Well, /lit/, a few days ago marked twenty years since this bad mama jamma tender juicy beef cake of a hot simmering bucket of prose landed on our plates. What are our thoughts?
it's a meme you dip
So many better books and authors out there. A shame that this was one that was made into a meme.
>>7760190
in modern literature? what about as influential?
>>7760190
Awesome. I wanna read them. What are they?
>>7760203
Is 20 years enough time to gauge literary influence?
>>7760210
on modern lit???? yeah????
>>7760222
Nice trips. Can you give some specific examples of technique/style/ideas/etc. that first appear in Infinite Jest and have since appeared in other modern lit? I haven't read the book, so I wouldn't recognize them if I saw them.
>>7760238
thanks. I'm just asking questions tho, I haven't read it yet either.
I've been here 2 months. Jesus this book gets posted a lot. Has it always been like this? Have you guys been talking about this book for years?
>>7760306
Nobody really talks about it.
>>7760306
kinda proves tho whole 'influential' thing. say what you will, but this book has had some kind of impact on our culture.
has anyone here actually read this motherfucker ???
>>7760352
Yes I have. Reddit was always talking about It. So I read it. It was funny and really depressing at the same time
>>7760370
any other comments you have to maybe save this thread?
>>7760387
well let's change that with this thread :^)
>>7760380
I dunno. That shit he wrote about the phone advancing to video phone was pretty spot on. Who the fuck FaceTimes people anymore you know? Shit lasted like less than a year. He called it
>>7760398
I FaceTimed last week. I also do it when contacting my family on holiday's. It's rare, but useful. Shit's better than Skype.
>>7760387
>he already forgot about Infinite Summer
>>7760408
Yeah but can you FaceTime your family while your jacking off and have them not notice your jacking off. I think not.
>>7760415
is that part of the book. i feel like it is.
I'm only like a quarter of the way through but one of the themes I've been picking up on is the dichotomy between individualism and being a part of a gestalt. America is idealized as a nation of individuals, but how can we retain that in the modern age? Is it even possible? Thoughts?
>>7760419
Lol apparently I am the only one who's actually read it.
>>7760424
he says as much in an interview i just watched. the individualism part.
>>7760424
There's a nice conversation between Marathe and Steeply about ~400 pages in about this.
I think it's possible, but more difficult today than it was even 20 years ago- before the internet became so big. I guess you'd have to define what it means to be an individual. Is it to be taken literally, i.e. no two people are exactly alike, or more vaguely, i.e. people are, in general, more homogeneous today due to more easily accessible information and the scope of modern entertainment.
>>7760340
>our culture.
Are the whims of a Mongolian carpet weaving image board really the standard for literary influence?
>>7760761
in a way, yes. more legitimate than some corporate publication's opinion imo.
>>7760424
Is that your dog? He's a little cutie.
>>7760387
You either
a. Are retarded
b. Are shitposting
c. Haven't looked particularly hard
d. All of the above
>>7760745
The whole land of the freely brave thing was about how individuality is defined through one's choices. The flaw in that reasoning is that most people will choose to do the exact same thing. Like if The Entertainment was real and people knew what it was, I think most people would "choose" to watch it because we've been conditioned by our culture to seek out the maximum amount of pleasure for the least work. And the ones who would choose not to would all do it for predictable reasons that'd all be the same.
Indivituality as expressed through preferences is a thing, but the human mind is limited in the number of preferences and ideas it can come up with so in practice there's no appreciable difference between the vast majority of people's minds.
WHAT THE FUCK is this board's literal obsession with this book?
Why do you people feel the need to endlessly talk about it? Every single day, multiple threads.
At first I thought it was just a troll or a ruse - but now it's beyond the fucking pale.
Seriously explain to me why this decently okay book is hailed as an omgmasterpiece on /lit/ & nowhere else.
>>7762428
No one thinks it's a masterpiece. It's just the most decent yet accessible thing written in the past 20 years so it's a meme because of that.
Would this be a meme book if big Dave hadn't offed himself?
>>7762446
It was already a bestseller years before that so yes. It's not like A Confederacy of Dunces which didn't even get published until after the author's suicide.
>>7762446
there would be a cult following of dave instead
Legit question: should i read this book?
>>7762456
>It was already a bestseller years before that so yes.
They mean in the context of /lit/, you fucking dweeb.
All the posts that don't "get" it - by non-Americans surely
It's by far the most enjoyable of /lit/ meme books, so there's that.
I was hoping for the 20th anniversary they would put out the original manuscript, with the 400+ cut pages restored.
>>7762601
>It's by far the most enjoyable of /lit/ meme books, so there's that.
This makes no sense to me at all. Unless you mean easiest to read.
>>7762613
I mean it is the most enjoyable of the three discussed most regularly here: it, Ulysses, and Gravity's Rainbow. None of them were all that hard to read.
>>7762748
Ya, that makes no sense to me. It would if you meant in the way that you could read IJ at the beach.
Any of the three can be read at the beach, Infinite Jest most enjoyably. If Ulysses made you laugh as much as Infinite Jest made me laugh, I'm nothing but happy for you, though.
>>7762601
other than Ulysses and GR I mean
>>7762806
Well, there aren't many more-enjoyable books than Infinite Jest, and those that might credibly rival it aren't really memes here.
The eye thing in the cover is interesting.The theory I had about Joelle's deformity is that she is the person Lenz refers to at one point in his rambles to Green, about a girl with one eye being born due to the Concavity radiation. Im not sure if it fits timewise but it would make some amount of sense since a lot of what Lenz says gets backed up by Steeply/Marathe's banter, plus it links somewhat to the Stork's annular research. (I haven't actually finished it yet, maybe it gets disproven later)
She's not.
I'm about 400 pages in, and I'm absolutely blown away by it. I had never been too big of a reader, but I guess I fell for the meme.
>how Orin really wants to boneSteeply
my fucking sides
I meant to get IJ, but the library only had Oblivion. Still pretty good though. I like how he uses the nigger word and talks about phenomena I thought only existed in my head.
IMHO, beyond the eschaton chapter, Infinite Jest is horrible. Spend your time reading something else, anything else. Read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann if you want a monumental book.
I'm sorry, but IJ was just page after page of awkward and stilted language. The Don Gately chapters were especially horrendous.
This is just one anons a opinions, but there is a mass hysteria and cult following around this book, and it borders on being absurd.
I can understand wanting to convey the postmodern condition; but, subjecting people to boring banal passages over and over in order to do so is borderline abusive.
>>7762866
>>7762366
>>7762266
>>7760388
Nice dubs.
>>7760222
Trips!
>>7763646
If people enjoyed The Magic Mountain half as much, they'd talk about it more.
>>7762440
>accessible
>massively overblown writing style and vacuous scene progression
>private lexicon has a higher count of obscure terms than that of hemingway's vocabulary in all his novels
>100 pages of endnotes
okee senpai
>>7762456
Wallace's suicide secured the novel a longer legacy. Had he merely grown old into obscurity, I doubt people would admire him as widely.
>>7763818
fuck's sake, ij can seem intimidating and unwieldy, but it's far from challenging once you get a bit into it. pretty simple language, not particularly deep, very entertaining.
>>7763849
First 300 pages are the set up. It's boring af with only 10% interesting scenes.
Next 300 pages are also boring, and are a plurality of descriptions of experimental videos. While boring, I personally enjoyed it because I've been waiting my entire life for such perversities to enter a major work of literature. I don't expect most reasonable readers to enjoy it though, and because the presentation was so artifical, I consider it fluff.
The last third rolled along nicely. I have few complaints with it, other than that there was no proper end (other than exegetic readings), and that the setup took too long without a truly rewarding final part.
Half of it is almost entirely shit. Should have only been the length of Moby Dick, which in turn would not be hurt from losing 1/3rd its whale blubber.
>>7763818
The length is the most "intimidating" thing about it. It's nowhere near as hard as you'd think. Also Hemingway makes no sense as a comparison because he's known for using a relatively simple lexicon and style.
>>7763880
no one is saying you had to. doesn't mean it's inaccessible tho
>>7763875
>>7763880
*Accidentally entered post
My point about Hemingway is that IJ's private vocabulary is larger than that used by a fully-fleshed language. With the time a person seriously studies IJ's lexicon--which only about 5% are really relevant, they could have learned the basics of another language.
>>7763883
That's IJ's fault though. It's not a particularly clever book, or even helpful for someone with experiences similar to DFW's. It merely makes DFW's feel smart. And they let themselves feel as much, while swallowing the shit that DFW smears down their throats.
>>7763890
*DFW's audience
^ Signs I need to fuck off and take a nap.
>>7763890
no one cares mang. you said it's inaccessible, that was my only gripe.
>>7763907
I'm not reading it to seem smart. I'm reading it cuz everyone's always tucking talking about it
I'm a slow reader, so it took me an entire fall to read.
It was enjoyable, albeit difficult to get into. Now I have no one to talk about it with because no one else I know (since graduating Uni) has actually finished it, if they even know about it.
10/10 would meme again, one day
>>7763952
cuz they wanna seem smart. most of the people who talk about it obviously haven''t read it
>>7763968
It's funny because it's a really easy book to read. I don't see why people haven't read it. I tried to read Ulysses and hated it. Was mad boring. I wouldn't say naked lunch is hard, but it's so boring and gay it becomes hard to read. Infinite jest is a cake walk. Just skip over most of the endnotes.
>>7763612
The meme is that it'sbad. The book is actually full of great stuff like that.
>>7763646
>the eschaton chapter
One of the worst parts until the actual fight broke out. Pages of esoteric geography and defense weapons terminology was not enjoyable to read.
>>7760431
I've read it too
The inside meme of us, people who have read IJ, is being silent about it and letting you plebs actually educate yourself
Then maybe posting sth insightful if someone wants to discuss it and not just post dank memes
>>7760352
I read the first 400 pages like 3 years ago, felt memed, quit. Not planning on revisiting it.
>>7762601
Fuck me, you mean that coked out bastard wrote even more than 1200 pages for this book? I'm on like page 720 or something and it's just fucking exhausting. At least it finally gets interesting around page 600 or so.
>>7764322
yeah cuz you fags are some special snowflakes right?
read IJ, it sucked.
>>7763818
you'r're just a pleb is all
I'm a newfag, been here a little over a month, when should I give IJ a shot, if ever? I'm not a complete layman, I read a lot as a kid and have a decently high IQ
>>7764541
said the pleb desu
>>7764544
yes
>>7764541
>/r/4chan
By the way, any one else thinks the New Sincerity is neither new (in fact, it's stylistically in-debt to its immediate predecessors, sort of like Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. It's after the fact, it's pandering) nor sincere?
New Sincerity- in all senses of that term- belongs to pic related. Not Jonathan Franzen and DFW.
If it isn't the funniest book of the last 50 years, I'd like to know what is.
>>7764544
Infinite jest is not hard to read Jesus Christmas. It's just long. Ulysses is hard to read. Infinite jest is simple.
>>7765197
Ulysses is comparatively difficult to make sense of, and a lot of people confuse that with great writing.
>>7765150
confederacy of dunces
>>7765729
Confederacy of Dunces has some light touches but it didn't make me laugh out loud. Now, Toole's first book, The Neon Bible, has a really funny last scene with the mom...
>>7765719
This, Joyce is a fucking horrible writer. DFW is Cervantes compared to Joyce.
