Dave Eggers returns

I'm still not sure what it is people have against him or against his first book, which I still think was very good. I think people resented his celebrity a bit. His second novel wasn't good at all, but I was surprised to see this new one tackling this subject and to garner the advance praise it has.

As far as his celebrity goes, at least he's gone on to do good things with it and the money he made.

this one sounds great.

during that whole million little peices/ Oprah smackdown thing i kept asking myself why the dude didnt just do an Eggars in the first place and save himself all that misery.

dude has/had a serious problem with Eggers and talked a lot about how much harder he was than him, and how real his shit was.

I can give you the exact point where I objectively concluded that Eggers is a colossal self-important yobbo full of stale old shit. The chapter in AHWOSG where he loses his wallet, blames some Hispanic kids, and then discovers that he left his wallet at home.

Fuck him and his McSweeney mafia. Let them anonymously self-review their spooge on Amazon.

I thought it was quite good of him to be honest enough to say "look how much of a kneejerk dickhead I was here."

Also, even if it makes him a cock it doesn't alter the book from being good. Which it is, and in fact I took great pleasure in liking it precisely because of a few people on ILX who'd sneered about the whole McSweenys mafia.

YSKOV has my favorite moment where a book with a mysterious title reveals itself in the text ever.

otm. And yet, Eggers does have a self-importance about him that turns a lot of people (even and especially people who know him personally) right th' fuck off.

I don't think I made it to this wallet incident in the first book. I think I gave up within a couple of chapters of him taking his brother in. Ugh.

Yeah, that's what I meant. People who know him report even worse.

The poor man, rich in faith, who
toils for the love of God and is generous of the little fruit of his
labors, is much nearer to heaven than the rich man who spends a fortune in
good works from no higher motive than his natural inclination to
benevolence.

-from "The Groundwork of the Christian Virtues"
by Archbishop Ullathorne
1945

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/1932416609.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V41400631_.jpg

which is the best novel I've read in years

(xp)

No, no. I think people read his books because they think he's a good writer. I personally think they're wrong. But hey, who am I? (If that's what we're really arguing.)

Meanwhile, his press and self-made publicity has turned him into something he is by many accounts not -- a nice guy, a great philanthropist, a kind of person to attach your undying fandom to.

You think I don't read the books because I don't like him as a person?

No, dude, I'm on your side. I think you don't read the books because he's just not that good.

Which is fine as long he sticks to doing so within his own sphere of endeavour: writing. When he joins forces with Bono, then I will have a major problem with him.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/printout/0,8816,1546275,00.html

His prose style is pretty awkward and amateurish when you strip away the schtick:

He first pushes the coffee table closer to the entertainment center, reducing the space between the three objects: me, the table, and the shelving. Now he drags a chair from the kitchen. He places this near my head. From the couch he brings one of the three large cushions that sit upright. He stands the cushion up against the seat of the chair. Bringing another chair from the kitchen, he places it, with a couch cushion soon resting against it, at my feet. He has effectively eliminated me from his view. My view is now limited to the ceiling above me, and the little I can see between the windows of the coffee table. I lie, finding myself impressed with his architectural vision, until he surprises me with the blanket. The bedspread from my room is carefully spread over the couch cushions until it forms a tent over me, and this is too much. Michael, I have little patience left for you. I am finished with you, and wish you could have seen what I saw. Be grateful, TV Boy. Have respect. Have you seen the beginning of a war? Picture your neighborhood, and now see the women screaming, the babies tossed into wells. Watch your brothers explode. I want you there with me.

Ugh.

Through the doorway I saw a kind of airplane, coming low over the village. It was a fascinating kind of plane, black everywhere and dull, unreflective. The planes I had seen before resembled birds in a rudimentary way, with noses and wings and chests, but this machine looked like nothing so much as a cricket. I watched it as it flew over the village. The sound was rich and black, louder than anything I had ever known, the vibrations shaking my ribs, pulling me apart.

He has the capacity to write well but he always seems in need of a better editor.

Yeah. This is my biggest problem with him. He like, re-released YSKOV with a new title and 50 extra pages or something and called it Sacrament? Dude, get thee to a fuckin editor.

jaymc, you should submit that to McSweeneys' Convergences Contest.

You mean within the last four months?

How about this para:
But it was strange. Adults were running from the machines, falling, screaming. I looked at the people running, though I was too dazed to move. The volume of the machines held me still. I felt tired in some new way, as I watched mothers grab their young sons and bring them back into their huts. I watched men run into the high grass and throw themselves to the ground. I watched as one of the crickets flew over the soccer field, flying lower than the other machines; I watched as the twenty young men playing on the field ran toward the school, screaming. Then a new sound pumped through the air. It was like the cutting and dividing of the machine, but it was not that.

