>Armando had been their most promising classmate. Exhibitions and showcases while still a student, articles in trade magazines, gallery owners eager to recruit the young prodigy into their stable.>That evening he had found him overweight, the kind of soft, yellow fat that signals poor health and indolence, puffing up the face while dragging the skin downward into cavernous bags beneath the eyes. He had spoken lightly, that blasé tone reserved not for trivial matters, but for those that have torn at us for so long and so deeply that we are no longer capable of suffering over them.>“I can’t do it anymore,” he had said with a shrug. Gin sloshed over the rim of the glass the solicitous cocktail artist had just refilled. “Every time I’m unsure about a line or a brushstroke – where to place it, what thickness or tone to use, how to structure a composition, anything – I know the solution is within reach. I know that if I asked Voithitikos, or any of them, they’d give me a dozen variations instantly, all as valid as anything I could come up with. Maybe more.”>He had looked through him. Dodo hadn’t moved, afraid of breaking something.>“Before, every work was a tangle of stimuli, a labyrinth full of puzzles, and untangling them one by one – that was the point. That was the whole pleasure. The sense of achievement, surprising myself with what I could pull out under pressure… Now it doesn’t work anymore.”>“But if you don’t use artificial help... ”>“I never have,” Armando had cut him off. “I never got that far. I never will. But just the fact… just knowing they exist is enough. It doesn’t work anymore.”>It had been the last coherent thought he was able to express that evening. Dodo had left him sprawled in the back seat of a taxi – and it had been fortunate that the AI driving it had been able to retrieve his address from a biometric scan, because he had no idea where he lived, and Armando was unconscious, drenched in sour alcoholic sweat. He had assumed he wouldn’t hear of him again until news of his suicide arrived.>Instead, a year later, the family had spoken of cardiac arrest due to a congenital condition. Not a complete lie, he had thought: the inability to adapt to a new world is a congenital condition.>[…]>“Contemporary art was garbage anyway,” he now said to a girl with Mongolian features that had boarded the bus a couple of stops earlier. Supple skin, nipples the color of a brick under the sun -- he knew they would be -- a pleasant alarm in her soft eyes. “Pareidolia and vain masturbations. An exhibitionistic outlet for their coprophilic urges. All we’ve lost are our hallucinations.”
>He pulled a small book from the row of spines with his index finger, more because it was within reach than out of real interest. "Canti" by Leopardi. The only poet who had ever struck a chord. >He flipped through the worn, underlined volume. The wretched ill-spined creature lamented faded youth and disappointed hopes. He had known. Man grows sick with expectation, one of those conditions (like the absence of fear) pathological in an adult but necessary in the young to develop properly. >Without expectation veiling our gaze, blurring the roughness of the road ahead, the stark harshness of the inescapable journey would exhaust us before we even took a step. Kindergarten children would hang themselves from window handles with their cartoon-character belts. That "confidente immaginar" he talked about, that trusting imagining, that unfounded certainty of joys and achievements awaiting us just ahead, is the only crutch that allows us to move forward along such a miserable path.>But sooner or later we reach and pass that turning point, that milestone where we had expected a certain resting place, a certain view to admire... and we do not find it. We go on, but the experience repeats again and again. >At last the ultimate deception reveals itself in all its annihilating force. It is that lethal psychological, existential fracture, usually dulled by common mentality (which always, always must flatten, prune, reduce everything to dimensions graspable even by the most myopic ant) under the label of a "midlife crisis" – as if it were a temporary discomfort, inherent only to that stage of life and then overcome, rather than a congenital and incurable affliction that the average individual tends to notice only then, after all the cues, out of cognitive sloth.>That is the moment when we finally admit to ourselves that we will not find, will not achieve, will not encounter the things and people we had always known, deep down, were waiting for us just a little further down the road, behind one or two bends.>"Perì l’inganno estremo / ch’eterno io mi credei." Perished the utmost deception, which I believed eternal in myself. The crisis erupts (and how could it not?) from the terrifying realization that those expectations we had nurtured as certainties were in fact entirely illusory. They have not happened and will not happen. In less elevated terms than those of the hunchback from Recanati: “Then you get to an age where what you might be gives way to what you have been. You weren’t Einstein. You weren’t anything. That’s a bad moment.”>Practice, as in any discipline, still comes to the rescue. Being aware of it from youth does not remove the blade from the entrails (no human tool or artifice can), but it dulls the pain, making it habitual, banal. The numbing power of boredom, one of the few truly invincible forces of existence, can be put to good use.pp. 134-5
