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/lit/ - Literature

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4680563 No.4680563[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

Are we allowed to talk about this book?

>> No.4680564

no.

>> No.4680585

>>4680564
Why not. I'm about 250 pages in and I think it's absolutely brilliant.

>> No.4680589

>>4680585
Why?

>> No.4680601

>>4680589
Well I'll admit that I thought it was a little pretentious when I started reading it and I didn't quite understand, but I enjoyed DFW's essays and the opening chapter was hilarious. But the farther in I get the more I realize how intentional the book is, and it dares you to understand. I wanted to look up and see if there was a Sparknotes for things like the Wardine chapter (and let's not bring up yrstruly), but sure enough there is no abridged version of the book or synopsis to speak of. This is because the book can't exactly be summarized; the amount of information you're given is exactly as much as you need. To quote Dave Eggers, the book is drum tight.

>> No.4680611

>>4680589
Have you finished it? You pop up in every thread about it to convince people not to read it.

>> No.4680614

>>4680611
Have you finished it yet? What'd you think of it?

>> No.4680629

>>4680614
I did, it was beautiful and surprisingly fun to read. I have no real perspective for whether or not it's actually overrated, but he had a unique voice and I think he was uncompromising in his realization of it. It was nice that he didn't feel the need to sacrifice all things that resembled entertainment, and it struck a nice balance between ambitious literature and something you'd read for pleasure. It was almost like a cartoon at times. I laughed out loud more during this book than in any other, and there were moments that made me cry. It was pretty good.

>> No.4680638

>>4680601
>the book can't exactly be summarized
'Kay. That's what I always get.

>> No.4680678

I thought the beginning was great, and the prose throughout is solid. I'm about 50 pages in now, and I just don't feel interested in the characters or what's going on. I've never experienced this before. It's good but it bores me.

>> No.4680701

>>4680638
Do you do this as a way of validating yourself after the book ended up being too tough for you?

>> No.4680704

I read it a couple years ago, and while I normally end up waiting a decade or so to re-read a book (if I even do), I thought about trying sooner after coming across this: http://infinitesummer.org/index

>> No.4680718 [DELETED] 

>>4680638
Wow you suck, why do you keep posting?

>> No.4680765

>>4680678
>I've never had a plot seem dull before
do you just not read or what

>> No.4680783

>>4680638
Just came to say fuck you.

>> No.4680789

I gave up after a few paragraphs because the prose was so horrible.

>> No.4680792 [DELETED] 

>>4680789
>Not liking murky fart smelling offices and anxiety

Go and stay go

>> No.4680813

>>4680792
are you even aware that 'murky fart smelling offices and anxiety' is a description of the content, not the style of the prose?

>> No.4680817

Honestly it is very very hard going when you first start it and nothing makes sense till you meet all the characters and get accustomed to the non-linear structure. It's a book you have to read twice to understand.

That said, It is one of my favorites and one of the most brilliant and funniest novels I've ever read. It did have me laughing out loud a lot.

>> No.4680823 [DELETED] 
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4680823

>>4680813

>> No.4680923

>up to page 50 something
>have yet to piss myself laughing like everyone else says they have reading this

Does it get funnier or is the humour 2deep4me or am I just an autistic faggot?

>> No.4680925

>>4680923

Maybe it's like those people who say they laugh out loud when reading Kafka. Maybe they have a humor very different from mine, maybe it's just an emperor's new shibboleth.

>> No.4681651

>>4680678
I challenge you to make it through the first two hundred pages. Honestly, it becomes more bearable at that point. It's like when you read chapters like Wardine and yrstruly it's frustrating and annoying at first, but after a page or so you get into the rhythm and grammar of the chapter. The same goes with the book; there's a rhythm and grammar to the way it's constructed that becomes easier, plus not as many ever-changing characters.

>> No.4682029
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4682029

>>4680638
Get the fuck off of this board.

>> No.4682042

>>4680925
I laughed out loud while reading The Trial, the part with the guys crawling over the bed of the artist (while he is sleeping) was pretty damn funny

>> No.4682048

>>4681651
I got to page ~250 and haven't read more in the past few months. I kind of lost interest I guess. I liked the book, but I don't like to be tied down to certain ones for too long, I guess I should get back to it.

>> No.4682085

i myself, personally, started this book after dropping summer courses last year and going on a road trip. through slow reading, i got to around p. 420 before the eoty, but haven't really even touched it since the turn of the new year... i should get back to it, also, but then again i also want to read through my backlog of freud books and i need to read a few works by spinoza, plus other school stuffs... so...

>> No.4682110

I think it's brilliant, OP. But I wouldn't argue against someone who didn't like it.

To be fair I probably only made it all the way through and really got a lot out of it because I read a lot of supplementary material (online articles/essays/guides) which helped me understand pretty much everything that was going on (at least enough to keep me interested, as I eventually stopped reading secondary sources.)

It also doesn't help that the book doesn't even reveal it's greatness until about halfway through. There's tons of good bits scattered throughout the beginning, but there's a lot of tedious stuff to wade through (maybe a second read will redeem this sections?)

I think it was after the last flashback to himself's childhood that the book really started to take off.

>> No.4682562

DFW was a man of infinite breasts.

>> No.4682571

got 100 pages in and wondered why I wasted my money.

>> No.4682800

>>4680629
While I want to be clear that I don't think it's a (near-)flawless book like some do, this sums up my thoughts exactly

>> No.4684005

Has anybody fucking heard of this:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/06/infinite_jest_on_stage_berlin_theater_adaptation_of_david_foster_wallace_s_novel_.html

>> No.4684046

>>4680923

It's funny, but you'll smile or smirk more often than you'll bust a gut. I liked this little zinger somewhere later in the novel, when two of the students are prancing about the halls helping clear students for their urinal drug tests, shouting:

>"Urine trouble?"
>"Urine luck!"

It's little things like that, or descriptions of events, (like a cat on fire 'tearing ass' across a backyard in pursuit of the dude who set it on fire, the two running for about ten fucking miles) that get you. The absurdity of some of it is really great, but only rarely will you laugh out loud.

That was my experience, anyway. I think it's a great novel extremely aware of itself and which continuously folds in and over itself again and again, like a puzzle. Because it's still a very fresh book and because our most prominent literary critic despises both it and the author I think it will be a while before some heavy-handed analysis arrives in text form.

But there's a lot of meat there to be chewed upon, even if most of it feel, in the end, to be more smoke and mirrors than actual depth. Every time Wallace approached something like genuine thought he dance away from it on the safe wings of irony, irony behind irony, and this sometimes made his pontificating irritating to read, as he was uncomfortable to do so and tried to fend most of it off as a joke. Of course, this was one of the themes present in the book, so it works, in this one.

