/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17793097]

ITT: Little-known facts about authors

William Gass's father was hacked to pieces and fed to dogs.

[Anonymous No.17793128]

It's a well known fact that Alexander Pope was 4'6, but what they don't tell you is that he was not considered seriously short at that time. He was as relatively short as a 5'6 man is today.

[Anonymous No.17793147]

>>17793097
BRAAAAP

[Anonymous No.17793160]

Aphra Behn had a medically tight pussy

[Anonymous No.17793166]

>>17793097
Another little-known fact about Gass is that his non-fiction is insufferable neoliberal proto-woke bootlicking where he shits on religion and family while wondering why paper cutouts of children around the world don't join in a big circle and hold hands. Also he was obsessed with Jews and I don't think he himself was Jewish. It's almost as if he hated himself and wanted the boot of neoliberal atheism to stomp on his neck and the neck of all Americans forever.

Another little known fact is that The Tunnel consists of either the best writing I have ever seen, or the worst, most pretentious, faggoty and waste of time writing I have ever seen. There is nothing in between.

[Anonymous No.17793191]

>>17793166
Gass used alliteration and logical, levelheaded argumentation
It was highly effective!
Admit you got BTFO

[Anonymous No.17793200]

>>17793097
I like how, never having heard of him, I could tell by nothing other than this picture and your post he was a purveyor of Nazi atrocity fiction.

Guess what. Not only is it not a fact, it's not "little known" either. This guy makes damn sure some form of that tall tale gets into every author's bio he's in control of, and every avid reader he has knows the story.

[Anonymous No.17793207]

>>17793191
Seriously his alliteration is so annoying I wonder if he's intentionally trying to annoy the reader. It's the literary equivalent of the author pinching and rubbing his nipples

[Anonymous No.17793212]

>>17793200
There were newspaper articles about it. His uncle did it in a fit of rage. William came home from school to find a couple of skinny dobermans tearing at a leg.

[Anonymous No.17793216]

>>17793207
If you can't enjoy the sensory overload you're probably a prude

[Anonymous No.17793225]

>>17793128
Jesus christ I couldn't believe this was true. It seems it was due to tuberculosis of the spine. Also John Keats was 5'1

[Anonymous No.17793226]

>>17793097
On the same subject, Dostoevsky's father was a malicious drunk who was murdered by his own peasants.

[Anonymous No.17793282]

Fernando Pessoa smoked 80 cigs a day. He once helped Aleister Crowley fake his death.

[Anonymous No.17793308]

>>17793282
>80 cigs a day
Bullshit, that's not fucking possible, or affordable.

[Anonymous No.17793328]

>>17793308
Kant drank 40 cups of coffee per day and he was pretty healthy. It's not impossible.

[Anonymous No.17793337]

>>17793328
Kant never left his home and was probably insane, I wouldn't describe him as 'healthy.'

[Anonymous No.17793350]

>>17793166
>Another little known fact is that The Tunnel consists of either the best writing I have ever seen, or the worst, most pretentious, faggoty and waste of time writing I have ever seen. There is nothing in between.
Haha, a good review I saw of the Tunnel said “Not even hating this book is simple”

[Anonymous No.17793365]

>>17793337
He didn't need to leave his home because he had already seen the whole world in his mind, and an insane person could not match his beautiful prose.

[Anonymous No.17793532]

>>17793207
I kek't

[Anonymous No.17793574]

>>17793365
I didnt need to meet faggot vanilla faced bumpkin men because i've known them all in my mind after i fuck their sisters and daughters and a pornstar can't match my penis size and stamina.

Sponsored by blacked.com

[Anonymous No.17793576]

>>17793308
It was certainly affordable - almost the entire price of cigarettes today is taxes. Back then, they were basically free, seriously.

And 80 is probably on the edge of what is possible, but smoking 40 is not unheard of.