Why is there the semicolon that late in the game? I assume its to accelerate the rhythm, but it just sticks out. Why did they run "toward the school, screaming" instead of saying they "ran, screaming, toward the school". Why does he need to keep mentioning he watched. Why can't the parallelism just be with "as" or even better yet, fade away. How does a sound pump through the air? Like a sump pump? Things don't even pump themselves through anything! They need to pump something else? What exactly is it that the sound is pumping through the air then?

The last sentence of the preceding para is: "I saw other boys in the village staring up as I was, some of them jumping, laughing and pointing to the crickets with the chopping sound." So where's the "it" that was strange? There is not "it" -- just more filler. He already established that it was an airplane that looked like a cricket -- the character doesn't need to keep calling it a cricket, either -- that's what people do when they don't know what it is, not when they just are reminded of something else. If he was staring up, then how did he see the other boys, by the way? Wouldn't they have been, y'know, level? Did the crickets have the chopping sound or the boys? Just the jumping ones, or all the ones?

Ok, enough, you see the problem here.

It's just kind of funny. I mean, I think the dude is a douchebag and a terrible writer, but I solve this by not reading his stuff anymore, but there are just some people who HATE him and look for any reason to start a Eggers jihad.

So also it feels like an American actor slipping in and out of a poor, say, Scottish accent.

I think it's an effective use of the parallel, it's a poetic image.
Other than that, yeah I agree with everything you said just about. Except for the pumping. And I think the "it" refers to the situation.

http://rakesprogress.typepad.com/

These words actually cause me more pain than anything else on the thread. (Not because of 'oh how the time has gone' nonsense but because the concept is annoying.)

xpost: Seriously? Infinite Jest is mind blowingly awesome and I will buy you a copy for you to read, if you will agree to try to read it.

It took me two times, too. The first time was when it first came out, I gave up after 25 pages. Then I tried it like 5 years later when I had very little else to do and it kicked my ass. I've been thinking about big books a lot lately, you have to put up with a LOT of bullshit (boring sections that would go on for a page at the most in a normal size book stretch on for 10 pages in big books) but in the end it is soooooo worth it. But if you don't want to put up with the footnotes and stuff I can see where it's offputting and annoying.

Seriously it's a really really awesome, hilarious (very very very funny) book.

Okay, I missed the nickname at first there. (Am I the only one to have read all the books in the Canopus in Argos series?)

xposts

The first 100 pages are rough(the Canadian spies bored me senseless). But now I can't stop reading it, to be honest.

waht

xpost- As for footnotes, the Filmography of James O. Incandenza is the best thing ever.

yeah jaymc, I hear you. Poor Nicholson Baker.

I was going to say. (The desk is right behind me to the left.)

I read somewhere that John Krasinski (Jim from The Office) is trying to put out a film version of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

In everyday conversation,I could say "She walked confidently down the street", "Confidently, she walked down the street", or "She walked down the street confidently". I'm sure one of those is more gramatically proper than another, but in the end, they all get the meaning across, they each have different rhythms that might sound more attractive at the moment of writing or saying it, so who cares?

It's like listening to music for notes that are out of the key instead of just letting yourself feel the emotion of it.

Reeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaallly? How deliciously perverse! (Sort of an essential part of the turn-off, personally.)

they all suck with the word 'confidently' in there

Yeah, but out of key notes jump out at you, and so does bad writing. That's the whole point.

ij, the thing is, always felt as sprawly and adolescent as its main character, and i guess read as a book being about that its pretty good, but when ppl. try to read more into it is when i go batty and get more turned off dfw qua dfw than i should.

always liked that "westward path of the empire" short story tho, as well as some of the other material in "girl with the curious hair."

now onto the thing about eggers putting adverbs at the end of sentences, repeatedly, delimited by a comma. doing so adds finality, firmly. it's as though the thought is complete and then as a coda, there's the afterthought, dangling. doing so interrupts the flow in the middle of paragraphs, jarringly, pointlessly. also, it implies that the closing adverb isn't central to the thought which isn't the case in the screaming sentence, irritatingly.

maria has. like ten times. but she's a freak. she tried to get me to read them and i looked at her like she was made out of the funny papers.

Ten times, I'm impressed. There are passages I still remember from when I read them as a teen.