Only in places like Hacker News is there a consensus opinion that Facebook is "a new addictive and time wasting form of entertainment who's contribution society is null or negative". Facebook has increased the number of interactions I have with my extended family by roughly a factor of infinity --- and I'm one of those nerds who's run a mailing list for his family since the mid '90s. A more concise way to say what 'grellas said is that these complaints about Facebook have nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with fashion. They are just a new way of proclaiming to the world that "I…
> “The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing…
‘Hal, you are here because I am a professional conversationalist, and your father has made an appointment with me, for you, to converse.’ ‘MYURP. Excuse me.’ Tap tap tap tap. ‘SHULGSPAHHH.’ Tap tap tap tap. ‘You’re a professional conversationalist?’ ‘I am, yes, as I believe I just stated, a professional conversationalist.’ ‘Don’t start looking at your watch, as if I’m taking up valuable time of yours. If Himself made the appointment and paid for it the time’s supposed to be mine, right? Not yours. And then but what’s that supposed to mean, “professional conversationalist”? A…
>I can only read either in small doses. It's very intense, and the passages deserve to be read carefully. Absolutely. Similarly, I read the Tao Te Ching 4x annually, by reading the same single passage both before and after bed, daily. Both Laotzi's and McCarthy's density of construction is just soooooo human condition. [Suttree book world] Harrington just found the eyeball in the junkyard vehicle — in a single paragraph humanity just oozes, including his toying with viscosity and shock, and re-toying again. Washes hands. The drunk boss having previously joked "yeah the driver only scraped…
The addiction and depression thing really bothered me too. There was so much detail on those topics I figured he must have gone through a lot of it himself before I read up on his life. Yet, there's so much that's just patently false. He goes on and on about the depravity of marijuana addiction and has a character try to commit suicide from overdosing on 4-5 hits. Ridiculous. I guess this is some parallel world where things aren't exactly as they are in real life, but that just seems like an easy out. I'm barely half way through the book, but some of the chapters written in ebonics are…
I'm currently reading it too, and am about 100 pages from the end. On a chapter-by-chapter level I think the quality is mixed, in the sense that not every chapter has the impact and pace that the first chapter has. In some chapters it feels like he labours a point for far longer than necessary for the reader to get the message. One criticism I hear quite a lot is that DFW's own writing on the topics of addiction and depression are shallow and not representative, though I can't really say how true this is for lack of experience. The thing that worked for me in I.J. was that Wallace managed…
Well I have not had dysentery but I have read "Infinite Jest" and had no trouble finishing it. It's an amazing book and particularly so for someone like me who was obsessed with "Hamlet" as a teen. That said it's a serious modern novel and while it contains a lot of very funny parts it's also at times difficult. If you like David Foster Wallace his other two novels "Broom of the system" and "The Pale King" are also great. The Pale King was left unfinished when he died and was completed (from various drafts and notes) as a labour of love and respect from his notes by his editor. It's…
The depth of the tangents and jargon in IJ are an aesthetic DFW adopted to counter the clever minimalism so popular in commercial speech of the late 90s. He called it maximalism. The burden is to some extent intentionally constructed; the reader must flip back between 2 bookmarks to read it at all since there are over >10% of the 1000 pages are footnotes located at the end of the book. It seems to be a meta-satire of two voices always present in late 90s US anti-depressant ads and the fine print that was always read quickly at the end. This burden forces the reader to constantly consider…
I got 200-300 pages in twice before finally, on the third try, getting over the hump, after which I couldn't put it down, and in fact re-read it a couple years later. I think the key to enjoying it is thinking of it less as a singular linear story, and more as a large portfolio of short stories, many of which can be assembled more or less linearly to tell a mostly cohesive story (though many of the other stories are peripheral to the main thread). This might sound ridiculous, but DFW was a masterful composer of short stories, and once you adapt to enjoying each little section of IJ on its own…
The article makes an opaque reference to "the oft-quoted David Foster Wallace passage on suicide and burning buildings". Here's the actual quote from Infinite Jest for those who have not yet had seen it quoted enough to know by heart: The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped…