Who here /chuck/?
>pop culture musing
>90% of his ideas are actually interesting and entertaining.
>really good prose as well.
>goat books:
Killing yourself to Live
I wear the Black Hat
Downtown Owl
>alright
Sex drugs and Coco Puffs
Eating the Dinosaur
>meh
IV
>>8256192
t. rex are terrible
this guy is probably a hack
Insufferable cunt you pretend to like to get hipster chick pussy.
>>8256279
Can't comment on the author but T. Rex are dope and The Slider is a sweet album. Do you hate glam in general?
What dose Harold Bloom think of John Green?
>>8256128
he doesn't
>>8256128
Last night he dreamt of John Green tenderly fondling him while dressed as an anthropomorphic fox.
T. his psychiatrist
>>8256128
"Slide it." - Harold Bloom, on John Green threads
>In The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom criticized Thus Spoke Zarathustra, calling the book "a gorgeous disaster" and "unreadable".
When did you guys realize that Bloom couldn't read for shit?
>>8255988
I don't pay attention to any literary critics.
don't even try kid
if Bloom says something about reading then he's right, maybe not about texts, but reading itself he knows more about than anyone else
>>8255997
What's his best work on reading?
I'd like to have magical aesthetic experiences when I read
Is this book worth reading?
>>8255923
Give it a try. It's incredibly disjointed and I didn't like it, but people seem to rave about it so perhaps I'm the pleb here.
>>8255923
Fuck no. It's nothing but Burroughs' drug-trip word vomit. There's really no literary merit to it and seems geared to just shock the public with how gross it could be. Burroughs was ashamed of this piece and Kerouac and Ginsberg are shitheads for convincing him to publish it.
good god no. one of the worst books I've ever read twice
"The fucking fascists who call the shots haven't stopped needing races to hate each other, it's how they keep wages down, and rents high, and all the power over on the East Side, and everyrthing ugly and brain-dead just the way they like it."
>>8255912
I suppose that they're trying to get at rich people benefit from racism because it keeps the ignorant from looking at them and the marginalized stuck fighting millennia-old struggles when they could otherwise be ascending to better lives and threatening their dosh?
>>8255927
That's it?
>>8255929
Makes sense to me; I mean, the only people who benefit from low social mobility are those who are already wealthy and powerful.
I feel like today's Zeitgeist is truly one of ideological warfare; the rich and influential goad the poor and disempowered to take up tained ideals, then set them upon one another to keep them down.
Truly the only solution is to purge the political class, totally.
ITT: Books you love that everyone else you know hates.
>>8255897
This. I never got why it's so hated. It's pretty much the best book ever in my opinion. It's so fuggin' comfy and poignant.
>>8255913
you're retarded
In fairness, it's not that everyone I know hates it, it's just that I have never met anyone that has read it, but I love it to pieces. I don't think it'd go down too well on /lit/ though.
Holy shit the first Kim Clark chapter is so fucking bad and it's like 30 pages. Up until this point every chapter was very good... This chapter is unbelievably shitty.
Oh shit waddup
>>8255950
WHO'S BANE AND WHY DOES HE WEAR A MASK?
I thought a few lit people had read this?
In 1982, when I first read Marguerite Yourcenar's "The Memoirs of Hadrian," I asked Arnaldo Momigliano, the great scholar of the ancient world, what he thought of the novel. Italian to the highest power, he put all five fingers of his right hand to his mouth, kissed them, and announced, "Pure masterpiece." Now, nearly 30 years later, I have reread the work and find it even better than before. A book that improves on rereading, that seems even grander the older one gets—surely, this is yet another sign of a masterpiece.
(…)
Part of the mastery of "Memoirs of Hadrian" is in its reminder that the emperor, like the rest of us, remains imprisoned in a perishable human body. Hadrian's letter to young Marcus is being written at the end of his life, and so with a sure grasp of the inexorability of "Time, the Devourer."
(…)
Like most of our lives, Hadrian's—and so Mme. Yourcenar's novel—is plotless. What keeps the reader thoroughly engaged is not drama but the high quality of Hadrian's thought and powers of observation. Hadrian, through the sheer force of his mind, comes alive. That this most virile of characters has been written by a woman might be worth remarking were it not the case that the greatest novelists have always been androgynous in their powers of creation. With the dab hand of literary genius, Mme. Yourcenar has taken one of the great figures of history and turned him into one of the most memorable characters in literature in a masterpiece too little known.
Quotes of Joseph Epstein
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704116004575522281643976468
>>8255884
>Imagine Machiavelli's "The Prince" written not by an Italian theorist but by a true prince. Imagine, further, that he also let you in on his desires, his fears, his aesthetic, his sensuality, his feelings about death—in a manner at once haute and intimate, and in a prose any emperor would be pleased to possess.
Looks very good
>>8255884
This book is great; it has a marmoreal prose style.
