K Veeky Forums no memeing pls.
Why do you guys hate Infinite Jest? Like, actual reasons.
>I know fandoms destroy everything.
>I know DFW was an asshole.
>But if you pick the novel per se isn't it a nice one?
I'm like 300 pages in and loving it. It has some pretty interesting concepts and ideas.
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I haven't even opened the book, but my impressions are
2 long
2 many footnotes
Because Harold Bloom doesn't like him.
Contrarians gonna hold contrarian opinions.
he's the morrissey of the literary world and infinite jest is the there is a light that never goes out of the literary world.
The man just couldn't write fiction.
Nice ideas, sure. That's about the only thing going for it. And even those aren't really properly elucidated. Theyre just kind of introduced as concepts and dragged out for a thousand pages. Otherwise I find it mind-numbingly long and tedious. A very ugly book. I have no idea how anybody really 'likes' it. Its such a fucking drag, man!
Not enough jets
From a plot standpoint, the core of IJ is a very mediocre story that, for all its focus on "postmodernism", is told relatively straightforwardly. The footnotes act primarily as a pointless gimmick, and could be integrated into the main text easily (some of them are literally just parts of the main story that he decided to put at the end). The prose is exceedingly average at best and just cringy at worst (the page and a half wherein he tries to write in ghetto speak is painful). The message of the book (that entertainment, like, distracts us maaaaaan) is banal as hell and is hamfistedly delivered in the lectures between steeply and marathe or by kate gompert. There are humorous elements in the book, but they can't change a book that, in its essence, is shit
I don't hate it. It's one of my favorite books along with "The Magic Mountain" and "2666".
Now we are talking!
How old are ya, user?
>K Veeky Forums no memeing pls.
>Why do you guys hate Infinite Jest?
That's the point. Why it is a meme?
It has to be something that made the a book so popular over here.
The book is popular because it's one of the better books written in the past half century and speaks to the majority of people (college educated loners, in their 20s, usually guys) who would go on a board like Veeky Forums.
the "hatred" for the book is a more recent phenomenon and has a lot more to do with newer users coming to the board and talking shit because they know it will get them (You)s.
it's a meme because most of these people haven't bothered to read the book
19
Well technically the guy is wrong there is in fact jets - second last paragraph of the first chapter. Hal is loaded onto the ambulance and is looking at the sky
>The jet’s movement and trail seem incisionish, as if white meat behind the blue were exposed and widening in the wake of the blade. I once saw the word KNIFE finger-written on the steamed mirror of a nonpublic bathroom. I have become an infantophile.
youtube.com
every time
Anyone who makes these arguments is someone who has read a plot summary and shitposts on Veeky Forums. The book is arguably the best commentary on 21st century America (though written in 96, so you can lump in the 90's), but to user's point, a lot of the points DFW makes you've probably already heard over and over again (on entertainment, addiction, class and racial divides...) when people complain about social media on facebook and when your friends complain about "mindless americans" while you're smoking pot with them. When plebs read the plot summary, they say "this faggot hasn't said anything worthwhile", and when you read the book, you realize he's speaks much more against these ironies.
Oh, idk, 300 pages of tennis come to mind OP. I get that he is forcing the audience to engage and work for it and push past the expectation of entertainment. I get it.
However, a 1300 monolithic ramble maybe isnt the best way to do it. It seeks to subvert elements of humor and plot but just engages them poorly. It seeks to overturn reader expectation but only manages to annoy.
And someone else already said it: the prose is mediocre.
I've read the book twice. It's not well written and it comes from a mediocre mind. Dfw was trying desperately to prove his intelligence (to himself it would seem) and failed
>le DFW is 2 smart 4 u meme
care to give some reasons for your judgement?
DFW is sam hyde but actually talented 2bh.
I don't watch MDE
ok and?
You must be fun at parties
So why read it twice?
Its a little strange that someone who hates a 1300 page book reads it twice, my friend.
I liked it the first time (I was 16 or 17) and reread it like a month ago and realized how bad it was
>Actually wasting your time reading this shit
>Not spending more time rereading/developing your understanding of major classics/philosophy
Fucking plebs.
I think you are the type of people that will enjoy this image
what did he mean by this?
i enjoy this image
>As if knowledge comes only by reading and not also discussing with contemporary people.
maybe upon reading it a third time, you'll realize that you actually love it
>Veeky Forums
>people
>autodidact meme
When are you gonna stop shitposting and get a girlfriend?
man she had that soulless face from birth
Wrong. He was the Kurt Kobain of the literary world. A drug-addled medium talent with obsessive work ethic which was really just a side-effect of his need to flee his own mind, who sucked the life out of his chosen artistic medium by rejecting that medium's drug of choice (cocaine in 80s rock, alcohol in literature) and making the most dangerous drug glamorous instead (heroin / prescription meds), heralding an epoch of talentless hack imitators who don't get it in the first place and will never succeed in any event, because they are not fucked up enough to really do that kind of work, and end up instead hooked on the new drug, which slowly kills them creating a gap in the institutional memory of the form which will never be patched or healed because once you lose a generation of artists, you lose the continuity of apprenticeship.
Kobain killed the tradition of guitar rock that started with Bill Haley and the Comets. Wallace killed the tradition of the American novel that started with Washington Irving.
People like Vollman are the equivalents of the Foo Fighters - exceptions which prove the rule.
I don't I like IJ and the experience was crazy. When I finally finished and started reading another book I sort of missed it.
It's a great read and don't let Harold Bloom's comments tell you otherwise. The man had talent.
OP here.
I think the majority of non-troll-memeing guys here on Veeky Forums agree that is a good book. But thanks to everyone for contribuing.
this is an awful post. if it isn't bait jesus
NO
DESCERNIBLE
TALENT
It's kind of amusing.
Same thing happened to me desu.
It's harsh to say, but I think the sentimental value of the book can distract from the reason that Dave doesn't have much deep to say and is a very gimmicky writer. Emotions are important, yes, but great works of literature have elements that transcend the sheer sentimental message.
>K Veeky Forums no memeing pls.
Incredibly boring, and reads like it was never revised. Not to mention the awkward attempts at awkward writing. Just look at >incisionish
What the fuck.
That is so not the message. You're an idiot. The message is that entertainment appeals to the death instinct which is "born" in us when we first die upon separating from the mother in early stage development. See Winnicot. That's why the entertainment is what it is, and why love and death are linked in IJ. The meaning is really oblique actually and requires a lot of thought and additional reading. Look at Steeply and M's convos and research rational choice theory.