Holy shit someone posted this in a dfw hate thread the other day and it's fucking gold

But man, I don't see him as trying hard to be contrarian AT ALL.

Most of the article he doesn't talk about DFW directly but what he sees has DFW's predecessors, Selby Jr., Easton Ellis, and Vollman. He's putting DFW in a tradition that he sees as totally disingenuous and exploitative, and he makes a thorough and entertaining argument for that if you'd even read it.

The thesis that crowns DFW as the final and logical conclusion of this tradition of literary fraud follows very naturally from the work he did above. DFW is an afterthought of this movement. It's important to couch his work in the fabric of its time. It's important to remember what kind of person DFW was and what he wanted to achieve in his life. What makes him unique? Why would another prep school jock have anything special inside of him? People talk about this thing like it's a UFO when it's nothing more than fart in the wind, of note only because the waterboy could make farts of exceptional loudness and stink.

Lastly, to address the only concrete point, yes DFW does pre-empt criticism of his overall point through doubts of the main characters, but show me where in book he goes beyond those doubts? I can see my flaws too, but not knowing how to solve them is what keeps me from ruling the world.

>Sure these jaded Los Angeles kids are a “lost” generation, but why’s it so bad that they’re “lost”? They have plenty of sex, drugs, threads, cars and cash.
this guy is a fucking idiot

pretty ugly article, and bland too. But give a cynical, underappreciated member of the literati from Australia, let alone Perth, even an inch of an opportunity to voice their dusty resentments, they'll gladly take a mile.

This section rang mildly true, at least.
>This wouldn’t work in Vollmann’s favour, because there are few things more uncool to his hipster audience than believing strongly in something. Even the vegetarians in those circles usually claim to be doing it for “economic reasons,” since shouting “meat is murder!” is almost as uncool as being a pro-lifer. In all those indie ensemble films that hipsters love it’s usually characters with strong beliefs that get played for laughs, whether it’s the Nietzschean teenager in Little Miss Sunshine, or the existentialists in I Heart Huckabees (with the smug hero rejecting both pessimism and optimism for a bland middle option), or countless set-ups where you have a hipster Everyman playing the “straight” role against a rabid Marxist or feminist. It’s also thanks to hipster irony that no one can use the word imperialist seriously anymore. (Some people even consider it too loaded for essays on the Roman Empire.) Under this situation, Vollmann’s piece makes perfect strategic sense. A story depicting vegetarianism as a Nazi war crime may well be the most retarded thing ever submitted for workshop, but at least it isn’t “didactic.” And that’s what hipsters care about above all else.
yet it seems he's less annoyred with wallace's apparently insincere and hammy depiction of drug addiction than he is with the fact that he has strong convictions about it - too Calvinist, i guess

also an autistic hatred of other peoples experiences and reflections on human nature as intrinsically trite and invalid. maybe, but I get bored after someone (who isn't a christian that regards it as heretical) uses the word 'calvinist' as an insult more than twice. what, exactly, is offending you?
>The rotten lie that “having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.”
does he read every novel as if it is an attempt by the author to impose their own life onto himself? no wonder he gets so worked up trying to detect undercurrents of alien philosophies in the books he reads, he doesn't want to be subversively compromised by the worldview of these fiction writers who can spin dials in his clockwork mind.

reading this pulls me back into that weird era in australian culture dominated by american-imported anti-americanism. there's not much reason for someone from australia to feel so much vitriol about evangelicalism. it's some kind of imitation of the american liberal rhetoric and attitude of the bush era, but lacking context its just strange and pathetic. reacting to the geopolitical imperialism of getting dragged into the iraq war by america everyone fell into the lazy cultural imperialism of adopting america's own self-reflective mannerisms, instead of coming up with a unique, national cultural critique of a foreign power. cultural cringe in action, i guess.

