>average middle-class house in the 16th century
>>24869433>Anne_Hathaways_Cottage_and_gardens_15g2006.jpg
>>24869450I hate women in positions of power so fucking much it's unreal.
>>24869449>>24869450>>24869454Anne Hathaway was the name of Shakespeare's wife you dolts.
>>24869507You expect us to believe she married some guy who died 200 years ago?
>>24869433Books with this aesthetic.
>>24867400>6 is Michel Houellebecq's serotonin right?Correct.
>>24867414People trust AI too much for sure. It can be good but it can also be insane. You can get quite a lot of sense out of it if you prompt it intelligently but you have to double-check everything it offers.Another point is that if you're searching for something quite like a very common thing but not exactly it¸ the common thing really acts like a black hole and pulls your search into it. Like imagine if there were some character called Harry in a book and he collected pottery, and you're trying to find him. Your day will go something like this:Character called Harry, collects potteryYOU MEAN HARRY POTTER, THE FAMOUS ICONIC CHARACTER IN THE SERIES OF CHILDREN'S BOOKS BY —No. Not J. K. Rowling. Harry but an adult. And he collects pottery. His surname is not Potter.HARRY POTTER IS A WIZARD IN A FAMOUS SERIES OF —No. Listen to me you piece of shit. I don't want you to tell me anything about Harry Potter. Got that? Now. It's a book, probably from the 19th Century, with a character called Harry, who collects pottery.Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.
Bumping this effort thread
The one about the Andrew Gill cigs is from Dr. Bloodmoneyuhhhh>>2486466875Which I didn't think was very good, probably my least favorite Dick. It has some interesting ideas but it's all over the place
>>24869183>The one about the Andrew Gill cigs is from Dr. Bloodmoney>75Correct.>Which I didn't think was very good, probably my least favorite Dick.It’s not very good overall but it has some good bits. This passage is quintessential PKD I think, because even though in theory he writes vaguely dystopian stuff he actually has a strong faith in the everyday goodness of the average person. There's a letter or something (maybe an essay?) where he talks about Robert A. Heinlein. Once when PKD was at a pretty low ebb financially and emotionally Heinlein wrote him an encouraging letter and gave him a new typewriter. He said, ‘RAH is about as far away from me politically as it’s possible to be but he still did this, and this is what I love about people and what I think matters’.>It has some interesting ideas but it's all over the placeYes it’s three or four quite separate novellas put in a food processor for a few seconds.
Why did the Brits kill off the giants? They were hostile invaders, the giants were there first. How convenient that the Brits cover up this aspect of their history and claim this book is fiction
>>24867745>please think of the heckin Indians!For what? So Alcoholic Anonymous hemorrhages in membership?>>24867750Tallness contributes to shorter life span. Ironic, huh?
>>24867745Not true, the romans only killed the men, then raped their women.
>>24866725Monmouth is a strange esoteric word.
>>24866725Do you guys think there are still giants in the world today? Nephilim-type ones, I mean.
>>24868112Yea, we get to be tall and suffer for less years. Beautiful.
>just commit sedokuWhat did Camus mean by this, /lit/?
>>24869486Being a novelist in pre-internet france must have been the freest access to pussy in the history of mankind.
Is it underrated? Virgil borrowed so much from it and yet no one seems to talk about it
>>24867778Yes and both are periods of Ancient Greece that a modern scholar should be able to synthesize and comprehend not get clung up that Apollonius isn’t a sitcom like The Office which was your main gripe. >>24866682
>>24867787> Apollonius isn’t a sitcom like The Office which was your main gripe>>24867744 was my first post itt, friend
>>24867850The Alexandrian poets, like Callimachus, Lycophron, Apollonius are worth studying as continuations of the Greek lineage via the Byzantine preservation of such and the Ventian publishing of such. The Roman poets like Dionysius Periegetes and Oppian do not indulge the myths, but have a more natural and scientific approach, which is why I used Classical Greek to loosely refer to pre-Roman Greek poets, as Apollonius is the last to write on the myths and be published in Venice aside from the anonymous Byzantine translation of Boccacio's Theseus poem. The Orphic Argonautica/Hymns was regarded as more ancient than Homer in the 18-1900s, but only recently has been said to from the Roman Empire Greeks, and it's first person from Orpheus himself, so I didn't use that as the Crown.
