>Colleen Leahy, an 27-year-old producer for Wisconsin Public Radio, showed up at last year’s conference in a shirt that read “I Haven’t Read Infinite Jest.” She told me that her first reaction upon trying to read it was “Fuck that. Fuck that noise. Like, what the fuck? No no no no no no no no no. Like, no no no no no.” Pause. “No.”
>That was in college. She’d been assigned it in a class and made it 40 pages through. From then on, she hated DFW and everything he stood for: needless obscurity, books-as-badges, white-guyness-as-prerequisite-for-genius, mouth-breathing lit-bros, etc. Leahy went to the conference last year as research: She’d decided to start a podcast with her friend Makini Allwood, And But So, about hate-reading DFW, and wanted to learn a bit about the book’s apparent fans, maybe call them out for not talking about race enough.
And consider this piece of juvenilia recently discovered in his papers the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, which is shocking academics and fanboy litbros across the planet
My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge That'll stab you in the head, whether you're a fag or les' Or a homosex, hermaph or a trans-a-vest Pants or dress, hate fags? The answer's yes Homophobic? Nah, you're just heterophobic Staring at my jeans, watching my genitals bulgin' That's my motherfuckin' balls, you'd better let go of 'em They belong in my scrotum, you'll never get hold of 'em! "Hey, it's me, Versace! Whoops, somebody shot me! And I was just checkin' the mail Get it? Checkin' the male?" How many records you expecting to sell After your second LP sends you directly to jail? Come on, relax, guy! I like gay men Right, Ken? Give me an amen! (A-men!) "Please Lord, this boy needs Jesus Heal this child, help us destroy these demons Oh, and please send me a brand new car And a prostitute while my wife's sick in the hospital" Preacher, preacher! Fifth grade teacher! You can't reach me, my mom can't neither You can't teach me a goddamn thing ‘cause I watch TV and Comcast cable And you ain't able to stop these thoughts You can't stop me from toppin' these charts And you can't stop me from droppin' each March With a brand new CD for these fuckin' retards ("duhh") And to think, it's just lil' old me Mr. Don't-Give-a-Fuck still won't leave
I can't see this guy surviving for much long in the literary world. His time has passed and maybe it's for the best
No, it's the fact that he cut&pasted most of his novels from the internet in the 90s & got caught out and suicided because he was a fraud.
William Robinson
>steal 1100 pages from 90s internet >slay audience pussy >kill self Truly /ourguy/,
Evan Russell
I thought this guy was just some nerd leftist wimp but he is fucking based
>wrote to his friend Jonathan Franzen to say that he sometimes thought he was “put on earth to put his penis in as many vaginas as possible.” I'll take 3 copies of INFINITE JEST, please.
Man's only purpose on this earth is to fuck vaginas and kill minorities. DFW is a great man an example to us all. If anything his antics will cement his place as a great writer.
Mason Cooper
>cut&pasted most of his novels from the internet in the 90s Enlighten me
Source, please, that's fucking brilliant, I hope it's true
Bentley Adams
DFW only killed himself because he saw what was coming. May he rest his sweet bandanna-ed head on the pillowy clouds of Valhalla without kikes, lesbians, fags, niggers, spics, or any cretin that registers as a liberal and may his gigantic penis never be unattended from audience pussy for eternity.
Anthony Cook
They covered this perfectly in the Jason Segel Andy Samberg documentary.
Angel Rogers
Maybe. A piece by DFW on language was assigned for discussion in a nonfiction writing class I was taking as part of a master's last year. The discussion, such as it was, consisted mostly of people angrily lambasting Wallace for his white privilege and his failure to identify English as an "imperial language."
Of course, almost every "discussion" of a piece that wasn't explicitly social-justice-flavored went in that direction. I felt bad for the instructor; he looked like all he knew to do was stand back helplessly as one discussion after another deteriorated into agitated denunciations of the author's racism or misogyny.
Oliver Hill
Lol infinite jest so mainstream
Ryan Roberts
>Eminem lyrics
Nathaniel Gutierrez
>hates fags >daydreams about another man's dead penis what did he mean by this?
Robert Hughes
Some of us don't get a giant image of mouthwatering dicks in our heads when we write a goofy hypothetical.
Samuel Green
Reading DFW was the exact opposite of what I expected, but I didn't read IJ. Oblivion is one of my favorite short story collections of all time.
