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Cormac McCarthy is a hack who plagiarized Louis L'Amour
English-language literature past Shakespeare was largely mediocre until Continentals injected vitality into it (Conrad, Hamsun, Mirbeau, Celine)
English-language poetry was a literal scam invented for career advancement (see: Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth by John Dolan)
the recording industry killed poetry. why write verse when you can learn six guitar chords and bang out love songs. musicians get way more pussy too
most "official" modern American lit is just boring Calvinist morality tales with identity politics and/or obtuse language drizzled on top to make it seem more sophisticated
Tom Wolfe was the diet coke version of Hunter S. Thompson and it's a travesty that the latter killed himself and the former died in a warm bed of natural causes
Ted Hughes was a genuinely talented poet whose career got ruined because he was blamed for his insane thot wife (Sylvia Plath) killing herself
Wuthering Heights is easily one of the worst things ever written in the English language
literature would be a lot better if lit-critics would stop pretending to be highbrow. there's nothing wrong with liking genre fiction, eating peanuts, drinking beer, and playing video games. there's nothing more childish than making a show out of being an adult
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are overrated. Twain's best work is Pudd'n'head Wilson, one of the most misanthropic works in the English language
Henry Miller was a Celine plagiarist who somehow managed to make casual sex boring by treating it like a Protestant Bible study
Norman Mailer was the mid-century equivalent of a Boomer trying to ingratiate himself with Zoomers by playing Fortnite
most English literature is undergirded by three fears: fear of Catholics, fear of Continental Europe, and fear of the Irish. post-19th century English literature adds a fourth fear: fear of the United States. these base, paranoid hatreds are never far from the English soul
1984 is the ultimate English paranoia novel, as it depicts all four of these fears: a totalitarian Britain that has been annexed by the U.S., uses the 24-hour (Continental) clock, and has an Irish/Catholic antagonist torturing an Englishman
most people shouldn't bother reading Continental philosophy (especially Nietzsche) unless they're fluent in the language it was written in, because English is too mercantile a language to convey its nuances
nobody should read Shakespeare. instead you should go see his plays performed live or grab a good movie version. people struggle to read Shakespeare because his works were not meant to be READ but to be WATCHED
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is an artless ripoff of Celine's Journey to the End of the Night. ever wonder all of his follow-up novels were so bad? it's because there was nothing left for him to plagiarize
Catholics make up a disproportionate number of the greatest English-language writers because they're capable of injecting personal suffering into their work. Protestants are too used to stamping their boots on Catholics' faces to develop the empathy needed for good art
e.g. Flannery O'Connor (Catholic) is a far better Southern writer than Harper Lee (Protestant). Lee was a careerist suck-up who libeled her own people in exchange for accolades from the New York set while O'Connor died young and in poverty
Canadian literature is a scam designed to reward whichever wordsmith is best at hating Americans. a prime example of this is the Handmaid's Tale, which literally imagines the U.S. as a Christian theocracy and Canada as the world's foremost defender of liberal democracy
English Canada has produced exactly three good writers: Leonard Cohen, William Gibson, and Heather O'Neill, and it's not a coincidence that two of them are American (Gibson fled to Canada to avoid the draft and O'Neill's mother was Southern and she was raised partly in the South)
French Canada has a much better literary record, much like how English-language literature in general was stagnating until the French helped revitalize it. check out Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'occasion (aka the Tin Flute)
the Coen brothers are the American equivalent of Shakespeare and the motion picture is the American equivalent of the stage play
much like how the recording industry killed poetry, the movie industry killed playwriting. aside from Equus, I struggle to think of a genuinely memorable play written after the rise of Hollywood. there are a few good ones but the fact that I can't recall them immediately is bad
a lot of "classic" literature is crap and no one wants to admit it
killing God was a very bad thing for literature. with the spiritual element excised from the public consciousness, writers have had to resort to ever more extreme descriptions of physicality (casual sex, ultraviolence etc.) to fill the void and...it doesn't really work
ex: abolitionists in the mid-19th century argued that slavery was morally wrong because black people had souls and it was wrong to enslave God's people. modern depictions of slavery (e.g. Twelve Years a Slave) substitute this with cartoonishly over-the-top violence
video games can be art, but conscious attempts to make arty video games (e.g. Passage, Gone Home) should be laughed out the door for the same reason that self-consciously IMPORTANT literary fiction should be mocked
Oscar Wilde was a good writer who deserved to rot in prison, and it's disturbingly appropriate that he spent his entire life scoffing at Christian morality and he was brought down by his own hubris
Chuck Palahniuk is painfully overrated. Fight Club isn't bad but it's a typical homosexual misunderstanding of what masculinity is. Yukio Mishima had the same problem: blinkered fixation on physicality, creating works that are slick but spiritually vacuous
a general theme among popular "classic" writers is that they were better at schmoozing and kissing ass than writing. ex: James Joyce gets far more accolades than he deserves (the best Irish modernist writers were Flann O'Brien and W.B. Yeats)
modern American literature is neoliberalism.txt: the dramatization of minor inconveniences by privileged individuals. the ur-text for this is Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, about SAD it was that his parents died when he was an adult and left him a ton of money
rhyming poetry only works when paired with music, particularly in the modern era, because a good guitar riff, sensual vocals, or a sax solo can wallpaper over slant rhyming and uneven meter. see the songs of Elysian Fields for an example of how to do this well
writing characters is more important than writing a story. if you're writing a work of fiction, focus on developing your protagonist. if you do it right, the story will write itself as you imagine plausible scenarios based on your character's personality
