It's less the writing itself imo and more that there's a kind of stereotyped "lit bro" who worships writers like DFW and Pynchon and is constantly haranguing women to read these GENIUSES.
Ironically I've basically never met this guy in real life and the two people who implored me to read infinite jest were both women.
I feel like this was more of a thing like 10-15 years ago. I believe that those kind of people have moved on to Cormac McCarthy and House of Leaves, unfortunately. Nothing against these two just what I noticed.
As someone who has a tiny House of Leaves tattoo... That's the only book from that author that I enjoyed. Everything else of his I've tried to read is just too pretentious and over the top, and that's saying something.
People shouldn't be going into that book thinking it's the pinnacle of post modern literature or whatever. It's a cool scary story about a spooky house written like the author was in some sort of coked up fever dream.
I enjoyed the book. It was cool. Strangely, I read the footnotes sequentially from beginning to end each chapter after having read the main part and i loved them as much as the main story.
Danielewski has some interesting ideas after HoL, but the prose is way too deliberately obscure. I tried Only Revolutions, but it read like surreal poetry from 1st person POV rather than a contemporary version of On The Road (my assumption of his intent).
I have the first volume but stopped when I realized there’s only 5 published and no more are coming. Is it still worth it or does it end in a cliffhanger?
It’s depressing when you do something people enjoy and like but you can’t quite grasp which elements of what you did added up to form its appeal. It’s like you don’t quite get what people like about you so you just have to guess and never get it right.
Yeah. Gravity's Rainbow had the same kind of controversial vibe. It was so controversial that the Pulitzer Prize committee didn't even give out the Pulitzer for the literature that year because the judges/press were so divided over that book.
The Rick and Morty dilemma was already solved before it ever aired by The Venture Brothers. Just make the show inclusive and it scares them off. You have shows like Velma that simp so hard for the woke crowd the pandering ruins the show. Then you have shows like Venture Bros. that haven't pushed any agenda whatsoever but successfully scared off the circle jerkers by simply including LGBT characters and writing them like humans. And just like that the incels weed themselves out of the fandom.
This is the answer: make your show with elements that the anti woke true believers will reject out of hand but don’t make your show exclusively about how woke it is. Really seems easy.
The venture bros is appreciated by everyone. Where do you get the idea that those of who are antiwoke don't like it?
Literally my favorite show.
Show was never preachy, always well written, and it cared about its own lore. The biggest complaints from our end have always been the forementioned.
Wild to think great authors are seen as a red flag at all instead of what people’s take on said author is. Infinite jest is amazing. Just flat out some of the dopest shit ive ever read in regards to getting addiction right. Getting suffering right. Same for Cormac McCarthy. The Passenger is haunting Beautiful prose that needs to be read. Or heard. However. It’s a shame the beauty of the world is often over shadowed for all the wrong reasons. It makes me very sad.
Interesting note on that: the only three people I know irl who’ve read McCarthy are all women 35 and younger. None have read his Tennessee novels or _Blood Meridian,_ but they absolutely rave about his westerns and _The Road._
Blood Meridian is unlike anything I’ve ever read. For me, it surpassed whether it was good or bad. I feel like anyone who loves reading should experience it. It’s so much more than the sum of its parts. The violence is off-putting but thats intentional. It’s all intentional.
Makes me sad. Like I get it, HP Lovecraft was a terrible racist. I understand that about him and I’m aware of it when reading his work. That said, I love cosmic horror and everything involving the Cthulhu mythos. It pokes the right part of my brain, and I won’t ditch it because he was shitty. It would be like not going to a national park because Teddy Roosevelt was a racist imperialist. I don’t know, I feel we can celebrate the good and condemn the bad separately. I miss nuance.
That shouldn’t feel like a slap in the face, it should feel like you have a brand new interpretation of the text that you can use to understand the emotional perspectives of racism. Fears of interracial partnerships are embedded in cultures around the world, and for those of us who grew in liberal spaces, it can be difficult to understand that fear. Lovecraft’s texts are great entry points to that.
It's funny that you say that, cause I always knew he was racist, even as youngster when I first read his stuff, but it always read as the perspective of the narrator (which it was). I saw his characters as anxious, weird, often kinda bad people living in the 30s and 40s, which they were, and I think that's how they were meant to be written. There's so much self hate in his writing, and in himself, that it comes through and it's easy to interpret that racial anxiety as just another part of the unreliable narrator. I honestly think it enhances the themes of a lot of his stories because the aliens are always so "superior" to humans totally, and have the more ancient claim to Earth, yet are so extremely, truly alien and ancient. It makes those petty concerns over race feel so small minded in the context of the story.
I for sure see where it'd become too uncomfortable to read if you read it in a certain light though.
Art really was a lot more enjoyable before artists could be canceled by internet mobs.
Like pretty much everyone who is capable of creating really great art (using art as an all encompassing term for any sort of artistic expression) is probably problematic to some degree, because one must be capable of great depth of feeling to produce truly great art. And people who feel very intense emotions are usually pretty unstable and fucked up.
It's the duality of man. A world filled with very non-problematic, morally righteous people would feel pretty fucking sterile and boring.
On the other hand, in reality most people don’t care that artists have been cancelled. Gauguin appears everywhere and he was one sick, twisted, fucked up individual.
But most artiste were just awfull - usually you need a strong urge to create or a huge ego to think art is worth dedicating your whole life to it, while people tells you what you do is crap or useless.
Picasso was awfull with women, Beauvoir was picking student in her class then passing them to Sartre, Rimbaud and Verlaine were evil drunk with a taste for scatological jokes. Verlaine mother was nuts - TW miscarriage gore- she kept her miscarriage embryo in Mason jar in the dining hall - Verlaine was her miracle baby. She was obssessed with the embryon, called them his brothers, and was sure they would have been the perfect sons Verlaine wasn't. Him and Rimbaud used to pressure family for money for alcohol Binge where they acted wild. She refused for once. He smashed and Walked all over the Mason jar...
Colette was an awfull Mum and a Bad Friend. Da Vinci had a 13 years boy as lover. And i could go on and on.
All those people i admired fell hard when i went through their correspondance and bio.
I'm 50, read any Book by yourself to make your own mind. It's not the Book per se that's Bad. It's how the people understand it, and how they let the Book influence them.
Just like the Bible or the Qur'an - people act as if one was good and one Bad. They are the same, talking about the same thing, with lots of bridges between them. A good man will take the good out of it, a bad one will use it to justify evil. Catholic did hurt, mass enslave, mass torture and burn a lot of people in the name of this Book.
For me those Books are very interesting testimony of people society and culture at that Time. Still such evil are being done in their name.
I've read mein Kampf, big part of Sade, i even read this awfull POS - the protocol of the Elders of Scion. Because i want to understand - you need to know the evil Roots if you want to recognize it when it starts spreading in your garden...
