Dilemma: you can support yourself solely from your work as a professional book critic, but you have to live with teeth like this. Would you?
>>23327833I grew up in the 80s when most people did not get braces and teeth were not unnaturally white, I don't really get the obsession people have with teeth these days and I don't see it as a good thing. Neurosis is not a good thing.
I want to make an irredeemable monster, but I want him to be comically arrogant and likable, how do I strike the smug snake villain that doesn't turn him into an annoying character people hate watching?
Make him right. That way, no matter what he does, he has the high ground, and even when people are in opposition to him, they will like him.
>>23327102Establish the arrogant and likable aspects before turning him into a villain and probably turn him into a villain by having him seriously and unapologetically fuck over the characters you have put in the time to get the reader to genuinely care about. Simplest way is to have him friends with those characters you are getting the reader to care about, use the group dynamic to build it and show it. Then he fucks them over and you force the reader to pick a side and you make it as hard as possible for them to pick a side.
>>23327102Im not a writer, but maybe you can find 5 villain characters in fiction that has that effect. Analyse and compare each of them and see similarities, differences and what makes them work or not
what do femcels read?
>>23325920
>>23325845I wish I was a tranny. I would have more sexual value.
>>23325390Not in any meaningful sense, no.
>>23327227Oh, nonsense. If you're a woman, you've got plenty of value. As a tranny, you'd only have value to perverts, and you'd spend your whole life living in the shadow between Man and Woman. As a semi-casual list for a real woman, not a bad list.
>>23325841>Women can tell if you're dragging your feet nine times out of ten anyway. They've seen it a million times. Just sack up and ask.No one has ever told me this advice. I needed it. Thank you.
Hey nerds, I'm hoping to find more examples of leftist literature. This book Ulysses is great but I need more. Stuff that's in this id like to see more of:>Dumb stupid Christian churchman is mean to jews, belittled for it>Lots of mopey atheist musings about dumb shit>Detailed description of a jewish dude taking a long steamy shit>Lots of gay stuffI haven't finished yet so it may feature this too, but I also want my next book to be very pro negro and anti white. Do you guys have any other fine examples of based leftist literature I can enjoy?
Marxists dot org
>>23327002Is he wrong?
>>23327186Yeah complaining about vernacular highlighting the political dichotomy present to 99% of the users of this site is pretty fucking retarded.
>>23327235>complaining about vernacular highlighting the political dichotomy
>>23327240Doesn't make me less right nerd
I have noticed multiple times, mostly with longer books but not limited to them, that I tend to enter a state of mind where I just want to finish the book as quickly as possible and reach the end. It doesn't matter how much I'm enjoying the text; it just happens subconsciously. Sometimes I spend 3 minutes per page, but as I near the end, it sometimes falls below 30 seconds! Has anyone else experienced this? How do I stop doing it? Or am I retarded and is it over for me?
>>23326310Enjoyment doesn't exist
>>23326236>>23326340ok retard, which books?
>>23326613Some of my recent reads:>The Haunting of Hill House>The First Crusade: A New History>Chess Story>The Door Into Summer>Macbeth (reread)>The Death of Ivan Ilyich>The Housemaid's Secret (no comment)>The Mysterious Affair at Styles>As I lay Dying>On Liberty (fell asleep thrice)
>>23326366>>23326236I USED TO BE THE SAME. No the problem isnt what you're reading, ive read some of my favourite books with that feeling. I still have it a little when im reading something quite dry. All i can say is keep reading until you're get through it because it will go. READ CONSISTENTLY
>>23326551gay
/wwoym/ write what's on your mindhigh trust editionprevious >>23324263
>>23327768>>23327753oh I meant "unacceptable"
>>23327744Yeah I feel you. The mood on /lit/ is palpable frustration, they're trying (and failing) to use books to "overcome" the frustration of their animal instincts. This is obviously stupid since you're just suppressing those animal drives, and it's leaking out of you 24/7 like a damp sponge.>>23327753We only criticize copes if they're unsuccessful. Like if you just up and joined a Buddhist monastery and you became happy, no one would criticize you for coping because clearly the "cope" is working. We dislike trad larpers because you're clearly lying to yourselves that trad ideology makes up for your unhappiness. And instead of fixing this problem, you guys plug your ears and shout la-la-la even louder until your crap goes everywhere. Real christians don't have to constantly remind you they're a christian, they just are, they know sinners will be punished in the afterlife so there's nothing to be worried about. That's what this place turned into, a literal failed cope-fest. I can unironically feel the waves of sexual frustration every time I come here.
