I know so many people that gave up trying to read picrel. Why can't full grown, college educated people read a long book? Are normie's brains really that fried from tiktok and porn?
 Shopping Cart Returner Shirt $21.68 |
 Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
Shopping Cart Returner Shirt $21.68 |
I am capable of reading a long book and retaining a fair amount of what I read (I like to take notes and actually think about what I'm reading) but I only read a few pages a day, basically for the reason you just described. I just keep plugging at it until it's done. A doorstopper might take me the better part of a year.
Perhaps you should ask them why they gave up, they really would know better than IQfy would.
Anyone who calls someone a normie is objectively a fricking moron. Shit thread, take more time making a thread, next time
>Anyone who calls someone a normie is objectively a fricking moron.
Nah, they are just a normie in denial, calling people normies is as normie as it gets. morons tend to be very open minded about others for reasons which should be obvious.
I agree, there's no such thing as a normie. Ironically DFW was like this where he looked at normies (though he didn't have this vocabulary) from a distance. The Gately parts of IJ
You gotta be a little mentally ill to get into Wallace. His style is not natural. It's fun if you get into it but it's really not how English is supposed to be written. It's very far from high style a la Joyce
I loved it at the time but now I have no idea how anyone reads it. It's strange I've never had anything like that with any art, where at one point I'm enamored and another completely confused as to its mechanism or appeal.
>Ironically DFW was like this where he looked at normies
You are almost certainly conflating the narrator with the author but lets hear what you have to say,
>It's fun if you get into it but it's really not how English is supposed to be written. It's very far from high style a la Joyce
Wallace is more traditional in style and language than Joyce, Wallace just plays with structure some. The only times language/prose style gets at all non-standard is in dialogue and free indirect speech the use of which is not much different than Joyce's use in Portrait in the way it evolves but executed with far more nuance and complexity.
I don't remember enough about the work to clarify. There's an essay I read that says as much. You'll find it valuable if you're interested in psychoanalysis
https://web.archive.org/web/20160205062039/http://timothylachin.com/
>This belief in the secret existence of a small number of elusive elect leads us to the second main argument in Wallace’s Kenyon speech, namely that we need to show compassion to “real” people. Like his first argument, it is delusional and symptomatic of his psychosis. Regardless of the validity of the ethical injunction of compassion in itself, for Wallace this belief had a pathological status. As Max illustrates, “real” people – which is to say, non-intellectuals – played an important role in Wallace’s life. He treasured his friendships with the ordinary people he met in AA and repeatedly vocalized his belief in an ethics of ordinariness.
>I believe that Wallace’s need to believe in the existence of “real” people living lives unpolluted with obsessive cognition was a direct result of his own psychotic inability to escape this kind of cognition himself. Wallace’s humble AA friends might be seen as the imaginary talismans of humanity and authenticity that he had to surround himself with physically precisely because he could not introject what they stood for: resigned submission to some paternal ideology, the eternal hallmark of “ordinary” people. Upon close examination, it is another disguised form of Wallace’s psychotic narcissism. In an attempt to rid himself of his terrifying, uncanny exceptional status, he tried to pass himself off as one of the guys, something like Superman pretending to be Clark Kent. [26] He even sacrifices grammar to this end: note that in the second sentence from the Kenyon speech excerpted above, Wallace splits an infinitive in an attempt to sound more common. It feels forced and inauthentic in his mouth.
I don't mean "standard" that's why I mentioned Joyce so you wouldn't think I had a problem with idiosyncratic techniques per se. He just was not good at putting words together in a way that is universally found "beautiful". His writing is highly intelligent but lacks the clarity of intellect you expect from great writers. Compare his writing to his master Delillo who is one of the best American prose stylists ever
>in the second sentence from the Kenyon speech excerpted above, Wallace splits an infinitive in an attempt to sound more common. It feels forced and inauthentic in his mouth.
