Can we have a biography thread? I really enjoy interesting facts and tales from the lives of authors. Stuff like the Joyce and Hemingway drinking together (link related) or Nietzsche eating lots of fruits. I feel that in some strange way it helps me know the authors better, or at least makes them more memorable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpPsAojqcKo
Right now, Gore Vidal comes to mind, gonna post more stuff as I remember it:
> Cyril Osborne was a hard line Conservative MP and Justice of the Peace. In a TV debate, he clashed with Vidal on morality and said he demanded a straight answer to a straight question: "Do you or do you not believe in corporal punishment?" Vidal replied: "Only between consenting adults."
> Vidal always rejected attempts to categorise people by sexual orientation, arguing that: "There are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts." While he claimed to have slept with thousands of men and perhaps women – when asked whether his first sexual encounter had been homosexual or heterosexual he replied he had been "too polite to ask".
> Vidal always maintained that his 53-year-long relationship with Howard Auster was sexless.
Speaking of homos:
> In his recently discovered secret diaries, Wittgenstein reports that, while masturbating at the front during World War I, he was thinking about mathematical problems.
From Zizek's How to Read Lacan
I'll just casually steal this from another thread to bump my own.
> But he soon had to return to Berlin to answer a charge of battery brought by a seamstress: Schopenhauer, who hated noise (and wrote an amusing essay [1851; translated, 1890] on the topic), had been enraged by her loud chattering on the landing outside his room; in the ensuing altercation he pushed her, and she fell down a flight of stairs. He lost the case and was obliged to pay her a monthly allowance until her death. (When she finally died, twenty years later, he commented, "Obit anus, abit onus" [The old woman dies, the burden is lifted]). The experience served only to make him more misanthropic and misogynous--his diatribe "Über die Weiber" (1851; translated as "On Women," 1890) is notorious.
where did wittgenstein splooge?
did he just bury it under the earth or something?
even if they had kleenexes what would he have done with them?
>>8053726
>In his recently discovered secret diaries, Wittgenstein [...]
What secret diary? Anywhere we can read about this?
>>8055089
There's also that one in which Schoppy gave grapes to one of his crushes at a partt, and the girl rejected him. Fucking hilarious.
>>8053726
When Kierkegaard was still engaged to Regine, he had planned a romantic ride by carriage. Normally aloof, unromantic and hard to approach, Regine was thrilled. When they arrived at the carriage, Kierkegaard walked away, saying the joy in anticipation of something is always greater than the joy of the thing itself.
Sometimes I am saddened that my autism isn't strong enough for me to become a notable philosopher.
>>8053726
Osamu Dazai held a reading party of some sort which Yukio Mishima attended. Dazai was hell bent on drinking as much sake as he could. Mishima, pissed off by the drinking and the grubby tatami room setting, told Dazai that he hated his literature. Dazai responded by telling the people there that Mishima must love him or he wouldn't have been there.
Mishima still talked about this decades later.
>>8053726
>There are people who care about Gore Vidal
>>8055089
>The experience served only to make him more misanthropic and misogynous--his diatribe "Über die Weiber" (1851; translated as "On Women," 1890) is notorious.
>There are people who misunderstood Schopenhauer this hard
He didn't fucking hate women, he merely thought of them as different and lesser; 'Big children'.
Even then he was gracious, saying they were perfectly suited to certain things in life.
I wonder how many morons will fall for that shit. The sneakiest little addition by any fatass Wikipedia contributor can tarnish a great reputation forever, sickening.
>>8055255
>He didn't fucking hate women, he merely thought of them as different and lesser
LOL
>>8055259
Prove me wrong, unless you're actually proving yourself to be a fucking moron here in professing your belief that recognition of inferiority is a profession of hatred (or contempt).
>>8053726
Gorky on Tolstoy
When he liked, he could be extraordinarily charming, sensitive, and tactful; his talk was fascinatingly simple and elegant, but sometimes it was painfully unpleasant to listen to him. I always disliked what he said about women — it was unspeakably vulgar, and there was in his words something artificial, insincere, and at the same time very personal. It seemed as if he had once been hurt, and could neither forget nor forgive. The evening when I first got to know him, he took me into his study — it was at Khamovniki in Moscow — and, making me sit opposite to him, began to talk about Varienka Oliessova and of “Twenty-six and One.” I was overwhelmed by his tone and lost my head, he spoke so plainly and brutally, arguing that in a healthy girl chastity is not natural. “If a girl who has turned fifteen is healthy, she desires to be touched and embraced. Her mind is still afraid of the unknown and of what she does not understand; that is what they call chastity and purity. But her flesh is already aware that the incomprehensible is right, lawful, and, in spite of the mind, it demands fulfillment of the law. Now you describe Varienka Oliessova, as healthy, but her feelings are anæmic — that is not true to life.”
