Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 2297. page

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>Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

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Is studying languages an ultimately pointless feat?
Even if you become fully fluent in a foreign language, you still think and filter it's rules through your native linguistic paradigm, you don't really 'read' foreign literature as much as you just skillfully decode it.
Sure, you can spend 20 years in a foreign country, speaking nothing but their tongue and naturalize yourself, but that just means losing your original language.

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>HB: I spend a good part of my life in bookstores – I give readings there when a new book of mine has come out, I go there to read or simply to browse. But the question is what do these immense mountains of books consist of? You know, child, my electronic mailbox overflowing with daily mesages from Potterites who still cannot forgive me for the article I published in Wall Street Journal more than a year ago, entitled "Can 35 Million Harry Potter Fans Be Wrong? – Yes!" These people claim that Harry Potter does great things for their children. I think they are deceiving themselves. I read the first book in the Potter series, the one that's supposed to be the best. I was shocked. Every sentence there is a string of cliches, there are no characters – any one of them could be anyone else, they speak in each other's voice, so one gets confused as to who is who.
>IL: Yet the defenders of Harry Potter claim that these books get their children to read.

>HB: But they don't! Their eyes simply scan the page. Then they turn to the next page. Their minds are deadened by cliches. Nothing is required of them, absolutely nothing. Nothing happens to them. They are invited to avoid reality, to avoid the world and they are not invited to look inward, into themselves. But of course it is an exercise in futility to try to oppose Harry Potter.


>Byatt - Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ''only personal.'' Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

Your hatred (and love of course) for the series, fans, the people being quoted and Rowling

Are Bloom and Byatt correct?

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Gaddis' work is deemed difficult reads, which many use as an explanation for its continuing obscurity; yet Ulysses, for example, is a more experimental and arguably more difficult novel, and yet it is world famous.

Why do you think this is?

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ITT: post best euphemisms

Not from literature, but Japs called their sex slaves 'comfort women'. How can you top that?

>Comfort women were women and girls who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied territories before and during World War II.

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Who wants to discuss the greatest philosophical work of modern times?

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Where online can I buy this Moomin series in English with the original cover art? The Puffin Books covers are complete garbage, I don't want those for my kid.

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My grandmother is dead. Happen just yesterday. All the family around her bed while it happened. I'm not really in pain, but I just came from the cementery and wrote this. I'm not really good with english (I'm from Argentina) but I think I'm gonna share it with you because it's an espontaneous little piece of shitty literature

"And when she was already gone, laying stiff in that bed, we were coming out of that nasty bedroom… nasty, dark and violent room. I was one of the first ones to come out. The next room, the living room, was bright. Clear sunshine came through the opened front door. It brought a sudden spring breeze, and it was so fresh and filled my lungs like a deep breath after an apnea night. It wasn’t any mysterious breeze from the outer-world or anything like that. Someone just left the back and the front doors opened creating a wind path. But this is what all this was about, for me. Everything was there just like symbols. And they meant nothing at all until you made them meant something. I guess that room… dark, nasty and violent room was so awful to me that the change to the next room meant so much. Then there was this sick joke. After I crossed the living room on my way to the kitchen, I saw this dish towel right next to the sink. I never knew where it came from, and I think I have never seen it before, but it had a picture of an ass (the animal, you know) with a bandage around his ass, pain symbols like stars coming out of it, his face in distress, and a legend called “If sex is a pain in the ass you’re doing it wrong”. And I thought of how many times that cloth was hold by my grandmother or my mother or my aunt and how it meant nothing to them because no-one speaks English. It took a sick smile out of me. Later that evening someone (I guess my brother) put a small plate over it to cover the nasty joke that my grandmother would have hated so much if she ever knew what it meant. And how different it meant to me, it made me smile. Not just the joke, but in those circumstances, in that house filled with people who would have never tolerated that kind of humor. And how different it was for my brother, who got shame out of it. And that’s how it was. Different for everyone."

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What is Deathconsciousness of literature?

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ITT: The worst book covers ever.

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Anyone else feel sorry for authors were nobody shows up for their book signing. They just sit there for hours and nobody is interested in their book, let alone getting it signed

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I want to get into politics. What are some good books that are merely informative about the history of politics and all the different (modern) political ideologies and the author DOESN'T insert his own biased worldview in the mix somehow?

Please no /pol/

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What's the point of reading?

Over this year, I read Seneca's Epistles. I went through the work slowly, allowing other books to interject as the letters are not something to be devoured in one sitting. As someone who had once aligned himself as Zeus-hailing pantheistic Stoic, as well as semi-competitent Classicist, I could easily anticipate what Seneca would say and how he would express his theme. Still, as I finished the work today, I struggled to recall some of the earlier letters within the work. I was shocked that the headings of some epistles seemed completely foreign to me - as though I had not read them. My recollection of some of these earlier letters were nearly void. Does this mean the letter had no effect upon me?

I remember a quotation, cited by Amos Oz in a short collection of essays, which read: 'A book not worthy reading twice, is not worth reading once.' Now, certainly, I believe that Seneca's letters are worthy of reprise reading, but it seems, in part, that the task would be futile if I could not establish firm memory of work after the first read through. Even if I were to memorize a book completely, a hafiz would not guarentee that one has drank fully from any given text.

Thus, is the only way to read a book to re-read a book?

(Another question worth asking would be what are books that you have constantly reread?)

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Should I start a physical book collection, or would that make me look like an utter fool?

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I'm not sure if this is the right board for it, but since it involves post-irony and new reality, might as well:
Is the internet "humor" getting stale? I don't mean each individual meme, but the practice of always striving for a quick joke or reaction, at the expense of everything, from intellectual conversation to IRL events. I say that because, especially here, on 4chan, what used to be funny and unique is now a repeated exercise of killing and creating memes. While the aspects of cringe, rekt, YLYL and the entire random comedy culture still inspires some laughs, it does feel dated and forced.
Comedy itself has always changed with the times. Is it time for a new way to approach comedy? What are your favorite books about comedy mirroring our society?