/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20068534]

American culture is the worst thing that ever occurred on this planet. Just compare any random American book to a classic. Think about something like American Psycho and put it side by side with Il Canzoniere by Francesco Petrarca. Take an absolute piece of shit like Gravity's Rainbow and compare it with Proust's Recherche. Let's even take a closer look to something so celebrated such as the rambling, incoherent, drunken poems of Emily Dickinson. The single worst verse of Hölderlin you can find will be infinitely more rewarding. Now put on a scale plate the mediocre reflections of Emerson and the awkward enthusiasms of Whitman with which it is said American literature took its first steps, and put on the other plate the bright, warm, heart-opening and moving lines of the Canticle of the Sun by Francis of Assisi from which the entirety of Europe's national poetic traditions gushes out like a waterfall of golden light. There is no hope for Americans. Everything they are is rooted in vulgarity, in violence, in emptiness, in childishness, in cold. They are the virus that infects and rots the world.

[Anonymous No.20068540]

Time to put your money where your mouth is. Explain why this:

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.

[Anonymous No.20068544]

>>20068540
Better than this, without just schizo namedropping, general assertions, and other meaningless nonsense:

....A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
.....It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No lights anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light only great invisible crashing.
.....Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer aces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city. . . .
.....They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into--they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass . . . certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naptha winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero . . . and it is poorer the deeper they go . . . ruminous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard . . . the walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal.

[Anonymous No.20068770]

>>20068534
Everything is about resources and power. Art never starts anything, it only follows what power says. The artists we know about, each represented the power structure of their time. There has never been a case when art actually toppled the institutions of power. If an opposition's art movement prevailed, the opposition had greater resources to begin with. Art in an inherently inferior use of a man's time. It's for inferior people. Not that I say this with spite, since I know I am inferior myself and this is why I dabble in the arts, but at least I acknowledge that I am the small fish in the pond and art won't prevent me from being eaten alive.
And on top of that, the more earnest art is, the more worthless it is. Obviously the powers know that propaganda can be a powerful tool, so art stripped of all the art happens to be the best art - and no I don't mean the great things that totalitarian regimes have accidentally made last century or the glorifying art of the Romans, because their understanding of propaganda was crude, but the modern, artificial, researched, algorithm-aided kind of propaganda that hollows people out today and can be erased tomorrow without anyone pining for it. Power is truly everything. There is no God, there is no justice, there are most certainly no human beings left, all that matters is power and its representatives, and that means for the majority of the population that money equals worth. We have achieved a state in society where money corresponds to the objective worth of a man, so when you earn nothing your life is effectively worth nothing, and a drooling retard who kicks a ball is effectively worth a millions of lives. Say a horrible criminal is worth more than me because he gives work to cops and lawyers and journalists and other institutions and although he may be worth not much, he moves around a big deal of money. Objectively speaking more people would be in trouble if this rapist murderer died than if I died. Society agrees with this even though they may comment about the injustice of some faggot who draws sissy porn earning more than a surgeon in his country, because it doesn't matter where you get the money, money is power and power is everything. Nobody gives a fuck about "culture" or "justice" or any of these concepts. We have stopped coping since the Industrial Revolution.

[Anonymous No.20068795]

American culture is just Western European culture diminished and ossified. Contemporary America and contemporary England, Germany, France are not actually all that different, despite the impression the buildings which line the streets in some places might give.

[Anonymous No.20068798]

>>20068534
hating popular thing doesn't make you interesting

[Anonymous No.20068940]

>>20068534
Sorry, Gravity's Rainbow is the best book ever written