QTDDTOT

Somebody on Veeky Forums recommended I read Baudolino as my third Umberto Eco novel and pointed out some similarity between it and The Book of the New Sun.

Has anyone read both Baudolino and Book of the New Sun? I thoroughly enjoyed Baudolino and Gene has been on my list for a while now. Are they actually at all similar, even stylistically? I think whoever it was mentioned the strangeness of each.

Best translation of the Republic?

What's the best edition/copy/combination for reading Blake at a critical/academic level? I'm thinking of springing for the Norton, but I've flipped through it and it seems to be terribly abbreviated.

Pic related is what I'm working with.

>Right now everyone sucks.

Follow up question.

Does everybody really suck? I mean, literature is such an old and time consuming medium. Add that to the fact that literally anybody can write a book, wouldn't it be more reasonable to simply assume that the best books of our era just haven't been found yet? Or their influence hasn't been felt by the time of this discussion?

Trump is 6'2", so his hands are likely larger than the average hands.

>taking the bait

The standard scholarly edition of Blake is "The Poetry and Prose of William Blake" edited by Erdman, published by Doubleday. It does not contain many of his designs, but all of the extant text.

If you're loaded and want to do some searching around. Princeton has a gorgeous series of facscimiles of his illuminated books, but they ain't cheap.

Of course, make yourself familiar with the Blake Archive online, if you're not already.

And if you were interested in Blake illustrations for other others, say for Edward Young's Night Thoughts, or for his illustrations to the Book of Job, Folio Society has some mind-numblingly expensive editions.

Is there any good lit on the subject of apathy?

>"The Poetry and Prose of William Blake" edited by Erdman, published by Doubleday
The one with commentary by Bloom? I'd been eyeing that one for a while but wasn't sure if there was a...better alternative.

I'd never thought about searching online for a Blake Archive, but thanks. I'll look into those Princeton editions since his plates are very important to his overall work. Thanks a lot.

Yeah, with the commentary by Bloom. Surprisingly, the commentary is very good anf requently lucid. He wrote it earlier in his career, before losing his mind in Blaketown.

If you're not fussy about picking up a used copy, I'd look for a hardback copy of the 1970 edition and for two reasons: the hardback holds together better than the softcover (the spine on mine splt pretty quickly... it's too thick for the perfect binding methods they used) and the way that the Four Zoas is printed in the 1970 edition is better than the 1997 edition. For some reasons Erdman, based on doubtless solid research, changed the order of some of the MS pages. I think it reflected Blake's own efforts to obscure linear meaning from the text, but the way that it's printed in the 1970 is simply easier to understand. I don't think there are other substantial changes to the text.

There's a few copies here: abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=blake&bi=h&kn=erdman 1970&sortby=17&tn=poetry and prose

Anyay, best of luck with it. Blake rewards careful and hard work. Beware of too many commentators, because they make the text far too esoteric. The Dictionary by Damon is useful, though.

Could one of you Blake-anons recommend a nice route into Blake? My knowledge of Romantic poets is generally lacking but his mythology and esoteric themes have piqued my interest often.

>pressure the front of Kindle
This is why ereaders will always be inferior. It is painful to press down on this device for a long period of time.

Is French difficult to self-learn if your main purpose with it is to read classic literature?

What are some good books that give a broad overview of the Ancient Greeks from their origins to, say, Alexander?

I'd say take the illuminated works in order...

- All Religions are One / There is no Natural Religion. These are short (single plate each) and somewhat obscure, but give you a sense of where he's starting with. Google and wiki a bit to understand the context he's reacting to (natural religion in the 18th century, Locke, enlightenment).
- The Book of Thel. Here you have a figure who is supposed to pass from a state of being into another (you can think of it as maturity, or his later concepts of innocence and experience) but fails. Try to see what it is that prevents her from making the deveopment and how the other figures respond to her.
- Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The songs give you a wonderfully approachable way into not only the concepts of innocence and experience (which are present in altered form througout his works), but also the degrees of irony through which Blake wrote. I mean, read a song and then ask yourself about who is uttering it and the ways that their perception and understanding are limited. For example, look at the difference between the fierce energy of the text of The Tyger and the ridiculous looking cat on the same plate. Or the harmful naivety of the children in Holy Thursday.
-The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It starts getting weird now. You're not fully into Blake's mythology yet, but more of the groundwork is being laid here. When you read it, remember that the speaking voice is not Blake, but frequently a demon figure narrating his own experience in hell (and demons are good here, if "goodness" still applies). The ideas of perception and irony still apply, as do liberty (this is 1793, remember) and the idea of printing. This is the point that Blake worked out his unique form of illuminated printing and it matters to the text.

From there you are into the mythology. Follow in chronological order... Visions of the Daughters of Albion (kind of a sequel to Thel), America, Europe, Los, Urizen, and Ahania. Think of these as Blake's working out the psychospiritual function of the fragmented individual within history. His mythological figures have archetypical mappings in the psyche, but also represent historical forces. Orc, for example, is a revolutionary energy that Blake tried to imagine as operative positively in a revolutionary reading of European history. He abandoned this eventually to focus on Los, the blacksmith-poet figure, who works at his anvil at the productive destruction of systems of authority and mental bondage.

From there you're into his epics and probably will have a solid footing to make your own way.

I usually have a glossary of names and terms with me when I work on Blake, and I also refer often to the dictionary by Damon. I find early Bloom helpful as well (his commentary to the Erdman edition, as well as his book The Visionary Company).

I hope this helps some.

No, French is rather easy. Go for it.

Anyone read novels by Margaret Doody ? Any feedback ?

The old greats lived in eras where there was a lively and respectable literary life. Magazines/journals with literati critics and back and forth letters, cafés and salons with writers and artists worthy of praise. The bad was forgotten and the greats were immortalized in their own time, and the people actually read.

Now we have dying or dead journals, Buzzfeed articles, Huffpost, Stephen King lecturing on writing, 50 shades becoming a bestseller, Ready Player One considered worthy for a follow-up novel, talent being discussed as second to nationality, ethnicity and gender, and the majority of readers just grab the shitty bestsellers.

Literature is dead, and it won't wake up again. There's not enough money to be made anymore.

What are some good books for aspiring writers?

I'm mainly looking for books that cover narration, structure etc. and can be applied in any language I speak.

Something like: "X works fine if you want to build tension in your short story, while Y is a bad cliché to be avoided", or "Do these things so your prose doesn't look like a shopping list."

Thanks for your help. I don't know if you're "the" Blake-user that's always helpful in these threads, but I really appreciate that some of the posters here have a good handle on a single writer rather than all of us just being kinda shallow in our collective knowledge.

What do I do after I'm done with the Greeks?

I want to read the Bible, how do I go from the Greeks to the Bible?

Is there an infograph?

How do I start meditating?

Butts smell like butts, regardless of sex.

How do you write a decent sequel? I mean, I wrote the first instalment with the intention of following it up with two further parts. I deliberately left questions unanswered. I left the ending open enough to pick it up again. And I'm having so much trouble doing it. The folder I've been dumping false starts into has 13 entries for the sequel already. The first piece only had 2 false starts before I found the thread of the narrative I wanted to follow. Why is this so hard?

Anyone?

Sorry. Wish I could help.

The one published by Hackett. Their complete works of Plato is the academic standard.

Allan Bloom is usually considered the most literal and overall best

Jowett is the classic older translation that is kinda outdated but still ok

Sachs is colloquial and good for dumb college kids starting plato

Wait, is Martin Prince a fascist?

What said is mostly right. There are dozens of literary journals that aren't nearly as popular as they were. Writing was a way of life, and an occupation, and nowadays, with more people going to college, and social media, the focus of literature changes.

Add to that a want to make money, to sell movie rights, and you have writers like John Green who might have had potential becoming a YA author that writes shitty stories that get turned into shitty movies all saying the same thing over and over.

It used to be (in Europe) that if a family liked an author, they would become patrons, and the author (or any artist) could simply focus on the art. Now, people just want money more than anything. The one exception could be academia, but even that is changing, albeit slower than the rest.

Thanks.

QTDDTOT does not originate in Veeky Forums, you silly goose.

Very glad to help. I've spent a lot of time on Blake and I think it's best to spread the wealth around.

I think some historical perspective would moderate this opinion some. I mean, if you look at literary culture in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain, you'll find a lot of the same banalities that we complain about now. Once there was a literature-consuming public, there was a desire for simple and sensational stories adn journalism, hack criticism, and populist writing of all sorts. I mean, Franco Moretti has shown that the "classics" that we think of when we think of the 19th century novel number maybe 100-150 books. But this is about 1% of the poipular and literary output of the age. We have the benefit of time showing us the cream of the age, while the hack writing, the tabloid journalism, the penny dreadfuls, the shit dramas and the vapid poetry--all of which made up the literary culture of the day-- has sunk into obscurity for us.

I think we are worringly short on figures who we could think of as "great" in the way that Johnson, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Henry James and James Joyce were, but it may just be that such figures are yet to emerge.

I worry about how digital culture has changed both reading and the market for reading. I can't imagine that there are no more literary geniuses, but are we just too cynical to recognize them?

Sounds more socialist desu

You don't really need anything - just start reading. Go with NASB if you want most accurate translation or with KJV if you're an autistic English lit major. Read the Apocrypha too.

Try doing a handful of the following and see what happens:

Take the ending of the first from a different perspective, maybe of a character that gets introduced

Fast forward a week/month/half year/year and follow the protagonist

Go to a draft of the first, and remove the ending and just continue writing. This is pretty much what Tolkein did with the frist two LotR

Try watching lessons from the screenplay.

youtube.com/watch?v=pFUKeD3FJm8

He often time mentions works like The anatomy of a story by John Truby in his video. Haven't read any myself but it might be worth looking into.

How's life been treating you guys recently?

French can be a bitch to learn when it comes to the grammar.

But it is possible

Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.

What book should I read next, and why?
Choices:

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

The King in Yellow

No Longer Human

Bleeding Edge (About half way through)

The Emigrants

Looking for good entry-level texts on Kabbalah and the Gnostics. Recommendations?

If you are a native English speaker then learning French is merely an issue of divorcing yourself from the freeform grammatical twists of bastardized German. In essence you're speaking a more fluid version of your own language.

Benjamin Franklin famously stated that he had more success learning the Romance languages before learning Latin, as opposed to the trends of the time, and I suspect the linguistic familiarity with French strongly influenced his experience.

Wherein lies the main difficulty? I ask out of curiosity, not snark.

French has very strict rules about tenses, and several common verbs have multiple conjugation sets. It's just a LOT of memorization.

I enjoyed The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall but you may find it too broad. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pages is a great entry point for Gnosticism.

Thanks, will check out the Gnostic Gospels. Anything entry level on Kabbalah? Even just a collected text of the Apocrypha would be cool.

Sorry, on phone. I meant Elaine Pagels.

Total indifference.

Bleeding Edge, so you don't end up with a half-finished book.

I feel absolute melancholy but thus is the life of a writer as we're often told by the Russians.

I wrote a small poem about it:

"Darkness;Shadows;Hunting my soul. A fire set ablazed. A lantern falling. Dread strikes but not alone. It sets me free; I'm on my own. "

Ch. II>Ch. IV> Ch. I> Ch. V> Ch. III

Based on quality, is this the correct order?

Best translation of Journey to the End of the Night?

What do you think are good ways to fracture a narrative or allow digressions without completely jumbling the thread or structure of the text?

Of portrait of the artist?

What's the difference between liberal/conservative and left/right?

Liberalism and Conservativism refer to political ideologies, particularly one's stance on the extension and/or creation of new legal rights (i.e. suffrage, social entitlements, etc)
Political Left and Political Right merely refer to the relative framing of a population's political views, typically expressed in a two-Party system. In a country that is predominantly Liberal (in the modern sense), the difference between the Left and Right may not be particularly far, with proponents of separate parties only disagreeing on a few key issues. Meanwhile in a more politically divided country such as the U.S., the difference between Left and Right can be quite extreme and involve several levels of ideological separation even between people on the same side of the spectrum.

In short, Liberal/Conservative is more objective and deals with your political ideals, while Left/Right is more subjective and is often used as shorthand for your Party leanings, at least in two-Party dominant systems.
However, it is totally possible for one to be a Classical Liberal and identify as a member of the Political Left while maintaining largely Conservative views, because western political systems have long been skewing their terms - leading to demonization of almost all shorthand political nomenclature.

>burgers unironically believe that there are extreme differences between their Right and Very Right parties as opposed to the rest of the world

It's subjective. Work on your reading comprehension before posting next time.

I think a lot of people use it for the wrong reasons, and like to rub it in other peoples faces and brag about how spiritual they are, and it's so fucking pretentious. TRUE zen buddhism is not a meme, but piece of shit human beings are real and they are real in all philosophies/doctrines/religions.

How do I get into Shakespeare?

Also, I'm looking for contemporary short story collections.
Any rec?

...

Are there other boards who regularly make them.