I think he was a very humble guy, or attempted to be.
Nathan Stewart
>y-you're gay for noticing my faggotry! :( bold strategy
Isaac Collins
Today I was looking at places online to submit a short story to and "literary culture" has gotten really bad. Just about every single outlet has some sort of "hate has no home here" bumper sticker above their submission box that lets you know they're extremely PC and aggressively pro-affirmative action. The only ones who seem to limit the PC stuff to a single line are prestigious magazines that unknown and unpublished and unconnected writers who did not attend a USNWR top ~30 school have zero chance at.
The culture has just gone completely to shit since the start of the 21st century. During my search I looked at the revamped Story magazine, which used to be a revered institution where first-time, unknown American writers could get their start if they only had they had the talent. Story was once a place that catered specifically to unknown talent trying to prove themselves; it essentially began the careers of names like John Cheever and Tennessee Williams. But in 2019 they are now publishing Tao Lin and extremely established industry names alongside one single debut charity pick (never a white male of course).
This PC liberalism stuff is a cultural disease. It's rich people and sullen perverts and brown people teaming up against the people who live in Western countries, and it's going to go through a very painful collapse at some point, but for the meantime it's churning out some really atrocious and blatantly ideological "art"
Samuel Long
Based as fuck
I’m actually glad I got memed into reading IJ
Oliver Russell
I remember the times when DFW was taken as the ultimate symbol of liberal softboyism.
That must have been until yesterday.
Yea Forums often changes its general hivemind but always to embrace even stupider ideas.
Chase Perry
it's all shitposting for reactive (You)'s. the shitposters never change themselves, they just change the material to those around them for optimum (You)'s
; )
Kayden Harris
What actually were his political beliefs. The world of IJ seems hyper commercialized and brutally exploitative at points but it never seem to make a singular cohesive statement
Adam Perry
He was being accused of being a fairly conservative WASP back when wardine be cry was a big meme
Isaac Walker
>Colleen Leahy, an 27-year-old producer for Wisconsin Public Radio, showed up at last year’s conference in a shirt that read “I Haven’t Read Infinite Jest.” She told me that her first reaction upon trying to read it was “Fuck that. Fuck that noise. Like, what the fuck? No no no no no no no no no. Like, no no no no no.” Pause. “No.” Is this real? Or merely the Spectacle?
Jason Howard
>Harold Bloom a 77-year-old Humanities professor for Yale, showed up at last year’s conference in a shirt that read “I Haven’t Read Harry Potter.” He told me that his first reaction upon trying to read it was “Fuck that. Fuck that noise. Like, what the fuck? No no no no no no no no no. Like, no no no no no.” Pause. “No.”
Yet you gave me one you incommensurate faggot. I wasn't shitposting, just stating my amazement at how people can meme themselves into seeing as based what they once thought bluepilled. And thus you managed to make a post even less valuable than mine.
I know most of the praise here is tongue-in-cheek or ironic, but some of it definitely is not.
I'm talking about how he was perceived on Yea Forums.
He was extremely autistic (studied formal logic in uni, even references it in one of his story, obsessed with paradoxes, was the kind to always correct people's spelling). Make of that what you will.
Both. That's the terror of it, she looks like a caricature, but is genuine.
Lincoln Anderson
kek
Michael Foster
you've misread
John James
>I'm talking about how he was percieved in Yea Forums Me too retard hence the mention of the meme. Go be a newfag somewhere else.
You can tell no one actually reads IJ because I never see anyone bring up the ebonics chapter
Robert Green
nothing in the wardine be cry chapter implies that wardine is black though
Luke Ortiz
just search the archive for wardine be cry
Jordan Phillips
>Go be a newfag somewhere else.
Iwas already here 5 years ago, who cares who you think is new.
>but muh you should remember every meme on Yea Forums >but muh 5 years isn't even that much, i've been here since I was born
fuck off
Carter Morgan
“You know, I don’t want to be offensive. But Infinite Jest [regarded by many as Wallace’s masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.”
It’s all a clear indication, Bloom notes, of the decline of literary standards. He was upset in 2003 when the National Book Award gave a special award to Stephen King. “But Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left. [Wallace] seems to have been a very sincere and troubled person, but that doesn’t mean I have to endure reading him. I even resented the use of the term from Shakespeare, when Hamlet calls the king’s jester Yorick, ‘a fellow of infinite jest.’