>He spotted her first, standing outside the place, turned three-quarters away. That gave him five steps to take her in undisturbed. >Her dark hair fell to her shoulders in long, languid curls. Her legs were sheathed in jeans, her feet snug in a pair of black combat boots. A red leather jacket was enough to shield her from the fifteen-degree chill. One hand gripped the strap of her bag.>Dodo had always considered it a wise practice to experience firsthand, at very close range, anything that from afar appeared illustrious and desirable – some dish typically reserved for the wealthy, a prestigious destination, a famous painting seen in person, a renowned individual met face to face – so as to realize that the very best the world has to offer isn’t all that much.>It was excellent prophylaxis against those crippling mental pathologies known as regret and the tendency to fashion idols before whom to collapse to one’s knees. When you get close enough to mirages, they usually dissolve; the cracks in the varnish become visible, and the disappointment is more than offset by the peace that follows, by the extinguishing of the need that had been gnawing at you. >But sometimes, in mercifully rare cases, the mechanism jams and produces the opposite result. When one encountered such exceptions, the hygienic thing to do was to turn away and run.>Vittoria sensed him approaching.p. 45
>>25517001I don't think Kindergartners wear belts
>>25517024Blast.
>>25517024The cool ones do.
>Dodo chose a table from which he could watch her move – quick, yet delicate. He studied her over the menu (kept sparse in a deliberate yearning for elegance: two first courses, three mains, one dessert). >She must have been seventeen. She was that type of girl whose beauty and youth were so effortless, so overwhelming, as to be offensive. Girls with a naively vulgar expression, clumsy and excessive makeup, eyebrows too thin, coarse features betraying their humble origin, but bodies exuding, radiating sex with a primal spontaneity of which they were certainly not fully aware – or they would wield it with far greater cynicism. Merely seeing them standing still, with that soft, languid, slack posture that accentuated their curves, was enough to take one’s breath away. Some females need only to exist to send promises of pleasure, unsettling the men around them, making them snort through their nostrils without quite understanding why. Females like vivid, exotic plants that the most sophisticated greenhouse could not sustain, yet that occasionally blossomed, by a whim of the wind, in the corner of a garage courtyard, in the crack of a sidewalk. Girls endowed with too much beauty for their station, that purely physical, raw, uncontainable charm which, moreover, tends to bloom as violently as it does quickly and to wither before ever truly bearing fruit. Little girls who became shabby women, prematurely overweight, young hags burdened by husbands as vulgar as they were, and daughters afflicted with the same erotic exuberance. >As far as he was concerned, the Almighty might have stopped there when he was shaping the various species of women – assuming the same being responsible for the world could also claim the production of creatures so exquisite. How foolish he had been, when young, to attribute value to female intelligence, even to make it an indispensable requirement for a relationship. The madness of youth. A single taste had been enough to cure him. Intelligence in a woman is neurosis and mental illness. The estrogenic machine cannot handle excessive power, it is dismantled by it like the chassis of a compact car fitted, by a mad mechanic, with the jet engine of a fighter plane. The intelligent woman overanalyzes, overthinks, overfears, overassumes, overspeculates, underconcludes, becoming hyper-anxious and hypo-happy, ensuring that every tiny experiential bruise, every inevitable psychic scratch, festers and rots into a purulent crater at the center of her being – chasms impossible to fill that will continue to erupt, upon herself and those around her, anxiety, neurosis, and self-destruction until death. The intelligent woman is radioactive, poisonous, unnatural, in her desire to pour herself into the intellectual sphere rather than the emotional one prepared for her by Nature. Yes, God should have stopped after creating this model before him: empty, smooth, firm, fragrant with sex in her white and pale-blue uniform.p. 25
>AIfuck off
>>25517111Slander, I painted the cover by hand. It took me 600 hours and 8 brushes. You can observe the whole process here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
>>25517111indistinguishable.
lolthe birdie looks like the froggie
>>25516994>Gin sloshed over the rim of the glassidk but this sounded like amateur writing and i couldn't take anymore. some of the descriptions previous were also bad but this one noped me out.
