/lit/ - Literature

ashiiiiiiiiiiieet how do you do Jump from conclusions to conclusions i can bearly get past 2 internconnected reasoning plateaus must be a iq thing.

David Forest Wallace

>>11929703
Wallace himself wrote in one of his essays that he wouldn’t be writing if he kept a TV set at home.

>>11929703
A man that admitted he was addicted to television and acknowledged it was an enormous vice is your example...

>>11929694
>Choosing to go back to the era of the penny dreadful
It's basically /b/ with less mods and more 12y/os with gore stashes in hardcopy. What about any of that is worth Kafka?

>>11929694
Agreed. The Internet and social media is simplifying and degenerating the English to the point where soon, the younger generations will be at large completely incapable of conveying ideas or emotions sincerely or elegantly through writing.

>>11929694
I don’t want to prove you wrong.

But this does tell you that simply by removing things like television, smartphones, video games, and internet from your regular life will be the first major step towards becoming a good artist. With hours and hours of free time, you will improve much more quickly than other “writers” who are presented with a multiplicity of distractions which you do not allow yourself.

>Hey, name some writers from the last 20 years that compare to the cream of the crop from the previous 5000
Do you understand what you ask?

>>11929694
>Prove me wrong.
g has been falling in the west for 50+ years and will continue to fall as we brown ourselves
>provide good writers from the 21st century
Don't need to, stupid request as there are none. bolano and Houellebecq the closest thing

>>11929783
People like Joyce and T.S. Eliot were famous in their contemporary time in literary circles and were already hailed as geniuses. Not to mention many others. Who do we have comparable today?

>>11929770
You act as if this was any different in their age.

Most people back then just toiled through the drudgery of life and didn't read because they couldn't. The difference between now and then: the idiots/poor can read but they spend it that time looking at pretty lights and clickbait.

OP is mistaking 'more bad writers' for 'less good writers'. Give it a 100 years and you'll have a list of classics, assuming retards dont blow each other apart before then.

>>11929783
Take any 20 year span post-enlightenment and it will include better novelists than anyone in past 20 years

>>11929694
>Pynchon
>Stephen King
>Murakami
>Ishiguro
>Bret Ellis
>Houellebecq
>Garcia Marquez
>William Gibson
>JK Rowling
>Cormac McCarthy
>Toni Morrison
>Alan Moore
>Salman Rushdie
>Noam Chomsky
>Neil Gaiman
>Anne Rice
>Warren Ellis
>Don DeLillo
>Chuck Palahniuk
>George R.R. Martin
>Phillip Roth
>Chris Ware
>John Green
>John Updike
>Slovaj Zizek
>Jonathan Franzen
>Brandon Sanderson
>Rick Riordan
>John Grisham
>Dan Brown
>James Elroy
And the list goes on. Try again.

>>11929694
>Prove me wrong
No, you're correct its because g is falling dramatically in the west every decade and will only fall further as lower iq populations flood in and outbreed the natives.
>Provide me with 21st century writers who stand up to the Greats
can't besides Bolano and Houellebecq.

Evidence:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000470

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/06/05/1718793115
>>11929798
>give it 100 years when iq is even lower than it was in the early 1800's
lol

>>11929798
the difference is that back then, culture proceeded from the artistocracy and the ruling class. Nowadays it proceeds from the bottom because of widespread resentment and skepticism of elites.

>>11929805
I hate to samefag but you should be dragged to death by horses outside the limits of a city witnessed by the Sheriff, religious leaders, mayor and major property owners of your polis.

>>11929805
Every single one of those writers are boomers and from a time when the Internet didn't really exist in the mainstream. They weren't brought up on it and wrote most of their best work before it was so prevalent.

Nice try

>>11929809
no its because g is falling, most famous authors weren't aristocrats at all.
>>11929814
I've got your back anon don't worry its because the humans are becoming schizophrenic retards, you've got a good intuition.

>>11929694
You realise quite often it takes time for great works to be recognized or to gain notoriety. We very may well have some neo-tech Melville writing TODAY that won't be known for decades.

It's too early to tell, and your inquiry simplifies things way too much.

>>11929805
>King
>Murakami
>Ellis
>Rowling
>Gaiman
>Palahnuik
>Green
>Zizek
>Franzen
>Sanderson
>Brown
nice bait

>>11929793
Cormac McCarthy. Pretty much everyone who reads know who he is.

>>11929814
the people that were 'brought up on the internet' are in their mid to early twenties at most. do you really think this age demographic is the one that writes masterworks?

>>11929824
Boomer who wrote his best work before the Internet or at its infant stages.

>>11929833
when do the 'infant stages' end?

