/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6419940]

>tfw /lit/ is being spammed by DFW
Stand back, plebs!

[Anonymous No.6420371]

Bump for clarity!

[Gene Wolfe No.6420420]

>tfw I wrote some Jack Vance fanfiction and sprinkled some thin Christian imagery on top of it and you all thought it was high literature

[Anonymous No.6420424]

>he actually thinks Meme Wolfe is a better writer than DFW

[Anonymous No.6420703]

>>6420420
>implying that Tolkien and Lewis are better at metaphorical christianity

>>6420424
He maymay now?

[Anonymous No.6420756]

I for one enjoy the DFW takeover. As /lit/, we are collectively engaging with the specter of DFW as a part of a bakhtinian dialogical process, one meant to aesthetically orient us towards the reduction of suffering, but whose suffering are we reducing? I believe it to be to reduce our own suffering but to also aesthetically reduce David's, or more specifically, his specter's. Obviously this is a futile attempt to conjure away his spirit, one that is already displaced from time and space. It is still fascinating to see it happening though.

[Anonymous No.6420801]

>tfw I love GW and DFW

[Jack Vance No.6420971]

>>6420420
>tfw when I wrote some Clark Ashton Smith fanfiction and sprinkled some thin references to the Odyssey throughout it and you all thought it was high literature

>>6420703
yeah wolfe is a meme because fans frothing at the mouth can't stop spamming his threads and calling him the best writer of the last century
wolfe is great and all but /lit/ is far too conservative in their opinions to every budge on the matter of genre fiction

[Anonymous No.6421021]

>>6420971
So /lit/ are conservative but yet wet their pantsus over an abusive, alcoholic suicidal?

[Anonymous No.6421038]

>>6421021
do you think i mean politically conservative?

[Anonymous No.6421163]

>>6421038
Pretty much same shit. But let's compare the writing styles, shall we?

David Foster Wallace:

>Orin ('O.') Incandenza stands embracing
a putatively Swiss hand-model in a rented
room. They embrace. Their faces become
sexual faces. It seems clear evidence of a ki
nd of benign fate or world-spirit that this
incredible specimen had appeared at Sk
y
Harbor Int. Airp. just as Orin stood with his fine forehead against the glass of the Gate overlooking the tarmac after actually
volunteering to drive Helen Steeply all the nightmarish way dow
n I-17/-10 to the ghastly glittering unnavigable airport and the
Subject seemed, in the car, not only not es
pecially grateful, and hadn't
let him so much as place a friendly and supportive pal
m on
her incredible quadricep during the ride, but had been irritatingly all-business and had continued to pursue lines of family-li
nen
inquiry he'd all but begged her to quit subjecting him to the inappropriateness of234224 — that, as he stood there after having
received little other than a cool smile and a promise to try to sa
y hello to Hallie, with his forehead against the glass of the
Weston
back door — or rather the Delta gate window — this incredible specimen had — unbidden, unStrategized — come up to him and
started a lush foreign-accented conversation a
nd revealed professionally l
ovely hands as she rooted in her tripolymer bag to as
k
him to autograph for her toddler-age son a Cardinal-souvenir football she had right there (!) in her bag, along with her Swiss
passport — as if the universe were reaching out a hand to pluck him from the rim of the abyss of despair that any real sort of
rejection or frustration of his need for some Subject he'd picked
out always threatened him with,
as if he'd been teetering wit
h his
arms windm
dying left hand to pull him gently back
and embrace him and not so much console him as remind him of who and what he was
about, standing there embracing
a Subject with a sexual face fo
r his sexual face, no longer sp
eaking, the football and pen on t
he
neatly made bed, the two of them embracing between the bed and the mirror with the woman facing the bed so that Orin can see
past her head the large hanging mirror and the small framed photos of her Swiss family arrayed along the wood-grain dresser
below the window,235225 the tubby-faced man and Swiss-looking kids all smiling trustingly into a nothing somewhere up and to
their right.

[Anonymous No.6421172]

>>6421163
He isa crypto-calvinist with no discernible talent

[Anonymous No.6421177]

>>6421163
Gene Wolfe:

I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when I came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper in which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still wearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, when I began to understand their care.”

His grip on my shoulder tightened. “We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with the thickest gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.”

“We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too who leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other

[Anonymous No.6421182]

>>6421172
True. And Gene Wolfe is a honest catholic.

[Anonymous No.6421204]

>>6421163
Did you gimp the formatting on purpose?

[Anonymous No.6421260]

>>6421204
Oh, now I see the difference between the pdf and the post. Sorry.

[Anonymous No.6421263]

>>6421163
>pretty much same shit
not at all. /lit/ is resistant to change is all i meant.

furthermore, i don't care to compare dfw to gene wolfe. what would be the point? two very different authors writing very different things.

[Anonymous No.6421288]

>>6421172
>no discernible talent

[Anonymous No.6421319]

>>6421288
yea

[Anonymous No.6421330]

>>6420756
>I understood that
I've been here too long.

[Anonymous No.6421349]

>>6421319

[Anonymous No.6421374]

>>6421263
Everything can and should be compared to everything else IMO.

[Anonymous No.6421441]

>>6419940
This is the library that will free us from the yoke of the IdiJots!

[Anonymous No.6421453]

>>6421441
http://ultan.org.uk/

[Anonymous No.6421816]

>>6421349
this interview is gold

>>6421374
that's nice

[Anonymous No.6423727]

>tfw there's no DFW-threads left
Feels good, man!

[Anonymous No.6425478]

>>6423727
does it?