/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4602334]

>Feel like the plot of my down to earth character piece are getting far to outlandish and unbelievable

>Realize all the most popular modern lit. is crazy existential post-modern stuff anyway

Fuck it, imma just go even crazier

[Anonymous No.4602371]

[Anonymous No.4602465]

Existentialism is modernist.

[Anonymous No.4602510]

Existentialism is a humanism :O

[Anonymous No.4602613]

Humanism is a spook

[Anonymous No.4602628]

I'll probably commit sacrilege by saying so, but I'm at page 50 and find the book only so-so. I had some "ha" moments, but you guys make it out as some holy bible or some shit.

Is this a Generation X thing I'm not getting? Maybe I should just read on and try to get it.

[Anonymous No.4602652]

>>4602628

i, too, form my opinions of books after reading half of one percent of them

[Anonymous No.4602662]

Why is everyone so comically fucked up in this book?

[Anonymous No.4602671]

>>4602652
That;s how everyone comes up with their opinion on IJ. There are a lot of words on each page and so really you get the gist of it within the first ten. And you can skip over the footnotes; they're just puffed up afterthoughts.

[Anonymous No.4602741]

>>4602671
>>4602652
Don't get your knickers in a passive aggressive twist.

Continued reading on the toilet, before reading any of the comments, because yeh, you can't really base an opinion on a whole work just on 5%

Had another chuckle, so that's a good sign.

[Anonymous No.4602755]

>>4602652
>50 pages of 1,000 page book
>0.5%

General criticism still stands, though.

[Anonymous No.4602765]

>>4602628

well, the first 50 pages will make sense after you finish, really that's how it works. The comedy isn't very overt, but IJ requires you to dig deep. Once you've gotten into the rhythm of the prose, understand what most of the abbreviations and "nicknames" mean, the significance of certain events.. you can start forming a better opinion of it.

That being said, I think I'll need a second read (finished two summers ago, wanted to put distance between myself and the book) to actually get more of the whole picture/themes.

It's good, has some nice sentiments about life, but don't expect to be blown away. Nothing can do that when you sit in anticipation for it.

[Anonymous No.4602768]

>>4602671
I read all the footnotes first so I wouldn't have to skip back and forth as I was reading the chapters. Then I read the chapters in the order of most interesting characters. Started out with all the Hal ones. And then skipped the rest of the characters. Hal was the only one I liked.

[Anonymous No.4602810]

>>4602628
Honestly, the first part of the book is a bit all over the place. I think the very beginning with Hal is fucking terrific but after that it can be a slog.
I'd recommend just powering through, things pick up about halfway through.
I love it, but it's definitely not everyone's cup of tea.

[Anonymous No.4602892]

>>4602768
That's cool, as long as you're joking. Be prepared for the book to continue to get weirder and weirder, and bear in mind that the book is probably sadder than it is funny.

[Anonymous No.4602922]

>>4602892
The people who recommended it to me, not /lit/, said it was so funny. I thought it was more sad though, and that all the humor is sad when you think about it.

[Anonymous No.4603527]

>>4602922
If you quit before the Eschaton, page 328 or so (I'm reffing that from memory), then you have failed. Seriously. Remember, DFW was totally batshit insane, so he thinks everyone should spend 19 hours of their life just establishing the secondary characters. The Eschaton is the key to understanding the entire work.

[Anonymous No.4603554]

>>4602628
>but you guys make it out as some holy bible or some shit.

i do? pretty sure that i always said this book is shit.

[Anonymous No.4603577]

i think the best passages in ij are :
don gately on the beach
mario talking to the moms about how to tell if someones sad
hal on the morning he goes insane, when he's talking to stice and sees the person in the snow
james and his father getting steaming talking about marlon brando and cars

[Anonymous No.4603590]

>>4602810
this i was kind of into it but i only got fucking hooked and truly got into around page 600
i spend like a month on the first half and read the last 400 pages in 2 days

[Anonymous No.4603604]

>>4603527
i dont really get the significance of this scene, i thought it was kind of funny and created a nice image but i didnt really see what i did for the book in a wider context, did i completely misunderstand ij?

