/lit/ - Literature

So I have a friend who works at a bookstore, and this elderly lady come in. She asks my friend, "Do you have a separate section for The Great Classics?"
"Well, what do yo mean? Are you looking for American Classics, continental classics, etc."
"No, like the Great Gatsby!"

That's the same fucking thing they said about The Recognitions; IMO, IJ will be like an anti-Recognitions: great reviews when it came out, trashed later.

>>4034310
>IJ will be like an anti-Recognitions: great reviews when it came out, trashed later.

It's been 17 years, man. It still gets praise. I'm pretty sure it will go down as a great novel.

When was the last time this board didn't have at least one thread going about this fucking book?

What exactly are you accusing him of? Attempting to write a good book?

>>4034314
Someone in another thread talked about how Giles Goat Boy had the same bloated fame when it first came out, but it's now forgotten and mostly disliked.

As for my thoughts on the book, its a cruel, long joke (hence infinite jest). It never gives the reader the satisfaction of seeing the plot resolve and characters meet, making its point about our addiction to entertainment in the most cruel way it could. It's melodramatic and parts, very overwritten, all the characters have pretty much the same, verbose dialogue (except when he tries to imitate slang, which usually turns out awfully), and despite his anti-pomo-aestheticism, he never misses the opportunity to overuse metafictional tricks and throw not-so-subtle allusions everywhere. Its only redeeming qualities are the characterization, plot, and points it makes, the former two never being satisfied because of the third.

>>4034334
>Its only redeeming qualities are the characterization, plot, and points it makes,

So you're saying its only redeeming qualities are all the things that matter in a novel.

>>4034335
How exactly is Atonement designed with the express purpose of becoming part of the western canon? It's a fucking amazing novel, but it doesn't feel like it should be in any canon tbh, even though I genuinely love it.

>>4034329
My sentiments

>>4034329
I'm accusing him of attempting to write a book that would become the darling of critics and Ivy League English departments due to its density and needlessly complex structure, instead writing a book that would convey anything particularly worthwhile, meaningful, or even entertaining.

>>4034496
well you're wrong.

>>4034314
people are just now finishing it

>>4034496
I found it worthwhile, meaningful and very entertaining. Oh wow I guess this discussion has reached an impasse, unless you plan to tell me my experience of the book was 'wrong' because it didn't match yours.

Not really on topic, but anyone ITT might appreciate this I found the other day. I havn't read it but, hey, it might be good.

http://www.academia.edu/4252554/Alex_Moran_DFW_Thesis

>>4034346

I've read Atonement. Whose atonement do you think the title refers to?

>>4034496

If that's the case Joyce beat him to it by about 70 years.

>>4036611

Double spacing might be just about the ugliest thing in the universe.

/lit/ suddenly hates IJ. What happened?

>>4036635

Yeah, it makes it look less like something to read, and more like something that's someone's work. I suppose that's because it is.

>>4036642
Overhype. We talk about it too much. Plus there is constant trolling. I would seriously doubt that more than 10% of /lit/'s regulars have even read it. I myself have only got about a third of the way through and put it on hold.

>>4036648

Same. I found it kind of bland apart from the references to philosophy.

>>4036642

I remember when /lit/ loved DFW and IJ. Then /lit/ started to hate him and it. Basically, yeah, it got to a point where it became too popular and too brought up on the board to the point where it was like a meme-- basically Aeroplane over the Sea to /mu/--so people decided to start jumping on the hate bandwagon.

I have actually read IJ in its entirety. It took me like 5 months, but I got through it and I enjoyed it.

I think probably 5% of /lit/ regulars have actually read the damn thing cover to cover. 40% to Half have probably given it a shot and gotten to page 300 or so or maybe half way if they're intrepid. But that's not going to stop people from having opinions.

The OP's topic question is clearly loaded, and he is not posing it in order to have an honest discussion. He has his mind made up and he will not change it. Honestly I don't disagree with him. But it's not as if that fact invalidates the work itself.

>>4034496
See you are clearly one of the people who has either never read IJ or read the first couple chapters and put it down. For the most part, Infinite Jest is actually quite readable and written in a layman's style. If you have actually read there would be absolutely no denying that this is the truth.

Just admit you, twat. You didn't read the fucking book. You're going off perception and decide to throw out a stupid little opinion. Stop doing that. It's not fair to the author or the work.

