DFW had 300 self-help books in his library

>I only have one self-help book in my library

and its Infinite Jest

>"I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation..."

>roasting dfw while aping his style

>"I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation..."
>roasting dfw while riffing on him

I have 8 self-help books, and they're all written by Nietzsche

Uh... Samefag?

No, see one of the images is a jpeg while the other is a png. This is just how well choreographed Veeky Forums threads have become.

I only have one.

none of them worked lol

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHA

it's reassuring to me that in the end he learned the only hep for him was he noose. it gives me hope the rest of the nu sincere cucks will one day realize that no amount of pseudo intellectual self improvement will fix their inherently cuck nature and they too will opt for the easy way out.

lol roast bro?

what the hell is a 'real' identity

This is water was Tony Robbins tier nonsense. But so was Meditations to be fair.

lit screams "Sucking up to religion provides transcendence!" but you're all pathetic frauds

oh contraire i think his suicide was the only thing he did to help himself. it certainly made the world a better place without him lmao!

>"Sucking up to religion provides transcendence!"
Being an empty shell of a man who recently re-read IJ, I've been struggling with this problem. What's the alternative. Full Nietzsche?

kek

i hope one day i can be as nonpathetic and sincere as you, sir.

>Full Nietzsche

Yes, but read the Greeks first and read rhe SEP articles and some secindary literature about Kant, Hegel and Spinoza. Do this or you won't understand what he is raging about.

>Tfw infinite jest was my favorite book as a college freshman
>the more I think about it/hear about DFW and his philosophy the more I wonder if he really was just a hack all along
Was bloom right? I gotta re read infinite jest soon

It doesn't say 300 self-help books. It says there were 300 books and some of them were self-help books. Just saying.

>helped him become a renown writer
>didn't help him to not kill himself

So are self-help books good or bad?

Which Greeks in particular, socrates plato Aristotle? Also what's the best order to read Nietzsche in?

Yeah start with everything that Socrates wrote, then move on to his pupil Aristotle. Then Aristotle's student, Plato.

good imo

he could have lived a little while longer before killing himself, but he lived about as long as anyone ought to

good, because apparently they help people

Was curious about what he had in his library and found out you can look up the complete listings via the University of Texas catalogue: catalog.lib.utexas.edu/search~S29?/xdavid foster wallace library/xdavid foster wallace library/1,1,322,B/exact&FF=xdavid foster wallace library&1,322/indexsort=a

Highlights:
>A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest
>only one novel by Franzen and it's not even The Corrections
>An Adult Child's Guide to What is "Normal"
>The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories by Jack B. Nimble
>How to Disappear Completely and Never be Found
>Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer
>Techniques of Burglar Alarm Bypassing

So this is sorting yourself out...

>techniques of burglar alarm bypassing
as far as i remember he probably read that for a single chapter in infinite jest.

>how to disappear completely and never be found
>how to be pynchon
can you imagine what a conversaition between DFW and pynchon would be like?

>How to Disappear Completely and Never be Found
didn't know he was a radiohead fan

Annoying like all the conversations in which DFW was involved. I've always imagined Pynchon must be a really normal dude, I don't know why. Maybe because he didnt kill himself or attacked women with coffee tables like DFW

>attack women with coffee tables
?

Educate yourself on DFW's shenanigans before replying to me.

why would i do that?

>you

Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle are the main ones, then read chronologically his major books (you can avoid all the minor essays, still you should read his writings on Wagner too, since they're still central to his philosophy).

>Be atheist member of upper class WASP family
>Have mental illness
>Read books by logicians and phenomenologists to try to understand your mind better
>It doesn't work
>Read self-help books
>They don't help
>Write a series of novels about mentally ill characters trying to help themselves solve their problems by applying the principles you found in those books to their lives as a form of self-therapy
>It doesn't work
>Kill yourself
>Your books continue to sell after your death even though your career was just FAIL compounded by FAIL over and over again but with a lot of hype
>If there's a Hell, be in it, because suicide
>yfw

DFW a shit

Where to start with logicians and phenomenologists

who says people who kill themselves go to hell?

>If there's a Hell, be in it, because suicide
Never change, Christcucks

The Greeks

The Bible

shoo shoo Schlomo

>The Bible
where specifically does it say that?

