Infinite Jest prep?

not really lol. this is just a meme by people who don't really understand IJ. YDAU is where most of the story takes place, the other years are basically flashbacks and Year of Glad is like a "one year later" deal.

You don't need to put in a lot of effort to understand IJ's chronology

user how old are those girls

Agreed
People say a lot of things about IJ, be a little skeptical about the difficulty of the work. I'm halfway through it and having a blast.

just read it
but use two bookmarks, one for the main text and one for the endnotes

user Infinite Jest is specifically designed to stroke your ego to climax with the minimum possible effort on your part. It has no prerequisites, in fact if you read too much it will stop the book from impressing you at all. Just lie back and let it stroke you.

You can read IJ without background knowledge but it'll be a waste of time. DFW was obsessed with literary theory and continental philosophy and a humongous portion of the novel is dedicated to dealing with those issues and how they relate to 90s America. Everyone on lit is a fundamentalist so it's never brought up that IJ was written for the pretentious undergrad (this is you even if you're not in school btw), the academy, his mfa peers, his dirty realism skeptical peers, and of course mary karr. He did this to further his reputation in the academy (literati circles) and the mainstream lit audience. It worked well. The novel oscillates between so many frequencies that people can gauge any sort of reaction and overall opinion of it that they like, i.e. arguments for or against its difficulty are equally valid depending on how you want to fiddle the evidence. If any prior knowledge is required I'd suggest reading his tv essay twice. Twice because it's not an easy essay to grapple with. You're being irresponsible if you don't read it once

You're not good enough to become an ∞ Jester yet

>discounting the genuine effort dfw makes to describe and at least halfway correct the tragic plight of the modern american consumer

IJ is shit, it's better to not read it at all.

It's probably the easiest of pomo mega novels to read, with its conversational tone. Only the length is foreboding. There's not much substance to be found within. The best of it is stolen from TBK and Pynchon.

If you take my advice you'll thank me later.

this is so retarded. IJ is 95% DeLillo

>If you take my advice you'll thank me later.
if he takes your advice he'll never know for himself anything you're claiming, so how's he gonna thank you later?
arrogant turd

If IJ is so good then why did DFW kill himself

is this a legitimate argument

There are things called peer-reviewed articles, turd. Did you not graduate from high school?

point me to the peer reviewed articles claiming IJ is the easiest of pomo mega novels to read, that it lacks substance, that the best of it is stolen from TBK and pynchon

It's not a difficult read at all, it's just long. I'd recommend doing what I did and reading 10pgs per day. That way you won't get burned out on it and you can read other things. There's only a handful of passages that are truly difficult and that was purposely so. And don't skip over seemingly minute details like the long list of JOI's filmography. Unless it's a scientific name for a drug then it's worth knowing

if you're too lazy and stupid to do basic research yourself, then i'm confident you wouldn't be able to trudge through the asswipe that is IJ.

mission successful.

i already have so...
thanks for trying

no you haven't pseud.

>each year is monetized and therefore has a sponsor's name. An example being the year of the Depend adult undergarment.
Huh.

I get the impression Wallace was yet another '80s-'90s American who thought that malls and TV and suburbs were really sinister and bad.

It strikes me as parochial.

He wanted to be like Kurt Cocain, or something.

Kurt Cocain was a sad guy who didn't like mateerlizm.

I'm getting a strange, vertigo-like sense of perspective right now. The camera is drawing back. I'm starting to realise that most "serious" literary writers from the US are basically Holden Caulfield, and are very "serious" about how things are in their immediate vicinity, and how sad it all is, that things are being bought and sold. How commercial. Never trust anyone over thirty, they probably shop at Shopco.

Just... parochial. How cheap and small of these people to have such cheap and small problems!

Basically the post-50s people. Cormac McCarthy an exception, not sure if he's a heavyweight, but he doesn't have this eternal teen angst issue.

the important thing is you're sitting on your great big chair looking down at the people who have done so much more than you
your arrogance never ceases to amaze me Veeky Forums

:^)

>I get the impression Wallace was yet another '80s-'90s American who thought that malls and TV and suburbs were really sinister and bad.

Your impressions are wrong. This is exactly what he rallies against while not apologizing for their existence on the same hand.

What, really? Is that his main thing, that TV and the suburbs and malls aren't so bad?

That's almost worse. Further down the toilet spiral. Why engage with such lemon-bleachy scented subjects at all?

because they constitute the fabric of modern america
what do you write about? the view from your bedroom window? i'm sure it's very picturesque stuff

no that's not at all what he's saying; he goes to extreme lengths to criticize tv. You obviously havent read ten pages of anything hes written

Instead of wasting your time with IJ just pretend GR is about tennis, read the Wikipedia article on Quebuec, and call it a day.

TV died, malls remain collections of shops that are covered from the elements, and suburbs remain aesthetically displeasing residential areas.

The job of a writer is to create the fabric of his culture, not to stoop to domestic commentary. Leave that to op-ed columnists and those chatty woman's magazine writers. Didacticism like this is middle-brow at best, no matter how many footnotes it has.

Yes, I sense that some precious ideas are in need of smashing.

Of course not. The smell of parochial smugness and oh so meaningul seriousness about driveways drives me away.

I am 100% certain that I can know a man by the scent of his writing.

Which leads to the slightly modified assessment of his odour:

He was an '80s moderate left-winger who thought that suburbs and malls were kind of OK and that TV was bad. I suppose he also wanted to save the rainforest, or something.

Presumably he thought TV was bad because it shoveled reams of indigestible and drab content down the throats of a captive audience. Haven't watched it in years, myself.
Ironic that IJ is now on college curriculums.

>doesn't even read
>his assessment of dfw is just regurgitating what some other user just told him
>thinks this is insight worth sharing
you're just the type we need

Was anyone else just like, profoundly disappointed and disturbed by the ending of the book? I felt angry and confused and cheated by the ending, I remember asking myself "that's it???" but for most of the book I'd been like "that's too fucking much." I'm conflicted.

what, specifically, would you have wanted from the ending that you didn't get?

I don't know, only that I wasn't given whatever it was . . . ha ha, there's my consumer culture talking. Couldn't really put my finger on what felt "off" about the book, but months later I read some essays calling out DFW for being guilty of the soullessness/hypocrisy/irony he wrote vehemently against and it sort of clicked? It felt like an ending that had given up.

1/2 an ending written by a man who'd already given up and stopped caring, if that makes sense.

You can tell a lot about a garment when you know the cloth it is cut from.

DFW seems like someone who could have written for 90's-era television or newspapers if his circumstances were even a little bit different, if he didn't have the Holden Caulfied spirit of...

Worth thinking this bit out... My method is like that of a spirit medium...

I really despise this and it depresses me, but make sure to take note of how nobly I rest my sad head on my firm fist. Oh, oh that modern life, man. Infomercials, those famous and permanent fixtures of our lives? They really get me down. And when I think about how plastic plastic mannequins are, I feel doubt about my place in the universe, and even a smidgen of doubt about how much you respect and admire the single tear that not even my jaded, McDonalds drive-through spirit of modernity can suppress, not even with supersized fries.

Visions beset me. Shrink wrapped hearts for sale in the bargain basement flash by, as do those famous chocolate coolios from Delve Twelve the convenience house, which represent black people or something, and finally an automatic carrot julienner festooned with polyester feather boas in shocking pink, for only ninety nine ninety nine if you order now, which I guess is like a castration image or something man.

i think a lot of the revelatory stuff in the novel comes in the middle, which can have the effect of sucking the punch out of the actual ending. i forget which interview he says this in, but i believe dfw structured ij in imitation of a fractal, so the ending mirrors the beginning and each lead slowly toward whatever """""lesson""""" was being given, in the center of the novel. maybe not very satisfactory but something to think about

i don't think it's fair to label that as soullessness/hypocrisy/irony regardless, not having an answer to the problem proposed does not equate to laughing it off. as many times as ij has been called comedic, it's mostly very sad and fatalistic, aspects stemming from a deeply held sincerity imo
but i'm just paraphrasing his interviews at this point

yeah okay

>soullessness/hypocrisy
>fatalistic
>deeply held sincerity
If you're trying to persuade me that my nose is wrong, you'll have to do better.

Different tack. What are the merits of this piece of parochial navel-gazing?

what do you think about that one scene where Himself appears as a wraith to Gately? because going back after that I realized that Himself (who is very similar to DFW) sometimes potentially has a really pervasive presence in the novel - I think DFW was aware of both this and how he'd loaded his own personal abstractions (sort of) into him and Hal; and yeah, hysterical realism runs rampant, but then, suddenly there's the Hamlet moment and that reaally made me think something about the novel and its message was fucked up in the last fourth of the book. But yeah, I actually wrote a research paper on this because, for whatever reason (honestly, i can think of like 3 good ones), no one wants to write about this scene.

