You know, I don’t want to be offensive. But ‘Infinite Jest’ is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it...

You know, I don’t want to be offensive. But ‘Infinite Jest’ is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.

Other urls found in this thread:

newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/05/good-people
youtu.be/5Th7MV6Odg8?t=37m33s
youtube.com/watch?v=mtPKDHdS5bM
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

>He can’t think, he can’t write
Bloom went too far with this one, I guess it was a different time

Go write another 45 books on Shakespeare

It’s all a clear indication, Bloom notes, of the decline of literary standards. He was upset in 2003 when the National Book Award gave a special award to Stephen King. “But Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left. [Wallace] seems to have been a very sincere and troubled person, but that doesn’t mean I have to endure reading him. I even resented the use of the term from Shakespeare, when Hamlet calls the king’s jester Yorick, ‘a fellow of infinite jest.’

Infinite Jest used to be one of my favorite books until I found out Bloom disapproved of it. Now I'm embarrassed to have ever recommended it to a friend. Why does one man's opinion matter so much to me?

>I even resented the use of the term from Shakespeare, when Hamlet calls the king’s jester Yorick, ‘a fellow of infinite jest.’


Lmao how fuckign insecure is bloom to include that. "I KNOW SHAKESPEARE BETTER"

Why does he wear the beanie

Are you serious? Wow that's pretty pathetic

What is the best DFW essay short story to start with?

Because he fought long and hard to keep plebs and SJWs from ruining literature and literary studies and it's pathetic how hard he failed. He's the last living bastion of the great literary tradition and he's failing because you had to go and recommend Infinite Jest to people rather than telling them to reread Shakespeare or brush up on the Bible. He's fucking suffering all day every day and his body won't let him die and it's all your fault.

Good Old Neon or Forever Overhead

Who is Bloom?
The guy that you all derive your meme reading lists from?

lol

newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/05/good-people

Here ya go

>Who is Bloom?
You really shouldn't post on a literature board until you've completed at least 45% of the canon

Veeky Forums is just one big circlejerk. Have your own opinions people

Just listen to this interview excerpt

youtu.be/5Th7MV6Odg8?t=37m33s

>first minutes is some jew giving an overly lengthy introduction
>randomly skip ahead into video
>talking about reading as though it's an athletic feat
>"well yes huahuahua well i cannot read as fast at SIXTYfive as i could at TWENTYfive OHBVIOUSLY but i do indeed have a prodigously frightently memoray ha

wow, really made me think

because you never read enough of his books to realize he's a bigger pseud than dfw

Just read Brief interviews

He's right.

he's a smart guy and i like the descriptions of his work, but reading him is fucking torture.

Wtf is with this board. Everyday there is a new thread of the same "DFW has no talent, infinite jest is terrible, Wallace is a pseud" circle jerk.

Everyone knows IJ is actually pretty good, no need to lie.

Dude is embarrassingly insecure, I am shocked that he had almost nothing of substance to say.

What else would you expect from post modernism?

>you can't read one book or else you'll forget everything about Shakespeare's plays

Bloom is a retard with short term memory loss.

>I even resented the use of the term from Shakespeare

Tolstoy hated Shakespeare. I don't know whose opinion I should conform my own to.

/thread

No insecure. Cult.

>recommended it to a friend.

kys

from someone who actually read the book, yes it is bad and not worth reading. If he cut out all the idiot pointless 'encyclopedia novel' drivel, which would shrink the book to about 300 pages, then it would be good. There were good parts, parts that made me laugh, but there was so much unnecessary fluff that by the time I finished it I was annoyed at how much time I had just wasted, but 3/4ths through i figured i might as well finish. I should have dropped it after 300 pages and read something worthwhile

Don't be like us adults.
Go grocery shopping on weekends.
Hop into the water.
mmmhahahah

that was based, motivates me to keep reading the canon

>Tolstoy hated Shakespeare
Why did he?

the way this pretentious cunt says literature is infuriating. stopped listening after 30 seconds

Why bother reading someone who couldn't even live with himself?

The only sincere moment in the life of David Foster Wallace was when he kicked away the chair. The rest of his life was a lie, the new sincerity was a joke whose punchline was the creaking of a leather belt around the rafter.

His literary career was a menagerie of self help lies told to keep his depression at bay - the audience pussy and drugs were the ghosts at that feast of hypocrisy.

The depression was warranted because behind all the gimmicks and the self awareness and the bandannas was no discernible talent.

