/lit/ - Literature

>>14150094
>The root of all my ills, thought Amalfitano sometimes, is my admiration for Jews, homosexuals, and revolutionaries (true revolutionaries, the romantics and the dangerous madmen, not the apparatchiks of the Communist Party of Chile or its despicable thugs, those hideous gray beings). The root of all my ills, he thought, is my admiration for a certain kind of junkie (not the poet junkie or the artist junkie but the straight-up junkie, the kind you rarely come across, the kind like a black hole or a black eye, with no hands or legs, a black eye that never opens or closes, the Lost Witness of the Tribe, the kind who seems to cling to drugs in the same way that drugs cling to him). The root of all my ills is my admiration for delinquents, whores, the mentally disturbed, said Amalfitano to himself with bitterness. When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and—the crowning touch—a one-amred amputee, but all I became was a literature professor. At least, thought Amalfitano, I've read thousands of books. At least I've become acquainted with the Poets and read the Novels. (The Poets, in Amalfitano's view, were those beings who flashed like lightning bolts, and the novels were the stories that sprang from Don Quixote). At least I've read. At least I can still read, he said to himself, at once dubious and hopeful.

>>13890433
>The root of all my ills, thought Amalfitano sometimes, is my admiration for Jews, homosexuals, and revolutionaries (true revolutionaries, the romantics and the dangerous madmen, not the apparatchiks of the Communist Party of Chile or its despicable thugs, those hideous gray beings). The root of all my ills, he thought, is my admiration for a certain kind of junkie (not the poet junkie or the artist junkie but the straight-up junkie, the kind you rarely come across, the kind like a black hole or a black eye, with no hands or legs, a black eye that never opens or closes, the Lost Witness of the Tribe, the kind who seems to cling to drugs in the same way that drugs cling to him). The root of all my ills is my admiration for delinquents, whores, the mentally disturbed, said Amalfitano to himself with bitterness. When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and—the crowning touch—a one-amred amputee, but all I became was a literature professor. At least, thought Amalfitano, I've read thousands of books. At least I've become acquainted with the Poets and read the Novels. (The Poets, in Amalfitano's view, were those beings who flashed like lightning bolts, and the novels were the stories that sprang from Don Quixote). At least I've read. At least I can still read, he said to himself, at once dubious and hopeful.
At least I've become acquainted with the Poets and read the Novels.

also post cute bolanos

>>12617210

yes
YES

>>12488789

Keep writing. Do not give up, anon.

>>12027121

I have read 2666, and the part of Archimboldi in my opinion is still channeling in those ideas of nomadism. I have not told the full story in the blogpost, but it is while reading 2666 and specifically the part of Archimboldi that things started to get better. That character was part, directly, of how certain views I had changed. Archimboldi is the archetype of the wandering writer. He literally has no possession, he goes around and only keeps a few books, he is unknown and somehow, after a certain point, invulnerable. I had the feeling that he could never die. That he was a sort of literary wandering jew.

I got two messages out of that bit of 2666. One was to preserve "the raging immaturity of Ansky", the guy whose diary Arcimboldi finds, which I took to be a way of saying that I can keep being faithful to my old self despite of the circumstances. That I can withstand evil if I manage to preserve something of that "raging immaturity" of adolescence, which is, incidentally, again, Belano's pocket knife - your weapon in the face of mindless evil and brutality.
The second message is "never go back to the crime scene", which an old lady says to Arcimboldi at a certain point. That really resonated with me. It meant that certain lost battles must be let go forever. That you should not go back to the place where everything slipped, that you should not try to win over things that are lost, or to right every wrong you have made. Go elsewhere, there is always an elsewhere to go, and everything that can be fixed will be fixed in the future, in paying it FORWARD. That really changed my attitude toward life. Another blogpost I'd like to make is about burroughs and time travel, because I think there is a literal way in which working through your past mistakes/trauma in processing them in future actions is a form of time travel, it that you can fix stuff that happened a long time ago if instead of focusing on the past you focus on the future.

So, yes, 2666 was another extremely relevant book, the second one I read after the detectives, but the detectives was the really relevant one because it got me into that mindset in the first place, so I thought I would talk about that book specifically. I will definitely read the Third Reich and I plan to read everything he has written.

>>11920225

>And what did Amalfitano's students learn? The learned to recite poems out loud. The learned by heart the two or three poems they loved the most to remember them and recite them in the right moments: funerals, weddings, loneliness. They understood that a book is a labyrinth and a desert. That the most important thing in the world was reading and traveling, without ever stopping. That once read, writers came out of the soul of rocks, which was were they lived after death, and established themselves in the soul of the readers as in a soft prison, but that this prison enlarged or exploded. That every system of writing is a betrayal. That true poetry lives between the abyss and the tragedy and that next to her house passes the main street of gratuitous gestures, of the elegance of the eyes and of the fate of Marcabruno. That the main teaching of literature was courage, a strange courage, like a stone well in the middle of a lake landscape, a courage similar to a vortex and to a mirror. That reading was not more comfortable than writing. That by reading one can learn to doubt and to remember. That memory was love.

>>11914855

If only you knew how good things could be.

>>11283137

>>10753356

>be in early teens
>stop reading shit-tier books and comics and pick up books to impress /lit/ qt
>read a lot in university
>as soon as life starts getting serious grow disillusioned about literature, work, the possible worth of the humanities and life in general
>spend one very shitty year stucked in my home town living with my parents writing my MA thesis
>grow borderline suicidal, extreme difficulty in proceeding with my university work, completely lost faith in academia or the humanities in general
>pick up novels as a distraction from academic work
>discover the pleasure to read literature for the fun of it
>for the first time read with absolute, disinterested sheer pleasure, without the aim of doing something productive, nor to learn anything
>engage with the great classics without any concern for the actual meaning of the book, only asking for some personal revelation they never fail to provide
>pleasure in reading increases even more
>finish my thesis
>prepare PhD project and get taken in
>separate completely between reading for personal pleasure and academic work
>regarding reading for pleasure as my main activity
>keep feeling good after every reading
>now more or less a functional human being able to cope with the fact that most practical shit you have to do in life has nothing to do with your individual development

This did the trick for me anon. Stop thinking about humanities as a mission, or as something that has any importance beyond yourself. I know it sounds like Stirner's meme philosophy, but it really makes life easier to just read for the pleasure of it. Take it for something that doesn't go beyond yourself: read for yourself, if you end up learning something from a book, don't take it as a general message to share with others, nor as a "truth" contained in the book: take it as a personal prophecy, a message for yourself.

Become a savage detective, anon. Reading, much like seeing new places or having sex, is about living "more" life. Not about having missions, political messages, improving the world, or impressing qts.

>>10713532

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/17/writers-earn-less-than-600-a-year

Get informed, friend.