I really don’t know why it is not talked about more often here on /lit//
>>8256180
Female author that is not physically attractive or deeply enmeshed in scandal. See also, Elaine Pagels, Svetlana Alexievich, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates,Toni Morrison
That literary figure who stole your heart
Who is it and why did you fall for them?
Biddy.
I have a thing for intelligent, sisterly-type girls.
every dickens' novel got a female character that makes me feel some type of way
the merchant from merchant in venice
whats the "dadrock" of literature?
/mu/ posters should be banned
/sffg/
ITT: Books women can't understand
>>8255836
all the classics
>homers D&D campaign
What's the best book about plotting?
The three-act structure of screenplays is good to know, even if you're not writing a movie. Most events can be understood as a three-act structure, like a fractal.
Will anyone take a second to recommend something?
I'll bump with recommendations for other, related writing topics.
King's remains very good.
Has anyone actually read this? I'm about 200 pages in. It is unlike anything I've ever read and I've read pretty much every meme post modern book book out there.
Not sure if I like it or not but I think that's the point. The writing is God level regardless.
I've only read Omensetter's Luck by Gass. Is it along the same lines (stream of consciousness, character based psychological dramedy)?
>>8255832
It's actually a lot different, more so than I expected.
It's hard to explain how it's written. The main character is basically just writing down his thoughts and memories about everything in his life. It's kind of like being in the mind of the "protagonist" so I guess in theory it is stream of consciousness but not completely bat shit like the furber parts of omensetter
>>8255825
Yes, it's one of my favorites. And you're right--you're not really supposed to like it; instead, you're supposed to see some of yourself in it.
Post your'e favorite poem.
>>8255791
tu puta madre
>>8255791
End, Middle, Beginning
There was an unwanted child.
Aborted by three modern methods
she hung on to the womb,
hooked onto I
building her house into it
and it was to no avail,
to black her out.
At her birth
she did not cry,
spanked indeed,
but did not yell-
instead snow fell out of her mouth.
As she grew, year by year,
her hair turned like a rose in a vase,
and bled down her face.
Rocks were placed on her to keep
the growing silent,
and though they bruised,
they did not kill,
though kill was tangled into her beginning.
They locked her in a football
but she merely curled up
and pretended it was a warm doll's house.
They pushed insects in to bite her off
and she let them crawl into her eyes
pretending they were a puppet show.
Later, later,
grown fully, as they say,
they gave her a ring,
and she wore it like a root
and said to herself,
'To be not loved is the human condition,'
and lay like a stature in her bed.
Then once,
by terrible chance,
love took her in his big boat
and she shoveled the ocean
in a scalding joy.
Then,
slowly,
love seeped away,
the boat turned into paper
and she knew her fate,
at last.
Turn where you belong,
into a deaf mute
that metal house,
let him drill you into no one.
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.41
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!42
Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated hour43
Sprung the fierce strife, from what offended power
Latona's son a dire contagion spread,44
And heap'd the camp with mountains of the dead;
The king of men his reverent priest defied,45
And for the king's offence the people died.
For Chryses sought with costly gifts to gain
His captive daughter from the victor's chain.
Suppliant the venerable father stands;
Apollo's awful ensigns grace his hands
By these he begs; and lowly bending down,
Extends the sceptre and the laurel crown
He sued to all, but chief implored for grace
The brother-kings, of Atreus' royal race46
"Ye kings and warriors! may your vows be crown'd,
And Troy's proud walls lie level with the ground.
May Jove restore you when your toils are o'er
Safe to the pleasures of your native shore.
But, oh! relieve a wretched parent's pain,
And give Chryseis to these arms again;
If mercy fail, yet let my presents move,
And dread avenging Phoebus, son of Jove."
The Greeks in shouts their joint assent declare,
The priest to reverence, and release the fair.
Not so Atrides; he, with kingly pride,
Repulsed the sacred sire, and thus replied:
"Hence on thy life, and fly these hostile plains,
Nor ask, presumptuous, what the king detains
Hence, with thy laurel crown, and golden rod,
Nor trust too far those ensigns of thy god.
Mine is thy daughter, priest, and shall remain;
And prayers, and tears, and bribes, shall plead in vain;
Till time shall rifle every youthful grace,
And age dismiss her from my cold embrace,
In daily labours of the loom employ'd,
Or doom'd to deck the bed she once enjoy'd
Hence then; to Argos shall the maid retire,
Far from her native soil and weeping sire."
(cont)
>>8255770
Why would you want to?
>>8255770
try annotating/commenting on the content to see what roles it plays in other parts of the book
try starting with Bible. Grab a copy with footnotes to see what to do
lds copes are swag for this desu they have tens of thousands of footnotes. some will be for weird mormon books but a lot are for just the bible
pic related
>>8255771
a richer experience
>>8255770
If you are a beginner, follow the advice of Schopenhauer
1) Read
2) Reflect on what you're reading
3) Re-Read
Read criticism/analyses by educated folk also, but think your own thoughts first.
Try reading certain passages (or the whole book) out loud. Focus in on parts of interest. Read other sources to understand the context of the work.