/lit/ - Literature

This is going to seem hyperbolically negative, especially given how vague it is, but I need to think it through. There's something about /lit/ that really depresses me and actively puts me off th whole concept of books, until I actually get back into reading something or talk to other people outside the gloomy /lit/ vortex.

It's hard to pin down, but I get the same feeling from people I follow on twitter who read book after book but without any sense of directedness or wider project, and I think that compulsion to see books as bricks in a mind-palace you feel obligated or compelled to build ties in to the claustrophobic loneliness and bitterness on the board. It's the same bitterness that drives people down all these dead ends of canon wars and idpol wars and irony wars and female psychology speculation.

The aesthetic I associate with /lit/ is also the one I most instinctively dislike, it's a kind of highly allegorial cosmic Harol Bloom, Master and Margherita, Dante feeling, and it seems like a totally different sphere to the things I like. I honestly get the same feeling from reading the Elliot Rodger manifesto, like life is this closed video game or mansion you progress through, with archetypical figures you need to please or overcome or at least put in their proper archetypical position.