Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace

>Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace
What did he mean by this?

>tfw you will never see a Stephen King and Harold Bloom buddy cop movie

I'd watch it

Though we need to write a screenplay asap, they're both getting old

Hyperbole.

DFW is pretty bad, though.

Me think he is saying Steven King is as good as Cervantes

>mfw Harold Bloom sitting around reading fucking garbage like King and Wallace because he already read all the classics

Completely honestly asking: is Infinite Jest even any good? It's more than a thousand pages, right? I don't want to slog through a thousand pages just to find out that I've wasted my time on shit or mediocrity. I could just read Proust if I want to read over a thousand pages, at least I know I'll be impressed. Is Wallace worth the trouble?

Honestly ... I don't like it.

It's too long. Deliberately so (idk, some shit about wanting the reader to pay attention and show how overly stressing the modern world is... idk wtf he wanted to do with that, putting as much bullshit in there as possible). The dialogue is kinda cringey and artificial sounding.

It has some moments of brilliance. In fact, the best way to decide is get it from a library, read the beginning and see if you like it.

Drunk father talking to his son
>Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever. Use it or lose it, he say over the newspaper. I’m…I’m just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN. Potential maybe worse than none, Jim. Than no talent to fritter in the first place, lying around guzzling because I haven’t the balls to…God I’m I’m so sorry Jim. You don’t deserve to see me like this. I’m so scared, Jim. I’m so scared of dying without ever really being seen. Can you understand? Are you enough of a big thin prematurely stooped young bespectacled man, even with your whole life still ahead of you, to understand? Can you see I was giving it all I had?

I think Bloom just didn't like the way DFW was writing. Bloom doesn't seem like a fan of intellectual-casual type writing, like when DFW compares a woman's skin to the color of a fine squash.
Everyone loves that young Jim part, including myself.
Himself in general was my favorite about IJ by quite a long shot.
Complaining about "artificiality" in dialogue is really only admissible when the writer is clearly an amateur or there is no real impetus for the artificiality of it - there always is for IJ.
I don't know if it's "good", it's entertaining but all of DFW's nails go through the wood.

It's pretty good, but flawed. DFW comes off as trying too hard to impress, and for long stretches of time the book gets dull (Gately in the hospital is way too long). Also all the AA stuff is far to didactic for my liking.

>Also all the AA stuff is far to didactic for my liking.

>not realizing the irony behind all the AA stuff

I really enjoyed it when I knew nothing about literature or philosophy. I haven't went back to it since (and I'd like to think I've learned a good deal in the interval since) but I would imagine it could get tiring for someone who went into it with an attitude expecting to be entertained quickly and for that to be sustained for all 1000 pages. It can be boring at times and gratuitous but he usually saves it with good humor at the very least. I also wouldn't imagine that someone who wasn't an over educated wasp would appreciate it much considering that environment and attitudes are what are satirized the most. I do know that I have been more impressed by Oblivion and sections of the pale king (the soliloquy being one of the vest pieces of writing I've ever read). If you listen too much to Veeky Forums though you're doing yourself a disservice, not that you can't reasonably dislike it either though. And for what it's worth David Markson and William Gass gave the book high praise.

but why?

Seems like an easy opinion to hold up to a crowd who have never read DFW's essays

it's honestly just not true, Bloom knows this and uses it as a sort of snarky punchline that maintains the vibe of his argument but without committing to it. There's no idiot in the world who would conflate the two much or less make the distinction that somehow King is better than DFW. Truth be told Bloom is an aging fart who did all his groundbreaking stuff decades ago and now tries to maintain a relevance by taking the somewhat cheap opportunities to respond to popular lit/how that pop lit reflects him in the case of IJ

IJ is brilliant no matter what your taste, the book is meticulously framed and the characters are all done with so much care the heart of the book shines through despite its snarky and unrelenting attempts to make you hate the narrator. The book is also a goldmine for conspiracy hunting (eg. who the FUCK is the figure outside on the day of the match near the end of the book in the snow). So yeah, read it.

you haven't read it, get over it and push through. wallace is smarter than you and is perfectly aware of how pretentious he sounds, pay attention to the things that seem to be brushed under the rug (for example the book's plot), as well as how the absurdities have definitve layers as opposed to being "muh random world." There's a sort of hierarchy between the growing absurdity in the stories of Gately to Hal to Steeply, IJ is incredibley 'discrete' in this sense, the devices it uses may be crazy and strange intentioned but they still have very mechanical presences in this regard

see my comment in the bloom thread; Bloom's a brilliant dude but needs to stop responding to the public like he's been doing the past 20/30 years now

you are hardly qualified to make this judgement, the didactic stuff as dude kind of gets at is the sort of classic separation in platonic idealism but Wallace uses this "jump" in terms of irony.

