/lit/ - Literature

A CHALLENGER APPEARS

>he who hears not me but the divine Slogos will say: Shit Is Red Hot Fire
>fwoosh

>what are you doing with your life tho girardfag
>i think it's time to stop now

>>9856782
write something awesome & spread the love. i want some of that. gimme gimme
>tfw actually i already have enough & my problem is that i have to be writing more myself & not shitposting on muh beloved /lit/ like a goofball
>would prefer also to just leave some wiggle room & salute based wokefulness rather than ask for more when one already has enough
>so, should salute
>*salutes*

anyways. gj opie. thx for the cheerful thought

>>9856847
sweeeeeeeeeeet

>>9856770
>become less and less interested in metaphysics because we can't know shit anyway
does not compute

>overwhelming sense of existential nihilism remains
computes

still tho. dat consciousness. wat do? wat do

the tao doesn't have all the answers ofc. i just think it has a helpful way of comporting yourself to the weirdness in which The Answers can maybe percolate out of the nihilism - as art, as science, as philosophy, as whatever.

what are you working on anon? do you do math stuff? science stuff? theory stuff? i mean to me nihilism is the baseline condition - nick land's wild ride and the rest - but it's more about the speculative opportunities this affords more than anything else. total bewilderment is where things begin to get interesting, imho. dem dark attractors & receptors. dat quantum physics & human consciousness. & the very real need for cross-connections b/t art & science & philosophy

just venturing that, fwiw. i think deleuze is right: the deal isn't eternity but chaos. the plane of immanence is very creative. just have to find something interesting to do with it that is interesting enough to keep you going

can this just be an infinite & ongoing thread? i feel like such an ass for shitting it up w/my own hysterical brand of taoist/accelerationist horseshit and literally all i want to do now is absorb neoplatonic incredibleness. i'm fucking tired of dwelling in the dark like a cave troll with a basketful of psychoanalysis. this shit is just in every way so vastly superior.

tao & the rest for survival of CTRL + nick land's wild ride, but only imho to fucking contemplate this goodness. i don't see what the fuck else there is to do.

>every thought process that I have is usurped by another, every belief by another. i will die in this painful uncertainty with nothing internally resolved. someone, help me.

that is the *only way to go* anon. that is how it is to unplug from meme reality. if you are crazy enough to have gotten to this point you are crazy enough to get past it also. at which point you will not be crazy
>says the confirmed schizoposter
but Interesting. and able to look back on all the ridiculous shit you used to think and say, wow, i can't believe i used to believe that. now look at all this crazy shit i believe now

and so it goes. that was my experience anyways. no advice no solutions all tunnel. good luck anon. aim for antifragility

yeti

city ruins

can into being a tribe of wandering abominable snowmen w/a mysterious & latent bent for the writings of freud & baudrillard & georges bataille

our bone carvings > the bone carvings of the other

perhaps we seek the Great Boneyard
>or perhaps we have been flung out of it

also we are hungry and are unskilled in language

we like human women too
v much
true, they are not as furry as we prefer,
and to some may seem repulsive

we are Amorous

but we believe that the answers to many things can be understood through the secrets of Boning
>compose yourself yetifag

also we are Elusive,
which is interesting:
Tactical Espionage Action

the stealth yetis come for your bone carvings
you cannot hide them from us

why do we desire these things
nobody knows

perhaps someday we shall build a YETI program,
the Yearning for Existential Intelligence

it's hard to tell with these things
yeti are mysterious

>>9856227
personally i think it's Axial Age 2.0 or something near to it & mcluhan called that shot like Babe Ruth.

Mcluhan: One Touch of Nature
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x6725NW8vw

what a guy. what a fucking awesome live-wire prophet he was. explains a great deal, imho.

or deleuze: what *is* a book, anyways?

>a book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don't know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of a substantive. one side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity.

>what is the body without organs of a book? there are several, depending on the nature of the lines considered, their particular grade or density, and the possibility of their converging on a "plane of consistency" assuring their selection. here, as elsewhere, the units of measure are what is essential: quantify writing. there is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. therefore a book also has no object. as an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. we will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. we will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge.

things to think about. exchange of information, you know. exchanges of energy. one vast incredible univocity. not so much human beings having a virtual/spiritual experience, but virtual/spiritual beings having a human one. it *is* the age of feels > reals: but maybe we can act accordingly also. more love, more wisdom, less knowledge, less power. more beauty, more order, less chaos, less madness. would be nice to think so anyways.

or maybe i'm just crazy & not properly oedipalized. entirely possible. and i am not a philosopher, and you should not take my opinions seriously. i am a chicken mcnugget.

that's my hot take.

