McElroy Thread(?):

"Lawrence meant a doctrinaire sweeping-away of repressive impediments in our feeling about sexuality and what I didn't understand at the time—and the symptom of this was that I didn’t understand Women in Love, didn't
understand how good it is—was—that Lawrence is not all that physical. Lawrence is physical by way of the psychical, by way of a rapid-moving but cloudy language. But it works. Sloppy as it some
times is. And it wasn't until about 1975 that I began to understand the intuitive jumps that are possible for Lawrence in his somewhat
inflated poetry in Women in Love. What appears often as the rhetoric of relationship—which is vague and not anchored as, for exam
ple, Updike's expressed sense of other people is anchored in physical concreteness—could still be powerful and immediate. One thing
I've been willing to do in large stretches of Women and Men is to let fly with a risky deep rhetoric which could express fully the back and forthness of relationships between people, the antagonisms, the moment-to-moment uncertainty about who knows what, who feels what. I think what I got from Lawrence in my later digestion of him was some confirmation that this was worth trying."

>adopting feminine anti-physicalism
I'll pass

This is literally some of the gayest shit I've ever read. It's literally cucked with a feminist spin on things.

Also clean your fingernails you damned dirty hippy.

Fuck always women and men. Anyone read smugglers, history or actress?

>Anyone read smugglers, history or actress?
If WaM is his most famous I doubt these would be any less gay.

Lol I fucking hate you guys so much. Smugglers is his most famous btw. But what do you care you have already made up your mind.

I've read smugglers and it's brilliant. Women and Men is admittedly McElroy's most insane and realized stuff, but Smugger's is an excellent little first novel. On the structure:

Stonehenge was for me certainly a place for reunion in the
deepest sense of the word. I think at some point David Brooke in A
Smuggler's Bible is called a reuniac. I suppose this is not a very
graceful word-image of the novelist's bringing a bunch of characters
together like Fellini?picking them from here, here, here, bringing
them all together and making them work coherently into a scene. So
my imagination might naturally turn toward a place that would draw
together a variety of people. Stonehenge also fitted into my plans as
a place around which many hypotheses circulated for generations. It
is a place associated with hokum, but it is also a very real place
where you can feel deeply about the past and about the mystery of
how much people knew about their universe a thousand, two
thousand years ago. Its association with measurements and obser

No, WaM is his most famous, by far.

Why do you hate me? I don't hate McElroy or you.

I read WaM but am quite confident in dismissing McElroy as tedious filler postmodernism.

Man I need to read women and men because the 3 I have read are nothing like that. Ancient history is so personal and dives deep into one characters past and his whole life. It's just his memories of his life and how they can change over time. Smugglers is kind of the same thing but it cover a bunch of different characters that surround the main character. I think you should really read another one of his books. I don't even see those 3 as post modern.

what i like about mcelroy "fans" is how they never articulate anything about him other than that they "like" his work or that he's "the greatest living writer."

they don't even bother to try to ape what he says in interviews (bullshit about ontological/topological themes) or what wikipedia says about his work. it's just "i like it" or "i need time to let in sink in" and other generic bullshit

see:
>most insane and realized stuff
> it's brilliant

and this brilliant analysis:
>Smugglers is kind of the same thing but it cover a bunch of different characters that surround the main character.

fuck off.

>it's just "i like it" or "i need time to let in sink in" and other generic bullshit
Same thing with Pynchon and DFW fans.

"i liked it"
"it was good"
"i sure am insightful"
"i'm not insecure about my intelligence and need a superficially difficult genre of literature to compensate"

I'm starting to see a correlation with postmodernism readers and low IQ thought processes.

You're an idiot, lmao.

You read half a dozen McElroy books and still come across as an imbecilic halfwit.

Lmao, postmodernism is so good lmao.

