/lit/ - Literature

100 pages of confusion and then a few months of telling yourself you will totally pick it back up after you finish your current book

>>16444816
Tennis, drugs, unfulfillable expectations, addiction, isolation, loneliness, endnotes, big laughs, little laughs, frustration, unrealized potential, personal attacks that at first glance don't seem so personal until four hours later you are making dinner and thinking about a book made you cry because youre a total let down a pile of human garbage.

>>16444816
A marvelous, erudite, funny, sad, prescient, oddball, excellent novel.

>>16444816
Footnotes out the ass

>>16444816
certainly not discernable talent

>>16445018

>>16445018
Go back to sleep Bloom. Your reincarnation isn't due for another two generations.

>>16444828
This is pretty accurate.

>>16444828
Me except it's been 4 years.

>>16444828
took me 2 months to read it. i did skip a few pages tho, there's a part in the first quarter of the book where it's like 3 pages of pure ebonics that i could not for the life of me understand

>>16445221
What ?

>>16444816
Slow going for the first 300 pages. Then it clicks and you breeze through the rest.

>>16444816
Lots of fun (if you aren't filtered by the first couple hundred pages)

>>16445314
That part was fucking hilarious

>>16444828
Hello, me department?

>What am I in for ?
I don't think you're likely to finish it, or even to make to 100 pages. You should pick an easier book, or maybe just watch the latest Netflix original series instead.

>>16444816
Stockholm syndrome

>>16444828
Sort of me. Ive seen a lot of DFW interviews and I really like the ideas he said he tried to lay out in infinite jest. Yet when I read it, it seemed like a bunch of 90s edge-cringe, like a more verbose and academic Chuck Palahniuk or something.

That vivid description of the guy who suffocated to death because he was tied up with tape over his mouth and his nose got stuffy, or the wheelchair assassin gang who gets their legs run over by a moving train as an initiation ritual, and the gross clinical detail of day to day life in rehab. It just wasnt what I expected at all when I heard him talk about new sincerity, it came across as typical 90s "I'm sad and everything fukn sucks" Cobain/Palahniuk nihilism to me.

Its a shame because I like the idea of his ideas, and of the 150 pages or so I read there were definitely some top tier passages that I just had to stop and admire because they were so well written. But I just dont think I could persevere through 1000 pages of that.

>>16446497
>typical 90s "I'm sad and everything fukn sucks" Cobain/Palahniuk nihilism
What's wrong with that?

>>16446516
I thought "new sincerity" was supposed to be a reaction to that type of thinking.

>>16446523
New sincerity was going against multiple levels of meta irony from decades of tv. Being honest about being sad and how things in the word make you upset, I’d portray correctly, is sincere. He wasn’t saying we should all pop a Xanax and be happy about everything. He was tired of what basically shitposting on 4chan is. I don’t know if this is meant to be taken in good faith or not, so subsequently I will not reply in good faith, but the hundreds of eyes that will judge my post will be in on the joke that the first poster could have been in good faith and the second one could have too, giving rise to four different interpretations of that interaction, and each of the hundred eyes seeing those two posts think they are in on the joke, no matter what combination. Add some esoteric frog that only makes sense if you knew the entire history of Pepe, and you have what television was like or him. His attempts were to use the tools of post modern writing to express themes from a more traditional literary background, and I think he did a decent job at that. I dunno, I assume that even if you aren’t filtered by the book, it isn’t for everyone, and I know for me personally there were a few sections back to back that really just hit uncomfortably close to home regarding my issues of addiction and wasted potential.

>>16444816
So is this book a meme or is it genuinely good?

>>16446604
I read the first two chapters and it was some of the most pretentious garbage I'd ever read

>>16446497
>>16446523
>>16446590
I thought when people were referring to New Sincerity, they were just referring to this IJ quote:
>It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent...

>...Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

>>16446609
filtered

>>16446616
I dont think I read far enough to get to that passage, I've only listened to him talk about it in interviews. But yes, that is a based social critique that is still relevant today. I guess I just don't like the direction he takes it of hyperfocusing on everything negative within ourselves and the world around us. I mean, I know plenty of people who both view the world with hipsterish ironic detachment and who seem overly preoccupied with focusing on why everything sucks, one definitely isnt an antidote to the other.

Oh well, guess the novel just isnt for me.

>>16444816
Ostentatious

>>16446659
>I guess I just don't like the direction he takes it of hyperfocusing on everything negative within ourselves and the world around us.
Yeah it is a bummer, and once you read enough of IJ it immediately becomes clear why he killed himself. I don't know if you read that passage in the book where there's a lady speaking at an AA meeting and she's talking about how when she was young her little retarded and deformed sister would get raped right next to her every night, and her dad would put on a wig to make her look like Raquel Welch, and how she (the speaker) would have an unspoken agreement with the father to take the wig off her little sister and clean up the semen so that the mother doesn't find her like that. What's fucking awful is that the WHOLE moral of that tediously lengthy and extremely nausea inducing scene is just to point out that it doesn't matter what your background is, blaming anything but yourself for your addiction is the wrong way to go about it from an AA perspective. That's it. I would have gotten the point had he told me right away, or had the story been 10x less vivid. It's a common trait among depressives (or maybe it's just because he's a skilled writer?), the ability to go straight down deep dark holes like that

>>16445314
The fuckin ebonics in this book is bizarre. I've never seen a black person, either in life or in media, who speaks the way we writes poor black people.

>>16446706
Guess I noped out at the right time then.

>>16446706
>common trait among depressives
thanks I didn't realize that not everyone is like this.