/lit/ - Literature

>>21979185
Why don't we ever hear of celebrities being born?

>>21979202
What a useless and inaccurate reply

There's no good writers because there's nothing to write about. Everyone went to school until his early twenties and continued with working eight hours a day to spend his leisure time watching netflix and taking a trip to the local city center occasionally. The West has reached a new Biedermeier epoch. Being as normie as possible is the only thing people dream about.

my diary
but fr tho idk the answer
desu

>>21979185
Will you fund it though?
I am looking for a prince. I want a piece of solid gold for each line. Then I might sing the praises of your State reverberating why there is surelly the greatest place to be in the whole world.

No?

Is there groupies, a least?

An object of art doesn't care if the motivation behind it was ill or good in order to be pretty. Beauty is acessed the same way, be it by the hands of a saint, or the hands of a murderer.
We can work together, if you don't mind my red-wet hands.


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-xOiKNFcbfU

From about 1870 to 1970, the education system gradually transitioned from an education with humanities, and especially classics, as the focus to education with technical subjects, civics, social sciences as the focus. It only went on to become more standardized from there. Everyone’s heard of common core and no child left behind and anyone who went to public school knows just how soulless it is. In 2023, a student could easily get through public K-12 and state university without exposure to even a single Greco-Roman classic and a minimal exposure to literature in general. At the same time, screens increasingly competed for the attention of young people. So the young generations get very little exposure to literature in general and the free time that they might otherwise allocate to literature on their own is instead allocated to the television or the computer or now the smartphone and video game. There was also a burgeoning literature industry back before digital so it was relatively easy to get s job as a journalist or something.

I also think there’s something to the idea that art imitates life and there’s just frankly very little to write about. By the time Hemingway was twenty-eight, he had driven ambulances in Italy during World War 1, worked as a journalist in Toronto and Chicago, moved to Paris and mingled with artists and writers, edited publications and poetry collections, traveled to Spain and Austria, married, had multiple affairs, moved back to America, lived in several states, and had a son. You know what most modern writers will have done by twenty-eight? They’ll have gone to school, possibly moved to a bigger city and something related to literature if they were lucky, but then again maybe not, and they’ll have worked a series of relatively meaningless unrelated to literature jobs. And there’s a good chance they’ll have spent most of that behind a computer screen. If they’re unlucky they’ll have stayed in a hometown or a college town or been a NEET. That’s it. So there really is something to this idea that there’s nothing to write about.

>>21979319
And it’s actually worse than I said because there are so many invisible and unsubtle rules that keep people static. You know, back then Hemingway could just move to a new city, get an apartment, and then a job. Nowadays, you can’t even get an apartment if you don’t already have a job and a specific income several multiples of the rent. Or perhaps the rent is simply too expensive. And it’s not like you can just move to Paris. You need visa sponsorship now. And it’s not like those salons and cafes still exist like that anyway. If people go to school and they struggle, often they’ll go back and forth or they’ll stay in school for 6, 7, 8 years because everybody knows they’re going to end up stocking shelves if they don’t. That’s 18 to 24-26 right there. You figure another year or two of trying to get established in a job. That’s 25-28. Throw in some COVID lockdowns for good measure just because life isn’t isolated and inert enough and you see how all of this is adding up to just totally suffocate life.

>>21979185
Short story magazines used to be a source of income for writers. That’s why Hemingway and Fitzgerald both have large corpora of short-form fiction work. There’s basically no market for that anymore. Sure, you can write novels, but that takes a longer period of time, during which you need to be earning some kind of living, which is difficult if you’re young and not well off financially.

A lot of mid-20th century authors were also better educated and more well-versed in literature than our current generation since it had a more central role in society at the time. To get into a school like Yale in 1923 you had to know Latin and Greek. Fitzgerald went to Princeton. Huxley was from a wealthy, eminent family. It’s not that surprising that a 23 year old (Fitzgerald) who’d spent the previous two decades reading could also write a good book. It’d be like a Zoomer today intuitively understanding how to create a popular YouTube video; they’ve spent years watching them so they understand what works and what doesn’t. It’s practically second nature by the time they go to make one.

A decent novel isn’t just something that you pull out of thin air. Even if all the components are there (exceptional narrative style, plot structure, innovative ideas, and good writing mechanics and style), the author still has to sit down and write it, which can take anywhere from a several months to 10 years. This is difficult for most people to do even if they have the potential to write a great work. Add to this the fact that books aren’t that popular anymore, that the publishing industry spends a lot of time maligning the one group responsible for turning out most of English’s great works, and the motivation simply isn’t there for many would be writers.

>>21979185
Publishing and reviews are all a racket and a club, often used by politicians or for propaganda purposes. Or just payed for.
So things are a bit dry. Same for other forms of media, too commercialized or nepotism.

There is still skill though out there. You probably just won't hear about them currently, most will probably become known as great long after they passed away. People also might be stuck in other mediums in order to find a proper outlet for their works to be recognized, like visual novels or a series of internet/blog posts. Something not traditionally seen in a good light but could have significance for the future.

>>21979319
>I also think there’s something to the idea that art imitates life and there’s just frankly very little to write about. By the time Hemingway was twenty-eight, he had driven ambulances in Italy during World War 1, worked as a journalist in Toronto and Chicago, moved to Paris and mingled with artists and writers

Im no so sure this matters, Proust and Joyce were similar titans in that era and all they did was sit around and Sneed all day.

>>21979339
>A lot of mid-20th century authors were also better educated and more well-versed in literature than our current generation since it had a more central role in society at the time

I dont think think this really follows, now even state level universities have entire departments devoted to classics/literature and there are likely more students filling them then ever before. Not to mention that in the old era for every Ivy league or landed gentry author there was a Hemingway or a Faulkner who came from the middle class and either dropped out or never set foot in a university.

>>21979331
This is really it. I watched that YouTube of Orson Welles bitching about this new thing called passports and how much they limit our freedom and it blew open my head a little bit. People in the old days could really just do anything and there was no way anyone could know and nothing that would stop them.

>>21979331
This. At the bare minimum, to do anything, be it join the army, move to another country, or switch careers, you need to wait at least a year.

This is all by design. There is no spontaneity in the world anymore, only the extremely rich are legally allowed to live lives that normal people would have taken for granted 100 years ago.

We're living in the end times.

>>21979331
>>21979550
Yep, bean counter world is the #1 problem for artists. Even if you're not chasing crazy and dangerous life experiences on the daily, you still sort of need to be around a scene or a center of some sort, which requires cheap and easy access. That is gone. Capital is omniscient. By the way, sir, can you explain this three-month gap in your resume?

Transgressive and/or inspirational figures in normieworld used to be artists, musicians, writers, athletes, but they've all been replaced by entrepreneurs and celebs and pundits. I hate to say it but it really is -- well and truly -- so fucking over.

>>21979481
Do you know Latin and Greek? Most of the 20th century British writers you’ve heard of, ones that attended Cambridge and Oxford, knew Latin and Greek. Same with many prestigious US colleges. Columbia University still issues its diplomas in Latin, a language that the vast majority of its students don’t know and that the university does not make them learn. Who care if a bunch of shitty state colleges have classes departments now? Do any of the students in those departments know Latin and Greek?

Regarding Hemingway and Faulkner, go look up the years they were born in and tell me whether it was more or less likely that they would have read more in childhood than a given child today.

>>21979222
Did you most in another thread recently about students not having anything to write about? I don’t completely agree with your theory, but I find it interesting and wouldnt mind if it was expanded on

>>21979564
How does knowing Greek and Latin somehow predicate being a good writer of literature? Id be willing to bet the number of writers who did is absolutely minuscule compared to those who did not. Besides, English and French are much more complex and nuanced languages than Latin and Greek anyway, so I have no idea where you seem to derive the idea that knowing the classics produces more great literature. I would consider this an extremely minor contributing factor to the modern lack of great writers

>>21979185
cultural stagnation since the 80s. after the collapse there'll be lots of great writers

>>21979719
Because it’s indicative of a general decline in the study of the humanities and literature generally. Regarding its usefulness: about half of English words have Latin and Greek origins. If English is the language you’re working with, a knowledge of Latin and Greek is going to be helpful for both reading and writing.

>>21979463
But it was a world where things were going on.

>>21979746
Things have not stopped "going on".

>>21979746
Not that poster, but a great deal is going on today. We’ve lived, and are living, through historic times.

There are a number of issues, many of which have been raised. Cultural stagnation. A lack of real stand-out talent, since artistic talent is invariably born of suffering, silence, and introspection, all of which are shunned and feared by young people today. I’m not so sure an inability to move is the issue, as like another poster said, you have Proust et al who lay in bed all day.

A real issue, though, is that not many people really read any more. Before the internet, televisions, radio, people got bored as fuck and had little else to do but read and write if they wanted. Nowadays the percentage of people who read regularly is very slim, the percentage who read fiction is slimmer, and the percentage who read serious literary fiction slimmer still. Cormac McCarthy and Kazuo Ishiguro may not be household names, but I think Christopher Nolan is, and Quentin Tarantino. Film has risen to be the dominant cultural art form of the 20th (and, this far, 21st) centuries, and barriers to entry are significantly higher.

Finally, OP, consider that even in the early 20th century writing has never been a ‘legitimate profession’. The vast majority of writers in history had to work a regular day job to support themselves. Some, like Hemingway, or Mann, were journalists, others teachers, others still civil servants or translators or, in Eliot’s case, bankers. The point is that it was very, very rare even in the golden ages of literature to be able to support yourself full-time on prose alone. Many, like Tolstoy, we’re independently wealthy and could afford to do nothing but write all day. Dostoevsky and Melville were geniuses both, but spent much of their lives destitute.

>>21979761
They have. Consider your own life. I’m willing to bet it’s not been all that dynamic. Life, the actual beat and pulse of life, has been extinguished by the internet age and consumer capitalism.

>>21979802
Since when was the average life dynamic by default?

>>21979563
Even entrepreneurs, celebs, and pundits don't really seem to exist these days. Entrepreneurs are either people like Bezos and Musk who were born into it, or they are sketchy youtubers claiming to be self made millionaires despite nobody ever having heard of them and being managed in the background by an "entertainment company" with weird links to the CIA. Celebrities are basically groomed from childhood or non-existent, and when they step out of line they're quickly whisked off to a secret military base ala Kanye where they are kept out of the spotlight till things blow over. Most recent """"pundit""" I can think of is Jordan Peterson, and again, as soon as he started getting big (even though he was advocating the most basic bitch conservative talking points) he was dosed with 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate, whisked off to Russia, and had part of his brain removed so now he just repeats talking points of Israeli Zionists.

And meanwhile all the normal people are just corralled into greater and greater levels of poverty with no real hope in sight. We don't even have a productive economy anymore, it's just boomers charging rents to the minimum wage earning service drones that wait on them hand and foot, and for what? To keep money circulating so the GDP keeps going up? Fuck all of this shit.

>>21979780
So much this. There absolutely are great writers today, except they don't work in books, they work in film, videogames, and anime. like it or not, anime are producing the greatest masterpieces of today, works of pure fantasy, scale, and humanity.

>>21979859
>Most recent """"pundit""" I can think of is Jordan Peterson, and again, as soon as he st

Even he worked for the UN, he is astroturfed as they come.

>>21979873
Yeah that too. Now with internet "algorithms" on every single platform you cant even connect with people or build a following organically online, you just get a curated feed of goyslop poured into your trough to ensure you never have any independent thoughts of your own.

>>21979870
>like it or not, anime are producing the greatest masterpieces of today, works of pure fantasy, scale, and humanity.

Anime and videogames are the modern day comic books. They are not works of serious literary quality.

>>21979485
>>21979550
This is honestly kind of blowing my mind. I mean logically, I knew that passports probably werent always a thing. But I never thought about how recent they really are and how annoying they must have felt at the time. The world has become regulated and domesticated in a lot of ways that most of us don't even think about.

>>21979816
The question you should be asking is since when was it not? I don’t know but it’s not anymore, and it was then.

>>21979929
Imagine living in the days before credit checks. Like you could just borrow a bunch of money, skip town, and keep on doing that your entire life while living in relative opulence.

In fact, lots of social climbers and artists did exactly that. It was entirely possible to make a living just scamming rich jews and rubbing shoulders with the elites.

Now thats all over. People like d'Annunzio or Pushkin are living in inescapable poverty today, without even being able to aspire to owning a house. Two centuries ago, they were spending their days dancing at fancy balls and fucking actual princesses.

>>21979563
> Even if you're not chasing crazy and dangerous life experiences on the daily, you still sort of need to be around a scene or a center of some sort, which requires cheap and easy access.

Ah yes, the archetype of the reclusive author clearly has bene a lie, Pynchon, Proust, McCarthy, Kafka, all in truth were active members of intellectual circles

>>21979870
Don’t know about anime, but I agree movie and game scriptwriting have usurped the novel.

Problem is, it’s probably 10x harder and 10x less worth it to make it as a scriptwriter. Directing is more worthwhile but that’s 10x harder than making it as a scriptwriter.

>>21979929
Oh, I think about it. I’ve thought about it for a long time. It’s been the origin of a lot of apathy.

>>21979185
The answer is unironically capitalism. "Great writers" are artists, and art requires a certain type of person to be able to appreciate it. To put is bluntly, there is just a way bigger market for smut books or thriller books or equally trashy, cheap, but accessible books. Thus, publishing houses prefer to publish and advertise these "mass appeal" books, rather than take books with actual merit but where the audience is smaller. If you look at a lot of authors like Dickens or Dosto, they printed serially, but this form of writing got transformed into TV shows, so the audience that used to read in the form spend their time watching TV now, and those who do still read, as I mentioned, read smut/romance/trashy books. Not to mention universities are now just a big con to squeeze maximum money out of wealthy people's kids for useless classes that give degrees of ever decreasing value, leading to modern "academic" writers to be the kind of nauseating feminist who prints books strictly in the approved thinking of today which no one reads but certain people buy for mere optics.

>>21979948
McCarthy was really not all that receive. The guy was doing all sorts of things, just not talking to other writers or editors.

>>21979938
>toils on the family farm for 50 years
>dies
The dynamics!

dead medium
cultural decay
neoliberalism
materialism
women dominated publishing industry

>>21979948
>the archetype of the reclusive author clearly has bene a lie
Indeed it has. It's a dumb stereotype and does no one any good. All those people were involved in literary pursuits, not just scribbling away in their bedchambers.

>>21979994
Whatever you do don’t look up the medieval French troubadours.

There is no spontaneity in life at all anymore. Even cities today are mostly dead, very little actual activity, most people just stay in their apartments and homes when they're not at work. "Public life" has essentially ceased to exist. If you could time travel back to a city in the 1800s you would probably be blown away by how much activity there is, people just going about, and in comparison the modern world feels like a permanent drugged up haze.

