Just finished this, my first Houellebecq novel. Brutal book. Houellebecq creates a bleak but accurate description of what the rotting corpse of the West looks like post-sexual revolution. The ending was a bit strange, I'm not sure what I think about it yet. The only major drawback is that at times it's way too pornographic; that could've been completely left out and it wouldn't have hampered the story.
I am starting to see a positive change on this board, just a few years ago everyone would queue to suck his cock irl because he wrote yet another book that is just >>24119829 or >>>24118841
Fucking americans get outta here with your puritanism. The fucking conceit that when sex can be left out without hampering the story, then it should be, get a fucking grip man. It is a normal and important part of life (though it may not be of yours LMAO).
>>24120083It is never normal in his books, half of his characters are coomers
>>24120096No they are just French. Most burgers don't realize this but the extreme levels of guilt and weirdness about sex are really an American phenomenon that sets them apart from the rest of western culture.
>>24119975This place is positively dead.
Anyone here read this? Haven't gotten round to it yet but I've been getting into some economic history of thought and I started reading "The Legacy of Piero Sraffa Volume 1". As a former Marxist economist I'm slightly intrigued by a revisitation to the Classicals, most notably Ricardo, because I understand the general thrust of the labour theory of value, however I am also partial to the Austrian criticisms - the criticism I think it most valid is the heterogeneity of labour argument from Bohm-Bewark. However, it seems the same problem can be applied to Neoclassical economists who take the homogeneity of capital to be given (and indeed this seems to be the main thrust of Sraffa's critique during the Cambridge Capital Controversies).Anyway, let's have an econ thread with some more high level ideas than the 50th Marxism post
I’ve tried to dive into economics multiple times but it always turns into dry dead ends. Will this book allow me to finally get into it?
>>24119538Fml image didn’t upload
>>24119178>the criticism I think it most valid is the heterogeneity of labour argument from Bohm-BewarkWell it's a theoretical unit of account. The "benefit" the classical economists saw was it's an actual general input contra something just for economic settlements ("currency") or existing as a feeling ("utility"). Really you don't even need that argument. Bohm-Bewark had some idea extra value appeared from somewhere but he claimed it emerges between what something's worth now and in the future and no one is exploited today because prices are always fair. Marx claimed extra value exists between what works worth and what it's paid today in aggregate already.>However, it seems the same problem can be applied to Neoclassical economists who take the homogeneity of capital to be givenIt's not just neoclassical economics. Basically all definitions of "capital" are gibberish and it's not just about substitutability.https://bnarchives.net/id/eprint/259/2/20090522_nb_casp_full_indexed.pdf
>>24119215Amazing that guy has almost a million followers. We really do live in the age of charlatans
>>24119538although this is a "history of thought" thread, if you really want to get into economics I wouldn't recommend a book covering the history of thought. it's unfortunate that a lot of the normie-angled econ books are on behavioural, rather than macro, since I find behavioural econ pretty boring and more to do with psychology than efficient allocation. it's a meme at this point but Why Nations Fail is a good exploration of institutional econ, plus the first chapter of An Alternative Handbook of Monetary Economics (the rest is quite technical). and finally for a good account of mainstream thought I'd rec Blanchard's "What do we know about Macroeconomics that Fisher and Wicksell did not?" it's a good paper that covers modern findings that contradict prior intuitions (or prior contradictions of intuitions).>>24119402yeah, just getting into the sraffa stuff it's hard to discern how much is others blowing smoke up his ass vs. how much it should actually be taken seriously. I'm sceptical but I do feel like the Cambridge Capital Controversies have gone largely ignored, and the post-Keynesian school has shifted away from Sraffa and Robinson in a way that makes it feel like most have just forgotten. plus based simply on skimming the wiki article I get the impression that the Americans did concede they were in the wrong (mostly Paul Samuelson).
Faustian Caesarism will take the form of AGI
>>24119126Trvke
If you like reading for prose then your thoughts on works of philosophy are questionable at best because you're more susceptible to being swayed by sophistry. You're the intellectual counterpart to the consoomer, devouring content simply because it has been given a certain form, with little regard as to the internal coherence of any body of work.
>>24118270I don't understand the psduds who read for prose, nor those that read for the plot. A work of literature should the embodiment of a philosophical insight in action.
