If Homestuck was just about these two snarking at each other nonstop I would still read it
What the unholy hell did I just read
welcome to homestuck
(via turboshitnerd)
I saw this memorable strip come up somewhere tonight, and I suddenly figured out why it has always irked me, which it has
(It’s a continuation of this strip and this one, but that doesn’t really matter)
I don’t think the attitude expressed here is not some sort of unspeakable nerd heresy. It’s a pretty commonly heard idea, and one that I very distinctly remember having halfway through high school. I realized that I was putting a lot of energy into stuff like playing through video games — sometimes even video games I didn’t like all that much, but which I wanted to play so I could keep thinking of myself as a guy who kept up with video games. It hit me all of a sudden that if I let go of the presumption that “a guy who keeps up with video games” was a natural thing for me to aspire to be, it actually seemed like a completely arbitrary choice. Instead of expending effort figuring out a frustrating game puzzle, why not expend effort on reading or school? It’d be less expensive, more lucrative in the long run, more likely to confer social prestige upon me, and at least not clearly less fun. (Perhaps ultimately more so!) All of a sudden, the world seemed wide open.
But although I had mostly given up video games, I hadn’t given up an essentially game-inspired way of looking at the world. I conceived of “effort” as a clearly defined quantity that you could “spend” on different tasks like a game player choosing their base stats. There didn’t seem to be any fundamental difference between the “puzzles” in a game and the “puzzles” on a problem set; I could straightforwardly transfer my energies from one to the other. (This was part of why I gravitated to math and physics, the most game-like subjects, at least at the high school and college levels: stylized puzzles with clearly defined rules, “objective” numerical feedback on your performance after each task, clever rule-exploits that work better than common sense, etc.)
The problem with this style of thinking is that it makes it easy to assume that your character starts as a blank slate, that you can min/max however you want. Obviously, this isn’t true. Your genetics and your early upbringing limit you. No matter how much I “grind” at physics, I’m never going to be Richard Feynman. And while it’s possible to deliberately alter one’s social presentation to some extent, how many people are capable of pulling off James Gatz-style self-reinventions? I’ve never tried and can’t imagine I would succeed. I know I’m never going to be President of the U.S., not just because I don’t particularly want to, but because there are certain qualities — like, let’s say, “political charisma” — that I lack and will never get no matter how many Ability Points I choose to spend on them.
“President of the United States” is not just another job class, one that happens to be the most difficult to master. It is qualitatively different — in its prerequisites, and as an experience — from “beating a video game very quickly” or “drawing a cartoon.” Different vocations are fundamentally different. "Being good at being the President of the U.S.“ is a whole different thing, a different way of being in the world, than being good at science, or activism, or Super Mario Bros. These tasks require different pre-requisites and select for different personality types. It’s possible to simply never be good enough no matter how much you grind.
The idea that any passionately pursued pursuit is as good as any other is easy to dismiss. I think fairly few people really believe that, though sometimes one slips into thinking that way. A nerd misconception that’s much harder to dispel is the one that’s actually advocated by this strip: the idea that being good at something, for nerds, is a matter of choosing a task and then applying something called “obsession” to it. The notion that you could be spending your ability points on just about anything, even if you aren’t. ”Yes, I’m spending my afternoon reading about sectarian disputes among furries on LiveJournal, but if I were to simply apply that same obsessive focus to reading about ‘alternative energy’ instead, why, I’d become some sort of level 80 alternative energy master. That’s what it means to be a nerd: you just select a task and then grind to the level cap.”
When you put it this way, it sounds narcissistic: “I could have world-class talent in anything, if only I were to use this vast potential that I’ve been mysteriously hiding from the world.” That’s not wrong — this does involve over-rating oneself. But it’s hard to see that clearly because, confusingly, this line of thought is most often used for self-deprecation. ”I could be world-class, but I’m not.” If the comic strip resonates for you, as it did for me, it’s probably because you’re already used to chastising yourself in this way.
