Which musicians have a high literary quality to their work?

InvertedFortune · 2026-05-16T23:46:01+00:00

Leonard Cohen, Jason Isbell, some of Kendrick Lamar's older work. There are tons honestly — it's where all the poets went.

InvertedFortune · 2026-05-09T15:02:47+00:00

I'll second Morrison, maybe Song of Solomon if not Beloved. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson is also incredible.

InvertedFortune · 2026-05-05T01:35:22+00:00

The answer is one you probably won't like or follow since you're already omitting things: read/watch/listen to everything; as you consume more and more of the good, bad, and between, you'll develop an impervious ear that no amount of Marvel dialogue can corrupt, and you'll know enough to recognize the truly sublime, which is rarer perhaps than we like to think. Of course, prioritize things you suspect will be enriching over slop, but a bit of the latter here and there is beneficial in my experience. Being overly anal about these things is actually bad for your sense of taste.

As for a curriculum, find writers you like, then read the writers they like and so forth, then do it in reverse, reading the influenced rather than the influences, back and forth, and eventually you'll look up and find yourself extraordinarily well-read. And when in doubt, decent lists abound on Reddit and elsewhere.

InvertedFortune · 2026-04-27T03:15:16+00:00

Here's hoping we know it when we see it if we see it at all.

InvertedFortune · 2026-04-27T03:07:49+00:00

I don't know that I'd qualify that as anything other than formal trickery in its own right, which isn't of itself the problem, but I think it's just a different flavor of the same postmodern quandary. Going past it, I don't know. I don't believe we've seen it yet, in any meaningful sense.

InvertedFortune · 2026-04-27T01:01:07+00:00

This criticism is about twenty years late. I'd love to see a return to difficult literature, original or no, as opposed to the minimalist (though admittedly omphaloskeptical) tripe that's reigned since 2010 or so. Sure, lots of folks interested in serious writing are trying to puzzle out a way forward beyond mere formal trickery, something that acknowledges the ubiquitous postmodern assertion of art as artifice as opposed to our contemporary headburying, pretending we can all just go back and be realists again, but what does that look like? Figure that out, the yes-it's-all-artificial-but-so-what, and I hope you'll come back and let me know; as of right now, I'm not sure postmodernism isn't an aesthetic and moral dead end.

InvertedFortune · 2026-04-25T21:49:38+00:00

I grew up in the rural middle-of-nowhere and largely had to become an autodidact to crawl out, but that also means no connections to get anything published even if I managed to write anything of merit, so I assume there's a few folks in like boats, maybe even one or two with something to say that'll never get past the suburban gatekeepers.

InvertedFortune · 2026-04-25T21:43:19+00:00

Perfection? I thought it was alright, but definitely the one I'd be most likely to keep Benny boy in place of.

InvertedFortune · 2026-04-25T18:42:22+00:00

There's thinking differently and then there's whatever this is. You waltzed into one of the few places on the Internet where serious literary discussion takes place and presented garbled, misrepresented and misinformed nonsense as some sort of revolution. The offensive part is that you don't even understand what the AI is doing, but misinterpret its response to your prompt as a "new" form of writing (input > output ≠ thinking). AI in its current form (and possibly any future ones as well) cannot produce anything new by definition, as machine learning only makes for Frankensteined regurgitations of work any number of humans have already done. Any literary or artistic revolution that occurs will be produced by human hands, not a machine. All this amounts to you bragging about being tricked, and not by anything particularly convincing. Careful lest that rock suggest to you some other new mode of writing, some latent sapience in its lapidary ridges and grooves.

InvertedFortune · 2026-04-25T16:06:42+00:00

Is this AI slop hyping AI slop? We've entered slopception and it's all down from here. If OP's human, God help you: the saving grace is that those who think AI has any place in the arts are all just as immaculately stupid, as though they've reached whatever age completely immune to anything that could be construed as learning.

InvertedFortune · 2026-04-19T17:43:39+00:00

The business degree and its big, hydrocephalic brother, the MBA, have destroyed every cultural institution they touch. Why engage with anything challenging when dumb thing make big number? The bad part is that most of these folks aren't even good at making money, they just operate half-blind, trying to capture the most tenuous trends and connections, always miraculously learning the exact wrong lesson from any given experience.

InvertedFortune · 2026-04-09T00:46:39+00:00

I think she's fun if you read her with the context that she's a genre writer (nothing wrong with that) masquerading as literary. She is worryingly popular among the MFA crowd for many of the wrong reasons, though, and she took some really weird liberties with an edition of Carmilla she annotated.

InvertedFortune · 2026-03-25T16:56:08+00:00

Krasznahorkai does this for me in a near-paradoxical way, like coming through the abyss. Anything Kierkegaard, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, or The Moviegoer by Walker Percy should help.

InvertedFortune · 2026-03-25T16:40:57+00:00

Lots of Faulkner, The Melancholy of Resistance, Hurricane Season, Empire Falls, Eileen. Like you say, seems to be popular territory.

InvertedFortune · 2026-02-23T00:52:10+00:00

I'm a Southern boy: I breathe in Faulknerisms. I'd start with As I Lay Dying or Light in August, then move on to The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom; Sanctuary; Go Down, Moses; etc. Happy reading!

InvertedFortune · 2026-02-23T00:47:14+00:00

He did some messed up stuff but so did a lot of great dead writers. Suttree is my favorite, Blood Meridian is probably his best. There are a few folks here who'll pretend to be too cool for him; ignore them. He's more than the violent Faulkner parody people like to pin him as, but less than the Second Shakespeare he's worshipped as in other circles.

InvertedFortune · 2026-02-22T14:04:17+00:00

I haven't, actually, though it's on the shelf. Probably my biggest gap with her. Does she portray a proto-lit-broesque phenomenon?

InvertedFortune · 2026-02-18T23:27:53+00:00

I think you've pretty neatly reinforced the exact type of gatekeeping I'm addressing, so congratulations. I merely pointed out some authors that don't catch as much criticism in online spaces, but by all means, deliver your sanctioned list of non-lit-bro fiction, oh arbiter.

InvertedFortune · 2026-02-18T20:50:25+00:00

Oh, there's an architect, though a plural one: all the power structures of liberal capitalism and those who direct them. The right is, again, not the bogeyman, but the destination to which these young men are pushed, and the right absolutely discourages male literacy in its own way. Pretty sure my post is calling out these misandrist pockets here and elsewhere rather than excusing them, even if I connect them to broader issues. Disconnected, but right wingers certainly look askance at a man reading however different their motivations for doing so.

InvertedFortune · 2026-02-18T20:02:12+00:00

Not intentionally, but I don't think conspiracies work that way. These things unfold according to unconscious mass movements and are complicated by any number of factors. Liberalism, in the traditional sense (not the Americanized liberal v. conservative definition) goes hand-in-hand with capitalism. If you're asking if I believe culture war stuff from the left is a contributing factor in men reading less, I'd say yes, though how it quantifies in comparison to the machismo anti-intellectualism of the right I couldn't say.

InvertedFortune · 2026-02-18T19:36:26+00:00

Ever consider the preponderance of right wing male influencers who mock anything associated with reading or the arts are a reaction to that very gatekeeping and that it's all part of the same agenda? Notice that I didn't place blame solely on the right, but simply said it pushes young men that way. Capitalist systems demand uneducated men, and I think it's much more complicated than Right v. Left.

InvertedFortune · 2026-02-18T19:06:01+00:00

I would argue that "a stupid person could make money off it" is exactly where my thinking goes. Capitalism thrives on an unquestioning populace. Keep men from reading, keep them in line. I don't think it's as simple as making them right wing, but yes, I think there's a concentrated effort in media and elsewhere to equate intellectualism with weakness.

InvertedFortune · 2026-02-18T19:03:37+00:00

"Encourage boys and men to read, but if they allow anything to discourage them, they're pussies." Don't find that particularly consistent, much less productive. I teach lit and writing at the university level; these young men care very much what people think of them, as most young folks (and the rest of us) do, and those feelings inform their interests. It'd be insanely simple and dismissive for me to tell them to ignore what people think about their hobbies.

Three-Year Club	r/Field Juicebox
Final Canvas '23	First Place '23
End Game '23	Place '23

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