That's really just a criticism of maximalism in general, though. Of course if you don't like maximalist novels, you won't like IJ. Surely you knew that going in.

Has anybody saved the copypasta of the guy making a fool of himself at uni by boasting about Infinite Jest to everyone until a lecturer BTFO'd him? If so, share please.

This annoyed me too. Not necessarily because it was an "encyclopedic" novel but because much of it just came off as DFW trying to prove how intelligent and educated he is by making (occasionally inaccurate) references to subjects that are conventionally perceived as intelligent. It's made all the more deceptive by the fact that he tries to hide this by explaining these references to the reader in the form of footnotes, when in actuality it's just him attempting to emphasize how knowledgeable he is to the reader.

I dunno, it just came off as insincere to me.

Only anglos like shakespear. Normal people don't

He knew Shakespeare was his only competition for the title of greatest writer in the history of the world.

See

>He was upset in 2003 when the National Book Award gave a special award to Stephen King.
I didn't realize Stephen King of all people was given recognition. He's a rich junk writer after all so he's already been recognized plenty in dollars without any need for a literary sideshow to pump up his ego.
>“But Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace.
Boom. Haven't really read DFW, but that has to be one hell of a case of unmedicated hyperbole.

The other user linked the video starting from 37:33 FYI.

>one hell of a case of unmedicated hyperbole.

This, Bloom was just throwing some bitchy shade

literally every criticism you could level at IJ could also be levelled at Gravitys Rainbow.

Bloom just doesn't like Wallace because of their deep rooted philosophical differences. He probably sees Wallace as a sort of neo-fascist, and it is undeniably true that elements of the Jest are very very faschy indeed. Secondly, Bloom is practically European in his aesthetics, thus the only American writers that he really applauds are those that conform to European aesthetic standards. This is the only possible explanation for why he thinks Henry James is the best American novelist, rather than say Herman Melville. Wallace is a terrifically American writer and his aesthetics must as such set Bloom's teeth on edge. Even if Bloom likes Pynchon, he probably doesn't have a lot of time for the less Euro-inflected aspects of his work like the acronyms and initialisms and the hyuk hyuk sez Slothrop etc., the stuff that most Pynchonites really get off to.

Wallace is a great but flawed writer; Bloom is a great but flawed critic. Dismissing either makes you a fag.

>neo-faschy

wut

why do people write like this?

so many people at my fucking university do this as well

all these references to bla bla and mr whogives fuck, x said y use some esoteric words bla fucking bla

you say so much but in the end you're just saying absolutely fucking nothing of substance at all

what a worthless, pathetic waste of post

fuck you

jesus you're just such a pretentious self-masturbating loser.

Not in any like some kind of skinhead sense of the word, but Wallace has definitely flirted with a lot of seriously traditionalist ideas, in and outside his work. When you look at his criticism of American culture, his solutions generally have to do with reorienting yourself towards a community and giving up your individual will to that of the collective. Like his descriptions of the Tennis Academy and AA all emphasise that ability to escape personal suffering and meaninglessness through dedicating yourself to a collective. Then there's Marathe's speech about America where he talks about needing "a love-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose"

By no means am I saying Dave is a fascist, but I think he's deeply conflicted about his liberal upbringing and makes a theatre of reconsidering conservative/traditional notions that he thinks the culture's trained him to disregard and ignore.

Haven't finished the book yet so maybe I'm getting the wrong end of the stick.

>never got through Gravity's Rainbow
Veeky Forums frauds are losers

What are you talking about you fucking mong. I'm making references that are pretty well-known on this board. If you don't know who any of the people I mentioned are you need to fucking lurk.

Literally why would you get buttmad about someone mentioning something you don't know, rather than just googling the name and learning something new.

My post was pretty simple, and not at all hard to follow if you know who Pynchon is, and know that Henry James was an expat who lived in Europe as you could have easily found out from his fucking Wikipedia page

People like you shouldn't even be on this board. Just go back to jerking off and playing video games if you're unwilling to even google an unfamiliar name.

So, he's holding literature back?

Alright this image needs to stop being posted now. This was the last time.

Okay I'll amend it. I've never heard a criticism of IJ on this board that couldn't also be levelled at Gravitys Rainbow. Im not even saying that IJ is as good as GR, but just that as has been pointed out multiple times itt most of the flak Wallace gets is for writing in a STEM-ish encyclopaedic style which is pretty much directly ripped from Pynchon, like the sections about imipolex-g and ig-farben.

