/lit/ - Literature

the courtier and the heretic (double biography about leibniz and spinoza)
truffaut/hitchcock
sexing the cherry

I haven't bought any books recently I've got too many

>>3148758
>sexing the cherry
that book is terrible

>>3148783
it was free *shrug* why do you say so

>>3148794

It's just a load of twisted psycho-sexual misandry that uses the excuse of being magical realism to be largely incoherent.

Soon I will unpleb

>The Idiot, by Fadador Daspadovsky
>The Rings of Saturn, by W.G Sebald
>Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, by Daffy Duck Wallace
>Bed, by Towelin'
>The Catcher in the Rye, by Thomas Pynchon
>The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, by Thomas Ligotti

I don't know why, but I just went out and bought all these earlier this week. The Lin and the Ligotti I had to get electrically, though.

>>3148808
it's a long way to unplebdom anon

>>3148803
>misandry

Back to tumblr, feminist.

>buying books
what the fuck people
you scare me

>>3148812
You should probably google for misandry.

>>3148819
Where do you get the free books bro?

>>3148803
I picked up some god-awful novel the other day, wherein the prologue had some guy tied up to a chair, blindfolded, being tortured, and then he started to scream because it hurt and then, because this female author had such keen insight into the masculine mind, he began to cry out of his shame of having been made to scream and feel weak, like a woman, and then he cried more because crying was something women do. Then, the next chapter began, and the dashing heroine journalist was feeling nervous under the gaze of all the dirty men on the train. If only it were satire...

>>3148825
>see /lit/ page 0

>>3148827
Sauce?
Could come in useful

I wouldn't say purchased exactly, acquired fits better.

>>3148832
I'll try and remember. Give me a second or two.

>>3148810
>Fadador Daspadovsky

>>3148840
Just not fucking coming to me. Sorry bout that.

>>3148827
That is so ridiculous, lol.

>>3148810
I notice you lift Pynchon's name intact.....

The Master and Margarita
Dead Souls
Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
Absalom, Absalom!

OP, are you my Mom?

>>3148755
Troll pic? Jesus. I recognize only one of those authors, Marian Keyes (whom my wife likes).

The last book I bought was Why Does the World Exist? by some fucker. But I have literally thousands of books I haven't read, so I mainly try to work through what I have.

>>3148755
Female readers are destroying literature.

>>3149151
Of course it's a troll pic

idiot fucker

>>3149376
you're such a dumb idiot (reading shitty books does not and never has been a thing that destroys literature) (in defense of shitty books)

>Catherine Cookson
>Danielle Steel

wth

>>3149397
>reading shitty books does not and never has been a thing that destroys literature

Yes it does, you fool. The women who buy these books send a distinct message to the publishers that there is a demand for them. As a result more of this shit gets written, more of these writers get publishing contacts, more space is pushed of shelves in bookstores, and these get marketed. Look at what women are doing to the erotica genre at the moment.

Google "Supply and demand, Basic economics for children"

I bought "As I lay frying" a guide to deep-fry cooking steeped in Faulknerian perspectivism.

>>3149397
>Of course it's a troll pic
The scary thing is that somebody actually owns that collection.

>>3149424
There will still be good literature, though, if you know how to find it.

The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life

not even joking. I've never read a book like that before so I decided to do so. metaphysics, meditation and weird geometry all over the place. Also lots of acid.

>>3149424
none of that kills good shit. this is not a zero-sum game. you could in the past make an argument that it was - but only to a limited extent, and with physical bookstores becoming less and less important, it's becoming less and less true. good shit will be published if its economically viable. pulpy entertainment novels being economically viable does not have a significant negative effect on the economic viability of good shit. and the only reason you even care about this is in an attempt to make yourself feel better than people who read pulpy things, which is literally the definition of a snob.

>>3149437
That's not true in the slightest. The women buying this shit engage in a feedback loop: They keep buying it - more gets written - higher marketing - they buy more of it. The market' stuff that's actually being printed, is swamped with this kind of crap. Anything decent is getting rejected from publishing houses, as it's riskier than trash guaranteed to sell. The new e-book market just makes it worse. The women buying this crap, (i'm including anything from twilight - erotica here, not just mom/lit/) are are ensuring that any good e-book again gets dwarfed. There is decreasing revenue, so a lot less money to promote anything of value and a higher level of market area is saturated with this.

They did the same to the music industry. As soon as 13yo girls became the dominant buyer and easy to advertise too, music became swamped with shit. This started a while ago, and is peaking at an all time high with one direction justin beiber and everything else.

>>3149463

The niche for literature will remain. Who cares?

>>3149463
>They did the same to the music industry. As soon as 13yo girls became the dominant buyer and easy to advertise too, music became swamped with shit. This started a while ago, and is peaking at an all time high with one direction justin beiber and everything else.

it's so beautiful watching you demonstrate that you have exactly 0 idea what the fuck you're talking about.

please return to /mu/ where this kind of ignorant shit might fly.

