[HN Gopher] Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Har...
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Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books
(2002)
Author : cocacola1
Score : 11 points
Date : 2024-02-04 20:38 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (adilegian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (adilegian.com)
| flenserboy wrote:
| All the reasons I can't stand Franzen's novels are found in this
| essay. Fascinating.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| geor9e wrote:
| "The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have
| left for your ideas." - https://paulgraham.com/simply.html
| geor9e wrote:
| I can slog through hard-to-read novels. I can decrypt your
| linguistic puzzles. I sometimes write in a hard-to-read way,
| but never on purpose. The only people who write that way on
| purpose are imposters, who camouflage their lack of ideas in
| infinitely-interpretable word salads. I truly don't believe
| there is any idea, thinkable by any human mind, that can't be
| communicated in simple writing. It might take more words, since
| you aren't taking jargon shortcuts, but it forces you bring
| your ideas into the full sunlight to face judgement. In all
| that re-drafting work to communicate simply, entertainingly,
| and smoothly, the author is forced to improve their ideas.
| ethanbond wrote:
| > truly don't believe there is any idea, thinkable by any
| human mind, that can't be communicated in simple writing
|
| I don't see why this would be true at all. Language is an
| extremely recent innovation, with most biological and
| conscious experiences happening nowhere in the vicinity of
| it. Also we _know_ there are ideas that can be expressed in
| one language and not in another, largely due to the need for
| cultural conditioning (i.e. repeated firsthand sensory
| experience)
|
| Here's a trivial example: describe the color blue to someone
| who has never seen it themselves.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read
| Books (2002)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35395519 -
| April 2023 (1 comment)
|
| _William Gaddis: Below Deck on the Ship of Fools_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30974668 - April 2022 (10
| comments)
|
| _Unrecognizable: William Gaddis's American Pessimism_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25460377 - Dec 2020 (4
| comments)
|
| _William Gaddis's Disorderly Inferno_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24839140 - Oct 2020 (2
| comments)
|
| Not many comments but actually pretty good ones there.
| angelsbrood wrote:
| :)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I took a course on _Ulysses_ at Stanford Extension. All the
| students were people who wanted to be there, and I had a teacher
| who 'd been teaching it for 50 years. You can't get a much more
| ideal environment than that.
|
| This is the canonical _Difficult Book_. So I was hoping to have
| that elusive pleasure of finally cracking it. You can 't call me
| unwilling.
|
| Nope. I was unimpressed. I thought that stream-of-consciousness
| was novel at the time, but now it's routine. Showing how people's
| minds _really_ work (fragmented): same thing, who cares?
|
| _Oxen of the Sun_ : the use of 14 or whatever different English
| prose styles to say the same thing: who TF cares? The teacher
| enthused, "He can do whatever he wants with the English
| language!" I thought, "Yeah, so what?"
|
| So I don't think "difficult" is automatically bad, but it's not
| automatically good, either. "To what end?" is the question I'd
| ask.
| Animats wrote:
| Target audience: "The elite of New York, the elite who are
| beautiful, thin, anorexic, neurotic, sophisticated, don't smoke,
| have abortions tri-yearly, are antiseptic, live in lofts or
| penthouses, this superior species of humanity who read Harper's
| and The New Yorker."
|
| I used to know someone who wrote for that audience. She was fired
| for writing this:[1]
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/fashion/13CRITIC.html
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