/lit/ - Literature

>>3692048

ill be bumping with some good art for anyone who is interested. i take /lit to also include general works of cultural value.

>>3692061

>>3692064

>>3692066

>>3692067

There was a few times with Chris Ware's stuff.

I wish I cried more, actually. There's lots of times that I want to.

>>3692074

how come? what was it about his work that spoke to you?

>>3692083

After being a crybaby as a kid, I've completely desensitized myself since crying was such an embarrassment back then. Thus I've only cried twice in the past 8 years, those two instances being the deaths of my dog and Grandmother. I envy those who are able to shed tears at art as I feel like I'm missing out.

>>3692084

>>3692048
I've been reading the waves for what seems like forever. It's terribly tedious and I can't advance too much. I'm happy to read somewhere along the book a powerful something might appear, cause until now its "nothing happens: the book"
and yeah, I know its not much about what happens rather than how woolf describes the interior world of each character but I can't help but feel a lot of those soliloquies have happened before in my mind too in a way or other

>>3692092

it's times like these--where i have saved images of klimt--that i'm really reminded of benjamin's "work of art in the age of technological reproduction." sure, there is something of a cult pilgrimage associated with going to see works in person, but with today's digitization of great art, you lose so fucking much.

anyone who has seen this klimt knows what i mean, and how much is lost in the digital transfer.

>>3692084

I kind of hate Damien Hirst, but that's neato.

>>3692098

that's why i cried. you don't know me, so you can't possibly verify; but it was one of the unique moments in my life where i saw my own self splayed across the open page in such a way that, briefly, i could feel something like this "human project" materialize in between the lines of another author. that she was there, long ago, the "woman writing," and i am here, now, reading--to see EXACTLY yourself...well, i don't know, but it was both terrifying and deeply moving for me.

if you want to know, i am an exact combination between rhoda and bernard. the way i think, the way i behave, the private soliloquies that churn over themselves in my mind: it was all there, for me to read and study and contemplate and understand. i am indebted to woolf on a level i cannot put into words.

the same is true of pessoa and wittgenstein, and that is why i listed his notebooks (book of disquiet) and on certainty

>>3692114

i agree, and find "valium" a rare exception.

on another note, this is one of my top five paintings of all time. i got to see this in musee d'orsay; it was perfectly presented in dark light. you cannot see the painting IRL unless it is in a VERY particular sort of lighting, and even then it plays with perspective as you move from one side to the other. Stuck had a technique i've never seen reproduced.

>>3692116
Well it might have to do with the fact that I am a man and my dad is to me what Kafka's dad was to him (but not to an extreme, just a bit), that I find myself easier in the son of a banker in australia who can't relate and feels so insecure and alien. The fact that I'm living in a city that is not my own and kinda judges me by where I'm from first of all is also a similarity.
I like the book. That's why even though I can't really advance too much before doing something else i haven't dropped it.
And yes, too many times you feel woolf talking to you.

I'm much more of a pleb when it comes to crying so I cried at the last speech of king Theoden before charging on the fields of Pelennor on the lord of the rings.

>>3692145

"the most theorized painting of all time"

>>3692166

i respect that, to each his own. it was a great speech, too.

this, too, is one of my all time favorites: to see catiline there, rigid and alone...there is something i love about catiline, and identify more with him than cicero. kinda wish he was successful.

>>3692173

I've never cried from a book. I haven't cried in about 15 years. I say this not to brag, it's simply a reality. I honestly think there's something wrong with me.

But there are times when I've come close, throat tight, eyes bleary. What come to mind are Benjy's chapter of The Sound and the Fury and the chapter of A Death in the Family in which Rufus brags (not quite the right word, but if you've read it you'll know what I mean) about his father's death to the bullies.

I'm not quite sure why they get me, something about the bliss-in-ignorance of the innocent (through age or through subnormality) in the face of tragedy. Maybe Flowers for Algernon, being similar but also sort of the inverse would make me cry.

>>3692145
But even that Hirst is just simplistic op art. It's something people have done much better decades before he hired assistants to do it for him.

Anyway, The Book of Disquiet is cutting pretty deep. Darkness Visible probably caused some crying, but I can't really remember.

>>3692221

fair enough; i feel the same way about a great deal of modern art, actually: either it is consciously distancing itself from traditional modes of art (and hence preserving those traditional modes), merely remodelling forms of traditional art (preserving them, though in a faux-novel manner), or attempting to break free from the anxiety of influence by shouting as loud as it can in the interest of "shock" (and hence reminding us why traditional art is important/good)

with few exceptions, modernist art just leads me back to traditional art.

book of disquiet is a sacred text. need to take a look at darkness visible.

>>3692214

benjy chapter is exquisite; i haven't checked out death in the family, but definitely will.

>>3692239

>>3692239
As a preview of sorts:
http://davidkirkpatrick.net/2012/06/30/james-agees-masterwork-knoxville-summer-of-1915-written-in-ninety-minutes/

>>3692239
Yeah, things have been kind of... complicated? lately. I'm not saying that there aren't serious artists out there, but a ton of really important ones have died within the past 5 years or so, so people are eagerly trying to point to who's inheriting what legacy. Regardless, there's a lot of nonsense to sift through and the shift towards digital art has made things complicated.

>>3692173

What's up with that blotch in the middle of that image.

Lighting is pretty genius there, though.

>>3692297

i like that painting, though: do you know the painter/title? i want to add it to my collection.

>>3692301

what blotch? i think i'm missing it...

>>3692048
aren't you that guy that did heaps of coke at one time, and has a mammoth of a library?

>>3692328
also Elsorto's last stand from For Whom the Bell Tolls. Easily overshadows the real ending.

>>3692328

heaps of coke? what? i've never touched coke in my life. have no desire too, either.

smoke all the time, though.

and yeah, i've posted my library before and yeah, it's pretty extensive.

how come? does that information impact which books you have cried over?

>>3692325

A black hole of light

> “It’s like a Woman, isn’t it, you look at each other, you think Of course not, she thinks Of course not,— yet the Alternatives hang about, don’t they, like Wraiths.”

Mason & Dixon has made me genuinely weep at times

>>3692338
not at all. I might just be confusing happenings on /lit/ since it was 2 years ago (I want to say). Nevertheless, your name stuck out in my mind because I remember you starting a bookshelf thread, then posting picture after picture... after picture. Then everyone collectively deemed that you should have a tripcode. It was kind of like pic related.

>>3692325
It's by Antonio Lopez Garcia, but I'm not sure of the title.

I don't typically like realism, but his stuff's pretty remarkable.

Many, many parts of My Antonia by Willa Cather.

Aule preparing to kill his dwarves even though he loved them so much. pic related, manly tears were shed

>>3692364

dude that's one of my favorites. LOVE David.

and yeah, i return every year or so and muck around the board for a bit, post an updated set of my books, then retire. it's been a healthy relationship so far.

>>3692388

there seems to me an odd, distrubing gravitas to his style-in the best way possible.

the cracked table, the dirtied street: the lack of subjects make it a uniquely human-made non-human world, like this were all an apocalypse that occurred slowly. i really like the feel to his work. keep that shit coming.

>>3692351

excellent choice.

>>3692398

another good choice.


>>3692403

silmarillion definitely made me emotional, though i cannot say i shed a tear. incredible work, though.

>>3692443

forgot my pic

>>3692444

>five senses
>five women

which one is which? I can fap to this

>>3692491

oh its

taste, hearing, seeing, smell, touch

not sure why first one is taste but the other 4 are clear

>>3692491

have some vermeer, then!

Of Mice and Men is still the only book to make me cry.

I cried a bit while reading the Sirens of Titan when the message is revealed. good stuff

>>3692501

>dat sadness in beauty

would waifu

>>3692496

oh wait, its actually

touch, hearing, seeing, smelling, taste

the 5th girl is actually going for a fruit!

makes sense

>>3692521

i gotta be honest, i love this painting, though the "taste" scene with the kid is a little weird.

anyone care to post a passage or two? i was going to post the passage from tacitus i was referring to in my first post, if anyone is interested. and if you haven't read tacitus, then go fucking pick up tacitus and read him.