[Anonymous No.4603666]

the real question is: when and where did Hal watch the goddamn Entertainment?

[Anonymous No.4603676]

>>4603577
It makes me sad to know I'll never know what happened to Hal, and Don Gately. I actually want to hug Don

[Anonymous No.4603695]

>>4603676
You're forgetting about Michael.

[Anonymous No.4603719]

>>4603527
I'm not OP. I finished the book.
Go on about Eschaton, though. I'm interested.

[Anonymous No.4603735]

>>4603695
I liked Michael and his brother more than anyone else.

[Anonymous No.4603754]

I have read it 3 times and made a book of my own annotations and I made tons of cool connections, but still can't figure out exactly what happened to Hal.

Did the mold he ate as a child take forever to grow somewhere in his GI system, then start releasing concentrated DMZ into his body?
Did the above happen, but maybe the marijuana halted it for a while, and the DMZ only took control when he had to quit smoking weed?
Did someone dose him with DMZ? Where? How? Who would do it, who even knew about the DMZ aside from his friends? Pemulis is a prankster but he always liked Hal and wouldn't do that to him.
Didn't we see a scene of Pemulis discovering that his DMZ stash was gone from the ceiling panel?
Did he watch Infinite Jest? If so, how?
Was he made partly immune to the effects of IJ because of the DMZ mold in his body?

[Anonymous No.4603786]

>>4603754
I'm not sure we know exactly why Hal becomes the way he does, and you've listed most of the possible explanations, but there is also a slight implication that James's ghost put DMZ on Hal's toothbrush.

[Anonymous No.4603816]

>>4603695
Pemulis? fuck Pemulis who cares about Pemulis

Pemulis can't be a meme

[Anonymous No.4603853]

>>4603754
Those are pretty much the points I am missing, too. And I've finished reading it a couple of weeks ago. For the sixth time.
Except I'm pretty sure Hal did watch the samizdat, considering his behaviour in the first chapter. The entertainment, which in James' intentions was meant to finally making him able to express himself, must have achieved the opposite effect (and he was actually able to speak before, even though his father couldn't hear him).
As you pointed out, the DMZ can't be the reason to that, since someone (probably James' wraith) made it disappear from Pemulis' hiding place.
I think Hal watched IJ as he was lying down in the viewing room, as his father's cartridges were being reproduced on the screening alphabetical order. Remember Pemulis opening the door, trying to talk to him, and making that comment about his weird grin?
This is my guess.

Don't know about the rest.

[Anonymous No.4603869]

>>4603754
>>4603853
How do you guys not feel stupid typing this stuff up?

[Anonymous No.4603880]

>>4602755
I don't think that 50/1000 = 0,5/100.

[Anonymous No.4603887]

>>4603880
I don't think you know how percents work

[Anonymous No.4604011]

>>4602765
>understand what most of the abbreviations and "nicknames" mean

This is so annoying and artificial. It's like he didn't know how to write so he just named every character 10 times over with clever yet corny metafictional monikers. I hope writers won't pick up on that.

[Anonymous No.4604029]

>>4603869
Take note, this is how smart people think. Personally, I find it uncanny and over-eager.

[Anonymous No.4604035]

>>4603887
He's right. 50/1000 is clearly the same as 5/100.

[Anonymous No.4604040]

>>4604029
>this is how smart people think.

Hardly.

[Anonymous No.4604119]

>>4603816
Pemulis is like the best friend I never had.

[Anonymous No.4604869]

>>4603869
Some folks like to talk about books. Some people like to shitpost. You are the latter. They are the former.

[Anonymous No.4604889]

>>4604869
better to shitposte and be thought a fool than to post something sincere and remove all doubt

[Anonymous No.4604901]

>>4604889
Is this the manifesto of postmodernism from the perspective of new sincerity?

