Thoughts on Raymond Carver?

wtf lmfao

holy fuck, I thought you said Raymond Carver. I had no fucking clue what was going on in this thread, thought I was loosing my damn mind.

everyone should read the long goodbye. It's so deliciously clichéd that I want to sing in joy for it.

>“There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight- arms you with an ice- blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up- from- under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial. There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non- fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa- Romeo town car complete with pilot and co- pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent- mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.”

Have you read wwtawwtal?
>What about Carver is edgy or has twists?
C'mon.

He's one of my favorites

All of his short stories are not great. Like Hemingway, a good chunk of his stories cover the same ground as other stories but with worse prose or presentation.

However when he is good he is very good. "A Serious Talk" is just one example.

Whoever says he's shit, read that. I don't understand how you can dislike how well that story does what it does. "One more thing" is a story that is similar to "A Serious talk", but it is also very good at what it does.

wew

>I thought you said Raymond Carver

He did. You just quoted Chandler.

Dude are you confused? If you've read any "realist" short fiction before Dubliners you should be able to handle and appreciate Carver. Discard your high school prejudices

you're right. i read the post three times to make sure my drunken self didn't fuck up something and still i didn't noticed it

>If you've read any "realist" short fiction before Dubliners you should be able to handle and appreciate Carver
Lmao nice argument. His writing has no literary value whatsoever and is just cheap tricks to appease critics.
Go read wwtawwtal and come back and say that's good.

what is good and what is not? everything is a pile of shit, anyway.

just because someone wrote some words, whose order and cadence makes you poopy-hole tingle, doesn't mean opossum-dick.

>Being this butthurt someone criticized your husbando
That's just how I see his writing man. Cheap and unoriginal. Uninspired.

i've never even _read_ anything by raymond carver. i'm the stupid drunk that stumbled into this pretentious shitfest to defend the honor of raymond _chandler_, even though i've honestly only ever read the long goodbye and am a poser, just like everyone goddamn else in this piece of shit board.

Look man that's nice, I was talking about Carver lmao. Just reading The Big Sleep rn btw.
You australian?

God no, i'm Luxembourgeois

(can you believe that's how they actually call eachother?)

you want to read something nice? something truly truly _nice? i already know the answer is yes, lest it be suspended in your disbelief for my aesthetic sensibilities; it's a goddamn truism really: if you like to read, then you like to read _nice_ things. unless you're a fucking subnormal or an analytical philosopher.

read the collected stories by D 'J Pancake.

PD: fucking mods, please enable italics in this _god_damn board, so everyone can talk like a phony and we can reach full circle again.

Describe the "tricks" you're alluding to and why you think they're cheap or inauthentic

Have you read any of his other stories apart from that collection?