/lit/ - Literature

Very zoomer post, I think this is a new low after "convince me to read this" / "is this worth my time" threads.

>>17229533
>racist!

You’ve gotta read it before you turn 25

>>17229540
>>17229544
>>17229548
Hmmm. As I thought. This would expose the book as the trash it is. I expected deflections.

She had promised to get him a fifth of a kilogram of marijuana, 200 grams of unusually good marijuana, for $1250 U.S. He had tried to stop smoking marijuana maybe 70 or 80 times before. Before this woman knew him. She did not know he had tried to stop. He always lasted a week, or two weeks, or maybe two days, and then he’d think and decide to have some in his home one more last time. One last final time he’d search out someone new, someone he hadn’t already told that he had to stop smoking dope and please under no circumstances should they procure him any dope. It had to be a third party, because he’d told every dealer he knew to cut him off. And the third party had to be someone all-new, because each time he got some he knew this time had to be the last time, and so told them, asked them, as a favor, never to get him any more, ever. And he never asked a person again once he’d told them this, because he was proud, and also kind, and wouldn’t put anyone in that kind of contradictory position. Also he considered himself creepy when it came to dope, and he was afraid that others would see that he was creepy about it as well. He sat and thought and waited in an uneven X of light through two different windows. Once or twice he looked at the phone. The insect had disappeared back into the hole in the steel girder a shelf fit into.

https://tayiabr.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/year-of-the-depend-adult-undergarment-erdedys-wait-infinite-jest/

>>17229594
I'm not trying to be a dick, but what is good about this to you?

>>17229594
When it comes to joints, it's just me and David Foster

someone post the rancid AA monologue that the random guy gave

>>17229686
The one about the solid shit? There are a few AA monologues. There is also the one about the kid and the dead body which I enjoyed.

>>17229533
The thing that really gets me about his work is the way he controls your knowledge, he limits what you know and repeats the ideas in various ways to make them seen banal and trite, than 500 pages later he dumps it all on you at once with the full weight. By that point you seem it as banal and trite, everyone in the novel is dealing with these issues and he even says they are banal and trite and everyone has these issues, but then he makes you experience the depths is such a blunt and vivid fashion that it just about crushes you. Anhedonia vs clinical depression is the example that really sticks in my mind. He does this sort of thing through out the novel and a great deal of the first half to two thirds of IJ is just programming the reader, setting you up, putting you in a position for those words to have their greatest impact. If this thread is still up when i get home from work i will go into more depth and add some excerpts.

>>17229798
I got like 350 pages thru and got distracted with life. My favorite part was the footnote with all the movies listed by the film maker and that they drop hints and tell a history. That was one of those neat "ah ha!" moments.

>The Chinese women were about the size of fire hydrants and moved like they had more than the normal amount of legs, conversing in their anxious and highpitched monkey-language. Evolution proved your Orientoid tongues were closer to your primatal languages than not.

>>17229812
The filmography is a good example of DFW once again hiding things in plain sight, those in jokes and the like are not its main point. It really tells you everything you need to know about Himself, but the context needed for that is not given until later. Rereading this footnote after rereading the young Jim chapters, the wraith sections and probably the professional conversationalist (one who converses much) chapter will put it into new light and really shows the psychic torture himself had dealt with for much of his life.

One of the main things to remember when ready IJ is that if something comes easy or gives you a little jolt of please like getting a reward, he is likely distracting you, he is pretty much screaming at you throughout the entire novel to ignore the pretty lights and then he flashes a pretty light at you.

>>17229594
This one struck me as a particularly good piece of prose. It painted such a vivid picture in my head

>>17229533
>Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

>>17229798
Another one which goes along and uses a variation of this technique is Mario. For most of the novel he seems more like a plot device than a character, he gets trotted out when every something needs to be explained or the like. He once again is limiting our knowledge, we only get to see Mario in a very small context for almost the entire novel, mainly in the context of the people of ETA, we do not really get anything about who he is. Then after 900 pages or so Mario meets Loach and we see him for the first time as himself, with no effort at all he saves two characters from a serious spiritual nose dive in one of the best scenes ever. Few bits of literature made me as happy as that did and still does. It transforms Mario in such a profound way and we see him as himself for the first time.

>>17229643
read the whole chapter, if it doesn't speak to you then maybe you haven't experienced addiction to substances. It's like he was in my head desu.