>>25517715>he's never filled a gin glass near the brim/lit/erates have truly fallen
>He lingered over the noticeboards. One of his sharpest regrets was not to have lived in the Weimar Republic, another society still reeling from the shock of a change too abrupt for its psyche to digest. But unlike his own, Weimar had shown remarkable creativity in its debaucheries. He was forced to contrive ways to squeeze every drop of endorphins from a far more banal world.>Presentations for MLMs had proved a generous source. The women who led them tended to be desperate, having indebted themselves to their superiors by buying vast quantities of whatever mediocre product they were peddling – generally, a marvelous coincidence, something to do with body care. For the mirage of a new subscriber, they were willing to offer free applications of lotions, moisturizers, and assorted cosmetics to anyone who looked tempted to fall for their scam. Gentle pressures, timid frictions, little rubs – perhaps clumsy, but made more delicious by their clear anxiety to give pleasure mixed with the fear of being abandoned – the most attractive traits in a woman. Dodo enjoyed his free massage, usually finishing without even needing to retire to a restroom, because the unfamiliar female touch, even on non-erogenous areas, heightened by the unawareness and submissiveness of the eager courtesan, was enough to bring about an immediate release.>For a couple of years this routine had yielded excellent, succulent results, but more than once now he had run into familiar faces at newly founded business presentations, and on at least one occasion he was fairly sure, from the quality of the looks he received, that he had been recognized. He had quietly slipped out during a break.>Seamstresses served admirably as well, with the added intimacy of their soft dens of velvet and chiffon. But to exploit their tactile potential – their delicate fingers pressing, adjusting, smoothing the fabric so it followed the lines of the flesh – he had to submit to meticulous measurements for bespoke clothes, and the cost was becoming excessive. Not to mention the risk that Bianca might notice the suspicious proliferation of suits, a species of attire he avoided with determination.>Lately, his dopaminergic springs had dwindled to the young, obliging girls who handed out samples of ointments and hand creams in shopping centers. They were usually interns paid only with the promise of a lucrative future in the cosmetics industry, though occasionally one could find the daughter or girlfriend of a man addicted to gambling, drugs, or other pastimes for which the universal income did not suffice. Dodo reveled in their forced warmth, the touch of their smooth skin, the seduction which, like any woman wanting something from a man, they could not help but employ even in contexts far removed from sexuality. But a dab of cream or the rubbing of a cuticle sponge rarely sufficed to bring him to climax.
>>25517715>some of the descriptions previousThere's only one description before that line: "overweight, the kind of soft, yellow fat that signals poor health and indolence, puffing up the face while dragging the skin downward into cavernous bags beneath the eyes", and honestly, my family doctor should get off 4chan.
Too little smut, lube is drying up.
>He did nothing. For four days. Procrastination was his method of choice for dealing with any dilemma. Instead of untying or cutting the Gordian knot, he let it strangle him, fretted and agonized until even the sharpest distress simply became boring. Then he would find that whatever the problem had been, he no longer cared about it, the solution would become clear, and he would simply execute it without emotion.>That was how he had ended all his past relationships. He would notice flaws in the woman, irritating or troubling habits; ignore them; slowly accept that the differences were irreconcilable; bask in the growing discomfort, noting his own relief when plans fell through, the pleasure of reclaiming afternoons and evenings to spend alone, the anxiety that preceded every meeting; let himself stew in the malaise and the awareness of being entangled in the wrong relationship, knowing he should end it but hesitating out of a natural aversion to confrontation. And then, one day, he would wake up tired both of the girl and of worrying about her, and leave her with a brisk efficiency that must have seemed like capricious cruelty to his former flames, rather than the belated fruit of a torment that had usually lasted entire seasons. >Granted, his sample size was far from extensive – indeed quite meager – but the method had always worked for him. The only exception had been Vittoria herself, whose impulsiveness had preempted him while he was still in the early stages of the process, freezing him there, trapping him in that unripe emotional state like someone photographed in the act of stumbling.>During those four days of fermentation, he was not surprised to find his mind invaded by fantasies and waking dreams – inclinations natural to his temperament, which a chance encounter with someone from his past was more than enough to trigger. Sometimes it took even less: merely hearing her mentioned by someone, or even dreaming of her, without the oneiric reminiscence being prompted by any real stimulus.
