How Aliterate are you?

How Aliterate are you?

thewalrus.ca/the-rising-tide-of-educated-aliteracy/

Ah yes 2017 the year where everything is normal.

Other urls found in this thread:

athena.unige.ch/athena/rousseau/rousseau_discours_sciences_arts.html
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

>mfw 2smart4u
:^)

When I was falling out of love with literature, I kept asking people in English departments why they loved reading, and they never gave me a good answer. Just one good answer, I'm sure, would have turned me around.

I only come here because /r9k/ makes me depressed. Fuck reading.

What pisses me off is the total apathy these people have towards "aliteracy".

No alarm bells sounding when prominent literary critics don't even read the works they're criticizing?

That's fucking INSANE, and proof that literature is dead. Leaf it to a Can(c)uck to be so impassive in the face of people destroying what he (claims to) love.

...

Also digusted by the author's supposed "love of slaughtering sacred cows." What kind of monster would love to defile things? Some sickening inhuman creature, but not a human being.

I'm not aliterate. I'm misoliterate. I think all books should be burned, or as many as possible. We should strive to destroy as much as we can. That way, people won't even be able to trick themselves into thinking they're having fun anymore.

i think it wouldn't be hard for every person in this thread to name ten books that they think everyone should read, and which nobody else in this thread has even heard of.

there is just too much stuff out there to read all of it. best you can hope is to find things you like and things that are similar to that. for example, Michael Moorcock -> Fritz Leiber -> Jack Vance -> E.R.Eddison.

that's what Veeky Forums SHOULD be about in my arrogant opinion. execute the Zizekposters, or exile them to /x/ with all the other Philosophags, so we can get back to talking about bloody books and not cults of personality.

The only good answer is that they loved reading because it felt good to read. Every other reason is superfluous or can be diluted to that.

pure

I'm 32 and I've read more in the past than I did during my adolescence and 20s. It's really difficult because pop fiction has taken over all of my favorite genres and everything is so terrible.

*past 2 years

>Philip Roth, who made his real feelings known, at least about reading novels, to an interviewer in 2011:

>“I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.”

>How so?

>“I don’t know. I wised up...”

>i think it wouldn't be hard for every person in this thread to name ten books that they think everyone should read, and which nobody else in this thread has even heard of.

it would be extremely hard for me

I'm not denying that aliteracy is good, especially when stemming from Interiorism/Spirituality, BUT Western Literature in general and post-Enlightenment Literature in particular proudly buries the lead several times over with pointless formalism, glacial prologues, hyperextraverted tangents, excruciating repetition, disclaimers, self-indulgent tripe, Rococo landfills, sheer padding, etc.

My aliteracy is pretty malicious, and I've started feeling bad about it. I'm hoping to actually read some of the texts I talk about, but it probably won't happen.

>I tried, at any rate, to read “Brooksmith” in preparation for this essay. Two pages were enough to give me over to unbidden thoughts about the necessity of cleaning my clothes dryer’s lint trap.

HAHAHAH

>it g-g-gets better a-after a-a few pages i p-promise

They’re just not interested. Indeed, they don’t seem to be interested in much of anything aside from airing their own uninformed opinions. This is an attitude characteristic of the internet—where it seems everyone has an opinion to express no matter how little they know about a subject.

Reminder that literally no one would be able to tell a "masterpiece" apart from a meme book that gets memed on Veeky Forums, like Big-Tooled Mechanic of whatever, on a blind read of, say, a 5-10 page excerpt. Actually, they might like the meme simply for not being bloated with garbage and containing more information per word.

Why are people so weird about books taking time to read? They aren't like that with anything else. I guess it's because you have to actually drop what you're doing to read, and it's not social going to a theater. But by far the best reason to read is because you like to read. Just like you would consume any other medium.

I'd like to think that books ARE better than those other mediums, probably because of the reasons that people now are not willing to read them. So it makes me sad that people think reading isn't worth the time.

Because reading demands total attention, unlike for example, video games or TV shows. In those mediums, concentration is not really focused on interpreting text, rather it is interpreting images. You can blame the internet for both destroying attention spans and replacing "text" with "image"

>it is impossible to read everything therefore I will read nothing

Funniest post I've seen all week

if we had always been unrestrained hedonists, our civilization would never have reached its current level of development

good

Fuck me, I'm such an idiot that I didn't get this at first and almost got mad about it

>tfw to intelligent for fiction

I don't fancy reading big novels but I returned to reading fictional literature thanks to Borges, and also the essay The Pleasure of theText by Roland Barthes.

How can you say that?

like this: good

I think it's just that there's more of a demand to worship books, book culture, literacy programs, and literature itself than to actually read them. Everyone's secretly net or tech addicted so they act like they're actually one step away from doing something that makes them look like an important and insightful person, rather than taking the time to actually do that because it's hard.
Like the article said, people complained about it before. Why does it matter? If you're so concerned that people aren't reading your books, then does that necessarily imply that your book is so amazing that not reading it is a bad thing?
Why is not reading literature a bad thing? Because the people who read and enjoy literature have no one to talk to? I always got the sense that people who liked literature didn't like talking to others anyways.

what I mean is: explain youself

you first

TV shows provide as much fiction as a novel and acting performances as theatre.
Book reading (we're speaking of novels only) seems less effective to provide fictional satisfaction than literature, it's that simple.

Ok. If we had lived in the woods forever, our lives would have been "nasty, brutish, and short."

But even more than that^ (which you could definitely argue against, as many have...), there is simply no keeping the cat in the bag:

If our ancestors had stayed stagnant, some other peoples would have gotten locked into the zip-tie handcuffs of technological development and would have developed past and slaughtered/subjugated us in the way that the technologically advanced Europeans did with the whole world in the ages of colonialism and exploration.

Yes, it's sad to think that (if you do believe it, at least) man grew progressively unhappier as his technology improved.

But, as sad as that may have been (nobody can deny the horrors of the industrial revolution, for example), it was still LESS sad than being some Injun on the east coast of the US, looking at the arriving ships and not quite realizing that it was the END of absolutely fucking everything, that things would immediately go from pure integrated paradise to pure shit, that this day you were enjoying would be the only "good" day you or your ancestors would have for hundreds of years, perhaps the last good day you would ever have.

I'd rather be the technological guy in that scenario, even if he has to work in the coal mines (though it's merely the lesser of two evils).

>If we had lived in the woods forever, our lives would have been "nasty, brutish, and short."
[citation needed]
>
*I* wouldn't exist if history was that different so I don't see why I would care who it happened to

Well I made most of the post under the assumption that I was wrong about that, that primal life really was edenic. My point was that, even if that was an eden, the arms race of technological development couldn't keep it that way forever.

>*I* wouldn't exist if history was that different so I don't see why I would care who it happened to

When you said "good," you meant that you'd have preferred to have never existed?

no but that is also true

Get the fuck out, disgusting robot.

Please, user. I'm clean. I don't hate women. And I regularly read from the canon. I may not enjoy it, but I still do it.

It'd be more fair to say that reading requires full attention. Those other mediums are closer to demanding attention in that it's harder to look away from them.

>people who liked literature didn't like talking to others anyways.

Literally me, I spend all my freetime before/after work reading and some on writing but I don't want to talk to anyone desu.

>he fell for the noble savage meme

You are like 20 years late, stop glorifying the past, the tribal times were absolutely atrocious if you actually take the time to learn about it.
You are living in the best possible world that humans ever lived.

[citation needed]

Citation is literally the history of the human civilization.

not a citation

Do you think he understands the irony about writing a book for people on how to not have to read books?

Of course. Why make any bones about embracing the cynicism of the whole thing if you still get a book deal out of it?

Big surprise, literature is meaningless without context. A book whose subject you don't care about is as illegible as a hieroglyphic tablet.

The only answer to this is complete destruction of democracy and the creation of a class of industrial serfs

>Canadian """academics"""
wow it's literally nothing

Some people here read the canon rather than random shit tho so yeah couldn't.

I could probably do a couple of books, but definitely not ten. Lit is a pretty canon oriented board, which is fine. It tends to collect people who are getting into literature and you should be reading canon at that point

...

Wow, people don't give a shit about a dying/dead medium, what a surprise.

>discussing books you haven't read
Book bluffing is a centuries old tradition. Even better is book bluffing books that don't even exist. Oscar Wilde did it at parties to sniff out the tryhards.

>Professor mentioned this article today
Yeah sure "your wife sent it to you" Steve.

I'm pretty aliterate, in the sense that I can read well but so often choose not to. I'm not one to brag about not reading or shit on authors who I've hardly/not read.

IMO, it's really easy to underestimate how good non-lit sources of entertainment have gotten in the past few years: and not just good as in "enjoyable" but a "net good", is in we're not sacrificing much to get it.

Fast internet, powerful computers, hi-res monitors and TVs, Blu-ray, modern vidya consoles, and so on: these are all much better now (and frequently cheaper, sometimes even without adjusting for inflation) than ever before.

Reading, on the other hand, has not changed at all. Sure, we may have access to eReaders, but the main process of reading hasn't been updated. Things like Spreeder are one option, but they have tons of faults.

Ultimately, reading is as boring and difficult now as it's ever been and ever will be. And because the other forms of entertainment/enlightenment have gotten better, there's no longer a gun barrel pointing to our heads, forcing us to read lest we be bored or have to stomach pure crap.

>"""""""random """""shit"""""" """"""""

My friend, kill yourself.

In my personal opinion, the reason the people you asked couldn't answer your question is because they most likely didn't know themselves. While at one point there was had a specific reason for reading, it simply became a reasonless habit.

Another possible reason is because their reasons for reading are simply too personal; for example, what drove me towards literature was a rather convoluted part of my life: when I was a younger teen -- around 12 or so -- I fell into your typical hormone-driven depression mostly due to factors outside of my control. Eventually, I became so tired of wallowing in my constant despair and cynicism that I began looking for a way out. I sought a purpose for my existence, specifically through literature (this is what drove me to read Dostoevsky's works in particular), and I attribute the fact that I am both happy and successful now to this literary pursuit of purpose back in my early teens.

I'm not really sure if this blog post will help you, but I hope you take something away from my spiel. ^.^

>t. brainlet

Reading fiction is on par with watching Netflix to be honest.

Mega cringe

1. People don't know how to read poetry, it takes some time to learn, and people are no longer literate people, with minds which pay attention to words, but words are simply used as instruments to get stuff, demands, with little thought or meaning. The Visual spectacle has overtaken literature.

2. People are intellectually lazy and don't grow out of childhood action shows like Game of Thrones or many of the other things you can find on Netflix for instance.

3. People are generally revolting and uncurious and self-interest and self-satisfied, are shit tier and deserve to be ignored.

This is one of the more Reddit opinions I see on Veeky Forums

These are probably the gross characteristics of the issue.

10

>people are happy with what they have
>"Stop being happy with what you have!"
every time

Being happy with what you have is literally a degenerate's ideology, every person of any worth is driven always beyond his present existence and what is simply given.

Way to out yourself as an idiot however.

Imagine if all humanity truly was happy by what they have, imagine the hellish prison of masturbatory present pleasures to go on forever. We would have no art, no life, no achievement, no science, no war, no love, nothing which truly concerns humanity. Literature and even human culture wouldn't exist because we would have no need for them, there would be no religion, since man would never feel the soaring need to carry on and imagine beyond, and also wouldn't feel the disappointment and despair which characterises humanity, where no earthly object can fill the depth of desire.

In short, we would lose the quality of infinite desire which characterises humanity, and be animals, simply enjoying what is simply given to them. What you've attempted to use to defend people is their 'happiness', well! If you think the animal state is so desirable!

A man is happy with his wife, children, several close friends and a steady job. What reason is there to go beyond that state of happiness and invite torment and sorrow into his life?
If by "drive beyond", you refer to plumbing the depths of literature and philosophy in order to satisfy the ego's desire for knowledge, then no, I don't agree that someone should do so rather than interacting with those already in ones life.

>Imagine if all humanity truly was happy by what they have
I don't need to, very few people actually achieve a state of perpetual happiness, and considering the blind luck that factors into getting to that state, I highly doubt that even a reasonable fraction of humanity will ever be happy.
Why do assume that the production of art, scientific inquiry and achievement would stop?
A man enjoys the creative aspect of produce art? Then he produces art. A man enjoys looking into the secrets of the universe and what makes it function? So it shall be.
People don't need to be forced by pain to create or inquire.