There’s something that irks me about the use of the phrase “research alternative energy” in the strip. It’s not that it’s any less well-fitted to that particular concept slot than anything else would have been. The problem is with the slot itself. I doubt that either John Campbell or his target audience have any concrete notion of what “researching alternative energy” actually entails; it’s simply being used as an agreeable example of something that requires intense focus and benefits society — an example of “something you could be doing if you weren’t sitting on your ass and reading webcomics right now, you piece of shit.” Those of us who read webcomics have an instant emotional response to this concept, so there’s no need to actually take the proposition seriously, as an actual thing a person might do rather than a boogeyman for the guilty.
What would it really mean for the people reading this comic to up and decide they’re going to “research alternative energy”? After all, that’s a task that requires a very specific set of fairly esoteric competencies. What if you weren’t that great at physical science in school? It’s possible that was because you weren’t putting enough Ability Points into it at the time. But it’s also possible that you simply aren’t very good at physical science. Which is nothing to be ashamed of! But it means that any AP you spend on that stuff will work inefficiently; other people will be learning more and having better ideas per unit of time and effort than you. (This goes for interest in a given subject, too. It may feel pleasantly virtuous to force yourself to learn things you have no curiosity about. But you have to remember that your competition includes people who just naturally find those things endlessly fascinating.)
I’m emphasizing competition here because that’s another quality that distinguishes science/tech research. Elsewhere in life you can do a lot of good simply by being in the right place at the right time, even if your skill isn’t world-class. But in cutting-edge science, if you and your team aren’t the very first people in the world to reach your goal, you’ve wasted your effort. The existence of the world’s most efficient soup kitchen does not somehow render all other soup kitchens worthless, but in science the winner takes all. (That’s a vast oversimplification, but the difference I’m pointing to is real.) What makes you sure you can be the best, when after all you’re up against every nerd in the world who’s ever decided, just like you, to stop “wasting adulthood”?
Isn’t this beginning to sound like just as big a pointless AP sink as sitting on your ass and reading webcomics, but with a lot more suffering attached? I mean, do you actually want to expend your efforts in the way most likely to improve the world? Do you want to seriously and mercilessly assess your options in the context of your own flaws, or to you just want to throw yourself into “researching alternative energy” (or whatever) because, hey, that sounds worthwhile, and you feel like you’re just kinda good at stuff in general, so why not?
Of these two approaches, the latter is far more typical of “nerds.” It is also gravely wrong. And this comic strip is an inspirational marching tune exhorting you to take it.
Yeah, I kind of despise John Campbell, and this is a good articulation of one of the main reasons. To my mind, the principal purpose of much of Campbell’s work is to make people feel bad about themselves. This is not intrinsically a bad thing: one cannot solve a problem before one recognizes its existence. John Campbell’s work, however, does not seem to care about the possibility of a solution. His comic on transhumanism is another good example of this: he brings up the “starving third world children” argument not out of any apparent desire to help children in developing countries to not starve (else surely there would be some link or additional text, rather than a throwaway line in one panel), but solely as a rhetorical cudgel. John Campbell is doing just as little to help starving third world children or “research alternative energy” as any of the poor saps he castigates, but he’s morally superior because he hates himself (and by association them/us) more than we do for this failure. John Campbell (to judge by his work, anyway; I know nothing about his personal life) is not someone who has broken out of the nerd obsession loop. He’s someone whose obsession of choice is self-loathing, which, as it turns out, is even less useful to the world than casual research on the politics of furry communities. His work is pure, crystallized depression, which could in fact be quite interesting and artful if not for the sanctimony and self-seriousness with which he presents his “moral lessons,” and the fact that most of the people I know who read him take his work to be an honest to God font of wisdom regarding how they ought to live their lives. I imagine he’s what you might get if you stripped David Foster Wallace of his emotional range, sense of humor, and the majority of his vocabulary.
Oh, and just for the record (referencing the comic immediately prior to this one): it does matter how thin a computer is if you’re disabled, like my girlfriend (you insufferable thoughtless fuckstick). John Campbell you are a terrible person. You disgust me. Your ethos is the shallowest possible expression of liberal guilt without any thought as to how one might actually improve the world. I would not deign to piss on you if you were on fire. I would consider a person who vandalized your wikipedia page so that it was only grotesque Gigeresque images of extremely unsexy penises plunging to extremely unsexy vaginae to be a valuable public servant, and agitate for them to be awarded all medals available to a civilian in their relevant district.
