Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 1596. page

The seducer's diary

To the lighthouse

Stoner

East of Eden

the biblical story of Samson and Delilah

File: happiness_not_found.jpg (21KB, 400x388px) Image search: [Google]

21KB, 400x388px

>>9223139
I wanted to speculate, but realized I don't actually remember enough of the ending conversation to answer.

>>9223139
Too fearful of finding out what it is they really want.

>>9223221
well I'm glad that didn't stop you from posting a vacuous non statement anyway to remind everyone of your pointless existence with a pointless post. well done loser.

>>9222934
This is actually an interesting point, because you could extend this observation to include every martial incorporation fiction and non-- from the knights of the round table to the Nazis, or back to the Homeric warlords, and forward to the Bloods and Crips. When society goes to seed, or even pockets of society, this is what emerges, always has, always will-- replete with territories, protection fees, scrip, insigniae, coded talk, secret handshakes, the works. But to answer the question: yes.

In what way are the two similar?

Odysseus was white

>>9222900
But this year, it seems to me that a change has occurred, not unrelated to the election of Trump and Brexit (neither of which I support by the way, so please don’t tell me to go back to /pol/). Something in the air, not quite yet fully formed, but well into its gestation, forced itself into the public awareness. This change is very difficult to describe; Because I think in synesthetic terms, I’d describe it as a shift from a dark red century to a light blue century, but I realize how radically unhelpful that is, so I’ll try and formulate it a little differently.

The awareness that the groundlessness which postmodern ideas create is bad for your mental and spiritual health is obvious to everyone with a shred of honesty and self-reflection. People are anxious and miserable without something to hold onto and all the great emancipatory ideas, telling people they are radically free to be whatever way they want, that gender is a construct and they should be whoever they want, that order is useless and they should destroy it wherever they find it, that love is oppressive and they should fuck whoever they want regardless of whether there is any emotional content to the encounter, all of these freedoms (surprise, surprise, considering the bottomlessness of the unconstrained human subject) promote nothing more than a deep existential vertigo.

And so, the people who want rid of the headaches, shakes, fevers and sickness, if they’re smart, seek structure. Obviously the old structures, if they’d been properly constructed, wouldn’t have been able to be so easily pulled down in the first place, and that’s something the radicals ought to keep in mind before they drag us kicking and screaming back to state religion and divine right of kings.

However, the intuition is correct. We are limited creatures and we can only think in limited ways. The structures which the various hubristic movements of (I’d say roughly) the post-1600s systematically pulled down, were not so easily replaced as those movements presumed, and perhaps that’s because we are inherently religious creatures, with certain inherent political attitudes coded into us (whether we agree with hem consciously or not).

2of3

>>9222902
Which brings us to Jung, and to a lesser extent the traditionalists, all of whom give us the most useful tools our modern age could want: namely, the tools, in Jung, that of the archetypes, which will allow us to rehabilitate and reconstruct the old structures in new form, in such a way that they can withstand the attacks which collapsed them the first time round. The archetypes give us a lens through which to view the ancient and modern as continuous, not divergent, and this is the only thing which can wrest from us the anxieties produced by the methodologies of suspicion foisted upon the culture by the 19th and 20th century. Whether his ideas are scientifically correct, or “outdated”, has nothing to do with this. Either it is a useful lens through which to view the world (which it has been in my case, and certainly seems to have been in most other cases, certainly a healthier and more productive lens than all the post-structuralist ideas people buy into, which quite literally will destroy your life if you take them seriously (which is why no one smart, not even their original theorists, takes them seriously)) or it will prove useless. Time will tell, I guess.

Jung will be more relevant than Freud in dealing with this century; the same can be said for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the latter of whom defined the 20th century to a large extent, and hopefully for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but that’s personal preference, and JP seems to prefer Nietzsche anyway.

That’s how I see it anyway.

3of3

Not the anon you'd be replying to, but I find myself in a similar page.

The masters of suspicion didn't give us enough tools to explain things such as the rise of religiosity, or how to fill the existential void left by all that skepticism.

I could only think of Heidegger being the token sane man, saying that no one is without religion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WDmRAASuKc

>>9222819

This channel an anon posted some weeks ago

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKuA9X4xm4xWKgqH9ct6X_A

It would be much better if he stopped behaving like an idiot.

File: diego.jpg (25KB, 480x360px) Image search: [Google]

25KB, 480x360px

>>9222819
only in french/italian

sorry, anglos

No. People with something important to say generally dont congregate on youtube.