>>3692145
I hate it when the presentation of a painting completely ruins it. Curators have a surprising lack of knowledge when it comes to what conditions some paintings were meant to be displayed in; my picture is the prime example. Rothko painted these with extremely low lighting in mind, so the figures would distort and move in the darkness. On the other hand, the Edvard Munch museum in Oslo has a perfect display of The Scream: completely solitary, at the end of a long dark room, with a single low-watt bulb over it.

>>3692533

i agree with this wholesale. you're a gentlemen with a fine and subtle eye for appropriate presentation. it's really odd to me how poorly some curators go about generally "showcasing" items that, at times, call into question the very act of showcasing.

i agree with your post fully.

>>3692543

fuck forgot pic again

>>3692543
There's a James Turrell exhibit at LACMA next month and I'm just scared to death that the works are going to just be fucking ruined by poor presentation. Of course, I have enough faith in the LACMA team that they won't be bumbling idiots and screw up something where the presentation is pretty much just as important as the piece, but the anxiety is still there. Not to mention art is ruined by large crowds that won't shut up. I was trying to write in front of a painting by Joan Mitchell that was just breathtaking, but this enormous group of high school girls would not be quiet as they took facebook profile pictures next to the adjacent Rothko.

>>3692557

my life entirely. there was a really interesting article in harper's not about the presentation of art, but in the complications in moving art exhibits across national boundaries, how european law identifies installation art, etc.

here's a link, though i think you need a subscription to read (either way, i'm sure you can find it):
http://harpers.org/archive/2013/02/blind-appraisal/

you live in/around LA? i lived in california for a bit--can't wait to get back. norcal, though: palo alto area. fuck nostalging so hard right now.

>>3692214
listen to 'this is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about' all the way through

>>3692584
Yeah, I'm within walking distance of LACMA. Are there any galleries up in Palo Alto, or do you have to go into SF? I've been considering applying for a job opening up there.

And yeah, I couldn't get into the article. I'll try JSTOR in the morning.

alright gents, allow me to frame this for you: i initially approached tacitus as an assignment for a strategic policies class, and he was intended to be read as principally a commentator on military strategy. as such, we had to read agricola and germania: agricola is the recounting of an exceptional roman general (by the same name) and his impressive conquest of britannia. the text is extremely lucid and offers more than a handful of absolute gems of political/military strategy. it is, mainly, a description of agricola's battles: beautiful renditions of iron splintering flesh and wood, cavalry ripping through misplaced lines, of armies run up against the sea and facing utter annihilation--absolutely epic stuff.

and then there is this one passage that comes out of nowhere. tacitus is basically done with the text; he has traced agricola's military and political trajectory, and has drawn some substantial conclusion from it. but then, without much warning, he ends the text with this (see next post):

>>3692557
>James Turrell

>>3692601
>>3692604

>mfw James Turrell

>>3692601

"Gnaeus Julius Agricola was born on the Ides of June in the third consulship of Gaius Caesar; he dies in his fifty-fourth year on the tenth day befor ethe Kalends of September in the consulship of Collega and Priscinus. Should posterity care to know what he looked like, he was attractive rather than impressive. There was no aggression in his features, but abundant charm of expression. You could see at a glance that he was a good man, you were tempted to believe him a great one. Cut off though he was in the midst of his prime, measured by glory his life was absolutely complete. He had wholly realized those true blessings that reside in a man's character, and having held the consulship and borne triumphal decorations what more could fortune offer?"

>>3692604
I honestly have no idea if you're saying he's a quality artist or mocking me for liking his work.

Prince Aundrey's death in War and Peace. I spent so long learning to relate to him.

>>3692613
That is how you fucking end a biography. God damn.

I shed some tears reading A Confederacy of Dunces. On the whole I didn't really like the book, but I remember feeling really sorry for Ignatius. Knowing a little bit about the author, I couldn't help but think this book wasn't as funny to him as it was the majority of his readers.

I also teared up a few times reading Crime & Punishment. The one part that hit me the hardest was, near the end of the book, when Raskolnikov recalled Sonia's words and fell to the ground in the middle of the square

>>3692168

It's funny how Foucault talks about three different interpretations of the perspective of this painting, whether the mirror in the background reflects the painting, the king posing for the painting, or some third option (I don't recall precisely), but only one of these interpretations is even physically possible because of the angle of the painting and the mirror...

I shed some tears reading A Confederacy of Dunces. On the whole I didn't really like the book, but I remember feeling really sorry for Ignatius. Knowing a little bit about the author, I couldn't help but think this book wasn't as funny to him as it was the majority of his readers.

>>3692613

"Should posteriety care to know..."

well, gents, i'm not gonna lie: I lost it at this. to feel a man 2000 years before you reach out across a gulf you find unimaginably opaque: for someone to say: "here is this man's life, from beginning to finish--remember it"--well, my god, is there anything else literature can accomplish? i said something similar in my post above on woolf, but it was one of those rare moment where you feel yourself within the great economy of things as a member not decoupled from the voices of the past, but deeply intertwined at a nearly animal level.

what vision compells a man not to write for his time, but to consciously write for all of posterity?

it reminded me of the first line and dedication fo Herodotus, too, who i think is worth repeating:

"Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his research so that human events do not fade with time. May the great and wonderful deeds--some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians--not go unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other."

it should never be forgotten that the first history ever written--and indeed to origin of history as a practice--was intended to raise the burden of war from the shoulders of man

i swear to god, i see shit today, i read shit today, and compared to this--which reaches across all of history to whisper the end of conflict--i just can't even comment.

mighty men who witnessed mighty things--and sought to record them such that man could better himself as a species. i swear to god this blows my mind every time i truly try to understand it.

>>3692614
Ha ha, sorry. I adore his work, and I'm very excited to be visiting LA in time to see the retrospective.

Worlds, by Joe Haldeman.
When O'Hara finds out her husband will remain behind on Earth and die.

>>3692627
>>3692613
Christ, imagine reading this in Latin. Surely the prose is more beautiful, but as I type this out, I can't help but feel what >>3692627 described.
There are very few works of art that make me feel like I am transcending time. Side 2 of Dark Side of the Moon does this for me, as does Glass's Violin Concerto. In literature, it would probably go to the first sentence of Decline and Fall by Gibbon.

"In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind."

It speaks at its heart of an incredible awe of the achievements of humanity. Yes, it is vaguely racist but the sheer immensity of what is being described alone is enough to make reading the entire history worth it.

>>3692644
Heh, this brought up something I never thought would make me feel: Seeking A Friend for the End of the World. I was not expecting such an emotional film.

>>3692629
Thank christ, my need for self-validation is satisfied.

>>3692627

>that post
>suddenly tidal wave of solidarity feels

this is a good thread and you should feel good

>>3692653

exactly. i imagine we would be friends.

gibbon is the man, and that's from the very beginning, right? hell of a fucking hook.

i don't know why, but it also reminds me of montesquieu and his treatment of the romans: at the apotheosis of their empire, at the peak of the glory that was rome, it was said that even having heard the latin language--to literally have even heard it spoken before you--meant that you were a subject of the roman empire.

their borders radiated, under this reading, to the very ends of the known world.

their's was an imperialism equal parts awesome and terrifying--certainly we have and use the word "epic" today, though it is hollow when compared to the dream that was the roman empire.

whenever i hear the word rome, it conjurs those lines from Tennyson:
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

"men that strove with gods"--this, as hopelessly romantic as it is, is how i picture the great men of the ancient world.

i cried yesterday when some anon told me to gb2>>>/pol/

life is hard sometimes

Before I Die made me shed tears twice. Its a YA (lol pleb) novel about a girl diagnosed with cancer.

>>3692735
The death of one girl with a cancer is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.

I was surprisingly moved by Stapledon's description of the lives of nebulae, in his novel Star Maker. Real tragedy.