[Anonymous No.17793587]

Famous political theorist, philosopher, economist, novelist, historian and short-story writer Anon (me), author of the groundbreaking post-modernist best-seller My Diary Desu, had the invariable habit of masturbating 7 times a day in order to obtain maximum stimulation of the physical body, which he believed would also allow for maximum comfort for the mind upon the compound post-coital release of endorphins into his brain.

[Anonymous No.17793600]

Schopenhauer had two pet poodles, Atman and Brahman, who were his dearest companions and some of the only beings he showed any affection towards.

[Anonymous No.17793640]

>>17793600
>Atman and Brahman
Only true Schopenhauer fans will get this reference

[Anonymous No.17795634]

bump

[Anonymous No.17795663]

>>17793337
>insane
try autistic

[Anonymous No.17795727]

>>17793166
>The Tunnel consists of either the best writing I have ever seen, or the worst, most pretentious, faggoty and waste of time writing I have ever seen. There is nothing in between.
very, very accurate
Gass writes for critics and it shows, but my god imagine how great he could have been if he stopped caring about what the faggoty critics like Michael Silverblatt thought

[Anonymous No.17796263]

>>17793207
kek

[Anonymous No.17796597]

>>17795727
Gass was immensely blessed linguistically, in postmodernism there is nobody close to him in terms of technical ability (except John Gardner and maybe Delillo, if prose is considered exclusively). However, he was always a mediocre storyteller and he could not do with pleasing critics because he was a critic himself.

[Anonymous No.17796621]

>>17796597
*without pleasing critics

[Anonymous No.17796664]

>>17793212
And yet somehow I knew he was a WW2 atrocity porn author.

I know bullshit when I hear it, Anon. You should too.

[Anonymous No.17796951]

>tfw you will never be a sozialrevolutionären Dichterkomponisten

[Anonymous No.17796963]

Kafka was into tentacle porn.

[Anonymous No.17796986]

William Shakespeare was actually a fraud and Sir Francis Bacon actually wrote his plays.

[Anonymous No.17797483]

>>17796963
Who isn't?

[Anonymous No.17797548]

>>17793308
My grandfather used to smoke 3 to 4 packs (20 cigs) a day before he had a thrombosis at age 60.
So, definitely possible.

[Anonymous No.17797616]

>>17796597
>John Gardner
Wait is this hack really considered good? Maybe it's just the natural reactionary position for generations born after an artistic ovement to reject that movement speaking, but post-modernism is fucking terrible if that guy is one of the best

[Anonymous No.17797622]

>>17796963
how..... Kafkaesque :)

[Anonymous No.17797623]

>>17796986
I will beat you to death and hang your body in the town center of stratford-upon-avon

[Anonymous No.17797651]

>>17796986
I hope you choke in your sleep

[Anonymous No.17797655]

>>17793097
baudrillard isnt real

[Anonymous No.17797661]

Dante era nero

[Anonymous No.17797753]

>>17797616
Have you read Grendel? He's very polished at what he does. He is not a maximalist but his prose is exquisite.

[Anonymous No.17797805]

>>17797753
The only part I liked in grendel was when the humans first ran into him
The rest all felt adolescent as shit

[Anonymous No.17797814]

>>17793097
I don't know if this really counts as little-known, but Maurice Leblanc had a daughter from first marriage, and he wrote Lupin to have a daughter from a teenage romance. Later he wrote Lupin to only have children of ambiguous paternity, two from Lupin cucking a scoundrel, an interesting observation considering Leblanc's only other child was a son from his second wife's first marriage, that he gladly adopted once the first husband finally cleared path.

[Anonymous No.17797815]

>>17796963
Nice.
>>17796986
Armed with a Ouja board to summon ghosts, we get it already.

[Anonymous No.17797826]

>>17793097
There's a small but real chance Shakespeare didn't exist.

[Anonymous No.17797852]

>>17796951
someone thought that was a good beard trim

[Anonymous No.17797923]

>>17797852
Chad neckbeard.

