Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 4931. page

>we will definitely bang tonight

>As I strolled through the park I was briefly fixated upon a rather striking female. Dolled up and polished, she shined like a stretch of silver bouncing directly into my eyes and into my soul. As much as I had enjoyed this moment, my cynicism crept as it did many, and spoiled the maiden before me. I was enveloped by a surge of nothing but what seemed like anger yet calmness. As quick as the moment of awe, was the moment of realization; she was nothing more than that, a doll who had been shined. Why would I, such as myself, waste time on such a childish thing. They are all the same inside and out, a childish thing.

>>7236721
>I am a beta living through women

>>7236629
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche

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>>7236629

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>>7236629

>>7236618
Patrick Rothfuss is an obsessive worldbuilder. Don't know if you've tried him already, he's really popular nowadays. Has a nice religious story in book one that explains (without every making it explicit) why the days have the names they have, and why there are 11 days in a span, etc. Full of good stuff.

R. Scott Bakker has some worthwhile stuff, but very heavily based on real-world cultures, e.g. Romans, Greeks, Medieval muslims, etc.

To a lesser degree, maybe try Brent Weeks' Lightbringer trilogy (Book one is called The Black Prism). Interesting culture, though the parts you don't visit don't really get fleshed out much. I guess that's not surprising, though.

>>7237665
Shit, forgot Abercrombie. Also very clearly based on real world (Scots/Vikings, Roman Empire, and Ottoman in the First Law Trilogy, with some Renaissance Italy in Best Served Cold). Very cynical writer, though, but amazing with character and plot.

>>7236618
Bakker. GRRM is also easily better than Jordan, not sure why you rate him so highly or mention him alongside Tolks.

>>7236541
Is it really 4chan that has made you like this, or is that you were like this when you were a teenager and browsing /b/ for the first time that you found something you could identify with. Were you the kind of kid who was always a bit of an outsider, somebody who just didn't quite gel with the cool thing? So as a coping mechanism you were like 'Fuck this, I'm gonna go do my own thing.' and then you found yourself on the contrarian path as a defense mechanism?

Hell, I'm just projecting my situation on to you here, but maybe it might be helpful. When I came to realise this about myself, I was better able to combat my contrarian attitudes by being conscious of making rational decisions. Breaking long term habits is hard, but to be honet what you really should aim to do is leave 4chan if you don't want to be bound to its sensibilities. You can either embrace it and enjoy being a smug troll man, or you can fight it and eternally battle the demons imprinted onto your mind.

>>7236541

Really? I was a contrarian when I first started visiting this site 6 or 7 years ago, but that slowly changed as I aged and learned.

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>>7236541
reverse-contrarianism is even worse than contrarianism. The only way out is actually learning to think by yourself instead of basing your opinions in what-you-think-other-people-are-thinking.

>>7236312
Folio Society or Easton Press if you're looking for something very special.

Penguin Classics are great, not sure if they have all the lives available though.

Loeb Classic Library if you want the original Greek and English translation.

I'm sure most editions will suffice.

Modern Library Classics have the full Lives in two volumes. The translation is the Dryden translation which is imo excellent; I'm not trying to appeal to authority but I believe that was the translation that Shakespeare would have used.

>>7237797
are those all unabridged?

>>7235711
Why don't you just fucking buy it and read it and find out for yourself?

>>7235720
Maybe because l'd rather not spend money on something that might not be worth it?

Why don't you just fucking ignore threads you can't contribute to?

>>7235732
how poor are you, moron?

Would be funnier if the mouse meowed haha

>>7235679
/thread

>>7235679
Well the mouse in this book is a microstate which manages to accidentally one-up the united states, so I think the mouse roaring is appropriate.

>>7235655

That actually isn't far off, but it's actually "The genre fiction of yesterday is the literature of today."

>>7235684
Yeah, but he was talking about The Witcher.

>>7235696
>Implying the Poles have ever done anything worthwhile

There was his mistake

>>7235609
hilarious stuff.

This thread is a shart with the Greeks

>not starting with the sybaritics
>not asking if she wanted to canoodle with the corinthians later
>not actually reading the greeks
you done fucked up, anon, you could have got a tasty meal too long to pronounce and a fuck too depraved to recount

Why would I discuss it if I hadn't read it? You've got the wrong idea mate.

>>7235568

All of them.

Not even shitting you. What I' read before I found /lit/ was also mostly classics.

>>7235578
That is literally the ethos of this board.

>>7235531
He;s still alive????

