/lit/ - Literature

I think IJ may be a criticism of the entire academic, post-enlightenment establishment that puts a positive value on exposing things, without actually correcting things.

What do you think?

I just finished this. Phenomenal book.
Your thoughts on it? What did you get out of it? On a very basic level, I understand the book as a lengthy argument that we are all addicted to something on some level, and that process of these addiction can be both equally pleasurable and crippling to the soul. Pleasure and addiction are intertwined on some level. JOI's addiction was to the making of technically accomplished films, as evidenced by his corpus of work.

One of the more detailed things I noticed was DFW's implied statements on the nature of conversation. Many of the conversations or dialogues between characters exist in a kind of triangular or circular fashion, where one character will speak about concept A (tennis), another about concept B (film), character 2 will speak about concept A again, then character will speak on concept B again, until concept C (drugs) is introduced by character 1, and then character 2 will respond to concept A (tennis). This in part seems to be a structural way of showing DFW's theories about loneliness, that we are all truly lonely people unable to have 100% empathy, and a lot of this comes in the way we converse with each other as people, never listening, always bouncing around in conversation.

This book owes a lot to Delillo too. The whole eschaton sequence is basically a riff on the football-as-nuclear-warfare metaphor of End Zone.

about 400 pages in. Some scattered thoughts and questions:
- The Eschaton game is super influenced by both Delillo's Endzone and DFW's love of Tom Clancy novel's obsessive eye for detail
-It is amazing how this book goes from heartbreaking and depressing (the stillborn child story at the AA meeting) to the comical (everyone wearing funny hats for Mario's film airing) with a deft hand
-thematically speaking, what's the relevance of footnote 145, with the Found Drama joke?
-Anyone else find the Marathe and Steeply stuff boring? Maybe I'm just not in far enough but it's not resonating as much as the stuff about addiction and growing up with a family's legacy.

What medium would have the best shot at adapting it in a way that does it justice?

Will this book cure me of my addiction?
>inb4 just stop lol

Why do midwits get filtered by irony?

>IRONY BAD
there, saved you 1079 pages

Is there anything written in the last 25 years that even compares to it?

>>17413543

there is no reason to ever write another novel

>2020
>I am forgotten

pic related

Is he right /lit/?
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2007/05/being-literate.html

Is this a good read?

3/3
David knew what he had created. He wrote Infinite Jest, essentially, to impress Mary Karr. His then love-interest of the time.
And an impressive novel he wrote. That cannot be argued with.
But what do us readers get out of it? It is addictive. It is entertaining. Yes, sure.
But David was right, it "[inflicts] the very culture the novel’s supposed to be about.”
I read Infinite Jest as a hungry, confused, emotionally repressed and impressionable young man.
I loved it. It spoke to me. Did it help me in any way at? Like, at all?
No, it took me deeper into my own neuroticism. It validated my neuroticism and made me believe this was what it meant to be a human being.
And I was one of the few who understood.
It warped my mind.
Relationships are just built on inauthenticity and manipulation. Everyone is just hiding behind their own shallow need for attention and validation.
What is the point? We are all alone. Trapped inside our tiny-skull sized kingdoms. It is impossible to truly know how others feel and think.
This was David's message in his famed 'This is Water' speech.
His solution was that we must try and connect with others. Be empathetic and caring.
He preached this as if it is some kind of radical and revolutionary idea that would cure modernity of its own in-grown sickness.
I am sorry, David. No...
This is just step-one of being alive. Most people just do this without thinking. They really do.
It is not something to be proud of. If you don't do this, you are most likely just a very selfish and self-absorbed person. Like I had become
... And like the characters in David's fiction.
And because I empathised and identified with these characters... This speech did seem radical. But it was a lie.
The tragedy is that David eventually saw this of his fiction.
He realised the sickness that Infinite Jest spread to its adolescent and predominately male readership.
It turned them inwards. It pointed them downwards.
And so, he tried desperately to write the novel which he had first intended.
This novel was 'The Pale King'.
And, from what was published, its message IS truly beautiful.
The quiet and heroic struggles of the everyday.
The deeply moving truth of mindfulness.
The transcendence of boredom.
"We are all of us brothers".
The tragedy, again, was that David had already written the perfect novel. Infinite Jest.
The Pale King had the superior message and intent but it could never compete with the technical and sophisticated beauty of IJ.
And David was a perfectionist. A beautiful and flawed perfectionist.
He tried. He really did fucking try. But there was just no way he could do it.
You had such a good heart and I have no regrets.
But now is time for me to move on.
I love you, David.
Thank you
Anon
X

I'm being deadly serious when I say Infinite Jest is one of the first novels to actually change something about me. I've just made it over a week without any alcohol, and I'm still going. This is surely the longest I've gone without it in a long, long time. I finished reading Infinite Jest just after New Years and I guess slowly, as I've drank more throughout the beginning of the year, I've thought back to the novel more and more, with all he says about sobriety and ignoring that need to feel something again, just once more. Just the other day I read about how once DFW went to AA and rehab, and then a halfway house, he started to produce much more creatively. I don't know. I've only just realized that no other book has really affected me like this.

So I was wondering, what novels have actually had an impact on your life, and how did they change you?

So we finally have this translated, and I'm looking into acquiring a copy.

I don't know much about this book apart from the infinite myth/shilling around it so please only spoiler me this one: is it possible to read it on Kindle or should I go for the physical one?

Why was Hal going through so much to get high alone? ;_;

How's the next great english-language literary tome going to top this?

Do I need to read all these footnotes? Man I need the audio book right now

>Prince Q______(as would anyone who refuses to eat pretty much anything but Töblerone) suffers chronically from Candida albicans, with attendant susceptibilities to monilial sinusitis and thrush, the yeasty sores and sinal impactions of which require almost daily drainage in the cold and damp of early-spring Boston, U.S.A. A veritable artist, possessed of a deftness nonpareil with cotton swab and evacuation-hypo, the medical attaché is known among the shrinking upper classes of petro-Arab nations as the DeBakey of maxillofacial yeast, his staggering fee-scale as wholly ad valorem.

Is this the first bar of Infinite Jest? It's O.K. to skip this sentence?

Is this the same JEST as in

>Think i'll JEST let the mystery be

?