[Anonymous No.17797935]

My lit teacher in hs said Melville hawthorns and Whitman were having gay affairs after I told him billy budd was really gay

[Anonymous No.17798074]

>>17797935
HAWTHORNE MY LOVE PLEASE RETURN MY LETTERS WHY DON'T YOU LIKE MY WHALE BOOK NO THE CETOLOGY CHAPTERS ARE NOT FILLER WHY DOES EVERY HALFWIT SAY THAT THEY ARE ABSOLUTELY VITAL TO THE THEMATIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL AND SERVE AS A GRAND METAPHOR FOR THE POINTLESSNESS OF SCIENCE AND THE VAST MYSTERYS OF REALITY RETURN MY LETTER OR I'M GOING TO BEAT MY SON AGAIN I SWEAR TO GOD

[Anonymous No.17798100]

>>17798074
The cetology chapters tied in when it’s revealed Ishmael is obsessed with whales and has their entire anatomy tattooed across his body, which juxtaposes ahabs obsession with vengeance on the whale

[Anonymous No.17798118]

>I am thinking of a story I heard a few years ago from my friend Odette, a writer and a survivor of the holocaust. Along with many others who crowd the bed of a large truck, she tells me, Robert Desnos is being taken away from the barracks of the concentration camp where he has been held prisoner. Leaving the barracks, the mood is somber; everyone knows the truck is headed for the gas chambers. And when the truck arrives no one can speak at all; even the guards fall silent. But this silence is soon interrupted by an energetic man, who jumps into the line and grabs one of the condemned. Improbable as it is, Odette explains, Desnos reads the man's palm. Oh, he says, I see you have a very long lifeline. And you are going to have three children. He is exuberant. And his excitement is contagious. First one man, then another, offers up his hand, and the prediction is for longevity, more children, abundant joy. As Desnos reads more palms, not only does the mood of the prisoners change but that of the guards too. How can one explain it? Perhaps the element of surprise has planted a shadow of doubt in their minds. If they told themselves these deaths were inevitable, this no longer seems so inarguable. They are in any case so disoriented by this sudden change of mood among those they are about to kill that they are unable to go through with the executions. So all the men, along with Desnos, are packed back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks. Desnos has saved his own life and the lives of others by using his imagination.

[Anonymous No.17798389]

>>17793216
Something similar goes, only moreso, for anything with long lists of examples, digressions in loopy meanders, or reflective stream-of-consciousness writing that resists mimicry because it's organized by the writer's way of imagining rather than by received formula. It's what makes Seneca's essays, the longer poems of Stevens, and Rabelais's long list of kinds of fools filter out the despots the live among us.

[Anonymous No.17798565]

>>17793226
and not as unknown but iirc dostoevsky was saved literal seconds from execution

[Anonymous No.17798648]

>>17793282
Didn't know the crowley and pessoa link, ty anon

[Anonymous No.17798746]

Once Molière had two writers friends at come drink a little wine. As it was getting late, Molière when to sleep but his friends kept on drinking. They became dead drunk and thought that life was shit and that they should kill themselves. They woke up Molière, telling him that they are going to jump into the nearby river and that he should join. He answered that it was indeed a very good idea but that they should wait until tomorrow morning because otherwise people would think they only died because they were drunk and their point about life being shit would be made null. They agreed. Of course no one jumped into the river the next morning.
There are also very strong suspicions that Molière married his own illegitimate daughter.

[Anonymous No.17799619]

>>17793097
is this true?

[Anonymous No.17799636]

>>17798565
Not true, it was a mock execution. It was their intention to make the Petrashevsky Circle believe they were to be executed and had been saved by the bell, when in actuality, it had been planned exactly that way.

[Anonymous No.17799684]

>>17797655
Precession of the Schizolacra

[Anonymous No.17799706]

Socrates was Schizophrenic and proud, yet he was the most sane.