>>24867352The original lost poems about Heracles are foundational to the culture, referencing among other things the expansion of the Greek and Phoenician sphere to its limits.He's like a patriarch of the culture while Jason is a product of it but Jason follows in his footsteps, tracing a later expansion of Greek colonies around the Black Sea, west up the rivers, south to Massalia and then returning to the pillars, Lake Tritonis, the garden of Eden/Hera and the daughters of Atlas.The bulk of the expansion was around the Black Sea where they mined gold from rivers by trapping it in sheep fleece.
Bump
Post and discuss any history books that tell a compelling story.
>>24868284bumpThe Wager was pretty good
Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fischer
>>24868284
>For two hundred years historians have viewed England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 as an un-revolutionary revolution―bloodless, consensual, aristocratic, and above all, sensible. In this brilliant new interpretation Steve Pincus refutes this traditional view.>By expanding the interpretive lens to include a broader geographical and chronological frame, Pincus demonstrates that England’s revolution was a European event, that it took place over a number of years, not months, and that it had repercussions in India, North America, the West Indies, and throughout continental Europe. His rich historical narrative, based on masses of new archival research, traces the transformation of English foreign policy, religious culture, and political economy that, he argues, was the intended consequence of the revolutionaries of 1688–1689.>James II developed a modernization program that emphasized centralized control, repression of dissidents, and territorial empire. The revolutionaries, by contrast, took advantage of the new economic possibilities to create a bureaucratic but participatory state. The postrevolutionary English state emphasized its ideological break with the past and envisioned itself as continuing to evolve. All of this, argues Pincus, makes the Glorious Revolution―not the French Revolution―the first truly modern revolution. This wide-ranging book reenvisions the nature of the Glorious Revolution and of revolutions in general, the causes and consequences of commercialization, the nature of liberalism, and ultimately the origins and contours of modernity itself.
I'm 250 pages in. When does it get good?
>>24865150Greatest novel of all time - my absolute favourite. Truly sublime. So many marvelous moments and marvelous characters. One of my favourites: When Shatov is trying to recover his pistol from one of his will-be murderers to pawn for cash for his child. Awful!
>>24865150If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place." Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.
>>24866931>>24865430>>24865230>>24865150Dostoevsky is pseud.
>>24868228I don't watch films as it's one of the lowest tier art forms, cinematard — I read books. This is a literature board, fuck off.
>>24866934>is this your first dosto?No, it's actually my 9th. I've also read Crime and Punishment three times.>it should really be read last.The Brothers Karamazov will be the last Dostoevsky work I read, most likely forever. If it won't be my favorite work by him, I'll be very disappointed.
HE'S LITERALLY ME.