Bawled like a little girl about half-way through Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf.
I also cried a little at the end of On the Road-- I wasn't even particularly partial to the book but the tragedy of Neil's character really struck me once Jack left him once and for all in Mexico.

My throat tightened reading Keats' Ode to a Nightingale.

>>3692071
I fucking love Waterhouse <3

I cried so fucking much at the end of the Death of Ivan Illyich. Tolstoy's my fav.

>>3692048
Pessoa's Notebooks are different from Book of Disquiet? And how did Wittgenstein make you cry?

The part of Brave New World about the decanting was the only thing I've ever read that made me nauseous. I need to read more, I guess.

>>3692048
>5. tacitus' agricola

I just bought this and didn't expect it to be a particularly emotional read. Why did it make you cry?

>>3693203
see
>>3692601

Never cried reading, except for tears or boredom.

I cry quite frequently, considering I guess. Probably as much as I laugh. Memorable teary moments for me, induced by books:

Grapes of Wrath
Bastard out of Carolina
Jane Eyre
Story of an African Farm (one of the most beautiful -- and sad -- ending scenes in lit IMO)

I find it particularly impressive when a short story makes me cry, because you have less time to become attached to characters, etc.

Two short stories that recently made me cry are "They that Sow in Sorrow Shall Reap" by James Agee and "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood." by Alistair Macleod, who I never hear /lit mention, but is one of the best living masters of the short story.

A history book about the Ostfront made me cry.

>>3692083
I find I'm very moved when you see the inner mind of someone lonely and it's all innocent and gentle. But only if it's not unrealistically so. Some of the Bloom sections in Ulysses had this quality too. I can't think of many examples. Sometimes Wallace had things like this but he'd get into the mind of the character too quickly. Ware strikes a really good balance of remoteness and intimacy, such that the character feels alone from even the reader.

Good Old Neon and On His Deathbed by DFW.

>twf no /art/ board

>>3692048
>3. wittgenstein's "on certainty"
...Did we read the same book?

>>3693738
There's /ic/ but it's kind of shit.

I cried three times:
George Orwell's 1984
Albert Camus' The Stranger
Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front( I used to be a warfag, but this book made me realize that war is terrible)

>>3692085
that fucking feel

I was such a wuss as a child, that I essentially cried myself out. This is one of those things I feel like I'll never be able to experience because of this.

I was surprisingly affected by Joyce's 'A Painful Case' the other day.

none of them

The ending of a starcraft novel, the marine is overrun by zerg and it was very emotional.

>>3692627
>as a species

evolutionist pls go

>>3692665
mhm dem lion balls

Thanks for the art, op.

>>3693738
/hr/ has good art threads sometimes, if you wade through all the porn and celebrities to find them.

>>3695699
But /hr/ has no discussion.

>>3692048
>5. tacitus' agricola
Which part exactly?

>>3695731

No one is actually talking about art here though. Although rapture is at least writing about literature in an intelligent way.

>>3692048
1. Pessoa's Book of Disquiet
2. Milton's Paradise Lost
3. Updike's Rabbit at Rest

/lit/ posters (at lest from a few months back) would bash me for the last one, thinking of Updike as a boring old man who indulges in endless descriptions of flora but Rabbit's inability to forfeit his sexual desires in favor of morality strikes me at least as authentic, as well as his sad but ultimately balanced resignation. That end, for a life so miserably vain and the analogy with the perceived national threat on the background coupled with his inconsequential death crushed me a bit

>>3692048
>3. wittgenstein's "on certainty"

...

As a kid, Bridge to Terabithia. Was not expecting those goddamn feels. Cried like a baby in my mom's office.

>>3695767
How could Paradise Lost have possibly made you cry? Are you a puritan or something?

This thread seems to be strangely (or maybe, sadly, not so strangely) buoyant. I think it's high time to sink it, then, by pointing out what, I would imagine, a lot of the more intelligent board-users have noticed but just haven't bothered to say: namely, that it is fucking atrocious, through-and-through namefag vanity and pretentiousness.
Surely I don't need to point out to anyone that the kind of person who claims that he has "genuinely shed tears' over Wittgenstein's "On Certainty" is someone that any decent and intelligent person will want to avoid like the plague. An absurdity like that just SCREAMS this guy's pathetic desire to be perceived and admired by a bunch of strangers as someone with a sensibility so refined and developed by the leisured imbibing of high culture that mere mortals like us tend to hold off from him, uncertain whether he is a genius or a madman
"Weave a circle round him thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise."
In the spirit of the Karl Kraus quotation at the head of this post, though, an insufferable thread like this one DOES have the merit of affording one an opportunity of pointing up some clear and undeniable differences between the pseudo-culture of the /lit/board namefag and REAL literary culture.
Let's run through this awful thread once again, from the top, and look at just what sort of "honey-dew" of deep and difficult literature this risible pseud Rapture actually HAS "fed on". Maybe an exercise like this will encourage some board users to give up posing and start actually reading.

>>3692101
Consider first this post alluding to Walter Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility".
It bears one of the most unmistakable tell-tale signs of the pseudo-intellectual: using a slegehammer to kill a gnat.
What is the point that this guy Rapture is actually making in this post?
One that any of us could hear our utterly unphilosophical Auntie Madge making any time we walked by an art gallery with her: paintings are nicer if you can actually see the original rather than just a reproduction.
What possible need on earth was there to drop the title of Benjamin's complex dialectical meditation on aura and authenticity in the perception of works of art in order to make so banal and trivial a point as THAT?
The answer is: there was no need.
If this guy REALLY felt it was necessary to back up the trivial little commonplace 'Art loses something in reproduction" with a reference to a published work, he could have chosen a hundred such works where this simple, basic idea is expressed, none of which would have impressed anyone very much.
But no, it had to be Benjamin - in whose essay this idea is rather an unspoken, self-evident premiss and starting_point rather than anything a theorist of his stature would actually descend to DISCUSSING - because people who read Benjamin are known to be an intellectual cut above the rest:

>>3692116
I think the next point where I retched was this explosion of pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-spiritual hyperbole decorated with a kitsch Caspar David Friedrich.

Rapture speaks toward the end of the first paragraph of this splurge of self-admiration of Virginia Woolf as "another author". I'm hoping against hope that what he meant by that was simply that Woolf is "another author that made him cry" in addition to Wittgenstein, Tacitus etc. I hesitate, for fear of bringing on another violent fit of vomiting, to even consider that he might have been implying with this word that HE HIMSELF IS AN AUTHOR, and that in the very act of committing linguistic atrocities like

"One of the unique moments in my life where I saw my own self splayed..." (Sorry, son, but either a moment where such a thing occurs is ONE of a series of such moments OR it is "unique". It can't be "unique" AND "one of several")

"An exact combination between Rhoda and Bernard" (One is not a "combination between" things, one is a "combination of" things).

"The private soliloquies that churn over themselves in my mind" ("private soliloquies" is a pleonasm, since a soliloquy is by definition private, particularly if it is also stated to be going on "in one's mind"; there is absolutely no need to add a reflexive pronoun to the verb "churn" in English. "over" is also pretty redundant. and the image of a "churning soliloquy" is the sort of thing that a verbally precocious and over-enthusiastic four-year-old would come up with anyway. Jesus, I'm noticing now that it is just fucking AMAZING how many laughable solecisms you have managed to commit in the space of just ten words).

In short, I'd take a brief look at The Waves again, if I were you, just to check whether you weren't maybe just a little off in your perception that your "own self" was "splayed" ("splayed!" Jesus!) between the lines of Woolf's novel. I read it and I don't remember her including any illiterate fools among the characters

>>3692168
A few posts further down Rapture is kind enough to offer, entirely gratuitously, an indication of just what a paltry little heap of recently-acquired dribs and drabs of student gossip his knowledge of art history - despite his established status as a Benjamin scholar - actually consists of.

"Las Meninas" is "the most theorized painting of all time".

I don't know what the quotation marks around that proposition are meant to signify.

Perhaps that it isn't something selected from Rapture's own millenia-spanning treasurehouse of knowledge, but the opinion of someone ELSE who has never opened a book written before 1960?

I'm aware that the "Foucault industry" has been working day and night shifts in certain American universities for about 40 years now and I have no doubt that a lot of forests have already fallen so that one or another mediocre grad-school show-off of Rapture's sort could regale us with YET ANOTHER critical synopsis of the first ten pages of Les Mots et Les Choses.

But I'm afraid that anyone who thinks that that makes Las Meninas the "most theorized painting of all time" is just showing to the world that "all time", for them, is tantamount to the trivial little trendy time of whatever's currently "hot" in "avant-garde" theory.

If you'd ever bothered to inform yourself about the contents of, say, the library of the Warburg Institute - or even knew what the Warburg Institute is - you'd be aware that there are a hundred paintings among the heritage of Western art that have been the subject of more, and more important, monographs than has Velasquez's painting

>>3692543
Actually, on examining it closely, I really don't know if I want to go on listing all the awful, half-laughable, half-despicable verbal and substantial intellectual atrocities this Rapture guy commits in this thread.

They just go on and on

"I agree with this wholesale"

example after example of this unrestrained shitting on the English language by a guy who claims that he is moved to tears by thoughtful and crafted prose...

It really is beginning to make me suspect that I am beating on a twelve-year-old here.

I bid you all good day...

>>3696336
>>3696346
>>3696375
>>3696410
>>3696423
>I think it's high time to sink it, then, by pointing out what, I would imagine, a lot of the more intelligent board-users have noticed but just haven't bothered to say
There's a reason for this, and because it's unnecessary and makes you look like even more of a pseudo-intellectual than you claim this guy to be. Just stop.

>>3696336
>>3696346
>>3696375
>>3696410
>>3696423

#rekt

"I declare
that later on,
even in an age unlike our own,
someone will remember who we are." - Sappho

The present tense always gets me. They never really died.

your feelings aren't literature

>people crying at stilted hacks like DFW and Woolf

hahhhhhhhhhaaaaahhaha

>not even a single mention of Homer

sure is high-pedigree in here

>>3696336
thanks for doing my job for me m8, in fact I'm so impressed that I wonder why you aren't a Tripfag, you would be a welcome member among our ranks.

>>3697215
Crying at Homer...? At the Iliad or the Odyssey, exactly?
Anyway, if you cry reading something contemporary and not reading a classic, does it make you less intelligent?

>>3697215
The Iliad is the most moving piece of literature ever composed. The homilia at the end of Book VI reduces me to tears every time. I obviously feel pity for Andromache, but I also pity Hector as he clearly wishes he could stay with his family but is constrained by the mores of the time and culture to go out a fight for κλέος. I like to think that the Iliad is based upon real events and that some incredibly brave warrior and loving husband from 3000 years ago has become one of the most famous men ever to have existed because of those simple virtues.

>>3697476
Also, the language alone makes me cry tears of joy that mankind can produce such beautiful art.

>>3697215

>Woolf
>hack

That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

>>3697476
But it never happened, though. It's all myths.

Achilles and Odysseus never walked this earth, never shared the same sun as you, never breathed the same air as they were seeing out there, in the sea, the banks of Troy unveiling; they didn't fight and Paris didn't kill Achilles, Hector wasn't fought to death by Achilles.

>>3696336
>>3696346
>>3696375
>>3696410
>>3696423

I would love to see the look of horror on Rapture's face as he read through these and saw how thoroughly he was shat on in his own thread.

On the plus side now he can add this to his list of "distinct moments in my adult literary life where i have genuinely shed tears over a text".

>>3692546
Rothko is incredible.

The only recent /lit/ induced crying I can remember is the end of Quentin's chapter in Sound and the Fury.

>>3698575
Also, I'd be lying if I said I didn't tear up at the end of Gatsby.

"Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

>>3692048
Don't think I've ever cried reading a book.
I teared up at the end of the film of Naked Lunch

I can only point to two at this place in time.

1. Good Morning, Midnight / Jean Rhys
2. The Path to the Spiders' Nests / Italo Calvino

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

O Meu Pé de Laranja Lima (I was 12)

Likhutin's suicide attempt in Petersburg.

Can't recall ever actually crying while reading a book.

Which is strange, as I've been moved to tears by a fair few films, so it's not like it's hard to move me.

Chinese Cinderella made me cry when I was a kid. That poor girl ;_;

>>3698698
meu pé de laranja lima made me cry when i was a kid and i still do every time i read it. so many feels

>>3696336
>>3696346
>>3696375
>>3696410
>>3696423
Une humiliation en bonne et due forme.

The Brothers Karamazov
In Search of Lost Time
Hamlet

That 40-something page speech in atlas shrugged that goes out over the radio.

I'm fucking tearing up now... Ahhh shit.

>>3698611

Overplayed

>frankenstein
>chapter 13

Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?
I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!

>>3698560
>On the plus side now he can add this to his list of "distinct moments in my adult literary life where i have genuinely shed tears over a text".
One of the hardest #rekkages I've ever seen

>>3698788
go away

It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses, a species returned to circumstances more like those for which it was originally evolved, more confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent - the sort of beings we would want to represent us in a Universe that, for all we know, is filled with species much older, much more powerful, and very different.

Our remote decendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth.

They will gaze up and strain to find that blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for it's obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.

>>3696375
>I read it and I don't remember her including any illiterate fools among the characters

1984

I was 11 at the time and for some odd reason it hadn't really hit me that a book could end without the good guys winning

>>3696375
Christ almighty, the poor guy got wrecked.

>>3698575
>potential work of yellowism

>>3699618
>1984
>good guys
heh

Holy shit I can't even handle all the butthurt on this thread. Sure there is some seriously autistic shit going on here.

>>3696336
>>3696346
>>3696375
>>3696410
>>3696423

i am literally loving this.

for the love of all that is good, continue.

>>3700203

what's even better, when pressed he falls back on a single brecht poem--An die Nachgeborenen--and in particular the lines:

And yet we knew:
Even the hatred of squalor
Distorts one’s features.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow hoarse. We
Who wished to lay the foundation for gentleness
Could not ourselves be gentle.

as justification for his behavior. it's simply amazing stuff: the dude is fighting a one-man brecht-infused class warfare on a relatively slow, sleepy 4chan board.

>>3696410

question marks around that proposition are meant to signify that it is drawn from a source other than me. perhaps if you read more, or read at all, you would know what they "signify"

the line comes from the book "the art museum," and is again repeated, in different language, in the first part of foucault's "order of things"

it's odd that you don't know what a quote is supposed to do. that's pretty basic grammar, man. but don't worry, i'm already embarrassed for you, so i doubt you have much work left to do.

>>3700438
it's remarkable how clumsily you dodge every criticism that user has made of your posts in this thread and instead focus on an erroneous interpretation of something more or less irrelevant to what he was conveying.

>question marks around that proposition are meant to signify that it is drawn from a source other than me. perhaps if you read more, or read at all, you would know what they "signify"

i'm incredulous that you purport to believe he doesn't actually know what *quotation* marks really signifiy. did you even read the rest of that post, and the rhetorical question he poses in the very next sentence?

>>3700438
A tactical rather than strategic tip this time.

When one is trying to save face one should

EITHER

adopt the "You can't hurt ME, I'm actually LOVING this" bullshit tactic

OR

adopt the tactic of flailing wildly about dragging in quarter-understood, contextless fragments of discussion from other threads and attempting to score petty confused points relating to secondary sources.

Do BOTH TOGETHER and your butthurtness and desperation become a little too obvious.

For what it's worth, though:

i) that you appear to be assuming that from the fact that a person has cited ONE Brecht poem on this board (and not even in the present thread) it can validly be deduced that that is "the single Brecht poem" that he has read is a fair indication, I think, of what intellectual benefits the reading of Wittgenstein has actually brought you. (Or perhaps your eyes were too continually misted over with tears to actually notice those parts of his oeuvre where he alludes to the laws of formal logic).

and

ii) As I said in the post itself, the remark about Las Meninas is a remark of shameful ignorance, whether it's yours, or Foucault"s, or a source of Foucault's, or a commentator on Foucault's, or whomever's.
I'm really not too sure that YOU know where the remark comes from, as - even though I haven(t researched this - I find it prima facie very unlikely that it would have occurred to anyone to describe Las Meninas as "the most theorized painting ever" BEFORE Foucault used it in Les Mots et les Choses.
One can certainly imagine a certain kind of semi-illiterate, blinkered, post-structuralist fanboy thinking it was that AFTER Foucault did his thing with it, because this kind of fanboy only ever reads stuff written by people like himself anyway and THEY have certainly regurgitated Les Mots et les Choses to death and beyond.
But someone thinking this painting was especially highly theorized BEFORE Foucault's book? I don't think so.
Your ignorance is showing again.

>>3700571
where's the other thread?

>>3700571
You're good, but you're an asshole. I really hope you're never in a position to educate children.

>>3700608
Yeah.. you're good at beating on this tripfag and well done for that but I really wouldn't want to talk to you. You seem angry.

>>3700571
It's good to be cut down to size every once in a while. It's humbling. However, I fear there is no one on this board sharp enough to cut you down to size in turn. Which is what you sorely need, because as this anon points out >>3700608 , you're an asshole. The smartest asshole in the room.
You came here to flex your muscles and beat your chest, same as what you're accusing Rapture of. Don't act like you're providing a public service. You totally derailed a thread that had every right to exist.

>>3700639
To be clear, I'm not asking you to apologise for being smart, but simply to ease up a bit because you've asserted your dominance already. Maybe next time do it without being so severe. There's a way to delicately and respectfully call someone's authenticity into question, you know?

>>3700639
People come to 4chan for relatively unmoderated, anonymous anarchy. Beach bullies are part and parcel. Sand castles will get demolished, indiscriminately. Feelings will be hurt.

I choose to be polite and understanding of others, because that's my way. But it's that anon's right to be an asshole.

>>3700679

I got banned for trying to post a url to help a guy identify a flower in /an. I couldn't even find anything about banned urls in the rules, and there's something that breaks the rules posted almost every hour here.

>>3700679
I would think that on the /lit/erature board of all places we would try to elevate ourselves above our ever-irritable and pugnacious cousins browsing /b/.

>>3700608
I'm getting on in years now, so I may never be in a position to see my dream realized, but I WAS an educator once, as a young man, at the Houston Stewart Chamberlain School for the Cultivation of the Superman which I and my colleagues managed to establish, under the protection of our gallant fighting men, in an area of Western Poland which was liberated, during a brief bright period in the otherwise dark and cheerless history of the last century, from the Judaeo-Slavic dominion over Europe and the world.

The class entrusted to my personal care and tuition consisted of fourteen eight- to ten-year-olds, four of whom succumbed to asphyxiation resulted from prolonged violent sobbing and weeping provoked by my critiques of their course-work, presentation, personal hygiene and immediate ancestry conducted before the entire class, and seven of whom hanged or otherwise put an end to themselves in the dormitories on their own time.

The disinterring of three bona fide Uebermenschen in a class of fourteen, however, and the elimination of the filth and dross that was covering them and obscuring their light, is a pedagogical achievement that I shall remain proud of until the end of my days.
Not even the death of all three of them in subsequent months on the Russian Front, and the annihilation of our school in the ensuing Jewish counter-offensive, has tarnished this my pride and joy.

>>3700685
Well, I said "relatively" unmoderated.

Being an asshole isn't against the rules.

>>3700688
I like your prose, you big ass.

>>3700688
Bravo, sir. Very creative.
How old are you, may I ask? I don't mean to use your age against you, I'd just like to know if you're seasoned or simply precocious.

>>3700688
That was a very roundabout way of confirming my fears about you. Do you have any writing online somewhere we could read, you're clearly one of the few people on /lit/ with some actual talent.

>>3700704
No, I'm old....probably twice the age, at least, of this Rapture guy I've been beating on.

And it's not necessary, and I'm kind of a bully...so, um yeah...

Would you believe I've had a hard and tragic life?

>>3700712
Tell us about it. I've been on the fringes of this thread but now I'm interested enough to post.

>>3700712
Well, I'm glad you recognise your status as a bully without necessarily being remorseful about it. I respect that.

>>3700714
I second this request. Great intellects born out of suffering are usually the most interesting.

>>3700712
Why the fuck don't you have a trip? You'd be the first person in history worthy of one.

Jonathan Franzen's 'The Corrections' made me cry a bit towards the end. Mostly due to how relatable it was. Which I think was his goal.

>>3700733
>due to how relatable it was.

At first glance, I thought this said "how unreadable it was", which makes more sense than what it really says.

>>3700767
Depends what you mean by "unreadable." The prose is very accessible so I assume you mean to say that the book's content was just offensively bad. In which case, I disagree.

>>3700730
I've only been using the board for a couple of weeks. I've developed a definitely unhealthy dependency on pouring out great floods of passionate and aggressive prose onto the Internet in the past five years or so and it really hasn't brought me anything but pain in the end, so I'm loth to develop a "persona" here as I have elsewhere.

It's quite an interesting, even if humiliating and degrading, story, actually, and all pretty much connected with 4Chan, despite the fact that I'm hardly of an age very typical for users of the site (or indeed even a user, up until now).

I got dragged into a dependence on "words on the Internet' through an infatuation with a girl thirty years younger than me whom I encountered on Stickam, to my eternal shame.

She in turn, as it turned out, was just getting involved at that time - it was 2008 - with a bunch of very disturbing and distasteful people who were still obsessing over the very first 4Chan "chan-girl" obsession, CrackyChan, several years after she had disappeared from the Internet without trace.

The Stickam girl had the bright idea of passing on to one of the Cracky obsessives, who ran a "Cracky site", some crazily eloquent e-mails I'd been sending her. They reminded the guy of the whole Cracky madness, he posted them, I complained, and I got dragged in to the whole thing that way.

A hell of a lot of strange stuff has happened in the five years since then, and the textual traces of it - which must amount to millions of words - have probably mostly been archived somewhere and could be dug up with a little effort.

I think there is matter for a good novel there, since either I am delusional or some kind of weird painful destiny is working itself out. The Stickam girl, who is almost 24 now, presently lives in London with an old friend of CrackyChan's (the Internet has been good to her and gifted her with a great life). London is my native city, but I was living in Berlin when I "met" her and her presence on the

>>3700793
the streets where I grew up, and where I walked around alone all night thirty years ago dreaming of a girl like her, has encouraged me to turn my absence into a kind of willed Joycean exile (please excuse the grandiosity). I somehow feel that the only way I can ever "possess" her is to allow her to exert this force of banishment on me.

But Jesus, now I'm starting to sound like Rapture...

>>3700793
>I got dragged into a dependence on "words on the Internet' through an infatuation with a girl thirty years younger than me whom I encountered on Stickam, to my eternal shame.
>She in turn, as it turned out, was just getting involved at that time - it was 2008 - with a bunch of very disturbing and distasteful people who were still obsessing over the very first 4Chan "chan-girl" obsession, CrackyChan, several years after she had disappeared from the Internet without trace.

You sound like a basement dweller of the highest caliber.
Why is everyone infatuated by this poser?

>>3700793
>>3700806
I got obsessed with a girl younger than me once, I'd imagine the desperation it would be a hundred times intense when you're middle-aged.

> I somehow feel that the only way I can ever "possess" her is to allow her to exert this force of banishment on me.

This is just vanity m8

>I think there is matter for a good novel there, since either I am delusional or some kind of weird painful destiny is working itself out

I think it's already been written, "Lolita".

>>3700793
Wow.
In that case, I appreciate your reservations in regards to a trip. I would welcome it if you did take up a trip, though. I think it would be good for the board, but it's possible your very particular style of invective will become instantly recognizable and serve in the same capacity as a tripcode. That's assuming you stick around. Which I hope you do.

Not to suck your dick or anything, I just spend way too much time here and I like that time to be interesting.

