/lit/ - Literature

Read Pynchon's 'Vineland' instead. It deals with similar themes - especially addiction - but it's shorter and the prose is better.

it isn't boring
confusing maybe

>>4042153
The best boring book you will ever buy.

>>4042153
Appreciate the parts individually, without trying to connect them, think of them as different pieces almost, just read them for them and don't look for anything more. Then when you're finished think back and connect everything and you'll see that it is all interwoven beautifully. I don't think that it made sense to me until I finished it and really thought about it, but I really enjoyed it the entire way through.

>>4042153

Am I an asshole for thinking that there's other stuff OP should read first?

Biggest literary example of The Emperor's New Clothes, this century.

>>4042315

Implying its not a truly great book.

>>4042328
It isn't.
It's a grossly verbose mess.

>>4042328
Not that guy, but I disagree. I'd say it's not even a good book, let alone a "great" one.

I think "Infinite Jest" has a lot going for it, in the sense that it is a great-work-by-numbers idea of what everyone thinks "great literature" has. It almost seems DFW had a clipboard in front of him going, "Shakespearean Title. Check. Lengthy Tome. Check. Footnotes and miscellaneous explanations. Check. Drug Culture. Check. Lengthy Descriptions of Sport Match. Check..."

If you think about it, it all seems like a joke (a jest, if you will) where DFW set out to trick people into thinking it was somehow a literary achievement.

>>4042315
>what even is "catcher in the rye"

>>4042334
No, DFW isn't smart enough to am become ironing.

It's just a painfully, canonically derivative piece of shit, that just screams 'APPRECIATE ME'.

>>4042338
Not even close

>>4042334
>>4042315
Don't you get tired of parroting the same thing in every thread, you loser? You haven't even attempted to read the book and don't pretend you have.

>>4042345
>canonically derivative

This is a really apt phrase.

>>4042334

The fact you described it as a 'work-by-numbers' makes me wonder whether you've ever read it. The plot structure itself is a marvel to behold.

>>4042354
The prose is god-awful.

>>4042366

Prose from which chapter? Quite a lot of differences in writing throughout the whole book. His dialogue is perhaps his weakest part of writing, some of dialogue seems too contrived, though his description and relation of emotive issues is exemplary.

>>4042349
except that 'jest' isn't being taught in high schools as if it actually has merit.

>>4042366
is that what /lit/ told you?

seriously, you're not fooling anyone who's actually read the book.

>>4042359
I'd agree with this. Infinite Jest is a great number of things, some of which may be negative, but conventional isn't one of them.

>>4042375
As it shouldn't be, unlike The Catcher in the Rye

>>4042359
>The plot structure itself is a marvel to behold.

Why? Because you saw pic related or one of the thirty other images like it? You're deluding yourself, and you're being bamboozled.

You could make a diagram like this of any book's plot--literally any book. You can make one for The Alchemist, for god's sake.

Think a bit.

>>4042387
Heh.

>>4042387

easy, the alchemist is the best book every written

>>4042389
That's child's play

>>4042377
It's incredibly verbose, and it's written in a weird, pseudo-Woolf pastiche-type thing, that simply doesn't work.

Also, he cannot write dialogue.

Cannot.

>>4042359
>>4042381
I disagree. You have to remember that "Infinite Jest" came out 30 plus years after "Gravity's Rainbow". Following post-modernism, "Infinite Jest" is as by-the-books as they come for an ambitious dude who wants to be taken seriously in the current literary world.

If "Infinite Jest" was written 100 years ago, you guys would be valid in stating it's unconventional.

>>4042387

Because its complex, beautifully constructed and subtle enough to leave the reader with enough information as to be able to project the ending of the book, after it has ended. Not to mention some fantastically written characters; Randy Lenz, for instance.

However, those info graphs on IJ are all a bag of shit anyway. The only one I saw made me rage when it labelled Gately as deceased.

>>4042407

Only Infinite Jest isn't a post-modernist novel.

>>4042407

Except Infinite Jest and DFW in general rejects most of postmodernism's central tenants. The only thing similar is the superficial observation that the plot structure is nonlinear.

>>4042389

ONAN clearly does not dissolve, there are references to the ONANCAA in Year of Glad. I think it's pretty clear that the AFR fails somehow.

Also, John Wayne is affiliated with the FLQ, not AFR. It's not at all clear whether he's been murdered or not.

>>4042338

Disagreed. Salinger is a true genius in every regard. His later work proves this.