Being called out for coping is good because there's still time to change. If you come on /lit/ every day to complain about females and libs and etc., you are wasting your fucking time. Not only does it make the board worse but you're hurting yourself too. Socializing is hard and I'm a fucking loser too, but you have to try. You just have to. There's no other future. This "coping with books" thing is just delaying the inevitable. You cannot continue like this.
>>23327732Anon probably sees it as a series of increasingly taboo fetishes, but the sine non qua of the core fetish for him is closer to >Seen in internet porn privatelyRather than any strict need for any given taboo within that medium
>>23327793>We dislike trad larpers because you're clearly lying to yourselves that trad ideology makes up for your unhappiness. And instead of fixing this problem, you guys plug your ears and shout la-la-la even louder until your crap goes everywhere.Fair enough.
Did I get an incomplete copy of this? Almost none of the major plot threads were resolved
>>23325539>Why would you do that when you could apparently read Pynchon and get the same thing?But why read Pynchon when you could get the same by watching a David Lynch movie?
>>23325433>read meme author>get meme result Many such case!
>>23325433are you literally retarded?
>>23325433No Refunds
>>23325482It's resolving if the plot arches are resolved. If the writer doesn't resolve them, and he or she doesn't resolve them sequel after sequel, he'll die unfulfilled. If he does resolve them, he or she writes a completely finished plot, and can go to plotfinishers heaven. There's a special place in hell for editors who take finished plots apart and put them in multiple books with individually unfinished plotarchs. Don't be that editor. Finish your plots.
Which is superior?
>>23327377Skillful as in "aiming to get this or that, one gets it" and "aiming to prevent the personal acquisition of this or that, one prevents the person acquisition of that very thing".To the end of experiencing what is agreeable, likeable, pleasant and desirable and to the end of not experiencing what is disagreeable, unlikeable, unpleasant and undesirable.
Idk why white supremacist /lit/ rejects Buddhism and Islam for being non-white when they fellate the Greeks so much. Just sayin'.
>>23327599ikr greeks are shitskins
I'm pretty new to Buddhism but my counter argument to all the people ITT who want to argue is:I do not care. It does not matter.Just be a good person.>inb4 HOW CAN GOOD BE REAL IF WE ARE FAKEYou sound like a bad person. I don't talk to bad people you will try to drag me down to your level and I'm trying to be the best person I can be.
Islam because they made this so I can trip balls on DMT looking at it later. Faggots!
It's a feeling and a taste, and it's black, and it's very heavy. It comes down over your head, and wraps its tentacles around you, and sinks its long dirty fingernails into your heart. It has the stink of burning flesh and the sight of dread.
I just marathoned this in 6 days. I enjoyed it. What are your thoughts on The Corrections by Johnathon Franzen?
>>23326370My thoughts are that it is one book in a long line of books about a random family that tries to be down to earth and realistic that some writers shit out, like DeLillo for example. I can't really say that Underworld, for example, is meaningfully different from the corrections. In fact, there's nothing setting apart Franzen's own Freedom from the The Corrections I'd say. It's all paint by numbers but the colors are swapped out each time.This doesn't mean the book is bad by any means btw.
Franny sucks
>>23326370If you insist on reading authors of that generation, Lethem mogs Franzen by orders of magnitude. But you'd be better off going back a few decades and reading their influences instead.
>>23326370I enjoyed it, stumbles from time to time but over quite good. Alfred and the bench was quite well executed and effective, completely transforms who Alfred is and suddenly you stop rooting for Enid to shove a salad fork through his eye. >>23326395Franzen makes the reader's relationship with the Chip reflect Enid's giving us all that drama of his life falling apart before dumping us into the banality of her life, we don't know what is going on with him anymore than she does and we miss him because his story was a hell of a lot more interesting than sitting home with Alfred wondering if they wayward and absent son will make it home and give her one last Christmas at home with the entire family. The novel does not work without Chip and Franzen did it well.>>23326417Freedom and The Corrections are very different books, both deal with family and do it from the perspective of a family drama but work to very different ends; The Corrections is about the family itself and how the family effects each other, Freedom is about the external pressures society places on the family. If you read them you are a plotfag.