maybe the poor man was analyzed to death
This was long after he died. Read the whole thing if you actually want to know what Wallace's problem was. He's on to something
>I believe that the explanation for this phenomenon lies in the inhuman voracity of consumerism. It is not just an economic system; it is a terrible God, and it speaks in our unconscious. The inane, restless voice that Wallace so brilliantly captures is neither “his” voice nor some hypothetical eternal superego voice. It is a direct transcription of the frivolous, harrying voices of capital and publicity themselves. The clarity with which Wallace renders this voice is both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness as a writer. Wallace writes like Americans talk today: with plenty of likes, kind of’s, and pretty much’s. One of his favorite tricks is to curate these down-home sentences with selections from his enormous private lexicon (“as big a vocabulary as anyone in the Western hemisphere”, according to Jonathan Franzen). On the one hand, this colloquialism gives his writing a tremendous immediacy and accessibility. On the other hand, it leaches poetry from his message. As Hegel recognized, form cannot be abstracted from content. The very form of certain dialects prevents them for serving as a vehicle for authentic thought or poetry. Heidegger famously claimed that true philosophy could only be done in Greek or in German. The world that generated Ancient Greek epic poetry was a world of myths and heroes. The world that generated Wallace’s American English (and mine) is a world of Big Macs and marketing cant. Living in France for ten years has opened my ears to how ugly most American voices are. American capitalism excels at creating a scintillating, infinite variety of glittering new forms, but they come at a heavy price. The world consumerism creates is one in which nothing is sacred, a world in which everything is equivalent. Life in late-capitalist America is inherently banal and meaningless, and the very rhythms and syntax it generates are ideal vehicles for this corruption. The only way to introduce meaning and poetry into such a universe is by repudiating the very substance of such a dialect.
This is insufferable and demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what literature is.
If you really think DFW is "literature" you need to grow up. Study latin homie
I don't think you have read Joyce or DFW, just what others have written about them.
Thanks for posting this. I was ambivalent about the novel before but this like tripled my appreciation in the same way psychoanalysis of Dosto did.
Infinite Jest is primarily about a kid forced to go to an extremely rigorous private school/tennis bootcamp that his own dad created. It appeals to middle class white kids that worked really hard in high school only to realize that the rigor doesn't really amount to anything.
Self discovery of worth and purpose is a big part of the book. David Foster Wallace got into the mindset of lost and chronically depressed people really well.
>primarily about
Only if you fixate on plot and ignore 2/3rds of the book.
>I'm enamored and another completely confused as to its mechanism or appeal.
I think it's very good at describing mundane things in a very unusual way. Which is compelling of itself.
It's just tedious
Why can't I just be different to most people, and aware of that? Why is everything always "cope" to you people?
>Why can't I just be different to most people
Because your not. This is the normie delusion, the belief in being special or better based on some ultimately superficial preferences. Most people grow out of this sometime in their 20s. Its not a cope, just a part of growing up.
I have autism. My brain doesn't work like yours.
I wish it did. I could actually have a normal life then.
>I could actually have a normal life then
Point proven. This is most everyone, just replace autism with whatever happens to be the fault they define themselves through. You have the same desires and fears but unlike most you have the luxury of a diagnoses.
Also, your language skills and your assumption about how my brain works suggests you are more normal than you think.
I've never been in a relationship, and I'm scared to go outside, and can't deal with crowded places because of the noise and stimulation, and I basically can't connect with people at all unless they share one of my very specific fixations.
Why can't you accept we aren't more or less the same? We obviously just aren't.
Because you're insecure that I might think I'm better than you in some way, which is laughable.
So you don't share the same basic desires as most everyone despite having expressed that desire?
I don't even know what you mean by that.
My greatest desire is honestly to be a kind of disembodied consciousness, and have the freedom to drift into different kinds of bodies, and live out different slices of experience, without ever having to belong or commit to anything.
This just isn't true.
You're insanely myopic or sheltered. There are very different people out there.
>t. normies
I've never been interested in reading it, but I feel like I should. Give me something to spur me onto it.
Oh? And moron is the choice of sophistication, is it? Shallow codhead.
OP really struck a normie nerve with this thread.
this book is fantastic and boring at the same time. It is hilariously mundane and weird.