translating poetry is impossible due to the fact that poetry relies on the quirks of the language it is written in in order to work. when you read poetry that has been translated, you're not reading the original poet, you're reading a new work based on that poet's verse
don't use big words in your writing unless they come naturally. breaking out a thesaurus makes you look like a pretentious fool. simple, direct, clear language is always the best; as Dolan put, people squirt impenetrable clouds of ink for the same reason that squids do
Ayn Rand's big sin is not that she was a bad writer, but that she ham-handedly used her literature as a vehicle for her politics. her first novel We the Living is her best for this reason: it has very little politicking
"neo-trad" writing is a bad idea. too many right-wing writers (particularly poets) want to emulate the styles of the past instead of trailblazing, inadvertently living up to the left's stereotype of right-wingers being backwards and provincial
English-language literature is perpetually held back by the fact that Brits, Americans etc. cannot enjoy a book unless they agree with the author's politics. it's one of the main reasons why regular injections from the non-English world are necessary to keep it alive
e.g. Nicolas Sarkozy has stated on numerous occasions that Celine, a fascist and Nazi collaborator, is his favorite novelist. in contrast, English-language lit critics and professors work overtime to erase "fascist" or "problematic" writers from the canon no matter their talent
it helps to have life experience before you start writing, but if you're not already inclined towards compulsive, self-abasing writing, don't go ruining your life with casual sex and drug abuse. writing is more of a mental illness than a legitimate profession
dying young can be a good career move not only because it will immortalize you in peoples' eyes, it will prevent you from devolving into self-parody. GenX writers/artists who are still alive are aging poorly because of this and will be remembered as jokes when they finally pass
GenXers are perpetual adolescents, at war with normality, thinking that being edgily anti-Christian and fixated on violence and sex are rebellious. Ex: Mark Ames, Jim Goad, Bret Easton Ellis. much like the Beatniks, their work is good when you're young but loses luster as you age
F. Scott Fitzgerald is overrated, but in his defense, he died before he could finish what would have been his magnum opus, the Last Tycoon, an epic about how the egalitarian WASPs who founded Hollywood were pushed out by patriarchal Jews and Catholics
Fitzgerald's great sin was feeling sorry for the rich. the Great Gatsby is best read as a tale of how middle-class striverdom ruins the people who fall for its lies. (and as an aside, the Amazon adaptation of the Last Tycoon, staring Matt Bomer and Kelsey Grammer, is really good)
in general, it's a bad idea to write about the "emptiness" of the hedonistic life. Americans eat that shit up (Less Than Zero, A Million Little Pieces etc.) because it makes them feel better about the fact that they're poor, unknown, and not getting laid, but it's not true
unless you legitimately believe in God, no one is going to believe you when you talk about how being rich and having all the girls and cocaine you want is a bad thing. particularly now, when a third of American men are incels
faux-confessional memoirs like A Million Little Pieces and the Heroin Diaries are a particularly fucked-up form of bragging: "my sins are way bigger than yours!" it's why they include weird shit like James Frey bragging about killing a priest for touching his thigh
New England Protestant literature, the dominant strand of American literature, is defined by its insistence on turning everything into a lurid morality play. even "avant-garde" writers like David Foster Wallace rely on this tired playbook even if they slather it in postmodernisms
ever wonder why Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, Hubert Selby, William Vollmann etc. insist on putting a moral into everything? this is why. the American Calvinist (wait, that's redundant) can't enjoy anything unless it spoonfeeds him a Mr. Mackey-tier moral about the world
all of these writers borrow the structure used by Augustine's Confessions, but without the crucial element of God. Augustine agonized over his sins not for their own sake but because he feared Hell. without that fear, the Augustinian approach fails
much in the same way that the insular nature of Wordsworth and the Lake Poets helped kill British literature for nearly a century, the SJW hatred of "cultural appropriation" is killing literature and art by blocking the cultural synthesis necessary for growth and evolution
it's not necessarily true that all good writing is rewriting, but it doesn't hurt. contra Bukowski's image as a layabout drunk, he was a perfectionist who obsessively rewrote his manuscripts until they were perfect. don't be afraid to work over your drafts
the English Civil War is the primary reason why English-language literature died after Shakespeare. Cromwell turned Britain into an insular, creative wasteland by closing theaters and banning fun, and the aftereffects lasted for over a century after he passed
gay male writing is often felled by the gay male superiority complex. gays unironically believe their bullshit about "Breeders," resulting in a creative output that is narcissistic and empty (ex: Milo Yiannopoulos). the best gay writers are able to transcend this
gay writer narcissism got exponentially worse after World War II when it merged with Nazism and the occult, becoming part of the gay identity: Tom of Finland based his drawings off Wehrmacht soldiers, and secret swastikas can be found in the films of John Waters and Kenneth Anger
David Bowie is the most famous example of a "gay Nazi": references to Aleister Crowley, Hitler, Nietzsche etc. are prominent in his lyrics, particularly on HUNKY DORY (e.g. "You gotta make way for the Homo Superior" and "Just a mortal with the potential of a superman")
Americans who like Charles Dickens, particularly A Christmas Carol, are cucks. Dickens' oeuvre was anti-American to the core: Ebenezer Scrooge is a parody of New England Puritans, namely their fixation on money and hatred of Christmas (which was illegal in colonial Massachusetts)
African-American literature is a tragedy because affirmative action has made it impossible for good black writers to rise; the ones who become popular do so by playing to the prejudices of white liberals (e.g. Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou)
the three best African-American writers of the 20th century were Donald Goines, Eldridge Cleaver, and Zora Neale Hurston. coincidentally, they all got frozen out of the literary establishment (or at least Cleaver was until he got a lobotomy and became a Reagan Republican)