This is the passage that I recall that i can produce on command, but there's a lot of other "wow" moments in the book (prose-related wow's that is)

>>17229905
is that from the novel, holy shit

>>17229533
i liked the part with the giant mountain of pills, felt like it was a pretty good commentary on addictive tendencies but taken to the absurd

>>17229798
>If this thread is still up when i get home from work i will go into more depth and add some excerpts.
bumpin'

>>17229798
>If this thread is still up when i get home from work i will go into more depth and add some excerpts.
excerpts are really incapable of communicating the effect you describe

>>17229812
>I got like 350 pages thru
I am being 100% sincere right now when I say you stopped exactly where it starts to get really good.

>>17229533
section of things you experience in a halfway house is one of the best sections in all of literature

>>17229533
>ill judge an entire book on an excerpt
christ whats happened to people?

>>17229533

...how the drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.

>>17229533
>eliminate her own map with the afflatus of the blind god of all doorless cages

>Time began to pass with sharp edges. Its passage in the dark or dimlit stall was like time was being carried by a procession of ants, a gleaming red martial column of those militaristic red Southern-U.S. ants that build hideous tall boiling hills; and each vile gleaming ant wanted a minuscule little portion of Poor Tony’s flesh in compensation as it helped bear time slowly forward down the corridor of true Withdrawal.

>Hal wonders, not for the first time, whether he might deep down be a secret snob about collar-color issues and Pemulis, then whether the fact that he’s capable of wondering whether he’s a snob attenuates the possibility that he’s really a snob. Though Hal hasn’t had more than four or five total very small hits off the public duBois, this is a prime example of what’s sometimes called ‘marijuana thinking.’ You can tell because Hal’s leaned way over to spit but has gotten lost in a paralytic thought-helix and hasn’t yet spit, even though he’s right in bombing-position over the NASA glass.

>>17229594
lmao this is everyones favorite part of the book. read on it gets better.. I didn't like thata he didnt want to bang her tho.. i woulda banged her

>>17229533
ebonics chapter

>>17229905
hes a GOD

>>17230578
>>17230554
I'm going to keep going because I'm enjoying reviewing my IJ kindle highlights

>—and then you’re in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it’s the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it’s you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool-and Substance-crusted T-shirt you’ve both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest’s center and centerless eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you’ve been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that It’s your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It’s gotten you into is undeniable and you still can’t stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can’t stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around. You are at a fork in the road that Boston AA calls your Bottom, though the term is misleading, because everybody here agrees it’s more like someplace very high and unsupported: you’re on the edge of something tall and leaning way out forward. …

>>17230578
The eschaton chapter and the druggies hitting their various bottoms were some of my favorite parts

>>17230368
I am going to do my best to manage this when i get home but i must do some writing before, the first chapter of my novel which i have been struggling with for far to long has formed almost perfectly in my mind and i must get it down before it is gone for ever. That is assuming I can keep it in my head for another 3 hours. Worst case,I should be able to offer sections to read for self study on this if time does not allowsomething more in depth.

>>17230491
While the impact is lost it illustrates the technique which is worthwhile in of its own self but it also will help anons understand the novel and DFW's style and techniques.

>>17230494
Been thinking about picking it back up again. I enjoyed what I had read so far, but I just got out of the habit of reading a few pages before bed. I guess I'll do that right now. Thanks anon.

>>17229905
This is very good. I wish the book had more of this and less of the 90s edge and irony that he's so clearly embarrassed by in this passages and in interviews he gives. Maybe that anon earlier in the thread was right that you have to be under 25 to get it, I'm a 30 year old boomer and got tired of wading through the shit to find the gold in this book

one of my favorite passages
>a.k.a. X or MDMA, a beta-something, an early synthetic, emotional acid, the Love Drug so-called, big among the artistic young under say Bush and successors, since fallen into relative disuse because its pulverizing hangover has been linked to the impulsive use of automatic weapons in public venues, a hangover that makes a freebase hangover look like a day at the emotional beach, the difference between suicide and homicide consisting perhaps only in where you think you discern the cage's door: Would she kill somebody else to get out of the cage?
but annoyingly almost every passage of the book is this good. the average sentence in this book would take me a year to come up with, if ever, and he wrote this in a couple years.

>>17229548
i'm 27, i finished it 2 weeks ago -- i wouldn't have responded the same way if i read it when younger

>>17230921
I’m 29 and when I was younger I was such a fucking idiot child. I wouldn’t have appreciated this book nearly as much as I am right now.