(via dagny-hashtaggart)
I saw this memorable strip come up somewhere tonight, and I suddenly figured out why it has always irked me, which it has
(It’s a continuation of this strip and this one, but that doesn’t really matter)
I don’t think the attitude expressed here is not some sort of unspeakable nerd heresy. It’s a pretty commonly heard idea, and one that I very distinctly remember having halfway through high school. I realized that I was putting a lot of energy into stuff like playing through video games – sometimes even video games I didn’t like all that much, but which I wanted to play so I could keep thinking of myself as a guy who kept up with video games. It hit me all of a sudden that if I let go of the presumption that “a guy who keeps up with video games” was a natural thing for me to aspire to be, it actually seemed like a completely arbitrary choice. Instead of expending effort figuring out a frustrating game puzzle, why not expend effort on reading or school? It’d be less expensive, more lucrative in the long run, more likely to confer social prestige upon me, and at least not clearly less fun. (Perhaps ultimately more so!) All of a sudden, the world seemed wide open.
But although I had mostly given up video games, I hadn’t given up an essentially game-inspired way of looking at the world. I conceived of “effort” as a clearly defined quantity that you could “spend” on different tasks like a game player choosing their base stats. There didn’t seem to be any fundamental difference between the “puzzles” in a game and the “puzzles” on a problem set; I could straightforwardly transfer my energies from one to the other. (This was part of why I gravitated to math and physics, the most game-like subjects, at least at the high school and college levels: stylized puzzles with clearly defined rules, “objective” numerical feedback on your performance after each task, clever rule-exploits that work better than common sense, etc.)
The problem with this style of thinking is that it makes it easy to assume that your character starts as a blank slate, that you can min/max however you want. Obviously, this isn’t true. Your genetics and your early upbringing limit you. No matter how much I “grind” at physics, I’m never going to be Richard Feynman. And while it’s possible to deliberately alter one’s social presentation to some extent, how many people are capable of pulling off James Gatz-style self-reinventions? I’ve never tried and can’t imagine I would succeed. I know I’m never going to be President of the U.S., not just because I don’t particularly want to, but because there are certain qualities – like, let’s say, “political charisma” – that I lack and will never get no matter how many Ability Points I choose to spend on them.
“President of the United States” is not just another job class, one that happens to be the most difficult to master. It is qualitatively different – in its prerequisites, and as an experience – from “beating a video game very quickly” or “drawing a cartoon.” Different vocations are fundamentally different. "Being good at being the President of the U.S.“ is a whole different thing, a different way of being in the world, than being good at science, or activism, or Super Mario Bros. These tasks require different pre-requisites and select for different personality types. It’s possible to simply never be good enough no matter how much you grind.
The idea that any passionately pursued pursuit is as good as any other is easy to dismiss. I think fairly few people really believe that, though sometimes one slips into thinking that way. A nerd misconception that’s much harder to dispel is the one that’s actually advocated by this strip: the idea that being good at something, for nerds, is a matter of choosing a task and then applying something called "obsession” to it. The notion that you could be spending your ability points on just about anything, even if you aren’t. "Yes, I’m spending my afternoon reading about sectarian disputes among furries on LiveJournal, but if I were to simply apply that same obsessive focus to reading about ‘alternative energy’ instead, why, I’d become some sort of level 80 alternative energy master. That’s what it means to be a nerd: you just select a task and then grind to the level cap.“
When you put it this way, it sounds narcissistic: "I could have world-class talent in anything, if only I were to use this vast potential that I’ve been mysteriously hiding from the world.” That’s not wrong – this does involve over-rating oneself. But it’s hard to see that clearly because, confusingly, this line of thought is most often used for self-deprecation. "I could be world-class, but I'm not.“ If the comic strip resonates for you, as it did for me, it’s probably because you’re already used to chastising yourself in this way.
