Reaching page 500 of this thing (last episode I read was Jim's dad fixing the mattress). I'm kind of upset...

How trenchant! What precision of insight! You must hold a doctorate from Oxford.

But, though easily mistaken for a recent high school graduate, I'm actually a store-front/street-sign identifying robot. It's a wonder I even got in here.

read it.

My god, the level of plebbit on display is astounding.

It's no wonder Veeky Forums is seen as such a shining example of literary scholarship. What need have user for analysis? The merit of his contempt is palpable! He who lacks such visionary instinct spends his time, necessarily, among the plebs and blue-pilled.

you're being a fool. who are you trying to emulate? i was like you for quite some time, thinking that altering my prose would make my points seem more poignant, but in reality, it only made my sarcasm that much more insufferable. and before you say it, if you don't want to appeal to people and convey your ideas without pissing them off, why try showboating in the first place?

And what necessary relation should I look for on this read through? What does "Infinite Jest" possibly have to do with Hamlet beyond a superficial and contrived daddy-issues and altogether-too-ingenious little puns. What about entertainment-as-opiate necessitates Sarpinski's triangle as structure? Why accept the unbelievable possibility of wheel-chaired French-Canadian assassins over the believable impossibility of a man turning into a bug.

For all the posturing, I've never seen a good defense of Infinite Jest ever. I doubt any of you are capable of such a thing. Not because David Foster Wallace was a "grotesque failure" (I've never seen a terribly good take-down either), but because you mouth-breathing fuckwits couldn't find such a defense on DFW's Wikipedia page.

But, what the fuck do I know? I'm a plebby, recent high-school graduate who spends my time on that contemptible "plebbit."

Post content or get the fuck out.

...

>masturbatory sequence ad infinitum.
What part of "infinite jest" didnt you understand?

Insightful.

I'll clue you in, say "read it" aloud, in past tense.

No one is defending IJ here. It's a meme for a reason.

I don't think Dave thought too profoundly about his Sierpinski triangle metaphor, but it's fun to see how the three main strands of the narrative, the ETA, Enfield House or whatever that recovery facility was called and the Marathe/Steeple conflict, connect at different points throughout the book. Those points in turn touch on other relations to one of the three anchors of the story or their derivatives, which of course doesn't give you a perfect fractal structure that would probably impossible or at least very contrived in narrative fiction, but does make some sense as a metaphor.

So what's bad about it? What's David Foster Wallace lacking that Charles Dickens or Thomas Pynchon has? Certainly not heart - Wallace's characters are as "real" as Dickens vibrating caricatures. Certainly not imaginative structure - the sequence and placement of events (albeit not the content) demonstrate at least as powerful an imagination as Pynchon in Mason and Dixon.

Oh, you mean "discernible talent?" It'd be astonishing if any of you could tell me what that meant.

Calling something a meme isn't a warrant for dismissal.

A metaphor for what?

Sorry, the way I wrote it is not very lucid. I'm not talking about the structure being modeled after a Sierpinski triangle as being a metaphor for something, but the Sierpinksi triangle being a rough metaphorical approximation of DFW's approach to structuring his writing. Thre main points, the outer triangle. Then characters associated with different starting points interact, which i would identify with the points on the edges of the first triangle, which in turn constitute the corners of the second triangle. Once you reach several steps of the procedure I think it doesn't really work anymore, hence my remark that DFW didn't think too much about this. I was just trying to say that the metaphor might be applied on a superficial level, and maybe it was one of those spur of the moment things, but fails when you try to follow through rigorously.

You got tricked!

It's incredibly boring and pretentious.

No one calling it

>boring and pretentious

has actually read it. It really is a fantastic book, every little 'boring setpiece' has a purpouse, even if it's just charaterization, a hint at justifying a later action by a character. The disparate pieces slowly come together, the confusing story (Year of the what? WHAT THE HELL) slowly starts to make sense....

In short, it's cool to shit on by people who don't understand it.

why i dont give a fuck about orin?. and after a time, about incandenza family too?. it´s like he wants to write a David Lynch movie with a realistic tone. and in a strange sense, im finding too much vanity and too little courage. (although had good parts but is simply not interesting at all (to me))
>i am like the op. i go out in the 500 page or so.
am i doing wrong?

>people aren't allowed to think a book is boring and pretentious because i liked the book

you sure did show everyone.

Just because you enjoyed wading through shit doesn't mean wading through shit is something you recommend other people do

Finally, something besides a banal witticism.

There's more to the Serpinski triangle than that. Whether he successfully reproduces the triangle on the level of narrative is somewhat (though not entirely) beside the point. Infinitely reproducible - identical at any magnification. Constructed by removal, the area of the original triangle shrinks while it's perimeter grows. An infinitely large surface with infinitely small content.

Huh, that's pretty interesting, thanks for the addendum.

Both of you have said nothing. Most of the other posts at least hint at a claim, even if it remains unwarranted.

Keep trying, Veeky Forums maybe someday you'll compose an entire book of contentless bon mots. Voltaire without the wit. That'll show those plebs over at Reddit who knows a thing or two about literature.

It's a shit book, sorry you're so bootyblasted no-one is stroking your ego over being able to finish that garbage

>samefagging

Infinitely superficial and infinitely contentless? Endlessly reproducible?

Wait! It's not a Serpinski's triangle! It's Veeky Forums! No wonder Infinite Jest is so popular here!

>muh fractal postmodernism
you're going far, son

>vapid green-text witticism
>accused the one demanding content of postmodernism

Infinite Jest is not a terribly good book. Its problem isn't that it's a meme, it's its contrivance. The Serpinski triangle is only interesting thematically and has no bearing on the work sensually. It's bad for the same reason Zadie Smith reads like a parody of herself. All idea, no heart.

But I forgot to allow my petty prejudices to blind me to the book's merits. I'd be a pleb better off on /pol/ if my opinions on literature ever went beyond merely poll-parroting a list of "great books" I saw Harold Bloom endorse on Wikipedia.

>he knew it as evidenced by stories of him expressing disgust when congratulated on his books years after their release.
Oh so you're not a writer, then?

IJ is actually designed to make lazy readers quit right about this point. after considerable examination, I believe it's on purpose. There is no other reason to bury the informing anecdote of it's own narrative program so deep, except as a weed-out mechanism. He often voiced this exact desire, to weed out those he considered unserious, while he was teaching at Pasadena. The threat that loomed over his course was that if he detected that anyone had not thoroughly read and kept up with the syllabus, he drop them, and if they attended anyway, he'd fail them.

The episode that explains the whole thing is when Gately lands in the hospital with his arm shot up. Then the wraith appears, and explicates the entire narrative innovation. Spells it out.

It's how you can tell who has read it or not - if they quit before the wraith's brain meld, they'll never get it. If you got what the wraith is doing, then you'll understand the whole PoMo project was to create an innovative kind of narrator. The relevance of IJ depends entirely upon your judgement of that attempt, and whether it succeeds in what it attempts.

In the history of story, did the lives of the figurants ever rise to anything like the importance of the hero and the villain? Should they? What would it sound like if they did? If you could hear the actual, real-time thoughts of the people around you as they experience their lives, clear of all vocal expression, would that surrogate experience of their as-lived lives bring you closer to them? Or would you find them repulsive? Would such an experience of the other person's life feel more "sincere"?

That's your "in" to IJ.

Well I'll happily tell you my experience with Infinite Jest, if you really want to hear my reasons for disliking it, as superficial and unsatisfying it will be for you. I read to about the point when the footnotes reveal the name of the deadly film in the list. Anyhow, not too far before this, there's a scene with a young woman and a psych in a mental hospital. Having experienced the event in depth 6 separate times, I was very keen going into this scene, seeing how he would portray it, only to be utterly disappointed in his analysis of the scene. It was as if the man was only guessing at the system that has chewed up and spit out countless mental illnesses. He embellished the wrong aspects, instead of making the psych inattentive, made him outrageously hyperaware, and the young woman was a damned caricature to such an extent to make one's teeth rot. I don't remember too far into detail the scene as to recite it for you, but I'm sure you're familiar. This moment simply broke my interest in the book. I will also say that the prose style struck me with an effect of double vision, he either had no style or had my style, and I had no use reading either, as at the time I typically sought the benefit of an apt author to show me interesting techniques. In the end I was unsatisfied with the work, and I simply elected not to finish it. Eventually I am sure I will return to it, if for no other reason than boredom. As I said, this will be an unsatisfying reason for you, but hearing you bitch and moan about it for so long, I couldn't help obliging you to shut you up.

And right here we have the crux of the problem with IJ. For all his narrative fireworks and deep study of the history of representation by written word, what is the one thing that can never be found in any of the three novels?

