Iceberg Slim: the real shit is the real shit

[version]

American reality is pulp. This is why all those egomaniacs straining to write The Great American Novel are doomed from the start. It's why Burroughs, Pynchon, James Ellroy get so much closer to the truth. It's lurid, grotesque, cheap, tacky, plastic, delirious, obscene, in bad taste. You can't turn it into 'literature.'

 

[forclosure]

I actually like pulp, not ashamed to admit it. I'd rather read some than some boring novel about a university professor having an affair while on sabbatical.

lolol i agree but i feel like i've heard about these sort of uni professor books than actually given names and examples of them

 

[william_kent]

lolol i agree but i feel like i've heard about these sort of uni professor books than actually given names and examples of them

Yeah, I was just using the sabbatical genre as lazy shorthand for "middle brow" fiction, but there did seem a time when the Booker prize shortlist would be made up of those sort of novels - for example, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee ( not read it , synopsis is professor has an affair ), books by David Lodge, Iris Murdoch, Anita Brookner ( although technically Hotel Du Lac is a novelist having a holiday romance, but still..) - this is basically the sort of fiction that I can not stand

 

[forclosure]

yeah yeah that tracks @william_kent or like older man in the twilight of his years fall in love with a younger woman type shit

yknow related to all this not exactly a Soft White Underbelly kinda person but i know this type of thing has an audience who want to see "the real shit" but they had Fillmore Slim on there, alot of interviews with pimps on the channel but this guy as far as the West Coast end is the guy who founded the whole ting, 85 years old and he's sharp as a tack