/lit/ - Literature

/lit/ doesn't read unless it's popular and political.

>>11318060
We talk about rupi kaur so there's no need to repeat ourselves

because he's a fascist.

>>11318202
btfo'd

>>11318060
Maybe if his Cantos weren't so F-ing awful I'd talk about him more.

>>11318918
His translations of the Confucian Odes are the best work of poetry done in English in the 20th century. Not the greater, as that would be the Cantos, but still the best;

>>11318107
I notice it very much.

Also, there's too much emphasis on contemporary authors, with everyone reading Pynchon and DFW, but nobody bothering to read John Donne.

>>11318989
Newfags are such an abomination. Please go.

>>11318989
Oh damn, John Donne, what a gem! Never heard of him before!

>>11318989
>>11318994
>Muh classics!

fuck off to /litpat/, we don't read dwm's here

>>11319021
Nigga, what

>>11318989
Been here 5 years, you’re right

>>11318994
I've been a regular poster since 2013, and a non-regular one since 2010 or whenever it was that the board was created.

>>11319003
Yes. John Donne is better than Thomas Pynchon.

>>11318995
See? You care more about obscurity than about literary merit.

>>11318060
He did a nice bit to bring literature out of the overly ornamented effete floral garden of English prose and into the hard, precise, and subjective with support for Joyce etc. His political views really were unfortunate, but Hemingway forgave him so why shouldn't we?

>>11319493
Altbro: the post

>>11319493
Hemingway's views were worse.

>>11319561
I was talkin to a bro in the hot tub tonight (explaining the lack of color in the object world), musta rubbed off. Funny.
>>11319581
Hemingway may have been a repressed homosexual, compensating with his Kansas City hard boy attitude, but he usually came round to compassion in the end eg: Fitzgerald memoir essay confessions reactions.

Pound is great. Still, I believe that he tried to hard with the cantos. Had he fleshed out most of them more, to get a more lucid experience (something like the
Came Neptunus,
his mind leaping like dolphins etc.
Canto)

he would have been regarded as a great poet. But the gibberish is inseparable from the lucid parts of the Cantos and that's what makes them so good.

I know he believed he had failed in writing a Paradiso, but he did much more. It isn't even that necessary to completely understand each part of the Cantos. It's a "ride" with some parts being more lucid than others. Like a collective dream.

>>11318060

I was actually getting around to starting a thread about his ABCs of Reading. I find his thoughts on poetry and literature as a whole refreshing. I was going to ask for more books in the same vein as the ABCs, but more oriented to fiction, since that's what I write. Any suggestions, anons?

>>11319861
Seek out his correspondence, much edification

>>11319561
Alternatively, when is someone an alt bro. I do have a bachelors in bro having grown up in a bro swamp. But like Alvin I resisted

>trying to be faithful and to get rid of what he's faithful to at the same time

But after all, I do love to get drunk at a bar, "get it in", then relax with some Wittgenstein.

>there are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.

May the perenium not be ripped to the anus on this one.

>>11318107
But he hated Jews more than anyone on this board

>nfw petals on a wet black bough

>>11318989
Objectively one of, if not the best poets from his era

>>11318989
Agreed, contemporary American literature is such a joke, I’m sure it’s only discussed by those unwilling to admit their country inspires nothing of artistic value. At least, not anymore.

>>11320079
I can guarantee you that I hate Jews more than him. Absolutely no doubt

>>11319340
>Yes. John Donne is better than Thomas Pynchon
Incorrect.

>>11318205
>>11319493
>>11320079

>Oh no, this writer didn't like Jews!!!
>Oh no, this writer was a total fascist
>Oh no, this writer had an opinion different to my own

You sound like such raging assholes, I bet you don't listen to Wagner too.

>>11320932
This. My two cents: if you hate jews or niggers or even just women, I'll fucking read your works.
Fuck political correctness desu

>>11320932
>>11320940
How many "DUMB FEMINAZIS GETTTING BTFO'D" YouTube compilations did y'all watch today?

>>11320932
I never said I didn't read him because he was a fascist. I've read ABCs twice, it's really insightful, but ultimately Pound has a short-sighted, elitist view of literature that's of a piece with his fascism.

However he isn't talked about on this board precisely because he's a fascist. None of the /pol/ posters or /pol/ posers read poetry, and if they did they still wouldn't understand Pound. The people who do read Pound mostly won't post about him because they would want to engage in an actual literary discussion, not to be bombarded with generic, boring racist opinions that are almost certainly not even sincere.

Despite being a fascist, Pound's literary output deserves to be seriously discussed, and it's impossible to have a serious discussion about an actual honest-to-God fascist, and an extremely intelligent one at that, on a board where flat-pack imitation fascists will jump into the discussion and ruin it with thoughtless regurgitated junk.

