>John Barth, who, believing that the old literary conventions were exhausted, extended the limits of storytelling with imaginative and intricately woven novels like “The Sot-Weed Factor” and “Giles Goat-Boy,” died on Tuesday. He was 93.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/books/john-barth-dead.html
It's truly over.
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RIP.
Wonderful stylist and very funny writer.
F
I've wanted to read Barth for years but his books are pretty hard to find. Think they will become more accessible now that he is gone?
>his books are pretty hard to find.
where do you live? they're easy to find here
I live in Malaysia and I gotta import it from America for 5 times the price of a Penguin
A lot of his stuff is very easy to find online. Even Letters.
We'd better get a sticky for this legend.
>his books are pretty hard to find
IME used bookstores very often have first-edition Barths for cheap. I think they printed too many of them. Good news for us.
>Even Letters
How is that one? I picked up a copy and might get to it this year.
Bizarre. I have a rule of never buying books online, and I found his book more easily than I found any of his contemporaries (that includes Pynchon, Hawkes, DeLillo, Gass, etc - I STILL can't find a copy of tThe Tunnel).
Good lord, I can't believe how much The Tunnel is going for right now. I heard theres a repress coming so hopefully that drops prices for ya.
Any recs for Wainhouse and Hawkes? I havent read either and I'm looking to check em out.
Hedyphagetica and The Cannibal respectively (they were classmates at Harvard)
>Wainehouse, de Sade translator
Color me surprised, been sleeping on it this whole time. Nice.
The Tunnel is such a good book! Any love for Gaddis?
Gadds is the man, I've read everything he's done and loved all of it.
Even the Pile Fabric Primer?
The Tunnel is getting a reprint as soon as August I think
I was looking for a copy of the Tunnel for years. My gf found one online for $15 in about 5 minutes. You need a woman’s shopping skills to get a copy.
I still have a preorder out for the next pressing. (Bought it April 23, not due to be delivered until July 25). I’ve only got about 50 pages left. Once I finish I’ll be giving the used copy to the used bookstore by me. Maybe you’ll get lucky.
Are they actually that hard to find? I found a practically brand new copy at my local used book store for $20.
I've never seen a single William Gass book at a used bookstore, except once I saw Middle C, so I bought it. I've been going to that used bookstore for my whole life. It's housed in an old warehouse, so it has lots of books and lots of inventory turnover too.
RIP
Sticky when?
RIP
One of the greats
pynchon is next
McCarthy is next
>Card mysteriously appears on Barth’s tomb after Pynchon dies
>”Been there, done that”
I'd been waiting for the other shoe to drop for a while now but I'm still tearing up. An institution of American letters (not to mention LETTERS) and easily the most joyously experimental of the postmodernists. He always struck me as a kind, avuncular figure and while his later works mostly rehashed his life story in various ways, I never tired of the way he did it. "Every Third Thought" was a really poignant reflection on aging and the anxiety of facing death. His publishing career spanned 66 years! May we all be granted such time.
"And thence retire me to my Milan, where
Every third thought shall be my grave."
Goddamn you, you glorious fricker, I snickered.
>His publishing career spanned 66 years! May we all be granted such time.
amen
never heard of him but even a description that short made me convinced I must read at least something from him
and maybe that's what it is all about
requiescat in pace
>Pynch outlived Barth
He's younger, why wouldn't he.
Don DeLillo is slightly older.
Pynchon is already dead or incapacitated, that's the only explanation I can come up with for why his papers have already been donated to an institution
He realized he doesn't need papers anymore since he can save everything in a cloud drive and then forget the password like the fool he is
even worse, his son was the one who managed the donation
also, assuming this is actually him
>that head of hair at 82
Damn, he looks like a wise old owl or something
Just yesterday I was thinking "damn it's crazy how he's still alive."
RIP
RIP! We miss you King. Thanks for your playfulness. You were the thinking man's Pynchon.
I never read Sot-Weed Factor because I heard it has a lot of rape and cuck jokes (which I am not fond of). Should I reconsider?
