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To: carranza2 who wrote (70753)	10/2/2006 9:37:05 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Maybe so, but the one I remember and the one that stuck was witch doctor. that is interesting. by the same token, "Quack" is the one i remember. i forget which book, but maybe Pale Fire or The Defense. i haven't read Speak Memory though it's been on the back burner for years. i have no clue about Nabokov and his uncle. i just googled "Viennese quack" and "Nabokov" and that was the first link that came up. the place to start with Pynchon is Lot 49, which is shorter, simpler, and has a more straightforward plot. i haven't read Finnegan's Wake. Joseph Campbell spent a decade on that book and it nearly cost him his marriage. that's where i draw the line on what i'm willing to sacrifice to read a novel -g-. btw, Pynchon has a new novel coming out in a few months: Against the Day. amazon.com a person presumed to be Pynchon published an advance summary of the book a few months ago and caused quite a stir. i consider Gaddis more difficult than Pynchon--at the sentence level if not in plot complexity. the nice thing about Gaddis is he writes entire novels in dialog, and doesn't even tell you who's talking. and it's the greatest dialog ever put to print. when you read his dialog you see that most writers are just hacks and don't pay attention to what people really say. Gaddis is an artist. just thumb through a few pages of JR or A Frolic of His Own and you'll see what i mean. the easiest Gaddis novel is Carpenter's Gothic. JR is the hardest, followed by The Recognitions (where the name Wyatt Gwyon comes from). as a side point, the title of Franzen's highly amusing novel The Corrections was a hat tip to Gaddis. Franzen had a love-hate relation with Gaddis and published a long piece in The New Yorker, i believe, called "Mr. Difficult", wherein he lambastes difficult writers like Gaddis and Pynchon. i really enjoyed The Corrections. speaking of ergodic literature ("hard" literature), i really enjoyed Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves over the summer. i can safely say it's like nothing you've ever read. he just came out with a new work, Only Revolutions, another highly innovative book (and by book, i mean the actual physical book)--it is meant to be read from both covers at the same time. the two stories (two people's perspectives on an intertwining story) meet in the middle of the book. amazon.com i spend a lot of time reading in Japanese, and increasingly Korean. so English novels, no matter how hard, are like a break for me. i do read some trash (i just read Darkly Dreaming Dexter to get a heads-up on the new Showtime series Dexter, starring Michael C. Hall of Six Feet Under fame), but English ergodic literature keeps it interesting.

To: carranza2 who wrote (70753)	10/2/2006 10:10:54 AM
From: Tommaso	Respond to of 110194

OT "A lot of folks say they do, just as they say they've read Finnegan's Wake" I have never run into anyone who claimed to have read all of Finnegans Wake (leave out the apostrophe). When Ulysses was published, about forty copies were given to people who had been special supporters and admirers of Joyce. Some years ago a scholar got hold of a lot of those copies, or saw them somehow. They had been bound in the French way, with uncut signatures. Few of the presentation copies had more than a few dozen of their pages cut. I have read and reread and studied Ulysses, and can say that it repays the effort. I have never read any of Finnegans Wake except the well-annotated selections in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Am waiting till I go to prison to take it up.