The primarily way distraction affects our literary culture is through readership, not authors. Fewer people are reading novels (especially ones written in the past couple decades), which means that writing isn't the career option it once was, which means that many potentially great writers will end up becoming computer programmers or college professors instead of spending their limited time writing the next Moby-Dick.

>>11929805
lol

>>11929694
Sexual excess is the main cause.

>>11930135
Sexual excess has been around for at least ~150 years

>>11930142
You're right.

i gues it makes sense, it's so easy to be a consumer of content these days, rather than create it. also copying stuff is easy so there is less creativity overall: creations are based off of something else much more than they were before-

although, this mainly happens in first world countries, so we should expect that less developed countries produce more content comparatively, and i don't know if this is the case

I don't know if this is the most snowflake teen or the most snowflake grandpa post on /lit/

>>11929694
Bitch, people didn't even knew how to properly read back then. Reading and writing since begining was only for the elite.

Fuck Trump for doing this to literature.

>>11929829
Exactly

>>11929814
Wtf people that grew up with internet still young adults/trens/kids, there's not that much of teens doing great books back then either.

>>11930135
People always had sex like crazy, they just pretend they didn't.

>>11929694
>Provide me with contemporary writers that are comparable to the greats pre-consumerist society.

Why? Why compare them? Two completely different worlds, you said yourself. Why would you force regression?

>>11930395
this, i never understood ppl who think they didnt fuck back then, literally everyone had an affair or two

Wrong, i'm writing my masterpiece, plenty of other anons are too. Literature is only getting better and this century will see the greatest literary expression of all (my novel, of course, but also other authors) because reading is getting less and less relevant (basically irrelevant), the masses only consumes pulp trash that are written in the hopes of getting turned into a film, so real literature, the writers who are trying to build upon the canon, are getting far and between, but see, this is not bad. Back then it was easy to read and try to engage with the canon because it was all they had. Today for an individual to be obsessed with the canon, to read the greats in an age of cheap entertainement, he must have a exceptionally high genetic predisposition to literature, making him way more capable than early writers. He must resit the cheap thrills of TV shows and films, and devote himself to a life of reading, and since every behavior is genetically pre disposed, the genetic expression that makes one select (and enjoy) reading Shakespeare and Joyce as opposed to watching Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad makes the 21st century writers in the 99.9% percentile of creative genetic expression.

>>11930395
>>11930404
>Of all members of the mammalian family, civilized man alone is a victim of an exaggerated and morbid sexual urge, a condition which he has inflicted, to a certain extent, on the animals which he has domesticated and which have adopted his diet, especially the dog. Wild animals in a state of nature practice copulation only at certain mating seasons for the purpose of reproduction. Civilized man practices this act at all times, and in most cases without intention to conceive. On the other hand, so-called savages and primitive races leading more natural lives and who follow their natural instincts to a greater extent are far chaste in their sexual behavior, as noted by Havelock Ellis. Such considerations must lead one to the conclusion that the sex life of civilized men is unnatural and that the excessive manifestation of the sex urge among them is due to certain aphrodisiacal stimuli rather than to natural instinct; among such stimuli are a high-protein meat diet (accompanied by physical inactivity), the use of tobacco, alcohol and coffee, sexually stimulating literature, dramas, motion pictures, conversation, etc. For these reasons civilized man has departed from the natural law, obeyed by animal and primitive races, which requires the separation of the sexes during pregnancy and lactation, for the benefit of both mother and child. Violation of this law may account for the large number of physically and mentally defective offspring produced by civilized races as compared with animals and primitive peoples.

>>11929694
It's the nature of neuroplasticity.

>>11929694
Art comes in many mediums, in many forms, we will not have a great author, we will have a great youtuber(let's hope they stack up in 30 years)

>>11929818
Whats "g"?

>>11930444
based

>>11931807
A theoretical construct for general intelligence.

Nicholas Carr has much to say about this. He's basically doing the job I aspire to do, discussing the intricate ways in which the internet is warping the human psyche.

We have shifted from a print to a soundbite culture and moreover, the way the brain processes information is a function of the environmental constraints which condition the sensorimotor apparatus.

The constant flickering, updating, profuse, splitting, jumping, proliferating aspect of the internet means that long form writing and deep thinking are a casualty of its format. Information comes fast in staccato bursts, and so we no longer take the time to compound and integrate information into a considered, long form exposition.

>>11929694
you cracked the code! now go and live your literary lifestyle and get the fuck out of my secret website faggot

>>11929694
Fuck me OP, you didn't even mull over your thoughts before posting did you?

No one can come up with an author comparable to "the greats" because, as with every medium, they are only "the greats" after creating a legacy.

Do you think people thought of any of those authors, or say The Beatles (inb4 "pfft they're not so great", I mean the legacy they left) as classic or great when they started?