>>3700826
He's more interesting than you, that's for sure. Poser or not.

Notice how I say that without even the slightest bit of information about your life. That's how confident I am.

>>3700842
Well, I happen to be a Navy SEAL so fuck you.

>>3700793
This is exactly the kind of backstory I'd expect an internet bully to have, but I can't help but sympathise with you. That's a tough gig you've landed there. Most everyone here is a loser so you'll fit right in.

>>3700871
I include myself in the loser category, to be sure.

The last story in Joyce's Dubliners made me cry. Pretty heavy stuff.

did I find her, anti-rapturechan?

>>3700889
I don't understand this chan stuff, can someone explain it? I don't even know why 4chan is called 4chan. I just come here and don't ask questions.

>>3700902
4chan is based off a Japanese site called 2chan

"chan" has something to do with Japanese, it's a suffix they use to identify a certain gender or seniority, I think. "John-chan", "Alex-chan", etc.

that list I just posted is a list of people that became internet famous by posting on 4chan, "chan" being a common suffix in the nicknames they were given by 4chan users.

>>3700806
I know you'll hate me for this, but I legitimately got misty-eyed reading this.

>>3700889
No, she was never a Chan herself, Virgin.

As you probably know better than I do, the forms and patterns of collective psychopathology that have grown out of 4Chan these past 10 years have often been Byzantine in their complexity.

The Crackychan obsessives developed - once Cracky had fled the Internet and become inaccessible to them - an arrangement with a small group of female camwhore types whom they rather ingeniously dubbed "Sisters of Mercy".

They were girls who would dress up as Cracky on cam and generally play along with the Crackyfags' sick fantasies about the poor absent girl.

The girl who was my particular obsession did that to a very limited extent for a very short period.

She really did and does belong much too firmly and fully to the kingdom of blooming, breathing life to play any very significant role in "Death"s dream kingdom", otherwise known as the Interwebz.

And besides, even if she had, no one would ever have thought of giving her the nickname MensaChan.

She is a sensual creature, not a cerebral one - although I really ought to add here also that her Tumblr contains one of the most beautiful poetic images, drawn directly from the tragedy and beauty of her own life, that I have ever encountered.

>>3700917
Ah. thanks, bro. I feel enlightened.

>>3700937
Come on, man. You can't tell us something like that and not link to her tumblr. You're killing me.

Funny how such a shitty premise for a thread became a postmortem of some guy's failed internet relationship. This is why I love you, /lit/.

>>3700730
and I agree, that guy needs a trip.

>>3700937
>She is a sensual creature, not a cerebral one
Mmm, just the way I like 'em. Love to feel superior to a woman.

>>3700957
Particularly as this is a literature board, I think people will understand how reluctant I am to throw out pieces of information about her without trying to exert some structuring and forming influence on how these pieces of information are put together. I've thrown out far too much info about her already,

It's not a matter of respect for her privacy. I'm no sort of a white knight when it comes to her. It's more a sort of possessive feeling that I have over her as a literary character. I feel far more respect for and allegiance to her as the female principle at the centre of a sort of myth I'm building up than I do to her as a real person.

If anyone is genuinely interested, I'll be only too happy to let you look at all the material I have about her once I have melted and reformed it - that is to say, distorted it beyond all recognition - in the forge of art.

But I"m Rapturing again..

>>3700990
Please. Forge it. And let us know when you're done. I will gladly purchase an ebook or some shit like that.

Raskolnikov's dream about the donkey in Crime and Punishment.

;_;

>>3700990
I'm guessing you don't have a blog or some place where you've published writing online?

>>3700986
Well, I don't see it that way.

Again, I think Kraus puts his finger on the truth of this matter as I experience it (excuse the German)

Ein Weib, dessen Sinnlichkeit nie aussetzt, und ein Mann, dem ununterbrochen Gedanken kommen: zwei Ideale der Menschlichkeit, die der Menschheit krankhaft erscheinen

The woman as "monster of sensuality" and the man as "monster of cerebrality" - they complement each other. There is no hierarchy there. And it is maybe only in this complementarity that they can each find salvation from their respective sicknesses/

>>3701012
>Kraus
I don't know him. Anything in particular I should read from him?

it truly boggles my mind why people are so enthralled with you. it's as though if someone says something loud enough, or obnoxious enough, they become the wellspring of profundity. i look back at this thread and am truly amazed: i began it merely to understand what works have touched certain people, and to offer some that have particularly impacted me. perhaps one can disagree with my selections, and certainly that's fair. but i look at this post (>>3696336), in all its rage and vindictiveness, and it's utterly astonishing. rather than asking my why it i might list wittgenstein, you write it off as "pathetic." do you have any notion that there are others out there beyond you, with convictions you might not share?--but rather than exploring this possibility, rather than announcing an openness to different opinions, you simply denounce. it's an odd strategy, one drenched in insecurity: there simply is no basis of human reproach in your style.

on top of this, your pedantic and hypocritical nature is horrendous: you attack me for "leisured imbibing of high culture" and then title your post by quoting Karl Kraus in german. if you truly hated me, and you truly thought what i had to say was bullshit, then i really don't understand how low you have to dip to engage me at all. why even waste the time? is it that important to you for others to think that you are superior to me that you waste your seemingly precious time arguing in this manner? you claim that i, who am still totally anonymous behind "rapture" (which isn't my real name), desire the satisfaction of people swooning over my "pseudo-intellectual posts"--and then you spend an inordinate amount trying to acquire the satisfaction of people swooning over your own posts. this (>>3700793) is evidence of that: i started this thread as a lit thread, i posted nothing beyond artwork and lit-related material. that you explicate your pathetic life story qua a girl on stickam (lol) is proof how badly you require recognition.

this thread made me cry

>>3701055
I think we're past this rapture. The guy has admitted to being a bully. Don't take it to heart.

>>3696346

i don't get this either. you talk about taking a sledgehammer to a gnat--i think that's a pretty fair criticism of my post, and certainly i could have been more detailed or explicit in my treatment--but jesus, dude, this is a pretty relaxed lit board with half the threads asking which e-reader to buy. talk about taking a fucking sledghammer to a gnat: you turn what is a reasonable reproach into dropping a nuke of anger on my single, cursory post.

that's probably why i just can't take you seriously: everything you say is so hyper-vindictive, so utterly beyond the pale of reasonable argument or discourse, so hyped over such small and insigificant posts--i mean, it's obvious that you just care about denouncing me rather than discussing ideas. and what's the root of this goal? the very will-to-recognition that you attack me for.

>>3701066
Yep, good thread Rapture. May not have ended up how you intended it to but what I got from it wouldn't have come up were it not for you making it.

>>3701069
Hmm, a good riposte in the second paragraph. I've been regularly attacked on /lit/ in the manner in which you described in that paragraph, and this response would have served me well. But I don't think it's entirely applicable to your attacker.

>>3701069
You got pick out and random and he made an example of you. As your elder and as your better he crushed you. It was within his power to do and he did it. Don't read into things any deeper than that.

If you look here >>3700793 he explains:
>I've developed a definitely unhealthy dependency on pouring out great floods of passionate and aggressive prose onto the Internet

So yeah, don't worry about it.

>>3701079
*picked out at random

>>3701055
I"m aware of the dubiousness - from several points of view - of what I have been doing for the past twenty posts or so: my talking about myself and this girl, and my posting at such length here at all, is neurotic, undignified, yes, all that.

But it"s sincere, and heart-felt. The things I've written about culture, and also about my sad wreck of a life, are things I genuinely feel and experience.

What you have written is nothing that you genuinely feel or experience, I"m quite certain of that.

I doubt whether anybody on earth has ever shed tears over Wittgenstein's "On Certainty". Or if such a person has ever existed, then it was someone who lived every moment of his life in the pure empyrean realm of ideas - someone that you would like people to THINK you are but that it is obvious from every line you write that you are not.

