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#lit major
burningvelvet · 1 year
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i’m so fucking sick of people (say, the people currently winning the lawsuit) claiming that the internet archive infringes their precious darling copyrights—if they want individual books taken down, why should the trial not only be about those?—why must they punish the entire catalogue? i use the archive primarily for old historical books, academic books, many books that are niche or 100+ years old which no one can buy anywhere, nearly no one would buy even if they could, and which the vast majority of real libraries do not even carry. i use the internet archive practically every single day for research and studying and it is my #1 resource by far. why do people value profits over knowledge? why do people value profits over accessibility? this is a library and the publishing companies are mad because it allows people to read their works for free. IT’S A FUCKING LIBRARY! poor people deserve to read and access archives. poor people make up the majority of the human race. all this trial is accomplishing is making thousands of great books inaccessible to poor people because publishing companies want to save a few bucks. sure, you can borrow books from other libraries via interlibrary loaning, but doing so takes WEEKS due to shipping. the internet archive saves people an enormous amount of time and money. this is a major case of book burning being put into action and practically no one outside of academia gives a fuck or even knows about this issue because journalists know this story won’t sell well and thus aren’t bringing attention to it. i am disgusted and my hope for humanity is in the gutter.
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creatinganewwlife · 2 months
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— "Allowables" by Nikki Giovanni
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One of the dopest literary stories of all time concerns the publication and distribution of Ulysses I’m not even a little bit joking.
James Joyce wrote Ulysses while living in Paris where he, and other modernist authors, hung out in a bookstore called Shakespeare and Company, founded by a woman named Sylvia Beach. The thing you gotta understand about this store and Sylvia is that this was The Place and she was That Bitch. If you were a writer and you came to Paris? You showed up. You bought a book. You talked with Sylvia. It was requisite. The result of this is that she was friends with all the modernists.
Joyce was kinda always perpetually fuckin broke and tended to overspend when he had money so he never had money for long. He was pretty broke at this time and was lamenting the fact that he couldn’t find a publisher to Sylvia. Sylvia was a big fan of Joyce’s work and also a good friend. She hated seeing him broke and was like “you know what my guy? Fuck it. I’ll publish your novel.”
So Joyce gets his book published and has some coin in his pocket and he’s happy. Sylvia has stepped up her career and she’s happy. Only problem? America is passing all sorts of obscenity laws about this time and the wretched moralists in charge have Heard About this book and will absolutely be destroying any copies that make it to port. Making matters worse is that there are hundreds of pre-orders that need to be fulfilled and she can’t do it without the books being confiscated and destroyed.
So Sylvia is lamenting this conundrum to her other good writer friend, Ernest Hemingway, who thinks for a minute and says “Sylvia, gimme a couple days and let me see what I can do.” What else do you say to Hemingway but “sure thing, Ernest.”
Couple days go by and Big Ern comes back to the store with a slip of paper. He hands that slip of paper to Sylvia and she sees it has a phone number. Hemingway tells her to call that number and tell who picks up that Ernest sent her.
There’s not a soul on earth who can resist that prompt and Sylvia, being both only human and also desperate to distribute this book she sunk money she couldn’t really afford into publishing, calls the number. Guy picks up. Asks a few questions about boxes and shipping addresses. Gives her an address in Canada and tells her to include the shipping invoices for the American addresses. Hangs up the phone.
So now a shit load of boxes containing James Joyce’s Ulysses are on their way to Canada. The address? Some fuckin apartment. Owned by This Guy. And everyday this guy takes a few books from the boxes, wraps them up and addresses them, tapes them to his body, and takes the ferry across the lake to the US where he casually slips them into the post boxes and goes on about his day.
Authorities are pretty baffled about how the book is being distributed but no one says a word about until Sylvia Beach spends roughly a page on it in her memoirs, “Shakespeare and Company.”
This was, I think, a few years before Hemingway had to look at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dick and assure him it was a good size after Zelda told him he had a small cock during an argument…..but that’s another story.
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I just need people to know that for my bachelors thesis I accidentally turned in a draft containing the sentence “vampires are gay because they do gay, but female vampires are more gay because they are also women” to my 80 year old professor
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h-polh-kaigetai · 6 months
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Breaking news: Girl loses mind as the Master's she worked her ass off to pursue is already incoherent from Week 1!
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Only three weeks into the semester and I already had 2 exams-
I think I did well though but now I'm sleepy ;;
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Never have I felt more like useless trash than when I have to recommend myself to an audience/ institution (:
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librarymoths · 1 year
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the amount of academic reading + reading i did for personal enjoyment this year has been so fulfilling that i don’t even care that i didn’t reach my goodreads goal and that’s honestly all i could ask for
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abracazabka · 1 year
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"writing this essay is killing me and I did not sign up for this," says i, literature major in what is essentially the essay writing business
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aarushia · 2 years
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Impatiently staring at those three dots while you type something because I’m a modern day gatsby
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burningvelvet · 1 year
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the wikipedia page of every white writer from the 18th/19th/20th centuries:
early life (horrific abuse, dysfunctional family, child prodigy)
career (early failures then sudden wild success, changed literature forever, feuds with other writers)
personal life (racism, anti-semitism, sex scandals, alcoholism, abuse, pedophilia, probably involved with a war or a murder, philanthropy, battles with illnesses, odd habits)
death (either died young in some romanticized way or lived long enough to become a conservative)
legacy (list of adaptations of their work, inspired every writer after them, beloved by scholars, voted one of the top 100 writers by some magazine, had their face put on some limited edition currency or postage stamp)
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creatinganewwlife · 2 months
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“What crimes have you enacted?
:Love makes me forget myself sometimes.I am horribly angry, I am sick with it.”
-Rebecca Tamàs, Witch
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My first semester of grad school is in the books.
Over the last 3.5 months I’ve written 70 pages, read 16 books, not including the hundreds of poems (or personal reading), and countless articles/essays.
This was tough as hell. Probably the hardest thing I’ve done (academically, at least) but just a few months into the program I can already see that I’m a better reader, a better writer, and more insightful critic.
I will absolutely not be taking a full load from here on—it’s all fun and games until you have three 15 pages papers dude within 4 days of each other—but I’m super coming into my own here.
10/10, would grad school again.
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h-polh-kaigetai · 7 months
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I love the Gothic I love dark fantasy I love witchcraft I love fairies I love delving into the psyche
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sapeja · 1 year
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First week of this semester has started and I am already slightly overwhelmed. But with some planning and diligence it will all workout. It’s always important not to stress too much and to despair but to keep a clear head. You can do it
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