How come he gets so much hate here when no one has read him?

it's honestly not that though. Read SB, it's a great introduction to his style, all its characters are so full of life low key. WnM is a little different though; but htere are still these brilliant litle bits that stick out in my head, eg. where the random hillbilly trash jumps into the back of the truck while teenage mayne is driving for the first time after the funeral. it's such a tiny scene, but the entire mythos of the book has these poignant little "cracks" here and there that work perfectly. The lowercased chapters of the book function as short story pieces, some in a reasonable style and others pretty fucking dense. The first two nera the beginning, something like "the sound" and "the departed tenant" are gorgeous pieces all on their own, and they stand apart from the fucking noise of the babbling "angels" in the narrative device.

I can see why you didn't pass high school.

I enjoyed that story from the night soul collection about the man in the park who threw boomerangs. A little heavy-handed but it was good.

Well, that was insufferable.

Abandon thread.

smuggler's was boring, history was cool, plus was gr8

I started reading Ancient History today because that's his only book my library has

stop reading stupid american postmodernism that mistakes word vomit and meaningless esotericism with quality and insight

Typical insights from Mcelroy readers.

Lol I feel bad for you. Clearly has never read a mcelroy novel in his life. What page are you on?

Incredible...this read like shit and yet the opening pages to Actress are some of the most promising stuff I've read.

And why didn't you continue? Or are you reading it now? I find his books usually open with a bang and never let up and just keep building on that. Especially ancient history. When the husband and law starts putting the key in the lock. HOLY.

I liked Smugglers, but could not honestly withstand his style in Women and Men. It was very obnoxious to me. McElroy seems to have very little sense of aesthetics and artistry and instead just autistically plays around with syntax with little to no purpose other than obscurantism. Impressive, sure, but good literature? Not to me, at least. I think people have fallen for the "it's difficult and long so it must be good" trap when it comes to this meme. And I loved GR and Ulysses, so it's not like this applies to all the memes.

>I think people have fallen for the "it's difficult and long so it must be good" trap when it comes to this meme. And I loved GR and Ulysses, so it's not like this applies to all the memes.

Someone who gets it.

What cheeses me about mcelroy is that when his name is mentioned people think of women and men. I've read most of his books and women and men doesn't rank anywhere near the top compared to his other stuff. It's not the book that he should be known for and people here just love to jerk off to meme trio type books. Forget women and men exist lads and read his other stuff desu senpaitachi. Anyone have hinds kidnap available?

It was the Amazon preview and I have other things I am reading at the moment.

>3
>half a dozen

you are mad

Listen to his interviews with Silverblatt, they go pretty deep into what he was going for and why. Also, read some criticism about the parallels between Women and Men and Being and Time. There was purpose to the language, but it isn't immediately apparent, and I'm still working a lot of it out myself (something I enjoy, truly, and feel others would rather read a collection of someone else's work on a novel than do their own). Some of the short story chapters contain some of the most human and touching sections I've read in a very long time. I agree that people fall into the trap of "it's long and difficult so it's good" trap a lot, as someone else pointed out, but I think it's unfair to tell people they need to reread IJ and GR to truly understand it, and then make critical comments about something that is (in my opinion) more difficult than either without having given it the same chance. I truly enjoyed every page, and it ranks among some of the greatest postmodern tomes to me, but I can see how others might feel differently. The thing is can't stop thinking is: would people be more willing to give it the time and effort they gave Pynchon's tomes if it had been memed as hard as those? Does whether or not something deserves multiple, close readings depend purely on what others have said about it? I'm not saying everyone needs to read it or agree that it's good, just that I believe it is worth the time, and people might feel the same if they read it the same way they read Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow, despite having not been told to by Bloom.

>HOLY

log off the computer for a while. even your reading habits are a meme

people who post about mcelroy only care about reading 'tomes'

the difference is that joyce/pynchon actually manage to convey ideas with their writing

Please explain how McElroy doesn't convey ideas in his writing? Read Cannonball, it's nice and short and not too difficult. If you come out of that without picking up on anything, McElroy definitely isn't for you.

That's interesting, could you explain to me exactly what ideas you find particularly stimulating in Joyce and Pynchon and how they are expressed? Why does McElroy fail where these two succeed?

