/lit/ - Literature

Its worse anon. Anons wont read the book and say they did by calling it "incoherent rambling"

>>17939952
>reading
>post 2017 /lit/
kek

>>17939997
That must be really bad then, because people weren't reading on this board in 2015 either. It was a bunch of chuds arguing over their differing readings of cliff notes pages.

Is the holy trinity still Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, and Ulysses at least?

>>17940006
>Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow
yes.
>Ulysses
Cancelled for being politically incorrect and un/ironically replaced with Call of the Crocodile.

>>17940025
>Ulysses
>Cancelled for being politically incorrect

I really hope you're joking.

Man, I can't imagine what they'd say about FW if they could actually get their heads around it then.

Does /lit/ still like Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury at least?

>Absalom, Absalom!
Haven't seen a single reference to it in over a year.
>The Sound and the Fury
I see people mentioning it in what are you reading? threads all the time.

>>17940031
I have not seen anyone talk about Absalom for years.
sound and the fury gets some threads every now and then

>>17940041
>>17940042

wow, this board really has gone to shit, hasn't it? What the actual fuck happened? I guess brain-drain was hitting the site in toto for awhile by the mid 2010s, but I always thought /lit/ would hold out longer than this.

>>17939952

>circle diagram appears near the middle of the text with two circles and the letter pi itself
>the proper text runs for exactly 628 pages, or: 2 pi, before circling back on itself

Am I the only one who's made this particular connection or did McKenna and/or some of the other theorists notice it?

>>17940049
What have you read since you've been gone?

>>17939952
We still have a lot of pseuds here who only pretend to read it. Check the pre ious threads on warosu, insanely embarrassing.

>>17940049
>I guess brain-drain was hitting the site in toto for awhile by the mid 2010s, but I always thought /lit/ would hold out longer than this.
We probably did as well as we could, given the odds. Now between the daily /pol/ raids, the Peterson threads and the constant push and pull of jezebel/coffeeposters (fuck this timeline sideways in its bleeding gash for making this dichotomy into an actual thing that makes sense, btw), the board is at its limit. Either they split it between /lit/ and /phi/ or it'll just cement itself into /b/-but-also-kinda-/int/-but-more-pseud.

>>17940031
>>17940049
>>17940006
>reddit spacing
>le haven't been here in 5 years
Stop pretending newfag.
And Faulkner gets around as much discussion here as he did years ago. Lot of people put AA in their rankings in 'favourite books' threads.

>>17940093
That's a pretty clever observation, never thought of that. Interesting reading, anon. Good job.

>>17940097
A lot of stuff. I stopped getting on this site around the time I started college in 2014, just got done with grad school (M.A. in lit, B.A. in lit and history and classics). Because of the work load through those six years, I didn't get much free time to read for leisure, so my I'll just post the things I genuinely enjoyed from school:

>Fiction and Poetry
Sons and Lover - D.H. Lawrence
The Cantos - Ezra Pound
Finnegans Wake - James Joyce
Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
Blood Meridian - Cormac McArthy
Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward
The Invisible Man - Harlan Ellison
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
King Learn - Shakespeare
The complete sonnets - Shakespeare
Faust - Christopher Marlowe
Peral and Sir Gaiwan - The Pearl Poet
The Fables - Marie de France
The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron
Insel - Mina Loy
We Wear the Mask - Paul Laurence Dunbar
Their Eyes were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Becket
The Aeneid - Vergil
The Illiad and Odyssey - Homer
Apocolokuntosis - Suetonius

Non Fiction:
Ordinary Men - Christopher Browning
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin - Timothy Snyder
The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran - Roy Mottahedeh
Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott
Reason and Revolution - Herbert Marcuse
Various works by Lenin
Various works by Cicero
Both of Caesar's books
The Annales - Tacitus
Antiquities of the Jews - Josephus
To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman - Daiyun Yue
The German Comedy: Scenes of Life After the Wall - Peter Schneider
Dialectic of Enlightenment - Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism - John Cooley

There's definitely much more I could put but I'm lazy and these are the things off the top of my head that I remember enjoying well enough.

>>17941616
Ignore typos, typing lists on an iphone is fucking dumb. Also "Ralph Ellison" not "Harlan Ellison". I'm fucking retarded and too tired to post without making dumb mistakes. Insomnia is a bitch

>>17941616

Thanks for the gratification on that circle thing finally, jesus, I was holding out for that (You).

>>17941654
I'm genuinely wondering if any big Wakean scholar has noted this before. It seems pretty specific to not be intentional and there have been many essays/papers on the mathematical concepts on the Wake (though since I'm not at all a STEM guy they usually go clear over my head). Might consult my copy of "Annotations to FW" or "Joyce's Book of the Night" or some other really big books in Wakean scholarship to see if anyone else has noticed this or not.