>Still, if the great Ned Flanders Lookalike Association of hipsterdom has one talent, it’s finding an excuse to adore practically anything. Poking fun at these vermin is like trying to kill bedbugs with pine-scented air freshener. They’ll always find a way to survive, at least until the rest of us take to the streets, form brigades and make it unsafe to be post-ironically ironic after dark. And even then, they’ll just join another, rottener subculture. Eventually, some Wallace groupie will find a way to spin everything in this article into a plus. I can already imagine the blurb: “Brilliant! Like a bum fight refereed by Einstein and Descartes!”
yikes.

haven't even read DFW and he comes off as silly to me, but successful criticism makes you feel antipathy to the author's work, not to the critic as a human being

How can I learn to shitpost like an Australian?

some of the comments were fun

My favorite comment is number 12 (bonus points for you if you know who made it)

Yours truly?

140 is a pretty good response.

>Start reading
>Author starts going off on tangent about Requiem for absolutely no reason
>Goes into deep racings about republicans and a bunch of other books that aren't really realted
>Drives back to talking about IJ and DFW by comparing them to these books and these people.

That was honestly one of the shittiest written criticisms I've ever read and the writer should douse himself in gasoline and light himself on fire in the hopes that he never waste anybodies time again.

I do love the intense REEEEing that Wallace clearly wasn't as informed about drug use as the author. Clearly whoever wrote this did a lot of drugs and is resentful somebody who doesn't understand drug use as well as he did wrote about it and wrote about it negatively like those Republicans.

You did not make comment number twelve.

I hope the question mark would indicate it mean you. sorry

I considered that you might have meant that, but you do not know who I am, so it would have made no sense for you to guess me. I did not make the comment, by the way.

Who made the comment?

No one famous. It's not worth explaining if you don't already know.

It's not that black pedo guy is it? Not that I would expect him to browse it..

When did DFW hate become so popular?

I mean, I read Infinite Jest and liked (then disliked) it, but I always thought the hate towards him was just a meme. I never knew he was so disliked all of a sudden.

Are you autistic? It seemed obvious from the get go.

Yeah, you'd have to be autistic to think I was the one who made the comment.

I know who you're talking about and it's definitely not him.

So you only started disliking it after it became popular to?

fwiw i don't know how Wallace can be a conclusion when he prefigured most of the other books mentioned.

it's viewing him light of a culture he had nothing to do with

No, I read it early last year after discovering Veeky Forums.

I hadn't read many books before reading IJ aside from non-fiction or pleb shit so after I finished I thought it was a masterpiece. After reading many more books I realised it wasn't as great as I once thought and it has some big shortcomings. Maybe part of the reason I loved it so much after finished was just because of the achievement that I finished such a long, difficult book.

Just finished reading it. Respect to the guy who wrote it - its very good.

Infinite Jest: The Movie
youtube.com/watch?v=5hz1UaEVyoo

I read this shit in some thread it was posted in a few months back. He has something of a point about how vapid the whole McSweeny's crowd and Vollman are but the link between them and DFW is tenuous at best.

>successful criticism makes you feel antipathy to the author's work, not to the critic as a human being

NO

DISCERNABLE

TALENT

(bloom is our successful critic, so you're 110% wrong here faggot)

>>Author starts going off on tangent about Requiem for absolutely no reason
Not really. DFW is a fairly inane person to talk about, I can completely understand why he wanted to talk about Vollmann more.

>Goes into deep racings about republicans and a bunch of other books that aren't really realted
I don't like these other things, but it's the same shit as above. DFW is just boring to harp about.

>Drives back to talking about IJ and DFW by comparing them to these books and these people.
Again, because he's shit.

>No, I read it early last year after discovering Veeky Forums.
>
>I hadn't read many books before reading IJ aside from non-fiction or pleb shit so after I finished I thought it was a masterpiece. After reading many more books I realised it wasn't as great as I once thought and it has some big shortcomings. Maybe part of the reason I loved it so much after finished was just because of the achievement that I finished such a long, difficult book.

You're a faggot. You should have instantly identified it for being the tedious garbage that it is. You're just another unthinking face in the mob. I don't care that you're right about it now, people like you make the literary world shit just by existing.

