/lit/ - Literature

>>11727638
But anon, what about my self-destructive behaviors that would inevitably lead to my death by overdose and/or alcoholism if not poured into a creative effort?

>>11727638
most of those look like YA garb to be quite honest with you ohpai

>>11727748
I find comfort knowing that everything has already been thought and written down. There hasn't been a new idea in centuries.

>>11727759
>There hasn't been a new idea in centuries.
Objectively false

>>11727824
Really? Tell us one of those new ideas.

>>11727638
>why writing books that are proof of our time and its way of thinking?

>>11727638
All of them are shit.
So is the one you are thinking of writing.
Don't.

>>11727826
Attack on Titan

>>11727638
99% of what has been published since 1950 has been shit beyond any measure. And 80% of what was written before 1800 has been lost. Leaving many in between which are just copying the better ones or too retarded to be taken seriously.

It's not really that much to read. You could get through every somehow important book in your lifetime. A book a week, makes around 50 books a year, 750 books till your 30 birthday if you start reading at 15. Makes 3.250 book till your 80th birthday. You'll be hard pressed to list as many worthwile books.

>>11727891
>80% of what was written before 1800 has been lost.
You sure about that? That may be true for antiquity, but after it the number of lost texts has been dropping continuously.

>>11727638

There are so many people we could easily do away with half of them. Why are you still here?

>>11727891
>3000 books in a lifetime
Now consider there are 200.000+ new titles published each year in the US alone.

>>11727638
fun

>>11727924
Pretty much all of them are trash, so what's your point?

>>11727995
My point is that over half a million new titles are published worlwide each year. Even if 99.9% of them are trash, the remaining 0.1% are far more than a person can realistically keep up with.

If we stopped writing now, in a thousand years there would only be 645 books still in print. We would eventually run out of books to read.

>>11728029
Why does the amount of good books in existence have to be something readable by one person in a lifetime? Are you stupid?

>>11727759
>everything has already been thought and written down
Then why does the amount of scientific publications grow each year?

>>11728050
I never said that.
My point is that the number of book titles in existence is so mind-bogglingly large (well into the tens of millions) that reading even a measly 1% of them would take you millenia. Thus, we simply don't need any more books.

>>11728108
A simple "yes" would have been enough.

>>11728072
This is actually a serious problem. I think you could throw away 80% of the books and papers and not lose anything. Most of these books simply repeat over and over the same ideas. Or else add some small variation or extension to the theory or idea.

Go into any major research library and you find hundreds of books on a topic, and all of them contain basically the same information. Only with slight variations. So it seems like we have a vast wealth of information, but in reality it is mostly repetition.

What academics ought to do is not attempt to do something original (which usually amounts to adding some little variation to an already well-established theory, or something relatively trivial like that), but attempt to cut the literature in the field down to the minimal expression. This would speed up actual innovation because you could see exactly what is known (or at least been established as known), and you wouldn't be so intimidated by the mass of repetitious clutter that fills up our libraries.

Not only that, but in fields like "classics," "history" or "East Asian studies" the imperative to do something "original" has lead to papers and books on topics that are so trivial or far-fetched that it's hard to believe anybody could have taken the time to write on it.

Or take philosophy. There are hundreds of books on Descartes' ideas. But there are only a few books by Descartes himself. None of these books contribute anything original. They simply repeat his ideas, or discuss them ad infinitum. So you have Descartes ideas applied to politics or compared with the ideas of Voltaire etc, etc, etc, etc....

We need to find the minimal expression of ideas to spare us having to waste out time with crap like this.

>>11728292
I think someone should write an article about this

>>11728108
You're fucking retarded. Other anons already said, the majority of books are complete shit. There's only like 10 books written a year that are even worth reading unless you're looking for something in a very particular niche.