>buying books

Lel pleb

>>3149472
>borrowing books from a library
>2012

>>3149483
>not stealing books from your parents
>not stealing books in general
>not downloading e-books

>>3149485

>e-books
Surely you're not serious?

>>3149468
Are you denying that the increase in the Simon-Cowell-method-of-churning-out-pop-hits-like-a fucking-production-line isn't due to higher marketing and higher revenue in the hands of teenage girls? Seriously, read a book on modern economy.

Its a market law, fucktard. As soon as revenue or power is given to women or children, the level of quality output is diminished. I don't like it but it's true. There are billions of examples of women and kids fucking shit up in every area. And it's not limited to the arts:

Men went away to the war. The voting demographic was saturated by easily influenced women. They were hit with propaganda by the The Women's Christian Temperance Union, and foolishly voted for prohibition of alcohol resulting in the Volstead Act. The men returned home to discover what they had done and were horrified. Honestly, everywhere you look there are examples like this. Women and kids are highly susceptible to marketing, and will turn the output of any enterprise to shit.

>>3149500
liek if you was born in the wrong generation!

Sure there may be more shitty music, but there's also more good music than at any other time. Bad music doesn't influence the production of good music, at least not in a bad way.
We're living in the golden age of music son.

>>3149506
>We're living in the golden age of music son.
We are living in the age of diversity. Music is fractalled into more sub genres than there has ever been. This means that the financially dominant genre, chart music, gets the lions share of revenue. Artists like Minaj and Gaga now have a substantially larger market presence over the smaller, fragmented areas. This means a niche areas like deep house, post-folk, or sub genres of dubstep have no chance of breaking the monopoly. They are restricted to minimal sales, now having to compete with both the market leader and the other competition. They cant establish adequate fanbases, afford to create music full time, and more artists are going unheard of as they are forever in the shadow of the few artists in the particular genre they are trying to break into.

>>3149506

I think you're confusing the golden age of music with the indie age of music. Just because we have a wider variety of music from a wider variety of places, doesn't mean that any of it is good or considered to be part of a 'golden age.'

>>3149500
it's more that you think that marketing pop music to teenage girls is a modern phenomenon that is "peaking" with One Direction and Justin Bieber, and that simon cowell invented the pop assembly line, when in fact pop music has always existed for the sole purpose of marketing itself to teenage girls, since the birth of pop music.

if you want to talk about the degeneracy of modern consumer culture, you might have a case, but blaming it on women and teenagers is just fucking stupid; and furthermore you very obviously have no idea of the history of anything you're talking about, which makes it very hard to care about or take you seriously.

>>3149463
>>3149500
>>3149506
>>3149532
>>3149538

Go home faggots
>>>/mu/

Why the fuck can't you fucks talk about books you bought recently? Jesus fuck, just fuck the fuck fuck.

>>3149545
>and furthermore you very obviously have no idea of the history of anything you're talking about

What do you think I got wrong? If you read my post before that one I explained how chart music has been on a gradual decline. I didn't blame Simon Cowell for the decline, I just hold him as one of the worst figureheads active at the moment.

>>3149567

fuck off

>>3149548
>>3149594

Someone doesn't know how to admit they're wrong.

Barefoot in the Head - Brian Aldis
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Miserable Miracle - Henri Michaux
The Epic of Gilgamesh
True Hallucinations - Terence Mckenna
The Tale of Genji
The Stranger - Albert Camus
Don Quixote - Miguel Cervantes
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

>>3149603
Someone doesn't know how to spot samefags.
I don't even listen to music you cunt, I just want you and your /mu/ buddies to stop shitting up /lit/ threads.

>>3149567

The only difference between Simon Cowell and Brian Epstein is that Cowell has had the "genius" to televise the process of creating and marketing a pop band, and to make money at both ends.

IImpressarios have always created and moulded bands. The truly hateful thing about the 21st century version is that people are prepared to watch in their droves as these people show them how they're going to be conned.

That and the way the proles enjoy laughing at the uggos and mentals like it's some kind of cathode-ray* Colney Hatch.

*I'm aware that TVs probably no longer use cathode rays. Although maybe they do - I've no idea what a cathode is.

>>3149643

go away

>>3149638
>I don't even listen to music
Son, I really pity you.

>>3149650

>Son, I really pity you.
>Son,
>son
>son

Haha, oh wow, I wonder what it is like to speak with you face to face

>>3149650
Then go back to >>>/mu/ and tell them all about how much you pity me

>>3149625
Nice books, except I'll never understand the attraction to McKenna.
> The Epic of Gilgamesh
Which translation? I really liked John Gardner's in relatively informal English.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
The Ticket that Exploded by William S. Burroughs
Timbuktu by Paul Auster
The Information by Martin Amis
Another Country by James Baldwin
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Assistant by Robert Walsher
Duluth by Gore Vidal
Murphy by Samuel Beckett
The Things they Carried by Tim O'brien
Zuckerman Bound (I think there is four books in here) by Philip Roth
Villa Incognito by Tom Robbinson
In America by Susan Sontag
Native Son by RIchard Wright
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The Arden Edition of Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Autobiography of Alice B. Thomas by Gertrude Stein.

