/lit/ - Literature

>>23299004
Not limited to /pol/tards but the same sort of chronic need to fail.

Fairly surprising it has not had a resurgence.

>>23209453
What was difficult about them for him was he was reading them for the wrong reasons, an arbitrary list of authors he singled out as signifying what he wanted to be as an author despite having not read them. But he grew up some and approached them differently later on.

Picrel really needs more love, Elkin is great.

>>23193212

Not quite contemporary but close enough. Starts with greatest grand dad George MIlls way back during the crusades and follows his progeny through the centuries (all named George Mills) right up to the 1970s. Essentially 500 pages and 1000 years of exploring what is a loser and why are they losers.

It is quite fun and interesting. The first chapter goes into a few pages of punctuation abuse that was rather surprising, he turns punctuation into something which is active and you are acutely aware of and makes you realize how much you rely on passive understanding of punctuation when reading. It has fundamentally changed the way I read.

>>22826773

Twice in one night I got to rec this, feels good. Once a week at best usually.

It travels the world and spans a millennium but an important part is in Florida. I think this might be the only book I have read which even mentions Florida, wonder if this plays a role in my disinterest in Florida.

The story of a man named George Mills and his descendants who are all named George Mills. Starts with the first George Mills in the time of the crusades and goes to the 1970s, they are all failures and very aware of it. It is like 4chan if 4chan was self aware and entertaining.

He knows he will join me soon enough even if he does not realize it.

Haven't been here in awhile but George (all four of them) has been reminding me of /lit/ and I see a great deal of him in many of you. Elkin is pretty great, sort of a halfway point between Vonnegut and Pynchon (Vineland/M&D era especially), suspect the 5 of you that still read will enjoy it. He has an interesting use of punctuation with his square brackets, triple em-dashes and abundance of commas that is quite effective once you figure out the sense of it all which is not difficult, he defines their use well and early on, his use of square brackets is especially effective. Have a few excerpts taken at random.

>All they knew was that they were entering the earth and they started to scream. (Independently they thought of all awful Chance which had brought them there, of Fate and annihilate alternatives. A thousand years later George Mills would, with disgust that he knew no languages and did not play an instrument, whistle the aleatoric music of license plates, thinking even when he caught a melody: the breaks, the breaks, my clumsy dribbleglass life——— mourning in retrospect all missed chances everywhere, crying over spilled or refused choices. Thus, inventing a form of negative inspiration, the two Britons, who did not even know that was what they were, abandoned philosophy and went to fear.) They keened, they whined, they wailed.

>To the poor most places are foreign, all soil not the neighborhood extraterritorial and queer. They cling to an idea of edge, a sense of margin. It's as if space, space itself, not climate or natural resources or the angle at which a town hangs from the meridian, dictates situation and size, even form, even vegetation. They believe, that is, in a horizon geography, a geology of scenic overlook, the visible locutions of surface like merchandise arranged in a store. For them, Nature, the customs she fosters, seem to exist within serially located parallel lines. Science and history are determined by latitude and longitude, little else. Savannas and rain forests, jungles, seashores, mountains and deserts——— those were the real nations.

>Which was how George Mills and Bufesqueu, his protector and benefactor, came to live as the only unimpaired males in the largest full-service harem in the world.