>>11321908
im a pol poster and I understand poetry very well, i write poetry every day. I don't really like Pound or his autistic fascism. The racist opinions are sincere, I take the completely reasonable position that differences in outcomes for races are partly genetic. This doesnt have anything to do with fascism in the first place.

poetry and politics have nothing to do with each other either, and the leftypol posters do just as much off topic shitflinging about politics, you probably just dont register it because you mostly agree with them.

>>11321908

why did you use the word despite

>>11322031
because poetry is about creating and communicating beauty, and fascism is an irredeemably ugly ideology.

>>11322151
fascism is obsessed with beauty

>>11322187
fascism is obsessed with aesthetics, that's a different thing.

>>11321959
>The racist opinions are sincere, I take the completely reasonable position that differences in outcomes for races are partly genetic

Since you do seem sincere, I'm interested in the details of your opinion. Which genes specifically do you think cause this, and how do they affect the outcomes? To what extent are socioeconomic and historical factors an influence?

>>11322254
>Which genes specifically do you think cause this
we don't know. Racism against various races exists and has an effect on outcomes as well. The reason I believe it's genetic is because of those twin studies that showed the iq was not really affected by environment. I also think it most parsimoniously explains the difference in outcomes in the real world. The part that really convinced me was that East Asians do better than whites on all these metrics, even though they undoubtedly face prejudice in white societies. You get these poor as fuck immigrants who dont speak english, and they behave like model citizens and have wealth within like 2 generations. The homicide rates in their own countries are also extremely low despite the poverty.

I dont think this would really matter in a different sort of society, since the bell curves all overlap with each other and you have every sort of person in every race. However, our society has the idea that the difference in outcomes, which it obsesses over, are due to one group actively hurting the other group. This idea naturally causes a lot of problems. I know that society is never going adopt my views, so i just keep them to myself. They don't have an impact on my day to day life anyway.

>>11322151
Reminder that W.B. Yeats, Fernando Pessoa, Martin Heidegger, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Karl Orff, D'Annunzio, Jorge Luis Borges, Pirandello and others all sympathized with or even adhered to fascist/fascistic movements.

You do not know anything either about beauty, ugliness, poetry, fascism, or aesthetics.

>>11322326
>Furtwangler

hehehe

>>11322308
You don't even need to talk about IQ in order to defend your point.

Just mention Usain Bolt and Garry Kasparov, and let the other guy screech.

>>11322341
>Furtwangler

Well, he was certainly not a Nazi and did a lot against the Nazi regime, but still... The fact he stayed there means a lot. If he had been Portuguese, he'd have supported Salazar.

>>11322308
>The reason I believe it's genetic is because of those twin studies that showed the iq was not really affected by environment.

It's by definition impossible for a twin study to investigate the effect of race, though, and race is different from environment. And you'd still need to show that IQ itself is caused by genetic differences, otherwise you're just making assumptions on top of assumptions.

> The part that really convinced me was that East Asians do better than whites on all these metrics, even though they undoubtedly face prejudice in white societies.

I understand where you're coming from here, but there are a whole bunch of socioeconomic and historical factors that could reasonably be hypothesised to contribute to this difference. Those factors are very complex, society and world history is very complex. I don't fully understand it, you don't fully understand it, nobody fully understands it.

I think that the most parsimonious approach is actually to assume that different outcomes are caused only by social/historical influences, which are after all incredibly complex, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary. That's not an ideological decision on my part, it's Occam's Razor: of the two explanations (social/historical and social/historical+genetics) it is parimonious to pick the simplest, absent any evidence otherwise, and I've seen no conclusive or even convincing evidence that suggests that a genetic explanation is required to explain racial differences in outcome.

Biologically speaking, genetic differences between races smaller than the genetic variation within any given race, too, and the genetic variation of the entire human population is very low for such an abundant species because we have gone through multiple bottlenecks in our recent evolutionary history. There's not much variation in genes that could explain different racial outcomes, but there is a huge amount of variation in socio-economic status, especially when its effects can continue for literally millenia.

>However, our society has the idea that the difference in outcomes, which it obsesses over, are due to one group actively hurting the other group. This idea naturally causes a lot of problems.

I think that society today tends to take an essentialist position where eveyone is divided up into groups based on race, sexuality, etc and so on, which is unhelpful. Ultimately people with power hurt those without it, and the main source of power is money, rather than the colour of your skin or who you want to sleep with. To my mind identity-based politics is a distraction. The western world is mostly led by rich white men, and the more people focus on their whiteness and maleness the less they think about the much more important part, which is that they are rich.

>>11322326
these are all ugly propagandists besides Yeats who you can't really call facist.

>>11322550
I don't see that Occam's razor applies the way you are saying. We see people behaving differently, the simplest explanation is that they are in fact different. To add in the idea that they are only different because of some impossible to measure phenomenon of oppression doesn't make much sense to me. Where is the evidence that a group of SS Africans can behave like Japanese if they are raised a certain way? There is no example of such a country,. Im aware of the argument about why Africa is the way it is(colonialism) but this is not evidence in favor of the environmental theory, it just throws into question the validity of using Africa as an example for the racist theory. The environmental theory has as far as I can tell no evidence backing it at all.