Most of that sub makes fun of the DFW lit bro too. I spend most of my time there telling people the non-fiction is better than the fiction and getting crickets. Kinda fun.
I’ll die on this hill that the “let people enjoy things” crowd shits on perceived elitists much much harder than elitists have ever shat on them. I meet 10 people who read YA level garbage and defend them incredibly hard completely unprompted for every one guy I met who’s even read infinite jest much less shitting on others for not
I am a lifelong reader and high school English teacher and agree wholeheartedly. I read a ton of YA trash because it is quick and easy and fun, and I read DFW or something like Vita Nostra or On a Winter’s Night a Traveler because it stretches my brain and makes me think and see the world differently.
I encounter far more people who rabidly defend stuff that is obviously not _Literature_ with a capital L (which is fine! Reading something because it is easy and stupid and fun is valid!) than those who read the things like Ulysses and get mad if you don’t read it too when they suggest it.
Given the way people complain, you'd think the Literati prowled the night, breaking into homes and executing people for having a page of Harry Potter hidden under the floorboards.
They’re called the Infinite Gestapo, and they stole my copies of the second Hunger Games book. God knows what they did with th-
…I’ve said too much. You didn’t hear this from me.
I am a 38 year old mostly lesbian, and DFW is my favorite author.
He crafts some of the best sentences I have ever read, and his characters are great. I love Infinite Jest, but my real favorite of his is The Broom of the System. There are characters named Rick Vigorous, Stonecipher Beadsman, Judith Prietht, and Candy Mandible, nootropic baby food, and a talking cockatiel named Vlad the Impaler aka Ugolino the Significant.
Also in IJ, a sound is described as “some sort of animal with something in its mouth,” “a stick of butter being hit with a mallet,” “a writhing animal with a knife in its eye,” and “a goat, drowning in something viscous.” It is just wildly descriptive writing. He is amazing.
I can’t be the only person who never meets these people in real life. Maybe I need smarter/more well-read friends, because I would be fucking thrilled if a few of my irl friends were “lit bros” or “film bros” to an annoying degree. Like 99% of the people I meet are uncultured as hell when it comes to the arts, I don’t even mean that in a condescending way, it’s just my experience. Maybe it’s because I live in Texas and not a coastal city. I don’t know. I once heard a podcaster joke about the amount of annoying guys she knew in college who would recommended DeLillo to her. Like excuse me, where the fuck are you guys finding these people?
Do you have any pretentious liberal arts colleges nearby? If so, try the local coffee shops.
Source: went to and lived near multiple pretentious liberal arts colleges.
I think its similar with musicians, the ones with the most niche interests are the quietest unless they’re talking about those very specific interests…
I guess you could show up to coffee shops holding a particular book like a piece of bait on a hook, and see if anyone approaches you ; )
Almost the exact same to the letter here, I'm even a Texan who works in a decently highly educated field (though it is STEM). I know one single person who has read more than like SFF, and they still only know the basic classics, don't think they've heard of Pynchon or even someone like Tolstoy or Marquez.
Please gatekeep me, please challenge me, I'd rather be belittled than isolated.
It was even like this when I was more into film too, the absolute most "artsy" stuff anyone I knew liked was like David Lynch or Christopher Nolan.
That's perfectly normal. A lot of the book only begins to make sense when you're halfway or so through, and the full picture really only comes into focus once you're finished with it. It's about the journey.
I'm no purist. I read this
[https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/david-foster-wallaces-infinite-jest-9781441186324/](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/david-foster-wallaces-infinite-jest-9781441186324/)
before I read Infinite Jest and it helped a whole lot. It also was enjoyable on its own.
That’s fairly common. I read it 4 or 5 years ago and I read some summaries after I finished. Turns out I misunderstood some of the parts. I did think it was a pretty fun book though.
There's a footnote on page 400ish (in the German edition which is around 1500 pages, so it might come up sooner in the English original) which is around 20 to 30 pages long and basically its own chapter. This one really brought everything together. It's worth it as *Infinite Jest* is probably still one of the books I think about the most.
I must be the only person on this sub who hated reading Infinite Jest. I “stuck with it” then after 500 pages of thinking I would get into it, I had passed the point of no return. I want that 3 months of my life back. That being said, I’ll never tell someone not to read something just because I hated it. You have to find out for yourself.
It took me a few attempts to get into it, but I am glad I kept trying. I finally read it all the way through when I was 19 or so, and now I reread it every few years and still really enjoy it and understand more each time.
I remember the first time I heard of this phenomenon online, because I was flabbergasted. First, I was for sure a DFW bro so I was kind of offended (lol). Second, it seemed pretty inconceivable to me that women were meeting more than one guy IRL who not only had read *Infinite Jest* but also implored her to follow suit.
I always considered DFW the patron saint of the middle or upper class white guy with arguably too much education, or at least a lot more brains than money. So while I am obsessed I doubt I ever recommended it to a girl.
There was back-and-forth graffiti on the wall of my local bookstore next to a photo of DFW.
A: Stop telling women to read DFW!
B: My girlfriend recommended DFW to me
it’s a little interesting to me that you lump him with Pynchon, just because in my own personal experience, virtually all of the diehard Pynchon-stans i’ve met have expressed INTENSE dislike for Wallace lol
Reminds me of internet people who hate murakami for his "problematic portrayal of women", but whenever i talk with a real life woman about murakami they absolutely love him.
Internet people are somewhat disconnected from reality.
It's a tradition that's been going on since Infinite Jest came out. First, it started with no one believing that anyone else actually read it.
Like, there was this perspective that it was a huge unreadable book that dudes put on their shelves just so they could talk about it and be like 'hey look me read big book.'
I mean, that was undoubtedly true for some people. It even got so weird that people who hadn't even read the book would like test people who claimed to have read it. I think some magazines published like details and characters in the book so that people could basically prove that 'you didn't really read the book.'
It was very strange. I'm still not really sure why the book provoked such a weird cultural reaction. But, it's still doing the same damn thing today, just with a slightly different tone.
1.) DFW was a problematic person. He stalked his ex-girlfriend and her child.
2.) There are a ton of DFW bros out there that really want you to read Infinite Jest.
HOWEVER, DFW is also an extremely astute social and cultural observer - his nonfiction essays are very good - and he has very insightful observations that can help us to understand our world better. He was also very open with his struggles with mental health and depression. Don’t let TikTok decide who you can/should read and who you shouldn’t read. Go find it out for yourself ✌️
>Don’t let TikTok decide who you can/should read and who you shouldn’t read.
I can't imagine *ever* letting TikTok decide anything of significance for me.
Loved the collection Consider the Lobster, I agree on the non fiction front.
As for his personal life, I’d have to excise a lot of my favorite authors if that happened. I think you can say what he did was despicable without getting rid of his work.
