/lit/ - Literature

Damn, no love, huh /lit/?

>>7319470
thanks anon, been working on sparse style lately, perhaps as a method to work on a distinct narrative voice in a longer project. I also did "This is Paul" a month or so ago, not sure if you remember that short fiction piece, but the voice was also sparse. Glad you like it. Want to see more stuff? Can't promise it will be in the same vein, but I have all sorts of shit in the hopper.

Howdy /lit/,

A number of times I've heard the Terence McKenna quote, "The world is made of language." It seems 'true enough,' but obviously I would like to me able to ground this idea in someone more...traditional. Which philosophers particularly espouse this idea?

>Bonus points if you can name some Eastern philosophers too.

>>Extra bonus points if you can provide links, esp. youtube, trying to explain some ideas of philosophy and 'what poetry does' to a Chinese exchange student qt3.14

>>7238812
Thanks, I will definitely give this a read! I've also heard of some fun postmodern things that John Barthe has done with Campbell's ideas.

>>7238814
Not sure if this is b8, should I actually look into Hegel?

>>7202408
ty, will make it my next big project

>>7186101
sorry for the wait: class & phone interview

Prose piece I wrote a month or two ago:


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.”

>>7166241
this is true, however, I have found with my French international student friends, that sometimes it can be an appreciation of the sonic art as well. For example, Chief Keef has almost no value lyrically, but the birth of Drill music in Chicago or Trap in ATL were important movements musically in world culture. There is something interestingly reflective of ghetto/oppressed Afro-American culture in Trap/Drill music.

New artists are also using trap to do things that haven't been done before, e.g., look at Dylan Brady or Doves or Night Lovell on soundcloud, their music isn't dissimilar to what would be considered grunge or emo 10 or so years ago. Culture leaks into whatever genre will allow it, and right now Trap is an open wound, teaming with eager bacteria.

>>7154689
At first, Paul didn’t understand work at Mio.

Paul had to work hard to get his degree in college.

Paul had to study an hour a day in college.

Paul worked hard and studied an hour a day and graduated with a 3.3 GPA.

Paul liked the days when Mike had closed-door conference calls.

Closed-door conference calls meant an hour and a half for lunch.

Closed-door conference calls meant going inside Chik-Fil-A.

Paul thought Chik-Fil-A was the best.

Everyone works together at Chik-Fil-A, towards a singular goal.

Paul stood inside Chik-Fil-A on a closed-door conference call day, watching the Chik-Fil-A workers in their pressed white polo-shirts.

Busy bees, Paul thought.

“I bet Ole Adolf is rollin’ in ‘is grave seein’ this, huh?!”

Paul looked up at a bearded man in a long-sleeved polo-shirt.

“If Ole Adolf had these kids runnin’ the show, shit! we’d be eating sauerkraut sandwiches!”

Paul looked around at the busy bees and imagined little ‘SS’ pins on their pressed collars.

Paul looked at the bearded man.

“Ha, I’m sorry son, just can’t help being myself, old and talky.”

Paul curled his upper lip a little and gave a close-lipped smile to the bearded man before looking back at his phone.

Paul was looking at the Mio!TV app on his phone.

A Chik-Fil-A worker buzzed over to him at the sauce-bar.

“Sweet Tea for Paul!”

Paul looked up from the Mio!TV app, Excite your water! Excite your life! Be Mio! was on the screen before Paul clicked the sleep button.

The Chik-Fil-A worker smiled big with her white teeth in her pressed white polo-shirt with her arm straight-out, holding Sweet Tea.

Paul took his Sweet Tea and curled his upper lip a little and gave a close-lipped smile to the Chik-Fil-A worker.

"Have a great day!"

>>7154372
honestly, I secretly hope that people recognize me by my commonly used pics, this summer i was posting daily

>>7078300
top kek

>>7044736
I don't think the defense of your definition of art/artistic intent is firmly founded; due to the finality of the DFW reviewed book, Mort D'Author, it's pretty clear that post-structuralism is obviously the most clear explanation of the value of any given utterance, no matter the medium.

If you can keep from being totally ignorant to your own ignorance, check the the audio recording of "Greatly Exaggerated" on SoundCloud, might clear things up a bit.

Chiao.

>>6987213
Yes, I too am an English major. I think the perception stays because IJ was so important to the cultural moment in the early 2000's. Now those people are grown up, raising families, not really teaching in any big schools (for the most part) and the few of us that are >25 and are willing to commit to something like this among the cultural moment are very few and far between.

