/lit/ - Literature

Infinite Jest, almost 300 pages in I'm starting to love the hell out of it. I just can't stop reading anymore.
The first 200 pages were really frustrating at times though especially for me as a non-native speaker.

But we see DFW’s zen poppy style Amerika relishing that challenge and some of it comes off ok and other stuff isn’t bad but sometimes doesn’t rise up enough to ripple through to the shock horror recognition receptors in the head that really have to be touched if a discussion of tennis is really going to do what is done in, oh let’s say Moby-Dick, Brothers K, War and Peace. Play Hard because Life is Short, blue and white Fila t-shirts, LL Bean fishing hats, jeweled bandeaux, pointillist-neon Evian ads, decoturf and chlorine blue tarp white proper nouns ‘Fujifilm, Redbook Magazine, Massmutual, Infiniti, Tampax’ are asked to be more than attachments to narrative and critical formations, but to play roles right up there in the box alongside Vronsky, Ahab and Alyosha, more so than the actual tennis player characters that are like springtime early colonialists standing out against former dulled values and wintry stereotyped effects of byegone adventures – and that’s because DFW is making the definite conceit work, excavating out of a mean, narrow, provincial place i.e. how tennis ‘fiscally speaking, it exists largely as a marketing subdivision of very large corporations, and not merely of the huge Tour-underwriting conglomerates like IBM and Virginia Slims.

Hey guys, I have a problem. It's not strictly lit related but I figured I'd find the most sympathizers here.

In short, my girlfriend is basically one of those drooling zombies from Infinite Jest.

We've been together a few years, and at first we were really well matched intellectually.....we used to talk about heavy 'existential' type of things, and she was definitely the smartest person I'd ever met.

In terms of like raw IQ I'd say she still is.

But lately I've found her to be incredibly boring. She has no interests....at all. Outside of work all she does is watch tv or browse the internet or play video games, anything that's upper case e Entertainment. The catch is, though, she realizes those things are bad for her and does them...not ironically, per se, but without any illusions.

As for me, I've taken a big interest in lit stuff, especially after reading camus and realizing that all the stuff I was thinking of in my own crude terms was shit people had already been writing about. If I had to sum up what takes up the vast majority of my head-space I'd probably say "Culture"--how it manifests, what things mean, etc etc, big picture stuff. Dialectical materialism is a term I'm familiar with.

I have friends I shoot the shit with about this stuff but it's increasingly becoming something I think more and more about and as a result it's creating a gulf between my girlfriend and I, who, while being super intelligent and really freakin intuitive, has zero motivation to learn any more than she already knows.

books about addiction?

*slow claps*

Fucking master trolls. Read infinite Jest /lit/ told me. So I tried. Got to 60 pages until I finally realized I've been duped by /lit/ again!

>>2959186

So I have this pretty, um, insensitive and maybe wacky theory about The Pale King and his suicide and how they correlate. Be warned that the following may come across as being reductive towards clinical depression and suicidal ideation...as someone who's been there, I know this is going to sound awful, BUT:

I almost get the feeling that DFW's suicide is the only way that book could have ended.

I know. I know.

Here's why I think this:

If you've ever read that '93 Larry Mcwhatever interview dfw did, he mentioned that to make good fiction you almost "sort of have to die for the reader" (no, keep going, i know he didn't mean literally, that's not my theory).

He was writing IJ around this time...if you've read DT Max's bio of dfw you know IJ came after a huge revelation of his, where he realized he had to write morally replenishing and redeeming fiction, not just critiques and satires. He went to hell and back in his life to learn this, but emerging from the ashes of that horrible period for him came Infinite Jest. What's that book about? For brevity, it's about how entertainment and american culture in general corrodes the souls and serves to make us lonelier, sadder, more addicted to the culture that fucks us over.

But what DFW prided himself most on in the book is that he found a solution. He found a way out. He not only diagnosed a piece of America's problem, he illuminated the treatment as well. That's why he so loved Dostoevsky: they both, as writers, were deeply concerned with moral redemption in fiction, not just for the characters but for the readers.(pt 1/2)

>>1767141
Read Infinite Jest. That book will change your life.

Well? Who's read it? Thoughts? Conclusions? Favorite bits?
inb4 tl;dr

Infinite Jest Thread #754

So what really happens to Orin? And did Gately and Hal and Wayne really dig up JOI?