/lit/ - Literature

Gnosticism gives you superpowers

I don't believe that.

>>17322119
Let's talk about reading speed. How much do you need to read to noticably increase your speed? Have any anons noticed speed increases. For me it kind of plateaued

>>17322119
I read 8000 pages an hour.

>>17322119
Bloom is a hack.

>read book
>go to teach class
>take book and fan the pages
>start talking like you've just absorbed everything
>"yeah no big deal bro can read like a gorillion pages an hour. btw shakespeare is dope"
>put hand on student's thigh
>???
>profit

Bloom had to lie about how fast he reads the same way Bruce Lee had to lie about his speed and martial arts prowess. His career and reputation depended on it. The same way all wrestlers and professional athletes use steroids. You have to become a fraud to keep the game going. This way, Bloom could opine about books he didn't read or only half-read without anyone wondering where he found time to read every book ever made.

>>17322119
It's possible but only a few people can do it. You need photographic memory and high end focus. I've worked with top academics who can do it. You basically don't read the text but look at the page intensly and it imprints the page into your mind just as if you read the sentence one by one and then the meaning of the whole page suddenly appears into your mind, it's difficult to explain. Only a very small percentage of people are able to do it, but anytime you think somebody is so well-read that it appears to be impossible with their citations it's usually the case that they have this kind of ability if they know what they are talking about and aren't just frauding.

>>17322308
>don't read the text but look at the page intensly and it imprints the page into your mind just as if you read the sentence one by one and then the meaning of the whole page suddenly appears into your mind

So much fraudwerk and hokum. So much of it.

>>17322308
>You need photographic memory
Does not exist.

>>17322303
No, it's totally possible. However only a few people can do it. Anytime your eyes go from left to right you're already failing. Same with subvocalization. It takes a lot of practice and a few people manage to do it. You have to look at the page as if it is one single whole without moving your eyes much.

>>17322308
>>17322317
Lmao

>>17322317
I have no doubt that you were bamboozled into thinking its real. Your posts are becoming repetitive, so I felt compelled to tell you that.

>>17322313
>>17322315

I've had an extremely well known academic display this to me in practice (I bet him $1,000 he couldn't do it). He told me to bring any book I like with me that I've read, that I don't think he read and we'll discuss the meaning of the entire book within 2 hours of him reading it and that I can be there the entire time watching him do it. So his field was biology and he was an agnostic and I'm a philosophy/theology guy. I've thought the easiest way to do this was to bring two different volumes of Aquinas' Summa, so I went with that. So I brought the two volumes to him and I watched him and he was just flipping pages for an hour or so, didn't even seem to be reading. I thought he was shitting me but this just kept going on, page after page, minute after minute. Finally he closed the book and looked very exasperated and his shirt was soaked with sweat, desu it seemed like he would collapse. I felt weird and got a little creeped out so I asked him if everything is OK but he said he was fine and just needed a glass of water and that this usually happens when he reads a book from a field he is not familiar with. And then he just said "OK fire away", I asked him how does Aquinas explain the Trinity, what his opinion is on universals, whether the intellect precedes the will or the will precedes the intellect and what is his delineation between philosophy and theology and he managed to answer all correctly and even cited directly what Aquinas said. I admit I was pretty shocked, then he excused himself and said he wanted to go to Church and that was that.

>>17322416
You just made this scenario up to try and validate your perspective. Pathetic.

>>17322416
Anecdotal and far-fetched. It is not believable you watched him flip pages for 2 hours. You also admit you do not know whether he had previous familiarity with the tome. This entire account can be dismissed out of hand.

>>17322416
Anyhow as far as I know he has been a Coptic monk in Egypt for more than a decade now.

>>17322308
>>17322317
Jesus this must be one of the most /x/ posts of the year so far on /lit/

>>17322416
10/10 bait

>>17322460
>>17322420
>>17322441

Not him but I can verify. There is a theory of this going back to the middle ages that medieval monks had photographic memory and were extremely fast readers. It is what is called Lectio Divina but before it became a mystical practice it was a purely practical thing for copying texts faster and retaining information that was very limited in those days. Some of the monks did it for so long they apparently developed this kind of photographic memory/reading skills. It's been told that Aquinas read Aristotle's corpus (what was available at the time) in a single day and had the entire Summa literally in his mind a week later and then dictated it to a scribe for the rest of his life from pure memory. So he might be on to something.

>>17322503
Stop samefagging schizo

>17322416
lame attempt at starting a pasta

>>17322503
Yes there were books on this practice burnt in the Alexandria library, none survived. The medieval monks discovered it by accident (they had nothing to do other than to read, memorize and write for their entire lives). But it goes further back than that. Plotinus was aware of it as was Pseudo-Dionysius. Plato was aware of it and portrayed it with the cave allegory (the modern understanding is banal, Plato had much more in mind and it was supposed to be internal to the schools). Socrates is supposedly the original person who popularized it but it died with the end of ancient platonism. All of those who knew of it were all apophatic in character against true knowledge, because they knew aristotelian linearity and syllogism was ultimately beside the point, a lesser practice against the negative contemplation (non-reading, non-linearity, non-progression, rather taking in the page as One). But Socrates was only the person who made it popular in philosophy, part of why they killed him was because the public believed he was channeling some kind of spirits from Hades, but all he was doing was copying what the Delphic oracle was doing. Did you ever wonder why Socrates a man of complete reason held such a superstition as the Delphic oracle in such a high regard? That's why. Plato then created the allegory of the cave to make this knowledge esoteric rather than exoteric so they wouldn't off him too and it retained that form until Pseudo-Dionysius, whom the monks accidentally copied (he was known to medieval authors but they didn't realize what it was about until they spontaneously discovered it themselves and then called it Lectio Divina). Now to my knowledge it only exists in its pure form in monasticism in Egypt and with the Coptic monks. This was attested to in the Voynich manuscript again esoterically but still after that the interest just died out for it mostly. I suspect Harrold Bloom stumbled upon it accidentally and wouldn't really know the entire history of it. Some people who do nothing but read their entire lives trigger it autonomously.

