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Would you accept to publish a book even if it includes your deepest secrets (something that will turn you into an outcast)?
>inb4 pseudonym
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You probably shouldn't write about your attraction to little girls, OP. You are no Nabokov.
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>>9509646
What if your secrets weren't actually secrets but deliberate faux-weaknesses that are employed for the sole purpose of lulling your readers into believing that they can destroy your will; but then you pull back the curtain of concealment to reveal that you never in the first place were serious about your "secrets" and no amount of insulting you based upon them will garner any anger from you because you employed them with a purpose.
Then I think you can go ahead with the book.
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>>9509668
Wow. I don't really know what to say about this.
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Is there any philosophical outlook that won't distance me from other people and everyday experience, but instead draw me closer to them?
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>>9509442
Basic bitch liberalism
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Cyrenaics, a less patrician proto-epicureanism.
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Left-liberalism
How much Gene Wolfe have you read?
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I've read BoTNS and Urth, making my way through Long Sun at the moment. Wolfe is fantastic.
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Some short stories plus almost all of Fifth Head of Cerberus. BotNS, Soldier in the Mist and Wizard Knight are waiting on my bookshelves.
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>>9509426
New, Long, Short, Urth
Wizard Knight
Best of shorts
Fifth Head of Cerberus
Innocents Abroad
Borrowed Man
There are Doors
Sorcerer's House
The Land Across
That's it I think, may have missed something.
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What are you favorite podcast?
Philosophy, history, politics, science, technology, bonus points for general comfy stuff
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the one where i talk about fucking ur mom
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In our Time
Revolutions
Quirks & Quarks
History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
The British History Podcast
99% Invisible
Dan Snow's History hit
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>>9509243
Thats b
That's weak even for 4chan
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>tfw too intelligent
I have a 130+ IQ. My mother, according to her, has a 26 IQ. We absolutely have never been able to communicate about anything but the most mundane details of daily life. Reports on bodily functions, mostly: eat, sleep. Those are the topics. She is 70 now and we have not had a functioning relationship since I was a child, and maybe not even then.
She raised my brother and I alone after our father left when I was a toddler. He probably couldn't stand her. My brother isn't much better. He is smart enough to figure out how to make spreadsheets and navigate adulthood, but doesn't read and is opposed to intellectual pursuits on principle. "I don't read." He has not read a book in his adult life.
What the fuck is wrong with the world. Being too smart is like being too tall or too short. You're either bumping your head on the doorway or can't see into the kitchen cabinet. The world isn't made for you. I can't enjoy normie shit without destroying it, and no one is interested in critical thought. What do.
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Tl;dr
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>>9509145
I have a 1+ IQ
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you sound like a pseud my dude
lose the arrogance because you ain't shit yet bitch
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>start with the bible
Is he right?
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why bother
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>>9509147
Probably because nearly everyone in the west after the second century borrowed parts of it and it's the biggest influential work bar none there?
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>>9509172
so all the important parts are out there in popular (and unpopular) culture.
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It seems to me that there is nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society is utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We are the first human beings who will never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore.
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you sound like you've never seen a vagina
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I wonder how many times a complaint along these lines was uttered throughout history. Millions and millions.
Here's something new for you, OP.
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>>9509003
I’m a self-soother. The Internet, DVR, Netflix, Twitter—all these things are moments in time throughout your day when you’re able to soothe yourself. We have an autonomy of comfort and pleasure. By the way, pornography? It’s a new synaptic pathway. You wake up in the morning, open a thumbnail page, and it leads to a Pandora’s box of visuals. There have probably been days when I saw 300 vaginas before I got out of bed. My biggest dream is to write pornography.
During sex, I’m just going to run a filmstrip. I’m still masturbating. That’s what you do when you’re 30, 31, 32. This is my problem now: Rather than meet somebody new, I would rather go home and replay the amazing experiences I’ve already had. The best days of my life are when I’ve dreamed about a sexual encounter with someone I’ve already been with. When that happens, I cannot lay off myself.
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Is escapism wrong?
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>>9508909
escapism is too poorly defined to be anything.
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>>9508969
Go back
There's a video out there of a man drinking a glass of water, then shooting himself in the head. Why did he drink the glass of water?
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to enjoy it.
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>>9508878
to be comfortable, physiological needs fulfill themselves relatively unconsciously
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he drinks a bottle of water, but that detail in that video always fucked with me too. it;s like even in his last moment he can't let go of his bodily needs. who cares if you are thirsty if you are about to blast yourself? at the same time, taking a drink of water could be calming and it's also like "alright lets do this boi" even if its only for the connotation of drinking water before strenuous exercise and therefore not being dehydrated afterward it would make sense in the moment
I'm looking for what I don't know what to call other than "lively essayists". I just want to read exuberant prose and pieces with some kind of deep feeling. Something sort of like the work of Lester Bangs or the essays of DFW.
I've just come off reading Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. I enjoyed them, and they are exuberant now and again, but there is a certain lack of panache or elan or whatever you'll call it in the prose.
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Even someone like Nietzsche is similar to what I have in mind.
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This may be a cliche answer, but have you read any Hunter S Thompson?