Merits? Navel-gazing . . . well, honestly I think people sometimes get too invested in the mystique, philosophy, abstractions of IJ to appreciate that it's a the story of the world's most surreal dysfunctional family and the world spiraling out of control under their noses. It's sad, funny, and profound at times, even relatable at others. Even if it uses a "shotgun method" to get there. There's 3 of us arguing right now, just for clarification.

are you saying you think dfw's implicating himself as somehow orchestrating the various bad shit that happens to gately and hal (as in dfw sees himself as the wraith who sets into motion many of the crippling events for those characters)? i'm not sure, it's been like 4 years since i last read it, but if we're to see Himself in that light, couldn't he be trapped and unwillingly wreaking that kind of havoc? his suicide becomes meaningless if he's ultimately a malicious character trying to spread the entertainment, or personally fuck with hal and gately

what do you think the wraith's motives would be?

I don't think it/Himself has a motive, he's not "evil" but he's aloof and apathetic and superior, and also easily taken advantage of. Avril and/or Orrin are probably involved in the distribution of the entertainment. I'm just wondering if there's a possibility he's not innocent. The entertainment is given to the medical attache on the anniversary of Himself's death; I vaguely remember reading something about Avril getting in a tryst with them somewhere?

My advice is to read through the whole footnotes regardless of how irrelevant they seem at the time (this will make sense to you later) and to pay close attention the whole time you're reading it. It's a wonderful book.

well there are those visions gately and hal both have (dreams?) where they dig up himself's head and attempt to find something in it that's already been taken, probably the entertainment, so my thinking is the action of the wraith serve primarily to bring hal and gately together for that purpose. although the fact that it's already been taken kind of renders his actions pointless, except that maybe if we are to see him as an extension of the author his impotence can be a kind of self-deprecation and wringing-of-the-hands with regard to stopping the indoctrination of the country. he reaches hal, gately and joelle, but he can't do more?
also could be a kind of playful deus ex machina self-insert to move along certain plot elements in a self-referential fashion
certainly brings the hamlet reference home i guess?

i'd be really interested in whatever ideas you put forth in that essay actually

I guess he writes in the style of DeLillo and Pynchon, so you might want to read them

what writers are better?

pretty much any other famous postmodernist. DFW is definitively the worst among them.

>definitively
proof

Hmm. I don't know if my opinion has changed, but I would like to say that this is a civilised response.

What, you're pulling that penny-pinching "if you can't say anything nice" move?

There is a stupid number of writers, user. They need to be dismissed and rejected as often and as brutally as possible. It's like the zombie apocalypse, but with bad writing.

DFW: probably not the worst writer, but the culling must continue, because god knows the writers keep getting born. And it's all the more urgent to assassinate doorstopper books, because they are difficult to evaluate, and yet they keep piling up. Cutting the dead wood becomes very literal here.

>I'd recommend doing what I did and reading 10pgs per day.
You would end up reading it for 4 months though

Man that shit actually happened. They took John Wayne to dig the head up.

By the way, no one ever talks about the characters and how good they are. Pemulis is one of my favorites of all time. And i have never heard anyone rebutt the power of the scene where madam psychosis is going to kill herself. Or even Matty when he is detoxing in the bathroom. I would recommend the book for those scenes alone.

I've read it twice, the second time I took about 3 months. It's a book worth serious reading. Not for a page count or check off the old supposed to list.

Yeah, I argued with myself in circles pretty much. The GIST/thesis of the paper (I think?) is something along the lines that the first round of criticism of IJ is too abstract and too concerned with theory, philosophy, and minutia in general so therefore no one ever talks about/studies the characters with the respect given to a "proper" novel. (Yeah, I love Pemulis too, for the most part. in an interview DFW calls him one of the "Antichrists of novel" which always bothers me..) Anyway, I've attached the paper, it's very meh professionally and I admit I didnt read some of the shit I cited. Oops.

fuck. ok im an idiot that's for pics.
pastebin.com/1499afEu

what is it then if not post modern?

lol you literally couldn't be more wrong.. is this bait?

you'll hear it called "post-post-modern" or "noveau" or "hysterical realism"but yeah, IJ is pretty much a post-modern novel that was written after postmodernism went out of fashion/began to acquire semi-canonical status.