Yes it is very funny. Goat-boy overstays its welcome in my opinion.
RIP, Sotweed was some of the funniest shit I've ever read.
Coover's the only one left
>that photo
What's the modern day equivalent?
The picture of F. Gardner and Waldun together
Can anyone ID the guy to the left of Vonnegut and the guy with the eyepatch? Are all the women just wives?
John Hawkes, Walter Abish.
Yes, all the women are just wives, though some of them were artists (not specifically writers) themselves.
Hawkes, probably the most talented man in the picture. Try this one if you can find a copy, it'll rock your world.
He never got popular because his books are challenging but short and unassuming, so pomo fans don't get to feel like a big man.
Hawkes never got popular because he is a prose stylist. It's the same reason Gass never got popular.
I like how that usually turns around well after the fact. It's slow right now, but there's been a renewed interest in these authors, and I expect a new look at the 70s next.
>so I told Bill to crouch and he actually did it the absolute madman
QRD on pic?
Just some people out having a good time
First and Last American Post-Modernist Meetup. Pynchon couldn't make it because he'd already left his last known address, and by the time the letter reached him it was months past the event. Pynchon sent an apology letter to Barthelme or Gass apologizing for missing the event. He promised to attend the next one should it ever happen. They never tried to have a meetup again.
https://biblioklept.org/2017/01/18/thomas-pynchon-sends-his-regrets-to-donald-barthelme-for-missing-the-postmodern-dinner/
>I'm feeling more and more these days like a one-shot flash-in-the-pan amateur
It's so strange to think of the old Pynchmeister as being insecure
Well there's a 17 year gap between Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland. This dinner took place during that gap. But I have to wonder what exactly did Pynchon do for work during those 17 years? His letter suggests his is a transient.
He published Slow Learner, which featured his foreword talking about how those stories came about, the most candid and open he's ever been in public.
He was working on what would become Mason and Dixon, Vineland, and probably Against the Day during those years. It was also back in the good ol' days where rent wasn't 50% of the average salary, so he could have feasibly lived off of royalties from his past catalogue and some advances here and there. That, and the funding from the CIA.
Ah, thank you. Thought I spied Barthelme there. Appreciate the link too - any other good places to read about this meet up they had?
That same website has an article on it. It's the only source I know of.
https://biblioklept.org/2020/01/29/photograph-from-the-postmodernists-dinner-jill-krementz/
At the bottom there are links to other articles he wrote about the dinner: the pynchon letter, and Barth's own description of the dinner.
Cool find.
Apparently he wrote the liner notes for some record from a band nobody has ever heard of, but he was a NEET recluse for the most part.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody's_Cool
>he wrote the liner notes for some record from a band nobody has ever heard of
I wonder how something like that even happens.
If this photo was taken today people would accuse the women in it of being trans
RIP, just got into his work last year -- read the two early novels and Giles. I enjoyed End of the Road very much. I think this is the first time I've experienced an author who I read while alive die (unfortunately didn't get into McCarthy much except for The Road). But it seems that death of an author is not really sad because they can always live on through their work. I was making my way languidly through Sot Weed, but I'll return to it with more attention now.
Frick it's real. RIP to the goat(boy).
Jannies sticky
Was beginning to think him immortal. RIP to a phenomenal writer.
RIP, I'm studying his "Floating Opera" for an exam. Not the first time an author dies right after I finished one of his main works
where is the sticky
Where's the sticky indeed. Quality effortpost threads used to last for more than a month. Pruning question begging & coomer bait OPs isn't hard.
>still not stickied
The absolute state of IQfy's moderation team. This is pathetic. Who do I call or complain to about this? John Barth is a legend of 20th century American fiction. He is one of the most playful and dedicated storytellers in American fiction. His short story collection Lost in the Funhouse is amazing. The Sot-Weed Factor is one of the greatest picaresque novels ever written, and THE best Don Quixote rewrite. And have you read Chimera? It's a beautiful triptych of story-telling and again exhibits Barth's playfulness. Let us also not forget The Seven Voyages of Nobody the Sailor. A great homage to The Thousand Nights and a Night and Scheherazade. And of course, who can forget Barth's Cold-War era campus novel, the estimable Giles Goat-Boy? I don't what the frick is wrong with Jannies and Mods, but they need to get their shit together.