>Muh i liked IJ when it was cool
>Muh IJ is stupid now that its unfashionable
>Muh I had to read to realize IJ's shortcomings

this. reading DFW leaves a bad taste in my mouth because I can't help but think about redditors, sjws, obama, anti drug psas, oprah, and all the detritus of crypto protestant anglo culture

does anyone else think maybe DFW and sam hyde are linked on a deep spiritual metaphysical level, like you know one couldn't exist without the other and they are both two sides of the same dialectic historical process?

>yes DFW does pre-empt criticism of his overall point through doubts of the main characters, but show me where in book he goes beyond those doubts?
Let's make it clear, DFW isn't just preempting the criticism, but adressing the criticism is literally the point of the book. I'm not sure about the rest of the argument of the article because I'm not familiar with the "movement," but in the end the author shows that he didn't understand the book, and so he's probably not the person to look to for criticism.

That being said, I think your question is a lot more interesting. You're basically saying, if DFW is trying to make a case for platitudes and, more broadly, general sincerity and sappiness, how exactly does he present this argument, and is it a strong one? I think, in broad strokes, he tries to establish cynicism as a reaction towards manipulative consumerism, which, if left unchecked, leads towards cynicism towards one's own emotions (and platitudes, of course), which leads towards repression and addiction. IJ tackles this from plenty of different angles and if you want we can go into depth about how exactly these ideas progress in the book.

Been meaning to post this to Veeky Forumsfor awhile. Whole article destroys him but if you really want your nips tweaked, look at the comment by Rosemarie. Fucked thing is she said posted that while he was still alive.

languagehat.com/david-foster-wallace-demolished/

am idiot.

If you think DFW needs to be "demolished" or taken down a peg you're a 12 year old pseud. His flaws are self-evident without some hack's "takedown" of him. This meme detraction of him is just as vapid as the meme worship of him was.

Not at all. I adore him as a writer. I could give a fuck about the article. I'm talking about how sad the comment is

>I could give a fuck about the article
>could

>be depressed
>meticulously arrange a manuscript the literal day you kill yourself (planned in advance)

>People who commit suicide never make plans for after their death

Sam Hyde and DFW complete and annihilate each other. The messiah, the perfect man, will take the shape of a Hyde-DFW synthesis

He could, but he is choosing not to.

The Christ and the Anti-Christ. DWF even kind of looks like Jesus too.

He knew he was letting down a lot of people with his suicide. Why not give those closest to you something to make money off of, you know, to lessen the blow of the fact that you killed yourself.

It really was shit, some of the comments were better, but in general shit.

I don't understand this meme hate for dfw, he was legitimately a smart guy and legitimately a good writer.

Most on Veeky Forums probably don't match up in either respect, and if you happen to then good for you!

Stop being so pathetic and just go write good stuff.

>So far, it’s worked well. Most David Foster Wallace fans have a self-mortifying attitude that goes something like this: “I don’t feel I’m even close to understanding Infinite Jest, but I don’t want to think that’s deliberate. Wallace always seemed like such a warm, down-to-earth person. No, not arrogant at all. He had long hair. He wore T-shirts, for Christ’s sake! Better to think he was struggling to communicate something, something deeply felt, about the limits of language. How he really wanted to connect with other people but couldn’t. Just think of him in front of the word processor, caged in his own affectedness like John McCain in the Hanoi Hilton. Imagine him for a moment, tortured by the Viet Cong of whitebread smugness! Really imagine! It’s MY fault I haven’t gotten it, not his.”

Veeky Forums on suicide watch

>See, some people are still provincial enough to think avant garde means “resembling a book written by Joyce in the 1910s,” instead of “at the forefront of art and fiction.” Under this reasoning, anyone who uses pastiche and stream-of-consciousness is “experimental” by default, even if they’re emulating books that are nearly a hundred years old.

How will Veeky Forums EVER recover?

And the point of this post is what exactly? It was claimed that being depressed means you can't plan things for after your death which is wrong. What bearing does your post have on that?

This thread really shows how far Veeky Forums has gone down the shitter.
The author of this article is a literal who, whom flings all his shortcomings onto writers based solely on their fan base and how much more experienced and "hip" he himself is about street drugs.

Fucking yuppy pansy bitch doing the same thing he's calling out those other writers for. Smells of blatant baiting of the modern political climate that loves shit completely besides the point.

He's absolutely right and you're a dishonest shill for isolating that sentence from the paragraph.

>The Augustinian structure flops immediately without eternal torment as a conceit. Sure these jaded Los Angeles kids are a “lost” generation, but why’s it so bad that they’re “lost”? They have plenty of sex, drugs, threads, cars and cash. Lacking a Christian Hell, the writer needs an equally powerful lie to prop up the narrative – either they pretend that insincerity is an emotional hell no amount of money can make up for, OR, they pretend that members of the Hollywood brat pack have the same life expectancy as Ethiopians, dropping like flies from an endless parade of overdoses and Lamborghini accidents, rarely hitting 30. The second option usually requires the writer to massively exaggerate the dangers of drugs, since they’re the easiest way to kill off rich characters without using your imagination too much. Naturally, this has lead to lots of books portraying your Ellis-Frey type as the sole survivor emerging from the wreckage. In the end, this is worse than if these brat pack authors were openly Christian – Augustine’s Catholic Hell would be just as scary if sex and drugs had no material consequences at all. It’s the terror of the hereafter that counts, not the pain of the present. Ellis can’t grasp this. He begins American Psycho with the words “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE,” but can’t find anything fearful enough to keep that promise. All his supposedly damned narrator can do is assure us that “there are no drugs, no food, no liquor that can appease the forcefulness of this greedy pain.” Pain which Ellis pulls out of nowhere.

>semantic argument about a semantic term attached to "writing devices" that try to encapsulate an extremely broad and abstract procedure within the brain that results in SoC and a pastiche style.

Why isn't no one calling him out on this shit? This is worse than a 10th graders essay.
The kid who shares nothing but Info Wars articles and long-winded rants on facebook about politics writes and critiques like this.

>shitting on Ellis

Not hard to do. Don't see how DFW and Vollmann fit into the mix though.

Fucking yuppies yelling at yuppies is funny.

the eXile published some of the most glorious shitposts of all time

>He's absolutely right and you're a dishonest shill for isolating that sentence from the paragraph.
He's completely wrong and failing to fundamentally understand something that is patently obvious.

What is the nature of the suffering of Ellis' psycho? Really, he can't figure that out? Why the fuck does this guy even think he's allowed an opinion then, let alone feels the need to inflict it upon others?

to be fair I was kinda interested in reading Vollman, but this article really makes him look like a huge fucking faggot, so i'm dropping him off my list for now

I don't even like DFW that much... but fuck me, this article encompasses everything I hate about the little microcultures that cultivate in the arts.
The whole >Muh authenticity and >Muh hipsters and >Muh real lit is all bullshit, as well as completely off-target when it comes to art in general.

fuck this smarmy faggot

Europe Central is great.

Way to prove how much of a soft, spineless faggot you are. Some whiny idiot who couldn't get his novel published so he copped out and did translation work on a book no one will even read used his insecure ramblings that offer nothing but semantic BS and thinly-veiled personal attacks on the establishment and all the cute bookstore girls who've rejected him.

good lord, straigten up

> It was claimed that being depressed means you can't plan things for after your death which is wrong
If you could think abstractly, you would realize that my post affirms your point, you fucking autist.

Actually John Dolan is a huge influence on journalism and US political counter-culture through his war nerd persona. He's far more influential than DFW, who was just fad created by marketing to people proud they know who Wittgenstein is but are too square to do drugs. But you wasted all that time reading bullshit and now that you know there are people who won't praise you for it, it makes you really mad.

>John Dolan
>influence on journalism

well... looking at journalism now, looks like he did a shit job.

literally who the fuck are you defending? lmfao

go away, news sperg.

That's not even John Dolan, and no, it's not a pseudonym.

If you havn't seen this article before, you're a Veeky Forums newfag. This article has been regularly posted for years.

Man the opening to Broom in the System is fucking terrible.

This essay starts out pretty good and fair but holy hell does it take a nosedive when he starts talking about that TV essay

DFW is the embodiment of everything everyone on this board wishes they could be, and they hate him for it. Successful writer by early 30s, literature professor, offbeat pussy slayer, and did I mention successful?

This writer isn't an actual person with thoughts and opinions. He's a resentful teenager who exists in a magical vacuum of time where YouTube compilations of Jon Stewart owning Fox News play forever on repeat. There are plenty of things wrong with Infinite Jest; the fact that it reminds you of your daddy's politics is not one of them

"Darren Aronofsky, who directed the film version, calls this “a very traditional heroin story.” No, Darren, it’s a fucking depressing heroin story!"

Is the intention here to say that Heroin stories are not traditionally depressing or is the author claiming that it's obvious heroin is bad?

He's saying that admitting there are any consequences to being a junkie is kowtowing to the Evangelical agenda. Though Requiem for a Dream was somewhat overwrought as a whole.

Everyone in here is an entry level psued who watched that retarded, shitty movie. DFW was a pathetic hack fraud in the most obvious, cartoon villain way. Read his biography if you really think he was some kind of genius.

The saddest part is none of you worthless no-talent fanboys will ever write anything even half as competent as him. One day you children might realize the fact that someone can put a sentence together doesn't make it significant artistically or culturally.

As always, read more, lurk moar, and keep your ignorant brain turds to yourself.

I think every person mentioned in this essay must've individually, taken turns over the course of several years pissing neon yellow into this guys cheerios over the course of at least 5 years. That's the only way such seething hatred could come forth.

Can you expand on why he's terrible? I see nothing of substance in your sperg rant.

>Dog the Bounty Hunter Quote #3: (*Talking through megaphone while his Neanderthal wife bangs on the front door.*) “ALRIGHT, IT’S UP TO YOU. WE CAN MAKE THIS AS HARD OR AS EASY AS YOU WANT, BUT YER NOT GONNA HOLD OUT FOREVER.”

>Dog Quote #3 Wallacised: “The realisation dawned on the poor trailer trash, incrementally, with each violent thump, that Dog was not, in fact, a bounty hunter, but rather the bounty hunter, a being, which to their methed-out, methed-in, methed-over consciousness was a Platonic ideal given nightmarish, impossible form. The Heat Death of the Universe. The Old Cold Hound. Gödel, Escher, Dog.” [By the way, here’s one to try at home: listen to Tom Lehrer singing “New Math,” then read the tax code chapters from The Pale King or the calculus sections in Infinite Jest. Who does it better? Who uses convoluted textbook language more effectively? My money’s on the dweeby vaudevillian–R.G.]

That's dead on lmao

You can tell it took some effort on his part though

the whole point of the parody is to show how effortful, artificial and strained dfw's """"style"""" is

Superior cosmoetica-kino. Much quicker to the point: cosmoetica.com/B326-DES266.htm

lol he was being honest, you should fucking kill yourself though

I will never not laugh at the greatly deserved ridicule of this hack fraud. 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.

I can agree with him on the grandiloquence, but I don't see why it really matters, it's not purely pretension, I think it can also be interesting from a stylistic point of view? While he might have a point about naivety too, the article generally seems nitpicky, doesn't really try to understand him and his work as a whole. And his characterizes his anti-drug position and casual sex skepticism as evangelical Christianity? At that point he's just in blatant denial that his entire life's philosophy was a fad that died in the 90s, these things exist in every religion, I have been taught the same positions from a purely hedonistic point of view as well.

