/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.940243]

Set to automatic,
the Nikon is a blur
focus stumbling confused and bleary in the setting sun,
ending in a over-exposed flash

Later,
surrounded by musk of dark-room cleaner and gas,
it misdevelops
and crumbles into a tangled and confused mass

You're dead,
I can scarcely remember
that windy day at the beach in evening sand
but it meant something at the time.

how quickly our devices fail us

[Anonymous No.940267]

decent

[Anonymous No.940282]

>>940267
>reasonable response
>on 4chan

[Anonymous No.940296]

That pic has nothing to do with your shitty poem, manchild

[Anonymous No.940309]

>>940296
No u

[Anonymous No.940320]

Set to vibrate,
the Fleshlight is a tremor
latex gripping artificial and hungry in my dorm room,
working towards an over-determined climax

Afterward,
dripping with effluvia of dorm-room solitude and spooge,
it abreacts
and glares with a resentful cyclopean orifice

I'm done,
It can hardly blame me
for a lonely night in the dorm on unwashed sheets
but it meant something while it lasted.

how quickly our devices fail us

[Anonymous No.940333]

>>940320
I get this guy every time I post a poem on /lit/. Good to see things are still normal

[Anonymous No.940349]

>>I get this guy every time I post a poem on /lit/

It's called PARODY. You're supposed to find it flattering.

Try reading "Crow" by Ted Hughes, and then "Budgie" by Wendy Cope.

Or "Burnt Norton" by TS Eliot, and then "Chard Whitlow" by Henry Reed.

I don't dislike your work, honestly. But every poet has a style, and it's always worth taking back and looking at that style through the lens of parody.

[Anonymous No.940359]

I preferred the parody to the original

[Anonymous No.940362]

>>940349
>actually responds
wut the fuck.

but thanks, I suppose. Always figured it was just trolling

[Anonymous No.940373]

I would publish it in the literary criticism journal that I edit, for what it's worth. :3

[Anonymous No.940377]

>>940373
ZWG get the fuck out

[Anonymous No.940381]

CROW BLACKER THAN EVER, by Ted Hughes

When God, disgusted with man,
Turned towards heaven,
And man, disgusted with God,
Turned towards Eve,
Things looked like falling apart.

But Crow Crow
Crow nailed them together,
Nailing heaven and earth together-

So man cried, but with God's voice.
And God bled, but with man's blood.

Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint
Which became gangrenous and stank-
A horror beyond redemption.

The agony did not diminish.

Man could not be man nor God God.

The agony

Grew.

Crow

Grinned

Crying: "This is my Creation,"

Flying the black flag of himself.

*

BUDGIE FINDS HIS VOICE, by Wendy Cope

God decided he was tired
Of his spinning toys.
They wobbled and grew still.

When the sun was lifted away
Like an orange lifted from a fruit-bowl

And darkness, blacker
Than an oil-slick,
Covered everything forever

And the last ear left on earth
Lay on the beach,
Deaf as a shell

And the land froze
And the seas froze

"Who's a pretty boy then?" Budgie cried.

[Anonymous No.940382]

>>940373
hey its the guy from the JJ thread

[Anonymous No.940388]

>>940382
It's me!

[Anonymous No.940391]

>>940382
>>940388
Did I miss something here?

/time to consult the Green Oval oracle

[Anonymous No.940390]

I can't be bothered to post any TS Eliot along with this, but if you've read TS Eliot, you can understand how this parody is (a) the sincerest form of flattery, and (b) a better kind of criticism than any "critic" could come up with.

*

CHARD WHITLOW, by Henry Reed

(Mr. Eliot's Sunday Evening Postscript)

As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four,
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.
And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)
To see my time over again— if you can call it time:
Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,
Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded Tube.