It's for this reason that /lit/ is actually a sort of bastion of literature from the last 50 years, because no matter how hard we meme about it, almost no one our age reads this shit. I just got done Gravity's Rainbow and I haven't met another human IRL that's read it. Even the most academic of my friends can only muster things like East of Eden and Atlas Shrugged

She seemed pretty happy, after twenty-six years of cutting hair, and spending what I assumed was another 18-20 in the same place, the same little homeland. She says she barrel races in Kansas City to keep herself from going crazy.

“Oh yeah? I’ve never been, but I almost bought a horse from Oregon last week…I saw the bloodlines and said, ‘I have to have it!’”

Yeah, I thought, we do that too.

>>6947086
Not bad. I think the truly hard part about doing this type of writing is that one little cliche line can spoil the taste of the entire thing.

>his eyes beaming diamonds in the dark

Which one got 2nd place? Or do you just mean she won and you and everyone else lost?

Here's a section of something I recently wrote.


We’ll let ‘er buck:

“4 for Environmental Protection, 5 for Health (human or gaian?), 6 for Parks & Golf Course, 7 for Solid Waste, 8 for Texas Agrilife Extension...

There’s some ambient highway hum now...

“Hi, this is Ronny Kimbroh, County Emergency Manager. If you have an emergency, please hang-up the phone and call 911 immediately, otherwise, please leave a brief, detailed message and I’ll get—”

So you wanna play hardball Roddy? Piece of shit probably screwing some cop’s wife with his starched khakis around his kankles, this arid Texas summer...This is Roddy Kimbro down on South Jefferson, we got a flood emergency, I’m drowning in pussy...yeah, send an enviro clean-up team down, would ya’?

I’d love to see the handkerchief Roddy uses to wipe the rolling beads off his brow before slippin’ his ole ten-gallon back over his slicked-back, thinning excuse for hair, the “C.E.M.” badge his wife toiled over—

“Michael...me and Brandy are heading out for lunch, you tagging along?

My best Roddy slips out, “Yessir. Yessir I would.”

20

Gravity's Rainbow

Slacked off and took too long to finish it, so I'm feeling ready to be done so I can start something else. Aside from my own missteps, it's probably the best book I've read thus far. It's like a Pollack painting, but planned, splatter for splatter.

>>6909829
tfw the only two pieces of verse you know are a random Charles Wright poem, and Hitch quoting Dowson quoting Horace, "I'm not as I was..."

>>6898886
Listening to recent U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Wright do a reading hooked me on poetry.

This excerpt from his long-form poem Body and Soul is the first piece of poetry I ever memorized.

I used to think the power of words was inexhaustible,
That how we said the world
was how it was, and how it would be.
I used to imagine that word-sway and word-thunder
Would silence the Silence and all that,
That worlds were the Word,
That language could lead us inexplicably to grace,
As though it were geographical.
I used to think these things when I was young.
I still do.

>>6831972
I was lead to believe by WNYC's Radiolab podcast that Eugene Thacker's book, "In The Dust of This Planet" inspired Cohle's philosophy quite a bit.

Listen to the podcast too.

I have a hunch it's out of laziness.

Why trust all these sources if they could be false.

If I want truth, I'll have to do the reading/thinking for myself.

Would rather watch CumGuzzlers Season 14 just uploaded to Netflix.

>nihilism for the masses.

>>6811396
20
Pynchon
Vonnegut
McCarthy
Hitchens
Annie Dillard

>obligatory David

Can't remember the name a certain American orator.

I believe he usually gave his oral essays in front of TV, did this in the 70's-90's?
He may have done this for NPR or PBS or something.
He had a short, choppy name if I remember correctly.

Please help /lit/

2 blunts deep after a 3 week break...trying to experience great art right...art...whatever that? right?! yes. right on there Tyrone! (best Cary Grant voice)

Anyway...listening to Neutral Milk Hotel rn.

>inb4 Start with the Greeks
>inb4 dont toke up and joke up...really thought, what is /lit/'s view on the consumption of THC?

>>pic related

>>6776504
Is there some story that's needs explaining here? I know Mary Karr took it regularly, but what do you mean?

>>6776436
So I actually bought The Ego and His Own while I was browsing /lit/ really high one night...should I try to read it? Do I need anyone specific for context?

>inb4 start with the greeks