Hopefully they’re just a bit slow in getting to it, but maybe they’re just really that shitty. I forgot the last time they stickied a thread for a “major literary event” (usually a well-known author dying, basically), I think there was a similar fuss about how they didn’t give William Gass that respect when he kicked the bucket a while ago, or maybe I forget and they eventually did do it.
100%, except I’m only speaking on the basis of The Sot-Weed Factor, which I read a long time ago but loved, and am planning to reread. Not just an experimental author who pioneered postmodern literature and expanded the boundaries of fiction, but actually also an amazing consummate storyteller (shouldn’t novelists be good storytellers?) who made works as fun, comedic, and filled with heart as they were cerebral. At least in The Sot-Weed Factor, he didn’t take postmodern experimentation with fiction to mean “I don’t have to tell an interesting story or keep the reader engaged.” The best of both worlds, it’s a hyperbolic comparison perhaps, but in this book I think he’s there with Cervantes and Shakespeare in creating works not only erudite and beautiful but that also tell great stories. Don Quixote and the picaresque novels are of course a great comparison (obviously, because this is what he modeled the book off of, the picaresque novel).
R.I.P., you were a real one, John.
> I forgot the last time they stickied a thread for a “major literary event
the last time they stickied a thread was for McCarthy's passing. even then I think they only stickeied him because of that stupid 5 hour long essay that allows zoomies pretend to have read it
>so basically the judge is like really racist and is basically the devil
fricking ridiculous
I genuinely believe that 99% of "video essays" on youtube are made by people who have not written an essay since high school.
Really heartened to hear that I'm not the only one who enjoyed Barth (I'm old af but still 2 generations later). He was a legitimately hilarious and SOVLFVL writer, his deadly masterpieces hold up very well, and he fell out of fashion but his later novels were worthy as well.
Of course I'm sorry to hear of his passing but the posts are encouraging. I read his books because my parents had boxes of old paperbacks with the pages falling right out of the dessicated binding, and Sot Weed Factor had a good cover. Utterly hilarious and the same intelligence and humanity shows through in his more "serious" works as well. I don't think I've ever met anyone IRL who has even heard of him. At least a few people know.
F to the realest one. Jannies I hate to distract you from jerking off to Dragonlance novels but we need a sticky up in this bytch.
Of all the “postmoderns” he was the one I liked the most because his books actually had likeable characters and page-turning plots, as well as being even more structurally formal than the work other Pomo writers. All the chapter structures and stories-in-stories. It must have taken enormous chops to do that because it’s easy to write a plot-and-character novel without any meta stuff, and it’s easy to write a bunch of formless chaos or a self aware structure without characters or plot that matter, but Barth took everything to the next level. Barth also seemed to be having enormous fun writing and it showed in the writing. He was the best.
>John Barth
RIP
Horrible news, I feel gutted. RIP to one of the last of the greats.
F
I'm currently reading sot-weed factor for 6 months. I been putting off for other projects and books, but at the news of his death I shall place it front and center and complete it. im at around 100 pages into the book, just as they about to leave to Maryland. even before I got into the 'real' part of the story, I've been having fun reading it. compare to other post modernist works, this doesn't feel like a confusing soapbox lecture but an enriching adventure; new England can claim Ebenezer cooke as their Don Quixote. there is a part in the early pages of sotweed factor, a small crumb of dialogue, said by Charles Calvert. it caught my eye and so I feel like I should end my post with it:
>Life's a battle that scars us all, victor and vanquished alike
>compare to other post modernist works, this doesn't feel like a confusing soapbox lecture but an enriching adventure
which post-modern novels would you say feel like a soapbox lecture? Not looking to argue or anything I'm just curious
I was thinking of Pynchon when I wrote it. he's a fun guy but he tends to get on his high horse midst of poop jokes and talking dogs
If this had occurred a decade ago, old IQfy would've kept it on the first page for a week straight. Now it gets barely 50 posts before reaching page 10 (and needing a shameless bump such as this).
