Percival Everett: ever interesting

[woops]

no i haven't and i can't say i'd heard of him before this thread

 

[wg-]

This lad seems cool, I'm sold. Whats the best one as entry point

 

[forclosure]

i think you'd like him and Paul Beatty for that matter

 

[forclosure]

This lad seems cool, I'm sold. Whats the best one as entry point

i mean the one i'm reading right now is great but i started with I am Not Sidney Poitier and he's also got Damned if i Do which is a collection of short stories

 

[woops]

i admit i had a quite serious DFW obsession while he was live alive

 

[forclosure]

i admit i had a quite serious DFW obsession while he was live alive

by that right Everett should be up your street i know for alot of people regardless of whether he has this rep as a litbro writer that he himself critiqued he's a big deal for alot of people

also if i remember right Everett's got a new book coming out in November of this year, i do find it interesting he's one of the few major literary voices who still puts out a book a year like back in the old days

 

[woops]

if i see one of his books around i'll snap it up.

 

[IdleRich]

Ashaned to say I never heard of him but sounds interesting, when I've finished my latest pike and orders I will order one of his I reckon... which should I go for?

 

[forclosure]

Ashaned to say I never heard of him but sounds interesting, when I've finished my latest pike and orders I will order one of his I reckon... which should I go for?

didn't you just seen the post i suggested 3 different books of his?

 

[IdleRich]

No I didn't... but if you had to say one, what are the pros and cons and... or did you say that? Maybe I'll just read the post.

 

[sus]

Never heard of him.

He's right that, while contemporary literary/artistic America has no shortage of minority artists/writers that are being spotlighted right now, they all have to inevitably right about representation and identity to be considered; it's its own sort of pigeon-holing.

Where do I start? Something short preferably don't give me an Infinite Jest-length tome please

 

[forclosure]

know what @IdleRich i'm gonna say the Trees since i finished that yesterday here 's why

Like all his books (only read I am not Sidney Poitier and a decent chunk of Erasure) his stuff has a formal sense of daring to them with how he likes to experiment with structure but not in a way that's like massively spelt out or obnoxious but like when a kid keeps prodding at a balloon to remind you how easy it is to collapse this thing.

It's informed by history and address America's original sin of racism but its in a way that's contemporary and "of the moment" how the past informs the present also for a book that deals with such a dark subject it's actually very funny it goes from being slapstick to deadpan to serious in a chapter by chapter basis (the fact that they're short sometimes a page also lends a episodic quality to it)

It reminds me of George S Schuyler's Black No More in that it paints a really grotesque picture white racists in Money Mississippi but it doesn't have Schyler's pessimism or contempt, they're grotesque cause the flaws they have seem more realistically human rather than just cyphers.

There's a chapter where the two black cops are made aware that there's a really pathetic looking cross burning on the lawn just as pathetic as the Klan chapter of this town and one of them says "i guess i was supposed to be afraid"

 

[luka]

that's one of the things i was getting at with the diversity thread. all different faces but do what we want you to do.

 

[versh]

This is what my mate who makes films was complaining about a while back, said the funding process means he can't just be gay and a filmmaker. He has to be a gay filmmaker.

 

[sus]

Proud to be the third person in a row to redundantly ask for an entry.

I think I wanna read his Dionysus book, yes yes

 

[sus]

This is what my mate who makes films was complaining about a while back, said the funding process means he can't just be gay and a filmmaker. He has to be a gay filmmaker.

that's one of the things i was getting at with the diversity thread. all different faces but do what we want you to do.

This is because most of the people behind all these initiatives are control freaks and/or sociopaths. This is why the "shut up and listen to black people/queer people/trans people" etc has always been such a fuckin joke. Guess what, minority groups aren't a monolith and you only care when they parrot your own provincial politics.

There was a guy, Coleman Hughes, who was in the same campus music/arts scene as me in undergrad. He was in a band making music with some progressive activist types when he wrote an op-ed for the school paper that made some anti-social justice points.

Got kicked out of the band, cancelled on campus, you couldn't even be friends with him anymore. Led to his full-blown radicalization and now he hangs out with Sam Harris and runs a massive anti-SJW podcast and works for some DC thinktank I believe.

So it worked out for him alright, but the principles behind it were appalling.

 

[IdleRich]

know what @IdleRich i'm gonna say the Trees since i finished that yesterday here 's why

Nice one, I think I will give him a go shortly.

 

[forclosure]

Never heard of him.

He's right that, while contemporary literary/artistic America has no shortage of minority artists/writers that are being spotlighted right now, they all have to inevitably right about representation and identity to be considered; it's its own sort of pigeon-holing.

Where do I start? Something short preferably don't give me an Infinite Jest-length tome please

he doesn't have any tomes but if you want short i guess Damned if i do is a good spot, its a collection of short stories

 

[forclosure]

Never heard of him.

He's right that, while contemporary literary/artistic America has no shortage of minority artists/writers that are being spotlighted right now, they all have to inevitably right about representation and identity to be considered; it's its own sort of pigeon-holing.

Where do I start? Something short preferably don't give me an Infinite Jest-length tome please

there's also the issue that alot of black art that gets celebrated for presenting a "realisitc gritty depiction of the black experience" is being made by black people from middle to upper class backgrounds presenting that they thing working class black people live like.

The irony is for some of them authors/creatives who get championed as representitives of the black experience the only people who you hear frequently speak about them are white people and of course the reason there's been such boom in black representation in art and putting them in certain job roles that never happened up until now is cause it all comes off the back of George Floyd's death. This thing talks about it better than i do https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/who-actually-gets-to-create-black-pop-culture

Its fucked considering this is all for black americans but as a brit even with everything that's happened it still feels like things ain't budged and i'm supposed to take people with double barrel hyphen names seriously who are the kids of MBE architects and musicians

 

[luka]

but on the other hand black culture runs the entire world and has done for decades