/lit/ - Literature

>>16863336
I actually wrote this copypasta and several others

>be freshman in college, first week of first semester
>only book i've ever read outside of high school was Infinite Jest, I never read any real literature. I was not aware it was regarded as such a meme book in the literary world. I genuinely thought it was the #1 greatest book ever written, and I only read like 3 books, 4 if you count that i read IJ twice.
>i would talk about it at parties with girls.
>i would bring it up in my english lit class, question why it isn't on the syllabus, i'd call out, interrupt the class. i'd go to office hours and try to bring it up to my instructor in front of the other graduate research assistants and they all just looked at me like i was insane
>no matter what the topic was in any essay, i'd connect it to IJ somehow, mainly because I viewed literature as 99% Infinite Jest and 1% people making poor attempts to create something as good (meanwhile having zero points of comparison to IJ)
>my breaking point was when i attended a seminar from some famous lit professor. he said something along the lines of Infinite Jest being good, and everyone laughed, and he smiled, as if he was sarcastic and I was really confused.
>i straight up interrupted him and asked "um why was that funny?"
>i saw a few of the grad research assistants from office hours stifling their laughter, i felt something was up
>speaker says "well it's a good book but the people who rave about it only do so because they've never read much else, like upper class white kids."
>fuming i say "that's not true at all"
>speaker says "if you rave about it, have you even read Pretentious Angst by Ernest Milton?"
>i blindly respond "of course i have, it's a classic"
>the entire room bursts into booming laughter
>i look around completely dumbfounded
>after 30 seconds of loud laughter which felt like an eternity, i'm beat red, speaker says "if you're still confused, that's neither a real book nor author, case in point."
>i storm out, switch majors the next day
>4 years later, senior year, at a bar talking to a qt3.14, she says she's an english major, i'm a marketing major, i bust her balls for not having any job security (100% taking out years of my STEM roommate busting MY balls about job security)
>her friend arrives, also an english major
>"oh i remember you, you're the Infinite Jest guy!"
>she tells her friend the story about the seminar and what i'd do in freshman lit class
>qt3.14 says "and now you're a marketing major, lecturing me about job security and commercialism. you've literally become the very thing Wallace criticizes in Infinite Jest", and they both laugh
>i storm out
>creates 2 year existential crisis i've yet to recover from