>>25518965>Vittoria was a repeat offender, an unrepentant invader. Sometimes, every two or three years, he would wake thinking of her, most likely because of a dream he couldn’t recall but whose aftertaste lingered, and for a few days he couldn’t help searching for her in the crowd, expecting to see her walk through every doorway, to find her around every corner, weaving fantasies in which they met again by pure chance and he spoke to her with charm, or – better still – in which she surprised him while he was doing something brave or intelligent. He recognized the symptoms, and knew there was no point resisting those intrusive thoughts. There was no way to stop them; they would ambush him again as soon as his concentration faltered, and he would only notice when he was already in their grip. No enemy is more insidious than one whose existence we aren’t even aware of. He had learned that the best strategy was simply to let them flow. He watched them play out in his mental theater, noting with detached cynicism their exhibitionistic, narcissistic, and at the same time lazy nature: in none of them did he take the initiative to go looking for her; in all of them she sought him out, or they met by accident – and always at a moment flattering to him. That poet had been wrong: the child within us survives far too easily; we can never rid ourselves of it – that’s the real problem. You only need to train yourself to spot its puerile influence behind impulses dressed up as rationality. In other words, it’s enough to truly get to know yourself – a practice by no means advisable. Temet nosce might be the most poisonous fruit ever produced by the tree of philosophy: familiarity breeds contempt even when directed at ourselves.>Normally he wouldn’t have worried. He knew that if he waited a few days without feeding them recklessly – perhaps by looking up information about Vittoria online, or exhuming some old photograph – those chimeras would wither and die of starvation. But this time, the fact that she had actually contacted him of her own accord, and the curiosity about what might have driven her to such a step (it’s urgent), nourished them, making them more unruly and even more aggravating than usual, prodding them to bite and claw at his brain from within.After days in which he was almost unable to function, he had to surrender to an unpleasant truth: he was dealing with that variety of wound – rare but occasionally inevitable – that does not heal on its own, but requires a deliberate thaumaturgical act.
>>25517111>nooo you have to hire le ebin human aRtIsT, be misunderstood, wait for weeks, receive shit proposals, be misunderstood again, wait more weeks, accept the least shitty offer, probably still receive AI slop, and pay him for itLook... I'm just not gonna do it.Pffffthahahahahahaha.
>>25517095>Intelligence in a woman is neurosis and mental illnessPreach.>The intelligent woman overanalyzes, overthinks, overfears, overassumes, overspeculates, underconcludes, becoming hyper-anxious and hypo-happy, ensuring that every tiny experiential bruise, every inevitable psychic scratch, festers and rots into a purulent crater at the center of her being – chasms impossible to fill that will continue to erupt, upon herself and those around her, anxiety, neurosis, and self-destruction until death.Hot.
>>25519821>Intelligent women are cra--ACK!Incel coded garbage.
>>25520296Yeah, I mean, if it was true, our ancestors would've talked about it.
I find reading greentext this dense to be exhausting, but this is pretty good. I think OP might actually be a good writer!Too bad I'd have to buy it to read it. In this day and age, that's a real impediment!
>>25520962Silly anon, I'd never blueball you like that.https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n7yZYutBzl1s0kIpc8ILwJe11BDoZ3jW/view
anyone willing to use a.i. for artwork is obviously also willing to use a.i. for writing as well. shan't be reading.
>>25521015False equivalency.It's actually a book about the lethal danger of letting AI take over your artistic endeavor (and the rest of your life, even the chores), and every last word was written by a Homo sapiens. I'm sure you'd be able to spot AI writing: it's dull and bland and insipid, too safe to have any real impact (God forbid we offend someone). This is not AI writing.>then why the ai coverDidn't want to 1) find an artist willing or capable of doing it, 2) wait for god knows how long, 3) correct their first proposals, 4) more of the same, 5) probably end up with AI slop anyway because more and more of them use it too, but it would've been less fit for my tastes than the AI slop I could've done. 6) Oh, and pay for this wonderful job.Cover artist are a blight on the world, they're one of the categories that deserve to be wiped out. This was a fully intentional attack on them.Now, more milk in that coffee, "artist". You need to pay the interests on your student loan (and only the interests).