>>17940006
>chuds
I see the time away has been unkind to you friend

>>17941692
Chud isn't a /lit/core insult anymore? God this place is a foreign place now. Hardly any Joyce threads (if any), people using "cuck" instead of "chud", no threads making fun of Tao Lin fans. It's fucking depressing.

>>17941685

I will be very clear. I have not read Finnegans Wake, but I am the author of this image which I've posted a few times on /lit/. Still, it's something I'd like to do eventually, since I checked out a copy from the library as a kid and learned about the memes.

>>17941708
Pro-tip

Get this book when you decide to read it. It's very helpful. Also, you don't have to read the book strictly linearly because of its structure. I recommend starting with Book I chapter 7 (Shem the Penman) as a starting point to get your toes wet. It's a much easier chapter comparatively and it will get you more acclimitized to the style and language. Anyone that says you HAVE to read it cover to cover hasn't read the book, or if they have they didn't get a single thing out of it and are just flexing that they wasted their time reading something they didn't understand at all.

>>17941685

Since you say you're not a big STEM guy, you should be aware of the very first demonstration in Euclid's Elements: how to construct an equilateral triangle. I read the two-circle diagram as a clear reference to that, the type of stuff Joyce would have had in his classical education, just the sort of thing that might make sense in a dream:

-Pick a point, then draw a circle around the point.
-Pick any point on the drawn circle. Then draw a circle of equal size around that second point.
-Connect the two points and the point of intersection between the two circles. It's a triangle with three equal sides.

There are subtleties here (covered in Heath's classical treatment), but that's the basic idea. Since I'm sharing, pic related is another gloss of my idea on how to approach the Wake, but it's been criticized. When I get around to it.

>>17941734
Vico isn't really as important to FW as some people like to think. He lends the basic structure/central theme to the book but it's not a requirement to be more than a little familiar with his work to enjoy the wake. You're right though that you NEED to read Joyce's other works though. At least Portrait and Ulysses as Finnegans Wake is kind of a strange inversion of those two. Joyce described Ulysses as his "daybook" and FW as his "book of the night". Also, in the same way that Homer is useful for Ulysses, the Egyptian Book of the Dead is important to FW, which is something I don't see discussed on forums and /lit/ much but which is very commonly known and promoted in actual Wakean scholarship, so I recommend at least reading up about it if you're interested. You also don't necessarily need to know a bunch of languages to get stuff from the Wake. That's just extra icing on the cake if you do. You can supplement your ignorance of languages with McHugh's Annotations since most of that is translating puns that are multi-lingual and pointing out esoteric literary/historical illusions (Irish history is extremely important in the Wake obviously). I only know Latin and Classical Greek and I was able to get through it just Fine using McHugh.

I also would add onto your plan that you need to actually read the book out loud and not just silently in your head, and preferably in a mock Irish accent. There's many puns that only work in Irish-anglo phonetics. FW is sort of a love letter to ancient, primordial literature in a way, and ancient literature was always meant to be read out loud. Silent reading is a comparatively new practice.

>>17941805

Neat, thanks! I mostly-knew these points, but the ones I didn't are appreciated.

Also, since the Penguin cover is a detail of the Book of Kells, I've spent lots of time just doing that instead, completely forgetting Joyce.

>>17941699
But you used cuck in the OP...

>>17941734
What else does Euclid of the Greeks say about the philosophical nature/implications of Pi? Because the graph that's in FW is implied to also be a depiction of Anna Livia vagina, symbolizing the fertile birthplace of the world itself. Is there anything at all that the Greeks said about Pi that could somehow connect to that? Or is it completely unrelated.

>>17941841

I haven't read FW, ask ithe erudite anon. good night.

>>17941839
You gotta do your best to adapt with the times, friend. It's a cold world. I'll miss "chud" and "chaz" till the day I die, but I'm willing to say "cuck" if I have to.

>>17941843
If you mean OP then that's me, I'm asking about what else you know about Pi as both a mathematical and philosophical conception and if there's anything remotely connected to the idea of fertility that could parallel what I mentioned.

But goodnight, anon, sweet dreams. Don't go softly into that riverrun

>>17940093
Neat.
>>17941734
>There are subtleties here (covered in Heath's classical treatment)
Quick rundown? I wrote about the diagram a bit here, but I haven't done much active research:
https://www.precursorpoets.com/always-again-another-bloomsday/

OP is a fart sniffer. This is a Blood Meridian board now you big headed loser.

>>17939952
Never have read it, never will read it.

>>17942918
>now
It always was.