/lit/ - Literature

>>8443242
A Brief History of the Alt-Right:

>election cycle starts
>Twitter/4chan users that are into trump's strongman politics start talking abt it
>Trolling and overt -isms aside, some educated frogs begin reading/adapting pol. theory and philosophy to right-wing political leanings
>By this time, #whitegenocide fags on twitter and /pol/ starting using Alt-Right as a banner under which their ideology presides
>Initial Alt-Right posters mostly abandon inflammatory rhetoric and move to holy-than-thou rhetoric so that the unwashed philistines cannot reach them
>Alt-Right founding-fathers move mostly to twitter
>Alt-Right founds change their general designation to WyrdRight (Kantbot2000, Menaquinone4, Melchizekek, Swiss Gnome, is this an attaq/@cooterthug)
>WyrdRight folks start posting Plato, Kant, Evola, Stirner, etc.
>AltRight essentially goes out of existence bc #WhiteGenocide- and #CantStump-fags never understood what the movement was aside from the fact that they are still upset that dindus and wewuzs can vote

>>7998855

To expand on this:

So basically, like, what are the things we know that humans do, if given enough time and calories to survive? In no particular order: Reproduce (sex)
Search for Calories (hunt & gather, protection from elements)
Develop Survival-Based Moral ('kill my sex-object = bad thing, take my calories = bad thing)
Use Language (spoken, then most times written [in pursuit of logistical efficiency wrt caloric acquisition and consumption])
Spiritual Phenomenon (goes along with language, in terms of making meaning of the world, leads to art, among other things)
Expand Horizon (i.e., "go forth and prosper," in an effort to increase probability that genetic information survives)

So, basically no matter what, humans (on the whole) are gonna do these things. We have the odd clever-ape that recognizes its own being consciousness, or the facade of its moral system, or its spiritual desires, (e.g., Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Campbell, etc.) BUT ON THE WHOLE homo sapiens will do these things, because for the incremental progression of evolution, we cannot shut this fucking thing off, though we can constantly recognize (ha...re-cog...constantly!) its presence, sort of like a combination of the Heidegger & Nietzsche modes of existential realization of Dasein/Self (I know Nietzsche would shutter at this, and I know he's not abt metaphysics, but its his own fault he wrote poetically and locked himself into these possibilities, bc he didn't tell me explicitly not to...and yes, I know Martin starts with being and not consciousness, but the Dasein superstructure works here).

All things considered, this is why communism doesn't work. One can clearly see that there isn't some 'non-existential logic' that comes with the superstructure of being a homo sapien, it's just those things listed above (and perhaps some others that I didn't think to mention?). I won't except altruism as an argument here, simply for the fact that it only extends to the sort of 'Polis Is This' idea that Charles Olson acts out in his poetics (check his resume, studied archaeology of civilization at Harvard, or some shit like that).

This being said, I think it's fair to assert that Christianity is basically the best chance at getting some sort of true-communist system to work, and one might even go so far as to argue that it did, for a long time. To reference the ref'd post, I think the exact problem is that the workers will always rise up until they secure some amount of comfortable wealth, and then they will hoard (bc $$$ = calorie/sex points), bc they are human, simple as that.

The big problem with all this is that if you're smart enough to enact this system, you can't rly do it in good conscious, bc if more than a handful of philsopher-kings are behind this, then the cycle repeats itself and the hoarding happens (or they recognize the banality of power and life and become the Nietzsche ascetic).

Thoughts?

>>7498673
i agree. I think it's probably the kierkegaardian thing about if you need the thing described to you, you'll get all the component parts, but miss the 'essence.'

Poetry is like pornography, you'll know it when you see it.

>>7434516
what topology meme

>>7401637
ty

>>7381773

May or may not have seen this already, but some of his thoughts, spoken in the Queen's English

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uSuwYcqSsY

>>7343158
>>7343130

Hey OP, this anon is right, but crit theory can sometimes be terribly sad and terribly banal, so I would recc. the Yale OpenCourse video series wherein Dr. Paul Fry teaches a semester worth of Intro to Literary Theory. If you can't do the work of finding that on YT, just be yourself, don't change, and live in quiet-ignorance.

Kisses,
Grisha

>>7326411
the misunderstanding of science by the right wing religious american, explored through pynchon-esque investigations into a character whose goal is to redirect natural selection back towards the 2nd coming of christ it was intended to be, or, a contemporary break-up text to conservative blue-collar america.