What is the one goal and emotion that human beings seek beyond all others that DFW not only never even attempted to portray, but in all likelihood, never himself even experienced?

Love.

Even the bildungsroman Broom of the System, the closest he gets is having the Hector-foil tell the girl, by way of stealing her from the protag, "I have the biggest erection right now." The most shallow and coarse and crass possible understanding of intimacy and commitment.

That is why he failed. He could read every part of every kind of mind around him - except for the part that makes us most human. Come to think of it, he could best be compared to Mouse from the Matrix, for whom the Woman in Red is the highest object of desire - but remains nothing more than an object.

This is the worst thread currently on Veeky Forums

the fashion thread was a work of art though. geddit?

DAE Goold Old Neon is autobiographical?

I can't read a book that Harold Bloom doesn't like.

you need to leave.

i thought it was an achievement, sure, and there were parts of the book that i absolutely loved (hal going to the wrong support group).

the highlights of the book definitely have a pleasant place in my memory, but as a work in its whole, i dont ever want to reread it. i think there was so much there that was of no use to me. you can say that i didnt understand what it was trying to do or whatever, but parts of it seemed like padding for padding's sake. parts of it felt so forced (the janitorial exchanges near the end). parts of it were so tedious that it took a conscious effort to get through them.

it was ok but it wasnt anything remarkable beyond reference to the time it was written. taken in context, it said a lot about the time but doesnt say much to me in scope of the literary canon that we're all working through.

kys

QUICK

In your own words, explain what makes Gravity's Rainbow better than Infinite Jest.

Instant gratification.

Discernable talent.

The fact that the characters in IJ don't love successfully doesn't mean that they don't attempt it. Orin fails and succumbs to satyriasis, for a large part of the book Hal is stuck in his dependency on what others think of him, Don's struggle for love is hindered by the effects of his addiction, etc. Maybe Mario experiences a form of love, not romantic love of course, but a sort of unconditionla benevolence directed towards his environment.

If by writer you mean temperamental twat , as you clearly seem to have the two confused, then no.

it's funny

Pynchon employed his encyclopedic knowledge of random factoids more competently and cohesively. That and his goal wasn't as obnoxious as DFW's special snowflake "meta between the two" or every figurant is equally important MFAfag bullshit.

yeah, this is basically it. When you read Pynchon, it really feels like he understands the things he's writing about and throws his factoids in when they relate to the story. When you read DFW, you can feel him steering you to his observations. Some of the observations are good, but IJ as a whole is flawed whereas GR as a whole is quite good.

I don't know why they'd be superficial and unsatisfying. , , , , and many others are superficial and unsatisfying. There is a difference between saying "it's a meme" and saying "I think DFW has nothing useful or accurate to tell as about psychosis."

This seems entirely like a misdiagnosis. Not only for the reasons said, but also by simple comparison to the landscape. "Thomas Pynchon can make us do anything but feel." Certainly Mario trying to get strangers to touch him or some of the scenes between Orin and Joelle are more moving than anything in Gravity's Rainbow (Mexico/Jessica maybe. Pökler at the camp, though that scene is manipulative at core). Or what do we learn about love in Huck Finn?

The problem isn't that those scenes are played between two ideas. Mario may be as real a caricature as say Jenny Wren, but Mario the character is flattened by the book's thematic content. Nothing about him says he would go do that other than Wallace trying to make a point about empathy in the age of entertainment. Whatever depth Wallace's characters have (and it's not terribly easy to accuse Wallace of making simple leitmotifs) gets flattened by the book's ideology. gets at it, though I'd disagree that Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon do all that much better. Who possesses much depth in those books?

Also, if you want to read cohesively woven erudition, why not simply read non-fiction?

>cohesively woven erudition
>why not simply read non-fiction?
Yeah, no. You have no idea what I meant. I doubt you even understood Infinite Jest past a high-school level reading.

What's cohesive about Gravity's Rainbow? What do references to obscure pop songs have to do with the dual nature of the rocket and technology? What do Rossini and Beethoven have to do with anything?

Care to enlighten us, or you just here to show off the brilliant analytic technique you learned in you Cambridge doctorate?

