OMGOMGOMG

A pubilcation date for A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in George R.R. Martins A Song of Ice and Fire has been set.

http://www.georgerrmartin.com/if-update.html

Best news ever.

Now I've got to remember to read books 1-4 again in June

i can't remember who recommended it itt, but im about a 1/4 way through "the blank slate" by steven pinker. quite good so far.

also just about finished with "this time its different" by reinhart and rogoff about the financial history of crises. to say the least it is exhaustive.

I actually have never read this one so can't comment any more on it, but I thought No Country for Old Men and The Road solidified quite the opposite for me, that he was not a strong writer but was a brilliant storyteller.

And here I am thinking he's both a brilliant storyteller and a savant of a writer.

He has some poetic/lyrical phrasing, and some incredible imagery. I suppose that does mean he is a kind of great writer. I am more talking about the technical aspects. He says he intentionally disregards the rules of the English language, but who knows how much of that is part of his ethos.

He isn't the only well-read writer out there that disses the grade school rules of english

Who are you thinking of? I am sure you are right that a number of popular writers write technically terrible English, and some of them say they do so out of intent.

James Ellroy
Jonathan Safran Foer

I've seen Pynchon do it in spots.

Can probably think of some more if you give me some time


The best story I recall is James Ellroy was told by his publisher that his 900 page novel was too long. So he took all the verbs out and shortened it by about half.

I am not as familiar with Safran Foer or Pynchon (shame on me for the last!!!!), so you can speak to whether or not their full body of work can lay claim to the same level of disregard for the rules of English that McCarthy's does. I know it is wrong to compare Ellroy's level of disregard to McCarthy's.

I mean, to make such a distinction is ultimately arbitrary, but there is quite a divide between someone who from time to time uses style to create an otherwise impossible effect, and someone whose books are nearly bereft of punctuation. McCarthy said something like he sees no reason to draw squiggly lines to indicate when someone is speaking. That is a far cry from, say, when I leave out a few commas because I want a series of events to read as rushed as the characters experienced them.

Here's a sample from Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand:

http://www.barcelonareview.com/24/e_je.htm

Not all of his stuff is like this, but recently he's said "f it" to more of the rules of English.

Lol that is the very example I referred to before I posted to solidify to myself my assertion about Ellroy was valid. Too funny.

Anyway. That example mostly displays a lot of staccato writing, which leaves the quality up for debate, but again hardly touches what McCarthy does. I am not at a computer but will be happy tomorrow to post examples of what I mean.

I'm too lazy to transcribe his writing.

But yes, I am coming to some conclusions about what constitutes great writing:

Do not bother using quotation marks. Using these things lowers the cerebral value of your writing and if the reader isn't smart enough to figure it out, then that's his loss.

Use long drawn out sentences. It is a competition guys: You did thirty words he asked her and with that she responded yes I am almost jealous of that other sentence you wrote with forty seven I think it was. He nodded yes, that is the truth I think.

The story itself doesn't actually have to make much sense. The use or lack of use of proper punctuation or any other stuff that would help the reader ease into the story will convince him or her that the writing is in fact very good. The story is just something to do while you are writing words.

------------------------

Not really frustrated with the story yet. At least I sort of don't like Holme, so that must be a good thing. Surprisingly, I am still able to read the story at normal-ish speed. That is why I think the writing itself is good.

I don't know - you could probably find a scholarly/academic article somewhere that examines why McCarthy doesn't abide to the proper rules of English. Perhaps he's thumbing his nose to authority, arrogance, individualism, or maybe his brain just works in some weird way that this is his only method to produce his stories. I don't know.

All I know is it doesn't nearly tilt me at all enough to put his books down. In fact, I kind of enjoy that he is a rulebreaker. I was a kid that always had red marks all over my grade school essays, and it often seemed the rules were so arbitrary anyway.

Wasn't what was said and how its said more important than these rules?

I would be interested to see anyone make an argument why he doesn't abide by the rules for any reason other than that's not what he wants to do. And as you suggest, he may not be capable of adhering to them.