>>9856090
>any of you philosophers actually read this guy's question, or did you just need a place to sit down?
>*sweats*
>*pulls collar*
>*crickets*
>&c

>>9856223
how *about* dem virtues? how *about* dat art? maybe the deal with writer's block is that it requires us to ask ourselves, in some deep way, what it is that we really believe in?

you know who was underrated in this sense? pic rel. ayn rand. pretty popular book. now i don't share these ethics, but it's worth thinking about. maybe writing is always about philosophy in this way, and maybe as such thinking about writing means thinking about philosophy. because sure as shit imho if you try to finish with seduction, or irony, or whatever, you will feel unsatisfied. in hollywood this leads to the phenomenon known as *cheesiness.* sometimes people want cheese, sometimes they don't.

but that's the *thing* with the monomyth - and i skew heavy on the monomyth for this reason. if you're into cool literary modernist fiction, that's fine. personally i don't read that tho. i like bond films and westerns and batman. because the monomyth is a fucking galaxy-class ideological thought-smelter. *you have to end the story on a note that you believe in, or else you will never be able to complete it.* or, maybe you will, but you will be unsatisfied.

and yes, ofc, there are exceptions to this. always. but let's not get crazy. the point here is *thought,* which includes both reading, and writing, and conversation, and reflection, and
>also &

so that's basically my answer. now, how much love is there in rand? i mean there's some kind of romance going on. let's not talk about Sword of Discipline and Punish. avellone & planescape torment is also no joke. schopenhauer is a crusty old battleaxe but it's hard to argue with him, he's a fucking genius and he knows it. personally? i think the boy RG has a lot going on here: desires overcome & transmitted to the human sciences. as readers go, you can't ask for a better audience than him. but, i mean, *if you prefer* you could write for rand also. her brand of love is tough love indeed but she also means well. why? *because she has to live in the same world as you do.* and, given that that is the case, she wants it to be full of people she can get along with, maybe so that she can get along with herself, too...

so love is a thing, and honesty is a thing, and humility is a thing, and intelligence is a thing, and things are things, and maybe these converge on something we might call Truth: and while *we* are triangulating and echolocating amongst ourselves, like a fucking cirque du soleil act, *the person we are talking to is also doing the same thing.* try to keep your brain from leaking out of your skull while you contemplate all of this. shit is ridiculous.

but it cannot be any other way. you have to presume that the other knows, or might know, something you do; and you have to consider the *very* strong possibility also that *you might be utterly gloriously wrong about everything you think or know* - and so it's a good idea to listen to the other guy too. because we are all in this thing together in the end.

>>9855495
wall of girardfaggery inbound.

let's begin by saying that - of course - there are going to be 20m different answers to this question. and *humility* is rarely if ever a bad look. humility is an underrated virtue. there can be no charity, or trust, or honesty, without it. warrants mentioning. i can't give the answer. but you know this already.

the answer has to be love, doesn't it? it has to love. philosophy is literally that: the love of wisdom. how do you love anything? you have to be able to have some measure of love for yourself first. the case of friedrich nietzsche, to name one example, illustrates pretty well how complicated this idea is. nietzsche's whole thing was ressentiment, bad conscience, self-hatred. on the other side of that was his own lightning-bolt symphony, which is going to be interesting af for the next 12 thousand years.

but there's also love as respect for limitations and understanding of same. language, for instance - and time - are pretty fecking complicated. it's why Art is such an interesting thing to think about: art mysteriously resolves paradoxes of consciousness into something transmissible and, i would say, greater-than-one.

i believe there is a thing called Mind and that everyone is inseparably bound up in it. we can talk about 'piety of thought' here. places where philosophy & religion overlap. it's why i like the Tao; among many other things, it teaches respect for limitations, balance, and reciprocity. the kungfu of the soul. self-defense against the self. psychoanalysis also; wisdom as therapy, as *relief* from Truth is a thing worth thinking about.

but the basic answer is love. we are all caught up in this thing together, more like energy fields and black holes than discrete monads, i think. it's an electric world like that. i used to fantasize that things would be great if we were All On The Same Page, or telepathic. well. about that. b/c sometimes you don't want to be on someone else's page. horror & seduction are two faces of the same coin. people have to individualize, people have to nondualize, people have to move on. and on it goes.