You're basically saying "well (person A) is known as being a master retrospectively. Why aren't they around now?". People probably asked the same thing 100 years back too.

>>11931907
There was a non-zero amount of people that said the Beatles were classic in their own time. Not a great example even though I do agree with you.

>>11929694
Start the new transcendentalist movement where you go out into the woods with your writing tools, books, and liquor. If you make it past the first couple of months you're in the green.

Leftists have always been against books and literature and have tried to portray them negatively in the media since forever. Why have people who read when you can gain a massive amount of misinformed followers who will be completely loyal to you?

>>11932130

>>11931843
The Shallows should be required reading for anyone with an internet connection. It does have an underlying message of hope that your brain can recover getting fucked over by modern media and technology.

>>11931907
Dickens was a massive celebratory even in his lifetime. There's stories of people waiting for the ships to come in from England carrying his stories.

So you want an excellent author published within the last twenty years who also grew up with the internet, which only grew prevalent over the last 15 years?

Lmao ok.

>>11932172
There's nothing wrong with burning the works of Hirschfeld.

>>11930191
>although, this mainly happens in first world countries, so we should expect that less developed countries produce more content comparatively, and i don't know if this is the case
Globalization, that content consumerism you talk about is everywhere. I livei n South America and I don't think it's any less intense here than in the US or Europe.

>>11930135
Then why am I such a shit writer?

>>11932290
Sexual excess includes masturbation. It doesn't say intercourse excess.

>>11929694
>I am genuinely convinced the reason why there are less and less 'good' writers and artists anymore is because of the Internet.
There are actually more. It's just that the novel has become a less popular medium.

>>11929694
>I am genuinely convinced the reason why there are less and less 'good' writers and artists anymore is because of the Internet.
It's mass media in general. Groucho Marx had a pretty funny quip:
>I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.
The internet has brought a further explosion of mass media into our lives, but the phenomenon isn't new.

I wonder how many people would join me if I started a cult based on the contempt of technology, focused solely on farming, reading, writing, debating and generally focusing on intellectual endeavors.
Life monks, sans religion.

>>11929694
>>10868803
Never thought I'd link to /lgbt/

oh I can't.
/lgbt/thread/10865813

>The internet's origins lie in deep state think tanks, back in the 40s and 50s. Dr Norbert Wiener wrote this book called Cybernetics: Communication and Control in the Animal and the Machine(perhaps betraying a certain high modernist optimism). distributed computing networks were designed to maintain the chain of command in the event of a full scale nuclear war. Hippies embraced the discourse of cybernetics as utopian community, leading to intensive cross pollination between counterculture and the military industrial complex and ultimately to the Californisation of the world under the aegis of Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and Co. The protectionist state of the postwar era dissolves into the network and newly dissagregated chains of production made possible by instant digital communication.

>>11932411
Heh heh. Wiener...

>>11929694
The internet has been around for too little for an "internet age XD" great writer to surge, but give it time, the human quirk will ultimately have its way.

>>11932411
There's an interesting essay about the Soviet attempt at a internet. It was supposed to be some kind of missile control system involving the command centers of the Soviet military.

Like most everyday tools, it all started from the inspiration of how effectively kill your enemies and hide your intentions of doing so.

>>11932175
Utopia is Creepy is quite good too. But it is a collection of blog posts you can read for free if you dig into is blog. He's a very good writer and knows the technology well too.

>>11929694
I take it you don't keep up with the contemporary scene. There are more good writers now than ever before.

>>11932411
Was the CIA involvement in the counterculture movement pure a destabilization attempt in the name of protecting the state power structure? Or do/did they know something about hallucinogens that led them to promote their use?

>>11929694
Attributing the cause of fewer great writers to the internet is naive. The type of evidence you request is a consequence of your false notion that all great writers are equally visible across all time.
Consider the following lines of reasoning:
1)There are great writers and shite writers.
2)The standards of quality writing seldom change if at all.
3)Quality writers are read often by experienced readers; are suggested to other readers by experienced readers so that the less experienced may read the quality author.
4)Poor writers are read often by experienced readers; are NOT suggested to other readers by experienced readers so that the experienced readers do not look like retards.
5) By lines 3 and 4, we may infer that quality writers will be remembered by readers for a time longer than that of poor writers.
6) By line 5, we may infer that most of the old writers we readers know about are probably only quality writers.
7) By line 5, we may also infer that we know more poor writers today because they have not been forgotten yet.
8)By lines 6 and 7, we conclude that there is no reason to cite the poor writers of today as an effect of the degradation of writing as we know it because such reasons for that belief existed in the past but writing was nevertheless fine.

Thus, we believe writing is bad only because we see bad writers of today and fail to see the bad writers of the past.