The one where the guy rapes a servant and then comes back decades later to see his son is some kind of retarded alcoholic was goodAlso the one where the guy finds an elderly man who dances in the gardens and then later introduces his wife and they were both professional dancers in their youthsAlso the one about the man who starts killing children as a part of his war against GodAlso the one where the prussians get a bunch of french prostitutes and then starts bragging about how all of France is there's and a French jewish prostitute stabs him to death and fleesAlso the one where the Frenchman starts feeding a Prussian soldier to fatten him up and then kills him and hides his bodyAnd the one where a Frenchman starts killing a bunch of Prussian soldiers And the one where a woman burns a bunch of Prussian soldiers in her attic after she finds out her son was killed in the warAlso the one where a woman gets infected with an STD from a Prussian and so decides to sleep with as many Prussian soldiers to infect themAlso the one where a girl pretends to help Prussian soldiers by letting them into their cellar but they lock the trapdoor and surround the house with soldiers to capture the Prussian soldiers I liked the story where a young servant on a farm has a romance with a young man who flees, she gets pregnant and gives the child to her relative. Eventually she marries the master of the farm but they're unable to have any children. Eventually she tells him that she has a child and he is very happy about it I've got the Pléiade edition of Maupassant coming soon, feels good he is my favourite author
Garcon, un bock is a great story>« À quoi ça sert-il ? Moi, je ne fais rien, comme tu vois, jamais rien. Quand on n’a pas le sou, je comprends qu’on travaille. Quand on a de quoi vivre, c’est inutile. À quoi bon travailler ? Le fais-tu pour toi ou pour les autres ? Si tu le fais pour toi, c’est que ça t’amuse, alors très bien ; si tu le fais pour les autres, tu n’es qu’un niais. » >« Non. Je me lève à midi. Je viens ici, je déjeune, je bois des bocks, j’attends la nuit, je dîne, je bois des bocks ; puis, vers une heure et demie du matin, je retourne me coucher, parce qu’on ferme. C’est ce qui m’embête le plus. Depuis dix ans, j’ai bien passé six années sur cette banquette, dans mon coin ; et le reste dans mon lit, jamais ailleurs. Je cause quelquefois avec des habitués. Thank God I managed to get a job because this story really hurtI don't like it when Maupassant writes very cruel stories, for example about starving beggers or animals being abused also les bijoux Les bijoux is just too damn meanAlso the one where a rich couple ask to adopt a child from poor farmers, one refuses which leads to the other accepting itThe son who was kept speaks like a poor person and has a very strong accent but the one who was adopted speaks proper french, that one hurts
Reading Bel Ami as an adolescent shaped my view of human relationships in a negative way. 10/10 would recommend.
>>24867895>>24868920What about the one where the hungry young laborer and an exhausted wet nurse on a train from Genoa to Marseille find mutual relief when, overcome by pain from engorged breasts, she lets him drink her milk?>https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/idyll/
>>24869186half way through it right now. it's amazingly good. the bit where all the newspaper journalists finish their shifts and grab their cup-and-ball toys from the cupboard cracked me up severely. felt almost Pynchonian. that was an uncharacteristic scene, though. what i like most about it the book how much he gets out of the simplest ideas. in a sense Duroy is a two-dimensional character, but he never feels two-dimensional. his problems are all simple and familiar (why can't i see into the mind of my mistress! is she comparing me with her previous lovers?), but they also feel like real life.
Since I was a kid I've been decent at prose, but whenever I come up with an idea for a story or a subject I begin to see its limits or pick holes in it as soon as I begin writing it out. It makes everything I try and do seem impotent such that my will falls limp immediately. I come up with a good premise for a screenplay or a novel but after writing it out it feels so empty or I see the limits of its conclusion. The same thing occurs in other areas of my life but I've been able to use it to troubleshoot and point out problems before they occur & make preparations and contingencies ahead of time, which has been useful in making my political work more effective (which I of course often question the ultimate point of as well, but since my work is about fulfilling material needs it's at least possible for me to say, well, at an animal level suffering feels bad, and that pain is seemingly irreducible enough that my assignment holds water enough for the time being - though maybe I'll lose interest in this too with age?). As I get older it seems to me that all perception breaks down upon close enough scrutiny, and life appears from a human perspective as more like a nonsense of purely sensory experiences deranged by an overabundance of abstract semantic thought more than it is anything else. What is there left to say? How do I spin narrative content out of a morass when I know the lie underneath these things? I should give up on being any kind of an artist probably but I won enough competitions and had enough praise growing up only centred around my apparent writing ability and ability to articulate creative concepts, analyze films, etc. that dropping it would constitute identity death and remove the illusion of narrative sense from my own life, after which I would be staying alive for its own blind sake and not to any ends. Which gives me intimations of something cosmological, overwroughy and strung out like taffy to an infinitely thin line of burning agony. An existential tailspin that flows only in one direction, only able to become more and more balled up and shrinking the more the algorithm attempts to resolve itself. Sometimes I think I might be going schizo but then I seem to be able to put these things into words too cogently (and I don't have any hallucinations, or psychosis afaik) for that to be the case. Thoughts?
