Do you got the balls to share a page you've annotated?

Do you got the balls to share a page you've annotated?

Include context to taste.

I'm ~400 into IJ and have found Wallace tends to get into these motivic fixes. Sometimes it's a shape, color, number, even a certain punctuation mark. I just fucking love it. It makes the whole goddamn chapter like a scavenger hunt.

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>writing on books
Fucking savage.

Take notes in a notepad you God damned pleb.

>he's a genius
If he's so smart, why is he dead?

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It got a little rain-soaked. Got some coffee on it too. I'm not halfway through and the spine's already creased.

I don't give a shit about the book. The book can go fuck itself as I enjoy it like the savage I may be; it's the words that matter, dude.

You fucking philistine.

People like you should be flogged.

Defacing a book should be a crime.

I am completely serious.

A society that allows people to destroy books - whether deliberately or through sheer barbaric lack of care - is a society that will quickly find itself wondering what's so special about books anyway.

You don't treat a book like a sacred object because it is a sacred object. You treat a book like a sacred object to establish the norm that books are fucking worth something. They're not just paper and trash to use, abuse, and then throw away.

holy fuck spooked

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woah... he repeats stuff... that is circular... geniouououoos

>use, abuse, and then throw away.

I mean, you're two for three. I'll give you that.

I'm also happy that you're militant about this, because I don't meet many people in real life who wear their passion proudly for anything, really.

I want you to know that I won't throw away my copy. In fact, I'll continue literally to sleep with it: if there's a crease on the cover when I wake up, that crease just signifies I loved the book so much it took me to my last vestige of physical effort, and no doubt seamlessly transitioned into some wild dreams.

I don't even call myself a hippy. It's like...The book started with scrawls on paper. If I want to unpack this delicately crafted work of art, and get as close into the author's mind as possible, I'm going to have to get down and dirty. It's a show of respect for me.

Library books sure but a man can do as he likes with his property

checkmate bandana man.

I suppose if you'd like to look at it from a completely cynical standpoint--or maybe from the perspective of a creator--he's including these little breadcrumb trails for me, a mouse. And it makes me feel clever when I notice the trail. Guilty! It's admittedly simple, but I still really enjoy it.

And I guess once I collect enough of these, the point is at the END of the novel to try to tie some meaning from it. Don't wanna step into "deeper meaning" shit too early. At least, that's what I learned in high school.

>that mirage thing
Don't say you wouldn't attack an user for writing that in a critique thread

I actually enjoy that layman style of communication, when it's done sparingly. So long as the context is appropriate "that mirage thing" - the dismissive way it's referred to - can perfectly connote an accurate description without bogging down the story in exposition.

Fair enough but the whole sentence is redundant as the previous line, heat shimmers on the deck like fumes from fuel' says pretty much the same thing. Bad writing in my opinion

The most insane example of this brazenly casual tone I found yet--It's one of the first descriptions of Mario, p82, right smack in the middle of a paragraph, he just lets out:

"This should not be rendered in exposition like this, but Mario Incandenza has a severely limited range of verbatim recall."

A complete demolition of indirect characterization. And it fucking works, because Mario's kind of a down to earth, casual dude.

>verbatim recall
makes me cringe

I'll concede that the entire novel is filled with fat. The option exists to trim it down. But, like, it's a celebration of excess, dude. It simply follows it'd be 1088 goddamn self-serving pages long.

In writing so damn unabashedly, in a sort of "fuck precision" way, he may have unwittingly raised a generation of bad habits.

I just can't help but admire that someone had the balls to have so much fun writing. And it worked out for him. It's so utterly selfish, and the enjoyment may be selfish as well. I don't know yet!

Why is infinite jest considered as some kind of masterpiece on here when it's so obviously flawed by so many different metrics ?

it's like 3am and my mania is kind of drifting. i guess regime-changing work is defined by that which challenges the very notions of what constitutes a flaw.

but at the risk of sounding blunt, i'm a little burnt out on Veeky Forums's whole classics fetish. having to wait a century--by which point any remaining work is coated in a suit of armor--waiting that long seems too careful. scared almost. it's like, "we're not gonna DARE enjoy something new. it's too risky."

i like to think if the average person here dropped their egos and picked a random 2017 from Fiction A-Z, gave it a chance, they'd enjoy it. and they'd hate themselves for enjoying it.

i'm a simple person who just wants words to make me feel things. and i'm happy that people here can enjoy something new-ish for once.

I always called this "riding the wave." I first conceptualized it while reading Ulysses. I had to work incredibly hard to even understand what was literally happening. Then on top of that, I had to figure out what references he was making. Then there were all the Homeric and Biblical motifs. Each sentence required my full attention.

Within the sentence, page, or chapter, the pay off was pedantic. "Ha, look how clever I am!" If you explained why your pride to someone else, they'd probably call you pretentious.

But that's okay, because they're probably a nihilist. Because the tools you are using to enjoy Ulysses are the tools you need to derive meaning out of your own life, attention to detail and faith that the connections will eventually reveal themselves.

For example, many of us have trouble getting ourselves to cook a meal and clean up afterwards. When we're younger, it's not even clear why this is a skill we should really value. We think we'll just earn enough money to eat out all of the time. Maybe we will.

Fortunately, I did not. Instead, I had to learn to cook. Then I had a roommate and had to learn how to share -- both our food and our dishes. Then I had a girlfriend and had to learn navigate who cooks which meals. Then I had a stressful job and had to learn how to cook when I was tired and grumpy. None of this was easy or without conflict. I fucked up a lot. I often questioned why I should even bother taking care of myself when I had so little else going for me. But when this wave finally crashed -- when cooking was no longer a novelty -- I found myself on a new plateau above the water. I now had an intimate concept of a home, a place where people compassionately negotiate responsibilities and needs. And already we're pretty close to so-called "Meaning."

>implying masterpieces can't be flawed
>not knowing the definition of "masterpiece", which is: "an artist's or a writer's best work", a metric which is entirely subjective

Let me guess, you're American.

idiot alert

anyway fuck with my 2 volume infinite jest + notes manual

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Can't believe Americans actually think this horrid shit is good

>He sits there in dumb animal pain.
what did he mean by this?

Haha so is your diary a masterpiece because it'd your best work? And I'm English, that was the most offensive thing anyone's said to me on Veeky Forums

When you're a big enough writer you can do almost whatever the fuck you want and it'll fly. We're overly critical when it's up to us in a writing critique where we all feel equal, but once someone gets some fame/critical acclaim, everything like that becomes a charming stylistic quirk. I gotta admit, though, if you're a good enough writer, I'll give that it's alright to do shit like that. DFW generally fits in a deliberately casual/conversational/informal tone into his writing that's pretty well done and which I don't think I've ever seen done in that exact way elsewhere

reverence is what ruins good literature

I’m dick

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What's the point in just underlining things

With nonfiction, secondary lit especially, I find that underlining is the only way to get value from reading. Sure it is great if you can retain as much as you can from the papers/research you read, but the reality is that you won’t be able to retain the majority of facts or ideas in anything but the recycling bin of recollection in your head, so I underline those things that will be most effective in recollecting the construction of thought that was produced in my first reading. I also underline those things that might be one relevant to anything I might be writing, I also underline key points in someone’s systematization of a set of ideas (e.g. first, second...). The purpose of reading is to make re-reading more efficient and effective, in my opinion, by annotating wisely to make the text more useful in the future. The text becomes an extension of the memory.