>>3700688
>>3700793
>>3700937

for a lit thread/board, all these posts are exclusively testimonials to your (evidently) wasted/shitty life.

you strike me as a hopelessly confused man, one who collects the torn sinews of his own character exclusively by angrily denouncing others and desperately trying to prove your own intellect through personal anecdotes.

protip: if you really think someone is full of shit, then don't even engage them. it simply adds fuel to the fire; you complained a thread being to "buyont" and, rather than not posting and letting it die, your idea is to turn it into your own life story.

every juncture you could actually prove yourself intelligent, every juncture where you could live by the very creeds you so viciously spout--well, your participation, in both content and consistency, proves how little you take your own medicine seriously.

as per usual, it's easy to talk the talk--but impossible for you to live by the same standards you require of others.

you're a sad, small man--and the fact that you meet chicks over stickham that are 30 years your younger is a pretty good indication of how the real world engages you.

Anti-rapture is clearly possessed by the spirit of Thomas Bernhard.

>>3701079

how did he crush me? he didn't even ask for a defense; his "pouring out great floods of passionate and agressive prose" denies even a real argument to come about. i wasn't even given the opportunity to be crushed: the field of possibilities that could constitute either "failure" or "success" hasn't even materialized, and his approach doesn't permit it.

this is what i mean: instead of inviting actual discussion, you think his policy is a sound one? he doesn't even permit argument--and thus recourse to something like "reasons" don't even enter the picture.

it's utterly absurd if this is how you think reasonable people go about critiquing one another.

>>3701084
This.

>>3701088
It's the difference between him and you, rapture. It all comes down to the fact that you sound disingenuous and he doesn't. That's why people aren't interested in your life or what you have to say.
Just go to bed.

>>3701090
How so?

>>3701088
>>3701097
So much butthurt.
People should know when they are conquered.

>>3701103
What he's doing here is a lot like Woodcutters - an angry German speaker ranting at length about his sad life and other people's pretentiousness.

>>3701108
I don't know, man. He makes some fair points.

>>3701055
I agree. You're both fags, and ultimately I'm the winner.

>>3701100

i don't think you know what disengenous means, or if so you are mutilating its usage.

it seems odd to me that someone would reproach me for beginning a thread over what books i have cried over--a pretty personal, genuine relationship--and then suggest that i am disingenuous without even asking for explanation. perhaps you could say i'm naive/stupid/wrong for my selections, but you would first be required to understand why i selected it; instead of making this crucial and reasonable step, your idea is to yell "disingenuous!" and think that works?

i can certainly see why you take his side: i imagine you two would make fine bedfellows.

>>3701126
dis•in•gen•u•ous (ˌdJs Jnˈdʒɛn yu əs)

adj.
lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity; insincere.

>>3701145

did you even read what i said? anyone can look up the definition and post it; it takes a bit more intellect to actually engage my argument.

again, thanks for proving my point.

>>3701145
>muh sincerity
>muh d.faggot walrus

le stick a propeller up your ass face

>>3701088
>>3701069
>>3701055
>>3701097
I sincerely hope anti-rapture is going to respond to this.

>>3701153
To be honest, I actually think you're right and I'm just fleeing the field of battle at this point. I was just winding you up, I have no stock in this fight.

>>3701164
I too hope anti-rapture responds.

>>3701170
What does any of that even mean?

>>3701177
you know very well what it means, you sincerity-obsessed puppy.

>>3701185
I SINCERELY do not understand what you're getting at, but whatever.

>>3692048
Back on topic...

The only book that made me cry past the age of eleven was the ending of Crime and Punishment.

>Dat dream, dat inner monologue, dat Bible

Velveteen Rabbit and Watership Down made me cry as a kid. Yeah, I really like rabbits.

>>3701126
Seems like a correct use of the term 'disingenuous" to me.

Websters defines it as "lacking in candor; giving a false appearance of simple frankness"

I don't think anyone needs to deploy elaborate arguments in order to explain why the claims that you make about the texts that have made you weep at the start of this thread lack candor and attempt to make an impression that does not correspond to the truth.

The image of someone dabbing teardrops from his cheeks over a text that deals with certain dry and abstract problems of epistemology seems an image that was almost expressly invented in order to make people fall about laughing at the vanities of the pseudo-intellectual, like Proust's image of the insufferable philistine Madame Verdurin pleading with her invited pianist not to play a Beethoven sonata because "its beauty will render her bedridden for weeks to come".

You really can't write arrant nonsense like that and expect NOT to be laughed at.

>>3701205
OH SNAP

>>3701205
Btw is it worth it to be a paying member of proz.com if I don't have a languages degree but know German and English?

>>3701115
Virgin, you contributed nothing as usual. Why do you even have a trip?

>>3701205

this. thank you, thank you, thank you. i was hoping you would just dribble on as you were before.

god, you just prove my point too well--and what do you have to say against my criticisms >>3701055
>>3701069
>>3701088
>>3701126

are you just going to ignore these as though they don't exist? are you seriously just going to call me a pathetic again, without even opening a field for reasonable argument to come about?

dude, this is exactly what i'm talking about. you ignore what i charge you with, agree with this guy >>3701100 who here says he agree with me >>3701174, and you don't even engage my ARGUMENT. you simply say: you're ridiculous, pathetic, etc. without realizing that those are all criticisms that ought to come AFTER one is given an opportunity at defense, rather than before.

learntoargue

>>3701220
Maybe he just doesn't have the energy? It's the internet after all. And he's been posting way more than you have, prior to your return anyway.

>>3701205

i like how someone claiming a unique relationship to wittgenstein is "arrant nonesense," whereas someone talking about their failed stickam flings (you, see >>3700793
) somehow is legitimate, worthwhile conversation on a fucking literature board.

you are an absolute joke.

>>3701227
Well then he should say he doesn't have the energy and admit defeat.

Ya'll suck at this internet stuff.

>>3701229
Hey, shut up, rapture. He confided in us and that took balls. What he had to saw was sympathetic whereas everything you've brought to the table has made you look like a petulant child.

>>3701237
*had to say

>>3701220
I'm sorry but, in all sincerity, I just don't see any "argument" to engage with in ANYTHING you've written.

All I see is you asking "why don't you argue with me?" interspersed with the occasional irrelevant ad hominem insult about my not being able to get laid.

>>3701243

thanks for not answering my criticisms of you.

you're a real tough guy: critique all others, deny even discussing what someone has to say about you.

go back to jerking it on stickam and leave us the fuck alone.

>>3701237
>confiding anonymously on the internet took balls
Do YOU take balls?

>>3701229
Damn straight, rapture. You've got him on the ropes.

>>3701249
He's right, though. You're whole tirade has just been ad hominem and whining.

And don't speak for the rest of us. Some of us want him here. He's got more to offer than you do, that's for sure.

>>3701243
OH SNAP

>>3701249
OH SNAP

>>3701012
DR. ALEXANDER REYNOLDS B.A., M.Sc., Ph. D
Freelance translator, writer and lecturer
e-mail
: dr_alexander_reynolds@yahoo.de
Born :
London, England, July 22 1959
Current residence
: Resident since 2002 in Berlin, Germany

Scoreboard

rapture: 1

anti-rapture: 0

>>3692048
>1. woolf's the waves
yes!
THE most beautiful book I have ever read.

>>3701271
Thanks /b/tard. Good snooping. Bet you feel clever, don't you?

>>3701273
Are you retarded?

rapture: 0

anti-rapture: at least 100

>>3701271
Glad to know someone on lit has an actual PhD.

>>3701281
no

Woah, this dude has a PhD. In what buddy?

>>3701281
He didn't have to do any snooping that info is available in a google search.

>>3701271
>1959
>still posts on 4chan

>>3701271
Reported.

>>3701305
What do you mean "still?" He's probably been on 4chan for as long as we have. It wasn't around when he was a kid, you idiot.

I think this place would be a thousand times better with more people over 40 having their say.

>>3701309
what for?

>>3701309
It's widely available information and can be found with a quick Google search of the email he provides. I found it prior to this day but did not care to post it in hopes that he would simply fuck off on his own time.

>>3701316
definitely agree.

