/lit/ - Literature

>>22926357
It's excellent. It has influenced my way of seeing greatly, not just in photography, but in literary analysis as well, especially in literature created after the camera became popular. If you don't want to read all of the essays, I'd highly recommend at least making time for "In Plato's Cave" or "The Image-World."

>>22924067
I like that jpg.

>>22924874
Wilt by Tom Sharpe

>>22920685
Very impressed to see Reznikoff on your list. I thought I was the only person here who read his work.

>>22918568
Next you should read Gogol's Diary of a Madman

>>22918178
>Was there ever an obligation to be gnomes?
You're telling me he created an autistically detailed and complete world of goblins, trolls, fairies, elves, dwarves, orcs, and dragons, but he explicitly excluded gnomes? I smell something afoot.

>>22912897
Right back at you. I read Wise Blood two years ago, I think. I loved its slowness even though I found the first two-thirds tedious. The end is like a fire.

>>22915007
It's a very strange novel to be sure, at least I think so. One of my favorites. I was disappointed when I first read it also, but then I watched Aleksandr Kott's adaptation of it and was mystified. I more of Lermontov's work and reread this book and that's when I really fell in love with it. Werner was the character I found most interesting.

You should watch this scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Raf8_VJX0&t=346s

12. How to Sharpen Pencils

>>22911475
I read some good books this year, as for my own favorites:

On Photography by Susan Sontag
The Flounder by Gunter Grass
Fearful Symmetry by Northrop Frye
Fathers and Crows by Bill Vollmann
Journey to the End of the Night by Celine
The Bacchae and Other Plays by Euripides (that old penguin edition from the 70s)
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

>>21933325
8 Count by Charles Bukowski is my favorite that I've read recently. I'd never read anything Bukowski has written before, but then while visiting home last weekend, my father showed this one to me and I liked it.

from my bed
I watch
3 birds
on a telephone
wire.

one flies
off.
then
another.

one is left,
then
it too
is gone.

my typewriter is
tombstone
still.

and I am
reduced to bird
watching.

just thought I'd
let you
know,
fucker.

>>21933727
>>21933743
These two are great poems. Dumb humor in poetry is a great thing.

>>21934179
John Milton is an essential resource for education theory in the UK and the Americas. Of Education, Areopagitica, De Doctrina Christiania and his antiprelatical pamphlets and tracts are all seminal resources.

>>21928772
What's the point? As you said, we have different opinions, so it's likely that any paragraph I post won't change your mind. Besides, to weigh a non-fiction book by single paragraphs is foolish.
>>21933249
I know what you are referring to, however that updated theory is actually dated. Research was done which showed that there wasn't sufficient evidence to suggest that the mold was prevalent enough in the area for Chris to have consumed it in deadly amounts. The theory I have been telling about is actually from the most updated version of the book, and Krakauer was actually involved with the lab work and research, which I think is commendable. Whatever people's opinions on him as a writer may be, they can't deny that he is truly invested in what he writes.

>>21927573
Nabokov was an ignorant literary critic, as a result I tend to ignore him. His criticism serves no purpose to me other than amusement.

>>21926929
I don't want to outright say that Grass is the best writer or that The Flounder is the best novel, but as far as my tastes go, I would say that this is my favorite twentieth century novel, and I feel comfortable saying it's the best novel I've ever read. Even if you disagree, it at least demonstrates that there are post-War novels which can go toe-to-toe with pre-War novels.
>>21927095
You've either never read Celine, or you've never read Joyce. Maybe you read neither. The same goes for your erroneous comparison of Mann and Proust.
>>21927273
An excellent choice.
>>21928032
Be careful when you suggest that Dubliners is less dense or esoteric than Ulysses or Finnegans Wake because there are many, including me, who would disagree. I have not approached Finnegans Wake, and just from an outsider perspective, I want to say it's his most difficult work. However, I feel that Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are both more difficult than Ulysses because of how compact they are. As far as how esoteric the works are, I feel that Joyce was far more sly and secretive with his allusions and references in Dubliners than in anything he wrote afterwards.

>>21927861
I actually think that the chapter on Everett Ruess and the chapter talking about those vagabonds are highly valuable to the work. Krakauer's intention by including these stories was to demonstrate that McCandless was not a completely unique phenomenon. You're right that Krakauer often comments on how he relates to McCandless, but with the exception of his chapter, it's always in passing, and on top of this, he even apologizes for doing so. To be honest, I've never understood those who think that Krakauer is a narcissist just because he takes time to reflect on himself. And besides, Krakauer is a skilled writer, and he did make the story into an icon for the modern American. The book has had staying power. Krakauer's book actually fulfills the parameters you've set.

>>21925898
That's a gross exaggeration. Out of the entire book, Krakauer spends one 15 page chapter talking about his McCandless-esque experience.

>>21924167
"Final," here does not mean that he means for this adventure to be the last thing he ever does. It was the finale of his great adventure. McCandless intended to go home after Alaska. He regretted that he would not be able to, but made peace with his own death in the end.