Knee hurt tired

I don't think about driving anymore

Except when I think about dying from it

Except when I want to thank whoever is driving behind me through a neighborhood with their brights on

I should just shut mine off and send them a card

We think the dryer downstairs broke

We couldn't check because our roommate has his new girlfriend downstairs

He has his first girlfriend downstairs

Was I like that?

Spending 25 minutes walking her the 40 yards to her car?

My roommates wanted to watch a scary movie

Maybe it's so we make ourselves think the scary stuff is still behind shadows and not desks

I can hear Blake downstairs

The breaker is getting tripped

Over and over

But we're stuck with the broken washer

I think in a perfect world everyone would be profoundly ugly

I saw a picture of the Affleck's nanny when I was standing in line at Hyvee and was confused as to why she wasn't profoundly ugly

The door to my closet is never closed

The door to my closet is imprinted with either a cross or two lower-case 'i's next to each other

The door to my closet props up the doll I bought from a couple on the internet that don't have jobs and just make videos

They don't really make their own videos

I'm entertained by having people tell me how shitty a video is

I'm entertained by emotive men speaking other languages

What's a stereotype for older Muslim men?

What's a stereotype for younger Cantonese women?

I saw my Cantonese friend today

She was wearing a sweater that showed two centimeters of her skin

At first I thought Ai Weiwei was authentic

Now he just advertises for BMW and Lego

He did an exhibit at the Tate where an entire floor space was filled with artificial sunflower seeds made in China by people who used to make pottery for Chairman Mao

There was some correlation between Mao and the sunflower seed

Turns out the paint they used for the artificial sunflower seeds had toxic levels of lead in them

I tried to tell my friend that poetry is about making new worlds out of language

She just messaged me on Facebook and the first sentence was 'Why do we need friends?'

My writer friend messaged me on Twitter and started the conversation by saying 'YO.'

A girl who was the prettiest girl during sophomore year of high school told me she is going to study abroad in Italy and that she doubts Elena Farrante is even a woman

Didn’t think anyone was in here, normally everyone keeps their door open when they’re in...

Oh—

Alrighty! I’m headed outta here, you go do somethin’ with your Tuesday off.

He purses and squints, exponentially more now.

You bet.

He liked it when he could shut the lights off in the church and work alone. He waited twenty minutes before walking into the open lobby, whose twin glasses panels separated the office hallway from the narthex, one quadrant of the cross. He did this every Monday afternoon. He thought it so...so unnatural, that members of the church staff would work so unprotected from the elements of the modern world. There was a jungle out there, and an empty church on a weekday was a camp without fire; though it had the same visual attraction of fire in the waning daylight, minus the threat of heat. He removed the keyring from his pocket and held it by the foam gorilla head, something his mother had given him before leaving home for good. It read ‘H.D. Zoo!’ He shut the lights off at the head of the church and locked the doors. The church was shadows, except for a lamp in the heart of the sanctuary and a reading lamp in his office.

He thought now of how slow that ladybug must be...to still be searching for some stimulus in the white disk on his desk. But his killing of it was a step forward, not for the ladybug, but for the Ladybug; Coccinellidae. His killing of it was a sharpening of the pool, a choice by nature to destroy itself for some greater dispensation, the body ridding itself of cells too unloved to prosper, as payment for a higher existence. And if he was God, this was his plan: redirecting—as everyone does without thought—the course of other natures, other insignificant non-cognates, species more blunt and primal than we could ever wish to be if we were to pursue such an epic collective summation, a single project of living and dying.

recently took a general assessment for UG students with 60+ credits, it covered reading comprehension, grammar, math story problems, linear math, pattern recognition, all sorts of shit. Was a bit worried about math, since I've taken 1 math class since junior year of HS, turned out I scored 486/500 overall.

I looked that up and found from their website that I am in the 99th percentile for everyone who takes that. Not saying muh hay eye-que or anything, but it feels good to know that I may be 'quite intelligent'

>>7301307
Think it might have something to do with the big other, fuck if I know, but I enjoy the little moments, e.g., sitting inside, away from the chilling wind today in the student union, eating chik-fil-A fries and watching/listening to that black & white public lecture Lacan did, thinking about if I'll get laid tonight, thinking how I can diversify the two narrative voices, thinking about how I might be fucked artistically b/c I'm a white male writer from the middle-class in the midwest, but comfortable knowing I can still get a dece job and maybe do some subversive shit. I can do whatever I want in a sense. Feels warm.