In the subtext :^)

>christfag baiting this hard

These are the kind of tidbits that make me, not just weary of dfw's appeal to sincerity, but contemptuous of it. His notion irony and sincerity is so facil anxious. You can sense his insecurity, and it sounds like the dude made himself a nervous wreck trying to guard against how vulnerable the ambivalence and duplicity of meaning made him.

He must of for real had some form of asburgers. Listening to how he talks about hypothetical people, there motives and behaviour, you can tell he's projecting his insecurities onto these phantom cultural actors. "I was never really cynical; therefore all cynicism is manufactured disinvestment from meaning in order to protect the ego from degradation in reciprocal obligation." And it seems like his 'sincere actions,' if put into practice, would have gravitated towards the absolute worst sort of milquetoast, talk show, hallmark emotionality where he obviously felt most at home and, incorrectly, believed everyone else secretly did too.

Frege and Husserl

At best, he's probably postmodernism for the young adult.

But not good for anyone over 21-23

No one way in hell a dude like Pynchon would like DFW or want to have any kind of conversation. Pynch isn't walking neurosis. Just a smart, funny, dude who cucks other guys.

He was protestant, he couldn't help it.

>Triggered upper class atheists from WASP families

Drama of the Gifted Child is not self help. It's theory. M Scott Peck however is a hack.

no just a suicidal, poorly educated middle class dude, who's looking for an easy way out of what looks to be a pretty dreary rest of my life

>easy way out
It's easy to fail at killing yourself, you know.

It sure is. I fail at killing myself every day. Ain't life grand.

it's easier than any other way out, aside from just sitting here for 50 years and letting old age kill me

Again, it's easy to botch a suicide.

that's no reason not to try

I took a creative nonfiction course with him at Ponoma back in '94. We weren't allowed to show anyone our essays outside of the class for some reason. He seemed naturally intelligent, didnt need to look at any notes or textbooks or prepare for any lectures, he just knew his stuff and was super casual.

I saw him talking to a girl on campus one day. He uncharacteristically wore a Fila sweatsuit, the kind that looks like it's made from the same material as parachutes, and trainer sneakers with a matching bandana. That was his pussy hunt outfit apparently. Several times a week, same outfit, I'd see him hitting on women in it. I once saw him wearing it while carrying an identical outfit from the dry cleaners, he had like 4 sets of same Fila sweatsuit.

I asked him about it in class and he said we aren't allowed to discuss anything unrelated to class while inside class, the same way we can't show anyone outside of class our essays. A student called out "but Dostoevsky isn't in this class and last week you talked about replicating his black tea obsession to test its affects on your own writing". Wallace stared blankly at the student with dead eyes for 30 seconds in dead silence then said "you just got knocked down a full letter grade. Any other smart asses? Didn't think so." and pushed up his glasses with his index finger.

I remember telling myself this guy will either be super successful or kill himself.

...

huge if true

Art

>have 300 self-help books
>still kill yourself

Why are WASPs perpetually dying out with their brains fried and their desires degenerate?

even if you dont like wallace his biography is pretty entertaining desu

wh*te people amirite

my friend... let me enlghten you on your joruney... will reveal the truth

>(((WASP family)))

All I can say is, good luck.

Good copypasta.

The more likely a method is to kill yourself the more horrific the consequences for failing. Cutting your wrists hard enough to kill you will forever inhibit your ability to use your hands if you survive, a failed hanging (more common than you would think) can leave you with brain damage going all the way up to full vegetable, the same with drowning, attempted suicide via some sort of vehicle crash often leave people with severe lifelong physical pains etc.
Most people who are actually suicidal (not that pressing teenage thinking you are suicidal but you wouldn't never make a serious attempt) are aware of these things. That's what makes suicide so hard for them. It's not just the physical fear of death or that fear of pain that comes with most kinds of suicide. It's knowing that there are probably going to be severe consequences for failing and suicide usually isn't a sure fire thing.
That isn't including all the mental health government BS you will have to put up for a long time/probably be forcefully held in a loony bin.

Suicide is pretty easy to do with very small chance of failing.
A long drop hanging for example will break your neck and decapitate you in a split second.

...

yeah i've definitely been struggling with this lately. i think the best way to go is barbiturates (countries with assisted suicide use barbiturates, the lethal injection is typically the same) but even then it kinda scares me. even if it works it's scary to think about what exactly would happen to me. i wish just wanting to die was enough to make it happen.

