/lit/ - Literature

Who is this ___________?

The Peregrine has the most beautiful, vivid language I've recently encountered, words you have to leave in your mouth for a few seconds, savoring their taste

>This was my first peregrine. I have seen many since then, but none has excelled it for speed and fire of spirit. For ten years I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that peregrines flush from the sky. For ten years I have been looking upward for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flinging through the air. The eye becomes insatiable for hawks. It clicks towards them with ecstatic fury, just as the hawk’s eye swings and dilates to the luring food-shapes of gull and pigeons.

>>7075499
Seed steed?

>but I feel like if someone else wanted to say the same things and wrote it down, I would take away the same message and also feeling from it.

Consider these two sentences:

>Matthew walked to the bank at 7pm
>Matthew staggered to the bank as night fell

Similar message, different feeling and implication. It's the same principle for anything.

I've attached the beginning of the Peregrine which /lit/ has a bit of a hard-on for. It's considered to be well written by most people. At least in terms of prose.

cannot wait to live in a world of technically proficient yet soulless consumerist idiots obsessed with mechanical keyboards and retarded by indiscriminate prescriptions of amphetamines for imaginary disorders

>>7075513
Purple prose

>that crossbow flinging through the air

Reads like what stupid people think good writing is supposed to look like.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?
One of the greatest passages in English literature, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Joyce is the greatest stylist ever to have written in English, Shakespeare is his only rival imo .

>>7075538

You should look up what purple prose is, because I don't think you've got it down. Baker may overwrite a bit but it's not purple. Purple is when nothing is really being said of any value and it goes on and on and on. It's something you usually see in shitty romance fiction and it's a genuine problem with the writing not just a judgement call when you think something is too flowery or pretentious.

>>7075493
Who is this lean wean?

>>7075560
>In literary criticism, purple prose is prose text that is so extravagant, ornate, or flowery as to break the flow and draw excessive attention to itself.[1]

de Quincey's "God Smote Savannah-le-Mar". Or really anything de Quincey.

>>7075579
Soooo do you copy-paste all of your arguments from Wikipedia? Is your head that empty?

Btw The Peregrine's flow is extraordinary

http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/bleakhouse/2/

>>7075538
This du' straight up think nigga shoulda said "I saw a bird"

It's in translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky, but I've always loved the opening of Hadji Murat by Tolstoy:

I was returning home through the fields. It was the very middle of summer. The meadows had been mowed, and they were just about to reap the rye.

There is a delightful assortment of flowers at that time of year: red, white, pink, fragrant, fluffy clover; impudent marguerites; milk-white "love-me-love-me-nots" with bright yellow centres and a fusty, spicy stink; yellow wild rape with its honey smell; tall-standing, tulip-shaped campanulas, lilac and white; creeping vetch; neat sabious, yellow, red, pink, and lilac; plantain with its faintly pink down and faintly perceptible, pleasant smell; cornflowers, bright blue in the sun and in youth, and pale blue and reddish in the evening and when hold; and the tender, almond-scented, instantly wilting flowers of the bindweed.

I had gathered a big boquet of various flowers and was walking home, when I noticed in a ditch, in full bloom, a wonderful crimson thistle of the kind which is known among us as a "Tartar" and is carefully mowed around, and, when accidentally mowed down, is removed from the hay by the mowers, so that it will not prick their hands. I took it into my head to pick this thistle and put it in the centre of the boquet. I got down into the ditch and, having chased away a hairy bumblebee that had stuck itself into the centre of the flower and sweetly and lazily fallen asleep there, I set about picking the flower. But it was very difficult: not only was the stem prickly on all sides, even through the handkerchief I had wrapped around my hand, but it was so terribly tough that I struggled with it for some five minutes, tearing the fibres one by one. When I finally tore off the flower, the stem was all ragged, and the flower no longer seemed so fresh and beautiful. Besides, in its coarseness and gaudiness it did not fit in with the delicate flowers of the bouquet. I was sorry that I had vainly destroyed and thrown away a flower that had been beautiful in its place. "But what energy and life force," I thought, remembering the effort it had cost me to tear off the flower. "How staunchly it defended itself, how dearly it sold its life".

Tolstoy is a fucking genius.

>>7075579

That's kind of there, but you'll see that it uses the words 'ornate' and 'extravagant' in its description suggesting that 'purple prose' isn't a completely redundant word. The Wikipedia article doesn't really go into it or give examples. If you looked some up you'd see the difference between simply being pretentious or ornate and something being purple. One metaphor in a short sentence isn't really purple prose.

