Why is there a huge disconnect / blind spot / willful ignorance over literature as "objectively judged art" and literature as "part of the entertainment industry" and / or as completely subjective in quality? I think it's because of pseudo intellectual and pretentious posturing from the people on this board.
You pretend that literature is the former when it is the latter. You use the endorsement stamp of a large enough publisher as a sign of minimum quality even though we live in the age of the internet, which allows a huge diversity in the types of content available to read and their distribution. You're lucky that you were born a long time after the invention of the printing press, otherwise your "bar for art" would have to be explained within the context of a previous disruptive technology that you blindly accept.
I think the NEET caricature annoys this board a lot. /lit/ tries to portray reading as a worthwhile and enriching end in itself, yet the extreme version of the "reader" (ignoring anyone who was born rich) is seen with disgust and disrespect. Getting /lit/ to admit that going outside to learn about the human condition is a valid strategy is tricky and I don't think that I have ever managed it.
I could go on but I'll end now by mentioning how I think seeing the worship of the academia-media-publishing industrial complex on this board mainly reminds me of Steinbeck's quote about Americans being millionaires temporarily down on their luck. /lit/ is desperate for the industry's stamp of approval, and associates it with the works of the Western Canon (ironically including books such as The Republic) even as it is responsible for the horrific YA and alt-lit / Mira-Tao trends.
>it's the academia-media-publishing industrial complex retard again
how's community college going for you buddy?
>>8217196
Stop pushing your shitty terminology you professional shitposter
>>8217196
Nice blog post.
>being completely puzzled and lost in the endless sea of countless philosophies that tell you how to live your life and how to achieve a greater perspective
>each time you find a philosophy that suits you, you find one that had already thoroughly debunked it
>endless cycle of jumping from one school of thought to another searching for meaning
>exhausted at the mere thought that everything there is to think of, has already been thought of before by someone else
>the age of great thinkers died about 50 years ago
>no new branch of philosophy has emerged for decades
How do you guys even sleep at night? Genuinely curious.
>>8217149
>each time you find a philosophy that suits you, you find one that had already thoroughly debunked it
Just blend stoicism with rational scepticism and fuck all the rest.
>tfw INTP
Alone without being lonely.
nihilism
that's how i sleep
>>8217149
By not caring about such trivialities
250 pages in...
What the fuck is going on
Do we ever learn about character's motivations???
>>8217144
Part of the experience boi
Keep pushing and stop being a scrub.
>>8217144
It's a fantasy novel, so the characters don't really have motivations. At best they'll act according to whatever symbolic archetype they belong to, but for the most part it's all about moving the plot along.
>don't have a friend with whom i can read philosophical works on the weekend like Adorno did with is pal
Why live?
>with whom
>>8217089
Is it grammatically wrong? My english sucks
>>8217093
"Whom" is correct, as you're using it in the object position, however correct English triggers some of our residents.
I suggest ignoring them.
Worst book you've ever read, and regret even finishing.
>>8217035
Worst book I've ever read was Hunger Games. I didn't even finish it, put it down after the second page because the prose was so terrible.
>>8217092
It might be for me, at reast in recent years. I finished it though, since I bought it for an airplane trip.
You should have kept going, after a while it turns into such a shitfest it's actually entertaining in a so-bad-its-good way.
>>8217092
>>8217117
I'm so glad to hear I'm not alone in by observations/analysis on the poor form of writing on display in the Hunger Games series of novels.
Poorly done descriptions (ever heard of less is more? Chill with the adjectives mate!) absolutely pedestrian dialogue and as for the awareness of the "show don't tell" aspect of plot driven narrative? Ha!
Enlightened gentlemen like is can really see through this weak trash.
And don't get me started on the Da Vinci code, am I right?
I have just finished my book and plan on reading Das Kapital. I did some research on wikipedia and would like to know which volume I should read and what the main differences are between them.
Also, should I read it in my native language Dutch or in English? I can read German but not good enough to understand the book fully I am afraid.
>>8216987
>Also, should I read it in my native language Dutch or in English? I can read German but not good enough to understand the book fully
While you will have a greater selection of translations in English, read in your native language unless you are very confident in your English, as Marx is a genius with language so you may miss a lot of what he says.
>I am afraid
Don't be afraid, Anon. History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.
Read the English translation of the French translation (the last edition Marx oversaw and put out in his lifetime), or if you can read French just read that edition
http://digamo.free.fr/penguin1.pdf
Volume 1 and 2 essentially deal with a closed off model of capitalism... the 3rd deals with an open model.
The presentation in volume 1 was centered on the process of capitalist production ITSELF avoiding secondary admixtures. This was to get the idea across that the wage-labour relation was the central source of capitalist dynamics. The process of extended reproduction and the circuits of capital are dealt with in volume 2. The more messy theoretical issues of finance and land-rent are left for volume 3.
Remember only volume 1 was fully complete and published during Marxs life... the other 2 volumes were not fully finished and were edited and published by Engels from unfinished notebooks after Marxs death.
Marx's reproduction schemes are the real starting-point of his entire analysis but it's important to remember they make theoretical assumptions:
1) the capitalist mode of production exists in an isolated state (so foreign trade is ignored)
2) that society consists of capitalists and workers alone (so you abstract from all "third persons" in the course of the analysis)
3) that commodities exchange at their value (so credit is ignored)
4) that the value of money is assumed constant
With these fictitious assumptions you obviously achieve a distance from empirical reality even while this remains the target of explanation. These set of simplifying assumptions will go together with a subsequent process of correction that takes account of the elements of actual reality that were disregarded initially so that each of the several fictitious, simplifying assumptions is subsequently modified.
>>8216987
>and plan on reading Das Kapital
You'll never get that time back.
litpleb here, really enjoyed this book and I happen to be in my feels. anything alike/better?
sorry if this is thread no 26294619 like this
thanks in advance
>>8216927
Literally every other book by Haruki Murakami.
>>8216929
Oh okay, any recommendations?
>>8217010
Kafka on the shore
1Q84
I don't know what /lit/ thinks of this book, but why do I keep seeing it on lists alongside Ulysses and Sound & Fury as one of the hardest books ever? i'm by no means a skilled reader but I'm about half way through and I think it reads very easy.
is it because it's boring? people die in literally every chapter and the dialogue is very quick and easy to follow. granted, the violence gets repetitive, but there's a ton of action.
is it because of the lack of proper punctuation and the way dialogue is just sort of thrown at you? I practically don't even notice it, whereas in books like Absalom, Absalom and The Portrait of a Young Man you go like 4 pages without a new paragraph
is it because of the spanish parts? I just read the Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is rarely considered a hard book to read, and there were Spanish words and phrases literally on every page. I've figured out every spanish word through context clues and everything else is entry level "Mi casa" stuff
is it because of the long descriptions? because they are absolute cake compared to shit people read in high school like Nathaniel Hawthorne
I'm enjoying the book thus far though it's not perfect, but I haven't been stumped or confused like I have with plenty of other of the "hard" books. do any of you guys find it challenging?
>>8216756
>why do I keep seeing it on lists alongside Ulysses and Sound & Fury as one of the hardest books ever?
You don't. You are making this up.
It's hard in the sense that its awful prose is unpleasant to read.
Also >>8216781
>>8216756
this is obvious bait.
also
>people die in literally every chapter and the dialogue is very quick and easy to follow. granted, the violence gets repetitive, but there's a ton of action
what.
the "gratuitous violence" is a meme.
it's actually pretty sparse
I don't get it.
>"getting" it
Read the other two in the trilogy and you should get a clearer picture.
Hint: it's about language...i think
>>8216745
no it's about WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE HUMAN
If so many of you /lit/ posters are British, how come you don't say british words like 'bollocks', 'rubbish', 'loo', 'get on', 'take the piss', and other things television and Harry Potter has taught me?
Because they're not.
When people say "hrmm, I feel like this board is more European than American" they sound like San Francisco faggots bragging about how their city is more like Milan or Paris. The data shows the traffic here is predominately American.
>>8216468
why don't you americans spell nuclear 'nuke-yah-lar' or aluminium 'aloominum' and other things television and Friends has taught me?