What do you gain for yourself by blindly hating an author you've never read?

>>4036642
Anti-hype. 4chan is nothing if not contrarian.

>>4036648
>I would seriously doubt that more than 10% of /lit/'s regulars have even read it.
>>4036667
>I think probably 5% of /lit/ regulars have actually read the damn thing cover to cover.

That never used to be the case. I guess the DFW fans (i.e. the original /lit/ posters, the people who made this a somewhat cool place to hang out a few years ago) have been scared off by the shitposters.

>>4034334
I find the novel entertaining to read but I really don't feel teased and I don't really feel the need for the plot to get going anywhere.

But besides that what an inelegant stylist DFW is. His prose is as clumsy as his person and has the same sense of style as a mid-western.

I believe that's what's gonna sink the novel in the long run: it has no aesthetic merit because it is written by a man who never understood aesthetics.

The whole DFW act seems to me only "pretend to be smart + put some sentimentality" with the result that he often comes out as cheesy and not that smart.
So in the end all the novel manages to be is entertaining.

>>4036769
>I find the novel entertaining to read but I really don't feel teased and I don't really feel the need for the plot to get going anywhere.

The plot does tie up roughly. Pretty hastily and a tad sloppy but it does. Be sure to read the first chapter again immediately after finishing the book.

>>4036769
>The whole DFW act seems to me only "pretend to be smart + put some sentimentality" with the result that he often comes out as cheesy and not that smart. So in the end all the novel manages to be is entertaining.

The thing is that DFW was a big fucking smarty pants McSmart. Probably too smart for his own good. He was very self conscious and self aware and always inside his own head and I think he cared *immensely* what people thought about him, his work and just as a person.

To be honest, I think it's actually more "pretend to NOT be smart." DFW was very wary of being thought of as pretentious. He wanted to be "cool" and funny, but at the same time he was basically a genius and couldn't help himself laying on the smarter-than-thou stuff.

>>4036794
I really don't think he was that smart: when I read IJ I'm thoroughly unimpressed because I see how easy it is to pull those tricks.
He is certainly smarter and more cultured then your common college educated kid but I have the feeling that a lot of people are duped by his paper thin references and his mocking the academic writing (like the titles of the essays at the beginning of IJ).

While reading it I never had for a moment of being in the presence of a sublime intellect, like for example when one reads Thomas Mann or Robert Musil.

This book is awful.

Nobody actually reads it, they pretend to. Kind of like Ulysses.

>>4036805
Yeah, I've done a lot of maths and physics through college and the way he sort of name drops concepts made it seem pretty clear to me that he's not so much someone who knows things as someone who knows of things. I sort of took it as another quirk of the world that the book occurs in, though, and it didn't seem so clumsy.

Later on I read some of his short stories and it looks like something he just couldn't help doing.

Has anyone else actually read the book? I would like to discuss it sometime but I don't think anyone else on /lit/ has read it

>>4036811
I've read both.

>>4034299
Just googled this(Not an american so I didn't know it). So this is just a rip-off of a Monthy Phyton Sketch?

>>4036805
Not evey symbol needs to be as deep as Mariana's Trench, and if they are any deeper than a puddle on a sidewalk, then they are probably too deep.
Why is it so uncool to say exactly what you mean?

>>4034342
>obviously hasn't read the rest of the post

The plot and characterization are basically negated because he had to make a point, and there's a lot of other bad parts about it.

>>4036811
you're a colossal faggot. i hope you know that.

>>4036856
I don't think it's uncool. I think that's the idea DFW had and unconvinced everyone that it's uncool and then that he was the hero fighting against it.

Mann and Musil are very sincere authors.

>>4036805
>>4036881
well let's face it mate, not many people are as prodigiously talented as musil and mann. that's an unfair standard to hold anyone to. furthermore, i don't think dfw was quite as ambitious as them either, so he didn't even need the equivalent of their talent to achieve what he set out to.

>>4036833
I used to volunteer at a scientific journal while in college so I learned how easy it is just to look at a couple of abstracts and generate new ones.

I remember this one year when all the papers where about fuzzy logic controllers and networks.

>>4034496
>departments due to its density and needlessly complex structure
It's not at all dense or complex, you fucking troglodyte. It's a fucking sci-fi book with all the depth of a second-rate PKD, for fuck's sake.

