my thoughts diverge so wildly from yours im not even sure my opinion can even mean anything to you. which is why i wondered if it was possible to communicate with you. not becasue i am so deep and wise, just there there is so much empty space between us. jenks, frankly, if you siggested de lillio was competent it would make me question your jedgement. for you to bracket him with 'the greats' makes me wonder if we're talking about the same de lillo. i've read about 4 or 5 bellows (i can't remember what they were called as they all belnd into one big sloppy mushy mass in my mind) de lillo ive read white noise, mao II, a couple of others and underworld. the others I(roth updike whoever) i've tried to read but i found so offensively bad i couldnt finish. well ok, bad is the wrong word. i admit it, my objections are moral. i find them repellent. the prose i suppose, is servicable, often enough, better than i could do im sure. my attempts to write prose never amount to much. why they offend my delicate sensibilities? well, christ i dunno. for a start i suppose my biggest problem is the meaness. its part of the american thing i guess. as i say, i should wait till i am in a calmer more generous state of mind.... look, think of american comedy, the snideness of seinfeld for example. its an american thing. i find it inhuman and grotesque. most of you lot love and you're welcome to it. i know i won't be changing any minds.
ridiculing people for the way the dress, for the eccentricites of their behaviour. its a mindset. dont ask me to define it further. i dont want to. you must know what i mean. and oliver you know exactly where our difference lie. you knwo exactly. becasue i've spelled them out time and time again, most recently i think, in my response to your last attempts to write for the blog. and you know how those difference inform our responses to novellists like bellow. here are some keywords to refresh your memory, surfaces, seduction, money, power, intrigue, clothes, beautiful cruel women.
i don't mind trying to explain this to other people but you do know where im coming from. maybe updike does describe being alive very precisely for a lot of you and if thats so, well, great acheivement. but it cant talk to me, becasue i cant feel the pulll of it. life is not like that for me. it doesn't feel like that. theres a whole dimension missing for me. the whole realm of the imagination is missing in all these writers. dont misinterpret me. i mean imagination in the grand blakean sense. i dont read novels. i dont like them. i think they.re absurd for most part. i can read dostoyevsky and i can read kafka and conrad (yes how very pompous etc) but beyond that, i dunno, i dont like it, why not journalism. if youre so cncerned with life on that level, then why not? journalism can be extremely powerful. its the proper tool for those investigations.
so as i say difference in sensibility. i like poems and stuff. i like imagination. i like superstructure. big shifting tectonic plates. that funny sneering burroughs line about infinite diversity of life, thats what i tak those people as doing, being so transfixed by 'infinite diversity of life' that they miss the things which, to me at leasst, are the important ones.
and perhaps i dont respond to the making yourself a patheitc 'human' charcter, and detailing all the pratfalls and humiliations. i find it seedy. i like the muscular whitman self as hero thing. i can go on but i suspect you lot will just queue up to rain scorn down upon me and im not sure im up for that.