>>17322575
Περὶ διαλεκτικῆς· οὗ ἡ ἀρχή· τίς τέχνη ἢ μέθοδος.

>>17322575
Bloom knew.

>Bloom illustrates this further by describing, detail for detail, the likeness between Socrates, Odysseus, and Achilles:

>When Odysseus disguised himself as a beggar, he influenced the actual Socrates, the Eros who Daytime, wise woman of the Symposium, called poor, filthy, barefoot. Socrates is not exactly a Platonic Form, visually speaking, though Plato found in him the Form-of-Forms. Both a mortal and a daemon, Socrates is half a good, like Achilles, and a resourceful deceiver, as cunning as Odysseus. (59).

>>17322667
>>17322575

He definitely knew. He got his ability filtered through Plato/Socrates.

>Bloom argues that Plato’s writings on Socrates “set the pattern,” which Bloom translates into the fact that “philosophy is a literary art”

>No other philosopher, argues Bloom, has “been so major a literary artist” as Plato.

He found out.

reminder that its really important to choose what you read. because lets be honest, that guy does not look like he enjoyed most of what he read

>>17322285
>put hand on student's thigh
kek

>>17322119
https://www.amazon.com/Post-Hellenistic-Philosophy-Development-Stoics-Origen/dp/0198152647

>he doesn't know

>This book traces, for the first time, a revolution in philosophy which took place during the early centuries of our era. It reconstructs the philosophical basis of the Stoics' theory that fragments of an ancient and divine wisdom could be reconstructed from mythological traditions, and shows that Platonism was founded on an argument that Plato had himself achieved a full reconstruction of this wisdom, and that subsequent philosophies had only regressed once again in their attempts to "improve" on his achievement.

>>17322416

This is a very well-structured piece of humor and it's a shame that people are taking it seriously, since it's actually genuinely funny and obviously intended to be.

>>17322119
It's called skimming.

>>17322877
Samefag

>>17322119
1000 p/hr = 16.67 p/min = 3.75 seconds per page

How much do you think you can realistically digest by looking at a wall of text for just under 4 seconds?

>>17322416
top kek

>>17322877
the end was genius

>>17322996
>>17323067
Samefag

>>17322956
I can't believe we're still dwelling in this obvious fraud. Don't waste my time. It's bullshit.

>>17322575
based

>>17322119
>Other Americans have been religion makers, down to Elijah Muhammad in the time just past. Smith's difference was not a question of success as such; we are, after all, surrounded still by Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, and Christian Scientists, as well as by Black Muslims, New Age Enthusiasts, and such curiosities as Theosophists, Scientologists, and Moonies. One studies those beliefs, and seeks to comprehend their appeal to those to whom they appeal. But none of them has the imaginative vitality of Joseph Smith's revelation, a judgment one makes on the authority of a lifetime spent in apprehending the visions of great poets and original speculators.
Yes, Harold Bloom read a lot, you can tell because he cites things and shows familiarity with what he talks about. Having read as much as he have, and on the basis of that authority, he says JOSEPH SMITH is one of the most imaginative minds America has ever produced.
>I myself can think of not another American, except for Emerson and Whitman, who so moves and alters my own imagination. For someone who is not a Mormon, what matters most about Joseph Smith is how American both the man and his religion have proved to be. So self-created was he that he transcends Emerson and Whitman in my imaginative response, and takes his place with the great figures of our fiction, since at moments he appears far larger than life, in the mode of a Shakespearean character. So rich and varied a personality, so vital a spark of divinity, is almost beyond the limits of the human as normally we construe those limits.
Mark Twain can gag himself with a chloroform rag, Harold Bloom is right and nobody has the authority to dispute his judgment here.

>>17322119
>A page every 2.777 seconds

lmao i love this board

>>17323269
Even if it were possible to read a page that quickly WHILE retaining 90%+ info (which I honestly doubt) there's no way it would be enjoyable.

>>17322516
>>17322893
>>17323142

Samefag

>>17322119
Have none of you retards heard of speed reading?
You understand they have to actually prove they read the books properly right?
You move your eyes down the page, not across, using the full field of your vision, and you move quickly and don't move back. It's harder with technical or unfamiliar content, but this is achievable. I learned how to speed read from a library book when I was 16.

>>17323667
>I learned how to speed read from a library book when I was 16.
So last week?

>>17323667
The only caveat here is that you don't enjoy what you're reading that much. I don't think you could appreciate the denser texts or the ones with very beautiful prose.

>>17323667
Don't bother me with this nonsense.

>>17323677
What a zinger. I don't know how you come up with such amazing jokes.

>>17323692
I learned how to make zingers from a library book when I was 42.

>>17322877
Correct and fair analysis.

amazing how these “speed readers” contribute absolutely nothing other than declaring their supposed feats

>>17322119
There should be a name for this George Steiner-esque sort of academic who just want to masturbate themselves to the thought of people going "wow, that's crazy!" over their rudderless, for the most part superficial erudition.

>>17322119
It's possible with non fic where they just give you an info dump but with literature it would be dumb. 1 page of Virgil or Ovid is extended to 10+ pages of analysis in ancient commentaries.

>>17323936
>wow you read as fast as you turn the pages you must have contributed great things to the world
*The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy*
>...
>...

>>17323703
Thank god you didn't go for the medical section.

>>17322119
No wonder he always had such shallow ideas about books.

>>17322308
Zoomer bites the bloom bait

>>17324058
And each one about as valueless as the next.

Everyone ITT is coping and still can't prove Bloom couldn't read that fast. Must suck to be a resentful speedlet.

>>17322416
I can do this its not that impressive

>see entire page
>bounce the keywords of the page around head until general idea is attained
>another glance to reaffirm this general idea
>flip page
>rinse repeat

Its like 15 seconds per page regardless of
genre if I actually read every word it takes me 1-2 minutes per page, and it varies by genre

>>17324104
>can't prove Bloom couldn't read that fast
Literally not how the burden of proof works.

>>17322416
Unbelievable that anybody took this seriously, but top good humor.

Bloom was able to read so quickly because the Aura of Election was upon him.

