We all need to answer

[John Bailey]

Parks seems to favour a particular literature of omission and
understatement and ambiguity - his trilogy of Sebald, Coetzee and
Ginzburg suggest this. Those are three amazing writers but there are
lots of other praise-worthy authors who aren't going for the same
thing at all. Surely he'd roll his eyes at Pynchon, which is his
right.

A bit confused by his dissing of so many authors as conniving
technicians carefully constructing their elaborate seductions. How are
the writers he likes any different? Are they just blessed by genius
rather than working at it?

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 4:10 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> his end position is also why I love group reads.
>
> And, re DISGRACE. I do not think the "moral equivalency" argument
> holds because the book is not an argument.
> We read the character in it not Coetzee too easily.
>
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 11:19 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> parks has been very interesting as he works out his full experience of
>> reading and critically. I have been strongly against
>> some aspects of his generalizing, yet find other aspects illuminating.
>>
>> yes to what Monte asks. I was going to ask the plist to riff on
>> 'plot-driven' vs. not but Parks goes there too. (ever since I
>> started trying to read 'the best that has been thought and
>> said'--Arnold and then (too) much avant fiction when young,
>> plot can hardly hold me. Language, prose riffs, insight and
>> complexification of notions and perspectives.
>>
>> We can start by discussing Parks here. From our coigns of vantage.
>>
>> First: What does he WANT, that is, think makes the best fiction?
>> Realism, even dense realism, seems not to do it
>> and too much effort on the page doesn't do it. I wonder what he thinks
>> of GR, for example, about which we will all
>> remember all those readers then and later--vidal, say--who said it
>> showed off its own prose...as he says of Neumann.
>>
>> anyway, talk amongst yourselves.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 9:04 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> And to ask:
>>>
>>> http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/nov/10/how-could-you-like-that-book/
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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