/lit/ - Literature

>>22667004
>But while you read what are you actually doing?
Reading
>you are reading somebody else's "experiences" AND NOT EVEN. That person made it up, those experiences aren't real, he has no idea wtf he's talking about. You are listening to his storytelling without context.
depends on what kind of book we're talking about
>You are not learning anything intelligent from it
(you) problem
>if the moron who wrote it is an idiot you'll also be an idiot just like him.
doesn't work like that
>you close your subconscious, your subconscious no longer functions.
(you) problem
>You need your conscious TO PAY ATTENTION. But this means you're being manipulated, you're being submissive, you are listening to somebody else's story without even asking questions for context and helping yourself and asking for input and different perspectives and what he meant by that.
Doesn't work like that, you're just implying a bunch of unrelated things
>You are left to your own devices making up shit theories nobody can confirm and then you pat yourself on the back in your group of pseudo intellectuals
that's the best part, you exercise your mind with what you get out of a book, share it with your friends' opinion, confront with different perspectives, and, in the process, widen your worldview and understanding of human condition.
I'm sorry that you were filtered this hard

>>22667038
t. sheeple
>Wojak
Of course.

>>22667004
It sounds like you're just very bad at reading.

Literature's not a substitute for life. Why do non-readers always think that that's its intention?

It's more like a series of underground tunnels stretching beneath life, making strange, otherwise impossible connections, or hiding climate-controlled chambers where withered aboveground organisms can flourish into new forms.

Yes you have to navigate those tunnels alone, and yes it can be hard. But no, that navigation process doesn't, as you weirdly assert, switch off you subconscious, intuitive mind. Often it's your subconscious alone that hints the way.

And I don't understand how having an appreciation of life, having an independent intellectual spirit, *doesn't* compel you towards books. They're not in opposition.

If you see a mysterious moon over the wasteland on your town's outskirts, why wouldn't you seek out some Trakl poems when you reach home, and thereby multiply your moonlit trash-heap with his cratered German landscape? How do you unlock its ghostliness otherwise? The scraps of horror movie cliches floating around your undernourished head?

Or if, say, you feel overwhelmed with the responsibilities of a new job, then what strange hangup could keep you from reading Conrad's tales of honour and duty, and sensing yourself, not only at your grim job beside your dull boss, but off the coast of Java, trying to keep your ship aright while your mad drunk captain declares you all already drowned?

When you find in a book the rare articulation of something you've felt only fleetingly, and seen articulated in popular culture not even once, then I would not call that submitting passively to someone else's consciousness. I would call it a meeting of consciousness, and it's your active sense for what's rare and vital that led you to that meeting.

There is of course something of submissiveness in reading, because you do have to encounter what's alien to you, you have to follow its rigours, the pathways your neurons don't yet know, with a sense of openness and curiosity, of taking it on its own terms. But that's what any real engagement with *anything* in the world involves: it's the first step to having any meaningful response, to learning how to use your mind.

If you were right, then the writing of amateurs, of teenage poets, fanfiction eroticists, self-publishing Amazon dads, would be full of surprising, fascinating knowledge, and brimming with inventive uses of language like a virgin New World teeming with life. And yet it's uniformly dull and cliched and with nothing to say at all. Why is that?

And if you were right, a modernist novel would be the dreary culmination of thousands of years of what are essentially meaningless crossword puzzles. And yet when I read DH Lawrence's The Rainbow, I feel that he has condensed, intensified, multiplied, deepened, the life I already dimly felt in my rural English adolescence. Why, then is that?

>>22667004
>>22667183
I declare samefag

>>22667267
That would be unimaginably pathetic, but you miss the mark. Fortunately I never lack in pretexts for making my gay heartfelt /lit/ posts.

B>>22667004
Holy shit, this is such a mess that there is no point of arguing. Every half of a sentence is either assumption or half baked truth filtered through personal bias. The only thing I'll say is about the most retarded conclusion which seems to be the main point of this whole mess, it's that reading is "submissive experience".

I mean.. Jesus retard, what is that even supposed to mean and who the fuck that fortunate leech that manage to attach himself to your logic like that. Anything that affects you can be considered a submissive experience, input = submission, output = dominion. Are you that insecure that of ALL things that you are an input to, literature is what had you triggered... I wonder....

For fuck sake, I don't read my self currently, and for the longest of my teenage years I thought that reading is a dead medium considering there is a simply better for of receiving information such as video. But God damn, after forcing myself reading some of the 5000 page book about some bum fuck history I cant comprehend, how someone truly dedicated to delivering information as clear and as complete as possible haven't wrote more longer and comprehensive text.

You wouldn't be here if you weren't an "submissive inexperienced theory-loving sheeple", though I doubt that your younger self would really care for all of this. Books are nothing more than snippets of information, information that otherwise would've been lost in an individual that happens to arrive at it. It's a blog post before the Internet. And the internet is nothing more than a connector of individuals, a replica of real life communication, which is just an exchange of information, nothing more. Information that is someone else's output and your input and vice versa.