Whether you would like to imagine it or not, humanity cannot resist 'to go beyond that state of happiness and invite torment and sorrow into his life'.

A man with a family is a supreme example of always going beyond and desiring beyond the present, just look at what a father is! A father is never just content, he suffers at work, he has to deal with debts, and he's always betting on the future of his children, which by definition goes beyond him, since they'll outlive him; if not that, his present job is never really sufficient, he's on the lookout for a promotion. He'll have a few drinking friends, but he'll be in competition, even envy, resentment of them, and his co-workers, since they are competing to be good fathers and workers, showing pictures of their kids to each other, for instance, and worrying.

Sounds like you have a nihilistic and buddhistic idea of happiness and contentment which is wholly alien to all the more profound insights even of the buddhist religion, and especially of literature, philosophy, and human life.

Even if you content yourself with what is given, as the pragmatic needs of life demand, you are only putting your present loves in the place of your desire to stop-gap it, to not risk falling into melancholy, dejection, even hatred of your present life. Finite need is to be distinguished from infinite desire, the desire which mortifies as much as it enlivens.

The average person simply does not have the mental capacity to understand classic novels in English.

It isn't that dire though, most of these people are plebs who would be peasants and slaves in years past. The """education""" system is set up for the lowest common denominator. Half of the population is below-average intelligence, and 90% of people are inferior subhumans compared to their betters and their rightful rulers.

>tfw to smart for humanity

Oh, so you too read the article?

What a naive view of human psychology. A look at world literature will show you that some of the highest pleasures are painful to perform, the highest needs are hard; nothing ever brings final consolation, and no enjoyable thing can be repeated ad infinitum, for it invites boredom and disgust; that if you aim for pleasure you get nothing but depression; that the only people who live in the moment live in either death or religious or erotic ecstasy; that man is as such, prior to any external circumstances, in desire of something impossible, finds enjoyment where he doesn't want to find it, even in pain, is full of envy and dejection and is incorrigible in life.

>the fact that I am both happy and successful now

Veeky Forums has made me so cynical that I felt a pang of resentment when i read this

You misunderstand.
The suffering that fatherhood brings is a form of happiness, and perhaps happiness is the wrong word to use when describing the feeling of fulfillment that one gets by performing actions that bring them towards what makes the most ideal person that they can be, or what they believe they can be. Or they can be happy shitposting on the internet and getting into arguments with retards over which anime girl is best. Regardless, to strive towards your goal using the means at you disposal is to be content, and your goal need not be reading dusty old tomes from syphilitic assholes.

You're incredibly naive.

You do realise that people fall into nervous breakdowns and depressions the minute they actually GET what they think they want, and live the ideal life they like? Death and despair is at the bottom of every joy whether you like it or not, and men can only bear life by not getting what they want.

I mean I am always alliterative actually. Don't worry folks, I'll be here all night...alone ;-; because all my friends are married and have livesand that being said I understand that from the word itself he must mean (a) as in 'without' as in people aren't reading anymore. It honestly sounds too much like illiterate or non-literate...too confusing imho desu senpai. Please free me from this prison /lit.

Free yourself by breaking you cage and slaughtering your jailers
dehumanize yourself and face to bloodshed

Do you think people can only enjoy one singular thing? The man gets bored of painting and decides to investigate another topic such as banging rocks together, the point is not to pursue happiness but topics that pique your interest and to investigate at your discretion, to sum up the point succinctly; The journey, not the destination, is what's important.
For example, assuming that you are interested in literature, do you enjoy the process of acquiring more knowledge on whatever philosophical or ideological topic that you investigate?

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, by Roberto Calasso

Ka, by Roberto Calasso

The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio – poet, seducer and preacher of war, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega, Gregory Chatin

Transparent Things, Vladimir Nabokov

To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee

Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo, Eric Hansen

Welcome to the NHK, Tatsuhiko Takimoto

Hey, Wait... , Jason

Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market , Pierre Bourdieu

There's my ten, Veeky Forums, let me hear yours.

