/lit/ - Literature

>>15466695
/lit/ is the new literary scene.

we are becoming increasingly illiterate as a society. i would wager that it is possible that there will be no 'scene' in the traditional sense in the future, because the social conscious has shrunk too far to appreciate more than one work of literature at a time.

>>15466695
>virtual fraternity simulator.
Based.
>>15467289
Were the 90s Anglo MFA brigade really a scene or just a bunch of similar people writing at the same time (there is a distinction)?

>>15467270
Definitely not.

>>15466695
Our libraries are homeless camps, our universities are bloated hives for bugmen, publishing is comically dominated by women. No, there are no more physical scenes, not really. Frogtwitter is a clique, which are all we have now, cliques of people networked without reference to space, nation, even identity.

>>15467395
How are you making the distinction between a clique and a scene? The group of writers orbiting Stein in 20s Paris were pretty cliquey, for example. You don't get more cliquey that than the Bloomsbury Group. Cliques seem, to me, to be always inherent in any scene.

>Our libraries are homeless camps, our universities are bloated hives for bugmen, publishing is comically dominated by women.

>>15467438
I think there is a difference, albeit a subtle one. A clique forms based on social status, social games, social skills, irrespective of the actual superficial reason for the groups existence. A scene forms when talented people recognize one another and join together, regardless of their individual incompatibilities, around the particular subject the group claims to be focused on.

>>15466695
The internet is the public sphere now, and so much of our cultural life flows through it that it is probably the best place to find the most vital literary scenes.

Places like New York, L.A., London, and other major cities elsewhere in the world still have significant literary scenes but because of the internet, you will find a lot of similar mindsets and sensibilities among them.

But here are some general observations...

>Mainstream Literary Culture
Universities, magazines, government funded arts organisations, etc. all seem to hold the same values. Diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism, indigenous peoples, minorities, and so on. The level of literary genius is unimportant, just the values or the identity that you hold. This is arguably a medieval style network (ala monasteries) of highly uniform and controlled organisations who wear the trappings of "the arts" while in reality they just act in the ways necessary for their continued survival... getting grants from Governments, NGOs, perhaps some customers and patrons, and so on. Like monasteries, the literature that is of highest status is derived from the authority of certain people. For monasteries- these were church fathers and classic authors from an imagined past more glorious and learned than now. For contemporary organisations- this is the moral authority bestowed upon minority groups for their unique suffering, and their authority is derived from an imagined future where things are more equal.

Call it insipid, milquetoast, divide-and-conquer, neutered, or whatever- but this is the least likely "movement" to produce anything of lasting value. It takes up space, celebrates social - not literary - values, and is more of a cultural bureaucracy reminiscent of socialist countries espousing self-serving propaganda. This value system actually does not like the idea of artistic greatness, or greatness in general. At its core, this style of "arts" is an empty, abstract, stripped-down celebration of imperial life- its fundamental story is about the uplifting of outsiders who want to be part of the social order and are willing to be loyal to it.

These values enter into publishing and wider culture, but only so far. Publishing still needs to make money ultimately.

>Contrarian Classicism
The culture war against western art, and the cultural cringe over western imperialism and european culture, leads to a strange situation where studying Shakespeare or the classics or any "dead white male" is a dangerous act. This isn't likely to produce anything of value either. If the mainstream values are an attempt to control, then this is a vapid rebellion where people only defend the past because they believe by doing this, it annoys their enemies. True love and renewal of european culture seems unlikely to come from this politics. But reactionary poetry (and memes) have always been strong forces in cultures, imagining things were better in some past golden age.

The given major city of a country (or state) still has activity, but the sharing element of such a cluster of writers has moved online.