>>17230935
absolutely. if i read it at say, 20, i don't think i would have connected so deeply to don gately's sections, which were my favourite part of it

>>17230624
>The clips of him punting unfolded like time-lapsing flowers and seemed to reveal him in ways he could never have engineered. He sat rapt. It only happened when he watched them alone. Sometimes he got an erection.

>It moved in and out of him like the very most feared prison-shower assailant.

>He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

the chapter on "things you learn in recovery" is incredible

>>17230951
>‘Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.’
>‘I give.’
>‘You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.’

>>17229533
Not for everyone, but I enjoy almost every instance where a scene digresses into a long character backstory that's usually funny and some kind of parable. Bruce Green, Lenz, Steeply, Barry Loach, Joelle, and the long ending section about Gately's rock bottom. There's more too, the device gets used a lot and constitutes a big portion of the book

These glimpses into the characters are really just excellent short stories themselves. Thematically relevant, tend to repeatedly subvert expectations in a fun way, plus they're often quite touching

>>17230965
jfc why did i never finish this goddam book

Ok, after some reflection I decided that I am not going to go into greater depth/excerpts on the things mentioned above, but I am going to use The Pale King instead since it allows me to show some fairly important things about DFWs technique without loss of context and is very much relevant to Infinite Jest as well. I also gave three examples of his use of controlling the readers knowledge, anhedonia/depression, Himself, and Mario and just looking those up on the online index and reading the sections it points you too should make it fairly clear, certainly more clear than I will be able to do short of writing a lengthy essay. Be back with more in a bit, need to eat something.

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.

>>17231560
So here we have §1 of TPK, a wonderful pair of paragraphs of great imagery and a pair of lines which do not quite fit in, We are all of us brothers, and Read these, What are we supposed to read? He is actually being literal and telling you how to read and understand TPK, the previous two paragraphs are what you need look for and read in the novel if you want it to make sense. So if you were out in that field with him what would you see? You would likely only notice a few of these details which are ultimately mundane, things we see every day, you would see the whole, another mundane scene that you have seen countless times, it is a common scene on the interstates of this country. But in DFW's description all these mundane and commonplace details add up to something unique and beautiful. That is what you read, the mundane details, they will give you the greater and more beautiful picture contained in the novel but you must focus on the mundane, not the entertaining or you will miss it just like you missed the starlings and the scent of alfalfa on the breeze while you were standing out in that field waiting for something to happen instead of noticing everything that is happening.

And the other out of place line, We are all of us brothers, it is also something to read for while enjoying TPK, a moment of honesty, sincerity. That is how they generally come in the real world and how they come in TPK, fleeting and quick like an arrow of starlings or an alfalfa breeze, it will go right past you if you are not focusing on the details and just waiting for the next entertaining bit or the next part you identify with.

DFW does this same thing in IJ, he teaches you how to read it in the first chapter, everything you need to know to find the clues and understand the novel are right there. But you have to work to find them and you have to keep working right to the end to not get distracted by what is entertaining and fun. With hard work comes great rewards.

>>17229533
You can be at certain parties and not really be there. You can hear how certain parties have their own implied ends embedded in the choreography of the party itself. One of the saddest times Joelle van Dyne ever feels anywhere is that invisible pivot where a party ends — even a bad party — that moment of unspoken accord when everyone starts collecting his lighter and date, jacket or greatcoat, his one last beer hanging from the plastic rind’s five rings, says certain perfunctory things to the hostess in a way that acknowledges their perfunctoriness without seeming insincere, and leaves, usually shutting the door. When everybody’s voices recede down the hall. When the hostess turns back in from the closed door and sees the litter and the expanding white V of utter silence in the party’s wake.

This rest of this part iabout Joelle s excellent too.

the nature of the book make it so 'excerpts' can't do it justice anyway.

So I'm getting the sense that this is trying to relate to the days when I was 18-22 and coped with drugs to feel better and have a good time. I'm not really sure if this may be for me at this point in my life. Like a lot of books you guys recommend, they deal with adolescent topics that no longer interest me. I have no doubt I share a lot in common with DFW, but I'm just not at that point in my life where that type imagery touches me anymore. I may give it a try in the future, but I feel like I'm just going to be judging a point of view that I just can't relate to anymore. The drugs, the emptiness, the pathetic nature of my future... Plus, one thousand pages of it is too much, and I'm not sure if he really deserves it compared to many other authors that call for my attention. We'll see.

>>17231902
It is not about drugs or addicts, drugs and addicts are part of the work but are there to serve the larger ideas.

>>17229540
Yeah, or 'redpill me on __' threads. Total waste of bandwidth

>>17230965
Stice's joke is better.

'Were you talking to yourself out here, or chanting, or what?’
A silence ensued.
'Heard this one joke,' Stice said finally.
'Let's hear it.’
'You want to hear it?’
'I could use a quality laugh right now, Dark,' I said.
'You too?’
Another silence ensued. Two different people were weeping at different pitches behind closed doors. A toilet flushed on the
second floor. One of the weepers was nearly skirling, an inhuman keening sound. There was no way to tell which E.T.A. male it
was, which door back down past the walls' curve.
The Darkness scratched the back of his head again without moving his head. His hands looked almost luminous against the
black sleeves.
'There's these three statisticians gone duck hunting,' he said. He paused. 'They're like statisticians by trade.’
'I'm with you so far.’
'And they gone off hunting duck, and they're hunkered down in the muck of a duck blind, for hunting, in waders and hats and
all, your top-of-the-line Winchester double-aughts, so on. And they're quacking into one of them kazoos duck hunters always
quack into.’
'Duck-calls,' I said.
'There you go.' Stice tried to nod against the window. 'Well and here comes this one duck come flying on by overhead.’
'Their quarry. The object of their being out there.’
'Damn straight, their raisin-debt and what have you, and they're getting set to blast the son of a whore into feathers and goo,'
Stice said. 'And the first statistician, he brings up his Winnie and lets go, and the recoil goes and knocks him back on his ass
kersplat in the muck, and but he's missed the duck, just low, they saw. And so the second statistician he up and fires then, and
back he goes too on his ass too, these Winnies got a fucker of a recoil on them, and back on his ass the second one goes, from
firing, and they see his shot goes just high.’
'Misses the duck as well.’
'Misses her just high. At which and then the third statistician commences to whooping and jumping up and down to beat the
band, hollering "We got him, boys, we done got him!'‘
Someone was crying out in a bad dream and someone else was yelling for quiet. I wasn't even pretending to laugh. Stice
didn't seem to expect me to. He shrugged without moving his head. His forehead had not once left the cold glass.

>>17231990
I stood next to him in silence and held my NASA glass with the toothbrush and looked out over the top of Stice's head
through the window's upper half. The snowfall was intense and looked silky. The East Courts' pavilion's green canvas roof bowed
ominously down, its white GATOR-ADE logo obscured. A figure was out there, not under the shelter of the pavilion but sitting in
the bleachers behind the east Show Courts, leaning back with his elbows on one level and bottom on the next and feet stretched
out below, not moving, wearing what seemed to be puffy and bright enough to be a coat, but getting buried by snow, just sitting
there. It was impossible to tell the person's age or sex. Church spires off in Brookline were darkening as the sky lightened behind
them. The beginning of dawn looked like moonlight through the snow. Several people were at their vehicles' windshields with
scrapers down along Commonwealth Avenue. Their images were tiny and dark and fluttered; the Avenue's line of buried parked
cars looked like igloo after igloo, some sort of Eskimo tract-housing thing. It had never before snowed like this in mid-November.
A snow-covered B train labored uphill like a white slug. It seemed clear that the T would be suspending routes before long. The
snow and cold sunrise gave everything a confected quality. The portcullis between the driveway and the parking lot was half up,
probably to keep it from being frozen closed. I couldn't see who was in the portcullis's security booth. The attendants always came
and went, most of them from the Ennet House place, trying to 'recover.' The flagpole's two flags were frozen and stuck right out
straight, turning stiffly from side to side in the wind, like someone in a neck-brace, instead of flapping. The E.T.A. physical-post
mailbox just inside the portcullis had a mo-hawk of snow. The whole scene had an indescribable pathos to it. Slice's fogged breath
kept me from seeing anything closer than the mailbox and East Courts. The light was starting to diffract into colors at the
perimeter of Slice's breath-fog on the window.
'Schacht heard that joke down at the Cranial place from some B.U. fellow with just terrible facial pain, he said,' Stice said.
Tm going to go ahead and ask the question, D-man.’
'It's a statistics joke. You got to know your medials means and modes.’
'I get the joke, Orth. The question is how come you've got your forehead all up against the window like that when your
breath's keeping you from seeing anything. What are you trying to look at? And isn't your forehead getting kind of cold?’