There are certain precautions— though none of them very reliable—
Against the blast from bombs and the flying splinter,
But not against the blast from heaven, vento dei venti,
The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;
And the frigid burnings of purgatory will not be touched
By any emollient.
I think you will find this put,
Better than I could ever hope to express it,
In the words of Kharma: "It is, we believe,
Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump
Will extinguish hell."
Oh, listeners,
And you especially who have turned off the wireless,
And sit in Stoke or Basingstoke listening appreciatively to the silence,
(Which is also the silence of hell) pray not for your selves but your souls.
And pray for me also under the draughty stair.
As we get older we do not get any younger.

And pray for Kharma under the holy mountain.

[Anonymous No.940401]

my dick
my dick
my dick

my dick
my dick
my dick is a tool of oppression
keeps the women and the black man down

[Anonymous No.940408]

>>940391
>go read the james joyce thread
>>940388 is an editor of literary criticism but anon wont believe it

[Anonymous No.940418]

No, honestly, I'm not trolling. And I apologize if you were offended.

WH Auden once said that the only proper way to teach creative writing was pastiche...i.e., get his poetry students to write parodies of existing poets. That way you aren't just *thinking* about poetic style, or treating poetry as a means of "expressing your thoughts" in some self-consciously poetic way. You're learning how to build a poem as a structure, without worrying about what you're expressing.

[Anonymous No.940419]

>>940408
somehow I don't believe it.

[Anonymous No.940450]

>>940408
Meh, I used to lurk in lit before summer, and would always talk about my job in those "What does /lit/ do threads."

It's easy to see why the other posters don't want to believe me, and I find it all pretty funny anyway.

Really hate Joyce though. I also dislike how insular the English Department I work in is. It's like everyone doing a major or a doctorate has something to prove to the world. Again, I know why this is. You tell someone you're an English major and they scoff and say "Oh, so you read books then?"

Of course the kneejerk reaction is to complicate and over analyze and bring in Derrida and Barthes and Saussure at every possible opportunity so that we can all feel like we're doing something HARD TO UNDERSTAND and IMPORTANT. I got into literary criticism and the study of literature in school because I enjoyed how accessible it could be when taught by the right people.

If you give me a slider that controls the complexity of language, I will always always slide it more to the simple and concise. There are way too many overly-verbose writers who have something to prove to the world about the size of their vocabulary. I know, because I'm busy telling them to Revise and Resubmit.

I'm quite happy to admit that the journal I work for, like every other academic journal, is foundering, and has been long before I came on. We're kept alive because we've been around for so long now and the university can fund us. We have, like, 563 paying subscribers which is pathetic. All of them professors and university libraries, or magazine exchanges. I want to move the field into a more accessible place. I want the average joe on the street to finish a book that he picked up, and then pick up an article and actually understand it. It's a pipe dream, I know.

[Anonymous No.940462]

>>940450

It's not Raritan, is it? Raritan was so good in the late 90s, and now is so NOT.

And I know this is a sort of double-blind Turing test here, but I'm a professional writer. And nobody on here ever believes me anyway. So the best I can do is either (a) respond to requests for gossip, or (b) try to prove I know a lot about literature.

But is your department seriously still bogged down with Saussure and Derrida and all that nonsense? I thought the "New Historicism" swept all that away.

[Anonymous No.940479]

>>940462
You wouldn't believe the shit we get submitted in, man. Just last week, I get an envelope from IRAN. I open it, and it's a typewritten article, a Derridean deconstruction of god knows what--something about how even atheists blurt out phrases like "Thank God" and "Oh my God" and this is subconsciously affirming the need for a montheistic deity. I don't know. It was so full of jargon it gave me a headache. The funniest part though was the cover page, beautifully done up on a typewriter had this guy's GMAIL ACCOUNT.

WAT

[Anonymous No.940486]

>>940462
Oh, and, no, not Raritan.

I don't need you to prove you're a professional writer. All kinds of people come onto 4chan. It's not that hard to believe!

[Anonymous No.940520]

>>940479

Well, that's the problem with the professionalization of lit crit. It requires jargon, so that the uninitiated will think that the work being done is highly specialized and impossibly difficult. Meanwhile, there's nobody around who does the work that Edmund Wilson or Mary McCarthy could do, from outside academia, which is: read a book and tell you if it's any good, or what's interesting about it, or whether you should read it. While still managing to place it in the context of all other literature.

