c/d: 'infinite jest'

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.