contrast the simple beauty of Goines' Dopefiend, where he pitilessly narrates the life of a junkie (a life he lived and eventually killed him), to Morrison's Sula, where she depicts black people as savage animals, circus performers for an audience of bourgeois white neolibs
people who whine about Russian literature being too "melodramatic" should spend a week in an ex-Soviet republic. once you've experienced the drama of life in Russia (or Ukraine, or Belarus), Dostoevsky, Gogol etc. make a lot more sense
arguably Russians are the only writers in the broader white/European world who still have a grasp on spirituality, quite possibly because of the Soviets' overt attempts to destroy Christianity (as opposed to the West's covertness). ex: Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita
an example of how the English-speaking world screws over writers based on their politics is how Eduard Limonov has been shunted to the sidelines for his involvement in National Bolshevism, nevermind his excellent Celine-style novels It's Me, Eddie and Memoir of a Russian Punk
King Arthur was a real figure but 90-99 percent of the Dark/Middle Ages stories about him and his knights were made up, either for propaganda reasons or in the service of making a good yarn
Arthurian tales peaked with Malory and Le Morte d'Arthur. everything else sucks with the exception of Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott." the further Arthur got removed from its context as a Welsh legend, the worse it got
right-wingers who scoff at "film studies" are moronic. films are an integral part of modern culture and should be treated seriously. Alfred Hitchcock is arguably more important than any actual British writer of the 20th century
Hitchcock was the rare Brit who could examine America---its flaws and virtues---without falling into the frothing anti-American hatred that forms an integral plank of the English identity. he was the first film director to grapple with the true implications of the medium
Vertigo, while not bad, is the most overrated of Hitchcock's films. it's a movie made for the approval of dumbass art critics and it shows. North by Northwest, Rear Window, Rope, and The Man Who Knew Too Much are much better demonstrations of his talent and vision
while we're on the subject of Hitchcock, Daphne du Maurier is a criminally underrated novelist. Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel are poignant examinations of life in interwar Britain
H.P. Lovecraft was the George Lucas of American literature: a mediocrity whose creations were better off in other peoples' hands. same with Robert E. Howard
in general, horror ages poorly. Lovecraft's conceit of a universe that is indifferent to man's existence only works in a society where belief in God is still widespread. in a world as nihilistic as ours, people just yawn
a lot of genre fiction is garbage, but the unfair stigma against it prevents truly talented writers in those fields from being recognized. Philip K. Dick is a prime example; he never got no respect until he died and now Hollywood wants to adopt everything he wrote into a film
Dick was a lit writer who masqueraded as a sci-fi writer. his writing was about the paranoia and fear of living in mid-century California. the sci-fi elements in his novels are window dressing to obscure the very real issues of his time, which is why his works are timeless
the novelists promoted by New York publishing houses don't enjoy writing in itself, but see it as a resume-builder so they can get plum university teaching job. note that their output always falls to nothing once they get hired by Columbia, CUNY etc.
there's nothing inherently virtuous about books compared to movies, video games etc. books are just a means of conveying information and/or entertainment. anyone who claims otherwise is just trying to look sophisticated and worldly
you will learn more about literature from a few passing @Logo_Daedalus Tweets than from a four-year degree program in most universities (buy his book BTW, review by Matt Forney coming soon at Terror House) amzn.to/2P23oJG
if you aren't reading at least ten books a month you have no business being a writer
Tolkien was a talented writer who killed fantasy and sci-fi. the world of the Lord of the Rings was rooted in actual scholarship: Tolkien was a linguist and medievalist who essentially recreated Middle Ages Europe. everyone who followed him is just a pale imitator for this reason
the Lord of the Rings should never have been adapted into a film. the Bakshi animated version is decent tho
Milan Kundera sucks
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was a better writer than the Marquis de Sade and it's a shame most of his work was never translated into English
literature written during a period of imperial decline is always better than literature during a period of imperial ascent. for examples, see Musil's the Man Without Qualities and Hasek's the Good Soldier Svejk, about the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
ancient Greek drama is worth studying for historical reasons but it is impossible for modern theatergoers to view it in the same way that the ancient Greeks, as it relies on the presuppositions of a pre-Christian world
Jean Anouilh's Antigone is a better play than Sophocles' original because it translates the drama of the original into a context that modern people can grasp. no one born after the advent of Christianity will feel the dread that the ancient Greeks did watching Sophocles' play
the 1948 Paramount decision killed Hollywood (at least until the New Hollywood era began in the 1960's). without the guaranteed income from vertical integration, movie studios stopped experimenting and instead moved their resources into shitty spectacle epics that don't hold up
soft censorship arguably helps improve writing, because it encourages writers to be more creative instead of relying on swear words and graphic depictions of sex and violence
James Frey should be sued for plagiarism and would have had the guy he stole from, Eddie Little, not died of an OD back in 2003. Little's novels Another Day in Paradise and Steel Toes are fantastic, BTW
Salman Rushdie is the absolute worst writer to be the victim of a censorship case. the Satanic Verses is unreadable slop
C.S. Lewis was a creep who desperately wanted to be Tolkien but lacked his scholarship, his honesty, and his Catholicism. he was the cuckold version of Ian Paisley
Ezra Pound sucks and right-wingers who embrace him for his fascism should be ashamed, you're as bad as the lefties who push ideologically-driven art
the obsession with world-building and exposition makes modern sci-fi/fantasy unreadable. A Song of Ice and Fire is a prime example: tons of tenth-generation Xeroxed Tolkien-style backstory, completely squeezing out much-needed space for character development
sci-fi and fantasy writers would do well to narrow the scope of their stories to focus on one or two characters, using ellipsis and understatement to build atmosphere instead of drowning the reader in endless backstory that is impossible to keep up with