>>17231944
But does he say anything that someone else does not?
>>17231958
I believe I was able to get you all to post what I wanted. Something you dolts don't get about this site is that you essentially have to bait anons into having genuine discussion. If I made a sincere request, no anon would bother except a few. Now they believe they have something to prove as I ridicule a book I have never bothered to read.

>>17231620
I like this a lot.

>>17232005
He says a great deal others do not and he says it in very effective ways for those willing to do the work. Most impressively, there is no filler in IJ, everything goes to support the main themes and everything is intricately tied together in a way that really drives home the point.

>Now they believe they have something to prove
Nah, I just like DFW posting, I don't really care if you read him or if you hate him. This being a public forum which means other will read the posts made and good conversation can result. I do my best to make this shithole a bit better.

>It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent...

>...Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia

>The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

>>17229905
Holy shit. This passage BTFOs every emotionally detached, """logical""" STEMlord (and other assorted autists) in existence. There is no way around it.

This is grim.

Great book

>>17233748
cringe.

>>17230624
Holy cringe. Imagine reading this trash

>>17233903
You are whimpering right now. I understand how it must feel, to have everything taken from you.

>>17229795
i was thinking of the one of the really terrible guy who is recounting trying to go see his daughter but his wife has a restraining order on him

chapter 14

To the anon that told me to pick it back up, thanks. Got another 30 pages in and fuck this book hits hard. Just read the section about the dad raping the retarded girl.

Don Gately and Mario were the only great characters in this book.

>>17229594
>>17230285
Is this a joke? This reads like somebody who smokes half a gram and gets put on his ass. I know somebody who talks like ‘oh I have to quit’ ‘oh i smoke too much’ and quits after a bowl or two. Also why does he say ‘marijuana’ and ‘dope’ instead of something normal like ‘weed’ or ‘pot’? he sounds out of touch. This is worthless writing and you have never been addicted to anything, or you’re just very shallow.

>>17234628
What reddit shit is this?

>>17236248
it is, read the fucking title

The part where he is waiting for the dealer to show up to his house and when he goes off on how he disappears when he smokes weed and his general relationship is one of the best things (and only things) I enjoyed in the book.

>>17236248
It is supposed to sound like that, the writing is reflecting the state of the character. The character uses the terms marijuana and dope because he hates it and what it does to him so he has stopped romanticizing it.

>>17229905
This isn't even a real quote you cheeky faggot

>>17236203
Objectively correct.

>>17236304
I read this book like a decade ago and that part still sticks out to me so much

>>17236803
Anon did good, it was a great bit of parody, think it might be old pasta though. Surprised how long it took anyone to notice.

OWANWILSEN.weebum

>>17236203
By this you mean "good people"?

>>17237206
Don was not good, just better than most around him, which is not saying much.

>>17236839
To be fair, it is very well done. I've read all of Wallace's work except TPK so far and it only stood out to me because DFW wouldn't describe Hal as "empty but not stupid", and "... hip empty mask, anhedonia" isn't syntax he would ever use in a part of the book about Hal. That said, I'm sick and high so it's probably an easy spot but no one here reads

>>17229540
fpbp

>>17237372
Thewhole hip mask sentence about the one truely American thing about Hal is what got me. Love it.

>>17229533
If you want proof of his skills as a prose stylist I'll give you the first page of the pale king. If you want to determine whether IJ is turgid and meanders then read it faggot:

>Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtain, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

>Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.

BIWHM is his best imo

I really want to write a book in the same vein as infinite jest but from the perspective of a lawyer. I know there’s already the addicted lawyer in the book, but as a lawyer myself he really doesn’t cover the spectrum of the human experience that we get. Like a John Grisham novel but about how awful it all is.

>>17236803
>>17236839
>>17237372
>>17237457
Are you guys doing a bit?

>>17237482
Lol, obvious Cormac nod.

>>17237626
The Pale King might be close enough, IJ from the standpoint of IRS agents.

>>17237626
Start with a short story. I'd love to read something like this.

>>17237648
I sort of was, seeing where things went. The other anon is just sick and high

>>17237648
>>17237728

Ah, fuck. Sick, high, and wrong.

>>17238220
And you were wrong on a public forum, this will haunt you for the rest of you life. Good luck ever getting a job or having a life. Thems the breaks.

>>17229533
you could say the same thing about moby dick and shakespeare (and you would still be wrong)

I liked the part towards the end where thr guy LARPS as a homeless guy and mario touches his hand

>>17237482
Wallace channelling his inner McCarthy. Is this a Suttree reference? I know that it was his favorite McCarthy book, so could be.