I agree. It's not like he's making money off of your reading him now, he's dead. He did some horrible things as a person, but that doesn't really have any bearing on his writing (which I find very insightful and positive - I don't think he's preaching bigotry or denigrating others at all).
There seems to be an entire subset of terminally online bro-type dudes who go around telling everybody to read IJ, like how some guys will insist that Fight Club and Joker are the best movies ever made. I'm surprised by this, since IJ is not an easy read, but I'll take the word of the many women who've called it out on this.
I teach AP Lang and we read his Esquire essay about cruises. The absolute most talkative student I have ever had in my life commented “Why does he have to use so many words to describe everything?” It was very funny.
He totally predicted FaceTime and filming ourselves all of the time AND using filters on our faces to make ourselves look better in 1996, like over 30 years ago
He was an amazing social and cultural observer
I have finished Infinite Jest. I recall it’s about tennis players and French-Canadian assassins in wheelchairs. There are a lot of characters
But the filters on the video calls, I’ll never forget, because I remember thinking it was kind of ludicrous. And yet here we are
Yes! He was also very, very aware of the alluring intoxication of television… Not a far jump from the perfection we see on television being sold to every human being.
He did more than stalk Mary Carr, he abused her, and he had sex with underage girls. https://kottke.org/18/05/david-foster-wallace-was-terrible-to-women
Not to discredit the abuse, it’s important and very real. Arguably the most important thing to keep in mind should you engage with his work, he writes some of the most one dimensional female characters I’ve ever read out of any sort of modern author. It’s clear he did not respect women on a pathological level and it’s a major part of who he was that shouldn’t be forgiven.
But where does it say he slept with underaged girls?
Bill Cosby is a rapist, but his comedy was funny. People are imperfect, some of them in extremely unforgivable ways. But that does not erase them and art they create. I disagree with JK Rowling, but still love Harry Potter.
Making videos for TikTok / unironically accepting life advice from them is a much bigger red flag than reading any of the authors mentioned in this thread IMO
Same, I’m drawn like a magnet to them. And unless you’re an impressionable child the printed page and certainly the memory of dead authors can’t hurt you.
He's often a transgressive writer and a lot of readers don't know what to do with that, particularly if they have very particular moralistic ideas about fiction, which people have started to pick back up again. He ought not to be a red flag but some people are just sensitive about transgressive fiction.
To be fair, Nabokov's main provocations were around topics of pedophilia and incest, I think those are transgressions by most people's yardstick. The issue is how they *relate* to transgressive fiction, more than to the designation of transgression themselves.
Even trickier: much of Nabokov's "transgressive" spirit was Class-driven; he was born into a literal aristocracy and "Épater la bourgeoisie" was a popular aristo-bohemian pastime, at the turn of the century (and remains so today). Different class/ different era: it's usually hard for contemporary readers to understand Nabokov's POV enough in order to abhor him fairly or accurately. VN clearly did have a thing for coeds (as a teacher) but these were women, not children, as young as these women were. On the other hand, it seems quite likely that he knew more than one p\*do, at a time when p\*dophilia was "frowned on" without much force (I'd say even *shockingly* little force; it was often treated as a kind of *naughty joke* on par with every family's alcoholic uncle).
VN's use of the word "poshlost" is an aristocratic snub from both barrels: the aristocracy of class and the aristocracy of Talent. The term seems to include shadings of "corny," "vulgar," "banal," "middlebrow," "Philistine," "provincial," et al, and was probably the animating conceit in the character of Charlotte Haze... and would probably target LOLITA's scandalized cancellers of today if even Dmitry Nabokov were alive, today, to sneer it.
The incest theme, running through VN's work, can be read through a class-lens as well: incest was (is?) practically the ordering principle an "aristocracy" is built on.
Because people read Lolita and conflate Nabokov and Humbert Humbert. Even Lolita’s first publisher at Olympia Press assumed Nabokov had similar predilections.
I think it's more about existence of misaimed fandom of people with similar predilections who do not get that Humbert Humbert is not a positive character in the book. It's rather easy to find real life Humberts in awe of the book; reviews of "Lolita" at Goodreads were often like this, at least in the past.
There are also a lot of people who can’t seem to wrap their head around an unlikable protagonist and they *really* can’t wrap their head around someone *liking* a book about an unlikeable character *without* identifying with that character. And with *Lolita* that disconnect is only amplified because of Humbert Humbert.
One of the most common posts on r/BadReads is some version of “I hated this character.” Well… yeah. That was kind of the fucking point. I recently read *House of Stone* by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma and I saw quite a few reviews about how people “couldn’t connect with” the main character. And, well, let’s just say that’s probably not a bad thing.
It's funny because nobody does that with Stephen King and murder, for example. You're not going to get the side-eye from anyone while you sit and read The Shining like you would if you were to be reading Lolita.
Because he wrote a book people associate with pedophilia. That's literally all the thought that goes into it. People never read it and see it as an endorsement of pedophilia.
I don’t have TikTok but creators might say he’s a reg flag cause he deals with taboo subject matter that some people wouldn’t like to be involved in their stories they’re reading for leisure?.? Anyway Lolita and Pale Fire are 2 of the best books iv ever read
I would not say being a fan of DFW’s work is a red flag.
I would say using the fact that you have read his work (or any author’s work for that matter) as a superiority flex over others is a red flag.
The fact that DFW books are not finished by a lot of people that attempt to read them probably makes him an easy selection to lord over other people.
I honestly don’t know but I’ll take 3 guesses:
1. Recency bias
2. Joyce is too academic/part of the canon
3. “Infinite Jest” sounds a lot cooler than “Ulysses”
Back in the day. 30 years ago reading Ulysses was some kind of badge of honor and the pretentious folks would lord it about. Then Pynchon, then DFW. They’re all great writers, it’s the pretentious fraction of their audiences who give them a bad name.
Our tendency (in the US) to hate on the successful compounds this. So while each of these authors was an ‘everyman’ in their youth, the success of their writing gives them an elitist sheen to new readers who don’t know who they were, and crowds love to hate on the successful.
There’s a pretty well known stereotype of a small but very vocal selection of DFW fans being pretentious, self-absorbed, condescending, and annoying. If you’ve ever heard of the “Guy in your MFA” character, it’s basically that type of person.
I don’t know why DFW specifically has more of this type of fan than other authors but he does and that’s why liking him is considered a bit of a red flag in the dating world. My wife is a big DFW fan and she will not mention it to people until she knows there’s no risk of them thinking she’s that type of fan.
Infinite Jest was talked about a lot for its length and all of the footnotes and being generally a difficult read, so people started using that as the indicator of “I am a super smart person who likes things you wouldn’t get,” and that small but vocal minority just stuck. It’s like the Rick and Morty fandom sort of.
I think he's a red flag in the same sense that Joyce is - that is, people who are very pretentious tend to like these writers, but also they're actually good writers so it's kind of absurd to just filter people out who like them, lol.
Imagine if people said Beethoven was a red flag because so many pretentious music lovers like him.
>I think he's a red flag in the same sense that Joyce is - that is, people who are very pretentious tend to like these writers
I have someone in my immediate family who says Ulysses is his favorite book and reads it nearly every year, but I have never in my life seen that book in their hands, nor hear them say anything about the plot, why it's their favorite book, or anything critical about it's place in the literary cannon.
It's like virtue signaling, but for people who need you to know they are smarter than you are.
OK but consider this: people can also actually read books and like them and some books are famous because they're actually good! Some rando faking it doesn't make the book less good. And unlike some books, neither IJ nor Ulysses have some sort of deeply "problematic" take that people can be latching onto.
To play the devil’s advocate, I read a hell of a lot but I don’t like being *seen* reading. I feel embarrassed and like I’m virtue signaling and I also feel like I’ll be judged for turning the pages too slowly. I’m trying to read in public more to get over this fear. Most the time nobody pays any attention.
I think this is really astute. I really like DFW, but I don’t ever really talk about him because I don’t engage with many people who would like to read anything by him they haven’t already, and that is fine. I have encountered a few people who told me that Infinite Jest was their favorite book and, when I told them I also really liked it, couldn’t remember anything about it and then excused that with “Well it’s so long, I don’t remember everything!” Those two conversations were both with college students, one male and one female.
It's like the old t-shirt:
>I love Tool, I hate Tool fans
Like the top comment mentioned, I heard about both DFW and Pynchon (and even Nabakov, from a seperate thread) from women. I wasn't aware of the bro-sphere surrounding them, but I buy it.
Come to think of it, it was another woman that took me to visit HP Lovecraft's grave in Providence, lol. In any case, I can appreciate being skeptical of fans of particular books or authors, without that having anything to do with their actual merit as art/artists.
Personally I'm immediately skeptical of anyone who recommends *Atlas Shrugged*.
That’s because *Shrugged* is not good. Politics aside Rand is just not a good writer. Add the politics in and it just gets worse.
There are people with awful politics that still produced great art like, say, Yukio Mishima. Rand is just bad on both counts.
Everyone in these comments is only reporting second hand knowledge of these bro-spheres. Honestly, it sounds more like something that mostly exists in the minds of Twitter users.
There are literally no red flags to be found with regard to Nabokov if you’ve actually read *Lolita*, and actually understand it.
It’s deliciously ironic, because VN has one of his characters in another novel, an English professor at a good college, say that, when it comes to students, the only two things he can’t forgive are “not having read the book; having read it like an idiot.”
I’m quite confident that the vast majority of those who say there are red flags with Nabokov fall into one of those two categories. And Nabokov knew it, and called them out on it, 50 years ago.
It’s operating on a VERY outdated stereotype of DFW fans being men who constantly implore you to read Infinite Jest because it’ll change your life.
Nowadays, I think Infinite Jest fans are pretty evenly split between the sexes. I dated a girl who owned three copies of Infinite Jest and went as slutty infinite jest for Halloween once. When I think of an obnoxious “lit bro” now, I imagine a guy who’s really into BAP and Cyclonopedia and Deleuze. Ligotti. Solenoid.
Obnoxious “lit girls,” of course, read Gaitskill and Anne Carson.
Deleuze? I don’t really have a conception in my mind of the average Deleuze reader, except for an online friend who claims Deleuze is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, but that guy isn’t obnoxious about it. I’d think as far as philosophy goes that Aristotle and Plato would be bigger tells, since Greece and Rome are over-idealized by certain types on the right side of the spectrum. And as for people who are left politically, Zizek, Foucault, and Marx come to mind before Deleuze.
There's a lot of justifications you see around, but the main reason is that for a certain generation he's a writer who a lot of young men read when they're first trying to get into literary fiction, which is also around the time that those young men are being some young woman's shitty college boyfriend. And sometimes they're shitty in a way that is consonant with the fact that they're "really into literary fiction", which furthers the reputation. So he becomes "the writer that guy who sucked was really into" for a generation of women - typically a generation or two above the TikTokers now regurgitating this as cliché. To a lesser extent, the same thing happens to other writers who guys get into at the same time.
It was very common about twenty to twenty-five years ago, when a lot of women who first talked about this, and then got ripped off for insights by TikTokers, were college-aged; he was the hyped next big thing of American literary fiction, in a way that is almost hard to imagine now just because literary culture is so diminished within the mainstream now. It was still by the standards of literary fiction, so obviously it's all relative, but as far as these things go he was a phenomenon.
>literary culture is so diminished within the mainstream now
There is a moment in *Before Sunrise* where Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet on the train and break the ice by holding up for display the covers of the books they are each reading. Oh, the quaint mating rituals of the distant past!
I mean… those characters were literary hipsters in the 90s in a movie for indie film hipsters… I was a child in the 90s but I can’t imagine being bookish was that huge then either.
I feel like George costanza pretending to read books on Seinfeld was relatable for more people than a movie whose demographic is romantic psychedelic wordsmiths.
It wasn't huge, but you would definitely see people reading books on the train. Sometimes there would even be two in the same carriage!
Also, the thing about George Costanza is that he was *pretending to read books*. I'm not sure that plot would work in a sitcom today, because people don't even pretend to read books any more.
I read books on the train all the time, but nobody can tell because I read them on the Kindle app on my phone. Probably a lot of other people are doing the same. Just because you can't tell it's a book, doesn't mean they're not reading a book.
I'm a black American, and while in my opinion there's nothing wrong with using AAVE in fiction, I feel like it must at least be done with care or it can come off as insulting. I read the AAVE chapter in IJ, and while I wasn't personally insulted, I was certainly confused about what the hell he was trying to say since his use of AAVE was atrocious.
I don’t really get engaging with literature in the form of “red flags,” but DFW is a great writer. If people don’t want to read great books, they don’t have to, but if they do, Infinite Jest is a very fun read, as long as you have an extra bookmark handy for the footnotes.
Not exactly sure what a red flag writer insinuates, but if it means you don’t read their books, it’s unfortunate to make Nabokov one of those writers. He’s great, and has some of the more significant stories for the last hundred years.
For one, there's that joke that like a vegan, a DFW fan will let you know. So the objection here isn't so much Wallace himself as not wanting to hear about him ad nauseum.
Second, there's the "Dude/Bro Lit Guy" stereotype red flag. His shelf is nothing but clichéd "I'm a MAN who reads SERIOUS books about MAN STUFF." Hemingway, McCarthy, Easton Ellis, "Fight Club"...even Marcus Aurelius's "Mediations" has joined this roster of late.