There’s something that irks me about the use of the phrase "research alternative energy” in the strip. It’s not that it’s any less well-fitted to that particular concept slot than anything else would have been. The problem is with the slot itself. I doubt that either John Campbell or his target audience have any concrete notion of what “researching alternative energy” actually entails; it’s simply being used as an agreeable example of something that requires intense focus and benefits society – an example of “something you could be doing if you weren’t sitting on your ass and reading webcomics right now, you piece of shit.” Those of us who read webcomics have an instant emotional response to this concept, so there’s no need to actually take the proposition seriously, as an actual thing a person might do rather than a boogeyman for the guilty.
What would it really mean for the people reading this comic to up and decide they’re going to “research alternative energy”? After all, that’s a task that requires a very specific set of fairly esoteric competencies. What if you weren’t that great at physical science in school? It’s possible that was because you weren’t putting enough Ability Points into it at the time. But it’s also possible that you simply aren’t very good at physical science. Which is nothing to be ashamed of! But it means that any AP you spend on that stuff will work inefficiently; other people will be learning more and having better ideas per unit of time and effort than you. (This goes for interest in a given subject, too. It may feel pleasantly virtuous to force yourself to learn things you have no curiosity about. But you have to remember that your competition includes people who just naturally find those things endlessly fascinating.)
I’m emphasizing competition here because that’s another quality that distinguishes science/tech research. Elsewhere in life you can do a lot of good simply by being in the right place at the right time, even if your skill isn’t world-class. But in cutting-edge science, if you and your team aren’t the very first people in the world to reach your goal, you’ve wasted your effort. The existence of the world’s most efficient soup kitchen does not somehow render all other soup kitchens worthless, but in science the winner takes all. (That’s a vast oversimplification, but the difference I’m pointing to is real.) What makes you sure you can be the best, when after all you’re up against every nerd in the world who’s ever decided, just like you, to stop “wasting adulthood”?
Isn’t this beginning to sound like just as big a pointless AP sink as sitting on your ass and reading webcomics, but with a lot more suffering attached? I mean, do you actually want to expend your efforts in the way most likely to improve the world? Do you want to seriously and mercilessly assess your options in the context of your own flaws, or to you just want to throw yourself into “researching alternative energy” (or whatever) because, hey, that sounds worthwhile, and you feel like you’re just kinda good at stuff in general, so why not?
Of these two approaches, the latter is far more typical of “nerds.” It is also gravely wrong. And this comic strip is an inspirational marching tune exhorting you to take it.
trees are harlequins, words are harlequins: I had a dream about Infinite Jest last night, so it’s been in my mind... →
I had a dream about Infinite Jest last night, so it’s been in my mind today for the first time in a while.
I like that book, and I really hate its reputation. By nature, it’s a cult classic, but by historical accident and successful marketing the “cult” part has gotten filed off, and that’s the…
I find this an interesting and illuminating account of your experience of reading and processing Infinite Jest, but I think we have very different ideas of what constitutes a ‘literary classic.’ To my mind, many of the characteristics you cite as evidence that IJ doesn’t belong in the canon sound like perfect descriptions of a ‘difficult’ or ‘idiosyncratic’ classic. If anything, your description makes me more convinced of IJ’s status as such.
Not all classics are straightforward, and not all of them are even straightforwardly good: Finnegan’s Wake is surely the ur-example of this, a text that is weirder, more difficult, and more dubiously meritorious than IJ by half. One might well describe it as flawed, but neither I nor the literary establishment seem certain enough of what the hell it’s trying to accomplish to adjudicate the question of whether it has succeeded. And Joyce is like that in general: while Ulysses is widely considered the greatest work of fiction in the English language, it is also relatively unapproachable, full of strange authorial fixations, frequently pretentious, and in your opinion and mine at least, pretty poorly paced in its first half. Gravity’s Rainbow and the opening sections of The Sound And The Fury also come to mind here, as does the entire genre of encyclopedic fiction. If a sharp tonal shift at the halfway point in a series is a violation of the conventions of good plotting, where does one even begin with a 75-page digression on the history of the Paris sewers?