I mean, the jargon is almost less of a problem than the specialization. You find professors who have read everything Virginia Woolf ever wrote, but haven't the faintest fucking clue about the sort of works that Virginia Woolf *read*. So they can come up with elaborate theories that bear no relation whatsoever to HOW a writer works, or even WHAT a writer does.

But as a result, we now have a generation with no actual writers in it. Because nobody bothers to speak up on behalf of the "common reader". Because maybe the "common reader" doesn't even exist anymore.

[Anonymous No.940526]

>>940520
>>940520
i thought a twilight book a year was enough for the common reader?

[Anonymous No.940528]

>>940520
That is exactly it, bro. Where were you when I was all alone in the JJ thread, getting called an eighth grader for daring to speak against jargon and the ivory tower? I'm stuck inside the fucking ivory tower and it's pissing me off at how everyone seems so happy to kill off their audience.

Lit crit requires literature. Literature requires an audience.

Kneejerkers who at the first hint of the word "appeal to the masses" or "common reader" immediately label you a "Dan Brown" fan.

Anyway, glad to see another level headed person on here, and a professional writer no less. Why am I not surprised?

[Anonymous No.940588]

>>That is exactly it, bro. Where were you when I was all alone in the JJ thread, getting called an eighth grader for daring to speak against jargon and the ivory tower?

I just avoid Joyce threads because I assume they're trolling. Then again, compared to just a few months ago, /lit/ these days seems to be ALL trolling and nothing else.

>>I'm stuck inside the fucking ivory tower and it's pissing me off at how everyone seems so happy to kill off their audience.

I know, I sometimes wonder what academics actually *read*. Like, for pleasure. If anything. I mean, part of the problem here is that a disconnect has developed: if it's not impossibly obscure and REQUIRES academic interpretation, it's not literature. Or the flip side to that: it has to be part of a niche. By which I mean, basically, the legacy of PC. In other words, you're practically required to write a memoir first, or a completely autobiographical fiction, so that everyone knows exactly where you're coming from and what kind of pigeonhole to place you in.

>>Kneejerkers who at the first hint of the word "appeal to the masses" or "common reader" immediately label you a "Dan Brown" fan.

Well, that's why I get on here and I try to promote writers who I think ARE decent, and who stand a chance of appealing to a reader with a brain, and a sense of what's better than Dan Brown, but which I can also recommend to people who are just looking for a "good read". So if you've seen someone cheerleading for Lorrie Moore or for John Wray's "Lowboy" lately, it was probably me. Although I'm sort of pleased to notice that people who are NOT me have started posting about those. I mean, there is stuff out there which is worth reading. The problem is that once upon a time we had critics who helped us find it. Now, I feel like anything readable that I'm lucky to find, I have to be a cheerleader for.

[Anonymous No.940624]

>>940528
You got called an 8th grader in the Joyce thread because you said, "An 8th grade reading level is more than sufficient to explain almost anything I could want to explain." You then spouted some idiocy about how physicists don't need to use technical terms to discuss fission.

[Anonymous No.940626]

>>940588
>I know, I sometimes wonder what academics actually *read*. Like, for pleasure. If anything.

They don't. I'm always digging through some WG Sebald or some McCarthy on my lunch break, and my head editor will sometimes pop her head through the door and look blankly at me when I tell her that I'm enjoying _All the Pretty Horses_ or _Rings of Saturn_.

When we do the Reader Reports for articles, she'll snip and edit and advise changes to articles unpacking books that she has never even heard of, much less read. It's bewildering to me. She's also the head of the English dept, and soon-to-be dean of Arts. Your suspicion about a disconnect here is well-founded. She's old guard, and I'm new guard, and I know where I'm taking this journal when she retires.

