Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 580. page
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>you spend more time planning to read than reading
>you havent read for months
>you have read 30 pages already today and aren't done yet
testing 123
If one were to bring about a radical political and social reformation in the world and form a hierarchy of civilization under the rule of true warrior aristocrats who were truly deserving of their position intellectually, ethically and through their actions, how could one prevent this form of aristocracy from losing it's vitality and being inherited by false aristocrats who would only exploit their position for materialist reasons rather than having a genuine vision for their society? How would one ensure that the aristocracy is only comprised of it's best citizens?
I have my own ideas of how to accomplish this, but I'm curious to hear others
population control. the moment the rabble has the ability to gain control through force is the moment the immoral members of the aristocracy would start playing to them.
free speech
>>7991935
What methods of population control would you enact? More to the point, what do you mean by "the rabble", the complete body of the people you're ruling?
A true Aristocrat should only be in power if he has a fully realized vision for the people he levies his guidance and protection towards. Seeing the body of your people descend into rabble in the first place reflects the failing of the Aristocrat to institute form and unity in his subjects
Do you think Ayn Rand's corpse has competently disintegrated yet?
Why do you hate women? The moment a strong woman like Ayn is successful, you disgusting right wing nazis try to bring them down.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
No, skeletal remains take quite a long time to fully decompose unless they're buried in acidic conditions. Placed in the proper environment, human bones can potentially last forever.
I actually like her stories. People are so hard on Ayn Rand and I don't understand it
hey /lit/
would anyone be interested in doing another infinite jest reading group this summer? it would be easy to follow last year's schedule, starting june 14th, or we could change the schedule as there were lots of complaints about rate of reading last year, or push the start forward or back
anyway, post here if you're interested
>>7991837
I'm interested OP.
>>7991837
would do
>>7991837
Can we do Gravity's Rainbow instead?
Gather 'round, children, and hear of the ultimate irl meme book, the most brazen act of self-promotion in literary history, and a genuinely mediocre novel.
It all started when an aging hippie made a fortune in the 90s internet boom and retired early. If he were anyone else, he would be on a yacht right now, enjoying the fruits of his labor. Instead, Rich Shapiro panicked, realizing he had become everything his younger hippie self hated. It was time to get his cred up, so he started writing. And writing and so on until he had birthed Wild Animus, a novel about an acid-head from the bay area who suffers from crippling delusions of being a wolf. Would a traditional publisher touch this? We may never know. It's entirely possible that Shapiro rejected The Man and decided to distribute Animus for free as an act of good will to the next generation.
In any event, the novel was distributed far and wide, by teams of paid college students and bums who left it in mailboxes, passed it out at marathons and left boxes of the novel in Ivy League dormitories.
I came across the book as a young middle-school lad in a resort/camp deep inside of Denali National Park in Alaska. Even though the prose hurt to read, I devoured the book, spurred on by my desire to read more about sex, drugs, and a lunatic trying to be a wolf. Was it left there by a guest, one of the seasonal workers at the camp, or did Shapiro personally make sure a copy made it to a location with such a connection to the book?
Has anybody else here encountered a copy of Animus? How did it come to you, and what did you think?
Yeah around 2010ish when I was at the University of Toronto there were some other students exactly as you described handing out this book.
I think I still have it around. Pretty sure I read a few pages and thought it was shit.
>>7991820
for a second I thought this is your story that you are shilling. is it? It's cool if you are. it's not bad, post more.
>>7991848
Nah, Wild Animus is a novel this Shapiro guy wrote and self-published and then spent a fortune distributing in odd places for years and years.
It's just super bizarre and there are places where copies practically grow on trees. Somebody's probably put the whole thing online somewhere.