[Anonymous No.4604917]

>>4604889
Don't you feel stupid for typing that out?

[Anonymous No.4604935]

>>4604901
What do you mean? Do you have like a brain problem or something?

[Anonymous No.4604965]

>>4604935
That wasnt difficult to understand.

I really dont know why you think its difficult to understand.

[Anonymous No.4604980]

i read this theory where hal is slowly turning into a wraith or something because at the start there's this one line which says something like his movements were all sped up, almost wraithlike

[Anonymous No.4604984]

>>4604980
i don't remember any of the deans saying wraithlike, they all said he moved/sounded like some sort of submerged retard goat or something and flailed and wriggled around
and i think JOI got to be a wraith because he died and Lyle because he's Lyle.

[Anonymous No.4605454]

>>4602671
>And you can skip over the footnotes
what

[Anonymous No.4606016]

>>4603604
>>4603719
In order to make IJ into a book of the dead, recited by the wraiths of all the characters, following the nuclear holocaust which Hal sees the first volley of (some ultra-mach fighter slicing through the sky like a scalpel opening a white seam; or whatever the exact line was) at the end of Year of Glad, there must be an in depth recitation of the game theory of nuclear warfare somewhere in the book. So there is. The Eschaton. That's why Glad is the last sponsored year. See the "post-continental crisis" footnote. Hal's last act on Earth was to face his father in a conversation - a tennis match, the only transcendant form of communication left to either of them. Himself plays in the possessed body of Stice. Which is why all the supernatural hocus poscus with Stice. Read the Wraith in the hospital room again. Speeding up and slowing down perception. The Wraith of Himself explains the book's fractured narrative structure.

I personally believe it was a tactical mistake on DFW's part to put the wraith scenes so late. Sheer reader fatique leads to it being the least-actually-read section, yet it is the primer for the book's structural decisions. A masochistic, thing to do, from a lover of pain.

[Anonymous No.4606035]

>>4602371
fuck yeah stephenson is awesome.

[Anonymous No.4606051]

>>4604980
>>4604984
There is a compelling case, made at staggering length elsewhere, that Lyle is indeed dead. His explanation is that, unlike Himself, whose defining attitude is of distraction, Lyle is a master of wraithness because he is maximally present in the here and now.

Hal's is not becoming a wraith, except in the sense that [whatever not really critical to specify combination of chemical toxicities] has rendered him mute; leaving tennis as his only form of communication. Muting the living Hal is the point. Whether it was by mold/dmz/bob hope/weed is all light show. There can be only tennis. Because he must play his father in the WhataBurger, in the body of Stice. Before he dies in the nuclear exchange. And becomes a wraith whose fractured ramblings constitute his part of the book.

[Anonymous No.4606093]

>>4606051
Art will be art, but this explanation is satisfying. To me. It can fit on a bumper sticker: "IJ is a book of the dead, recited by its dead characters."

Every long form, novel, film, stage play, is perfect in the mind of its author. Then it becomes subject to all the corrosion of the process. Money. Schedule. Editorial review, directorial interpretation. Actor performance; characterization temptation. "It's too long" etc. The judgement on quality of the vision is largely made on how much of it was durable enough to survive the corrosion of the process. I think this is why Star Wars IV is a cultural touchstone, and I, II and III sucked ass. Same with The Matrix.

So there may be niggling details that got smeared or elided or yet to be worked out, but if you feel the need to put a bow on IJ and allow it to leave your life, this functions as a summation, if you trust that the quality of the vision was good enough that it's all in there somewhere, for more OCD investigators to tidy up.

[Anonymous No.4606165]

>>4606093
The conversation about IJ has been stuck on "what happened in IJ" for 18 years. If a functioning summation can be found, it allows the talk to go forward. What does IJ mean?

Whatever else it is, it's a quarter million-word suicide note whose project is to construct the author's comprehensive model of life death and after life. And it's all in there.