ITT: one more /lit/ard feels peer-pressured into IJ.

>>4042407
>implying Dfw wasn't totally against postmodernism

>>4042469
>implying that by resisting postmodernism you don't become even more postmodern

THERE IS NO ESCAPE

>>4042463

>been peer-pressured into reading book

how beta do you have to be

>>4042474

As beta as anyone who got to this book because of /lit/.

Ten years in the English department and I had never heard of it before I got here.

>>4042389

That doesn't look like a sierpinski triangle...

>>4042482
I learned about it from the internet but not this board

op here, i come from "under the dome" by king...be easy on me

>>4042463
I think it's more "what's all the hype about?" then peer pressure.

>>4042523

Only severely intense peer-pressure will force one through Pynchon, Wallace, and Joyce.

Say what you want but none of these are anything enjoyable to read.

And don't give me that "books can't be fun if they're good". I read Sartre's philosophy for fun, and Plato's, and biology textbooks too. I wouldn't read shit if I didn't ENJOY it.

These books, "litcore", is like someone's half-assed YouTube video in which they masturbate their tiny cocks.

I don't give a fuck. Any Hemingway short story from In Our Time beats all these books in terms of literary merit.

>>4042551
>And don't give me that "books can't be fun if they're good"

Who the hell says that? If a book isn't enjoyable, it's failed in its purpose.

>>4042551
This is a terrible post

>>4042567

The majority of /lit/ would frown at you for daring to enjoy a book and praise enjoyability as a quality.

It's because they're cuntards who consider literature their beta workout; they read for image, for self-validation, and so they want to suffer through a book, to feel the pain that proves they're working hard at this.

I despise all who do this.

I have far more respect for people who admit they don't like books and don't even try.

>>4042577

It's a terrible truth about a terrible board. If you had anything worth sharing, you would have already, so I won't bother asking you to elaborate.

>>4042551

>people can't like things I like

Nobody forced me through Pynchon or Wallace, I enjoyed them.

Plato on the over hand I cannot stand.

Weird, isn't it? Peoples taste.

>>4042567

Nobody enjoys Finnegans Wake, Gravity's Rainbow, or Infinite Jest, or even Ulysses or Dubliners.

>>4042581

>claims to enjoy Pynchon

I'm waiting for you to say pleb or patrician within 5 posts.

>>4042579
You are the most pretentious idiot on this board

>>4042313
no

but that you're asking for any anonymous poster to tell you you are(n't) tells me you're a faggot, tho

>>4042582
That is a lie.

>>4042584
You are autistic.

>>4042579
You are a terrible person with poorly-formed opinions.

>>4042334
>didn't understand the point
oh, yeah, and btw, you know dfw killed himself, right? that's pretty significant

>>4042595

You wish. Maybe you're one of those who read the way others lift. At least lifters go for what they want: health and a nicer body to get laid and look good.

>>4042404
yes, he can-- in fact he did


kill yourself

>>4042599
>>4042601
>>4042595

These guys: all butthurt, not a shred of argument between them.

Keep confirming my opinion.

>>4042611
You don't have any arguments either. All you can do is make sweeping, unsubstantiated statements. You are clearly the most butthurt person in this thread, and it's all because people like books that you don't. You are a pathetic loser.

>>4042620

Funny you should say that because I'm pretty fucking sure you'd instantly start hating on books I, or anyone else, enjoys that you don't and start vomitting the word "pleb" for every other letter I type about said books.

>>4042620

Do you like Twilight?
Do you like Game of Thrones?
Do you like Harry Potter?
Do you like 50 Shades of Grey?

>>4042582

I enjoyed everything Joyce wrote, and large parts of Gravity's Rainbow.

The Pale King >>>>> IJ

>>4042651

How did you enjoy Dubliners? Some stories are great, but on the whole, it's quite a borefest, no?

>>4042657

Sorry but I respectfully disagree.

>>4042651
you actually read the pale king?

fucking kill yourself.

christ you kids are intolerable.


dfw didn't even finish that before taking his life. on the other hand, he did finish ij before taking his life. that should tell you something.

>>4042660

I'm OK with that. I read it a million years ago and don't even remember the stories I enjoyed. Same for Portrait.

>>4042666

What's wrong with the Pale King?

>>4042670
for one it was posthumously published as incomplete

as if to capitalize on his death

>>4042675

You implied that there is something wrong with reading it, though. Why's that? Why are you so angry?

