>I have always believed that genius and originality should be evident almost at once and delivered like a punch—in a paragraph, a stanza, even an image. One should not have to eat the whole roast to determine it once was a cow. That’s why I always liked Ford Madox Ford’s “page ninety-nine test.” (Wyndham Lewis also laid claim to this method.) Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you
What books pass this?
it takes longer for a story to develop then a page
>>7749191
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS ARGUING AGAINST THAT GUY REGARDING BOOK OF THE NEW SUN vs MOBY DICK. holy fuck. thank you based borges. to answer that, Petersburg by Bely. never been blown away quite like that.
>>7749198
>implying that one reads for 'story'
>implying that the transcendence of the author cannot be revealed in a single paragraph and done consistently through a book
>what is Proust Madeleine scene?
>>7749205
I'm sorry but is it not possible that a character is developed throughout a book and the "climax" for that character has increased weight because of previous occurrences?
>>7749218
Yea it is
But that won't be a genius book
>>7749223
and what about growing "accustomed" to the idiosyncrasies of that particular author? To immediately grasp the "whole" is to me somewhat unlikely
>>7749228
>arguing with borges
the guy's dead.
>>7749239
why am I imagining borges reading authors like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaXQQbcgw0
>>7749247
more like people reading Borges.
>>7749247
everyone should read books like that
>>7749257
i always thought this was how you read in the first place?
>>7749191
The Recognitions, Don Quixote, Ulysses, Inferno...
>>7749239
Except that the quote is not from Borges, but from Gass...
>>7749228
What authors have you been reading?
>>7749268
well, you're in luck then, you can send him an e-mail and argue with him!
with that, however, i will say THANK YOU BASED GASS
>>7749271
he's ashamed to admit it, but Gene Wolfe. isn't that right, anon?
>>7749274
To be exact, from his review here
Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium
I have always believed that genius and originality should be evident almost at once and delivered like a punch—in a paragraph, a stanza, even an image. One should not have to eat the whole roast to determine it once was a cow. That’s why I always liked Ford Madox Ford’s “page ninety-nine test.” (Wyndham Lewis also laid claim to this method.) Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you. (Of course, if you do that to Harmonium, you will read from “Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks,” lines stamped with the poet’s individuality, but not, I think, genius. Nevertheless, overleaf, you will encounter a poem entitled “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” and all doubts will be dispelled. Although some individuality is lost, since it might—almost—have been written by Edith Sitwell—“Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk.”) With Stevens, you will not be kept long in suspense, if you’ve begun at, as one ought. Shortly you will sense that something extraordinary is happening to the language. By you are reading of “golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,” and by you come face-to-face with the first masterpiece, “The Snow Man,” which quietly begins “One must have a mind of winter,” a line that does true justice to m and n, and then concludes, so characteristically:
>>7749277
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Listening, our breath taken, we behold it. Later, in that same first work, we shall encounter “Sunday Morning,” perhaps the pinnacle of the metapoetical—do I dare to say?
>>7749218
that's not the point
the point is that you can tell, if you've got the eyes to see, the talent and vision of the writer just from a few paragraphs because genuine skill shows up in every sentence, it doesn't take hundreds of pages to show up
anyone can have a moment of brilliance amidst 500 pages
>>7749283
This is why shorter works are god tier
>>7749284
because they don't have a 99th page to turn to?
>>7749300
Because the form pretty much requires you to bring your A game with no bullshit filler.
Seems accurate enough
Gray’s Lanark:
"The house was changing. Obscure urgency filled it and in bed at night he heard rumours of preparation and debate. Coming home from a friend’s back green he stuck with his head on one side of the railings and his body on the other. Mr. and Mrs. Thaw released him by greasing his ears with butter and pulling a leg each, laughing all the time. When free he flung himself howling on the grass but they tickled his armpits and sang “Stop Yer Ticklin’, Jock” until he couldn’t help laughing. Then one day they all came out onto the landing and the house was locked behind them. His father and mother carried his sister Ruth and some luggage; Thaw had a gas mask in a cardboard box hanging from his shoulder by a string loop; they all went up to his school by the sunlit bird-twittering back lanes. Murmuring groups of mothers stood in the playground with small children at their side. The fathers spoke in noisier groups and older children played halfheartedly between."
Coupland’s Generation X
It's three hours or so after Tyler's phone call, and people are weirding me out today. I just can't deal with it. Thank God I'm working tonight. Creepy as it may be, dreary as it may be, repetitive as it may be, work keeps me level. Tobias gave Elvissa a ride home but never returned. Claire pooh-poohs the notion of hanky-panky. She seems to know something that I don't. Maybe she'll spill her secret later on. Both Dag and Claire are sulking on the couches, not talking to each other. They're restlessly shelling pea- nuts, tossing the burlappy remnants into an overflow- ing 1974 Spokane World's Fair ashtray. (That was the fair where it rained a lot and where they had buildings made out of aluminum soda can : tabs.) Dag is upset that Elvissa gave him not one shred of attention today and Claire, because of the plutonium, still won't return into her house. The contamination business has bothered her more than we'd suspected. She claims she'll be living with me indefinitely now: "Radiation has more endurance than even Mr. Frank Sinatra, Andy.
I'm here for the long haul." Claire will, however, make forays into her residence—no longer than five minutes per foray per day—to retrieve her belongings. Her first trip was as timid a one as might be made by a medieval peasant entering a dying plague town, brandishing a dead goat to ward away evil spirits.