>> No.4684077
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4684077

>>4684005

Have you seen THIS?

>> No.4684134
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4684134

>>4684077

>> No.4684162

this book gave me a short-lived inferiority complex at age 14

>> No.4684190

>>4680638
Another one added to my filter

>> No.4684556

I'm on page 845. I like it a lot.

Spoiler: I'm at the part where Gatley is in the hospital.The scenes are really interesting because of how long the sentences and paragraphs are to make his time in the hospital feel painful and forever.

>> No.4684619

>>4680701
Didn't read it. Disappointed that no one can even begin to tell me about why they like it.

>>4680718
OH MY GAWD!
You are the worst person EVAR!
Why are you still alive?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?

>>4680783
Goodbye.

>>4682029
Go back to yours.

>>4684190
Shitposting 101

4chan: Summer camp for poor kids. Open year round.

>> No.4684626 [DELETED] 

>>4684619
>Replying to everyone

Wow you actually are a fat dyke from reddit aren't you?

>> No.4684661

>>4684626
>Implying that's not one or two people.

I let it go for quite some time, but it's your goal to shitpost all night with me.

>> No.4684668

>>4684619
Why haven't you read it? I imagine there are reviews you could find if you want a description before giving it a shot. Then again, it might just not interest you. It's a lot about entertainment, sincerity & such in the modern world, but it makes its point through a lot of maximalism at times so it could definitely come off as tedious to some people. That said, I found it really great and funny after getting a feel for it. I don't really know how to fully summarize it, which is probably a problem you've been getting with a lot of other people and is to be expected just because of the sheer volume of content.

>> No.4684673 [DELETED] 

>>4684661
>Think it's one person

Is this how you keep living? You pretend the fact that no one wants to fuck or talk to you is the fault of the patriarchy and one troll online?

>> No.4684675

>>4684619

I like it because it's a unique, funny, heartbreaking, and insightful novel.

Now it's either I leave it at that, or I write a fucking thesis about it.

>> No.4684680

>>4684673

Did that thread on white privilege get deleted and one lone /pol/-tard leech onto the first thread he could find?

>> No.4684697 [DELETED] 

>>4684680
Do you really think anyone here visits /pol/? Are you that much of a butthurt off-site nigger that everything you don't like is the fault of some mythical Trickster-god archetype board? How many times per day do you shitpost a contentless one-liner about this board?

>> No.4685163

>>4684046
>>"Urine trouble?"
>>"Urine luck!"

For some reason I laughed for a full minute just from that.

>> No.4685645

>>4684134
This is the greatest/strangest thing I've seen in a while.

I fucking love Hunter S. Thomson too

>> No.4685658

I have a loose theory that understanding Mean Value Theorem somehow helps understand the structure of the book. Can anyone speak on this?

>> No.4685749

>>4685163
>"Urine luck!"
meh, that's the name of a popular brand of detox products that's been around before infinite jest

not that funny

>> No.4685756

>>4680923

>read about 5% of the book
>gives sweeping criticism

>> No.4685765

Im about 700 pages in. There are some parts that are hard to get through but its worth it to get to higlights which are amazing segments to read.

>> No.4685766

>>4684046

The ancient kung fu move translated to The Old One Two was one of the thing that really made me laugh.

>> No.4685837

>>4685658
You are correct. Because until the Eschaton becomes central to any critique, the discussion remains stuck on "what happened in IJ." I will spoil, and summarize, if requested to do so.

>> No.4686059

>>4685756
but the only thing he criticized was himself. which wasn't really a critique, more of an implied accusation

>> No.4686073 [DELETED] 

>>4685837

plz do

>> No.4686162 [SPOILER] 
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4686162

>>4686073
**SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS**

Let's stipulate that not every single microfiber strand of every single thread of every event is tied down. Let's stipulate that it's in there somewhere.

Infinite Jest is a book of the dead, uttered by all the wraiths of all the dead characters, following the nuclear holocaust that ends subsidized time. It's thematics are pain, isolation, and legacy. It's formal aspiration is to acquire "seraphic" transcendence of post-modernism. It's formal primer is the Wraith of Himself, who exposes and explicates the formal calculus of the fractured narrative. The ending, which is there-but-not-there, is the goal of Hal playing Stice in the WhataBurger, with Stice possessed by the wraith Himself, so that he and his son can have a real conversation, as a tennis match, the only form of communication Hal has left.

Hal sees the first volley of the conflict: "ultra mach fighter overhead"

Subsidized time ends in a Continental Emergency, pg 934, which ends subsidized time, endnote 114.

The selection of scenes and characters all relate to the moments and events which contribute to the end of the world.

The Eschaton is the central pivot of the plot, like the play within play in Hamlet. It is holocaust within the holocaust. Note the aspirin-advertising car idling nearby for the whole chapter. That is the moment the Master Cartridge's whereabouts are known to those who can use it to advance the political tensions into Continental Emergency.

This is the interpretation which allows the discussion to advance beyond "what happaned" and on to "what does it mean, beyond a 250k word suicide note." And unless you buy into DFW's metaphysics as given, the answers, beyond a few masterpieces of prose construction, like the Eschaton itself, is "not much."

>> No.4686183

>>4686162

a 250k word suicide note?

didn't dfw commit suicide several years after the release (therefore several years+a few more since writing the thing definitely took some time) of IJ?

>> No.4686195

that bit where schtitt is talking about vanquishing the limited self and how tennis (life) is like suicide or like life (tennis) gave me a full body smile

>> No.4686203

>>4686183
He took his time with it. There was no rush.

>> No.4686204

>>4686183
Yes. 12 years after. IJ clearly establishes his eschatological premise. It also, unironically, explicates a clear set of axioms for the moment of death, and the aftermath of the soul. See Franzen for as face-value as possible explanation of suicide as a,life-long addiction, and destinationk, re DFW:

"Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love."

:The need to have something apart from other people, the need for a secret, the need for some last-ditch narcissistic validation of the self’s primacy, and then the voluptuously self-hating anticipation of the last grand score, and the final severing of contact with the world that would deny you the enjoyment of your self-involved pleasure: I can follow David there."