>You do realise that people fall into nervous breakdowns and depressions the minute they actually GET what they think they want
That's my point, people must strive to a goal and not to actually achieve, or think that they achieve the highest point that they can reach in order to remain content. To strive is to be content, to stagnate is to fall into despair.
The man grows bored of Netflix, if he does nothing he will fall into despair, so he switches to fucking the dog on the couch to remain in a state of contentment. He's "achieving" a goal by doing so, not a particularly good goal, but a goal that he has set nonetheless.

That's obvious, but the minute you say 'the journey and not the destination is the point' you've already agreed with me. First on the way humanity is never happy with any one thing, and moves on and on in a continued movement, secondly that happiness cannot be got but arises unexpectedly by constant detours, putting off any final happiness or destination, and so that man always desires beyond his present condition.

You have agreed with me, and we are a far way away from 'being happy with what you have', a thesis which really sounds like ressentiment and repression to me, a sucker's trick; or in the context of someone using it as a moral rule, an ideological justification of someone elses insatisfactory conditions.

>The man grows bored of Netflix, if he does nothing he will fall into despair, so he switches to fucking the dog on the couch to remain in a state of contentment. He's "achieving" a goal by doing so, not a particularly good goal, but a goal that he has set nonetheless.

Underrated post/10

You what?
As said earlier, the process of achieving a goal is to be content; the person watching Netflix is in the process of achieving the goal of watching the show, the person finishes the show, they're no longer content.
While this is starting to sound like "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery", I hope I've made a point that is at least coherent.

THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO THAT I'VE NOT ALREADY DONE TO MYSELF

*does crazy dance*

This is without factoring whatever moral code a person may have, even then, it's rare for someone to be entirely entirely self indulgent, or entirely mindless when doing so.

Everyone reads the Internet, which is the POST-BOOK of our world, shaping it to a greaters extent than the invention of print

What will kick the next civilisation leap

Why is it always the French?

Why do people complicate this shit, if you don't read just say you don't read or you've gone off reading. Why pretend you still read? That's like pretending you still play videogames when you've just stopped playing them altogether.

yeah right you dumb faggot

related: you being BTFO by Rousseau athena.unige.ch/athena/rousseau/rousseau_discours_sciences_arts.html

Because the thing they like most of all is being part of a group. When it's group+ to read, they pretend to read, or do so with a minimum of effort if they don't enjoy it, and when it's group+ to not read, they will admit to never having read anything, or downplay the amount they've read to fit in. And it does occur with video games, anywhere there's groups, but not in that way because the question doesn't come up too often: how many games have you read this [period of time]?

>aliteracy

In what sense?

If you were aliterate you wouldn't be able to function as an adult in the developed world in 2017. I'm tired of pseuds throwing around words like they know shit.

if you read the article you'd know

Idem. I can count the books i´ve geuniely read off the fingers of one hand, i prefer /lit always because is the least cancerous board here.
I shouldn´t even be here i´m majoring in math.

I think there could not be anyone more aliterate than me but i feel totally comfortable about it, if i wanna know about some text i just read different reviews about it and that´s it, i rarely feel atracted to an author or a work enough to say i will read it by myself, don´t know exactly about what user states but it does make a difference the amount and type of content we have access to in 2017.

Hopefully one of the things i have to say about this topic comes from one the few books i have actually read, THE BOOK OF SAND by BORGES, within which the short story by the same name tells about a book that is physically infinite, this is having infinite pages and made me understand something crucial about the reason that discourages me from reading that is the undeterministic that the very reading process is, one cannot read one book and say one finish it, simply because one cannot rewrite it.

I think that one would never understand an author´s work unless one puts the exact same effort in reading it that the author spent in writing it, otherwise and anyway the reader will never know completely the idea of a text. All the books are infinite! not even the author himself is completely conscious of his work, discussion is a reasonable aim for reading but having a full relation with the spirit of a book is nothing more than a vain pretension.

Aliteracy isn't synonymous to illiteracy

you.. i like you

I've heard of the d'Annunzio biography and Welcome to the NHK, but to be fair you posted a picture of of one of those books on Veeky Forums