>>8055271
I'd rather you be wrong in peace than knock that /pol/ chip off your shoulder and derail the thread, like how this always goes. Currently awaiting your posturing dismissal of me.
>>8055287
Then he began to speak about the girl in “Twenty-six and One,” using a stream of indecent words with a simplicity which seemed to me cynical, and even offended me. Later I came to see that he used unmentionable words only because he found them more precise and pointed, but at the time it was unpleasant to me to listen to him. I made no reply, and suddenly he became attentive and kindly and began asking me about my life, what I was studying, and what I read.
“I am told that you are very well read, is that true? Is Korelenko a musician?”
“I believe not; but I’m not sure.”
“You don’t know? Do you like his stories?”
“I do, very much.”
“It is by contrast. He is lyrical and you haven’t got that. Have you read Weltmann?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t he a good writer, clever, exact, and with no exaggeration? He is sometimes better than Gogol. He knew Balzac. And Gogol imitated Marlinsky.”
When I said that Gogol was probably influenced by Hoffmann, Sterne, and perhaps Dickens, he glanced at me and asked: “Have you read that somewhere? No? It isn’t true. Gogol hardly knew Dickens. But you must clearly have read a great deal: now look here, it’s dangerous. Kolzov ruined himself by it.”
When he accompanied me to the door, he embraced and kissed me and said: “You are a real mouzhik. You will find it difficult to live among writers, but never mind, don’t be afraid, always say what you feel even if it be rude; it doesn’t matter. Sensible people will understand.”
I had two impressions from this first meeting: I was glad and proud to have seen Tolstoy, but his conversation reminded me a little of an examination, and in a sense I did not see in him the author of “Cossacks,” “Kholstomier,” “War and Peace,” but a barin who, making allowances for me, considered it necessary to speak to me in the common language, the language of the street and market-place. That upset my idea of him, an idea which was deeply rooted and had become dear to me.
>>8055288
I already made my claim, paraphrasing what Schopenhauer actually said. I have Essays and Aphorisms sitting right beside me at this very moment.
You're the one defending the claim that he actually 'hated' women; I've proven otherwise, prove me wrong.
>>8055292
It was at Yasnaya Polyana that I saw him again. It was an overcast, autumn day with a drizzle of rain, and he put on a heavy overcoat and high leather boots and took me for a walk in the birch wood. He jumped the ditches and pools like a boy, shook the raindrops off the branches, and gave me a superb account of how Fet had explained Schopenhauer to him in this wood. He stroked the damp, satin trunks of the birches lovingly with his hand and said: “Lately I read a poem
The mushrooms are gone, but in the hollows
Is the heavy smell of mushroom dampness . . .
Very good, very true.”
Suddenly a hare got up under our feet. Leo Nikolaevich started up, excited, his face lit up, and he whooped like a real old sportsman. Then, looking at me with a curious little smile, he broke into a sensible, human laugh. He was wonderfully charming at that moment.
Another time he was looking at a hawk in the park: it was hovering over the cattle-shed, making wide circles suspended in the air, moving its wings very slightly as if undecided whether or not the moment to strike had come. Leo Nikolaevich stood up shading his eyes with his hand and murmured with excitement: “The rogue is going for our chickens. Now, now . . . it’s coming . . . O, he’s afraid. The groom is there, isn’t he? I’ll call the groom . . . .”
And he shouted to the groom. When he shouted, the hawk was scared, swept upwards, swung away, and disappeared. Leo Nikolaevich sighed, apparently reproaching himself, and said: “I should not have shouted; he would have struck all the same . . .”
>>8053726
Lucretius wrote a great poem in Latin describing the teachings of Epicurus called De Rerum Natura. It's mostly about physics but also about the materialistic hedonism that Epicurus taught, opposition to religion, etc.
But the poem ends practically in the middle of a sentence describing the Plague of Athens, with people vomiting bile through throats choked up with bleeding ulcers.
Lucretius had killed himself without finishing the thing. Cicero had to work it over into what we have today. He had been driven mad by a love-potion and composed his work in his lucid intervals, then killed himself.
That's all that's known about him but it makes for a good story. However devout of an Epicure was, the teachings of his master weren't enough to make him happy and life became unbearable. After so many beautiful passages about lying on soft grass in the spring time, and sipping from the rolls of the Master like a bee from flowers in the lea, and building a tower of Philosophy from which to look down upon the world, he ends his poem with an apocalypse of misery and ignorance, and then kills himself.
