literature can change your life

the question is the poll title, not the brackets

Not just my life - everyone's life. Culture, society, the human condition. You can argue that literature is part of a greater lineage - that of conscious expression - but it's consistently been the most powerful and lasting means of advancing that expression

can you give an example?

strongly agree, but perhaps not in the way you mean, ie not in a sense that includes much of the idealistic, but includes much to do with the formation of mental structures, obsessions, narratives of interpretation that you use, which can influence action, decision, styles of written and vocal expression, the comparative importance of material and immaterial things, how you treat information, what things you search for, not necessarily in 'life' as such,but in a place, in a person, in a season.

will write more about this - on phone at the moment - but yeah, strongly agree.

ok, xposted past imago, but yes, wider implications beyond the personal, tho I find that harder to formulate in a way that isn't unverifiable speculation.

i'm talking more on the personal level.

is it practical to learn from literature and implement it in your life?

'the company we keep'

i voted "inclined to agree" because fundamentally i think yeah there's some kind of 'value' of this sort to lit. (...), but i don't have an articulation of what i think that value is or where it lies and nor do i ever quite trust anyone else's

To be completely crass about it, The Bible. To be less crass, Austen and Dickens versus the various social oppressions of their day. To be a little nuanced, the poetic traditions of Homer and the tragedians, and how they related to ancient philosophy - how philosophy was often written in poetic metre, no less. And then there's Chaucer's popularisation of folk-tale, Shakespeare's revolution of idiom...we're back to crass again but I hope the point is clear.

And that's before talking about the incredible, mind-expanding works of 20th-century fiction that have irreversibly awakened me and I'm sure most of you to the possibilities of creative thought. To say I view life in a more carnivalistic, intertwined, energised sense would be an understatement. I'm much more aware of the possible consequences of my actions, and the possible consequences of others' actions. And as Fizzles beautifully puts it, literature helps you to establish a means of approaching, sorting, connecting and discarding the sensual data flung endlessly our way.

fizzles, you are talking more of the subconscious influence.
but what about a conscious will to change?
if, for example, you want to be existentialist after reading Camus - is it practical?
the only philosophy that gives you practical tools to implement is Buddhaism (via meditation), but otherwise i think a reader is a slave to his own old self for most of the time, regarding literature. especially when we have such a short memory..

it's not therapy (that is if you believe therapy can change a person).

"literature helps you to establish a means of approaching, sorting, connecting and discarding the sensual data flung endlessly our way."

i hope so. maybe it is so much a part of me that i take it for granted.

Well, in one sense, literature exists to inspire more literature, just as the global ecosystem exists for its own protraction - the simple, titillating joy of reading invokes a desire to create. This pattern of human behaviour, whether inadvertently or not, has had the side-effect of revolutionising language, society and culture. In my own life, choices I have made about what company to keep and what aspirations to bathe in have hinged, ultimately, on the ineffably buoyant matrix of literary ingressions to my active stream of thought. You want examples? Were it not for an underregarded clique of Modernist poets, I wouldn't be here with my spouse, dog and job, and I certainly wouldn't have refined my conscious choices down to the limited and conversely ambitious few I now harbour.

I disagree strongly with your prescriptive 'two causes for reading', for what that's worth. Or at least, I don't read to escape - quite the opposite - and I don't read to 'improve' myself so much as to explore the current range of human expression and thereby derive pleasure, as well as a sense of how much further, deeper or wider it could be hurled.

I read to pass the time :)

as Fizzles beautifully puts it, literature helps you to establish a means of approaching, sorting, connecting and discarding the sensual data flung endlessly our way.

thanks imago, but I'm not sure that's quite what I meant! I think I'd strongly dial down the 'help' there - as literature itself becomes part of the data, to use your terms, that you have to deal with. I'd like to think that was the case, but I'm not at all sure it is.

It can give you a language - to put it very crudely - to interpret the world, but I wdn't say that language has any special properties that set it above

To answer your question then, nostormo, no, I'm inclined to be sceptical about literature helping or informing a conscious will to change.

Self-help literature probably can! But as for the rest, including the Bible, it's too elliptical in my experience to be of any practical use.

I think you can become an existentialist by reading Camus! or at least, you can believe what Camus writes to be "true" and share the perceptions, interests and the implications for behaviour and priorities that his writing describes or implies, tho i think the practical demands of becoming an abdolute match for a Camusian existentialist are insurmountable (be French, be from the post-war period, be ostracised via a cultivated lack of social affect to the point of martyrdom).

er, set it above any other language/lens?

I'm going to get a Chinese steamed pork bun and see whether I can pick up the new pere ubu album anywhere.

"I don't read to escape - quite the opposite"

i agree - more accurate is to say: read to escape by getting more involved and vice versa.

also, i forgot the third reason, about imagination.

i voted "inclined to disagree". i'm thinking of myself alone mostly.

briefly:

i disagree with the idea of reading as escapism. i don't read to avoid anything outside of reading. i get pleasure from reading but that's not the same thing.

do i read to change or approve my life and/or opinions? perhaps, up to a point, but this formulation of my motives feels off too. i like to learn, but all experience is learning in my opinion. texts can offer useful knowledge in specific ways but i rarely read for that specific purpose. i think i read to explore, and in that sense texts widen my experience and potentially change my opinions, gradually, but again so does all experience. i don't set out to make a change. i set out for pleasure and the pleasure of discovery, and my life changes because each discovery impacts on the course of my life but i haven't set off to make changes.

i'm blathering a bit i suppose. got the new Football Manager and have other mental fish to fry. i don't really believe in self improvement or escapism hence my vote. i'll follow this thread with interest when i'm less distracted.

As many have said it -- from giving other viewpoints to changing the way you receive info and its perception -- there is an internal change from a contact with literature.

I wouldn't say its too different from the contact you may have from seeing a film, watching a play, going to a concert or meeting a person by stepping outside.

Which brings us to the whole business of reading/listening/seeing what people write and make are ways of meeting people without necessarily meeting them.

There may or may not be any value in this, but I wouldn't put literature above anything else in particular.

only u can change ur life, but only if a statue in a poem tells u that u musst

http://i.imgur.com/AvVKC.png
i think google's ad intelligence is leaning towards literature as hedonistic escapism.

The strongest factors for changing one's life involve direct personal experiences and real people. This cannot be disputed. But the question is phrased such that literature need not be a powerful engine for change, but merely contain the possibility for creating signifigant life changes. In that context, I emphatically agree.

In real life experience we are limited to the sum of the people and situations that accidentally occur in our vicinity. In a city, where we may encounter hundreds of people with reasonable frequency, this is less of a limit than when living in rural areas, but it is limiting nonetheless. Literature has the power of introducing us to ideas, characters and situations we could never have experienced otherwise and great lit embodies profound ideas and a universe of situations.

Ideas are very powerful things. They shape cultures and cultures shape us. Injecting new, strange and powerful ideas into our necessarily restricted lives will always change us. It couldn't be otherwise.

http://tx.english-ch.com/teacher/len/elephant-ear-266x234.gif

The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural....

-- Wallace Stevens

This has left me very little space to speak of things that you have been reading. I think, therefore, that I shan't speak of them at all, but instead try to raise a question in your mind as to the value of reading. True, the desire to read is an insatiable desire and you must read. Nevertheless, you must also think. Intellectual isolation loses value in an existence of books. I think I sent you some time ago a quotation from Henry James about living in a world of creation. A world of creation is one of the areas, and only one, of the world of thought and there is no passion like the passion of thinking which grows stronger as one grows older, even though one never thinks anything of particular interest to anyone else. Spend an hour or two a day even if in the beginning you are staggered by the confusion and aimlessness of your thoughts.

I'm going to get a Chinese steamed pork bun and see whether I can pick up the new pere ubu album anywhere.

― Fizzles, Saturday, 5 January 2013 13:53 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

can hipster food change your life

depends on how hungry u are

I'm absolutely cunted. does that count?

what nv said, but i havent got the new football manager.

sometimes, during a good story, a writer can express something nicely or powerfully or imaginatively, be it descriptive of an action or a concept or an ideal, and i'll think 'oh that were good that were, i can see where he earns his corn at this writing lark' and then i'll continue on with the story. that's as much as i'll take from my literature.

obviously ymmv (and i like the answers above fwiw), but in answer to the thread q i guess i'd say only in the way music or accountancy or that chair leg or a promise to a dying man or a particularly good bowl of chilli can change your life: as much as you want it to, consciously or otherwise, and probably in direct proportion to the extent that you've been looking for your life to change.

Or, y'know, maybe i'm just reading the wrong stories.

I don't think it's a case of reading with the goal of changing your life, just that the reading you do may cause that to happen, regardless.

I feel like it's obviously true that all art changes you or at least has the potential to make you think about things in new ways, but it's very tricky to differentiate about the ways that a given form does this.

I instinctively feel that literature is more immersive and direct than cinema or theatre, or music, at least in terms of actually changing your thoughts. I feel like music and theatre and cinema are more part of an ongoing relationship with art itself, whereas I think books can feel more instructive, even if it is still your own interpretation instructing you.

I don't know if others would agree with this though. It's highly personal, but in my case I feel like The Man Without Qualities influenced me hugely, though the whole "best books are the ones that tell you what you already know" is probably a factor. Plus the time of my life I read it in (illness/depression) can't be separated from its effect.

I can't imagine how I would be without having read that book. And even though this is due to the fact that my life as it was was sort of smashed to pieces and had to be rebuilt, I don't think that another form could have taken on so much significance.

You just spend so much more time with books, and it's such a solitary experience, that constantly runs in tandem with personal thought.

Maybe this is how others feel about films, or music, or theatre, and I'm not denigrating my relationship with those, just I guess I feel that literature is the most intellectual form.

from this brilliant post http://jeremydenk.net/blog/2011/10/16/taking-on-taruskin-2/ linked in the Alex Ross thread:

OK, let’s get serious again. Taruskin’s vision omits a central human fact: that we forget (Roland Barthes: “it is precisely because we forget that we read.”) We can add information to our understanding, but old information is always crumbling away. Meaning is not additive; this is true individually and collectively.

i've known this, and forgotten it, and remembered and re-forgotten it, for a long time, and it feels so fucking true

ugh, apologies for my outburst - too much hipster food obv. had one of those drunks where you get lost amidst familiar landscapes and ended up wandering round the bonny purlieus of Tottenham at 3 in the morning looking for nightbuses.

want to write more later but at the moment I'm still feeling bleary and I've STUPIDLY volunteered for something I didn't need to at work that I can only fuck up.

Bring on the escapism.

bonny purlieus is spurs new scottish/french right back

The self help model feels off to me. The 'literary' is kind of a shifting target, tends to resist being used like that imo – when it's taken as lesson or manual or instruction it flattens out, its capacity for surprise is abraded. There's redundancy, an awareness of the non-functional built into it – style as supererogatory. When it's asked 'what can I get out of this?', it refuses to answer, despite the riches it seems to promise.

But on almost all other levels, strongly agree. As Aimless says, real-life experiences are more fundamental, but the experience of books can absolutely be – if you have that kind of nature – constitutive of how you are in the world. It's an encounter, or sequence of encounters, with some of the finest and fullest imaginations that the world's had; it doesn't quite come down to meeting new minds, or finding out about the experience of others – there's a pattern or energy that's at the heart of it for me, recognition and disruption – an alien or startling articulation of something that was in me or I'd seen, and being unsettled or excited by this, and then coming to terms with it, or rebuilding through a three way tussle between me, the world and the book.

But I read a lot of books out of habit, of course, or because they have interesting info in, or they're simple fun. But there's that other thing in the background.

I don't think this is exclusive to literature; I have no doubt others respond to the other arts in the same way; I do occasionally, certainly did, but I feel less committed nowadays.

otoh, I suspect the semantic content of literature makes it different from 'a good meal'; meaning-in-language can carry messages that good food can't. (I'm not sure where that leaves me w/r/t music though. Almost certainly in a contradiction, or in some massive tangle about intension and art-reception-structures.)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

really enjoyed this thread btw

yeah was great

if only ILX would devote say 1/6 of the energy it does to tiresome cyclical clusterfucks...but then I've fallen into the trap there

But on almost all other levels, strongly agree. As Aimless says, real-life experiences are more fundamental, but the experience of books can absolutely be – if you have that kind of nature – constitutive of how you are in the world. It's an encounter, or sequence of encounters, with some of the finest and fullest imaginations that the world's had; it doesn't quite come down to meeting new minds, or finding out about the experience of others – there's a pattern or energy that's at the heart of it for me, recognition and disruption – an alien or startling articulation of something that was in me or I'd seen, and being unsettled or excited by this, and then coming to terms with it, or rebuilding through a three way tussle between me, the world and the book.

this was beautiful, woof - the book as liminal negotiation between self-in-mind and self-in-world - the establishing of a decoded interaction with the limits (or, indeed, quotidian medley) of one's own experience

clusterfucks are a very necessary part of lyfe on ilx, if only people didn't get so worked up about them, which of course is central to the clusterfuck under current technology. dyson should reinvent the clusterfuck.

let's have a laid-back clusterfuck, darraghmac, right here

you're kinda wrong about shit, bro. like, fundamentally, but it's cool, I know some mean techno you could be hearing

i don't really listen to music that isn;t made by real instruments, but thanks for your very kind offer

ah man you've totally done it now, enjoy following your mildly disappointing association soccer crew

ok steady the fuck on

you're right, i went too far. but you're still completely wrong in a way that i can deal with

i have learnt to live with being completely wrong all by myself tbh, one simply doesn;t last in public service without embracing the duality

see i think you're right, just in a really wrong way

you've set me back years, but that's ok, i was happy back then

excuse me, what is this

oh, that

dyson clusterfuck

ima go ima go ima go
ima go ima go ima go
ima go there deems
ima....that deems

dysonned by a bibliophile in a polite beef

you and your crew have driven me to the point of quitting the boards, except i'm not going to do that *yawns, stretches*

^ catty in more ways than one

you've resorted to verbal abuse, an interesting development, and one which you will have regretted

ok, nultisms now, is it

every clusterfuck will feel it needs a proven nultism

i think deems is using his trademark selfdeprecatory humour itt!

IGNORING the clusterfuck...

For me, reading makes much of life bearable: it's a pretty immersive escape hatch into other lives/headspaces/ways of thinking/just really interesting stuff. So, a YES vote

aye and he's ruining every third thread with it, seems

just so sick of this nonstop barrage, think i'm going to enforce a darraghmac excelsior embargo until he cleans his act up

oh what fresh hell, it's irritating singer-songwriter james morrison

i mean, i agree with him and all, but he's fucked up even showing his face. pfft, ilx eh

right i quit

this is doubly distressing, both for the sad spectacle of internecine zinging between esteemed old world ilxors and the possibility that my sparkling zebra katz parody will go unnoticed below the fold

sorry i had to come back just to ask what the fuck that means, but then i'm gone, right

that parody shouldn't have been published under these circumstances - it's morally decrepit and makes your position completely untenable

darraghmac definitely should stay here though as i love him dearly, even if he is wrong

anyway fuck the close reading on this thread

i think we read for 2 reasons (mainly):

oh that techno thing, right, i quit again

i'm tired

where's my dog

imago, all the beagles?

the fifth beagle, stuart muttcliffe

there's no way back from that

it's cool i don't think anybody's reading this any more, also goodnight guys getting up early sucks

there are so many problems with the opening formulation, not least in its implication wrt not reading

of fizzles' enumeration upthread, the formation of mental structures is probably the one i have been thinking of lately

this is wrt sebald, who i like rather a lot without considering him to be near the great pantheon of propadeutic greatness envisioned by the phrase 'life changing', and whose longueurs, the 'sebaldian' as a set of temporospatial inflections, seem to have left a greater legacy in the life of the everyday than might have been expected

wait a fuckin minute

!

Can reading clusterfucks change your life?

Agree slightly

^^ leakage

i like words sometimes in books

Strongly agree.

I don't know that it necessarily changes your life for the better. If you don't need literature, maybe it's because you're really good at meeting the world on its own terms. In literature you get a stylized version of the world. To me that's exciting, but I'm never sure that it's usefully adding to my consciousness of things.

There's also the fact that reading can cultivate your attention span. It can train you to reason for longer stretches of time.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

it's no shins tho

At 15, I the couch potato happened to pick up a very tiny paperback, Drive He Said. It went off into predictable mid-60s dark farce, but did foreground a hip basketball player, unpredictably enough (I didn't know about the Basketball Diaries), and somehow the way he went from stoned flights of jazz-listening to rapt feats of basketball-playing got me onto the courts too. You might as well picture an even more literal couch potato in the mix, but I did it, and it taught me something (which I eventually remembered) about literature (or at least the written word) and myself.