Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 3891. page

>>8002602
I have this one in my soon-to-read stack. Glad you like it. I read his The Body Artist a few months ago and really didn't like it. I'm holding off on Underworld, but that one's supposed to be great.

>>8002602
Haven't read it yet but Delillo doesn't publish shit like Pynchon does.

you didnt miss shit, reading is useless and if you think that it will give you any knowledge you are lying to yourself

That's not that late

>>8002517
I didn't start until 20 either, and now I'm doing a PhD in literature, have an enormous book collection and generally live a fairly literary lifestyle.

You've got plenty of time, OP.

I'm actually interested in this as well (Not OP)

The advice I got from a friend who is in the Classics department at my school was Mandelbaum

>>8001839
You should also read the Aeneid.

>>8000167
Did you not read the dialogue? Doesn't he describe in there somewhere his belief that everything comes from having been not because it is? You aren't led because you are in a state of being led. You are led because you were once not being led now you are. He uses this meme to justify his belief in an afterlife. For you to become dead, you must live. For you to live you must have been dead or some state previous to being alive. In his words, not mine, he believes that because this theme is common in nature. That there must be a state between the two or before. Hot does not become Cold because it is Cold. It becomes Cold because it is cooled. And this is where some of his logic stems from, observations of nature.

Few things:

1) Euthyphro is an early dialogue and entirely concerned with refuting the eristic argumentation of the sophists (specifically, not clarifying their terms) This involves linguistic ambiguities, often things as simple as making false equivalence between homonyms that look or sounds like, but are nevertheless loaded with different meanings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro#Third_definition
>To the modern reader, this part of the argument (10a-11a) sounds painfully convoluted. But it had to be written this way, because the Greek of Socrates's time lacked the grammatical terminology to refer to the active voice and passive voice which would have greatly simplified Socrates's expressions.[4] Nor can he refer to Aristotle's Categories, which also goes into great detail on this distinction (treating it as between simple expressions of state and secondary substances). So he explains with detailed examples ('carried', 'loved', 'seen') instead.

2) You're reading Jowett which can be tricky for exactly this reason even in the best of cases, even in dialogues other than the Euthyphro. But here it's fucking murder. He just translates the thing and assumes people will figure it out, I guess?

In general though, Jowett is not going to give you seventeen footnotes for every sentence, and often won't provide the Greek equivalent of phrases in brackets, which critical editions will usually do. Very helpful, e.g., when the English translation is horribly clunky and confusing but the original Greek makes intuitive sense, as in this case. You kind of need a good sense for when you should be imagining the Greek "behind" Jowett's translation of it, rather than just the English. Combined with the above point, this can make many of Plato's early dialogues especially challenging, because eristic argumentation naturally hinges on ambiguity of terms and linguistic issues specific to the Greek language.

You're unfortunately reading a particularly bad swamp of difficult translation in Plato, both in the usual sense and in cultural terms since they lacked concepts we now think of intuitively. On top of that, literary communication is secondary and oral is primary at this point - Plato is one of the first real prose writers in the Western tradition. So the ancient reader of this dialogue would pick up on Plato's point intuitively, that homonyms are not necessarily synonyms, where you're lost as fuck. Plato is trying to tackle things in whole paragraphs that we could say in two words because we have formalised grammar and writing.

>>8000167
Existence precedes essence

Sit down in bed with pen
Watch porn for 7 hours
Get KFC/pizza
Go to bed

>>7998668
I usually try to write during the morning and the night. My word count improved a lot since I have two writing sessions a day.

I always try to convey my character's traits like Tolstoy does, describe details as best as I can like Nabokov would recommend, and present it in an interesting prose. My style has been tooled a lot by Pynchon and Tolstoy lately, I believe. Even though I know I'm not as good as them, the idea of becoming a decent writer in the future keeps me going.