>had a friend who claimed to be super speed reader
>give him a hardcover book I know he hasn't read because it was a dragon book I bought from Lulu that just came out
>he takes it
>holds it close up to his face, squinting
>flips the pages with the book open just the slightest bit
>totally serene
>then, holding the middle-side of the hardcover front and back in his two hands, he suddenly pulls it wide open
>screaming like he's going super saiyan
>somehow manages to pull both covers off at the same time
>core of the book goes flying up into the air
>binding rapidly falling apart
>pages falling everywhere
>he takes a deep breath
>grabs one of the falling pages and hands it to me
>points to a paragraph
>tells me all about what's happening there, and how it all fits in with the wider story
>goes on at length about the whole dragon history introduces
>can somewhat even intuit where the story is going
>the sequel comes out 15 months later
>read it
>he was right

>>17322416
Wow, that’s wild.

>>17322416
What a turn of the screw

>>17322119
He was surely joking. I know bookish type people from the new England area who knew him and say that he read romance novels and never even read Blood Meridian

>>17322119
Unpopular opinion: Harold Bloom had bad taste.

He was an outdated Romantic who often praised kitsch authors such as Tennyson and Jane Austen in detriment of more interesting ones such as, say, Thomas Carlyle, or Robert Browning. This trend in his thought applies to all periods of literature, as can be seen by his opinion that T.H. Lawrence was a better poet than Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (seriously), and his preference for authors such as Saramago over António Lobo Antunes, or Pablo Neruda over César Vallejo.
By "bad taste" I don't actually mean that the authors he liked were bad - they were great, indeed masters, and most often their praise was fully deserved - but that he looked for the wrong things in them: supposed "wisdom"; religious, quasi-mystical "sublimity"; lofty romantic rhetoric filled with adjectives and nice-sounding words that don't mean a thing.
A few years ago, I found myself surprised when reading his chapter on Dante in the Western Canon by how he focused so much on stuff that is nearly irrelevant to me - the character of Beatrice and whatnot - instead of actually going into the reasons that make Dante a great author, which are basically his linguistic genius, his meter, his amazing positioning of the vowels, his vocabulary, his concision, and above all the direct and visual quality of his speech. I understand that he was writing for an audience that can't read the original, but still... Bloom was saying nothing about the technical aspects of the poem, only about idiotic pseudo-psychological, pseudo-religious themes. I had to stop reading.
The thing is that, had Dante been solely a philosophical poet, he would have been forgotten as a minor Thomistic author. However, he was a poetic genius - a genius of the "Italian" language, in all of its intricacies and expressive possibilities -, which is why we remember him.
Bloom's bardolatry is a result of this persistent attitude, because Shakespeare, though a very important playwright, is highly rhetorical and specially easy to make semi-mystical generalizations on.
Also his other ventures, such as trying to prove that this or that book of the Bible was written by some random woman, or that Shakespeare "invented" the human, all of this is a product of his rhetorical mentality. A person with a clear mind wouldn't have produced such drivel.
It even explains why he considered Stephen King better than DFW. This is an opinion that makes sense under his rhetorical framework of mind, though it seems strange to us.

Finally, I consider Bloom's bad taste to have been proven by his bad novel.
No one who has good taste will write a really bad book. When George Steiner wrote a novel, the novel was good. When Samuel Johnson wrote poems, the poems were good. Not so with Bloom. He tried to put a bunch of metaphysics inside a novel, but lacked the craft.

Pound and Eliot were right, their revolution came to stay, and there's little that can - or should - be done about it.

>>17325040
>I know bookish type people from the new England area who knew him and say that he read romance novels and never even read Blood Meridian

>>17325060
PS: I very greatly appreciate Bloom for the noble fight he fought. Doesn't mean that I agree with his Romantic view of literature, though.

>>17325060
>romantic bad
Bugman spotted.

>>17325070
No, not necessarily.

Blake is great. Leopardi is great. Gerard de Nerval is great, though I am not sure he can be really called a romantic. Goethe is great. Some of Wordsworth, some of Keats is good.

The problem is that rhetoric, cliché sentimentality and excessive adjectivation don't go hand in hand with literature. Sorry if this annoys you.

>>17325097
Here is a poem that Bloom considered a fine example of aesthetic greatness, from Tennyson's Mariana:

All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"

The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then said she, "I am very dreary,
He will not come," she said;
She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!"

If you rate that highly, or fail to see the amount of clichés and insipid Victorian sentimentality, I am sorry for you.
If you compare that to the stuff that Flaubert, Stendhal, Leopardi, Holderlin, Schopenhauer, Gogol, or Pushkin were writing at the time, it's just brainless nonsense devoid of originality.

>>17324122
>he unironically follows the Tai Lopez reading method

>>17322119
bump

you have to have impeccable reading comprehension to read a thousand pages within an hour

i don't have it. i have to reread paragraphs a lot of times because my brain sucks

>Harol D. Bloom was actually Spee D. Reader
Who would have guessed.

>>17325250
You're probably just tired. I have the same problem after reading any complex non fiction work for extended periods of time.
>>17322119
Obviously bullshit but the guy talking about the techniques monks used to apply isn't completely fucking around; they had stuff like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_memory

>>17325134
I'm mostly mad that this almost has a good meter, but keeps hicking up every now and again. Then again, maybe I'm not good at reading poetry in English.

>>17322416
>I admit I was pretty shocked, then he excused himself and said he wanted to go to Church and that was that.
You cheeky fucker

I've watched a lot of interviews with Bloom, read a little bit of his books, and I'm pretty sure he's unequivocally full of shit. He's an old fella. He's from the time period when people like Sensei Steven Seagal and Uri Geller could routinely fool the public with their mystic personae. You just can't get away with that shit anymore. Bloom claims to have read at a ridiculous speed and also that he taught himself English as a little child by reading the poems of William Blake.

I don't doubt that Bloom was well-read or that he necessarily has bad taste, but he was so obviously full of shit and despite his defence of the canon, his actual literary criticism and analysis is extremely underwhelming.