>>15467481
>studying classics is a dangerous act in modern culture
summer

>>15467481
>

>>15467530
he is the ugliest man I’ve ever seen

>>15467481
>Digital humanities
If the old trend was critical theory, the new one is digital humanities. English departments no longer want to LARP as physicists, with complex theories and large words. That is more of a 1970s era trapping of intellectual authority. The sexy thing is now to copy computer scientists, Silicon Valley, and tech culture. It is also a good way to differentiate yourself from colleagues who lack computer skills and new methods, so the humanities are likely - over the next several years - to gradually adopt the appearance and methods of the new big thing. We already see some OuLiPo-esque experimentation, so it's possible the borders between computer science and literature will be fertile ground for interesting software, AI, assisted creativity, collaborative creativity, and similar ideas. People who are living through the advancements in computer technology are desensitised to the profound change- but this is far larger and faster than the printing press was, and in many ways human culture is still far behind the technology and the possibilities. Technology - using it and writing about it intelligently and understanding the new media with the greatest impact - will be the origin of many great "creatives", who may be partly literary, wholly literary, or not at all literary.

>Le I'm hopping on whatever is next after post-modernism
People constantly ask "what's next", as if that is ever really decided until after-the-fact. If you wait for the next scene, or the next movement, or the next milieu... you will miss it. Not least because the question "what's next" is rooted in a modernist view that things comprehensibly or recognisably "progress". Again, the technological change - and the social reaction to it - is the most profound change going on. But it won't necessarily go on forever if the conditions and complex systems supporting it were to break down for some reason. But one thing is for sure- there won't be a sudden intellectual or artistic flowering that decides to do away with postmodernism, garners attention and admiration from all art hoes, and creates a historic movement you get to belong to, full of misfit frens. Sorry /lit/.

>>15467395
>publishing is comically dominated by women
and Jews

>>15467571
You're looking at the Marx of the 21st Century, faggot.

>>15467395
tHIS

WON''T SOMEONE PLEASE HIT THE EPIC WHITE GUY BUTTON ??????

>>15467584
>The sexy thing is now to copy computer scientists, Silicon Valley, and tech culture.
>>15467530

>>15467458
seething

>>15467614
If he doesn't successfully cause the death of tens of millions then I will be disappoint

>>15467289
who's the cripple

>>15466695
the internet has destroyed subcultures, they cycle and are co-opted too quickly to make any kind of purchase on the ground or produce anything of value.
start your own thing, but you've gotta do it in real life. Purposefully exclude pseud narc grifters, but don't make it obvious and do something beyond just excluding them.
Positive creative goals and values, that's the name of the game.
Avanti e Coraggio!

>>15467289
>zadie looking at a manlet with disgust

>>15467395

wtf is publishing really dominated by women?

This could be the single monolithic reason that good contemporary lit is so scarce

>>15468040

>>15468089
its like 80 or 90%

>>15467458
>pic of normal young man with an interest in history
devastating

>>15467289

David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Davide Azzolini, Zadie Smith, Nathan Englander, and Jeffrey Eugenides

>>15468139
oh and Antonio Monda

>>15466695
Frogtwitter is BASED

>>15467571
he's really not that bad
he's a solid 6/10 when cleaned up

>>15468176
has he published anything

>>15466695
I was never able to connect with people as an English Major despite writing for the lit magazine, writing for the university news, and taking part in as much department stuff as possible. I didn’t absolutely hate the other students but they just weren’t really interested in reading anything challenging, it was basic bitch NYT Bestseller stuff or YA (if they read at all). I made good friends with a few of my professors. One was a young guy who I talked about Pynchon with, and he got me to read Underworld. One was an old lady who was a literal genius, she spoke 5 languages and was an expert on anything German literature. I still keep up with the 2nd through email because I TAed for her and we became friends.

From there I moved to a small town where there weren’t many readers, but I found two, both older. One used to be a French professor and she loves Camus and Proust. The other loves 19th, early 20th century realism and modernism, he reads a lot of James, Flaubert, and Chekhov.

I wish I could meet people my own age who are like me (early 20s recently graduated) but at the same time I’m appreciative for what I do have.

>>15468188
If you count shitposting tweets as published, then yes.

