This brick of a book right here

HOLY FLAMING ANAL BEADS THIS BOOK IS HUGE

IT THIS SHIT WORTH READING?

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If you like DFW, yes.

Never read Davidium Forest Wallsex

Well, I'm of the opinion that reading IJ is worthy way to spend your time.

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, is the worst science fiction novel ever written. The truth is it might be the worst novel ever written, or at least published, but given the fact that Wallace has stiff competition from the burgeoning spawn of PC Elitist writers, not to mention his own PoMo kith, such as Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and that ilk, I think I’ll stick with just calling it the worst sci fi has ever produced. Granted, I am not one who has read all the depth of sci fi offerings, but I’ve read enough to know that this so far undershoots the rest that by mere extrapolation it would be a titanic achievement for another author to do worse. Yes, there are the sword and sorcerer riff-raff, the cyber-punk crapola, and the remanent dross of the Golden and Silver Ages of sci fi still hanging around, and even those who’ve produced masterpieces, such as Richard Matheson and Ursula LeGuin, have been known to write horrorshow books in terms of quality, but this dystopian novel by Wallace is worse than them all.

If novels like Leo Tolstoy’s War And Peace and Les Miserables can be abridged, so can this piece of crap. Let me suggest a haiku:

Infinite Jest shows

David Foster Wallace sucks

really, really bad.

This is a copypaste i hope

It's worth reading if you have an IQ above 120. Otherwise just stick to genre and ez-mode "classics."

>The truth is it might be the worst novel ever written, or at least published
Hardly.

Yes, it's probably the best novel of the past 25 years

It's only like 1000 pages. Isn't that long

Fuck off. Longer does not equal better or more meaningful and sure as hell does not require a higher IQ. It requires more time on your hands.

No. It's really not worth reading. DFW killed himself because he realized that length did not make a book more meaningful and trying to appear smart did not make you smart.

Yeah, this. Because memes aside, it’s still one of the best modern novels and a hell of a lot better than what an average writer is/can be pulling off. Most of the people who criticize Wallace don’t have nearly as much literary talent as him. It’s a really flawed but great work

>horrorshow in terms of quality

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Infinite Jest is interesting and demanding for a lot for reasons besides simply being long. It has a very unique structure, subject matter and style.

DFW was suicidal before he even began working on Infinite Jest, and published tons of magazine articles and short stories in that time. He killed himself because he came off his meds and then they didn't work when he tried to get back on them.

t. Butthurt 110 IQ
The ones who almost made it are always the most resentful

I need a serious answer that isn't a meme, i'm thinking of giving this book a try because of how much people meme about it but i can never find out why. Is this really a meme?
Is it worth reading at all?

There is a reason IJ is a meme on this shithole. The book is trash. DFW has no sense for poetry, scene crafting, characterization or any insight at human nature at all. DFW maximalism is the worst of the postmodern generation. He throws so much useless detail at you (though you can excuse in the first chapter for example, as you can say it's meant to mimic Hal's perspective, though it's not much different than the third person in the rest of the novel) that you'll be lucky if you can recall a scene at all. His masturbatory use of the footnote obfuscates, providing nothing of worth. His characters are a pastiche of what DFW thinks reality actually is, you'll understand what i am talking about if you read his essays on entertainment and irony. Wallace thinks muh irony is bad, but he fails to realize that the only irony poisoned individuals, are people like him, college educated, 110 Wittgenstein readers who unfortunately have a lot of time. You need only one look at Facebook Mom groups to realize that Murica needs more irony, not less.

David Foster Wallace died of suicide in september 2008.

>*110 iq

Extremely pretentious. DFW can go fuck himself. Footnotes? Jesus he was full of himself.

Think of it like an internet honeypot. But instead of trying to catch pedophiles, IJ is trying to catch spergy bookworms who think they're smart because they are spergy bookworms. Every fan of this novel sounds, inside their own head, like the voice of this novel. Inbent, high as fuck, directionless, and dependent. BUT full of oooh way fascinating things to say about what is going on around them.

"John Wayne is of the sock-and-a-shoe, sock-and-a-shoe school."

Devastating.

Go to books.google and read the Eschaton chapter. It's funny. It's actually literature. Then consider yourself fully fortified with all the DFW you will ever need.

from my understanding the entire appeal of DFW is him having a weird funky writing style because woah man it's postmodernism now and nothing matters and this dude is the bleeding fucking edge, latest greatest shit. And yet people who've read him still can't tell me exactly, and coherently what his style is trying to say. Absolutely pointless. Stick to philosophy.

I have an IQ of 140
Will I be too smart to read this?

You may be able to read it without references if you're also well-read already.

No

Is infinite jest the ITAOTS of Veeky Forums?

NO
DISCERNABLE
TALENT

Infinte jest has to be one of the worst titles ever

To be fair though, facebook mom groups mean absolute shit in regards to world history. People talking about modern ailments and pathologies have always been referring to the educated.

I see.
Thank you both, makes sense.

It's really more like the Yeezus of Veeky Forums (mixed reception, interest in the artist's celebrity lifestyle that often outweighs discussion of the actual artwork, obnoxious)

my little baby cant into aesthetics or appreciation

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Yes, Infinite Jest is the ITAOTS of Veeky Forums, because most people here (who have actually read it) like it, but love to talk shit about it for being a meme and the people who actually don't like the book are annoyed that it is posted all the time.
>interest in the artist's celebrity lifestyle that often outweighs discussion of the actual artwork, obnoxious
All of these apply to ITAOTS.
People are obsessed with Jeff Mangum's reclusive lifestyle and lyrical allusions to Anne Frank even though neither of these things are actually that important to the album. Instead of discussing the album, /mu/ tends to shitpost 'funny' lyrics and conspiracy theories about Anne Frank and time machines.
Although there is an argument to be made for Gravity's Rainbow being the ITAOTS of Veeky Forums, I think Infinite Jest fills the part much better.

Also Yeezus is nowhere near as sincere as ITAOTS.

how the fuck am i supposed to know before reading that?

lol no Sebald alone is one hundred times better than this hack

Feel like most people stopped caring about yeezus like a year or two after it was out on /mu/ ITAOTS is still pretty memed much how infinite jest still is memed

I just finished it without reading most of the footnotes, am I an idiot?

you were an idiot for ever starting to read IJ in the first place, so yes, you are among fellow idiots as well

:( well, I liked the shitty thing, for what it's worth

I wonder what to read next

i'm sort of new to this board. why are so many anons always so angry? i mean i get if you don't like the author but it some of these posts feel like someone angrily frothing at the mouth behind a screen furiously typing insults at the writer and people who like him out of fear of having their opinion invalidated.

like, not a single user in this thread has even tried to explain why they dislike him. all i see are insults and labels with no justification. like why does everyone assume that their opinion is automatically accepted or doesn't need justification?

I think there are merits to dfw. in his essays at least, he writes in a candidly and in a conversational tone which means that reading him feels similar to talking to a peculiar and observant friend. he gives context about why he sees things the way he does (by diving into his own personal history), gives reason as to why I ought to give a shit about what he's writing and then writes about what he's observing. like his essays on a luxury cruise, TV, tennis and the state fair. On the surface all these things seem obvious and unworthy of any major analysis but he gives interesting if not correct perspectives on them.

in fiction however i haven't read much by him so i can't comment. but honestly his writing style in the essays was refreshing to me .

The anger is a part of chan culture. It exists to push apart established ideas that are usually rotten to the core nowadays, but in itself can't typically create anything new. You need to go elsewhere for that.

Yeah

>You need only one look at Facebook Mom groups to realize that Murica needs more irony, not less.

He was definitely not unaware of this if you go through his 9/11 essay, his comments on irony have more to do with personal fulfillment.

I will never not laugh at the greatly deserved ridicule of this hack-fraud. Why bother reading someone who couldn't even live with himself? The only "sincere" act in the life of David Foster Wallace was when he kicked away the chair. The rest of his life was a lie, the "New Sincerity" a joke whose punchline was the creaking of a leather belt around the rafter. His literary career was a menagerie of self-help lies told to keep his depression at bay - the audience pussy and drugs were the ghosts at that feast of hypocrisy. Behind all the self-awareness, the gimmicks and bandannas there was no discernible talent

What the actual fuck are you on about? There are so many memorable scenes in this book. Mario is one of the most likable and endearing characters in modern literature.

You sound like you’re upset that the book didn’t hold your hand. Sorry there wasn’t a long scene where the character takes a bath so you could pontificate on how that’s obviously a symbol for renewal or baptism.

Based off your writing style alone I can tell you’re upset that the book takes work and you can’t use the entry-level critical reading tactics you learned at community college to make decent analytical statements about the text on your own. This is probably the first book you read that really reminded you you’re not the smartest person in the room, and that’s clearly pissed you off to where you felt the need to write something like “His masturbatory use of the footnote obfuscates, providing nothing of worth.”