>>24118270>If you like watching films for cinematography then your thoughts on documentaries are questionable at best because you're more susceptible to being swayed by sophistry. You're the intellectual counterpart to the consoomer, devouring content simply because it has been given a certain form, with little regard as to the internal coherence of any body of work.>If you like listening to music for compositional quality then your thoughts on works of mathematical theory are questionable at best because you're more susceptible to being swayed by sophistry. You're the intellectual counterpart to the consoomer, devouring content simply because it has been given a certain form, with little regard as to the internal coherence of any body of work.This is how you redditatheist-ass le rational free-thinker mfs sound
>>24120363>If you like listening to music for compositional quality then your thoughts on works of mathematical theory are questionable at best because you're more susceptible to being swayed by sophistry.lost
>>24119162Absolute Garbage Sophistry: The Post
>>24118270And if you post anime then I assume you frequent loli threads on /b/
Kino
>>24120223>jewish authorno thanks
>>24120231the title didn't tip you off? typical 3rd world intellectual
shito
>I have read at least half a dozen Nabokov novels at least half a dozen times. And at least half a dozen times I have tried, and promptly failed, to read Ada ("Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle"). My first attempt took place about three decades ago. I put it down after the first chapter, with a curious sensation, a kind of negative tingle. Every five years or so (this became the pattern), I picked it up again; and after a while I began to articulate the difficulty: "But this is dead," I said to myself. The curious sensation, the negative tingle, is of course miserably familiar to me now: it is the reader's response to what seems to happen to all writers as they overstep the biblical span. The radiance, the life-giving power, begins to fade. Last summer I went away with Ada and locked myself up with it. And I was right. At 600 pages, two or three times Nabokov's usual fighting-weight, the novel is what homicide detectives call "a burster". It is a waterlogged corpse at the stage of maximal bloat.>When Finnegans Wake appeared, in 1939, it was greeted with wary respect – or with "terror-stricken praise", in the words of Jorge Luis Borges. Ada garnered plenty of terror-stricken praise; and the similarities between the two magna opera are in fact profound. Nabokov nominated Ulysses as his novel of the century, but he described Finnegans Wake as, variously, "formless and dull", "a cold pudding of a book", "a tragic failure" and "a frightful bore". Both novels seek to make a virtue of unbounded self-indulgence; they turn away, so to speak, and fold in on themselves. Literary talent has several ways of dying. With Joyce and Nabokov, we see a decisive loss of love for the reader – a loss of comity, of courtesy. The pleasures of writing, Nabokov said, "correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading"; and the two activities are in some sense indivisible. In Ada, that bond loosens and frays.
>>24120095>"better not write this because it would be too self-indulgent"I assure you that this has never stood in the way of any author ever.
>>24119499I love Amis' writing but this is a funny opinion coming from him. Even though I wouldn't want to lose a single line of his prose, I think his novels fail to keep up the requisite momentum and end up feeling too long, like a drum solo you're impressed by but also wish would end.
>>24120034Wait really? I might read it as well then lol
Can only rec "The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov" if you think his novels bloat too much. It's probably the most inspirational prose fiction to me.
>>24120149I'm near the end of Money and yeah, it's felt like it's gone for too long, overstayed its welcome. I was breezing through the novel but these last 80 pages are a slog.
Faustian Caesarism Traditional Catholicism will prevail over i*lam, j*daism and h*nduism
Is chud agp faustian?
Hier steht der Wahnsinn im Person.
cringe
>>24117330>butThat's not really how this word works you know
>>24119861Schopenhauer had a negative view of basically everything.
>>24119285If he was so smart, he should've used that intelligence to grow as a social being to be more likeableHe should have taken his own adviseInstead he cried like a bitch without the self-awareness to realizes it's his own faultSome genius lol
>>24119982He came up with some of the best metaphysics known to man, what have you done other than shitpost on /lit/?
>>24119982>if you were so smart, you would listen to what other people want, despite finding it morally abhorrent, instead of doing what you wantI think the wiser move is to recognize your own autonomy and continue doing what you want to do instead of becoming the slave of inferior passions and people.
Post em
>>24119723I legitimately do not remember the last time I've seen spoiler tags that hide a genuine spoiler.I don't think I ever have.
>>24115204I posted that OP. Thanks for saving.
>>24117350Your epistemological mistake was in thinking a burger is infinite.
>>24120222I don't speak French well, but I read so much ancien and moyenne francais that I have no doubt I would use language like this post if I ever tried to speak.
When was the last time you read a book that was released not more than a decade ago?I'm genuinely asking this because all I ever see you people talk about are the same several books that's more than decades old.
>>2411754922/12/24: The Infinite and the Divine (Robert Rath)I rarely read contemporary authors. It was my first Warhammer novel.
Well, for example, I read Babel and City of Brass last year.>fantasy slopYes, yes, I know, now shut up.
>>24117549Last new book I read was Sea of Tranquility, which ruined everything I liked about The Glass Hotel. I recently got The City and its Uncertain Walls gifted to me I intend to read it within ten years, my hopes aren't that high though.
>>24117549If something good comes out recently, I'm going to be able to read it at any time in my life. It's not as though quality disappears outside the release window of a work. At least, that was certainly true of many of the books I've read from well over a decade ago.The more pertinent question would be, why shut yourself out of literal millennia of great works in favor of a laser focus on works from the infinitessimally small window of time that mass up our lifespan? It's hard to find good recent novels because most people with taste tend to stick to recommending established classics or older works, and the vast majority of people who read and recommend new books are the people who upvote stuff like this >>24119542. It's hard to find good literary works when the average reader's standards are so low; if there is a masterpiece in this image, you wouldn't know it because it's marked no differently from the slop.It's more worthwhile to get acquainted with the best that writers across all of human civilization have created, before trying to wade through a mire of garbage hoping to find something worth your time.