Therefore, there is no good reason to believe that writing is any worse than it was in the past.

>>11932663
>muh free market place of ideas

>>11932391
I'd do it at least for a few months

>>11929722
Because then maybe I too would do great writing

>>11932716
>muh smart opinion are muh argument

>>11932663
It's called the availability heuristic. Low quality writing is almost by definition more abundant than good writing. The availability of bad writing therefore anchors the perceptual bias surmising all of contemporary writing by extension as a category.

So as your eyes are bombarded with unholy poor prose you begin to think all modern prose is that bad.

>>11932663
>The standards of quality writing seldom change if at all.
This is debatable. There are plenty of works that are considered great or good now, but where shat on upon when they were first released.

>>11929807
That really isn't a sound conclusion based on the evidence you provided. Like, at all.

>>11930552
Why are you quoting outright lies? (And politicized pseudo science at that.) Dogs masturbate, chimps masturbate, and bonobos have regular orgies with lots of oral sex.

>>11932391
It's called being a Luddite, and it's nothing new.

>>11932399
Learn to crosslink, newfag. >>>/lgbt/10868803

>>11932830
The quality of writing is more fundamental than whether or not it is 'good' writing. Those works you mention may have been considered 'bad' for reasons other than the underlying form of the work.

I've used the term 'quality' instead of 'good' because it is more faithful to the common thread that ties great works together. I claim that we can find (and disagree) about reasons why a work of writing is good but the quality (underlying form) of the writing is the only reason why we are even discussing why something is either 'good' or 'bad.' It is this underlying form , therefore, that determines popularity.

>>11932574
Shame shit over here. The internet started at DARPA. Turned out to be really useful, so now we use it primarily for porn, secondarily for shopping, and tertiarily for shitposting. It's a phenomenal display of limited self-awareness for anyone to complain about the proliferation of the internet as some sort of scheme or conspiracy FROM the internet itself, and on a site you shitpost on every day. No one is making you come here, you just really like it. There is way too much /pol/ ignorance in this thread.

>>11929800
their lives were arguably much harder so they possibly deserved to have better writers

>>11929800
>Take any 20 year span post-enlightenment and it will include better novelists than anyone in past 20 years
I choose the last 20 years as my post-enlightenment span. Pointing out the nonsense of your statement aside, how many novelists of the past 20 years have you read? Readership has gone down, which means it's going to take even longer for the best writers to be recognized than ever before, but that doesn't actually mean that we have less amazing writers than before, not even per capita.

>>11933147
Life is hard no matter what. You have different problems when you're poor than when you're rich, but that doesn't mean you deserve to write better if you were poor. Pretty much any time after the fall of Rome, most of the best writers were aristocrats or at least sons of professionals. A lot of the best artists in history have been relatively pampered and relatively rich.

>>11929694
plato complained about writing for weakening people's memories.

fact: there are countless quality writers forgotten by time. what we consider to be canon has more to do with our own interests than with the works themselves. e.g. flannery o'connor: hyper-canonical for some time in the fifties and sixties, forgotten today. e.g. zora neale hurston: worthless anthropological novel, until around the eighties when the academies became interested in minorities and she became textbook standard.

there are plenty of competent writers, and even writers with the potential for putting out 'great' material. read chariandy's soucouyant and tell me it's the product of youtube. yes, it's true that there aren't many mature writers in their 20s, but that's self-explanatory.

>>11929805

>>11929694
You just don't know who the 'good' writers are. Maybe some anon is working on the cult classic "My Diary Desu; or, The Book of Disquiet 2, Electric Boogaloo"

>>11931843
Yeah, that's why the jews banned him and then killed...

>>11929708
>>11929710
You guys are clowns for thinking the poster you replied to was using dfw as a counterpoint. The poster was clearly attempting to say that OP's revelation was just a poor attempt at re-wording dfw.

>can't isolate self from internet to be productive because research-heavy work depends on internet
If I could break my 4chan addiction I'd be set.

>>11929793
Pynchon is superior to both. Gene Wolfe (the inventor of Pringles) is still with us. McCarthy is a literary great as well. I don't know about non-American writers of that stature despite being an Eurofag.

>>11929694
>There was no buzzing phones in their pockets or the next best Netflix special or your favourite YouTuber's new genre of comedy.
I do none of those things and I'm not so bored out of my mind as to write a great novel.
q.e.d.

>>11932182
>But wait there were a handful of exceptions!

Well fuck anon I guess you destroyed my argument there.

Comparing the most important authors of a span of 100 years and saying "Ha find a modern example with as big a legacy" is fucking retarded.

>>11936848
Pretty sure the only thing it would change for me is the amount of anime I watch. I'd like it if I watched more anime, but it's not a big deal either way.