[Jochen Stremmel]

Speak, Memory?

2016-03-10 23:31 GMT+01:00 Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>:

> I do not read memoirs but I think the appetite for memoirs is closer to
> the appetite that creates People magazine than any reaction to fabulist
> fiction. I don’t accept that the bulk of fiction has followed the examples
> she offers either. On the other hand I and many on the list who have this
> interest in Pynchon, Marquez, Delillo etc. do feel a need to balance their
> reading with heavy doses of  non-fiction. I also need poetry which is as
> close as I get to memoir.  For me at least there is a tonic relation
> between the various genres so I’m inclined to think there is something to
> the general idea in the broadest sense, but I truly doubt that M Karr is
> putting her finger on a meaningful phenomenon.
>
> There are probably some very good memoirs somewhere. Ya think?  I liked
> Merton’s Seven Story Mountain.  I think that is the only memoirish book I
> have read all the way through.
> > On Mar 10, 2016, at 7:08 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I suppose you could argue that Breaking Bad and Gilmore Girls and
> > Bojack Horseman are directly responsible for a thirst for
> > Kardashian-related television, too.
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 10:44 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> Karr's is the kind of airy generalization that makes me want to go all
> >> quant. Have those fabulist etc. categories actually increased as a
> share of
> >> novels published? Is there some per-reader sales tracking data to show
> that
> >> readers who tried those categories are now reading more memoirs? Is
> there
> >> any reason to think this argument -- ostensibly about the public world
> of
> >> books and readers -- is more than  a projection of Karr's preferences?
> >>
> >> On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 6:07 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> "Changes in  the novel have helped to jack up memoir's audience as
> fiction
> >>> grew more fabulist or dystopic or hyper intellectual under the sway of
> Joyce
> >>> and Woolf and Garcia Marquez and Pynchon acolytes, readers thirsty for
> >>> reality began imbibing memoir."   ---Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir 2105
> >>>
> >>> Well, maybe, Mary, partly......
> >>>
> >>> But I, who along with readers and critics' 'lengthy assaults' on
> memoir,
> >>> such as by Wm Gass, Jonathon Yardley and James Wolcott will just add,
> >>>
> >>> Knausgaard and Ferrante have been hugely read as novelists bringing us
> >>> back to 'reality'. And the rediscovery of Stoner and more and more.
> >>
> >>
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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