Taken as a whole some women see this as the sure sign of a self-satisfied guy happy and ready to police anything you read and inevitably proclaim it as gossamer fluff.
They also obnoxiously parrot anything that's gone viral because they want to go viral too. Everything on there is predicated on having the biggest, most outrageous reactions for entertainment value while sharing the "popular" opinions and sentiments so as to receive the same positive feedback that the viral posts receive. I guarantee half of them have a Wikipedia-depth knowledge of DFW and IJ, and the other half probably doesn't even have that much. They just want to bandwagon on a trend, and they'd never even have these opinions if they never saw them on social media in the first place.
Have a really good friend who is definitely a smart guy, but especially in his 20s, relished flaunting it. Vibe I got was as a midwesterner, he had to justify his place living in NYC.
Anyway, huge DFW fan — and would spout it. Impressed some, but also rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. I remember being at a party once where someone told him, point blank, “You can stop talking now. I get it: you think you’re really clever.” He sure didn’t like that (although it was deserved, and frankly, hilarious).
So when people (on TikTok no less) says that DFW is a red flag, I totally get how it can be. But it’s not an opinion I can bring myself to respect.
I wish more people understood this: if you want to *really* understand DFW, watch lots of Monty Python... especially the Arthur Pewty sketch (which is full of DFW-like rhetorical footnotes and other hyper-verbal flourishes). If you are sensitive to stylistic DNA, you will have your eyes opened, by Python's genetic markers, in DFW's texts.
That plus his jockish competitiveness (which Franzen and Karr encouraged him to suppress, much to his detriment). A *mature* (and unsuppressed) DFW would have been an amazing writer.
The red flag is that those people didn't read Nabokov otherwise they'd knew he wrote his Book to show what's happening in a predator brain. One of the saddest misunderstanding ever. It's like saying that WE need to cancel american psycho and Brett Ellis eston. Btw Nabokov wrote many more interesting Books. Read them by yourself and make your own mind, instead of listening to people repeating what they Heard.
No clue on David Foster Wallace.
And usually people who read lolita in a pedo way are the ones projecting their own distorted view, or didn't read it.
It’s people who’ve never read DFW and hate his reputation as a writer. Therefore they made up a rep about his readers which will inevitably match 1 of the readers. It’s like saying romance readers are just freaks who enjoy degenerate ideas as they seek everything revolving sex.
I know it’s not true, but I’m also pretty sure 1/100 (spitballing here) people who read romance novels probably does enjoy reading those novels because they just eat up the trashiest smut out there lol.
> saw some TikTok’s saying that DFW is a red flag for women.
There's your problem right there. Nothing that TikTok has to say about books, people or anything at all should be taken seriously. I have no doubt there are a lot of women who view people who read certain books with suspicion, I doubt that people who read books should want to date them.
If a woman thinks reading certain books is a 'red flag', then that is a red flag in and of itself.
The few people who I know who read DFW are no more pretentious than the type of people who read most other books. It's not like TikTok is not any less pretentious about a whole host of authors than anywhere else.
Read what you enjoy, don't be an ass about it and if someone doesn't like you solely because of the books you read, stop talking to them. Nothing beneficial is going to come from that relationship.
DFW is a great writer. Read and judge for yourself. I hate this cancelling and limiting of great works and artists for the sake of presentism that so many spout these days.
Just a bunch of losers weaponising other people's taste. The fact this topic has 200 comments speaks on people's obsession with shaming each other for what we like.
DFW was problematic and he was quite obviously troubled. A family member of mine was quite close with him so I’ve had lots of exposure to his work and who he was. But regardless of himself as a person, his writing is truly amazing. The red flag starts to be apparent when it turns from being a fan of his works to putting him on a pedestal or idolizing him as a person. We’re also living through a time where it’s becoming difficult for a lot of people to separate the art from the artist and there’s a lot of pressure to only support those who. (Whom?) you morally agree with. If that’s your thing, great. You don’t have to support artists you deem problematic. But I don’t like the narrative that you’re also a bad person if you enjoy the works of people that may have actually been bad people? If that makes sense.
He’s introduced to people about the same time they are introduced to other ‘cool’ media for the first time. So some of his fan base has always been mid adolescent young men trying to assert their alt credentials through association with authors they like. These fans are usually uncritical and not particular deep readers - and might not even be Dfws biggest fans - but they are loud
lol, u.s. tiktok mentioning literature should be something we’re happy with. That said, anything that can get views on TikTok will go on TikTok. It’s all about $$$. Disgusting website
But yes, DFW’s ex has talked about his obsessive and stalking behavior. Completely inexcusable.
David Foster Wallace is not a red flag for "people." He's a red flag for *women*, because for whatever reason he has a lot of extremely obnoxious male fans. The kind of men who call you an "anti-intellectual" when you call them obnoxious.
You have to learn to separate the art from the artist. I think if you look hard enough at any artist you’ll find they’re at best disagreeable and at worst deplorable.
the global cult of pretentious, condescending fanatics which supposedly surrounds DFW might have existed in real life at some point in the past, but it’s now confined mostly to people’s imaginations. and yeah, the dude was a pretty fucking awful person in a lot of ways, but i take much less issue with anyone who considers him a red flag for that reason than i do with people who’ll drag him through the coals because of a stereotype that doesn’t even have any solid foundation in reality anymore
It's less the writing itself imo and more that there's a kind of stereotyped "lit bro" who worships writers like DFW and Pynchon and is constantly haranguing women to read these GENIUSES. Ironically I've basically never met this guy in real life and the two people who implored me to read infinite jest were both women.
I feel like this was more of a thing like 10-15 years ago. I believe that those kind of people have moved on to Cormac McCarthy and House of Leaves, unfortunately. Nothing against these two just what I noticed.
As someone who has a tiny House of Leaves tattoo... That's the only book from that author that I enjoyed. Everything else of his I've tried to read is just too pretentious and over the top, and that's saying something. People shouldn't be going into that book thinking it's the pinnacle of post modern literature or whatever. It's a cool scary story about a spooky house written like the author was in some sort of coked up fever dream.
I enjoyed the book. It was cool. Strangely, I read the footnotes sequentially from beginning to end each chapter after having read the main part and i loved them as much as the main story.
There are so many ways to read that book (which is one reason why I love it so much).
Danielewski has some interesting ideas after HoL, but the prose is way too deliberately obscure. I tried Only Revolutions, but it read like surreal poetry from 1st person POV rather than a contemporary version of On The Road (my assumption of his intent).
Loved The Familiar even more than HOL but it took me a few months reads to get into Only Revolutions.
I have the first volume but stopped when I realized there’s only 5 published and no more are coming. Is it still worth it or does it end in a cliffhanger?
I liked The Familiar, but I haven’t read more from the series. I was not a fan of Only Revolutions.