>>17229594
Dude weeeeeed

>>17229533
When Gately is being hospitalized and refuses to take the painkillers, because they are the drug lead to the worst moment in his life, which the reader doesn't yet know, and you see his struggle to continue his abstination in pain, and he later on deliriously remembers that horryfying story.
Pure kino

>>17229594
On the whole it pretty much sums up the addict's mentality. Not saying I find it fascinating but the way he describes how he has to have these rules on how he gets his pot by using other people to get it for him shows how fucking pathetic addicts are so he does a good job of portraying that. The whole thing could be edited down though. It didn't need this many meandering sentences. They aren't poetic or comic so it gets pretty drole. And the last bit with the bug, yeesh let me guess it's really not there but some post modernist metaphor? Yeah why does /lit/ shill this guy again? He wouldn't even pass a second year Creative Writing course in an average college with this shit.

>>17239143
What was Gatelys worst day? I thought it was when his friend OD'd in the alley

when gately is doing dilaudid and pissing on the floor its so funny lol

>>17239177
He was the most compelling character. Worth reading just for that.

>>17229533
Someone post Orin’s letter to his mom (Avril?) in the footnotes

>>17239163
No, his worst moment are those which he refused to think about, and only acknowledged as a way to avoid the excruciating physical pain he was going through in the hospital, the emotional pain he had been avoiding turned out to be a great distraction from the physical pain he was currently experiencing. He could have saved his friend but he chose to scale mount dilaudid and avoided what was difficult. He killed Fackelmann because it was easier to just get high and forget about the problem. The worst of it was that he did not do it because he was an addict in need of a fix, he did it because he was a coward as he always had been and he has always known this, he never actually tried, he never took a real risk in his life.

randy lenz killing cats and it making shapes in the bag and setting them light and also bit where the heroin junkie is sitting on the toilet getting mauled by withdrawals and he imagines a big bird or whatever that symbolises the pain and suffering

>>17239148
>aren't ... comic so it gets pretty drole

That word does not mean what you think it means.

Also the thing with the bug is fairly clearly about the tendency of the stoned to achieve protracted focus on trivial shit that would otherwise get filtered by the brain.

>>17239702
>tendency of the stoned
No, he was attempting to distract himself about the fact his pot had not shown up, he was sober and had been sober for awhile. To focus on the bug meant he did not have to think about his problem he did not have to confront it, just like the pot it was easier than the alternative.

>>17229533
The Ken Erdedy chapter is what sold me on the book.

>>17230759
>I am going to do my best to manage this when i get home but i must do some writing before, the first chapter of my novel which i have been struggling with for far to long has formed almost perfectly in my mind and i must get it down before it is gone for ever.
Why is /lit/ like this so often? So aloofly pretentious.

>>17229533
The author admitted he made it obtuse to read on purpose. Any such book is a bad book, and what little I've read of it here and elsewhere only confirms this.

>>17240658
Yeah, people here should stop wanting to share ideas and write, should just sit about and judge everyone else who is not in their circle jerk.

>>17229533
The endnote gimmick was neat and made me go "Wow" when I realized it.

>>17236248
>This reads like somebody who smokes half a gram and gets put on his ass.
That's the point

>>17229533
Infinite Jest is coming here everyday to waste time trying to get a quick dopamine hit while my life withers away, as do my dreams everytime I fail to control my impulses, and become nothing else but a husk, slave to my own instincts.

God, I hate myself.

>>17230935
ironic

>>17229594
>The story here tonight is a typical WWII romantic intrigue, just another
>evening at Raoul’s place, involving a future opium shipment’s being used by
>Tamara as security against a loan from Italo, who in turn owes Waxwing for a
>Sherman tank his friend Theophile is trying to smuggle into Palestine but must
>raise a few thousand pounds for purposes of bribing across the border, and so
>has put the tank up as collateral to borrow from Tamara, who is using part of her
>loan from Italo to pay him. But meantime the opium deal doesn’t look like it’s
>going to come through, because the middleman hasn’t been heard from in several
>weeks, along with the money Tamara fronted him, which she got from Raoul de
>la Perlimpinpin through Waxwing, who is now being pressured by Raoul for the
>money because Italo, deciding the tank belongs to Tamara now, showed up last
>night and took it away to an Undisclosed Location as payment on his loan, thus
>causing Raoul to panic. Something like that.

>>17232005
hey just wanted for u to know ur a retard to everyone but yourself and no one wants to talk 2 retards