300 pages in…. When does it get good?
after your bong hit transplant
>>25206909Every time I see this, I think, what the fuck could Kojima do with IJ? He makes DFW look like Shakespeare.
>>25206909>one of the main characters is an honest-to-goodness glow-in-the-dark CIA nigger trannyDFW was decades ahead of his time
I'm sick and tired of the whole "Kojima is a creator of artistic masterpieces" meme
>>25206909I'm glad Kojima is finally developing another stealth action game. He sure took his goddamn time.
>>25206980Is he? It will suck—not that I even play games anymore but I just know it. The faggot hasn’t made a good game in over 20 years.
>>25206979>objective facts are a meme
>>25207010
>>25207010Back to /v/ with you.
Wait... we didn't all unanimously agree years ago that Infinte Jest is the #1 poster boy book for "tryhard pseudointellectual performative faggot" literature?
>>25207037>we
>>25207047Yes, redditor. "We"
Infinite Jest performative and trite this; David Foster Wallace no discernible talent that. Does no one actually talk about this book in earnest anymore?
>>25207050the absolute irony of your post
>>25206909You haven't really started until you've hit the Joelle chapter.
>>25207068>ummmm, yikesFuck off, trannitor
>>25206909If you are not liking it yet you should probably stop now. With that being said, the last 300 hundred pages or so are the best part.
Try to make it to the Eschaton chapter though, probably one of the best chapters in the whole book.
>>25207201>the Joelle chapter.That, right on the hysterical cusp where internalized rage can so easily shift to externalized rage, the mother had hurled the -pH flask at the Daddy, who'd reflexively ducked; and that the rotter, one Orin, right behind, a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis — dazed and bradykinetic from the sudden venting of so many high-pressure repressive family systems — open for a direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity. And that it had been everyone's failure to press any charges that had liberated the mother from Southeast-KY custody and allowed her access once again to her home's kitchen, where, apparently despondent, she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal — first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.>first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.I think about this a lot
It’s nice to see some geniune DFW discussion here, all I’ve been seeing lately is endless bashing by people who haven’t read him.
>>25207353not that one, the first one. the best chapter in the entire book
The chapter where he talks about how absolutely fucked and desperate you have to be to decide that joining a cult like organization like AA is not only reasonable but your only hope has always stuck with me.
>>25206909I really admire LD Wallace's originality in combining the meme video game guy with the meme book.
>>25207037This was briefly a thing in the 00's, then women felt insecure about not being able to read Infinite Jest so they used it to launch a campaign against the "lit bro." Said lit bros overall wanted to be agreeable so most reprogrammed their thoughts to regard DFW as "good intentioned but ultimately cringe/white" and also "entry level" even though nobody reads him anymore. That's where the "tryhard pseud" association comes from: a Jezebel campaign against men who read big books who haven't been a cultural force for over a decade, because of women. Now people are curious about him again because they realize, consciously or not, that he was the last great white male author. Great in terms of fame that is, I'm a fan but not arguing about the quality here.
>>25207056People don't even appreciate good prose. It's not like they can remove the actual work from the social context of the people who read it.And the entire "performative male" angle is funny to me. Maybe I'm a shut in, but I've never met a person that's read Infinite Jest. I've met people who were reactionary to DFW and were self-proclaimed Bret Easton Ellis fans or liked Pynchon--themselves having no actual literary talent or noticeable discernment of what makes a good book, so apparently they just offshore that skill and the labor to cultivate that skill to the authors themselves--but not a single DFW fan. I'm much more likely to meet people that pretend to read difficult continental philosophy or maybe something like Finnigan's Wake, but never more obscure authors. Nobody pretends to like William Gaddis, for example (you'd need to actual read to be familiar with the name). Even DFW isn't popular enough to compel refutation other than in clinically online circles parroting a meme because (1) people read books less than ever and (2) the publishing industry is too catered to women reading books about gay hockey players slipping their cocks into each other. They don't publish decent fucking fiction.Jesus, at least his sense of voice was good. IJ was good, the Pale King was enjoyable, albeit unfinished, and Brief Interviews was good. He's overall a good author, and it's been the better part of a decade since I read him last.
>>25208125You obviously didn’t go to college. Every second person has heard of DFW there. In my postmodern lit course, we spent an entire lecture talking about meta modernism.
>>25208126When were you in college? By the time I went to college, most people had received the DFW bad update.
>>25208126I'm not giving out personal information, but if you knew where I went to school the top of your skull would be blown off from how ironic a claim like that actually is. Maybe every other person majoring in the humanities fields have heard of Wallace, but any time I heard people casually talking about media, it was music, less frequently television, and (rarer still) movies.I didn't know very many literary types, but they were all more engaged in talking about Theory than specific authors, unless they were reading them currently or they were specific favorites.
>>252081522017-2022. I was in a phd I couldn’t be bothered finishing. The faculty got mad at me for rehabilitating Ezra Pound. There were at least 3 dudes who wouldn’t shut up about DFW at any given time. >>25208169Sorry that you went to a shit school, anon. It sounds like you’re either less than 25, in which case you should GTFO and Lurk Moar, or you’re a liar. Everyone knows who DFW is. >muh theoryDFW was obsessed with literary theory and opened the flood gates for this garbage. His first novel was about Derrida-Searle debates, retard.
>>25208186That surprises me. I was in school from 2010-2014 and everyone knew who DFW was, but you have to know who he is to repeat the opinion that he's a litbro. I wasn't aware of anybody actually reading him, but I wasn't in the English department. Most English phds I knew were researching coloniality.
>>25206979Basically every game he's had complete control over has been complete garbage. He's hasn't been involved with a single good game since 2004. It's also weird that so many of his fans haven't even played more than a few hours of his games and almost none of them have completed any of them.
Lit bros ruined DFW. Now it’s our turn to rehabilitate him
>>25208206Depends where you are. If your faculty focuses on that, then you’re going to get more of it. We had a mixed bag of various strands of thought, but my supervisor focused on postmodernism and modernism, so he had a fairly broad list of topics he’d cover, including Pynchon and speculative materialism and Marxism and Blanchot and whatever.
>>25208186>everyone has heard of DFW>your school was shit>btw I was studying for my PhD with an implied focus on literatureAnd people say academia is a myopic enterprise.
>>25208215none of these people have ever spoken to a man about literature
>>25208240You’re on the literature board where as laud the literary lifestyle. You’ve got to be expecting that I am more well-read and better than you.
>>25206909The Interdependence Day puppet-show and Don Gately AA meetings part. You're getting close. Of course, it's good from the start, but that's when it all really started to click for me on the first read-through and I started really having fun reading it.People meme about IJ being hard, but really if you put in some level of effort, it's really a fun and breezy novel that crams a huge amount of substance into its 1000 pages especially considering how accessible most of the book is.If you quit right now, you will hate it, but if you finish it you'll finish excited to read it again.
>>25208273>really>really>really>really I'm not at the top of my linguistic game today
>>25208254Yeah, I hopped into this thread expecting someone with aspbergers to try and dunk on me for the accomplishment of dropping out of a PhD program. Maybe one day I'll grow up to be as self-aware as you.
>>25208215Context is important. The line in question is a tattoo that one of the Ennet House residents has, if I remember correctly. DFW explicitly states that tattoos are one of the indelible long-term consequences that the addicts will have to live with for the rest of their lives, even in sobriety. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but a line like that being a permanent tattoo almost seems to represent a perpetual state of adolescent melodrama. Given the novel's recurring motif of regression to childhood/infancy, trauma, stunted development, etc. that might be what DFW intended. Or else he was just poking a bit of fun at teenage angst.it's like if someone is making political posts where he quotes Johnny Gentle unironically and believes that's what DFW is saying about politics.
>>25208297>aspbergers Nice spelling, retard.
