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"no, you see calling crying a 'lacrimal event' is a way to defamiliarize the audience with crying," he says as he is dragged to the pit of obscurity
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 17:28 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 10:52 |
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like legit I am so pissed right now that this mother fucker is like "clearly you aren't smart enough to see the genius of calling crying a lacrimal event" and its like being insulted by a dude who subsists only on red meat and infowars supplement bars
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 17:32 |
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suspendedreason posted:Cool! There's a lot of really half-baked, overconfident opinions getting thrown around here, which makes it easy to go through and knock them down systematically. Creative Convention is over here, Ben Lerner.
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 17:47 |
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"lacrimal event" is a phrase that i would find hilarious if it were a joke and the joke was that an author is using the phrase "lacrimal event."
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 17:49 |
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Let this moment be a self-reflexive penetrative event for you, you subsapient matriarchal polyamorist see, I know you probably get told to "go gently caress yourself you dumb motherfucker" a lot so I ~defamiliarized~ it so you might be forced to reinspect how you should go gently caress yourself, you dumb motherfucker
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 17:49 |
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suspendedreason posted:Cool! There's a lot of really half-baked, overconfident opinions getting thrown around here, which makes it easy to go through and knock them down systematically.
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 17:57 |
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imagine going through life looking like the guy in a teen comedy who invites the protagonist to a beach party to meet chicks and doesn't get laid
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:03 |
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Your words can hurt.
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:07 |
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Let this moment be a self-reflexive penetrative event for you, you subsapient matriarchal polyamorist
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:12 |
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suspendedreason posted:Sounds like the brightness of a "gleam" is definitionally ambiguous, and Ben Lerner specified. Ok let's play the 'get the dictionaries out' game, then OED posted:
Given delighting the mental faculties can still inspire dread or awe, beauty also definitionally allows for terribleness, (and terrible beauty most definitely did exist in Easter 1916, and exists at any important turning point in history, according to Yeats) yet terrible beauty is still an oxymoron. But it doesn't even matter anyway: Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms posted:
They don't have to be completely mutually exclusive to work. All oxymorons do is exploit the ambiguities in language to make words that seem like they don't fit actually fit together. Me saying 'dimly gleam' is an oxymoron is something of a compliment, oxymorons are [/i]nice things[/i], it's an example of me being charitable to gentle Ben
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:29 |
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the doughiest man
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:30 |
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ben lerner: farinal event
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:35 |
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Cest, as our resident dude who likes poetry how do you respond to the guy arguing his prose was influenced by his being a great poet
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:36 |
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I am kidding and I am not kidding when I say that, as I sat and looked at him, sitting and looking, I intuited an alien intelligence in his countenance, his outrageously curvaceous frons seemingly rising further upwards as the succession of adverbial phrases continued, and even though, properly speaking, it was impossible for them to physically tread beyond their carefully allotted cranial real estate, I could not turn my gaze away from the coastline paradox of his brows.
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 19:07 |
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suspendedreason posted:Spoiler: Ben Lerner is describing himself and his own project, and comparing it to what stupid octopuses do.
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 19:14 |
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Let this moment be a self-reflexive penetrative event for you, you subsapient matriarchal polyamorist
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 19:14 |
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Seriously, I'm going to break this down because I can't believe that someone who stumps so hard for this guy can't manage to puzzle out the one idea he's trying hardest to pound into the reader's head:quote:We had ingested the impossibly tender things entire, the first intact head I had ever consumed, let alone of an animal that decorates its lair, has been observed at complicated play. quote:We sat and watched the traffic and I am kidding and I am not kidding when I say that I intuited an alien intelligence, felt subject to a succession of images, sensations, memories, and affects that did not, properly speaking, belong to me: the ability to perceive polarized light; a conflation of taste and touch as salt was rubbed into the suction cups; a terror localized in my extremities, bypassing the brain completely. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Jan 26, 2019 |
# ? Jan 25, 2019 19:37 |
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I actually liked Angle of Yaw a lot when I read it 10 years ago or so, and as far as I can remember the prose poems were really snappy and pared-down, basically the opposite of this. I don't really know what happened to him in the meantime.
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 20:21 |
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I like fantasy and sci-fi because I am a subsapient matriarchal amorist. Frank Hurbert, Children of Dune posted:Slowly, as befitted the mother of a god, Jessica moved out of the shadows and onto the lip of the ramp. That imagery. Gravitas abounds. Jessica is a space witch and mother of the Muad'Dib, the space Jesus. You are reminded that the protagonists are more akin to the revelers on Mt. Olympus than those living in the city in its shadow. Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer posted:“I have said that I cannot explain my desire for her, and it is true. I loved her with a love thirsty and desperate. I felt that we two might commit some act so atrocious that the world, seeing us, would find it irresistible.” The speaker is Severian, an apprentice in a guild of torturers. Here he describes his relationship with a prisoner he's raping. What for her is a monstrous act of survival is for him a beautiful, poetic thing. He has no self awareness, lies all the time, and is generally a poo poo person. What makes Book of the New Sun so good is that if you don't constantly pause to consider what's really happening, if you just gloss over the words, you'll miss the entire story. Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant posted:“Absolutely.” Baru scuffed her boots on the marble, tugged her belt, adjusted her collar, and shot her cuffs. “It’s time to reward them for their return to our care. Ease off the lash. Give them a little”—slack on their chains—“honey for their table.” Good prose doesn't settle for bad verbs. gently caress. It looks so easy, but I think anyone who has ever tried writing knows it isn't. If your discipline slips for just a second, you're done. The enemy of good prose is the vague, the non specific. Hopefully this is acceptable prose discussion and not just masturbatory quoting. I tried!
