/lit/ - Literature

Dear God I am sorry my prayers this morning did not please you but inshallah please may I at least not hear any zoomer's attempts at thinking and speaking for the rest of the day alhamdulilla

>>22184752
>How is it that they are so popular?
Only because it's Japanese. Anime comes from Japan so it's cool and exotic. As i get older i start to realize all Asian cultures in general are fucking garbage and extremely deficient in talent and the only time they make anything good is when they're influenced by western culture and even then all they do is robotically copy shit, It's only SOMETIMES they plagerize and actually do some things better.

>>22184752
I guess it's the limitation that makes it special. Like those ISIS songs that don't use instruments (but gunshot samples are halal).

If it can be really brief but still fill you with emotion or whatever, that's special and I'm cool with it.

I vastly prefer other poetry too, but most of it is shit just like most haikus are. I think people who talk about poetry a lot are usually the fart sniffing pseuds, I just come across a poem every now and then that I like and I assume most others don't feel the same way about it.

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

That plum poem is just cute to me, but the love of my life would always break out in mischievous giggles whenever she remembered it.

>>22184756
Your "allah" is a demon, Yahweh is the one true God and Christ is your saviour. Repent of your unbelief and put your faith in His finished work on the cross
>>22184825
Interdasting. Personally to me the plum thing just sounds gay man sorry. I can see the appeal though it's conjuring an cutesy image of a picnic in my mind. You have a love of your life though, perhaps this is why it is so special to you.

>>22184861
Allah was the moon god in Arabia before Muhammad came along. His symbol was also a crescent moon and star, and he was part of a polytheistic pantheon. Muhammad just did what Akenhaten did after the Israelites left Egypt, change the existing polytheism into a monotheism.

>>22184752
I feel this guy would excel at giving the most exquisite blowjobs

>>22184752

intellectual fake,
haikus are midwit tier cope
not real poetry

>>22185916
>^intellectualLY
fml lol

>>22185916
>>22185924

Intellectually fake,
Haikus are midwit tier cope;
Not real poetry.

>t.~anonymous

>>22184889
At least Google this shit before spewing like a proud boomer.

>>22184825
awful poem

>Where the cuckoo flies
>till it is lost to sight—out there
>a lone island lies.

>Won't you come
>and see loneliness? Just one leaf
>from the kiri tree.

>As bell tones fade,
>blossom scents take up the ringing—
>evening shade!

— Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694).

>>22184760
I learned Japanese to fluency and then realized Japanese culture and tradition sucks and I'd have rather learned a European language. Contemporary Japanese literature just feels like American slop.

>>22187493
Japanese is kind of stifling in the way it is so reliant on unchanging stock phrases leaving very little room for any form of worldplay or innovation beyond autistic kanji literalism puns.

Its kind of like if there was no other way to express annoyance in English other than saying "Ain't that a kick in the teeth" so that is what everyone said all day. It's a language that is 90% catchphrases and slogans.

It can't be helped.

>>22184752
Sucks a lot of cocks
That is what our anon does
His farts smell like cum

>>22187493
All contemporary literature everywhere is American slop. But classical Japanese literature is one of the greatest traditions on the planet. Haiku can be good but the waka of the Kokinshu is I think the finest lyric poetry ever written anywhere.

>>22184752
Issa's haiku on the death of his infant daughter is probably the greatest poem ever written

This dewdrop world—
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet - and yet

I would burn the Divine Comedy for these three lines

>>22184752
>How is it that they are so popular?
They're short

>>22187719
Ok I'll attempt to learn to read the classical lit, it's really a separate language from Modern Japanese of course so that has put me off pursuing it