>>11728332
And how the fuck do you know if they're worth reading?
You're probably the kind of guy who only ever touches
>flavor-of-the-month titles of /lit/
>bestsellers
>"classics"

>>11727653
>SIG SG 552
of course

>>11728397
Idk family, how do I know that your vampire steampunk genderfluid urban romance isn't worth reading? It's a mystery.
Seriously, walk into a bookstore sometime and tell me if you can and cannot tell whether a book is shit or not without needing to actually read the whole thing, you god damned room temperature autist thinking he's god's gift to intellectuals by arguing "hurr there's too many books to ever read, let's stop writing books" and "you can't say that 80% of published books are shit!11!11!1!!!"
Please honestly get the fuck off of /lit/ and return to facebook or wherever you came from.

>>11728292
How do you apply this to literature?
You are mostly talking about academic writing.

>>11728410
>out of the 50.000.000 book titles im existance, 49.999.000 are either niche professional literature, or genderfluid cyberpunk vampire romances
You sound very close minded.
The best book I've ever read is an obscure absurdist SciFi title with 213 reviews on goodreads, that I found randomly in my parents' old closet.
Just because a book isn't an "acclaimed classic", an NYC bestseller, or a /lit/meme, doesn't mean it's shit.

>>11727638
Because most books are shit?

>>11727759
Are you being ironic rn?

>>11727875
I chortled

>>11728072
Most of those are bad quality re-hashings of stuff that has already been known, they fall into two types. 1. Theory from [insert time period between 1920 and 1970] says this, our observations confirm/refute this theory. 2. using [insert super mega computer] and [insert theory from 1920 to 1970] we found X. Science is fucking dead

t. scientist

>>11728431
With fiction, it's more difficult to know what's crap and what isn't. But you can make an educated guess. Genre fiction, for example, is meant to provide you with the literary equivalent of a "sugar rush." Most of it has no pretensions to aesthetic greatness. So the very fact that genre writers are not even concerned with anything beyond giving people a good "rush," ought to be a fair enough indication that it's not worth your time.

I once read a little of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci code because I was interested in techniques from catching and hold reader attention. But the fact is Dan Brown is not a very good writer. And the techniques are better picked up reading Henry James, who is an undisputed master at this. I never finished The Da Vinci code because it was just an awful waste of my time.

I personally believe that even if you were to write a "genre book" at a certain point it becomes so aesthetically impressive that the publisher will simply move it over to the "literary" category.

Idk... it's more difficult with fiction. But a lot of those new titles are probably just amateurs putting their stuff up on amazon or something like that

>muh minimalism
This is the testament to modernity's curse on most people, who are not able to realize the immense failures set upon them. Consider OP, who cannot even slightly assume himself on the side of reasoning, yet explains his *feelings* as to why the infinite medium of communication should be limited for his sake, and not for the existent bodies of those who will themselves to have their own education, to breathe freely in the essence and spirit of glorious histories, expansive philosophies, and the inheritance of a rightful knowledge. When Socrates in Theatetus had found the meanings of words to have been more ancient that he would have recalled, should he have detested the future of meanings, to bring dismay to any further learnings of men, since the ancients may have found all truth, all reasoning, and all discovered things? Not even in the mind of Plato, should that have been written; it wouldn't be irrational, since the claim would not be able to be proved, and senseless, as the conjecture of the future's writing cannot also be proved in present time. OP is the man who would have disposed of Moby Dick before it was popularized, who would have practiced sophistry throughout the ages, who would have been a heretic not from a clever subversion, but from a passivity in the face of the pious. You should soon find, /lit/, that this is the man you have hated: the bugman, the isolation of autism spoken of by Deleuze and Baudrillard, and the navel-gazing solipsist, who wills nothing, yet assumes everything from this action. You are very lost, OP, but I do not pity you, because you enjoy your state of being, so there's no reason to see you as a sorrowful character. I hope you gain enough rationalization to see this scope of this saddening state, with you hopefully escaping this petulant mindset.

>>11728292

>This would speed up actual innovation because you could see exactly what is known (or at least been established as known), and you wouldn't be so intimidated by the mass of repetitious clutter that fills up our libraries.