Pynchon obviously has a more flowery and lyrical style, which Wallace more or less abandons, but complaining that a writer doesn't write beautifully enough for you is a non-criticism if the writer wasn't intending to write beautifully, and Wallace's interest in deliberately unaesthetic prose is well-documented and skill fully handled in his works

Awful, I don't understand why people worship Bloom so much

The guy's post was pretty simple and had a clear argument so I think you just might be retarded

get off this board

He has authority,

DFW slams Harold Bloom in Infinite Jest btw.

>who is Bloom?
He's the jew who undeservedly obtained a position critiquing goy literature, who is incessantly championed by the neurotic jews who try to police goy speech about goy literature on this jew-infested board.

No user kun it's actually much more simple than that pseudo rant you got going on. DWF dissed Bloom in the book so Bloom disses him back. It's high school warfare.
Also
>DFW neo fascist
>undeniably true that elements of the Jest are very very faschy indeed
what are you on man

Can't think. Can't write. No discernible talent.
Likely a latent faggot. Definitely not alright.
See a shrink, David; you're not Heaven-sent
Slurring and stuttering probably high as a kite
Your book sucks, you suck, you're fucking bent
The infinite jest of infinite jest is that it's shite
Can't think. Can't write. No discernible talent.

>welcome to the water

Re Dfw having faschy elements read
Also I think that the Bloom-Wallace beef is way too long-lasting and vicious to be just about the "artistic influenza" footnote. I mean Harold was still talking shit about IJ after Dave's suicide, and who wouldn't be able to get over something like an insult in a footnote when the author's just ended themselves. Nah I think there's more to it than that, and that Bloom feels genuinely threatened by some aspect of Wallace's work.

we're all drowning in the water, muehuehuehuh

you can't swim at a grocery store, hahehuh

That is atrocious. Contrived, incoherent, unconvincing, stylistically perplexing, a complete mess. Laughably bad.

Wow.

If this is typical DFW quality, I might agree with Bloom that Stephen King is in fact Cervantes in comparison.

what did DFW say against bloom? i'm oretty sure he never mentioneted him in IJ

I hate these retarded posts. Why do you write that? It wasn't funny the first 1000 times either.

waterposting has only been around for like 2 weeks, fag. i know because i started it.

His voice is so affected I feel like I'm listening to a failed but aspiring actor/ress.

That said, DFW is pretty bad.

Now I be cry. :_(

These sort of debates could be settled by just splitting Literature departments in two - the traditionalists (inc. the likes of Bloom) who are broadly interested in the aesthetics of Literature and strongly non-relativist (some things are worthy/canonical, some aren't) could be trad-lit, and the new wave fems, post modernists, post colonialists etc, who broadly see literature as a way to change culture and politics, or at least a history of these things, and are strongly relativist, could be called 'neo-lit', and never twain shall meet

Us adults are all screaming inside.
Try to not be like us.
Just keep treading water, little fish.
mmmhuehuehah

slight autism attack there desu, that post youre quoting wasn't all that obscure or erudite, you might be just be an ignorant person. Do some reading, you'll have fun

What do I need to read before I'm ready to try Infinite Jest? Serious question.

Literally nothing, just dive in (to the water)

Are the water memes from the book or somewhere else?

You thought books were about fun?

Books are about reading the eloquent ravings of self indulgent narcissists, for the most part.

Splitting boards is a fucking disaster. Inevitably all the actual content migrates to the smaller board and the older, original board becomes inundated with cancer.

>Uses fag as an insult
So what, in 2 weeks you managed to do the joke 1000 times

>>Uses fag as an insult
why do reddit users insist on unmasking themselves? also, no. i only posted it once. now it's a full-fledged meme

>be sitting on the subway
>have my headphones in so don't notice the people looking at me
>just finishing up Infinite Jest for the third time
>almost done, just getting through the last few pages of endnotes (it's a Swedish translation)
>listening to the audiobook of The Second Sex because I don't want anyone to think I'm a misogynist
>a youth gets on the subway
>apparently asks for my seat, but I don't hear for obvious reasons
>he gets upset and grabs my book
>I just let him have it because I don't want to be called racist
>I get up and give him the seat and subtly change to the audio book of the Koran

Has anyone else had trouble reading on the subway?

he's a big guy

its jews all the way down

oooh ah ah ah ah

wait... are we not singing down with the sickness?

i read it without reading anything in preparation and i honestly loved every second of it.
dont go in thinking oh boy this is the #1 on that list on Veeky Forums, even though after reading it i agree that it is #1 for good reason and only after that happened did it become a meme