Gonna do a 360 and walk the other way ;)

I'll check out Moore and Wray--thanks for the heads up.

[Anonymous No.940627]

>>You then spouted some idiocy about how physicists don't need to use technical terms to discuss fission.

I'm not the person who posted that about physicists, but I happen to agree with Vonnegut that any scientist who can't explain what he is doing to an eight-year-old child is a charlatan.

[Anonymous No.940630]

>>940624
>You got called an 8th grader in the Joyce thread because you said, "An 8th grade reading level is more than sufficient to explain almost anything I could want to explain.

I still stand by that by the way. You should have a look at the style guide that writers at the New York Times get when they're hired on. They're told to write at a 10th grade level, and they do just fine. You keep on keeping on with your "adult words", buddy. I'll enjoy my job.

[Anonymous No.940633]

>>940624
>idiocy about how physicists don't need to use technical terms to discuss fission.

Carl Sagan is disapoint with you anon.

[Anonymous No.940635]

>>I'll check out Moore and Wray--thanks for the heads up.

Oh, don't check out the most recent Lorrie Moore, I should have noted that. She didn't publish anything for 10 years because her son had cancer.

But if you read the last thing she published before that---it's in her story collection "Birds of America", and it's about dealing with a child with cancer---well, it doesn't get better than that. The whole collection is great, but that particular story is called "People Like That Are The Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk." (Which I also like because the title itself is a parody of pseudo-academic nonsense, while the story itself reads like she had to rip it out of her own heart.)

[Anonymous No.940639]

Oh, hey, you can get a PDF of the story online.

cjanmcmahon.googlepages.com/Moore.pdf

I hate to deny her the pittance that authors get from royalty checks, but if you want to read her at her best, there you go.

[Anonymous No.940640]

>>940627
That's why Vonnegut was an author: his job was to make pithy statements. A scientist's job is to explore the world through experimentation and explain his results to other scientists. Eight year olds need not apply.

Science uses jargon because it is specific. Everyone in the scientific community agrees on what those words mean. The beginning of an article defines the terms if they depart from standard usage. It saves time for the scientists who are trying to share an idea in as specific and simple a manner as possible. If Nature was written for 8 year olds there would be no possible way to replicate the results of the experiments.

[Anonymous No.940651]

>>940640
Oh. lol. This is a misunderstanding. If you go back and read what I wrote about nuclear fission, I was talking about how it was much more difficult for a scientist to condense his ideas down into a simple.wikipedia.org article than it would be to just use the terms of his trade on regular wikipedia.

This is not about replicating results. This is about accessibility. It was in the context of a discussion about writers being purposely obtuse (Joyce, but I don't think we need to start on that again).

Anyway, cheers, mate. Keep on fighting the good fight for intellectualism.

[Anonymous No.940652]

>>940627
>>940640
Interestin' fact here: Vonnegut studied anthropology at the post-graduate level and was a complete and total failure at it.

[Anonymous No.940653]

>>A scientist's job is to explore the world through experimentation and explain his results to other scientists

You're romanticizing science. A scientist's job is to pick a research topic which people with money are willing to fund, and then report back to them. If you think that scientists operate in some pure realm where they are all doing legitimate research, then you probably also think a scientist is a perfect frictionless sphere.

[Anonymous No.940659]

>>940633
First of all, Sagan was a popularizer of science, not a scientist. He was a more attractive Malcolm Gladwell but with a PhD instead of a journalism career.

Second, Sagan's explanations of scientific principles are dumbed down so non-scientists get interested in science. You know nothing about how fission actually happens after hearing Sagan's auto-tuned voice describing it. It's like watching a Discovery Channel show on black holes and thinking you're qualified to hold a real conversation about them. You're not. You're just a layman who watched some cheap computer graphics and heard Morgan Freeman's voice narrating dumbed-down science you'll never understand.

[Anonymous No.940658]

>>It was in the context of a discussion about writers being purposely obtuse (Joyce, but I don't think we need to start on that again).

