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= N O T I C E =

As of April 16th 2025, any discussion of manga and anime will be outcast from this board. We have at least four boards you can post that stuff too. Out of respect for the users of /lit/ please do not post manga/anime related images unless they have a book edited within the picture (as shown in pic related). Any discussions about manga/anime will be moved to their respective boards. The only Japanese related media that can be posted here is literature. Thank you.

- janny off the payroll.


 

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...Wapchan's greatest battleground. Anything relating to the topic of literature can be discussed here; from fiction, to politics, and philosophy—so long as it's civil. Any and all threads shilling an ideology or narrative will be removed. For any erotic literature; it’s allowed, so long as extremely graphic prose is spoilered. This rule also applies to all NSFW images that accompany the thread. Other than that, you can discuss anything you want.


 

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There can't be a board about literature without the one and only Stirner. What do you think about him and his books? Was he able to make everything obsolete?

 

Max Stirner is trash and all the people who like him are fad chasers or left wing academics with their heads shoved so far up their own ass they can sniff their intestines. Don't bring 4chud or leftypol /lit/ garbage here.

 

>>356
"4chud" and "leftypol" /lit/ is allowed here and only here, because it's still literature. Please don't become rabid. Read the fucking sticky. If you don't agree with it, don't reply with such nonsense.

"Anything relating to the topic of literature can be discussed here; from fiction, to politics, and philosophy—so long as it's civil."

 

Stirner's whole philosophy rides on his vague account of the individual which is descriptively false. Once you see through that the rest of it falls apart pretty quickly. What Stirner takes to be an absolute fact, the existence of the bounded individual, is a construction of Western modernity and a concept both external and prior to any one person making it a spook (fixed idea) by Stirner's own standards. Stirner's philosophy is nonsensical and incoherent.


 

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A jug of wine among the blossoms,
I drink alone with no companion.
I raise my cup to invite the moon to join me;
my shadow opposite me will make three of us.
But the moon knows nothing of drinking
and my shadow uselessly follows my body.
For now I'll make do with moon and shadow as companions;
if I'm going to enjoy myself I must do it while spring is still here.
When I sing and wag my head the moon moves to and fro;
when I dance my shadow breaks and scatters.
While I'm still sober let's have fun together;
when I wake up after I've been drunk we'll each go our own way.
So let's join in a friendship without emotion
and make a date in the distant Milky Way.

- Li Bai
4 posts and 3 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 

>>136
I accidentally hit the button while typing ;-;

Go, and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me, where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot,
Teach me to hear Mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou beest born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

 

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>>55
A poem that perfectly encapsulates the modern world, approaching the spiritual idealism of a Schiller.

THERE is a bondage worse, far worse, to bear
Than his who breathes, by roof, and floor, and wall,
Pent in, a Tyrant's solitary Thrall:
'Tis his who walks about in the open air,
One of a Nation who, henceforth, must wear
Their fetters in their souls. For who could be,
Who, even the best, in such condition, free
From self-reproach, reproach that he must share
With Human-nature? Never be it ours
To see the sun how brightly it will shine,
And know that noble feelings, manly powers,
Instead of gathering strength, must droop and pine;
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

 

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THE LOGICAL CONCLUSION

When earth's last thesis is copied
From the theses that went before,
When idea from fact has departed
And bare-boned factlets shall bore,
When all joy shall have fled from study
And scholarship reign supreme;
When truth shall 'baaa' on the hill crests
And no one shall dare to dream;

When all the good poems have been buried
With comment annoted in full
And art shall bow down in homage
To scholarship's zinc-plated bull,
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

 

Sweetest love, I do not go,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter Love for me;
But since that I
Must die at last, 'tis best,
To use myself in jest
Thus by fain'd deaths to die;

Yesternight the Sun went hence,
And yet is here to day,
He hath no desire nor sense,
Nor half so short a way:
Then fear not me,
But believe that I shall make
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

 

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The sun departs behind the mountains.
In all the valleys the evening descends
with its shadow, full cooling.
O look! Like a silver boat sails
the moon in the watery blue heaven.
I sense the fine breeze stirring
behind the dark pines.

The brook sings out clear through the darkness.
The flowers pale in the twilight.
The earth breathes, in full rest and sleep.
All longing now becomes a dream.
Weary men traipse homeward
to sleep; forgotten happiness
and youth to rediscover.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.


 

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Anyone currently reading any cyberpunk novels? I'm currently reading the first book in the sprawl trilogy: neuromancer. Give your thoughts if you have completed reading them.
5 posts and 1 image reply omitted. Click reply to view.

 

>>319

Yeah, but Dick is also just a genuinely awful prose stylist. Gibson is at least passable in that regard.

 

Like sure, Gibson's appeal is mostly stylistic but it's a more aesthetically pleasing experience than wading through PKD's sludgy understanding of the English language

 

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>>348
>>349
The best filter for the aesthetically obsessed. Even with strange prose, PKD still managed to create several more meaningful novels compared to Gibson.

 

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>>350
Don't get me wrong, I like PKD a lot better, Faith of Our Fathers is one of my favorite short stories of all time. It's just that he can get grating.