>>4036967
your facile criticism has convinced me

>>4036974
Not that anon but anyone who finds infinite jest convoluted is a pleb.

Anyone who bemoans infinite jest for not being a straightforward entertainment realist novel is twice a pleb.

And for fucks sake stop using the adjective meaningful. I'm starting to believe that the word meaningful is the mark of the suburban bourgeois, it's like telling the whole world that you bought a print of kinkade at wall mart and you are now browsing for a frame so that you can hang it inn your living room next to the tv framed by a souvenir eiffel tower and a porcelain angel. So middle class it hurts.

>>4036805
>>4036833

Lol, You realize when DFW was in undergrad his focus was on modal logic and math.

>>4036835

I actually really truly have. Ditto Ulysses and I ain't even lying. Come at me, brothers.

I was wondering about this the other day. People used to write for excellent reasons: sharing life experiences, digging aspects of life, exploring ideas that may affect life, etc.

It always had to do with life as people know it.

Then, in the 20th century, literature became about itself. A sad form of cannibalism. Why?

The answer is simple.

In the 18th century, many great writers were military men, colonels, soldiers, etc. They had quite eventful lives and have things to say from their experiences.

Noble people were often writers too because they had time to devote to that. You need time for great literature. Who has time nowadays?

>lit students

These literature students are basically children who go to school and study great writers, but have no lives of their own.

I'm not trying to be a bitch here, I'm explaining why the writer who was/is a lit student will tend to trust his own life less than the books he's read, assuming that the better books he reads, the better a writer he may become, rather than focusing on his own experience of life and his contemporaries.

Thus, you end up with intelligent young people who write like Poe or Joyce and wonder why they don't get published.

Similarly, irrational hate of ANY successful book will happen: hate Twilight, hate Fight Club, hate Harry Potter, hate Stephen King, etc.

Scorn is a contemporary's privilege. Nobody will scorn Stephen King in 5 centuries. Just like nobody scorns Herman Melville today (if you do scorn him, you do so aware that you're in a striking minority, not yet the case for King).

Now, the canon thing, it's from the same roots. Great books and literature in general evolves, through history, etc, but not necessarily so consciously, and not necessarily because of literature itself. Modernism came about because of world wars and advancing technology: Joyce and Woolf didn't just make it up in their garage. They were reacting to life, no literature.

What I see nowadays is authors reacting to books, not life, not history. This is very understandable now that the entire world is connected via Internet and the media, even though that connection has shown its limits.

Along with this fload of information came this individual filter: you may live right next to someone, but because your interests vary, you may never watch or read the same things. We live in a completely different world.

The same happened to painting: it's completely dead now. It started cannibalising itself and now there's nothing left to eat, and those who'd stay true to their roots are mocked.

Same with popular novels and writers. That's how art dies, it acts like it's its own thing and cuts all connections with life. That never works. Even less so for literature, which uses language, which is a consensus. A red stain will always be a red stain no matter how you call it; it's a thing in itself, but words aren't like that.

Solution: man the fuck up, write good stories, stop caring about canons and scholars and c-

>>4037012

-itics. They were wrong about Melville and many others. They don't matter.

Come at me bros.

Also, how do I become a tripfag?

>>4034305

>Sorry, elderly lady, your world had class and knew what was shit and what was not, but we no longer make that difference because it hurts people's feelings. We're more delusional than you will ever be when senility kicks off for you.

>>4037014
>Also, how do I become a tripfag?

Don't. Go back to where ever you came from.

>>4037006
Mine was history and philosophy of math.
It takes no effort to open a journal and copy and abstract as he was doing.
The point is that even though I knew what he was talking about I didn't get anything from his name drop. So even less informative must have been for people that didn't even know what transformational grammar is.

So what was the point of that lingo? To make his character appear a genius. The problem is that your character is only be as much of a genius as you are.

>>4037018

I didn't come from anywhere. I was here before /lit/ even existed.

I'm gonna become a tripfag and speak righteous words. I'm gonna be /lit/'s Batman.

>>4037020

We need more Hemingway in this century.

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay."

What are relevant plots today?

>plot
>I see you from afar
>you're about to rage
>this is a sensitive point, isn't it
>I think you hate plots because you're braindead

>>4037018

Am I a tripfag yet?

>>4037043

Show me how easiy it is to crack someone's tripfagness.

