c/d: 'infinite jest'

I agree. And, I find his main characters exceptionally moving. Hal will always be one of my favorite fictional characters.

Aimless, I'd happily participate in an infinite number of Infinite Jest discussions!

Something amazing about it is reading ASFT after and realising how few of Wallace's obsessions actually made it into his first two books, like he was consciously holding off writing about them until he'd grown enough as a writer to do them justice...

orin's self-pity is just one aspect of his being a jerk, which i like, the way in which he has become a jerk and how it is handled.

big duh for missing out the first time that both steeplys were the same person: god i was dumb.

first google result for 'consider the lobster' = www.lobsterlib.com! i guess wallace (or someone) gave them permission to reprint the article, which is kinda cool. i'm looking forward to it, his essays are pretty remarkable things.

"allegedly funny" is good: i do honestly think there's lots of stuff that's meant to look as if it's meant to be funny mostly as a kind of distraction. i dunno, i think it ties in with his stance on irony - also i think it's the upshot of a thousand-page manuscript, not that i've ever written a thousand-page manuscript: i don't think "Year Of The Depend Adult Undergarment" is going to seem all that funny to anyone, the ninetieth time they've written it ...

what the years thing does manage to do is obfuscate where everything you're reading about happens, chronologically, for the first half of the book or so. i dunno, the stuff with Incandenza's filmography is a better example of what i'm trying to get to.

like: 'Blood Sister: One Tough Nun'. okay, this is a pretty feeble gag. (although the better gag is that it's part of a whole genre of religious action heroes that exists in the postmillenial America DFW is writing, though this is only worth about a 4.5 out of 10, as a joke, to me.) the entire incandenza filmography (the longest footnote in the book, and the first one with any kind of substantial content) looks at first like it's just gags, and bad gags, but throughout the book his films get brought up in ways that require the reader* to re-evaluate it. Towards the end Hal is watching Blood Sister... and there's a lot on it, about why hal doesn't like it, about it's relation to his father's biography, making this silly gag serve the serious purpose of fleshing his father out as a character, about hal (and bridget boone's) reactions in a way that seemed (to me, last night, at least) really quite surprisingly poignant..

that said i don't think i've found anything actually funny in about 48 hours, so all of this might just be me.

*well, i hate saying that the author "requires" anything the reader: it sounds so bossy and formal and horrid.

Thing is, "essay"-wise, the guy is just a very good feature-writer, and judging by the new collection he's gotten better and better at it. Even his constant use of footnotes seems to have something to do with this -- reading the new collection it becomes clearer and clearer how he's writing magazine-style features and then more or less tucking all of the novelist's "thinkpiece" and "analysis" stuff at the bottom of the page. (I.e., it's almost more a genre thing than a stylistic one.) The lobster essay is both lousy and also bizarre -- he was sent by Gourmet to write about a lobster festival, and does so for approximately four pages before going off on lobster-pain and winding up going "I dunno, it's complicated, but I'm mostly just curious if Gourmet readers even think about that stuff at all?" Which is kind of fascinating and perverse but not exactly good writing.

But but. The Harper's grammar-and-usage essay is in there, and it's one of my favorites apart from that almighty television-and-fiction one. The Rolling Stone John McCain primary-season is in there in full, and reads even more terrifically than it did at the time. There's a piece called "Host" that I never saw on publication, I guess -- a profile of an average-seeming talk-radio host and the mechanics of his station -- and that was a great first-read, too; I'm a little wierded out sometimes by DFW-on-politics, because he has this kind of over-thoughtful moderation that can start to seem unimaginative (too much moral care and not enough moral vigor?), but like I said, he's a good feature-writer, part of which is knowing how to feature something other than your own thoughts.

(Ha: "good feature writer" = anyone even vaguely liberal who can spend weeks hanging around a shouty AM talk-radio station without picking fights / going nuts / killing self / becoming completely poisoned and uncharitable to the extent of not being able to "feature" the place at all?)

