We all need to answer

[Mark Kohut]

And yet he moved Coetzee into the everything can't be great column, no?

And was he dissing Coetzee's Disgrace---or the readers who respond in one way?

And, a lot of this IS about we readers and not the writers, yes?

On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 4:52 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l