>It's not just the physical fear of death or that fear of pain that comes with most kinds of suicide
Yes it is.
It's very easy to kill yourself if you truly 100% wanted to and had little to no fear of death or pain of dying.

Even long drop executions done by professionals fail. The odds of someone who is not a professional with equipment substandard to what would be used in a government execution and under the extreme duress needed to muster the strength to make the act will invariably make failure more likely. That's not even counting the not insignificant amount of times in formal executions where a long drop hanging fails to break the neck and the person dies by strangulation which is very painful. There are times blood flow to/from the head is only partially obstructed even after a broken neck delaying the onset of unconsciousness and death. It is a good method if you are very, very careful, have a good rope, a good height to fall from, a good object to tie the rope to and are sure that you won't be discovered. Even then the failure of the "easy" way of the long drop can easily become the intense pain of a regular hanging.
Anyone who is serious about hanging should know all of these things. Deciding to kill yourself by long drop is hardly an easy thing to do.

lol m8 that was savage

savage

There is for the most part, though not without exception a spectrum going from easy to do to hard to do which parallels another spectrum of unlikely to succeed to likely which is also linked to another spectrum of not so bad if you fail to very bad. Your method is likely to fail though failure might not be that bad. Tbh I think these methods are pretty weak, and it's why women tend to try to kill themselves this way. It's also why women survive suicides far more than men. If you look at the statistics men successfully kill themselves FAR more than women, and it comes down to the methods they choose.
Yea, except most suicidal people are nothing like that. So when I talk of most suicidal people you creating some sort of outlier hardly contradicts that.

lol

>Yea, except most suicidal people are nothing like that. So when I talk of most suicidal people you creating some sort of outlier hardly contradicts that.
So, the people you're saying are suicidal aren't really suicidal. That's a fun little definition you have here. It's pretty trendy to be suicidal where you are I imagine? A nice little accessory?

so out of curiosity, if you HAD to kill yourself, for some reason, how would you do it?

>So, the people you're saying are suicidal aren't really suicidal
I actually have no idea what you are on about. That is nowhere in anything that I said, nor can it be inferred by what I said. It's not even something opposed to what I said, it just has absolutely nothing to do with anything that is being said.

Let me recap. I said that suicide is hard for most suicidal people (heavy emphasis on the most) because of a physiological fear of death, plus the fear of the pain/discomfort that comes with most forms of suicide, plus (and I have no idea why you chose to ignore this reason) because of the fear of the consequences of a failure.
You said I was wrong and that suicide is easy, you just have to not care about pain or dying.
I then pointed out that (going back to that heavy emphasis) that even if such people exist they would be outliers and thus does not contradict what I said about most (again with heavy emphasis) suicidal people.

>It's pretty trendy to be suicidal where you are I imagine? A nice little accessory?
I've been a counselor you huge douche. But clearly you wouldn't know anything about that because your reading comprehension is so shockingly bad that it's obvious you never got a degree. This whole post shouldn't exist. I doubt anyone else managed to misread what I said as badly as you have. The sole reason it does is to try to penetrate the thick mist of stupidity that pervades your mind.

Not that user. I don't live in a country with easy gun access but probably something like buying a decent shotgun and blowing your brains out. I'm guessing it's pretty hard to fuck that up.

>Even long drop executions done by professionals fail
Only because they don't want the head to come off and they want to minimize structure needed.
Just 2-3x the listed height for your weight and put a weighted backpack on and your head will pop off.
>with equipment substandard to what would be used in a government execution
Literally a piece of non-climbing rope or wire and a guide to tie a noose.
>Yea, except most suicidal people are nothing like that
You said it wasn't just the fear of death or pain in dying but the fear of failure, I said that was silly given the many effective ways there are to kill yourself. I'd say the fear of death, pain in dying, and your death's impact on others is far larger disincentive then being worried about failing and having to go to the mental ward.
Maybe it's different for chicks since they're so shit at killing themselves.

>Wallace stared blankly at the student with dead eyes for 30 seconds in dead silence

...

wow so sincere and spiritual

YASSS SLAY WALLACE SLAAY

>you will never be so authentic that you need 300 self help books to realize that you should kill yourself
And but so

Delicious pasta, my compliments to the chef.

...

>Ponoma

still chuckle at this

Not very long