Infinite Jest has a lot of meme power
The father in this book kills himself by building a custom microwave and sticking his head in it.
Another guy dies because he gets robbed and the robbers tie him up and cover his mouth. He dies because he was suffering severe allergies, so his nose was stuffed up. He slowly suffocates to death while trying to breath out of his snotty, inflamed nose.
Shit like that is so metal.
>that lil homie who played tennis with one hand because he used the other hand to keep a pistol at his temple at all times
>if he ever lost he would kill himself immediately
>he wins everything and they finally put him as #1 on the leaderboards
>fricking kills himself
or
>the canadian kids who jump over the rails while the train is approaching and all of them are fricking crippled because of it
>once a kid didnt jump so the adults ganged up on him and murdered him
or
>the homosexual who steals the mechanical heart of the woman waiting for a transplant thats hidden in her backpack
or
>the comically large mirrors placed in corners on the twisty mountain road so traffic will think theres someone on a crash course and they steer themselves over the cloff to avoid
or
>the addict b***h who has tricks absolutely sexually destroy her in the worst ways possible while in her third trimester
>gives birth to a corpse and goes so crazy that she pretends its alive and walks around with the decaying corpse for weeks
absolutely love the book
that sounds fricking hilarious
It's just fricking long. Fun to read, though.
1000 pages is too long for working stiff with 9-5 job. That being said, do have interest in reading it, just not dropping more than five dollars for regular copy.
>1000 pages is too long for working stiff with 9-5 job
On my first read of it I was a full time student and worked 20-30 hours a week and had 10-20 hours a week of studying I had to do. Only takes an hour or two a day of reading to get through it in a few months.
I finished it. It was funny.
I don't know why Frostwalla killed himself. Maybe if Napoleon Dynamite was a bigger movie than blue alien Avatar then the director of Napoleon would kill himself too out of shame. Because Infinite Jest is just Napoleon Dynamite in book form
infinite jest is a book that tons of people form opinions about but few actually read. The author, David Foster Wallace, had a unique personality and manner of speaking that people love and hate.
I think it is spot on.
IJ is easy to read. I wanted to be longer. Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow are hard.
From the Pale King:
>Obetrolling didn’t make me self-conscious. But it did make me much more self-aware. If I was in a room, and had taken an Obetrol or two with a glass of water and they’d taken effect, I was now not only in the room, but I was aware that I was in the room. In fact, I remember I would often think, or say to myself, quietly but very clearly, ‘I am in this room.’ It’s difficult to explain this. At the time, I called it ‘doubling,’ but I’m still not entirely sure what I meant by this, nor why it seemed so profound and cool to not only be in a room but be totally aware that I was in the room, seated in a certain easy chair in a certain position listening to a certain specific track of an album whose cover was a certain specific combination of colors and designs – being in a state of heightened enough awareness to be able to consciously say to myself, ‘I am in this room right now. The shadow of the foot is rotating on the east wall. The shadow is not recognizable as a foot because of the deformation of the angle of the light of the sun’s position behind the sign. I am seated upright in a dark-green easy chair with a cigarette burn on the right armrest. The cigarette burn is black and imperfectly round. The track I am listening to is “The Big Ship” off of Brian Eno’s Another Green World, whose cover has colorful cutout figures inside a white frame.’ Stated so openly, this amount of detail might seem tedious, but it wasn’t. What it felt like was a sort of emergence, however briefly, from the fuzziness and drift of my life in that period. As though I was a machine that suddenly realized it was a human being and didn’t have to just go through the motions it was programmed to perform over and over. [2]
Only DFW can write shit like this. It is deranged but also weirdly relatable. How often have you suddenly become aware of yourself, or allowed self conciousness to ride your mind?
How is that deranged?
it's the internal monologue of a mentally ill person
why would someone lie about this. my guess is your a liar who's projecting. famously DFW was a big liar
>it's the internal monologue of a mentally ill person
No. It is the first hand account of a person who is on speed while they are giving that account or possibly David Wallace (the fictional one) attempting to reduce his own neurotic writing by creating a character who makes him seem normal or at least less neurotic by comparison. Theme strongly supports the former with the latter being a compelling idea leading the reader into the metafictional abyss the book is built around.