>>4042675
That's good. Just like Nabokov's The Original of Laura, incomplete works give a great insight into the process and preliminary methods the author uses. I wish it was a lot easier to get first drafts and unfinished work.

>>4042693

I always wanted to read Nabokov but hating pedophilia, I don't want to read Lolita. What sayest thou?

>>4042682
because you're actually giving money to the company that published an incomplete work by a man who took his own life due to 'depression' which was probably in no small part due to things like companies publishing art for profits and etc.

really, like, my god, do i have to keep explaining this to you, you fucking anti-critical autist?

>>4042693
see >>4042698

>>4042695
Note: spoilered section contains actual spoilers
It doesn't really condone pedophilia - by the end, Humbert Humbert regrets his actions. Sex acts are rarely explicitly described. I think you'll be fine.

>>4042695
you don't deserve to experience the joy of reading nabokov.

>>4042315
More like Don DeLillo's entire oeuvre is the primo example.

>>4042698

That's an argument against purchasing the book, not against reading it. You need to learn to read. I asked what is wrong with reading the book.

>>4042702

Why, because I hate pedophilia? You can't be this retarded.

op here, started ulysses and left it, i didnt understand shit, is going to happen the same here?

>>4042736

And the child saw that the emperor was naked.

We need more of you on /lit/. Thank you for existing.

>>4042740

Just because you didn't understand it doesn't mean that there wasn't anything to be understood.

For fuck's sake just pick up any decent secondary literature on Joyce. Bloom's book on Ulysses would be a good start.

>>4042675
Wallace purposefully semi-organized what he had done so far so that it could be found, so I assume he would have wanted it to be published. Also,

>The Book of Disquiet

>>4042744

I didn't read the book, I'm just very uncertain that I would enjoy literature that's mostly an autistic puzzle made of references, even if I got them. You know?

>>4042744
>JUST BECAUSE YOU CANT FASHION IT DON'T MEAN HE'S NAKED JUST LOOK AT THIS MAGAZIN OF THE LATEST!!!

>>4042749
he organzied it so that it could be found, huh? source?

you sure he wasn't just, like, organizing it?

>>4042707
fair enough, for some certain reason it didn't really occur to me to pirate dfw's books

yeah, well, in any case, i'd have to read it to be able to judge whether it's worth reading or not, faggot.

>>4042754
You can read and enjoy Ulysses without picking up on a single reference. They're not vital to its reading or anything, Joyce put them in there for the scholars.

>>4042765

>leave typed and neatly piled manuscript on your desk
>kill yourself

>>4042770
>Joyce put them in there for the scholars.

Hemingway quote about popinjays. That probably was about Joyce.

>>4042774

Demanding more info on his depression.

>>4042774
i thought i asked for a source on this.

you're simply asserting that he left a typed, neatly piled manuscript on his desk

how do you know this?

Just ordered it.

Guys, GUYS.

Wish me luck ;_;

>>4042781
read IJ...

>>4042783
Wallace in his final hours had "tidied up [his] manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel."[3]

>>4042505
op again, saying this i hope you realize what kind of reader i´m, so...

>>4042778
I doubt it. Hemingway loved Ulysses and was good friends with Joyce.

>>4042792
shit he had a wife?

well thx for taking the time to do that (i obv. now see that this information was readily available on wikipedia)

>>4042792

I want pics of his wife.

>>4042799

Joyce taught Hemingway to write, Hemingway taught Joyce boxing, or so the story goes.

Still, Hemingway resented authors who had their characters discuss a painter or another author for no valid reason and generally avoided doing that.

I can't imagine that Hemingway particularly enjoyed literary cannibalism, although he DID smuggle Ulysses into America.

>>4042435
Hal and the AZ administration are behind events. See Continental Emergency.

>>4042811
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/10/karen-green-david-foster-wallace-interview

Interview with her for those interested.

>>4042815
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbMOhRL6wsA

This always brings a smile to my face.

>>4042818

More pics.

Post other authors' wives. Hemingway had ugly wives.

>>4042821

Lel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkxUY0kxH80

He looked so depressed and nervous during interviews

>>4042857
much like tao lin, he had aspgers syndrome

>>4042857

One minute of this:

>tries so damn hard to impress the interviewer
>worried to death about saying something smart

Jesus Christ, CHILL, MAN, CHILL, you got a good voice, you talk sense, although you seem to be grasping (your word) for clever shit and references when a straight answer would work just fine.

