimalists are no less infected by popular culture than other C.Y.
writers: they merely choose to define their art by opposition to their own atmosphere.
The attitude betrayed is similar to that of lightweight neo-classicals who felt that to be
non-vulgar was not just a requirement but an assurance of value, or of insecure scholars
who confuse obscurity with profundity. And it’s just about as annoying.
DFW btfoing some talentless hack
did u just assume xer gender
I was reading the same passage in the same book just now too.
"If a man does not have sauce then he's lost. But that same man can be lost in the sauce." - Gucci Mane
Why did he format his criticism like a poem?
He didn't, it's just the way the copy and paste turned out
Finally, we come to the third step, where the sophomoric attitudinizing of the half-witted Nietzsche, which does not even represent anything whole or coherent—mere sketches of immoral, unfounded ideas—is regarded by advanced men as the last word of philosophic science. [....] We have before us the incoherent, most rankly sensational writings of a witty, but narrow-minded and abnormal German, who is obsessed by the mania of greatness.
Tolstoy on Nietzsche
What, because DFW had the courage to write an epic where Easton Ellis doesn't have the balls or the imagination for anything longer than an extended screenplay?
This desu. Finding out that Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers didn't like each other was quite distressing.
>an epic
An epic piece of shit
FROM THE HORSE'S VERY MOUTH
literally tumblr: the post
fuck off
The majority of Europe then proceeded to listen to Nietzsche and not Tolstoy.
Not that the world wars were a good thing, mind...
literally mean asshole: the post
preach sister xD !
Oregano pastrami
Leddit leave now
>Wilson tries to school a LITERAL Russian in his own language
>Gets btfo
>Is salty for years after
Nabokov did nothing wrong.
>“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
idk, this could be considered a compliment
anyone know what novel Hemingway was criticizing here? seems to me only Absalom, Absalom! goes overboard with the "sauce-writing."
>>“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
>William Faulkner about Ernest Hemingway
How is this bad though? Why does Faulkner want to send his readers to the dictionary?
>Control-F "Turdsworth"
>no matches
step up your game Veeky Forums
Read this, cuck.
>You speak of Lord Byron and me – There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees – I describe what I imagine – Mine is the hardest task.
>Dan Schneider
>a great poet
brillant, very underrated post