Jesus fucking Christ man, YOU are the ironic shell of a person this book is aimed at healing. Your addiction is to your superiority complex. God forbid someone enjoy something you didn’t “get”, so you had to come here and talk shit on a book that has a lot to offer and is certainly deserving of its praise.

I hope to God something makes you change.

Wallace's fanbase also seems to think he was a genius polymath. I'll admit it takes a lot of cunning to make other people feel stupid and still seem approachable, and DFW pulled every trick he could. For starters, he claimed that Infinite Jest didn't “work the way novels normally work” and was “really designed more like a piece of music than a book,” with lots of “leitmotifs and things that curve back” and “all this stuff about movement within limits and whether you can puncture the limits or not.” So how's that different from the way “novels normally work”? Fiction doesn't have rhythm or recurring motifs? Of course it does, but you won't intimidate many people if you tell them to read your novel like a book. Better to play the obsessive Wagnerian genius, make everyone secretly insecure for touching your work without having a PhD in music history.

What the actual fuck are you on about? There are so many memorable scenes in this book. Mario is one of the most likable and endearing characters in modern literature.


Great, memorable scenes like "i get in a taxi and say, to the library and step on it!", and human like characters like Mario, the retarded noble savage.


>and that’s clearly pissed you off to where you felt the need to write something like “His masturbatory use of the footnote obfuscates, providing nothing of worth.”

Wrong. His use of footnotes rather than to add depth and narrative, almost always are used for showing how much Wallace knows about some subject. It was also a way to make his readers feel smart (and he admitted it), making entry level points about subjects like philosophy, so undergrads can read and feel "woah, i understood that".


>God forbid someone enjoy something you didn’t “get”, so you had to come here and talk shit on a book that has a lot to offer and is certainly deserving of its praise.

What the actual fuck are you on about? You can enjoy Infinite Jest all you want. OP was looking for an honest opinion about the work.

He was chronically envious of others’ artistic achievements (even bad ones, like those of Dave Eggers and Don DeLillo), going so far as to verbally intimidate and harass students whose work received praise from their classmates, under the auspice of “keeping egos in check”. Even his close friend, Jonathan Franzen, admitted that Wallace was basically a narcissistic, anhedonic jerk, and that his suicide may have been at least partially an underhanded form of careerism, a way to galvanize him and his work in the hearts and minds of his fanbase. He was the ultimate poseur, a man obsessed with using art as a way to feed his ego and satiate his depressive neediness, though he never escaped feeling (and reality) that he was a fraud, for such demons taunted him all the way to his death. Yet despite the reality of his behavior and pathology, his verbosity, look, and education allowed him to be marketed as some sort of intellectual savior, a man whose big brain and broad education must have held some key to understanding the complexities of the world.

Let’s operate on your (incorrect) assumption that his footnotes were put in place to make people feel smart about themselves.

You’re just further proving my point about how fragile your ego is. No one can feel smart except me! Me me me! I go on lit and I read the books!!!! I’m a gatekeeper to both fiction and critical thought!! I want no one else to feel smart but me!!!

God damn dude. That coupled with your fundamental mischaracterization(1) of Mario as a “noble savage” (a term you likely throw around a lot when encounter any character with sub-par intelligence because you remember how your teacher spoon-fed it’s meaning to you back when you read Heart of Darkness in 9th grade and were the only kid in class giving your opinions because you thought they were divine when in reality the other kids just didn’t want to bother with a class discussion that was being emceed by you and your supercilious bullshit) just reinforces the fact you’re giving unqualified opinions.

1. Fundamentally mischaracterizing Mario Incandenza is something people with inflated senses of self-worth and intellect often do.

Not him but this whole post is a huge projection. Sad!

Ah, yes, it is I! Projecting!

Dude I was homeschooled. I didn’t have class discussions. I’m also arguing with this guy because he’s trying to cut down a prolific author who I will fully admit is smarter than me and has things to say that warrant his work being read.

I’m not projecting at all. I don’t think the other user and I are in any way similar. Not everything needs to be reduced to some psych-101 Freudian thing, no offense.

>You’re just further proving my point about how fragile your ego is. No one can feel smart except me! Me me me! I go on lit and I read the books!!!! I’m a gatekeeper to both fiction and critical thought!! I want no one else to feel smart but me!!!