>>22184760
Only Western culture is great. This is the truth, and also applies to Eastern Europe, Latin America (where I'm from) etc., which are only good insofar as it is Westernised.
Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Ottoman etc. cultures are at the same level as Russian culture before Peter the Great and their Westernization, i.e., the level of exotic curiosities with few things which are truly admirable. There's no better way of realising this than by looking at their very greatest masterworks -- Egpytian Pyramids, Cambodian temples, Japanese poems, Chinese paintings and terracotta statues... It's all very nice and curious, but ultimately naive and you look at it as something that is below you, something that you -- if you're able to produce genuine Western art, which admitedly very few of us are -- would never have cared to have done yourself. Imagine I became your patron and gave you all the time and money to become an artist, as long as, for ten years, you produced only terracotta statues like the ones in China, or haikai in the style of Basho, or Japanese theatre -- would you accept it? No Western artists would. It's not worth it. Those statues and plays are not that great... Even as ordinary a Western work as Nabokov's Pale Fire, or even a Balzac novel, already contains in itself much more culture, craft, intellect, advanced philosophical assumptions, self-criticism, etc. than even the greatest Eastern masterpieces, Confucius, Basho, etc., and it doesn't have anything to do with modernity per se, because Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Plato, Augustine, Petrarch, Cervantes, Milton, Donne, Shakespeare and others are already like that.
The truth is that Homer and Athens are the true sources of great civilization, and if we are more civilised than others it's because we are closer to them than others are, regardless of race, creed etc. Ancient Germans were savages until they met Greece and Rome, Ancient Christians were iliterate imbeciles until they met Plato.
The best Eastern artists realize all that, and become Westerners like the Russians did three or four centuries ago, and the Japanese in the past century.
There are many reasons for that, but mostly comes down to the fact that Western culture is strongly linked to intellect, freedom, and criticism. Whenever those disappear, we go back to primitive art, e.g., Chanson de Roland (nice poem, but ultimately a curiosity).

It's hilarious when people try to pretend science and math are isolated from culture. For this is what's assumed by the thesis that, e.g. Chinese culture is as great as Western culture. If it is so, why then did they not develop the scientific and industrial revolutions? Why were Galileo, Einstein, Newton, Planck, Gauss all Westerners?
In reality, the very same superiority of Western science also shows up on all other cultural areas, and when Western science was not the best (during Islamic golden age, for instance) neither was its culture (Omar Khayyam > Chanson de Roland).

>>22187723
Perfection. I am a fan of Basho’s death poem:
On a journey, ill;
my dream goes wandering
over withered fields.

>>22184752
>intellectually dishonest
What?

>>22187723
As the OP said: midwittery, and sentimentaloid midwittery at that.
And you've never read Dante.

>>22187508
This has artistic as well as personally merit as well though. Even the phrase "Ain't that a kick in the teeth" would hold a beautiful significance to it if it tied to not only all your own memories of every instance of annoyance, but the memories of all of your people as well. In that way it becomes a language chock full of poetic significance, in every area of life from the books you read to the small talk with your friends.
I think it leans a lot into why a lot of Japanese art focuses so heavily on impressions and archetypes, and why they hold so much importance on beautiful or elaborate creation from very simple means, which can be seen in their art, architecture, and technology.
It might not be an objectively best culture or language, but it is still a very beautiful and unique one that has produced some very worthwhile works. I'm amazed you studied to fluency without realizing that, maybe it's because you've never spent any time actually within the culture or the people?

>>22188212
So can anyone refute this or are eastoids buck broken forever?

>>22184752
>haikus are midwit tier and intellectually dishonest
Yes.
>How is it that they are so popular?
Because when it comes to poetry barely anyone cares if it's super intellectual and shows the genius of a writer. They care if they like it. I just think they're cute.

>>22188446
A culture can produce great things that are worth checking out without being the best, and checking them out can give you some new perspectives and ideas, as well as improve your ability to study cultures overall
(you)fags btfo

>>22184752
>reading haiku in English
Let's just say they don't translate well. Pictographic writing never does.
Pictographs are the reason Japs write great poetry and crappy instruction manuals.

>>22188611
>A culture can produce great things that are worth checking out without being the best, and checking them out can give you some new perspectives and ideas, as well as improve your ability to study cultures overall
I agree with you, and am the anon who wrote that long post.
In fact, no one understood what you say better than Westerners, e.g., Ezra Pound and China, the modernist painters and primitive arts, Borges and the Arabian Nights, Renaissance mathematicians and Algebra, not to mention the Greeks and all they got from the Persians, Babylonians and Egyptians.
If not for the West, we probably wouldn't even have deciphered Egyptian, or read the epic of Gilgamesh yet!
Westerners are also the ones who preserve and spread other cultures more than any others, and in fact invented most of the means of cultural preservation and spreading, such as printing, musical notation, audio recording, photography, video, and even such things as safety regulations for cave paintings, proper museum techniques for handling old objects, painting restoration, countless dictionaries and translations that help us preserve rare languages, etc.

>>22190049
I'm from a South Asian country, and I agree with you. A lot of people in post-colonialist studies seethe but I truly appreciate the British Museum. Their discovery and preservation of world history is a magnificent thing, and I could not care less who "owns" ancient artifacts.

>>22187493
yeah, everything after isolation was aped, either from French, or then America after they got buckbroke from the war

>>22184752
if its a midwit tier poem wrote by midwits wouldnt that make it intelectually honest?

>>22190256
No.

>>22190216
True