>>17325060
I remember listening to Bloom talk about Tom O'Bedlam, anonymous 17th century poem. It's very cosy to listen to him talk about poems. Still, when he got to these lines:

>The meek, the white, the gentle
>Me handle, touch, and spare not;
>But those that cross Tom Rynosseros
>Do what the panther dare not.

He was so blown away by the change in emotional temperature, from "the meek" to roaring "Tom Rynosseros". This was proof, he claimed, that Shakespeare wrote the poem, because only Shakespeare could use the English language like this. In various places he seems to suggest that the self-reflection found in Shakespeare's writing invented the very idea of humanity. I'm writing this off the top of my head so I can't remember specifics, but over the years it's struck me just how poor the guy is at actually analysing and discussing literature, especially novels.

>>17322285
topkekerino

>>17325060
you can't doubt that Dante is remembered equally well (if not more) for the strength of his invention as his linguistic skill
>but that he looked for the wrong things in them: supposed "wisdom"; religious, quasi-mystical "sublimity"; lofty romantic rhetoric filled with adjectives and nice-sounding words that don't mean a thing
"nice-sounding words that don't mean a thing" is the exact description you give of Dante's virtues - it is not his philosophy, not his characters, nor the fable, but just the pretty jangling of the words

>>17322303
Bruce Lee would be completely unknown if mma had been a sport then. The average gymbro with 6 months of boxing and bjj would humiliate the manlet.

>>17325411
His interpretations of Blood Meridian's title and a few other things in it were laughable as well. If the subject is aesthetics, Bloom is a master but beyond that, especially the content of the work, he is annoying.

>>17322416
>said he wanted to go to Church
lel

what a nice fiction

>>17325454
>"nice-sounding words that don't mean a thing" is the exact description you give of Dante's virtues

Go study poetics. I could mention countless examples. Anyone could.

Example from a line taken at random:

>che non lasciò già mai persona viva.

Why is that a good line?
1) because the "ai" (an interjection of pain) is put precisely where it should in order to be most effective: in the 6th line, which is one of the two strongest ones in the Italian eleven syllable verse; this is a precise instance of what I described as "his amazing positioning of the vowels", a virtue which, as you can see, means something extremely specific and verifiable by anyone.
2) because from the strong "a" it then finishes in a strong "i" (pronounced "eeh" - veeh-vah), which is a very correct reduction of vowel openness, which creates not only a more harmonious music, but also leaves a lingering sense of darkness after the scream ("ai") has been given - all of which, of course, is carefully modulated by the three-syllable "persona" in-between;
3) because of it's concision in defining a path that leads to the underworld: "lo passo che non lasciò già mai persona viva". Adjectives? Only "viva", which is not rhetorical, but addictive, i.e., it adds to the noun a property without which the line would make no sense. Adverbs? None. Syntactical obscurity? No, on the contrary: total clarity. Is the description itself obscure, i.e., is the reader left in doubt about what exactly Dante is referring to? In no way whatsoever: the verse is a clear as it could have been; although obscurity has its place in literature, in a narrative poem such as the one Dante is writing,and in this particular moment of the narrative (first canto), clarity of action and of description are important.

That is why it's good, and not because of some strange metaphysical meaning that you may attach to the line, although, of course, Dante himself would probably attach quite a few (up to four) levels of meaning to it, given his poetic theories. However, although the thought is important, it's the images, the music, the clarity and the concision that make Dante a great poet.
His conception of the book is in itself very impressive, as are all the themes discussed by Harold Bloom. However, he could have done all that and failed, if the writing hadn't being good in itself. I could cite many poets who created highly intricate epic constructs, yet failed for precisely this reason.

>>17325652
Just for clarity's sake, could you translate the line? I don't speak Italian, and it would be easier to follow you if I had a translated version of the line.

>>17322317
Subvocalisation is literally how memories are encoded. If you're not doing it you're not reading, you're just looking at words.

>>17325666
"the pass
Which never yet a living person left." (Longfellow)

>>17322416
Based parablist

>>17322285
top bant

I hate words like "chewing" or "digesting" or "eating" to describe reading. It's almost repulsive to me.

>>17325681
I see, thanks.

And I take it, the verse is iambic with a female cadence? So the stresses are on "non", "-sciò", "mai", "-so-" and "vi-", right? Of course, again, as I don't speak Italian, I might get this wrong, but isn't it a slight inaccuracy to have such a word as "già" unstressed? It seems to significant to have it an unstressed syllable, as it even has its own accentuation.
I'm not trying to knock Dante, mind you, even if I probably sound like I do. He is obvious a great poet who very clearly knows his craft. I'm impartial to this discussion you are actually having. This is just something that crossed my mind, as I enjoy a good meter and like to think about it. I assume what I perceived as an inaccuracy is actually just my lack of pronouncing or understanding Italian.

>>17325715
>And I take it, the verse is iambic with a female cadence

No, the verse is an endecassilabo (equivalent of the Iberian decassílabo).
Italian and English have different metrical systems. And not only Italian: all romance languages, as far as I know, use a syllabic system.

>but isn't it a slight inaccuracy to have such a word as "già" unstressed

It's not about stresses. However, there are two main strong syllables: the 6th and the 10th.
And no, it's not an inaccuracy. Also, it's actually only one word, which nowadays is written "giammài".

>I assume what I perceived as an inaccuracy is actually just my lack of pronouncing or understanding Italian

Yes.

>>17325698
RAVENOUS DEVOURING

>>17322285
>put hand on student's thigh
fucking lol

>>17325754
I see. My native tongue is not English but German, just to be clear.
Thank you for your explanation. So Italian metrical systems don't care much about when a word is stressed, there just needs to be one correct stress at the correct syllable count? That seems very unintuitive to me, but definately interesting.

>Lies about his reading speed

yeah, I'm thinking based. If he was a zoomer, he would be posting on this very board

>>17325652
On the contrary, the invention is the necessary element here: you give clarity as a virtue, but clarity is a virtue only when the subject, being interesting, requires it - his poetic virtues are predicated upon the subject
That the invention is far more important than his technical skill is easily proved by the existence (and readability) of translations which naturally preserve the story while destroying the music
We can easily imagine a Dante who is a bad poet - even he would remain an interesting read, a gothic relic - but we cannot conceive one who was a bad fabulist and a good poet at the same time
Books with an interesting conception but mediocre writing can be still entertaining, or profound, or influential - witness the Castle of Otranto or the Poems of Ossian; but one struggles to call to mind a book whose subject is inconsequential but the expression fine - literary developments have always attended a development of subject: the Euphuists were destroyed, and the same fate attends their successors

>>17322119
This is bullshit

>>17325833
I disagree: execution is more important than concept.