>he can't into non-episodic literature
OP is w e a k

hey man, a conception of time is a difficult thing to master for people who don't have an inkling for things that don't operate as the arrow of time flies

Wow, I can't believe so many lonely young men types out so many words that meant absolutely nothing in this thread
I don't use the word pretentious much... But goddamn, some of you are pretentious fucks

Neither you nor pointed to anything like love. in fact concedes my point in his first sentence, then provides a list of failures. Mario's yearning is not love, and attempting to redeem Orin in any way amounts to getting an "I really didn't get it" tattoo on your forehead.

see

The real problem with Infinite Jest is that DFW was unresolved in defining an overarching purpose that could be discerned within a cohesive thematic strategy. This can be seen more clearly as one understands the relations within the character's development, poignant details of the theme of each story, and their conclusive resolutions. Putting all these dimensions together, and having the background knowledge of DFW's intent and general manner of thinking, one can, without a doubt, be able to conclude that his own intellectual cloud was too out of focus, where the lines of cohesiveness are obscured by his robust need to produce something of an almost pretentious substance. This book should be a prime example of what-not-to-do when writing, because its failure is fogged by the equally pretentious who seek resolution and purpose, but are driven to admiration of this garbage because they themselves know that the regular person will not attempt to properly analyze the text, thus giving them the perceived illusion, which they make themselves believe, that they have stumbled upon a literary gem.

Fight me, Veeky Forums, I dare you.

What is the best time to add the turmeric in your curry?

/thread

That's preposterous. What do Huck Finn or Moby Dick or Heart of Darkness or countless other classics have to tell us about love? Don't say notable for absence because the same argument can be made of Infinite Jest - particularly re:Orin.

And enough with the smugger-than-thou "if you have to ask, you'll never know" bullshit. If you think you've understood something about the book that we poor unenlightened plebeian rabble haven't, say it.

How trenchant! What precision of word usage! You must hold a dictionary from Oxford!

But, though easily mistaking flowery language for substance, you actually write much without saying anything at all.

>unresolved in defining an overarching purpose that could be discerned within a cohesive thematic strategy.

Sure sounds a bit like modern life, eh?
Sounds like hours spent surfing television and clicking hyperlinks to other pages, does it not?

It is of its time, twenty years ago. Reading it twenty years later is kind of the exact wrong moment. Nothing looks good twenty years later.

I read it when it came out, it was amazing and it changed everything. Millenials have no sense of the place of artistic works in their milieu. It used to be somehow easier when old stuff was actually old because not everything that had ever been recorded, written or filmed was instantaneously available and presented as new.

Anyhow, you're living with new books written by people who read it at a formative moment, of course it seems a bit clunky. Checking back in another decade might be the thing to do. Or maybe not.

Nearly all criticisms are foreseen within the text itself, either directly or by satirising the criticism itself. Whether you think that is cute or whether it makes you want to pull your own teeth out with pliers is a matter of opinion but the idea he didn't know what he was doing is wrong.

I also think people aren't paying attention to voice either when the complaints about style kick in. Oh noes it so pretentious it hurts to read. That would be the sections of the book from the POV of someone who goes to great lengths to explain to you just how grotesquely, hideously pretentious he is? I guess DFW couldn't write.

And Infinite Jest is mostly about love, I don't get that one at all.

You're saying a novel that coined the term 'anticonfluential' is anticonfluential?

Wow, he obviously really slipped up there.

This thread was painful to read.

It really was.
The real reason no one likes the English major type, is that you fucks always believe a novel has to answer all the burning questions in life within its narrative. You believe that true "literature" is the be-all-end-all of human experience. All your criticisms fall into semantic nonsense you've read in Bloom's works.
I wonder if when you people actually speak in real life, if people around you want to just grab your lips and squeeze them shut.
You people seem to miss the fact, maybe because you're all so autistic, is to mirror modern life's general structure.
For real
>cohesive thematic strategy
>conclusive resolutions

What is this bloated nonsense? Do you speak in pleonasms to sound smart all the time?

If I heard those phrases spoken in real life, that someone actually put in energy to form those words, I'd laugh until I'd shit my pants.