it's easier i think to love people who already love themselves, or love something else, to some degree. that much you can build on. you can't go it alone, but you can't be everywhere at once 24/7 either. so *character* is good. and character comes with virtue, for which there is no substitute. cynicism just does not work. it's necessary, sometimes, for a time, to bust out of things, but in the end you have to go back.

now obviously i could talk for days on end about this. and i would sincerely love to. but i don't want to talk your question and run away with it: that would be uncharitable. and i don't want to give the impression of having neatly tied it up in a box: that would be selfish. the *right* thing to do would be to reciprocate in kind. so:

one possible answer: wisdom.

you read schopenhauer: he makes total sense.
you read plato: it could not be otherwise.
you read nietzsche: ofc he's right.
you read pic rel: how else could it be?
you read x: x.

if you know what you are trying to say, and you believe it, the reader will also. certain kinds of writing aren't like painting. it may very well be more like mind control, as weird as that sounds. but better to call it something else. minds are just plastic like that.

same as training to do anything else. you see somebody doing something really well, some of that rubs off on you. you can learn more about cooking from fifteen minutes with a world-class chef than from three weeks with some random dude.

ofc there are literary stylists, but this too is just the product of understanding yourself well enough to be able to say what it is that you are thinking or feeling. because it all comes from Nature or whatever you want to call the experience we live in.

i don't know. just my hot take. the more you know about a thing, the less you have to worry about What Did He Mean By This. just read everything there is to know about a given subject and then say how you feel about it. if you've read everything there to know about subject x, whatever you say will in the end be interesting to anyone else who wants to learn about subject x. it will bore anyone who is not into subject x, but who cares? you're not writing for them anyways.

just write about what you love, anon. that's all that matters. there's no point in writing about anything else except what you love and want to talk about.

>>9854815
i'm glad you think so. i'm pretty much all worked out now i think. ready to be a cool silent nobody again.
>mostly

figuring out & thoroughly digesting acceleration & deleuze was the big one for me. and b/c acceleration is *never fully digestible* - not on planet meme - well, i mean, you have to fucking *talk about that shit.* it's a mechanosphere, everything's connected
>maybe ludosphere also
>more on that later maybe

i can't even be mad about solipsism either, it's true...mostly. i just prefer thinking about loud. talking stuff out is good, just working out your weirdness and articulating. i'm sure most of the time i come across as manic or abrasive or whatever but really it's just being excited or interested in ideas and wanting to lay my cards fully on the table, no tricksies.

my thing is that cynicism sucks. that's all. i'm built to make cynicism hard because i set out to be as cynical as possible and in the end it just didn't work and the basket i had all my eggs in fell apart and now i sound like this, schizo-neurotic wasteland mendicant. everything that i have been posting on /lit/ for the past year or however long has all basically just been a part of trying to deal with what happens when none of your internal suppressors work any longer, and you basically have to talk about shit somehow or go insane. fwiw virtually everyone i meet IRL gets the same never-ending speech from me: capitalism, tech, paranoia, w/ev. and because i am wholly convinced that only analysis or mystical/nondual stuff works. everything else is hysteria or cynicism. people have butterflies in their stomachs and these i feel i understand

but i feel pretty sorted out now tbqh. CTRL > capitalism, but the Way > CTRL. pic rel computes entirely for me. but the reason why i was so into that neoplatonism thread is because that too, i think, is also worth thinking about. that is the shit that all got shelved by Nick Land's Wild Ride.

incredibly now it only seems that much more beautiful. it's why i can't really do neoplatonism myself; i'm built for liminalia and existential hijinx. but i am all in on doing Nice Things for neoplatonists. i like those guys.

so in terms of solipsism i'm like a defective sphinx. i can't ask riddles, i can only tell you about them and how they all fall apart in the end. it's why i like the chinese so much. deleuze also. ofc girard. i used to be able to ask sexy riddles and i fucking riddled myself clean through to the other side into whatever the fuck i now am. bizarre. but that's philosophy for you.

anyways. glad to know there's been some positive mimesis going on tho. all glory to the /lit/ mimetosphere as always. and thanks for the kind shout-out once again. makes my day.

c-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate

>>9853445
it's awesome

he wrote this too

frank is a god

On the Creation of Niggers
part the second

Some time later, the Westerns wrought
that Thing called Capital - quite a thought.
It functioned mainly as a Mouth and Hand
and it haunted the dreams of poor Nick Land
who envisioned, sharing with Lovecraft
a sort of chronophagia, fore and aft.
So in a *literary* sense HP is class.
But otherwise? Jesus. What an ass.

i am. been trying for a while. have produced a couple of drafts & manuscripts previously but they were all worse than garbage. too didactic & obvious. interesting ideas but the style was terrible.

i'm liking the current iteration tho. it's really the setting that i'm interested in: a big liminal world with a lot of monsters & intrigue & paranoia. sort of like nick land's middle-earth, if that makes any sense. or maybe alpha centauri crossed with final fantasy. the characters are mainly in it just to take a tour of the place i think. i'm about 60K in atm & it's flowing reasonably well. just backstory mostly. got the MC, antagonist, beginning/middle/end all worked out.

it's intended to be cheesy pulp fun and not heavy.

