/lit/ - Literature

>>22726912
The real manifestation of tiktok zoomer brain isn't an inability to read for extended periods. It's being overwhelmed by the slight difficulty of pushing yourself to incrementally increase your reading time, and being so overwhelmed that you just give up at the first hurdle and never developing your ability to read. If you can only read for ten mins max before your brain starts crying out for screens, that's fine - but make sure you read for ten minutes every day, and then after a week your limit will have increased to fifteen minutes. That's ultra basic and cliched advice, but it's also Tried and True.

>>22373304
>seemingly banal or atleast very common subject matter
I feel like a sea-story about a crew braving life and limb at the orders of a monomanical captain bent on vengeance against an ancient white whale doesn't really fit in that category.

That aside, the whole premise of your post -- the notion of books doling out some kind of quantifiable portion of abstract Literary Profundity with which we should be satisfied -- is so goofy it's beyond argument.

Imagine someone told you they were a film fan, but when you went over to their house all they had was a BluRay of The Godfather Part 1, and a den covered in Godfather posters. And that was all they ever watched and all they ever wanted to watch, because they'd convinced themselves that it was the GOAT. Who do you think would be more sensitive to film, be more in tune with what makes the medium great: that guy, or the guy who's always recommending you Hong Kong action films one week, forgotten film-noir masterpieces the week after, grotesque B-movie obscurities the next... The latter's the guy I would want to talk about films with.

>>22373304
>seemingly banal or atleast very common subject matter
I feel like a sea-story about a crew braving life and limb at the orders of a monomanical captain bent on vengeance against an ancient white whale doesn't really fit in that category.

That aside, the whole premise of your post -- the notion of books doling out some kind of quantifiable portion of abstract Literary Profundity with which we should be satisfied -- is so goofy it's beyond argument.

Anyone who dismisses the vast, unmappable range of literary pleasures and insights just because they're not uniformly stamped with the authoritative mark of all-time transcendent greatness doesn't genuinely like literature. They just want to feel like they've already consumed the 'very best' so they can stop the messy, indeterminate business of actually reading works.

They don't have personal responses to texts; they've never had an unexpected aesthetic encounter with an unfamiliar author. They don't have the sensitivity that those would require. All they're doing is collecting the gold stickers on the front of their Great Works.

Imagine someone told you they were a film fan, but when you went over to their house all they had was a BluRay of The Godfather Part 1, and a den covered in Godfather posters. And that was all they ever watched and all ever wanted to watch, because they'd convinced themselves that it was the GOAT. Who do you think would be more sensitive to film, be more in tune with what makes the medium great: that guy, or the guy who's always recommending you Hong Kong action films one week, forgotten film-noir masterpieces the week after, grotesque B-movie obscurities the next... The latter's the guy I would want to talk about films with.

>>22107841
If you don't enjoy thinking about things, then there's probably zero point to it.

>>22108503
I haven't read enough Deleuze to know whether you're agreeing with me or criticising me. If the latter, I apologise for being so un-Deleuzian as to tangle up his rewriting of metaphysics with questions of desire and practice. Gilles forgive me.

>>22062672
I honestly think this post is really insightful.

It resonates with my own experience of writing, which has always been most fruitful when following through a logic inherent in the material. A story seems to work only when I can let the writing take on a life of its own through the sparks and connections at the sentence level. If I instead try to imbue it with some ineffable incommunicable vibe, it's dead on the page by the time I go back to read it.

Those ineffable feelings are obviously important, but they can't be approached directly. Think of Kafka book: nothing has a more unnerving, uncanny vibe, imo, but at the level of the text he's just working out a sequence of small point-and-click-game puzzles and describing a cast of goofy automatons. He's riffing on the 'external world'.

>>21997404
You're right. He's missing something, but it's hard to identify what.

It's something like the quality of charm, or weirdness, or original perception, that makes good pulp writing feel alive, like it comes from a sensitive brain, from a storyteller sitting directly opposite you, with a little glint in their eye. Howard's voice feels monotonous and empty, as if writing were an obligation. He doesn't know how to have fun with it.

