Why is a picture of the sky on almost every cover of Infinite Jest?

Maybe it's cause the sky is infinite

Last page. You're welcome for what may well be the most substantial string of posts on Yea Forums all day. Unfortunately, this place has become popular among people who are incapable of reading even seven (or six and a half, or six, even!) pages sprinkled with light commentary, so this thread will most likely be rapidly pushed to the bottom, my efforts an empty vanity akin to all efforts.

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I appreciate your effortposts, my friend. I will read them when I take a break from reading Demons.

I appreciate being appreciated.
I would like to follow this up by noting that DFW and/or Kate Gompert presents with a confused understanding of psychotic depression in this passage. (One wonders whether this was DFW's diagnosis at any point: there is a raw sensitivity here that reads more like anger at the term itself than what the term actually means. The first psych ward scene reads similarly.) To say that somebody is psychotically depressed (I think the DSM-V term now may be "depression with psychotic features") is not to say that the person's depression itself, or the person's suffering itself, is "psychotic" and misled. The very same (and very accurate) inability to identify which DFW describes does often mislead people similarly, a person feeling so awful all of the time that they are able to leap to offense at any given set of words regardless of what is meant by them, because surely all the world consists of hateful intent. But clinicians do still identify with their patients, and understand that they are suffering; it is not dismissively chalked up that it is somehow "in their head" and as such not "real" or genuinely felt. Rather, what psychotic depression or depression with psychotic features implies is that a severely depressed person additionally presents with (usually brief) hallucinations and delusions, such as that one's television is speaking to them. And I don't remember Kate Gompert ever presenting with anything like that: she is severely depressed, but not psychotic.

This may well be the origin.

I always connected it to the part where Doony Glynn tells Lenz about being on DMZ and seeing the blue sky turn into a blank gray map with the DOW ticker shit on it, and this page w/r/t anhedonia: "Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world."

But it was L,B's choice and Wallace apparently didn't like the cover so make what you want of it. I always found it fitting.

mine has a skull

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Simplest answer would be that the book was effectively marketed and so subsequent art teams who are paid to produce new content have a lazy excuse to recycle the imagery which is already associated with a long book they haven't themselves read on the grounds of a sort of brand maintenance.

I preferred the girl in a psych ward segments of Pale King. Some of this stuff ("howling fantods") is doing some weird shit with the voice, whereas that book, which has the episode narrated by the character feels incredibly vivid, and also horrifying if read as a reflection of the author's relations to people who tried to pull him out through love.

because it's infinite, bruh

>reading in PT
O I am laffin

>I preferred the girl in a psych ward segments of Pale King
This actually makes me much more interested in reading Pale King! Is it more depression stuff? Odd that DFW sequesters off his suicidality as feminine...

Every time I look at the sky I think of Infinite Jest. What the fuck is wrong with my brain?

bump

Weird choice. The sky motif is so iconic and fits the book so well. I'm glad there's situations where the artist doesn't get to have his vision perfectly realized.

It's about a wrist cutting teenager and her relationship with a dude who sets out to pull her out of the negative cycle. It's much less dramatic about her depression, has a sort of brilliant double layer where there's the asylum guy who sorted her out, and the other completely different guy who's pulling the story out of her years later. And a lot of stuff about how her attractiveness conditions other people's reactions to her. Got to assume that's the author getting cleverer at feminising his stand-in.

Honestly, of the chapters that make up TPK you could just extract maybe 60%, divide them into short stories and have peak Foster Wallace. Having the first hints of how they might have connected inbetween hardly helps much. The Toni Ware story for instance is astonishing.

superior edition coming thru

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discordance axis

dfw was into grindcore??

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twitter.com/ViralVideos4you/status/1172169816326717442
Welcome to the water

Hey, started reading this, like it so far, why is it memed here and shat on? Dumb Engineering major here.

DFW was such a good writer, goddamn

>why is it memed here
It is traditionally associated with overly eager, poorly read English major and MFA candidate types, i.e. effete young men whose only goal in life is to give off the impression of being wackily bigly brained and depressed but in a deep way, which may have been how it first came to Yea Forums. It has partly maintained its position as a meme because it ended up immortalized in the meme trilogy, which used to be shilled here far more often and counter-memed far less often, and because it is the easiest book of the three to read, so it recieves the most discussion. Joyce and Pynchon are discussed a lot, but moreso their oeuvres at large, and/or moreso their easier works; Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow have not been immortalized in quite the same way as Infinite Jest has, i.e. singularly and in relative isolation from the rest of the author's work. The contents of the book also lend themselves better to meming, being of less of a baroque or lunatic flavor than Joyce or Pynchon, especially the whole angle of anxious-to-please "intellectual" young adults, much like this board, with its average age of 23 (in the Year of Glad, you should have been laughing when he was citing Camus and Kierkegaarde and Hegel and so on: it is youthful sophmorism personified, trite parrottings stated as deep wisdoms). The contemporary addiction narratives probably help make it identifiable to the board too, given that anybody who stays here long and contributes regularly knows in his heart of hearts that he is a kind of addict, and the type prone to such imageboard addiction is probably prone to other types: television, alcohol, maybe even Orinish sex.
>why is it...shat on?
It has always been shit on as an extension of the same meme that it is incredible, but I do think that the shitting-upon has increased, and there are probably several reasons for this. For one, I think that the old-Yea Forums posters who initially popularized the meme on Yea Forums in particular have probably aged out and left. Infinite Jest is more a millenial meme than a zoomer meme, and I think that it is probably the case that its identifiability is beginning to wane. Similarly, this board is much faster than it used to be, so age aside, this influx of new Yea Forums-browsers seems less equipped to understand the joke. They believe that they are in on the joke because they see it made fun of and make fun of it, but they haven't even read it, for the most part, and aren't able to mock it effectively, much like the long-standing tradition of Twitter-type women identifying it with "litbros" and writing long angry blogposts about its toxicity just because some guy had the gall to recommend a book he liked.

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Middle-brow pseuds shriek and throw rocks at it because if they enjoy it, and people see them liking it, they’ll be caught with their pants down.
It’s Caliban’s mirror.

It is appreciated. I have heard of this book often, but it only was on my radar. You've given me a free taste, and I will be reading it now.

I'm glad to subvert another youth

whats wrong with the other two

Nothing, they're just harder to read.

It's so you can hold it at arms length after you finish reading and pretend you're lying on the beach waiting for the tide to come finish you off.

why you bein the jester dude

I really don't get DFW. I read plenty of classics and dabble in contemporary works, but DFW's popularity is a mystery to me. While his essay collections are great, his attempts at fiction are dry and simply layers of obfuscation placed upon absolutely nothing solid or meaningful. Yet that very mock depth seems to be exactly what everyone likes about him.
Does no one actually read his work? Do they simply see the complicated/difficult writing and assume he's brilliant? Or am I the one completely missing his "brilliance" ?

Fuck you, OP.
I wanted to make an Infinite Jest thread and it would have been very funny.

you need a certain sense of humour

>Do they simply see the complicated/difficult writing and assume he's brilliant?
If you think his writing is difficult, you either haven't read him or you aren't the target audience. cf. &