>>9852714
>the based OP returns
>the thread continues
>fuck yes

>>9852374
this is beautiful

>>9852368
no doubt. and i do not blame you either. esp given my own frequently blog-length schizo-rambles on this board.

so this i am not doing. just want to salute a cool anon posting a hegel site with some cool hegel stuff on it.
>salutes

>>9852329
what? i'm not criticizing. that blog really is interesting & i'm enjoying reading it.

sheesh. sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, you know?

>>9851576
what a cool blog. thanks anon

>>9850480
this is one of my absolute favorite novels. the sequel is just as good (part 3, eh...)

he's also the author of LA Confidental, which is a pretty good film also. but this is better. for despotism & dirty tricks it's hard to beat J Edgar Hoover or the assassination of JFK. the characters are all balls-deep in corruption, crime, the FBI, the CIA, all of it. ellroy is an incredible writer and his style is super-punchy. lots of violence, crime, mayhem. but all of it really well-researched too.

seriously if you had a fantasy version of this it would be pretty cool. this is all about power & control & other stuff. the mob is tied up with the CIA, who is tied up with the president...all this.

it's just a thought of course. you gotta write what you want to write. i do think that there is also a lot of cool stuff going on with a seafaring kingdom too, handing out rewards & bounties, colonizing the world, fighting with rival powers back home, everybody trying to pull in money, pirates, all of that...too good. pirate stories always are.

sometimes you can't really know how a story is going to sound until you try it out. imho you just need one really good villain who can say all the shit that makes you crazy about the world. but what i do know, i never published anything...

hope this helps anon. good luck

>>9850374
i mean it sounds cool to me. and i'm not as NRx these days as perhaps i once was.

still tho. to my mind the way to go is to start with inequality. despotism is always fun to see, naked power grabs &c. it is fun. and the more complex the political system is the cooler it will be, i think, to see.

if you're a natural born savant like howard ofc you don't have to worry about it too much. just Do You and it will all be awesome. hell, if you had that kind of talent *and* a fucking wicked political clusterfuck to write about too that would be awesome no doubt.

despotism & dictatorship is indeed awesome to read about. intrigue & politics & all that.

have you read any james ellroy? american tabloid? stuff like this? i mean if your fantasy state is essentially a humongous version of an entirely corrupt LAPD & full of shenanigans - tho staffed with barbarians, or knights, or necromancers, or whatever else you're thinking about...hey man. sounds pretty good. write that shit homeboy. get that paper

maybe check out ellroy. i don't know. feels like your world could have some Bad Cops doing Bad Shit for the Right Reasons and be fun & grim & so on. maybe like a pirate kingdom? exploring the world? gotta love privateers...controlling those spice routes, fucking up local princes...

>>9850383
>>9850391
all good

yes. hugely

fuck, just set it in some kind of tottering neoliberal world (the world of today) *or* as one of complex dynastic/monarchical politics (arguably also the world of today).

sooner or later somebody is going to write a great NRx-inspired fantasy world and it is going to be dope as fuck to read. can you put snobby aristocratic ultra-rich elves in it? they're still elves, they still think they're good - and they are - but off the top of my head here, if you wrote a story about Elf Politics or whatever and had Upstart Humans - or the reverse, i guess...for sure, i'd check that out.

NRx has all kinds of neat stuff to write about. what happens when Elves fall in love with money? backstabbing? intrigue? what happens when Elves and Humans don't get along and they're both supposed to be good guys?

don't have to make it as decadent and weird as elric or anything. but yeah, i mean, abuse of power stuff is always interesting. very human.

power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely...could be wicked fun. no need to copy game of thrones, how about a French Revolution-inspired fantasy? decadent nobles, trying to hold on to power...redpilled elves, redpilled humans, bluepilled elves, bluepilled humans...politics, love and money...

would read OP. or, if you prefer, take all of that and flush it. i don't know. but yeah. cool stuff.