Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 47. page
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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 Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
11. The Mandarin: And Other Stories by Eça de Queirós
12. The Jesuit Empire by Leopoldo Lugones
13. The Counterfeiters by André Gide
14. The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
15. The Greek Myths by Robert Graves
16. & 17. Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
18. Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner
19. The Great God Brown and Other Plays, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill
20. Tales of Ise by Ariwara no Narihara
21. Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
22. The Tragic Everyday, The Blind Pilot, and Words and Blood by Giovanni Papini
23. The Three Impostors
24. Songs of Songs tr. by Fray Luis de León
25. An Explanation of the Book of Job tr. by Fray Luis de León
26. The End of the Tether and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
27. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
28. Essays & Dialogues by Oscar Wilde
29. Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux
30. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
31. Buried Alive by Arnold Bennett
32. On the Nature of Animals by Claudius Elianus
33. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
34. The Temptation of St. Antony by Gustave Flaubert
35. Travels by Marco Polo
36. Imaginary lives by Marcel Schwob
37. Caesar and Cleopatra, Major Barbara, and Candide by George Bernard Shaw
38. Macus Brutus and The Hour of All by Francisco de Quevedo
39. The Red Redmaynes by Eden Phillpotts
40. Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard
41. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
42. The Lesson of the Master, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Private Life by Henry James
43. & 44. The Nine Books of the History of Herodotus by Herdotus
45. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
46. Tales by Rudyard Kipling
>>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. Fantastic Stories by Juan José Arreola
57. Lady into Fox, A Man in the Zoo, and The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett
58. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
59. Literary Criticism by Paul Groussac
60. The Idols by Manuel Mujica Láinez
61. The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz
62. Complete Poetry by William Blake
63. Above the Dark Circus by Hugh Walpole
64. Poetical Works by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada
65. Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
66. The Aeneid by Virgil
67. Stories by Voltaire
68. An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne
69. An Essay on Orlando Furioso by Atilio Momigliano
70. & 71. The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Study of Human Nature by William James
72. Egil’s Saga by Snorri Sturluson
73. The Book of the Dead
74. & 75. The Problem of Time by J. Alexander Gunn
>>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 just outside the city, the Empress Anasurimbor Esmenet searches frantically throughout the palace for her missing son Kelmomas. Meanwhile and many miles away, Esmenet’s husband’s Great Ordeal continues its epic march further north. But in light of dwindling supplies, the Aspect-Emperor’s decision to allow his men to consume the flesh of fallen Sranc could have consequences even He couldn’t have foreseen. And, deep in Ishuäl, the wizard Achamian grapples with his fear that his unspeakably long journey might be ending in emptiness, no closer to the truth than when he set out.
The Aspect-Emperor series follows Bakker’s Prince of Nothing saga, returning to the same world twenty years later. The Great Ordeal follows The Judging Eye and The White-Luck Warrior, and delivers the first half of the conclusion to this epic story. Returning to Bakker’s richly imagined universe of myth, violence, and sorcery, The Aspect-Emperor continues to set the bar for the fantasy genre, reaching new heights of intricacy and meaning.
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 than Martin's), but this is the only thing they have in common.
Oh, and make sure to read the first three in a row. The Judging Eye takes place after a time-skip of 20 years, and doesn't make sense unless you've read the whole first trilogy.
>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