"By his own account to me, he had never ceased to live in fear of returning to the psych ward where his early suicide attempt had landed him. The allure of suicide, the last big score, may go underground, but it never entirely disappears. Certainly, David had “good” reasons to go off Nardil—his fear that its long-term physical effects might shorten the good life he’d managed to make for himself; his suspicion that its psychological effects might be interfering with the best things in his life (his work and his relationships)—and he also had less “good” reasons of ego: a perfectionist wish to be less substance-dependent, a narcissistic aversion to seeing himself as permanently mentally ill. What I find hard to believe is that he didn’t have very bad reasons as well. Flickering beneath his beautiful moral intelligence and his lovable human weakness was the old addict’s consciousness, the secret self, which, after decades of suppression by the Nardil, finally glimpsed its chance to break free and have its suicidal way."

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/18/110418fa_fact_franzen?currentPage=all

>> No.4686216

>>4686162
Is this pasta? Interesting comments about ghosts 'n' stuff. Honestly, I kinda disliked the talk of wraiths. I thought it to be an unnecessary insertion of fantasy in an otherwise intoxicatingly realistic book.

Then again, I did only read it once.

>> No.4686221

>>4686183
IJ, on the moment of death:

"and Lucien finally dies, rather a while after he's quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally sheds his body's suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues."

There is nothing in this passage to suggest irony, narrator insincerity, or jest. He meant it, just like that.

Also wraiths, and you are born to the woman who kills you in your previous life.

>> No.4686227

>>4686216
For all the times I;ve posted it,k it might as well be. Frankly given all the hubbub over this title, I'm surprised it's not. I've read it 6 times since 1996, and I'm pretty sure I've nailed it down enough to let it go. Every now and again, I feel the compulsion to save a few other anons from unnecessary suffering. Because that's what we have here. An infectious disease of a book, to which a large fraction of the population is not immune.

>> No.4686250

>>4686216
Note also, it's not just talk /of/ wraiths, it is wraiths talking, and for many thousands of words which are mission critical to DFW's project. I have also said before, that it was a tactical mistake of story-telling to put those chapters so late. Sheer reader fatigue makes them among the least actually-read.

>> No.4686254

>>4686227

however you feel about these posts you've constructed for us, they continue to be so insightful and helpful to people

thanks!

>> No.4686278

>>4686221

you suppose this is meant to be taken as a literal?

i know wallace was a god fearing man but the ascension of the soul to heaven is basically dogma

>> No.4686281

>>4686183
IJ on the nature of the soul in the afterlife:

"The wraith said Even a garden variety wraith could move at the speed of quanta and be anywhere anytime and hear in symphonic toto the thoughts of animate men, but it couldn't ordinarily affect anybody or anything solid, and it could never speak right to anybody, a warith had no out-loud voice of its own, and had to use somebody's like internal brain voice if it wanted to try to communicate something, which was why thoughts and insights which were coming from some wraith always just sounded like your own thoughts, from inside your own head, if a wraith is trying to interface with you."

Again, there is no irony here. This is DFW explaining his program of narration. The author is the wraith, telling you the story of IJ. It goes on to qualify how he learns to "affect anything solid" and create all the jazz with Stice. It is also his text-mediated belief system about the afterlife.

>> No.4686297

>>4686281

>The author is the wraith, telling you the story of IJ.
>and had to use somebody's like internal brain voice if it wanted to try to communicate something, which was why thoughts and insights which were coming from some wraith always just sounded like your own thoughts, from inside your own head, if a wraith is trying to interface with you

i have definitely heard him comment, in interviews, about how after he'd read books other writers had become "voices in [his] head"

>> No.4686298

>>4686278
What I am asking is, what evidence is there that it is not meant as read? His Hamletic source harbors no such doubts about the reality of Hamlet Sr's ghost. Lucien has this experience. He does not imagine it as a death-dream or NDE.

So yes. I believe that Franzen's coyness about the "hideous" "revengeful" specifics of the suicide scene conceal proof of something very like this. Personally, I believe DFW hung himself drop-snap style mid-orgasm, leaving the scene covered in emission. That's why Franzen is so mightily pissed off about it, why he is so vile in his ellipses of description, and why, finally, he holds back on what those "hideous" "hateful" details actually were.

>> No.4686313

>>4686297
that's right, and he was also susceptible to these post-modern just-so theories about how Hamlet is reflexively aware that he is a character in a play being manipulated by an Author. Which again makes the Eschaton within an Eschaton all the more central in exigetical approaches to this book.

>> No.4686315
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4686315

>>4686298

you're right. that's definitely a question i'm going to have to bare in mind as i'm re-reading it (which i realize is not rly your desired result)

>Personally, I believe DFW hung himself drop-snap style mid-orgasm

...go on

>> No.4686327

>>4686315
See the Franzen essay, cited and linked above
>>4686204
It is the only testament of an insider who actually found the body. He uses several words and phrases, "infantile" "misplaced murderous impulses" "hateful" "revenge" in re the specifics of how the body was arranged to be as spiteful as possible to the survivors. Yet he conspicuously fails to name those specifics. Why?

DFW clearly held extra-Biblical beliefs about the nature of an afterlife. I have cited the most important one, and it can safely be described as "ecstatic."

Franzen also makes conspicuous mention of a doodle DFW made in a signed copy of one his books, an outline of DFW's huge penis "scale 100%" on the cover page. They knew each other for years. Of the hundreds of anecdotes, why pick that one?

>> No.4686336

One doesn't just "talk" about Infinite Jest, OP. You live it. You commiserate over it. You let it guide your life and your thoughts, your goals both lifelong and fleeting. You let it destroy you, and you reshape yourself and become the man you could become.

>> No.4686348

>>4686327

well good golly god damn. that's... one way to go out

>> No.4686371

>>4684675

Not him, but what about IJ is insightful? Everything else I agree with, but the issue with IJ--and Wallace, in general--is his always leaning towards something significant--and making a big fuss about how he wants to write morally powerful literature--before prancing away and making a joke out of the entire situation, layering ironies upon ironies and defending each of his poorly conceived denouements behind the excuse that everyone's deep, genuine feelings, when expressed, become no more than cliche--which is horseshit, in the wake of better writes who have explored the dark terrains of the human heart without becoming shy of their philosophical ramblings. Wallace always got to the edge of insight, expressed an idea that we'd all made ourselves when 17, and then, realizing he'd made a mundane observation, clothed in his style of verbosity and wrote it off as being tragically cliche.

I like Wallace, but he wasn't a great thinker outside of his splurging of factual data.

My two pennies, of course. I'm willing to be argued against.

>> No.4686381

>>4686162
>the Wraith of Himself, who exposes and explicates the formal calculus of the fractured narrative
Are you saying Himself wrote the endnotes?? If so, what evidence do you have?

>> No.4686421

>>4686381
I'm saying the Wraith as the Author subsume all the various narrators.

" a warith had no out-loud voice of its own, and had to use somebody's like internal brain voice if it wanted to try to communicate something, which was why thoughts and insights which were coming from some wraith always just sounded like your own thoughts, from inside your own head, if a wraith is trying to interface with you."

So when we are reading that horrible ghetto slang Poor Tony chapter, we are hearing the wraith, listening to and translating for us Poor Tony's experience. The Wraith, remember, has a very hard time staying still for very long. He has to jump around alot. Don't make me go get another cite. Like I said, it's in there.

So why do the chapters and chronology jump around so much? Because it's hard for wraith Himself to sit still.

Evidence? That's where your Master's theses begin. But I can fit this much in 300 chars:

What is Himself's legacy?
One is the tennis academy. Another is the set of inventions which make annular fusion possible (which leadsa to the continentqal reconfiguration and sets the IJ world on a course for annihilation). Yet another is his filmography. And the other is his disfunctional family, who are the unwitting players enabling the Eschatonic end of subsidized time. But what is the sum total of himself's legacy, if he is responsible for destroying the entire fictional universe of IJ? It is IJ itself. The story, told by him, dead, is its own legacy. That's the "infinite" part. See Hal's attempt to describe the "infinitely devolving loop of marijuana thinking" in regard to the map v. territory debate which ends the Eschaton. Right in there where Pemulis is jumping up and down and his hat is coming off his head on each jump, like Yosemite Sam.

>> No.4686435

>>4686421

I've really liked everything you'd provided so far. This is great stuff and justified within the text itself. I'm impressed. I also feel very bad for Wallace; there was no way in fuck he was living up to this. He knew it, too.

If you're willing to provide more--just for the pleasure of reading's sake--I'm sure most of us would like to read it.

>> No.4686439

>>4686348
Yeah, and the final thing in that connection (that being "IJ is a suicide note") - did you dig that long discursion about "the infinite divisbility of a single slice of time" :

"And yet one of his own favored tropes, articulated especially clearly in his story “Good Old Neon” and in his treatise on Georg Cantor, was the infinite divisibility of a single instant in time. However continually he was suffering in his last summer, there was still plenty of room, in the interstices between his identically painful thoughts, to entertain the idea of suicide, to flash forward through its logic, and to set in motion the practical plans (of which he eventually made at least four) for effectuating it. When you decide to do something very bad, the intention and the reasoning for it spring into existence simultaneously and fully formed; any addict who’s about to fall off the wagon can tell you this. Though suicide itself was painful to contemplate, it became—to echo the title of another of David’s stories—a sort of present to himself."

Franzen is trying to encode for us that DFW believed that when he died, the finality of experience would feel like an infinitely-divided slice of time. What better way to spend an infinitely-dividing quantum of experience than that?

>> No.4686456

>>4686439
>of which he eventually made at least four

See, Franzen is hiding some very detailed and specific knowledge about some pretty fucking awful details of that garage and its contents. We know he hung himself. Franzen knows we know that fact has never been in dispute. So, beyond that, why so horrible, Jon? It's because DFW did something so embarrassing to his legacy even Franzen, at this remove, cannot bear to reveal it.

I'm telling ya, he died with his dick in his hand.

>> No.4686487

>>4686421
So, now, line up against Himself's legacy the items and agencies necessary for the world to end in a nuclear exchange.

There must exist, a weapon so terrible, but also, small and portable and unbelievable that it can kill anybody, like a diplomat or a general, or a germophobic president, from a resting start in plain sight. This is the Master Copy of Infinite Jest, a creation of Himself. Himself is responsible for creating the weapon the Wheelchair Assassins will use to kill whomever they wish to get what they want - the concavity back, and an independent Quebec.

But it's missing. So we have to find it. We need some people who's barely-connected life stories have crossed paths in such a way that between them they can find the Master. Himself's tennis academy is the setting where these people live, and his family plus Gately, and Joelle, et. al., and his own skull provide the means to find the Master.

You need a geopolitical motive for nuclear powers to move against each other - annular fusion and it's waste products and consequences. Another of Himself's inventions, during his genius optical career, before becoming a film maker.

It's all about Himself's legacy, and legacy in general. And I'm afraid that DFW came to some pretty grim conclusions about any value of what we leave behind, since the summary of his views here are that we leave behind a really complicated joke.

>> No.4686532

>>4686435
That's all for tonight. If any of you really must, go start at page 321. Eschaton. It's the funniest end of the world ever. Funnier than Strangelove.

But release any feelings of inadequacy if you feel you've failed to find the "ahha!" moment when it all makes sense. It isn't in there. And that was on purpose.

>> No.4686542

>>4686532

>> No.4686640

>>4686532

I've already read the novel. I enjoyed it, but because of its stature and reputation and its cult-forming it's a difficult book to discuss with any distance. I like your posts because they offer analysis without any apparent gushing admiration of Wallace or mockery of his writing. It's refreshing, since he seems mostly to inspire one or the other.

>> No.4686955

>>4686439
>>4686456


yo this shits bananas.

>> No.4686994

>tfw frightened of reading Infinite Jest on the risk that you'll 'get' it too much, potentially to the level of the author's understanding, and kill yourself just like he did

>> No.4687206

>>4686994
Well you're already just as pretentious as him.
ZIIINNNNNGGGGGGG

>> No.4687220

>>4686994
He killed himself because he had to stop taking his anti-depressants because of stomach problems they started giving him

>> No.4687232

>>4687220
This is a myth.

He actually killed himself because he knew he hadn't any talent.

>> No.4687304
File: 7 KB, 182x143, 2014-03-21-00-58-20-243554539.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4687304

>>4686439
>>4686456

Hehe...okay anon, you can stop now. I know you're just fucking with me...right?

>> No.4687311

>>4686456
>he died with his dick in his hand.

His hands were taped together behind his back. It's well-known.

>> No.4688465

>>4687304
>>4687311
Then what is/are the missing detail/s that Franzen is so coy and obvious about? Have there ever been any photos from the inquest released?

>> No.4688482

>>4686487
Another extension, aside from the extra-textual mode of "suicide note."

IJ is also, fictively, a "suicide note" in the sense that it is the dictation of wraith Himself, who took his own life by placing his head in a microwave. And since Himself's sum legacy is the end of the world (as implemented by his combinatory contributions of annular fusion, Infinite Jest V, his psycho family, his tennis academy, and his suicide), IJ is also a murder confession. So, structurally, the best summary of IJ is that it is Himself's posthumous murder-suicide confession.

>> No.4688509

>>4687304
>>4687311
>>4688465
Is it simply that he taped his arms behind his back (somehow - I understand we are talking about a creative mathematician, but think about trying that part - that alone requires significant planning and premeditation) because that act conveyed the intention of preventing himself from chickening out at the last moment? Is the double-intention of hanging himself and preventing himself from stopping himself once going, by taping his arms, by itself, sufficient to explain Franzen's multiple hyperbolic hints about the scene specifics?

Dismissal is easy. That's typical 4chan. Assert an alternative that explains the Franzen caesura, beyond the empty speculation that he also is soap boxing the event to sell books. The New Yorker piece is far too personal and public to be simple vanity. He is hiding, at the very least, the details of three alternate suicide plans, which he explicitly names.

The question is more that morbid curiosity. A great many people who became invested, personally or professionally, in this writer have a real stake in putting to rest their evaluation of a body of work which, whatever else may be said of it, is still being discussed, sold, and reified, daily, 20 years after Broom.

Show us some thinking, anons.

>> No.4688617

>>4686381
About those endnotes. What would you say is the central problem post-modernism, in general, aligned itself around? Would, "the sincerity-stifling artifice of the relation between artist, work, and audience" suffice?

Wraith Himself lays out a specific program of narrative technique. Within that program, temporal simultaneity plays a big part. The souls of the dead, while awaiting rebirth to the woman who killed them in their previous life, are capable of going anywhere, as well as any-when. They have access to the "sum toto" of all human experience from all times at the same time.

So for a text, printed on paper, this perspectival simultaneity poses the kind of "intermediation" problem DFW loved to obsess about. Pose a hypothetical Faulknerian-type solution: here are some events in chapter 1. Here are the same events again, from a different narrational perspective, in chapter 2, which explicitly takes place fictively, at the same time as chapter 1, which you have already read. In chapter 3, 1&2 are synthesized somehow. Would a responsible reader not be forced to flip pages back and forth, several times, to run down the big picture? If you read As I Lay Dying without flipping back and forth often, I humbly suggest you may not have quite got it.

DFW had the option to make the notes in IJ footnotes. He did exactly so in many of his stories, specifically so no page flipping required, and because no sane periodical editor is going to re-layout the entire issue just to make some POMO point about narrational perspective. Just glance down to the page footer. Still an interruption, but much milder in degree.

The endnotes solve the narrator mediation problem of simultaneity. Though it is impossible, in English printed text, to present to the eyeballs two strands of narrative at the same time, it is possible to present one, superscript it, and in the endnote provide the second for the reader's optional discretion.

To read each endnote in-line inflicts a disorientation to the traditional linear reading experience, I argue, memetic of the disorientation which defines wraith Himself's mode of experience as he frenetically jumps about the cacophonic jumble of all the narrational internal thoughts available to his new reality. The endnote construct is central to DFW's attempt at solving the central POMO problem of "who is the narrator, and how is he not 'fake' somehow?"

>> No.4688618

>>4688617
page 837: "The wraith says he just paid a small quantumish call to the old spotless Brighton two-decker of one Ferocious Francis Gehaney, and from the way the old Crocodile's shaving and putting on a clean white t-shirt, the wraith says, he predicts F.F. will be visiting the Trauma Wing soon."

"The wraith says Just to give Gately an idea, he, the wraith, in order to appear visible and interface with him, Gately, he, the wraith, has been sitting, still as a root, in the chair by Gately's bedside for the wraith equivalent of /three weeks/"

page 831: "Wraiths exist in a totally different Heisenbergian dimension of rate-change and time-passage. [...] to a wraith, normal animate men's actions and motions look, to a wraith, to be occuring at about the rate a clock's hour hand moves"

"The wraith disappears again and again[..] now holding one of Gately's [..] photos"

"The wraith[..] stand upside down on the hospital's drop ceiling[..] doing pirouettes[..] into Gately's mind[..]with roaring force[..] comes the term PIROUETTE"

"The COke can now rests on Gately's forehead[..] it smells like low tide" page 833. Note - the wraith has here visited the last line of the nominal text, which ends on low tide.

So yeah, the wraith wrote the endnotes. And everything else.

>> No.4688788

but why did Himself create the novel?

>> No.4688848

Hmm idk, I read about 500 pages of it in the summer then got bored and have only read about 200 pages since.

>> No.4688860

>>4688618
For complicating narrational attribution purposes, it should also be pointed out that Lyle, the sweat-licking yoga master, is also a wraith. He and Himself both appear, together, to Gately as wraiths, and Lyle licks sweat from Gately's forehead, which Gately responds to with a swift attempt at a punch to Lyle's wraith face, which prompts both wraiths to disappear.

So since it is established, at face value, that Himself and Lyle are running around this alternative Heisenbergian reality together, another Master's thesis footnote would be involved with attributing exactly which Enfield Tennis Academy scenes are possibly thought-mediated by Lyle, and which by Himself. Personally, I would initially gravitate to the position that Lyle, if he contributed any text at all, was restricted to his own scenes.

>> No.4688862

>>4688788
Infinite Jest V: "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so terribly sorry. You must believe how very, very, very, very sorry I am about all of this."

The apologia of the author of the end of the world.

>> No.4688864

>>4688860
But Lyle was always visible to all the students and coaches, if it took so much effort for Himself to sit still how could Lyle sit around all day? He also audible speaks versus voice in head.
Or has he reached 'Nirvana' in this mythos as he is a yogi so he can do whatever the fuck he wants?

>> No.4688882

>>4688788
>>4688862
page 939. It is strongly suggested, in DFW's metaphysic terms of extra-realistic Heisenbergian intuition, that Joelle is aware of wraith Himself interfacing with her during her technical interview with Unspecified Services.

Note, for example her stuttering, re-starting testimonial style during that passage. Just like wraith Himself's description of trying to communicate with the living. "catadioptric" is probably a "ghostword," since she contradicts herself at least twice by claiming she is ignorant of lenses and optics.

And the stylization here very nearly locks it up that she can hear Himself laughing:

:That's the part of the joke he didn't know. Where he's buried is itself buried now. It's in your annulation zone. It's not even your territory. And now if you want the thing -- he'd enjoy the joke very much, I think. Oh shit yes very much." pg 941.

Himself issues his apology through Joelle, who is herself describing an apology for a "murder" in the context of her performance in the Entertainment, Infinite Jest V.

>> No.4688906

It's been a while since I read the novel but I'm loving this thread so I must ask what exactly is the concept of annular fusion? And what end of the world conceptions are in the novel other than infinite jest V and the possibility of war surrounding the terrorist organisations who use it?