Whenever I start a new book I get really bored after a page or two and go back to shitposting. Is there a way to not do that?
you dont actually like reading stop pretending you like reading
sup senpai
phil/math major here. been studying philosophy since my last year of high school, but only really started studying it the past year or two. what i mean by this is, i only started reading kant, fichte, reinhold, hegel, etc, in the past couple years, and as such have only really gained a respect for the historical significance of my philosophy education. my university is trash desu, and the way it's set up (without any pre-reqs for phil. courses besides intro to phil) deprives one's education, by my view, of its historical character, and really makes it difficult to acquire an appreciation for that character. since i've only just now come to realize its value, I'd like to brush up on my history. but, as it's only just now that i'm realizing its benefit, i don't know where to start. I'm thinking the french revolution, and working my way up from there, but do you guys have any better starting points? what books do you guys recommend for the newcomer to historical readings?
History is fucking weird because it's accessed on so many levels (pop stuff in general, non-scholarly/retail books, decently accessible scholarship, really hardcore scholarly stuff), it's hard to know where to start. I'm also biased because I'm a History guy who veered into Philosophy.
It depends what you're interested in. If you're ultimately interested in having a good feel for history in general, at some distant later date, I would recommend that you start by "learning how to learn" history, so you can then re-apply that at your own pace. Broad reading is fine, but really broad surveys tend to be ineffective for actually learning broad history. If I were you, I'd start by picking a period that interests me, like the French Rev (though that's a particularly tricky one), and then reading a reasonably "exhaustive" syllabus within that era or area. What I mean by "reasonable" is somewhere between an undergraduate syllabus worth of readings on that topic (which these days means little more than a topical, interest-based surface skim) and an overly dense mastery of the topic.
So for example, I'd take an undergrad syllabus for a "Greek history" class, follow it, but then on top of the course I'd also read 2-3 old, magisterial history books on top of the class readings, plus some topical ones. This is a few thousand pages probably. On top of that, I'd inundate myself in Wikipedia, documentaries, a few books chosen just for sheer interest, etc. An example regimen might look like
>An online lecture series
>The primary sources used by the lectures (Herodotus, Thucycides, maybe one other)
>The secondary material used by the lectures (maybe one textbook and several articles)
>Another, more serious, but still enjoyable (literary or significant) general history of Greece
>Some more specific interest-driven stuff that caught my eye
>Some more primary sources that caught my eye (say, the major Athenian plays)
By the end of this, probably several thousand pages of reading and months of work, you'll have a good feel for Ancient Greece (e.g.). Now you'll know how it feels to have a feel for a period, for its scholarship, for how scholars construct that scholarship, for how modern books tend to be dumbed-down and topical, for how pop books tend to be even worse. Now you can reapply that knowledge to another era, which may be totally different - Renaissance Italy, let's say. But now you'll be more efficient, and it'll go much faster. And after few of these, concepts and facts will start to interconnect and interlace, and you'll find yourself already knowing half of what you read - suddenly you find that doing Roman history is a lot easier and a LOT deeper after having done Greek history, e.g.
That moment in learning about history, when you reach critical mass and it becomes exponentially easier, is the hardest thing to convey. But this is how I'd try to force it to come about in a younger version of myself.
i was once like you; i shared your concerns about the deficit of history of philosophy that many of the world's universities had adopted over time; but you must understand that you have no point of reference to judge what's good and bad philosophy, especially if you've only "started studying it the past year or two". seriously, the "history of philosophy is paramount" and "why are the contemporary academics of analytic philosophy neglecting muh irrelevant schelling and hegel?" will at some point wear off. as it is with physics, there's a reason why one's undergrad education shouldn't dwell too much on history of philosophy: you don't expect young physicists to spend semesters on newton's principia, do you? it's been extended and corrected by hamilton and lagrange; the principia is now read by historians only. by and large, the purpose of an university is to get you up to speed with the contemporary knowledge, techniques, etc. etc.
here's a better alternative: learn what your contemporaries have to say, go back to history of philosophy if you have to, and realize that much of the < 20th century thinkers were confused beyond repair.
>>7991851
>there's a reason why one's undergrad education shouldn't dwell too much on history of science
typo. fix'd
Can anyone recommend a text that breaks down Blake's mythology? Where is a good place to start with Blake scholarship?