Furthermore, I think your description of the type of intense experiences that these cult classics engender, and the fandom that springs up around them, rings true for a lot of clearly canonical works and authors as well. Consider Mace’s relationship with the works of Herman Melville, or Michael Chabon’s essay about his experience of Finnegan’s Wake (and really the phenomenon of Joyce-heads in general).Great works create obsessive fans and haters as surely as the works you describe, and while a crazy intense fandom is not a definite indication of a work’s greatness, I don’t see any reason why it should be taken to impeach it.
To bring this around to something resembling a point: I think what is actually happening here is not so much that the public has mistaken IJ for a classic on account of publicity, but rather that IJ merits inclusion in that august roster, and is presently ascending on wings of burning paper to take its place as a cherub beside the Merkabah. Unfortunately, as with Ulysses, Moby Dick, and a horde of other classics, this means that any idiot with pretensions in the direction of culture now feels obligated and entitled to an opinion on it, irrespective of whether they have read the damned thing. (q.v. http://dresdencodak.com/2012/08/09/dark-science-20/) Such pat responses are frustrating, certainly, but they’re more a standard instance of the way people deal with classic and otherwise noteworthy works of fiction than anything too specific to IJ or Wallace.
I agree with a lot of this. When I make the “cult classic vs. classic” distinction, I’m basing it mostly (and I didn’t spell this out at all in the OP) on how easy I find it to identify unequivocal flaws in the work.
There’s a chapter in Ulysses where Stephen Dedalus says that a genius like Shakespeare makes no real mistakes, only deliberate moves that look superficially like mistakes. (“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”) Whether or not Joyce actually believed this, it seems pretty clear that he tried to provide himself with this kind of critical escape hatch. Ulysses involves so many complicated interlocking systems and so many deliberately surprising elements that I would have a very hard time confidently identifying anything in the book as “a mistake,” rather than just a deliberate deviation from an expected pattern. On the level of stuff like pacing and character, it’s easier to criticize, but even then I don’t entirely feel like I’m on firm ground: there is certainly internal justification for the shift halfway through (the transition from day to night), and although I found a lot of the first half boring, I felt less like I was reading something flawed and more like I was just not quite in the target audience.
Finnegans Wake goes even further in this direction: it’s hard to confidently identify a typo in FW, much less any higher-level error. It is strange and controversial, yes, but the negative opinions tend to cluster towards “Joyce’s goals are pointless” rather than “Joyce doesn’t achieve his goals.” (Whatever Finnegans Wake is, it is certainly the best work ever written in Finneganese, if you see what I mean.)
What groups together the “cult classics” in my mind is that they contain real, unequivocal, often very beginner-level errors of fact and craft. When I say “DFW makes math and science errors” or “some of DFW’s descriptions involve clumsy usage of technical vocabulary that doesn’t really apply in any interesting way to what’s being described” or “DFW really should never try to write in African American English” I feel like I’m on pretty firm ground. (For an example of this type of attack on the book, see this wonderful review.) Likewise, I somehow feel like the pacing in Evangelion is more objectively in error than the pacing in Ulysses – in part because I know that Eva was largely written on the fly, and that the incongruity of the earlier and later segments wasn’t less a deliberate effect than a result of the creators’ lack of knowledge about where they were going.
Maybe that shouldn’t matter, but psychologically I can’t force myself to think that way. I can’t shake the sense that Eva feels like it was made up as it went along, even if I only feel that way because I know it was. If I want I can explain DFW’s math errors as a device for demonstrating that his character Michael Pemulis is kind of pretentious. But after I read DFW’s nonfiction math book, where he makes the same sorts of errors, I could no longer think of those theories as anything but masturbation; the brute fact of the matter is that Pemulis was supposed to be a math whiz, and Wallace lacked the knowledge to depict that convincingly.
Obviously this is all kind of subjective – I’m so tough on Wallace in particular because math is something I know about, where others might be tough on Joyce in some other area. But I agree with that review I linked that there’s sort of an overall pretentiousness to Wallace that I don’t feel with Joyce or Pynchon, who, no matter how strange and perverse they are, seem to check their sources pretty fastidiously. You can say you don’t like them, but it’s hard to catch them making unarguable mistakes, which is the heart of this distinction I’m making.
(via dagny-hashtaggart)
I had a dream about Infinite Jest last night, so it’s been in my mind today for the first time in a while.
