Caleb Caudell

My third book, Hardly Working, is now available on Amazon amazon.com/dp/0645776874/…

Excited to bring this novel to you, late June

@eleanoir I doubt it. West is an accomplished translator

Sounds like he made him feel stupid

If you’d like to read people not entering and exiting rooms middleamericanliterature.substack.com

You can write a whole novel without ever describing someone going into or out of a room

@IndiciaObscure Oh yeah, sex in novels is not to be trifled with. If you can’t nail it (heh) you’re much better off referring to it in brief

@LitMiddle The real test is describing sex. Where the arms and legs go, AND you have to make it not repulsive. sometimes the best authors fail horribly (Murakami)

Why is Venmo trying to entice me to place bets? From a productive to a service economy, we’re now in the stage of industrial scale gambling and prostitution, a universal Vegas

@GabranGray @KristenPoli For sure. The Beckett example is more to the point of how you don’t need to anguish over a supposed realism of character movement in a straightforward fashion. And late Beckett is a better example of disembodied consciousness going nowhere

@LitMiddle @KristenPoli I don't completely disagree with your initial point, but to be fair, people (such as they are) move in and out of rooms in all three books of Beckett's trilogy. Molloy specifically is really clocked into physical movement through space.

@SurtseyAna It’s a stylistic/narrative choice, avoiding tedium, etc

@LitMiddle Why would you want to?

@KristenPoli The novels of Antonio Lobo Antunes, also Beckett, starting with Molloy and on. And it’s not that there’s literally no character movement, but little to no realistic diagramming/logical sequencing of bare physical movement

@LitMiddle what are some of your faves in this mode?

Anyone in Chicago need a roommate?

@jhendersonYT I’ve been baffled for a while by the positive reception of his work. It’s always struck me as thoroughly mediocre

Started reading this, checked the reviews, and let’s just say that my first impressions are very much at odds with the world right now. It’s short, so I’ll finish it, and we’ll see.

I’m truly not worried about my “attention span”

sorry, more bitchin about being in a kitchen

@theraggedwood Indeed. I don’t think he’s a hack or some literary abomination, just never quite did it for me

Surprised no one has brought up Robert Alter’s review of The Tunnel, which he claimed was bloated by moral and intellectual flatulence newrepublic.com/article/146163…

@pourfairelevide Yeah, I didn’t find most of the arguments all that persuasive, though I do think a case could be made for there being some bloat of a sort, nonetheless

@LitMiddle Alter is prosecuting an argument against a straw man postmodernism that really has almost nothing to do with the book, imo, and his conflation of Kohler with Gass is just flat out weird—unfortunate review that’s been rightfully forgotten