/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14416736]

Is section 22 from 'The Pale King' (that long novella-like chapter about Chris Fogle having a religious conversion during an Advanced Tax course) Dave's Magnun Opus? I certainly think so.

[Anonymous No.14416779]

Yes, I agree. A lot of his stuff is hit or miss for me but that section is gold. I didn't even know someone could write about consciousness that way before I read it

[Anonymous No.14416814]

>that paragraph in the end notes that says DFW was planning to end the book with the autistic guy completely ripping the girl he was chatting with a new one
I really can't see how you go from what we got to that. The book seems mostly complete, and there's no hint that he hated her.

[Anonymous No.14416883]

>>14416779
It's an amazing lil' gem and better than all of Infinite Jest. I just wish he could've finished that damn book. It would've been such a good contribution to American lit.

[Anonymous No.14416931]

pale king is a work I only learned to fully appreciate once I “finished” it.
In retrospect it actually is amazing. I desperately have to reread it.

[Anonymous No.14416948]

>>14416883
It is a tragedy, but at least we have what we have. Gonna go read that Chris Fogle thing again soon I think

[Anonymous No.14416961]

Now I'm trying to remember that chapter where the character is taken to the main IRS building and there's a weird traffic jam going on due to bad design choices and human stupidity. I hated reading that bit but every time I think of it, it makes me smile. Based Dave, making me love what I hate.

[Anonymous No.14416997]

>>14416961
As someone who has walked and biked their entire adult life and has never really experienced being stuck in a traffic jam, I found that part hilarious. I often walk or bike by/through traffic jams and I love looking at the expressions on the faces of the people stuck in their cars. Subsection 1 will always be my favorite from the book, it makes the rest of the novel possible.

§1

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.

[Anonymous No.14417031]

>>14416736
>>14416779
Kindred spirits, the wastoid novella might possibly be the best sub-100 page thing ever written.

I feel like he wanted to do something like Good Old Neon with this. Worked out beautifully.

[Anonymous No.14417042]

>>14416961
And everybody's sweating. DFW had a real life issue with sweating, hence all the sweating characters.

[Anonymous No.14417047]

>>14417042
True. There's even a character on that novel who is literally traumatized by being a sweaty freak. I guess he had this problem his whole life and it made him extremely self-conscious about it.

[Anonymous No.14417055]

>>14417047
there was a passage about a boy who used to walk quickly to class to get the seat as far away from the radiator as possible, but not walk quickly enough to actually sweat on the way. the whole section is one of the best depiction of anxiety over body issues i've ever read, and it was especially salient because i have the same sort of insecurities.

[Anonymous No.14417061]

My favourite part was Shane Drinion levitating while talking to some self-absorbed nutcase at an after work drinks event.

[Anonymous No.14417066]

>>14417055
That's exactly what I was thinking of. That section's a gold nugget of being a paranoid anxious person. God, how I wish ol' Dave could be alive and writing about social media addicts. I think he would have browsed /lit/ from time to time, just to check our opinion about his books and being the sensitive guy that he was, would always have his feelings hurt by the experience.

[Anonymous No.14417080]

>>14417066
he said in an interview he doesn't read reviews because he feels traumatised by criticism. it deeply affects him and he's very honest about it, that's why he moved to the middle of nowhere and doesn't have a tv. the only magazines he reads are his wife's cosmo.

[Anonymous No.14417085]

>>14417047
DFW's sweating was more a side effect of his meds. He was self conscious about sweating his entire life, but phenelzine made it a real issue and was likely one of the hated side effects that caused him to risk trying other medications despite knowing that more often then not, phenelzine ceases to ever work again once you stop taking it.

Sweat is part of IJ as well.

[Anonymous No.14417159]

>>14417085
I'll try to read IJ this next year, I've been putting it off since 2017.

[Anonymous No.14417175]

>>14417159
Are you the anon that has been posting about debating between IJ and some other DFW work, Oblivion?, for months and in every DFW thread? If you are, just read it already.

[Anonymous No.14417183]

>>14417175
Nope, I barely davepost at all.

[Anonymous No.14417206]

The Pale King is absolutely based.

Is section 22 the one where he talks about the boredom seminar where he is told to picture sitting on a beach while tensing his ass muscles to overcome boredom? The whole thing about confronting and embracing boredom is great.

Infinite Jest in a sense is a negative novel, in the sense that it warns of the dangers of entertainment, hedonism etc. But TPK is a positive novel in the sense that it offers guidance on how to function in the real world and what it takes to submit yourself to the greater good etc.

[Anonymous No.14417212]

>>14417061
with the storm approaching. Really atmospheric.

[Anonymous No.14417223]

>>14417206
I don't think section 22 is all that positive, to be honest. The character who says that kind of shit is basically an IRS drone, reviled by his colleagues. Some of it is indeed good, specially his relationship to his father and the way his dad dies and how his mom became a lesbo with a feminist bookshop and stuff. That description about taking the TV show 'As the world turns' literally as meaning: YOU'RE WATCHING AS THE WORLD TURNS is based as fuck.

[Anonymous No.14417236]

>>14417183
Well, does not really matter, just read it already.

>>14417206
>IJ = Negative
>TPK = Positive
That says far more about you than it does about the novels. Neither are really positive or negative in of themselves.

[Anonymous No.14417717]

>>14417236
what this anon said. as an alcoholic, IJ offered me a sideways look into why i can't cope with life sober and helped me clean up. meanwhile TPK offered to me a depressing glimpse into ways sober people cope with the relentless monotony of being. DFW was a good, not great, writer because he can be approached from whatever angle you are dealing with in your own life.

[Anonymous No.14418647]

>>14417717
That’s powerful