>>7235531
>Falling for the Wolfe meme
Ayyyy

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>>7235552
Its not a meme

>>7235435
great haram meme lol

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>>7235441
Hehe there's more
ask and you shall receive

>>7235452
lmfao!!!

got any more?? preferably about jews and muslims

I have not gone to the effort of trying to reconcile my interpretation with academia but here goes

I got a very strong impression that the officer could be looked at as a christ like figure, obviously implying that the machine represents the crucifix. Building from this I reasoned that the text also may have been making a humorous commentary on the apparently incongruous nature of Yahweh in shifting from the old testament to the new testament and his almost bipolar shift in disposition. This is summarized by the office of Commandant. The old commandant and the new commandant are an exaggeration of the two gods; with the old commandant being a martinet and the new commandant going so far as to coddle the condemned of the penal colony, stuffing them with candy. It is almost as if the first commandant is defined by his chastisement of humanity and his reverence for ceremony and the second commandant is not only forgiving of hedonistic excess but actively encourages it. Both characterizations of God are probably going to offend but as I say, these are probably intended as humorous exaggerations. And in exaggerating the two Gods I think Kafka makes a very apposite remark on the nature of the officer. Somehow he has to redeem humanity in the name of the old god, a wanton disciplinarian. This situation as you might imagine, naturally would create some cognitive dissonance in someone charged with such a destiny. This is why he comes across as such an incongruous character himself, apologizing for minor offences while committing a monstrous ritual on a regular basis. He is not a bad natured guy but he is also not inclined to apostasy and therefore upholds the brutal system, as the patriarchal figure of the old commandant can do no wrong. He justifies the machine's efficacy in "enlightening" the condemned and treats this enlightenment as something to be envied.

>>7235481
That shit is fire

>>7235361
a lot of very small interesting things, I don't think there is a big overall theme.

As >>7235481 says, there is the religious topic, which is quite obvious with the religious epiphany that the victims of the machine experience.

The plans of the machine and the instructions of the old Commandant could refer to the Bible (similar to this >>7235481 interpretation), but also just to the power of words, that is also emphasized by the method of killing (writing the sentence on the victim). In that way you can see (as often in Kafka's work) a biographical influence, as he stated several times that he suffered a lot when writing because he felt that his writings were never as good as he wanted them to be and as he imagined them to be (a topic that is discussed in The Hunger Artist as well).

I don't remember the story too well though, else I could write more. The most interesting character for me has always been the guy who was sentenced to death and his strange behaviour towards the end of the story.

bump .

>>7235277
>It is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of a) did you understand what was said and b) did you agree with it or not. It has nothing to do with art.

Maybe if we're talking about a list on Wikipedia, but most nonfiction is prose text composed to varying quality by researchers of varying ability.

Why do you assume your preposterous presuppositions based on observing the behaviour of an uncountable number of anonymous users posting ironically and sincerely and simply for the sake of it is worth questioning like that? /lit/ as a gestalt entity barely qualifies as a spook, it should be so obviously transparent.

All my misfortune in life—I don’t want to complain, just make a generally instructive observation—derives, one might say, from letters or from the possibility of writing letters. People have hardly ever deceived me, but letters always have, and as a matter of fact not those of other people, but my own. In my case this is a particular misfortune which I do not want to discuss further, but it is nevertheless also a general one. The easy possibility of writing letters—from a purely theoretical point of view—must have brought wrack and ruin to the souls of the world. Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a whole series of letters, where one letter corroborates another and can refer to it as witness. How did people ever get the idea they could communicate with one another by letter! One can think about someone far away and one can hold on to someone nearby; everything else is beyond human power. Writing letters, on the other hand, means exposing oneself to the ghosts, who are greedily waiting precisely for that. Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way. It is this ample nourishment which enables them to multiply so enormously. People sense this and struggle against it; in order to eliminate as much of the ghosts’ power as possible and to attain a natural intercourse, a tranquility of soul, they have invented trains, cars, aeroplanes—but nothing helps anymore: These are evidently inventions devised at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal system, the ghosts invented the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. They will not starve, but we will perish."

—Kafka, Letters to Milena, September 1922

"Witches I'm spooked"
--Banquo, Macbeth 3:16 Carnage

"This is what it amounts to: on the one hand, he constantly hopes for something he should be remembering, his hope is constantly disappointed, but on its being disappointed he discovers that the reason is not that the goal has been moved further on but that he has gone past it, that it has already been experienced, or is supposed to have been, and has thus passed over into memory. On the other hand, he constantly remembers something he should be hoping for; for in thought the future is something he has already taken up, he has experienced it in thought, and that which he has experienced is something he remembers instead of hopes for. Consequently what he hopes for lies behind him, and what he remembers lies before him. His life is not backwards but back-to-front in two directions. He will soon notice his misfortune even if he does not grasp what it really consists in. But to make sure that he really gets the chance to feel it, that misunderstanding comes along which every moment in a remarkable way casts ridicule. He enjoys, for everyday purposes, the reputation of being in his right mind, yet he knows that were he to explain to a single person just how things were with him, he would be declared mad. This itself is enough to drive a person mad, yet he does not become so, and that is precisely his misfortune. His misfortune is that he has come to the world too soon and is therefore constantly arriving too late. He is forever quite close to the goal and the same moment at a distance from it; he now discovers that what it is that makes him unhappy, because now he has it, or because he is this way, is precisely what a few years ago would have made him happy if he had had it then, whereas then he was unhappy because he did not have it."

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