>>21924103
If he was stuck there long enough without knowing how to get out, it's absolutely likely he would would have died from some form of starvation. However as it is, there isn't evidence to suggest he died from, or was even suffering from protein poisoning. Also, McCandless was killing and eating porcupines, which do have a decent amount of fat, so there is one source.

What truly killed him was eating the raw seeds of a wild potato plant. The movie misrepresents this in the scene which implies that McCandless accidentally consumed a poisonous plant which looks similar to a non-poisonous one. However, in reality, McCandless never made such a mistake. He was foraging and consuming wild potato plants which are safe to eat, however the seeds contain an anti-metabolic toxin which affects mammals. McCandless's field guide failed to mention this as Krakauer pointed out. Consuming those seeds in high quantities while on a stressed diet likely gave McCandless lathyrism, weakening him and preventing him from being able to forage. Then the toxins blocked his metabolic processes preventing him from gaining any nutrients from other food he had. Eventually he did starve to death because of these events.

>>21924093
Alaska is not the completely frozen wasteland which many assume it is. Where McCandless was camped was not a terribly cold area either. It's not the cold which makes much of Alaska a difficult place to live, it's the rain and the desolation.

>>21922275
It's clear that McCandless had some form of autism. However, you can't attribute that alone to his actions. The truth is that McCandless felt a real passion for adventure and exploration of the Earth and that's what drove him on his adventure. This >>21922417 is a fair assessment.
>>21922442
To be fair, McCandless was aware that he could've spent more time and money working up to the challenge, but he wasn't interested in that. He wanted to go balls deep. He didn't want to die, but he understood that it was a possibility. McCandless was intentionally unprepared. It wasn't a wise decision, but he knew that too.
>>21922444
He was certainly not one of a kind. In the book Krakauer relays the stories of several individuals very similar to McCandless.
>>21922600
>The classical thinkers all knew socialization was the mark of a civilized person, and we are meant to live in a society.
McCandless was aware of this too. His great adventure was a social one. He spent two years on the road and not much of that time was spent totally alone. Out of those two years of travelling and making connections with people, only 114 days were spent totally alone in Alaska.
>>21922825
Well it's important to remember that McCandless did not go in the winter, and did not intend to be there during it. He also purposefully went in gear-lilght, even though he knew it was not a wise decision. Something that people often forget is that McCandless was actually skilled in hunting and preserving meat, however he learned all of these skills while living in South Dakota, and the methods and techniques one employs there do not apply to the Alaskan environment. Hence the Moose disaster. I also hesitate to say that McCandless died because he was unprepared. On one hand, his refusal to use a map prevented him from knowing about the cable-car across the river, but on the other hand, that's not what really killed him. McCandless died because the field guide to foraging did not explain to him that eating the seeds of the plant he was foraging in high volumes would poison him.

>>21922118
Celine's ideology is difficult to define because he was such a worm. He deliberately avoided making his politics easily categorical, and continually maintained that he was not an ideologue, but a stylist above all.

This is an excerpt from a letter between Celine and Milton Hindus:
>The fact that you consider me a stylist makes me happy-I am that above all-in no way a thinker, God forbid! nor gr writer but stylist I believe I am-my gr-father was a professor of rhetoric at Le Havre-I take from him without a doubt this skill in emotive "rendering." ... I follow emotion closely with words I don't give it time to dress itself in sentences... I seize it totally raw or rather totally poetic-because the core of man in spite of everything is poetic.... Still it's a trick [truc] for making spoken language pass into the written-the trick I'm the one who found it no one else-all in all it's impressionism-To make spoken language pass into literature- it's not stenography-It is necessary to imprint on sentences, on intervals a certain deformation an artifice so that when you read the book, it seems as if someone is speaking in your ear-That is accomplished by the trans- position of each word. ... To render on the flat page the effect of spoken spontaneous life it is necessary to twist all of language, rhythm,cadence, words and it's a kind of poetry which provides the best spell - the impression, the bewitchment, the dynamism.

Those who have attempted to categorize Celine's ideology inevitably have had to fall back on his racism as the principal guide. His sympathy for Nazism is highly debatable and theories which state he was a fascist are flawed. Celine fashioned himself as an anarchist, but in my opinion, his anarchism was driven more by misanthropy than by a search for the proper government. What is undeniable is his racism.

This is a good essay on the topic: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1773329

>>21879225
I am divorced between Mark Twain and John Steinbeck. I lean towards Mark Twain because it's my opinion that Huck Finn is the greatest American novel, but then I lean back towards Steinbeck because I believe that he is the more prolific and consistent novelist, while Twain's talents showed more in his short stories and essays.

>>21879251
Melville wrote eleven novels, but at any rate, just as you could sum up Melville as a bunch of adventure/sailing stories, you could just as easily sum Faulkner as a bunch of fall-of-the-family stories. It's equally silly to do either.

>>21878743
Milton being blind would have been at an awful disadvantage.