>>17326044
concept is more important: all execution is the execution OF a concept - concept precedes execution and determines its form completely

>>17326101
Concept in itself is important, sure. But a concept alone is worthless. A well executed work of art will be always be better than a shoddily slapped together ball of "some good ideas in there".

>>17326126
by no means is concept alone worthless - there are poorly written and tedious books which express great ideas: for my part I would rather take a good conception badly expressed than pretty tinsel adorning a banality

>>17325097
Why is your whole view of Romanticism just "rhetoric, cliché sentimentality and excessive adjectivation"? Romaticism is about nature, emotion, individuality, beauty, and so on. Read Byron's 'Prisoner of Chillon' to see what I mean.

>>17326191
A poorly written and tedious book which expresses great ideas is not a great book. Or can you name a book you consider great, that is badly written but expresses good ideas?
Moby Dick, for example, which is a really good execution for a rather banal idea, is a great book.

>>17322285
KEK

>>17326330
certainly a lot of philosophical books fit the bill - a lot of Aristotle's or Kant's pieces are very tedious but the ideas behind are so interesting that it matters little
On the converse I suppose we have works which have no conceptual information but which are prettily expressed - being music (which I think can hardly compare to its opposite, philosophy) and even its purity was sullied by romanticism
I haven't read Moby Dick so I can't comment on that, but the idea itself is not bad - men attempting to kill a great beast - I had the impression the author ties a lot of his reflections into the topic, "The Whiteness of the Whale" etc.

>>17322285
basado post

>>17326468
I would not call the books of Aristoteles or Kant great. Their ideas are certainly great, but the way in which they convey their ideas is not. We do not read Kant to read Kant, we read Kant to learn of Kant's ideas. But if it's only the concept you are after, isn't it much better to read the wikipedia summaries of a text rather than the text itself? Can you name a great book of which you might aswell just read a summary?

Although, I think we are somewhat doing the ideas of "concept" and "execution" an injustice by separating them in such a clinical way. A great concept without any execution - without a word said to convey it - is as unthinkable as a great execution of nothing. Every work needs, atleast, any concept and any execution. The dychotomy is faulty, since these two are not entirely separable - infact they work with and elevate one another.
Let me explain.
My example for a great execution of a banal concept was Moby Dick. However, what is the concept of Moby Dick? The concept might be the story of a man manically chasing a white whale. That could be said to be "at the core of it". But when reading Moby Dick, you will see that there is much more to it. Melville, seemingly as manical as Ahab, processes the idea of whaling in such a manifold manner, and likens it to so many other great events and ideas - through his writing - that in the end it would appear laughable to sum up Moby Dick as "a book about whaling". But in the end, that is what it is.
So what is the concept here and what the execution? Is the concept that chasing a whale is like all those other events in the history of man? Isn't that what the wonderful execution makes out of the concept? I don't think it would be possible to re-write Moby Dick, thus giving it a different execution, without atleast somewhat changing its concept. Likewise, and probably much more obvious, you couldn't start out with a different concept than that of a man chasing a whale, and derive from it (or build upon it) an execution that in any way resembles what Melville wrote when he wrote Moby-Dick. The concept is the fundament of the execution, but the execution shapes the concept. If Melville would have written differently, then Moby Dick would not be the book that it is, in both concept AND execution.

So I suppose the idea that concept or execution is "better" or "more important" is somewhat of a silly moot point, since it is not even really clear which is which.
Maybe you could say that the execution is "the written text" and the concept is "the ideas behind the text", but then again you would run into the question of what sense such a seperation makes. The ideas of the text are concretely what is written in the text. If it was a different text (as in a different execution), it wouldn't have the same ideas.

>>17322416
Congratualtions, Anon; this is the most filtering post I've ever seen on this board! Funny as hell, and the niggies who took it seriously and got mad showed beyond doubt that they do not belong. Imagine being on a literature board when you have no reading comprehension.

>>17326656
I would, of course, much sooner read Kant or Aristotle than summaries of them because the idea will be distorted along the way - but that is hardly relevant, and really plays more into your idea
I admit the distinction is murky, but that it had arisen so instantly within our heads and is of so great use in composition and the analysis thereof speaks something, I think, to its value: maybe not as an honest delineation, but as a tool - I'll mull over it some time or other
>Go study poetics
Got any recommendations? I'm mostly into older stuff and would like to read period criticism, but a lot of stuff written during the age when poetry was at its highest honestly seems pretty stupid - there is an essay by George Gascoigne the English poet who recommends shit like "just think really hard about the next line bro" - and later on in the 18th century it seems that autistic rules and stale truisms as in "Essay on Criticism" are everywhere - the only book I've really come to admire is Lessing's Laocoön. So if you have any idea of a canon of poetics please tell me

I mean... it depends what your definition of reading is.

First off, many speed readers have a "photographic memory" (I know, kind of a meme -- but they definitely have some advantage they were born with that you will not be able to acquire), and their speed"reading" is actually just speedscanning the information into their brain, and then when you ask a question, they search their archive for the answer. But until you asked the question, they didn't know the answer. It's obviously extremely useful as a skill, but it's tough to call that reading.

Second, even if they do absorb the information instantly (not just retroactively if asked about it), there is just no way you can absorb a page of a novel in a second, or 5 seconds, or 10 seconds even. You may have grasped the information, but you can get that from the wikipedia or sparknotes summary. The prose is literally the point of literature, and it's impossible to actually read sentences at that speed -- you just see keywords. So why read literature at all? Ulysses wasn't written because there was some ancient wisdom Joyce needed to communicate to readers.

>>17322575
Now its starting to get a bit Manly P. Hall.

