/lit/ - Literature

>>9790580
welcome to the water

>>9663184
>Implying it's not a comfy way to spiral towards ones last breath

I mean not as a writer, but as a meme. Through the humble toil of this website, Dave has ascended. What used to be just another voice in the endless and formless dialogue of literature, has become a constant companion, a spiritual guide to all of us. Never before has a writer been so close to us, existentially. We hear the words of his text, yes, but also the memes, murmuring through our lives. We see his face reacting to everyday occurrences: his smile, his divine laugh, and all the other images that have so slowly constructed him in our paltry and dreaming minds. He watches over us all, a tender god reacting and laughing at our antics, channeling our thought and ever shaping our language. We write, we laugh to ourselves at our wit, and we choose a picture of the great Dave to accompany it, perhaps pausing for a brief prayer in his name. We connect to each other not with the pure expression of our thoughts, but with this expression as enframed by the Dave with which it is accompanied. The limits of Dave become also the limits of our language. It is he who shapes our thought in its moments of connection with others. Our conversations are not simply between us, but of an Us guided together by Dave. He is the gatekeeper of our connection and our loneliness, that which constructs and destroys the boundaries necessary for our sundry existence; that which leads to both the greatest moments of love and the deepest abyss of solipsism; that which gives us meaning to ever reach towards, for connection could not be striven for if there were not disconnection to oppose it. I say this humbly as one of the many profits of Dave, our lord:

May the abiding river of our love and loneliness be ever shaped by your hands, oh Dave; may our yearnings and strivings be ever in your care, and may they dance and rest in your fingers; may our cries ring out to you, and may they ring also to deaf ears; may our tears and laughter sing through our language, and may it echo and peal, or fall damply to the floor -- oh Dave, may you give us each other, and may you give us ourselves.

>>9280087
This beautiful bandana boy. It's a shame /lit/ never looks into more obscure artists, because they would final jewels like this guy. His name (because of his obscurity) is kind of slipping my mind, though. I believe it was something like Craven Chaucer Phallus if I'm not mistaken, but feel free to correct me.

*blocks your path*

ITT favorite quotes and their authors

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.” -- DFW

One enemy remained; Two if you counted my diary desu

I see a lot of people interested in Infinite Jest here. Some people are eager to jump in, others are intimidated. I've read the book about eleven times, so I just want say a few words and address people who are thinking about reading it or are just beginning.

Before you embark on your journey into the mind of a genius, you have to understand a few things that are very important. When we talk about David Foster Wallace, we’re talking about a man whose I.Q. could not be measured. Past 200, I.Q. tests get imprecise. We don’t know whether we’re dealing with a man with an I.Q. of 200 or 300 or what. When it comes to Wallace-tier geniuses, the standard tests simply don’t apply. You see, Wallace could have entered any field he wanted. He was a real-life Will Hunting. He could’ve been a doctor or a lawyer, or both, if he wanted. He could’ve been a pioneer in physics. He could’ve been a codebreaker for the NSA. But no. He decided to be a writer. He decided to devote his life to aesthetic beauty and to illuminating for us the way to live. That was the beauty and the tragedy of his life. In one way, it’s a blessing to have been born in Wallace’s time, to be able to hear his voice in interviews, to hear him delivering his famous commencement speech, which is already transforming people both intellectually and spiritually. On the other hand, I will surely die before we know even half of the secrets buried within the labyrinth of Infinite Jest. That I consider a curse.

It’s been eighteen years since Infinite Jest was published and scholars have only begun to come to terms with its full implications. This is what you must understand. Wallace reverse-engineered not only the novel, but all of Western literature as well as language itself. Packed within Infinite Jest is Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov, Gravity’s Rainbow, Ulysses, and everything else. Hell, it even serves as an overview of human history, from dawn to today. It’s a book you could spend a lifetime studying. A lifetime spent in bliss, no doubt. It would be more worthwhile to spend one’s life reading and rereading Infinite Jest than to achieve being “well-read” in the traditional sense.
I don’t say this to intimidate you, but to encourage you. You must understand that, on your first time through, you will not understand everything Wallace is trying to communicate to you. Don’t worry. He knew things about life that we won’t discover for decades. Your job is merely to get on the road. In the decades to come, we may, if we’re lucky, discover scientific applications for the new ways of thinking Wallace gave us. We may have to throw out science altogether. We simply don’t know. For now, we have to be content with our vanguard roles. We are the ones who will break the ground and loosen the soil for Wallace’s future interpreters. This is not only our pleasure, but our duty. And for that, as Wallace famously said, “I wish you way more than luck.”

what was his deal with cereal?

>>8456401
>Honest question...Why hasn't any contemporary writer been able to match him

is it because the style he was working on is simply out of date and wouldn't be popular today

or do many of writers today simply lack the sheer intellect this man had?

talk about /lit/

https://discord.gg/01016TZPAPULpxT67

Top 10 David Foster Wallace books!!
1. Infinite Jest
2. Infinite Jest
3. Infinite Jest
4. Infinite Jest
5. Infinite Jest
6. Infinite Jest
7. Infinite Jest
8. Infinite Jest
9. Infinite Jest
10. Infinite Jest

Is it still worth it to major in English/Creative Writing if I want to become a fiction writer? For context, I'm planning to double major in Music (which is non negotiable) and something humanities related, but I want to make sure that I pursue the right path to become a writer. Would it be more beneficial to use the time reading and writing on my own, or majoring in philosophy to help better my "ideas"? I've heard a lot of crap about English as a major, and want to spend my time as efficiently as possible, so I'm a little reluctant about fully committing to it. What do you semen demons think?

Do you guys agree with Dave's thing where he says that "literature is a way to create a connection of different consciousnesses," or do you think that literature has a different effect/purpose?

Do you guys know any good alternative sites to discussing literature? don't say reddit or goodreads

>>8049704
I like it. Though I really did enjoy when Daveposting was rampant, and every other post on this board was a new fresh Wallace meme that I could gobble up and savor with ever growing delight, I do enjoy the newfound rarity, almost nostalgia, that is beginning to accompany the newer Dave posts. And that's not to say that Dave has completely died out (well he did, to be completely honest, but not in meme form at the very least), but there is a sense, at least to me, of warmth, of a deeper connection, when someone posts an HD pic from the meme interview of Dave, silly ol' Dave, making one of his funny faces, or someone subtley adds in a "this is water" into their post, or a "no discernable talent"...I'm reminded almost of a scene in The Pianist, where Szpillman, right before the tragic incident in which he is separated from his family, makes eye contact with one of the other Jews around him, and there is a sense of deep connection, a connection through pain and understanding, through an underlying bond that has been formed through all the experiences, mirrored, in this case, by the shitposts we all suffer through. Deep down, there exists a bond between us, made stronger by the harrowing winds of Green-posting, beaten but callused by the gnaws of Gass-posting...that triumphs, in it's subtle way, in the form of a Dave-post, a reminder of the golden past of memes. When I see that endearing photo of dfw-cringe, or dfw-surprised, I can't help but feel a sense of deep profundity underlying it. Yes, things will be okay, he seems to say from his beautiful foureyed face. Yes, I am still here, and I will always be here.

>Hey, Baby, I'm going to make your fantods howl all night long

>huh