>You are borne by the woman who killed you in your previous life.
>Death is like flying into the sky, babbling in all the world's well known languages.
>Being a wraith, in the afterlife, while waiting to be reborn to the woman who killed you while she lives out the rest of her time, is like being Billy Pilgrim with a steering wheel and a dose of omniscience.
>Life is a single-minded pursuit of transcendent absorption.

When the almighty academy finally gets passed "what happened" then they can finally advance to the more productive conversation of how IJ fits in to questions about whether legacy has any value, in general. Is sharing pain with others a narcissistic indulgence? Or a basic human compulsion? Or a struggle between those? And is art the way to resolve and redeem those questions (art is the humane sharing of pain)? So that what is left behind - the product of our lives - may have some value?

Otherwise, IJ is just a nihilistic jigsaw puzzle with all corners missing.

[Anonymous No.4608401]

>>4606016
Thank you.

[Anonymous No.4608446]

>>4603754
>>4603853

Hi, I'm not used to using spoiler tags, so if I fuck up please don't read further, ye who haven't finished IJ yet:
[spoilers] It's more than lightly implied that Himself's ghost put the DMZ on Hal's toothbrush. This, in my mind, is almost certainly why DFW left the whole anecdote about someone spiking the toothbrushes at an earlier point at ETA. This explains Hal's condition, as well as why it kicks in when it does. Himself likely did it because he was desperate to have a 'real' conversation with his son again, as expressed to Don Gately. [/spoilers]

[Anonymous No.4608454]

>>4603754
>>4603853

Hi, I'm not used to using spoiler tags, so if I fuck up please don't read further, ye who haven't finished IJ yet:
It's more than lightly implied that Himself's ghost put the DMZ on Hal's toothbrush. This, in my mind, is almost certainly why DFW left the whole anecdote about someone spiking the toothbrushes at an earlier point at ETA. This explains Hal's condition, as well as why it kicks in when it does. Himself likely did it because he was desperate to have a 'real' conversation with his son again, as expressed to Don Gately.

[Anonymous No.4608905]

Gonna read IJ in the coming weeks

Should I read the footnotes?

[Anonymous No.4608922]

>>4608905
>>4608905
yes they are essential to properly understanding the book
also ignore anyone who disagrees with this they are retarded or fucking with you

[Anonymous No.4608944]

>>4602334
>Fuck it, imma just go even crazier

That's exactly the same reason why John Dies at the End was written and we all know what happened there

[Anonymous No.4608965]

i had a nightmare that I was still reading Infinite Jest. that stupid book.

its like a large bag of stale popcorn. you keep eating it and you dont know why. its kinda good, but horrible at the same time. then you finish and throw up. and its supposed to be about hamlet, gimme a break. stale popcorn.

[Anonymous No.4608969]

Postmodernism is over brah

Keep up grandad

[Anonymous No.4608991]

>>4608965
lmao i felt the opposite, it was only when i finished it that i realised how fucking good it was
the whole time up till like page 700 i was like ehhhhh its okay but it kinda sucks dick

[Anonymous No.4609016]

>>4606016
Goddamn you make this book seem great. I'll have to read it.

[Anonymous No.4609569]

>>4608454
Yes. I agree that is enough to settle the how-did-Hal-get-dosed debate. Wraith Himself stole it from Pemulis' ceiling stash, which clears up that detail, and also makes Wraith Himself indirectly responsible for Pemulis' ejection from ETA.

[Anonymous No.4609578]

Besides Infinite Jest, what other books by David Foster Wallace are good?

[Anonymous No.4609594]

>>4608965
As a child I entered a fun house at a fair. Tilting floors. Funny mirrors. But at the end, the 10 foot tall exit tunnel was painted and it rotated like pic related. The inner-ear v. visual input conflict drove me to my knees. I couldn't move. Moms and da had already run out. They were mocking me from the tunnel exit mouth for being such a crybaby, screaming for help, but I was physically paralyzed. I double-face palmed in agony and suddenly, with my eyes covered, I could tell up and down again. I slowly felt along the steel catwalk with my toes, with my eyes closed, and got out. From just outside I looked back in and nearly got crushed again. I fled, and never trusted my parents again.