>>17325134
I dont desire orginality in what I read and I dont mind sentimentalism. I think its just your own personal taste.

>>17322119
if you read Ulysses like that, at tha end you understand only one thing - that someone called Bloom say something XD

>>17325155
who is Tai Lopez

>>17322266
Since starting an online university course a few years ago I've noticed my reading ability improve. I don't subvocalize and I can get the gist of a paragraph at a glance by focusing on the core words and phrases of the sentence. I guess I skim automatically by habit but it feels more in-depth than skim reading. Sometimes I'll zero in on a sentence if it's particularly relevant or go over a paragraph.

The description in the op sounds like the big ups fitness influencers like Jeff Seid use. It's an obvious lie, he would have to absorb multiple pages in a span of a minute.

>>17325833
>Books with an interesting conception but mediocre writing can be still entertaining, or profound, or influential - witness the Castle of Otranto or the Poems of Ossian

That is, it seems to me, just bad writing that hasn't really survived, which was influential due to the bad taste of romantic readers (I haven't actually read the books; I am just assuming from what I've heard about them).

Anyway, as I myself said, the conception can also be impressive: "His conception of the book is in itself very impressive, as are all the themes discussed by Harold Bloom. However, he could have done all that and failed, if the writing hadn't being good in itself."
Can you read a book for the conception, the story, and the overall architecture alone? Yes, but what makes the book great is the writing. I can read a medieval chronicle and utterly delight myself in the stories it tells, but that doesn't mean the writing itself is good: it may even be terrible, and I may have to tolerate a large amount of rhetoric, randomly located prayers, and excessive words, just in order to get to the actual subject, which is what really interest me. Or I may even enjoy the random prayers, as a historical relic, but this interest would be non-aesthetic, and therefore not related to the writing as literature.

The point is: had Dante written like Byron, he wouldn't even have been selected to Bloom's essential canon, which consists of only some twenty five writers. Part of Dante's *interest* may come from the story, and so on; but his *greatness as a poet*, and therefore his canonical status, comes from his use of words and literary technique. A beautiful face depends on a good skeleton below it, but it's not the skeleton that we fall in love with; likewise, a great conception is merely the structure that allows great writing to shine properly.

>but one struggles to call to mind a book whose subject is inconsequential but the expression fine

I don't: the troubadours and the ancient Arabs (of the "suspended poems") wrote very great poetry, but often repeated themselves; the same applies to poems such as Herrick's "Gather your rosebuds while ye may", which is nothing but a repetition of the "carpe diem" theme; and what can we say about translation? "When you are old and gray and full of sleep", by Yeats, is actually Ronsard, but it's still a very great poem. And is not the King James Bible a masterpiece? Yet it has no subject conception of its own: only verbal conception. Even the Greek tragedians simply recycled old subjects, but imbued the with the fire of great poetry.

A great subject might make an interesting book, but only great writing makes a great book. Otherwise all history books would be great. "The Penguin History of the World" is supremely interesting and has a masterful conception, but it's not a great work of literature.

>>17322416
10/10 pasta, I'll remember this one in the next /lit/ humor thread.

>>17327075
>Go study poetics
>Got any recommendations?

Just saw your post. (The poster it replies to is not me; I was asleep).
Yes, in English you could read John Hollander's The Rhyme's Reason, which has a nice presentation on poetic meter and form.
The other ones that I know of are in my own language (Portuguese), so it would be useless to recommend them here.
There are also important poet-critics such as Horace (for classical criticism), Ezra Pound (modern), among countless others. Usually all contemporary poets have at least one or two books of essays. These are very important to read, because they show how the poets themselves understand their craft.

>>17327385
A youtuber. His advice made me very rich.

>>17325757
voraciously devoured

>>17322119
He's a girly jew who is now burning in hell.

By lying through your teeth.

>>17322308
>It's possible but only a few people can do it.
>1000 pages an hour
>16.6 pages per minute
>3.6 seconds per page
>~83 words per second

A human cannot read this rate for even a single second.

>>17322416
Genius recognizes genius

>>17325411
>over the years it's struck me just how poor the guy is at actually analysing and discussing literature, especially novels

It was really apparent to me right away. I think one of the earliest videos I saw of him he just randomly broke out into reciting poetry and everyone clapped their mitts together like he'd just done a magic trick. Good on him for deluding and mystifying plebs, I guess.

>>17328416
To continue the skeletal metaphor, the structure of the bones determines how you may stack flesh upon it: if you should begin with the skeleton of a hog or a rat, you could never produce anything of true value - rather you require the bones of a human creature
Or to make it into English, the subject determines what devices or expressions ought be used to describe it: the force of eloquence depends upon the subject
As for the troubadours etc., they are rather a stroke in my favour: "Inconsequential" does not equal "unoriginal" - the subject was judged so proper a part of writing by the ancient writers that men hardly trespassed outside the traditional conceits
>which was influential due to the bad taste of romantic readers
>had Dante written like Byron, he wouldn't even have been selected to Bloom's essential canon
It might be interesting for you to note that the romantics were the first to suppose every subject fit for poetry: Hugo gives an especially vigorous romantic defence of low or squalid subjects in the preface to Cromwell

>>17328975
>if you should begin with the skeleton of a hog or a rat, you could never produce anything of true value

Of course you could: you could produce a well-done image of a hog or a rat, which would be much superior to a mediocre image of Apollo.
This rhino by Durer is superior to the vast majority of humans and saints ever portrayed in art, even though it is a simple mammal. Why is it good? Because of the painter's skill in showing the subject - a subject which, though rather inane (a fat animal doing nothing), still offers to the draftsman a whole number of possibilities, and the best draftsman will be him who knows how to choose the best ones.

>the subject determines what devices or expressions ought be used to describe it

True, but every subject is worthy of description.
A great philosophy written in unremarkable prose will never be great literature: it will remain solely great philosophy. A great history written in unremarkable prose, such as is the case of most history books that we read, will not be great literature. This is why we say Plato and Pascal were great writers, but not Saul Kripke; this is why we say Gibbon and Suetonius were great writers, but not J.M. Roberts.
On the other hand, a pornographic scene described with the perfect words, the perfect rhythm, the perfect images and in the perfect manner will be great literature regardless of whether it contains "deep ideas" or not. This is why Virgil could be a great poet even when writing about farming, or Martial when writing pornographic epigrams; while the historian J.M. Roberts couldn't be a great writer even when producing the massive "Penguin History of the World".