I like that book, and I really hate its reputation. By nature, it’s a cult classic, but by historical accident and successful marketing the “cult” part has gotten filed off, and that’s the worst thing that can possibly happen to a cult classic.
I picked it up in May 2010 on a whim, knowing almost nothing about it. It took me the whole summer to read it, and I spent the whole time trying in vain to figure out what the hell I was reading. It was, in the end, a very disturbing book for me – the most effective horror story I’ve ever read. Not so much because of the dark content (though it’s very dark), but because of its constantly shifting tone. It kept switching back and forth between totally ludicrous Douglas Adams-esque comedy worldbuilding, queasy ultra-black humor about stuff that was too fucked-up for me to even imagine finding funny, and convincing and finely detailed portraits of realistic human beings in various states of psychic malaise. I had no idea what to make of it all, and the book seemed aware of this and intent on fucking with me in as many ways as possible. I finished it just after moving, and spent several days in a daze, half-convinced that both the book’s bizarre ending and my new place were dreams I would soon wake up from. It’s still one of the most unsettling, unassimilable things I’ve ever read. My mind has no idea how to digest it.
To me it seems that the natural category for Infinite Jest is the same one that stuff like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Twin Peaks belong to – works that are strange, idiosyncratic, highly influential, highly flawed, extremely memorable, and which above all are famous (or infamous) “experiences” more than they are masterpieces of technical craftsmanship. Everyone who’s seen Evangelion recognizes that it takes a weird unexpected turn halfway through, and that this is pretty much unarguably a technical “pacing flaw”; and yet the existence of that glitch is part of what fuels the gleeful gleam in the eyes of anyone who recommends it to the uninitiated. The problems are part of the fun, and part of the legend. To belabor them feels in some way like a category mistake, like lambasting the “artistic failures” of a dream, or an acid trip.
Whenever I have a strong personal relationship with a work of art, it’s always a little discomfiting to remember that it is a thing in the world that other people have experienced, rather than something that simply coalesced out of my unconscious. It was weird to emerge into adulthood and realize that that work of teenage psychosexual surrealism I had found so relevant at age 14 was a real thing that other people had seen, too – but at least other people remember Evangelion in largely the same way I did. It was weirder to emerge from reading Infinite Jest the undigestible horror story and encounter Infinite Jest the modern classic. It was like seeing the storyline of one of my nightmares getting shelved alongside Proust and Joyce, and then getting slammed for not quite measuring up.
Infinite Jest’s reputation as an object of banal admiration is so solid by this point that I can’t really blame anyone for instinctively not wanting to read it. I’m fond of contrarians, and feel a lot of contrarian impulses myself, and by now Infinite Jest has become perfect contrarian-bait. That guy from The Decemberists reportedly likes to go on and on about it at cocktail parties; how much easier to hate can you get? The popular picture of “David Foster Wallace” is the guy we read about in D. T. Max’s breezy journalism, a sort of sanctimonious, bandana-wearing hipster whose axe to grind is that people make too many ironic jokes and should be nicer to each other or something. If your image of Infinite Jest is listening to that guy for 1000 pages, I can’t blame you for abstaining. And if that doesn’t turn people off, what if they test the waters by trying out Wallace’s nonfiction, and find that it’s mostly a bunch of pretentious rambling about how much he likes prescriptive grammar and John McCain? (I wish I were kidding.)
Infinite Jest, too, is infinitely criticizable. It’s massively uneven, often tedious, and some parts of it are just plain badly written. The author has a very obvious and desperate need to seem smart, which results in numerous cases where he overreaches and talks out of his ass. (He appears to believe that the Oxford English Dictionary includes synonyms of words, and that the derivative of x^n is nx + x^(n-1).) These characteristics would be harmless, even endearing, in a cult classic, but they’re damning in an unqualified classic, a masterpiece.
Imagine a world where Evangelion is an established classic that film schools required their students to watch. A world where one could feel like a brave, iconoclastic rebel for pointing out that, say, the comedy scenes about Asuka’s boobs are kind of inappropriately juvenile in something that later decides it’s a grown-up work of Art. Wouldn’t it be much harder, in that world, to have the experience that Evangelion is trying to give you?
