Meanwhile, on bizarro Veeky Forums

>I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.

What did he mean by this?

I just love books
I think Veeky Forums is a good board!

[meaningful discussion in which every post hits character limits and all participants learn something new]

[thankful post about how insightful you were without the use of homophobic language]

Start with what you like most.

Start with John Green

I enjoy living.

nice thread, love seeing Veeky Forums at its best

Lolita>>>>Pale Fire>>>Ada

I'm really not sure what I should do with all this money that I make from self-publishing my erotic short stories on Amazon. It's just too much.

I think we can all agree that sci-fi outweighs literary fiction as a genre in terms of ideas, but why has its prose gone unsung for so long?

and when you are done with everything else, end with the greeks.

if John Green were a phase of a lead-antimony alloy, he would be the beta phase.

I deeply regret my classical education. I'm thinking about suing my parents.

Well, let me recommend some of the greatest literature humanity possesses by using a rational, objective viewpoint and not spamming "Infinite meme".

Unholy..... I want less...

So glad there's a Protestant board. Let's all privately interpret the gospel as recited to King James.

eke

[numerous threads about booktube guys]

Holy shit is this guy's bibliography overwhelming

Still, I guess I won't be posting about him until I've read it all

Continental Philosophy is pure garbage.

Thank God for another day on my favourite Analytical Philosophy board.

>in my humble opinion, no one needs to read old works of literature in order to lead a better life, since they lost whatever they had of value ages ago. a much better alternative, that is if you have the absolute need to read, is to pick up the most recent book you can find by minority authors. if you were to read something by, say, a cis asian woman but you have the opportunity to chose another, this one written by a transblack pansexual body-happy goddess, by all means, go with the latter. the important thing is not to carefully chose what to read, but to read the most recent you can. also, sorry for being white and privileged

I can't take this anymore!!! Why do these white males think they can give opinions about whatever want? Helllooo, you're so privileged you can't even measure your amount of privilege! Don't come here telling me what to do!

Hey Veeky Forums, I just want to say how much I love you all. You guys are the most insightful & well-read people I have ever encountered, and you never cease to amaze me with your unique opinions about great works of literature. There are a lot of people who pretend they read books to seem smart, but not you guys. Everyone here knows what they're talking about, and honestly I've found no greater pleasure than taking part in the consistently deep discussions that take place here everyday.

Bizzaro Veeky Forums, not old Veeky Forums.

Hey Veeky Forums, just dropping in from /pol/ and was wondering if you guys could recommend me some books or articles that debunk fascism and the far right.*

*PS I'm definitely not here to pick up the appearance of having come to fascism through serious readings into political and social theory.

Just done reading the meme trilogy: Game of Thrones, The Fault in our Stars and The Alchemist. 10/10

Hey, appreciate you stopping by! We could always use more crossposters on this board, as it's unfortunately difficult to get any sort of political thread going; I can hardly remember the last time made a thread about communism.

Reading is about enjoyment. Literature is more than just a checklist of works that prove you're a cultured intellectual.

I have a great story about some insightful comments a classmate of mine made.

Can someone explain this?

One of Derrida's major concepts is the critique of the "metaphysics of presence" in the history of Western philosophy and thought.

In Limited Inc., he writes, “The enterprise of returning ‘strategically’, ‘ideally’, to an origin or to a priority thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent."

Here, the joke is that saying "pls go" has something to do with his physical presence in the place he is in, so he refutes it with his critique of logocentrism, which comes from the presence-privileging metaphysical framework described here. The philosophical concept has more to do with immediacy in a more abstract sense. I started to explain further and pull up more quotes and then I realized that I really can't be bothered.

Gotcha. I think I understand what you mean at least in some surface level capacity. I've always been too intimidated to read Derrida. You seem to have a firm grasp on ideas. What's the best way to approach him? I've read a couple of intro texts that touch on him (Beginning Theory by Barry & Literary Theory by Eagleton), so I have a general idea of his project, at least with respect to lit criticism. I've also read some of his precursors (eg Saussure, Foucault) and didn't find them to be as inscrutable as everyone says, but Derrida arguably has the worst reputation for "obscurantism" of the structuralist/post-structuralist bunch. Any tips for a novice?

