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Hey, /lit. First time poster here. Have any of you read the novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace?
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y u do dis gooby
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>>>>>>>>>>>>>/reddit/
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>>7845518
reddit general?
>tfw you will never have an infinite jest audiobook narrated by DFW himself
his voice is so comfy, /lit/
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>>7845127
I have thought this as well.
There are some clips of him giving a reading from it but not too many
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what kind of american accent did he have
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>tfw you will never read anything written by DFW because you watched a couple of minutes of an interview with him and Charlie Rose and instinctively know a retard when you see one
Anonymous
Am I a simpleton is his work blows my mind? 2016-03-24 03:25:16 Post No.7845096
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Am I a simpleton is his work blows my mind? 2016-03-24 03:25:16 Post No.7845096
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Am I a simpleton is his work blows my mind?
Anonymous
2016-03-24 03:25:16
Post No. 7845096
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Thoughts/lit/
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>>7845096
reddit general?
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What in it blew your mind? I finally got around to smoking some weed and watching the Neil deGrasse Tyson version of Cosmos and I am still staring at my hands in wonder. Did you know that the atoms in your right hand probably came from a different star than the atoms in your left hand? Let that sink in for a minute. We are stardust.
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>>7845096
What about it was mind blowing?
I liked it, but nothing there was nothing really mind blowing and nothing particularly incredible about it.
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hello /lit/,
could you please recommend some books about jesters or jester-like characters? or just any books featuring such characters. thank you very much in advance
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skyrim
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King Lear
The Cask of Amotillado
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Not OP, but this is also of much interest to me as well. And if you know about any books featuring similar characters; such as mimes, clowns, or ventriloquists, I would be very pleased to hear about them.
Anonymous
Actors fitting perfectly in literature charachters 2016-03-23 18:41:59 Post No.7843359
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Actors fitting perfectly in literature charachters 2016-03-23 18:41:59 Post No.7843359
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Actors fitting perfectly in literature charachters
Anonymous
2016-03-23 18:41:59
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Has ever happened to you while reading a book to picture some charachter's appearance, and immediately immagining it with some specific actor/actress' looks?
Here's the thing: who is the best actor to impersonate Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, and why is Adam Driver?
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>>7843359
Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice was spot on tbqhwu.
Michael Cera as Hamlet
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>>7843359
I tend to imagine Slothrop from GR as Michael Richards
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Mickey Sabbath from Sabbath's Theater
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Reading too straightforwardly, I initially glossed over Severian's ramblings, which I found pseud (yeah, yeah), but maybe there's something to it. Some of the Catholic interpretations are interesting, and I'd like to know more about how Wolfe embeds Catholicism in his work. However, for Wolfe/Severian's opinions on semiotics, my opinion is that they don't compare to established thought like those of Barthes.
Here are some examples of the philosophical banter:
>"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges."
>"The pancreator is infinitely far from us," the angel said, "And thus infinitely far from me, though I fly so much higher than you. I guess at his desires—no one can do otherwise."
Does anyone smarter than me (shouldn't be too hard) have better informed opinions on this level of BotNS reading? How does Wolfe add Catholicism to BotNS? Other related thoughts?
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Someone once told me about how Wolfe is not as interested in injecting religion into his works as he is in making you think about things the way the religious do.
I think there is some truth to this, being Catholic myself. I would argue that the whole entirety of the world of BOTNS is deeply Catholic, because to be Catholic is to be weighed down with meaning and symbolism. The smallest things in the Catholic world--the Mass, the feast days, the celebrations and the coronations--are freighted with symbolism developed over thousands of years, which within the span of meager human reality seems every bit as long as the millions of years it has taken to make the Urth of BOTNS.
I'd imagine it must be the same to be part of any of the Apostolic churches. You feel a sense of heaviness in all you do in the faith, because the men and women who came before you, who did what you did and gave those things meaning, is nearly infinite in number. It is as though one is trapped in the past yet eternally oriented towards the future.
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>the Mass, the feast days, the celebrations and the coronations--are freighted with symbolism developed over thousands of years
If it's not too much to ask, care to elaborate on that? Also, what do each of the items of that list correspond to?
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>>7841520
*correspond to in the Urth universe
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Why /lit/ doesn't even read Pierre Boutang ?
/lit/ has a reputation of elitism, and not knowing French is pleb as fuck.
On top of that, Boutang :
-started with the Greeks
-is a true erudite (literally knows the Greeks, Latins, Augustine, Aquinas, Rimbaud and a lot of others by heart)
-blew the fuck out of Sartre and deconstructivists
-wrote the French Ulysses (Le Purgatoire)
-fucked bitches
-wrote pamphlets, philosophical essays, literary criticism, novels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRyRhf_FK1Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHnJ79e7Sns
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When you're writing in English you don't put a space between the words and the punctuation mark you fucking worthless French piece of shit. Put in the bare minimum to acclimate to another culture when you live and work in it 24/7, and maybe your garbage fucking Muslim-hole of a country will become relevant again. Fucking piece of shit French.
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>>7840852
Salty as fuck.
I guess you're not even francophone, filthy plebeian.
