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what are you reading today?


almondcrush

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I'm working on Robert Fisk's The Great war for Civilization.

How is it? Easy to read without extensive knowledge of Arab history?

Just finished:

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It felt very natural reading Anthony Beevor's The Battle For Spain (excellent history book), then Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, and now this. Actually, I think it's important to learn about the Spanish war, or at least understand different viewpoints, because it affects how you see all kinds of issues, whether non-intervention against fascism, the foreign media coverage, etc. This essay http://www.george-orwell.org/Looking_Back_On_The_Spanish_War/0.html was written after the book and is a good explanation of his views. Personally I think that it is crucial to understanding 1984, in fact the basic idea of 1984 comes from his experience of the Spanish/Russian Communists and their oppression towards the end of the war.

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Great book. The tone is perfect.

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I do.

I really like most of his short stories, but found this tedious and self aggrandizing.

I hate a literary obstacle course/jerk-off session more than anyone I know, but Wallace doesn't go out of his way to make IJ a hard read.

It's just long.

If you split it into two or three separate books you wouldn't hear this complaint, but it'd also be cutting out the heart of the book -- that weird sadness of being alone together in our addictions and looking for more.

Back on topic:

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I hate a literary obstacle course/jerk-off session more than anyone I know, but Wallace doesn't go out of his way to make IJ a hard read.

It's just long.

If you split it into two or three separate books you wouldn't hear this complaint, but it'd also be cutting out the heart of the book -- that weird sadness of being alone together in our addictions and looking for more.

i found the thickness of it daunting until about half way through. by then i didnt want it to end and as i got closer to the end i really didnt see how it was possibly going to be enough.

if you get the kind of mementum going that it takes to plough through that novel, and youre like me, you could happily have it go on forever and live in that abusrdist reality until your brain turns to mashed potatoes. which i think was the point of the book in the first place.

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Hi Doom, how's the books? worth reading? worth buying?

I love these books! If you love paradigm shifting / unorthodox short reads with a philosophical twist to it then you'll like these books. The one on the right, "It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be", is my favorite of the two since it pertains more to business and creative endeavors. You can pick both up used for under $15 on amazon or read them in a book store. Both are pretty quick reads.

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http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

This was the best wrap-up I remember finding after finishing IJ and trying to tie up loose ends. Wallace isn't trying to screw with your head or consciousness or take you out of reality -- it seems, more than anything, he just wants you to experience reality more keenly; to feel more human (I feel like Hal's trajectory transmits this message with the least amount of subtlety)

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Wallace doesn't go out of his way to make IJ a hard read.

It's just long.

The length doesn't really bother me, and I don't think its a hard read necessarily, more so that it just stopped being enjoyable at some point.

Not that all books need to be enjoyable either, but I guess I lost faith in what he was trying to achieve. Its just personal taste I guess.

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Not that all books need to be enjoyable either, but I guess I lost faith in what he was trying to achieve. Its just personal taste I guess.

If it wasn't enjoyable, it does just come down to personal taste, which I can totally get.

I'd never recommend anyone forcing their way through it like homework. I think this is a book that should be enjoyable if you're going to get anything out of it. For me, the book was really fucking fun -- when it wasn't crushingly sad, anyway. Maybe compelling's a better word.

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^Also read that after reading IJ, and would say that it is almost a mandatory article to have a look at if you read IJ.

Right on with the momentum.

At the end of the day, I see the book as mainly a very intriguing narrative, the way that it mashes with your brain is nice and fun but by far not the most enjoyable aspect of the read for me and not what DFW was trying to show imo. It feels like he must have had such a blast coming up with the plot and setting of the book that the "mashed potato" effect is just a by product, not the core.

we're gonna have to agree to disagree then. i think the brain mashing is the most prevelant theme of the novel. the fact that its titled infinite jest is self criticism of its length and absurdity. and the driving force of the story line is a work of art thats content is so addictive that it will actually make you a vegetable whos only goal is to view 'the content' repeatedly.

in the setup for this 'content' wallace goes way off on tangental descriptions of matters that give no useful context to the storyline and only make the characters harder to comprehend rather than easier. best examples of this would be the back history of the wheelchair assasins and the insane complexity of the game the boys play with the tennis balls.

i think wallace is pretty much challenging you to put down the book at these points. getting through them either requires that you share his obsession with absurity and will keep going (thus submitting to the samizdat), or youre gonna say fuck it and tell all your friends that the book sucks. and i think both are totally fair criticisms and possibly the only logical conclusions that the book can acheive.