>why would someone lie about this.
Why would someone ask such a thing on IQfy? Everything you say misses an important context or detail and this goes beyond just forgetting unless you also did not comprehend. The above for example, viewing Fogle's section as internal monologue shows completely missing a fairly important aspect of structure and theme despite it being explicitly explained more than once in the novel.
>is the first hand account of a person who is on speed while they are giving that account or possibly David Wallace (the fictional one) attempting to reduce his own neurotic writing by creating a character who makes him seem normal or at least less neurotic by comparison. Theme strongly supports the former with the latter being a compelling idea leading the reader into the metafictional abyss
Or, as the other guy said, a mentally ill person.
Sure, if you don't understand literature or care about comprehension.
You repeated what he said but wih your head up your ass. DFW was ill, on and off meds, and took his own life. He wrote exclusively about himself under the guise of greater American concern, which most people have by now recognized and dismissed. Pipe down. You said absolutely nothing.
lol. Still avoiding actually talking about the book. Also, Fogle's bit was finished before he went off his meds.
>No. It is the first hand account of a person who is on speed
"internal monologue of a mentally ill person" is how you can describe all of his writing. The Wallace style is for most part a mentally ill style, regardless of the particular context in which it takes place. His relationship with language itself is pathological. If you read the essay I linked, which by no means is perfect and I don't endorse it entirely, you'll see a discussion/speculation on this.
His writing is comforting for people who are mentally ill and it may help them to cure their problems, but it's weak as literature. In a sense its peculiarly bad in a way that makes it (potentially) very good.
I read enough of it to know that he fails to support anything he says, ignores or invents context as needed, assumes intent without supporting that intent in anyway, etc. He seems to have no understanding of literature and views it as an exercise in psychoanalysis.
Support what you are saying, talk about the works and demonstrate your point instead of waffling about. Talk about literature, this is a literature forum after all.
Look homie I'm trying to help you. If you can't see that Wallace as his work were deeply pathological, I don't know what to say, it should be obvious if you are healthy. It's odd that you keep demanding evidence as though this were a logical proof when literature, the understanding of which you keep coming back to, is about intuition.
>i believe it to be so and if that is not enough to convince you then clearly you are mentally ill
I did not ask for evidence or proof, I asked you to support what you are saying with the books themselves so we can discuss literature. I was very clear in this request. Is your comprehension that poor or are you waffling again? Some of each?
I don't know why you are being so tedious. The most important thing when it comes to a writer is not the content but the manner in which the content is conveyed, what is referred to by the term style, which Schopenhauer called the physiognomy of the mind. Wallace has a very unique style which might be described as a breathless logorrhea. It's the manner of thinking of someone who you wouldn't be surprised to hear would hang himself a decade later. Open Infinite Jest up on any page and this should be readily apparent. For the sake of one's sanity and future happiness, Wallace-consciousness needs to be overcome
>wanting to talk about literature on a literature forum is tedious
Just admit that you have never read IJ or TPK.
I have been discussing literature. You need to understand that its important aspect is style which is the basis its orientation of perception and ontology. "It is only the style" -- Picasso.
I have nothing to say about Madam Psychosis' radio show or Orin Incandenza putting tumblers over was it wienerroaches? or getting an erection when he watched a video of himself kicking a football or how Hal Incandenza feels alone or how Avril Incandenza (who in her OCD and such was modeled after Wallace's mother) is a prostitute or something like that (which we know she was hurt by). I don't remember much from the book and I don't believe the symbols of his art are very strong, but more so an evocative mapping of the peculiarities and fixations of his mental world which was very narcissistic and hardly objective.
If it makes you feel better to think I'm lying about reading it or didn't truly understand it, go ahead.
>I have been discussing literature
No, you have been talking around it.
