On the attention span thing, youre rightbabout how hard it is to read when we're desensitised to stimulation. I have a job where I only need to do about two hours work a day but have to be in the office from 8 till 430, so I spend a lot of time reading on my computer to pass the time, and i think without this situation I'd never have started, let alone finished, this weapon of a book
I've been reading this book for about two months now and I'm only about 150 pages into it. You are so on point when you said it feels like short stories. I absolutely love that about this book. I have read other books since I've started this. I adore the chapters as they do feel like essays. Wallace's writing style... I love it. Your explanation of the book tells me that I am not crazy. That this is exactly how the book was supposed to be.
New viewer and subscriber here! Great review, Alex. I have had a love/hate relationship with this book since last year when I first finished it after a half physically read and half audiobook listened to 3 months of enduring the mental battle that is Infinite Jest. It's a book that I have had thoughts about revisiting but I felt intimidated knowing just how much of a commitment it is. I was able to convince a friend who attempted the book a while ago to pick it back up as we read along every week, 20 pages. I think it will be a year's time when we both finish but I think it will be worth it. Yes, I am actually rereading this behemoth. I agree that it is anti-literature and entertainment and yet there are some sections that are so gripping that you just want to read it over and over and over again. Cheers!
thanks for this video; i read this book OVER AND OVER when it came out lol but now it's just an old obsession. i still love it and it's def soooooo influential ❤ also the structure almost mimes the video.. one could just become hypnotized by it and read it in a loop forever
Good video. Interesting thoughts. The book is really just the screenplay to the movie Infinite Jest. That’s why you’re supposed to keep reading it over and over and over etc. Notice it’s never been adapted into a film? Don’t you think maybe there’s a reason for that? They don’t want everyone dying watching it over and over like how it happens in the book! Scary.
i had zero idea what this book was about even though it had always been on my radar because it feels like a cult classic. hearing you talk about it blew my mind as thats not at all what i expected (although i have no idea what i expected) WELCOME BACK. we wait impatiently for your videos in these parts. good luck with the rest of school!
Took me 4 months to read and finished it 2 days ago I share your sentiments on not liking this book at all if i read it when it came out, but i bought the physical version and plan to reread it next year. I'm enjoying listening to what people have to say after reading it as it's an experience that is not easily comparable so I appreciate this video
Great review, felt a very similar way finishing it, where I wasn't really sure what to think about what I just spent so much time on for months on end. A unique and laborious read. Felt like I accomplished something like a marathon when I finished it, but I don't know if I't tell anyone they need to run this race.
Other analysis claims Infinite Jest is to be read in context of Shakespeare's Hamlet. It's one thing to be observing. It's another to have a possible solution or consequence articulated.
There is a line of dialogue from a party Joelle attended that convinced me into treating plot with minimum attendance(I mean that after I've read the whole thing ofcourse, as in to stop spending time trying to figure out who sent cartridges where and who ate what): - way it can be film qua film. Comstock says if it even exists it has to be something more like an aesthetic pharmaceutical. Some beastly post-annular scopophiliacal vector. Suprasubliminals and that. Some kind of abstractable hypnosis, an optical dopamine-cue. A recorded delusion. Duquette says he's lost contact with three colleagues. He said a good bit of Berkeley isn't answering their phone.’ Here, some random guy at a party is obviously describing the Entertainment's properties. He states that its so compelling because of techniques it was created with. I think Wallace tried to do similar things with the book itself, plant a feeling that the plot is going somewhere, that you will understand it eventually if you be attentive. Just exactly the feeling that will help you stick to the end of the book, ofcourse not as ultimately compelling as it's fictional counterpart, but it led me to think that the plot is ONLY there to give you that sense using cues on cues on cues that never come to sort of finality.
Saved this video months ago for when I finished reading it. The most unexpected ending maybe ever? I'd been spoiled on them digging Himself's corpse and was expectant of it until I realized it happened on the 17th page of the book. I really gotta read it again now
It didn't even really happen on the 17th page just mentioned very briefly. Yeah I was definitely expecting some super epic scene where Hal and Don finally meet and go to Quebec for the master but was surprised when a scene like that never really appeared in the book, only as a paragraph-long hallucinogenic dream sequence and a small clause on pg. 17.
agree that IJ is not really a Recommendation per se. i reached a point with it where I was sort of like 'i get it already' wrt the style it was written in. it's sort of just Fine, personally i think it's overrated. good luck with all your work :/ overworked grad student solidarity (and welcome back! if just for now)
I think it's overrated, but also feel that the pendulum has kind of over-swung to the other direction in some circles. It has this reputation of being an overlong pretentious waste of time. It's pretentious and long, but for me it was very worth it, and I appreciated it enough as a completely unique experience. I do think that for anyone slightly interested, it's worth at least trying.
The point of the book is to accelerate post modernism to the point where the reader stops reading to prove a point to themselves and starts living a meaningful live in the world. Youre supposed to stop reading and start living at some point. It achieves its goal of promoting suicidality and de realization but the irony is the one must reject that lest they end up hanging by a belt from their back porch
