/lit/ - Literature

>>7935596
Boston metro area. There are so many good universities and hospitals here that it's hard not to meet really brilliant people and easy as pie to see a lecture from pretty much any luminary alive.

Downside is that it's expensive, but if you live in Allston, Brighton or Somerville with roommates it's manageable.

>>7539037
I was trolling, but I'm actually a soft atheist/agnostic who attends a UU congregation in Cambridge, MA because I feel at home with the sort of people who attend and the discussions can be fascinating. Grew up with a super fundamentalist Christian church and family so I think spirituality is a powerful force that needs to be investigated thoroughly.

>>7479452
Boston and its metro area are honestly pretty solid. Throw in the cluster of artists at Bedford and you've got something going on. All those universities don't hurt, though of course universities aren't themselves an engine of creativity.

>>7187913
Boston is easily the most intellectual city so this doesn't even surprise me. The "best of" section of the Boston Craigslist is quite impressive.

>>7090259
>>7090251
I can see the appeal, but I already have a decent job and lots of money. As much as I blame my parents for being so uptight and isolating me, family is still extremely important to me. When I see my future, I see doing the things my dad took me to do with my own son and having the kind of closeness with my wife that my dad has with my mother, and that my grandparents have with one another.

I hate to get all /r9k/ about it, but sometimes I do wonder if the way we approach sex now has poisoned the well for this sort of thing.

>>7082932
Thinking about applying to MFA programs this year. I've been out of university for a while but I'd love to meet some other writers and make connections now that I think my shit's actually good.

>>7068725
Literary fiction makes a case for seeing the world a certain way. It can be challenging but you find something unique at the end that came from the author's heart, like diving into deep, water for pearls.

Genre fiction invents a world for the readers to sink into without clashing with their view of the real world or even alluding to it, like a warm bath.

>>7027574
Trust fund babby writer/adventurer
Writer married to a rich woman
Ghost writer for someone famous

>tfw no half-Japanese cardiologist gf to pay the bills and think I'm a genius even though I can't sexually satisfy her so she sleeps with another doctor even though it breaks her heart

>>7020177
Europeans don't value their heritage because to many of them the world wars were proof that the original values of western society were irredeemably flawed. To replace their original European identity, they reach out for non-western sources of strength (Islamic converts), Marxism, and the cultural suicide they are committing through massive unfiltered immigration combined with an obsession with subversion and a culture of "tolerance" that makes no effort to assimilate immigrants from destructive environments into what used to be the most productive environment on earth.

I'm not anti-immigration, that would be a ludicrous stance for an American, but Europe is doing it horribly wrong for all the wrong reasons.

>>7015637
Tom Wolfe: Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Truman Capote: In Cold Blood

Norman Mailer: Armies of the Night

David Foster Wallace: Big Red One, that cruise ship essay, Up, Simba

Erik Larson: Devil in the White City (required reading for a visit to Chicago)

John Steinbeck: Travels With Charlie

Ernest Hemingway: Green Hills of Africa

>blurred lines edition
Hunter S. Thompson

>>7006133
I read Infinite Jest when I first moved to the Boston area for college from the rural south. This book is to Boston what Ulysses is to Dublin, and as I explored the city I began to gain a deeper appreciation for the way Wallace wrote his experience with Boston into IJ, so I read it again and enjoyed it even more the second time.

Coming from the background I did, I was also touched by DFW's portrayal of characters like Wayne and Pemulis, who come into contact with an elite world from working-class origins. I appreciated that he didn't beatify the poor (inb4 "Wardine be cry") and in fact made the characters with rough backgrounds the most manipulative and brutal, because that was my experience growing up.

It's a lengthy experiment that doesn't always work just right but taken as a whole, Infinite Jest is heartache beautiful.

>>6858876
I'm gonna be that guy and defend studying at university (not necessariy straight out of high school, but at some point).

>if you need a professor to grade everything... distinguish crap from quality...

That's not what they're there for. If you think professors are all like Harold Bloom, building their own canons and decrying what they don't personally like, that just shows how little you know. Grades are for employers. Being an autodidact might sound romantic but it's much quicker and more effective to become friends with a few people who've already spent decades studying your fields of interest and learn from them. You'll find that professors not only have their own areas of knowledge, but also vasty differing opinions and approaches that you can use to place yourself. If you come into a university classroom eager to learn you can engage with the professors in a way that will certainly challenge everything your highschool-failing ass thinks it knows.

It's fine to delay studying at a University, but you're absolutely robbing yourself if you don't fight for entrance/scholarship at a decent one in a few years.

If you're going to let some "uninteresting middle class cuntbags" decide what you can and can't do, then I suspect you just aren't cut out for success by any route.

I went to a good school in the Boston area and was able to engage with brilliant people, both in the student bodies and faculties of the local universities, who each contributed far more to my worldview and education than the grade-grubbing side of things. Definitely would not have met them if I just fell back into the blue collar world I grew up in.

If there's something inauthentic or uninteresting about postcoital conversations about Shakespeare in a Harvard house overlooking the Charles river in the fall then I don't want to be authentic.

>>6842018
I had a beautiful, half-Japanese girlfriend who would read anything in English, Japanese, Chinese or French. We discussed things we read and what I wrote. She was a solid writer in English but had gotten out of practice since she worked a demanding laboratory job. She was sexually aggressive and loved to cook for me in short skirts and aprons.

Guys, there's more to it than books. She was everything weebs dream of in a Japanese girl, but with just enough of the "play until 30" indoctrination in her system that I always knew she wouldn't stay. Just find a girl who's not so dumb you fear for your childrens' safety and make sure she loves you and wants the same things out of life and the relationship that you do.

Really smart girls are fun when you don't want it to be serious, but tiresomely restless when you try to settle them down. I spent my college days maintaining serial partners at various schools in Boston; that is the life if you want to be with smart women but don't care about exclusivity. I've seen things you wouldn't believe: Harvard premeds with shelves covered in Shakespeare, cumming in the golden shade of a New England fall while boats race home on the Charles; the daughters of industrial Titans kneeling before rugby players at Wellesley society houses. All those moments are lost now... like tears in rain.

>>6708318
>>6711218
Used bookstores are amazing - if you live in a city with a few good ones. Everyone else is out of luck. If you live around Boston it is imperative that you visit Raven Books in Harvard Square, like, yesterday.

>>6700902
I read the coprophagia scene in Gravity's Rainbow on the MBTA Red Line today. I was terrified the guys sitting next to me would catch a glimpse and think I was just reading erotica.

>>6623137
I'll sit down if you'll explain what it is you want to write about. Otherwise I've got Stalinist policies to make excuses for and bitches to fuck.

To answer your first question, your book will need to be aimed at an audience with a specific level of background knowledge. Even if you decide to assume that your audience has a masters, consider the possibility that biologists who haven't studied evolution as much as you might still be interested.

As to structure, try reading Gould or "The Blind Watchmaker". Gould and Dawkins make their cases logically plain while digressing only to catch the reader up on specific examples and tie them in with the overall argument. This is something you'll need to plot out in advance to make coherent.

>>6504440
No, but if IJ had been published a few years later it would've been. There's plenty of daily life in between the bizarro conspiracy stuff and it's definitely a love-hate note to Boston. I read Infinite Jest when I moved to the Boston area for college and it defined why I love this city.

>>6463655
No, around Boston.