Reading IJ is like that.

[Anonymous No.4609608]

>>4609578
For novels IJ is it. Finding a real fan of Broom of the System is like finding a real fan of Joyce. Not like, "Oh, I love Joyce," poseurs, I mean someone who chooses to fill 4 hours on a snowed-in Sunday with Finnegan's Wake. Such a person does not exist.

Personally, I think Wallace missed his calling as a journalist, and prefer A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again, along with his essays for Harper's, which are online for free. He'd still be alive if not obsessed with the need to Write The Great American Novel.

[Anonymous No.4609645]

>>4609608
What about his short stories books, like Oblvion?

[Anonymous No.4609646]

>>4609578
And I suppose it is now required to mention Pale King. Having read it once, I have never felt the need to go back. It would be wrong in every way to say "The IRS killed DFW," since as a suicide it's all on him. But it is also true that if not for his involvement with the IRS, he would still be alive. His addiction to soul crushing pain took him to the worst place in the universe, and he had no chance.

IJ is his suicide note, the document that constructed the after-life system I think he really believed in and needed to construct in order to make his suicide okay. Note he spoke often about gunshots to the head, but chose to preserve his brain intact; I believe because of the current notion that "death visions" or near-death experiences require the brain physically intact at the moment of death. I think he thought he would experience what the Antitois brother who gets spitted through by Marathe experienced. Flight and ecstatic omniscience.

The Pale King, then, is nothing more than a death rattle. Where IJ has the Eschaton, the MASH aside, Orin parachuting to a stadium, the burly man spy in a dress, the wheelchair assassins half-washed van, Stice's family anecdotes, the hilarious descriptions of committing plagiarism, the letters in the footnotes, including the one that riffs on Mt Idy, the halfway house comedy; Pale King is joyless and witless throughout, and has no music in it.

[Anonymous No.4609663]

>>4609645
I like some of the stories, but no one volume stands out from the others. I think that if IJ had not sold so well, the shorts would be collecting dust in the obscure academy journals where they first appeared.

The Depressed Person.
The separate pieces called Interviews With Hideous Men
The one whose title I can't remember about the parents and the sceaming infant with the diaper.
The abortion one with the young couple arguing at the park successfully updates Hills Like White Elephants

That's all I can call up from memory, and I own them all.

[Anonymous No.4609669]

>>4609663
Good Old Neon is fucking brilliant, among his best writing overall

[Anonymous No.4609683]

>>4609646
I've only read Consider the Lobster and Infinite Jest, but I started reading The Pale King, and it was soul crushing. It was just an existentially painful experience, and there seemed like there wasn't any real point to it. I came in expecting a slightly disappointing, obviously incomplete attempt at Infinite Jest 2.0, and instead I got a disjointed collection of painful imaginings.

I agree with you on everything you wrote, and wouldn't recommend Pale King to anyone, aside from a handful of excerpts, maybe.

[Anonymous No.4609689]

>>4609669
I wouldn't try to talk you out of it.

Now that I've looked them up, The infant one is called Incarnations of Burned Children and appeared in Esquire, which is neither academy, nor obscure.

The abortion one is called Good People, and is also post-IJ, so it appeared in New Yorker.

[Anonymous No.4609724]

>>4609683
Yes, and there are both wraiths and goggle-eyed babies in Pale King. I think he wanted to expand on these notions of being haunted by ghosts of fathers and by ghosts of authority. Transforming the IRS into a metaphorical death factory eternally re-cycling spirits of parents might be a noble conceit. But when his shallow experience of flourescent-lit life-sentence institutional imprisonment absorbed the real abattoir of IRS regional operations, the voice in his head went pic.

[Anonymous No.4609973]

>>4603666
He didn't, it was the DMZ.

