this vs. that

I want to post about the apparent discrepancy of taste in the section titled "Other people's books."

The list has mainly stuff by so-called 'minimalists' or worse 'realists,' though I don't think they are either of these things. These are the writers I read a lot and have some kind affinity with, though I'm not sure why. I just like them. I think it has something to do with clarity of vision (image) and language - I'm drawn to this. I also like some big, monstrous books, that are sort of confusing, but that I find beautiful or worthwhile anyway. Suttree, I think, is McCarthy's best. The thickness of language, getting lost in that book is fun. Same with Omensetter's Luck by William Gass. Those are what I call 'big language books,' where the language of the text is what makes the book, where language actually becomes content (though, I'm not sure you can't say this same thing about the 'minimalists', it's just more obvious with these big-language books).

Here's a thing: there's this on-going debate between these different types of writers. Between say, the minimalists, the more post-modern guys (say, Ben Marcus, Gass, Barth, Foster Wallace) and maybe the regionalists, Southern Gothic, like McCarthy or William Gay. The Minimalists got yelled at in the 80's, though they sort of dominated the 80's. It was dumb for people to bitch about them; I think we all get this, in retrospect, but the problem that's come out of it is that somehow 'minimalism' is not as good, not as beautiful, or worthwhile, or (frighteningly), not as creative or inventive as the big Tomes. That's sad. I mean, it's really narrow-minded. I think for both experimental, surreal, avant-garde stuff to work, there has to be a solid base of some kind of representational stuff (not commercial shit, but good, 'literary' representational stories). This is another problem though: people conflate realism and representation. This is wrongheaded - William Gass (of whom I'm a sort of never-ending fan) even wrote a retarded essay on representation called "Representation and the War for Reality." Most of the (good) minimalists aren't trying to mimic reality though; their aesthetic is not one of mimesis as Gass would have his readers believe, and that's sort of sad, because it shows that Gass never really took the time to try to understand these works. Also, someone says somewhere that the experiments, those inventing big, obvious and new things make the world safe for the representational writers. This, also, is simply a retarded way of seeing the literary world, as it makes a hierarchy of things - See, experimental lit is the outcast, yet the protector, honorable crusader for all Writing everywhere, making the world safe for it. I think it's more a give and take thing - all the different groups feed each other, test each other. Representational authors push things in the same way that avant-garde or experimental writers push things, they just do it in (often) quieter ways. This is a symptom of our culture, I think. If it's not big and loud, we don't think it's anything great. Likewise for avant-garde/experimental films. Therefore, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufmann, David Lynch; while no one knows of Phil Morrison or Goran Dukic, though at least Terrence Malick is well-known even if his (early) films are rather quiet.

Note: I'll probably edit this post some. I don't mean to confuse avant-garde or experimental or other terms, I'm just sort of grouping those terms together for ease of, what, explanation, I guess.