>>23326417Referring to DeLillo’s writing as down-to-earth and realistic hurts my brain. Underworld maybe, but that’s it.
The time has finally come for me to tackle this beast.Where should I start?I want to learn the complete story from the rise to the fall.
>>23323346Start with Wheelock. To truly understand Rome you must learn Latin. It's not as hard as you might think.
>>23326761unironically this, supplement with books as you go. Duncan gives pretty solid recommendations as well, no shame in sticking with more modern "pop" histories as well. Just beware the ideological trappings of "Augustus was le ebil ackshually!" or similarly subversive commentary regarding Nero and Elagabalus, for example.
>>23326883He doesn't even touch on them in his work
>>23327443>similarly subversive commentary regarding NeroYes, forcing Seneca to kill himself is not evil at all. Even if 90 out of 100 other things attributed to him were false -assuming they actually are false- then the other 10 individual ones would still make him out to be evil.
>>23327765I was unclear, I meant people defending Nero. There's room for some discussion of his portrayal being unfair, but it's often taken too far and perverted to a complete exoneration."Subversive" was meant to say anything radically deviating from historical precedent, namely for the sake of dismantling the tradition.
How we dreamed of all the great things we would do? Where did it all go so wrong bros?
>>23326354?BUT IT IS (You) WHO IS MOPING ABOUT NOT HAVING A LIFE, AND I AM TELLING YOU WHY.
>>23326331It's over for most of us here.
>>23326331stop dreaming and start planning. stop complaining and start doing. it's never too late to walk the path you were born on.
>>23326331Read the Tartar Steppe by Buzzati
>>23327037Yeah it's a bit too late now for some us in our 40's, but I agree for those in their 20's there is nothing to complain about they still have their whole life ahead of them.
>Main villain gets defeated by baconEpic
>>23327763I think Stephen King SUCKS
Let's discuss Chinese poetry. Who are your favorites? What periods do you like? Do you have particular translators/sinologists/critics who you believe to be good curators? What are you interested in reading? I'm reading Du Fu right now, I *almost* see what people mean about how great he is but I think I'm a little too caught up in the immediate experience of reading to really take stock of the whole, once I'm done I'll be able to look at him with more clarity. But it's obvious enough that he has the sense of scale/humor that is the seed of all genius.
>>23324764I agree that it's far from ideal, but it is capable of capturing certain dimensions of greatness nonetheless. I wish I had the patience to learn the languages of every poet I want to read, but that just isn't me.
>>23324772Well, if you like poetry Chinese opens up an especially great amount of good poetry.
>>23324783If I ever do it, Chinese will almost certainly be the one, yeah. And I've put a bit of time into it on and off, I know most of the standard poetic words, your yue, qiu, shanshui, all that. I'm just not enough of a poetic technique connoisseur to really feel like I need to prioritize it when my backlog is such a black hole of time and attention.
I'll just bump with random thoughts/observations/questions: Decided to skip ahead and check out the rhapsodies (ahead in the collection, that is, they were written very early on). Definitely feels a little smoother, a little more refined, with somewhat different concerns and a different flow, compared to the old rhapsodies. I suppose even the Wen Xuan rhapsodies were written over quite a long period, although even among those the later ones are already quite imitative. I had thought of it as a form that was not relevant after the Han, and I don't think Du's stuff disproves that really thus far, but it's interesting to see that it still existed in some capacity and great poets were still attempting to keep it alive.
Bump: The animal transformation stories vaguely referenced in the old myths associated with the Heavenly Questions are very interesting - they seem to hint at the animist religious practices of shamanism whose traces are quite hard to find in the Near Eastern/Mediterranean West, except maybe in preserved ancient rituals like the arkteia of Artemis at Brauron. I wonder to what extent these things existed and were replaced, vs. actually developing differently.
Was this "The Avengers" of the ancient world?
>>23327602No
>>23327602I never saw the avengers but I read the Iliad. They were just pagans.
>>23327602Yes
it's the Sneed's Feed & Seed of the bronze age
