Trying to put together a short list of 5-7 books that most comprehensively capture the character of America. All I have are Moby Dick and JR by Gaddis.I think this is a retarded exercise but my ocd wont allow me to not do it. What would /lit/ add or remove?
Of Mice and MenHonestly, I think you could just go copy a list from any American Lit class. Most of the recommendations here could be found in those.
>>24984508>Americans are sociopathic golems who live their lives by the mantra of Fuck or be FuckedI believe we have a winner here.
>>24983338Explain
>>24984520Shan't.
1984 by Orwell and Brave New World by Huxley
The book I have enjoyed the most this year has been The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In it, the author seeks to describe what it means for an individual to accept or reject the responsibilities that arise in their life.Specifically, it describes two lifestyles. On the one hand, there is a life that accepts responsibility. This life is more grounded, connected to the earth, and experiences life in its fullness, since many of its actions have an impact on the world—to the point that the weight of those actions can end up crushing the individual to the ground. On the other hand, a life of lightness enjoys its own existence by avoiding any responsibility in order to focus on oneself, even though this life ultimately feels a sense of unease when realizing that all its actions end up being insignificant in the face of the world.In summary, the idea that responsibilities make us more or less connected to the world around us has surprised me greatly.What book have you enjoyed the most this year?
>>24984504That's about as much as I expected out of you. You're not beating the allegations here.
"The Practice of the Presence of God" by Brother Lawrence, and Beowulf.
>>24984437Noted. It's true that I've heard the story more than once, but I've never actually read it. With any luck, I might be able to come up with a few thoughts.
>>24984475Do you recommend any of them?
>>24984532Interesting
Thoughts on scaruffi's best novels ever rankings?>https://www.scaruffi.com/fiction/best100.html
>>24984523It's fineBut what the hell is that photo?
>>24984523kafka is a minor author
PBUH?
Guenon is not a philosopher. He does not genuinely engage Islam. Where is his commentary on the Quran? If he even took any effort for a close reading (not just selective and vibez based) he would notice the incongruousness of the Islamic holy texts and the earlier Abrahamic texts. There is no philosophical inquiry done here. It is a religious delusional state which can only be maintained by him so long he is unreasonable. Any serious inquiry, or even a singular moment of philosophy would break the spell of perennialism. Real thinkers like Leo Strauss and Wittgenstein knew the limits of thought and religion by its didactic role. Consequently, no renunciation of the possibility of Truth in them out right, but no delusions to what follows from the premises stated.
>>24981936From the standpoint of traditional metaphysics, this objection rests upon a category error that Guénon himself repeatedly identified as characteristic of the modern mind. To reproach him for not being a “philosopher” in the academic sense, or for not offering a line-by-line commentary on the Qurʾān, is to mistake the nature of his undertaking. Guénon never claimed to practice philosophy understood as an autonomous, discursive inquiry conducted within the limits of individual reason. His work proceeds from a radically different order, that of metaphysical principles known through intellectual intuition and transmitted by orthodox traditions. In this perspective, the Qurʾān is not an object to be anatomized by historical or philological critique, but a symbolic and doctrinal expression of a supra-formal truth whose coherence cannot be judged by external comparison with earlier scriptural forms. Apparent incongruities between revelations are precisely what one should expect once one understands that each orthodox tradition addresses a determinate humanity under particular conditions, while nevertheless deriving from a single principial source. To deny this possibility in advance, while demanding that it conform to modern criteria of “serious inquiry,” is not critique but prejudice.As for the charge of “perennialist delusion,” it merely inverts the true situation. What Guénon exposed, again and again, was the delusion proper to modern philosophy: the belief that reason, severed from any principial knowledge, can judge the totality of the real. Strauss’s prudential esotericism and Wittgenstein’s therapeutic modesty may acknowledge limits, but they remain confined within the horizontal plane of thought and language. Guénon’s renunciation is of an entirely different kind. It is not a renunciation of truth, but of the pretension that truth can be produced or refuted by discursive ingenuity alone. Metaphysics, in the traditional sense, is not broken by “a moment of philosophy”; rather, philosophy dissolves when confronted with principles that transcend its domain. That this appears unreasonable to those who recognize no higher mode of knowledge than dialectic is neither surprising nor decisive. It simply confirms the gulf separating the traditional intellect from the modern mind, a gulf that no appeal to “real thinkers” can bridge so long as first principles themselves remain unexamined.