741.
I probably read slower than that though, my mind often wonders while reading, and sometimes I will re read certain passages if I like them enough.

>>9222020
271, but I only read philosophy, so my pace is pretty slow. 10 minutes per page at least.

275 but that's only because I was trying to read fast. Casually I would read like 200
Also there's nothing wrong with reading slow as long as you're reading a lot and absorbing the information

>>9220144
"No."

- No.

>>9220144
All awards are pseudo events.

why did the jews let the germans murder them?

>>9219585
Beat working in a bank and living in a boardinghouse

File: Pruflas.jpg (140KB, 542x626px) Image search: [Google]

140KB, 542x626px

Never got that either,

>>9216926
Yep. And the kids that populate /lit/ these days perpetuating all the reddit memes, showing their capability for independent thought and critical understanding.
Also, Nietzsche was much more than just "a very smart intellectual".

File: Stirner Ignores Property.png (37KB, 870x545px) Image search: [Google]

37KB, 870x545px

>>9216926
>he hasn't combined Nietzschism and Egoism to become the true uberman
Heh

>>9216931
Tee bee haich hadn't read much of him until recently, then read through thus spoke zarathustra and beyond good and evil

I was shocked by the dissonance between what public perception of his ideas are and what they actually are.

I wonder how he came to be the go to guy to describe edgelord "nothin personnel" behavior

File: giphy (4).gif (175KB, 250x300px) Image search: [Google]

175KB, 250x300px

GUESS WHERE?

MY FUCKING DIARY DESUUUUUU

AND DON'T FORGET TO SUCK MY DICK

HOHOHO!

>>9227735

THE. GREEKS.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1y8_RRaZW5X3xwztjZ4p0XeRplqebYwpmuNNpaN_TkgM/pub

File: 1451722509894.png (1MB, 750x1334px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 750x1334px

>>9227739
>>9227747
Meme posts are already here, waiting for a real answer now.

he meant that it isn't reasonable to be furious even at Hitler; let alone at God

>>9227650
But what did he *mean*?

>>9227642
he meant that there was only one hitler; two if you counted god

I'll beat you in a minute you slut

>>9226954
>can't beat
As in "Kan't understand"? Or "Kan't disprove"?

>>9227028
Kan't even finish a fukken book lad. The way he writes is impenetrable

>>9226667
comics are for little children

>>9226667
Probably my favorite newspaper comic strip

I think only midwesterners like this bullshit.

What about my guy Richard Flanagan tho

>Further, due to the fetishisation of the past/history, a feeling of inferiority is created, since the rest of the world has already "had" their culture, and it is so to speak too late for us. Like an adolescent trying to join a conversation with elderly people who clearly have much life experience.

This is why Australian nationalism is retarded. Even more LARPy than /pol/ style nationalism

File: 1452399522634.jpg (440KB, 994x636px) Image search: [Google]

440KB, 994x636px

>>9226210
It's too late Pham. Literally nothing good is coming out of this country ever again. Have you seen what an English course looks like in our high schools? I'm pretty sure 2/3 of my classmates didn't even read the books in year 12. What are Australians going to write about? Australia doesn't have a culture anymore. It's been systematically obliterated in favour of being cosmopolitan with a slight tinge of those stupid memes you referred to in your post (see Australia Day probably being moved to May 8th soon and other such poz).

Nobody in this country thinks. Our schools are garbage and social capital is gone. No sense of community or unity or whatever else. Just ice, increasingly unwatchable sport and a silent acceptance that things are just going to keep getting worse and we can't stop it.

>>9226236
>Australian nationalism is retarded
What would you have us do?

The novel clocks in at 981 pages, with over a hundred pages of notes that serve no purpose, reference nothing in the book, which is footnoted, and are filled with nonsense and faux information, with a small dab of the real tossed in. This is the T.S. Eliot Effect. At least, now I know where Dave Eggers ripped off his garbage that ends his wretched A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. By that rationale, one might say Eggers novel-cum-autobiography is worse than Wallace’s tome, until one gets to the fact that Wallace’s monstrosity is about two and a half times as long, considering it’s larger page format and smaller type. Let’s see; Eggers’ crap is how many pages, to Wallace’s? Do the math and times- Oh, well, I guess that equation was unnecessary- sort of like this book blurbs on the book’s cover claim its descent from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, but while that book is poseur crap, as well, there is, at least a love of wordplay, poesy, alliteration, and plot machinations, despite its ill construction. Infinite Jest lacks even these few meager pluses. In short, if Finnegans Wake was a rancid fart that was proudly left to rip, Infinite Jest is a weak one, lacking sound and odor.