I've heard people say that there must be some time between a book being released and it becoming recognized for its artistic merit or something like that so one could argue that you should just wait. What do you mean by great anyway? Is Harry Potter a great book because it sold well? There's always DFW too.

>>21979222
I kinda agree, but one can say that's just an American/European phenomenon.

>>21979761
Read a biography of a famous writer. Their social lives were completely different. They could go to the cafe and make friends with other great writers of their generation, who would introduce them to famous artists. They were constantly in the midst of historically important literary movements.
If they were poor, it wasn't like being poor today. Their clothes were nicer. Their food was better. Their schooling was vastly better. When they did get a job, they made a good living doing shit like clerical or editing work, or writing weekly articles which brought them real notoriety.
There is nothing like that today. Compared to even 50 years ago, it's like night and day. You can do remote work writing copy or for highly specialized hobby magazines, you can write porn, you can try to write the next Harry Potter. The culture is stagnant and moving only in one very rigid direction.

>>21979222
Not everyone has had that boring of a life, but I get what you mean. If I were to describe a number of life experiences I had before 25, it would sound like something that someone made up. But yes, many of the MFA types seem to have led the sort of life you’re describing where the main tragedy of their lives is that simply nothing ever happened.

>>21980154
Describe them.

>>21980144
What you are describing is still there, just with ecelebs.

>>21980126
I don’t think it is an American/European phenomenon. The same thing seems to be happening, albeit to a lesser degree, in all developed countries. The internet age gave us stay at home lifestyles. It’s the case anywhere there’s an internet connection.

>>21979964
All he did was cope trying to be a scientist. He was nevera part of any literary circle nor active in any artistic institution

>>21979944
I wonder from time to time why the more or less direct patronage of the arts, with artist and patron directly interacting and perhaps even being friends, just up and completely evaporated. Now it's just government grants that get siphoned off into oblivion and/or CIA/DARPA/whatever pernicious think-tank of choice funding the most aesthetically offensive stuff for reasons mere humans couldn't begin to fathom.

>>21979948
>reclusive
Proust was out and about spending all of his family's wealth trying to fuck boys. Pynchon and Kafka were gainfully employed and, while not in intellectual circles, at least interacted with the public in some capacity. The level of solitude and alienation widespread today was unheard of outside of the strictest ascetics.

>tfw regarded by my peers as a pretty good writer
>have gotten some short stories and some poems published
>trying to get my big masterpiece off the ground, hopefully will get the first book published sooner rather than later

Wish me luck, /lit/, I'm going to try and save Western letters.

There are more people reading than ever. Hence Barnes and Noble increased sales. And book sales have also increased. Web novels like Wattpad and Royal Road have taken off. The problem is nobody is writing what YOU want to read. Game of thrones are considered"great" or masterpieces.

>>21980218
>OP is about quality
>immediately talk about quantity as though that somehow means that quality must follow
you are one of the millions of flies that eat shit every day. you cannot possibly be genuine in saying that "my life in another world as a chinese anime blood wizard" and "Harry Potter and the Forbidden Dildo" have any sort of merit

>>21980160
Grew up homeschooled in a religious quasi cult. Left at 18. Was homeless for an extended period of time. Worked all kinds of odd jobs: projectionist, TV production assistant; worked for a big studio doing movie premieres; did political campaign work all across one large state. Trained competitive martial arts and competed nationally and internationally. Lived in New York, San Francisco and LA. Got into university despite having no high school diploma due to community college. Lived a block from Eliot Rodger and was in Isla Vista the night he killed a friend of mine and five other people. Moved to the UK and studied at Cambridge. Had multiple high profile politicians and ex-politicians as professors. Worked as a lobbyist. Worked as an editor. Worked as an administrator at one of the US’s largest libraries. And a lot of other stuff in between. Things eventually slowed down when I finally found high paying, steady employment. I get bored with life sometimes now but I understand that interesting things can’t always be happening.

>>21980218
Onv bait lol. But for people who actually take this serious, poplit has always been around and almost always outsold what becomes great literature. Look at the best seling books of the 20s and 30s, most of the authors are completely forgotten. The George Martins and Stephen Kings of today were the Agatha Christies and Sonclair Lewis of back then.
But what the OP implies is that there was a market for great novelists not that long ago, and authors were respected and widely known. It seems that has completely changed, and withe exception of DFW theres not been anything enduring produced by young authors in a very long time.

>>21980183
The aristocrats of the past had wealth based on land, which meant they had direct inter-generational ties to the community around them, and thus had a vested interest in beautifying their communities. They also competed zealously amongst themselves to have the greatest salons, which meant courting trendy philosophers, scientists, etc. etc.

Now capital has produced a race of bug men who's only real raison d'etre is to make the numbers of them and their patron's portfolios go up. Theyre usually on three different kinds of SSRI and subject to the same economic pressures as the rest of us. At the very top it's either a cabal of intergenerational satanic pedophiles or purely inhuman market forces which are guiding all of this, depending on who you ask, and I'm honestly not sure which is worse.

If it's any consolation, Spengler says that eventually the force of blood will overcome the force of money, when some strongman realizes he can just murder his enemies as long as he's got more loyal followers than the other guy, and all those numbers don't really mean shit. That could take another 100 years though and it won't be pretty

>>21980233
What makes, let's say, name of the wind, less than three musketeers? Rothfuss writes better than Dumas.

>>21980305
Reddit tier bait

>>21979185
These potential writers are making incredible stuff in the world of collage and social media.

What does literary mean

I am unsure if we will actually ever have "great writers" of genuine impact again. The internet is here and we can't just go back, resulting in a population of scatterbrains with even the most promising minds being intellectualy assassinated by devilishly manipulative capitalist consumer culture. Pop literature can perhaps be interesting and somewhat clever, but they are not of lasting impact. Ze end of le history? Is the best thing we can do right now to sit back, read past classics and learn some Ancient Greek? Is there even a point in trying to write anymore if there is no proper cultural grounding? Ist es vorbei? Schluss, aus, Ende!? Over, over. It is over...

>>21980106
Me from a crowded bar in a city

>>21980180
Santa fe is still an intellectual circle. Definitely more than indie publishing

>>21979222
>>21979319
>>21979331
>>21979380
>>21979929
>>21980298
just name the problem already
here: it's modern technology

>>21980234
Hard to believe that all happened before 25.

Sorry about your friend.

>>21980180
Yeah, but he was doing various other things. He had dropped out of college, got stationed in Alaska as an airman, lived in a shack in the Smoky Mountains, had a wife, managed to get literary grants, all sorts of stuff. He also submitted to literary magazines in college so it’s likely he talked about writing with someone.

>>21980334
I think your failure to see what he means beyond the myopic view from a barstool in some big city, where most of the patrons are no doubt scrolling their phones, really just reinforces his point.

>>21980517
Most of it was through age 25. Some was between 25 and early 30s. I appreciate the condolences.

Going out and “doing stuff” is tricky business though, right, because if you want to do it how do you even start? It’s already been pointed out here that some authors lived, didn’t do much, and wrote about the inner life, but they did it very successfully. (Joyce and Proust have been noted. I’d add D.H. Lawrence to that list.) But for every author like that, there’s someone like Jack London, who lived by his wits and got into all kinds occurrences and it powered his art. If I were to give any kind of advice to anyone about getting out into the world it would be 1) Sometimes the world belongs to those who show up, not the most qualified people. That means putting yourself in challenging, uncomfortable situations on purpose to change things up. And 2) Life changing events are often the result of taking drastic action, which is why almost nothing interesting happens to anyone. If a person’s main goal is comfort, nothing much will ever happen to them. A lot of things that happened to me were mere chance, but not all. A lot were the result of me putting myself out there. If you don’t want to live a boring life, you need to go do what’s uncomfortable and ignore your little common sense brain screaming at you to take it easy.

>>21980191
Kafka was absolutely involved in intellectual circles when he was not being a womanizer, you tard

>>21980341
He didnt join Santa Fe until well into his literary career.

>>21980523
>dropped out of college and joined the military
This is legitimately one of the top 3 most common career paths for college drop outs, lol. Its not like being stationed within his own country was some transformative experience that solidified him as a writer. Obviously he didnt draw any inspiration from it for his writing

>>21980566
I only knew enough about the lives of the authors mentioned to prove that guy wrong that they were all recluses. Thank you for the correction.

>>21979944
>>21979938
>>21979929
the best part is that the general population wants more intrusion of civil servants into their life and thinks it's normal to want this.

You have to understand that a republic is an oxymoron: the more the civil servants and merchants abuse the population, the more the population wants to dependent on them. That's because of the propaganda that only the bureaucratic ruling class can make things great again, ie everything must go thru the bureaucrats and their republics.

This sadism from the ruling class and this masochism from the population is why women thrive in democracy. Women can be on both parts of the system now and they love it very much.

>>21980715
He has been there since 1987. He began writing in 1959. Do the math.

>>21981044
I have gradually come to conclude that the entire rest of the world will be better off the day the United States dies. All these ideas you are deploring have American origins. The United States is a unique, hellish blend of congregationalist Protestantism, Freemasonry, materialism, and excessive deference to Jews. It's a toxic brew and it's very bad that they are the reigning hegemon. It has led to all these things: credit checks, bureaucracy, passports, the collapse of the bohemian lifestyle, the end of the aristocracy that could patronize the arts.

America is the Devil. America is the Great Satan. It is the end of history and we're all worse off for that. The rest of the world needs the United States to go away for great things to happen again. Even the Chinese would be a better hegemon. At least the Chinese are awful in a way that's INTERESTING.

>>21980726
It was. Read his Wikipedia page. He says he didn’t even read until he was stationed in Alaska.

>>21980555
I just think realistically there are few opportunities for life changing events.

>>21981142
If it wasn’t the US it would just be some other country. Tech world doesn’t just allow freedom.

>>21980555
Show up to what though? This the thing? I was born in 94 and for my entire adult life I never felt that there was ever anything in particular to show up to. You couldn’t wander to find something either because you simply couldn’t pack your bags and head to another country because of passport and visa restrictions, you simply couldn’t quit your job and move that new city because of income requirements on rentals or prohibitive costs, you simply couldn’t get that job making some expedition somewhere because you now needed a PhD in science to get on the team. Do you understand what I’m saying? Even when you look at your list it’s not entirely you showing up to things but rather some things happening to you.

The rapid proliferation of work-from-home jobs is a testament to just how meaningless and inert modern life really is.

>>21979185
There are. You're just too scared to spend your time reading something that someone else hasn't told you is "great".

has anyone said jews yet?

>>21979185
>WW2
Absolute reality with potential life or death consequences for every action. Sartre said the German occupation was the best time of his life for this reason. Life is incredibly real and vivid when you're staring at death.
>since at latest the 1980s
The tail end of the Cold War. For decades the looming threat of nuclear annihilation had kept life somewhat grounded in reality, even when and where there was little actual conflict or hardship. The end of that situation allowed for a very unserious attitude to life (just have fun and "find yourself" bro). The 1990s were the victory party you have after you've conquered the world. The 2000s were the hangover you get after the party. The 2010s were the ennui you feel when the hangover wears off and you realise your life is pointless.

>>21979954
>>21979870
Could you name some examples? I am not necessarily opposed to the idea that a great deal of creative individuals are now active in this field of newer media like anime and videogames, but how in the hell would you argue that these are the masterpieces of today? Even the most critically acclaimed works tend to be amalgamated or derived from the "classics", be it literary or filmic, and usually do not surpass them in any way.
Take Berserk, Evangelion, or games like Fallout, From Software titles, or whatever the hell is considered a masterpiece - they're merely a postmodern hodgepodge of previously estabilished narrative/visual forms.
And while I enjoy some of them and would be the first to admit that a great deal of creative talent is involved in their creation, they're hardly masterpieces of any sort. More like the best that the capitalist entertainment machine can spit out, like an anomaly, an accidental side product of a machine that is otherwise calibrated to spit out the same inane, bottom-of-the-barrel content that is dictated by market analysis and sales figures.

>>21981265
Yup, bureaucracy and credentialism have drained the world of all its vitalism. He probably doesn't understand because he got into Cambridge and has all sorts of career experience (either high charisma or luck,) but what's a 28 year old with none of that supposed to do in a financially collapsing post-memeflu world besides off himself?

>>21979463
Proust and Joyce were geniuses. If you're not a genius and you want to git gud you have to make your life interesting.

>>21981340
I wish I had joined the army personally. There’s a good chance I might’ve got stationed in Alabama doing nothing but then again I might not have.

I think you guys are ignoring general IQ and attention spans falling off a cliff, as well as how dysgenic and obese the modern populace has gotten. Check out Ed Dutton's channel for more on this and it becomes obvious why nothing great is being made and intellectual/dynamic society has come to a standstill.

>>21981300
Good thread

>>21981406
War surely gives some meaning to struggle, but that's not a good enough reason to like war

>>21981404
There are enough intelligent people left to be writing books. They’re just stuck in programming and banking jobs.

>>21981142
>At least the Chinese are awful in a way that's INTERESTING.
Explain it, WITHOUT Orientalism.

>>21981265
>you simply couldn’t get that job making some expedition somewhere because you now needed a PhD in science to get on the team
This is what bothers me the most.

There are a few. Jared Kobek (Atta), Daniel Matthew (Pervertathon), that guy from Chicago who wrote the book about crocodiles.

>>21981411
You don't actually need to be at war though. You just need a real and credible threat to your in-group. No one actually fired nukes at each other during the Cold War, for example, but the threat was real and ever-present. I don't think it's a coincidence that this period saw an explosion of creativity in all forms of art and literature.

>>21980234
After experiencing death and the outer regions of the human experience I get that feeling too but it oscillates between the extremes so life never becomes painfully boring.

>>21981142
The United States is the most advanced country in the world, so it's just getting there first.

>>21981677
We gotta put knives on the necks of the artists.
There, I solved the problem. Eureka!

>>21981666
No.

>>21980072
Troubadours were already noblemen. Musicians of non-genteel birth worth jongleurs and they were looked down on about the same way a street-busker is today. You have a bit of a point in general, but in this specific case an troubadour’s ability to rub shoulders with the elite was a privilege of literally being elite themselves.

>>21979185
He looks cute even in hospital. I'm fascinated.

>>21979994

Goddam If that isn't what I want to do.