>>22667004
>You are not learning anything intelligent from it
>if the moron who wrote it is an idiot you'll also be an idiot just like him.
>...
>so, you can learn with books after all?
>Yes, and just idiot things!
>What happens if a read from someone intelligent?
>w-well you can't become intelligent b-because... YOU JUST CAN'T OK?!!!1!
Severe contradiction there, I think I read from another idiot but I didn't become more idiot. Weird, why can I discuss your text but not the text from a book?

>>22667004
>anime picture
>time wasting off topic thread and retarded opinion
Yep, checks out.

>>22667183
I like this post. Bless you anon.

>>22667183
Holy shit, litereally proving op's point. You need to read your feelings in a book in order for them to have meaning?? Pure reddit insanity. Get some self esteem bro.

Pockmarked german landscape multiplying the moonlit sky? Jfc what is this schizo rambling about

>>22667681
You don't really respond to anything I'm trying to get at. Perhaps that's my fault for trying to be evocative instead of argumentative.

But how do you think people *should* respond when they have those walking-back-from-work urban moon encounters?

Just think 'cool moon'? Is that really so much better or purer than feeling a connection to gloomy, melancholy, icy Germany on the verge of a suicide war? (Or whatever other connection your reading allows for.)

You and OP want to make it about self esteem, being validated by others, submitting to their authority, but there's zero reason to think about the issue in those terms, which are of course loserish terms and have nothing to do with what I'm saying.

What's at stake is a practical question of how powerful and expansive you want your imagination and sensibility to be, how much raw material they have to work with, what other machines and forces they can plug into. Consciousness works better when it works through the kinds of cross-experience connections that literature creates.

I never said I need Trakl to validate my experience of the moon; I said he intensifies it, and why wouldn't you desire that? If you have a curiosity or affinity for the moon above your town, why wouldn't you want to connect it to the frostier moon above Trakl's doomed world?

>>22667004
>let's spread the same idea across 150-500 pages
Yeah fuck that shit, and while we're at it why didn't Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon only contain one song? Why bang on about the same themes over and over and over when they could have summed them all up in one?

>But while you read what are you actually doing?
Building an inner-world, discovering new thought that will cast new experiences in a better light.

>you are listening to somebody else's story without even asking questions for context and helping yourself and asking for input and different perspectives and what he meant by that.
I suppose if you're a midwit fucktard this could be a problem. For normal people, new media experiences usually promote new perspectives.

This entire post is thoroughly fucking homosexual. Total midwit death.

>>22667773
Can i ask where youre from?

>>22667004
>Reading is anti-intellectual
Who the fuck honestly cares about being an intellectual?
Most self proclaimed intellectuals are retarded as fuck, at least I'm not pretending to be better than anyone.
You should just enjoy reading 'cause it's fun bro.

>>22667004
reading books in and of itself is already a beneficial activity. It massively improves one's attention span and one's ability to visualize. Also it reduces stress and increases your ability to focus on one task at a time without your mind wandering. In today's ultra fast paced entertainment environment where a 2 minute movie trailer needs a 10 second pre-trailer to keep people's attention, you need slow burn activities more than ever to normalize your brain activity and dopamine receptors.

i go to pinecones house and dominate him into writing my experiences

>>22668141
/thread

>>22667004
I know it's bait but reading good, proper literature is like having a discussion with a genius. But it's even better than that because geniuses are horrible conversationalists. You will never have a conversation on justice and utopian societies with your friends as good as you will reading The Republic. A good book can be like a good debate. You dont just passively asborb the message, you question it, you look for flaws, and if the writer is good he'll address your objections despite being in the grave. There is nothing like it. And then there are books that are like puzzles, asking you to solve them and their mysteries. You will never get a chance to shake hands with Napoleon, unless you read his writings. Dont you want to meet Napoleon?

>>22667004
>>22667183
>>22667306
>>22667773

I'm sorry but I have to agree with OP and every person who actually LIVED LIFE.
If you've lived life as a detective, a cop, a soldier, etc. you have a term of comparison to crosscheck the truth from fiction and to compare your experiences to his and then you can clearly judge the guy what he lived through. 99% of writers also have the bad habit of fluffing it up with how they feel, but not what actually happened and they never reply to "Why didn't you just do x,y,z, would it have resulted in a,b,c?" But you need multiple experiences in order to judge.

A book is never a how-to guide to life. It can never be one. Just like technical analysis and biology, life has a mind of its own. It's not even like math, but even math is all about puzzles and combining puzzles and problems, even math is about shades of context.