I usually write in the evening because I attend to college in the morning and I'm too lazy to wake up before 7:30. Sometimes right after lunch, sometimes before dinner. On weekends I use to stay awake for some hours after dinner (usually at 23:00, mediterranean hour) and write if I don't go out partying. My standard writing session is one hour long and something between 500 and 1200 words. Although I don't write everyday.
Started writing in september of 2015 and I feel like my progress has been pretty fast. Now I check some drafts I wrote in september/october/november and I see them as clearly inferior to my last stuff. I have posted some of my "late" writings on the spanish threads of /lit/ and they were well received (1L to that argie who used to insist on writing the critiques in english, your reccomendations were and are appreciated), so I feel like I'm already visibly improving my writing and that's what keep me going. I'd say my main inspirations are (not always deliberately) Flannery O'Connor, Faulkner, Chekhov, Roberto Arlt and maybe Pynchon. Although, as I said, I've been writing for no more than half a year and I know I still have a shitton to write, experiment and work.

I-I'm sorry OP, say again?

Yes, they're called comics.

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The Burning Plain - Rulfo - University of Texas ed. I don't know if the Spanish original had pictures.

Got any sauce for that image? I don't know if looking at these types of photos satisfies my lust or just aggravates it but in any case I'd like some moar if you would be so kind.

anything with pictures will attract a wider audience than something without because pictures don't require as much thought. and seeing as how the greatest authors of our generation are JK Bowling and etc. who make a point of appealing to the lowest common denominator...

yeah go ahead. but if you're just in it for the money then become a fuckin banker or something.

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>>8001653
Rumi, comes to mind.

Maybe Kahlil Gibran?

>>8001653

So it's not Arabic, it's Persian, but the entire field of Rubaiyyatic studies is fantastic. (That is, the study of Omar Khayyam's Ruabaiyyat, which means 'quatrains' or 'verses'). Old Omar was a poet in like 12th century (Islamic) Persia.

Really you can't go wrong with Fitzgerald's translation at least for an aesthetic experience even if it's not a literal interpretation

>>8001653
ibn arabi

MY

>>7999006
dairy

God's eye sees my life. That's good enough.

>>7975430

>>8002529
The sky is burning in fast forward, the wind is blowing backwards. Formless effervescing plankton expand and dissipate, consuming one another for growth, popping like pixelated fireworks in super-imposed bioluminescence. Their silhouettes scar the conflagrant sky with a silent, salted fear. Eyes roll into darkness, the sound of grinding rocks, cracking hungry bones. The sun splits into fiery jaws, descends onto the shivering earth. Ripped skin is born from flames, shapeless matter whirrs in suspended animation. Hills are formed and defiantly rise. Mountains cough and explode in drowning fire.

Red worms are pulsing in soup. The pan is blackening, the worms ignite. Muted invertebrate screams echo. Worm-broth shudders and splits, piercing sunlight floods.

"Sir, will you please close your blind."

My eyes open slowly and I swivel to look at the speaker with the incredulity of blear, a blank, humming heat in my eyes.

"Sir? Your blind?"

Gradually, lines are forming in the whiteness. A lady in a blazer. A hat rests precariously slanted upon her head, her hair is in a tight bun. She is looking at me strangely.

"No, I can see" I say. She squints at me in bewilderment and gestures past me to a window. Beyond the panes, there is the soft lap of blue sky on cloud coast. The rising flare of a new day blushes the billows from beyond the horizon. My view is cut abruptly to alabaster infinity as the woman's hand slams the blind shut.
She rights herself and looks at me, face of confusion, waggling finger of universal reproach.

"Please keep your blind down for the duration of the flight, Sir"

>>8002535
"Who are you?" I say, kneading my scalp between my fingers and trying to focus my nervous pupils.

She keeps her eyes fixed on me and shifts her weight. She taps a silver rectangle name-badge emblazoned in dark print with 'Karen'.

"Karen" She says.

She turns to leave.
There is a pressure in my head that is building with my disorientation. She begins to walk away and I realise with an anxious twist in my guts that I want her to stay.

"Karen, wait"

She glances back at me, looking tired and bored.

"What?"

"Where are we?"

