/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.7058242]

Anybody else annoyed at the type of authors who advocate humility and so on despite having made every effort to become famous and avoid the life expected of the average person?

I listened to DFW's This is Water speech and Zadie Smith's commencement speech and they both advocate giving people the benefit of the doubt and being humble and appreciating the mundane aspects of our lives. What annoys me with these and other authors who advocate this kind of perspective on life is that very often they have never been forced to have a 9-6 job and have never been tormented by the sort of depressing lifestyle that entails. Anybody know where I'm coming from? Nothing annoys me more than (for want of a better word) priveleged authors telling me to appreciate my life more while they get to sleep until noon and work whenever they like a lot of the time.

[Anonymous No.7058282]

Middlebrow hipsters TBH

[Anonymous No.7058288]

>>7058242
sounds like youre a bitter wageslave

live with your parents if its oh so difficult for you to get through the Struggle of having to have a job

[Anonymous No.7058292]

>>7058288
I am a bitter wageslave, but that's pretty much beside the point here.

[Anonymous No.7058754]

this is why I like Burroughs. if he gave a commencement speech, it'd be called This Is Shit. most people are more or less p-zombies, the world is a hostile alien conspiracy, and he stresses bravery more than humility.

>in b4 muh degenerate

if somehow you have not, read Naked Lunch, but especially read the Red Night trilogy for what I'm referring to. Western Lands is god-tier as a life guidebook.

[Anonymous No.7058820]

>>7058242
If being a successful author is so easy then why don't you become one then?

[Anonymous No.7058832]

>>7058242
>people who were never broken by the daily grind of a wage slave can become inspired authors and artists

Yes, we know that. Whats your point?

[Anonymous No.7058882]

>>7058832
Read the post again, edgelord.

[Anonymous No.7058917]

A similar kind of hypocrisy that many rich people show -

>I worked hard to arrive where I'm at now!
(but my parents' money paid for university and their connections started my company)

>You should do what you love!
(which I can afford to thanks to my trust fund)

>You should experience the world!
(I pay for my flights with my family's credit card)

>Everybody can be a great writer!
(But my parents are both professors of English and they encourage me trying to become a writer, paying for my expenses)

I know this is how the world works & that hard work takes you a long way, but it pisses me off when people censor the luck in their own past.

[Anonymous No.7058936]

There are a lot of naturalistic fallacies going around.

>don't have a schedule, you'll kill your soul / inspiration
>do what you love
>don't bother working hard, it's for losers, it'll kill you

Yeah, I'm sure that's all great if I have a top 5 % IQ and some irrational love of programming / maths / something that happens to make money. Maybe in the next life but sure as hell not now

Wisdom in general is shit

>books are better than movies
>movies better than vidya
>vidya is a waste of time

Not that I think those are dumb / always wrong (though I would consider myself playing vidya a waste of time right now because it's all shit). It's just "wisdom" talking. Old is always better than new. Productive capitalist shit is great but not having lots of free time. Art is good because it improves ("betters") us in some productive capitalist way.

What's lollable is that a lot of this, even from the highbrow people, is either naked self interest advice or [insert r9k tier red pill arguments here that i don't want to go in to because it would shock your little delicate minds]

[Anonymous No.7058937]

William S. Burroughs was also a lot more educated than Smith and DFW AND worked a wage slave job before he killed his wife and all that mess. Also a much better writer.

[Anonymous No.7059096]

Both those speeches you are referring to point that out about the speaker. DFW was disillusioned with his fame and academia, Zadie Smith disparages herself for trying to be an individualist, and special as a young woman.

[Anonymous No.7059112]

>>7058242
I get what you mean. How many great authors can claim to truly understand what you mean, the potentially soul-crushing life of the normal person?

[Anonymous No.7059115]

>>7058917
Same here.

It bummed me out a little to find out Tao had it so easy, financially speaking.

[Anonymous No.7059140]

>>7059096
Yes but that's exactly what I'm talking about. Neither of them would have been as succesful as they were (IMO) had they not had the overwhelming ambition to be famous and well-like for their works. It's the same as any millionaire celebrity saying "oh this doesn't mean anything to me, I realize that now" but still living the same kind of lifestyle. Many of the most successful writers were kind of unpleasant people to be around, partly because their desire for success often came across as narcissistic, callous and so on. These things, while being "bad", were only symptoms of the drive they had, and I don't think they would have been published (and therefore reached the point of being asked to give speeches) if they hadn't been that way. One thing I've noticed is that writers who have been forced to wageslave generally hate wageslaving and are often pretty pessimistic about people, while those who have financial backing or whatever and have not had to work are pretty optimistic (often in a sacharine way) about people in general and life and all that, or at least recycle the same old axioms of loving thy neighbour and giving yourself away to others and sacrificing time for the community etc, while they, the burnt-out writers satiated with their feast of interviews, reviews, attention, audience pussy, and so on, try to play the "wise guy" persona and rely on cultural ideologies ("you're going to have to work long hours, so just enjoy it and have a little more empathy, okay?" etc) to pander to their wide-eyed fanbase.

[Anonymous No.7059236]

I feel you, OP, I'm a bitter wage slave too. This is way Bolaño is morally superior to everyone.

https://youtu.be/r2RvO7dcdcg

[Anonymous No.7059240]

>>7059236
What jobs did Bolano work?

I thought he bummed around in Mexico or whatever

[Anonymous No.7059263]

>>7059240
If you speak Spanish, watch the documentary I posted. If not, this small lines are taken from his Wikipedia entry:

> On his return to Mexico he lived as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible, "a professional provocateur feared at all the publishing houses even though he was a nobody, bursting into literary presentations and readings," his editor, Jorge Herralde, recalled. His erratic behavior had as much to do with his leftist ideology as with his chaotic lifestyle.

> Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, on the Costa Brava, working as a dishwasher, campground custodian, bellhop, and garbage collector. He worked by day and wrote at night. From 1981[16] to his death, he lived in the small Catalan beach town of Blanes.

[Anonymous No.7059271]

>>7059115
Didn't he have to steal for a living and shit?

[Anonymous No.7059285]

>>7059263
Nice. Still, sounds like he didn't work full-time very often. Not that working full-time is a good thing, but it makes me feel more shitty for working so long.

[Anonymous No.7059288]

I am not, the two aren't related.