/lit/ - Literature

>>10496708
it's poetry, and the use here is perfectly fine. there is a general information (verse 1), then more context to it (verses 2 & 3). Using 'first' in prose is way harder to do without turning your sentence into terribly structured drivel.

>>10496718
oh boy, are you 100% sure about that? the work itself might demand all of the meaning and most of the style, but there might be numerous models of attributing a properly styled phrase to the meaning. I'd say the opposite of your theory: anybody who just accepts the initial flow of words and never decides to filter them will never be a good writer.

Bast in JR and both Benny and Gwyon in The Recognitions hit me hard.

Daily reminder that the vast majority of writers lead lonely and boring lives and that you will not be experiencing a full life if you devote yourself to this craft. You will be spending your time reading and writing instead of trying to experience the world, to meet people and bond or conflict with them, to learn as much as you can about the real inner workings of the world. Sure, you will experience the world, but you will be constantly retreating from it. And even when you are experiencing the world, you will be often analyzing it for writing material, from the point of view of a writer, and so you will always be detached from it. If you have never felt the detachment of a writer, then you are not a true writer.

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, the performing arts entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning it into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat...”
- Pessoa

>inb4 mentioning an author with massive balls who lived an exciting life
These people are the exceptions, obviously, and have more balls than you ever will, so stop trying to make excuses. You will not be the next Hemingway or Hunter S. Thompson. Who both, incidentally, killed themselves.

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”
- Hemingway

>inb4 writing only takes up a certain portion of your day, so you have so much other time to do whatever you want
If you do not devote yourself to your craft they way the best writers do, then you will be writing trash and are not fit to call yourself a writer. Don't act like you don't have to work ridiculously hard to create a great work of art. The best writers, like Joyce, are the ones that devote themselves to writing the most.

“The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one...Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.”
- Faulkner

Art is beautiful and important, the but the life of the writer is not a beautiful or important one aside from the art he creates. To want to be a writer, to live the life of a writer, you must be a sort of masochist, or must be so consumed by your passion as to see no other possible route for yourself. The life of a true writer is not a good one, and may not even be so romantically and aesthetically terrible as to make up for its horridness.

“What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology?”
- William Gaddis

>The birth of a nation. Let in the light Open the nunneries And save the girls. Free lemonade, Mineral water, Shower baths Coming! to Haggard's Gospel Tent A drama of eighteen live people This is a clean high-class lecture exposing the whole Roman Catholic Religion from the Confession Box to the Nunneries, High Priests, Mother Superior, Altar Boy, Six Nuns, Holy Altar, Holy Candles, Holy Water, Holy Gods Just as it looks in Catholic Churches everywhere. With the mother giving her daughter to the church for a supposed more holy life, daughter taking the Carmelite nun vow (Black Veil) buried alive, thrown into a dungeon and how are they to be rescued
>He stopped to cough, and courteously caught the cough away from the air in his open palm and walked on again. Courteous, to this flood of unspeakable hyperduliacs, and why? to be rescued and wear a stinking merkin for a beard? If she is only a woman (but a good cigar is a smoke) with Eve caught by the furbelow, Hae cunni (the oldest catch we know): Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, praebeat ille nates (I seem to mean usefulness), but Thisbe's gray eye on Alfonso Liguori — There is no mysticism without Mary. Stabat Mater shrouded in the decent obscurity of a learned language, fœmina si furtum faciet mihi virque puerque: dolorosa while Origenal sin wields the blade. Carnele-varium (the heart came out very late) reveling in lavish polymastia (Zwei Brüste wohnen, ach! in meiner Seele) now, in Martinmas, Saint Martin's given or only Lent to SS Pelagia & Mary of Egypt, thence to Thai's, Kundry, Salome, and even Saint Irene; Costanza (Ds ac Redemptor, S.J.), Valeria Messalina, Marozia in the garden, in the Garden, Messalina in the gardens of Lucullus hic jaceted age 26 years, Thrawn Janet's black man gone down the garden wall, and the men et ardet: Anaxagoras pre-empted in contemptu Chris-tianae fidei; Lucretius (dead of an overdose of love philter) preempted, — Religio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta. I.e., ex-homologesis (c. 218) by Calixtus I. Pelagic miles distant, on the Rock, resident Barbary apes pelt stones at the local Y.M.C.A. In Spain Ignatius' militant limp and Xavier 4'6" exhomolojesuis abhor the shedding of blood, and the Inquisitor De Arbues describes Love ex hac Petri cathedra without raising a Welt. Amor perfectissimus explaining what is dark by what is darker stilclass="underline" Who then was the gentleman? (I mean the excluded.) Not Philo, De Exsecrationibus! not Philo, certainly not Aristobulus busy-handed Alexandrine Jew to prove plagiarism: Pythagoras Socrates Plato Homer & Hesiod, all plagiarized from Moses, one and all. Pues dime Sigismundo, dí: El delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido. Calixtus, then, after all? Politicking, No, no, don't listen to them 1870! Nono the winner: infallible (what is that racket?). The College of Cardinals turns to look. — It's Arkansas, crying Non placet.

What the absolute fuck did he mean by this?

Memes aside, is he not the greatest modern American prose writer? After reading the The Recognitions, I was immediately struck by how consistently high quality the level of prose is throughout the book, despite its incredible length. This man is so fucking based and if any of you fucks haven't read his shit, you should do so immediately. Of all the memes or pseudomemes on this site, Gaddis is probably one of the greatest and the most underread so get on it.