>>7290938
He understood, he thought. He understood why we do these things, feet trapped in the wrappings of cool bedsheets. Why every college boyfriend and young husband works toward the direct contact, the real thing. I am right with the world, with nature, with this idea of God, he thought. Out of all these things he knew, he knew most of all that the biggest mistake of his life was his fiancee, who, he suspects, is infertile. So many times he has written the death wish and quietly submitted it, slipping it under fate’s door. Everyone wants to come inside, it’s ingrained...otherwise we wouldn’t, humans too lazy, too distracted by art and language and beauty and endless pages and holy incantations to actually do the thing. We have to have some itch to scratch, to want it and to like it more than anything else.

If you actually are gonna do this, post here right before, so you can wire me your savings. I will use those funds to pursue a pure and literary life of reading/writing. Will also dedicate my first novel to you.

I had a revelation about some of the blind spots in my history class
My professor got the gen ed western civ 1 class really into the idea of the Spartans
She turned the volume up really loud and played the agoge scene from 300
Not a bad idea, to get the people that think the class is boring/hard as fuck interested in some badassery
Of course there was 2-3 lectures about the Spartan government and the ephors and the ethnic population of slaves they kept perpetually enslaved to be able to focus on badassery
Which doesn’t really take away from them in any sense
It actually kind of makes it more badass in a way
I talked to a guy recently who works at a jimmy johns and was smoking indoors
He said he thought that if we had more than the 4% of aristotle’s work than we currently have we would be way more cognitively advanced than we are right now
I’m not sure I believed him because I think we would just get to ‘now’ sooner
It did make me wonder though
Why didn’t we talk about Spartan guys fucking each other’s asses
It didn’t even get mentioned in passing
Like how in the Troy movie, we never get to see Brad Pitt as Achilles fucking the ass of his younger cousin
His cousin dies, and I can’t help but think that throughout the rest of the movie Brad Pitt must have been torn up inside because he knew he would never feel that asshole again
And you know, almost for sure, that the Spartans must have been famous for their lack of foreplay
I read recently that in some male worms there is a unique neuro-synapses that gets created when orgasm is achieved
And we can’t think back to original memories because we always are remembering that last time we remembered something
Except maybe males can remember orgasms
And maybe that memory is unchanged
My memory is a beach and the only sizable rocks are just the orgasms
And eventually I meet someone nice and the winter comes and we have to build a small encampment and the only building material we have are my orgasms because hers are all sand
And so the first few nights we just dig out some sand over by a dune and throw some of our memories out onto to other ones
And I think about the ones I’m losing that I’ll never remember even when I’m losing them and we both dig sort of slow because we’re both thinking about what remembrance we’ll never remember again
And we build a fire pit and we line it with the only rocks we have which are just a bunch of memories of my orgasms
I made sure that earlier when I told her I would go find some rocks that I got all the ones that took place in the dark
Because even though my original plan was to leave other people out of it I soon realized that any feelings she had for me might quickly deteriorate if I brought back a bunch of memories of me furiously masturbating while the shower runs in the background
So I brought back the orgasms and we dug the hole, etc. etc.
Then we sat together in the circle of dark and quiet orgasms
(there's more if u want)

>>7287515
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that what most hipsters are trying to do is live something akin to the 'poet' lifestyle. Thought they look the part, live in similar neighborhoods, and may very well ride out road-bikes, eat vegan, and drink Yingling, they don't have the same artistic authenticity or poetic humility of life.

Most times, 'hipsters' are people that choose that lifestyle bc of a certain aesthetic appeal, because if you look/eat/live a certain way, you'll think yourself some sort of 'truer' human, but, in fact, I claim that this is merely ideology at its finest; I am eating *SNNNFFF* at the trash can the whole time.