>>21980126
It’s naive to think this is only Europe/North America. The blueprint for modern life comes from post-war Japan and Korea, and the whole system is just farther gone there. China is the same shit for a different master. Every developing country is so stuck in loser status nowadays that they’re unable to make any culture of their own that isn’t reactionary or brain drained away. Reading about Indonesia in the 60s and the amount of intellectual potential snuffed out by poverty or brain drained away is depressing. Nigeria is actually the one place I’m hopeful for, because it’s managed to become its own center through sheer gravity.

>>21981704
>Troubadours were already noblemen
Not always.

>>21981704
>an troubadour’s ability to rub shoulders with the elite was a privilege of literally being elite themselves.
You mean in money and birth or ability?

>>21981731
>Reading about Indonesia in the 60s and the amount of intellectual potential snuffed out by poverty or brain drained away is depressing.
quick rundown?

>>21981406
Everybody was off to the front fighting wars whether they wanted to or not so obviously the hospital wards are going to be empty and the suicide attempts down. If you wanted to commit suicide you would just go to the front.

>>21981601
The west is founded on a teleological view of history whereas the dominant strains of eastern thought presuppose a cyclical universe. Naturalism is a strong intellectual undercurrent in both cultural spheres, but the historical particulars of the idea’s evolution and unfolding into larger culture are quite different.
Eastern spiritually of all stripes tends to embrace volunteerism whereas this is anathemic to mainstream Christian thought.
There’s more but these are some fairly strong points of departure.

>>21981733
You can’t just say a word means what you want it to. Troubadours and Trouveres are a very specific type of artist: they composed for courts (which they themselves were members of) and concerned themselves with courtly love (metaphorical unpacking of Neoplatonism). There subjects and writing could only come from educated members of the gentry writing for leisure. It’s not just a catch all term for medieval musicians. There was different vocabulary to mark musicians of common-birth, which tells us the distinction was given some attention.

Too much pollution and entertainment, I won't elaborate

>>21981265
I get what you’re saying. I suppose was thinking in part of things that happened that I didn’t list. For instance, I once decided to go to a board of trustee’s meeting for my community college because I’d heard a contentious administrative issue was being discussed that night. I did this despite being tired from being at school all day (I considered not going). While I was there, civil unrest occurred between a large body of students and the campus police, which was then covered by major news outlets. I ended up making friends with people involved in that event (other students) that I’m still friends with 10 years later. The following year, while working at a newspaper, that experience served as a backdrop as I interviewed a state legislator responsible for introducing a statewide initiative to implement a policy similar to the one protested at the board of trustee’s meeting I’d attended and that had initiated the unrest, and in fact was the reason I’d taken up the story. This was all because I decided to go to that meeting that one night rather than stay at home. Something similar happened again five years later when I was living in San Francisco and thought it would be interesting to go to a contested event being held at UC Berkeley, where I ended up filming a group of protestors breaking into a bank and my video was featured prominently online. A lot of what’s possible in life is heavily dependent on the context, yes. (Notice how in the first example it was contingent in my being in school at the time.) But at the same time it can also depend on you showing up or not when there’s a little sliver of opportunity there.

With regard to making drastic changes by just up and moving to another town: well, you could just do it. I did it. That’s how I ended up homeless the first time as a teenager. I wouldn’t recommend it but it shook things up. I left the little midwestern town my family was in and moved to a large city. That sort of thing has always been a problem, and so has money. People keep noting Hemingway here and how he moved around and did a lot of things, but he was also very poor for much of it (until he later married a woman with money) while also voluntarily putting himself into precarious situations.

>>21981677
>We need more exception and crisis to get over the ennui of our constant age of crisis and exception
We haven't not been at war in the west since 9-11. What we need is a break and maybe the ability to buy a house or change careers without a 100k barrier to entry.

I'll never understand the anons ITT that think their life will suddenly have meaning by becoming a zogbot. Like if they get their dick blown off by an IED they'll somehow finally be secure in their masculinity. Weird shit.

The art from that period wasn't even good, it just got cooked into the ideological background of the new world order. What kind of historical amnesia does one need to suffer to seriously think that leave it to beaver and the grateful dead were the apex of western civilization?

>>21981744
I feel like I’m not qualified to do anything other than muddy the waters. My knowledge of it comes from Asian Studies and Economy classes as well as “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” by Perkins. Perkins was on the ground there at the end of the Sukarno presidency and the transition into the Suharto dictatorship.
Basically it was one of the first colonies to achieve an independence movement. Dutch learning had saturated the capital and larger cities and there was a large class of intelligentsia, and things were extraordinarily optimistic. Indonesian students benefited from Sukarno’s realpolitik in that they could study abroad in both Soviet and American spheres, and - mixed with the already multiethnic and multicultural canvas of Indonesia - this gave the intellectual culture a distinctly broad and open character. All this was completely crushed out with Suharto.

I’m not doing a great job of explaining this and I probably come off as a histrionic - but I remember one particular comment here about Indonesia that has always stuck with me, some tourist said he hated how no one there read books.
All the ones who did read books were killed our brain drained out - and that’s the fate of every developing country in this day and age. The reason Nigeria gives me hope is that the sheer gravity of its population and internal resources has allowed it to dodge this fate to a degree before unseen. (This isn’t to say Nigerians AREN’T brain draining out in some numbers. And of course the country is also many ways a lawless shithole. But since a lot of this thread is concerned with bemoaning how safety has seperated us from art, danger seems to be a point in Nigeria’s favour)

>>21981854
> I'll never understand the anons ITT that think their life will suddenly have meaning by becoming a zogbot.

Because being in your 20s feeling like you’re doing nothing worthwhile doesn’t feel good. You’re feeling yourself and your life just slowly slipping away and it’s as though there’s nothing you can do about it. If nothing else, joining the military makes “something” happen. Also a lot of people lead very atomized lives, and the military offers some sort of community. I’ve never been in the military but the whole thing makes a certain amount of sense.

Because top selling books are really just money laundering so there's never any discussion or talks about great writers coming out with new ideas or thoughts. It's simply money laundering or temporary grifting on a subject.

>>21979185
can't get published because not woke enough and brown enough

>>21981700
Yes.

>>21981913
>Also a lot of people lead very atomized lives, and the military offers some sort of community
You are a retard who just discovered the word atomized and you have no idea what community vis-a-vis the military means, you retard. You are just parroting platitudes you heard thanks to recruiters

>>21979870
>like it or not, anime are producing the greatest masterpieces of today
look no further for the crystalline-pure peak of damage wrought by the fall from grace society has felt in the past 80 years than this single snippet of a post on 4chan

>>21981854
>becoming a zogbot
I just said the exact opposite. You DON'T have to join the military or go to war to get the benefits of a society under existential pressure. Learn to read before you reply.
>>21981913
I can see the appeal, but again it's not really necessary. A lot of the most creative people from the Cold War era never personally served, but the gravity of the situation is still present in their work.

>>21981854
A war can obviously give you some sort of meaning, or at least necessitate not confronting meaningless. When it’s do or die, there’s no way to sit around and think about lack of purpose. Your purpose is to survive and win the war. It’s built in.

As for the military outside of peacetime, I think there’s always a small group of military personnel that will get the action described above, war or no war. But what the military really does for people is give them the right experience that qualifies them for meaningful work later. It gives you the biography you can point to at 33 and say “look, I’m qualified to run for office, or to publish this book, or to do this job” whereas the typical 20-something has nothing to point to besides like shitty retail work that no one is impressed by or cares about. So it doesn’t confer meaning but it opens doors that can.

>>21981704
Rich kids today go to college and work at banks. The point stands either way because it was about human freedom, vitality, and dynamism.

>>21981789
Why is a teleological view inherently worse?

>>21981850
It’s not about being poor it’s about being possible. Hemingway wasn’t homeless today, you’d be homeless. And homeless doesn’t even mean the same thing. Homeless in Paris in 1920 means getting free lunch from your publisher friends at a care. Homeless in Philadelphia means getting jumped and mauled by pitbulls. You couldn’t even get a place, even if you had cash, because you didn’t have an income.

>>21982066
Well, I wouldn’t know because I didn’t say it was worse.
Do you just read every reply here as innately biased to Asia?

>>21981850
I guess I feel like nothing ever came together for me like that. When I look back, I don’t see much resembling a story.

>>21981862
What exactly do you see in Nigeria besides a big population though?

>>21982007
Nice of you to make fun of me for using a peculiar word then bust out “vis-a-vis.”And I know all about the military not because of recruiters but because I’m from a military family. Go take that big brain of your and teach yourself some manners.

>>21982082
You said that China would be better and when pressed why you said that it doesn’t hold a teleological view of history.

>>21982107
>zogbot family
Unless you served, fuck off, faggot

>>21982111
Oh, I was just another person offering a view of why China is different.

>>21982091
I think it’s in the position to make art and become a center of culture in some ways: some of the reasons why are problems in a political context, but the original conversation was about how stagnation and apathy is counter productive to art.

There’s social stratification, internal wealth, tons of students being educated abroad and then returning to the country, a general atmosphere that reminds me of the jazz age of America. From what I understand Lagos is the center of most film and music in Africa as well. Particularly in music, there’s a mixture of international influence as well as regional idiosyncrasies (styles, instrumentation, tonality) and I think there’s promise in that synthesis. It seems similar to how Dvorak viewed America when he wrote the New World Symphony. To be optimistic, the country seems in a position to make something new and exciting.

>>21982119
Lol. Are you lost or something? What’s someone like you doing in /lit/? And why do you think “atomized” is a complex word? Mentulam ede, pathice indocte.

>>21979719
The vast majority of vital western thought was written in Latin and Greek. The archetypes at the heart of our culture are found in the Illiad.
Knowing Latin and Greek means having access to the things at the depths of ourselves as westerners, even if we don't consciously realize it.
>>21979339
There's a couple short story magazines being spun up again, pulp is making a comeback. Might be worthwhile to look into. Old Moon, New Edge Sword and Sorcery, Whetstone, etc. There's potential, GRRM has singlehandedly strangled the epic novel.

>>21979185
I feel like this is mostly caused by the fact that not many people read anymore and those who do are not reading literary fiction. Even for the small portion of readers who do like literature, they are mostly stuck reading the established canon and are not seeking out new works (with the exception of those written by hold overs from past generations like McCarthy and Pynchon). Becoming a literary author in this day and age is such an unachievable pipe dream its likely most artists with some level of talent or ambition give it up because they need to make rent in their overpriced 1 bedroom apartment. ITT most anons are focusing on the lack of anything to write about in the contemporary world but I dont buy that. Many great works of literature are about fairly mundane parts of every day life at the time of their writing. There is no doubt a wealth of stories waiting to be told; there is just no market for people who want to read them.

>>21981300
Does that make the 2020s the period of suicidal ideation, then?

He explains literally all of this.

>>21981666
>two first names
ngmi

>>21982424
QRD?

>>21981325
The writing in anime and video games is 90% derivative drivel. There are some very well done narrative works, evangelion and cowboy bebop somewhat impressive, Fallout New Vegas also has some very well written characters and factions. But in general there is nothing in terms of narrative abd characterization that stands even remotely close in those mediums to the literary giants of the past. I think they are more likely to attain high art status in the way that films can be high art, but in terms of literature they aren't the same thing.

>>21981666
Lol Kobek is a meme writer who no one save a select few internet cave dwellers regard. He is not even remotely close to the names mentioned in the OP

>>21982376
maybe it'll wind up being the decade in which we decide that, as a wise gimi (pbuh) once remarked, as long as you have more drinking days than hungover days you're okay. maybe this will be the era in which we knowingly throw so much away for nothing other than the thrill of it. it seems that way.

>>21979185
It is nearly impossible for truly great writing to exist in modern society because the sense of a higher purpose/power (not necessarily religious) is lacking, and unfettered honesty is not permitted to exist. As a result everything feels hollow or lobotomized.

>>21982081
NTA but you are far too enchanted with the romantic side of their lives to see reality for what it is. I've also been homeless, trust me you can find out ways to mitigate the negative experiences.

>>21980072
I'm sure they made up a sizeable chunk of the population.

>>21982811
I really don’t think I am.

>>21983022
The only way you could verify this observation is by actually being in Paris during the 20s, conversing with both the publisher and the man himself, soaking up the literary atmosphere and having a through knowledge of the surroundings you're in. You have none of this (unless you're a time traveler or more than a hundred years old). What you have instead is a catalog of received impressions floating around in your mind, ready to be used as a skeleton for your latest argument. Things were different back, medicine was not nearly advanced as it is now. Look anon, I understand that things have changed and they will continue to for as long as the Earth abides. What we can do is continue to persist.

>>21983197
That’s the thing. I don’t feel like I’m persisting so much as I’m just floating.

>>21983241
Yeah that's a terrible feeling, just bouncing around. Honestly there isn't any solution other than doing the work you're supposed to, even if it gives you no joy. I went through that feeling from the age of 17 to 28 and it was hard. Eleven years of struggling under this mental malaise. Everyday was like waking up with morning wood but having no way of climaxing.

>>21983264
That’s kind of where I am at. I thought I found an out at around 28 but I’ve not had much success in that area.

competition has basically been completely eliminated from western society. capitalism has been totally replaced by a kind of big state economic management. and yet everything is fake because we all pretend otherwise. theres nothing to write about because western society has no forward momentum. theres barely any real wealth creation, the money doesnt even represent anything tangible, its just printed and inflation is controlled through interest rates. the inherent fakery has rendered creativity null. there is no spontaneous creation only circling the drain. the west has not experienced any real sense of city, architectural, or technological innovation for decades.

>>21979319
The first paragraph is spot on. Bring back mentors and classical education. The idea of a single tutor mentoring a child consistently throughout their developmental/school years needs to become popular again.
35 kids in a classroom = less learning and less personal attention to each student and less personalized teaching plans

>>21980010
>women dominated publishing industry
What makes this a terrible thing? I'm not against you, but I'm not sure how to explain it myself to why this is a bad thing

>>21983635
Did you know the largest employers in most states are a hospital chain or a university system? Really think about that for a second…

>>21983656
35? My typical high school class size was somewhere near 50. My college course size? Regularly 100-300.

Because there are no great people to write for.
It's a society that revolves around tearing things apart and making them worse. One must not simply give birth to a child. They have to rip it out of there, mangle it, eject it with a saline solution. One must not simply get an education and then a job. They have to earn favor from a bunch of rainbow faggots in suits, tow the party line.
The good news is that our conservatives have enjoyed a huge success that nobody asked for, bringing back child labor!

What do you write to a world like that?
"Fuck you!"

>>21979331
>>21979563
>>21983801
We live in a bureaucratic world and it sucks. Everything is monitored. Everything is counted. Nothing goes unnoticed. All problematic or abnormal behavior is reported and corrected. Do not vary from the plan or you will get administrated.