>oh jee wow this book is so boring and long and one of the main characters comes from a family who severely admires achievement and social placement over others
>oh wow a book about the empty nature of commercial entertainment has some long, boring, tedious parts
>oh wow we spend hours looking at shit we'll never remember from youtube and Veeky Forums (sounds like boredom with a sexy outfit on, yes? )
>ugh all the young tennis players are forced to do intense academic learning and borderline torturous physical drills every day just so they can achieve the finesse it takes to succeed in that world (blah blah student debt dwindling job market STEM memes irl -- think for yourself for a bit, please)
>this one kid, hal, is the voice for most of the novel
>he's emotionally stunted from weed and derives real meaning from academic prowess
>oh wow the prose seems rather synthetic
>oh wow the prose and characters seem heartfelt and emotional at some bits when real human conflict comes into play
>oh wow the POV switch at the beginning when hal's interior life is alive thanks to his father's wraith's plan to make the boy become in touch with himself so he doesn't live a life of enclosed misery
>oh wow it's a book that reads all these little shits on Veeky Forums like a fucking book and warns them not to fall into the self-absorbed rabbit hole of egotistical knowledge fetishistic pursuit

what happened to you, Veeky Forums?
You went too far up your ass...

The dude's empty inside...
He takes a point that could've been two sentences long, and stretches it out with bullshit.

He got nothing from reading Infinite Jest...
Either he's a bad reader, or just plain stupid trying to act smart.

You're not very self-aware, are you?

Your autism is clearly showing.

I don't wanna rock your world but this is the literature section of a Tuvaluan Canoe Appreciation forum, not real life.

>Be at my LBS
>In the back with the biographies
>Here the owner and his wife talking
>Wife: "Hon did I tell you that a dude came in here looking for Infinite Jest"
>Owner: "Pfft, are you being serious?"
>W:"Yeah" and then they laugh together for like 20 seconds
Is this really what people really think of people who read this?

>If

but yeah...
Everyone I know in my academic setting tends to look down on online literature discussion because 80% is muddled by self-important young with inferiority complexes who just project their inner-ugliness out into the world, using their lines of data to finally be heard... but what they say is so goddamn pretentious and beyond the point, it's no wonder no one really listens to them in real life.

They're either assholes
>owning a bookstore, chances are they are assholes
or, they just laughed at the common stereotype of people never finishing IJ. Jason Segel told an anecdote about buying IJ, over how the girl behind the counter rolled her eyes and said "ugh, Infinite Jest. Every boy I've ever dated has an unread copy on his bookshelf."

There's a lot of confused young men buying that book, putting it on their shelf to look smart... which is ironic considering what the book is actually about.
Most people who buy it don't finish it.

>>oh wow it's a book that reads all these little shits on Veeky Forums like a fucking book

Haha, Veeky Forums BTFO'd. I think this is 99% of the problem the least popular member of Le Meme Trilogy, it hits far too close to home for comfort.

There is an ongoing joke about this in Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City where its called "Obstinate Dust" by "Ralph Warden Meeker". It ends being hurled, still unread, into a massive hole in the ground believed to be an art installation.

In Lethem's book its a 9/11 thing really but I think he is also hoping you notice its Infinite Jest getting chucked into the Great Concavity also.

Its part of the culture now.

Then again, the same is said about Ulysses.

I tried and failed twice to read it, once when I was 19 or so and again towards the end of college. Getting about half way each time. But it never pulled me in.

Then in my mid-20s during grad school I got heavily into pot, had a couple nightmare experiences with depression, experienced a few years of the spiritually numbing effects of the adult working world, and messed with other drugs in a bad, bad way. And after all of this I picked it up again, having basically forgot about the book, and it fucking gripped me.

I remember a specific passage, somewhere around the middle of the book if I recall, where Geoffrey Day is describing to Kate G. his experience that led him to realize how people can be driven to kill themselves. What that must feel like. (not the burning building meme). And coming to understand the word hell. His description of that experience was so eerily familiar that I knew in that instant that I had been there too. In that exact place. It was extremely cathartic and one of the most memorable reading experience I will probably ever have. When I read it when I was younger, I probably thought "yeah okay, that's dark I guess. That sounds like something someone that was depressed might say" but it wasn't real to me.

kek

Same can be said about most big books, really.. just so happens that IJ is popular. The more something gets noticed, the more open it is to ridicule.

Just read and enjoy.

I hear ya

Literally this.
Infinite Jest is a meme.
>It's 1000+ pages
>Keeps summer away
>clowns who actually take the bait don't came back for months cause they're stuck reading this

It is well meme'd indeed. Read this over the break. Story could have been told in about 200 pages or so. The rest is filler.

this is lit

how long have you frequented 4chin? all of this you know teehee

>say it.
Again? I just realized I'm exchanging posts with a noob.

warosu.org/lit/?task=search&ghost=&search_text=wraith narrator

Never mind.