Seriously what the fuck was that

Seriously what the fuck was that

It was a bad book.

>DUDE DRUGS LMAO

you got memed to huh

did you really read it

I am meandering through the audiobook,and enjoying it. The reader is skilled,and it may help dealing with its rollercoaster like subject matter than plain text. A lot of it so far has depth beyond the words that only an actor versed in nuance dialect and the emotional root of certain monologues that really "sell" the story. Experienced Alan Moore's Jerusalem before this. More strange meandering,and just as entertaining.

Post-postmodernism

You're not really meandering if you're listening to the audiobook. The medium matters. There's a significant difference between passively receiving the words and actively reading them. Glad you're enjoying it, though.

It really is better as an audiobook than a book.
The reader really captures the voices of the more uneducated spastic characters whose text reads like shit.

The best book you'll ever read. I'm gonna go read it again, as a matter of fact.

Best novel in the last 30 years, top 10 maybe top 7 maybe top 5 best American Novel of all time

please upload Wardine be cry

I bet there are other books that need to be performed to be truly appreciated. One comes strongly to my mind: Le Morte de Arthur. Having owned the abridged version of the audiobook read marvelously by Derrik Jacobi,I decided to get the full print version from Amazon. What I got was a few hundred pages of prose laid out like a solid wall. Not arranged in paragraphs, nor with simple punctuation marks like quotations to tell when characters were speaking,just the occasional capital letter or period. It hurt my eyes to read it,and how Mister J managed to translate such textural brickwork into nuanced poetry one can only wonder at. Anyone else find a distasteful text better heard than read?

>"I do things like get in a taxi and say, 'The library, and step on it.'"
>that entire ebonics section, which would probably be offensive if it wasn't so incoherent
>multiple mathematical errors and a hilariously faulty understanding of organic chemistry (DFW later admitted that he just copied most of the information on drugs out of a pharmaceutical textbook)
>completely unnecessary endnotes which are not only irritating to read but destroy the cohesion of the narrative rather than allow it to flow
>"And so but"
>frequent and casual use of the word "fag" + multiple transphobic portrayals of transvestites and the ambiguously-gendered
>goofy names, obsession with popular entertainment and the invisible social structures which govern us, postmodern style, endless abbreviations, yet DFW claims to have never read Pynchon
It's obvious to anybody who looks beyond the size of the book, the front cover blurbs from Wallace's MFA-cronies, and the many Veeky Forums memes, that this is not a good book. It's an insecure attempt by Wallace to demonstrate to the literary establishment that he was just as smart as he thought he was, and he failed.

Please Veeky Forums, look beyond DFW's carefully manufactured celebrity appeal and listen to Bloom. Some of you are better than this.

Anyone know how the fuck to get through this. I was at 200 and wanted to kill myself.

Upload the solid turd part my man.

The fucker didn't know how to end a story or how to funnel it into a direction.

How do the endnotes work with an audiobook?

A woman says a number associated with the footnote. I don't know as yet if these are read out at the end of the nivel,since I haven't reached it.

ALL AROUND ME ARE FAMILIAR FACES

>giv Pemulis bf

...

Had a teacher once refer to authors trying to copy Ulysses as “The David Foster Wallace Trap.” Think that sums it up nicely

I noticed all those (shallow) things my first read through. Considering the thing is 1000 pages, those complaints are extremely minor.

>people get called fags

You can’t be serious with that one.

Anyway it’s a good but flawed book, and rightfully a part of Veeky Forumss trilogy of memes.

>DUDE TENNIS SUPERCOOL

what a pseud excuse of a teacher.

how is he trying to "copy" anything non-american, yet alone Ulysses?

his style resembles a more linguistic-oriented Pynchon/DeLillo lovechild, but really a mixture of just about everything that's great about all the highest XX century literature. He's been accused of paraphrasing/parodying Pynchon too much, even though Pynchmeister is kinda lost in there along with all the other influences. Many people claim that IJ was meant to be a successor of GR, written earlier, bit longer, and destined to be as important. And your teacher comes up with a flashy term meant to indicate that DFW copied fucking Joyce?

What a shame.

>non-linear structure
>thinks "the end" is at the physical last page

how can one read, but not think?

to expand on this a bit, I'd probably have to ask what authors did your teacher have on his mind. did he really put some second rate writers' efforts on pair with Wallace, claiming that falling into the trap comes across as a tendency to write something heavily influenced?

It makes so little sense. The writers who read some big works, say Ulysses, and can't stop writing in a similar manner to Joyce's for couple years, have nothing in common with Wallace.

>flashy term
figures

It was sheer brilliance

Overrated piece of crap praised and flaunted by amerimutts as some great work of art

Stale prose, boring story, masturbatory excess of neologisms and 'narratives'

All in all a huge failure, its only merit is filtiring out pseuds from my social life

you sound like a fun, well-adjusted person, who will go on to achieve many great things, and not be bogged down by envy and insecurity.

>implying you have a social life

>DFW claims to have never read Pynchon
source? ive heard him talk about pynchon on a radio show. plus somebody mentioned how big of an impact crying of lot 49 had on him, as in they knew him while he read it andtalked about it with him

>DFW claims to have never read pynchon
source this or you're full of shit
he loved Pynchon and consider Gravity's Rainbow his favourite work until he was 30

You do know the Bloom quote has its origins in the fact that DFW called Bloom's work "turgid" in an endnote in IJ?

Hmmm, literary people have huge, sensitive egos? Who would have thought.

You are the biggest pseud here desu

>stale prose

this is how you know he hasn't read it

I totally missed the meaning and implied conclusion but agree with this. It is honestly a work of genius, and unlike most great opuses that seem to be preeminent from other works by the same author, DFW delivers in his minor works too. IJ captures the American soul in a distinct way that relies on suspicion, obsession, and technology.

How did Mario's ability to redeem with the homeless man make you feel? What did Mario do exactly? What book was that alluding to?

>dull
It's literally not possible to find Infinite Jest "dull." It's the literary equivalent to dividing by zero. If you claim it's "dull" then you're not just stating an absurdity, you're lying about your emotional reaction to Wallace's achievement. Infinite Jest governs the manner in which stories are told in the 21st century; if you've experienced Western culture at any point in the past 20 years then you've imbibed Wallace's stories, dramas, style, characters and their descendants, either consciously or unconsciously. Whether you're aware of it or not, Wallace's work, diluted or otherwise, has entered your mind and drawn your amusement and fascination.

I understand that you might not really know what you're talking about so I'm going to allow you to apologize to me and Infinite Jest in your next post; but frankly, lying about finding Infinite Jest "dull" is a very vulgar and unintelligent thing to do, even if you did so out of ignorance.

I couldn't agree more

Fag1

1 ʸᵒᵘ'ʳᵉ ˢᵉʳiᵒᵘˢˡʸ ᵃ ᶠᵃᵍᵍᵒᵗ ᵖˢᵉᵘᵈ

As in Malllory? Bitch get on my level. Seriously though, after a couple of hours you get into the pace and it is genuinely one of the best books I've ever read

Shit

Holy fuck this, i had to skip most of it on my first read because of how retarded it was.

a-are you the angry ghost of harold bloom??
>carefully manufactured celebrity appeal
dude it sounds like you're talking about a disney star rather than a man who an heroed is way out of existence

my advice:go back to your resting place and bide your time until you get the chance to sexually assault the ghost of naomi wolf

lol why is everyone so mad about this book sud i read this?

>Should I read this?
Yes.

>Why is everyone so mad
Because it is a divisive book. Some people (like me) see it as a breathtaking work of genius. Others see it as a self-indulgent waste of time.

fun fact: the people who hate it just can't come to terms with the fact that their own lives are self-indulgent wastes of time.

reading anything that isn't a "page turner" and full of "excitement" reminds them how boring their lives truly are.

There is quite a bit of cock sucking and quite a bit of player hating going on here. I am in between the two camps. Every word is not perfect, and it may not be as clean as it could have been. But it is a book with a world, and that means something. This book really breathes.

I'd argue people can't come to terms with it because it does read like self-indulgent trash. The only part of IJ that truly did bother me, and I think bears demertiting the world as a whole, were the endnotes and the amount of nicknames in the book. The acronyms were fine, but DFW was clearly deeply intluenced by Don Quixote and I'm positive this influence was overwrought in his need to flagrantly mix identites of characters to a point of excess

Strong arguments fellas

You really convinced me thi

DFW necked himself because he felt he was a failure as a writer.
He was right; he just should've done it sooner and saved the world his pretentious drivel

So you're going through the audio without following along with the endnotes. Hilarious.

Read it once and now listen to the audiobook, it's like riding a bicycle.

>In a letter to Steven Moore from 1988 he claimed not to’ve read Pynchon’s novel, and in an interview with David Wiley following the publication of Infinite Jest he repeated this claim: He said: “The first book that I wrote, The Broom of the System, some reviewer for the New York Times [and we know that’s Kakutani] said it was a rip-off of The Crying of Lot 49, that I hadn’t read yet. So I got all pissed”
Just the first one I could find. DFW pretending not to have read Pynchon or other obvious influences is something that comes up fairly often in articles, usually when his friends call him out on those lies.

Is that Norton? Oxford World Classics has an edition that’s slightly modernized (paragraph breaks, spelling) that’s very readable.

He read The Crying of Lot 49 in 1980 during his first year of college. In interviews its standard for artists of all kinds to publicly feign ignorance of other writers who's influence or fanbase they want to avoid. Most writers would do anything to try to glance away a blow from Kakutani. His favourite author around that time was actually Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon was the kind of pop-culture heavy, self obsessed and paranoiac writing that DFW wrote Infinite Jest to attack (particularly Vineland, which was Pynchon's worst to date and published in 1990, the gestative period between Wallace's drug problems and the publication of IJ)

>In interviews its standard for artists of all kinds to publicly feign ignorance of other writers who's influence
Not to that extent. And he routinely lied about it to editors and other people, not just in interviews.

Infinite jest is litterally nothing like Ulysses

>some reviewer for the ******** said it was a rip-off of The Crying of Lot 49, that I hadn’t read yet. So I got all pissed

This is exactly what they said about Otto Pivner's "The Vanity of Time" but we all knew they were right, right?

Wallace had a marked history of lying to better feign a genius-level intellect, which is why he felt like such a fraud. His sister remembers him lying about his SAT scores, for example. He was ashamed of the fact that he was only accepted to Amherst because he was a legacy, and he avoided math courses to up his GPA.