>>4037012
Well your view is just historically false and comes from a certain prejudice that is embedded in some national literatures, especially american.

It is the same literature that built a cult of authenticity that starts from emerson, goes through crane and hemingway. In fact authenticity if you notice and real life are less of a preoccupation in europe (even if heidegger is the one that really thematized it).

But as I was saying it is false. All of literature was always responding to literature.

Don Quixote is basically a response to literature. Shakespeare often took inspiration from previous works and authors.
Dangerous Liaisons by Laclos is a constant reference to other literature (Richardson and Rousseau mostly). Stendhal too opens the red and the black with Sorel reading and Sorel will be extremely influential on Wilde. And that's without even moving to the modernists and people like T.S. Eliot who believed that all literature is just relation to the literary tradition.

Again I'm sorry but what you say is just not true.

>>4036642
>>4036648
>>4036667

Any thread about DFW is almost always unanimously positive. /lit/ doesn't hate IJ at all. Just because some people have a different opinion to you doesn't mean they're trolling or trying to be edgy.

>>4036994
how the fuck did a discussion about Infinite jest turn into you claiming class superiority?

>>4037050

I was exaggerating, to see what people would say in return; I generally get more interesting answers if I say something way out there rather than a well thought-out banality.

Most of what I said applies far better to paintings than to literature.

People still read, but people go far less to painting galleries, and when they do, it's only for classic painters, not new ones, unless they're wealthy and want to invest in contemporary art.

Hope you guys like my tripfag name. See ya around.

>>4034496
>attempting to write a book that would become the darling of critics and Ivy League English departments

The irony is that after nearly two decades at university in the English department, I had never heard of Wallace before I came to this board.

I don't know if America worships this man, but in Europe, he's pretty unknown.

>>4037063
Actually art fares better than literature.
The art market it's still a great place for conspicuous consumption, money laundering and tax evasion.

>>4037079

Economically, perhaps, but that's not what I'm talking about here.

The art's health is what I meant.

Why are there so few famous living painters?

Are paintings a thing of the past?

Everyone knew Picasso when Picasso was alive; nowadays, if someone knows HR Giger (pronounced geeger, not guy-ger, by the way), that's already an accomplishment in itself.

Do YOU guys have any favourite living painters?

There's Giger for me, and some nonfamous painter from Canada whose work I really like.

Pic related.

>>4037093
Try Gerhard Richter

>>4037104

I gues Bob Ross was the most influen painter of the second half of the 20th century.

>>4037134

>influent

>>4037104

I'm checking his website.

Am I correct in saying that this painting was used by Sonic Youth?

I forget which album... Never a big fan. Nice painting, though.

>>4037143

Sotheby's, London, UK - 27 February 2008

Estimate:
£ 1,800,000 - 2,500,000
$ 3,521,815 - 4,891,410

Sold For:
£ 7,972,500 Prem

Well, shit... How do I into the art world?

>>4037143
http://youtu.be/BKMD8vI1MaM

Post more Sonic Youth songs that are this good and better!

Thanks.

>>4037148
gt gd scub

>>4037148
Move to new york, get an unpaid internship in a gallery, start sucking curators' and critics' cock.

No metaphorically, literally. They don't care about how good is your art, they care about how pretty is your mouth.

>>4037050
You've confused a 'cult of authenticity' with the accurate observation that contemporary writing only comes out of the experiences of petty bourgeois idleness, and by and large it is suited to the narrow tastes, experiences and psychology of a class of superfluous men. If you want to know why 'literature' as such is in decline it is due to its own insularity. Of course you can always delude yourself about it going ignored by your social inferiors, so you'll likely ignore my post in favor of another strawman.

>>4037199

I have a beard. I guess that's that for my art career.

>>4037202

I like that guy.

You should take a tripfaggy name too.

>>4037230
I was going for the "manipulative, smug and self-serving" troll angle there. Would a trip help in this endeavor?

>>4037202
What you are saying cannot be true.
Because if what you say would be true than the middle east should have the greatest literary community in the world since they are living in the most eventful part of the world.

The generation that was entering their teens during the balkan war now they should be masters of literature.

But this is not the case.

Great literature, as great art, always comes from superfluous men because art in itself it is the cherishing of what is superfluous. Practical men don't cherish art, ornament and beauty exactly because art is that which has value by being useless.