>> No.4688935

>>4688864
I think yes. Remember, Himself required many wraith-year equivalents to learn just enough to move objects. And distraction is Himself's defining characteristic. Lyle is all about Zen perfection, and has reached the apex of wraith-ness.

In any event, for Lyle not to be a wraith requires an alternate, and fulfilling, explanation of page 933, along with an explanation of how he hovers in the air while seated, all without irony or narrator insincerity.

"Nobody knows where he comes from or why's[sic] he's allowed to stay"

"His tanktop says TRANSCEND"."

"This guru lives off the sweat of others. Literally" pg 128.

We are here being hit over the head with "this is not fake. READ AT FACE VALUE." The passage is not dated. It appears alone beneath the O symbol. Which is an important marker throughout.

>> No.4688939

>>4688906
And the scene of eschaton of course

>> No.4688988

>>4688906
The Eschaton chapter's whole purpose is to foreshadow the Continental Emergency. It serves the same hinge purpose as the play-within-play in Hamlet. It is the apocalypse within apocalypse.

Also, Joelle, as the (again, completely unironic) Angel of Death, via Gately, paraphrased, because I'm sick of looking up page numbers, and I can just do this from memory:

"Every man lives many lives. Each time you are born to the woman who knowingly or unwittingly killed you in the previous one."

Himself was killed by Joelle, unwittingly, due to her involvement in the Entertainment, IJV. It was the concluding work of his life, he killed himself the day after its completion. When your future mother is herself dead, in the Continental Emergency which ends subsidized time, where can he be re-born, except into the text?

The Wheelchair Assassins' stated goal is a conflict which returns the annulation zone to an independent Quebec. That's actually two wars. ONAN is more than the US. It's the entire North American block, presumably to the Panama canal.

There is also verbiage in the Eschaton chapter suggesting that the exact geopolitical mechanism by which the first nuke is fired doesn't really matter. It's in there about Otis P Lord's ingenuity in creating TRIGSITs. The suggestion is also that the book is already so long, that adding in a bunch more extra-ONAN geopolitical machination would add a camel's-back straw too much. Like I said at first, some of the very fine details must be stipulated to more obsessive detectives. It's all in there somewhere.

Annular fusion is the novel-world's main electrical power production method; a process by which some highly toxic initial nuclear fuel is transformed (annulated) into another form of highly toxic nuclear fuel, in a cycle (annulus) which ultimately produces a toxic waste so horribly toxic that it must be disposed of in the boreal forest extremity of eastern Quebec. The Concavity is the name of that territory, post-Reconfiguration, which is the government's euphemism for the land grab which created it. Think what just happened to Crimea. It was like that.

>> No.4689018

>>4688939
"Transcendence is absorption."

The word count for all forms of "annihilation" is in the dozens, if not close to one hundred.

The marker for the penetrative act of sexual intercourse is "X." The symbol of unknown, or, in context usage in the novel, for annihilation of self.

The argot for homicide, or the attempt to perform a homicide is to "eliminate one's map." The concept of the "map" being "eliminated" is refrained many, many times, in many metaphorical modes.

As is the notion of a self-consuming torus ring ending in infinite recursion, which is identical in descriptive terms of the conception of eternally re-cycling re-birth to your former life's murderer, here interrupted by the CE.

>> No.4689022

>>4688939
It is also almost universally overlooked that Marathe, the brutal murderer of Lucien Antitois (Anti-you), has already given up, and actively betrayed, his loyalty to the Wheelchair Assassins; largely, it is suggested, because his experience with his hydrocephalic wife has imbued him with sufficient humanity that he must forego his commitment to the violent endgame the WA's have planned.

>> No.4689028

>>4689022
In other words, Marathe looks into the face of planned global conflagration, and turns away.

>> No.4689043

>>4689028
The source of urgency which compels M. Hugh Steeply to masquerade as a woman, to prostrate himself to so many humiliations is given several times as the possibility of the Master causing maximum mischief. The long discursion about M*A*S*H, during Marathe's and Steeply's all-nighter on the mountain, includes abundant apocalyptic imagery regarding the Frank Burns character. The anti-Christ, is, I believe invoked in that context.

>> No.4689048

>>4684619
You write like a girl

>> No.4689064

>>4688939
It is also supportive that Orin killed a Saudi medical attache, personal physician to a Saudi diplomat (using one of his copies of IJV).

When Evan Ingersoll fired his "missile" which ignited the Utter Global Crisis during the Eschaton, Evan was then playing the faction of IRLIBSYR, Iran + Libya + Syria, the arch enemies of Saudi Arabia.

The parallel must either be intentional, or a fabulously lucky accident. Occam argues the former.

>> No.4689093

>>4688988
*Concavity is the Canadian name, from their perspective the map was caved in.

Convexity is the US-led ONAN name, since their side of the map grew larger.

These "occular" terms are also thematically linked to Himself's contributions, and to his later occupation as a film maker whose expertise is lenses, including the "occular wobble" lens which confers the perspective of a newborn infant, which was the technical breakthrough giving IJV its lethality and apocalyptic potential.

>> No.4689144

upset the book is science fiction when I learn what Infinite Jest is.

disliked it a lot more after that, sticking to dirty realism in the future.

>> No.4689301

>>4689064
I should add, that the Saudi Prince Q himself was also killed in the mass murder of the first cartridge. Also the doc's wife.

>> No.4689328

Man, I need to reread this book

>> No.4689510

this tread is blowing my mind

>> No.4689514

>>4689510
Ah yes?
Your mom is blowing me right now.

>> No.4689673

>>4680589
>>4680601
>>4680629
>>4682110
>>4684046
>>4685765
>>4686073
>>4686216
>>4686254
>>4686278
>>4686315
>>4686381
>>4686435
>>4687304
>>4687311
>>4688788
>>4688906
The process of reading IJ is very like assembling a jigsaw puzzle without the box. The vast majority of discussion is arguing about how to put pieces together. This char, that char, this scene, that scene.

And the discussion gets stuck there, at the level of assembly, because everyone is myopically focused on this piece, that piece, no one ever ventures to look what picture has been suggested by the pieces that are already together.

I'm saying that if you've got 950 out 1000 pieces put together, and what you see is a mushroom cloud, and the last 50 pieces are just scattered pixels here and there, then the last 50 pieces are not going to change the mushroom cloud into a daffodil.

It's a mushroom cloud.

The value, if any, to advancing past those last 50 pieces is in the grist of evaluating the meaning of this particular mushroom cloud.

My own is above - there is no punchline, it's a 1000 page hairy dog joke. And this is the only fair and fulfilling pathway to criticize DFW, through the process of assembly, then evaluation.

