/lit/ - Literature

>>22569299
the twink names are like the names Ben Jonson would use in a masque, and for that reason are they good

the wizard names sound like anti-heartburn medication, and for that reason are in dire need of scrapping from whatever draft document this screenshot is of

>>22570682
I like when books' front matter used to include commendatory poems (usually several of them) by the poet's friends.

It's weird that the older I've got and the more I've read, the more two opposite ideas seem to be true: the idea that you get out of culture only as much as your imagination, or wit, or whatever brings to bear on it; and the idea that you are nothing but your transformative encounters with culture that transcends the few meagre scraps you call your mind.

>>22566692
If you like it, then for you it's not purple prose. Words emerge because they serve a useful function, not because they correspond to some strictly defined objective thing in the world. The useful function of the term 'purple prose' is that it's a quick and easy way to refer to writing that you think is flabby, overwrought, pretentious and unfocused.

Anyway, sorry I don't have a good example for you; the thing is, my library is all hits.

>>22566347
Purple prose is, by definition, not beautiful.

>>22565503
I guess the first big red flag would be the fact they're all numbered Ch. 3.

You guys love to mock Lacan, maybe justly, but his concept of the Big Other is the only way to explain why people write these affected, self-conscious, attention-seeking marginalia even though no one else will ever read them. They're writing for the Big Other.

>>22564906
That's honestly an attractive guy. A rough, regal, spirited face.

>>22562431
Books are my 'special workfield', in my personal economy.

>>22561451
I didn't realise this was Pynchon until I reached the Pointsman in the second paragraph. I was thinking, I never knew how good a writer Jordan Peterson was.

>>22562317
I see the contemporary culture wars as fundamentally similar to the European wars of religion, for this reason. The religious debates, looking back at them now (unless you are one of the pious /lit/ brothers who still care), seem ridiculous, and fought over made-up stakes. But I think they were really a civilization coming, painfully, to learn about this epochal new technology - printing - and how it affected the interchange between ideas and society. Similarly fought over what seem like made-up stakes, and similarly ridiculous, the contemporary culture wars are, I think, civilization learning how to use the internet, quite literally learning to graft this new prosthetic onto the species, learning with great difficulty and many dead-ends. But if the wars of the religion ultimately led to the Enlightenment, and to what seem like unrecoverable glory days for literature, then I hope to live to see whatever follows this.

>>22562317
I see the contemporary culture wars as fundamentally similar to the European wars of religion, for this reason. The religious debates, looking back at them now (unless you are one of the pious /lit/ brothers who still care), seem ridiculous, and fought over made-up stakes. But I think they were really a civilization coming, painfully, to learn about this epochal new technology - printing - and how it affected the interchange between ideas and society. Similarly fought over what seem like made-up stakes, and similarly ridiculous, the contemporary culture ways are, I think, civilization learning how to use the internet, quite literally learning to graft this new prosthetic onto the species, learning with great difficulty and many dead-ends. But if the wars of the religion ultimately led to the Enlightenment, and to what seem to have been unrecoverable glory days for literature, then I hope to live to see whatever follows this.

>>22562761
Most fpbp that I've ever seen.

>>22562669
what on earth. what does that mean.

>>22562619
i'm communist for life, but if i weren't, and wanted to make some money, i'd write a pulpy alternate history series about a19th-century french ex-soldier who makes it his mission to take out all the key figures of 19th-century socialist thought. obviously he'd have some bloody backstory at the root of his vengeance, like a band of communist factory-hands looting his house one night and murdering his wife in the process, all because he, a working man himself, refused to pay their coerced union dues; or being the last survivor of a doomed voyage to the East Indies, and making shore in some barbaric, big-templed place, and making a life for himself in the jungle in a hand-built house with his native wife, only for the aristocratic son of the decadent court, schooled in Paris in the demagoguery of Rousseau and his legions, to make our honest hero the target of his pet project: a draconian 'land reform' programme, which sets the local peasantry, intoxicated with ideological bloodlust, burning down his house and raping and killing his wife. and thus still bloody, as it were, from the wife-murder/murder-rape scene, and after a cold year of training with a mercenary corps in the Alps, honest men all, men who prayed and studied and took care of their strength, he descends from the slopes into the industrial pits and through the back alleys where sordid sons of the bourgeoisie come to get drunk and plot the overthrow of all order. he buys weapons, they're illegal here, the Prussian police want to know about them; but the market finds a way, men make deals in wine cellars, as serious men always have, and he has his weapons and needs little else. for the revolutionists of 1830, liberty personified was a bare-breasted woman. for those serious men in wine cellars who knew too well how watchful one must be against tyranny, liberty's emblem became the cloaked soldier in the mist, pistols in his hands, Alpine gleams still icy in his stare. i think that with an ad campaign target at the right political and demographic subgroups this could have commercial potential.

I want to get one of those depraved padded mousepads but with Engel's lewd doodle instead of an anime girl.

It's not even a good line you dweebs:
>Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

>>22562157
Yeah, I suppose one big flaw in my position is that it depends on valuing human consciousness.

It's pathetic watching people like OP seethe just because they couldn't deduce the solution before it was revealed to them.

>>22561214
Tell us more, mummified Trojan nobleman.

Ah yes, the book about how good and important it is to judge and analyse everyone's slightest action in order to reveal how guilty they are.

>>22561092
DH Lawrence writes a lot about this feeling (and inspires it in me), including the weird sexual dimension. E.g. (this isn't a great example, because it's about knowing another, not yourself, but nevertheless):

>As they sat side by side in the motor-car, silent, swaying to the broken road, she could feel the curious tingling heat of his blood, and the heavy power of the will that lay unemerged in his blood. She could see again the skies go dark, and the phallic mystery rearing itself like a whirling dark cloud, to the zenith, till it pierced the sombre, twilit zenith; the old, supreme phallic mystery. And herself in the everlasting twilight, a sky above where the sun ran smokily, an earth below where the trees and creatures rose up in blackness, and man strode along naked, dark, half-visible, and suddenly whirled in supreme power, towering like a dark whirlwind column, whirling to pierce the very zenith.

>The mystery of the primeval world! She could feel it now in all its shadowy, furious magnificence. She knew now what was the black, glinting look in Cipriano's eyes. She could understand marrying him, now. In the shadowy world where men were visionless, and winds of fury rose up from the earth, Cipriano was still a power. Once you entered his mystery the scale of all things changed, and he became a living male power, undefined, and unconfined.

>>22560852
The OP's poem was very bad but your post is immeasurably worse. The two points of substance you make aren't even correct: the poem is way closer to the Beats (or Rimbaud, as someone said) than to anything rap-inspired, and there's not even a strong rhythm or rhyme scheme for 'aesthetic' to disrupt.

>>22560730
>Because Poe is foundational for Baudelaire?
Maybe he is, whatever 'foundational' means, but what specifically do you think you'll get out of reading Poe first? Will you then also read all the sources that inspired Poe? Can you think of any other occasions when it was necessary to read an author's influences before you read the author themselves?

To be honest, I think this 'what do I need to read first' thing is a pure fiction invented by posters on /lit/ because they prefer drawing up charts and compiling reading lists to actually reading. I bet if you surveyed academics who focus on Baudelaire, and asked them how they first got into him, the vast majority would say they just opened up a book of his poems and started reading.

Anyway, check out this site, which provides the Fleurs du Mal along with several different English translations for each poem: https://fleursdumal.org/1868-table-of-contents