Fearful Symmetry by Northrop Frye.
Although it's more a creative work of criticism than a pernickety historical recreation of what Blakes intent might have been.
Have you actually read the entire meme trilogy, /lit/?
Did you like it?
Which one stood out to you the most?
start with the greeks
>>7991720
GR and Ulysses are masterpieces. IJ is great but doesn't reach sublime status as the others do.
>Have you actually read the entire meme trilogy, /lit/?
yes, though not with any intention of reading the 'meme trilogy', they are just three important books in english lit
>Did you like it?
yes, all very worthwhile.
Which one stood out to you the most?
gravity's rainbow is a personal favorite, ulysses is a high standard of what literature can be. infinite jest is good contemporary americna lit, but easily the worst of the three, if i had to pick one. well rounded and good but not a standout work intellectually, aesthetically, or technically
Did this pic ever get updated? Also, general book list picture (whatever the fuck these are called) thread.
Dumping mine first. Only got, like, 6.
What is the Leicester City FC of books?
An author that has been shit for so long and finally created a masterpiece?
Have no fucking clue
>>7991665
Don Quixote
give us some context OP, did they win something?
I'm not sure what the intention of this book was. I was told it was to make people aware of the value of black culture, both in the real world and in literature. However, all but one of the black characters are portrayed in a very negative light. Why would the author do this?
>>7991599
Whole book is just b8 for liberals, don't pay it any mind.
morrison is awful
Morrison is secretly redpilled. She hates "black culture" just like Aaron McGruder, and just like a long line of black thinkers have ever since the days of W.E.B. DuBois.
What books were you wrong about? Pic related
GO
>>7991592
this book still sits on the shelf of bmv in Toronto (biggest used book store in the city). it's been about 5 months now. same copy, same price. $7 is too much for torontonians to pay for tao lins shit book lol. I smile every time I see it there.
>>7991630
Odd. I'd expect Torontonians to be exactly the kind of faggots that would read this hot trash.
I'm always amazed at how so many people on /lit/ seem to be "writers".
If you're one how identify as such,
- how old are you?
- how long have you had some job?
- how long do you write
and, what I want to get at
- do you write next to your current job?
I mean how??
I got lucky and went into academia, so I get paid to do the research that would be necessary for my writing even if I were an independent scholar
i'm writer
>>7991578
I really don't like that term even though it is accurate of me. Even if I am an amateur I would still be an "amateur writer". Writer just sounds sort of pretentious unless that's literally what you're getting paid to do.
>28
>Been working my current job since Oct '15
>Since maybe 2013
>Yes, in my free time which I have a lot of I feel
I want a postmodern meme novel to read this summer. I read Infinite Jest last summer and liked it although not enough to jump immediately into another DFW book. I was thinking specifically either Gravity's Rainbow or White Noise and leaning towards the latter. Halp.
˙dlɐH ˙ɹǝʇʇɐl ǝɥʇ spɹɐʍoʇ ƃuiuɐǝl puɐ ǝsioN ǝʇiɥM ɹo ʍoquiɐɹ s,ʎʇiʌɐɹפ ɹǝɥʇiǝ ʎllɐɔiɟiɔǝds ƃuiʞuiɥʇ sɐʍ I ˙ʞooq MℲp ɹǝɥʇouɐ oʇui ʎlǝʇɐipǝɯɯi dɯnɾ oʇ ɥƃnouǝ ʇou ɥƃnoɥʇlɐ ʇi pǝʞil puɐ ɹǝɯɯns ʇsɐl ʇsǝſ ǝʇiuiɟuI pɐǝɹ I ˙ɹǝɯɯns siɥʇ pɐǝɹ oʇ lǝʌou ǝɯǝɯ uɹǝpoɯʇsod ɐ ʇuɐʍ I
W O M E N A N D M E N
>>7991565
Not as good as GameQuoter/10