RIP
He sounds like a literal who despite all that so called acclaim. I've never heard him as a an author nor as influence. In fact, in the last four months, he was mentioned less than 24 times on IQfy. I guess we are now going to be flooded by people pretending to like him for a week until everyone forgets him.
i never post on lit because i have an actual life and girlfriend, but just an FYI barth was actually an amazing author and you are doing yourself a disservice but not at least giving his early work a look
Embarrassing
Man, nu-IQfy is truly horrible. As
said, Barth's death would have been a big deal here 10 years ago, but now we have all these zoomies who don't read and haven't even heard of him.
>He sounds like a literal who despite all that so called acclaim
Pynchon's Mason & Dickshit is solidly in the shadow of his Sotweed Factor. Of the big names of post-war Boomer novelists, he actually deserves the limelight.
Congrats anon, you were right.
I knew it was bad around here but IQfy is actually dead. Worse than IQfy maybe.
Not even. It's still bad but I had to crawl over endless sot-weed recommendations while looking for something completely unrelated in the archives a few months ago. Most of them recent. So much that I have it in my backlog where I'll read it after I read the Sot-weed Factor.
Your post is unintelligible. We are not you. We do not know what these vague references you are making are supposed to be.
than /mu maybe
>Not even.
That should clarify it all. You sure you read postmodern lit?
>It's still bad but I had to crawl over endless sot-weed recommendations while looking for something completely unrelated in the archives a few months ago. Most of them recent. So much that I have it in my backlog where I'll read it after I read the Sot-weed Factor.
This is unintelligible. We are not you. We do not knkw what this "it" is that you had to seach tirelessly for and plan to read after The Sot-Weed Factor. Seek help for your autism.
Something else is irrelevant and I plan to read the Sot-Weed Factor after finishing the Sot-Weed Factor. Bumping a thread through trolling does not have the effect you want it to, unless you're a troll.
RIP
I love all of his first three novels, but the Sot-Weed Factor is one of the greatest novels ever written. For me its up there with Gravitys Rainbow, Ulysses, In Search of lost time, Brothers Karamazov etc.
as sad as it is hopefully this will get more people to his stuff
Yes, The Floating Opera is rarely mentioned, but it's truly a magnificent novel. Crazy to think that he lived for seventy more years after writing that
Rest in piss to another postmodern communist coward corruptor of the youth, one less blackguard ne'erdoweller befouling the befuddled minds of bedazzled babes
>the old literary conventions were exhausted
isn't this cope? Feels like Shakespeare's form is still great, just no one can pull it off anymore
When you have a Shakespeare or a Michael Jackson or fringe weirdo who does a thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2Y1R0ePMPY like this, you don't have to. Attempting to do the same thing becomes derivative once the core of it is 'solved' and you have to go to new fringes.
I agree, even though I like Barth. I don't like sweeping generalizations like "x is overdone" or "you can't do x anymore." Anything is acceptable as long as you do it well.
I have literally never heard of this man mentioned once on this board and i've been here about a decade.
I found out about him from this board but it was ages ago. He's great. Well, he was, but his writing still is. RIP to a real one.
I have a hard time believing this; people talk about Sot-Weed all the time. I prefer the GOAT boy but I get why it's less popular.
Sot Weed Factor is a comic novel and pm pastiche of modest ambition (to make you lol) though great intelligence, and it succeeds completely; Giles Goat Boy is a semi-comic novel and deeply ambitious pm satire of ... existence and everything in it, basically, which is about 25% too long. Sot Weed is pure pleasure, but Giles Goat-Boy is a self-consciously Great book, and a pretty good one too.
So your ignorance is MY fault?
Yes. You claim to respect the man only once he's passed. When he was alive? Nothing.
Nah I've posted about Sot-Weed multiple times, usually comparing amd contrasting it with Mason & Dixon.