>As for the troubadours etc., they are rather a stroke in my favour: "Inconsequential" does not equal "unoriginal"

Dante and Petrarch are consequences of the troubadours. The troubadours were the ones who created a whole tradition of poetry written in the romance languages instead of Latin, and their work gradually developed - though slowly and through many repetitions of common tropes - towards the creation of such an intricate and technical art of poetry, that great poets started to flourish all over the romance speaking world.
Dante himself pays tribute to this when he meets Arnaut Daniel in the Purgatorio, and Bertrans de Born in the Inferno. Arnaut's words in the Purgatorio are, in fact, written in the provençal language of the troubadours.

>It might be interesting for you to note that the romantics were the first to suppose every subject fit for poetry:

That is incorrect. "Low" subjects have been present in poetry since the very beginning. Catullus is as "low" as you can get, and even Dante has fart jokes in the Inferno. What the romantics did was just to reject the antiseptic nature of 18th century neoclassicism.

1/2

>>17329239
Finally, I would add that, for an intellectual person, it is *indeed* important that a work of art presents deep, interesting, and original ideas, because we feel more attracted to them, and we feel that they mean more to us than, say, the pornography of Martial. *However*, this shouldn't be mistaken for literary quality. This is quite simply a reflection of our own personal interests, and does not depend on how well the writer uses his language, but rather on how intellectually-inclined we ourselves are.
Similarly, a very religious person might feel that any work which doesn't touch on theology is mediocre and empty, because it ignores what to them is the most pressing and important of all issues: God. But again, this would be just a reflection of that particular person's own inclinations, and not an aesthetic judgement upon the work, which should be based solely on how it depicts that which it wanted to depict, i.e., in the way the words are used to describe the poet's experiences, ideas or emotions.

So I do understand where you're coming from, but in the end I believe that you are taking your own personal intellectual interests - which I myself consider very laudable - when trying to judge the actual literary merit of literary works, which is something that shouldn't be done.

2/2

>>17322119
I bet this fraud was relieved that he died before some zoomer called his bluff and posted it on YouTube or TikTok for the world to see.

Fat phony fails to write one (1) work of fiction to match the hundreds of works he dedicated his life to bloviating over - turns to obvious lies to protect his fragile ego, and idiots on /lit/ buy it and suck him off. Many such cases!

>>17329261
I want to read his novel just to see how shitty it is.

>>17329239
>>17329249
maybe you pursued the metaphor too literally - I would consider a rhinoceros, a strong and awful animal, a good subject - but that is of course beside the point
>True, but every subject is worthy of description.
How does this follow?
As regards the troubadours, I made no offense upon them, but rather they support my opinion - they focused their attention on certain topics, because they naturally imagined certain topics superior to others - a paucity of subject is exactly what I would expect
As regards low subjects, you are of course in the right - even the enlightenment had Pope's Dunciad - but a key distinction remains: that Catullus, when writing about gaysex, never thought himself the equal of Virgil - but the Romantic demands it, because he thinks epic subjects have been superseded even as paganism has been superseded by Christianity: he places low subjects as equal to high ones: and that is surely unique, and rather a result (as they admit) of religious or philosophical or political developments rather than aesthetic ones
It is natural for man to value certain events, things, persons &c. above others; it follows that he will value relations of certain events above relations of others - and this is the very pattern found across the letters of all nations, who have universally placed one subject-matter above another. Nobody will doubt that a skilful poet can relate a low subject well, or that a skilful relation of a low subject is a proof of great ability; but it ought to be equally obvious that a high subject well related is superior to a low subject done equally well

>>17322503
Can you please post some sources for your bullshit?

There were fast readers in antiquity and the middle ages, but most reading was slow. Why? Because it was done out loud. Augustine wonders in _Confessions_ 6.3.3 why Ambrose reads silently:
>When Ambrose read, his eyes ran over the columns of writing and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest. Often when I was present—for he did not close his door to anyone and it was customary to come in unannounced—I have seen him reading silently, never in fact otherwise. I would sit for a long time in silence, not daring to disturb someone so deep in thought, and then go on my way. I asked myself why he read in this way. Was it that he did not wish to be interrupted in those rare moments he found to refresh his mind and rest from the tumult of others' affairs? Or perhaps he was worried he would have to explain textual obscurities to some eager listener, or discuss other difficult problems?

It's a holdover from preliterate oral tradition. Reading stuff out loud persisted. Many letters people received were announced, not given for their recipients to read silently, which is why one has to consider the ancient and medieval letter as a performative act, not just a text. A lot of manuscripts were copied by dictation, not by collation, which explains certain scribal errors.

Copying texts faster was hardly a concern for an intellectual monk. Their texts were copied for them (look up scribal centers /scriptoria in the middle ages). Many authors (Augustine included) dictated their works to a scribe. (Augustine could certainly do it himself, but this was a common practice.) You seem to imply that a monk would be copying the same text over and over (necessitating photographic memory or reading skills) - this wouldn't happen in monastic scriptoria typically; it would occur in secular workshops or places where school books / university texts (yes) were copied for a fee. (See de Hamel, _Scribes and illuminators_ p. 5 on that)

Many scribes didn't even know what they were copying. We can tell because there are odd mistakes or spacing errors that wouldn't be made by an educated person. Yes, there were good scribes, yes many were highly educated. But if you work in this field, you know how a scribe can botch a text.

Finally, I have never heard ofoccult speed reading techniques in antiquity or the middle ages, and I've been studying ancient/medieval literature for over a decade. They had better memories than we do, and there's a lot written on mnemonic techniques. But if you want to say this shit, post where you read it. The first stage of lectio divina is methodical, slow reading of a text. It has nothing to do with quickly assimilating information.
Pic: Hoc opus est scriptum. Magister, da mihi potum. Dextera scriptoris careat grauitate doloris. "This work has been written. Master, give me a drink. May the right hand of the scribe be freed from the burden of pain."