Reposted from another DFW hate thread, genuinely curious as to what people think of my opinion. Tear it apart if you think it's unfounded.
--
The sooner you accept that DFW is overrated, the better. I read 50 pages of Infinite Jest in high school and gave up. I've read 2 books by Alastair Reynolds, amounting to pretty much the same number of pages, both of which were written in a more technically demanding style than anything I read in IJ or The Broom of the System, both of which touched on deeper themes than DFW gets to, neither of which fundamentally fails in completing the ambitious projects underlying their plots and structures, but neither of which received anything like the amount of praise or intellectual labor that has gone toward Infinite Jest and its interpretation. In other words, DFW is worse than an above-average genre fiction writer in every area that counts (except maybe characterization, if you count psychological problems related to turn-of-the-millennium WASP affluence as characterization but don't count Sky Haussmann/Tanner Mirabel/Cahuella or Felka as adequately characterized). What does this tell you about how he stacks up next to the actual great writers of the 20th century? How does The Broom of the System's theoretical underpinning stack up next to the Wittgensteinian project that inspired it? To what extent was DFW anything but a low-E.Q. middling-I.Q. tryhard rich kid with connections to publishers?
These are the questions that keep me up at night.
And when I say I "gave up" on IJ, I mean that I stopped reading because I wasn't at all interested in reading 30-page footnotes about fictitious movies. I'm still not, six years later. I'm not interested in reading books to say that I've read them. I'm interested in reading books that interest me. This may make you think I'm retarded. Maybe I am. There's a place for footnotes, but I don't understand why this information couldn't be better conveyed via experiences that the characters actually have. Going back to Alastair Reynolds, these are very information-dense books--but nowhere does Reynolds decided that he has to attach a footnote explaining what a lighthugger or entoptics or medichines are. He just explains them in the text, or makes the various functions of his imaginary machines glaringly obvious to the reader. Why didn't DFW convey vital information outside of footnotes? Maybe it was because he couldn't--maybe it was because he spent so much time trying so hard to be smart that he failed to realize how writers of information-rich fiction go about revealing their worlds. DFW could have learned a thing or two from Frank Herbert of Dan Simmons, even--but he obviously didn't. The great task of literature in the 21st century is the annihilation of the barrier between myth, sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction, and non-genre literature, just to prevent people like DFW from being canonized as he has.

There should be some spoilers in there but I forgot to spoil when I cuntpasted, apologies to anyone reading Chasm City.

>timeless

Man I hate this qualifier.

The whole point is that his style has no substance and therefore anything about it that is self-emphatic can be disregarded as masturbatory, and that it's not hard to understand him or his work.
>evangelical Christianity?
Well, DFW was from a family of WASPs-even if he wasn't a Christian (probably an atheist) himself he grew up in a puritanical context. This is the only interesting tension in his life, and it probably explains why he killed himself.

good shit man. will check out Reynolds

Great argument. Glad your humanities education is paying off.

Chasm City is a good place to start.

>I've read 2 books by Alastair Reynold
That should say
>I've read 2 books by Alastair Reynold in the past 2 weeks
I've read 3 books by him, 4 if you count audiobooks, but the ones I have in mind are the ones I've read most recently. Sorry for the repeated self-replies.

on your main point, it's because the one thing he knew was the technical apparatus of academia. He knew that academic papers, the way they look and feel, intimidate people visually.

At the same time he wrote this rather friendly math book called everything and more that really does help a layman dip his toe in those ideas. But the book is filled with all the anxieties he must've felt in the face of the academic mathematician who he probably felt always watching him.

He wants to say, hey, I understand how to talk at your level in your own language and rigorous style. What the op article shows though, and what reviews of his friendly math book showed, is how no matter how hard he tried he couldn't be that all encompassing polymath. Really, what is so impressive about looking shit up? Especially in the Wikipedia age? And the desire to pretend to be smart, to wish to be someone like Hal instead of himself. Stupid faggot.

>it's because the one thing he knew was the technical apparatus of academia.
Probably a major factor, yes. It's no excuse for bad prose.

>current year
>not realizing that it's okay to like DFW and think infinite jest is good

Yeah, being wrong is OK. I agree with that.

I still like dfw

>16-23 year olds shitting on dfw for adult themes they still can't relate to yet

Believe it or not this does get old