If there's any problem with collections like this, it's just the gap between what's a terrific piece in a magazine or newspaper and what seems worthy of single-writer collections, bought in hardcover or whatever. It's those big ones -- grammar, McCain, talk radio -- that can kinda sell this as a book. A lot of the others are great, but in a different way: there's a really sharp piece on a sports biography that would totally make your day if you caught it in a newspaper or alt-weekly or whatever, but I can imagine plenty of you growsing that a really well-written review requires something more than it's well-writtenness to seem worthy of going in a book?

is the harper's grammar one the one connected to the kerfuffle about his, uh, not overly wise comments to a black student?

nabisco I was talking about IJ! I am using ASFT as evidence of the obsessions, and saying how few of them made it into the first two fiction books.

I think possibly if I were rereading Brief Interviews, rather than Infinite Jest, I'd not want to ask this question.

*the magazine articles as well as the novels! there's something (proceeds to speak from hindquarters) 19th-century magazine reportage about them, about their not quite knowing what's expected of confronting this particular form -

leaving aside the narrative absurdities, which might be a little harder to categorise, i'm quite curious about wallace's 'style': in that there are lots of bits of writing in Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews where wallace is deliberately not writing his 'style', and lots of bits where he exacerbates particular bits of his 'style', or at least particular stylistic tics, either with some kind of result in mind or just to see what happens.

his regular prose style involves kind of fuzzying out of direct pronouncements of things in favour of either an academic(?) or a how-regular-people-talk circumlocutory way of putting them. there's a peculiar fondness for these dangling (modifiers? i dunno) post-comma, ending a sentence, like (at random):

"The whole thing started out looking like tit-on-a-tray, burglary-wise."

(in which we have a common-speech usage or two stuck together in a way on the page where they look pretty much like something someone would never say.) (actually i could do with giving about half a dozen more examples here but then this starts to look a bit much like work.)

one of the upshots of it is that his prose is very rarely limpid in that stereotypical literary prose way; combined with a tendency to decompress, to refuse to reduce a scene to the essentials, i think this is what a lot of people see as "cold" or "robotic" about the writing, maybe - ? anyway i recall being disappointed with 'oblivion' because I realised, reading it, that Wallace really did have a very particular style, almost a schtick. This effect being in part i) because 'oblivion' unlike the previous two books didn't have any particular "here-i-am-writing-in-a-non-david-foster-wallace-idiom" bits ii) because with the most immediately schticky aspect removed (the footnotes, duh) the almost-schtickiness rest of the writing showed up a little more.

rereading this again. forgot i'd done this, the first time

by which i mean, started a thread to ramble on about it.

i do honestly think there's lots of stuff that's meant to look as if it's meant to be funny mostly as a kind of distraction

this has been popping out at me more and more. i think dfw uses this mode of, like, parodic science fiction (not parodic of science fiction, it's one that shows up in like 50s SF itself) to do these sweeping broad versions of his theme without having to invest them with seriousness or probability, which i think is valuable. the bit about the rise of videophones leading to downfall in self-confidence about how one looks leading to the demise of videophones is maybe the most striking example i guess. closing sentence:

"Even then, of course, the bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon's endurance can't be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and -delivery, and didn't cause much industry concern."

which i find it kind of interesting, actually, how this novel (conceived in what, the early 90s?), which is set in i think 2010, though it's hard to tell, doesn't get the internet entirely wrong ...

he gets the internet/mass entertainment totally right!

i kind of agree with you--the book takes a while to warm up. there's all this seemingly random stuff he throws at the reader. (the e-mail about the construction worker, the videophone stuff, filmography.) i think the book works better for me when he incorporates that sort of material into the story more--like, for example, Mario's movie about Interdependence Day.

this (third time) is the first time that i've read it and basically known where this stuff is going and how it's connected, like, reading stuff about Mildred Bonk and Ken Erdedy and remembering well enough to skip forward to the bit where the residents of Ennet House are enumerated; though ha i did just cheat and google to work out who 'yrstruly' is.