Think about the examples I mentioned here, >>7075528

For it to be purple it would be something like:

>Matthew wearily staggered from one foot to the other, taking each step like he was walking through the violent torrents of river Styx and feeling as though his heavy-laden heart was trying to drag him to the bottom of it, he travelled with deepest sincerity to reach the small squat village bank before it closed and the prison he found himself in succumbed to a terrible darkness that would grab his perfectly spherical grape of a head.

That kind of thing. It just goes on and on and it's not telling you anything of real value and it doesn't itself hold much value.

>>7075632
But that's my point.

>For ten years I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that peregrines flush from the sky. For ten years I have been looking upward for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flinging through the air.

The author of Peregrine describes spending 10 years searching for a good bird in one sentence, then repeats the same thing with a crummy metaphor or two in a second sentence.

>>7075653
Prosefags btfo

>>7075619
I'll post the rest of the passage since it's just so good.

The way home went across a fallow, just-ploughed field of black earth. I walked up a gentle slope along a dusty, black-earth road. The ploughed field was a landowner's, a very large one, so that to both sides of the road and up the hill ahead nothing could be seen except the black, evenly furrowed, not yet scarified soil. The ploughing had been well done; nowhere on the field was there a single plant or blade of grass to be seen--it was all black. "What a destructive, cruel being man is, how many living beings and plants he annihilates to maintain his own life," I thought, involuntarily looking for something alive amidst this dead, black field. Ahead of me, to the right of the road, I spied a little bush. When I came closer, I recognized in this bush that same "Tartar" whose flower I had vainly picked and thrown away.

The "Tartar" bush consisted of three shoots. One had been broken off, and the remainder of the branch stuck out like a cut-off arm. On each of hte other two there was a flower. These flowers had once been red, but now they were black. One stem was broken and half of it hung down, with the dirty flower at the end; the other, though all covered with black dirt, still stuck up. It was clear that the whole bush had been run over by a wheel, and afterwards had straightened up and therefore stood tilted, but stood all the same. As if a piece of its flesh had been ripped away, its guts turned inside out, an arm torn offf, an eye blinded. But it still stands and does not surrender to man, who has annihilated all its brothers around it.

"What energy!" I thought. "Man has conquered everything, destroyed millions of plants, but this one still does not surrender."

And I remembered and old story from the Caucasus, part of which I saw, part of which I heard from witnesses, and part of which I imagined to myself. The story, as it shaped itself in my memory and imagination, goes like this.

I typed all this out, hope someone reads it and then decides to enjoy Hadji Murat just as much as I do. :3

lmao at the retards who fell for the troll

>>7075682
The only "retard" who has been "trolled" in this thread appears to be you...?

>>7075579
No. Purple prose is sound and fury signifying nothing.

>>7075493
>I'm a scientist and never found out what it means for a book to be beautifully written

that's because art and beauty aren't scientific so who cares if you're a "scientist" you douche. I will say that they've tried to get scientific with beauty facial features but it can never be concrete.

>>7075653

Simply repeating yourself doesn't make something purple prose. That first sentence isn't purple at all. It's not over the top in the slightest. A bit poetic with the use of 'violence' but that's about all you can say. The repetition of similar content is a purposeful rhetorical device, not fluff. In the first sentence he's telling you he was looking for peregrines. In the second he's saying he was looking for this almost mythical creature. It's not a superfluous sentence and it's not over the top.

The second sentence is more ornate but even that's not purple prose because it's a relatively short sentence with only one adjective in it and if you actually look only one metaphor.

If he had written:

>For ten years I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that peregrines flush from the sky, for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flinging through the air.

You might want to start calling it purple prose but given the nature of the book it's allowable. He's not writing fiction.

There is no such thing as "good" or "bad" prose. Quality is a subjective thing. There is no barometer by which good or bad prose can be measured absolutely. Any criteria we choose as parameters to measure quality by have been selected on the basis of personal preference, and are still subjective.

Good and bad are not inherent properties of things. They are concepts we project onto them. Good prose is prose you like. Bad prose is prose you do not like.

>>7075513
>This was my first peregrine. I have seen many since then, but none has excelled it for speed and fire of spirit.
Reminds me of GR's opening sentence tbh

>>7075710
Holy fuuuuck can we institute a "ban plebs on sight" policy?

>>7075699
But the innovation behind invisible style is that all prose that is visible is superfluous and therefore purple. Look at Elmore Leonard's main rule of writing from his 11 rules: if it sounds like writing, rewrite it.

>>7075493
Can someone explain why she looks like a pokemon?

>>7075710
Thanks-o captain O'

>>7075718
The pleb/patrician dichotomy is a falsehood based on an erroneous view that objectivity with regard to artistic value exists.

If it doesn't exist, then you can't feel superior - there is no longer a reason to identify with this "enlightened elite".