Philip K. Dick excels precisely because he didn't world-build. he threw out enough detail to establish his sci-fi settings, then sat back and focused on developing characters. makes his work far more relatable than, say, Heinlein, who couldn't develop characters for shit
every character in a Heinlein novel is either himself or his wife. Starship Troopers is overrated and one of the few cases where the movie is better than the book
the only two good Dick film adaptations are Blade Runner and Total Recall (the Schwarzenegger version, not the modern version). every other Dick adaptation misses the point in spectacular fashion
Blade Runner 2049 is a good film, but it won't hold up in the same way that the original did. I think it was overpraised when it was released because everyone's expectations for it were in the basement and they were shocked to see that the creators put effort into it
Michael Moorcock should sue the jackass who wrote the Witcher novels for plagiarism
Harlan Ellison was mediocre, but his good stuff (I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, A Boy and His Dog) was REALLY good
the only truly great Star Trek series is Deep Space Nine. the original series is decent enough for its time but is aging poorly. TNG was deeply uneven, suffered from Roddenberry's idiocy, and was saved primarily by Patrick Stewart. Voyager and Enterprise were horrible
American culture peaked in the 1980's and has been sliding downwards ever since, with only a slight bump in the late oughts/early tens. the 1980's was the only period when both mainstream culture and indie/alternative culture were firing on all cylinders
if the Coen brothers are the American Shakespeare, David Lynch is the American Marlowe. it's a symptom of how diseased the movie industry is that he can't get work anymore
Aphra Behn was a really good playwright, possibly the only good female playwright
the Divine Comedy is a good poem. it is NOT Catholic doctrine, you fools, stop treating it as such
the Turner Diaries is hilarious to read so long as you keep in mind that it's a moronic revenge fantasy written by a sperg and not a goddamn ideological treatise you dumbass wignats
The Golden Lotus is the sexiest novel ever written
if right-wingers really want ideological art that badly, they should read Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart, a novel about the colonization of Nigeria, is one that would resonate among nationalists if they bothered to read it
Tolstoy is the worst Russian writer by far, a moralizing creep whose comprehension of Christianity was on par with Pete Buttigieg's
Roy Campbell is an underrated poet whose career was unfairly derailed when he got cucked by Virginia Woolf's lesbian side-piece
Campbell was the master of the magisterial backhand in verse form. Here he is giving Virginia Woolf a bitchslap in "On the Same":
Far from the Vulgar haunts of men,
Each sits in her successful room.
Housekeeping with her fountain pen,
and writing novels with her broom.
Far from the Vulgar haunts of men,
Each sits in her successful room.
Housekeeping with her fountain pen,
and writing novels with her broom.
Thomas Pynchon can't write for shit. anyone who claims to have read and understood Gravity's Rainbow is probably a liar
Herman Melville is emblematic of why early American lit is mediocre: grasping attempts to emulate Europe (or at least what he thought was Europe) instead of drawing on the uniqueness of the American experience
Charles Portis is the most underrated novelist alive today. True Grit is great, but his best novel is the Dog of the South. also, the Coen brothers adaptation of True Grit is better than the John Wayne version; Jeff Bridges played Rooster Cogburn, John Wayne played John Wayne
James Joyce's letters to his wife, where he talks about jerking off to the thought of her farting in his face, are more entertaining to read then everything else he ever wrote with the exception of Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kerouac is both overrated and underrated. read him when you're young. if you try and read him past the age of 22 you're gonna hate it
The Jane Birkin version of Serge Gainsbourg's "Je t'aime moi non plus" is far better than the Brigitte Bardot version
nepotism and cronyism in the publishing world suck and should be countered whenever possible, but I've noticed that the people who complain the loudest about it are losers who have no friends, not even online ones. make some friends and they'll promote you, it's not hard
Lolita is a disastrously misunderstood book. Humbert Humbert is supposed to be a pathetic individual who gives up everything to pursue a prepubescent girl who doesn't even like him. as heavily censored as it is, Kubrick's adaptation captures this aspect pretty well
the Kubrick adaptation of A Clockwork Orange is better than Burgess' original novel precisely BECAUSE it omits the final chapter, where Alex reforms
Momus is a shallow man who represents the vacuity at the heart of Generation X. His songs are amusing but there's no there there. he also sucks at writing anything that's longer than four verses
Lars von Trier is a frustrating director because he always manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Nymphomaniac could have been a great study on borderline women but is constantly undermined by you-go-grrlisms
The Cement Garden is not a bad novel. The movie is decent and has good cinematography, but unfortunately the thrill of seeing a teenage Charlotte Gainsbourg with her clothes off is ruined by the fact that her character is getting fucked by her brother
The Song of the Cid is better than any other European epic poem aside from the Iliad and Odyssey
Jews make good writers because their talent for verbal creativity combined with their neurotic nature gives them the empathy and self-abasement necessary for entertaining lit
didacticism makes for bad reading. it's why the best American writers tend to be Catholics or Jews; white American Protestants (read: Calvinists) feel the need to shoehorn a moral into everything. if you feel the need to explain the point of your story, stop
Jane Eyre is one of the rare gems of Victorian literature. Charlotte Brontë was infinitely better than Emily
Sherman Alexie would still be driving drunk on the rez were it not for universities forcing students to read his drivel
Gary Shteyngart is a rare example of a mainstream writer with legitimate talent. The Russian Debutante's Handbook is damned good for a debut. unfortunately, like all the other New York scribblers, he gave up writing once he got that sweet Columbia professorial gig
Don DeLillo sucks
I'm sad that the Coen brothers never got around to making that promised film adaptation of the Yiddish Policeman's Union
Disney is a cancer on the animation industry, promoting weepy sentimentality to children
no contemporary American writer captures the desolate nature of modern sex better than @AndyNowicki (and Terror House will be republishing his books!)