>>3701320
Oh, in that case I'm sorry. I kind of reported you without thinking.

>>3701290
>>3701286
>thinking that a PhD still means something

>>3701330
It wasn't my post, I just thought I would inform you.

>Klopstock!

>>3701316
>It wasn't around when he was a kid
Your reading comprehension is laughable, kid.

>>3701338
>reading comprehension
>of 5 words, not even a sentence

I didn't have a lot to work with.

>>3701330
no problem. the email he provides could be a ruse anyway

>>3701332
It's the only thing left that means something.

>>3701344
You're only strengthening my argument, kid.
Take a look at this page, some of it might be familiar to you already http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_comprehension

ZISH ISH PURE IDEOLOGY!

>>3701356
Fuck off Slavoj.

>>3701359
Wait, that was me. Oh god, oh god, oh god.

>>3701356
>>3701359
>>3701362
Go away retards. Jesus.

>>3701365
Oh for fucks sake. Here we go.

Dumb bastards.

>>3701354
I'm not arguing, I'm just saying that if I misinterpreted the original post it's because it was written in greentext which is a notoriously stupid way to communicate.

>>3701318
Probably for being right.

The Three Metamorphoses of the Pseudo-Intellectual Name-Fag:

1) "My soul was gently transported into a realm where it melded with the soul of Virginia Woolf and we shed tears together over the ineffable beauty and tragedy of the human condition"

2) "You've only read ONE poem by Bertolt Brecht but I've read FOUR so YOU'VE BEEN OWNED LOLOLOLOL"

3) I know your NAME muthafucka so me and Virginia Woolf are going to put your name on a PEDO site you Stickam-jerk-off loser oldguy fuck....that'll teach you to fuck with us and our gentle all-embracing tearful loving empathy with suffering humanity"

>>3701370
I think I might love you. Is that weird?

>>3701370
What a miserable human you are.

>>3701376
Yes, because you sound like an incredible tool.

>>3701376
At least it suggests that you're not the queer sadist guy from the other thread.

I'd obviously be a tough bone to chew.

>>3701387
Why sage?

>>3701387
What kind of tool? A screwdriver?
Why tools are incredible to you? Is it because of their practicality?

>>3701392
Woah, there really is only like 15 people on /lit/ isn't there?

>>3701370
I like you. I think you should stay

>>3701370
I apologise for the bullshit /lit/ has put you through (this rapture cunt in particular). I hope this experience hasn't scared you away.

Dropping in again to point out that ya'll are dumber than a bag of wet bananas. Peace.

>>3701410
You're pushing it now. Cop the fuck on and stop being such a faggot.

>>3701413
I'm a girl. It's not gay.

>>3701417
Yes it is you dyke cunt.

>>3701370
I'm reading Metamorphoses right now. It's pretty good. There's more rape in it than I would have expected.

>>3701417
so that's why you sound so pathetic, carry on cunt:)

>>3701419
Ouch. Why are you so mad?

>>3701423
Told

Perhaps it's the result of slight drunkenness, but I find every word of this thread absolutely hilarious.

>>3701430
It is pretty funny in retrospect. I've been taking it so seriously, but yeah...

>>3701423
The smiley face at the end is what hurt me the most.

>>3701419
GAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSHHHH!!!!!!!

I haven't had gash since 1988!

I don't care if you're fat or use "literally" to mean "not really" or ANYTHING!

Talk dirty to me on Skype and I'll reserve judgment on Slavoj Zizek or mingle my tears with Rapture's over a copy Liddell and Scott's Classical Greek Syntax or WHATEVER YOU WANT!!!!

Just allow me a naufragar' in vostra mare!

>>3701440
A PhD who hasn't been laid in 25 years. Yep, the academic lifestyle isn't for me.

>>3701417

>>3701436
That reminds me of a cunt I used to quarrel with on a forum. He was a 20 something guy who had served in the US military and was a religious, homophobic cunt that would deny the existence of evolution. Anyway, whenever he was ousted in an argument he would begin winning by losing and ended his posts with this: :]

By far the most cuntish smiley face I've ever seen.

this thread was about literature until this post: >>3696336

...and now look at it.

yeah, since he refuses to even engage in argument, since he merely aims at the same "ad hominem" he declares everyone else to suffer from, since he merely wants to talk about his own history and his exploits on stickam, ima close this miserable thread.

thanks for turning a lit thread into a cockfight.

>>3701448
>the existence of evolution
>the existence
:] :] :]

>>3701444
The pussy goes dry at the same speed as the studies.

>>3701448
So first you admit to being a manbull dyke, and now you're a freedom hating commie. Get the fuck out and don't let the hope hit you on the way out.

>>3701451
I liked your art rapture

>>3701448
oh, the horror!

how euphoric are you right now? i'm gonna go and pray that you get asscancer :) :] no need to be angry :D

>>3701448
>winning by losing
Not what I meant, I was attempting to reference an article I had seen on cracked.com but I cited the wrong thing. What he would do was start giving underhanded and snarky 'apologies'.

I hated the cunt, luckily he got banned once he began creating accounts to agree with himself during arguments (and to make racist remarks with).

>>3701456
I'm a man.

>>3701440
I like you as a board personality. I want you to stay on /lit/. That doesn't mean I want to fuck you. I hope you're trying to be funny.

And I don't know what that last sentence means...

>>3701456
You are really confused right now.

>>3701466
Goddamn it, I want to fuck you. I'm not him but you are my desire and I know that much. I could cuddle you and you could give your half smile that doesn't quite stretch your mouth but is spoken in your eyes and you could fall asleep in my pectoral muscles, and then I could read you some poetry from my country. And you would appreciate and understand it.

>>3701440
Gash is an ugly term. And I don't think it's ever sounded uglier than the way you just used it.

>>3701466
it means 'a slippery penis in your stormy vagina'

>>3701481
So you're ugly?

>>3701481
He's just joking. Don't flatter yourself, love.

>>3701466
Crikey, it IS a girl....

That's the way they think and none of them know Italian.

Don't worry, Mademoiselle, I've been talking to girls on the Internet like this for six years and I've never gotten within a continent's breadth of pussy.

I suppose that makes me what's known as a "predator"

>>3701484
I'm leaving now. Fuck you guys, seriously.

>>3701481
>you slobbering idiot
For some reason I read that as 'globbering idiot'.

Imagine what a great word that would be.

>>3701494
But, my angel! Don't you dare leave. I think your leaving message would be the first text that I'd shed tears over.

>>3701494
That's what we want you to do! Fuck us, that is.

>>3701491
ok it's shipwreck in your sea

>>3701493
Dude... What is wrong with you? You're not going to charm her talking like that.

>>3701499
Oh man, shipwrecked in your pussy. "I got fucking shipwrecked in her cunt, dude". That's hilarious. I am so fucking using that.

>>3701493
you have a PhD, why don't you take on a couple of students? Isn't that the standard way for guys in your position to get laid?

>>3701511
Yeah, didn't DFW spend most of his time fucking his students?

THINGS WRONG WITH /lit/:
1. Bullies who pick fights they don't mean to finish
2. tripfags with egos bigger than zeppelins
3. teenagers who harass any and all women who dare to identify themselves

And we're supposed to be the most sophisticated board on 4chan

>>3701511
Fat fucks find fantastic challenge in finding females to fuck fat fucks looking to fuck.

>>3701499
It's Leopardi.
"E dolc' è il naufragar' in questa mare"
He isn't writing about a woman there but then again he sort of is

>>3701518
stay buttagonized, cunt

>>3701523
But they DO get a special treatment, don't you see? It's not "special" in the positive sense.

Jane Eyre- Helen Brown's death
Anna Karenina - Kitty's illness killed me
Les Misérables - Everything involving Fantine
Animorphs - Why Did Rachel have to die? After all they'd been through ;_;

>>3701518
>And we're supposed to be the most sophisticated board on 4chan

Since when? It's obviously /tv/. Nobody more sophisticated than Humbert Humbert.

>>3701535
>Animorphs
I lol'd.