/lit/ - Literature

>let me tell you what's wrong with Americans and their culture today first off I- ACK

why did DFW always wear this ugly thing on his head? it reminds me of cancer patients

Be sincere.

How do I get over the fear of too "cringe", "corny" or overly sappy and sincere and not hide it behind layers of ironic distance?

Why did he do it?

"An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity. A physicist tries to make it simple; an idiot, anything the more complicated is, the more he will admire it. If you make something so clusterfucked he can't understand it, he's gonna think you're a god cause you made it so complicated nobody can understand it."
- Terry A Davis
People who hate simplicity are pseuds. Being complex in your story is a bad thing and can muddle or negate the point you're trying to make. Simple archetypes are often better for this reason.
That's basically what the greatest works of fiction are. Whether they do it with super simple babby shit like the 10 commandments, or they hit you over the head with it incessantly for hundreds of thousands of words like The Brothers Karamazov, the best works of fiction are very simple.
The only time things need to be complex is when you're not telling a story but just laying out facts. if your story is complex, you're probably a really incompetent author. "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." If I had more talent, I would've written a less complex story.

Post-modernism is replete with this BS --- I find most of the authors to have far less insight into culture and life than I do, yet I'm supposed to pretend that their half-baked utterances about human emotion and the human condition are some product of deep philosophical grounding and reflection. It's a joke. They aren't fooling me, at least.

Then you have unwitting audiences, like the ones on this board, who have even less insight than the authors, who think these people are geniuses. Wallace talks about the banality of TV culture. Wow, my 4th-grade teacher told me about that, and then I built on that insight in high school. From what I've heard Foster say about it, I could teach him a thing or two on the subject.

Film grapples with all the same issues as literature, it just mirrors the stories back to us using a different medium. You don't hear the writers, directors, and actors posturing in this way. Listen to an interview with Sydney Pollack, or Scorsese, or Hitchcock, or John Schlesinger, or any other great director. There's no BS or pseduo-intellectualizing. Is there deep analysis? Yes. They understand the human condition as much as anyone else, as much as these so-called literary authors, but they are masters of the craft of FILMMAKING, and they talk about FILMMAKING with an expertise we don't have. And we learn from their interviews about that art. They aren't didactically trying to instruct us with some half-baked sophomoric insight they have, not realizing that we might have a much deeper grasp of the problem than they do.

With these literary people, they are supposed to be experts on STORYTELLING. And when you read a post-modern novel, it's abundantly clear that so many of them are not masters of their craft. They aren't masters of the human condition, nor are they masters of the writing craft, which is why so much post-modernism is CRAP.

>Refused to wear anything other than 100% cotton shirts and didn't want to be uncomfortable.
>In "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again" he describes memorizing all kinds of weird facts and statistics such as shark fatalities when he was a kid.
>His sister described him as "Someone that just came out of a space capsule" in terms of how he handled social norms. Everything seeming foreign to him.
>Always took a book with him to parties
>Paraphrasing here but one time said something like "One thing that fiction fails to do is show just how much information we're overwhelmed with on a daily basis."
>Almost all of his characters being caricatures of himself
>The stuttering in interviews
>The way he often asks "Did that make sense? I'm not sure if that made sense."
>The maximalist prose
>The way he was so big on being alone and in solitude for many years.
>His struggles with mental illness.

As someone who's autistic myself, every time I watch or read this guy I feel like I'm looking in a mirror or at my own writing. Almost everything is the same. What do you guys think?

Why did he champion post modernism, yet argue for sincerity so much? Isn't post modernism what caused this ironic era in the first place?

Is he actually good or is he a fake intellectual?

How poignant were his observations about the modern world even at the time? Was it stuff that everyone already knew?

Is he actually good or is he a fake intellectual?

His takes now feel more relevant than ever before. He took his own life before living in the hell world we live in now.

>>20418257
Not my problem. Keep it to yourself

What would his take on jan 6 2021 be?

Was DFW a Nihilist?

Was his entire life story just a failed and forced attempt to relate to normies?

He wouldn't have been able to withstand social media culture.

David comes across in both his interviews and his books as someone who thinks he is far more intelligent and profound than he actually is. As if he worries that by indulging us with his great profundity he may expose us to an unbearable existential dread, when in fact all he provides is fairly surface-level observations and unnecessarily complex esoteric paradox.

How does an ideal /lit/ person spend his free time aside from reading and writing?

I'd like to read some of his work but I worry it will turn me into a Redditor. Any advice or first-hand experience on this topic?