The recognitions

>the recognitions is pro catholic

found the brainlet

i read for like an hour and got 26 pages in (this thing is fucking THICC) and so far it seems to be mocking protestant puritanism more than it is supporting catholicism

obviously just a teensy bit early to judge but that's my initial impression

gonna go read for another hour before bed

you're right. other guy likely hasn't read it and is just shitposting

is it merely the insecurity of youth that makes people start threads like this?

It has nothing to do with supporting religion. Get ready for some shifts in the narrative, btw.

Who cares? Every excuse to talk about Gaddis is well received.

In my country, this book is everything.

It's not a shitpost. It's something Gaddis has acknowledged as not being a completely retarded interpretation.

Maybe do your homework?

I'm about 40 pages in but haven't picked it up in a over a month due to being busy with other stuff. You can tell it's great writing and that he put a large chunk of his life into it, but I just wanted to say that I thought what he said later on, after it was semi-panned then made a comeback, was pretty funny. Something like, "I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd won the Nobel prize for it." Must have been a crushing feeling when the opposite happened. Glad he didn't seem to let it get him down too much.

>Glad he didn't seem to let it get him down too much.
Dude, he didn't write another book for 20 years and, even after that, all his books are pretty much him being incredibly bitter about pretty much everything and calling other people destructive idiots with no taste or passion for anything. If you read Agape Agape is pretty much a 100 pages long rant about this.

Okay, I think I partly knew that and had it cross my mind as I was writing what I did. Gave him the benefit of the doubt not knowing the complete story and figuring J R came out so much later because the books he wrote took a lot of hard work. I didn't realize it made him that, justifiably, bitter.

He even uses some of the bad reviews of The Recognitions as a joke against critics in JR. If you read some of his interviews or the wonderful afterword to Agape Agape you'll see he's a blend between the insecure aspiring artist (Bast / Otto) and the mad, feverish believer in the arts (Eigen / Wyatt). He was writing out of pure personal passion.

I watched, not read, a couple of his interviews a while back and thought he came off pretty easy going, which likely contributed to why I thought he took it in stride. But he was also pretty old at that point. I know what you mean about passion though. One of the questions he was asked after the Recognitions had made somewhat of a resurgence that stuck with me was 'what does it take to write a great novel like that,' to which he replied with something like 'you have to want to be considered a great novelist.' Glad he eventually got the recognition.

Aren't all his other books other than J R him "getting down too much."

What's Agape Agape other than him bitching that no one reads him?

I'll just take your smug and passive aggressive word for it.

youtube.com/watch?v=WzKm44Lgdnk

honestly the actual 'should I prepare' thing was a pretext, I would have jumped in regardless. I just wanted a Gaddis thread

33 pages in and this book is amazing, gonna read more this morning

What is it about the prose of writers like Gaddis and Joyce that makes them feel so important? Not just that it's good prose -- they have this formal but approachable quality that makes you need to listen

Christianity

not even meming, they have the high seriousness combined with sly humour that was prevalent in theology until the turn of the twentieth century

Interesting. Do you think that tone can be emulated by reading these authors, or does one have to go back to the source?

More pertinently, *should* people be trying to emulate that, or is that style now an outdated relic?

The RI Coons Ignite

This question answers itself. Do you like it? If so, emulate it.