what's even the point of writing something like this? Do American readers find joy in the extensive description of miserable and marginalized situations of substance addicted people? what am i missing here?
Infinite Jest
what's even the point of writing something like this? Do American readers find joy in the extensive description of miserable and marginalized situations of substance addicted people? what am i missing here?
DFW had issues, was sincere and intelligent, and a bit of a hack. I find that passage disgusting as well. Not in the sense of squeamishness, rather in the sense of tastefulness. One could go on and on about dismemberment and it would be gripping and also meaningless.
it was supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, and it worked
it made me feel uncomfortable because it's obvious that DFW it's laughing about it. Don't get me wrong, i found hilarious reading this type of things, but i can't laugh without asking myself why do i even find this funny.
>it's obvious that DFW it's laughing about it
It isn't
why are you so sure?
because I read the book. Why would you even assume he meant that passage to be funny? There isn't anything in what you posted thats funny
how is it not funny? it's descriptions are just too graphic
Get that 'tism checked out anon
have a nice day homosexual
I suppose you forgot to read the title
>joy
Huh? it's meant to disturb, the man went through rehab centers and probably heard of horrible things like this and you dwell on that type of stuff. The cost of addiction is just that severe for some that it makes you act inhuman.
If it's funny it's in absurdity. But there is nothing really to imply humor, only pity.
It's called sincerity, and it makes the world a better place.
The world got a little brighter when he killed himself
They half-measures, like that not quite ergodic or parataxic enough to be artful prosody despite the tawdry subject.
Wow that really is garbage. Thank you op, sincerely, I really was close to being memed into buying and reading that trash
+Wow that really is genius. Thank you op, sincerely, I really was close to being memed into not buying and reading that masterpiece
DFW fans are so precious
this thread put me over the edge on reading infinite jest. im starting now
>
I am a big DFW fan but I feel like the Incandenza half of the book is a thousand times better than the addiction house half. Parts like these make me really wish his editor reined him in better, but the other parts make up for it
Anon be cry
DFW is part of the American academic atheist mill, the religious wing of the postmodern neomarxist cabal, he's doing the exact same thing Voltaire tried to do in Candide. The only reason this passage was written was to harden hearts.
Hell no. Voltaire is genuinely a clever little atheistic Enlightenment writer and thinker, still a great talent and Candide I suppose will forever remain on college syllabuses so long as there’s still people left in the West who can read books, and but so anyway Voltaire is definitely closer to this critique you seem to be making (?) (all the different terms and buzzwords sort of bump up against each other, making it a little incoherent) of just another product of the “academic atheist mill” (although of course not specifically American, w/r/t Voltaire and the Enlightenment milieu).
Voltaire was doing this as a reaction against Leibnitzian optimism (“We live in the best of all possible worlds”), also expressed in works like Pope’s Essay on Man, a satire drenched in irony. It’s precisely what DFW was criticizing in its modern and postmodern manifestation — works obsessed with satire, irony, a strictly NEGATING and CRITICIZING force, without offering anything substantially positive, of worth, of value, or even transcendentally meaningful. Sure, he (DFW) didn’t do this in some staunchly and explicitly religious way, like a sort of American Dostoyevsky, but there are comparisons that can be made to Dostoyevsky (which I’m sure DFW would’ve been flattered by but also denied he was on Dosto’s level, as he indeed had tremendous respect for Dostoyevsky).
It’s not written to harden the heart; if anything, I think DFW (saccharine and schmuckish as it may sound) was including stuff like this precisely to SOFTEN the heart, to try to move people and get them to realize the tremendous suffering and sadness that can exist in this world, and to be more human, engaged, empathetic, compassionate and concernful towards it. Basically trying to reach out to these same type of cynical readers and critics reared on the works of numerous writers from Pynchon to Bret Easton Ellis and potentially made somewhat hard-hearted by it, viewing all of modern life, Western society, and the literature and art we can make in this milieu as nothing better than a black comedy, filled with dark humor, irony, pessimism, satire and cynicism.
I doubt you’ve read the book or even know much about DFW.
I have read and rejected DFW's nasty little book ´INFINITE JEST´ he wrote the book to infect your brain with the same disgusting images that infect his brain. If he wanted to portray reality he would have gone into documentary, instead he wrote caricature fiction, serving the state propaganda wing just like Dostoevsky and Voltaire did.
At least voltaire broached the truth in his propaganda, if only to lend himself credibility
A broken clock is still entirely worth throwing in the garbage.
lol, touche
>personal incredulity
No one cares israelitel
> instead he wrote caricature fiction, serving the state propaganda wing just like Dostoevsky and Voltaire did.
Oh, you’re at least a little schizoid, schizophrenic, or just very paranoid, then, I already was picking up on that in your posts
. Ironically, I hate to dismiss others with these labels, as I also have unorthodox political, social, and religious views that could easily make me dismissed in that same way, but you take it too far in a way which just sounds outright insane. Voltaire and Dostoyevsky are both very different writers, and I don’t see how Dostoyevsky of all people could be called “serving the state propaganda wing.” You seem to have this strange idea in your head of numerous great or well-regarded Western writers over the centuries being part of some plot, which I don’t find coherent.
>You get to choose what to worship.Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
>And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god … to worship … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
>If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.
>Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
>Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They are the kind of worship you just gradually slip into day after day … without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
Wrong.
20:1 And God spake all these words, saying, 20:2 I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
20:3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
20:4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
20:5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; 20:6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
Americans enjoy any pretense of intelligence, so using hyphen in a sentence as a description of a human, a reference to Homer that doesn't work, and semicolons without any consistency is passably "smart" enough to them for him to be granted a kind of moral exception for his contempt. It's kind of hilarious if you're actually educated enough to do those sorts of things with a basic competence, because it's clear he doesn't know what his words mean when he describes limbs as arachnodactylic, and digits as mucronate, because that shows your reader you don't understand that a dactyl is a digit.
It reminds me of the sad, pretentious things you get from teenagers who just discovered what a thesaurus is and never thought to check their new vocabulary against a dictionary.
Thread full of filtered gays.
Empathy.
A study came out saying that the elites like fricked up shit on their fiction way more than everyone else.
Elites are highly conformist.
drugs are bad
Modern art revels in ugliness.