/lit/ - Literature

I found out a few days ago that that feeling you get in your stomach when you haven't eaten anything in awhile is called "hunger."

I don't know about what format kindles take but there's a program you can download for free called Calibre that will convert ebooks for you.

My recommendations are to pirate a bunch of shit. Paying for books sucks, especially when they don't even exist physically.

Jay Z

OP post your essay. I have no idea what would be wrong with it (ovbiously, as I haven't read it) but a few things that could be a problem:

- you seem to use the word "hipster" (already a hazardous word) in a very crass yet insipid way. It's hard to take the word seriously when used unquestioningly as a pejorative. Thus you've got some big problems if you want to suggest x is bad because it's "hipster."
- Tao Lin is a meme on 4chan. Writing about him outside of 4chan might have been a bad idea. Your professor probably had to look him up. As for his hipsterness, it would have certainly of been unknown to your professor. You probably could have picked a better example.

>>2162786
>>2162789
> a photo is not a painting
wow thanks for the tip, because I actually didn't know that and completely seriously thought they were both the same. In return I offer you a tip: sometimes on the website "4chan" people say things that they don't seriously mean and may have a few layers of irony (in it's extreme form this is called "trolling").

My favorite painting is a photograph by Michael Light. Unless the comics of Chris Ware could count as a painting.

Also, a lot of you guys have pretty obvious high school level try-hard taste in art. Sorry.

>>2161275
but his first few albums suck so Idunno why anyone would listen to them.

In high school my creative writing teacher submitted a poem I wrote to the yearbook without asking my permission. It was really awkward because the poem was about a girl and it would have been obvious to this individual that it was about them, and the girl in question read it and then said to me "um that was an, uh, interesting poem you had in the yearbook" and I was like wtf u talkin' bout nigga ain't no poem of mine in the yearbook, but then I looked and sure enough it was there. Then at an end of year party this asshole got up on a table and read my poem to everyone and it was embarrassing as fuck. Now I don't write shit about my own life because that's for fags anyways.

OP, even if there are no "fresh" ideas left (I don't know that there aren't or even that this is a coherent or important question), you would never have written anything original, in the sense that you mean it, anyways. Things are only meaningful when we compare them to past instances of those same things. Meaning does not exist in a vacuum. Thus the sort of newness you are searching for is literal nonsense.

>>2161227
wat. Lot's of people read new authors. They wouldn't be published if no one read them. That's capitalism, nigga. Maybe few people on /lit/ do (although I know there are some) but outside of this place lots of people are reading contemporary authors that are not "ironic" or "joke-fiction." I think /lit/ just has this thing where they are slightly skeptical of contemporary lit because they can't know if any specific piece of writing is in good taste like they can know that classic literature is in good taste.

shut up OP we all know Hemingway. My favorite by him is The Sound and The Fury.

>>2161110
I'm sorry but the reality of the matter is that the overwhelming majority quality writers don't write anything good until they're in their 30s. That's why lists of the best young authors are usually under 40 lists. Sure, there are a few exceptions of writers who produced good shit in their early years, but they're rare. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be trying to write when you're young, it just means that you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking you're writing the Great American Novel.

>>2161135
unless you're black and plan on reciting your poems over a beat it's generally not a good idea to have them rhyme in 2011.

like a blog or something? I don't know what's cool these days as far as blogs go, but personally I have a tumblr. It's pretty nifty because you can make it look pretty.

>>2160023
> Getting a lobotomy is right up there with suicide in terms of "solutions" to unhappiness.

why is that, exactly? Would you say that any "unnatural" change to one's brain as a solution to unhappiness would suffer from the same problem? For example, let's say Bob was born with a chemical imbalance in his brain, whereby he felt very anxious at time when he shouldn't be feeling anxious at all. This was making Bob unhappy. So he starts taking Valium or something similar, and he's no longer anxious when he shouldn't be, and thus he is happy. Assuming Bob couldn't reasonably have hoped to achieve such an effect without artificially manipulating the material make up of his brain, would he still be in the wrong?

>>2160012
no you just start taking more drugs when your old dose doesn't have the desired effect

>>2160017
I don't know if I'd call exercising "bettering yourself." That reeks a little too much of the sort of self help bullshit that only ever works as a placebo. I mean it might be a good idea to exercise if you want to feel good, but let's be honest, all you're really doing is feeling good, and all you've really done is found a natural drug of sorts with few negative side effects.
> poison
don't be silly

>>2160018
does it count as tripfagging if you don't have a tripcode? Because I mean anyone can take my name and use it and no one would know.

>>2159987
so does cocaine. and you don't even need a gym membership.

>>2159976
> Anyway, get on the general social survey and find what things correlate with happiness, then try to live your life more like people who are happy live theirs (if what makes them happy could potentially apply to you).

Homer Simpson did this once, in the episode that Moe took the crayon out of his brain and he became intelligent. But being intelligent made him sad because being sad correlates with being intelligent. So he had Moe put the crayon back in so he could be happy, because being happy correlates with having a crayon in you brain fucking up your intelligence.

I once had a philosophy professor throw crayons into the lecture hall and tell us that it was the secret to being happy, according to Aristotle (apparently). The problem, though, is that, according to Aristotle at least, shoving a crayon into your brain is not "noble." Fuck Aristotle though, if he's so smart how come he's dead?

>>2159973
Finnegan's.

oh and also Finnegan Wake.

Joyce and Woolf are modernists, not postmodernists. If you want similar stuff check out other modernists. I suggest Faulkner, but then again I'm not really an expert on this stuff as I find contemporary literature much more engaging.

OP a lot of this reads as if it's the back story that you're paraphrasing of some larger piece of writing. I think that's because you do a lot of telling and not enough showing.

If you read good flash fiction you'll notice that a lot of it is just a sort of glimpse at things--it leaves a lot of things ambiguous and unanswered--than a full flushed out story. Don't be afraid to leave loose ends. You don't need to (and probably shouldn't) aim to explain as much as you have.

Also, there are a few things you should cut out. These are things you shouldn't waste time telling the reader because either it's irrelevant or obvious. Such as:
> He glanced up again:
> (he had gone to church every Sunday with his family, until their deaths of course)
> The prisoner looked back at the clock.

because in history they usually just fly into Mordor on the eagles and that's no fun at all.

Read Guy Debord and Bataille and Baudrillard (hell, read anyone who puts an ounce of thought into their work) and realize that you should be whiny and apathetic and nihilist if you live in a western society as it is the only reaction that proves you have an IQ of over 100 and (to risk the cliche) are 'alive.' Sorry bro, but the simple facts of the matter are that though western society may look all fun and great and comfortable, humans we're simply no meant to live in conditions like these. We're more at home in the third world.