/lit/ - Literature

I never post here but I'm gonna guess you hear about Judge Holden a lot. More than anything, I was extremely underwhelmed by the book. The prose did not bother me at all. I admired the poetry of it. That was almost all I admired. That and the four or five funny moments, like the scene where they tell the nigger at the restaurant that he has to sit somewhere else, and some of the hardboiled dialogue, which gets old fast. There are too many characters, some of whom are interesting but most of whom are not, and who are all forgotten about with equal speed. What happened to Bathcat? Where is "The Kid", the protagonist, throughout most of the book? What is he doing throughout most of the book when he is not on the page?

The Judge is clearly the true main character, having grown more interesting to Cormac in the course of writing the book, but not to me. His tirades grow very tiresome. He starts out as mysterious, but by the end of the book he has become all too familiar: just a another prolix schizoposter who finds himself more interesting than we find him. To be generous, perhaps that was the intention.

My first impression of the Judge was that he was the result of too much thought going into a villain, too many bad ideas tossed together, Mephistopheles the giant albino pedophile lawyer for cowboys.

I read somewhere halfway through finishing the book that the Judge is supposedly a real figure from history, or at least mythology. That has tempered the harshness of my judgement, at least somewhat. But Samuel Chamberlain, the author who first attested to the existence of such a character, has been called a liar and a fabricator, and it has been suggested that Judge Holden was simply a fixture of his mind. If this is true, Cormac McCarthy is just a plagiarist and Chamberlain was almost certainly the better novelist.

Think about it: If Chamberlain's memoirs are in fact a work of fiction, then what Cormac McCarthy basically did was take the 19th century equivalent of a Frank Dux or JT Leroy "memoir", which we all know is actually a novel, and steal the plot and characters, calling it a "novel."

My copy of the book came with a forward by Harold Bloom, unfortunately. He says the whole thing is about Gnosticism and some other shit, says The Judge is the greatest villain of all time, that he couldn't finish the book the first couple of times he tried, because it was just so bloodcurdling.

I was reminded of Bloom's virulent hatred of Harry Potter. Considering that both Blood Meridian and the Potter books feature a pale Gnostic serpent villain and a nondescript boy hero with no personality, I find his taste difficult to understand.

It could still grow on me, though.

>you're a psued for regurgitating other people's ideas
Well, someone told me 2 plus 2 equals 4.

>>19152866
>talent, but slothful

>>17675157
You're not reading the western canon out of neurotic conformist fear of reading books you're "supposed" to read and feeling insecure about entering Leddit without having the "proper" background knowledge of pop culture references. By and large you're not enjoying most of these books but you haven't mustered the courage to admit that many of them are obsolete, boring junk. You deprive yourself out of seeking books you'd actually want to read before you reach thst imaginary "epic Leddit pop-culture reference slinger" threshold. You will lash out against this post because it'll hit the nerve.

>>16662949
Online news publications

>>14802489
and who created preexistence?

fuck you /lit/ I'm starting with lacan, deleuze and derrida

>>12275837
nice.

If you had to write a thesis in philosophy, what topics would you explore?

>>10949020
>The written transfer of information isn't needed

This guy.

I know this isn't strictly literature and im sure this thread as appeared before but whats /lit/'s essential non-fiction. I really enjoy good secondary scholarship in history but any recs are good. Also if theres a chart can someone link it?

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

>>9997878

>>8867121
Thanks

>>8835429
Indeed.

>>8827201
>ladies and gentlemen, the death of intellectualism.

tfw to intelligent to read some autistic rant

>mfw STEM
>mfw smorter than humanity fags
>mfw high salary in a field I like
>mfw I read more books than half you jelly plebs here
>mfw consistently get laid, triggering /lit/-faggots

Lmao you humanities majors are so pathetic

>>8725061

Im unironically published lad

What's the greatest book of all time?

>>8430968
My diary. I'm literally writing a short story that hinges on this theme.

ITT obsecure intellectuals I need to know of.

>>8270132

F

books like "into the wild"

I just saw the movie and it was really good. I've read lord of the flies, and I'm looking for more about a guy who "lives offa tha fatta tha land!" haha!

prefer no women

are platitudes literature?