Holy comes from J R you stupid faggot. J R repeatedly says holy. Kys

Lmao never read McElroy.

McElroy sounds to me almost impaired. His writing style is so artificial, strange, forced, and unpoetic despite all its attempts at metaphors. The syntax almost sounds like he's a very intelligent but non-native English speaker.

It's deeply irrational, so much as to almost be schizophrenic. It's like he's seeing connections between things that have no connection, or as if he's just free-associating.

It's the most unrigorous prose I've ever read, if by rigorous you take to mean a prose style that tries to be as clear and sensical as possible.

>...to let fly with a risky deep rhetoric which could express fully the back-and-forthness of relationships between people, the antagonisms, the moment-to-moment uncertainty about who knows what, who feels what.

That's some of the most clunky, jarring, ugly prose I've ever read, and even though I know the more-or-less literal meaning of every word taken by itself, and of most of the clauses, as a whole, and in some of its phrases, it makes no sense. What the fuck is the "back-and-forthness" of relationships? What exactly is a "risky deep rhetoric" and how does it express this "back-and-forthness"?

Poets and poetic writers typically try to express things (ideas, feelings) which can't easily be expressed in a rigorous, scientific/mathematical/logical/philosophical language, so they rely on metaphors, similes, and the poetic bending of syntax to convey these ideas and feelings. However, they should also take care not to get too abstracted, not to get stuck in their own asshole scribbling in some nonsensical private language of their own no one else can understand.

This is what i feel McElroy does: he gets stuck in his own language. He forgets the necessity to balance out poetic language with sense, to balance it with a language that can make sense to other people beside himself.

He's also in general too wordy without caring about rhythm, flow, or concision. Even Joyce and Pynchon, when they want to, can write short, simple, meaningful, concise, and breath-taking sentences. Because this is also a necessary balance. However, McElroy doesn't have this balance, from what I've read of him.

Pretty much this

I found only womem and men to be written somewhat like you said and I'm pretty sure that wad on purpose. What could he have meant by that. Maybe that was his way of filling up 1000 pages lmao.

Prose seems okay to me senpai. Only ever read actress in the house and that was fantastic.

I like it. What book is this from?

can any of you ACTUALLY tell me what Women and Men is about, barring the 'colloidal unconscious' that mcelroy speaks about

i get the feeling that people read this monstrous 1200 page book and literally cant even describe it. goodreads and amazon reviews are masturbatory drivel. what's the story? what's the point?

great post


no shit

When I said never read McElroy I was talking about other Mcelroy's. I've never read women and men.

same with vollman fans

we've had a lot of discussion about pynchon. dfw ive completely ignored. dont know anything about him or his fans.

His only good book is Lookout Cartridge and it's out of print and not good enough to spend +100$.

When the mass market paperback Lookout Cartridge comes out then I'll recommend McElroy.

It's probably because scholars haven't yet told them what to think lmao

there's an ebook

I suspect you've already made up your respective minds to hate this book without reading it but I'll try to as best as I can to try to say "what it's about":
At the center of it all is a character called Jim Mayne, who's repeatedly described as being "from the future." This cute little sci-fi jab comes into play a lot though, and there are elements of WnM that are straight sci-fi, but all of them sort of swirl around the book's central themes of Men, Women, and the space between them. Let me give some examples:

Grace (the "Woman" of women and men) never meets Jim despite living in the same apartment building. We instead get this very confusing web of relationships and conspiracies involving their mutual friends and influences.