>You need to understand that its important aspect is style which is the basis its orientation of perception and ontology
So make your case so we can discuss. You have yet to offer anything of any substance, just keep on saying you are right and I should believe you because you are right.
idt you have case here then
if you cant provide argument using the texts of the writer you are talking about as examples, you have pretty poor case
it rather seems you really want to pin down the writer as a very specific type of person and you are demonstrating it by viewing his work as if they were personal diary
which im sure you can understand is not a very strong argument especially if you dont rationalize it very well to begin with
in the same vein one could claim pynchon was a pedophile cus slothrop had sex with a child and dostoyevksi really wanted to kill his dad because patricide is a reocurring motif
but thats rather shallow and poor way to read anything dont you think?
>reference to Schopenhauer
stfu pseud. you're in no possition to criticize DFW
I thought the "DFW bro" meme was a myth until today kek
i haven't even read the homosexual. it's just ironic seeing a fan of a pseud writer (Schopie) talk shit about another pseud writer (DFW). you homosexuals choose the shitiest authors to obsess with. no wonder, considering that that would imply that only homosexuals with pipe dreams of being intellectuals can endure this cesspool of a website for so long
>anon makes interesting points
>you keep saying he's not really "talking about literature" even thought that's literally what he's doing
>you keep calling anon a pseud and badgering him to admit that he hasn't actually read IJ.
>You go on to admit that you yourself haven't even read it.
Holy cope and projection.
don't waste your precious time on filtered people. He didn't read the book, he probably barely even read the essay mentioned prior. He didn't read about the solipsism parts. He confuses author and protagonists. He didn't see the great adult sorrows in the book. In infinite jeast already one can recognize wallaces forbearance. And he calls this guy a narcissist.
It's just not a very good book is all. I read it, enjoyed it, and moved on. Most people with a reasonable amount of intelligence will recognize it is the over indulgent fluff piece that it is and either go all the way in for the zany DFW 'but so um actually' prose style or drop it. There is nothing artistically or aesthetically substantial about IJ besides its length.
>Most people with a reasonable amount of intelligence will recognize it is the over indulgent fluff piece that it is and either go all the way in for the zany DFW 'but so um actually' prose style or drop it.
This OP. War and Peace was a long read but it was easy to finish since it was so good. Infinite Jest is just immature pablum that needed a stronger editor; not going to submit myself to 1k+ of such just to say that I read it.
ah, so you haven't read it? Too many people judge Infinite Jest on what they have heard about it rather than reading it.
IF is a cool novel, but it is easy to project your own baggage onto it.
I read halfway through and dropped it.
And thing is that I like DFW; at least his essays. But this book wasn't for me.
I think I might give The Pale King a try because the subject matter sounds more interesting; shame he died before finishing it.
I love it. There's a decent audio version of it on YouTube. I lay on my bed. Phone plugged in and resting on the bed beside me. Video playing. Eyes closed. Gently drifting in and out of sleep. The audio blends in and out of the dreams. No stress about reading it linearly. Skip to random times pots. Based? Based. I love it.
This isn’t really a good example of a normal book that just happens to be long what with all the neologisms, run on sentences, autistic punctuation, plot relevant footnotes, lilted prose, and references to postmodern philosophy. This is like sitting a regular guy down in front of Inland Empire or Come and See and then saying he just doesn’t like movies.
is there a guide to all or most of the references to postmodern philosophy (especially not relating to economics and consumerism but more so literary theory)?
