Wiliam Gibson favored this

[Mark Kohut]

Every man is entitled to his own opinion, and every other man is entitled
to knock him down [not physically]
over it. -----Dr. Samuel Johnson..(and this is probably a paraphrase,
Jochen, who rightly likes quotes properly looked pup but I'm Tired)

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Mark,
>
> you are construing a "rather ugly dismissal" and a "he ain't shit"
> attitude. What I wanted to point out is that to call Eco an "absolute
> giant" is too much, even if he died the day before; as stylist he was no
> giant, and I have difficulties imagining that somebody reads his novels for
> the prose.
>
> So you would say the English translation is bad? The German seems quite
> good
>
> 2016-02-21 23:10 GMT+01:00 Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>:
>
>> Thomas, believe me, you don't have to sell me on the uncanny brilliance
>> of Pynchon's prose. I myself have described reading Gravity's Rainbow as
>> being like imbibing some alien liquor, capable of pushing the receptive
>> reader to the edge of a near literal drunkenness. It's incredible. It's
>> amazing.
>>
>> But it ain't the only game in town.
>>
>> Foucault's Pendulum, for me, steeped since early adolescence in the
>> Continental tradition of occult obsession (of which the Anglo variety is
>> but a pale and paltry shadow), was an INCREDIBLY important novel. So much
>> so that I forced myself to read it in French, feeling that it would somehow
>> be closer to the Italian original. Having subsequently re-read it in
>> English, I would say that I made a wise choice.
>>
>> I'll probably try to explain myself more clearly in a future essay for
>> the P-list. As for now, however, I have a bunch of illustrations to churn
>> out, and I've been doing far more procrastinating than is advisable to
>> someone with my health and economic issues.
>>
>> Not trying to start any fights here, I just thought the rather ugly
>> dismissal of Eco on the occasion of his death was unseemly and distasteful.
>> I loved the man's work, both his fiction and non, and I can't fathom the
>> knee-jerk "he ain't shit" attitude that his demise was greeted with by some
>> here.
>>
>> And as for mocking the Sherlock Holmes stuff from Name of the Rose...
>> really? From fans of the guy who brought us the Learned English Dog, and
>> characters named Bigfoot and Mucho Maas? Come on, guys.
>>
>> Yours,
>> Jerky
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 4:51 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <
>> thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>>
>>> You were probably responding to my comment, Mark, as I was the one
>>> suggesting to compare random paragraphs.
>>>
>>> The following is a little reductive, I know, but for the sake of the
>>> argument:
>>>
>>> For me, the ultimate test of one's worth as a writer lies in one's prose
>>> style. No matter how intrigued I am by subject matter, plot lines or the
>>> author's knowledge of science or her/his general erudition -- it is the
>>> style that counts. Everything else is secondary, even if it is interesting,
>>> suspenseful, important etc.
>>>
>>> "1984" may be the most important novel of the 20th century -- but it is
>>> not the best, not by a long shot.
>>>
>>> It is a common experience for most novices to GR to have no idea just
>>> what on earth is going on on the novel's first pages but to keep reading
>>> for the prose. Rick Moody put this best:
>>>
>>> "What accounts for the perpetual hold Gravity's Rainbow has on the
>>> consciousness of American writers and critics? What accounts for the myth
>>> that has sprung up around it -- a myth that seems to have ensnared even the
>>> facts of the author's life, or, at least, our idea of those facts? What
>>> makes GR so crucial to the voyage of younger American writers? I'd contend
>>> that it's Pynchon's style, not his subject. Whereas the prose in V., Lot
>>> 49, and the early stories is occasionally inventive and arrestingly lyrical
>>> ("For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer,
>>> the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and
>>> left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there
>>> would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth"), in GR it is
>>> more than dazzling -- it's uncanny. It discards the usual limits on English
>>> and American prose. In fact, the writing -- notwithstanding the physics and
>>> hard science in a novel often fascinated with the intricacies of ordnance
>>> technologies -- seems to me the point of GR, its motivating force,
>>> especially as this language elucidates Pynchon's febrile imagination. Take,
>>> for example, the stunning opening page, with its nightmarish evocation of
>>> the London Blitz.
>>>
>>>     'They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main
>>> station, out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate
>>> parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no
>>> one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a
>>> disentanglement from, but a progressive /knotting into/ -- they go in under
>>> archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops
>>> of an underpass ... and it is poorer the deeper they go ... ruinous secret
>>> cities of poor, places /whose names he has never heard/.'"
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/07/surveyors-of-the-enlightenment/376912/
>>>
>>> True, in terms of "uncanny prose" VL, IV and BE are not on the same
>>> level as GR, but for me generally the above holds true for them as well.
>>> And Eco, as much as I may like him as a public intellectual or a
>>> semioticist or a literary theorist or a medievalist -- as a writer of
>>> fictions he is nowhere near the same ballpark.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Am 21.02.2016 um 12:55 schrieb Mark Thibodeau:
>>>
>>>> Just putting it out there that maybe, just maybe, comparing random
>>>> sample paragraphs from different authors' novels isn't the BEST way to
>>>> determine the relative value of each.
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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