/lit/ - Literature

>"I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win."
>"Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself and the surer you are of your rights."
>"As long as we're young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the scene, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you've come to. There's no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you."
>"so many vaginas, stomachs, cocks, snouts, and flies you don't know what to do with them ... shovelsfull! ... but hearts? ... very rare! in the last five hundred million years too many cocks and gastric tubes to count ... but hearts? ... on your fingers! ..."
You might not like the way he writes. But, please, refute any of the above statements as they pertain to human experience our collective knowledge of it. Protip: you can't. That's why he is so widely read.

He tried to save our generation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2doZROwdte4

>>20392882
This is because Wallace was writing from a former generation, and was steeped in a certain milieu — that of the pop culture and mainstream media of his time (Generation X), as well as the literature, the postmodern and avant-garde artistic circles. Hence, Wallace’s worldview is like an obscure autistic little niche based on modern disintegrating hyper-rapid American culture with a surfeit of information and new communications media and technology, as well as the whole system of hyper-consumerism and advertising, which we haven’t necessarily evolved to keep pace with, mentally and emotionally. Keep in mind when he makes these observations on sincerity and irony, he’s someone, as a writer interested both much in the literature and avant-garde theories of art of his own day and circle, and the pop culture he absorbed, that he’s so much as saying, “There’s a sincerity and spiritual striving in the works of Dostoyevsky (a famous writery writer whom I, David Foster Wallace, have also read, since I am a modern famous writery writer) I don’t necessarily find in the works of modern writers as apparently different like Pynchon on the one hand or Bret Easton Ellis on the other hand (ditto), who share this same hip irony and cynical transcendence of tradition.”

Wallace is someone who disappeared so far up his own asshole in this new soulless American cultural milieu plus, that he created this outrageously detailed, autistic, claustrophobic little niche of, “What reality and humanity and modern literary and mainstream media and pop culture seems like to me, David Foster Wallace.” In this little cranny, he paradoxically disappeared so deeply up his own asshole, thus becoming the characteristically “Wallacian” writer he is — this metamodernist sprawling hyper-detailed experimental bric-a-brac, colloquial yet poetically literary, high-culture (references to Joyce and Shakespeare and the like) yet low-culture (also to the Brady Bunch and Beatles), while claiming he was precisely NOT trying to escape up his own asshole like other postmodernist writers did, and that he was trying to transcend modern hip cynicism — so, over his essentially cynical, emotionally and psychologically damaged nature as a victim of the claustrophobic consumerism of the place and age he lived in, he artificially and painstakingly grafted over it, this idea of a “sincerity”, an “authenticity”, which he couldn’t actually reach, only pretend and try so hard to — hence, “Yes, I’m going to write this 1000+ page long book, hundreds of pages of which are endnotes, but I’m also going to include stream-of-consciousness analyses of just some average drug addict from Boston, an apparently low-class unsympathetic character, one people with PhDs in literature might find themselves too ‘hip’ and ‘cynical’ to relate to, but I’ll try to MAKE it relatable.”

>Wardine be cry

>>13720770
>"You know friends, with great power comes great responsibility. Rudyard Kipling called it "White Man's Burden." Myself I just call it as I see it: the responsibility of the master to discipline the servant."
>David looks directly at the audience.
>"The niggers, the spics, the kikes, the chinks...on The Day of the Rope they shall all swing from the elm tree. We will have all niggers dead or in chains in the next ten years, and if I'm wrong may I hang myself from the rafters of my home this very night. God bless the American Nazi Party."
God damn David, did you have to be so blunt about it?

>When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed very hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.
>The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

Huh, so this is the power of no discernible talent...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

>In the early 1990s, Wallace became obsessed with the memoirist Mary Karr. Despite her statements that she was not interested, Wallace got her name tattooed on his body[36] and even contemplated killing her husband, according to biographer D.T. Max.[37] The two later had a tumultuous relationship during which, Karr reported, Wallace once threw a coffee table at her[38] and attempted to push her out of a car.[39]

>Wallace is reported to have slept with some of his female students while teaching at university and sometimes exhibited stalking-like obsessive behavior when enamored of a woman.

He was a fucking creep. Good riddance.

>>7408108
Anything by this guy. Especially that one called infinity jest or something like that.

Is David Foster Wallace the poor man's Don Dellilo? I mean, it seems to me that they are both getting at the same generational issues but I find DFW to be splashing around in the shallow end as it were, and they both experiment with magic realism, but Don pretty much pioneered that. Not at all to say DFW is a bad writer, but what do you guys think?

who /this is water/ here?