There's a new DeLillo short story in the New Yorker called The Itch:

Ur so redpilled bro so kewl, wish I could be as kewl as U.

Thanks for the link.

Will read and return to the thread.

Kill yourself, retard.

Im so kwl I get my lit reviews from Breitbart and Pol. I'm *Dangerous*

Kek Kek Kek.

You should've been an abortion.

Why must you fellas be so mean?

HIS NAME WAS SETH RICH

Great thread guys, this is why I come to Veeky Forums

I've never read DeLillo before and can't say I enjoyed this. Can any DeLillo fans tell me why they liked it?

this

reddit.com/r/literature/comments/6qnxdk/the_itch_by_don_delillo_the_new_yorker_2017_short/

>every comment on topic
>thoughtful responses
>everyone actually read it

Why is Veeky Forums so trash and full of pseuds who only pretend to enjoy literature?

>missing the point this hard

sure there's tons of assholes on /lit, but the smart people are far better than any milquetoast reddit kiddies. if you're smart enough to filter, high variance is more important than a high average

summer

I don't care about the fact that there are assholes on Veeky Forums, I care about the fact that this board repeatedly seems absolutely unable to discuss literature in any sort of fashion. Look at this thread, for example, and then compare this to the reddit thread. Do you honestly prefer this fucking mess?

Yes. The reddit posts are high school level analysis, along with on-topic shitposts.

Its just not a good story. No good discussion will come of it unless an autist off his meds reads it and graces us with a breathtaking pseudo-analysis.

is it about masturbation?

Papa D does it again.

way too fucking long, did not fucking read, although i got through a couple paragraphs, if you're doing to bore us to death, at least come with fire prose, not some ol' weak shit

I made it a little more than halfway through before I was too bored to continue. The writing is painfully boring, which is very disappointing when it's coming from DeLillo.

The New Yorker is great you idiot.

L O L

bougie dunce pls go

Ana

you have to realize that there's more than one Veeky Forums and separate the wheat from the chaff. there's an invisible caste system. any thread about someone like Delillo will attract a high proportion of dalits

at the very bottom are lepers who post memes of david foster wallace's face. I'm not fully convinced that these are humans. i have never and will never reply to any of these "people"

There seems to be this emerging trend in contemporary literature where the tone and atmosphere is deliberately calibrated to be as vaguely melancholic as possible. Little quotidian observations or mundane platitudes, flat declarative statements that are meant to imply some sense of existential boredom or displacement.

I wouldn't mind it if it weren't so self-conciously banal and standardized. It's as though the author was so afraid of melodrama that he regulates the entire emotional frequency to the lowest possible setting, understatements upon understatements. Reading Dostoevsky would give these guys a heart attack. Have confidence in the urgency of your own feelings and convictions.

>This is just my opinion, but i really detest the style this is written in. It feels like he's trying too hard to be minimalistic, every paragraph has a virtually identical structure and as for the prose, instead of being cool and mysterious like he clearly wants it to be, the whole thing just seems garbled and artificial.

>tfw you agree with a redditer

people write today as though they were posting on social media.

I can't be sure, but it seems as though this style predates the widespread adoption of social media. You could even perhaps see it in an embryonic form in certain parts of Infinite Jest, I think.

>There seems to be this emerging trend in contemporary literature

Delillo has been doing this for 30+ years now. Your opinion is trash.

Did I upset you because you like Don Delillo? If so, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to step on anyone's toes.

Go to reddit then

>this post brought to you by the Borowitz Report

What a bad short story.

Because literature is dominated by women, cucks, numales, and them

*modern literature

lol u cant handle the bantz m8, relax.