A lot of these were about a dollar or even sometimes 50cents at my library's bookstore

hyperion
snow crash
the other wind
perspective made easy 5th ed.
animals in motion
digital art masters vol.7

I haven't purchased any books recently because I haven't been reading at all. I've really fallen behind on a lot of things, mostly because of all the new games that have come out. I went through the same shit last year.

>>3149643
But can't you see the gradual degradation of the process? Managers, from Epstein to McLaren, knew how to market their product, but still relied on the artist for commodity. The 'Cowellian' approach is to sit in a board room, asses current trends, let the marketing executives and songwriters collaborate, then hire a teenage dancer to be the face of the song to maximise market saturation.

This has been a progression from the marketing of people like Elvis and the Beatles to the modern day Disney Brats. The real explosion in manufactured bands was with Take That, which sparked everything from the Spice Girls to N-Sync.

>The truly hateful thing about the 21st century version is that people are prepared to watch in their droves as these people show them how they're going to be conned.
I know that feel. The X-factor finale is one of the highest viewed shows on television.

>>3149690
they all went too quickly.
again, must needs another book run. quickly, before hated withdrawal begins to set in.

>>3149673
don't remember

with McKenna its definitely one of those things where certain subtypes of people with very peculiar interests will be into it and no one else

Collected Poems - John Berryman
Collected Poems - John Ashbery
Valis - Philip K Dick
Selected Poems - Randall Jarrell
Holzfaellen - Thomas Bernhard
Duineser Elegien/Die Sonette an Orpheus - Rainer Maria Rilke
Das Urteil - Franz Kafka

>>3149738
<- these kinds of people?

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen
A Dance with Dragons - GRRM
Lennon, The Definitive Life - Tim Riley

>>3149745

I salute you, fine person.

>>3149758
well its true. the same thing goes for cannabis. its illegal because it promotes values outside of a conservative society. I don't get people who don't understand mckennas words. I guess you can say the same thing for
robert anton wilson, timothy leary, ram dass, nick herbert, michael talbot, john c lilly.
the list goes on there were a lot of intellectuals going through the 60s/70s.

>>3149791
>its illegal because it promotes values outside of a conservative society.
What do you mean? Are you saying it's based on a faulty notion that drugs are 'wrong,' or talking economically? If you mean economics, it's in societies best interests to legalize all drugs. 'Ethically' it's the right thing to do too; not just for personal freedom, but for innocent victims. Either way I don't fully support McKennas view that it's to prevent individuals thinking. I think it's more to do with antiquated, theological based, social morals

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLsCC0LZxkY
Even Based Friedman (Captain Capitalist) thinks all drugs need to be legalized.

>>3149808

drug control is though tcontrol

>>3149791
>>3149808
>LEGALIZE LE MARIUJANA HIJACK!!!!!! OCCUPY 4CHAN

>>3149808
>societies best interests
Not to be that guy, but what you're using as a premise here is something it isn't widely agreed upon as to what it is.

>>3149808
friedman is right absolutely. my point was on the ethics side however.

>>3149817
this isn't the place to act like that

>>3149842
>>/420chan/
they call for you

>>3149818
>Not to be that guy, but what you're using as a premise here is something it isn't widely agreed upon as to what it is.

The premise is reduced death, reduced crime, decreased government expenditure, and increased revenue.

>>3149745
I fucks with you

>>3149498
I imagine you live in the center of a very large and highly developed city, where you can get every thus far written book in hard copy while paying e-book-standard prices, yes?

>>3149463
>any good e-book gets dwarfed
That's why we've got sharethreads. That's why the Russians had samizdat. The richest authors have always been crowd pleasers.

>>3151255
don't be a pussy bitch, buy used, buy paperback, or go to the fucking library

>>3151284
I said hard copy - as in, physically constant: ink and pages and shit - not hardcover.

>>3151284
>2012
>not buying only hardcovers
plebs

>>3151327

>hardcovers
>using the word "pleb"
>thinking this bait will actually work

At least you tried, kid.
At least you tried.

>>3148808

Try Calvino's other work, like Invisible Cities. Winter's Night is more clever than actually substantial, and it lacks the magical prose Calvino is normally capable of.

I'm not exactly sure why I bought that 1,500 page densely-packed, small-font Penguin History of everything; it's too broad to be all that informative and it's dry as fuck

>>3151498
I hope you enjoy 2666

>>3151498
Philosophies of Art and Beauty is a nice sampler. Good for writing papers.