E.g. this opening from Clark Ashton Smith could never have been written by Howard -- you sense too much of Smith's humour and personality, and you almost hear it in a campy Vincent Price voice, which would never work with Howard's prose:

>At the hour of interlunar midnight, when lamps burned rarely and far apart in Susran, and slow-moving autumn clouds had muffled the stars, King Gadeiron sent forth into the sleeping city twelve of his trustiest mutes. Like shadows gliding through oblivion, they vanished upon their various ways; and each of them, returning presently to the darkened palace, led with him a shrouded figure no less discreet and silent than himself.

>In this manner, groping along tortuous alleys, through blind cypress-caverns in the royal gardens, and down subterranean halls and steps, twelve of the most powerful sorcerers of Susran were brought together in a vault of oozing, death-gray granite, far beneath the foundations of the palace.

>The entrance of the vault was guarded by earth-demons that obeyed the arch-sorcerer, Maranapion, who had long been the king's councillor. These demons would have torn limb from limb any who came unprepared to offer them a libation of fresh blood. The vault was lit dubiously by a single lamp, hollowed from a monstrous garnet, and fed with vipers' oil. Here Gadeiron, crownless, and wearing sackcloth dyed in sober purple, awaited the wizards on a seat of limestone wrought in the form of a sarcophagus. Maranapion stood at his right hand, immobile, and swathed to the mouth in the garments of the tomb. Before him was a tripod of orichalchum, rearing shoulder-high; and on the tripod, in a silver socket, there reposed the enormous blue eye of a slain Cyclops, wherein the archimage was said to behold weird visions. On this eye, gleaming balefully under the garnet lamp, the gaze of Maranapion was fixed with death-like rigidity.

>From these circumstances, the twelve sorcerers knew that the king had convened them only because of a matter supremely grave and secret. The hour and fashion of their summoning, the place of meeting, the terrible elemental guards, the mufti worn by Gadeiron — all were proof of a need for preternatural stealth and privity.

>For awhile there was silence in the vault, and the twelve, bowing deferentially, waited the will of Gadeiron. Then, in a voice that was little more than a harsh whisper, the king spoke:

>"What know ye of Malygris?"

I agree on an instinctive level with OP, but -- stopping to think -- what does 'literary merit' actually mean? Is Kafka a profound chronicler of the inner lives of his characters? Does Beckett evoke a humanist verisimilitude? They're both obviously up to something quite different.

Plus, if literature's about reflecting the world, why are our fantasies not equally part of the world? Why do we want to banish the appeal of mossy ruins, or the appeal of grotesque beasts, to a region we can only enter with embarrassment and a smirk of disavowal? The appeal of those images is surely psychological, because there is no sort of appeal that isn't an appeal to something in our psychology. It's circular reasoning to say that the psychological (meaning, I suppose, the realist novel conventions of motivational cause-and-effect) is good because it's not superficial, and that the superficial is bad because it's not psychological.

And what does 'false' mean? What's the implicit mistake being made? Is Raymond Chandler (not a fantasy writer, but the only genre writer I really know) making a mistake in evoking a sprawling LA underworld in a fun and flashy way? I think being fun and flashy is an achievement, and doubly so if it unlocks a sprawling LA underworld. What Kafka did with the Hotel Occident in Amerika, Chandler does with the dive bars and canyon mansions of the Marlowe novels: they make space active and dense and criss-crossed with trajectories, which is not an easy feat.

OP seems to think that literary merit relates purely to certain elements ('themes' and 'characters') that are incidental and external to their 'setting', which is considered a sort of shameful necessity. Well, why should literature not aim to be also a literature of setting, and of the inextricable (not merely external) relationship of people and culture and drama to the specifics of the world they live in? Something is unmistakably different, different forces are tangibly active, when two men look at each other tensely across a smokey roulette table in an illegal boat-casino in the San Francisco bay versus those same men looking at each other tensely across the dining room table of a Victorian novel's drawing room. Why not investigate the difference? Why not enjoy it? What anxiety motivates the divisions and prohibitions about which OP seems to fantasise?