>>25521045I typed a post out insulting you but then I felt bad for you and deleted it. You can shill your book here but that time will be wasted. Have a nice day anon.
>>25521401No arguments.No money.No value.
>>25517787>Gentle pressures, timid frictions, little rubs – perhaps clumsy, but made more delicious by their clear anxiety to give pleasure mixed with the fear of being abandoned
>>25521401>that time will be wasted.You don't speak for all of us, faggot.> Have a nice day anon.Female pettiness. Nothing more repulsive than a feminine male.>>25517095Not mysogynistic enough.
>>25521401>>25521015>>25517111Shut the fuck up, you reddit.This crusade in defense of le poor cover artists is the gayest shit. Hypocritical too. Those same poor artists didn't hesitate to switch from physical stores to amazon as soon as they could. They didn't care about le poor store owners back then. They didn't keep paying travel agents when online booking appeared. They didn't rally against ATMs because le poor bank tellers needed their jobs. They didn't keep buying their groceries directly from farmers and butchers when supermarkets arrived. They didn't reject streaming services because video-store clerks needed a paycheck. They don't buy only handmade clothes because muh sweatshops.Try telling them they have to drive all the way to the farmers and buy directly from them because using supermarkets feeds le evil multinational companies. "But… but it's too expensive… it takes too long...""But the produce is actually better.""Yeah but it's a hassle, I don't have time, I don't have money, the dildo in my ass needs to be lubed up again..."When a new system is convenient for them, they don't care about the people it makes obsolete. But now that it's their turn, suddenly progress is bad, you have to keep paying them for the same quality you can get for free in a fraction of the time.>"That's not true, we provide better quality!"If that was true, we'd not be having this conversation. This is a self-regulating system: if you really provide unique value, you don't get replaced. The fact that even LLMs from 2023 (to not say anything of current ones) could replace most commercial artists, should tell you everything you need to know about the value they provide.>"Human art is better because it's human!"Muh mystical "human-soul element" that we can't even discern reliably in blind tests and that somehow doesn't prevent le ebin human artists from vomiting bullshit just as cliché as ChatGPT. (Actually look at their masterpieces and tell me how much originality you find.) Again, if their product actually was better, they wouldn't risk being replaced.The matter is very simple: in our system you need to JUSTIFY YOUR PAYCHECK, and they couldn't. Everything else is whining.>>25521045>a book about the lethal danger of letting AI take over your artistic endeavorShould've made it about the danger of letting worthless luddite fags hold us back with hypocritical sanctimonious stances.
/lit/ -- Art and Graphic Design
Besides the AI thing, pretty good stuff. But /lit/ will prefer to shit out another IJ or GRRM thread.
>>25522407It's called essentialism. It's the difference between your teddybear that you had as a child, and the exact same teddybear that another child had, or indeed an identical teddybear made 5 minutes ago to try to trick you it's the same as the original. And really, what's the difference between it and the original? Why does its history matter? All you care about is its utility.It's why practical effects are more impressive than CGI even when they look faker, or why even CGI is more impressive than AI generated effects. People think that the story matters. And if you don't think that the story matters, then you're basically saying you can't conceptualize time, that you only exist in the moment.Though personally I hate the people who embody this stereotype of the modern artists and wish only the worst upon them, I would still prefer to have a hand-drawn cover for my book over an AI generated one. If it were practical, and the AI one didn't cost the equivalent of a cent and the hand-drawn one didn't cost 200 bucks. If I were rich enough that 200 bucks were nothing to me though, I would still choose artist-drawn. Though at that point I'd probably choose an artist that cost even more than that. Which I guess is why the ones complaining are the ones complaining. It's not the best artists complaining, it's the worst ones, who aren't good enough to be worth paying a lot for, so everyone who might have chosen them as the more cheap option over their ideal one now choose AI instead.
>>25521045The text is obviously AI and the "anons" in this thread praising the writing are obviously (You). Pathetic really.
>>25523580You're obviously a mongoloid. AIs can't write remotely like that. There's no "It's not X, it's Y" sentence structure. Nothing reads like AI. You're just a redditor who wants to feel clever by AI-hunting.
>>25523580>obviously AIEven AI detectors, notorious for false positives, identify this as almost certainly human.Try it yourself: https://gptzero.me/
>>25523580If you really can't instinctively tell the difference between AI and human text at this point, you're just revealing yourself as a shit for brains.