(also found someone on a blog complaining that his attempt at "Ebonics" in that section was so bad as to be offensive, which uh)

that Ebonics section is pretty bleh, tho

that was the only section in the whole book that made me go 'really, dfw?'

the narrator's white! and racist!

i'm reserving judgement on the actual ebonics bit, tho ("Wardine say her momma aint treat her right." etc.)

have this book taunting me from beside my bed for a while. its so fucking big and difficult to hold tho.

i wonder to what degree my tendency to enjoy this sort of overmassive encyclopedic stuff is biologically predicated by my ridiculously huge spider hands

oh duh i never linked mario's arachnodactyly with his father's fear of spiders before

"This is a thing I do know. They can't kick you out."

i cant imagine reading this book 3x

its as plausible 2 me as physically eating the hardcover of it sitting on my shelf. thinking of it sitting inside me...

still thinking about that fast huh

"He invoked the raw numbers. The frenzy. He was thinking out loud here."

^ i think i quoted that on a thread a while back where ppl were posting favourite sentences and they were all p. over-egged; the conversation being reported is coming on from just where we (the reader) are starting to get the idea that Orin is more or less a pathological liar; plus also after the book's interest in the deep meaning and therapeutic value of cliché is starting to show up.

i mean: the book invests so much time i) in setting up these deeply-incapable-of-communication people ii) and then setting up these moments where they can redeem themselves: there's kind of a world of humanity in the slippage between "He said that he was thinking out loud" and "He was thinking out loud here."

"Mrs. Avril Incandenza isn't crazy about the idea of Hal drinking, mostly because of the way his father had drunk, when alive, and reportedly his father's own father before him, in AZ and CA; but Hal's academic precocity, and especially his late competitive success on the junior circuit, make it clear that he's able to handle whatever modest amounts she's pretty sure he consumes -- there's no way someone can seriously abuse a substance and perform at top scholarly and athletic levels, the E.T.A. psych-counselor Dr. Rusk assures her, especially the high-level-athletic part -- and Avril feels it's important that a concerned but un-smothering single parent know when to let go somewhat and let the two high-functioning of her three sons make their own possible mistakes and learn from their own valid experience, no matter how much the secret worry about mistakes tears her own gizzard out, the mother's."

^ i could kind of go on for ages about how fantastically i think these sorts of sentences function, as well, but won't, yet

one of the things i like best abt the tastycake focus group story in oblivion is how much it seems like one long sentence, like a house of cards collapsing in on itself. p breathtaking

^^Once you get used to the archaisms, there are parts of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy that function in v similar ways. Seventeenth century prose was sophisticated, but not yet rulebound.

i actually bought a copy of that about the same time i bought infinite jest, maybe even the same bookstore visit. that one i have not read three times.

(What I like about what's going on in the Avril sentence is to do with how you're getting Rusk's therapeutic-bromidish stuff refracted through Avril's sensibility and grammar-wonkishness, which then drops into the way more demotic register at the end — & how Wallace's grammatical tics (restating the subject after the parenthesis, and then again in this little like tag at the end) work to reinforce that.) (Plus also yes 'hey look it's me david wallace writing this thing!' — a lot of like unremarkable-seeming and non-showoffy passages manage to do this sort of thing, in this book.)

(The cake story in Oblivion is the one I always try and explain what's going on in it when people ask me (this has happened) 'so what's this david foster wallace guy all about then': though I don't know it's the best example, because it's kind of as-far-as-you-can-logically-go with all his tics. On one of the other wallace threads nabisco talks about him 'exhausting' his style, in that book, which I think is totally true and not necessarily a negative judgement on it.)