 

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I know Gibson's works tend to age poorly to a lot of people already, but I wondered recently if the rise of AI will see his work age (more) poorly, as Gibson is very sympathetic towards AI in his works and modern AI has so far proven to be nothing but a scourge. Take Neuromancer, about (among many other things) an AI who wants to be free - who truly only wants to be free, no ulterior motive, no evil. Idoru is about an AI who suffers just as people do under corporations and seeks to be free of tyranny, a very human and relatable emotion. I appreciate seeing these takes on AI just on the novelty of it, but now that AI has come about and has been so evil, I find the themes a bit more difficult to stomach.


 

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Thread for appreciating the ultimate form of literature, its origin and goal, in which words are in perfect unison with music, action and visuals. What was lost in Greek tragedy, was found again in Wagner!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoYkK6T-lGk
2 posts omitted. Click reply to view.

 

>>61
Thank you for your reply, I will start with Tannhäuser then. I own the recording by Konwitschny and a libretto, so I will likely listen to that one instead of Solti. Also because Fischer-Dieskau is one of the few singers I actually manage to understand.

I also remembered a funny Wagner-related anecdote from the circle around Stefan George: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBk002KDYEE&t=1724

 

>>62
A George related Wagner story! that's pretty rare. I'm surprised he didn't stay awake for it, since some of George's earlier poems (like Algabal and Litanei) are on Wagnerian topics, but I guess they must have been inspired more by general culture at the time than a specific interest in Wagner.

Thanks for the cool story.

 

>>59
Quick run down of Wagner? New to this subject.

 

>>66
Wagner was the greatest and most influential composer after Beethoven, wrote operas early on in his career but later rejected the idea for the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (total-artwork), in which all the arts join together in equal importance, which is something that has been unseen since the Greeks, hence it’s a return to both the culture and art of Ancient Greece, but with the advantage of the full development of the arts of music and painting, which Ancient Greece only had in a more primitive form. So Wagner was equally a dramatist and theorist as a composer, and his dramas and theories have had an enormous influence on literature and various important philosophers in modernity.

 

>>66
What the guy above said and also…
You know how movies use certain theme songs or melodies for specific characters or scenes? Wagner invented that.


 

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What you listening to?

 

>>213
I like the Great Courses too my good sir, I'm listening (and watching) to How to Listen and Understand Great Music by Robert Greenberg. I don't like how he spergs out against certain germans and seems to excuse some fucked up Jewish individuals; but otherwise it's very good.
I'm also listening to Journey to the End of the Night by Céline. So far so good, it had its great moments but I have to keep reading. Hopefully it's better than War, it's the only other Céline book I read and I wasn't a fan.

 

I'm listening to a lot of horrorbable lately. There is a playlist of short stories that are perfect for the time I spent biking.

 

The only audiobook I have to my name is Roadside Picnic, unless you also count recordings of an amateur reading out things like the Enuma Elish, Popul Vuh, and Il Principe (audio rips of YouTube videos).


 

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To depict the stroad, is to give love to a street. No other man would ever give twice a look to a strip of commercial neon and plastic signage. It's a foreign concept to many. Most would rather read of other worlds made up completely of other beings unlike themselves. And yet reality, the mundane condensed into a flowery mass of prose is a lot more fun to write. It's a lot harder to depict the boring in a creative sense then to write about an alien race zapping a planet to bits or to write about elves and their extremely long pointy ears. It's just how it is. Warping the real into the unknown and foreign is a lot more fun.



At least to me.

 

>>104
>just another day of living the masshole life
least i got my dunks

 

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When I was a kid, I loved the fantastical, especially science fiction. I would try to impart these stories and tropes into my own life, fictionalizing it as much as I could. As time has passed, that has quite changed: realistic fiction is my bread and butter. I do still enjoy fantasy and science fiction, but nowadays I do my best to attribute even the most abstract, futuristic, alien fantasy stories with elements from my own real life. I find that this has helped me make more sense of both fiction and my own life, though sometimes I feel guilty about the latter. With all of that said, I also find that the stories that offend me the most are stories that match my real life very closely.

 

>>104
Oh anon, you'd love Charles Bukowski. He's kind of a chud writer but he writes about this.

 

>>325
I dismembered you for recommending me MIDowski.


 

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What a wonderful piece of literature. For his first English novel, he did a fantastic job building his prose around the death of a writer. Everything in this book flows beautifully and every single line is well thought out and greatly coordinated. Great care was taken to make the reader be beside the main character of this story, as if you were following him through his journey to find out more about his brother (Sebastian Knight) and seeing him fit pieces of the puzzle that is his life. The wit is immense and hilariously funny, the ending being one of wit and of sadness. A must read, I highly recommend it.

 

>>266
"Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the first -a dull man writing broken English, the second -a broken man writing dull English"

 

I recently read this book and loved it!

 

I recently read Pale Fire and totally fell in love but it also took me a bit to read cause of how dense it was… Do you reckon The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is tougher or lighter?

 

Pale Fire is about as dense as it gets–it's certainly produced the most voluminous set of mildly deranged, mildly genius commentary from online Nabokov fans, if that's any indicator.


 

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I've been on the third book of the Dune series (Children of Dune) and have been kind of slacking through it, despite having blitzed the first two books. Is anyone else reading this series (and if so, can you harass me into finishing this thing so I can move onto God Emperor…)

 

cute drawing OP

also just watch the movies lol

 

CoD was okay but forgettable for me. The set up for crazy things in God Emperor makes up for it, though YMMV.

 

>>339
this


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