Oh, do you care what this piece of shit was about? So did I, for the first two or three pages, until I saw the author didn’t give a damn. Of course, his ennui in storytelling, character development, and plain old grammar, is nothing new when considering Wallace’s career in letters, wrought of smoke, mirrors, and the occasional tongue dance on a glans. As for plot? Forget it. Having just read and reviewed Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho before reading this it’s worth comparing the two books’ merits. Neither comes near greatness, but Ellis at least tries, in his book, to create a character. Granted, it’s a psychotic character who indulges violent fantasies, but that, at least, gives a reason for the sketchiness of detail. Wallace is just lazy, and as a result the first words of Ellis’s book could act as Wallace’s book’s epigraph (including the capitalization): ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE. In short, there is no plot. Whereas the anomy of American Psycho’s plot, and the scathing look at the materialism of the 1980s, has a justifiable reason, Wallace’s work does not. With good editing Ellis’s book might be a solid read, Wallace’s is hopeless. Ah, epigraphic relevancy- footnote needed.
Here’s the bare bones ‘plot’: The first chapter gives a syllabus of events to come, but it feels tacked on, by the publisher, to prevent it from being a total cheat. Hal Incandenza, the baby of his clan, is a troubled pothead youth and budding tennis star in the near future, in a Boston suburb called Enfield, where corporations have taken over sponsoring the years. Yet, nothing I will outline will tell you what ultimately becomes of him. He waffles in nothingness, then is dropped from the book. The character that replaces him as protagonist never meets Hal. Some may feel cheated, but actually this is a good thing. If only the whole work would drop itself. By chapter two we go back in time and see Hal has no problems. Normally, this would mean that the book is going to connect the dots, and Hal is a Holden Caulfield manqué, right? No, we get bupkus. But characters are not the only things Wallace drops. On the rare occasions he has a cogent observation, he never follows up on them- neither directly, nor within the narrative. Here’s an example from page 32:

Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive.

As for the rest of the book? Given the modern references, and some other incidentals, one can project that the time frame is the 2010s, or about twenty or so years after the book was published in 1996. Most of the action in the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or Y.D.A.U. Other years referenced are the Year of The Whopper, the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, and even the Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile. Here is the first evidence of a twinkle of satire or humor, but- unlike Ellis- nothing more is made of the fact. The country has fallen into a bit of a fascist state, called the Organization of North American Nations- or ONAN, as in masturbation (ain’t Wallace clever?), where the USA has forced Canada and Mexico into joining, and run by a singer-cum President called Johnny Gentle, with phobias that make Michael Jackson seem normal. Although the fascism presented is corpo-fascism, not necessarily state fascism, is this then, by definition, fascism? Of course, such deeper queries go not only unanswered but unprobed. The book basically documents Hal’s life as a tennis player at an exclusive tennis academy called Enfield, which his family founded, to, well, the same. His mother (aka The Moms) is fucking the tennis academy’s head, and her half-brother, and a psychotic named John (No Relation) Wayne, who is perhaps the best tennis player at the school. His dad is dead, a suicide who stuck his head in a microwave oven (ah, Sylvia Plath lives!), and founded the academy. He is called Himself throughout the book. He also created a film called Infinite Jest that many people use as porno, but which has the power to send its viewers into a fixations that lead to death. How this works is never explained- but became the basis of The Ring horror film. He also did arts films, such as one that involved interviewing men named John Wayne- which was how No Relation came to the Academy. Hal’s older brother is Mario (or Booboo)- a retard and grotesque dwarf. The oldest brother is Orin- a pro footballer and Lothario- who was involved with Joelle Van Dyne- the female protagonist, of sorts, who is a radio show hostess, and star of the film Infinite Jest. She is also a recovering addict at the nearby Ennet House, run by a former addict-cum-counselor named Don Gately. Some of the characters may have ties to a Quebecois separatist terrorist group called AFR (Les Assassins Des Fauteuils Rollents, or The Wheelchair Assassins) who seek the film of Infinite Jest. Why? Who knows? The book gives no answers and only a skim through the notes gives any backstory- as if anyone not wanting to write a review would care. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest this is not.