Anyone with groundbreaking insight into a field isn't getting "lost in the sauce" at the library. The amount of unnecessary publications isn't preventing the innovators. Those who go the library, see the amount of work it takes to make discoveries, and turns back around didn't have the will to become great in the first place.

>>11727638
There really isn't. In the past there was at least a valid point to be made that literature acts as a kind of time capsule that reflects the thoughts and issues of it's time, but nowadays books are irrelevant and obsolete, so things like movies, video games, and archived internet posts are better representations of the times.

>>11729298
Perhaps. But this cuts down on the intellectual myopia that is the product of over-specialization. Fields of inquiry need to be cleared of all the repetitive rubbish, and their knowledge fully systemized and coherently organized. Over-specialization is a problem because we fail to see the forest for the trees. It is increasingly difficult to make larger, more encompassing, interdisciplinary theoretical discoveries if we are overly specialized. This is a problem because it requires too much work to systemized so many fields of study.

Take a philosophical problem about the nature of reality. How can a person even begin such a task, when they have to wade through so much time-consuming repetitious information as is contained in all the books on biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology?

There is simply too much information, and it's becoming harder and harder for people to distinguish the important from the unimportant, relevant from irrelevant, repetitious from novel, etc. It's a swamp. So the first step is to clear it all up. Then we can move forward

>>11727638
>What's the point of making new ones?
As an author, money.
The more important books there are the more the shitty pseud books (99.99%) fade into obscurity.

>>11727638
New, more precise, and more extensive information.

>>11728072
It is incredibly difficult to become (and then remain) an expert in any one scientific field because everything changes so rapidly in the modern age, and there's just so much to know.

>>11727638
in the dutch bookstores 99,99% of the books are shit. write more good books.

>>11727759

>>11727638

>What's the point of making new ones?

To cuck thousands of authors by making people think your book is more worth people's time than theirs.

>>11729821
Just want to say you're one of the few intelligent posters I've seen on /lit/ or anywhere else on this shithole of a site. Maybe 20 guys, max, showing a bit of brain. I've read this sentiment elsewhere as well as a growing problem, than in our specialization we become too distanced to speak to each other, and even within a field too specialized against one another to make further overarching progress. Reality is multi-disciplined. The world is not divided into chemistry, biology, mathematics, and physics. They're all one and the same.
I wonder if this is the "great filter". If knowledge progresses linearly, the intelligence needed to take in the larger picture of all of it increases exponentially. If knowledge increases exponentially, than the required intelligence to process it all the faster. If the average intellectual can master one discipline, and a genius can master two, what happens if the secret to the next step requires knowledge of three or four?
>>11729297
kek
op eternally blasted the fuck out of his own thread

>>11729821
Your mistake is thinking all that information is useless simply because the sheer amount of it cannot possibly all be relevant, but it is. The universe is complex anon, and our growing awarness of that phenomenon is creating the problem you're describing, not the other way around. The information synthesized by the human race in the last 200 years has grown way to numerous for one mind to comprehend. You just want to eliminate the wealth of information so you can Larp as a renaissance man

>>11727653
>>11728403
Do the Swiss also have this folk story? Thought it was mainly a Scandinavian thing.

>>11727872
Watch me.

90% of books are trash

simply read the classics, you know, the books that every other human before you has read and gone 'shit that's a good book'

the odds of you reading a future classic in the modern day are practically zilch as so many of them are utter tripe

plus would you notice if you read a future classic anyway desu?

>>11727638

What's the point of anything?
It's edifying to stand on the shoulders of past greatness knowing you will never equal it.

>>11731509
Thank you sir!

>>11731509
That's exactly my concern. We need to see a completer picture. We can't see that picture if all its pieces are scattered about in different papers and books, 80% of whose content is repetition. So we need some new system to organize all the information. Probably the best way to do this is two disciplines at a time. Map one to the other. All the objects that make up biology mapped on to all the objects that make up chemistry. Ditto with the functions. Processes. Etc....