/lit/ - Literature

Have you guys ever found a thinker or writer that seemed to bridge the gap of time entirely, and you felt totally connected with him? Out of everyone I've read, only Duke de la Rochefoucauld and Schopenhauer come close desu.

>10% of the time I feel normal, the world is full of wonder and I want to learn about everything
>90% of the time I'm too depressed to do anything, nothing is fun
Sucks so much. I don't even know why it happens

I've consumed enough media to realize that there's insane potential in every art form just waiting to be tapped, but 90% of works don't even come close to doing this, and there's a handful of works in each art form that illuminate how much better things could be if we put in the effort. I think both Flaubert and Nabokov realized this, and it's why they had such unique styles and paid exquisite attention to detail like no one else, they realized it was worth it.

It's honestly hard to convey the full extent of this realization. Let me try it this way: You know that certain stuff in art makes you feel good. In a song, lyrics can be pretty impactful, right? Everyone knows this, people quote songs by The Smiths all the damn time. Yet nearly 40 years after The Smiths, still almost no one's trying to write good lyrics. Two other artists who write good lyrics are Edwyn Collins and Arab Strap, by the way - check them out. Anyway, imagine if you want to make your music as good as possible. By trying to write good lyrics, you're immediately ahead of most people since they don't even try. And about songwriting - well, that's harder, but you can start by NEVER including anything on a finished product when you know it's not filler - when it's just "good enough".

Okay, great, already you're ahead of the competition. Now what? Here is where you can move from good to great. There are a billion ways to do this, creativity is the name of the game, but for the love of god do something. One underutilized technique in rock music is having each song flow into the next. Two of my favorite albums do this (And The Glass Handed Kites by Mew and The Walking by Jane Siberry), and it seriously deserves to be a more popular technique. But beyond that, you can have a THEME to your music like literature does. You can make it revolve around a subject, and through the freedom of creative expression you can do whatever with the theme you want, including delivering a very concrete message about the topic, or just shrouding your true beliefs in ambiguity. And not to mention storytelling. How many musicians even attempt some kind of story in their songs? It's a depressingly small number. This is one reason Slint are excellent.

Honestly, bands like Neutral Milk Hotel and Slint are fantastic, but they're not on some unreachable plane of talent and skill other people cannot reach. It's mostly just that they paid attention to things 99% of bands don't and actually aspired to create something with a genuine theme and artistic direction. The crazy thing I've realized is that even these 1 in 1000 works of art I love usually excel in one or two areas, and then have all these other ways they could be done better. This is pretty much the state of affairs for every art form. Probably the most untapped potential currently lies in animation and video games, just because the possibilities are insane, but it takes a budget and time to get anything done. Just understanding this changes everything

I wasted 2 years at uni

>>17160957
okay