>>21979291
id rather kill myself than read something you wrote, even your melodramatic little reply was a fucking dull slog to get through. this (you) is the most reward youll ever get for your exhaustingly faggy prose

>>21979564
This is ridiculous. You honestly think, just off the top of my head, Latin and Greek knowledge was vital to Dickens, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and so on? Whether they had an education or not, their primary influences would have been their peers and the generation that wrote before them. Quit coping and seething ya dumb fuck.

>>21980343
The problem is not modern tech but the systems trough which that tech comes to be.
A vaccine falling into the hands of an ill tribesman may not be a problem, the systems which a vaccine requires in order to come into existence are the disasters which the industrial revolution has caused.
Read the material again.

>>21979185
There are a lot of these threads lately. Here is my take on it. There are no profound artists or thinkers anymore simply because no one has anything profound to say.

>>21984764
I’ll add on to this. This whole thread is in agreement that we currently live in an era of entropy, creative sterility and consumer slavery. Therefore, great works of art in the 21st century must reject this global paradigm and tell stories that explore its negative effects. So why hasn’t anyone done this? It seems like a fairly obvious solution. My own story that I’ve been working on for years is my attempt at doing this by exploring the younger generations born this century.

But the one thing that people in this thread are missing is that there’s not just a lack of great artists, there’s no room for them to exist at all. Even if someone makes a truly amazing 21st century novel it won’t be influential or welcomed by any intellectual classes. Cinema and television are now far more significant than literature when it comes to narrative storytelling in modern life. So why try to write something great at all when everyone will just wait for the film adaptation? Why write a novel exploring our age when it’ll just be condemned as reactionary or bigoted and shunned by everyone?

So Edward Dutton's argument of dysgenic decline of IQ seems appropriate here

>>21984817
Lol how can people take that pseud seriously?

>>21979185
women have destroyed western civilization

>>21979331
>>21979550
>>21979563
>>21979859
>>21979929
It’s all unironically part of an agenda to tie the peasantry to the land once again with the internet serving the same cultural locus for our ties of fealty as the church was in times past. Whether or not the agenda actually exists as a codified set of agreements and set tactics towards a communally set goal, the bourgeois Geist moves in a wave across them all simultaneously. That’s why the fed is printing money like it’s going out of style with no foreseeable end. The plan is to collapse the dollar. Do you really think they’re stupid enough to not realize that? Once the dollar is collapsed there are two options with a little room for a mix of the two. 1) the wealth of the new gentry will serve as their de-facto right to rule and a new monetary system will be established in which they will have direct participation on a political level as some of the foundational necessities are within their control: water supply, energy supply, transportation, etc. They won’t be foolish enough to attempt some grandiose gesture like getting rid of the constitution. Rather, they’ll use their newfound stranglehold on essentials as leverage in the power struggle against one another now that all pretenses of money are out fo the window and the direct political competition with one another in separate economic spheres is the only path towards further acquisition. Or 2), more likely in my opinion, the e-dollar will be created to take the dollars place and the world’s reserve currency will become a blockchain wherein personal data on one another will be the implicit backing. Now that the middle class has been annihilated and a vast peasantry is forced to either work or starve the forces of production are no longer the restriction on trade. The bounds of value are set by data. Each e-dollar and e-wallet will keep a psychological profile of the consumer and the entirety of the market will be driven by A.I. dominated futures algorithms that compete with each other over which can more accurately guess the sexual and social depravity to which the consumer will succumb. There will be more than enough products. So many that entire consumer nations will have to be bred with comfy non-jobs that only transfer money in their small isolated circles so that the consumer drones can spend them on goyslop which goes right back into their paycheck from GoyslopMoneyWashersInc. You can already see the trends leading here everyday. Trans people are one thing. Going on Reddit or Discord to see “‘memes” that are just gay porn promoting trans shit is genuinely horrific though. It’s blatant mindwashing just because some algorithm figured that it was an untapped market with enormous growth potential. get it? Heh Of course, most of this later spending will be on debt and as such a formal transition from 2) to 1) is much more likely than the collapse of the dollar straight to 1)

>>21984764
Leftist intellectuals defending liberalism? No, they're just liberals defending liberalism.

Isaac Wood was pretty good

>>21982211
Insecure cope. Retard.

>>21979563
>By the way, sir, can you explain this three-month gap in your resume?
Brutally spot on :'(

>>21986007
Who?

>>21984867
I think the bourgeois does want to be a new aristocracy, but not a blood and soil type one. They don’t want the peasantry on the land.

>>21984529
You’re missing the forest for the trees. The point is that people were classically educated and cultivated as human persons, which is a prerequisite for creation.

>>21979185
I think a big factor is that the publishing industry is dying because it can't keep up with the internet. Readership is "high" but the only books being published are fantasy novels and the same generic novels written by POC authors about issues in their community boring cover impact font title non-offensive anything. Why would you even want to become a published author these days?

You give:
>100% of the effort in writing a book, entirely in your free time, completely unpaid
You get:
>An extremely rigorous selection process for what gets published (AKA not you)
>10-20% of the profits of the book (not enough to live off of with the economy's current state)
>No marketing (you have to do this yourself)
>The publishing company owns your name (if your book bombs, you can never publish another book anywhere else)

I have a friend who writes fairly eloquently with interesting topics, constantly rejected. I had an English professor when I was in college in her mid-40's bragging about how after ten years of applications she was finally getting her first book published.

Meanwhile, you go on the internet, there is such a plethora of literature to read for free, with much better avenue streams for the authors. You lose out on the "prestige" of being in a bookstore with a published book, but in exchange, you have writer freedom. The next great novel might already exist. It's just probably buried somewhere within Amazon Marketplace, AO3, Royal Road, as a self published novel that got overlooked.

>>21987400
it's clear we need some kind of gatekeeping, because you look at wattpad and it's an overflowing sewer. no one has stomach to dig through the shit to find a few gems. but neither is tradpub fulfilling that role. they reject good novels and throw idpol pandering and trend du jour schlock at us. our "nobility class" are uncultured negrofucking decadent trash who twerk to tiktok videos, and our democratized avenues are full of prodigious amounts of unfiltered raw sewage from deranged morons and equally retarded users who gobble it up. the thinking man has no representation.

>>21979870
Too bad they're always totally lacking in quality to their predecessors, since the masses have become even dumber than before.

>>21987482
what can we do with this?. who should be the actual gatekeepers?.

>>21987482
I don't think there's a need for gatekeepers, because then the gatekeepers decide who gets to write. Literature should be something completely open to everyone, which is why the wild west of self published literature is effective. The only issue is finding good works. On one end you have 15 years olds writing bad erotica, and on the other end you have failed authors who actually have somewhere they can put their uninteresting novels. Somewhere in between is good, readable, literature, it's just that there's so much there's no real way to find it. Still, infinite freedom seems better than an extremely narrow selection. Give it some more years and I think it'll evolve into something worthwhile. This new age of internet writing can lead to a new writing movement.

>>21986980
They want to be a transient aristocracy that owns a couple rental properties in various "cute little town"s and collects electronic payments from tenants they never have to see, while they are waited on hand and foot in exclusive vacation destinations by a transient stream of milquetoast wagies who's names they never need to bother to remember. And if anyone steps out of line they're crushed by the full weight of the omnipresent police-mommy-state, because after all, /they/ didn't oppress that violent and dangerous wagie, they're just passively existing in a comfortable state of opulence. Besides, their parents payed 300k for them to go to a /good/ school and get a /degree/. They /earned/ their place in society.

>>21987620
>Somewhere in between is good, readable, literature, it's just that there's so much there's no real way to find it.
im not the guy you are responding, but thats the problem. thats why we need the gatekeeping, and i talk like a reader here. we need some crazy guy with good taste who read shit after shit after shit of the self published maremagnum and take our the little jewells for us. but somehow we never have that. and tradpub, like the anon say, its simply a joke, they are like tv producers.
>This new age of internet writing can lead to a new writing movement.
seems like you are new to this. people say that shit since internet was mainstream. but what we have twenty years later?... if your premise is correct we would have not only two or three big authors but an absolute stream of content and readers. i feel that absolute freedom, and i dont like to say it, but it ends in boredom and inactivity. nobody want to eat shit with no credential all her life. the problem here is that there is no a complex and honest and sincere imaginative writers different from one another, we have freedom but everyone do more or less the same shit. so you end up tired and without enthusiasm of read basically the same voice one time after another looking for that two or three strange and unique writers. thats why we should need some stubborn piece of shit who believe in the great works or have a vision, its the only way i think like a plausible solution to this problem. i even start to think it can be even a good business model.

>>21987482
>>21987605
What we need is to hoist up new gatekeepers. Roberto Calasso said that the first job of a good publisher was to act as a discriminatory reader.

Personally I've been pumping out a bunch of self-published translations of interesting historical documents. Currently working on a series of books about the Soviet expansion in Central Asia, all the books are already available online but I'm trying to offer decent formatting, cover design, and appendixes with maps, correspondences, essays, etc. etc.

Might be a waste of time, but I think there's a real need to for publishers that someone can look at, and say, "That! That must be a good book, if /they/ published it."

Something thats been brewing in the back of my mind anyways. Id be interested to hear if anyone has any thoughts.

>>21987638
Denoso Cortez described the bourgeois as the discussing class. I still think that’s true. They’re the people that want to have steering committees, and assemblies, and various sorts of organizations to get together and make a fuss, and they want the whole world to sort of be kept at home filing paperwork to leave the house and gaining licenses. The only difference is now there’s a technocratic bend, and a demonic sort of one at that. You’re right that this isn’t and never will be an aristocracy of the land, and as long as they’re in charge no peasantry will ever really be peasantry. A underclass of peasants hooked up to computer screens is the most dystopian vision of the world I can imagine.

>>21987649
The issue is that the crazy guy with good taste, even when he does find something good, doesn't necessarily have the pull to publish it. I mean, some random writer on royalroads, especially if their book is good, why would they trust some random guy on the internet to "publish" their book? It seems like you'd need to be already established as a publishing company in order to do this.

Also, to riff on your ideas, it seems like publishing has been seriously left behind by modern media. I mean, how many publishing houses have a decent youtube channel? If you look at writers of the past it was full of drama and flashiness, writers would diss their contemporaries, get in duels, fuck the hottest women in the country, etc. etc. Now when you think of a writer, its a middle aged PHD with a tweed suit and a limp dick.

What I think literature really needs is its own WorldStar, its own TMZ. There isn't enough drama to keep the normies hanging on, and I really don't know how to reconcile this with 'serious literature'. But Rimbaud was smoking opium and getting in shoot outs during his glory days, so clearly it can happen.

>>21987666
>doesn't necessarily have the pull to publish it.
the shit is already published. i was talking about self-published books. the hypothetical crazy guy only have to point out that this specific work worth your time. if he really have good taste, the ball grows alone and more people trust in him. i was talking of online content. but its just an idea. we need people like that.

>>21987666
>and I really don't know how to reconcile this with 'serious literature'.
also, yes. i totally reconcile it. we have burroughs, henry miller, bukowski, even faulker and hemingway, writers can be easily be romanticized. we just live in cynical times, and thats the problem with current literature. they all look like buraucrats (and they write like them...) but there is space to grow precisely because of that. but i dont know, i am 33 now, and i think about this since i was 20 and nothing really change.

>>21981854
>We haven't not been at war in the west since 9-11.
Not real war. What we're talking about here is when everybody in the nation knows and feels that they're in danger. Hasn't happened in the West since WW2.

>>21987653
That's a great endeavor. It's driving me insane how much academic material we are losing because a university keeps it locked up behind a paywall for 50+ years until it fades to dust. And besides that, it's 2023, the internet is global, and we can't get decent translations of important works despite bilingual people certainly existing and even having college degrees, but they're not assigned this task at all, they don't know it exists, and everything is stagnant in bureaucracy and paywalls. And at the same time when we could be funding this, we'd rather send 500 billion to american pavement apes or slav-on-slav proxy wars. Our "leaders" both political and cultural/academic have lost the plot.
>>21987666
only recently have agencies begun using email. and they still think a pdf attachment will give them a virus, and demand you paste the body into the email (only american agents demand this). I'm certain most of their processes could be made far more efficient with technology, but the boomer dinosaurs in charge still cling to stacks of paper and hand-shake queries where you have to know someone or lick ass well to be considered. The people in power are stagnant and need to fucking die.

>>21979870
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq5z55IdMVo

There up and cumming writers such as myself. Give me a few months I'll have a schizo draft ready for you.

>>21984030
>this (you) is the most reward youll ever get for your exhaustingly faggy prose
Your mom also felt 'exhausted' after I did her, anon. kek

>>21985550
same difference in the current year

Critique of materialism has been done. Writer's today love to smell their own farts, hence all the advice books. Advice from money to love. What we're lacking is a story that encompasses the appeal to "authority" or rejection of it.

>>21984794
>Why write a novel exploring our age when it’ll just be condemned as reactionary or bigoted and shunned by everyone?
Maybe we need only a bit more of momentum. A new generation have to feel the bad effects for themselves, birth rates falling, so on. Only then can begin a honest look for answers.

>>21987653
It’s necessary, but much of what is getting to the publisher is just not that good anyway m. The truth is that young male demographic is just not that interested in reading and they’re especially not that interested in writing. It feels like the internet just fundamentally changed everything m and so doing things the old way is noble but futile.

>>21988021
> What we're lacking is a story that encompasses the appeal to "authority" or rejection of it.
wtf this means?

>>21988055
Sure, but literature as a medium has been with humanity for 3,000 years. Even when we write long form effort posts on 4chan we're engaging in a tradition of letters that goes back to the Byzantines at least.

Maybe the old way of doing things isn't worthwhile, but is it impossible to envision new ways of doing things? The publishing house has only existed for about 300 years, maybe it's time to start looking towards the future? And what does that look like? Lots of intellectual types of Twitter writing for substack these days. Idk, it seems lazy to just throw up our hands and declare the written word dead.

>>21988261
It seems to me that what's missing these days is a profitable literary culture.

So what does that mean? Well there are lots of lone wolf authors out there, cranking out solo projects, but it doesn't seem like there's a easily recognizable community of authors who are circlejerking/criticizing one another. So that's needed. And how do these people communicate? Is it through tweeting at each other? Or maybe long form emails published in the form of a "correspondence" book? Basically for literature to be cool, there needs to be an insider club, with groupies hanging around at the margins to have sex with, and even more captivated normies who are watching the whole thing unfold as spectical. That's the culture part at least.

And it needs to be literary. Which means it has to be in active dialogue not only with contemporary authors, but also with a 'canon', perhaps Bloom's western Canon, maybe something else. But without paying homage to this historical legacy it's not really literary, just a regular old circlejerk.