>>4042851

rulz

>>4042872
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkxUY0kxH80

>Wittgenstein believed that the most important problems could be discussed only in the form of jokes

That's bullshit though. What W said was that a philosophical tract could consist of nothing but jokes.

>>4042821

>tfw you will never tell Hemingway to deal with him

>>4042894

>tfw Joyce was a fart-sucking gnomes who only wrote 4 books in his life, half of which meant for scholars to jerk off on

>>4042898

You're forgetting Exiles.

>>4042857

Funny thing about Wallace is this: I hated him for no other reason than his constant mentioning here, and the first time I actually read anything of his, not knowing who the author was, I thought it was pretty fucking good.

I had asked for good and bad writing in literature.

Was given two passages. Wallace was given as bad, but I thought it was awesome, and the second passage I thought was contrived and tryhard as fuck.

Turned out it was Blood Meridian.

Sorry.

>>4042900

I don't even know Exiles. Exile from his bitch's ass?

>>4042890
philosophy only tackles the most important problems though

>>4042740
Are you claiming that Ulysses is shit?

>>4042916
It's very third rate.

>>4042916

I haven't read it. I'm just suspicious of anything that people use to sound superior.

It's like Twilight and Harry Potter for adults, so I'm suspicious.

>>4042584

Crying of Lot 49 is, to me, pretty fucking hilarious.

>>4042964

My experience with Pynchon is this:

>once saw a documentary on the art channel
>spermadilocious website about him, or something
>seems fucking interesting
>from atoms to alligators in New York's sewers
>buy GR
>years later, attempt reading it casually
>always tired when I tried to read it
>quickly got lost
>200 pages later, wtf am I reading
>only remember the toilet scene

I admit I was so tired that even a regular book would have lost me, but now I'm afraid of going back and experiencing the same frustration.

I also, even before that, read a story in Norton's Anthology, something called Entropy. I remember reading it and not having a fucking clue what the point was. It was just an apartment description, or something.

Enlighten my ass.

>>4042407
Not the person you're responding to, but I think you're exaggerating a little. I agree that for its time it was not particularly experimental. However, a hundred pages of footnotes is hardly conventional. I think that a lot of the narrative and plot stuff that is highlighted as "unconventional" seems less surprising in light of Pynchon's work but was still unusual for the mainstream (let's be honest, very little of the general public has actually read Gravity's Rainbow). Wittgenstein's Mistress it may not be, but it was still not a fully "conventional" novel.

In terms of plot points being crafted to produce a 'literary' feeling, I agree about the Shakespeare title. However, I think that the lengthy nature of the book is just DFW's type of thing, and the drug culture is too important for the book and too relevant to his life for me to see it as being forced. I don't actually view the sports match as belonging on that list, as it doesn't seem like a particularly 'literary' thing.

>>4042904
What Wittgenstein was saying, though, was not "it is impossible to discuss these problems except by using jokes," but "it is possible to discuss these problems by using only jokes, if one so wishes."

>>4043009

So much for being a smartass, Dave.

He sounds nice though. Except he makes faces when he thinks he failed in answering like the smart fuck he thinks he should be.

>get 100 pages in
>It's so dull I can't keep going
Help.

>>4043022

No one can help you. If you don't like it, don't fucking read it. Christ.

>>4043029
But then I won't be able to figure out why people like something so fucking boring.

>>4042979
I never finished it, can't remember why but from what I remember there are two apartments, each with a very different sense of entropy about them.

One is an "open door" and full of brassy military type drunks and play boys and party goers. Any order achieved there is disintegrating and tending towards disorder as forcefully as possible.

The other is like a terrarium or a sealed up garden sort of that relies on less and less from the outside to maintain its (cyclical) order and contain both the people there completely.

So basically it is like Pynchon playing around with these two different projections of entropy as a dictating force of both physics and "human level" affairs. Like I said I didn't read the last ten pages or so I don't know if there was any big revelation. There is probably a little more too it than that.

>>4043031
>>4043022

I'm interested in this guy's take. Guy, what books do you enjoy reading? Be specific.

>>4043038

Interesting. I should perhaps read it again.

He doesn't have any collection of shorts, does he?

Guys, post some Wallace quotes.

You assholes never quote writers enough.

I've heard about Wallace a thousand times, but only ever saw one quote.

Impress us with his fucking talent!