[Anonymous No.4610015]

>>4609608
I read The Broom of the System first and really loved it. I thoroughly enjoyed the way the novel was a collection of stories within stories and how familiar and personal DFW seemed to speak to me through those stories.

I have yet to read IJ (less than twenty pages in) or The Pale King, but I am sure that they will be pleasures to behold as well.

[Anonymous No.4610035]

>>4610015
I will concede the humor of Bombardini, and the cowboy guy. And the description of Lake Erie.

[Anonymous No.4610127]

so i was reading that brief interview hideous book and i didn't like it. IJ is a whole lot better ,right?

[Anonymous No.4610136]

>>4610127
DFW was a gen-X white male over-educated OCD, Bi-Polar, substance abusing genius IQ emotionally arrested 16 year old trapped in the body of a grown up. His core audience all have at least four of those things in common. So if that;s you, yes.

[Anonymous No.4610146]

>>4610136
do you work in public relations?

[Anonymous No.4610250]

>>4610146
I am guilty of selling things. Look, Dylan Thomas was a happy drunk. Really. Booze made that guy into a peach of a human being. I'd self-mutilate to go on a three-day bender with Dylan Thomas. DFW? I'm glad IJ exists, but for each of us the time comes to let it go, and sum it up for what it was to us. So it can recede.

[Anonymous No.4610284]

>>4610127
>>4610146
And I still say, read the Eschaton first, or read through that, then decide to quit or continue. That chapter stands by itself. If you don't laugh, out loud, at least five times during the Eschaton, it's probably not for you.

Here's what I mean. This passage describes pieces of tennis gear laid out on four connected tennis courts, to serve as targets for lobbing tennis balls at. Each ball is scored as a 5 megaton ballistic warhead:

In the game, Combatantsí 5-megaton warheads can be launched only with hand-held tennis racquets. Hence the requirement of actual physical targeting-skill that separates Eschaton from rotisserie-league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs around kitchen tables. The paraboloid transcontinental flight of a liquid-fuel strategic delivery vehicle closely resembles a topspin lob.

Pieces of tennis gear are carefully placed within each Combatantís territories to mirror and map strategic targets. Folded gray-on-red E.T.A. T-shirts are MAMAs ñ Major Metro Areas. Towels stolen from selected motels on the junior tour stand for airfields, bridges, satellite-linked monitoring facilities, carrier groups, conventional power plants, important rail convergences. Red tennis shorts with gray trim are CONFORCONs ñ Conventional-Force Concentrations. The black cotton E.T.A. armbands ñ for when God forbid thereís a death ñ designate the noncontemporary game-eraís atomic power plants, uranium-/ plutonium-enrichment facilities, gaseous diffusion plants, breeder reactors, initiator factories, neutron-scattering-reflector labs, tritium-production reactor vessels, heavy-water plants, semiprivate shaped-charge concerns, linear accelerators, and the especially point-heavy Annular Fusion research laboratories in North Syracuse NNY and Presque Isle ME, Chyonskrg Kurgistan and Pliscu Romania, and possibly elsewhere. Red shorts with gray trim (few in number because strongly disliked by the travelling squads) are SSTRACs ñ equally low-number but point-intensive Sites of Strategic Command. Socks are either missile installations or antimissile installations or isolated silo-clusters or Cruise-capable B2 or SS5 squadrons ñ letís draw the curtain of charity across any more MILABBREVs ñ depending on whether theyíre boysí tennis socks or boysí street-shoe socks or girlsí tennis socks with the little bunny-tail at the heel or girlsí tennis socks w/o the bunny-tail. Toe-worn cast-off corporate-supplied sneakers sit open-mouthed and serenely lethal, strongly suggesting the subs they stand for.

If the arid veritable sand dune dryness of that humor is lost on you, you won't like IJ. I still laugh.

>Rotisserie league holocaust games

[Anonymous No.4610478]

>>4610284
sold