And finally it needs to be profitable. That means add revenue. It means speaking engagements. It means books which sell more than a thousand copies regularly. It means that someone can make enough money writing to do dick all the rest of the time, and hang out in cafes with other authors sucking each other off, or that they can afford to head to whatever global conflict is going on and write a shitty pamphlet from the front lines, and that needs to cover their airfare and hotels.

You see where I'm going with this? None of this requires a bunch of rich yuppies in New York or Paris talking about TS Eliot with their fellow Cambridge graduates. but it does require.... Something. And I'm not sure yet what that something is, but unless our generation can find it, literature might as well be dead.

>>21979185
What else is left to say?

We've had enough

>>21988293
you can't have criticism circles anymore. look at reddit. you get BANNED for giving concrit. it's a bland hyperpoliced assrubbing circle for midwits who need their mom's supervision to use a kitchen knife. in the modern environment you can't have the kind of banter you get on 4chan (or spicy goodreads reviews) because people cry and whine and report you and then crybully brigade you for fwwwwaaaaaaaming them

the problem is the modern populace doesn't deserve good literature

>>21988293
Now we're talking real, my man.

>>21988293
>You see where I'm going with this? None of this requires a bunch of rich yuppies in New York or Paris talking about TS Eliot with their fellow Cambridge graduates. but it does require.... Something. And I'm not sure yet what that something is, but unless our generation can find it, literature might as well be dead.
I like the urgency in your speech.

>>21984794
>But the one thing that people in this thread are missing is that there’s not just a lack of great artists, there’s no room for them to exist at all. Even if someone makes a truly amazing 21st century novel it won’t be influential or welcomed by any intellectual classes. Cinema and television are now far more significant than literature when it comes to narrative storytelling in modern life. So why try to write something great at all when everyone will just wait for the film adaptation? Why write a novel exploring our age when it’ll just be condemned as reactionary or bigoted and shunned by everyone?
Wish I could refute this.
I've been writing in english for quite a few years now; at first to translate some early rubbish I'd written in my first language and to improve myself, then as I convinced myself that I'd die miserable before my writings received any acknowledgement in my homeland. Nowadays, I'm plagued by the thought that this possibility is no longer restricted to my poor third world shithole, and that I would remain obscure in a world laser-focused on social media content and watered down movies and tv shows, or that everything implodes before I even get the chance to publish, and the more I read about the state of the world and try and envision what may come to be, the more they grow.
Worse still, whenever I dared talk about my writings to some people, some which I trusted (some which I still do, in spite of the disappointment) as honest friends, and some whose trust I meant to test a little. To this day, I think only three have shown legitimate interest, and only one has read everything I sent their way (one of which is quite understandable due to health conditions). At least they've loved what they found.
It really appears that this post-modern world has no space for literature, and lord knows whether this is a cycle or worse... Yet here I am, writing anyway. 153 pages, notwithstanding random scribbles and ideas I'm yet to write about. I can't claim I've been efficient, seeing that I've been working on this for four years and nearly a half, but then I have written and rewritten, developed some things and trashed others, from simple passages to entire chapters. These characters and their world have been populating my mind ever since, and I think there's more to my stubbornness than mere pity of otherwise silencing them.
There are some things I wish to communicate.
It might be a slow effort, and perhaps mankind will implode before I even get to print one copy, seeing that, so far, I'm so clueless on how to proceed that I haven't even contacted any publisher...
I'll stop here because I feel I'm just about to drive in circles, and I think I've said what I wanted to say about this: I've been despairing, deep inside, but somehow I haven't become hopeless. Somehow, I'm persevering.
Sorry for the huge blog, I just felt I had to.

>>21988363
can you criticize my shitty book?

>>21979185
Could also be that less people read books. "What makes one great is what they read, not what they write. " - Borges

>>21984764
what a profound insight

>>21979319
People like to shit on NEETs but ironically our lives aren't all that different in terms of activity. The wagies can afford more starbucks and steak dinners, that's all.

>>21979944
Aspiring writers have a patreon page and get donations. Several of young, aspiring writers earn unbelievable money, 300k+ dollars a year just from patreon, not counting merch or books sold on amazon and audiobooks. Those who are good (as in, write what people want to read) can be successful. Those who are uninteresting perish. It has ever been so. It is so today. All else is cope.

was the 1990s the end point of cultural commentary? in the late 90s there was a common theme of "modern alienation". books/movies like fight club, where the general feeling is that nothing really happens anymore and you won't get satisfaction from society. after that there isnt much to talk about. culture has never moved on from that feeling.

>>21989390
>Those who are good (as in, write what people want to read)
I could write 200k words of foot fetish erotica and make more money in a year than Edgar Allan Poe did in his lifetime, adjusting for inflation. Would you mistake that for good?

Why isn't anyone talking about the wealth of great indie presses publishing genuinely interesting work such as - Amphetamine Sulphate, Apocalypse Party, Infinity Land Press, Nine Banded Books, Expat etc. ?

>>21988293
Anon, writing communities exist, especially the ones engaged with Amazon & Patreon. There are discords with authors collaborating and circle-jerking each other, especiallyfor authors of LitRPGs/Progression Fantasy stuff. You look at Amazon and Patreon and see the same names. You see them reviewing each other on Royalroad and other sites, supporting each other, using the same few audiobook narrators. Micro-cosmos of big publishing.

But they only engage with their genre. Fantasy authors at best read Pratchett, GRR Martin or Wheel of Times. Anything older than 30-40 years could just as well not exist. Well, some reference the greeks or some latin writers, but that's about it.

It must be remarked upon there're actual writing cliques, especially on Reddit where they rule subreddits with over 50k users and steer the discussion towards their own works. Shit's wild.

>>21984794
>>21988650
>“Why don’t you let them see Othello instead?”

>“I’ve told you; it’s old. Besides, they couldn’t understand it.”

>Yes, that was true. He remembered how Helmholtz had laughed at Romeo and Juliet. “Well then,” he said, after a pause, “something new that’s like Othello, and that they could understand.“

>“That’s what we’ve all been wanting to write,” said Helmholtz, breaking a long silence.

>“And it’s what you never will write,” said the Controller. “Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if it were new, it couldn’t possibly be like Othello.”

>“Why not?”

>“Yes, why not?” Helmholtz repeated. He too was forgetting the unpleasant realities of the situation.

>“Because our world is not the same as Othello’s world. You can’t make flivvers without steel—and you can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma. Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!” He laughed. “Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello! My good boy!”

>The Savage was silent for a little. “All the same,” he insisted obstinately, “Othello’s good, Othello’s better than those feelies.”

>“Of course it is,” the Controller agreed. “But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.”

>“But they don’t mean anything.”

>“They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience.”

>“But they’re ... they’re told by an idiot.”

>The Controller laughed. “You’re not being very polite to your friend, Mr. Watson. One of our most distinguished Emotional Engineers ...”

>“But he’s right,” said Helmholtz gloomily. “Because it is idiotic. Writing when there’s nothing to say ...”

>>21989516
>Would you mistake that for good?
Is philosophical musings good only because they are compelling to intelectuals? Is exploration of a phylosophical concept worth more than a scene of a futa woman making love to her shy, anxious boyfriend that the audience can relate to and self-insert? What makes for good literature? The rarity with which a topic is tackled? The intellect necessary to write coherently on a subject? Is a well-written power fantasy harem erotica worth more or less than amateurish and uninformed book on social structure and economy?

Is one feeling of satisfaction better than another? Platon wrote Fileb, and he finished it leaving the question unanswered. If we had 200 kafkas with 1000 novels on loneliness, social alienation and anxiety, and only 10 erotica writers, would the erotica writers be worth more?

Which would give the reader more after finishing the book? Would it really be the 'high literature' that is supposed to be mentally stimulating and leave the reader with tough question or a wider perception of reality? Or maybe it would be the 200k long foot fetish erotica that overall has more positive impact on someone's life. Wouldn't that be 'good'? Something that DESERVES more support?

How do we decide which is which?

>>21989745
de sade is considered one of the greats. porn or erotica itself is not the problem. but mediocrity is. come on, you already know it.

>>21986084
This I think bothers me more than anything else about the modern workers state of being that if you dare to live on your own or to travel or to simply exist you know "I was working out in a cave for 3 months reading Greek mythology fuck you" okay so now you're too much of a wild card and the golden more like pewter handcuffs we offer just aren't going to be enough so we might as well not risk even talking to you anymore.

>>21989646
Because we are retarded and you have to post each title along with the author along where to find it along with a synopsis we're completely over inundated with information so you posting these titles into the void I read and just go huh and then my attention shifts back to the audio from the friends simulator so I have playing in the background as I get ready to leave for wage slaving.

>>21984794
It honestly comes off as something of a dark age and I think that's where the exploration needs to begin. And not just books I mean everything cultural artistic intellectual it's simply not going to be approved of or boosted by the current regime and it's ruling classes you have to exclusively exist in the puddle of mud that is outsider art and so much of that in the coming decades and centuries is going to be lost and forgotten yes even with and in fact because of the internet and electronic storage and distribution mediums. And again this could go on for a few decades and we just look back at the current culture the same way people look at 70s haircuts or this could go on for a thousand years I don't have a way out of a dark age but certainly we are in one.

>>21979735
I don't think there's going to be a regressive free for all. The post-War liberal world order is on its way out and thank God but all this is shifting to, unless something changes, is Chinese predomination of markets and thus technological and cultural direction. Which, personally I'm excited for as multipolarity and illiberal societies will bring entirely new directions of technology and its supposed uses, systems of production, cultural initiatives and so on and it's from these things (we used to have) that we get our writers, painters, musicians, etc. The US world order has been congealing blood in an increasingly putrid corpse since the 90's.

>>21989962
This.

>>21990059
>The post-War liberal world order is on its way out and thank God but all this is shifting to, unless something changes, is Chinese predomination of markets and thus technological and cultural direction
Anon, China is dead. Aside of its ticking bomb of population that will implode it from the inside, just a half year ago USA banned trade of microelectronics to China. All of their AI and advanced technology research is dead. They have nothing to replace it with. I mean, they can try, but that will take years, meanwhile USA and Europe run ahead. Technology dead in the water, societal collapse imminent, what crack are you snorting to think China is able to become more than 2nd, 3rd tier player?

>>21989653
It's not the communities that are lacking, it's the simularicon of that community..it's the spectical of /literary greatness/ which is observed by the everyman on the street which is lacking.

Anyone can start a book club or contribute to a zine. What's missing is a spectical which takes the act of reading a certain book or contributing to a certain magazine and /elevates/ that to near mythic proportions.

That's why I don't agree with ppl itt that say social media has killed literature. If anything, literature is floundering because it takes itself too seriously for social media. There has to be a sense, in the Anglo world as exists in the French, that being a great writer, writing the great novel that defines your generation, is a Promethean struggle which will get you invited to all the best parties, let you sleep with all the best women, and carve a notch in history which will never really be forgotten. People will always write books, but there was a time where writing books carried the same status as a rock star. It seems like the establishment doesn't want to prop up authors as rock stars any more, at least not straight make authors, so the question has to be: how can that perception be forced on the population at large regardless.

>>21990145
Authors don't have rock star personalities anymore. The establishment can't prop up that which isn't there.

(Frankly, rock *bands* don't have rock star personalities anymore. I blame austerity for this endless kumbaya.)

>>21979185
read houellebecq

>>21990324
lol

>>21989422
I think 9/11 and then the rise of internet quashed civilized ennui as a mainstream subject. Now the main concerns are gay tranny PoC wank and clown-world outrage/emergencies.

>>21990172
Who's fault is this though? There's not shortage of heroin addicts, ex cons, and mercenaries who are plausibly literate (honesty with the right persona you can just use a ghost writer), so why isn't there any push to cultivate these people? Why does everything need to be sterile and castrated to make it into the citadel?

Every generation in the history of literature had it's Rimbauds. But now we get Harvard educated Jews and Wine Aunts.

>>21990634
>>21990172
What stops authors to be as socialy active as in the days past? Just look at H. G. Wells, he wrote almost 40 novels, incredibly well known in between 1890-1950. He not only wrote Time Machine, he made interviews with fucking Lenin and Stalin, very active in radio. Wrote texts that influenced the conception of United Nations post WW2. Can you name a writer today who's capable of this? Could G.R.R. Martin go and do something socialy that isn't just another medium to be consumed?

Now look at Youdkowsky. He wrote Methods of Rationality, a very well known fanfiction. Part of rationalist community. Never actually published. Yet at the same very active in media. An authority in terms of AI, people make interviews with him, the infamous 'we need to bomb servers of people not aligned with our views on AI Developement' comes from him.

Another person from rationalist community? Scott Alexander. His blog is so well-read and influencial he was targeted by the main-stream media after writing controversial article on how Democrats aren't as good as they claim to be (he's the furthest thing from a Republican, btw). He also wrote a fantasy/sci-fi(?) book, not published in print IIRC.

These people are modern H.G. Wells. They write, are read, and use their influence in the real world.

Why? Because published books aren't what gets you popular in the right ways in the modern era of information. Writers were 'Influencers' of the old era, now most of their position has been replaced. Bloggers are where it's at. Youtube is where it's at. Substack. Era of writers just writing, getting published and getting an access to intelectual circles is over. Intelectual circle is on substack, few clicks away.

>>21990760
Great post, even if people are going to hate on it. Our current culture of letters is in YouTube video essays and Twitter users shilling their substack. Probably this will eventually coalesce in groups of influencers hanging out in third world countries with low cost of living and cheap high speed internet. It seems like lots of right wing e-celebs have been flocking to India lately, although I'd prefer mexico or Argentina myself.

>>21990760
Anyone who dissents is either a fraud trying to grift in 2023
>tate
>any substack
>controlled opposition like Alex Jones, Dim Fool
Or they are just banned from everywhere completely and you will never hear any of their views because it is too threatening to the establishment
>jason bryan
You cry out like a bitch:
"what stops authors to be as socialy active as in the days past?"
Bro, we HAVE been very social, where were you in the 2010's? The problem is, that society was tightening the rules of what you could say for so long, that the authors who were socially active in the 2010's and earlier are just all banned now.

How can you even get your work out there if you're banned, fucking moron?

If Bloggers are where it's at, then certainly writers like Brett Stevens would have a following, or Molymeme, but no, they aren't part of the cathedral so they're absolutely ass-blasted by obscurity. If you're too stupid to realize that the entire social fabric of the west is pozzed beyond belief, then nothing can save you.

You are either writing pro-establishment shit, or establishment-adjacent shit, or you're an outcast. There is very, very, VERY little room to walk the knife's edge in the neutral zone between the establishment and the social outcasts. The conformity is so incredibly all-encompassing that nobody outside of the mainstream paradigm will ever be taken seriously.