>>24973019>It is obviously absurd to try to define the InfiniteInfinite means not finite in math.>because any definition is necessarily a limitationAnd if something doesn't have a definition what do we call it? Indefinite. Bizarrely, Guenon wants to call infinite sets indefinite when they have very precise definitions and objects to calling them infinite when they are very much not finite.The rest is just garden-variety crank ranting about Cantor
>>24983148>Infinite means not finite in math.And Guenon explains why this is inaccurate, i.e. something being strictly unlimited i.e. infinite is not the same as something being of an indefinite quantity.>For Guénon, the infinite in the strict sense is that which has no limits whatsoever, not only no numerical bound but no determination of any kind. Properly speaking, only the Absolute, or the metaphysical Principle, is infinite, since any determination, form, or condition already implies limitation. By contrast, what modern mathematics typically calls infinite, such as an unending numerical series or an unbounded continuum, is not truly infinite but merely indefinite, meaning that it is open-ended within a given set of conditions. A numerical sequence that can always be extended is still defined by number, order, and succession, and is therefore limited in kind even if it is unlimited in extent.>Guénon argues that when mathematics labels such entities infinite, it implicitly treats quantity as capable of reaching the Absolute, thereby obscuring the traditional metaphysical hierarchy in which quantity belongs to the lowest level of reality. This terminological shift, in his view, reflects a broader modern tendency to reduce metaphysical principles to quantitative abstractions. The result is not merely a semantic error but a philosophical one, since it encourages the belief that the Absolute can be approached through accumulation or extension, rather than through principial knowledge that transcends all determinations.
>>24981936>Real thinkers like Leo Strauss and Wittgenstein knew the limits of thought and religion by its didactic roleTranslation: I'm a humanist cuck obsessed with discursive thought.
Through the years literature and humanities have only brought me poverty and bleakness. If I only had a liking to maths, I would be better off in life. Can you force yourself to like maths? Anyone else in this predicament? I don’t think I’ve ever more than a handful of times used directly, referenced or discussed what I learned reading on a social setting to outweigh the negatives. I feellike all of this isn’t really worth it in the end.
>>24984092i sold out to have a chance at a decent life. i got double vaxxed 3 months ago and am now just entering my 2nd year of nursing at 24 after switching majors multiple times. i went from theology to economics, took a one year break then finally nursing.
2 + 2 = 4
>>24984294>PhD in math>any job you want>300k starting
>>24984297>well-connectedlet's not pretend it'll be anything other than that.
>>24984294I'm finishing my bachelors in mathematical statistics and pretty much everyone here gets a job with it, let alone a masters, pay is also way better than the average wagecuck to whom solving a quadratic is like solving the riemann hypothesis, so you're very off. The only bubble that is popping is CS, you have to basically submit to slave wage to get a job.
I just want to learn what's so appealing this genre
>>24983387Thanks I'll check it out. I've been reading a book another anon recommended and so far I think the reason it might be appealing is as this anon said>>24977034
>>24979914You cant just say that without elaborating!
>>24976052It’s fine if a handsome gym chad with a big fat cock does it, it’s only bad if a little sexual undesirable chud freak does it. Women are not moral persons. Nothing intself is wrong. What is wrong is what her desire says.
>>24976081Yeah, if you enjoy a video game because it sublimates a desire to kill people you are just as fucked in the head as someone who wants to get raped.
>>24984179You’re comparing a deep sexual insatiable desire that impacts the whole anatomy and gives the hardest most addictive orgasms to just a little video game. This shit is like saying you play pacman because you want to eat people. No retard it’s not that, it’s fun because it’s like a puzzle+ fast paced engagement.
Talk about poems/poets you like, post your own work, and critique others.
Do a poem, he saidSo I didGo home, I saidPaki scumGloucestershire council bewareThis is an actionable threatPunishable by UK law
>>24978098>>24979136The rocks clearly rolled from the top of the hill but it turns out the area was underwater around 12k years ago and had a relatively sudden uplift around the time of the big global meltwater pulses associated with the event the Atlantis and the garden myths come from which was likely partly caused by the trail of a comet.
Balls a lickingCock a throbbingLet me swallow We're both so erect
time for a poetick year—
Stubborn fish, the current is a thing of the past for you.There are bigger predators but you make them laughSo you let the riverbed tingle the bellyEach day in the sand that changesYour children not too far behind, busy learning The ins and outs of swimmingNot in opposition with the tree, or the squirrel living on it.Encounters of “you too?”, and yes, everybodyLiving here gets wet the same wayFreedom, one day, not to have a reason of being.
I think the 1897 Dracula novel looks good.
I finished reading this yesterday and honestly it was kind of boring.The first few chapters detailing how the Spanish plundered the continent were great but then when it comes to the 20th century he gets bogged down into way too much detail and mentions a bunch of literally whos and corporations that make me lose interest.
>>24982839When will Latinos go to Europe and take back what they are owed?
>>24983063Never, because no one cares. They usually just want Europe to stop moaning about some nonsense or another.
>>24983072I think a lot of them are going to Spain though. It seems to be full of immigrants these days.
>>24983545Yeah. But that's independent of historical grievances. More economically prosperous, no language barrier, permissive government. Migration is an economic issue, not really an ideological one.
>>24979093I'm Latin American. This is not a very accurate book, if you actually study history or economics in a good university. High-school history teachers back in the 1990s loved it.There are two good proxies to know if a book about Latin American history is completely trash. 1. It was written in the 1960s or 1970s2. It claims the British got Brazil and Argentina to destroy Paraguay in the Paraguayan War.We were taught in high-school in the 1990s that Paraguay was becoming a developed country and Brazil and Argentina were the lackeys England used to destroy this nascent rival to England.Except that Brazil and England didn't have a good relationship and we almost got into a war a few decades before due to some drunk British sailors.Paraguay actually invaded Brazil and we spent the first part of the war getting our butt kicked since Paraguay had a good army and Brazil had a decent Navy and a pretty poor army. To the point that there is no sea between Brazil and Paraguay and our best victory in the war was by our navy...
>read it all but didn't understand so I used Grok to summarize it for meI don't understand a lot of novels but am actually really enjoying reading. I just can't seem to understand anything beyond surface level. What I usually do when watching reading a book like this is finish them and then go on Grok/GPT or Youtube to have it analyzed for me. I want to do this analysis myself but I don't see any deeper meaning when I can just get it summarized by someone else
>>24984278I agree, the purpose of education is to help form a person's understanding of knowledge. Therefore, we should understand that James Joyce went from a writer of intriguing short stories to a man trapped up his own ass.
>>24984242That's Nabokov, not Joyce.But with pedophilia behind the superficial aqueous aquamarine screen.>>24984292It's not that hard of a read. As English as fourth language, I understood the thoughts of characters and sequences of actions (and that includes the Oxen of the Sun).You're just a trooned out retard.>>24984331The point with Joyce is that he wants you to feel certain very powerful emotions through writing. He wants you to have an epiphany. He succeeds with that in Ulysses. If you read the book and felt nothing after the final Yes, you're autistic and low IQ. Likely brown. Highly likely Estonian.
>>24984385>He wants you to have an epiphany.i know you said you’re ESL, but you’ve somehow co-opted an embarrassingly american way of looking at things.
>>24984385Who said it was hard? It's retarded and pretentious, not hard. It's artist's shit, like when you do the needful, saar
>>24984385>The point with Joyce is that he wants you to feel certain very powerful emotions through writing.Quite the opposite, which is why many have problems with him. His lack of actual story, substituting it for commentary, intellectual interests, dense worldplay, etc., makes for a deliberated product rather than a felt one. Demanding that you pick apart and decode something is antithetical to feeling and knowing on a deep emotional level.
>When the loud options are moralistic anti-technology on one side and managerial techno-optimism on the other, the vacancy is real. Into that space Land arrives, not with a program, but a jerry can full of accelerants. He offers a style of lucidity that makes refusal of justificatory exposure feel like realism, and he supplies different factions with the same transferable permission to burn what they already want to burn.>Land exploits that vacancy by treating contestation itself as pathology. The slow work of stating conditions, specifying stakes, tracking costs, and admitting defeaters is redescribed as security reflex and primate panic. His central gesture is substitution, the labor of justification gives way to the glamour of inevitability. He swaps arguments for accelerants, then calls the burn insight. Landian inevitability is counterfeit realism, a get-out-of-reply-free card stamped with ‘what is coming.’ If every objection is already a symptom, nothing has to be answered on the merits.>Thus, the space of the reasons is displaced by a regime of selection, time, capital, war, optimization, whatever can be invoked as an external criterion. Behind this move sits a familiar ancestor. Darwinian selection, abstracted into a metaphysics. The Landian trick is to treat selection not as a local operator but as a final arbiter. Whatever survives is taken to deserve survival. Whatever scales is taken to be true. This is how selection is promoted into a theory of justification, and it is also how resistance becomes illegible. If the arbiter is selection, then objections are not reasons, they are symptoms.Actually pretty good. I think the polemics lean a little too heavily on a dated caricature of Land’s thought, but the criticism of provenance as a substitute for justification is sound, imo. If you submit your ethical judgements to the invisible hand of technocapital then every criticism can be framed as a transient pocket of negentropic drag that doesn’t deserve an answer. Of course if in raising your metaphysics to the status of an ethics your position magically becomes immune from criticism, there’s definitely a problem there.
>>24984330Go back to what Husserl said about the intersubjectivity between plural monads.That makes more sense: a world of varying degrees of ontological entities/wills that co-mingle.
Deleuzians just speak mumbo-jumbo
>>24984436Getting deeper: how sure are we about each others phenomenological experience of reality? For all I know I could shake your hand and you shake mine, but in your reality it's tentacles shaking and accomplishing the same essential result (the hand and the tentacle thus get reduced to aesthetics and the co-operative shake is the real substance here).Perhaps there's some sort of metaphysical Fourier Transformation for reality that allows all these different phenomena to "make sense" to each other despite our distinct unique subjective being?We communicate energetically but retain our distinct essences.
>>24981193I don't have advanced familiarity with Land or D&G for that matter but I would contend the challenges the original Orthodox Marxists faced are a sort of recurring part of this. If you accept the dialectical unfolding since then you could frankly turn this into a Baudrillardian paradox in and of itself. Marx left infamous commentaries on false consciousness in the German Ideology. He also refers to a climate of total criticism in one of his last surviving letters. The astonishing number of possible permutations of Grundrisse could leave anyone stuck in theoretical for the rest of their mortal life. If all parties stay in the present then the expectation of a defense of some future notion is absurd, take it or leave it, or just don't bother. If it can be defended epistemically then consider it on those grounds. The totality of criticism has been done, the results are always the same, denial of external world and Descartian experience machinery. Prediction square offs turn into Aristotelian slap fights and Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx are still the last guys.
>>24983772>The problem is that upscaling a descriptive account of local processes of selection into a metaphysics ultimately means that the crux of Landian thought is a style rather than a program.Interestingly, it always seemed to me like the metaphysics came first for land, and the novelty was in describing the local operations. Land is first and foremost a deleuzian, albeit with a cybergothic bataillean bend.