Tennyson wrote a famous poem about it.
>>8055294
No really anon, I'm sick of this song and dance. Nobody ever proves anything in these discussions, it's all bullshit. I don't hate these arguments, I just think they're beneath me.
>Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance.
>>8055308
Then I'm glad we agree. Schopenhauer didn't hate women; he likewise simply thought they were 'beneath' him, and men on the whole, and he was right.
>>8055225
Source on this?
>>8055318
Disagree on basis of semantic indifference, anon. What's your favorite tea?
>>8055308
>>8055318
rare
>>8055327
Lapsang Souchong, much as the Chinese themselves like to turn their noses up at it.
Alternatively, I'm happy with any sort of steamed green or else liquorice root for when I want sweetness without the sugar. The latter tends to give me a slight headache, however.
>>8055321
https://books.google.ca/books?id=fuSeAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA144&lpg=PA144&dq=Mishima+Dazai&source=bl&ots=R08zxXKMKx&sig=6ndS6A7ruFEMnt7LZ8200-aAhto&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjF2MXhreTMAhWFcj4KHbX_Ct4Q6AEIIjAB#v=onepage&q=Mishima%20Dazai&f=false
It's in several of Mishima's biographies, but here's something from the footnotes of a book on Dazai.
>>8055341
Thank you, anon.
>>8055328
I once saw him as, perhaps, no one has ever seen him. I was walking over to him at Gaspra along the coast, and behind Yussupor’s estate, on the shore among the stones I saw his smallish, angular figure in a gray, crumpled, ragged suit and crumpled hat. He was sitting with his head on his hands, the wind blowing the silvery hairs of his beard through his fingers: he was looking into the distance out to sea, and the little greenish waves rolled up obediently to his feet and fondled them as they were telling something about themselves to the old magician. It was a day of sun and cloud, and the shadows of the clouds glided over the stones, and with the stones the old man grew now bright and now dark. The bowlders were large, riven by cracks and covered with smelly seaweed; there had been a high tide. He, too, seemed to me like an old stone come to life, who knows all the beginnings and the ends of things, who considers when and what will be the end of the stone, of the grasses of the earth, of the waters of the sea, and of the whole universe from the pebble to the sun. And the sea is part of his soul, and everything around him comes from him, out of him. In the musing motionlessness of the old man I felt something fateful, magical, something which went down into the darkness beneath him and stretched up like a search-light into the blue emptiness above the earth; as though it were he, his concentrated will, which was drawing the waves to him and repelling them, which was ruling the movements of cloud and shadow, which was stirring the stones to life. Suddenly, in a moment of madness, I felt, “It is possible, he will get up, wave his hand, and the sea will become solid and glassy, the stones will begin to move and cry out, everything around him will come to life, acquire a voice, and speak in their different voices of themselves, of him, against him.” I can not express in words what I felt rather than thought at that moment; in my soul there was joy and fear, and then everything blended in one happy thought: “I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it.”
>>8055241
OP here, I haven't read him so I don't know if he's worth caring about or not. One of those facts (the interview one) was from a Zizek video on Youtube and the other one I read in an article when googling about it. They just seemed funny, regardless of the actual author they're about.
>>8055433
He has some decent historical novels, and some gay shock novels that didn't really hold up after their controversy came and went. He's interesting to me, but as a personality more than a writer.
His Henry Miller takedown is a classic too
http://www.waggish.org/2012/gore-vidal-in-retrospect/
>>8053726
Joyce liked farties
>>8055288
I think monkeys are dumber than, lesser than, and overall inferior to humans. That does not mean I hate monkeys.
inb4 you go willfully misunderstand me, saying I think women are monkeys.
>>8055294
We get it, you love boypussy like Schoppy did.
This was great, except for the laughable marxist tangents where he makes apologies for Stalin and Lenin in order to defend the inhuman violence of the Haitian revolution.
>>8055143
Here was a man.
>>8055143
that is hilarious
>>8055103
I'm no expert, but googling Wittgenstein Secret Diaries redirects to some books with those exact names so maybe it was translated directly.
>>8055493
> As a lover, Henry Miller is a national resource, on the order of Yosemite National Park. Later, exhausted by his unearthly potency, she realizes that for the first time she has met Man … one for whom post coitum is not triste but rhetorical.
> For a man who boasts of writing nothing but the truth, I find it more than odd that not once in the course of a long narrative does anyone say, “Henry, you’re full of shit.”
