Infinite JUST

if he hadn't told everyone he was trying to be sincere/anti-pretentious/post-irony nobody would ever have thought it about him even once. but somehow because he wrote an essay or two where he said he wasn't pretentious, people like you think he really wasn't. I don't get it.

it's ironic, really.

How is being sincere == pretentious?

no no no. PRETENDING to be sincere is what's pretentious.

>choosing a book list to not look pretentious
>sincere

>book list contains obscure classics
>PRETENTIOUS
>book list contains pleb lit
>FAKE HENCE PRETENTIOUS
There's no winning with you people

it's that he put in a load of pleb lit to pretend to be not pretentious.

it's sincerely ironic, I guess, rather than ironically ironic. but it's still pretentious.

>The top 10 list.
He was just listing books that he liked to read. He also taught a lot of stuff like that and had perfectly appropriate reasons for doing so.

>His /litcore/ list,
When he was as young as most Veeky Forums is and was reading the stuff that pretentious young men always read is as follows:

Socrates (funeral oration)
John Donne
Richard Crashaw
Keats
Schopenhauer
Descartes (meditations & discourse)
Kants (Prolegomena, "the translations are all terrible")
James (Varieties of religious experience)
Wittgenstein (Tractatus)
Joyce
Hemingway
Flannery O'Connor
Cormac McCarthy
Don DeLillio
AS Byatt
Cynthia Ozick
Pynchon ("about 25% of the time")
Batheleme
Tobia Wolff
Raymond Carver
Steinbeck
Stephen Crane
Melville
Larkin
Auden

Lit's problem with DFW is that they don't like looking in the mirror.
He was also, in real life, a complete fuck up and a massive liar, see the DT Max biography.
Again, just you YUO.

This post is actually clever.

For just this once, I'll make a sincere, unironic post regarding IJ.

The book is not as pretentious as the author, but it's still worth a read.

Entry level, sure, I got a lot out of it. One of my favorites.

It seems as if lit has already corrupted any chance of you liking this novel, thereby putting you on guard to all the sappy shit that permeates this book as well as all the tedium. In fact it's smart and insightful and funny (and really sad and disturbing) but dont waste your time reading a 1000 page novel if you're not going to give it its fair shot in explaining itself.

Also the last two hundred pages are worth the grind (but it's not even really a grind) in itself imo

>If you don't like IJ you were just close minded and brainwashed by lit

is that a tin foil hat?

Why do people like Infinite Jest again?

It's just garbage. One of the worst sci fi books of all time

But thats not even what Im saying and you know that

You could almost read the bible for the same number of words. There is no excuse to actually read one of the memetomes especially if you haven't read actually good works of literature yet.

>There's no winning with you people
This. This is/was his ultimate message. There, now you can all fuck off.

everything needs to be sincere and honest and genuine.

also giant carnivorous hamsters lol.

Why would you try to make a point about sincerity with a 1000 page book full of pretentious worldbuilding

Fjodors Dostojevskis.

Out of the 1100 something pages, I enjoyed maybe 200 of them. Reading that book was not worth the effort whatsoever.

This, when he's not putting on his bandana. An example that sticks out significantly for me is around page 180 or so where he lists off the things you come to learn in a psychiatric ward. That was throughly enjoyable to me, then a scant few pages later with Hal and friends titrating some super epic lsd with a list of technical terms on hand. Dub really could have had an excellent 400 page book

i like them both so i guess that makes me an idiot

Ive read infinite jest twice, and while I really like reading each individual part of it, the book cannot justify itself as a whole. It's too long and convoluted to make sense why it's too long and convoluted, which adds nothing to thematic goal of the book.

Still worth a read tho

No

Discernible

Talent

Stupid cunty posters like you who start threads asking Veeky Forums to convince you to read a fucking book need to kill. Your. Selves. Pretending you already have an idea of what the book will be like even though I guarantee you've never read any DFW, instead you go off memes and infocharts. You're a piece of shit and I would bully you both physically and psychologically if I were to ever meet you in real life.

wtf I hate dfw now

>IST

It's actually Pheodorous Dostoevlou, the real man behind Homer.