Joshua Ortiz
Qouting Shakespeare in your title is just tradition
Benjamin Lewis
What? That comes up all the time. And it's really near the beginning.
Juan Jenkins
One character in IJ says the same about Himself using it for the title for the Entertainment. Maybe that bloom guy should actually read the books he reads.
Ethan Mitchell
I'm not spoon feeding you, faggot. Follow your hero
Eli Peterson
Top angry "big boy" post.
Lucas Gray
Yikes
Chase Moore
Literally, wh*te "men" on suicide watch
Ethan Cox
Whatever is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Seriously, I googled it and couldn't find anything.
Lucas Kelly
Have you tried reading between the lines?
Landon Ramirez
FPBP
Isaac Butler
He didn't literally cut & paste but if you read authors like John Hawkes, William Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, Barth, etc., you'll notice that a lot of his ideas and stylistic affectations seem to have been lifted from them. I wouldn't call him a total fraud but he's a lot less creative than he seems if you never read any of those authors.
Camden Adams
He cut&pasted most of the footnotes unfortunately, most of the sites are gone but you can still find some on wayback
I heard it too, the shit that was out of his wheelhouse, like physics he would just yank from .edu sites. Thought no one would notice.
Ayden Morris
I will never not laugh at the greatly deserved ridicule of this hack fraud. DFW will be remembered by posterity as the most incompetent snake oil salesman western literature has ever produced.
The only sincere act of his life was when he kicked away the chair. His life was nothing but a series of ironies and lies predicated on the the joke that is new sincerity. The big punchline was the creaking of the rafter and the piss trickling down his leg to the floor.
his epiphany that the only viable thing for him to do was to kill himself was the best thing to happen to literature in 30 years since he began writing because behind all the self aware gimmicks and self help books and the drugs and the audience pussy there was no discernible talent.
Kayden Kelly
>Colleen Leahy, a retard, admits to having an IQ of 80 and being a shitlib who thinks anyone except niggers and the rapidly dwindling supply of white liberals cares about "talking about race"
>Which is how a surprisingly accessible talk on the “synecdochic network of the Encyclopedic novel” — from Kathryne Metcalf, a neon-orange-haired graduate student in American Cultural Studies at Bowling Green State who’d driven through the night from Ohio to get there — wound up being delivered to me, and only me, while at regular intervals raucous, sold-out-crowd laughter erupted from the next room (this from a panel titled “Depression, Alienation, and the Medical Gaze in Infinite Jest”). Eventually another person did slink in, allowing me to tactfully flee next door, which sounds cruel but by this time Metcalf had ceded the floor to her Skyped-in co-panelist, an Italian named Marco who’d spent much of the talk darkly muttering to someone (or something) off-camera. (“Honestly I don’t really know what happened,” Metcalf told me, over make-your-own-tacos at lunch. “He defined the word ‘ouroboros’ over and over, and then he talked about programming for a while, and then he defined ouroboros a couple more times, and then it was over.”)
whoa surprise surprise the guy that committed suicide is a pessimistic faggot
Tyler James
there is no actual reason to be optimistic about anything though
Hudson Ortiz
i choose to believe that tech will lead to a great expansion in consciousness. though i am spiritualistic to some degree.
Jace Gomez
>gurofag >autistic weirdo who commits suicide
adds up
Jordan Howard
they hate DFW because he wrote the last great american novel before low iq millinals decided they prefer to text instead of read, and because he committed sudoko before they could attack him for being a white man who had sex with women. What grinds thier gears most of all was that he was smart, and he saw what was coming and basically they can never ruin him
Mason Myers
How come I never see comparisons of current culture fads to the Cultural Revolution in China? The spirit of our current trends lines up with it exactly, and although we arent executing people in the streets I have a feeling if you pointed out the comparison to the torch bearers of today's movements they would take it as a compliment.
>he misssed the opportunity to put in a "No!" at the end what a waste
Aaron Rogers
Colleen clearly has daddy issues.
Parker Wood
>Colleen Leahy, an 27-year-old producer for Wisconsin Public Radio, showed up at last year’s conference in a shirt that read “I Haven’t Read Infinite Jest.” There’s nothing later than the attempts by intersectional types to be transgressive. Infinite Jest itself comes pretty close.