>>25523580I'm running out of AI detectors, but they all agree.https://www.zerogpt.com/
>>25523580one morehttps://www.humanizeai.pro/detector
>>25523580Last one.https://copyleaks.com/ai-detectorThese detectors are getting better, they used to be all over the place. They're still gonna give you a very small percentage of AI likelihood just in case (like 23andme will give you 2% african DNA by default), but I expected less clear cut results. Good.
LLMSloppa from the very first post. Soulless. KYS, jeet
>>25523734You're not even trying anymore.
>saar, do the needful and try harder, saar, please saar I no use ai, saar
>>25523742Could be a new /lit/ banner. You seem to be representative of the current userbase.
This is honestly some of the worst writing I've ever read on /lit/. All you do is string together three to 5 descriptions of the same thing in every sentence in the faint hope that one of them is "genius". It's tiring and bad. >inb4 nuh uh I don't do thatLet me quote you, extensively.>She was that type of girl whose beauty and youth were so effortless, so overwhelming, as to be offensive1. effortless2. overwhelming3. offensive>Girls with a naively vulgar expression, clumsy and excessive makeup, eyebrows too thin, coarse features betraying their humble origin, but bodies exuding, radiating sex with a primal spontaneity of which they were certainly not fully aware1. naively2. vulgar3. clumsy4. excessive5. too thin6. coarse7. humble8. exuding9. radiating10. primal>Merely seeing them standing still, with that soft, languid, slack posture1. soft2. languid3. slackYour prose is extremely tiring, philistine, and long-winded. You just ramble and repeat yourself and came up with bizarre metaphors and similes thinking this is somehow improving your writing when really it's detracting from it. It's just really bad, like Waldun tier bad. Learn how to edit. Honest to God you're a really bad writer. You could probably improve but you don't understand what fucking works. It reads like you read a bunch of Pynchon novels (substitute any pomo novelist) but then didn't understand what actually makes Pynchon's writing readable. It's a really bad imitation.
>>25523758Don't know what to tell you. I like this style. I like reading it, and I like writing it. Admittedly, the character in those excerpt is designed to be a bit of a pompous ass, so it's turned up to 11, but I still like it a lot. Not going to simplify it, it would be a major step backwards, despite what the current zeitgeist seems to believe. I can and have written in a much more streamlined style (pic related as an example) but simpler is not always better, sometimes it just impoverishes.>tiringI've been told it flows well despite the density. Re-reading it months later, I still like it. That's usually a reliable test.>1. naively>2. vulgar>3. clumsy>4. excessive>5. too thin>6. coarse>7. humble>8. exuding>9. radiating>10. primalThose adjectives don't all refer to the same thing. You just copy-pasted all the adjectives of an entire paragraph. Not sure what you think this proves.>imitating PynchonOnly tried "V" and didn't like it, so no. If anything, Proust and Woolfe (but it's not conscious imitation, I just like them a lot). What do you think of them, out of curiosity?Thanks for going beyond the usual single-sentence jeetery, that's already a lot, but why do you sound so angry? It's difficult to put any stock in what someone foaming at the mouth says.
>>25523885>I'm imitating Proust and WoolfeMost delusional post I've read all day.
>>25523885>Those adjectives don't all refer to the same thing. You just copy-pasted all the adjectives of an entire paragraph. Not sure what you think this proves.It proves your writing is long-winded and tiring. Your sentences don't have a point. It's just you vomiting words on the page and hoping one of your comma spliced clauses is "genius".