What's really superficial is the way OP has bolstered their argument with second-hand assumptions without bothering to put any of those assumptions to the test of experience or thought.

Trying to pin things down with a list of essential features like 'plot-centric vs character-driven' is pointless. There's way more discussion of character and motivation in Games of Thrones than a Kafka novel.

I think you shouldn't look at abstract definitions but at the history of the split in writing and reading practices. There wasn't this distinction in medieval literature. The Canterbury Tales wasn't seen as exclusively ponderous high art or exclusively an entertaining, lewd poem. Literature was just the things people spent a lot of time carefully writing and a lot of time pleasantly, thoughtfully reading.

Then when books become mass-market commodities, people found that you could make a lot of money by selling stories that had an immediate exotic or illicit appeal and that corresponded to forms people were already familiar with. People liked reading about spooky gothic castles, and they liked knowing that if you buy a book called 'The Dagger in the Rose Garden' you're going get your gothic-castle pleasure centres stimulated.

And I think other writers then had to work to deliberately differentiate themselves from these genre forms that felt played out or overloaded with associations, like how modernist writing was a race to discover new unclaimed territory for consciousness, or like how in Austen's Northanger Abbey a character reads gothic novelist Anne Radcliffe and Austen's implicitly saying 'my novel is authentic, because it is a level removed from these familiar fictions'.

The genre-literature split is obviously a real thing but it's more useful as a way of understanding a tension in how society produces and consumes books than as innate essences that books either possess or don't.

t. Raymond Chandler #1 fan

>>21405898
Reading slowly and attentively is important, especially if you're reading literary fiction or the type of philosophy where the 'feel' of the ideas counts.

For a long time I was reading things on the train on the way to work, just skimming over stories to fill time. Then I re-read a story one weekend that I had originally read on the train, standing squeezed between commuters, and it was like a whole different text. Instead of a list of paraphrasable plot points, it was like every sentence was an intricate little contraption of its own, and I had a hint of that sense of soul-level transport that I got when reading as a kid, alone in a quiet room on a Sunday.

I remember seeing a list that Walter Benjamin -- maybe one of the best readers of the 20th century -- compiled of everything he read in a year, and it was like 50 books. One book a week, for a guy whose job was just to read books and to write articles for Berlin literary mags.

Benjamin has an essay in praise of copying out passages from books you're reading. He analogises it to walking through a landscape compared with flying over that landscape in a plane. Copying out was a major part of being into books before digital text storage. Everyone would have notebooks full of passages they liked or thought important. That might be why everyone seemed to have way more facility with composition: they already had an immediate, tactile feel for the way sentences and paragraphs were put together. I think slow reading can approximate some of the same attentiveness and engagement that copying encourages.

All that said, I remember an anguished anon on here saying that they suffered from an almost OCD-level compulsion to re-read paragraphs and sentences, because they never felt they were fully appreciating them. So I guess that that's a hazard too, and that it's possible to fetishise 'fully immersing yourself in the text' to a neurotic degree.

My name is Mr Bean;
You're probably wondering what I mean.
How can a man, also be Bean?
When surely Bean is a vegetable theeng,
While man belongs to the animal scene.
Such a mix has never been seen,
Not in history books or on TV screens,
Only, perhaps, in a terrible dream.
Well let me tell you what I mean.
I am indeed both man and Bean.
Though semi-Bean I may not seem,
Scrub my coating and make me clean,
Scrub until I'm all pristine,
And you'll uncover my skin of green:
From head to toe I'm green as a Bean.
See it sparkle with a vegetal sheen.
(I paint it over so it remains unseen.)
Behold my body wrought taught and lean
And the secret pulsing of the unseen Bean.