If anything is the cause of today's low quality in the art first of all is poor education and attention payed to the humanities.

Second it is this attitude that wants literature to be in touche with life/reality/the common people and make it the instrument of some political project or populist message.

What damages literature is not wanting to let literature be an art in itself, the desire to obtain from it something other than great art.

If you want great art let it be. Great art is always the result of a lifelong monomaniacal dedication to the art. And for this to happen one needs leisure and time.

If you don't believe me just look at how uneventful the life of some of our greatest writers was. Proust, Cervantes, Shakespeare are just some of the examples.

Don't get me wrong: an eventful life does help. It certainly helped Rousseau and Hemingway. But one does not have to make the mistake of believing it is a precondition.

>>4037171

youtube.com/watch?v=q2ovGHzvuWw

Sonic Youth covering Neil Young. You're welcome.

>>4037304

I'm listening to the Daydreaming Nation album.

>>4037274
>Because if what you say would be true than the middle east should have the greatest literary community in the world since they are living in the most eventful part of the world.

Events in themselves don't create "great literature". The social strife in the Middle East may yet yield some great works, but those oh so boring and philistine people are actually engaged in something as trite and commonplace as political struggle. Le Sigh.

>If anything is the cause of today's low quality in the art first of all is poor education and attention payed to the humanities.

There have never been more people in human history pouring more hours into the professional study of the humanities. You're deluded if you think this education is of low quality in terms of both the breadth and depth of study.

>Great literature, as great art, always comes from superfluous men because art in itself it is the cherishing of what is superfluous.

*sigh*

>Practical men don't cherish art, ornament and beauty exactly because art is that which has value by being useless.

This is a lazy stereotype couched in flowery language. You seem to be creating an artificial dichotomy between practical men and a class capable of possessing a sense of aesthetics. What happens here is the usual routine of subtly cloaking your class chauvinism in an insipid defense of one of the highest pursuits the world has to offer.

It's emblematic of the very problem I have with what you might broadly term the 'literary establishment' and the culture of privileged twats it serves.

I mean hey, I guess if your aesthetic standards come out of this insular, decadent class and nowhere else you can't help but define aesthetics as by and large a province of superfluity and 'impracticality'. A simple thought like engaging the external world can't help but be an affront to this ethos, because it amounts to a circuitous rationale to remain firmly within the ivory tower.

>>4037274
>Practical men don't cherish art, ornament and beauty exactly because art is that which has value by being useless.

You must not know many practical men.

>doctors read novels
>physicists watch movies
>they all love nice cars
>nice houses

I can't agree with most of what you're saying. Art isn't valued by being useless.

>>4037274
>Second it is this attitude that wants literature to be in touche with life/reality/the common people and make it the instrument of some political project or populist message.

I really hope you can appreciate the idea that serving a political end isn't a recipe for poor aesthetics. "Art ought to be more political" -- if that's your thing, then yeah, sure, why not?

I guess what I'm saying is, the idea that there's something intrinsically wrong or un-aesthetic about populism is closer to a symptom than the disease itself. There's no lack of emphasis on craft or a broad understanding of aesthetic devices or literary history in the world, but rather a lack of engagement with the world outside it. It creates works by and for a narrow group of individuals who then lament that "no one but us appreciates this stuff!", who to varying degrees attribute this to the philistinism of mass literacy or 'the media'.

Of course, in attributing it to these factors they play the same game every other little petty faction in society does ... but hey whatever helps you elude self criticism and tiresome nonsense like human interaction.

>>4034299
>desperately
i think you misunderstood the book buddy

>>4036769
seems like you're an insecure faggot w. unchecked projection

>>4034334
>Someone in another thread talked about how Giles Goat Boy had the same bloated fame when it first came out, but it's now forgotten and mostly disliked.

Its fame was never this bloated and it's not nearly as disliked as IJ is by the people who dislike it, and it's a much better book

>>4037326
Well you see: I talk about books and I talk about authors. You talk about class and privilege. And that's because you are an ideologue. You are not interested on understanding what makes good literature but what ideas serve your particular political vision.

>>4037328
Have you seen how most of those people dress?
And curious that if they cherish the arts so much they consistently cut the humanities budget.

>>4037342
I do agree that political engagement is not equal to poor aesthetics.
There is a lot of very political works I love.
The human condition by malraux, the italian resistance novels like Fontamara, Calvino's Path to the Spiders' Nest or even the novels by Upton. Heck I even like the full fledged populism of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

What I think is damaging is to pretend it to be there, is to require authors to pass an ideological litmus test to be viable for circulation.