You don’t lurk enough.
Barth, Gaddis, Wainhouse, Hawkes — these were the American writers of the finest hour.
I read Chimera a few months ago on anon's recommendation. It was breddy cool. RIP big guy.
F
Are you serious!! No!
I am actually devastated!
Goddamn we lost Toriyama, McCarthy, Carl Weathers and now Barth??
What's next Larry David?
Sarcasm?
No I just haven't slept in a couple of days so I am writing like Wolfe
vax status?
had only just picked up a copy of sot-weed on the 1st. rest easy.
Not letting this thread get to page ten. At least not until I finish reading Lost In The Funhouse
>4 days later
>less than 100 posts
If browsing through IQfy isn’t a sign that the current landscape is different then this is. I’ve seen the Gaddis, Barth, Gass, DFW, Pynchon, PoMo novelists as one of the main ingredients of IQfy culture and interest. Unironically getting literally who? posts is a little shocking. The IQfy zeitgeist has changed. It’s probably best to move on for good
Yeah I was dead sure he'd at least get a sticky. If IQfy doesn't celebrate the life of a postmodernist then who will? Sad!
couldn't agree more. i just popped back in to here and IQfy just to see the current state of things and its pretty sad. although i think a lot of that is just that ive grown up. the idea of yelling into an empty void and having people who you have no way of knowing if they are complete pieces of shit or not has just lost its appeal to me
Anonymity is double edged sword and it’s at the point where I see it as more damaging. Nothing interesting is done with it, just politically incorrect BS and every anon seems like every other anon. I’d love to know which anons just aren’t worth reading. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a small amount of people who post the most and give IQfy the appearance that it’s worse than it is and anons leave or cut back. Radical extremist posts are just boring anymore. Part of it is, like you said, growing up.
You can always go to reddit, since you hate the main thing that attracts people to anonimity, the ability to not get banned immidately
You guys are just gay together, jacking each other off like homos
Bump for mods doing their jobs
I guarantee the mods are thinking, "Why sticky the thread? It will stay up for about a week anyways. IQfy is a slow board, so there's no reason to sticky a thread." However the mods don't understand the sticky isn't about preventing the thread from being bumped off the catalog, it's about the prestige and respect that comes with a sticky.
They know, they just don't care.
There isn't anything of him on Libgen or maybe I'm moronic? Plz post link of his works plz.
https://annas-archive.org/search?q=john+barth
click an option under Slow downloads
Thanks bro.
REMINDER WHO DIDENT GET A STICKY
>Charles Portis
>Gene Wolfe
>Larry McMurtry
>Anne Rice
>Mark Samuels
and now
>John Barth
Where do I start with Barth?
The Floating Opera
so young
Time to read Letters again
You know who is alive though? Alexander Theroux. You know who has a new book out THIS MONTH? Alexander Theroux.
RIP John Barth tho
The Floating Opera - kino
Lost In The Funhouse - KINO
Sot Weed Factor - KINO
Giles Goat-Boy - kino
All his books were kino, even after he fell out of fashion, and he was incredibly innovative and influential to a generation of writers who got much more famous doing everything he had already done, only not as well.
Not a lot of them left now.
Bump. This one hurts, he was a big part of my 20s and opened me up to a lot of new ideas and approaches, in a very funny and deceptively clever way. Erudite like a motherfricker, and not in any way a put on - he could only do the postmodern pastiche thing because he read and absorbed *everything*. Definitely abused ADD meds, but it agreed with him.
>Definitely abused ADD meds, but it agreed with him.
what makes you say that?
So I freely admit that I've never read any John Barth, but Dalkey has these recent reprints of The Sot-Weed Factor and Chimera. Are these okay places to start?
i'd go with the anchor books paperback of sot-weed and files goat-boy over the dalkey reprints, mainly because I've seen some photos of the reprint having issues with typos.
How does that even happen
Who knows? Retyping the whole book by hand?