If your point is that the English language relies on arbitrary rules, so it doesn't matter why or how a writer adheres to them, I think our viewpoints may be too far apart for us to agree, though I am enjoying our discussion. I see good writing as containing three basic components: expert technical skills, style, and something worth saying. It sounds like you agree that McCarthy displays the last two, but doesn't display the first. I don't know if he ignores the rules because he can't follow them or because he doesn't want to. That is my only real point. Despite my insistence on it, I also enjoy his books.

As I said above, yes. Most definitely. But McCarthy is only very good at one of those things.

Do graphic novels belong ITT? If so, I picked up a treasure trove last night (reading graphic novels is expensive)

Daytripper - Slices of man's life
Coward (Criminal Vol. 1.) Std. Noir
Blacksad - Feline crime-noir
Ex Machina 1-5 - Mayor of NYC former hero, controls machines, helped on 9/11
Comic's Guide to the Mission District - compilation of short comics about San fran's mission district.

can we petition Don DeLillo to write a fiction about gambling? I swear in all of his books where he touches on the subject, it's par excellence

same goes for his sports

I do enjoy the occasional graphic novel. I am not familiar with any of these though. Then again, my graphic novel knowledge is worse than my literature knowledge.

Sample from Cormac McCarthy:

Outer Dark, page 65-66:

"They rode on through the new green woods under the rising sun where wakerobins marked the roadway whth their foiled wax spears, climbing, the man jiggling the reins across the mule's tatter withers, through a cutback and into brief sunlight wher the olds woman hooked her bonnet forward on her had and peered sideways at the other like a cowled mandrill, her puckerstrung mouth working the snuff that lay in her lower lip, turning again, a jet of black spittle lancing without trajectory across the edge of the wagon and into the woods, descending, the man working the break, the wagon creaking and sidling a little in loose gravel, onto the flatland again, fording a weedgrown branch where dead water rusted the stones and through a canebrake where myriad small birds flitted and rustled dryly like locusts."

--------

My edit:

" "

Thank you. I like mine better.

It's really not a bad book. I can't help picking on it though.

I enjoy passages like that in McCarthy books. I try to envision it and fall into a dreamlike state

I think you hit the nail on the head. If you are a reader that enjoys dissecting every word you read, then this is not the author for you. If you are just trying to become part of the story and just be one with the book, this is for you.

However, this does not mean you can be a lazy reader. That sort of reader should stick to the Twilight series.

It's interesting that to be a good writer, you have to learn to be a good reader. In order to become a good reader, you have to challenge yourself to be a better reader. McCarthy poses that challenge to you. In this perspective, he is a valuable author.

Like most quips, "If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time to write" is a surface quote few people ever get the meaning of.

Another one is "Write what you know."

Many people don't seem to agree with this, and I don't understand why. I've heard people criticize people like McCarthy and John Irving for always writing about the same stuff, which of course is debatable in itself. But I mean if an author finds his niche and is good at it, why shouldn't he stick with it?

The most popular/accessible/most comic book-y (and also the only one I had read before) of the list is Ex Machina. It is super great, and it is the same guy who wrote Y the Last Man (a disease kills everything with a Y chromosome, except one man and his pet monkey), which is also the best.

Yeah, me too. For me the difference between whether I like that passage or not is whether I actually hear it as a monologue in my head. If I read it and process it as symbols (I am not sure how to articulate this), I get really impatient and am all "come to the point, eh?", but if I actually hear as I would spoken language it is really awesome and really works for me.

I ruined my appreciation for a lot of this stuff by doing a literature degree where you have to read books over a certain timeframe. It got me reading too fast and unable to enjoy stuff like this because I was always just searching for the point so I could get to the next page. I'm just finding my way back to this stuff and do think it's really good. But when I can't get into it, I just put it down and read something faster and am glad it's there later. I think to enjoy this stuff you have to take your time.

I kind of disagree with it if you take the quip at face value. Not sure how to explain it. I think that most people take the quote to extremes. "Write what you know" should probably be rewritten into a longer essay, but no one can remember that.

It is sort of like the old saw: "Money is the root of all evil." Obviously it isn't (discounting the fact that this isn't even the complete quote), but many people take it at face value to justify their own poverty. Similarly, "write what you know" is commonly used as justification for one's impoverished writing.