What happened to the guy who did the Zeitgeist series? Where do you ever heard about Black Pigeon Speaks outside of niche circles? Where's Dylan Avery's appearances in mainstream news?

If you aren't sucking the dicks of the corpo-governmental social apparatus, you're going to be mired in places full of shit and crabs, like /lit/.

>>21991170
>lots of right wing e-celebs
You got grifted hard, dipshit.

>>21990172
Speak for yourself moron, I definitely lived a rockstar life during the 00's and half of the 2010's, but there is NO PLACE in modern society for an outspoken straight white male. We are at the bottom of the totem pole and the Canadian government imports a new brown citizen every 1.4 seconds of every day of the year.

If you can't see what is happening in front of your face, then you're too stupid to even live and should KYS immediately. The entire cultural landscape is controlled by corporations and government, while the demographics are being replaced as fast as possible by strong, tribalistic people who will support each other while if you're white, the boomers absolutely hate their own young and do everything they can to profit off the nose-dive of this country.

Just look around /lit/ to see what the future is for white guys who create. You will just be relentlessly attacked while if you look on other platforms, the establishment authors are uplifted by everyone and promoted non-stop by their fans and the corporations they work for and with.

>>21991195
If you're too midwit to appreciate Chad Hagg Peak Oil that's on you buddy

>>21991209
None of these "right wing e celebs" are actually real. Every single one is a grifter.

Remember Jack Murphy? Mr. Alpha Male himself? Where'd he disappear off to after getting caught doing gay porn on streams?

These are your "right wing e celebs" bro... all fakers and liars.

>>21989745
>Is exploration of a phylosophical concept worth more than a scene of a futa woman making love to her shy, anxious boyfriend that the audience can relate to and self-insert?

Yes. You are engaging in post-modern relativism which is incorrect since the existence of God underpins all values. Objective values exist because God exists.

https://www.montanarightnow.com/missoula/zooey-zephyr-back-in-missoula/video_771bd22a-e6a9-11ed-b166-1373b0307a37.html

Another thing, if you want to be a "rockstar" in 2023, you don't try and be a fun, adventurous white guy with an attitude...

You become a woman, then the normies line up to cheer on your delusion!

>>21981406
What is this exerpt from? Id like to read more

>>21991193
>authors are banned
>cathedral
Darkly Enlightened moron detected. I thought all of you died off after your stupid schizo movement failed to launch. Unsurprised some of you dwell of /lit/

>>21991403
Let me guess, you still think there are fundamental differences between political parties?

Different wings, all the same bird.

>>21991292
>I'm right because God
Is it truly the best you can do? God exists therefore value is objective? You must recognize how intelectualy lazy it is. You basicaly reduce everything to convincing another person to be a believer in your specific God, otherwise you have nothing to say. Teology at its worst.

Btw, even if I would agree to objective values, I don't see how YOU can tell me WHICH values are objectively higher than others.

If Good and Love is more valuable than Knowledge, wouldn't a futa erotica cause more Good to people than a piece of text containing some Knowledge? One would definitely cause people to feel better.

>>21991410
No, because I'm not a americuck. I can watch all the way from Europe how schizos who can't comprehend the reality build unhinged theories to justify their fringe radicalism. You are delusional and utterly detatched from reality, which is why even 4chan schizos can't treat you seriously. Take meds, go outside.

>>21984529
Hemingway is a bit of a point in your favor because he specifically made a point of to-the-point writing that wasn’t intertextual with the 2000 years of canon behind him.
But Dickens and Fitzgerald, literally yes.

>>21987649
Would you link your books about Soviets in Central Asia? That sounds like a worthwhile read

>>21991445
Theyre not out yet, going to release them as a series with a bunch of additional maps, essays, etc. attached as appendixes. I'll make a thread here when it's out, but in the meantime the books are: Blood and Oil in the Orient by Essay Bey; Asian Odyssey by Dmitri Alioshin; and Men, Beasts, and Gods by Ferdynand Ossedowski. The last one gets a lot of attention here, but the other two are criminally underated.

Blood and Oil is the autobiography of Essad Bey, a young Jewish-Azerbijani refugee turned Muslim convert turned fascist children's writer, and is kind of a broad description of the Orient on the cusp of modernity. Asian Odyssey is an adventure novel of a young Russian officer who ended up fighting in Mongolia under Baron Ungern-Sternberg, a White Russian mystic and warlord who tried to create a pan Eurasian empire to oppose the soviets through syncretic warrior Buddhism.

The entire period is absolutely bizarre and full of drama and adventure, so it's fun to read about. Sadly ignored by contemporary historians who'd rather focus on the Western Front. Each book will have a couple short stories/essays and a collection of historically contemporary maps, so stay tuned.

>>21990760
Nobody cares about “socially active” writers. They want good poets and novelists writing good poetry and novels. Their being “socially active” is merely a pre-requisite to writing good stuff. If you think they’ve been replaced by influencers in this regard you’re missing the point. They’ve not been replaced. They’ve simply disappeared.

>>21989422
Well, it did get a little stale. If you really are at the end of history and nothing ever happens, what are you going to do? Write about that feeling forever? 3 decades on and it’s boring to talk about. When did fiction become about “social commentary” anyway? Is that just what we do when we can’t actually make anything genuinely good? Fight Club was good on its own but hot garbage relative to something like the Count of Monte Cristo.

>>21989390
What the masses of online people want to read is not necessarily what’s genuinely good. If it were up to funding from the masses, Moby Dick would’ve never been written.

>>21988650
If you have a finished manuscript, you may as well try to get it published. That’s as easy as e-mailing an agent or a publisher or whoever. Sometimes it helps to get some short stories published first.

>>21988293
The best possible solution would be something like writers’ schools or communes, clubs basically for writers and poets work together and dedicate themselves to writing, not unlike what existed in Greek and Rome, not unlike a community of religious monks in a monastery.

>>21988261
I think the more we slide into the online space, the more literature and real life die. In my mind, the ideal solution is something for poets and writers like what monasteries are for monks. Otherwise, we’re going to be stuck with being lone wolves.

>>21988261
It’s not dead and it will never completely die, probably not anyway, but it seems really indisputable to me that the written word is struggling to compete with the screen for the attention of would-be readers.

Andrei Tarkovsky said that he saw film as a sort of poetry, and approached all of his films as a poet might approach his poems. Many people have commented that Tarkovsky appears as a sort of successor to Dostoevsky. I’m not going to say claim that I agree with either of these statements, but I don’t think the sentiments suggest something about times. I suspect that a lot of creative talent, and frankly the function that books used to fulfill in relationship to the uncultured culture and uncivilized civilization broadly, has migrated over to more modern mediums, namely film, animation, and video games. People don’t engage with epic poetry like they used to. Neither do they engage with the novel like they used to. But movies? Video games? Sure. I’m not totally convinced of all this, but it’s something I think about. And I notice it in my favorite movies and games.

>>21991550
You have a better chance of winning the fucking lottery than getting a novel published.

>>21991569
These already exist and they're gay as hell

>>21991423
If you knew Canadian politics at all, you'd know all the 3 big parties, NDP, CPC, and LPC, all have the same policies.

>>21979185
Jews and SJW atheists who adopt jewish victimhood and kvetching.

Try writing something outside of the bounds of "permitted thought' and sell it on Amazon, it'll be taken down once some jew or SJW sees it and cries.

>>21991713
100% this. Buddy has not been to a writer's event in his life. If you're a straight guy, like maybe 1/10 guys there will also be straight. So many old homos and fat chicks.

>>21979185
There are greater writers.

They will be known 100 years from now, maybe.

But in our present age literature is not commercially viable.

I am one such greater writer. My tales and talent are an accomplishment for all humanity. Yet there is little humanity about me, only swine as far as the eye can see. There's nothing to do but hone your craft and distill your stories in the meanwhile.

>>21980106
Tell me the truth anon, are you repeating a talking point you heard from Mencius Moldbug? Because he makes this exact same point. I want to know, honestly now.

Also
>he thinks nothing happens
Things happen, it's just that they are organized and orchestrated, you could call them artificial I guess. They absolutely do happen though, until they are likewise stopped. What you describe is the in between.

Modern hi-tech, developed and industrialized civilization cultivates the bodily senses, but not the bodily health, nor the spiritual life beyond that (which includes fields like art, philosophy, theology, poetry, novel-writing, and the like, being seen as “useless and unprofitable detritus”). Hence, the average modern citizen is physically ill, mentally, emotionally and physically desensitized through excessive hedonism and bad habits, and spiritually dead.

The average highlights of this “amazingly high new standard-of-life” of modern industrialized civilization (as Steven Pinker will graciously explain many of us now have, as compared to much of past history) are pornographic titillation (not even actually having sex for many young men now, apparently, according to studies and polls, as even that’s getting difficult for them, probably due to warped cultural dynamics around gender and politics, systematic impoverishment of the younger generations which makes them more likely to live with their parents, not have a good career etc. for much longer, and hence young men not being so appealing to women, and, finally perhaps even hormonal fuckery from all the toxic shit we eat, drink and breathe), or some drug high, or reading funny memes on the Internet, or social media addiction and smartphone addiction in general, playing the new video-game, or watching a good new movie or Netflix series.

Combine this with the far deeper and sophisticated analyses given in this thread by former posters about various other sociological, economic, educational, etc. factors contributing to the homogenizing and domesticating of many literate modern citizens who could conceivably be our great writers, artists, and thinkers, into dull conformist serf-like pawns and careerist little toadies of a hyper-capitalist society with few interesting life experiences beyond going to school for too long and working uninspiring jobs, as well as the reverse Flynn effect or decreasing IQs and attention spans (probably Internet/smartphone/social media addiction plays a lot into this, as well as hyperprocessed food, obesity, sedentary lifestyles, etc., which also all have strong effects on the brain), and you have a recipe for a society by and large so chronically spiritually depleted, overworked (either that, or, paradoxically, underworked, as in the rise of NEETs, both of which conditions seem just as soul-crushing), and so insipid and uninspiring in their personal lives that it’s hard to imagine how they’ll rear great artists, writers, and thinkers.

>>21991719
Did I say writer’s event or did I say writer’s commune?

In what Henry Miller presciently called “the air-conditioned nightmare” of much of modern American and European life, it’s tough to really get a store of interesting life experiences that might help one write, say, a moving novel, or create very profound characters, or have something very interesting to say. One has to be something a notch above the average “Last Man” of today (per Nietzsche) to have interesting thoughts and emotions, or life-experiences, worth conveying through art.

Ironically, it’s probably some “genre fiction” fields, or mining the tropes thereof, like sci-fi, for instance, that might rejuvenate the novel. Guys like Philip K. Dick, for example. Or historical fiction (like McCarthy, Pynchon, Ian McEwan, etc.) Or verging into surrealism, “magical fiction,” fantasy, and the like (like Kafka, Borges, Marquez, Pynchon again, Bolano, Ishiguro, Wallace, etc.). What else, on average, do many who plausibly CAN be great writers (with the requisite degree of socioeconomic comfortability and literacy to do so) have besides this to write of today that’s interesting, unless it’s diversity-hire novels, short stories and/or mediocre free-verse poetry about being a lesbian emigré from the Caribbean (a sort of redo of how Soviet realism made for mediocre artists, but now instead in a “Woke” hypercapitalist society), or some attempt to redo a Flaubert/Joyce/Proust (with a fundamentally realist attitude, that is, but focusing on beauty of style and psychological depth to raise it to the level art) about the modern suburban experience of life?

(And, as the turgidity of a book like Gass’s “The Tunnel” proves, it’s now too easy to go so far with the latter, if one is a super-brainy well-read academic type, that it becomes too off-putting for much of the populace and not really that inspiring. The hangover of modernist and postmodernist literature, basically, which glorified difficulty, complexity, trickiness and flashiness for their own sakes.)

Kacyznski was right about too many things, sadly.

And don’t forget the famous quote of old Frederick Taylor Gates, advisor to the more well-known John D. Rockefeller who worked with him on creating the General Education Board, a massive founding influence on modern standardized public education!

>In our dream, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from their minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…

>>21991420
>Btw, even if I would agree to objective values, I don't see how YOU can tell me WHICH values are objectively higher than others.

It is in here. Look at the consequences of amorality. Imagine what would happen to a society if people just did whatever they wanted. That is hell. It is not a coincidence that the Victorian age was the most stable and peaceful period in world history; it was due to Christian morality.

>>21991792
>Yet there is little humanity about me, only swine as far as the eye can see.
Aren't most great writers sympathetic to the human condition, however foolish their fellow citizens might be? Don't you want to see them grow as people rather than dismiss them? A great writer cannot hold people in contempt.

>>21991899
Waste not hope on the hopeless.

>>21991873
>(with a fundamentally realist attitude, that is, but focusing on beauty of style and psychological depth to raise it to the level art)
why exactly this is bad?. beauty of style and psychological depth are prerequisites to make great literature, isnt it?.

>>21991908
Nobody is hopeless with Christ.

>>21992031
based

>>21979185
>likes of McCarthy
He didn't get traction until well past 40. It's the same as music -- there's always great things going on, you're just not in the limited market loop to catch wind of it, and neither are the music studios/publishers whom have dropped the ball on proactively scouting talent with human intelligence + taking risks on it, versus the Boomer facilitated lazy version of swooping in on established acts that have grinded through those early filters.

>>21979319
>>21979331
>>21979339
>There’s basically no market for that anymore
And it's the exclusive domain of ne'er-do-well haute bourgeois MFAs where there are such monetization opportunities that remotely approximate that.

>>21979380
Book deals are a routine payoff and money laundering modality. No one reads this shit, and trees die for nothing.

>>21979780
>Film has risen to be the dominant cultural art form
The return to theater may be an atavistically good thing, but it has more in common with poetry than prose when it does everything right. The ones that aim at what the novel does end up looking like Haneke.

>>21979859
The likes of Peter Thiel yanking funny money out of Pandora Papers tier Silicon Valley Bank runs may be a good sign of Astroturf going the way of the dodo.

>>21980298
>a race of bug men who's only real raison d'etre is to make the numbers of them and their patron's portfolios go up
>the force of blood will overcome the force of money
It is in the end as Mao said, and these Foxes are in for a rude awakening by those Wolves holding both real power and the moral high ground to dispose of them however they see fit. This is not Red-posting.

>>21980343
This is an idyllic limited hangout fantasy that will garantee a breakaway civilization rules like unto gods behind the scenes with what is effectively UFO grade tech as automation facilitates the retrograde slide of civilization as the capital basis the biomass represented is no longer required.

>>21981406
>more men are born following wars
There are epigenetic cues with societal stressors - like the world war - precipitating such things.