Not to sound like a pedant, but Joyce was purposely *obscure*. I don't think anybody would call him obtuse.

Unless you are referring to his geometry, in which case I'd have to get out my protractor.

[Anonymous No.940657]

>>940639
Nice! Thanks, man.

I'm about 1/3rd of the way through The Mountains of Madness on the computer screen, but I could use something to break up Lovecraft's style. It's pretty tiresome for me, tonight.

[Anonymous No.940663]

>>940658
Oops, yes, sorry. I'm getting pretty sleepy over here.

[Anonymous No.940665]

>>940659
OK, man. I'll never understand it. Leave the science for the scientists, and the books for the academic critics. Fuck the layman.

[Anonymous No.940668]

>>940653
I'm from a research university and work in labs with big names and lots of money. Our research is awfully free.

[Anonymous No.940677]

>>940659
It's very important that the layman has some cursory understanding of what is going on. If they don't, they'll hate it because they don't know it. Look at stem-cell research in the United States. A clusterfuck of misinformation spread by interest-groups that succeeded in pressuring the government into shutting it down.

Carl Sagan did more for the field of astronomy and physics than you ever will, simply by caring enough to try to explain it to everyone. He popularized it and made people passionate about it, and got young minds curious and started down the path themselves.

[Anonymous No.940679]

>>Carl Sagan did more for the field of astronomy and physics than you ever will, simply by caring enough to try to explain it to everyone. He popularized it and made people passionate about it, and got young minds curious and started down the path themselves.

And now who is going to explain the Maunder Minimum to people who believe in global warming? Nobody.

[Anonymous No.940682]

>>940665
>Leave the science for the scientists
Yeah, pretty much. If you think black holes are awesome, that's great. Talk about them with your friends after a Science Channel special and a Wikipedia binge. If you enjoy it, hurrah! But you're not a scientist. There's a reason a PhD takes a long time and is hard to get.

>Leave the books for the academic critics.
No one said that. You should read the books you enjoy. If you like Dan Brown, go for it. If you prefer Finnegans Wake, good for you. But you're not an academic critic. They have spent their lives studying forms of literature - it's a specific field of study with its own quirks, jargon, and paradigms. You are not clued into that world. Why does it upset you so that that world exists?

Read your own books. Enjoy science. Know that Wikipedia won't make you an academic literary critic or a scientist. That's ok. You probably know that. You should also know that your inability to understand the complexities of science and literature does not make those fields useless, nor does it make their jargon useless.

[Anonymous No.940690]

>>940682
>But you're not an academic critic.
I am, though. That's what's funny. It's literally my job.

[Anonymous No.940698]

>>940690
Ok, so what's your point?

You want to be the Ebert of book critics? Go, do that. He doesn't complain every time a movie appears that is more complicated than Transformers. Why do you complain about books more complicated than The DaVinci Code?

[Anonymous No.940706]

>>940659
So how was Carl Sagan not a scientist again? You seem awfully comfortable delineating who gets to belong to your exclusive little PhD club. Being a popularizer of science does not negate his accomplishments in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. You sound like you're on quite the high horse.

[Anonymous No.940717]

>>940698
My point is that I'm an academic critic. No more, no less. You make an awful lot of assumptions about people. I'm correcting you.

[Anonymous No.940738]

>>940717
You're an academic critic. Great.

What is your point in saying that? You've already noted that academic critics do a bad job at discussing literature. You think they aren't qualified to discuss real books for real people. You have admitted that you are bad at what you do, and everyone in your industry is also bad.

What point does this prove, other than that you are a hypocrite and a blowhard?

[Anonymous No.940750]

>>940738
Hmmm... well I have been talking a whole lot about how I'd like to change things when I get my hands on the reins of the journal, proper. That's the gist of what the pro writer guy and I were discussing. The need for change in the field. I'm unhappy with it and have the opportunity to do things differently.

I hope you're happy with wherever you are in life, bro. I'm gonna head back to some more Lovecraft, and then sleep for work in the morning.