>Entry level, sure

stopped taking you seriously there
Why do you feel the need to hoist yourself above your own opinion to impress cynical assholes on the internet?

Just say you like the fucking book, and that it's one of your favourites; stand up for your interests, you insecure baby.

No, I have to feel superior to everyone else because I don't get that same attention in real life.

Honestly, I dislike Dostoyevski. He's a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journalism seriously.

Furthermore, I'd like to point out that The Double was his best work while I disliked Crime and Punishment intensely. It was ghastly rigmorale.

IJ is great the first time, and even better the second time. Hugely funny, terribly sad, an astonishing demonstration of powers. If there has been a better American novel since, I would be very grateful for the heads up on what it was.

>Hugely funny, terribly sad

you are the worst sort of person, though that is to be expected of a DFW fan

>If there has been a better American novel since, I would be very grateful for the heads up on what it was.
Zettels Traum

underworld came out the year after. I like IJ though

Some articles said it's 'unfilmable' but are there any good IJ fan films?

youtube.com/watch?v=22AYtR6pYXw

This is pretty cool.

You're missing the point. To say a book is entry level is to say, hey, this book isn't as difficult as you might think. If you think, what makes a book good is whether or not you liked it, you're a total pleb. It isn't to impress others, it's to help peers carve their way to a better understanding of literature. There are stepping stones. Infinite Jest is a good place to start carving your way.

IJ isn't about sincerity, it's about artificial happiness.

...

Out of all the Veeky Forums memes i'll never bother with IJ.

That's too bad. But books would be shit if they all appealed to everyone I guess

It's just Veeky Forums has put me off it.

That really sucks. Im glad I read it before coming here.

this
and jerusalem/zettels traum

>you are the worst sort of person, though that is to be expected of a DFW fan

Don't you know how tired this stupid sneering-at-a-book-you-probably-never-read pose has become?

>underworld came out the year after. I like IJ though

I thought Underworld was unremittingly boring after the 1951 part. A lot of people I respect think it's great, I just can't imagine why.

It's as if I can imagine him sitting and writing it, taking delight in describing things, that shines through at times, and other times it just feels like OCD writing, writing for the sake of it, with complete disregard to any pleasure of a reader.

There's so much of the latter that I feel this novel could be cut in half again and it would only benefit from it.

this cover is better than the book.

>If you think, what makes a book good is whether or not you liked it, you're a total pleb.
This is the most pretentious post in this thread.
What is wrong with you? Of course it's all about liking it or not liking it, it's your own opinion, all art is subjective. Or what does 'good' mean to you?

I'm assuming you didn't read the whole post.

I've always thought he must be pretty full of himself to publish a book that long. The first draft pf A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was about a thousand pages long but Joyce had the decency to cut 75% of it.

>There's so much of the latter that I feel this novel could be cut in half again and it would only benefit from it.

What would you excise? I wouldn't cut a paragraph, myself.

Evidently he cut several hundred pages. I imagine at some point the whole first draft will be published, like they did with Thomas Wolfe's first version of Look Homeward, Angel.

How about all that dialect shit with poor tony and wardine? There was NO reason for to include something so offensively unreadable.

I like Poor Tony, but I definitely agree with Wardine be cry being cut.

But I'm only on page 380.

It's cringey, but it's still necessary plot-wise, and it's only a page or two, isn't it?

Stop memeing this book

i can't believe this whole discussion. There's literally a section in the book that deals with this!

> p946 Did Himself subject us to 500 secons of the repeated cry 'Murderer!' for some reason, ie is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and tehn near-rage aroused in the film's audience by the static repetitive final 1/3 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his how stuff?

Poor tony is the seizure guy. Roy tony is the black guy who hates hugging people