Imo DFW is pretty much a Foucaldian at heart so I would recommend brushing up on some of his easier texts like the History of Sexuality or Madness & Civilization. (Of which the entire Ennet house side plot could be seen to be directly ripped from if you wanted to) From there id recommend The Order of Things as it’s essentially Foucault’s central theoretical text and will make it a lot easier to understand the logic behind the logic of postmodernism. It also has the added benefit of, at least in my opinion, being the most systematic elaboration of postmodernism qua postmodernism to date. The next big hitter for DFW is Derrida. I wouldn’t get into Derrida unless you’re really familiar with what he’s critiquing. (Saussure, Strauss, etc) Generally what you want to take from Derrida is that the literary text is like a chimera in that it doesn’t have a single “true” form but depends on the reader to construct the context into which it will be placed. Think of how the Iliad would have been a sacred religious text to the Greeks but people read it nowdays like an action film because we’ve lost the “original” context it was understood in. Now, the properly poststructural turn in this example is that the “original” context never existed in the first place. The illusion of an original context is itself a product of the context that WE put it in to begin with. Even if it was a sacred text we have no way of ascertaining what the inner experience of Ancient Greek worship amounts to and any attempt at it will be tainted with the ideological baggage that we carry around already. If this doesn’t make sense then I’d recommend to read some Deleuze: The Logic of Sense or Difference and Repetition (not his work with Guatari though. He’s surprisingly more lucid without him)
The book is a rorschach test.
It may as well be a mirror.
Don't like what you see?
Not my problem
well put
DFW gives off a certain “tone” or vibe that turns off a lot of readers
I downloaded this book the other day and I made it all the way to the second paragraph, when he starts talking about the high traction sole of his Nike's, then I closed it and deleted the file. I've read Oblivion, his short story collection, and I can't do anymore than that. I've had enough of his style. I get it. I get his whole deal, although I think it's overrated. Anyways, I could force myself to read it to say I've read it, but that would be moronic.
I love the part where the kid has a total mental breakdown during his college interview. The way he is described to be making horrible inhuman noises is hilarious. I think that is right near the start of the book?
I forced my way to drop it at Poor Tony part. Stupid & boring book.
>Discuss DFW!
>Okay. He sucks
>NO NOT LIKE THAT
DFW fans are so fricking stupid.
Psychoanalysis of an author through their work is not discussing literature and when done with a complete lack of self awareness it is just blog posting.
I’ve been reading IJ for the past like two months as my book stack grows and grows from my lack of self control at the used book store. I enjoy the book, specifically the parts at Ennet house, but holy frick theres so much fluff and dick-stroking about how much “esoteric knowledge” about random sciences that DFW stuffs needlessly wherever he can. I have enjoyed the ride but I can’t wait to finish it so I can go back to reading very well writted 200 page novels instead of reading what amounts to DFW’s insufferable diary
>Why can't full grown, college educated people read a long book?
the problem isn't that it's long. i'll let you ponder other reasons as to why someone would drop a book.
i began to re-read it a few days ago and its ridiculous how much stuff i missed the first time.
>just spend 100 hours of your limited time reading it bro
I wish I had that much free time on my hands, there are just other books Id rather read first
Because you have to read about 300 pages and another 20 pages of footnotes to have any understanding of what is going on even on the surface level.
I absolutely agree, I had to force myself to read 50 pages a day until I got to ~300 pages, then the book started becoming really enjoyable and I finished the rest of it in 4 days. There are a lot of characters introduced early on that seem out of place, but make a lot more sense as the plot progresses.
I find this book a lot less enjoyable since first reading it years ago. But, it's still pretty good.
I’m only reading this book to learn obscure vocabulary. I couldn’t be assed to care about the plot kek
There's a difference between reading something long worth reading and not. I plugged away at picrel for a while, as well as the Federalist Papers and the Count Of Monte Cristo before. Even though City Of God and The Federalist Papers took a while and I picked it up and put it down in favor of other books, I definitely feel as if I got a lot out of reading both.
Infinite Jest however is not worth the time or effort.
>Introduction by Thomas Merton
Oh, the irony. Religionists...
It is ultimately as ploddlingly pedantic as Jordan Peterson, not funny but pathetic and sad, confessional not satire-- INSINCERE, insouciant, inauthentic. The Performance Art Piece of live action redaction is the only thing notable about it and it's ab extra.
Alliteration and assonance don't alleviate the astounding asinine inanity of your argument's asymptotic antithesis, asshat.
This book is just straight up boring as shit dude... You're telling me you read the first chapter and enjoyed slogging through it? frick right off.
This board really has been overrun with midwit normies. What a sad state of affairs...
It's OK for people to drop bad books
Yes.