>>7749308
Borges Collected Fictions:
In the cosmogonies of the Gnostics, the demiurges knead up a red
Adam who cannot manage to stand; as rude and inept and elementary as
that Adam of dust was the Adam of dream wrought from the sorcerer's
nights. One afternoon, the man almost destroyed his creation, but he could
not bring himself to do it. (He'd have been better off if he had.) After making
vows to all the deities of the earth and the river, he threw himself at the
feet of the idol that was perhaps a tiger or perhaps a colt, and he begged for
its untried aid. That evening, at sunset, the statue filled his dreams. In the
dream it was alive, and trembling-yet it was not the dread-inspiring
hybrid form of horse and tiger it had been. It was, instead, those two vehement
creatures plus bull, and rose, and tempest, too-and all that, simultaneously.
The manifold god revealed to the man that its earthly name was
Fire, and that in that circular temple (and others like it) men had made sacrifices
and worshiped it, and that it would magically bring to life the phantasm
the man had dreamed-so fully bring him to life that every creature,
save Fire itself and the man who dreamed him, would take him for a man of
flesh and blood. Fire ordered the dreamer to send the youth, once instructed
in the rites, to that other ruined temple whose pyramids still stood
downriver, so that a voice might glorify the god in that deserted place. In
the dreaming man's dream, the dreamed man awoke.
>>7749315
Celine's Journey to the End of Night
I don't dare ask him questions. My job was to keep walking, that was clear to me. In
the darkness here and there, as we passed, a red-and-green light flashed a command. Long lines of gold
marked the doors. We had passed the 1800s long ago and then the 3000s, and still we were on our way,
drawn by our invincible destiny. As though driven by instinct, the little bellhop in his braid and stripes
pursued the Nameless in the darkness. Nothing in this cavern seemed to take him unawares. His whistling
modulated plaintively when we passed a black man and a black chambermaid. And that was all.
Struggling to walk faster in those corridors, I lost what little self-assurance I had left when I escaped from
quarantine. I was falling apart, just as I had seen my shack fall apart in the African wind and the floods of
warm water. Here I was attacked by a torrent of unfamiliar sensations. There's a moment between two
brands of humanity when you find yourself thrashing around in a vacuum.
Suddenly, without warning, the youngster pivoted. We had arrived. I bumped into a chair, it was my room,
a big box with ebony walls. The only light was a faint ring surrounding the bashful greenish lamp on the
table. The manager of the Laugh Calvin Hotel begged the visitor to look upon him as a friend and assured
him that he, the manager, would make a special point of keeping him, the visitor, cheerful throughout his
stay in New York. Reading this notice, which was displayed where no one could possibly miss it, added if
possible to my depression.
>>7749191
>turn to 99th page in my favorite book
>literally a blank page
welp. that says a lot about me.
>>7749315
clearly a fucking genius.
>>7749191
let's see the book of the new sun's 99th page, anyone have it?
>>7749357
>>7749363
no genius here.
bird! From golddawn glory to glowworm gleam. We were
lowquacks did we not tacit turn. Elsewere there here no con-
cern of the Guinnesses. But only the ruining of the rain has
heard. Estout pourporteral! Cracklings cricked. A human pest
cycling (pist!) and recycling (past!) about the sledgy streets, here
he was (pust!) again! Morse nuisance noised. He was loose at
large and (Oh baby!) might be anywhere when a disguised ex-
nun, of huge standbuild and masculine manners in her fairly fat
forties, Carpulenta Gygasta, hattracted hattention by harbitrary
conduct with a homnibus. Aerials buzzed to coastal listeners of
an oertax bror collector's budget, fullybigs, sporran, tie, tuft,
tabard and bloody antichill cloak, its tailor's (Baernfather's) tab
reading V.P.H., found nigh Scaldbrothar's Hole, and divers
shivered to think what kaind of beast, wolves, croppis's or four-
penny friars, had devoured him. C.W. cast wide. Hvidfinns lyk,
drohneth svertgleam, Valkir lockt. On his pinksir's postern, the
boys had it, at Whitweekend had been nailed an inkedup name
and title, inscribed in the national cursives, accelerated, regres-
sive, filiform, turreted and envenomoloped in piggotry: Move
up. Mumpty! Mike room for Rumpty! By order, Nickekellous
Plugg; and this go, no pentecostal jest about it, how gregarious
his race soever or skilful learned wise cunning knowledgable
clear profound his saying fortitudo fraught or prudentiaproven,
were he chief, count, general, fieldmarshal, prince, king or Myles
the Slasher in his person, with a moliamordhar mansion in the
Breffnian empire and a place of inauguration on the hill of Tully-
mongan, there had been real murder, of the rayheallach royghal
raxacraxian variety, the MacMahon chaps, it was, that had done
him in. On the fidd of Verdor the rampart combatants had left
him lion with his dexter handcoup wresterected in a pureede
paumee bloody proper. Indeed not a few thick and thin well-
wishers, mostly of the clontarfminded class, (Colonel John Bawle
O'Roarke, fervxamplus), even ventured so far as to loan or beg
copies of D. Blayncy's trilingual triweekly, Scatterbrains' Aften-
ing Posht, so as to make certain sure onetime and be satisfied of
their quasicontribusodalitarian's having become genuinely quite
>>7749191
The great problem is Infinite Jest doesn't pass. At all.
>>7749308
>Lanark
mah nigga
>>7749205
>transcendence of the author
Holy fuck you're retardedd
You don't know shit about Proust
>>7749315
Seems esoteric to me, tbqhfam
>>7749641
It does in the italian translation
