Allright, budding writers... Defend yourself against THIS! Cioran tells it straight - don't be a writer.
"In this amazing and unrelenting epistolary essay, the Romanian philosopher EM Cioran urges a young, aspiring author to give up his ambition to write so that he may protect his sicknesses and sins from the healing power of the word. To write is to destroy the grace bestowed upon us by misery and disease and failure. And to become a literary man is to join the age of the epigone – the copycat."
http://radio-weblogs.com/0124722/stories/2003/05/24/cioran.html
Illness so weak as to die with a gust of breath is illness not worth protecting, and failure that can be redeemed is not real failure; as for being not yourself, what else could you be?
Everyone else is his competition. Duh.
The important part, when attempting to fail, is to be not too successful.
How should I start with Nietzsche /lit/?
GREEKS
R
E
E
K
S
Let's see, how would you pronounce Nietzsche?
>>8271332
knee-che
>Only the cinema has the possibility of truly fighting against time, thanks to montage. This microbe which is time, the cinema can come right to the end of it. But it was more advanced on this path before the sound cinema. Most likely because man is greater than language, greater than his words. I believe more in man than in his language.
LITERATURE ETERNALLY BTFO
Will /lit/ ever recover?
Now try communicating that concept through film.
I'm a complete pleb, I have no idea what the fuck he's saying.
What does he mean by fighting time? Cinema coming right at the end of it?
>>8271226
the eternal struggle
I rarely see this guy mentioned here. What are your thoughts on him? Favorite novel?
I personally enjoy Oliver Twist the most, but I've only read Two Cities, Great Expectation, and Twist, and Christmas Carole so far. I'm considering reading Bleak House next, but I've never met anyone who has read it so I don't know if I should.
I've posted multiple times in the past few months about going through Nicholas Nickleby extremely slowly due to boredom
>>8271161
read whatever you want, nobody cares
Currently going through Our Mutual Friend, it's great
Recommendations:
>Fantasy
Selected: http://i.imgur.com/r688cPe.jpg/
General: http://i.imgur.com/igBYngL.jpg/
Flowchart: http://i.imgur.com/uykqKJn.jpg/
>Sci-Fi
Selected: http://i.imgur.com/A96mTQX.jpg/
General: http://i.imgur.com/r55ODlL.jpg/ http://i.imgur.com/gNTrDmc.jpg/
Previous: >>8263672
First for Poul Anderson's Broken Sword is the epitome of fantasy.
*unsheathes shardblade*
>>8271141
*windruns behind u*
If one could write like Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Proust or Cervantes, for example, and at the same time had a body like the one in pic related, wouldn’t that be nice?
Imagine pictures of such a writer crowned with a laurel wreath: now that would be glorious. The perfect achievement of great body and soul.
The old Greeks and Romans would sing endless hymns of glory for such a man, and Pindar would certainly write his best Ode on the honor of him.
the greeks were ripped dude
not my taste
>no homo
EL BICHOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Jorge Luis Borges thought you ought to read this
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/jorge-luis-borges-personal-library.html
1. Stories by Julio Cortázar (not sure if this refers to Hopscotch, Blow-Up and Other Stories, or neither)
2. & 3. The Apocryphal Gospels
4. Amerika and The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
5. The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery by G.K. Chesterton
6. & 7. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
8. The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck
9. The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati
10. Peer Gynt and Hedda...
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>>8270912
47. Vathek by William Beckford
48. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
49. The Professional Secret & Other Texts by Jean Cocteau
50. The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories by Thomas de Quincey
51. Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza by Ramon Gomez de la Serna
52. The Thousand and One Nights
53. New Arabian Nights and Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
54. Salvation of the Jews, The Blood of the Poor, and In the Darkness by Léon Bloy
55. The Bhagavad Gita and The Epic of Gilgamesh
56....
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>>8270912
Why do some take up two numbers and others have like three on one number?
Where are the women writers?
>There are two kinds of people in this world
>>8270754
those who shitpost, and normies
>opening paragraph is just the narrator being ambivalent
>>8270754
Those who post literary trope threads, and those who post in literary trope threads.
