/lit/ - Literature

"John, why aren't you getting any work done?" asked Anna.

"Well, it's a multifaceted answer, Anna. First off, it's the day after Christmas, but it's also a Monday. Who's fucking bright idea was that?"

"Well, I'm not in charge of the calend-"

"Then who the fuck is, Anna?"

"I heard his name was Greg."

"Anyway, I also have this debilitating urge to not do work. I don't do anything actually fun anymore, like read or watch movies, because I have this internal expectation to do work, but when I sit down to work, I just refresh the internet all day. The work is there in front of me but it feels like when two magnets repel each other. You can't see why, it just is. I could sit here all day and give you a million different reasons as to why I don't want to work, but to get to the real answer I'd have to work on myself, Anna. I'd have to do a little digging, Anna. I'd have to meditate and psychoanalyze the deep reason as to why I'm not doing the work and then forcibly rehabilitate myself to do the thing I hate, Anna."

"Why don't you just set a thirty minute timer? I've heard it works, something to do with tomatoes."

"Anna, if I could afford to hire anyone else who was competent at the three things you're good at, I would and I'd fire you over a nice Christmas Ham."

"So, I'm employed for another year! Wonderful. Get your shit done John, It's almost new years."

After Anna wandered off to be productive in her little type A world, John opened up 4chan and decided to write out a bit where Anna wasn't just a manifestation of his internal dialogue he was arguing with, but, in fact, a real person he could afford to hire.

John missed when the captcha was about picking boats. John missed even more when there was no captcha at all.

>>17482135
It really is awful, especially with social media, to see all these people fall into their little places. As you said, I've seen everyone get married and knocked up and take out debt to get a shitty suburban house. I've had good friends die and bad friends make it. I've seen back stabbers become sucsessful and the friend I thought were going to do grand things settle for overweight and lonely women with a heard of cats. I've seen the smartest people I know get sucked into world of warcraft and I've seen the dumbest people I know troopin' along. Good thread, friend.

>>17460670
No.

>>17434322
based. Just doin' it.

>>17409594
>it makes me feel like i can read spoilers first since the goal is to figure out what the author is up to
There are many different ways to enjoy literature and that's why there are so many different "methods of analysis" that get progressively more and more meta.

Some like the idea that the work should be looked at objectively and without context.

Some like the idea that a work cannot be looked at without the context of the author's intent and what the author experienced

Some like the idea that a work should be looked at purely through the context of one's subjective intent and that, because the work is affixed and permanent, the author is simply another person interpreting the object that is the work.

And if we are talking about the expectations of the reader and the author and that subsequent communicative relationship it's figments of the mind all the way down. The author writes for an imaginary audience, but it is a real audience that reads it, the real audience then creates an imaginary author in their mind and project what the imaginary author meant to that imaginary author's imaginary audience. Then, within that frame, the author must input thoughts and ideas of concepts into words, basically forcing the subjective idea of a brain into a platonic form of an idea, but the problem there is that every audience member has their own personally affixed idea of what object correlates to the platonic form. (eg. everyone knows what a dog is, but everyone has a different type of dog imagined in their head). So then the author must craft all these representations for the previously mentioned imaginary audience that is then interpreted by the real audience interpreting the expectations of an imaginary author for an imaginary audience.

It's a fun meta game of choosing what meaning you want from a given work. There's lots of ways to do it. To expect that you don't "learn anything" from reading fiction is to hold that the idea of communicating with other people isn't an experience you experience.