If you're so confident that your viewpoint is the correct one, why don't you explain why you believe in it, instead of calling me a faggot, etc.?

>>7075493
>Can someone point me at an example, 400 words, of something very well written?
Don't bother searching. You'll never know beauty. A scientist is like a greasy chinaman who can only count beads on an abacus.

>>7075729

cause she's buff/fit yet very petite as well it's kind of a paradox on one person, and somewhat comical in her pose also

>shes a slut just like pokemon.

>>7075710
There is no such thing as subjective. Prose is either successful in a given environment or not. your personal taste can only add or subtract from this expression.
How much you personally think you are enjoying something does not factor in the actual work.
Everyone experiences the analogous phenomenological data and the quality of that relationship is objective.

stfu you dumb cuck. you sound like someone who skimmed a Nietzsche wiki and assumed the entire debate of objectivity.

>>7075729
>I'd machoke that.

>>7075758
You have simpy changed the definition of what is considered good or bad - in fact, your definition is still composed on individual responses, so it tacitly acknowledges that individual subjectivity is a thing - the point of discussion of this thread.

Why would you care what the population as a whole experiences? Your personal experience is the only that matters, as you won't experience the feelings others have when reading a book/listening to music/etc.

>How much you personally think you are enjoying something does not factor in the actual work.

"I know how you feel better than you do!" While I agree that personal opinion of personal experience is often unreliable, to think that everyone experiences everything to the same degree is ridiculous - our brains are not composed identically. Some people like the taste of honey and others do not. Are those who do not lying to themselves?

>>7075788
No i have not.

What i'm really saying is you are able to experience good or bad objectively pre reflection, and its only after reflecting that you make up some bullshit about why you liked a bad thing when you really didn't

for kids they like pop music because its cool and marketing proves this because anything marketed with enough money gets big, while similar quality work unmarketed is ignored.

your "personal" experience does not matter because its biased and edited.

You are essentially saying "for me 1+2=3 because thats how i feel about it" well no faggot, you cant just run into your own brain and self report.
How much you are reporting to enjoy something isn't even subjective, its just garbage.
We arn't comparing intensity in reactions in the brain, thats never leveled as the objective metric.

>>7075723

Nobody really follows those rules though. Do they? More often than not they apply but those are just things people say to say something. People don't tell Cormac McCarthy to tone it down because, you're reading Cormac McCarthy. He wrote what he did and not something else. People love him because he goes into great detail when he wants to.

>>7075812
I agree that reflection colours the experience.

However, I do not agree that everyone receives the same experience during the act of experiencing a piece of art - which is the crux of my argument. You can view the brain as a very complex input-output system. If the system is different in every individual (which it unquestionably is), then the same input will produce different outputs in different systems. Neither is more "wrong" or "right" than the other. Neither is "better" or "worse". They are only better or worse when viewed through your own personal viewpoint, considered in the context of your own personal preferences (which are inherent and subjective).

>>7075710
>There is no such thing as "good" or "bad" prose.

not on its own, no. but depending on what you're discussing yes. like anything... good and bad needs context. not just personal opinions. opinions change when you become less stupid, yes?

>>7075872
>good and bad needs context

In this case, we use context to evaluate whether or not something is good or bad. Context acts as a means of "objectively" measuring the value of something.

What is context, then? Context is a number of criteria which are implicity or explicity held to be true, to be used in the evaluation of good or bad art. These criteria cannot be objectively selected - they are the personal preferences of those discussing the art in question. There is no objective criteria when discussing absolute quality. You can say that X book is good when everyone speaking agrees that descriptive prose is good, because X book has a lot of descriptive prose - but there is no objective decree that states descriptive prose is objectively a good thing.

>opinions change when you become less stupid, yes?

to imply that someone does not like a book because they are stupid/do not understand/etc. is understandable, but incorrect. Would everyone on earth like Ulysses if they were all subjected to the same education? No.

I can understand why some people like Shakespeare - the monologues are philosophical reflections on life, there are meta-features to aspects of the narrative, etc. I understand all of this, but I don't enjoy reading Shakespeare.

Education can give you more of an insight into your personal preferences, it does not tell you what is objectively good or bad.

>>7075908
>I don't enjoy reading Shakespeare.

Can plebs
please
just
fuck
off
?

>>7075910

>he doesn't adhere to the standards of my secret club

Nice argument, you've certainly convinced me.

>>7075908
>Education can give you more of an insight into your personal preferences, it does not tell you what is objectively good or bad.

you learn to critique literature so you can learn to better critique your own work. you learn the rules of writing so you learn how to break the rules WELL. if you're a naïve dunderhead then you're writing boring cliché stuff and you're totally oblivious to it. there are all sorts of rules and ways to break them in interesting ways depending on what you want to write. you're trying to use some universal catch-all philosophy when life and especially art doesn't work like that. yeah you could say there is no such thing as good and bad, or you could provide context and pursue the "good" in whatever direction you want to go. otherwise you will go nowhere forever.