>>15468176
imagine him in 30years

>>15467270
I wish

>>15466695
For some reason anything approaching a movement (coherence, interest, the right number of people involved) tends to get quashed on the internet. Remember when /lit/ went through its Delueze phase prior to the /acc/ circlejerk? That could have developed into a real movement (imagine a core group of 6-7 writers taking Deluezian concepts out of context and turning them into short stories/novels. Yet one group of people derided them, and the other took them straight into g acc bait threads. Kierkegaard would say that we live in a passionaless age (recall his metaphor of the skater moving dangerously on thin ice)
The closest thing to a group with passion that I can see is the speedrunning community. We may very well be in the middle of its golden age. People are committed to games they play and lowering those times not because of some warped sense of grandiosity, or artistic pride, or money. They are as close to an artistic purity as anything I've seen. When someone reaches towards heights people cheer them on.
Contrast that with writers and publishing, where everything is a slave to capital. Where either you are beholden to the market or the academy, and while few have the ability to experiment, even fewer are willing to. While speedrunners will incidentally make a living just due to their passion, a writer believes he/she can only begin to really make art after they are popular and have made a secure living. Until then 'improvement' is the ideological word used to denote 'better able to fill a particular market demand' and not necessarily an improvement in artistic craft.

Perhaps the thing is that speedrunners have a really really good way of measuring who's better than the other, while writers can only circlejerk.

>>15466695
The Lit Quarterly is an emerging scene. Even though only two of us have met in real life, we correspond frequently and I'm sure will cross paths in real life at some point.

>>15467289
Only Wallace and Franzen are genuine useful literary figures here.

>>15466695
There is none in Europe/USA. We are unadulterated civilization devoid of culture. Read Spengler.

>>15467289
wow, I haven't seen a group of people posing for a pic this uncomfortable with it

>>15467289
If Jonathan Barth was in this photo then I’d be willing to call it cool

>>15469077
>Read Spengler.
yeah read a century old book to get aware about post-industrial society and it's culture.

>>15466695
Top left isn't a scene, it's Rushdie hiding out in Hitchens's apartment while the Ayatollah tried to have him assassinated.

>>15467289
This isn't a scene, it's a group of winners of some award. Only a handful were in correspondence with one another.

>>15469066
Lit Quarterly is likely just one of several /lit/-based magazines which have come and gone over the years. But good luck, etc.

The idea of physical geographical location is out-dated to the point of being irrelevant. There will probably never been an IRL literary scene, primarily because of the internet and also because of house prices and the degenerating state of major cities. France in its cultural heyday was where a lot of people in Europe went, and even as recently as the 1980s people like Houellebecq were a member of the avant-garde in that city. Now like it or not it's an Africanised-Mahgrebised city, and native white people are leaving in their masses. London is seeing a similar trend, with fewer graduates heading to the city and people there moving out at an earlier average age each year. The poor areas aren't populated by the working class French and a few budding van Goghs and Wagners, but by Africans and Moroccans etc who tend to live among their own and deter others from moving there.

In the past there were more localised regional scenes in the US for example. Look at Breece Pancake and his writing workshop in 1970s Charleston. Or look John Edward Williams, who lectured in Colorado and was part of a regional group of writers attending or orbiting around the University of Denver where they held parties, likely had some kind of regional magazine etc. Kafka's prague. Pessoa's Lisbon. Print magazines are dead, newspapers are in their last throes, and do middle-aged literary men really want to spend their time online to discuss literature, especially when their jobs already likely involve staring silently at a screen for several hours a day? There are still colleges which offer MFA courses, but how many of these courses make sense economically in this day and age? Unless you're getting a free scholarship, in which case you still run the risk of being "that white guy in your MFA" popularised by Dana Schwartz. Fewer men are attending college, and are likely avoiding the humanities like a plague more recently. Plus so much of life goes on online now, and the majority of budding writers will probably at this point be focusing a lot of their energies on creating and sustaining an online "brand" for themselves, so they can tell publishers they have X amount of followers on social media, etc. Whereas pre-internet people were forced to live in the outside world, which caused the formation of literary groups in certain cafes etc, now they can just sit in their rented room and do the same, with their "conversations" either streamed on Youtube or tweeted etc so that everything humorous or clever they say can be quoted and used to gain more followers, more attention, etc.