Been waiting for this book for a while now. Since I live in Europe, it's gonna be a while before I get my hands on a paper copy, so I wondered if the ebook has been leaked anywhere?
Here's the blurb:
Praised by fans and critics worldwide, R. Scott Bakker has become one of the most celebrated voices in fantasy literature. With The Great Ordeal, Bakker presents the long-anticipated third volume of The Aspect-Emperor, a series that stands with the finest in the genre for its grandiose scope, rich detail, and thrilling story.
As Fanim war-drums beat...
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Has this been officially released in the States yet, or are there just advance copies floating around?
>>8270713
Bakker worth getting into? I've heard more comparisons towards Dune than ASOIAF and I have the first two of the first trilogy and The Judging Eye.
>>8270740
It's absolutely worth getting into, if you like fantasy lit of the more "sophisticated" sort - there's a lot of philosophical themes, and a Bakker usually has a heavy focus on neuroscience and philosophy of the mind. It's not light reading, that's for sure.
It's not really like ASOIAF at all, a lot closer to the Dune books and especially to Tolkien's Silmarillion. It's in the same dark-and-edgy genre as ASOIAF (the torture-porn in these books is a lot more extreme...
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>tfw too intellectual to read fiction
>>8270310
>Too intellectual for fun
FTFY
See, that's how you think it works, but in actuality you've simply been overcome by a sort of conceit.
>>8270310
>outing yourself as a pseud
>when Joyce and drinking buddy Ernest Hemingway faced a potential brawl, Joyce would hide behind his more imposing comrade and shout “Deal with him, Hemingway, deal with him!!!’
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/james_joyce_in_paris_deal_with_him_hemingway.html
Absolute madman.
How often do you think they fucked? I bet Joyce was the top.
>>8270259
James Joyce..possibly the most overrated novelist in history.
The “greatness” he is accused of is that he is the first “stream of consciousness” writer; IE he writes EVERYTHING that passes through someone’s mind in a single day in “Ulysses”. He called it “Ulysses” because in his opinion his story is also a great epic; that’s how pretentious he is. To compare his crap to the Iliad!!!
That’s it. That literary trick is his “great” contribution to literature. Forget about Shakespeare! This man is the shit eh!
People often jump on the “praise” bandwagon for Joyce; knowing that many “intellectuals” are supposed to highly regard him they think if they do the same they’ll look clever.
His stories are awful. Boring crap. His characters are forgettable and one dimensional. They think terrible things in their stream of consciousness; as it includes all things, it includes thinking about taking a shit and in one case a woman thinking about what it would be like to have a stallion’s penis inside her.
I suspect you’ve never even read his books.
Joyce sucks; ALL his stories (Well – the ones I read anyway – Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, Portrait of the artist as a young man – are boring crap.
Try reading a real masterpiece, like Les Miserables, then you might change your mind about Joyce.
Which are his best works?
Which are his worst?
>>8270223
>best
all of them
>worst
none of them
ps marlowe poster preemptive kill yourself your meme is forced and not funny
>>8270235
:^)
'tis unnecessary since you yourself already said "all of them"
>>8270235
> marlowe poster
Who?
So if every reaction, action, motivation, anything we do in our lives can be boiled down to just brain chemicals then what are things like thoughts and ideas, judgement and analysis, love and attachment?
>>8269865
Particular patterns of brain chemicals.
>>8269888
Why do we place importance in them then? If that's brain chemicals too then how did humanity get here and what should anybody's purpose to live be?
>>8269893
>live to be
ftfy
write what's on your mind
>>8268627
ur mum
It stands in the axis bellowing, vexing it's own existence
it screams for the decimation of the decimators. Peace in his own consideration, is a deluge of ravenous howls, a spasmodic shrill of complete lividity.
It's lusts after the blood of the wicked, it yearns for the agony of the iniquitous. When dark covers the world it's insatiable hate masked as a growl will brim the ears of all who proclaim themselves to be predators, all who submit them selves to the nefarious path. Their utter destruction will be that of ten-fold of that of which they gave.
I want to have sex with my ex gf and die right after, before I remember how sad I am
Well, /lit/?
http://www.arealme.com/vocabulary-size-test/en/
>>8268423
WELL!
i'll take it but i'm a little disappointed desu