> Not since H. P. Lovecraft has there been such a lover of language.
kek'd
>>8055143
I'm guessing that whole "I must choose between Regine and God" shtick was just Kierkegaard's fairy tale about why Regine left him.
Tolkien was stolen by a nigger when he was a baby.
I've always liked the concept of beans and Pythagoras
>>8056020
What?
>>8056290
I heard the story was about some different kind of beans that were poisonous or something. Although, the ancients sort of associated air/wind with soul so maybe they genuinely believed that farts were threatening. That, or Pythagoras hated farts and made shit up.
>>8055288
>I'd rather you be wrong in peace than knock that /pol/ chip off your shoulder
He didn't even say he agreed with Schopenhauer. The fuck is wrong with you people
Think about what the average woman was like back then
>>8057637
The story goes that when the Pythagoreans were being chased by bandits they came across a field of beans but would not cross them cos beans and so they were slaughtered. Autists like Russell make a big show of this apocryphal story to show how stupid Pythagoreans were.
The bean thing was adopted into pythagoreanism from the orphic traditions, they signified life and were thought to be sacred, thus untouchable and uneatable. Russell of course didn't care to mention that in his account of Pythagoreanism.
>>8055143
And then she broke up with him...
>>8057794
Women are just not profound enough for Captain Kierk. It's almost like Schoppy was right.
>>8057632
It's true. His family's servant in South Africa took him to his village or something to show the white baby to others. Carpenter describes it in his book J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography.
>>8058091
> And that's how Tolkien invented orcs.
What's going to go in your biographies 'nons?
>ibn4 spent most of his life masturbating to 2D japanese women
>>8053726
Not someone we traditionally think of any author, but Hamilton's life was truly fascinating. He wrote so much and of so much importance. How he did it is remarkable.
>>8055089
I love him already, but this anecdote has increased the ardour of my love. There's one or two noisy cunts I would enjoy pushing down the stairs too!
>>8055143
Isn't it true, though? The event is always prejudiced by anticipation.
>>8058487
It's not that part that's hilarious, but the fact that he abandoned the ride altogether to prove a point.
I have some letters from Pynchon another anon posted a while ago if you want them.
>>8055143
Christcucks, not even once
Emil Cioran once spotted Samuel Beckett reading a newspaper in a Montparnasse park, he had never met him before and greatly desired to tell him how much he enjoyed his work but felt such an interjection would only lead to an inauthetntic greeting of trivialities
>>8055288
Holy shit you're retarded
>>8058641
...is that it?
>>8055241
i read autumn as autism even though ive seen that picture like 10 times at least
>>8055107
"But an examination of his life reveals a yearning for marriage frustrated by a train of rejections. In the year 1831, Schopenhauer fell in love with a girl named Flora Weiss. At a boat party in Germany he made his advance by offering her a bunch of grapes. Flora’s diary records this event as follows: "I didn’t want the grapes because old Schopenhauer had touched them, so I let them slide, quite gently into the water." Apparently, she was underwhelmed."
bamp
>>8055143
is it bad this is what I immediately thought my course of action would be before even reading what kierkegaard did
>>8058226
Mind giving some more information?
>>8055292
huh, tolstoy was a bit of a dickhead.
>>8058949
Romanian here. I have a few anecdotes about Cioran.
> Cioran wrote a book called The Transfiguration of Romania [transfiguration as in when Jesus changes his face, not sure if people are familiar with the term since it's different in Romanian] aiming to change his country, inspired by The Reich's marches, because he was rejected by women while a student in Germany and he attributed this to being Romanian. Later he rejected all his involvement in politics, especially extremist politics and groups.
> Constantin Noica, a Hegelian Romanian philosopher and friend of Cioran, wrote in his journal twice (probably out of forgetfulness, but also pride) about how he was worried that Cioran might commit suicide and Cioran, in order to comfort him, once pulled him aside and told him "Don't tell anyone, but I enjoy life".
> Cioran, Eliade and Ionesco used to meet while in Paris and play silly pranks on each other. [Sadly, I can't remember the pranks since they were so childish and boring that the details are lost on me]
> Cioran's first book On The Heights of Despair got its title from a random waiter that Cioran asked to choose between several titles he had in mind
>>8060861
The ten-dollar founding father without a father
Got a lot farther by working a lot harder
By being a lot smarter
By being a self-starter
By fourteen, they placed him in charge of a
Trading charter
And every day while slaves were being slaughtered and carted
Away across the waves, he struggled and kept his guard up
Inside, he was longing for something to be a part of
The brother was ready to beg, steal, borrow, or barter
Then a hurricane came, and devastation reigned
Our man saw his future drip, dripping down the drain
Put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain
And he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain
