Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 3830. page

>>8039147
Fire produces light and loins produce life.

this shitty post you made is a waste of your time and mine

this poster is also repulsive in three distinct ways, the way that upsets me more being the fact that it is not even for the book, but instead for the awful Kubrick movie. If this was the actual poster for the movie, it would have beem the most sexual element of the entire entity by far. It perhaps better reflects the contents of the book, but of course imagery that hints at something sexually explicit reflects a failure to understand the novel

anyways kill yourself

>>8039174
Good post

Start with the Greeks

The Greeks. Now get out.

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>>8039074
>>8039076

Greeks don't interest me. Macedonians on the other hand..

>>8038990
no wordprocessor i know of, but there's a bunch of epub converter software that's free.

I usually just get the book published in print and then download the ebook copy they give me

I think epubs can be produced by latex. It's called pandoc. I haven't used it, but that's what Google days. Also, libreoffice has writer2xml

Let us know how that works, op >>8038990

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>>8038672
The thing about age extension is that once we can add, say, 50 years to your life, there's a pretty good chance the science will have advanced enough in that 50 years to give you another 50.

And so on.

The first man to live to be a thousand has probably already been born.

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Emil Cioran's books.

>>8038672
>I need somebody else to help me how to think
What are you, a liberal? Think for yourself, you fucking pleb.

>>8038652
>Best poetry for beginners
I usually recommend John Donne, but Whitman also has some nice poems with O captain my Captain, and When Lilac Last in my dooryad bloomed.

>My favourites
I like the Kerouac

>>8038652
>getting into poetry
Shakespeare's sonnets got me into poetry. Before that I only read poetry for English class and not because I wanted to.

>favourite poets
Still Shakespeare's sonnets. First love = best love.
Currently reading Don Juan for the first time and loving it. You mentioned an interest in Byron, so you should definitely read it.

>>8038652
John Donne, Charles Bukowski, Adonis, Paul Eluard, Pablo Neruda, Alexandr Blok


What does /lit/ think of the picks?

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>>8038604
>chilean
>literature

>>8038610
t. Argentine

>>8038604
Wish I could actually recommend some prose writer, but I've yet to delve into Chilean literature.

Violeta Parra was a wonderful lyricist and musician however, if you feel like reading some poetry.


Me volví para Santiago
sin comprender el dolor
con que pintan la noticia
cuando el pobre dice no
abajo la noche oscura
oro, sangre y carbón,
y arriba quemando el sol.

>studying philosophy unironically

>>8038567
why would you pursue a degree in philosophy?
better off just getting a psych degree

>>8038567
>Should I switch my major?

No, you should kill yourself.

>I had to convince [x] to read great books.
>[x] has only read childlike shit for SJWs.
>[x] wants only easy things because [x] is mentally retarded.
>[x] is a girl.

Why waste your time teaching a dog to walk on its hind legs? Even if you get it to feign reading real books, it'll just pose for Instagram selfies.

Teach it to cook and suck your dick and be happy with what you have. Women don't have souls.

East of Eden. Lots of scenery and one of the main characters is a psychopathic female.

>>8038584
who hurt you

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, is the worst science fiction novel ever written. The truth is it might be the worst novel ever written, or at least published, but given the fact that Wallace has stiff competition from the burgeoning spawn of PC Elitist writers, not to mention his own PoMo kith, such as Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and that ilk, I think I’ll stick with just calling it the worst sci fi has ever produced. Granted, I am not one who has read all the depth of sci fi offerings, but I’ve read enough to know that this so far undershoots the rest that by mere extrapolation it would be a titanic achievement for another author to do worse. Yes, there are the sword and sorcerer riff-raff, the cyber-punk crapola, and the remanent dross of the Golden and Silver Ages of sci fi still hanging around, and even those who’ve produced masterpieces, such as Richard Matheson and Ursula LeGuin, have been known to write horrorshow books in terms of quality, but this dystopian novel by Wallace is worse than them all. His book, only a decade old, is more outdated than many Golden and Silver Age sci fi books specifically because of his slang’s sounding as relevant as John Dryden’s courtly verse. Unlike Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, the slang is based in the then-contemporary world, which makes it seem so 1990s trying to seem cool, rather than timeless. Even his use of emails, with outdated isp formats, seems to belie his lack of creativity. Not that his relentlessly PoMo use of product brand names, bumper stickers, redaction marks, and lengthy digressions on things as pointless as Hawaii 5-0’s relevance versus Hills Street Blues’, does not already belie his creative bankruptcy, but it’s worth noting. Of course, nothing comes of his discourses- they’re tossed in like olives in a salad, so Wallace can preen his learnedness to you, and dropped just as quickly- a habit that he too often indulges- bringing up and dropping things