>>8216498
lol those are some pretty weak stereotypes chief
How to get into Saul Bellow?
>>8216430
My intro to Bellow was Herzog which is considered his tour de force i suppose. It was decent enough and i'm glad I read it -- if only to have an opinion on Bellow. Whether it will stand the test of time I don't know. At one point, Augie March was considered the next Great American Novel. That claim doesn't stand up to scrutiny in 2016.
My advise is to start with herzog -- if you like it then work backwards to Augie march. Like everything else he wrote, it's effuse in jewish neuroticism...
>>8217337
Bellow is in eclipse for reasons other than the quality of his work.
OP read Seize the Day. It's a novella. If you don't like it you can move on desu
>>8217337
I just finished Herzog last month and rather enjoyed it, despite (or perhaps because of) the slow, introspective disquiet that the book essentially is. Should I just jump straight into The Adventures of Augie March, or are there a couple of other books I should read along the way. I was recently recommended Humboldt's gift by someone who's taste I don't entirely trust, and it'd be nice to get a second opinion.
for soemone who wanted to write more 'sincerely' and directly about actual issues - why does he waste so much time on 'postmodern' wankery and dumb humor?
this goes back to infinite jest too. if you watch his interviews on the book he presents a very different image than you'd get from reading the novel. he explains it like a very sad, straightforward cultural commentary. then you read it and you end up getting a shotgun scatter of quirky scenes that need to be decoded and spend half your time reading about all these characters' silly hobbies and obsessions.
and it's very much the same with the pale king. even in a book with no real aim at doing anything but discussing the 'real issues' it's like david shys away from engaging them and instead does some silly author insert story and flips through characters like the one armed ass biting surrealist and the guy with useless ESP. all these things feel so beside the point to his writing.
for someone who criticized dumb entertainment he sure seemed a slave to it, especailly in his wriitng.
Actually the po-mo stuff in this book supports the central theme of the book, which is that valuable work is often boring, tedious and apparently without purpose. The legal shindigs with the authorship and the chapters full of IRS terminology is designed to place you, the reader, in the seat of an IRS employees whose work is mind-numbingly boring but is nonetheless (so his thesis goes) valuable and in a way heroic.
Tl;dr
But Wallace is keeping with a long literary and philosophical tradition of saying one thing and giving another when he had your attention.
Whitman
Kant
Proust
Heidegger
McCarthy
Your conflating sincerity with honesty
>>8216501
but he doesn't do this! he never really explores boredom in this book. it's just one big joke or tragedy after another
the closest he comes is exploring the idea of exploring boredom
/lit/ I have to do a narrative for this creative writing course and there's a cuck word limit of 800 words, I feel like there can be hardly any character development & events taking place pls help
>cuck
pls noone respond this man is an idiot
>>8216387
>there's a cuck word limit
Kill yourself
What is it about the human mind that makes seeks meaning? Doesn't it seem sort of absurd that there's a meaningful and meaningless dichotomy in our heads? Does something cause this in our society or are we innately wired to have this feeling?
>>8216382
>Doesn't it seem sort of absurd that there's a meaningful and meaningless dichotomy in our heads?
Not at all. We have evolved to be pattern-seeking, problem-solving creatures. We find solutions to our basic problems (how to locate tasty animals; where to find reliable water sources) by a process of selection and discrimination.
Meaning emerges naturally out of a sea of solutions and non-solutions; of patterns and noise. Multiply this enough times, and you gain an intuitive sense of what is meaningful and what isn't (try cleaning a disorganised drawer to feel this intuition in action: you may choose to keep a set of batteries which may solve a later problem, yet throw away a bit of wire for which a potential use is less clear - yet you are not incapable of imagining a scenario where that wire could be useful.)
Also I'm drunkposting so maybe what I just said is total horse-shit
>>8216382
This is the literature board.
You should go to /his/
sage and report
>>8216420
It makes a fair bit of sense, when you talk about human beings being pattern seeking creatures. How else would human beings be able to function without these pattern seeking functions? It's hard to imagine.
What were his final thoughts?
I could really go for some tortillasssssssss
fucking lol
>>8216372
"RIP William Gass"