Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 4258. page

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We live in ridiculous times.

He glanced up at me from the screen. He was in deep. Gone were the days when your friends might at least have bad habits that seemed outwardly cool. A cocain addiction. A cigarette hanging limply between two fingers, or behind the ear waiting to be reached. No, like most others he was simply not really here. Not really there. He didn’t exist in the three dimensional space that I did. No, he occupied a 3G space. Probably he had wet dreams about one day being able to afford to suckle from the sweet tit of an iphone.
“Mmm…yeah?”, he said, looking up from the screen, eyes as glazed as its sheen coating. “Yeah, that might be cool.” He looked unhealthy. His palid colour could have been from its glow or from his hours of staring into it. It was impossible to tell.
I had asked him to come on a “quad date”. That was a term we had coined for four of us (J and G, as well as I and him) taking four girls out at the same time, to the same place without letting any of them in on it. His being on his phone at the minute was of course to use a dating app; I could see his thumbs swipe in the tell-tale way. And yet he exhibited little interest in the prospect of actually meeting them. This irked me, but was in no way surprising.
When he glanced back down I slipped my hand into my pocket and stroked its cool surface. I took a sick pleasure in him not knowing I had it. I knew it was wrong, but I was much too far gone now.
“Yeman, come on. It’ll be hilarious.”
He looked a little annoyed now that I had interrupted him again, but hid it behind a smile. “Yeah, alright dude. I’ll talk to you about it later, I better be getting back to class”. He got up from the bench, and after stretching out an arm for a fist bump he said what I knew he would:

“Just a quick one for the gram man, yeah?”
It had all pointed to this. Why would we go to the park on a day like today if we couldn’t show the world? Why would he have spent those extra five minutes combing his hair back and tying it neatly into a manbun if he couldn’t show the audience?
He had his beard neatly trimmed, and his thick-rimmed glasses donned like a perfect intellectual. If I were Medusa and turned him now he wouldn’t look out of place beside Socrates or any other great thinker.
He leaned in, and I could smell his shit. His thick scent of pure bullshit, and I abhorred it. I abhorred him.
Inside my pocket I pressed my finger on the little button, relishing the feel of it submission to my will.
He posed a little longer leaning into me, arm now over my shoulder. We both smiled, his that fake smirk I knew so well, and mine for once totally genuine. Pure delight lit my face, as I looked at the camera at the end of his outstretched arm.
“Haha, sound man!”, he chuckled. “Ahh, shit no-“

“Connection.” I finished for him. He looked at me a little unnerved at my quickness. “Because I blocked the signal, you little slug”, I thought.

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Who is the Tarkovsky of literature?

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Whose fault do you think all the bad things that happened in Macbeth were? Was it the witches? Lady Macbeth? Or Macbeth himself? Or maybe a combination of them all?

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Can a book capture 'epic'?

I'm not /lit/erate, I've read but not widely or particularly well. It looks like I'm going to get into the film industry, and something has been bugging me for a while.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about ideas, themes and imagery that I would like to explore in a visual form. Since I was a kid, I've daydreamed about these 'epic' scenes, invariably accompanied by some 'Requim for a Dream' style soundtrack.

These images are vivid and compelling. Far more so than anything filmed and presented to an audience. I've notebooks full of such 'ideas'.

Some are camera movements, some are interesting phrases. Some are simply feelings and atmospheres. To exemplify, I've been keenly interested in capturing the following feeling:

>when you're in a place you haven't been before/rarely visit, and there are very few people around. It's quiet and you feel strangely alone and depressed.
I get this feeling in very quiet, darker parts of hospitals and weird towns I visit. I get it when walking down a street far from where I live. There's anxiety in being removed from the crowd, and what you know.

Film is limited heavily and these almost idiosyncratic ideas seldom translate clearly to the medium. The aristry is often rendered visually 'cheap' by the realities of life.

So, can it be done in a book?

Most films I watch do not compell me. Compell is the key word, because these huge, complex ideas in my head do.

Thoughts? Can anyone point me to any works that explore the chasing of these huge, incredible, perfect ideas that cannot exist in the tangible world?

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Writers: how do you get over the embarrassment from people you know reading your writing and knowing the personal experiences and relationships that influenced you to write certain things?

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Has there been an eloquent defense of elitism? Not just in literature but in general. How do you justify the idea that quality exists outside of personal opinion and that it is important. Or books generally literally justifying elites and their dominion over the lower classes. Just general authors who deal with the concept of eliteness in a positive light.

I've read Evola, watched Barton Fink, and I know of Bloom. They dealt with these topics but I'm interested in others.

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Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

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What does this symbol mean? I've seen it tattooed on an anarchist punk and in a comic mocking SJWs. Basically a compass composed of arrows.

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poem about wanting to be a dad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-N6Yy5xWMk

aww

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I can't read unless laying down fuck

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the concept of "chromatic" time?

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Which one should I read and why

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Being serious here, do you even need ANY kind of education to write a book?

It looks like some people get famous while butchering the language, then they praised for their new and "innovative" styles.

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Convince me that we don't need the semicolon and that the em dash is always sufficient.

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I'm looking for language learning books