>>24117549This year I read both The Poppy War and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (just finished this one yesterday), so not that long ago
Imagine Futurama's Trisolians are the Three-Body Problem's Trisolarans
>>24120001wowzers is that a heckin chunger REFERENCE? bazinga!
>>24120121>t.
Who's the best character your favorite writer wrote, anon?
>Stephen DedalusEspecially if you read portrait of the artist and then Ulysses, it's like watching him grow up and be stupid and naïve, but also find yourself in him. Still haven't read a good amount of books, but he and Pemulis are up there.
>>24119779Toss-up between Contessa Gina Pietranera and Fabrice del Dongo in The Charterhouse of Parma, leaning slightly towards the latter. Although Stendhal is not my favorite writer, these are my favorite characters in any novel for sheer vitality.>nb4 jokes related to a certain patronym
>>24119779Is pic rel Onegin? If so, great character
>>24119779>Bussy
What's it all for, in the end. I read all these books, I try to write on my own, I dig into the past to understand the present better. But most people don't read. The modern world doesn't reward literacy. No one takes action. The rich get richer, the new books remain unread and disposable, the world keeps going as usual as the writer's words fall on deaf ears and blind eyes. I don't know if I'm just wasting my time or not. The chances of becoming a great, known author today are near nonexistent. And the wisdom you get from literature has no practical application in modern times either.
>>24117406>What is meaningful in life is precisely our experience of it, so an art that can enhance that is valuable beyond measure. I can't accept that someone who is as familiar of literature as you has never felt this.Because he isn't familiar with literature. OP is a dilettante and these feelings come from a fragile ego afraid of experience. "The world is shit anyway so why should I even bother". If everything smells like shit, then it is you who smells like shit.>>24116875>But most people don't read.I was surprised to learn of the phenomenon of "booktok" and "booktube". People read, people are interesting in the literary arts. Look at R.R. Martin and Sanderson (both crap I would never read but regardless).>No one takes action. You don't take action. This whole thread is you not taking action, because you are a coward.>The chances of becoming a great, known author today are near nonexistentThe chances of becoming a great known author are astronomically high compared to former times. First off, you have all the resources you could ask for thanks to the internet. Other books, images, videos, maps, articles. Everything and more than everything that you need to furnish your imagination. Second, you can publish your creation directly to the world, unlike in the past where you had to go through literary agents, editors, producers, etc.But what is more likely is that YOU are a mediocre soul with an inflated ego just because you browse /lit/.If this doesn't motivate you, nothing will. Good luck.
>>24116875Doesn't matter if most people don't read. Ideas change the world and they spread through the written word.
>>24119681Post-literacy is an advancement. Just like Books are inferior to digital media.
>>24116875>spends time reading instead of doing>complains how it's all meaningless
>>24118226Yes
Why does he get called an unreliable narrator? I read the books and he seemed pretty reliable to me.
>>24119640Thanks anon, you've cleared that up for me...a bit. I think I'll do a reread.
>>24119549You're not meant to get it. Severian doesn't know what happened so why should you? Only in the last book someone spoonfeeds him the answer, and guess what, it's not something other than the author could know. You can theorize who Apu-punchao is (the conciliator) if you know South-American mythology, but the real truth and why it happens, no.
>holden caulfield....... in spaaaace!dogshit. i'm not in the least bit interested in the unreliable narrator conceit, or who severian is as a person or his dalliances with whores. i am not interested in the problems of memory and identity, i am interested in the theology, spirituality. that the best wolfe's most charitable interpreters can come up with is some neo-monomyth probably says it all. wolfe excels at big idea worldbuilding but the rest is so much chaff. he doesn't know, no one knows, i don't know, you don't know, but we sort of know! lay off it. speak with precision and say something real. that wright could spin a whole secularist jrpg story off the books is not a testament to wolfe's strengths as a writer. american writers are too infatuated with ambiguity. i hate it when skilled fiction authors just refuse to play to their strengths. bakker managed to walk the tightrope until unholy consult.
>>24120040Just go read academic scientific reports, man.
>>24120061>i am not interested in the problems of memory and identity, i am interested in the theology, spirituality.No. I am not a Redditor. Here is a particularly beautiful passage from a paper on Wolfe's scientific theology:>Combining with the sun, “the center of the symbolic universe,” the White Fountain murmurs an endless spring at the feet of a “golden sun bird,” which roosts commandingly atop the crest of life energy supported in the wide night of outer space. The winged creature may seem to be the master of this force, and while it does hold rightly an importance, it is ultimately a herald for something greater than itself.
>>24119915Don't know of any, but based>Hail, to the R--....Perhaps (now that I'm slightly more awake) Gore Vidal's Washington, D.C.