"Please keep your blind down for the duration of the flight, Sir" She says, emphasising the word 'flight'. "We are on a plane." She makes a frowning face and heads down the aisle.

I look after her, feeling betrayed without knowing why. Passing four rows she turns, quickly looking back at me, meeting my eyes, then passing out of sight.

I feel beads of cold sweat emerging from my forehead as my heart begins to pump previously docile blood. My lucidity is returning in unwelcome high-definition. The snores of my fellow passengers are increasingly transmuted to bitter rasps and the clogged pores of the sleeping woman to my left look like dirty sinkholes.

I fidget in my seat, the anxiety of reality grating on me, filing me to a sharp point, skewering my nerves. I neurotically fiddle with the buttons on my shirt, twisting one off by accident. I decide I should look out the window again. You've done it before, I think, but what if it's different this time? You're getting more and more awake now. The pills are wearing off. Try not to panic. What are the odds you die in an airplane crash? Just look out the window and don't panic, never panic. You might make a scene again. It could make everything worse, much worse and then it would really have been better to have never looked at all. You're already biting your nails. I nip into the quick of my nail by accident and blood blossoms underneath.

>>8002538

I close my eyes and press my forefingers into my temples for a moment.

Peeling the blind up a tiny bit, I glimpse the wing. It jolts up and down under the power of the wind. I recognise the Airplane's turbofan engines from Google images, but they look much bigger in real life. The noise they make seems to emit from inside my own head, the sound of dying machines, robot screams. A wintry palm grips my throat at the thought of mechanical failure. Charred rubble.

I shut the blind quickly and look around. Probing my blazer pockets, I find an amber prescription bottle and shakily unscrew the lid. I summon spittle into my mouth and coax two yellow tablets down my gullet. Leaning over my armrest, I look at the person behind me. Drowsy woman of mid-forties. Her handbag is knitted with bits of fabric and held affectionately to her stomach, her hair is clean but frayed. She looks back at me through pinched, tired eyes.
Weighing on the chair in front of me is a corpulent Colonel Sanders look-alike. His furry maw dances to the rhythms of snore.

The sound of slumbering breaths is constricting the air around me, making it heavy and claustrophobic, the incessant wail of the engines is making my eye twitch. Everyone is asleep. Why can't you be like the others?

I am jittering in my chair, uncomfortably praying for sleep when out of the corner of my eye I see movement, a leg changing positions. I lean over to get a look at the person. They are dressed in a grey suit, with a tie-less white shirt and black brogues. He is looking into the desolation of the closed blind. I cough and he turns his head towards me.
My teeth clamp together, pre-empting the surge of quivering bile up my oesophagus.
The man has no face.
Where his face should be there is a void. Like a perpetual cigarette burn on film, as if reality has not processed his face, it is not there.
He seems to look back at me, measuring, waiting.

then read the fucking book. why are you such a co-dependent pleb

Purity more like Poority lmao

Franzen is the Franzia of literature.

>frogposting
Kill yourself.

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>imitating the style of your favorite authors and including references and "in jokes" to those authors great works for shits and gigs because you know the book is that great that people will be reading it almost a century later

>>8002357
>having a favourite author
Why would you be such a cuck?

>use

>suicide is the only way out of this misery
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

useless for what? it's been a buttload of use in giving me fun stuff to think about.

>>8001150
>Rousseau was the most based social contract theorist

That would probably be Montesquieu even if Rousseau is more pleasant to read.

The reason he is appears so based is probably because he is one of the protogenitors of the spooks that possess you currently

>>8001150
plz Wolstonecraft made rousseau look like a bitch,

>>8001774
That was only on his educational philosophy, the social contract was his true masterwork, then discourse on inequality.

>>8001726
Stirner may have not believed in a state, but I think some of his critiques became a bit silly. For example, saying that even if he made the law he shouldn't be obligated to follow it because he could change his mind, nevermind the fact that if he made the law in the first place he could just change it after he changed his mind.

I also happen to believe that ideas of rights, justice and legitimacy, short of being value judgments, are useful tools for me to evaluate myself and my own compared to the power of other's wills.