More on the 'sci-fi' factor: the book hypothesizes about some futuristic device that sends two humans to a space station exactly halfway between the earth and the moon. Thing is, the souls of these individuals end up being fused in the process. So little themes of childbirth are there from the very beginning; quite literally so as the book begins with the childbirth of a minor character. This "two becoming one" happens a lot; certain characters are reborn into mythological roles, sometimes taking on two roles at once in respect to different people in their lives. Eg. Jim's grandmother is told to "go west" (in a very american sort of way) from New York, which is mythologized as being called something like Tron(?), a city created by the hermit inventor (a kind of jab at puritans/jesus/whatever)

Melroy tries his very best to establish a sort of mythos for the book. So we have a pantheon of characters including the aforementioned Hermit Inventor, as well as the Anzazi (mispelled) weatherman, who doesn't get reborn but is immortal in that he doesn't die. He also eventually becomes a cloud in the myth and all this weather talk gets repeated over and over again. We have the sky meeting the earth, slightly reminiscent of Gaia/Uranus couplings.


what else... McElroy is smart...like incredibly well read and knowledgble in every little reference he's able to pull out of his ass. So there are moments where despite the schitzo nature of the book (especially in the not so aptly named "breathers" in the book where the angels talk cacophonously under interrogation by an anonymous torturer (maybe the reader). You do have to "trust" that there will be moments of sudden focus where you're given an insight into the floating "why" of the book regarding its sometimes unreadable momentum. One that comes to mind is a discussion somewhere halfway through where we get a cute little singularity in the midst of all the weather, wind, ect. This brief singularity/eye of a storm/where the wind isn't blowing is also scientifically broken down as a sort of optimization problem, specifically in the econ discussions in the book.

Also worth mentioning is that the characters are...well great. One of the biggest surprises I had when reading the book is that I sort of gave a shit about mayne and all his little failed relationships/the poor girl who fell off of a mountain once possibly due to some insurgency in South America (the book goes everywhere). Jim's childhood is fun, and he finds himself constantly haunted by another reporter who may or may not be his long lost brother. His grandmother is a bad ass and his mom a hottie violin player. There are plenty of little flashbacks where we get episodes of Jim's childhood and they're often staggeringly poignant in how they echo all these crazy themes we're supposed to keep in mind.

The book "swirls" on itself a lot, repeating itself, contradicting itself, and it sort of wants you to go crazy.

as for the passage indicated in the parent post of this thread :

my basic analysis is the similarity between tribal culture, it all being fleeting, rushing about and fit to the land, and american (specifically capitalistic/technological) culture. "Cities in the future like periodic fairs, you know?" this is a refernce to the chicago world fair, where Mayne's grandma is again told to go west If I remember correctly. It's this aforementioned "fleeting"ness that's important here. "Markets in the human sense."

More science references near the bottom of the passage; "you've got your weak force that you get when things break down" a reference to the "weak force" one of the four fundamental forces that comes into play when the nuclei of unstable atoms breaks down (think uranium and the radiation it pisses out). the the "strong force" being the force that keeps like-charged protons stuck together in a nucleus depsite their similar charges. Of course, these "forces' are meant to also refer to societal/cultural ones, or the momentum that pushes WnM forward from page to page. the book is seldom not "screaming" at you to listen to it, if not understand it.

You did a good job, but for future reference, that guy does this in every Vollmann and McElroy thread. It doesn't matter if you explain it better than anyone on here's ever explained the meme trilogy, he'll continue to say the same thing over and over again. He's likely the most idiotic troll on this board, so don't feed him.

Absolutely pathetic

who cares, it's a mcelroy thread, figured there should be some discussion outside of this weird anti-pomo phase that /lit's been on the past couple weeks.

do you study literature

>More science references near the bottom of the passage; "you've got your weak force that you get when things break down" a reference to the "weak force" one of the four fundamental forces that comes into play when the nuclei of unstable atoms breaks down (think uranium and the radiation it pisses out). the the "strong force" being the force that keeps like-charged protons stuck together in a nucleus depsite their similar charges. Of course, these "forces' are meant to also refer to societal/cultural ones, or the momentum that pushes WnM forward from page to page. the book is seldom not "screaming" at you to listen to it, if not understand it.

>Reducing modern physics to pop spirituality hogwash.

Into the bin it goes.

Also, it's pretty obvious you have limited formal education in science, as you fucked up the science part.