“You just went into it looking for things to criticize” is an oft-heard rebuke to critics, and it’s usually very obnoxious. But when it comes to cult classics there really is some truth to it. Cult classics tend to be flawed enough that if you want to criticize them, there is no end to the valid points you can make. Thus, there is a real danger that you’ll spend so much time making valid points that you’ll actually miss all the fun. Even when you have toppled the idol, the fans will just go on partying in the ruins. As they should.
——————————————————–
There’s a huge, mystifying gap in D. T. Max’s mediocre biography of Wallace. Much of the biography consists of extended descriptions of how difficult it was for Wallace to write, how much trouble his early short stories and essays gave him. Then, with practically no context, the biography reveals that he now has this gigantic, many-hundred-thousand-word project he’s working on (which would eventually become Infinite Jest). Where did it come from? How could such a habitually blocked writer suddenly produce something so long? Of course I don’t literally believe in stuff like writers channeling stories from the beyond, but honestly that would, if possible, provide a convenient explanation for Infinite Jest’s genesis. It was marketed as a classic, a masterpiece, and that’s the label that stuck. But what’s actually printed between its covers feels more like an occult enigma, written in a trance.
I want to recommend that fucked-up book that messed with my mind so effectively in summer 2010; but unfortunately, by historical accident, that book is identical with “Infinite Jest,” overexposed and overhyped cultural touchstone, which everyone is already tired of, even if they haven’t read it. The two Infinite Jests – the idea and the text – have almost nothing to do with one another, but we live in a world where the two are inextricably connected. Oh well.
David Foster Wallace’s Love of Language Revealed by the Books in His Personal Library
‘I didn’€™t think much of Infinite Jest in the beginning,’ writes Jacqueline Munoz, librarian at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center.OpenCulture takes a look at the books in the great American writer’s personal library.
a bloo bloo bloo bloo
yeah, David Foster Wallace is one of those guys for me. Which means I’m a David Foster Wallace guy for most guys.
but just, gah. There’s talk of a David Foster Wallace cult, surrounding his ideas. is this the concept of fandom?
like people resonating with what he wrote, as if his work was a big tetris block or puzzle piece that locked in and clicked into your brain like no writer had ever come close to? the wordiness, the need to be understood and loved and the paralyzing anxiety and depression, all not entirely invisible, but more the knowledge that there’s a guy out there who’s smarter than you and grappling with the same stuff or that for this moment reading is less a thing your brain does and more what your eyes are doing?
and then the fact that he of course is going to be canonized because of his suicide, which is the only narrative way for his life to have ended or else he’d still be here today and there isn’t a void left by him so much as a void left by feeling understood. or that idols help up to be greater than yourself are also human.
in my best moments, I try to emulate him. In my worst moments, I tried to emulate him too.
I like DFW and I like the “DFW cult” in the sense you describe. On the other hand, I think there IS a DFW cult in the sense of people making too much of, e.g., his intelligence in a really misguided way. (Really, most of the “intelligence” shown off in his books is BS. His math is all wrong, his etymology is all wrong, his chemistry is all wrong.)
Then of course you have the backlash to all that where people want to depose the naked emperor from his pedestal, and somewhere in the shuffle is lost any appreciation for his prose, formal innovation, humor, characterization, intuitive grasp of psychology, etc., which are the reasons I like him, because they’re the reasons I like any author of fiction I like
It’s gotten to the point where I just prefer not to bring in up him in conversations, even though he’s one of my favorite authors, because he’s become a terrible cocktail party touchstone in a way that has nothing to do with his writing. Every asshole’s got an opinion, and most of them haven’t read the books and don’t even want to!
When I was reading Infinite Jest a few years ago, and brought up that I was reading it, I encountered two different people who said, with a note of hipster disdain, the exact same ludicrous phrase: “I haven’t read it, no, but I’m … familiar with the concept of it.” That’s the problem in a nutshell. You can’t be “familiar with the concept of” a work of literature. You either read the damn thing or you don’t, and then you enjoy and value it, or you don’t.
(via fool-injection)