Wrong. I'm merely stating the footnotes were a psychological trick and DFW is a hack for using it.

>1. Fundamentally mischaracterizing Mario Incandenza is something people with inflated senses of self-worth and intellect often do.

Mario lacks any depth. You can keep saying it otherwhise but the retarded man who acts sincerely and kind bringing the goodness in everyone belongs in a high school girl anime.

I just read DT Max's biography of DFW and this basically sums him up

>. You need only one look at Facebook Mom groups to realize that Murica needs more irony, not less.
And irony will help them, how?

Come one man. Mario certainly doesn’t bring out the goodness in everyone. Just look at how he makes Avril act and how many times it’s hammered home that her over-coddling of her children is actually terrible, fairly calculated, and half of what has all of her sons fucked up.

It’s also stressed so many times throughout the book that Mario’s presence for most everyone other than Hal is somewhat of a psychological burden. He’s also present in the room when Clipperton blows his brains out. CT is in all likelihood his father and they have no relationship.

It sounds like you’re applying the nature of Mario’s relationship with Hal to his relationship with every other character and that’s just not true. Every chance Orin gets the chance to talk about him he calls him a stunted worthless retard.

You’re just wrong my guy.

>It’s also stressed so many times throughout the book that Mario’s presence for most everyone other than Hal is somewhat of a psychological burden.

Wow. A retarded kid is a psychological burden? holy....

Mario's noble savage christ-like ( :) ) figure is shallow and puppet like. His one dimension comes from the fact that the man barely acts on free will, since he's brain damaged. He's used by Wallace as an ideal of sincerity and humanity which shows the naivety of DFW when analyzing human nature.

>You're just wrong my guy.

Wrong.

Infinite Jest is a mess in nearly every way imaginable.

He actually killed himself in a calculated attempt at aggrandizing his posthumous reputation as a tortured artist, the man is an embarrassment.

>book literally called the eternal meme
>IS THIS SHIT WORTH READING HURRRR??
No it's fucking not. It's a meme.

>>Why bother reading someone who couldn't even live with himself?
>There are still people, in this day and age, who think not killing yourself is the greatest accomplishment there is
deadweight

> abridging Les Miserables or War and Peace

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he’s written other much shorter stuff bucko

IQ is meaningless and intelligence can be improved.

Worth reading? It's not worth shitting on while jerking off. DFW is such a fucking loser. Thank fucking GOD he offed himself.

Wrong. IQ has been shown to correlate with wealth, success and many other things. It is the single most important number in the West if you want to succeed.

Correlation does not equal causation. Not only is hard work much more important than IQ for success, your intelligence improves by working hard if your goals align.

The trouble is a terse description lends to opinionated description, the sort of shallow interpretation he sought to overcome.

Take for example:

Harry was dumb, he stuck his dick in the pencil sharpener.

vs

Harry ran the pencil game almost every day, outperforming the lottery with an R squared value chin shavingly close to monadic. As a young-bull born to incarcerated parents, he often felt that society neglected to grant him the sympathy and cuddling he felt he deserved, more so than other kids. This lead to him volunteering to eat worms or lie face down in the road - anything that might make an onlooker feel compassion for the boy being so taken advantage of, these were the sort of human connections a young Harry craved. As he made forward progress in the timeline, Harry found he had to constantly up the ante to remind people the emotional debt owed to himself accrued. Like most people, Harry's childhood pathology extended well into adulthood, inculcated within a veneer of street smarts he personally believed himself to have in spades. By this time his cohorts, now co-workers, had ceased to permit his increasingly dangerous escapades, and he satisfied at finally establishing the value of his humanity, continued par for the course. But what he mistook for compassion was the groaning sigh under load of loathing. That was why when the new guy Fred, who was uninformed but could read social cues well enough, was offered to bet 20 simoleons Harry totally wouldn't fuck the pencil sharpener, he caveated with "as long as it's plugged in first."

>It is the single most important number in the West if you want to succeed.
That depends on how you define success. If one's idea of success is middle - upper middle class life, then IQ isn't really all that important. A high IQ will help, but it is in no way a requirement.
If your idea of success goes beyond an upper middle class lifestyle then IQ becomes a much more important number.

that second one is accurate

>t. hasn't read the book

Since it's not possible for me to be objective on this point, can someone else supply a shortened version of the pencil story?

>obsessed with IQ
>uses the term “the West”

hey look a political prostitute

>t. trying to meme another victim into reading his meme book