I had a revelation about some of the blind spots in my history class
My professor got the gen ed western civ 1 class really into the idea of the Spartans
She turned the volume up really loud and played the agoge scene from 300
Not a bad idea, to get the people that think the class is boring/hard as fuck interested in some badassery
Of course there was 2-3 lectures about the Spartan government and the ephors and the ethnic population of slaves they kept perpetually enslaved to be able to focus on badassery
Which doesn’t really take away from them in any sense
It actually kind of makes it more badass in a way
I talked to a guy recently who works at a jimmy johns and was smoking indoors
He said he thought that if we had more than the 4% of aristotle’s work than we currently have we would be way more cognitively advanced than we are right now
I’m not sure I believed him because I think we would just get to ‘now’ sooner
It did make me wonder though
Why didn’t we talk about Spartan guys fucking each other’s asses
It didn’t even get mentioned in passing
Like how in the Troy movie, we never get to see Brad Pitt as Achilles fucking the ass of his younger cousin
His cousin dies, and I can’t help but think that throughout the rest of the movie Brad Pitt must have been torn up inside because he knew he would never feel that asshole again
And you know, almost for sure, that the Spartans must have been famous for their lack of foreplay
I read recently that in some male worms there is a unique neuro-synapses that gets created when orgasm is achieved
And we can’t think back to original memories because we always are remembering that last time we remembered something
Except maybe males can remember orgasms
And maybe that memory is unchanged
My memory is a beach and the only sizable rocks are just the orgasms
And eventually I meet someone nice and the winter comes and we have to build a small encampment and the only building material we have are my orgasms because hers are all sand
And so the first few nights we just dig out some sand over by a dune and throw some of our memories out onto to other ones
And I think about the ones I’m losing that I’ll never remember even when I’m losing them and we both dig sort of slow because we’re both thinking about what remembrance we’ll never remember again
And we build a fire pit and we line it with the only rocks we have which are just a bunch of memories of my orgasms
I made sure that earlier when I told her I would go find some rocks that I got all the ones that took place in the dark
Because even though my original plan was to leave other people out of it I soon realized that any feelings she had for me might quickly deteriorate if I brought back a bunch of memories of me furiously masturbating while the shower runs in the background

(there's more but idk if you want it and it's too long, plus I need to critique someone else too)

>>7250491
Hey anon, you might enjoy this New Yorker article from 2005 about Russian Translations. A little long, but I know we're used to long white object, least 'round 'ere...

newyorker(dot)com_______/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars

either the Astari channel on YT while I write or ASMRMassage videos with no talking...Crinkle Heaven 12.1 (no talking) on soundcloud is a must, Mastercrafted Inaudible Whispers is a great one too.

Took me 5 months to read Gravity's Rainbow.

The most complex thing I'd previously read was Slaughterhouse-Five.

I liked Catcher In the Rye.

I liked Old Man and The Sea.

>>7230157
Honestly, I've considered a number of times how to bring up ASMR on this form, and it's one of the subthemes of some fiction I've done.

Other favorites include:

Non-weird EphemeralRift
GentleWhispers
MassageASMR (Dmitri, the Australian)
CosmicTingles (she rolled a blunt in one video)

Charles Wright
Kennedy Leigh

Even though I knew it was impossible, I thought about what it must be like to be in love with a woman like that. A woman who, for her job, heck, for her life, reads and thinks. And not only reads and thinks but talks about reading and thinking. I remember watching a video of her once speaking at some reading festival, and her saying something like, “I don’t think I’m smart enough to read David...I think I’m probably the dumbest person on this panel.” The way she said it really made me believe it, and I wondered what it would be like to be in love with someone like that, who when you do something really backwards and nasty doesn’t just read you and think about you and what you said and how it was really backwards and nasty, but how she thinks to herself, “He’s probably just smarter than me, everyone is probably smarter than me.” I think I would like someone like that, always thinking that everyone else is smarter than them.


Now I have both my hands over my head, working and working this branch of an Osage tree, the thinner limb in my left hand and a drywall knife in my right hand. Osage trees can really be the damndest things, hard as rock and wet, the knife gets all gummed-up and there’s still a little sawdust coming down into my eyes. I look at the ground to keep the sawdust out of my eyes and she says through my earbuds, “You wonder what happens to that type of love, how it always seems to perfect, but all of the sudden it’s three years later and you get a divorce.” So I guess she’s been divorced. I can sorta tell she tried to keep it together, I think she really did. “All of the sudden it’s three years later and you get a divorce.” She says it that way on purpose, like she must have been married for three years, like it wasn’t a divorce that she wanted, but it was a divorce she got.


I got that Osage branch down finally and left it in the yard to dry, on account of it probably wouldn’t die very soon if I put it under the shade of the deck. I went inside and took a cold shower and got some socks out of the dryer and sent an email to a classmate I went to dinner with a week or two ago, she writes poems too. I lent her a copy of a Kafka short story and I told her to tell me what she thinks of it and I sent her a poem about being an oilman for the summer and how I feel like we rape the earth in a very official sort of way. She hasn’t responded yet, so I sent her a message and said, “I’m sorry if the language of my poem offended you,” and then later another one that said, “But I stand by my artistic choices.”