And similarly requesting more relevance from the authors will only damage them. Often, not always, great authors are untimely, they are not writing for this generation.
It's great if a writer manages to speak to great audiences in the way sartre, mann and mishima managed to do. It's great if an author manages to be the organic intellectual gramsci talked about.

But to expect that is to expect great personality to be subservient to the tastes and expectations of the majority. To expect that is to be able to accept great talent only if it comes packaged in great marketability. And there is no reason to do that. There is no reason to expect that great literary talent has to come with charisma, looks and morality.

>>4037365
Read it next to Gaddis and Fitzgerald and tell me that DFW's prose isn't simply clumsy.

>>4037012
>What I see nowadays is authors reacting to books, not life,

sounds like you haven't been keeping up with the 'alt lit' scene

>>4037418
The alt lit scene is authors reacting to memes and tumblr posts, and not life.

Also it's shit.

>>4037423
No and no

>>4037455
They just
showed the
World's
smallest
adult butt
on tv...
it was weird

>S. Roggenbuck

Yeah...your point?

>>4037467
Roggenbuck isn't representative of th emovement as a whole.

>>4037455
From a random twat on shabby doll house:

when you leave i don’t watch you go, when you leave i walk across a bridge in a cold european city, when you leave i look at my kitchen and the food you left behind, i make a mental list, five kiwis, a tin of herring, a little block of goats cheese, rice cakes, half a packet of feta cheese, a jar of coffee, i eat two of your kiwis and think of all the fruits you have made me try for the first time; peaches, pineapple, kiwi

>>4037472
this really isn't all that bad.

>>4037060
I don't browse this board very often but whenever I see a thread about IJ or DFW in general the vast majority of people post hate comments.
Just a year ago this wasn't half as bad as it is now.

>>4037470
Tao Lin is their best writer and that says it all.
But the ironic fact is that he is not even that in touch with real life. Just because he puts gchat and macs and tumblr posts in his book does not make him connected to real life. He has no awareness of the world and certainly does not try to represent it.

I mean Franzen is much more in touch with reality than any of the alt lit movement.

>>4037423
>memes and tumblr posts

Which is life now

>>4037479
>Tao Lin is their best writer

I don't think that's true, and your saying that only shows how out of touch you are witht he movement

>>4037012
Nothing you have said is original; in fact, it's just a drawn out version of "live first, then write!"

You sound like a child who has a fetish for Ernest Hemingway (man the fuck up, mention of military men, 'muh experience).

>Joyce and Woolf didn't just make it up in their garage. They were reacting to life, no literature.

What the fuck are you saying

>>4037498

Are you one of these people who think being "original" binds you to greatness? Hilarity!

>live first, then write

I see nothing wrong with that.

>You sound like a child

Ad hominem! I can do that too because... you sound like a bitch.

Hemingwas never in the military, by the way, he was a nurse. That's his nurse uniform.

Neither Joyce nor Woolf lived anything much besides bourgeois lifestyles. I join Conrad in his criticism of them.

>>4037489
Who shoul i look into? No Crispin best or calloway.

>>4037485
When you are a teenager living in the suburbs with your parents.

>>4037516
which, ignoring your hyperbole, describes a significant portion of writers

>>4037506
>Are you one of these people who think being "original" binds you to greatness? Hilarity!

Where could you possibly have gotten that from?

>I see nothing wrong with that.

There's nothing wrong with it in of itself, but it becomes stupid when used as a mantra, especially when people expand the mantra into a wall of text.

>Ad hominem!
That's not an ad hominem (it's neither about a specific trait of yours nor trying to build an argument off it).

>Hemingwas never in the military, by the way, he was a nurse. That's his nurse uniform.

I don't give a shit, he was wounded and used his experiences for writing, that's all that matters in this context.

>Neither Joyce nor Woolf lived anything much besides bourgeois lifestyles. I join Conrad in his criticism of them.

You just indirectly praised them by using them as examples of great writers. Don't backpedal. If you knew anything about Joyce (or Woolf for that matter) you'd know he was very concerned with the full body of literature.

>>4037514
What kind of books do you like? Because I don't think you'd like anything I'd have to recommend.