"Everything I've let go of has had claw marks in it" yes this is a cheesy wolverine esque quote but the idea behind it is what wallace tries to distill despite the sarany effects of cliche and irony, how do we get our language to "transcend" itself into a more meaningful place in our minds, at the point where the mantras/catchphrases/tennis lessons become something automatic and more spiritual (lyle/Joi/metempsychosi)

It's not bad. It's clearly very thought out and lots of effort went into it, but sadly DFW just cannot write to save his life. Plotwise it's fine, if needlessly cryptic—there's a point to it, yes, and it does work to an extent, but it can detract from your experience—; the characters are good, interesting and fleshed out; it has thematic depth and contemporary relevance as well; but the prose is just God-awful: Not just the gimmicky sections of yrstrly and Wardine be cry, but the entirety of the novel shows an evident disregard for the aeshetic qualities of fine writing. DFW comes from a place of essays and nonfiction, not from poetry and artistic fiction; his personal library was full of self-help books and Stephen King and it shows; the rhetorical tools he uses are used without ear or skill—where used they are hollow, cliché and with little regard to how they fit in with the rest of the sentence. Infinite Jest is the work of an intelligent writer who spent much time and effort with his thoughts, but none to his craft.
That said, it's not a bad novel; you just have to know what to expect. The characters and plot are good; the themes are mostly well developed; it's very long and requires some effort from the reader; and the prose is terrible. If last two points don't bother you too much, go for it. Though I might have come across as negative, I did enjoy the book; I was just slightly disappointed in it.

speaking of Proust, how deep in the game do you have to be before you're good to take it on?

bum p

>you haven't read it, get over it and push through. wallace is smarter than you and is perfectly aware of how pretentious he sounds, pay attention to the things that seem to be brushed under the rug (for example the book's plot), as well as how the absurdities have definitve layers as opposed to being "muh random world." There's a sort of hierarchy between the growing absurdity in the stories of Gately to Hal to Steeply, IJ is incredibley 'discrete' in this sense, the devices it uses may be crazy and strange intentioned but they still have very mechanical presences in this regard
I read it twice.

Wallace was a try-hard faggot and you're a sycophantic pseud sucking on the spectre of your master's penor. Bitch.

Bloom really seems to hate DFW

If you want meme about IJ on Veeky Forums then you should read it

What did Bloom say about John Green?

>Bloom will be dead soon
>Nobody will be around to defend the canon from bourgeois liberals pushing young adult novels

I stopped after 2 pages and decided it wasn't worth it. Read something you enjoy, or something that brings you meaning. Two pages in and I got, this is going to be a negative book without enough insight to match how terrible it's going to make me feel.

That dialogue is fucking excellent, makes me want to read this

>Gately emerges as the hero of the book because he endures his pain and suffering
>Wallace kills himself

What does this mean?

No, Wallace is a shitty hack writer they only read his book because that fucking limp-dicked nixon-loving liberal killed himself whilst committing autoeroticasphyxiation

not2Bdenied

Well, Bloom have called himself a longuinist. So for him style is more important than abstract ideas, in the sense that style engenders ideas of its own.

everyone hates it now that it's no longer cool to like it, but honestly IJ is the best book to come out in the last 20 years

He is so full of shit. Yes, I think DFW is an overrated pretentious celeb-tier faggot, but I can't deny having loved IJ and a few of stories, and most of his essays.

HOWEVER, I feel like Bloom just got butthurt over DFW slamming him in a footnote in IJ.

Oh for fuck sake, I can't tell which meme is worse: DFW is garbage or DFW is GOAT.

He's good. Not great, not bad. But good.

That's your fucking fault, faggot.

It's kind of hard to be just lukewarm on the only guy to do anything innovative with fiction in the past forty years or so especially considering he wrote a 1000 page monster asserting his opinion with several hundred pages of non fiction too. You either agree or don't

you shut your whore mouth

Holy shit. Read a fucking book.

I know more about the history of literature than you so bring it on pseud

Okay, then. I do not agree.

What, exactly, was so 'innovative' about IJ?

Be specific.