IJ isn't even close to the level of talent found in GR
You need to make some research on GR

Pynchon actually gives his "STEM-ish" style a reason for being there. IJ lacks the cohesive element, is just messy because "messy is cool isnt it :P" and the only insight is "sometimes jokes hurt ya'know"
GTFO

...are you mentally retarded? There's a lot of posts on Veeky Forums that could be accused of being turgid without much to say and with many name-dropping, but that post has simple sentences and refers to

>Harold Bloom and DFW (who the thread is about)
>Pynchon
>Henry James
>Melville

Pynchon is pretty relevant to DFW, and if you haven't read anything by James and Melville, well...

that post could definitely be criticized in other ways, but obscurity? lmao

You have to remember that to an ignorant person even very common literary references may be opaque and confusing. They do not have the ability to tell the difference between a common and uncommon reference. Hence they get angry at "pretentious cunts" when they see a reference they don't understand because to them it might as well be extremely arcane name droppery whereas to most readers the names are so common it's almost shocking when someone hasn't heard of them.

I think it would be helpful for many beginners to acquire a good book on the history of world literature or preferably a set of such books. I didn't do my reading about the history of literature in English so I don't know what kind of sets are available, but I have a 12-volume set of books in my native language that my then-girlfriend scored for me by dumb luck at a flea market at a bargain price. Prior to that I borrowed books from that set from the library. I drew so much general information about literary movements and authors and works that my reading list ballooned, not to mention the series of books in itself was extremely fascinating aside from being a source for mining book titles. I would recommend beginners and frankly anyone interested in literature to acquire a good set of books on the history of world literature if possible.

Because I was talking about you

>Pasta this old
>Nineties Pasta that still believed readers would only buy cookie-cutter Aristotle plot-arc pulp narratives

>WHAAAA I DONT GET WHAT THEY'RE SAYING PRETENTIOUS PRETENTIOSU PRITEND SHUS

This is what you sound like:
youtube.com/watch?v=mtPKDHdS5bM

No, IJ was legit terrible. It's a guy trying to be canon and original really really hard and that's it.

>This is the only possible explanation for why he thinks Henry James is best american novelist, rather than say Herman Melville.

Bloom sees Moby Dick as an epic rather than a novel, and considers Melville the best American writer after Whitman in the climax of his talent. Consider James the best American novelist because the sum of his 25 novels achieve something I do not remember.

Bloom is a God.

Footnote 366.
"Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom's turgid studies of artistic influenza..."

Just because he admires collectivism and father figures doesn't mean he's a straight fascist. Remember, he's criticizing PoMo. He's simply arguing that killing dogmatism and authority has consequences. DFW had some right wing beliefs, but he wasn't a fascist. You aren't supposed to necessarily agree with Marathe in everything he says. DFW props Marathe as one extreme of the spectrum.

google Tolstoy on Shakespeare and read the little excerpt about how he read the plays at a young age and then again at 75 and he still didn't enjoy them.

Then read Orwell's essay comparing Tolstoy to King Lear.

Honestly, if you've read Shakespeare and Tolstoy, you can connect the dots. They're so different (at least in my translation of Tolstoy), with only a few great things in common (complexity of characters, ability to hold your attention if you're a good reader).

Shakespeare is Shakespeare -- it's lyrical. It's unarguably meant to be read in English. It's infinitely re-readable because it's almost impossible to enjoy reading one of his plays on its first readthrough (especially if you're not well-versed in the canon). Shakespeare is magical, and it takes dissecting the plays to realize how down to earth it is, whereas Tolstoy is down-to-earth and more easily digestible. That's not to say that makes Tolstoy worse, idk... I fucking loved Anna Karenina and Tolstoy is in my top 5.

>I'm sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.

I don't understand if the appeal is anything more than i liked a couple scenes.

I didn't think the technique or themes of infinite jest were anything special.

But i cannot deny enjoying it.

I am far from patrician. My favorite reading experience was The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

And i call that an experience.

Infinite Jest, the half of Pynchon's novels i've tried to read, and J R had one thing in common.

And that is: they were like eating a really boring salad with IHOP lettuce and mayanoisse with a little bit of ground beef in every fifth bite.

A lot of their problems can be solved by embracing beauty and truth as a core tenent, then they wouldn't write so much trash, they'd try to make beautiful works.

Is what i think i'd say if i was a highbrow literature critic.

We can play pretend for today.

*smooches myself*