>>4037517
Yeah but that's the problem that originated discussion:

>writers are insular
>try alt lit
>they are just isolated teenagers
>like most writers

>>4034528
I laughed.

>>4037527
I like Celine, decadentism and German expressionism and Eastern European post war lit.

>>4036849
No.

I rage quit after reading the first page after reading this:

>I believe I appear neutral, maybe even pleasant, though I've been coached to err on the side of neutrality and not attempt what would feel to me like a pleasant expression or smile.

Lol bandana wearing hipster neet fiction extraordinaire.

"Wahhh I'm a gawky individual with anxiety problems, I'm shy, I kill muhseelf"

BWAHAHAHAH

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend
^ Every IJ thread forever, because so many vacuous cunts didn't understand the book.

is writing about what it is to be a modern writer valueless writing

Huehuehuehuehuehue

http://www.amazon.com/review/RQH61VXK9P3F6/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0316066524&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=

>>4038051
There are many people who have difficulty interacting socially and don't feel comfortable when they're around others. Just because you go out every night to bang supermodels doesn't mean that IJ is without merit.

>>4038419

Not that guy, but I want you to be aware that this argument goes both ways. That is, just because you (and others) relate to the discomfort of social interaction depicted doesn't mean IJ has merit.

>>4038051
Obvious bait; if not, go fuck yourself.

>>4038433
Well put.

>>4036994
>I'm starting to believe that the word meaningful is the mark of the suburban bourgeois

'bout time.

>>4038433
>>4038419
I think the conclusion that we can draw is that 'merit' is a very nebulous term to apply to a work of fiction (or art of any medium) and that at very least there's no authoritative definition of it, and that whether something has merit or not is, in the end, up to the individual experiencing it.

I don't like ideologies, isms and grand literary theories, not that I don't think they're valuable but I repeatedly tried to understand it and all I got was dry academic prose and rehashed ideas.

I also don't like that fetishism of great literature, though the great writers and classics are my favorite part of the library.I love literature as a whole. I still cherish and reread the books of my childhood (Diana Wynne Jones, Rowling, Verne, Melville, Tolkien, St Exupéry) but also the Canon and more recent postmodern works.

I like Shakespeare, Voltaire as much as I enjoy Pynchon, Heller and I certainly like DFW just as much. I'm not totally uneducated, I read Spinoza, Descartes, Platon, Leibniz, Sartre, Pascal, Heidegger a bit of Kant and plenty others but I don't pretend like I know what I'm talking about.

I read comic books, manga, I even watch a bit of anime sometimes, oh indeed but I don't really tell anyone, I'm 21 years old after all. I have a massive amount of mathematical textbooks I cherish since I study the damn thing. I love getting lost in my uni library randomly flipping books about cellular biology, physics or ecology (the scientific subject not the political crap). I read self help books because some of them are infinitely fascinating, I read women's stories, I don't like erotica much, I jerked off to hardcore porn way to much to enjoy it at this point.. I sometimes read non fiction too.
I don't like other arts too much, save for music, but I try to understand. So when I read something about DFW's "horrible prose", "awkward display of intelligence" or "convoluted plot", I just laugh. None of those plaints stand out. Plenty of masters have used convoluted plot, absurd levels of technical trivia, weird sentences and plenty of other sins. DFW can be anything you want but he isn't a visionary, sorry. On the other hand he touches me because he's a great testimony to what plenty of people "feel". DFW's style illustrate his point, it adds to it. You don't like it? fine, we get it, but to say he's a hack, a bad writer is simply not true. It's about the feels goddamn it. Plenty of people recognize themselves in what he writes. You can shit on him all you want and call those people idiots and insult the author using the fan-base but you don't see Classical musician say Wagner was shit-tier because the nazis liked him? Yes he was a massive racist jerk but he made good music. That's why I hate politics and art being thrown into the same basket.
So DFW is liked by idiots? I don't see the problem. I am an idiot then, so be it. I'll go back to liking my DFW, Pynchon, Shakespeare, Le clezio, Voltaire, Melville, Tolkien, Rowling &al like the proper moron that I am.

Don't think for a moment that I can't make the difference between people liking the idea of enjoying great literature and people actually enjoying literature. Who the fuck are you to think only great literature is worth reading?

>>4037093
>contemporary art is for investment only
>oh, sweet painting, mine fairest flower - whither art thou?