Having got this far, I would point out that not a single character in IJ ever repents (in any even secular sense); never introspects in any meaningful way which fulfills a character arc which could pay off the tortuous journey DFW drags us through.

If he was thinking of Hamlet, his project must be judged a dismal failure. Hamlet, and even Laertes, finaly, exchange regret and forgiveness. Hamlet with his dying breath, restores order to the chaotic kingdom. Their redemption couldn't be more clear, short of a chorus suddenly popping up to sing, "Hamlet and Laertes are redeemed!"

Instead, DFW just nukes his whole universe. The ultimate act of map elimination, by what Franzen I believe correctly described as a childish, dissembling, genius.

There are reasons to preserve and revisit IJ. They have mostly to do with the left-brain aptitudes of the forensic side of storytelling. The grammar and style, the intentionality of those sentences, the deployment of that vocabulary. But these should also not be confused with reasons to preserve and refer to IJ for cautionary tales regarding how and why in the summary construction of your thematic, you should never, ever, ever stab voodoo dolls of your readers full of knitting needles.

They might just conclude that your moment was a pan flash, and your genius is not worth the suffering.

>> No.4689741

>>4689673
So what I'm getting from you is that after the book ends, the world blows up?

I think I missed that part

>> No.4689746

>>4686195
There is an awful lot of moments for a former high school athlete to nostalgia over. I was especially fond of conditioning drills as punishments. "No one liked how what's her name had played the same one single tennis racquet every year since her first 6 ago, and liked even less how she needed to retape the handle for every match" - it's like "This one time at band camp" - you know what she was doing with her racquet.

>> No.4689750

>>4680563

It's fucking awful.

>> No.4689753

>>4689741
Yeah. That's what I'm saying.

see {SPOILERS}:

>>4686162

page 934, endnote 114 demand their due weight. They must be explained in the context of a comprehensive reading which fits all the other known pieces.

>> No.4689754

>>4680601

Dave Eggers, lol.

>> No.4689770 [DELETED] 

>>4689673
Not a single? What about Gately going through AA and reminiscing in the hospital? What about Hal in the beginning and end of the novel, where he realizes the greatest monster is the one who can tell a lie completely blank-facedly (literally supposed to be Pemulis, but implicitly supposed to be Hal, leading to his nervous breakdown and drastic change to sincerity in the first passage of the novel ("I think and feel. I have opinions," or something along the lines of that, I'm paraphrasing).

>> No.4689771
File: 496 KB, 500x261, 684684684.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4689771

I enjoyed it thoroughly, for the reasons previously listed in this thread. Entertaining presentation and one-liners, interesting tidbits only noticed upon revisiting, its unique style that knows it's a little too much, and lets you know its aware of that.

There are tons of LONG explanations of bad films made by the character obviously most close to DFW's personality. From a movie with nothing but clips of painful dental surgery to the film about the biker nuns, it's all about making entertainment and art that may or may not be good. Despite the feelings of anxiety, disinterest, mild disgust, boredom, and/or infuriation that his bad films may have inspired in their audiences, there was some meaning you could squeeze from them.

Then later on it explains one of the worst films and how people HAD to rationalize and tell themselves it meant something, because why the fuck would someone torture you like that if there wasn't some symbolism or meaning you were missing?

He spells it out for you; see something or don't. Whether there was or wasn't a point aside, take something from this as a positive or treat it like a piece of your life you regret and want back.

> Himself and his father were some of the best parts of the book IMHO.

>> No.4689772

>>4680563

Harold Bloom said DFW is incapable of thinking and talentless, and Bloom loves Blood Meridian which I love, so I prob will never read IJ

>> No.4689774

>>4689753
I read the book about 2 years ago, so my memory is hazy. Page 934 has Hal and Gately digging up His skull, and finding they are too late to recover the IJ master tape, correct? I forget how everything works, but how exactly does the Canadians having the tape mean that they nuke everyone

>> No.4689777

>>4689673
Not a single? What about Gately going through AA and reminiscing in the hospital? What about Hal in the beginning and end of the novel, where he realizes the greatest monster is the one who can tell a lie completely blank-facedly (literally supposed to be Pemulis, but implicitly supposed to be the perpetually ironic Hal, leading to his nervous breakdown and drastic change to sincerity in the first passage of the novel ("I think and feel. I have opinions," or something along the lines of that, I'm paraphrasing)? What about almost every single character who is in the process of going through AA?

>> No.4689799

>>4680638
Tripfags are the gayest fags to fag up the gayest shit ever faggot

>> No.4689809 [DELETED] 

>>4688935

I probably knew this sometime in the past but I've since forgotten - what is the significance of the O symbol?

>> No.4689832

>>4689741
Why else is Glad the "very last year of O.N.A.N.-ite subsidized time"?

Note: not the "last year"
"the /very/ last year"

What is the "important thing buried in the guy's head" which they must find to "divert the Continental Emergency"?

And when Hal holds up the skull by the hair, screaming "Too Late" what is it too late for?

Did you think that was just a dream? Because wraith Himself has by then explicitly, and with no intention to deceive, demonstrated several times that he is "interfacing" with the living. There are no "dreams" as such after page 820. Maybe none before then, either.

And here is another spoiler -

page 934 is where the narrative actually ends.

>> No.4689862

>>4689832
I guess I always assumed that the Continental Emergency was a widespread release of the IJ tape?

>> No.4689877

>>4689862

Yeah and the "important thing buried in the guy's head" is the master tape. In the beginning, JOI mentions something about something in his head being made of film things or something.

>> No.4689880

>>4689777
Is Gately on a drug drip in his last appearance? Does Hal cynically commenting on the espadrille in the toilet really sound meaningfully redeemed? In the process does not equal completed the process. Wraith Himself is every bit ass dismissive and acidic about AA in his last appearance, and he's /dead/.

And still, and again: What Continental Emergency, which ends the very last year of subsidized time, is it Too Late to prevent?

>> No.4689886

>>4689772
>Harold Bloom

He only hates it because of endnote 366

>> No.4689893

>>4689877
Then how is that a nuke? is it a nuke is a figurative sense? Am I taking these assertions of nuking too literally, and IJ is the "nuke"?

>> No.4689894

>>4689862
>>4689877
Widespread enough to end the calendar? How many people would have to die in their chairs in order to end the calendar?

And does that reduced form of ONAN-wide apocalypse mitigate DFW's sentence in having ended his world with a whimper rather than a bang?

"ultra mach fighter overhead"

Enough puzzle pieces, guise. Have at it.

