/lit/ - Literature

>One of Nabokov's students once related how, one day in 1957, as he was vehemently denouncing Freud, the heating pipes in his Cornell University classroom began to make a terrific clamor. Nabokov stopped still and exclaimed: "The Viennese quack is railing at me from his grave!" (Boyd 1991, 308).
be careful not to attract the Viennese quack's curse anons.

>50 posts
>no Nabokov
he makes /lit/ seethe more than Corncob YeCarthy

>Camus, Albert. Dislike him. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me. Awful.
>Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journalism seriously.
>Freud, Sigmund. A figure of fun. Loathe him. Vile deceit. Freudian interpretation of dreams is charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense.
>Hemingway, Ernest. A writer of books for boys. Certainly better than Conrad. Has at least a voice of his own. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Loathe his works about bells, balls, and bulls.

>>15095852
One cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous achievement of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is - a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) - a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

Who are your favorite prose stylists? Pic related

Lolita or Pale Fire first? or something else?

How did this man gain such profound mastery of English prose when it's not even his first language? How can it be possible? What is his secret?

Daily reminder that the greatest writer was a Hegelian

Don't fucking step at me when it comes to Nabokov — I am one of the world's leading authorities on Nabokov. You just read the top three hits in his American period— I on the other hand have copies of his first translation work from his time at Cambridge. Don't fuck with me.

>/lit/: ghastly rigmarole

Freud, Sigmund. A figure of fun. Loathe him. Vile deceit. Freudian interpretation of dreams is charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense.

Mr. Mercedes was not comfortable. One of King's worse works. And that's saying something.

>>13074851
Been a while since we've had a Nabbing round these parts. It's a pretty safe neighborhood these days.

Now that's one helluva Nabbing.

Don Quickoates. A cruel and crude old book.

>>12888417
Nab hated Orwell's retardation the most.

>There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction. The purpose of this foreword is not to show that "Bend Sinister" belongs or does not belong to "serious literature" (which is a euphemism for the hollow profundity and the ever-welcome commonplace). I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: "great books"). I am not "sincere," I am not "provocative," I am not "satirical." I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of "thaw" in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent. As in the case of my "Invitation to a Beheading" - with which this book has obvious affinities - automatic comparisons between "Bend Sinister" and Kafka's creations or Orwell's cliches would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one.

Ayn Rand. Loathe her. Discontented woman looking to fill the void of her sterility. Her books; product of amphetamine psychosis, not talent.
Atlas Shrugged. Sanitarium Scribbles.
Fountainhead. High levels of lead.
Anthem. Reads as badly as any anthem sounds (never had an ear for music).

>>12813528
Good post, reminiscent of the the nabster.

>“When I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool”

+ Bonus
>There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction. The purpose of this foreword is not to show that "Bend Sinister" belongs or does not belong to "serious literature" (which is a euphemism for the hollow profundity and the ever-welcome commonplace). I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: "great books"). I am not "sincere," I am not "provocative," I am not "satirical." I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of "thaw" in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent. As in the case of my "Invitation to a Beheading" - with which this book has obvious affinities - automatic comparisons between "Bend Sinister" and Kafka's creations or Orwell's cliches would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one. ---- Nabokov

Bukowski , Charles. Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A hobo, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his postal journalism seriously.
Pulp. His best work, though an obvious and shameless imitation of Hergé's "The Adventures of Tintin."
Post Office. Dislike it intensely.
Women. Dislike it intensely. Ghastly rigmarole.

>I dislike Jane Austen, and am prejudiced, in fact against all women writers. They are in another class

Poster, Original. Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A phaggot, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his greentexts are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his grievances seriously.
This thread. His best work, though an obvious and shameless truncation of Luther's "95 Theses".
His previous thread. Dislike it intensely.
His next thread. Dislike it intensely. Ghastly reparative.

Roth, Phillip. Intensely dislike him.
The Human Stain. Never liked it. A feeble and garrulous book. formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by its short length to put the reader out of his misery sooner. Detest it. A cancerous growth of subversive obscenities.

>There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction. The purpose of this foreword is not to show that "Bend Sinister" belongs or does not belong to "serious literature" (which is a euphemism for the hollow profundity and the ever-welcome commonplace). I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: "great books").
>I am not "sincere," I am not "provocative," I am not "satirical." I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of "thaw" in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent. As in the case of my "Invitation to a Beheading" - with which this book has obvious affinities - automatic comparisons between "Bend Sinister" and Kafka's creations or Orwell's cliches would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one.
How can one man be so based?

>>12803204
Resentment. Light of my life, fire of my brains. My sin, my fuel. Re-sent-ment: the trip of my tongue zigzagging back, forward, then concluding with a definitive labial movement, the finality of the t resounding like a bell in my head. Reeee. Sent. Ment.

It was hate, plain hate, in the morning, at ten till four on the clock. It was rage to pay tax. It was anger on the dotted line. But in my amygdala, it will always be resentment.