Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 2881. page

>>8498819
I haven't ready any sci fi with cool robots. Any recs?

>>8498819
>http://i.imgur.com/r55ODlL.jpg/
>Consider Phlebas
>not Player of Games or Use of Weapons
meme chart desu

I've tried reading Jack Vance's Dying Earth and his writing seems pretty bad. Big disappointment since he's been touted as a huge influence on a lot of writers.

>He he he, that he had heeded Howard, ha ha, it was hardly horrible.

>>8498390
That should be a colon. Semicolons don't work in that context.

>>8498390
>He had but one fear; others.

Just watch porn you dip

>>8497225
Did Borges shack up with some fine brown 20 yo hunty when he was old and crusty af?

>>8497227
>>8497227
>>8497227
ayyyyyy lmao

>>8495184
doesn't specify if it's an e-ink reader or not while also mentioning the use of ipads in the study. are you sure it's not comparing a kindle fire to reading a paperback?

>>8495184
>mystery story

PS: I bet you read translations

>>8495199
>>mystery story
That was just one study out of many

>PS: I bet you read translations
I'm fluent in 5 languages, and more than capable in 8. Everything I read is from original text.

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italian fascist architecture is really interesting

>>8495119
Walter Benjamin's the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

>>8495119
Go on /his/ and shut the fuck up

Taking an honors seminar on (((Yiddish))) lit. I go to an East COAST school in the US, so these aren't hard to come by for any good goy with interest.

Reading Call It Sleep by Henry Roth rn and liking it.

Small town Midwest Liberal Arts school checking in here. I'm taking a great course on American Literature during and after the Civil War. Reading a lot of Whitman and Melville poems about war, Drum Taps is amazing. Otherwise, I'm just fucking around and getting random poli sci and english credits until I can go get a teacher's license and make high school kids whatever books I want them to.

Also, I volunteer by teaching in a prison which is pretty cool. Highly recommend doing some service-based learning before you leave college.

>>8493233
I applied for Glasgow but ended up going to Cardiff, pretty stoked to start next week

In terms of required reading I've got Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Oedipus Rex, Ovid's Metamorphoses and a few poems to read for the first few weeks
>I am literally starting with the greeks

>>8492366
If you're trying to lift yourself out of nihilism, you can't. The way out is through, and only the beast you become at the bottom of the pit is strong enough to claw its way out. You can maybe save your social life by becoming an ironic walking Bernard Black reference but either way you're doomed to at least a few more years of misery.

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>>8492377

That's some deep shit, anon. Thank you.

>>8492366
my diary, desu

What are the red ones?

> rate
Don Quixote is good to read at least once; certainly not a 'keeper', in my opinion. Odyssey is good. Hobbit is trash.

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>>8491788
Read Pushkin before Dostoevsky. It may or may not help, but he likes to allude to Pushkin a lot.

I guess I'll bump with more schlock until someone gives attention or asks for it. The second of these requires expansion. I think it to be my best poem so far (which is awful), but the meditation it implies needs more time to unfold. I'll have to at least double it while maintaining its reverent feel, which is difficult for me, because I'm not naturally reverent. Oh well.

The Sorrow of Literature

Think.
--The Waste Land, §II

Think of the brawling song in which achieves
The milky violence of a poet’s sigh.
One’s thought can make a harmony in sieves…
And yet the image of ‘milky violence’—Why?

Because the mournful myth of cadence dips
Beyond the living, loving World that leers
In laboring hands and every page that rips;
Is murdered; and becomes the domain of fears.

It dips, and now the clamorous Muse achieves
The fully empty heart that cannot sigh.
Dead leaves, the fruit of myth, are brought in sieves,
Whose sighs compose a silenced singing: Why?

Paean to Shakespeare

The lass who graces
This serest of spaces
Is indivorcible from Shakespeare.

She will seem an image isolated,
Undebated,
Yet know the debate was won by Shakespeare.

Her curls, you’ll surely say,
Smack of ambrosi-ay—
But know ambrosia is monopolized by Shakespeare.

Say: ‘Your gait, dear, traced in cloudy fluff
‘Is in form earthly enough;
‘Yet ambrosia is its stuff.
‘It is a like a play of Shakespeare.’

Say: ‘Your smile, dear, is philosopher and stone,
‘Yet it is not your own:
‘The first alchemy, and the first at alchemy, was Shakespeare.’

Shakespeare, Usurper-King!
Thy play’s the thing
Wherein Beauty taketh wing.
But, whoreson magus! the wing is always thine, Shakespeare.