>>25524183You're intentionally misrepresenting what I said here.>>25524186>>25523758Know what? Let's expand on this. Nobody is gonna read it (and if they did, they'd discard any explanation as the excuse of an arrogant wannabe writer) but this is still a board for discussing literature, and we have the chance to examine some concepts beyond the usual "is show-don't-tell good for you?"Repetition isn't always bad. There's redundancy that does nothing besides bogging down the prose, and redundancy that builds, escalates, shows a character's psychology, deepens it, creates a certain rhythm and atmosphere. Only the first kind should be cut down.Consider these 2 excerpts:>"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet...">"Why should I care?" he asked, not even looking away from the movie he was watching.A (not well-read) editor would probably tell you that the first paragraph needs editing far more than the second. That editor would be wrong. The repetitions in the first excerpt aren't mere repetitions, they're escalations, expansions on the matter. They build towards a climax, and they generate a specific textual flavor. The second "whenever", the successive symptoms, and especially "damp, drizzly" are not there because Melville didn't notice that he had already communicated "this guy is depressed". They establish a cumulative cadence in which Ishmael's melancholy progressively acquires physical, atmospheric, comic and pathological dimensions. The rhetoric finally culminates in the extraordinary conclusion that he needs to get on a boat before he starts knocking people's hats off.And "drizzly" isn't simply a synonym for "damp". The two create a texture: dampness + persistent fine rain + sound pattern. Removing one would convey the exact same concept, but it would impoverish the sentence.The second (made up) excerpt looks more agile, but only deceptively so. It's actually repeating the same concept twice, telling you that the character is uninterested first through dialogue (which would be fine on its own) and then through an unnecessary description.This is the sort of redundancy that needs to be cut. It's subtle, most readers wouldn't even consider it a mistake, but add enough of this fluff and your prose becomes a pointless slog. A page of dialogue becomes two and a half pages, most of which is needless exposition that forces you to slow down for absolutely no reward.(cont.)
>>25524417Not every complex paragraph is verbose. Eliminate some of the adjectives, and you get different pacing, atmosphere and character psychology. Eliminate most, and you get a completely different character doing a different thing (a controlled guy coolly analyzing something, instead of a neurotic guy being overwhelmed by it).My MC is a manic guy obsessing over what he sees, letting his thoughts ferment and trying to extract general life principles from them. It's what he does, and the insistent, redundant style is the best to portray his internal ramblings. The repetition is characterization. Remove some of those adjectives, and the impression he makes on the reader changes. Take your hated:>"soft, languid, slack"Delete "languid", and you get a perfectly serviceable description. Delete "soft" and you still have one. Delete both and retain "slack" and you still communicate posture. But the original doesn't merely mean to communicate posture. It gives you Dodo's perceptual experience of it: languorous, yielding, sensual, almost narcotic. The three terms make the gaze linger. They are all necessary. One simply wouldn't get the same effect. Literary prose isn't a telegram, it shouldn't optimize for speed of information delivery.Similarly:>"purely physical, raw, uncontainable charm"There is a progression here: physical --> raw --> uncontainable. The abstraction is gradually stripped away, and by the third term Dodo isn't calmly cataloguing attributes anymore, he's presenting the phenomenon as something excessive and uncontrollable. Again: you eliminate the repetition, you alter the flavor (and not in a good way). The compulsive, obsessive character becomes orderly, just taking inventory of what he sees. The description of the girl becomes just that, a description, instead of gradually becoming a generalization ("the kind of woman who...") and then even a prophecy ("prematurely overweight, young hags...").Do you see?Another classic example of repetition-as-propulsion is Cicero. He often talked like this:>"Nihil agis, nihil moliris, nihil cogitas...""You do nothing, you plot nothing, you think of nothing..." An editor whose sole criterion was avoiding repetition would simply replace it with "You accomplish nothing". That would be atrocious. The three-part structure is a tricolon: parallel clauses accumulating pressure until the final one lands. It was pretty much Cicero's trademark.But he's just one example, pretty much every great author was well aware of the rethorical power of well-crafted repetition. Dickens, Milton, Nabokov, Faulkner, and obviously Proust, they didn't operate on the principle "one adjective is enough, two is masturbation". Their work would've been much poorer, if they did. I wonder how much damage contemporary editing practices have already done.
>>25524186>Your sentences don't have a pointI'd change that to "I didn't understand the point".
>>25524426>>25524421>>25524417I didn't realize Napoleon Bonaparte was still alive.
Watching this delusional Italian faggot try to prove his writing is on the same level as Proust, Melville, Woolfe, Faulkner, or Nabokov is hilarious. Keep posting my guy. You're the new F. Gardner.
>>25524751I'm not sure that was my intention, but it was 4 beers ago, so maybe it was.How many groupies do I get if I dethrone Woolf at least? She's a girl, how tough can she be?>>25524686I accept your admission of having no arguments whatsoever.
stop invading my thread you fagetsstay in your containment thread.
