Art Garfunkel's Library

[David Morris]

Everyone's entitled to their opinions, especially in this era of
blogs.  So I won't succumb to the temptation to snark about HIS
relative talent in music, because it's irrelevant.  And if Joe-Schmoe
can have a blog abou literature, then I guess Art's entitled.

But does he know what postmodern fiction is?  He includes Catch-22 on
his list.  That is at least a bit post-modern?   And what about
Portnoy's Complaint?

His favorites list contains some fluff, but again, he's entitled.

And what the hell does he mean when he calls GR "fraudulent."  I
suspect he just couldn't follow it, so he feels obliged to denigrate
it.

David Morris

On Jan 22, 2008 1:29 PM, Ian (Hank Kimble) Scuffling
<scuffling at gmail.com> wrote:
> From the New Yorker,
> http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/01/28/080128ta_talk_paumgarten
> "I avoid fluff," Garfunkel explained last week, on the phone from a  Marriott in Florida. "The stuff that men are always reading on planes: I don't read that." He also doesn't read postmodern fiction—the Garfunkel Library contains no Pynchon or Barthelme. "I tried 'Gravity's Rainbow,' and I thought it was fraudulent," he said.
>
> "I read for the reading pleasure, not for the gold star," he went on. "Reading is a way to take downtime and make it stimulating. If you're in the waiting room of a dentist's office and don't want to twiddle your thumbs, you turn to Tolstoy." ("Tolstoy is the king of writing," he said.)