What's the vaporwave of Literature?

Georges Perec desu

The people in my MFA group were very impressed with my poetry that you guys helped critique. God only knows what I would do if my only recourse were to ask for advice on my writing from a group of bitter, spiteful, and vindictive narcissists who do nothing but sit at home all day! Thanks again for the help, Veeky Forums.

He's really not all that hard to read if you actually pick up some texts and spend some time with them. I think the whole thing about him being difficult to read comes from the fact that he is very invested in a critique of an opaque use of language - not attending to its intrinsic hierarchies and mechanisms while using it as a tool, leading to arguments rife with metaphysical assumptions. He often invents new terms to mark what he sees as the interplay between concepts, and if you are not familiar with his practice then this can manifest itself to you as a totally bizarre text. If you're well-acquainted with the Greeks, Plato's Pharmacy maps some of his stuff really well onto some canonical shit that has made sense for some of my friends. I think Of Grammatology is pretty classic and engages directly with Saussure, who you mention, so you will have that essential background which should help you a lot.

It's interesting how similar his prose is to The Meme

Thank you! I really appreciate it.

>He often invents new terms to mark what he sees as the interplay between concepts, and if you are not familiar with his practice then this can manifest itself to you as a totally bizarre text.
I have a degree in philosophy so I am accustomed to reading philosophers who invent new terms, for lack of a better way of putting it, or at least using existing words in a more precise context. Is this what you mean or is it something different specific to him?

>Plato's Pharmacy maps some of his stuff really well onto some canonical shit that has made sense for some of my friends.
I have read a decent amount of Plato so I'll have to check this out, thanks.

>I think Of Grammatology is pretty classic and engages directly with Saussure, who you mention, so you will have that essential background which should help you a lot.
Good to know. Do you think I ought to read Structure, Sign & Play prior to Of Grammatology? Or should I hop right in?

Re: new terms: it's not quite the invention of terms to describe new concepts like in most philosophy (biopower, unity of apperception etc), but rather things like différance, which might be the most classic example of this - a deliberate misspelling of différence which would be pronounced the exact same if read aloud, meant to play on the sight/sound - text/speech dichotomies - in the context of his work on the nature of linguistic binaries after Saussure, this becomes significant. Stuff like that abounds throughout his work: deconstruction is less a tool to apply to things and more a mindset that attends to contradictions brought about by assumed binaries (for me at least, not an expert-expert) and it's hard to put the results in the exact same system the problem was formulated in in the first place (opaque discourse in language) so new terms tangentially outside that system mark these events. It's not like différance defines his ruminations on difference/deferring, but it's still a crucial point of drawing attention...

Re: Of Grammatology, Course in General Linguistics in the essential Saussure text Derrida engages with here. If you've read that, and have general philosophy background, you should get something from OG.

>What's the best way to approach him?

Impassive, you say, "I am interested in the idiom in painting," remaining motionless for the duration of the sentence, careful to refrain from any gesture. At the point where he perhaps expects it, near the head and around certain words, for example "in painting," you do not imitate the double horns of quotation marks, you do not depict a form of writing with your fingers in the air. You merely approach and announce to him: "I am interested in the idiom in painting."

>deconstruction is less a tool to apply to things and more a mindset that attends to contradictions brought about by assumed binaries
This is what I've picked up on from trying to get the gist of his objective. Very fascinating how the form of his argument eg writing style, language he uses becomes a component of the argument itself (and necessarily must since he is talking about language). Thanks for clarifying the point about new terms.

I'm going to take a crack at Of Grammatology now. Thanks for the pointers/confidence boost!

This is bizarro lit; maybe a year ago there were alot of marxists and catholics but now it's all that dude with the patchy facial hair (the TED-talk hatebro... can't remember his name) and whatever else the sister-fuckers at /pol/ are reading/ consuming

When I said "threads about communism" I didn't mean "threads in favour of communism"

There are a lot of shitposters all over the political spectrum who will make posts like "did marx get literally anything right/wrong" without reading the relevant works

To be fair though, this is a larger problem with Veeky Forums than with Veeky Forums these days

Oh, and the guy's name is Sam Hyde

Marxists have disappeared on Veeky Forums because Left-Wing Politics died in Europe as a result of the European immigration crisis.