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 20:36 |
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Regarding the octopus argument, if the writer is comparing his project of defamiliarization to a 'stupid' octopus playing, isn't he cheapening the whole project? Even if the project is self-aware, even if it's both mocking and not mocking the 'literary', at the end of the day it's just something with a bit of intelligence playing around and it's unimportant. Whereas if he was elevating the idea of the octopus playing, saying that was a symbol of a great intelligence worthy of study, then his project has merit? Did you sabotage your own argument by calling the octopus stupid?
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 21:30 |
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Benson Cunningham posted:Hopefully this is acceptable prose discussion and not just masturbatory quoting. I tried!
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 21:40 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:All the quoting in this thread is masturbatory, but that is pretty unwarranted masturbation. you didn't want to rub one out to that thing with the torturer-rapist going all "I have such beautiful pain to show you, Kirsty"? more like Marquis de sad. 120 days of boredom.
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 21:54 |
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The dead octopus limb being analogous to the “dead” branch of the New York transit system that was converted into the High line is decent enough. But the way he writes about it strangles the idea to death for no good reason.
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 22:02 |
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ahem, "literally massages"
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 22:05 |
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JERRY: You're crying! Admit it, George, you're crying! She made you cry! GEORGE: I'm not crying! This isn't crying! ... It's a lacrimal event!!!
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 22:49 |
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This forum is truly mad when it tries to discuss lit at a more elaborate level than "im reading this 1920s slovakian nazi" "he'll, same". Not saying these posts are bad but they're definitely kinda nuts
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 23:30 |
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suspendedreason posted:Cool! There's a lot of really half-baked, overconfident opinions getting thrown around here, which makes it easy to go through and knock them down systematically. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV1fUwKMdAI
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# ? Jan 25, 2019 23:33 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:He's saying that meat is murder you dip I know. But things do and mean multiple things at once. You can like, kid and not kid simultaneously? He's definitely asking questions about whether it's ethical to eat octopuses. But the person I responded to wondered why he didn't just sum it up as "so weird we eat these intelligent creatures," and I was showing why: because the way he investigates the ethical allows him to also make a fun, undercutting jab at his own project. And the 10:04 project is nothing if not trying to be both ironic and serious simultaneously, both self-deprecatory and deluded with grandeur. EDIT: quote:The dead octopus limb being analogous to the “dead” branch of the New York transit system that was converted into the High line is decent enough. Yeah, it's super cool. There are like six different things happening with the octopus description. Also I love that you guys all think I'm Ben Lerner, keep going I'm so close. suspendedreason fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Jan 26, 2019 |
# ? Jan 26, 2019 00:30 |
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Shut up, Ben.
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# ? Jan 26, 2019 02:02 |
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Guys, this very day, for the first time, Ben Lerner taught me that eating things that have thoughts and feelings might be wrong. Like, woah. Woah.
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# ? Jan 26, 2019 04:57 |
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Ras Het posted:This forum is truly mad when it tries to discuss lit at a more elaborate level than "im reading this 1920s slovakian nazi" "he'll, same". Not saying these posts are bad but they're definitely kinda nuts this was also my impression
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# ? Jan 26, 2019 05:32 |
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J_RBG posted:In that passage I really cringed at 'dimly gleaming'. It could work in a different context (like most prose sins), but something about how it's tossed in there makes it sound like as if it's only in there because Lerner thinks it sounds nice, not because it does something. As it stands the effect is: there's an oxymoron that sounds weird ... and then we move on. It's a weird approach, like just throwing stuff at a wall and seeing if it sticks. it helps the cadence of the sentence a lot, but its insane because the rest of it is just hopeless metrically
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# ? Jan 29, 2019 12:48 |
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"The city had converted an elevated length of abandoned railway spur into an aerial greenway" messes with me. theres rhythm there. there's subdrama. velar frictive, dental consonant, beat, space, beat, then it's smooth dipthongs riding out from the spurs into the modern world. but then it keeps going gay guy fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Jan 29, 2019 |
# ? Jan 29, 2019 13:03 |
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PlaygroundPrimer posted:velar fricative where? PlaygroundPrimer posted:dental consonant lol PlaygroundPrimer posted:then it's smooth dipthongs riding out from the spurs into the modern world. what?
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# ? Jan 29, 2019 13:39 |
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What do any of those words mean? Is this a linguistics thing or what?
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# ? Jan 29, 2019 17:17 |
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Yes. But they're all wrong.
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# ? Jan 29, 2019 17:21 |
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yeah I teach phonetics and that is gibberish
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# ? Jan 29, 2019 17:41 |
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sorry, voiceless denti-alveolar stop, sibilant fricative. diphthong as in aerial greenway
gay guy fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Jan 29, 2019 |
# ? Jan 29, 2019 17:52 |
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Sibilant means s. Like in walrus.
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# ? Jan 29, 2019 18:02 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 10:52 |
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PlaygroundPrimer posted:sorry, voiceless velar stop, sibilant fricative. still makes little sense, please elaborate. to what are you referring? PlaygroundPrimer posted:diphthong as in aerial greenway neither of the former two is a diphthong: /æ/ is one vowel sound; /ɪə/ is two syllables in this instance.
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# ? Jan 29, 2019 18:04 |