/lit/ - Literature

>>14418379
Name another OP making useless threads.

Oh, all of /lit/

It is so great, but all you can give us are the memes that are repeated over and over. You got a 3000 character limit, why not use it and tell us something worthwhile.

>>14418379
I wouldn’t describe IJ as delicate or understated when multiple characters all discuss the same things about addiction, greed, competition, etc. IJ isn’t trash but I think there’s a lot more in some other biggies like JR, GR, The Lost Scrapbook, The Tunnel, etc.

>>14418393
what is JR and GR pls I am OP little baby poops in diapers

>>14418393
>multiple characters all discuss the same things about addiction, greed, competition, etc
Apparently delicate enough for you to miss the point and get nothing but a superficial understanding of the novel.

>>14418409
William Gaddis - JR
Thomas Pynchon - Gravitiy's Rainbow

>>14418409
Bill Gaddis’s JR; Gravity’s Rainbow by Pinchmaster.

I had a lot more fun with GR than IJ.

>>14418421
>>14418431
couldn't even finish Gravity's Rianbow, felt like he was trying too hard to be funny and failing. reading IJ was like what it was supposed to be like to read Gravity's Rainbow

>>14418438
The humor is the popular humor of the time in which the novel is set.

>>14418390
Based

>>14418417
It’s been a decade since I read it and most of it was a slog for me. Most of the scholarship on Wallace is no longer about IJ, huh, almost like it’s not really all that complex when you get down to it.

>>14418379
V. by Thomas Pynchon. Both books are highly accessible, are able to mix humor with deep introspection, and both lampoon literary conventions. Making the comparison between Pynchon and DFW is easy, but damn. V. is the most underrated Pynchon book, easily the most entertaining read.

>>14418379
House of Leaves

>>14418479
Surrealist toilet humor was popular in the 1940s?

>>14418379
>this fun
don't know. IJ was rather whimsical.
>vocab
DFW has the vocabulary of a basic white bitch. You've been duped by long sentences and endless puffing. Nabokov, Faulkner, Melville; take your pick. They use a wider range of words and do so with greater grace.
>topics and disciplines
IJ is very narrow in content. It's just thick. Lesser Pynchon has it beat. As does Joyce, Melville, Tolstoy and others. content
>delicacy
IJ is a doorstop of stupidity. It's undoubtedly fun, though.

>>14418417
Point out the delicate reasoning for all of DFW's characters having the same narrative voice as every other work of writing published by DFW, then, plus his propensity to imagine the lives of people outside his academic upbringing in ludicrous caricature unbecoming of even a high school writing project. You might pull your head out of your ass long enough to realize you're full of shit. Onus is on you, faggot, I've read a good chunk of DFW and am content to shit on his garbage heaps all day.

>>14418657
Good post, way to say nothing.
>>14418799
That was not really supposed to be humorous, it is Slothrop's drugged up dream, but I am sure you knew that.
>>14418824
Way to meme. Everyone who has read Wallace, especially IJ, know you never read it, or at least did not get past Clenette's first appearance fairly early on in the novel.

>>14418860
>That was not really supposed to be humorous
You're telling me pic related is supposed to be read with straight faced seriousness?

>>14418873
Have you never been intoxicated? Had just one two many wine coolers? It is the narration of someone who was just injected with sodium amytal, their mind is unhinged and free associating to what ever stimuli the doctors are feeding him, which we do not get to know since he is as far from a reliable narrator as one can get at that point in the novel and completely lost in his own head due to the effects of the drug.

You should probably work on your reading comprehension and learn about context.

>>14418824
>same narrative voice
There is a lot to criticize DFW for, this is literally the last possible thing you can accurately say against him. Read the book.

>>14418903
>Have you never been intoxicated?
Yeah, I have, and guess what? It makes me laugh more.

>>14418940
Well then, it should be no problem for you to understand the state Slothrop is in and the symbolism of the dream.

>>14418989
I get that. But the passage has humor and you aren't going to convince me otherwise.

>>14418824
this is the most valid criticism for me. his "Black voice" is really pretty horrible

DFW's prose struck me as something from a man in love with his own intellect, while the intellect is of thoroughly mediocre quality. I got to the part with the movie titles and just gave up. The narrative far up to that point had been a disjointed collection of typecast, smugly depressed characters and ridiculous situations straight from a Quentin Tarantino movie. The page of Ulysses envigorates me more than a chapter of DFW.

The Instructions by Adam Levin

>>14420265

It is fucking awful. It’s like he just equated black voice with uneducated voice and ran with it, amputating all creative aspects of black expression.

>>14420296
>didn't get to Eschaton
You didn't even start the book.

>>14418379
Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie

>>14421030
Commander Coriander Salamander and 'Er Singlehander Bellylander is better.

>>14420911
>it gets good after 50 hours I swear

>>14418770
this, reading it right now. most ive enjoyed a book since IJ desu

>>14422230
Ask anyone who's read it.

>>14420296
>The page of Ulysses envigorates me more than a chapter of DFW.
this I can agree with, but a chapter of DFW sometimes comes close to a page of Joyce, which is honestly very high praise.

I enjoyed the ideas, but the prose just stinks. I checked to see if the prose improved after the pleb filter period, but it doesn't. I require a certain standard of aesthetics in conjunction with ideas, no matter how clever or interesting they might be.
Imagine a painting with the finest subject, say, the most beautiful woman in existence, or the face of god himself, but it's fashioned by a man with simulated parkinsons holding a crayon. I'm confident that wallace could have written in a better style than the and but so tripe, but decided to write as he did for the lulz. No matter how exquisite the subject, it's still going to look like shit. I'm happy people can enjoy his works, just as I'm happy people can enjoy Heinlein or Vonnegut, but frankly, they're just not capable of controlling the written word with sufficient grace. Even Joyce's Penelope chapter manages to retain that flawless genius despite taking on a grotesque style. The grotesque can be a vehicle for beauty, but it takes a true master to be able to join the seeming opposites. A sort of thematic quantum superposition. Wallace endlessly blundered and we are left with only the grotesquely shrouded jokes, like some failed modern Rabelais.

Infinite Jest is a masterpiece. But thankfully there are many masterpieces of literature. It seems to have run its course in "public" awareness as our culture sort of stepped over the lines that it itself drew, but that only diminishes the quantity of reception, not the quality of its book. Its in a strange place where its chronologically the closest masterpiece (that im aware of) to our time, and yet distinctly feels like a book of the last century.

The criticism of IJ feels stinted and try-hard. Often it is the equivalent of tv-tards saying that "the pacing was off" or "it suffers from style over substance". Just look at this retard
>>14418809
lmao

In any case. Im somehow glad that /lit/ dropped IJ and DFW. The hype was too massive a few years ago.

>lol weed

>>14418379
>name another book that's this fun to read
any Rabelais

> name another book with this kind of vocab
gtfooh

> name another book that pulls from this many different topics and disciplines
Man without qualities

> name another book that accomplishes all of these things while also handling its theme with anything appraoching level of delicacy
gtfooh

>>14418379
Ulysses

>>14422671
I agree completely excepting your aside that IJ is the most recent masterpiece in literature. What do you think of The Road or House of Leaves? I'd argue those are masterpieces, although they don't reflect and comment on the culture as a whole in the same way IJ does, but I'm curious to hear your opinion.

All the Pretty Horses is funnier than Gravity's Rainbow.

>>14424061
>The road
>Masterpiece

>>14424061
House of Leaves is a cool experiment but a bad story

>>14422671
>>14424061
Is 2666 a masterpiece? I haven't read it but it's the most recent /lit/ meme doorstopper