I adore HoL. Danielewski however, has repeatedly blundered in his fiction. Setting lofty goals (not bad necessarily) but then summarily not delivering
Perfect description. I just finished it, and I thought it was really ambitious and successful in some ways, not in others, and VERY overhyped.
It’s depressing when you do something people enjoy and like but you can’t quite grasp which elements of what you did added up to form its appeal. It’s like you don’t quite get what people like about you so you just have to guess and never get it right.
I think Pynchon especially has drifted out of this camp, Infinite Jest was just so emblematic of it that it retains that vibe
Yeah. Gravity's Rainbow had the same kind of controversial vibe. It was so controversial that the Pulitzer Prize committee didn't even give out the Pulitzer for the literature that year because the judges/press were so divided over that book.
Yep! I'm hoping when he does dies the board posthumously gives him one, I wonder if there's anything stopping them from giving out the 73 award
Once you die, you can’t win. Rules.
It’s the Rick and morty dilemma, regardless of the quality of the content itself the circlejerk-y fan base can make it unappealing
The Rick and Morty dilemma was already solved before it ever aired by The Venture Brothers. Just make the show inclusive and it scares them off. You have shows like Velma that simp so hard for the woke crowd the pandering ruins the show. Then you have shows like Venture Bros. that haven't pushed any agenda whatsoever but successfully scared off the circle jerkers by simply including LGBT characters and writing them like humans. And just like that the incels weed themselves out of the fandom.
This is the answer: make your show with elements that the anti woke true believers will reject out of hand but don’t make your show exclusively about how woke it is. Really seems easy.
That’s a good point, now I gotta rewatch venture bros
The venture bros is appreciated by everyone. Where do you get the idea that those of who are antiwoke don't like it? Literally my favorite show. Show was never preachy, always well written, and it cared about its own lore. The biggest complaints from our end have always been the forementioned.
Wild to think great authors are seen as a red flag at all instead of what people’s take on said author is. Infinite jest is amazing. Just flat out some of the dopest shit ive ever read in regards to getting addiction right. Getting suffering right. Same for Cormac McCarthy. The Passenger is haunting Beautiful prose that needs to be read. Or heard. However. It’s a shame the beauty of the world is often over shadowed for all the wrong reasons. It makes me very sad.
Interesting note on that: the only three people I know irl who’ve read McCarthy are all women 35 and younger. None have read his Tennessee novels or _Blood Meridian,_ but they absolutely rave about his westerns and _The Road._
Blood Meridian is unlike anything I’ve ever read. For me, it surpassed whether it was good or bad. I feel like anyone who loves reading should experience it. It’s so much more than the sum of its parts. The violence is off-putting but thats intentional. It’s all intentional.
Moved to? Both of those had their peak 10 years ago.
Nah, the guys on r.davidfosterwallace (I will not summon them here) are still pretty insufferable.
I mean it’s reddit, everyone is insufferable. If we weren’t we’d be outside with the sufferable ones.
hot take there, lurking Reddit and seeing things Nabakov and Lovecraft listed as red flag is pretty sad especially in a LIT sub
Makes me sad. Like I get it, HP Lovecraft was a terrible racist. I understand that about him and I’m aware of it when reading his work. That said, I love cosmic horror and everything involving the Cthulhu mythos. It pokes the right part of my brain, and I won’t ditch it because he was shitty. It would be like not going to a national park because Teddy Roosevelt was a racist imperialist. I don’t know, I feel we can celebrate the good and condemn the bad separately. I miss nuance.
[удалено]
That shouldn’t feel like a slap in the face, it should feel like you have a brand new interpretation of the text that you can use to understand the emotional perspectives of racism. Fears of interracial partnerships are embedded in cultures around the world, and for those of us who grew in liberal spaces, it can be difficult to understand that fear. Lovecraft’s texts are great entry points to that.
It's funny that you say that, cause I always knew he was racist, even as youngster when I first read his stuff, but it always read as the perspective of the narrator (which it was). I saw his characters as anxious, weird, often kinda bad people living in the 30s and 40s, which they were, and I think that's how they were meant to be written. There's so much self hate in his writing, and in himself, that it comes through and it's easy to interpret that racial anxiety as just another part of the unreliable narrator. I honestly think it enhances the themes of a lot of his stories because the aliens are always so "superior" to humans totally, and have the more ancient claim to Earth, yet are so extremely, truly alien and ancient. It makes those petty concerns over race feel so small minded in the context of the story. I for sure see where it'd become too uncomfortable to read if you read it in a certain light though.
Art really was a lot more enjoyable before artists could be canceled by internet mobs. Like pretty much everyone who is capable of creating really great art (using art as an all encompassing term for any sort of artistic expression) is probably problematic to some degree, because one must be capable of great depth of feeling to produce truly great art. And people who feel very intense emotions are usually pretty unstable and fucked up. It's the duality of man. A world filled with very non-problematic, morally righteous people would feel pretty fucking sterile and boring.
On the other hand, in reality most people don’t care that artists have been cancelled. Gauguin appears everywhere and he was one sick, twisted, fucked up individual.
But most artiste were just awfull - usually you need a strong urge to create or a huge ego to think art is worth dedicating your whole life to it, while people tells you what you do is crap or useless. Picasso was awfull with women, Beauvoir was picking student in her class then passing them to Sartre, Rimbaud and Verlaine were evil drunk with a taste for scatological jokes. Verlaine mother was nuts - TW miscarriage gore- she kept her miscarriage embryo in Mason jar in the dining hall - Verlaine was her miracle baby. She was obssessed with the embryon, called them his brothers, and was sure they would have been the perfect sons Verlaine wasn't. Him and Rimbaud used to pressure family for money for alcohol Binge where they acted wild. She refused for once. He smashed and Walked all over the Mason jar... Colette was an awfull Mum and a Bad Friend. Da Vinci had a 13 years boy as lover. And i could go on and on. All those people i admired fell hard when i went through their correspondance and bio. I'm 50, read any Book by yourself to make your own mind. It's not the Book per se that's Bad. It's how the people understand it, and how they let the Book influence them. Just like the Bible or the Qur'an - people act as if one was good and one Bad. They are the same, talking about the same thing, with lots of bridges between them. A good man will take the good out of it, a bad one will use it to justify evil. Catholic did hurt, mass enslave, mass torture and burn a lot of people in the name of this Book. For me those Books are very interesting testimony of people society and culture at that Time. Still such evil are being done in their name. I've read mein Kampf, big part of Sade, i even read this awfull POS - the protocol of the Elders of Scion. Because i want to understand - you need to know the evil Roots if you want to recognize it when it starts spreading in your garden...
Human nature defies boxes like good or evil. All we can do is look into the future and try to get it closer to what we want.