>>15469487
Why did the previous /lit/-based magazines stop printing people's stories? Why didn't they continue? Is the new one different at all?

I don't think any movement, even one on the internet needs any sort of popularity or pretension to greatness to be a movement. All we really need is a bunch of writers who love the writing itself. All we really need is for a handful of people who write to be a little bit naive, and we'll have a movement on our hands.

>>15469066
No

>>15469393
Sweet Christ I share a board with brainlets

>>15469801
>Can't refute him

>>15467289
Chad manlet making Zadie wet while DFW is cucked and sad.

>>15468040
>>15469838
I genuinely can't tell which it is.

>>15468390
seen his posture in TFWNOGF? nobody with that posture lives very long

>>15467289
>running shoes
>rubber dad sandals
>bright moccasins
>dark moccasins
>leather pumps
>hiking trail boots
>5/10 leather shoes

>>15466695
I think Dublin is an example?

Stinging Fly and The Dublin Review are doing well and have a lot of crossover. Obviously Rooney is the big commercial success story from the stable, and Rooney is kind of boring, but there's also Kevin Barry, Oisin Fagan, Nicole Flattery and Paul Murray who are all making proper careers.

>>15467289
All shit. Wallace is almost good tho

>>15469941
Seeing his awful posture in tfwnogf is what made me decide to fix mine, which was the only thing of value I have got out of both Kantbot and that dumpster fire of a documentary.

>>15470086
>mixing with dublin folk

>>15470103
I wouldn't want to live in Ireland either, but it's undeniably producing better shit than London.

A bit like how Norwich, fucking Norwich of all places, was essential to the 80s crop of British writers - a generation that still basically hasn't been replaced.

>>15469834
Spengler accurately predicted a few important things decades in advance, like the Third Reich ending before 1946, the early 20th century unabashed enthusiasm for maths and science turning into scepticism, or developed countries being more divided accross the urban/countryside line than anything else.

>>15470133
Isn't that because of the Creative Writing program at UEA? I know a bunch of young writers who still want to get on that.

>>15469050
No-one with a developed brain gives a fuck about your twitch streamers rushing through Super Mario 64.

>>15469994
fag

>>15470211
>>15470133
It's only because of the MFA program. It's not as though Norwich has a rich literary history to speak of. Then again, that MFA program produced a few noteworthy authors, general contempt for 'writing courses' notwithstanding.

>>15470419
>>15470211
Yeah, mainly from the period where Malcom Bradbury ran the course. More recent alumni are less impressive, though the place still pulls its share of celebrity guest tutors. I can only assume that in the 70s/80s the creative writing course dogma hadn't coalesced yet.

There was a strong performance poetry scene in my city that seemed to be going somewhere a few years back but has started to fall apart now, becoming overtaken by social justice arts collectives and uni students hunting for clicks at slams. More generally, it seems that any movement is compelled to shed the bulk of its most interesting aspects before it can ever begin to touch the mainstream.

>>15469066
>revealing you don't read

>>15470666
How? How, retard?

>>15466695
>Throughout literary history there have been "scenes."
A myth. There have been gatherings of people who, for a radically brief moment in time, shared conversation while engaging in their own artistic pursuits/supporting the artistic pursuits of others. This is fundamentally achievable anywhere if you are busy enough with your own craft and value the input of your immediate community. And I do mean immediate. Think of how many of the Beats or the Lost Generation were just brothers, sisters, cousins, people who lived next door, lovers, etc. The post-hoc attribution of "scene" to these gatherings is a feature of celebrity and not something inherently special about the assemblage of people. Do you think Samuel Pepy's or Boswell really thought they were making a scene when they wrote down the daily happenings of everyone in their immediate vicinity? You can do this right now, uninhibited thanks to the liberation of meat-space via the internet.

>>15471382
>A myth.
Not really.

>>15467395
Frog twitter is the new lit scene. And they actually write books unlike the faggots on this board.