>>7075939
>you're trying to use some universal catch-all philosophy when life and especially art doesn't work like that.

I accuse you of doing the same thing. You don't provide the reasoning for your beliefs, you just assert that "rules" exist, that they should be respected, and that they are "right" (at least to an extent).

There is inherent subjective preference, and there is nothing else.

> otherwise you will go nowhere forever.
You will pursue art that you know you enjoy, free of adherance to what is considered hip or cool by "respected" groups. You will no longer use art as a fashion accessory, as some conscious part of your identity.

>>7075965
>You will pursue art that you know you enjoy, free of adherance to what is considered hip or cool by "respected" groups. You will no longer use art as a fashion accessory, as some conscious part of your identity.

you assume too much. I meant art that you want to grow within yourself. that only satisfies yourself. take music for instance...literature is a craft like music believe it or not.

you could try learning music on your own and if you try hard enough you can go to all sorts of places. but you can get there way earlier and go much further by studying the groundwork laid out by centuries of music already available. you don't emulate what you've learned. you gain these things as new tools to use for your own work. new colors you didn't have before etc.

>>7075965
>I accuse you of doing the same thing. You don't provide the reasoning for your beliefs, you just assert that "rules" exist, that they should be respected, and that they are "right".

They are right in context. you're saying there are is good and bad in literature.

then why do English professors suggest a lot of the same works? because they're all drones? good grief.

You are oblivious to that context until you STUDY literature. You can sit back and speculate all day and that's fine. It won't get you anywhere nearer to what I'm trying to say. Join a writing workshop or book club. Most people in these clubs aren't stupid even if they don't share your tastes. at least don't get into "good and bad" and just discuss literature and why things work or don't with others. see where that takes you and come back.

>>7076017
>assertions
>appeal to authority

>you're saying there are is good and bad in literature.
If you mean what I think you mean, you've miscontrued the central point of my position.

>>7076010
I've never argued any of the points you're discussing. I only say that good and bad are subjective, and are not inherent properties of a piece of art.

>I'm a scientist

Scully?

>>7075618
what the fuck

I didn't know that cover was a still from a video

mindblown

>>7076041
Mulder, it's me.

It was her life, and, bending her head over the whole table, she bowed beneath the influence, felt blessed and purified, saying to herself, and she took the pad with the telephone message on it, how moments like this are buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only); not for a moment did she believe in God; but all the more, she thought, taking up the pad, must one repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it — of the gay sounds, of the green lights, of the cook even whistling, for Mrs. Walker was Irish and whistled all day long — one must pay back from the secret deposit of exquisite moments, she thought, lifting the pad, while Lucy stood by her, trying to explain how.

Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it's not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it's gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.

>>7075499
>___________
Are you a wizard?

>>7075713
What is GR?

>>7076111
>A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

>>7075708

>If he had written:
>For ten years I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that peregrines flush from the sky, for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flinging through the air.
>You might want to start calling it purple prose but given the nature of the book it's allowable. He's not writing fiction.

I'm a bit of a pleb unfortunately, but how would that be considered purple prose? Genuinely curious.

>>7075493
>dat face
>dat furninture
this bitch is Russian isnt she?
or Ukrainian or some other type of soviet

>>7075619
>>7075675
Will read the rest, thanks

>>7076063
Yeah, it's from this (dilla produced the beat)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtgsWg5zjiU

>>7076883
dilla is so mediocre that i have to conclude all the hype for him online is marketing

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

“I know. And when my father would tell me I would say to him, ‘Get to that lake— get my mother there— don’t let it happen again, not this time. Just once let’s tell it: how you got to the lake and built a house of fir boughs.’ And my father became very Chinese then. He said, ‘There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar,’ ” “Get on with it,” Adam said irritably. Lee got up and went to the window, and he finished the story, looking out at the stars that winked and blew in the March wind. “A little boulder jumped down a hill and broke my father’s leg. They set the leg and gave him cripples’ work, straightening used nails with a hammer on a rock. And whether with worry or work— it doesn’t matter— my mother went into early labor. And then the half-mad men knew and they went all mad. One hunger sharpened another hunger, and one crime blotted out the one before it, and the little crimes committed against those starving men flared into one gigantic maniac crime.

Steinbeck, John (2002-02-05). East of Eden (pp. 356-357). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

bumpity

>>7075493
It's just one of the many ways elites try to stamp out new thought without actually having to contend with it.

>>7075493
Nice tits

>>7077611