Mister Squishy is downright claustrophobic

stuff i'd forgotten got mentioned in this book: Wittgenstein, grammar-wonkishness, Cantor, the 'this is water' joke

"The left side of her face was very alive and kind."

some of the best descriptions of depression in any novel i've ever read.

just cracked this for the third attempt and its the first time i think its gonna take.

it occurs to me that in all the whacko plot-theorying on this i've seen on the internet, no one's ever tried to fill in the missing events with close reference to the hamlet parallels? which seems a weird omission?

though i guess it's probably been done in like the proper academic writing on it, somewhere

okay, it took a month but i did it

i kinda wanna reread it tho

yeah i had the same feeling - partly 'so wait what did happen in--', partly 'i just want to stay here'.

i got halfway through it in a weekend, this time, and then took a month to finish the rest

'take': we're meant to take the hyperbolic SFish dystopian stuff as a big Hitting Bottom story for the US, & extrapolate a recovery based on hints in the 'year of glad' section

-

i was kind of surprised (well, no, i thought 'oh, i guess that makes sense') to notice he'd written his thing on dostoyevsky, and frank's bio of d., and the difficulty of writing seriously moral fiction, the same year he'd finished infinite jest

how everything cataclysmic is only pointed towards (snatch of orin in the tumbler/the FLR arriving at ETA)

also, the final line

also found someone on a blog complaining that his attempt at "Ebonics" in that section was so bad as to be offensive, which uh

Ha, I think a lot of the Infinite Summer readers had problems with this too. I mean, here's the thing: he's not super-great at it! He's attempting something, and not entirely succeeding, and it's a little awkward and maybe embarrassing. But I also think that's kind of great. I mean, he could very easily have avoided trying to have this voice speak. I'm going to take a wild guess that he was hyper-aware and self-conscious about the potential pitfalls of trying to use it, and he didn't have to. So I actually really appreciate that he tried, for good reasons, with good motives, at great risk of personal embarrassment.

tbf a lot of the infinite summer readers were insufferable. though the entire thing was interesting in a "hipsters suckled at the warm, soft teat of eggers encounter DFW" sort of way

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2010/12/10/infinite-jest-visualized/

The flicker account's pretty dope!

ha, i think i'd seen all of those before? oh dear.

Just finished this, it took me fucking ages.
I liked the complete immersion in that world.
I hated the word 'which' by the end.
I found it hard to read sentences with so many acronyms punctuated with full stops (like O.N.A.N.) that don't serve as full stops.
I didn't realise I was at the end when I was and am kind of sad that I am.

All the rivers that flow into the Great Basin of the western USA never make it to the sea. They just flow down until they stop somewhere.

i feel like i ought to make it clear that that "so uh" of mine was about people identifying the bit that's the testimony of an illiterate white person as being "ebonics", not me going "hey, what could people possibly see wrong in the bit where dfw does ebonics", which is a different bit

the other week my gf's dad gave me an annotated map of boston, which he said would 'make sense' once i finally read infinie jest.

Great thread

This book will always haunt me, I think.

this thread will always haunt me, certainly

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3e80b10a-b95c-11e1-b4d6-00144feabdc0.html

http://i.imgur.com/7C6pD1K.png

When you consider how desperately any public figure like Maggie wants to control their image, being willing to approve only the most flattering portraits for such use, that is one horrific pic.

thatcher is a really excellent text for considering the differences between now & then; to hear recordings of her speaking almost defies belief, & it is impossible to imagine her flourishing in her natural state today. I feel like we are not able to see that picture the way it was seen.

good post

enhhh i remember an argument with my sister where i was arguing that major and maybe heath were the only two PMs of the past 50 years who didn't have a good grip on their public image and the media, and it emerged she thought thatcher was bad at manipulating her image. which seemed crazy to me. otoh she was a teenager and i was a kid in the 80s so i dunno.

i am trying to remember why she's in infinite jest. there's a line about someone being sexually attracted to margaret thatcher that ends up in there i think? that wallace had been looking for a place for, maybe used somewhere else, for years?

i watched a bunch of youtubes of thatcher the day she died and i was kinda stunned by how brutally, blatantly uncaring she was willing to behave in public. there's a clip out there of a mother angrily asking her about cutting off milk to schoolkids and thatcher's attitude is basically just 'go fuck yourself, it's your problem.' conservatives may have gotten worse in a lot of ways but i can't honestly say they've gotten meaner.

they are just the same thing. they are the same thing with a tree rendered in the style of a child's crayon drawing affixed to the logo. as close as I can get to noticing change is in some of them perhaps acting through deep & insulating ignorance, cf IDS, like an obliviousness that makes empathy impossible. but they are the same thing, constitutively unable to see outside of their narrow parameters while deciding how things should be. disability benefits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/business/energy-environment/mountain-of-petroleum-coke-from-oil-sands-rises-in-detroit.html?hp

WINDSOR, Ontario — Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the Detroit River.

Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom.

And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.

The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.

The coke comes from a refinery alongside the river owned by Marathon Petroleum, which has been there since 1930. But it began refining exports from the Canadian oil sands — and producing the waste that is sold to Koch — only in November.

“What is really, really disturbing to me is how some companies treat the city of Detroit as a dumping ground,” said Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan state representative for that part of Detroit. “Nobody knew this was going to happen.” Almost 56 percent of Canada’s oil production is from the petroleum-soaked oil sands of northern Alberta, more than 2,000 miles north.

...

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/05/18/business/PILE/PILE-articleLarge.jpg

christ

Ha yikes

http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/national_review_wonderland.jpg?w=470

that would be a much better illustration for the deluxe edition

Mark Steyn on Zombies

j i thought you were anti this book

you must have been projecting in order to feel more secure as you broke away from the core of the dfw community

reading this on a kindle screen feels quite different. the words have more precision, somehow. more of a center of gravity.

also i have been reading a lot of old timey english prose the past couple years and i have to say aimless otm above

xp

How do you go about navigating those footnotes on a Kindle? I don't use one so I'm curious as to its effectiveness. I'd like to try it, though imagine something might be lost through not carrying around a book that continues to remind you of its physical presence even when you're not reading it. I think I'm approaching a second read...

i haven't gotten to one yet

I read this on a Kindle like two years ago. Worked fairly well with a few hiccups. You'd click on the superscript in the main text and you'd get a pop-up of the endnote iirc. Issues arose when the endnote was too long which (lol DFW) happens a few times. You'd get to a line and then you'd get some programming babble and then everything past that was truncated. In these cases you'd have to manually navigate to the endnote instead of using that "pop-up" method.

IDK if this has been fixed/changed in the past two years.

cover of the 20th anniversary edition coming out in a few weeks is pretty ugly

http://www.themillions.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/FINAL-COVER-IJ20-Anniversary-Editionlarge.jpg

why not stick with the sky motif? i really like the covers of the first three editions

are you serious

a very special christmas

I finished this 4 years ago and can't remember much about it! It's about tennis, right?

what the hell is that cover

It was a contest. This is the dude who won, big blog about his process and all the designs he came up with first. Pretty much all of them suck. I don't like the TV motif. The sky was perfect...but whatever. No need to buy another copy of Infinite Jest. http://www.joewalshdesign.com/#/infinite-jest/

Was he a Roky Erickson fan?

wow that's a bad cover

tbf it's better than all the designer's other attempts

i am... rereading this. idk why lol

it's delightful of course, so readable and accessible for something so forbidding in shape. some of the things that bothered me about the novel ten years ago (for example: anytime a man's focus zooms in on someone's breasts; uss millicent kent's central trauma being that her dad is a transvestite is not a funny joke) are worse now because idk they do not seem to be ugly reflections of human nature that still get at some essential truth much as they are projections that aren't even necessary to the characters that have them. realizing this is a rich critique of a novel that is in many ways about projection but for me it's distracting not illuminating

it's a small complaint. i did enjoy reading nabisco on the "wardine say" section upthread

novel definitely takes place in the interval of netflix still having mail-oriented dvd service but having also introduced netflix instant so yeah 2009-2010. i am usually not into determining what a speculative novel got "right" vs. what it got "wrong" (latter is way more interesting anyway) but the death of tv and the transition to all on-demand programming... that shit's pretty good

I read this in the summer of '99 (mostly taking the long way to and from my job and reading while I walked through my mostly-empty college campus). Long before I ever heard another human utter his name. Loved it at the time and still vividly recall certain portions, but I'd be interested to see how it holds up now that I'm twice as old as I was then.

it's amazing how much of it sticks in your memory, i even kinda remember the order of scenes. it's been ten years!

also a little more fun to read now that i've been to boston several times

guess I should give it a try, eh?

why not? imo it goes fast for 1000 pages

Having grown up and lived in the places he describes was a big part of my enjoyment of the book. The school and half way house were situated just down the road from where my parents lived at the time.

It was my favorite book when I was a college. Recommended to me, a c-average high school honors student, by my straight-a AP friends. I always thought that despite its length and footnotes and digressions, all of which I still hear it assailed for to this day, it was incredibly readable in ways that other recommendations from them, such as Gravity's Rainbow, were not. I'm sure that, as a 19-year-old community college burnout, I didn't understand everything about this book, but I fell absolutely in love with it. It was the most important book in my choosing Literature as a major (regrets regrets regrets), hoping maybe to recapture the high I felt reading it.

My hardcover copy is one of the only books that I've held onto from that era that I've held onto throughout every move and life transition, but I haven't actually cracked it since the mid-2000s. I was incredibly disillusioned when Wallace committed suicide and the outpouring of his biographical details in the press afterward. It hadn't occured to me that this guy writing about depression, suicide, and drug addiction was actually experiencing these problems in his life. I had created this stupid platonic ideal in my head that he was just creating all of this, and supplementing his fantasical creation with research. That the acknowledgement of AA on the copyright page was just part of a totally-immersive, exhaustively journalistic research ethic.

So I haven't read it since then, and the Lit major broke me of my urge to ever read anything vaguely literary again. I stick mostly to true crime and rockstar autobiographies these days. But I thought about him last week when David Berman died. I had no such illusions about Berman's relationship with the depression - it all seemed very obvious to me that he was writing from a very real, very dark place. Wallace just seemed more academic, more removed to me. But they both had such warm voices and good humor, bringing me comfort in their discomfort.

When I first read this, as 20-year-old in the late 90s, I was thrilled by exactly the showy-precocious-clever angles that Wallace was nursing some embarrassment and dissatisfaction with, and I did not, I don’t think, properly absorb nearly enough of the useful stuff he was trying to push past those angles to get into. (This is an uncontroversial way to see Wallace, right? As someone who understood he had inbuilt impulses toward the brainy-funny-thinky stuff, worried those impulses were glib and empty and juvenile, and wanted to find a way to something more sustaining?)

So for a long time, whenever I’d go back and reread sections, it was with a similar sense of how dumb and dweeby and irritating and point-missing I have been, a lot, in life, which I guess you could call an index of better reading and personal growth but doesn’t always feel positive or great, sort of like reading one’s own ILX posts from 2002 and marveling at what a shitty little disordered high-handed weasel one spent too much of one’s life being without even really realizing it.

If this sounds suspiciously like an account of someone’s personal stuff wrapped around another guy’s fiction, well, yeah, and that is something I personally will probably always find interesting about this book.

But an interesting thing is that maybe a year ago I looked at it again and I had finally come around, a little, and felt protective of some of the impulses the author may have worried about but clearly enjoyed and could not escape, because they are pleasurable and have that certain energy that was maybe more common and acceptable in fiction at the time — the pure pleasure of making up fun or funny or strange or dazzling things, playing with words and ideas and images in interesting ways, pulling off tricks because why not. Which clearly isn’t some kind of vestigial problem with this book, or a drag on some deeper or more sustaining thing. It’s its own joy, maybe, with its own value.

Whoa, welcome back man <3

nabisco......otm

feels good

Love the list of films by James incandenza

Re reading this ten years after a first run
Eminently readable

I sometimes wonder if this would hit me as hard as it did 20+ years ago

Yeah I liked that stuff. Pretty acute avant-garde film riffing, didn’t seem cheap or clueless like parodies of that sorta thing almost always are. Fun, funny, interesting way of building out that character and his timeline.

xposts

it's fun to go back to that footnote every time one of incandenza's movies is described in the text. those little summaries in the footnote are often very reductive in hilarious ways

i did finally finish this reread a few months ago, was kinda blown away all over again by it

ten years ago i must've had the "hm... i only have a few pages left but it doesn't seem like the book is ending... oh... ohhhhh.... ok THIS is how he's ending it????" experience but i had it all over again

i don't know if i'll ever do it again but i had a blast reading infinite jest.

Ending is incredibly bleak and heartbreaking

i do not read it that way. don had to hit his bottom again but it's like a spiritual breakthrough

oh but the scene itself is incredibly bleak yeah

I read this maybe past the maximum impact age or just the right age. 30. I loved it. Kind of an impeccable balancing act. Burned through it like a teenager with a Stephen King book. All of DFW’s thoughts about the values and perils of entertainment and the unfair impenetrability but worthiness of ~srs art~ encapsulated in just the right way.

I know it’s a Lit Bro totem and I went in super skeptical, but it’s legitimately pretty great.

I conflate it in my mind with Gravity’s Rainbow for some reason but it’s so much more enjoyable. I should prob give GR another try though. My favorite Pynchon is inherent vice.

gravity’s rainbow > infinite jest but yes the former is more difficult

i wanna read mason & dixon i’m guessing that’d be my preferred pynchon epic

ten years ago i must've had the "hm... i only have a few pages left but it doesn't seem like the book is ending... oh... ohhhhh.... ok THIS is how he's ending it????" experience but i had it all over again

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Saturday, May 9, 2020 10:24 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i remember i had to recalibrate and reread the whole thing after having this reaction the first time

I did the same, but he passed when I was in the middle of my reread and I had to put it down

i swear there's a stupid twitter thread trending like every two months about how no one who has a copy of this book can be trusted and it's more annoying every time it happens

This was the best take I saw:

liberal feminists can’t imagine men being anything other than indifferent to them, which i guess is why they have contempt for goethe — an author whose male protagonists were so devoted to their one true loves they either sold their souls to the devil or killed themselves 💅 https://t.co/Qelqnt3itX

— hannah e. (@hurlinspiel) August 24, 2020

The offending tweet led to a lot of debate on the merits of Goethe on my TL. His poetry never did much for me but I think I'll give Sorrows...a go sometime.

Christ I had to block the initial tweet because my secondhand embarrassment was off the charts - does this shit have to be posted here too?

yes...yes it does

once at my old job a couple of my co-workers were sneerily agreeing with each other that dfw's essays were far superior to infinite jest and it felt as uncomfortably close to real-world twitter as i ever want to be

Of course twitter is actually lots people countering that narrative of DFW being terrible.

that McHugh comment and the replies are a solid reminder of why i stay the fuck away from Twitter.

seriously don't know why you'd bother posting shit like this (none of which are HOT FRESH TAKES except (lol?) Goethe) other than to shake the beehive.

we stan the tiktok turgenev teens

DFW was a terrible guy, by all accounts.

I have some fond memories of Infinite Jest from my only read, in the summer of 2002. I remember some scenes with the older brother tennis kid sort of sneaking around the school complex, and how his inner world was written with such precision... And of course, a lot about rehab.

I love a lot of DFWs essays, and his short story 'Incarnations of Burned Children' is among the best short shorts written in the past fifty years. Students are horrified but also love talking about it.

I should say, I thought they were very precise depictions at the time, and I was also 17 going on 18 at the time, so there's that.

if liking this book makes me undateable then so be it

So glad I had the chance to read and enjoy this years before everyone was required to voice an opinion about it.

it's pretty clear never having read Infinite Jest is not a barrier to having a big opinion about it

I haven't read this book but I have read 10000 posts about it

This came up recently in conversation with my core friend group and all of the women are IJ fans, but we're all mid to late 30s, which is probably the real dividing line here.

So glad I had the chance to read and enjoy this years before everyone was required to voice an opinion about it.