>>15471463
Really. Mostly bought, sold, and perpetuated by white men who want to feel apart of something but don't have the aspiration, conviction, or strength to make that something themselves.

>>15467571
Curt is a nice family man

>>15471488
Frogtwitter is dilettante central. Nothing of any lasting value has come out of there. Don't bring up that meme book.

>>15471504
Scenes aren't exclusive to white men retard.

>>15471516
I didn't say that, I said they were the ones who most often craved it and perpetuated it. See: yourself.

>>15469393
Holy fuck you retard read old books or keep huffing glue

>>15471508
You won't know if it has lasting value or not for 100 years. Please point me somewhere else where groups of smart people are being creatively generative and growing real interest.

>>15471546
>Please point me somewhere else
But you won't know if it has lasting value or not for 100 years!

>>15471520
Except I'm not white. Non-white people crave scenes as much as white men do. It's fucking stupid to say otherwise and could only be said from a position of extreme ignorance.

>>15471546
Thielbucks and autist-grifting does not constitute real interest.

>>15471585
>I'm not white
Yeah okay buddy.
>crave scenes
Stay craving while you could be creating, whitey!

>>15470086
Dublin? Bloody, ruddy, Brit-stained Dublin?! I have a fairly good idea what the literary scenes are like in the Pale. Middle to upper middle class hipsters, stuck in the mire of ideology, incapable of humour and original thought, buttering toast beside avocados whilst bemoaning the latest inconsequential political incident on Twitter. The priest may be gone, but Paddy is more than peppy to pontificate from the pulpit.

Kevin Barry is the best of the lot. Sally Rooney can keep her Marxian Socialist erotica away from me.

>>15471504
>we know that creative people used to congregate in centralized areas so it didn't actually happen
Wew lad

>>15471609
>noooo it's impossible there can't be browns on my 4channel
Think you need to get outside more bud.
>Stay craving while you could be creating
Not mutually exclusive. Scenes enhance the quality and the rate of creativity, it's why they're so important.

>>15471520
white hands typed this post

>>15471662
>>15471672
Your thread is dying. You mad, whitey?

>>15471826
kek seethe more

>>15471905
>_____ hands typed this
>seethe
White people are so unoriginal. No wonder they lust for the guidance of others

>>15466695
Frogtwitter had potential but became too caught up in posturing and petty squabbles. The whole shitposting post irony aesthetic makes it far too provincial a scene to have any lasting impact.

>>15471229
Those truthful trips stung, didn't they?

>>15472191
>still not explaining how
Still waiting retard. Not gonna do it are you?

>>15472573
Cope

No one finished the burgerpunk project. We could have had something great by now.

>>15472715
Cus it was shit.

>>15471826
I would advise you stop saying 'u mad whitey'. Legions of white men champ at the bit for state approval to expel non-whites. If you wanted to promote peace and understanding (or even the continued subsidization of your peoples existence) I would recommend not further antogonizing da whyte mang.

>>15472829
Sure you are buddy

>>15472902
Sure you are what?

>>15472796
Dude I accidentally wrote the first 30 pages to snow crash without knowing what snow crash was at the time. It was fun.

>>15471610
Kevin Barry is from Limerick as well, not Dublin

>>15472920
OK

>>15466695
Most of these scenes were vanguards in its own way. Any true vanguard has to go beyond its own time somehow, to be innovative or anticipate to the future, and to go against the grain of the values of the moment. What I've been noticing lately is a tendency in certain counter culture spheres towards pretending to go "clandestine", avoiding social media in particular. The best parties are only for the Vips, so to speak. They are still present in the internet of course, but they say things discretely, not only in internet but in their publications, articles, public expressions of all kinds, using codes only a few initiates amongst them can fully understand. This way they share a sense of community and purpose they could not properly have in full exposure. There are more elements in the mix but I think that sums it enough.

>>15473473
>certain counter culture spheres
?

>tfw the ironists ITT
jeez louise senpai

>>15474513
earnestly, who has time for a scene