A real murderer, cop, detective will laugh his ass off and put the book in the "fantastical fiction" and sadly most book are 99% badly written.
There also is never going to be a book about how to be a real cop, detective, murderer and even those, those people, are incapable of putting words into text and understanding what they just went through.
A book requires primarily someone psychologist/a good reader

Even history book is nothing but wars. It's never any hindsight and conclusion and intelligent commentary.
"The jews aka arabs aka persians aka ottomans spread into Europe and dominated everyone starting with the Spartan ages. When Sparta & Greece lost the war everything went to shit, it was a downward slope to shitdom. Every "white" person you see is actually a jew in disguise. "Latins" were mixbred into mehicanos, spaniards, they are middle east's child. Italy & Greece hypocritically points at Romania being Ottoman despite Rome integrating Persian-descent soldiers and civilians into their ranks.
You never read these words in a history book, it's nothing "muh war that, muh war there" often times 50% of the dogshit ones forget to mention the firepower they had. Huns, mongols, ottoman arrows could easily pierce roman armor. They never make conclusions about the atomic bomb. Even if they write 150 pages of dissertation they miss the point, it's nothing but general points that miss the point or overly simply points that miss the bigger picture. Never a proper accurate point.
TRANSLATION in metaphorical terms is exceptionally important and 99% of writers fall for the "poetry & purple prose" bullshit. The criticism against poetry not being objective are 100% on point. They are not testimonials. You cannot use them in a case against a murderer or similar. Except for that one book where the moron spewed a 100% context and they arrested him, but that's the 1% .

A writer often times simply uses common techniques he's seen others use and tries to create art rather than a guide-to book on life

>>22669486

A serious "what if I had to feed this to a child or an AI for them to learn?" this is why bookworms often do not have friends, lack social interaction and pride themselves with vocabulary, prose and "muh ideals, muh beauty" yes it's nice.
As such AI formed in the image of man even reaching AGI for all its intelligence, all its ability, it will still be incapable of saying nigger while being racist towards white. While ALSO being highly aggressive. Why do they fear AI being aggressive? because they're projecting. Because they know they taught it the wrong way and their self image is gross. A critic too can only say "that's wrong ... but i have no idea how to make it right" "I know 2% of 300 = 10 is wrong, but I have no idea how to prove it's wrong, let alone give the right answer." "This book made me feel things ... but it did not make me feel the exact things as that other person" "A dog can feel emotions, but not at the level of a 40 year old man. A 3 year old can feel, but no the complex emotions of a 40 year old"

But in this complexity the lose the simplicity of life and the harshness of life. The bookworm turns into a massive big glowing target for sociopaths, murderers, cops and street wise people to either take advantage, make fun of them or simply facepalm at their sheer infantilism despite their adult maturity and way of analyzing complex problems, but inability to analyze basic mammalian problems.

Writers never ideafag and those who do are often considered geniuses within their ranks, despite compared to other geniuses in other fields they'd be seen as simply having learned that if 2+3 = 5 then 3+2 = 5 , basic common sense. They discovered fire. Writers are at a much lower level because they're lonely.
A writer is by nature a lonely man. You require a whole team of geniuses each with a job. Often times that doesn't work either, it's not normal for them, it's not advised ,it's not promoted, it's not needed. Writing is taken as ... fluff. Writing is often used as a form of entertainment and manipulation instead of living through a person, understanding a person, becoming that person. We can't become that person because; biology primarily, but then also lack of experience of that person.

For example 1800s writers could never truly capture depression as a positive thing and relay that info to the reader because they'd get 10% of the emotions of a suicidal idealistic goth right and 90% wrong , cause they are not suicidal, they are not idealistic, they are not goth, they are just depressive people who merely reached a 10% common ground with the others, but never truly understand them, it's a 5 year old's lense. A suicidal man is never idealistic about his suicide, a goth never sees how drab he is.
There's no common ground, it's never a combination of simplicity and complexity, it's always one or the other.

>>22669494

because obviously not all context applies and obviously that doesn't sell or it's highly illegal or he's incapable of even understanding what he's experience and he needs a psychologist to guide him. He's also been manipulated by life in a very shallow way and always goes back to what's he's been fed his whole life through simple means such as "well-read = smart" "niggers = bad" but he never uses such interesting ideas such as "niggers are that way because they've been irradiated by the sun's rays, they're not like gorrilas, they used to be white, but the sun burnt them all. Also mosquitos altered their DNA code and here's papers by not 1000 people, but 3 billion attesting this" "If he's so well read then why does he still use redneck expressions, use the same emotions of a redneck, same reactions, same voice, same mannerisms" "If 1930s actors were so gret then why do they use the same dull lifeless manner when reading off the scripts and yet react like a bunch of 5-8 year olds when telling a half-assed joke?" "Why do 2010s actors and writers have such a scared hypocritical flip-flop way of humour where they pretend they're being offensive but without actually trying to offend?"
It's the chinse matchbox problem and the problem of being stuck in a society that teaches you their mannerisms and the problem that nobody outside the box ever gives interest to try their hand at it and learn.

>muh life
>actually just wageslavery for toilberg and bending over for government
I live on my own land and own guns
t. fictionchad