/lit/ - Literature

>>9906545
I bet you'd lap it up under different circumstances

I'd attempt to publish Pynchon novels around the same time that he would be writing them, deepening his paranoia and pushing him to write better books.

>>7167454
Thanks.

>>7167444
Oh, so this "Not-Pynchon" guy is literally a no one an unimportant pleb. An insignificant. A slave.
Thanks bud!

>>7167355
>>7167180
Both of these people are imitators and very bad ones at that...That's it, I'm using a trip from now on.
This thread is going to deteriorate to nothingness soon, keep that in mind before i disappear again...

>>7166820
>Why live?

Because you are programmed to. Self-destruction feels wrong since life, for whatever reason, insists on surviving.

>>7166895
Everything that you are is possible only in life. In death, you won't be anymore. Life and death do not intersect.

>>7166823
Sir, I ask you to please stop spreading these lies. I am real, for real, really real.

I am now realizing, listening to it, that Stockhausen's beep-boop-beep music is genius.

>>7166815
Not the real one..

I did not use trips because i forgot to at first.
When the fake replies came in it was too late...

>>7166800
I dislike tripping. It's a principle thing.

>>7166788
I disagree. Hideo is an authentic visionary.

Seriously I'm like half of these "Not-Pynchon" replies...Can't you see that "not-pynchon" is not only one person?

>>7166730
Honey, it wasn't my thread till I hijacked it, and it's interesting for me to hear someone knowledgeable discuss something interesting that I know nothing about.

Was the style of humor competitive / one-upsmanship somehow? Like again, the depressing thing about Internet communities---all these solitaries come together for the sake of a shared idea, but then there's nothing to keep them together.

It strikes me that if all these people had banded together they could have done a collaborative project along the lines of Army Man (the legendary gold standard) or 70s-era National Lampoon (when it was genuinely good, and Terry Southern was writing them letters about SGR) or even The Onion (when it was still UW Madison undergrads doing it, and not a commercial enterprise).

>>7166518
He's not taking himself seriously, so why are you policing those whom you fear might? What are you afraid of? (As Iris Murdoch said we must ask any philosopher.)

>>7166528
>>7166537

Okay, yeah. You revealed my ignorance. I participate in Internet culture altogether at a level of remove---unless you count 4chan, which I only started frequenting when I heard in 2008 that Sarah Palin's email was hacked by somebody who posted the info, so it seemed like it might be populated by charming undergraduate jacobins with a sense of humor. At that time /lit/ didn't exist, but the minute it did I only ever posted here.

But from the way you describe it, it sounds like what it held up was the promise of an aesthetic community. Which is the biggest disappointment of the Internet, in my mind. It ought to enable people to find each other, but social interaction online seems to be fundamentally unstable in certain ways: one reason why I was able to handle only /lit/ on conditions of anonymity. Until the sudden moment when I thought that anonymity had been breached and that suddenly everybody was judging me for opinions that I expressed at such speed and ferocity I wasn't even sure that I held them, or that they were opinions---I was just reveling in the apparent freedom, at a moment before Snowden revealed that all such freedoms online were basically illusory.

(Not sure why I'm back now. I guess it was better than what I was doing all week, which was contemplating suicide because that boy wasn't texting me back. He still isn't.)

>>7166471

Well yeah. If there's an analogue to weird twitter in previous artistic movements, it's probably in Dada. (Hélas.) And that raises the question, what kind of art is anti-art? What kind of art announces a lack of faith in the concept of art?

If I can give you a personal example: I found Horse E-books to be entertaining enough. I don't really pay attention to Twitter so I didn't follow it, but it was cute for what it was. The idea that an inept marketing algorithm would produce little gems of pseudo-poetic nonsense was a beautiful idea. But then I reacted with stone cold horror when I realized some girl had gotten a Horse E-books tweet tattooed on her arm. (I have a really weird set of opinions about tattoos, but I think they're related to underlying assumptions on my part about art, or permanence, or the higher bar set for words that you would consider inscribing: a tattoo is like an epitaph, especially if Leviticus is right and tattoos are profane, or if Morton Smith was right and Jesus had a lot of them.)

So by the time Susan Orlean got to reveal that Horse E-books was actually yet one more self-promoting nonentity on Twitter---not a wonky algorithm but a human being impersonating a wonky algorithm so that he could merit the attention of a cultural arbiter like Susan Orlean---I didn't even care. It had already strayed from its proper place in the aesthetic ecosystem by persuading some girl to advertise her own quirkiness by enshrining its nonsense in a permanent tattoo. To discover that she was the victim of a confidence trick rather than an authentic automated quirkiness mechanism doesn't seem to make a difference.