>>8038560
The novel clocks in at 981 pages, with over a hundred pages of notes that serve no purpose, reference nothing in the book, which is footnoted, and are filled with nonsense and faux information, with a small dab of the real tossed in. This is the T.S. Eliot Effect. At least, now I know where Dave Eggers ripped off his garbage that ends his wretched A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. By that rationale, one might say Eggers novel-cum-autobiography is worse than Wallace’s tome, until one gets to the fact that Wallace’s monstrosity is about two and a half times as long, considering it’s larger page format and smaller type. Let’s see; Eggers’ crap is how many pages, to Wallace’s? Do the math and times- Oh, well, I guess that equation was unnecessary- sort of like this book blurbs on the book’s cover claim its descent from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, but while that book is poseur crap, as well, there is, at least a love of wordplay, poesy, alliteration, and plot machinations, despite its ill construction. Infinite Jest lacks even these few meager pluses. In short, if Finnegans Wake was a rancid fart that was proudly left to rip, Infinite Jest is a weak one, lacking sound and odor.

>>8038561
Oh, do you care what this piece of shit was about? So did I, for the first two or three pages, until I saw the author didn’t give a damn. Of course, his ennui in storytelling, character development, and plain old grammar, is nothing new when considering Wallace’s career in letters, wrought of smoke, mirrors, and the occasional tongue dance on a glans. As for plot? Forget it. Having just read and reviewed Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho before reading this it’s worth comparing the two books’ merits. Neither comes near greatness, but Ellis at least tries, in his book, to create a character. Granted, it’s a psychotic character who indulges violent fantasies, but that, at least, gives a reason for the sketchiness of detail. Wallace is just lazy, and as a result the first words of Ellis’s book could act as Wallace’s book’s epigraph (including the capitalization): ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE. In short, there is no plot. Whereas the anomy of American Psycho’s plot, and the scathing look at the materialism of the 1980s, has a justifiable reason, Wallace’s work does not. With good editing Ellis’s book might be a solid read, Wallace’s is hopeless. Ah, epigraphic relevancy- footnote needed.
Here's the bare bones ‘plot’: The first chapter gives a syllabus of events to come, but it feels tacked on, by the publisher, to prevent it from being a total cheat. Hal Incandenza, the baby of his clan, is a troubled pothead youth and budding tennis star in the near future, in a Boston suburb called Enfield, where corporations have taken over sponsoring the years. Yet, nothing I will outline will tell you what ultimately becomes of him. He waffles in nothingness, then is dropped from the book. The character that replaces him as protagonist never meets Hal. Some may feel cheated, but actually this is a good thing. If only the whole work would drop itself. By chapter two we go back in time and see Hal has no problems. Normally, this would mean that the book is going to connect the dots, and Hal is a Holden Caulfield manqué, right? No, we get bupkus. But characters are not the only things Wallace drops. On the rare occasions he has a cogent observation, he never follows up on them- neither directly, nor within the narrative.

>>8038547
Gertrude Stein

More like Very Smelley, because her writing stinks

>>8038547
Belle Randall

People used to think you could trip on absinthe. Turns out it's actually not the absinthe that did it, though, it's some of the stuff involved with traditional styles of drinking it.

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>>8038543
All good authors and prophets used psychedelic drugs.

>>8038559
They were drinking beer though I think

haha bible

>>8038537

what kind of metaphor were the aliens?

The whole "aliens were a metaphor for PTSD making him lose touch with reality" thing never sat well with me. I think it's pushed by high school english teachers who teach just Slaughterhouse Five, because if you read the rest of Vonnegut, his worlds are all filled with actual aliens interacting with humans. It's light sci-fi, not allegory. I think Vonnegut was just trying to use the aliens to explain his outlook on dealing with tragedy.

Also, the aliens clearly didn't want anything. They just noticed he came unstuck and explained it to him. They didn't unstick him themselves.

>>8038517
I literally and literarily cannot complete a story

>>8038635
I believe in you, senpai

>>8038517
12 pages of my life in a cult book completed so far. May need to rewrite them.

If Plato had one or both of his legs amputated by Diogenes the Cynic, would he be considered castrated / no longer a man anymore by his own definition?

>>8038553
How does this definition fits with his theory of forms either way?

you can't amputate a leg of the form, baka

remember that lying faggot who said he would audiobook it all and didnt

>>8038491
I'll do it.

>>8038439
Yes. It was really fun even though my contribution got edited. Also, I helped with the cover.