Never read IJ or Gravity's Rainbow. I've read everything Joyce ever wrote though. Ulysses had really enjoyable parts, shit parts and lots of WTF parts. Very mixed to me overall. Finnegan's Wake is just too gibberish for me to bother with while Portrait and Dubliners are both amazing, two of my favorite books.

>>4043058
He's not really a quotes man. His work is very good, but it's more about the funny situations he concocts.

>>4043058
>"Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy — happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love — are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify… ."

>>4043058
>The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

>>4043058
>I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it's just been ... overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you've overlooked and turning your head to look back at what's been right there all along, the whole time...

>>4043117

That passage reads badly. I resent this prose.

Before returning Inherent Jest to it's proper place, (This occurred roughly, 6 months ago, at the local library) I decided to take a seat and read the first 49 pages. I should probably withhold judgement? Yes?

>>4043047
He does, actually. Slow Learner. It's where Entropy is from. They're all early pieces (mostly college), and the foreword is basically him saying how bad they are. I wouldn't suggest reading Slow Learner unless you're a Pynchon fan, though. With the exception of The Secret Integration, which I think he ended up adapting into one part of V, the stories really only have value for the insight into Pynchon and his later, better works that they give.

>>4043073
GR gets compared to Ulysses a lot for its length, density, and general bizarreness. Still nowhere near as insane as Finnegans Wake, though.

>>4043352
>Inherent
>49

>>4042857
what he begins by saying is also freud's idea of jokes. witt and freud have much in common

>>4043352
good 2 m16

>>4043930

You're driveling.

>>4043941
your driveling

>>4043945

Driveling as a verb

>>4042153
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend
^ Every IJ thread forever, because so many vacuous cunts didn't understand the book.

>>4043952
ill drivel you're verb

>>4043975
>so many vacuous cunts didn't understand the book.

I'm not saying you're wrong nor right, but this is literally the stock retort to anyone not liking something.

Here's a fun thing you supposedly don't ever have to do even once, let alone again: google "You just didn't understand it" and see what pops up.

It's probably one of the most documented responses on the internet.

>>4043975

i have read the book one full time, read many many reviews and blog posts, then picked through it a second time, and listened a third time on audiobook, and failed to reach those conclusions. that blog post blew my mind. i'm with you either way--masterpiece if you grasp that abstruse stuff, masterpiece if you enjoy it piecemeal.

>>4042358
excruciatingly

>>4042161
but the rehab stuff was always the worst parts

>>4042493
the editor cut the shit out of the book so it's really really lopsided and it's only the character interactions that show up fractally.

>>4042422
>dat grand narrative and unfragmented storyline
no. Infinite Jest is textbook post modern.

>rejects many of postmodernism's central tenants
But how will it ever make up for all the rent money it will lose?

Seriously, I will never get how so many people make this error. I could understand mishearing it - they sound nearly identical - but the meanings are so different that you'd expect someone to correct the mistake pretty quickly.

>>4042581
Really? I lolled out loud when some geezer threatens to dance nude. And the descriptions of Atlantis, effing epic RPG description of a world.

Platon is fun and awesome.

>>4042179
this is probably the best advice you can get.

Infinite Jest is post-modern in style but bluntly sincere and straightforward in substance, developing a butal realism using his characters to communicate a wide array of feelings. My view on this is that DFW uses this contrast to criticize and show how we're trapped in this information age, prisoners of the tools and systems who are supposed to help us.

Technology cripple us (video system article, Interlace too powerful)
Entertainment becomes to efficient to the point of being dangerous (Samizdat)
The political system gets out of control (ONAN, executive branch out of control, intelligence/counter-intelligence/terrorist betray each other to the nth degree, ecological catastrophe)
People think the only way to survive is to be ultra competitive (the Clipperton saga)
Difficulties of "making it" in any path of life (Himself having trouble getting recognition, drug addicts losers, tennis academy)

On the edges of this sad painting, DFW nevertheless offers glimpses of hope using a few key characters (Mario, notably).

This is my simple, no bullshit firsthand interpretation of the premises and basic developments of the novel. There is a "goal", the guy isn't writing random bullshit.

Anyone care to comment on this?

>>4044543
Sincerity is a joke to me.

>>4044543
>Clipperton

I completely forgot about that character. I disliked the book but I was completely shocked and attracted to how he introduced this one.

It was a stroke of genius among ruins of mediocrity.

>>4042389
>>4042397
>mfw realizing that the authors actually made these diagrams

>>4047262
To be fair Joyce probably made that as a joke