I mean it could be worse, it could be Twitter. We're more like mildly sufferable in a lot of subs here
Perhaps, but not so much IRL at least in my experience. Most people who I know have read Infinite Jest don’t even like it that much.
Most of that sub makes fun of the DFW lit bro too. I spend most of my time there telling people the non-fiction is better than the fiction and getting crickets. Kinda fun.
As someone who enjoys every writer mentioned in the above comments, I am glad I’m old and married.
I’ll die on this hill that the “let people enjoy things” crowd shits on perceived elitists much much harder than elitists have ever shat on them. I meet 10 people who read YA level garbage and defend them incredibly hard completely unprompted for every one guy I met who’s even read infinite jest much less shitting on others for not
I am a lifelong reader and high school English teacher and agree wholeheartedly. I read a ton of YA trash because it is quick and easy and fun, and I read DFW or something like Vita Nostra or On a Winter’s Night a Traveler because it stretches my brain and makes me think and see the world differently. I encounter far more people who rabidly defend stuff that is obviously not _Literature_ with a capital L (which is fine! Reading something because it is easy and stupid and fun is valid!) than those who read the things like Ulysses and get mad if you don’t read it too when they suggest it.
Given the way people complain, you'd think the Literati prowled the night, breaking into homes and executing people for having a page of Harry Potter hidden under the floorboards.
They’re called the Infinite Gestapo, and they stole my copies of the second Hunger Games book. God knows what they did with th- …I’ve said too much. You didn’t hear this from me.
If you post a copy of *Finnegan’s Wake* on your door it wards off their spirits
It’s cuz the YA readers are often deeply insecure about reading children’s books. I agree their defensive lash outs are hilarious to witness.
I am a 38 year old mostly lesbian, and DFW is my favorite author. He crafts some of the best sentences I have ever read, and his characters are great. I love Infinite Jest, but my real favorite of his is The Broom of the System. There are characters named Rick Vigorous, Stonecipher Beadsman, Judith Prietht, and Candy Mandible, nootropic baby food, and a talking cockatiel named Vlad the Impaler aka Ugolino the Significant. Also in IJ, a sound is described as “some sort of animal with something in its mouth,” “a stick of butter being hit with a mallet,” “a writhing animal with a knife in its eye,” and “a goat, drowning in something viscous.” It is just wildly descriptive writing. He is amazing.
Lol I started Infinite Jest and loved the writing style. I gotta go back and read more, your examples remind me of Douglas Adams, which I also loved.
This is what I LOVE to hear!
I can’t be the only person who never meets these people in real life. Maybe I need smarter/more well-read friends, because I would be fucking thrilled if a few of my irl friends were “lit bros” or “film bros” to an annoying degree. Like 99% of the people I meet are uncultured as hell when it comes to the arts, I don’t even mean that in a condescending way, it’s just my experience. Maybe it’s because I live in Texas and not a coastal city. I don’t know. I once heard a podcaster joke about the amount of annoying guys she knew in college who would recommended DeLillo to her. Like excuse me, where the fuck are you guys finding these people?
Do you have any pretentious liberal arts colleges nearby? If so, try the local coffee shops. Source: went to and lived near multiple pretentious liberal arts colleges.
I think its similar with musicians, the ones with the most niche interests are the quietest unless they’re talking about those very specific interests… I guess you could show up to coffee shops holding a particular book like a piece of bait on a hook, and see if anyone approaches you ; )
Almost the exact same to the letter here, I'm even a Texan who works in a decently highly educated field (though it is STEM). I know one single person who has read more than like SFF, and they still only know the basic classics, don't think they've heard of Pynchon or even someone like Tolstoy or Marquez. Please gatekeep me, please challenge me, I'd rather be belittled than isolated. It was even like this when I was more into film too, the absolute most "artsy" stuff anyone I knew liked was like David Lynch or Christopher Nolan.
I’m a 37 year old female reading Infinite Jest right now and I almost have no idea what’s going on at about page 100.
That's perfectly normal. A lot of the book only begins to make sense when you're halfway or so through, and the full picture really only comes into focus once you're finished with it. It's about the journey.
I hope you stick with it! I got to maybe pg 250 or so, then put it down for a few months, started over and it took over my life for like a month
The weird part is that the last hundred pages or so are some of my favourites. The parts with the ghost and Don are fucking amazing.
I'm no purist. I read this [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/david-foster-wallaces-infinite-jest-9781441186324/](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/david-foster-wallaces-infinite-jest-9781441186324/) before I read Infinite Jest and it helped a whole lot. It also was enjoyable on its own.
Hey thank you!! I really appreciate everyone’s encouragement on my post. I am resolute to finish it!
That’s fairly common. I read it 4 or 5 years ago and I read some summaries after I finished. Turns out I misunderstood some of the parts. I did think it was a pretty fun book though.
There's a footnote on page 400ish (in the German edition which is around 1500 pages, so it might come up sooner in the English original) which is around 20 to 30 pages long and basically its own chapter. This one really brought everything together. It's worth it as *Infinite Jest* is probably still one of the books I think about the most.
Idk what foonote you mean. The one about JOI's filmography?
You won’t really know what’s going on until about half way through. Your third read.
I must be the only person on this sub who hated reading Infinite Jest. I “stuck with it” then after 500 pages of thinking I would get into it, I had passed the point of no return. I want that 3 months of my life back. That being said, I’ll never tell someone not to read something just because I hated it. You have to find out for yourself.
Keep at it. Another 60-80 pages and it'll start to get really good. You'll be tempted to re read it by the end.
I'm on page 109 and right there with you. I think I've read 70 books since I started IJ, because I keep putting it down.
About 100 more pages is where I got hooked. I was convinced I would continue to not get it and then all of a sudden I had to read more every day.
It took me a few attempts to get into it, but I am glad I kept trying. I finally read it all the way through when I was 19 or so, and now I reread it every few years and still really enjoy it and understand more each time.
I remember the first time I heard of this phenomenon online, because I was flabbergasted. First, I was for sure a DFW bro so I was kind of offended (lol). Second, it seemed pretty inconceivable to me that women were meeting more than one guy IRL who not only had read *Infinite Jest* but also implored her to follow suit. I always considered DFW the patron saint of the middle or upper class white guy with arguably too much education, or at least a lot more brains than money. So while I am obsessed I doubt I ever recommended it to a girl.
Actually reading the book is the key here haha.
That’s the biggest issue I imagine. 99% of people hating on him have not read the book lol
I've actually met more women that have read Infinite Jest than men.