>>21981666
>checked
Joseph Suglia, Table 41. It's about Chicago and an entire novel of a Thalidomide Kid episode from The Passenger.

>>21981850
>civil unrest occurred between a large body of students and the campus police, which was then covered by major news outlets
The Berlin Wall settled nothing and we are living the prolonged hangover of the Cold War because of half measures by Silent to Boomer generations.

>>21984857
>t. infant mortality zombie.

>>21988650
>It really appears that this post-modern world has no space for literature
Silent reading was a regression. Literature - poetry - must be heard and spoken. ~ Nietzsche on prose composition ancient vs. breathless modern.

>>21989745
What passes for 'philosophy' has nothing to do with wisdom, metis, or the exercise of will so as not to be compelled by one's inferiors. They're intellectual fidget spinners

>>21991976
It’s not necessarily bad and it could be done, too. But the bigger barrier to it is probably the declining attention spans and less reading of great and serious literature by the younger generations in general, due to flashier and easier alternatives (film, video games, TV shows and Netflix miniseries, etc.), which hence makes it less likely that the upcoming and present generations even CAN write books like this. Even Updike (a great realist author in this tradition) was foreseeing it decades ago and spoke in an interview how he was afraid the novel might die, as books like his were “something a bit more complex and attention-engaging than what youth today might be accustomed to and enjoy reading.” And Philip Roth’s final interview and renunciation of writing, too, exactly spoke of this, rather presciently — “the death of the novel.”

>>21979185
Who controls all of the publishing houses now?

>>21992031
>>21992089
The mediocrity of the present world is the purest and most inevitable expression of Christian principles. It is precisely their dominance that has lead us here. You are categorically wrong.

>Why are there no great young writers in the West anymore?
for the exact same reason that there is nothing great in the west anymore

>>21992232
You failed to notice that civilzation began to fall apart in the 20th century when people lost faith.

>>21992268
VGH...

>>21983945
I'd read a few hundred pages of "fuck you" desu

>>21979870
>anime are producing the greatest masterpieces of today, works of pure fantasy, scale, and humanity.

wtf no theyre not
anime tried to be deep for awhile in the late 90s/early 00s but the money ran dry and it became formulaic trash just like everything else

>>21979994
My grandpa was a farmer and he lived a very interesting life. He could tell fucking awesome stories for hours, just rambling about his life and the things he experienced. What will you have to talk about when you're 80? That day you spent shitposting on /lit/?

>>21980298
This culture existed in America and President Lincoln burned, looted and murdered it.

>>21992339
fuck you

>>21992268
People don't need to believe in god to believe in the core tenets of Christianity. it became the very environment of the west, and after that it seeped deeper into the west and is functionally genetic. It suffuses the cultural, legal, and aesthetic backdrop in which we are all born and raised. Most people don't know the first thing about Moses but follow the commandments. And that sort of psychological underpinning is how we arrived here. Christianity is subconscious.

>>21979185
In order of importance...

>No hope for the future
>No Incentive, because corporations will derail and then buy out your ideas
>No Legacy for most young people in the West, disincentivizing people to do or learn much of anything.

No woman, no kids and no home, with no hope of any of that ever happening in your lifetime and the promise of your nation slowly sliding into permanent brown means that most people simply won't. Its not that they can't write a masterpiece, conduct a symphony, win a Nobel Prize or invent the longer lasting lightbulb. They simply won't, because they won't get paid for it, and even if they did get paid for it, there's no legacy to apply that money and work towards, and even if there was a legacy, there's no future for the nations in which they live that makes people want to contribute.

Its possible that someday someone will tackle the enormous task of totally purging and then reforming the sectors of education, entertainment, finance, sociology, government and manufacturing. However, since reforming even one of these is tantamount to basically building a whole new nation at this point, I think most people will just keep their heads down and amount to nothing until the system self-corrects in nuclear fire or rampant famine.

>>21992453
>Vgh, we could have been a literal mulatto slave state instead of just figuratively one
>Never forget what they took from you.... a USA with tens of millions more Africans and the social/economic structure of a failed LatAm state

>>21992556
>steamrolls your path

>>21979185
Anon, if you're still there? Can you clarify by what do you mean by young? Age 30 and below? I don't think this part is clarifed.

>>21992479
Who is going to write about 2023 Canada? Like WHO?

Basically the only people writing will be gays, troons, women, and immigrants, because they are the only people who have built-in audiences that will read their genres. If you are writing about the state of Canada in 2023 in the negative, you will simply not even exist on social media. It takes someone with massive balls like Billboard Christ to get anywhere in the cultural zeitgeist these days because history is over. There isn't anything new to say or do other than troon out, because everyone has silently acknowledged the downfall has already happened. Nothing is "getting better" in society anymore, we're all waiting for something big to happen to reset shit.

>be teacher
>1 month left in the semester until finals
>just finished grading the latest batch of essays
>mfw the class average is 35%
My students are so fucking retarded it's unreal. Standards have dropped so badly a bunch of 17-18 year olds are unable to properly analyze All's Quiet on the Western Front.
A quarter of the essays mention Hitler and the Holocaust for fucking some reason.

>>21992596
>If you are writing about the state of Canada in 2023 in the negative
Because Canadians care more about hockey than anything else. That's it, period. The Angloid ones, anyway.
>>21992757
>Standards have dropped so badly
I know, right? Like how anons like you think they can pretend you're actually contributing members of society. Give me a break. A teacher? Please. Let me guess, you drop red pills to the boy in the far back, too?

>>21992757
>All's Quiet on the Western Front.
See, teacher, nobody cares about that book, unless they do for their own reasons.
>a bunch of 17-18 year olds are unable to properly analyze All's Quiet on the Western Front.
Gimme a break. A bunch of teenagers won't really bother about reading old fiction, what do you expect? You may expect some standards but neither do you have one considering the use of anime picrel (yeah I'm judging you on that, unless you're a teenage girl, which is NOT)

Also, let me drop the bomb. You're their teacher. Maybe you just don't teach it well. Don't go around getting angry at them next time you see them because you're the one who posted your mistakes in 4chan.

so what have we learned in this thread? that he won

>>21992775
Crazy to me that 11,000 people have OD'ed and died since 2016, like three 9/11 worth of human lives, and COUNTLESS more people who survived but have brain damage and are more addicted and fucked up than ever... yet Canada just marches on with acceptable losses because boomers are STILL profiting from their real estate due to mass immigration.

What a wild time to be alive. The youth have no chance.

>>21992794
That most 4chaners belong to a disenfranchised, impotent group of 20-30+ men that do not fit into modern society and reject its values. Majority of people fit, and consider the society good enough. We are either going to get a revolution somewhere, soon, or the society will move closer and closer towards internal antagonism as the impotent groups don't vanish, only grow.

>>21979185
Collapse of Christianity

>>21992864
Being 44, I don't even understand how most 20-somethings in Canada make it through the day. Life was SO kino 20 years ago. Now it is a world of shit, surrounded by NPC boomers, hopeless zoomers, and crackheads.

>>21979185
To OP and all of you illiterate idiots, name at least three books from authors born from the 80s onwards that you have read in order to say that "there are no great young writers"

ITT cope

>>21979222
>There's no good writers because there's nothing to write about

>Over 2000 years of history
>Much Information is easy to reach
>Most books are cheap
>Education is easy to gain
>Most books of various thematic, allow you to know various things

People are ignorant, and every book can be accepted because has its fellows, but now this simple thing is difficult to understand; this world has various opportunities, and people feel depressed, in the past, there was nothing of these opportunities but still we have great products of the arts.

These people are pathetic but because you are a politically correct follower, you can not say this and you safìd depressed because society says how you must feel.

>>21979222
>There's no good writers because there's nothing to write about

>Over 2000 years of history
>Much Information is easy to reach
>Most books are cheap
>Education is easy to gain
>Most books of various thematic, allow you to know various things

People are ignorant, and every book can be accepted because has its fellows, but now this simple thing is difficult to understand; this world has various opportunities, and people feel depressed, in the past, there was nothing of these opportunities but still we have great products of the arts.

These people are pathetic but because you are a politically correct follower, you can not say this and you feel sad because society says how you must feel.

No one has said anything in this thread that would actually prevent you from being a great author. If you're all convinced you're really that brilliant, just self publish -- I'm sure the world will immediately recognise how much better you are than everyone else. You'll market the book yourself with what little money you can afford if you're that confident.
>But I won't make as much money as the women writing YA!
You don't make money anyway. Do you want to write something worth reading or not?
>But I'll be shunned for writing uncomfortable truths! I'm just too based!
/Pol/tards seem to genuinely believe they're the only people who've noticed how fucked modern society is -- and their idea of incisive writing is just spamming the words "faggot" and "troon" over and over again. I wonder why no one is impressed.
Writing whatever edgy garbage 4chan would approve of does not make you an independent, intelligent adult. It makes you an election tourist with the same reddit mindset you came in with.
If you're really that talented, you should be able to communicate something more interesting than "I don't think I like black people very much" -- and if you're really so convinced that what you have to say is meaningful, you should be confident enough to take the predictable responses from woke retards on the chin. Just fucking write something already.
This board is full of disingenuous cowards and delusional schizos and the cowards are somehow worse.

>>21993219
>this world has various opportunities, and people feel depressed
If you don't have opportunities you have to make happiness where you are. If you have opportunities then lack of happiness is always a personal failure as a result of making the "wrong" choices. You think maybe if you had done something else, you'd be happier. Grass is always greener effect. It doesn't help that the world generally encourages the idea that happiness is "out there" somewhere, to be found or purchased, rather than made at home. It also doesn't help that we live in a highly mobile world. All my friends moved away in search of "opportunities". I always wonder what life would be like if we had just stuck together.

>>21993620
>this world has various opportunities, and people feel depressed
If you don't have opportunities you have to make happiness where you are. If you have opportunities then lack of happiness is always a personal failure as a result of making the "wrong" choices. You think maybe if you had done something else, you'd be happier. Grass is always greener effect. It doesn't help that the world generally encourages the idea that happiness is "out there" somewhere, to be found or purchased, rather than made at home. It also doesn't help that we live in a highly mobile world. All my friends moved away in search of "opportunities".

Nowadays the concept of one is not important and is better the concept of all, this means that you can be important if you stay alone.

>All my friends moved away in search of "opportunities". I always wonder what life would be like if we had just stuck together.

They search for Narnia, is better to let them stay away from you.


Anyway, nihilism is an old bastard that corrupts people to let them think they are able and delete time.

>>21993620
Nowadays the concept of one is not important and is better the concept of all, this means that you can not be important if you stay alone.

>All my friends moved away in search of "opportunities". I always wonder what life would be like if we had just stuck together.

They search for Narnia, is better to let them stay away from you.


Anyway, nihilism is an old bastard that corrupts people to let them think they are able and delete time.

>>21979185
I'm not categorical about it but in a way I believe litterature is getting the same treatment the church received in the 19th/20th century, when science started to offer a more convincing speech than religion did on topics that used to be the churchs' prerogative.

Like, one strong suit of litterature used to be the exploration of the human psyche. Now we've got a discipline called psychology that condensed and organized all knowledge on the topic.
Another thing used to be the description of society's structure and balances of power; now we have sociology and... the news for that.
Books about information and justice have become somewhat obsolete to investigative journalism too.
If you've read 19th century lit, you'll see there's a good deal of technical info dumps about the time's trades, and inventions, and knowledge of all things in general in there. But now we've got easy access to education, manuals, and the internet.
Beauty, another usual concern of litterature, has not been challenged in the same ways, but in today's world, is mostly approached through the eyes and the ears. A beautiful sonnet isn't what people look for when they want something beautiful. So why write one?
And lastly, you've got: works of the imagination, such as tales, stories that care for no more than telling a thrilling, or shocking adventure, and for this the new medias of tv and cinema offer an experience easier to go through.

All this to say that litterature's hunting grounds have been gnawed at. The game is still the same, but there are others hunters competing for it. It's challenged on all fronts. Probably, a lot of potentially good writers turned to other careers, more aligned with the times. Lit is just not as necessary as it once was.

>>21993744
This is great, but you’re missing the bigger picture in my opinion. Yeah, literature is fighting obsolescence relative to other things. But look at what the function of literature is an has been? What makes these great books great? 90% of the time, novels since at least c. 1800 are more or less social commentaries. They comment on public life, and private life as it relates to public life. Public life is virtually gone. It’s been dispersed and sent indoors by so many factors it would be difficult to expound on them all here but I’m sure you can think of plenty. And so there’s nothing to comment on. Hence, no literature. This is also why authors like McCarthy and Houllebecq get so much attention despite not actually writing anything all that great. They wrote books that do sort of attempt at social commentary. They’re just miserably nihilistic. But that they offer a social commentary at all is why they stand out. whether or not we’re living at the end of history, who knows? But it sure feels that way, and that’s why it’s so hard to write.

>>21993801
>They comment on public life, and private life as it relates to public life. Public life is virtually gone. It’s been dispersed and sent indoors

Do expand.

>>21993835
Not that anon, but did you miss the whole pandemic? Public life was essentially made illegal for two years because boomers were scared of the flue.

>>21993835
>>21993844
Not only the pandemic lockdowns although that’s the most obvious and egregious example we can point to. But it’s really just everywhere and everything. People commuted to work alone in their cars, or on public transit eyes glued to the phones, solitary, they worked solitary, often with headphones in, on essentially meaningless efficiency driver work and not productive work because this is the economy of managers, symbol analysts, and salespeople, their social lives are highly online, if they live in a suburb, they live essentially cloistered home lives, if they live in the city, the streets are too dangerous too crime ridden, too expensive, freedom is restricted by cost or by paperwork, and the favorite pastimes of virtually all men under 30 are digital pornography and digital video games. There are honestly so many examples to point to. Public life has eroded entirely and it feels basically like the culture is not just dead but dead and buried, and we’re like maggots just trying to live off the corpse. But the body is dead. It doesn’t move and neither do we. We just kind of have exist, and sit, and eat, and occupy ourselves hoping everything changes one day.