One more bump. This is a metrical exercise of the worst kind. Formally, I was consistent, but I think it to be a truly ugly piece of writing. Pitifully, it is my longest poem also.

Commandment in Reverse

Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
--‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, §IV

The banyan tree was fed
Upon an empty husk;
This poem, though born dead,
Shall smelly up the dusk.

It can’t do any better. Smell,
Though lowest of the passive senses,
Can by the figgy tree do well.
I won’t presume to use incenses.

Poetic inspiration, I’ve been told,
Is like a heightened epileptic fit:
Pressed tongue. The New assumes its throne; the Old
Expires. Heaney says, ‘I’ll dig with it’;

Or Beckett snatches grey ideas from out the foam;
Or Joyce engraves the Host upon a sooty face.
The entire enterprise becomes an onyx dome
Astride an emerald harboring a faery race.

And yet without that dome and race, the verses would go nude;
So Stevens pulses metaphysics’ strings; so pavement square
Comes to be haunted by white legs, and mind’s first quietude
Is burnt by shroudless Personage or concept. These all dare

A poet (how absurd!) toward actual expression. But Shakespeare knew
That absolute Construction must conceal all things t’reveal the One.
Obscurity should take its strange and truest Self: ‘A girl whose dew
‘Put Life, they say, to shame; for this verse first was gathered ‘neath the Sun.

‘From then on, prose will grow to rule the Earth. The dome’s obscuring tint o’erwhelms
The necessary hopelessness of nude ideas, dead in th’ heart. Enjamb-
Ment glints its bitter claw and beckons. No more the promise made by emerald helms
That house heads hollow, marching but to Poem’s simple beat. No more the Lamb.’

No poet claims this as the story of his Fall or his Decline: What is it then?
List, traveler: it is the grave of thought and self-appointed Creativity,
Who hails from indices and stars instead of rebel Bacchus and the Spirits’ din.
From this point on let these my lines flow backward, and the dangerous Truth my doctrine be.

Interesting, and in some ways excellent. Thanks for sharing, anon. Your wit and clever wordplay is refreshing, though oddly out of time: this reads like someone from Dryden and Pope's circle of friends, or Swift. Whence the Augustan sensibility? Do you like Horatian and Juvenalian satire? Have you read Lovecraft's hilarious Eliot send-up, Waste Paper? I enjoyed them all, even the "Shakespeare did it!" and lesser exercises. You have legitimate poetic dimensions and abilities, though they obviously serve your head more than your heart. Skill is not your stumbling-block, but sincerity might be, if you want to also write poetry that demands to be taken seriously, even at the risk of being scorned. It took Eliot a long time to stop winking at the reader for even a few lines. Just my two cents. I'm an adjunct prof, so I have seen a terrifying amount of amateur poetry (and real poetry too, of course).

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>>8472400
This will be the opening scene of a short story I'm working on. I want the narration to be slightly erratic in order to compliment the main character's less than stellar mental state.

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>>8472423
I don't like the uncle's second opening line. I want it to a bit less rambolic but still chiding. I didn't mean to separate his speech without an action in between, that's an error on my part.

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>>8472435

>>8505492

Sleep 8 hours today, read the biographies of Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville, and then reconsider.

>>8505492
No

>>8505492
i did. would not recommend.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

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>>8505407
In terms of the whole point being less about the content of the work and more about its style and form, particularly the way in which the form actually obscures and distorts the subject matter and draws attention to this distortion, I'd unmemeingly recommend Ulysses and other formally-fucky high modernist novels as shoegaze-esque.

>>8505441
Ulysses is not like that.

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>>8505237

>A petulant imbecile and his cohorts use satanic rituals to thwart the plans of Magic Snake Hitler.

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>>8505237

>A farm hand learns the value of eugenics.

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>>8505237
Mein Kampf and Schopenhauer's 'On Women': everything they say is true

not literature
fuck off

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>>8505038

traditionalism has already failed to support itself against technologically driven socialism

the traditional world is being bulldozed for the uberwomb because its safer for childbearers and Julius Evola has yet to catch on with pregnant women (or men)

>>8505065

What world are leftists living in? Why do you remain so deluded about your imminent success?

Reactionaries are on the rise, everywhere, from the alt right around Trump to Moscow having Evolians in their thinks tanks. A social democratic couldn't even get the nomination for president and Europe is turning to the far right with every new wave of refugees.