Exaggerated as you may claim it to be, I'm really not surprised you jumped into the thread mourning the loss of Great Men of Great, Manly Deeds in literature.

>>4037406
that you didn't get that i was referring to the last part of your post (and not the part about the prose-- i could give a fuck what you think about his 'prose', and i can't imagine what kind of a person you're like outside of /lit/ saying shit like that), that is, the part of your post where you say something to the effect of dfw comes off as 'trying to be smart'-- that you didn't get that basically just confirms the truth of my earlier statement

now pll go find a tall bridge or someat n kill yourself, kid.

>>4038528
This post is disgusting in about a thousand ways.

>>4038517
Quality post m8, this is why I still come to /lit/.

>>4038517
i like you, anon. this place needs people like you.

>>4038517
Changed my mind on DFW. Good on you, m8.

>>4038517
k i never liked the whole "fedora" thing that has been going on on this board lately, but this is the most fedora post i've read on this board.

>>4038550
great reply to anon's post, m8

>>4038517
>>4038536
>>4038545
>>4038546
So much samefag that it hurts.

Seriously bro, kill yourself or up your medication.

>>4038556
I'm >>4038536 and didn't samefag, you cheeky cunt.

>>4038560
Sure sure.

>>4038555
okay. why did you make such a long post namedropping philosophers and fields of study just to tell us that you laugh when people criticize DFW's prose? why did you give us that little biography of yourself? oh right, to contrive sentimentality in order to make up for your lack of actual content.

(and lets not pretend you aren't samefagging, bud.)

>>4038560
Go back to /fit/ or something, please.

>>4038517
Wait a minute m8 are you trying the emulate DFW

>>4038550
I usually associate fedoras with atheists.

That guy is just a faggot.

>>4038555
"Platon" is pretty excessive unless you're really into proletkult or something

>>4038566
lel not samefagging, i just agree with his points.

>>4038570
>I usually associate fedoras with atheists.
Fedoras have transcended the simple atheist dichotomy.

We are now living in a fedora transcendentalist world, were the ideology of the fedora pervades everything the fedora does, not simply in regards to athiesm.

>>4038566
Well put. I like you.

If we combine our strength, we may be able to save this board yet.

>>4038051
m9 try reading the book

>>4038496
No, not really. All it says is that you don't judge literature by how much you identify with the characters.

Because if you do the result is that you give merit to bad writers because they talk to facts you can relate and you criticize wonderful works of art because "I could not like any of the characters".

Also any person that has a little bit of training in judging works of art knows the difference between what he personally likes and what has merit.

Naturally this does not stop critics from making mistakes. Being a good reader is as hard as being a good writer. Both are arts and the success of both resides deeply in the talents, sensibilities and intelligence of the artist. There is no algorithm for good reading as there is no good algorithm for good writing.

>>4038528
The fact is that I'm not really that concerned about his smartness. I'm ready to concede that he is authentically smart.

What I wanted to communicate with that post is that he bets everything on heart and brains and forgets style. DFW is aesthetically challenged and that is a big flaw for an artist.

>>4038643
>aesthetically challenged
so we're at an impasse then bc i don't think this at all and i think your prescriptive diagnoses in general are awful

>>4038556
I didn't samefag m8.

Has anyone pointed out yet that these threads are the sorts of conversation IJ pokes fun at?

>>4038664
It's a guy that used to wear round glasses and a bandana. I would not trust his aesthetic judgment.

>>4038683
Even the servant maid mad fun of thales for falling into the well, not understanding that he went in there to better see the stars.

DFW has this life long battle against intellectualism because his preoccupation in life was that of not being made fun of and saw how ridicolous his being overly intellectual made him., but it's not like he had any better ideas besides some revolting populism.

>>4038683
That's not very clever.

of a book so totally concerned with western culture, this is a pretty meaningless criticism to make

>>4034299
NO, because it was not authored by Harold Bloom, my dear.

>>4036667
/mu/ doesnt hate ITAOTS

>>4036783
Yes. the nuclear apocalypse ignited by the AFR's acquisition and dissemination of copies from the master has already begun when Hal sees the "ulatra-mach fighter" slicing the sky overhead. This argument "it has no plot, it is a loop, there is no ending" is the dead givaway of a troll or a lazy reader, or a non-reader. The Eschaton passage alone was worth $25.