>>21993888
This website is a testament to just how dead public life is. I mean think of yourself. Maybe you’re writer. Where have all of your influences come from? Probably this website, maybe a podcast, never from real life because real life is basically sterile and dead if it even exists at all anymore. If people had real jobs, purposeful jobs, friends, dating prospects, that they mean in the real world in real places in an organic manner of living, do you think people would spend as much time here as they do? No. The reason they’re here is because they can’t get what they want in real life. Real life is, frankly, a complete disaster. But art and poetry and fiction comes from real life. It doesn’t come from a digital mimicry of real life. And there’s another problem where the small, small minority that do live real lives, often live dangerous and adventurous lives and those are often not suited to writing or their writing is too unrelated and we’re too cynical. Nothing is really quite cool anymore. In Hemingway’s time, bull fighting was cool. Soldiering was cool. Nobody thinks these are cool anymore. Bill fighting is immoral. Soldiering is stupid. All of this suggests that no matter what you do in life you can’t win. Everything is serving this thing beneath the surface that you just can’t consider with anything other than cynicism or outright hatred. And the only people who interest me at the moment are people who are doing a lot to return to something more pre-modern consciously and alone, but those people come from very specific backgrounds and have specific means. I don’t know if it’s suitable for everyone and some would be poets might just have to suffer with pursued lips and frozen pen. I don’t know.

>>21981142
>Even the Chinese would be a better hegemon. At least the Chinese are awful in a way that's INTERESTING.
They are also on the other side of the planet if they do turn out to be as bad as Americans

>>21993935
Honestly, the only people who aren’t living hopelessly depressing lives in young adulthood as far as I can tell are the small few who successfully pursue thinking and creating occupations, like artists or journalists or people working in film. Everyone else is suffocating under the weight of post-modernity even if they don’t realize it.

>>21989422
>>21990460
>>21991540
I'll bite the bullet on this, I don't think cultural commentary just died, it was fucking murdered because the Government started doing everything people quietly predicted in the 1990s and they couldn't let people just explain what they needed to do.

This is the """calm""" before the storm as the US implodes

>>21994002
It’s been eroding since long before the 1990s as far as I can tell and in some ways this is just the inevitable end of centuries long processes, made severely worse by our relationship to things like politics, economics, and especially technology and religion.

>>21993469
>just bee yourself, bro

>>21990324
“Why are there no great young writers?”
Here, read this 67 yo french pervert

>>21992123
>He didn't get traction until well past 40.
He didnt get mainstream attraction, you mean. Yes he became much more known to the general public in the 90s with the adaption and press around All The Pretty Horses, but he was well known in the literary community before then, at least as popular as Pynchon etc. thats why he was the first novelist to get the MacArthur.

>>21979185
There are, they just write about things that people on this site would consider to be treasonous to western culture. Most influential writers across history have been viewed as usurpers of the status quo. Those people didn't go away. You and everyone else on this board just so happen to support the status quo. That or you're right and culture suddenly stopped being advanced around the time you were born. Spot the cope if you can.

>>21993744
sociology and psychology are part of the system, sociology and psychology erode their subject of knowledge because they are part of a dogma. they dont substitute literature or art. they desecrate the meaning. like every authoritative dogma do.
this is like someone saying in dark times that literature is dying because christ give meaning to soul so nobody have to write nothing more.
real art is always looking through dogma.

>>21994122
what is the status quo of today according to you?.

>>21994138
Pick any social issue. What cultural narrative was it locked into a decade ago? That's the status quo. Take troons for example. The status quo is them existing in secret because people are disgusted by them. The only time you'd hear about them on the public stage is for comedic effect or shock value. Now you're starting to see them in ads, and that's a derision of the status quo. Writers who will be looked back upon favorably in hundreds of years are writing about issues like that. Your reluctance to dignify faggots is irrelevant. There are thousands of influential texts from history about, say, the transcontinental slave trade. Those texts and arguments contained within them were considered fringe at the time. Now they're classics that most English PhD candidates read for their qualifying exams.

>>21994079
>french pervert

>>21993961
How are artists not 'suffocating under the weight of post-modernity'?

>>21994155
>trans are a derision of the status quo
you are beyond deluded. you can not say in any seriousness that transgression today is the trans movement. trans is the status quo of today and people writing about it are too. you really think they are not?.

A lot of people has talked about a lot of factors ITT and I agree with most of them
But the bottom of the issue is that s
Spengler was right, Cultures are born, develop by fulfiling the forms inherent to them, and when these forms are exhausted they fossify and become a Civilization where the spiritual is left behind and the practical is adopted
The 19 century is when our Greek period turned into our Rome period
Theres nothing to talk about, no ways of living, concerns for good, beauty and truth are anachronistic, religion is either viewed as compulsory habits without reason or as a joke by most people
The Indians had Buddhism, the Greeks had Stoicism, we have French Existentialism and Nihilism as the de facto ideologies. Even if people have never heard of them, people in developed areas dont want to have children, which means implicitly they dont trust in the future of the species
The character traits that built this civilization like self discipline, integrity, honor and loyalty are viewed as things for prudes and squares, and speaking of virtue is enough to have your audience scratch their heads in confusion
No tree can fruitify in this soil
There are no Great Men anymore

>>21994171
I wrote up a reply but I’m finding it really hard to articulate. I just think they’re in a better position when it comes evading a lot of the psychological suffering and exclusion of possibilities that come with modern life. I don’t think a low-level journalist is usually as alienated and hopeless as like a low-level financial analyst.

Perhaps the one source of hope is that, not matter how bleak the present is and the future appears, there's still a possibility, flimsy that it might be, someone will persevere and carve a new path.

>>21994206
They're not. Go outside more. Feel the grass on your feet and wind in your air. Accept the reality that people hate troons. Effectively the only country that hosts them without constant violence is the US, and even then, half the country wants them to have no representation or rights. Consenting adults can't host a drag show in several states unless it's just a few people in some guy's garage, for example. Why pretend that faggots who are constantly caught in political crossfire are somehow benefitting from the status quo? They're a subject of debate, certainly. That's not the same thing as being the status quo. This site is an echo chamber. Again, go outside. Or stay here and sit resolved that <1% of the total world population that mostly kills themselves before 40 are somehow deciding culture when most people in the sole country that tolerates them don't want them to be visible at all. I don't know why I expect more from /lit/, but every time I come here, I get into an argument with an election tourist who thinks the west is on a collision course to desolation just because we have faggot celebrities. Faggots have always been celebrities. They were celebrities before the west even existed in the capacity that it does today. Trans isn't the status quo. That's just what you heard from Tucker Carlson or somebody who watches him then motherbirded it to you. If you're going to deny reality, I'm not going to roll around in the mud with you all day. You can discuss your wrong opinion with any other retard here.

>>21994210
If I recall, Spengler identified ethical Socialism as the analogue to Indian Buddhism and Roman Stoicism, not Existentialism or Nihilism. We should also point out that Rome also had its poets even in the twilight days of the Republic and its greatest in the early days of the Empire. Life was never so alienating for people in Rome nor in India as it is for modern people in the West. In Rome, young men were cast head long into wars and risk their lives, sure, but never were they deprived of life itself and never was civilization so stifling. We have entire generations of young people that basically never done anything besides go to school (on a computer) and move around symbols and squares for a job (on a computer) and with 1-3 full years of actual lockdowns at that. That’s true even for the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful. So if Spengler was right, there’s something he missed because his morphology doesn’t explain just how bad things have gotten.

>>21994163
>faggot

>>21994239
I can walk myself to having hope for the future. I have a harder time having hope for myself.

>>21994239
It’s relatively easy to walk oneself to hope for the lives in the future. Walking oneself to hope for one’s own life is a lot harder.

>>21987653
>Currently working on a series of books about the Soviet expansion in Central Asia,
alright, time for you to become a good acquaintance of mine. hit me up.

>>21994244
we are talking about literature. about culture. trans is huge in this days culture, really huge. almost like a fashion trend. if trans writers or trans-related books are really this outsider content you are trying to imply, then we dont have oprah talking about it. trans is literally a hot topic. all kind of status quo writers, journalists and academics made it possible.
its like you are living in the 80s and still tell me to go outside.

>>21994256
I dont thimk he knew about existentialism or nihilism, but that was me trying to expand on his ideas, I didnt remember what he sais about socialism but that makes even more sense and hes even more right, because that is the official ideology of academia and our mainstream culture (not really socialism but progressivism with socialistic overtones)
Good points you make, I would add those theorists that talk about media environment to complement what spengler said and provide a fuller picture, especially how the kind of personality society creates has to do with the structure of the dominant media

>>21994210
Even if Spengler was right a nullified cultural growth period does not explain the human soul. Plato was right that art is art because it is art, not because societal conditions allow it to be art. True, certain conditions can allow literature to proliferate more rapidly but historically it has not been a requirement, nor does it explain the absence of art in the modern West.

>>21994327
The people feeling dread for the cirremt world are posting in this ghread instead of writing and even if they did the manuscript would rot in their drawers in the current cultural climate

>>21994327
>the absence of art in the modern West.

The art of the past has value also in modern times.

>>21994348
>even if they did the manuscript would rot in their drawers in the current cultural climate

Who cares? money is more valuable than your health?

Capitalism mentality.

People can not live with over 1.000 dollars per month because they want every comfort. Pathetic.

>>21994428
Im not talkuing about money
Im talking abiut no one will read their stuff
If anything you are the one who thought of money
My point is that no one will even be aware of their books because theres informatoon overload, and the media structures depriorotize deep sustained engagement
Also theres no audience anymore, the kind of public for those works is too mentally ill an sedated now to engage with anything, too stressed because of the current civilization situation to do productive things, and is posting here right now

No one talked about hyperpopulation and hyperconnectivity yet
We evolved to live in small communities, but today the number of people in the world rivals the number of dead people through all human history, and if before we organized in semi isolated communities, now everything is connected
Our brain just cant cope with that
Theres also the fact that microinteractions, person to person, are faster than ever because of yhe sheer number of people and because distance doesnt matter anymore and language and culture are mattering each day less
But at the same time macrointeractions like historical processes still happen at the same slow speed
So there is an imbalance between micro and macro interactions that has never existed before

>>21994327
Novels are not art and they never have been.

>>21984794
>>21988021
>>21988041
>>21989422
>>21990029
>>21990145
a few years ago there was some go-nowhere brainstorming on this board for some new type of literary movement. one of the concepts formulated was that of naivete, which basically boiled down to a flat-out rejection of accepted beliefs, norms, facts and assumptions. obviously this isn't groundbreaking stuff in itself since this was historically the basis of most such movements, but i do think it is particularly prescient for the current age, where we are too plugged in, so to speak. too online, too filled to the brim with shit, living off of impulses and short attention span, which this influx of information is supposedly meant to keep us properly informed and educated, but which i think really creates massive blindspots in our understanding of the world, causing us to react to events and situations based on a large amount of ignorance to historical context.

so, when naivete was first floated it clearly did not make it past a single general thread, but the more i read these posts, the more i really do feel a forcible rejection of supposed 'understanding' and a deliberate diving into of a foundation of 'i do not know' could help us re-orient our bearings in this world, and step away from the technodystopian matrix that offers us no actual useful tools by which to comprehend or navigate the world we currently live it. time is moving fast, and large swaths of the global community is being pulled away by the current with no lifejackets or even a rescue team to save them. it needs to change.

>>21994292
I don’t think it makes more sense. In fact, I have a very hard time imagining how Spengler’s vision of a future socialism can be reconciled with current trends in technology and ecology. Climate change alone renders it undesirable and impossible. The only official ideology of academia and mainstream culture is social niceties to the historically disenfranchised, oppressed, or abnormal. Everything else is confused at best. No serious academic believes today that an industrial sort of socialism like we saw in the 19th and 20th centuries represents a positive vision of the future. They actually have no idea what is a positive vision of the future. They have none. Nobody has one. It seems as if we’ve hit a wall, and that’s probably part of the reason for the social Justice insanity actually.

>>21990115
with all due respect, this entire post reads like somebody way too fucking plugged in to the unsourced and patently biased nonsense that passes as 'honest journalism'. you are wrong on almost every count, and i implore you to improve your sources for information. no, this is not a commiepost, yes, you are actually misinformed on what you believe to be settled facts, and without rectification of this line of thinking you will continue to stumble through life completely blind to the obvious reality, and it will assert itself upon you with all its might regardless of how little you comprehend.

>>21994541

There’s no time to day dream anymore. We’re constantly bombarded with screens and sounds and all sorts of goings on. I was born in ‘93. I remember these moments as a kid that were quiet and just me and my immediate world and my hand could subconsciously move my pen to doodling original pictures or I could daydream some scenario in my mind. But now there’s so much noise from televisions, from computers, from smartphones, from podcasts, from highways, from so many different sources that that daydreaming moment never really happens.

>>21994556
i assure you, there is no homosex implied or suggested in anything i shared in that post.

>>21994557
Creativity doesn’t come from those moments of intense action or active work or socializing and talking or frenzied activity. It comes in the moments of silence and contemplation AFTER all those are done and IN BETWEEN them. So it’s not simply that there’s no public space and life isn’t really happening anymore although that’s true. The moments of daydream and introspection aren’t really happening either.

>>21988293
>but it does require...something.
...he said, writing on an anonymous "something".

Have you guys stopped and considered the very tool you are using to communicate ? Maybe this is part of the solution ? I know I come here for this kind of thread

Have you guys played Disco Elysium ?
I think the makers of the game came to the same conclusion as you guys. They just made one of the most literary games out there and luckily it was a hit.

I know that I'm writing to learn how to make a story, but the future is in games. Depending on what you aim (impact, money, fame, stability, fun,...) but for me, storytelling can mold itself in different forms.

Like, this tiktok.
https://twitter.com/hilaryagro/status/1643981590354350088
Tell me it isn't the work of someone talented. It uses the medium to push a message, which is the goal of art IMO.

If you just want to "write" because you like the medium, fine. But since you know no one is reading, don't go in it expecting "that" type of success. You can have satisfaction, but being sad about this is like being sad about not being able to be a milkman or whatever.

>>21994613
What do you mean?. Make everyone anon?.

>>21994660
>Tell me it isn't the work of someone talented. It uses the medium to push a message, which is the goal of art IMO.
thats the goal of propaganda my sweet sweet anonette.

>>21994289
>its like you are living in the 80s and still tell me to go outside.

true dat

>>21993961
Looking at the state of both film and journalism, I don't think there are any young men in either field actually doing anything.

>>21994155
>Writers who will be looked back upon favorably in hundreds of years are writing about issues like that

That depends on how far the movement goes. If it's just the last gasp of a dying civilization, it won't mean much. But if the future is really genderless then you could say it begins here.

But that is somewhat dubious because the US or West has lost its global hegemony (or in process of that), and if it is globally discredited, it may not have much staying power.

Either way we really can't predict what people 400 eyars from now are going to be reading, probably not much at all when they have another 400 years of content to try to get through if they were really intersted (which they probably wouldn't be).

>>21994966
There are. There are people like Paul Kingsnorth who turned to novel writing after a career in journalism. Nobody who had a career in financial services is turning to a career in novel writing.

>>21993469
only based post ITT

>>21979185
there are you've just never heard of them because you are a pseud.