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>le purgatoire
>"French Ulysses"
I read French. Boutang is a fucking joke. A decent novelist maybe but his politics are such bullshit. For people who don't know French politics, Boutang essentially arse-licked the Action Francaise, a proto-fascist, royalist, Catholic group who cheered on the Nazis when Petain bent over and let them fuck France during the war. Go back to /pol/ you Nazi frog
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Is lolita worth reading? I have heard some good things about it, but most have come from friends with shitty taste. Other friends with good taste have also recommended it to me, so who is right?
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Bait? Reddit? I don't get it.
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>>7844945
I'm starting to read more intensely this year as a new years resolution. I figured you guys know your shit, but if not, then I can find out in other places.
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It's good as fuck OP. Read the first chapter and you'll be hooked. Pic fucking related.
Also
>calling someone's taste shitty
>hasn't read Lolita
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gentlemen I have a question: money means power? please if they have an opinion about it or can show me books that can help me clarify my question I would be released very grateful.
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*releases dick*
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ayn rand
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*releases dick*
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what are you favorite quotes /lit/
i like this one from the great gatsby man its cool
"No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o’clock — until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees."
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"Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, -when the soul seeth not, when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining- we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is."
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"Words build bridges into unexplored regions."
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"This too shall pass."
Just watched the movie
It's stupid, violent, anarchist and rebel, the perfect edgy teenager combo
Is the book better or is it as bad as the movie?
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>>7844534
Book is fairly similar. It could even be a little more "edgy" since the girls he picks up at the record shop are 14 or so. It's been a while since I've read it though.
I don't feel the same way about the movie though. The second half is a little slower/drawn out.
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>>7844534
You have to see the movie in the context of the time that it came out, not watching it a decade after Irreversible came out.
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>>7844534
You couldn't read it so it doesn't matter.
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Have you all read any of Peter Sotos' work? Is it any good?
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>>7843772
>Peter Sotos
Literally, who?
Please go, Peter. Please go.
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>>7843779
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sotos
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>>7843781
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sotos
I say again, literally who?
Please go, Peter. Please go.
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Greetings /lit/, italianfag here.
Name me all the best English/American books that you think should be read in their original language by non-native English speakers.
Please, don't recommend anything that could be too complex or difficult to understand for me (i.e James Joyce). My English skills are quite good, but not enough.
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Jude the Obscure
For Whom the Bell Tolls
A Christmas Carol
Blood Meridian
Lolita
American Pastoral
The Waste Land by Eliot
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
Probably Orwell and Huxley
Romeo and Juliet/Othello/Hamlet
Frankenstein
Moby Dick
Scarlet Letter
Heart of Darkness
Kim
Lord of the Flies
In Cold Blood
The Catcher in the Rye
The Bell Jar
The Poems of Emily Dickinson
Churchill's History of the English Speaking People
No particular order and off the top of my head
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In my opinion most of the works that absolutely must be read in english are the most difficult to understand. Shakespeare is lauded as having some of the absolute best use of sound, but his writing is archaic and uses some very advanced vocabulary. You mentioned Joyce, who is the same way.
On the other hand you have writers like Hemingway or McCarthy who write very well and could most likely be understood by you, but probably don't lose too much in translation either. Those two would be good authors to work through for you though. Add some Vonnegut too -- he gets shit on for being simplistic and high school-tier, but he tells some good stories and writes in a unique way that might not translate well. I find his short story collections better than his novels for the most part.
Have you ever read shakespeare? If you don't mind keeping a dictionary nearby you might be able to handle him, and it'd be very worth it.
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>>7843058
Also forgot to mention Moby Dick. One of the best works ever written in English. Melville uses some large words but 1) the actual outline of the story isn't nearly as confusing as something like Joyce and 2) many of the stranger words are specific nautical terms that modern english speakers wouldn't understand without looking them up either.
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is Pushkin better than Dostoyevski?
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pushkin's prose fiction is horrible. his plays are okay. his poetry (barring onegin) is good.
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no but he is better than tolstoy
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>>7842732
>>>barring onegin
Fuck off pleb
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What are your thoughts on reading books that you aren't "ready" for?
I've recently been reading quite a bit of Pynchon, but haven't tackled the larger of his works.
I feel like I understand probably 70% of what I'm reading on first read-through, there's maybe 20% that requires re-reading a few times, then 10% which just doesn't sink in at all.
But this 10% which I'm not quite understanding, is to me, what makes Pynchon, Pynchon. Very long sentences with confusing prose. References to historical places,events, characters, etc.
Now I'm really enjoying what I've read, but comparatively to when I read something like Don DeLillo, I feel like I'm maybe just not quite ready to tackle Pynchon's larger works. The other thing is that I have an entire lifetime to read them, and novels like Gravity's Rainbow are typically considered 'difficult' and a test of your literary prowess.
So do you typically power through things you're not quite getting? Or is there a book or author you're waiting to tackle until you're more well-read?
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In general, don't be too much of a pedant. You have to start somewhere and you have to grow a kind of thick skin to things unknown or understood incompletely.
There's a huge irony to learning: the more you do it, the more knowledge you have, but the more aware you become of your ignorance. If you let the ignorance baffle or overwhelm you, you will not be able to handle learning.
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Depends. Do you only work out by lifting weights you can lift easily, or do you try and lift the heaviest ones available on day one?
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I don't think pynchon's too hard to understand desu. All writers are understandable, its the reader that needs to up their knowledge. reading should be a process of learning senpai