version
Well-known member
@CasperLCat 1 year ago
Amis responds to the question of aging with a big abstract answer — death. Sorry, DEATH.
Leonard’s answer is “a big prostate” - specific, concrete, comical.
The Prose Stylist
- Thread starter version
- Start date
@CasperLCat 1 year ago
Amis responds to the question of aging with a big abstract answer — death. Sorry, DEATH.
Leonard’s answer is “a big prostate” - specific, concrete, comical.
version
Well-known member
Seems a particularly uncharitable reading of what's going on in the novel. You've reduced a wealth of political and historical content and context to stylistic choices for the sake of style.
It's a book set during WW2 and written during the 60s and 70s dealing with the way individuals are pushed, pulled and used like pawns by technologies, systems and institutions. What you're describing as some sort of indulgent flaw on the part of the author is precisely what he's trying to illustrate. It's not some cynical exercise, he's describing the world as he sees it.
Granted, it's an incredibly pessimistic book, but that was obviously his state of mind at the time, watching the disintegration of whatever he'd hoped the movements of the 60s were going to achieve.
Murphy
cat malogen
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Oh yeah I didn't mean to frame this as indulgence or vacuity on behalf of Pynchon, I actually think its an excellent expression of the postmodern zeitgeist in general. I guess I was more calling attention to the fact that characters arcs aren’t really appealing to empathy, at least not in the traditional sense, but are all seemingly treated more as objects, as threads in a larger tapestry. Almost done in a generative sense, which is what I was trying to get at, IE these are all very singular characters, some cartoonishly so, and I think much of the brilliance of the book is what happens to emerge when these characters coexist and collide long enough in the mind of the author.
I definitely think it’s a brilliant book, i just don’t think most of it (maybe with some exceptions like the Pokler bits) was written with the intention of getting the reader to really invest in the characters, pathos-wise.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Yeah in this sense I didn't get much of a private language vibe from Pynchon (only read Lot 49 and GR), at least not compared to folks like Deleuze or Joyce (just got a copy of the Wake, and looking through it is pretty ridiculous haha, in possibly a great way).
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
ChatGPT is good at Finnegan's Wake style, if you want to translate your website into it. Just realised why there are fewer angry aesthetes: dwindling stocks of testosterone population-wide.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Well not everyone can procure hamster-sized orgone accumulators, biscuits. Check your privilege.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Someone mentioned Ellroy, I guess its well known that he developed that style cos he had to cut his word count but he didn't want to change the story so he went back through the whole thing and removed every single word that wasn't absolutely necessary, accidentally creating a brilliant style that I guess is part of what lifted him above other similar neonoir type writers. Though obviously he had the brains to recognise he'd stumbled on something and keep doing it.
I left LA Confidential at my parents and suggested they read it but Dad threw it aside after a few pages complaining about how it was written.
I left LA Confidential at my parents and suggested they read it but Dad threw it aside after a few pages complaining about how it was written.
Big Mike John just posted on his blog this morning!
mysteries of the
Bedside notebook, probably written during the middle sections of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again: “Shaw dreamed a room that he’d forgotten, full of things he’d forgotten he o…
ambientehotel.wordpress.com
sus
Moderator
It strikes me that the protagonist's problem is not that he dissimulates more than other people, but that he is more acutely selfconscious of his dissimulations