most contemporary women writers are garbage. they're completely lacking in empathy and perspective thanks to a social environment that trains them to be narcissists and gives them unearned power
English's strength as a literary language comes from its incorporation of Latin and French vocabulary, so STFU Nords
book piracy has existed literally since the printing press was invented and trying hard to fight it is a waste of energy
Lysistrata was intended to parody how dumb and petty women can be which is why it's funny whenever feminists propose a "sex strike" based on the play
the best examination of radical Islam is Orhan Pamuk's Snow. also a good examination of inceldom
Mary Shelley was the weakest link in the Byron/Percy Bysshe Shelley literary circle
W.H. Auden was a talentless leech who built his name on Yeats' corpse, a classic move for hacks (Martin Amis famously did it with Nabokov)
Christopher Hitchens was also a hack who oozed between the right and the left based on whichever one was better for his career. glad he's dead
the French have a better eye for spotting good English-language writers/artists than native English speakers do. ex: Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Philip K. Dick
American conservatives have shit aesthetics. my favorite example of this is when William F. Buckley proclaimed the Lives of Others (a good movie, to be fair) to be his favorite movie of all time merely because it had an anti-communist message. the far-right has far better taste
this is mirrored in the shit aesthetics of American Protestants. crap like Unplanned and Fireproof could only emerge from the mulched minds of people whose primary criterion for art is whether it reinforces their worldview
the left continuously wins the culture war because they produce content that is entertaining. right-wingers have this obnoxious need to beat people over the head with their views which turns off the moderate middle
additionally, the left is willing to invest in cultural projects that aren't immediately profitable. the right naively believes that the "free market" will ensure that the cream rises to the top, unaware that culture has been funded through patronage throughout history
George Sand > George Eliot
being a writer is the easiest way to get pussy if you're fat and/or ugly and are too lazy to go to the gym. be careful of getting MeTooed tho 'cause them groupies are nuts
the Coen brothers adaptation of No Country for Old Men is way better than McCarthy's novel because the Coens cut all the fat and sentimentality out of it, and also loaded it with callbacks to Blood Simple, their first movie and their most underrated
American literature is defined by the cultural struggle of New England Protestants vs. everyone else. read Albion's Seed for the academic's explanation of this
Prince secretly wanted to be white. he grew up in Minnesota during a time where there were few black people, largely dated white women (and even cast a white woman as his character's mother in Purple Rain), and his persona was designed in opposition to stereotypes of black men
nobody really likes musicals, just like aristocrats in pre-WWI Europe didn't really like opera. they're both sustained entirely by the snobbery and pretension of their fans
Nazis are more popular as villains in popular culture because communists are boring. they look like shit and have small penises. Nazis wore leather outfits and talked about death and murder, and many of them were also gay, so you've got the gay occult angle too
Richard Brautigan doesn't get enough respect. Trout Fishing in America is great
Celine > Hamsun
American English is more mellifluous than British English because Americans preserve more of the language's French roots: for example, Americans still pronounce "garage" as "ga-raj" while the British have the ugly and clunky "gher-idj"
Southern American English, long ridiculed as the accent of "hicks" by Northerners, is derived from the traditional accent of the English royal family (which makes sense when you consider that the South was historically settled by Cavaliers fleeing the English Civil War)
Smilla's Sense of Snow is an overlooked novel in the English-speaking world
The Atom Station is Halldor Laxness' best work
Soldier of Orange is the best World War II film ever made
much of British literary output post-WWII has revolved around trying to whitewash the crimes of the Empire while finger-wagging every other imperial power: the French, the Belgians, and especially the Americans. weirdly, British leftists are more vociferous about this than Tories
a prominent example of this is the Gringo Trail, a godawful memoir of three British hippies backpacking across South America. the book whines a lot about how the Spanish and Americans raped Latin America, ignoring how the British raped it during the 19th century
understanding Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler is a lot easier when you learn that L.A. was the WASPiest large city in America until relatively recently, not as immigrant-dominated as New York and Chicago. their work (Dick more so) chronicles the end of this paradigm
Austrians are better writers/musicians/artists on average than Germans, who are too humorless and Prussian
Sylvia Plath wanted to fuck her father
people who dismiss 20th century (or newer) literature/art/music/whatever are churls pretending to be kings
Edgar Allan Poe was the first truly American writer
St. Vincent is the Millennial David Bowie, right down to the Nazi/occult signaling and situational homosexuality
Tender is the Night > The Great Gatsby
The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's worst novel. it's worse than the Sun Also Rises, where he had the excuse of youth
The Catcher in the Rye is a whiny novel for children
Houellebecq is the most Catholic writer that France has produced in centuries
John O'Hara got a bum rap. BUtterfield 8 is extremely good, as is the movie adaptation with Elizabeth Taylor
Tennessee Williams could have been a contendah but he chose to be a bum. He was good with dialogue but his fixation on his own homosexuality gives his plays an unsettling narcissistic feel that only got worse as he got older
Samuel Beckett was a pretentious twit. Waiting for Godot is good tho
Ken Kesey's starring role in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Wolfe's only good book BTW) was a greater contribution to literature than anything he wrote himself
learning Latin and Greek should be mandatory for all college students
Tim O'Brien is a better antiwar novelist than Kurt Vonnegut
novels about womanizing professors (The Corrections, Tomcat in Love) are almost always gormless, navel-gazing trash
My Years with Ayn Rand by Nathaniel Branden is a much better book than anything Rand herself wrote
Ayn Rand plagiarized her novel Anthem from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, a far-better book, though it lacks Rand's fetish of getting raped on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange
John Dolan's Pleasant Hell remains the best novel by an English-language writer in the 21st century so far
the best literary nonfiction work of the 21st century thus far is @rooshv's A Dead Bat in Paraguay. The Pussy by @Delicious_Tacos and Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm are two and three. all these books capture the ennui of the modern man expertly and are funny
Bartleby the Scrivener is the worst short story ever written
Aldous Huxley > George Orwell
the original Douay-Rheims may be the more accurate Bible (for Catholics, anyway), but the King James Version is way better to read
D.H. Lawrence was like the Unabomber if the Unabomber fucked
Wallace Stevens was the greatest poet of the 20th century
Tennyson was a sellout. He was genuinely talented but wasted his gifts on licking Queen Victoria's hairy muff
John Milton was the 17th century version of John Hagee and every other mulch-brained Calvinist preacher
William Wordsworth singlehandedly ruined English-language literature for a century
Mamet: extremely contrived but snappy dialogue. should have become a poet
there's more value in a bit of doggerel by Baudelaire than in The bulk of Victorian English poetry
WASPs have spent generations oppressing Catholics, Irish, and meds for the crime of existing and have lost all capacity for introspection and self-awareness as a result, with the occasional exception such as Lord Byron
good. courageous. the ending of Of Mice and Men was an act of bravery
Macbeth > Hamlet
Shalamov > Solzhenitsyn
Parliament of Foules > The Canterbury Tales
if you haven't read Aristotle's Rhetoric, don't even bother writing philosophy. this sounds obvious until you realize that post-Nietzsche Anglo philosophers make a point of ignoring every predecessor of theirs that wrote in a foreign language
heroin is the best drug to abuse if you want to write well. marijuana is the worst
Raoul Vaneigem's Book of Pleasures is the best explanation of the Anglo obsession with commodifying every aspect of human life. he was also probably one of a handful of '68 intellectuals who wasn't a CIA stooge
the last great literary generation in terms of signal to noise ratio was the Silent Generation (born 1925 to 1942). the next great generation will be the Zoomers (born 2005 to present; Zoomers born 2004 and earlier are just late Millennials). read the Fourth Turning to learn more
Arthur Bremer's An Assassin's Diary is the greatest piece of incel lit ever and it deserves a proper film adaptation (re: not Taxi Driver, as fine a film as it may be)
Michel Foucault's concept of "biopower" was just a rationalization of why he enjoyed getting flogged in dungeons with a ball gag in his mouth
Continental philosophy is as much literature as it is Weltanschauung, a reality that is lost when it is translated into English (particularly by Americans, the most hardheaded and literalist of Anglos)
the French victory in the Hundred Years' War set the stage for the isolationism and mercantilism of the English-speaking peoples. evicted from the European continent, they developed an instinct for parochialism and paranoia that requires effort and determination to fight
Emily Dickinson was the second truly American writer
Americans are better at paranoia than the English. English paranoia is always insincere and self-pitying (see: George Orwell, Charles Dickens), American paranoia is motivated by legitimate, deeply held fear
Amiri Baraka was right about white men
The Matrix trilogy is the second-most prominent and expensive example of the disasters that happen when Anglos read Continental philosophy without understanding its proper context. the most prominent and expensive example was the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville
Australia and New Zealand are cultural vacuums, living proof that the further white people get from Europe, the dumber they become
having said that, Candy is a great novel and a far more accurate depiction of drug use than any American novel released during the same period
The Lucky Country by Donald Horne is a hilarious piece of cultural criticism made even funnier by the fact that Aussies don't realize that the book is about what fucking morons they are
conspiracy theories are an integral part of American culture, a byproduct of our Puritan forerunners' fear of Catholicism. banning conspiracy theories from the Internet is the equivalent of the Italians burning down the Sistine Chapel or the British banning Shakespeare
another integral American archetype is the fire-breathing, pulpit-pounding Protestant preacher. only in an environment freed from the weight of European/Christian history could characters like Pastor Steven Anderson and Pastor David Manning not only survive, but thrive
Marxism was destined to devolve into identity politics onanism the second the Communist Manifesto was translated into English. the capitalistic, mercantile mind of the Anglo cannot abide a philosophy that is collectivist at its core
Czech culture is defined by craven opportunism. see: the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the Good Soldier Svejk, Closely Watched Trains
the most important non-English literary languages aside from Latin and Greek are, in ascending order, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Russian
Allen Ginsberg helped save poetry from declining into irrelevance in the age of the record player and it's unspeakably offensive (and stereotypically Anglo) that the left is now throwing him under the bus for his political beliefs
Michael Jackson almost certainly did not molest anyone. he was a child in an adult's body, mentally regressed thanks to his father's abuse and the horror of watching his teenage brothers bang groupies as a kid. @RAZ0RFIST's videos do a good job making the case for MJ's innocence
from a literary perspective, the Song of Songs is the best book of the Bible
men are typically better at writing female characters than women are at writing male characters, particularly in the modern era when women are trained to become narcissists the moment they get their first period
Dune is an incredibly tedious novel
Tucker Max deserves credit as a pioneer of modern publishing, but his narcissism did him in. His first book is entertaining (if exaggerated/fabricated in parts) but the follow-ups are sad
Wagner's operas were the Turner Diaries with an orchestra: lots of bombast and big words, no substance, no introspection. that's why he got BTFOed by Tolkien so easily
the Germans are better at philosophizing than entertaining, the French are the reverse
De Profundis is Oscar Wilde's best work
Slavoj Zizek is a meme
Pauline Reage > Marquis de Sade
Salo is the most honest depiction of homosexuality ever made
Malfew Seklew > Ragnar Redbeard
German is the ugliest literary language. it reads like the ravings of a schizophrenic and sounds like a frog taking a shit in a blender
Jonathan Bowden's SADE is a better analysis of the man's works than any actual biography of him
Luc Besson is the French David Lynch and a rare example of the French not just ripping Anglos off but also failing at it. The Professional is good tho
John Fante doesn't get enough credit. Ask the Dust is great
Alexander Dugin is the best living example of how Continental Europeans blur the line between philosophy and literature. he's the Russian Milo Yiannopoulos and I'm sure he is deeply amused by Americans who think he is some kind of global fascist puppetmaster
Inception is Christopher Nolan's finest film and one of a handful that succeeded in taking Philip K. Dick's ideas and developing them in an interesting way
Tim Burton's Batman > Christopher Nolan's Batman > whatever the "DC Extended Universe" is
Charles Bukowski is the greatest Christian writer of the 20th century
Jack Vance is one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century
Beowulf is the least interesting of all the European epic myths
I'm never going to understand burlesque for as long as I live
1960's skin mags were more literate than mainstream novels published today. did you know that Playboy et al. used to run short stories?
Ezra Pound composed exactly two good lines of poetry in his life
T.S. Eliot's work aged like Chinese food left on a sidewalk on a sunny day. I can't read "The Hollow Men" without fighting back a chuckle
Kenneth Koch's "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams" is funnier than anything Williams himself wrote
Douglas Coupland's "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" is one of the most contrived books I've ever read. I couldn't even finish it. how fitting that GenX was named by this mincing fraud
"In a Station of the Metro."
It's not even that good, it's just that unlike the rest of Pound's work, it doesn't overstay its welcome.
It's not even that good, it's just that unlike the rest of Pound's work, it doesn't overstay its welcome.
I can't fucking stand Mitch Albom and the bullshit Oprah mushy Christianity-without-Christ treacly faux-inspiration hokum garbage that he puts out. I had to read Tuesdays with Morrie in high school and I hated every syllable of it
John Cale was a better musician than Lou Reed but Reed was a better lyricist. Cale's work has a slick coldness to it (with exceptions such as ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, his best album) while Reed's hits you right in the feels (particularly BERLIN and STREET HASSLE)
Moe Tucker's solo work is underrated
the only convincing love stories in video games were in Wing Commander III and Heavy Rain. the romance plots in BioWare RPGs have gone from tolerable to embarrassing over the past twenty years. I literally facepalmed through the sex scenes in all three Mass Effect games
I'd say that Hideo Kojima should have become a film director, but the problem is that he'd be a mediocre film director, while the video game industry has less competition when it comes to storytelling and writing. Metal Gear Solid 2 is underrated though and gets an unfair rap
Spec Ops: The Line is overrated goony trash and could only gather the accolades it did because video game journalists are provincial morons
The Velvet Underground > The Velvet Underground and Nico > White Light/White Heat > Loaded (but Loaded is much, much better than the purists give it credit for)
Thurston Moore > Kurt Cobain
if Kurt Cobain hadn't blown his brains out he'd be a Russiagater and a pussy hat wearer and everyone would see him for the vacuous junkie he was
late Boomer culture (born 1955 and after) is infinitely better than early Boomer culture because late Boomers absorbed some of GenX's nihilism. e.g. Sex Pistols > Grateful Dead
Thurston Moore's solo work > Lee Ranaldo's solo work >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Kim Gordon's solo work
Television was the best band of the 1970's
Sex Pistols > The Clash
the 1990's were the absolute worst decade for popular music. all of the good acts during that period got their start in the 1980's (e.g. Nirvana, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). the fall of the Soviet Union made Americans dumb and stupid
Animal Collective is only worth listening to when Deakin fucks off to play with his Barbie dolls or whatever
Folktronic is Momus' best album and his recordings of "The Lady of Shalott," "Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan," and "Pygmalism" are better than Kahimi Karie's originals
twee pop (Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura) is Scotland's greatest contribution to world culture
oughts were an improvement due to an explosion of indie acts (St. Vincent, Florence and the Machine etc.) breaking the record industry's stranglehold. indie has now choked on its own farts and its best artists (such as St. Vincent) have fled the ghetto
Western RPGs > Japanese RPGs
video games are at their most "artlike" when they explicitly take advantage of the medium's key strength: player control
American culture was destined to supersede British culture. America's dynamism in incorporating European immigrants and African-Americans helped counteract the Hitler's bunker mentality of its founding English stock (or more specifically, New England Calvinist founding stock)
ironically, Anglo and European culture might be better off if the French had lost the Hundred Years' War. if the English had not had their connection to the continent severed, they might not have become so mercantile and lacking in self-awareness
Frank is a better album than Back in Black because Amy Winehouse hadn't completely trashed her vocal cords with cheap cigarettes when she recorded the former
blacks are far better at improvisation than whites. indeed, improvisation is one of blacks' greatest contributions to American and European culture (e.g. jazz)
In Utero > Nevermind
part of the reason why American culture (particularly music) peaked in the 1980's was because it was an era of massive racial crossover. ex: Michael Jackson being the King of Pop, Prince having a majority-white backing band, Talking Hands having a majority-black touring band
Leonard Cohen > Bob Dylan
Ireland has remained a cultural backwater since the founding of the State because the Irish define themselves not on their own qualities, but as being anti-English (much in the same way that Canadian identity is about being anti-American)
Joni Mitchell is the greatest female musician of the 20th century
Dune is David Lynch's worst film and yet it's still better than the book, mostly because of Lynch's knack for grotesque if illogical imagery (see: Baron Harkonnen being a blood-drinking homosexual, or the Man in the Yellow Suit being lobotomized with a bullet in Blue Velvet)
The Undiscovered Country > The Voyage Home > The Wrath of Khan > The Search for Spock > The Motion Picture > The Final Frontier >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> all of the TNG films >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> all of the reboot films
the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, far from being a misogynistic archetype of patriarchal control, is in fact an idealized depiction of borderline personality disorder. if MPDGs existed in real life they would be continuously driving their boyfriends to commit suicide
the sterility and vacuity of Canadian culture and politics is a vision of what the U.S. would have become were it not for immigration from non-Anglo countries
most self-published books suffer because their authors are too cheap to hire an editor. if your typos are bad enough to give people headaches they will hate you. pay someone to look over your book if you want people to pay money for it (hint: Matt Forney edits for a living)
Twin Peaks' second season is (somewhat) unfairly maligned. it's not bad up until the point where BOB is revealed (though Ray Wise's acting in the episode where BOB is arrested is good)
Isaac Asimov was terrible
sci-fi, like horror, has a short shelf life thanks to changing technology. H.G. Wells is a joke today, but Star Trek, Star Wars, Heinlein, Asimov, Stephenson, Gibson, and all other beloved science fiction will be a joke 100 years from now
the supremacy of 1980's culture is best visually illustrated by the music video for Vanity 6's "Nasty Girl": a black girl on the left, a white girl on the right, and a biracial/Jewish girl in the middle, singing a song that is clearly influenced by black funk and white New Wave
which is more interesting: a spy novel based on someone who actually worked as a spy (Ian Fleming), or a spy novel written by someone who's read a lot of spy novels? the answer to this question explains why mainstream culture has become so gormless and sterile in recent years
another example: George Lucas based Star Wars Episode IV off of 1940's pulp action serials and footage of World War II fighter battles. J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson based THEIR Star Wars movies off of watching movies. as such, they are unable to grasp what made Star Wars great
Max Stirner > Friedrich Nietzsche
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus > Goethe's Faust
Goethe was a mediocrity among polymaths and a perfect example of the inferiority of Germans and other northern Europeans when it comes to literature
Arthur Schopenhauer was the greatest of all German philosophers
Lawrence Auster was a terrible writer, a sclerotic thinker, and a nasty human being, but he was an infinitely better writer than his cousin Paul Auster: the New York Trilogy is unreadable
Upton Sinclair was a left-wing fin de siecle Ben Shapiro
H.P. Lovecraft was a serious sperg, which is why his writing lacks the bite it needs to be truly enduring. it's also hilarious that he was an anti-Semite who lost his virginity to a Jewish woman nearly a decade older than him and she was the only girl he ever fucked
same with Robert E. Howard, he was a cloistered sperg whose works lack humanity even if they are stylistically sound. unlike Lovecraft, Howard never lost his virginity because he wanted to fuck his mother
The Conservative, the political zine that Lovecraft wrote and published between 1915 and 1923, is more entertaining than his fiction works because of its comical near-total lack of self-awareness
Tito Perdue is one of the most underrated novelists of our time, mainly because he's so damn prolific. dude's in his eighties and turning out multiple novels a year, all of which are good. we should all hope to be as high-energy as him when we get to his age
in general, "message literature" like the Jungle and Uncle Tom's Cabin has an extremely short shelf life. it's useful to study as historical documentation but has little value beyond that
Kubrick films ranked: Barry Lyndon > Paths of Glory > A Clockwork Orange > Killer's Kiss > Dr. Strangelove > Fear and Desire > The Shining > Lolita > Spartacus > Full Metal Jacket > 2001: A Space Odyssey > The Killing > Eyes Wide Shut
Coen brothers films ranked (1984-2000): Barton Fink > Blood Simple > Miller's Crossing > The Big Lebowski > Fargo > O Brother, Where Art Thou? > The Hudsucker Proxy > Raising Arizona
Coen brothers films ranked (2001-2019): True Grit > Burn After Reading > Inside Llewyn Davis > A Serious Man > Hail, Caesar! > The Man Who Wasn't There > The Ballad of Buster Scruggs > Intolerable Cruelty > No Country for Old Man > The Ladykillers
David Lynch films ranked: Blue Velvet > Lost Highway > Wild at Heart > Eraserhead > The Straight Story > Mulholland Drive > The Elephant Man > Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me > Inland Empire > Dune
Roger Ebert killed film criticism, turned it into glad-handing of newspaper advertisers with his bland, shallow analysis. Armond White and John Simon were infinitely superior to him and will always be superior