This reads like the autistic bastard child that was not well-worked enough to fit in to Gary Lutz's Divorcer. Every sentence sounds artifical, as if DeLillo wants the reader to be completely detached from whatever they're reading. It could be a stylistic choice--to futher the connection between the reader and the primary character through mutual detachment--but it's not working for me. I'd rather it if he focused more on the individual neurosis--such as the itch in the title--that the character developed through the lonliness. The pleasure that the character gets from his fixations--unlike in a Lutz story--are nowhere to be seen, and I really think that it's a missed opportunity on the author's part.

>But nobody showed up

What the hell is that but coordinating and why Don gets a pass on stuff like that?

Same reason McCarthy get a pass on his punctuation?

Corncob's prose is sounding. This is just dull.
youtube.com/watch?v=RjQryQLRmPs

This short story is exceptionally banal and insincere. It really feels like he tried his best to make every single sentence as unemotional and uncreative as possible. It reads like something I'd expect from some stagnated MFA grad who writes in the same blogpost-style of writing as 99% of the people who call themselves writers. I now have no interest in reading anymore of DeLillos work, if this is really the best he can do at 80 years old.

I like this type of writing so I'm biased (include here any Lish graduate like Lutz and Hannah as well as people like Schutt and B. Marcus and Corncob). But I think a lot of you are missing what he's trying to do here, which is to completely sever any kind of outside referent of the language and just create something purely syntactic. If you're reading this as a lonely depressed guy piece I can't help but feel bad for you, because this is exactly the type of person that is being made fun of here. See Gary Lutz to see someone take this type of sarcasm and syntactic play to its logical conclusion.

How many searched for the name?

A few professors are making bets while enjoying a few drinks at some banker's party. Two have there cell phones out, and one has a laptop that is directly connected to the university lab. They're laughing now, but don't mind them.

How many searched for the name?

>as uncreative as possible
>meanwhile he drops this in the second paragraph
> At night he kept to his half of the bed with his back to the other half. Over time a life slithered out.

If you are so intent on reolplaying as a critic atleast read some criticisms.and spare us such horrible sentences:
>It reads like something I'd expect from some stagnated MFA grad who writes in the same blogpost-style of writing as 99% of the people who call themselves writers.

This seems like a un-complex reading by someone who needs to have a blurb ready at a cocktail party to reassure himself and others that he's in the know.

That said, I don't think your wrong that someone is being teased a bit, but isn't that the reader, particularly his readers? And isn't there also some play going on with the role of language in society?

He really has never struck me as a one note whiner - or some such hahaha reply, jokes on you.

>This seems like a un-complex reading by someone who needs to have a blurb ready at a cocktail party to reassure himself and others that he's in the know.

this describes me perfectly. but the truth is that I read it this morning, spent the whole day writing an essay due tonight, came back to this thread, got triggered by people reading it even worse than me, and typed that comment out while taking a break from my essay. Maybe if this thread is up tomorrow I'll try to post something worthwhile. But probably not. But maybe.

Sarcasm, coincidence, literary authority, in-group familiarity, status, haphazard comment.

Decontexualised information.
A warehouse of itching powder in packets that tell you that this stuff is a fun prank that is harmless.
Futurism.

Breakdowns are unnecessary and should be avoided at all costs.

None can perfectly see what is not sounded properly.

Do not hesitate.

I think you're overlooking one of the themes of the story, which is exactly that obsession with surface-level details. The characters are deliberately distant from their true feelings, and those who aren't are looked at as alien.
That said, I still agree that it's stylistically uninteresting. If I wanted to experience life as if it were some lusterless annoyance, I'd just go live mine.

Agreed. I don't see the attraction of it.

>implying implications this misguided
infinite kek

it bothered me, too. you just know he did it as a troll. "I'm gonna call up the New Yorker and they're gonna fall all over themselves to get a story from me. I'm not even gonna deliver it until the check clears. I'm gonna start it with a conjunction and those assholes are gonna print it, and they're gonna like it."

10/10 good post

archive.is/hR2bd

I mean, New Yorker is no Harpers and all, but ur clearly tuff as fuck.

about to hit 50 actually iirc