>>17330047
>falling for a larp

why are so many people taking this obvious joke seriously? how much more obvious does it have to be that it's a joke?

>>17322282
>is
You mean was

>Ils savent

>>17329746
>I would consider a rhinoceros, a strong and awful animal, a good subject

That is an entirely subjective preference on your part. Personally, I prefer the rat.

>How does this follow?

Everything is worthy of description as long as there is someone interested in it. Why wouldn't it be? Because you consider it to be "low"? What if I disagree?
I would much rather read a well-written account of a sexual encounter - or a film like Pasolini's The Arabian Nights - than a badly-written account of God - or a mediocre kitsch film like Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ.

>It is natural for man to value certain events, things, persons &c. above others

And I believe it is laudable. I like hierarchies and would also rather read a philosophical novel than a pornographic one, but *as long as they were both well-written - however, if only the pornographic novel were well-written, then it would be my preferred choice*: I'd rather reread Petronius, despite all his filth, than a novel written by Saul Kripke, despite all his philosophical genius.
And I also recognize that these hierarchies are a personal preference of mine: I place ideas, truth, intellect and beauty above all things, but so does the Christian or the Muslim place God above all things. If a Christian deems a work of art to be better than another solely because it describes God rather than sex, then this is a failure of aesthetic judgement on his part, for he is confusing his own sensibilities and hierarchies of values with those of literature.
Also, I believe everyone's own values fluctuate now and then: if I am feeling particularly happy about myself, or preparing to meet a girl, I might prefer Catullus to Homer; if I am in a very serious situation, I might prefer Homer. None of this has to do with the actual literary value, which is in the writing itself, and not in how it corresponds to our personal value system.[1]

>Catullus, when writing about gaysex, never thought himself the equal of Virgil

In the 20th century, many poets have reevaluated Catullus and a few of them concluded that he was not only an equal, but indeed superior to Virgil.
If that surprises you, just consider that Sappho has historically been considered one of the very greatest poets, yet her work mostly consists of lesbian erotica.

[1] Obviously, literary value itself, like morality, ends up being subjective. However, there are aspects such as concision, metaphorical creativity, clarity (or conscious and justified obscurity), originality etc. which have almost universally been considered valuable by writers, critics, poets, playwrights throughout the history of Western literature. This set of values is what I mean by "objective literary value", although I recognize that this objectivity is, ultimately, subjective too - but we have to accept it as an objective fact if we wish to be literary writers, much like we must accept morality if we wish to live in normal human society.

>>17330476
>mediocre kitsch film like Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ.

filtered

>>17322119
Cool. Go read every science text of merit in a year, retain it, and then synthesize it all into a Super A.I. or a cure for cancer or indefinite lifespans. 1,000 pages an hour? Let's say you take it easy and read 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, that's 20,000 pages a week. That's 1,040,000 pages a year. Let's round down and just assume you can do a cool 1,000,000 pages a year. Do it for 10 years and you've now read 10,000,000 pages which is probably more than every textbook and research paper of note written on every major scientific field in the past 50 years. Assuming 950 pages/book, that's still over 1,000 textbooks a year.

>>17330090
I didn't think >>17322503 was an obvious larp.

The post earlier about betting the atheist he couldn't speedread was funny though.

>>17330476
I didn't know 20th c. poets wasted their time debating which ancient poet was superior! How do you compare across genres like that? Epic, elegaic, epigram, invective - who has such a stick up his ass that he wants to organize these into a hierarchy?

If you're preparing to meet a girl, Odysseus's introduction to Nausicaa (Odyssey book 6) is hot as fuck, and it's sad that Ovid doesn't even get a mention here. If the bro was exiled (it's not clear he actually was), it was probably for his smutty suggestions in the Ars Amatoria.

>Sappho has historically been considered one of the very greatest poets
by whom? It's all fragmentary, save one poem (the Ode to Aphrodite). It's great and all, but come on.

>Anon I'm so glad you could take the time out of your busy schedule to help me with my work. Now could you find my copy of the complete poems of Hart Crane? I used to be able to recite his work completely off the heart but my memory just isn't what it used to be.

>>17331896
>I didn't know 20th c. poets wasted their time debating which ancient poet was superior

Yes, literary criticism exists. Surprised?
I was specifically referring to Ezra Pound, who in his ABC of Reading highly praises Catullus, but is dismissive of Virgil.
And William Butler Yeats didn't seem to have liked Virgil either.

>by whom?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho#Legacy

>>17332046
Criticism isn't really just putting writers in some lazy hierarchy. Not really.

ok but seriously
how do I comprehend and understand books/passages more efficiently? doesn't have to be fast, but I want to retain as many as possible

>>17322285
>put hand on student's thigh
kek

>>17328960
Meh, agree to disagree. I like rewatching the interviews where he is analysing, say, The Broken Tower by Hart Crane. Peak cosy.

>>17322416
I have extremely bad hot farts this evening/10

>>17322119
Caloric and logographic glutton. No discernible discernment. No truffle pig.

>>17322119
> was* a lightning fast reader

>>17322275
I read 8001 and one pages per hour, but okay

>>17323667
My parents sent me to a speed reading intensive course when I was 14. During the 5 days I read like 20+ R.L. Stine books using the method and did exams after each on minutiae.
My method was to lead my finger across the page in an alternating, "zig zag" manner, first reading left to right, then lowering the finger down a few lines and reverse. The finger serves as a guide for the eyes. You don't actually read any single word, you widen the field of vision you focus on and your brain actually pieces things together. With this it already took me like 10 seconds per page, and there are more advanced techniques.
It does not sound believable, but your brain can actually cope with that just fine. Don't ask me if it would work with reading actual books of value, as I've used this 0 times since. Mostly because I tend to a) not read in my native tongue and b) it's not enjoyable, it's exhausting. I am half-entertaining the idea of regaining that skill, but purely as a 'skimming' method.
The retention is real btw. At 26 I still remember somebody was driving a yellow pickup truck in one of the books, which was mentioned once but was featured in the book's little exam.