Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 2092. page

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Is this the equivalent of john green posting?

>materialism is bad
>buy this 200$ plain black "philosoper's" sweater

>>8969974
Allen of Button is a pseud.

>>8969974
I'm painfully in love with the lady that does some of the Art/Architecture videos.

Write some good right wing literature first.

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jam it in your buttbutt diary, f.a.m.

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>>8969885
>>8969896
>Being this salty that the left can't create actual culture

Cancer Ward boi. Fantastic novel

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I suggest you start off with 'The Jews and Their Schemes'.

Yo professor Jordan B Peterson, is that you? Fuck off.

You have one valid argument and the rest is you being the same kind of extremist you're railing against.

bumparino

late bump

surely someone has some recs

>>8969710
It's genetic. You either have it or you do not.

anon how the hell did you manage to create this situation

Shove a baguette down your throat and try to talk

It should sound like french

>>8969676
are you supposed to know french? Maybe the teacher doesn't know and assigned it by mistake

>>8969552
hee-hee-hee!

He's so ironical and self contradicting, he'll outwit any old criminal, but he met his match with old Rodya, and boy did he delight in his delivery. A lot of people hate their own voice. Porfiry is not most people

I was rooting for Rodya all the way

>>8969509
He chopped it up. There's a few narratives going on at once. It'll make sense after a while. I got bored of it though, so only got halfway before reading something else.

>>8969509

It's not meant to have a coherent plot. Take it episode by episode.

>>8969521
that contradicts >>8969519

He's a fucking horrendous writer.

The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word renowned. Here is the paragraph with which the book opens. The scene (says a dateline under the chapter heading, 'Prologue') is the Louvre, late at night:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.

But Brown packs such details into the first two words of an action sequence — details of not only his protagonist's profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn't work here. It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunière is fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he was curating at the Louvre.

The writing goes on in similar vein, committing style and word choice blunders in almost every paragraph (sometimes every line). Look at the phrase "the seventy-six-year-old man". It's a complete let-down: we knew he was a man — the anaphoric pronoun "he" had just been used to refer to him. (This is perhaps where "curator" could have been slipped in for the first time, without "renowned", if the passage were rewritten.) Look at "heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas." We don't need to know it's a masterpiece (it's a Caravaggio hanging in the Louvre, that should be enough in the way of credentials, for heaven's sake). Surely "toward him" feels better than "toward himself" (though I guess both are grammatical here). Surely "tore from the wall" should be "tore away from the wall". Surely a single man can't fall into a heap (there's only him, that's not a heap). And why repeat the name "Saunière" here instead of the pronoun "he"? Who else is around? (Caravaggio hasn't been mentioned; "a Caravaggio" uses the name as an attributive modifier with conventionally elided head noun "painting". That isn't a mention of the man.)

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html

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>>8969453
Well, actually, there is someone else around, but we only learn that three paragraphs down, after "a thundering iron gate" has fallen (by the way, it's the fall that makes a thundering noise: there's no such thing as a thundering gate). "The curator" (his profession is now named a second time in case you missed it) "...crawled out from under the canvas and scanned the cavernous space for someplace to hide" (the colloquial American "someplace" seems very odd here as compared with standard "somewhere"). Then:

A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move."

On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn't speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. "Chillingly close" would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man's pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.

Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better.

>>8969387
minimalistic desu

>>8969387
words

Melodiously.

Never read books as a kid but isn't calling them the Baudelaire twins a bit on the nose?

I'm sorry you had such shit taste as a child, OP.

>>8969413
I'm sorry you never were a child anon

It would do you well to remember that the self and 'I' are not the same thing. You're crossing into spiritual territories with this question. Check out Rollo May

>>8969323
This isn't a question of psychology but of philosophy so if you want a psychological book on the matter you are out of luck. These links should give you a good place to work from. The questions you have asked are immensely difficult and complicated

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-intentionality/index.html
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-intentionality/consciousness-self.html

>>8969341
And what exactly is the difference between the self and 'I'

>>8969267
I enjoyed it but Dan Simmons is a nut job. In one of his blogs he talked about being visited by an angel in his dreams which told him to take an interest in the white power movement.

All in all, it's a messy composite of several sci-fi ideas but he blends it reasonably well and the characters have good development. He explores the concept of pain a lot in it.

He's a psycho though.

I liked it enough that I'll probably read the sequel later this year but I wasn't totally blown away by it like some are.

>>8969289
Nails it pretty well. Link to the blog post?

Only the first book is good. The second one is meaningless political bullshit and typical sci-fi drivel. The magic of the first book lay in its intricate and beautiful worldbuilding, and all of that is lost in the second one. I couldn't even get through half of it.

The bible.

>>8969244
Why wouldn't they just send a full 64gb SD card up there?

>>8969315
Because they fear data damage. Books are contained in a sterilized chamber so it's more secure

Greeks -> Romans -> Chaucer -> Shakespeare
-> The Beats

come on, it really isn't that difficult

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>>8969145

Derek Walcott -> Nikki Giovanni -> Jericho Brown -> Melville -> William Morris

come on, it really isn't that difficult

Are you a young man? If so, I would strongly recommend Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock." I cannot tell you how many times I have heard of adolescents getting into poetry because of that poem (and it's partially so in my case as well). And it remains an excellent poem no matter how far you steep yourself in other things.

>>869151

In case you couldn't tell, OP, this is a bad troll. The Beats are not really even worth reading.

>>8969138
Why not?

>>8969150
Jews

>>8969183
>More intelligent than all the other races
>Not /lit/
retard