Reader's Block Presentation

Hey, everybody. So, things have been abundantly busy and stressful this week. As a result, I have gotten none of my work done unless it's for class. (And even some of that has been difficult to squeeze in.)

Even though I don't have anything to share about my short story sprint project (which is quickly metamorphosing into "the short story crawl" :-/  [Odd, I thought things were supposed to get better when they "metamorphosed."]), I do want to share with you a semi-creative piece I did as a part of my group presentation for the Introduction to Literary Genres: the Novel, class.

A brief background: Reader's Block is an experimental novel by David Markson that weaves numerous quotes from literary figures into a bare-bones story about a man known only as Reader who is trying to write a book about a character named Protagonist. It is this word-tapestry style that I attempted to emulate in presentation on the surrounding context of Markson's work, using the internet.

Right. Okay. And now for something completely different.



Reader's Block

The most helpful favorable review

(*****) “The best piece of American fiction in ten years.” By A Customer

Reader’s Block is one of the purest books ever written, not a novel to taste but to ingest. We owe Markson everything, for he is more than gifted and we, struggling readers, are more than blessed.

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Geoff Dyer: Reader’s Block

Don’t read much now.Philip Larkin, “A Study of Reading Habits”

Sometimes I’m too lazy to read, preferring to watch television; more often I am too conscientious to read.

bookslut.com

HOW TO COMBAT READER’S BLOCK

1. Note to self: Stop it with the Law & Order re-runs already.

Urban Dictionary

Reader’s Block

May 12, 2009 Urban Word of the Day

Eddie - Hey, man I see you’re reading McCarthy’s The Road. Nice.

Nerdlinger - I’m trying to read it, but I got this damn reader’s block! I’m 20 pages in but I don’t remember anything. Fuck!

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--> Google Search: “Philip Larkin”

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--> Google Search: “Law & Order”

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Philip Larkin: The Poetry Foundation

Despite his wide popularity, Larkin “shied from publicity, rarely consented to interviews or readings, cultivated his image as right-wing curmudgeon and grew depressed at his fame,” according to J. D. McClatchy in the New York Times Book Review.

Law & Order TV Show Series on NBC: Find Cast Info and Episode Guide

NEXT ON: Thanks for a great 20 years! Watch highlights and check out brand new photos from the series finale!

The Nerdlinger Awards: About

And it would be best if the awards were beer bottles with custom made labels on them!

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The most helpful critical review

(***--) “The Culture of Death” By R. W. Rasband

It resembles Julian Barnes’ “Flaubert’s Parrot.”

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The New York Times, “Obsessed with the Hermit of Croisset” by Peter Brooks

Behind the magnificent and melancholy novels, as every lover of Flaubert knows, stands one of the richest and most entertaining of all correspondences: witty, iconoclastic, bracingly profane, unbuttoned and often explosive - so different from the carefully controlled novels.

The Guardian, “Critical thinking: Julian Barnes’s narrator in Flaubert’s Parrot can mock literary criticism, says John Mullan, but he can’t get away from it,” by John Mullan

So traditional is the novelist’s disdain for critics that one whole section of Flaubert’s Parrot consists of Flaubert’s acerbic denunciations of professional criticism. [...] Yet the pretend-errors and hesitations of the modern novelist are just as self-indulgent as “the assumed divinity of the 19th-century novelist.” He is writing criticism himself.

Time Magazine, “Books: Pleasures of Merely Circulating Flaubert’s Parrot,” by Martha Duffy

Almost any literary contrivance can be called a novel nowadays.

The most helpful favorable review

(*****) “Deeply Felt, Highly Literate, Highly Entertaining,” By mp

Conventions of narrative, style, and form are dispensed with throughout this work - it is composed of a range of genres (multi-voiced narratives, chronology, encyclopedia/dictionary, and even essay-exam questions).

The most helpful critical review

(**---) “NO, I DON’T WANNA CRACKER,” By John Stahle

In 1876, writing his last completed novel, Flaubert borrows a stuffed parrot from the Museum of Rouen to grace his desk.

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paratactic - definition of paratactic by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Encyclopedia

par-a-tax-is (pronunciation guide)

n.

The juxtaposition of clauses or phrases without the use of coordinating or subordinating conjunctions, as It was cold; the snows came.

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