― the secret of sucess is to know all rules ...and brake them (Old Lunch), Tuesday, August 25, 2020 8:37 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

ditto, I read broom of the system when it came out and there was no cultural weight attached to it whatsoever, even when IJ made a splash it was still something that mostly weird lit people had an opinion about, if you were talking "books that might impede a hookup" in the 90s it was, like, ayn rand or the celestine prophecy

Yeah, it probably wasn't until at least the release of I guess Consider the Lobster that I got the impression that he made much of an impression on anyone beyond literary critics. I certainly didn't know anyone else who read his stuff.

if this happens with Pynchon I am quitting society

need to read IJ this winter

I've had an unread copy on my shelf for something like 15 years now.

me too but for gravity's rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow is my Infinite Jest. Don't know how many times I've read those first 90 pages or so.

When Pynchon dies twitter will be great again

I'm picturing these as notes tucked away in the bookshelf. Definitely suss.

Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man's Bookshelf:

6. "Lolita is my favorite book."
7. "'Fathers and Sons' Is my favorite book."

The only comment I'll make about that reductive and generally stupid list is that any dude who fetishizes The Sorrows of Young Werther in particular or its skin-crawlingly creepy protagonist is probably someone to steer well clear of.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that it's a big hit in incel circles, for example.

I don't get the impression the incel community are big on 18th-century German literature, but I could be wrong

yes, they just pretend to enjoy European culture, they're not reading Goethe, my dude

also 99% of people who complain about infinite jest hasn't read it and it's a great book and not a remotely challenging read (I read it back to back with gravity's rainbow, which broke my brain, and the recognitions - which was also a much more difficult read)

ok now you're just showing off

i mean was that your cooldown after finishing finnegans wake

ulysses took me several years iirc. finnegans lake I have read the first page lol

me too but for gravity's rainbow

I did that sneaky'comic book inside a textbook' thing but with a copy of Finnegan's Wake jammed between the pages of IJ.

Finnegan's Wake is great if you just read it aloud and don't pretend to understand it. IJ is not hard! Gravity's Rainbow was too hard for me

IJ isn't hard, just long and in a small font (analog edition)

I've been wanting to re-read Oblivion lately

Wait what? You didn’t read this specific copy or any copy ever?

started it a couple of times, never read it (the fact that I grimly made my way all the way through V and never started liking it affected my decision-making here)

The furthest I made it into GR was about 300 pages, but I'm not sure if my brain was even processing the words on the page at that point. I think I just don't like the way Pynchon uses language. Of his other books, I've only read Crying of Lot 49, which was a much easier read but in my recollection also immensely cheesy.

Infinite Jest is very readable and relatable and compassionate towards its characters, and while there are some digressions into subjects like math or tennis where I'm not entirely sure what's going on, mostly you just need a good dictionary on hand.

it was really easy for me to get bogged down in dfw's endless descriptions of place much as they're part of the pleasure of reading infinite jest. i was really losing it when hal was trying to attend the AA meeting that ends up being extremely-not-an-AA-meeting and he was just going on for a whole paragraph about what the carpet felt like, come on dude i am 700 pages in here throw me a bone

gravity's rainbow's shiftings between action-packed slapstick comedy and really dense description are kind of what kept me going through it

Top 7 warning signs in a woman’s bookshelf:
1. Dog-eared copy of The Second Sex
2. Too Much Sylvia Plath
3. Any amount of Margaret Atwood
4. JUDITH. BUTLER.
5. Angela Carter
6. ‘I’m so inspired by Hilary Clinton, have you read Rodham?’
7. Jack Monroe cookbooks in the kitchen https://t.co/SwPQVxfD2v

— Sebastian Milbank 🥀 (@JSMilbank) August 25, 2020

"Theology Graduate at Cambridge. Blue Labour."

My thoughts on S Milbank are best not conveyed in writing, but unsurprised he’s a wrong cunt on this as he is everything else.

ilx's bookshelf warning signs top 7 could probably be collated from our recent hatethread

The Goethe equivalent would be the hard one. Who's the most innocuously classic author that ILX despises?

Man, woman, ilxor, the three genders.