/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14624720]

It is profoundly disturbing that crabs and lobsters are bugs. That is to say Arthropods, the phylum comprising such bugs as Insects, centipedes, and spiders.

This entire section of life is just a problem in my opinion. Apart from Metamorphosis what literature deals with these abominations

[Anonymous No.14624859]

Here is a poem about a centipede(why?)

A centipede was happy – quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, "Pray, which leg moves after which?"
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.

[Anonymous No.14624901]

An excerpt from The Western Lands(William s Burroughs, 1987):

Let me confess that I hate centipedes, above all other creatures on this horrid planet. And I am not alone in this aversion. Many others have confessed to me that they hold a special antipathy for this creature, which is so far removed from the mammalian mold. … There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. Personally, I would regard such an individual with deep suspicion. … Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on his underbelly? ‘And here is my good big centipede!’ If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race

[Anonymous No.14624920]

>>14624901

EXTREMELY based. I have a very strict kill-on-sight policy; once one is spotted, everything stops until it's killed. It does not matter whatever other vermin they kill. I do not suffer the centipede to live.

[Anonymous No.14624923]

>>14624901
Mmmm... now I wanna tie someone up and have centipedes run all over their squirming body

[Anonymous No.14624950]

>>14624920
The centipede is surely the worst offender. That doesn't mean we should be overly gracious to the other arthropod classes however.Tolkien seems to have had the correct idea about spiders:

Thus [Melkor] came at last to the dark region of Avathar. That narrow land lay south of the Bay of Eldamar, beneath the easter feet of the Pelóri, and its long and mournful shores stretched away into the south, lightless and unexplored. There, beneath the sheer walls of the mountains and the cold dark sea, the shadows were deepest and thickest in the world; and there in Avathar, secret and unknown, Ungoliant had made her abode

The Eldar knew not whence she came; but some have said that in ages before she descended from the darkness that lies about Arda, when Melkor first looked down in envy upon the Kingdom of Manwë, and that in the beginning she was one of those that he corrupted to his service

[Anonymous No.14624999]

The deeply unsettling Wikipedia page for "Cockroaches in Popular Culture" includes such phrases as:

>Because of their long, persistent association with humans, cockroaches are
>In Arabic and other eastern societies, sometimes a traditional method to protect books and scrolls was a metaphysical appeal to "Kabi:Kaj" (كبيبكج/كَبِيكَج), the "King of the Cockroaches." By appealing to the king to protect a manuscript, cockroaches of less nobility (or lesser insects) would refrain from intruding on documents which could be eaten by the king only.
>Naked Lunch — the main character, William Lee's "case worker" appears to him in the form of large cockroach that speaks through a hole in its abdomen. Later, this cockroach appears again as a hybrid of a cockroach/typewriter that has a keypad on its face.
>Revolt of the Cockroach People, an autobiographical(???!!!!) novel by Oscar Zeta Acosta,

[Anonymous No.14625091]

Wikipedia also has a page for "Insects in Literature' containing the dubious section "Positive Qualities'. Apparently a deranged man named Aesop wrote a story praising the industry of ants and laughing at starving grasshoppers:

One bright day in late autumn a family of Ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving Grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat.

"What!" cried the Ants in surprise, "haven't you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?"

"I didn't have time to store up any food," whined the Grasshopper; "I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone."

The Ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust.

"Making music, were you?" they cried. "Very well; now dance!" And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work.

[Anonymous No.14625112]

>>14625091

What about related stories? Let us here consider the casus, my dear little cousis (husstenhasstencaffincoffintussemtossemdamandamnacosaghcusaghhobixhatouxpeswchbechoscashlcarcarcaract) of the Ondt and
the Gracehoper.

[Anonymous No.14625117]

Yeats appears highly confused about the relationship between bees and peace, though the poem is otherwise fairly nice:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

[Anonymous No.14625161]

Moving on to the much more appropriately titled Negative Qualities, subsection Strange and Alien Beings, we find Alice meeting a giant caterpillar:

She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and
peeped over the edge of the mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large blue
caterpillar, that was sitting on the top with its
arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and
taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.
THE Caterpillar and Alice looked at each
other for some time in silence : at last the
Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouthand addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
“Who are you ?” said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a
conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “ I—I
hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I
know who I was when I got up this morning,
but I think I must have been changed several
times since then.”
“What do you mean by that ?” said the
Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself !”

(the caterpillar continues to berate her for no reason)

[Anonymous No.14625176]

>>14625112
>Gracehoper
Interesting find. Grace and Hope are bizarre attributes to associate with such a creature but Joyce had...odd proclivities.

[Anonymous No.14625208]

Finally a good thread

[Anonymous No.14625383]

Dave is aware of the basic issue here, though he gets sidetracked for some reason about whether the lobsters are in pain:

Moreover, a crustacean is an aquatic arthropod of the class
Crustacea, which comprises crabs, shrimp, barnacles, lobsters, and
freshwater crayfish. All this is right there in the encyclopedia. And
arthropods are members of the phylum Arthropoda, which phylum
covers insects, spiders, crustaceans, and centipedes/millipedes, all
of whose main commonality, besides the absence of a centralized
brain-spine assembly, is a chitinous exoskeleton composed of segments, to which appendages are articulated in pairs
The point is that lobsters are basically giant sea insects.3 Like
most arthropods, they date from the Jurassic period, biologically so
much older than mammalia that they might as well be from another
planet. And they are — particularly in their natural brown-green
state, brandishing their claws like weapons and with thick antennae
awhip — not nice to look at

[Anonymous No.14625820]

Disturbing developments, the widespread complacency about arthropods may be due in part to a concerted effort to normalize them to our susceptible young:

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a children's picture book designed, illustrated, and written by Eric Carle, first published by the World Publishing Company in 1969, later published by Penguin Putnam.[1] It features a caterpillar who eats his way through a wide variety of foodstuffs before pupating and emerging as a butterfly. The winner of many children's literature awards and a major graphic design award,[2] it has sold almost 50 million copies worldwide