This is all a true story and probably tells you more about me and my own distrust of the Internet than it does about Weird Twitter, but there you go.

>>7166439
I totally don't mind. If I can be of interest to you, o polite friend in the anonymity of the internet, I am glad to do so.

(I mean, as long as you don't mind that I combine an encyclopedic breadth of knowlege / scattershot but frequently well-informed literary opinions, while also being absolutely cripplingly paranoid and anxious outside the written word, such that I am persuaded that the sudden influx of noxious anti-Semites on /lit/ are actually agents of Putin who are trying to winkle out whether I am part of the Philadelphia Experiment, or Chinese hackers who are firmly convinced, based on secret Tibetan astrological data, that I might be Hitler reincarnated and feeling very sad and overly defensive about being beset by dumb anti-Semites because really it was a product of amphetamine toxicity, or whether this is really the Matrix and "amphetamine" means what it says in Greek, a double-eta, written HH, which looks like shorthand for "Heil Hitler", or whether it's the fucking Iranians and Pakistanis, the former who are slightly pissed that they've still got Hekmati in prison based on faulty information they derived from my 4chan posts, the latter still somewhat bewildered that somehow the US government managed to drag VS Ramachandran into refuting what looked like claims on my part that there was a secret plan to adulterate drinking-water in Bangladesh with a new form of amphetamine that could make sweatshop workers not merely hyperproductive but could make them whistle while they work to boot, when in reality I never said anything of the sort, I wrote a work of fiction which would only look like it was hinting at baleful governmental secrets if you thought I was somehow a part of the intelligence community rather than their catspaw, or.....well, look, I can keep doing this all day, because I am insane, but I have plenty of other stuff in the brain too which might be useful or interesting to you, so feel free to pick it while I'm here, or if I vanish again and cease to be a namefag, mostly because of paranoid fears about whether this is a /pol/ invasion or a giant persecutory plot [comprised, Escher-like, or people who are pretending to believe in a giant persecutory plot, while actually perpetrating one against me] directed to destroying what remains of my sanity.)

(I'm not Pynchon but I may be Raymond Roussel. At least this afternoon.)

(I do feel relieved that this website is now under Japanese ownership. moot was distractingly adorable.)

>>7166367
Is @dril or horse ebooks or the like entertaining? Yes. Is it literary/artistic? That's problematic. The problem is that culture is being atomized, devoured, digested by the Internet. I don't even have the right verb for what's going on because it's going on now and we are all implicated in it. But one of the more baleful manifestations is the desire to treat art/literature as memetic, i.e., to see them only for their informational content. So a @dril tweet is only artistic insofar as it is memorable---it refuses to offer legitimate information while also forcing itself to stick in your mind lastingly and gratifyingly. In that sense it's an analogue of poetry---I mean, a highly circumscribed form, since 140 characters is no more or less arbitrary than a haiku or a villanelle---but it can't aspire to anything other than what it is. A random linguistic fragment that establishes meaning through a refusal to do so, or through an implied subversion of other poetic meanings. It can't accommodate narrative. It can't do anything but infect the larger flow of time and pseud-information on Twitter as it passes, and it's value comes mainly from the implied critique of everything else on Twitter (mostly, as far as I can tell, journalists being stupid in real time, and self-promotion--charming or tedious as the case may be--on the part of everybody else). So it's like saying that the only place a haiku can exist is in the middle of a physics textbook, and you have to believe the physics textbook is important to fully appreciate the haiku. I have no idea if I'm making sense anymore, but if I didn't make a prolix pretentious effort this wouldn't be /lit/ would it? I guess my point is that it's worth considering as an aesthetic phenomenon on the Internet----but the Internet is so wholly altering those aspects of our brain which respond to art (like, the willingness to have the TEMPORAL experience of Bleak House as part of the narrative experience) that I'm not actually sure any of these categories will still be standing by the time we figure out what Twitter is. For all I know, in 20 years time we will realize that Twitter was the fortune-cookie-factory of the Singularity all along, and nobody noticed.

>>7166340
Total top/service top here, ducky: no real opinions about any willy save my own.

>>7166341
אַל-תַּעַן כְּסִיל, כְּאִוַּלְתּוֹ: פֶּן-תִּשְׁוֶה-לּוֹ גַם-אָתָּה.

>>7166316
You're awfully sweet. I'm glad I'm entertaining somebody.

