Novels and their relevance

>"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them"

Is novel writing a madness, when they are made redundant by the availability of concise summaries on Wikipedia and elsewhere? If we accept this, we would accept that the summary of Infinite Jest, to pull a random example, is superior to the full work; and that there are commentaries and reviews which exceed the merits of the original work.

And is the short story a superior form of literature anyway, because of its efficiency, economy, and accessibility, when it comes to an author crystallising an idea without the bloat of plot? For myself, I enjoyed Tolstoy's short fiction a long more than his doorstoppers, and this is the same with Dostoevsky. Anton Chekhov is a marvel.

Is there too much emphasis on long-form writing in literature?

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sometimes people like writing lots of words and sometimes people like reading them

>novels are about expressing ideas

Go figure this quote comes from a man who is world-famous for jump-starting the metafictional approach of 20th and 21st century literature, literally writing stories that are just him describing a book that doesn't exist.

Novels are entertainment first and foremost. If you want to express an idea concisely, you should write poetry.

Sometime i have thought about what I say before I say it, and sometimes I know I'm not sure but I want to say something, anything...please, god, please, let them listen to me once! Please oh lord please have them stop yelling at each other and look at me and listen. Just everybody, you're all valid and right and lets just get back to me, please? Please? Please?

Merit suggests a content, a transferable thing which one can pass like a stone from one's cock. The assumption here presupposes that novels are philosophy, though the speaker comes at this from the inverse. He believes that truth may only lay in central metaphors. This is akin to saying that a man's life is worth only what his accomplishments mean to us, what his deeds produce in value for us - such that a machine could one day take all creative jobs by simply plugging in a randomiser with a plot generator and a scriptomatic 3000.

Yet the measure of a man can simply be in his style, and that in itself may affect the world more than a simple truth, because it is the raw content of our social environmental biological existence tempered by language and mythic structures.

To reject the long-winded dandy is to reject the value that is only apparent in appearance, and one does so unwisely. Take for example Les Chants de Maldoror. Seriously, take him! Take him and be done with it. I mean this! I have no one want of him in hear and you shall not hear the end of this you fool if you do not take him soon away from this place! He tears at the ships bottom, listlessly. I desire him to be gone from inside me, and I do not want this, or this, or this.

Otherwise, the marvel is un-miraculous because it cannot actually contain terror and wonder, the object never awesome. A story long and longer still only but an interest and ever a doom that suggests you are in despair.

Or, I like to read long-works when they entrap me, make me anew, cut my body open and tear at my guts. It's very hard to sustain this though, which is why I read mostly actual philosophy and truly awesome poetry - when I'm not reading newspapers.

If you like Chekhov, try Alistair Macleod and Alice Munro.

And they're great scribd.com/document/150460490/Borges-Theme-of-the-Traitor-and-the-Hero

Ideas, a feeling, a tone, an observation - a short story or poem can do it better.

This. I absolutely love and respect Borges, and I he not only made a good point, but also lived up to it, but the sheer undeniable popularity of novels still today attests to their relevance. Not that i think novels are a superior form, but it says something perhaps about the consumption tastes of the general reading public, which as shoppers seem to prioritize speed ("I need a page-turner that I just can't put down!" I fucking hate this term 'page-turner' and what it means) or mass volume ("I need to get hooked on a new series to binge!"). We live in an age of "marathoning" a season of TV in a sitting, we seem now to value the act of consumption in itself, not for the value of slowly reading or watching a narrative and contemplating it. Consumption has become an end in itself, perhaps as a status symbol, an expression of how much liberty and free time one has so as to be able to choose to do this with their time.

Yes, but I also think there's something to be said about the value of immersion. It's enchanting when a piece of media swallows our attention whole for a couple days.

Jorge Luis Borges' stories are very good to reread, which is what I like most about them. The Lottery In Babylon is recommended for those who want to read something by him that is fairly representative of his style and themes. Or just pick up Labyrinths.

What are they for? Share your observations?

Creation is the process of synthesis of new concepts from previously existing ones. In order to synthesize new concepts it's necessary to examine and decompose old ones and analyze the relationship between them and their parts. A new concept may arise spontaneously in us but only after we have gained an intuitive understanding of these relationships through methodical logical observation and verification.

The point is to distract you from the misery of being alive, or to somehow think being alive is good

Alistair Macleod looks interesting so I made a note. As for the all-consuming fashion of novels, this is one aspect where I concede its superiority over a short story. But I find very few novels are without lulls and bloat. I couldn't name a perfect novel, but there are flawless short stories.

This sounds vaguely existential, that something is worthwhile if it stops us from killing ourselves.

Books are also huge now, especially genre work, but I think they're bulked by being more dialogue driven.

>shitposting because you're dumb

lmao. keep telling yourself that.

Ok. Enlighten me then. I'm always up to learning somethin new.

Inferno, I, 32 :: J. L. Borges

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a wall and perhaps a stone gutter filled with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things to pieces and the wind carrying the scent of a deer, but something suffocated and rebelled within him and God spoke to him in a dream: “You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem.” God, in the dream, illumined the animal’s brutishness and the animal understood these reasons and accepted his destiny, but, when he awoke, there was in him only an obscure resignation, a valorous ignorance, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a beast.

Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life. Tradition relates that, upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of men.

>we have gained an INTUITIVE understanding of these relationships through methodical logical observation and verification
you understand the contradiction in this, dont you?.

>you understand the contradiction in this
Honestly, I don't.
For example is not an abstract concept by definition logically derived?
Many people will claim to have an intuitive understanding of an abstract concept by having observed various instances of that concept and thanks to this intuitive understanding would be able to identify other instances of that concept. Still it would have been impossible to do so without first having logically analyzed the former instances to deduce what are the distinguishing qualities of that concept.
I am bad at this whole logical reasoning terminology thing.
Regardless of semantics my initial point stands.
Creation is impossible without the ability to mentally mix and match different pieces of information. You can't dismiss the the latter process as not valuable since is it is integral for the synthesis of new knowledge.

>be Borges
>be incapable of writing a novel
>rationalize my incapacity by arguing that novels are stupid

Yes, but there is his poor eyesight and blindness after the forties. I recall he admitted his shortcomings which include his being bad at describing people. Is there truly a flawless author? I wonder if he would have written something longer if he had better vision - but to my knowledge he always preferred the short form.