>>24869197>How do I touch eternity with one hand and life with the other?is that a metaphor for handguns?see image link for doc
>>24869197not reading all that boring info on your life sorry my friend. but:>whenever I come up with an idea for a story or a subject I begin to see its limits or pick holes in it as soon as I begin writing it outi think that's an interesting problem and it affects me too. all i can do is give you the advice i wish i'd received. i think your problem is the classic 'gifted kid' problem of impatience.my recommendation is to stop focusing on realising your idea, accept it will always elude you, and instead focus on the process of writing itself. i'm always more productive, and have more fun, when i start a story with a conception of a voice i want to write in, instead of an amorphous feeling i want to make concrete. this way you're setting yourself up to be constantly surprised rather than inevitably disappointed. i think you need be humble and radically restrict yourself to the task of creating sentences that will give another reader a reason to keep reading. focus less on eternity and more on the words on the page. when i did an art course i spent way too much energy trying to heroically birth a new aesthetic that would correspond to all the diffuse mysterious things i felt inside, and the result was feeble and confused and boring. i wish i had spent that time diligently sketching from life and studying art history, because i now know that humble patience is what leads to the real mysteries.
>>24869444more ideas on this theme. i read an interesting take on the distinction between pulp stories and 'literary fiction'. this was in a book that took pulp stories very seriously, so it wasn't being dismissive or snobbish, but the writer's point was: why is it that, even if we acknowledge all the interesting things going on in these tales, they will never draw us back in the same way that, like, a Kafka story does?their conclusion was that, if all artworks are in some way incomplete, if they all fail to capture what you called eternity, or others might call life, and are inherently haunted by disappointment, then pulp stories repress this by saying 'the *real* pleasure is waiting for you after the cliffhanger, the mystery will be revealed in the next issue, the Platonic cowboy story you long for but can never grasp can be yours for just 25 cents,' whereas in literary fiction that lack or emptiness is somehow incorporated into the work itself.hard to pin down exactly what they mean by 'incorporated in the work itself', but i think of it in metaphorical terms: good writing is not exactly, at its core, the expression of an idea or emotion, but rather the building of a kind of shrine to something that doesn't itself come forth. it's a tomb built around an impenetrable crypt. humbly you chisel the marble and check the soundness of your pillars, but you have accept, as a sad sacrifice, the death of what all this is dedicated to.(i might have strayed far from your original concern and be talking purely to myself here.)
>>24869471one more screenshot and then i'll get back to work.
why do all these books have such soul-crushing gutpunch endings, jesus fucking christ
>>24868828>>24866241Carver has his stories set in such ambiguous places that they could be anywhere in America. Is Berry the same?My idea of PNW literature is a kind of writing that takes landscape and nature and setting a lot more seriously. Kinda like Robinson Jeffers.
>>24868606>>24869238The Curve of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet is really nice, though set up in the inlets of British Columbia. Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey is good too, and impressed me with how his descriptions of nature properly conveyed the immense confluence of it.Disclaimer: not from the PNW and have never been there.
>>24868606Brautigan
>>24869319Did you at least see the Goonies?
>>24869392Ty anon. Good rec
Rereading Iliad and it hit me in the heart, that was a good man who deserved so much more.
>>24868056Hector = cucked oriental domesticityAchilles = virile Aryan homosexuality
>>24867975This
>>24867989Hector was a tamed city boy, whose devotion and piety only earned him a quick death.
>>24867946Yes I even mention him in the epilogue of my novel
>>24868327>my novelThat is?
I feel like one of the many reasons why west is getting surpassed by Asian countries like China is because there is no rigor given to school education in the west compared to Chinese or other Asian schools. Though Western unversities were still fine but they are seriously getting crapier day by day. One of the many reasons of why west managed to conquer the world through out last four centuries is because of insanely intelligent people nurtured by equally insane education system aka Classical education system. So, should we reintroduce those subjects albeit in a modern form?
>>24867646>>24867652No, the West doesn't need more trad-larping 'RETVRN' bullshit. You're not handling the problems with (post-)modernity, you're engaging in a childish pastiche which has already been called out (Jameson) as a unique type of mental illness within contemporary society. It's just so embarrassing too. You never give an actual reason how this would achieve anything. It's obvious to any onlooker that you're associating age and a sense of traditionalism with quality simply by default. This is the same wavelength that third world browns operate on, when they look through cow shit because the ancient text such-and-such suggested one should do so.
>>24869115Your condescending attitude is very effeminate. All of the other replies already explained what is wrong with our post-modern shithole. Traditions and customs give you strength to fight and a purpose to pursue, or a bloodline to preserve. And while I would agree that Zoomers Christianity is a mere larp, a revival of classical value in education is a whole other issue.
>>24869184Your attempted flight from postmodernity just pushes you deeper into the postmodern condition. That's the problem with trad larping and with pastiche more generally. It's not enough to simply insist on tradition. The traditions and customs of the ancient world existed within an entirely different symbolic universe than ours.I'm condescending in response to condescension. To write off the entirety of recent philosophy because it's "decadent" and "leftist" is just a nonsense anti-intellectual attitude, especially when those "decadent leftists" have penned far greater analyses of the postmodern condition than anybody else.
>>24867646No
>>24869219Modern intellectuals are worthless and haven't contributed anything meaningful to society except for endless subversion and perversion
One thing that doesn't get talked a lot in this board is style. How did famous writers create and improve their style? How did they learn to "write well"?I don't believe in the genius theory where they instantly knew how to write well because it was only a tiny part of what made them successful, the rest being an extreme amount of work. But what work?
>>24869167>How did famous writers create and improve their style?Reading and writing every day.Really you have to ask this?
>>24869167>How did famous writers create and improve their style?By taking runny shits 94 times a day.
>>24869279You could write for a 100 years and barely improve your style. There's more to it than "just writing"
>>24869167>>24869339Read works with an interesting style. Rip 'em off, especially if you're in the middle of reading something good and feel inspired. But if you want to practice style in a cleanroom environment or imagine how the cavemen started composing unga bunga verses, then pay attention to the structure and flow of a sentence, which is determined by your syntax, punctuation, and word choice; poetic devices also have use in prose. Read out loud to yourself and re-write where there's friction (i.e., where it reads awkwardly), and change up sentence structure based on what requires emphasis (e.g., forming and breaking patterns). Think that you want the writing to flow but you don't necessarily want monotony. This can all go along with rip-off practice anyway.
>>24869339utterly wrong
Is it a good book?I can't find a summary of the plot
>>24866765More likely because the real reason for the fatwa wasn't blasphemy but portraying Khomeini as a pathetic old man. Rushdie's book was bound to be controversial, but there would have been nothing more than a few protests if Khomeini hadn't felt personally humiliated.
>>24866765Absolutely positively based. Islam shits and Christ never stops bleeding (her period) *tips*
>>24865791Bad book.
>>24866417get used to hearing this for the next few months. This false either or is all the creatively bankrupt yids can come up with. It has to that dumb anyways because they're outsourcing so much to India.
>>24865791The character based on Mohamed was the middleman between an angelic messenger and the scribe and put his own spin in the translation. The suggestion of this threatens the power of ayatollah who declared open season on the author to cement fear in his own people.
anybody here read this? about halfway through the book, really not sure if i should drop it or finish it.
>>24868085yep. do you actually intend to read it? have you read his older book?
>>24868091I did when i bought it. Now I do not.Ive only read the divided brain which is only 38 pages.
>>24868047Heidegger for retards
>>24868047I won't read this because Whatifautist constantly recommends it