John O'Brien died and whoever that deep vellum moron is is tanking each reissue with misprints, he nearly sunk Palol, the delayed essentials imprint looks like pure shit. the typos pullulate
most depressing thread I've read this year, for this reason. It would max a thread had he kicked it earlier. But IQfy will not be rewritten and the quality of talk will only degrade
I never knew old IQfy. Speak to me of these days gone by when such authors as Barth would've been celebrated, old timers.
People actually discussed the novels and treated threads like discussion in literature classes. It was wild. People would actually quote and analyze passages.
I wish I was smart and could contribute to the betterment of board culture
It’s too late. It takes more effort and time to effortpost than it does to shitpost or offtopicpost. When the effortposter are vastly outnumbered by those who don’t care it won’t matter
You had anons who specialized in different authors and movements and other anons who were at least familiar with some of them. People read and you could join a discussion after you finished the book because the thread was still up. Shitpost threads and low quality posts were deleted quickly. Hell, you actually had to be pretty careful what you said and make a serious effortpost before calling someone a dumb gorilla Black person.
>lurk more
This phrase existed and was often obeyed. I know I lurked for a while before finally posting. This anon
is right. There was an eclectic group of anons who had areas of expertise or even just what they enjoyed. You could recognize anons. Even though I didn’t like it at the time I’d much prefer the snobbish, snarky New Yorker larpers that frequented IQfy. It’s much better than the slack jaw yokels of today. This anon
is also right. Not as many threads were made so threads lived a while. Every oldgay has a story of being banned by strict jannies which is the opposite today. Basically if you actually read books and wanted to discuss them, the board was much better. There were legitimately impressive anons, graduate level knowledge on certain writers.
One time we just started reading the modernists for the frick of it. No organized campaign, just picking up some Updike and having a go at the Centaur. Then some butthole would chime in and tell you the stylists blow. You could tell that there were maybe 60 core anons, but today there's like 12, judging by stack threads. All the shitposting was intellectual and the memes were absolutely bizarre.
The graduate level discussion was pretty intense and kept plebs out, the ESLs and IQfy didn't have a foothold. I wouldn't even call it gatekeeping, it gatekept itself.
In 2010-2015 IQfy was much more serious about the "Postmodernists." If Barth died twelve years ago there would have been far more discussion. Idk if even the Pynch's passing would get a sticky nowadays, it's quite sad to see.
This happened nine days ago and I can't believe I'm just finding out. I literally visited this board on a whim to check up on if any of my favorite authors had died recently. RIP Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor was probably the single most fun book I've ever read, and The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, and Giles Goat-Boy were all fantastic too.
So anons:
Barth, Barthes, Barthelme, Barthelme, or Barthelme?
Instructions unclear, penis stuck in Goat-boy
Karl Barth, or Karl Bartos?
>>John Barth, who, believing that the old literary conventions were exhausted, extended the limits of storytelling with imaginative and intricately woven novels like “The Sot-Weed Factor” and “Giles Goat-Boy,” died on Tuesday. He was 93.
Never heard of this fella but he sounds cool
Need something to start right now, what's his best book?
The Sot-Weed Factor is his best but The Floating Opera and/or The End of the Road are probably better to start with
Why does this homie look like hes drunk as frick in every photo I see of him. RIP tho I guess, sympathies to his family and all that.
Spite bump.
If you're going to bump, maybe discuss how he mined classic literature for ideas (Greek myths, Sinbad the Sailor)
No
Go on, idk Barth very well but I want to hear about this
Looking at Chimera and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor specifically. Chimera is a triptych of three stories retelling older stories, but with a twist.
In Dunyazadiad (named after the younger sister of the b***h from 1001 nights) Barth himself (probably) finds himself talking to Scheherazade, who thinks he's a genie, and he's the one who gives her the idea for the format of the 1001 nights (which he himself got from her).
Kinda like that. Like, Barth is reading 1001 nights to her and she's then telling those stories forward, thus creating the story that he's reading. Is this complicated enough? Barth wrote himself into his stories a lot, his correspondence with his own characters is what Letters is all about.