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>>9508975
Came here to post this. For all his faults, HST is a genius at exuberance. Also, since we're talkint about Thompson, Transmetropolitan is a great comic which excels in absurd levels of exageration
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Good books that combine deeper themes with dark humor? I'm looking for more books like Fight Club and American Psycho.
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Throw both of those books in the trash and read Confederacy of Dunces
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>good books with deep themes
>fight club and american psycho
W E W
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you'd probably like naked lunch a lot if you haven't read it already
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One time, it was dark and I was watching videos on my computer. Some insect was walking on my arm (I hate bugs). Not realizing it was a bug, I picked it up and held it in my hand for a good 10 seconds. Suddenly, it moved and in the split second it did, I realized it was a bug and at the same moment violently hurled it at the wall opposite of where I sat. I heard a thump when it hit the wall, then got up to turn on the light. When I found the poor insect again, it was wandering around on the floor, looking pretty dazed. I hate bugs, but I still feel kind of bad for giving one a concussion.
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>>9508419
Don't feel bad, they are about as aware as self driving cars
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>>9508428
When aliens come, they'll say the same about us
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a lot of people eat a very similar-looking bug where i live, sometimes alive in tacos, but mostly in salsa.
it's almost that time of the year.
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I'm having SO MUCH trouble paying attention when I read. Any suggestions/hacks to reading faster or concentrating? I just wanna finish IJ before I die.
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>>9508283
Adderall
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Simple, don't read IJ. /lit/ wised up after reddit invaded, and now hates it.
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>>9508293
fpbp
Anonymous
'Bartleby' by Melville 2017-05-15 02:45:05 Post No.9508200
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'Bartleby' by Melville 2017-05-15 02:45:05 Post No.9508200
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I was re-reading Melville's 'Bartleby', and a question occurred to me.
What exactly would have been so traumatizing about working in the dead letter office? The story goes on about how what he must have seen during his time there impacted him in such a profound manner as to cause him to do his "I would prefer not to" and waste away in the most literal sense of the word.
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>>9508200
The story didn't imply any of that. It's more likely either a poetic/rhetorical flourish or the fancy of the narrator.
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think about it for half a second, what could the dead letter office symbolize?
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>>9508200
It's letters that can't be sent. So he probably must have seen a lot of important letters that the post office, try as they might, couldn't send, letters that might've been pivotal for relationships, letters about life and death, etc. It represented an ultimate failure of society, or a social institutions, to care about and help individual people, no matter how important their letter was.
If the letter has no return address on it, for instance, as the letters that end up at DLO often do, they can't even send something back to the person to tell them their letter failed. They think their letter got through, but then they never get a response, and have no way of knowing what happened --- maybe the other person didn't respond on purpose. There's no way to notify them of their error.
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My theory on crit threads, as a person who used to post his work and receive a generally positive but admittedly uneven response, is that it's impossible to post something actually impressive or solid to one. Note that i didn't say 'write'.
Let me explain.
Since most of us are writers desperate for an objective appraisal and the rest of us are aware that most of us are, we're all familiar with posting something previously published to a crit thread to feel out the reactions, to see if the people of /lit/ will actually laud a legitimate work of fiction or poetry, or treat it with the same unintelligent and vulgar criticism it gives most things posted. In my own experience, these works have overwhelmingly been given the latter.
I suspect that this isn't because /lit/ has bad taste, and not just because most published works are actually mediocre, but because seeing anything in this context--that is, on a 4chan thread--automatically cripples the work's reception. This affects even the best of us. It's either because this board is so bitter and pessimistic that anything genuine that is offered is subconsciously seen as bad, amateur, meh, or because reading anything in any place that isnt a legitimate journal or trustworthy environment affects how the work is perceived. Both might be the case. And either way, this may also show that the context in which a work of fiction is seen may affect what we think of it more than we think---we often see things we think are mediocre in the New York Times but still trust the publishers, don't we?
I don't write this as a bad writer looking for excuses (though im sure someone will attack the writing in this post, and i have no choice but to be alright with that), and i dont write this hoping to end crit threads. This is just some thought-food, and hopefully a catalyst for some rare civil discussion.
Thanks, /lit/.
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>>9508140
Also: This criticism isn't geared towards the obviously bad poems, fragments, which sound like 16 year olds writing for their english teachers, but the debatable ones, the ones that receive tepid but earnest feeback in the mix of desu's and strings of slurs. About 60% of all crit threads make me horrified that i write way worse than i think i do regardless of my idea's validity.
And expanding on my idea of our bitterness crippling an anon's post: all memes considered and ignored, we do not appreciate sincerity and honesty, and thrive off of anonymous hate and humor. Creative shit is the epitome of personal, confessional, unmasked, so of course we have a reason to hate on sight.
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>>9508140
i just wished critique threads offered actual critique
>this is shit
>this is good
>buzzwords buzzwords buzzwords
legitimately no help at all
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>>9508738
I posted once and received harsh but much needed feedback on my story. I was going to submit it to a contest but now I feel shitty about something that I felt okay about before. Can't say that's lit's fault (you guys helped me make some changes and see some things I couldn't before) but I will probably bring it to someone in person so that if I feel they are directly insulting me I can just hit them in the face.