I know I am not going to convince you, but it just seems, well, obvious to me. You right that there is not enough genetic evidence yet to show exactly how this works, so being too sure doesn't make sense. But if I have to make a decision based on the information we have today then this is what makes sense to me. Other traits vary by race, including height, which is also polygenic. The natural selection pressures for intelligence in different regions of the world could plausibly be different, even agriculture could have contributed to the process.

also i dont really mind about soceity getting mad at white men, i dont care what society does in general unless it is going to involve me having to go to war or something

>>11322637
>I don't see that Occam's razor applies the way you are saying.

To be parsimonious we have to make the least number of assumptions. I have made one assumption: that socio-economic and historical factors cause difference. You make this assumption too. You also make the assumption that genetic factors cause difference. Therefore you are being less parsimonious.

>We see people behaving differently, the simplest explanation is that they are in fact different.

This is literal tautology. There's no a priori reason that the explanation for different behaviours should be genetic. Mods and rockers behaved differently, is the simplest explanation for that difference genetic? Homeless people and billionaires behave differently, is the simplest explantion genetic? Religious people and atheists behave differently, is the simplest explanation genetic? No, in all those cases there are more-or-less complex social explanations for the difference in behaviour. So when you insist, without anything approaching the appropriate amount of evidence for such a claim, that there must be a genetic explanation for racial differences, you are making a logical leap, an assumption, it's not parsimonious at all.

>>11322826
mods and rockers can literally turn into one another so I dont see how that is the same as races, same with the homeless example, those are arbitrary things beyond the actual individual, who has a physical reality, a phenotype

I think there is really quite a lot of evidence, all the iq studies, the crime rates, etc. But no it is not conclusive until the genetics are worked out.

>>11322863
>We see people behaving differently, the simplest explanation is that they are in fact different.

You were talking about differences in behaviour being most parsimoniously explained by genetics, then when I gave you examples of people behaving differently you told me that behaviour is an arbitrary thing that is not part of the phenotype... so is behaviour decided by genetics or not?

>>11322968
I see your point. I suppose the way I think of it there is a set level of behavior that cant be altered by environemnt. This is the point of the IQ test, it cant tell you everything but the 80IQ guy is unlikely to be a physicist. You could make a similar range for psychopathy, I don't know if someone has.

So when we see that the average behaviors of people of different races are diffferent, I think of this as being genetic, because you cant change these things-intelligence levels that is, you cant raise the iq of an 80 to a 120. BUt the language they speak, the way they dress, this stuff isnt related to the inbuilt IQ levels, or if it is the connections are more tenuous and matter less.

So there are more arbitrary behaviors, that are culturally mediated, and then there are ranges of behavior that are innate. You put the race differences in the former category, and I put them in the latter.

>>11323025
>So there are more arbitrary behaviors, that are culturally mediated, and then there are ranges of behavior that are innate. You put the race differences in the former category, and I put them in the latter.

I was under the impression that you put race differences in both categories, since you said

>Racism against various races exists and has an effect on outcomes as well.

which would imply that there is at least some arbitrary, cultural mediated aspect to racial differences. However now you've implied that you put all racial differences in the category of innate behaviours. Can you clarify your position?

>>11323097
races obviously differ in both of those categories, but the differences people care most about, the outcomes in wealth, crime, and educational achievement, correlate with IQ, meaning IQ is part of the question here.

That there are cultural reasons for disparities I am not arguing with, though it is worth noting that the 'leveling the field' type policies, such as allowing blacks to have lower SAT scores(and bizarrely requiring Asians to ahve higher ones than whites) exist in addition to the racism against black and latinos that contributes to their poor outcomes.

Most things are going to involve both culture and genetics, it is rarely going to be just one or the other. And i dont think all racial differences are genetic, i didnt say that, there are people who adopt the typical culture and behavior of a different race entirely. I said i think there is a component and the component is the lower average intelligence, which has all sorts of ramifications on the behavior of the people. I imagine there are other harder to measure differences as well, differences on average again, not essences that everyone from a race has.

Do i think the way things are now is how they will always be? No, many things could be changed. What i find unlikely however is that we see the gap between races disappear.

>>11323164
>the differences people care most about, the outcomes in wealth, crime, and educational achievement, correlate with IQ, meaning IQ is part of the question here.

and there's no consensus on the extent to which racial differences in IQ are genetic, so we're just going round in circles. and again you're not being as parsimonious as you think. parsimonious is not the same thing as intuitive. your assumption that genetics must be involved in differences of outcome between races might be intuitive but it isn't parsimonious, because you assume the existence of a causal relationship which may or may not in actual fact exist.