Or should I read the fanfic by White or Tolkien?
>>24980747
>>24980897Only in Ohio.
>>24980558fate stay night
>>24980882Consider the olfactory qualities.
Image and topic say it all, I have all three and debating which to read to kick off the new year. I wish I could do wild sheep chase or south of the border again but Ive read them both.Also I have the missing chapters downloaded and annotated WUBC but is it really necessary to read it this way or can I just read what’s in the shitty translation?General Murakami thread if you like.
>>24984027>>24983925(You)>>24983907Carver sucks though, not even baiting. His characters are presented in a comically unsubtle and over the top manner yet supposed to be taken as genuine and realistic. It’s like watching a sitcom when it tries to get serious only without the crutch of being a low brow comedy punching above it’s typical intellectual weight.His only short story I find compelling is the birthday cake one and that’s wholly because of the plot and inherent emotion of the situation. Cathedral, the story not the collection, is decent enough too. Richards Yates is a far better writer of Americana both in short story format and novel length.
>>24984110I've only read the story Cathedral by Carver and it was pretty great. I still think Murakami's Barn Burning started off as an homage to Cathedral. They have similar set-upsBut I still think Murakami is my favorite short story writer in the modern era by a longshot and ironically what makes them great is the same thing that makes his novel trash. His ideas work best in small contained stories. When they get drawn out to novel length it loses the charm. You can find almost any of his short stories hosted online on various edu websites if you Google so keep that in mind if you'd like to check out some of my favorites. Favorite Murakami short stories are - The Second Bakery Attack (this is just pure fun, go read it now and have your day brightened)Barn Burning On Seeing a 100% Perfect Girl (I think that's the title)It's been years since I've opened a collection of his, I know I'm forgetting some I enjoyed. I remember my favorite collection was "The Elephant Vanishes"
>>24984162>makes his novels trashWe have no middle ground to discuss anything. My only question is why enter this thread?
>>249833141Q84 begins, in story, in April so I’d hold off. But it does end in November/December iirc
I really liked Killing Commendatore.It's full of reused themes from earlier books, but somehow I didn't mind.
Suggest books you want to read with other anons. Earliest dubs decide.>11 Jan>22 Feb>33 Oct>44 Nov>55 May>66 Dec>77 Jan>88 Aug>99 Feb
>>24984057Bryher - Ruan
Jules and Jim
Ali and Nino
The Voyage of The Beagle by Charles Darwin
>>24984457The Nibelungenlied
the fourth blackfyre rebellion editionASOIAF wiki: https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Main_PageBlog: https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/Old blog: https://grrm.livejournal.com/So Spake Martin (interviews): https://westeros.org/citadel/ssm/Book search: https://asearchoficeandfire.com/SSM search: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=006888510641072775866:vm4n1jrzsdyGeneral search: http://searcherr.work/TWOW samples: https://archive.org/details/411440566-the-winds-of-winter-released-chaptersold: >>24949686
>>24983379The Others are a magical bio-weapon created for us against the First Men that turned into a Frankenstein monster for the Children of the Forest, who had to then ally with humans to contain them.
>>24983157He got assmad the Daenerys got DORNE'd, the things with legitimazation and the sword was just Bittersteel looking to get back at Bloodraven
>>24983379Kek, GRRM redditism are so predictable that even his own reddit audience owned him>>24983474The Others are a big mystery box of nothing because GRRM didn't plan anything out. The Others are just child sacrificing ice people because Winds is never coming out.
>>24983157The idea/possibility that Daemon was content with his lot but was set up against Daeron just so Bittersteel and Bloodraven could fight each other is tragically funny
More and more do I realize that George is like that Miyazaki guy. They NEVER care for what happens to the adaptations of their work. They will ALWAYS just say “go for it lol, do whatev” and then they’re like “wuh happen” once it turns to SHIT.