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ps - this wrap up is totally killing my boner for the book.

i mean, its nice to know how some of the loose ends fit, but half the thrill was the alluding of solutions and connections that never really materialized to the point of satisfaction.

i liked that i could piece it together to about 90% but that the other 10% was completely beyond reason. and now im being proved wrong and its making me want to read the fucking thing again which is simply too much commitment.

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Wallace isn't trying to get you to put down the book. I will shout myself hoarse against this because when people mis-read IJ and lump it in with totally empty writing like House of Leaves or something, it makes me break out in a fucking cold sweat. Same thing with people focusing on the "funny" parts.

He's not doing a Vonnegut thing. It's not a zany story with weird, goofy, po-mo shit. It may have some of those same signifiers, so there's a temptation to read it that way, but that is so completely the opposite of what this book is trying to do.

Whether or not it succeeded for you is up to you, but there's no shortage of Wallace interviews where he makes it clear he's just trying to say something simple in a way that isn't ignored by our too-smart generation because it sounds simple. He's not trying to be smart. He IS smart, and he's always trying to reign it in. Watch the interview with Charlie Rose, see him fucking twitching like he's got 20 thoughts he's got to sort through before he can form a sentence. He was crazy smart and constantly trying not to bully the reader with it, trying to put his thoughts about Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein and etc and etc into some package that would be effective in communicating things about the basic American human experience to people who don't know who the fuck Wittgenstein is, or care.

"If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you're writing for other writers, so you don't worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you're communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way -- essentially television on the page -- that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.

What's weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature's current marginalization is the reader's fault. The project that's worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it's also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses."

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This is essential American reading. I confess a bias, because it's a favorite which I reread every couple of years.

Also found a full PDF of something I read not too long ago. It was just a random grab with an interesting title, from some crappy bin in some crappy shop. Turned out to be a really solid set of stories.

http://escholarshare.drake.edu/handle/2092/295

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american_hearts has pretty much said most of what I feel about the book, so I'll just say that IJ (to me) is exactly not what you describe it as and this is why I like it so much.

To me it was a good read, a good narrative. Tada! that's it.

I so tired of the way that the first thought that enters somebody's mind these days when they read a book or look at a work of art is "what is is trying to say", as if by default things can not be taken for exactly what they are.

A nice painting can be a nice painting and nothing more. A painting does not have to be laced with metaphorical meaning. For whatever reason, people make a distinction between graphic design (aesthetic things) and fine art (aesthetic things that mean something (whatever that is supposed to mean)). For books there are no categories like that, but this does not mean that books can only be of the sort that are "saying" more then they are.

Wasn't it obvious reading it how much DFW must have been enjoying writing IJ?

DFW isn't trying to do anything with the book, he is actually just writing a book.

but a book definately says something. if you can write 1300 pages without saying something, thats quite an incredble feat.

i would concede that at the core of the overlapping narratives, there is a simple moral to the chracters experience. but i will hardly say there is anything simple about the novel. the pomo shit might not be the point, but its prevelant and it at most times overshadows almost everything else.

and it is definately obvious how much wallace was enjoying writing it, but at times its also obvious how much he was writing out of some obsession to makes sense of his thoughts rather than his desire to tell a simple story.

am_hearts: how can you not acknowledge the pomo wit as a massive reason why this novel matters. it doesnt have to matter at the expense of the characters or detract from the overall significance of wallaces underlying message or criticism about emotional detachment and addiction. it actually adds to the impact.

theres definately something implicit in the writing style that ive never felt before from reading. and the fact that he was able to bring it out from the same generation hes criticising speaks to his understanding of drugs and over stimulated media-washed brains. he rewires your brains expectations for instant gratification while serving you lengthly diatribes on the pitfalls of instant gratification and its consequences.

the book becomes the drug and the content of the film which shares the title of the book. everyones either in withdrawl from their addictions or seriously looking for the next, and better high. and the narrative kind of rolls with that duality of euphoric mania and unattainable satisfaction and it usually can sustain them both at the same time which is what i found most incredible.

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It draws from post-modern lit, but it's beyond that. It's something new made out of two old things. I'm pulling this quote out of my mess of a post from earlier because I feel like it's a perfect representation of what this book is, and what Wallace accomplished:

"You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you're communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read.

Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way -- essentially television on the page -- that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way."

He combined the two in a brilliant way with IJ.

Edit: 'Combined' is the not the right word. He figured out how to "trick" those accustomed to the former into feeling the emotions (some of them very, very real) and waking up to the simple truths associated with the latter. AA is a perfect example and beautifully utilized in the book (not as a symbol of something ELSE but literally as the thing and the program itself). 'All my best thinking got me here.'

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