Gonna mail this to Google. Funny or not?

You catch a healthy one here on occasion.

Do it, faggot.

Do it.

The battery on my old nook finally died for good; what's a good e-reader that's
-cheap
-has a light
-has physical page turn buttons (optional but i really want them)

thanks

How long and how often should someone need to write before they can expect to be capable of writing anything worth publishing?

Are the King Arthur books any good?

I was thinking about reading them and just wanted opinions, also are they mainly intended for children?

no one will read it (including me), so sure

I dont get the pic

Try watching a play instead of reading it if you can't make up your mind to picking it up. If you are asking for a starting point King Lear is good.

Girl ass can smell amazing, smell like nothing, or it can smell horrible. When you're a virgin you think any "bad" girl smell must be "bad in a sexy way." But no, girls can be just plain horrifyingly bad, like choking and vomiting, you cannot even force yourself to do this, bad.

The key thing is that you always do an exploratory smell before you go in there for the long haul, enough to give yourself plausible deniability if you detect it's gonna be bad and need to deflect to kissing her back or something.

Never gamble on swampass. Eventually, you'll lose.

Someone recommended Mindfulness in Plain English here recently and it seems good. He also said not to go too deply into vipassana if you are potentially schizo.

My meditating friend recommends starting with 10-20 minutes a day of very low-key, easy mindfulness, in no particular position. Just one that you won't fall asleep in. Do some reading on how mindfulness works and try it out. Many different versions of it exist, lots of different goals. Be careful if you're schizo prone.

Manheim by far. I think there's some defense of the older one, but Manheim supposedly has a better holistic feel for Celine's colloquial style. And he's a good translator in general.

>How do I get into Shakespeare?

Read plays that interest you first. Use an annotated version. Take it slow. Learn to feel the rhythm of the iambic pentameter. Listen to some readings of what you're reading on Youtube and see how people do it rhythmically and you'll get it eventually.

Keep your mind flexible in interpreting the syntax. Teach yourself not to demand rapid skimming with full comprehension. Slow down and logic out what the structure of a sentence you don't understand is.

>How do I get into Shakespeare?
Start off with one of his "lighter" plays: Romeo &Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, maybe Henry V. Read the lines out loud if possible. If not, just remember to forget everything Veeky Forums has ever told you about subvocalizing. Try to read as much of a particular play at once as you can; they were written to be consumed all at once, and actually reading them that way will help you keep up with all the characters and plotlines. Use annotations or reading companions if possible; there has been more written about Shakespeare and how to approach his work than maybe any other author, so don't ignore the resources available to you. Finally, try to enjoy what you're reading! Once you get into the rhythm of the words, hopefully you'll start to see how engaging and worthwhile the material is.

Can we talk about Proust?
What's your favorite translation in English?
Does anybody know how the Swedish translation compares to the two English ones?
I felt that Swann's Way wasn't as impressive as I hoped when I first read it in Swedish but I'm considering rereading and most likely in English, hoping to afterwards continue with part 2

Are Ishmael and Queequeg gay? Because so far it's hard to imagine how they could be more gay without actually having sex.

Ha! That's absolutely classic Martin!

Veeky Forums will almost always have one up

Is the "Penguin book of Japanese Verse" any good?
It seems like a wallet friendly option to get a little sense of Japanese poetry, which I'm planning to do,but what about the contents?
It seems decently sized.

If consciousness is an emergent quality, then causality should apply to it via traceable processes, thus negating free will. A somewhat common argument to this is "nope because quantum physics", but obviously this does not apply to molecular level where all the processes in the brain operate. Is is correct, and if not so, what opposing arguments exist?

*Is this

>contemporary short story collection
Make Something Up by Chuck Palahniuk is a fun read

Yes and No
Start with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as it's largely disconnected from other Arthurian series. If you like what you read, The Death of Arthur is a good collection.

Don't get the picture either.

...

...

reading DFW turned that girl into a whore

Definetly start with Richard III or King Lear, that's the lighter stuff. Julius Caesar and Romeo And Juliet are mid tier, and save Macbeth Hamlet and The Tempest for last.

Should I read Ulysses first with notes or without notes?

Also, which text? I've heard the 1922 Oxford is good.

I'm a newfag, I looked on the wiki and read some books on it and it's mostly been pretty pretty bad, what are some good books for a newfaggot like me?

The books that I've read and enjoyed so far is Catch-22, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Siddhartha