>> No.4689896

>>4689893
>Am I taking these assertions of nuking too literally, and IJ is the "nuke"?

yes

>> No.4689902

>>4689894
>Widespread enough to end the calendar?

It's a good movie.

>> No.4689929

>>4689893
>>4689896
No. Literal actual nuclear war. Eschaton. I'm not repeating everything above. Read your way into the thread for complete evidentiary review.

Good night.

>> No.4689930

So if IJ is one big nihilistic ironic Apocalypse joke why was DFW so obsessed with sincerity

is IJ sincere

does it matter

does anything matter

help

>> No.4689947

>>4680563

http://asupposedlyfunblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/infinite-jest-as-infinite-jest/

This guy has it right.

>> No.4690120

I've just started this because of this thread.
Why does the school faculty wrestle him to the ground?

>> No.4690123

>>4690120
He has trouble expressing himself.

>> No.4690130

>>4690123
Even assuming he was having trouble expressing himself, why did they call the police, and literally attack him?
Honestly, I don't understand how the author could possibly think this is a realistic response.

>> No.4690138
File: 999 KB, 500x211, DaFuckBra?.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4690138

>>4690120
15 pages into a 1100 page book and you're already asking /lit/ questions about it? You should be avoiding this board like the plague while you read IJ.

>> No.4690150

>>4690130
>why did they call the police

IIRC They were calling an ambulance.

>> No.4690159

>>4689880
Huh. Well damn.

>> No.4690162

>>4690150
Yeah, I got that now.

>> No.4690495

>>4689930
Is he?

read it:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/18/110418fa_fact_franzen?currentPage=all

>> No.4690516

>>4689947
This thread offers a close reading-derived exegesis which integrates every aspect of the novel. Your link is to a spitwad shooting functional illiterate.

Why is the Eschaton there?
Why a Saudi diplomat? Why not a Begian?
Why wraiths?
Why wraiths obsessed with post-modern questions of narrative form?
Why wraiths spending 18000 words creating narrative mind melds with major characters?
Why an ultra mach fighter?
Why tennis as an absorptively transcendent medium of communication?
Why Joelle as the Angel of Death?
Why did Marathe betray the WA?
Why did Steeply humiliate himself?
Why is Orin a cold blooded mass murderer?

My reading, partially original, mostly not, integrates all of this, above. You're shooting spitwads.

Offer your alternative comprehensive reading, or sign off.

tl;dr: Do you even lit?

>> No.4690530

so did ONAN bomb Quebec

>> No.4690537

>>4690495
But what about some of Wallace's own essays? "Joseph Frank's Doestoevsky" comes to mind

>> No.4690682

>>4686327
How could he have died mid orgasm when his hands were duct taped behind his back?

>> No.4691713

>>4690682
I asked for alternate explanations which fulfill the public record, and got dead air. How do you tape your own arms behind your own back?

I believe he did it - if he could do that, what else did he do to provoke such a response?

"Franzen is just throwing a tantrum"

No. That is not rigorous. It is lazy.

>> No.4691717

>>4690530
The point the Eschaton makes, rather clearly and explicitly, in fact, unironically, is that it doesn't matter who fires the first shot.

WWI started when a foreign lunatic assassinated Arch Duke Ferdinand.

Here, an American lunatic assassinated an entire Saudi royal family.

It is sufficient.

This is just more dickying around with puzzle pieces.

>> No.4691723

>>4690537
The picture of the whole body of work lines up with addictive personality periodically focusing his addictive anxiety upon a series of topics he quickly mastered and then threw upon the trash heap in exchange for the next plateau.

That by the way, is nearly a word for word description of Himself, and of Hal, from Himself as a wraith, doing his Heisenbergian mind-meld thing. If DFW was sincere about anything, it was about portraying his own failure to be sincere.

>> No.4691739

>>4690530
The Arizona of IJ is recognizable as our own AZ. He names SkyHarbor international airport.

PHX hosts about 1500 flight cycles a day.

The USMC Air Corps base outside of Yuma hosts, on average, about one per day.

It is 1500 times more likely that Hal looks up from the ambulance guerney and sees a commercial airliner. But he doesn't. He sees a military "ultra mach fighter."

Lucien Antitois' ecstatic soul-flight into the northern sky (the same antipodal route an ICBM would take between ONAN and SOVWAR) is defined by a "call-to-arms."

Not a hymn. Not praise the deity. Not some ecstatic Heisenbergian realization of all human wisdom and folly. Not any of a mkillion things he could have called out.

"an almost maternal call-to-arms"

>call-to-arms

>in all the world's well known tongues

I continue to await alternate interpretations which address a comparable range of questions.

>> No.4692522

I am 8 hours into the audiobook and the failed actor dad is drunkenly lecturing his son, who would go on to become the dad/tennis/optics/microwave guy, and omg it was so long and painful I had to stop. The fucking thing is like 20 min long. I tried to go back to it twice now but i just cant pickup in the middle of that maudlin speech. So I switched over to Suttree which is ironically funnier than jest.

>> No.4694750

>>4684046

the "Help Wanted" sign underneath the screaming lady

>> No.4694765

>>4691739
>>4691723
>>4691713
>>4690682
>>4690537
>>4690530
>>4690516
>>4690495
>>4690162
>>4690159
>>4690138
>>4690130
Anybody who's read it and wants to recommend anything similarly gripping, plz post recs

here
>>4694718

>> No.4695654

>>4689930

dfw sincere ;^)

new sincerity as applied to DFW shouldn't be understood as 'be sincere not ironic' but rather as 'use irony to show how irony is shitty and sincerity is better/healthier'

>> No.4695807

>>4692522
That's among the best scenes in IJ, what are you on about

>> No.4695828

>>4695807
I must agree. That and the story of James and his dad trying to fix the creaky bed spring are fucking priceless.

I have to admit that many of my favorite parts of IJ either A - I hated at first (the parts with James and his dad, the game of Eschaton), or B - incredibly funny and sad at the same time (the "male bonding" scene, the incontinent semi-detox addict, pretty much everything with Mario). IJ and many of its characters have a type of freak-show quality to them.

>> No.4695962

>>4689930
he uses irony in expressing sincerity, to break through the reader's media imposed hip-ennui

>> No.4696850

>>4692522
the audiobook format is your problem. How do the end notes even work with that?

That be like reading an audiobook of Kant no shit you're gonna get bored

>> No.4697148

>>4696850
>When DFW read his own works he'd just say "footnote", recite the footnote's text then say "return to text". I imagine it would be something similar with IJ (though a lot more clusterfuckish since the endnotes often occur in the middle of sentences).