Really I'm just here so that the NSA has a lot of contradictory data about my own sanity level, because they think I'm more schizophrenic than I genuinely am, and in order to prove that point, all I'm trying to do is little spiders omigod little spiders formicating all over me or aranaeating i suppose help flames flames jonathan edwards sez the devil wants me to perform strenuous cunnilingus on my former landlady while she recounts to me in detail what the plot against me was back in 2011

>>7166271
I have no desire to feed Judaeophobic trolls, but are you actually suggesting that "Bleeding Edge" validates your anti-Semitism? If the novel maybe hints (vaguely) at Mossad involvement in 9/11, it certainly does not hint at Mossad involvement in Maxine or anyone like her----and SHE'S THE ADMIRABLE HEROINE OF THE NOVEL AND SHE'S JEWISH, IN CASE YOU DIDN'T NOTICE. And resembles the kind of Jewish people that I know and love, even if (say) Sharon or Netanyahu do not. Either you are a moron, or you are imagining the novelist is trolling you when he isn't.

>>7166284
How would you know? Have you ever tried to flap me? I'd consider letting you try if you're cute.

>>7166250
>>7166261
Haha. Look, we established I'm queer. Can we just assume a familiarity with Moz rather than any actual liking/appreciation/fandom? Because to be honest, he is frankly an embarrassment. And I seriously resent having to consider his autobiography as a Penguin Classic alongside the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, Benvenuto Cellini, P.T. Barnum, and Saint Augustine.
>>7166264
You're utterly correct. On that note, I take my leave. See you again in another 3 years, maybe.

>>7166183
Vae te, sceleste.

>>7166190
This is the novel I was referring to:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Planets-James-Finney-Boylan/dp/0517178516
The fact that it has not received sufficient readership to warrant a new edition without the author's deadname on the cover ain't my problem. Bibliographical accuracy =/= transphobia.

>>7166213
Ok, give me topics that you find interesting, and if I have anything substantive to say on one of them, I'll say it. And then you can mock me and feel authentically proud of your efforts in doing so. Please. Let me entertain you, as Robbie WIlliams and/or Baby June used to say.

>>7166171
It was weed. It could not have been booze.

>>7166146
You are probably too stupid to understand the real conspiracies anyway...

>>7166183
Shut up you nigger

>>7165912
Sorry, who are you and what's with the David Icke / Der Stürmer bullshit? Doesn't this board have a janitor?

>>7166021
Why don't you critique what I said now that I've concluded it. I'm sure you wouldn't dare countenance criticism of Infinite Jest from somebody who'd only read 666 pages of its bulk. Why do you criticize my comments on it when you only read 2/3? Have MAOI inhibiting drugs caused you physical and mental ejaculatio praecox like they did with Dave?

>>7165958

Again, if you want to compare IJ to Zauberberg, then let's note that there's no equivalent to Naphta---the nihilistic presence that threatens to undercut the whole philosophical enterprise.

In IJ, this would have been represented by a drug user who doesn't fit the 12-step definition of a drug user: someone who uses them successfully and happily. A cameo by William S Burroughs would have sufficed, a happy nutty 80yo smack addict perfectly fine with being a smack addict, living on inherited wealth and writing masturbatory fantasies for entertainment and literary glory.

Instead, the successful drug addict in IJ was the man doing the typing and taking his psychiatric meds. And ignoring the fact that MAOI inhibitors (or whatever primitive antidepressant he was on, can't recall) are just as bad for you, and harder to discontinue using, than the cannabis that IJ is at pains to demonize, or the other drugs-of-choice that Gately's wards were hooked on.

Basically, I think the limitations of IJ are that DFW didn't have much to work with except an autobiography that wasn't so remarkable or interesting----apart from tennis, and being (in Mary Karr's words) a creepy pussy-hound, he apparently spent most of his time doing his homework and assigned reading. He clearly liked the idea of applying his philosophical methods to pop culture, hence that dumb co-written book about rap music. But until he decided he had a problem with drugs, and he realized he had to confront a philosophical issue (God's existence) in a real-world way (12 step program), he didn't have a solid thesis for the kind of ambitious novel he wanted to write----but once he had the thesis, he did not have the chief novelistic skill to go along with it, which is making up a story. His paradigm is essentially neoclassical not modern---you take an idea and then illustrate it with fiction, like Fenelon's Telemaque---but in terms of neoclassical criticism, he "lacks invention". And in terms of the logical propositions of his overall thesis, he seemed to miss the yawning gap in the enterprise---which was that he was addicted to legal drugs, while writing 1000+ pages to limn the wonders of foisting a religious cure onto those addicted to the illegal ones.

I could make the points better if I were actually writing an essay on DFW but meh. You get what I'm saying. Apologies for prolixity and reduplication. I'm just typing what I'd say in conversation if you were here listening and letting me rattle on uninterrupted.