I'm confused by the point you're trying to make. McElroy used these terms to make references to these little intermolecular forces. And he does it in the context of describing the stability of social structures: what is it that keeps societies together as well as what is their mode of catharsis or transition from a higher energetic state to a lower one.

Aaaaaand believe it or not I'm a math grad student. Granted it's not as if we're studying atoms, but we do get into some of the nonsense that starts happening there: (hilbert stuffs as well as modified versions of fourier analysis? I'm name dropping but it is something I've had problems on).

Well believe it or not, I don't believe it, or if you are, you aren't a particularly good one. Try not to opt for talking about science in literature if you don't have deep knowledge in it, it's embarrassing.

How would your rank W&M among the novels you have read? (Post may have inspired me to read it.) And what are some of your favorites?

It's low on the list of postmodern mega-novels, very low in the top 20.

I like Pynchon more, my favorites from him are Against the Day and M&D.

I'm not the one that posted that, but I loved Women and Men, and it ranks in my top 5-7, depending on the day. Others I rank highly (big fan of postmodernist authors, despite the recent Veeky Forums backlash):
>Gravity's Rainbow/Against the Day/Mason & Dixon
>The Sot-Weed Factor
>IJ/The Pale King
>2666
>Underworld
>The Recognitions

All memes, I realize, but these are the novels that stayed with me the longest, and that I will continue to revisit, repeatedly, until I'm old and decrepit.

I'd also like to say it's my least favorite mcelroy. His other work is a lot better.

What are the rest of the top 20? Those are the types of novels I enjoy the most, so I'm curious.

Really? I liked it more than Cannonball, but that's the only other I've read. I thought the lowercase chapters were some of the best things I've read all year, and despite them being challenging and a little mastabatory, I had a lot of fun parsing the Breathers. What about it makes you say it's his worst work?

you're insufferable

I don't like getting into this business of ranking them because desu they all end up being masterpieces in their own way. (what snowflakes they are).

I will say it's definitely harder than most of the classic tomes we throw around on here. But I'd say its comparable to ulysses (well at least the more challenging parts of ulysses).

what i do enjoy about all of these is the "space" they take up in my thinking, even when I've finished the book. There's a sort of almost architectural space they take up which I find a lot of fun, you have at hand these characters and themes because of how much they're sometimes pounded into you what with all the repetition and tangents to give the idea shape.

his other work is more accessible. I'd say WnM is his most realized work but McElroy was reasonable enough to write much more accessible masterpieces. (I personally love SB, there's something about that book which makes it the first book i recommend to someone looking to get back into reading).

You're the guy who posts in confession threads saying you have strong opinions about books you've never read, I just know it.

I haven't read them all yet. Still haven't read letter, plus or hinds kidnap. I'm going to sound like a pleb for saying this but it had a lot of boring parts. A lot of pseudo science went over my head ( I might not be smart enough ) I found all his other books to be super tight and didn't ever suffer from that at all. They open with a bang and never let up. WAM had great stories mixed in with some crud. It was still good though. And if someone who hasn't rad mcelroy sees this thread and thinks I'll give WAM a shot it might put them off senpai.

*read

>you're insufferable
And yet I'm not a pseud praising Mcelroy's pseudo science.

>The Sot-Weed Factor
>IJ/The Pale King
>Underworld
More works that lack meaning, despite being crammed full of information. Okay.

seconded

That is a very exciting paragraph to read.

ok so just so we're clear, you have in the same post denigrated people for expressing their like of an author in surface level language, but also suggested that critical-theoretical-philosophical language is "bullshit"

have you ever read criticism?

What books do you like?

Lmao yeah post your favorite 20 books tough guy.

>thinking someone who acts like that reads

Im new to thread. Just wondering what books you like since you seem so hateful.

The books you like, excepting the ones that are bad. Why even bother asking? It's a simple thing really.

>he didn't understand the easiest of the postmodern tomes
Wew
What are you even doing here besides shitposting?

Postmodernism IS shitposting.

/thread

Yeah I'm going to go ahead and not listen to someone who puts /thread in their own post. Nice try though