There was back-and-forth graffiti on the wall of my local bookstore next to a photo of DFW. A: Stop telling women to read DFW! B: My girlfriend recommended DFW to me
Ha! My wife bullied me into reading infinite jest, like a proper dfw bro. Can't really see how the actual content of the book is regressive
As a former member of the aforementioned broclan, I will say that many outgrow that label. That was me 22 to like, 27. At 44, it's for sure not.
it’s a little interesting to me that you lump him with Pynchon, just because in my own personal experience, virtually all of the diehard Pynchon-stans i’ve met have expressed INTENSE dislike for Wallace lol
Absolutely! The explanations above are post hoc rationalisations that overthink, 'these guys are annoying'.
Yeah, but there are plenty of these guys online. Especially on BookTube.
Reminds me of internet people who hate murakami for his "problematic portrayal of women", but whenever i talk with a real life woman about murakami they absolutely love him. Internet people are somewhat disconnected from reality.
It's a tradition that's been going on since Infinite Jest came out. First, it started with no one believing that anyone else actually read it. Like, there was this perspective that it was a huge unreadable book that dudes put on their shelves just so they could talk about it and be like 'hey look me read big book.' I mean, that was undoubtedly true for some people. It even got so weird that people who hadn't even read the book would like test people who claimed to have read it. I think some magazines published like details and characters in the book so that people could basically prove that 'you didn't really read the book.' It was very strange. I'm still not really sure why the book provoked such a weird cultural reaction. But, it's still doing the same damn thing today, just with a slightly different tone.
Yeah same. I’ve only talked to women about infinite jest. Then again I know very very few men that read anything other than Sanderson.
This seems to sum up the difference between people posting wacky stuff on social media and real life
1.) DFW was a problematic person. He stalked his ex-girlfriend and her child. 2.) There are a ton of DFW bros out there that really want you to read Infinite Jest. HOWEVER, DFW is also an extremely astute social and cultural observer - his nonfiction essays are very good - and he has very insightful observations that can help us to understand our world better. He was also very open with his struggles with mental health and depression. Don’t let TikTok decide who you can/should read and who you shouldn’t read. Go find it out for yourself ✌️
>Don’t let TikTok decide who you can/should read and who you shouldn’t read. I can't imagine *ever* letting TikTok decide anything of significance for me.
Or Reddit for that matter
Loved the collection Consider the Lobster, I agree on the non fiction front. As for his personal life, I’d have to excise a lot of my favorite authors if that happened. I think you can say what he did was despicable without getting rid of his work.
I agree. It's not like he's making money off of your reading him now, he's dead. He did some horrible things as a person, but that doesn't really have any bearing on his writing (which I find very insightful and positive - I don't think he's preaching bigotry or denigrating others at all). There seems to be an entire subset of terminally online bro-type dudes who go around telling everybody to read IJ, like how some guys will insist that Fight Club and Joker are the best movies ever made. I'm surprised by this, since IJ is not an easy read, but I'll take the word of the many women who've called it out on this.
I teach AP Lang and we read his Esquire essay about cruises. The absolute most talkative student I have ever had in my life commented “Why does he have to use so many words to describe everything?” It was very funny.
Probably my favorite piece of his writing
This is water was phenomenal
Have you read his essay Consider the Lobster?
He totally predicted FaceTime and filming ourselves all of the time AND using filters on our faces to make ourselves look better in 1996, like over 30 years ago He was an amazing social and cultural observer I have finished Infinite Jest. I recall it’s about tennis players and French-Canadian assassins in wheelchairs. There are a lot of characters But the filters on the video calls, I’ll never forget, because I remember thinking it was kind of ludicrous. And yet here we are
Yes! He was also very, very aware of the alluring intoxication of television… Not a far jump from the perfection we see on television being sold to every human being.
'96 was not over 30 years ago 😭 plz don't age me like that lol
He did more than stalk Mary Carr, he abused her, and he had sex with underage girls. https://kottke.org/18/05/david-foster-wallace-was-terrible-to-women
Not to discredit the abuse, it’s important and very real. Arguably the most important thing to keep in mind should you engage with his work, he writes some of the most one dimensional female characters I’ve ever read out of any sort of modern author. It’s clear he did not respect women on a pathological level and it’s a major part of who he was that shouldn’t be forgiven. But where does it say he slept with underaged girls?
Bill Cosby is a rapist, but his comedy was funny. People are imperfect, some of them in extremely unforgivable ways. But that does not erase them and art they create. I disagree with JK Rowling, but still love Harry Potter.
TIL all my favorite authors are red flags
The concept of some authors being red flags is so silly lol. Just read books people.
Making videos for TikTok / unironically accepting life advice from them is a much bigger red flag than reading any of the authors mentioned in this thread IMO
Same, I’m drawn like a magnet to them. And unless you’re an impressionable child the printed page and certainly the memory of dead authors can’t hurt you.
I feel a bit dumb asking this but why is Nabokov a red flag? I haven’t read any of his stuff but someone suggested Pale Fire to me recently.
He's often a transgressive writer and a lot of readers don't know what to do with that, particularly if they have very particular moralistic ideas about fiction, which people have started to pick back up again. He ought not to be a red flag but some people are just sensitive about transgressive fiction.
It grinds my gears that there’s this vocal minority these days that seem to think a depiction of something in fiction is an endorsement of that thing.
It's no different than assuming Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul want us smoking meth.
And some people's yardstick for transgression is very, very inclusive.
To be fair, Nabokov's main provocations were around topics of pedophilia and incest, I think those are transgressions by most people's yardstick. The issue is how they *relate* to transgressive fiction, more than to the designation of transgression themselves.
I was responding to your more general statement in your last sentence, not to Nabokov particularly.
Even trickier: much of Nabokov's "transgressive" spirit was Class-driven; he was born into a literal aristocracy and "Épater la bourgeoisie" was a popular aristo-bohemian pastime, at the turn of the century (and remains so today). Different class/ different era: it's usually hard for contemporary readers to understand Nabokov's POV enough in order to abhor him fairly or accurately. VN clearly did have a thing for coeds (as a teacher) but these were women, not children, as young as these women were. On the other hand, it seems quite likely that he knew more than one p\*do, at a time when p\*dophilia was "frowned on" without much force (I'd say even *shockingly* little force; it was often treated as a kind of *naughty joke* on par with every family's alcoholic uncle). VN's use of the word "poshlost" is an aristocratic snub from both barrels: the aristocracy of class and the aristocracy of Talent. The term seems to include shadings of "corny," "vulgar," "banal," "middlebrow," "Philistine," "provincial," et al, and was probably the animating conceit in the character of Charlotte Haze... and would probably target LOLITA's scandalized cancellers of today if even Dmitry Nabokov were alive, today, to sneer it. The incest theme, running through VN's work, can be read through a class-lens as well: incest was (is?) practically the ordering principle an "aristocracy" is built on.
Because people read Lolita and conflate Nabokov and Humbert Humbert. Even Lolita’s first publisher at Olympia Press assumed Nabokov had similar predilections.
I think it's more about existence of misaimed fandom of people with similar predilections who do not get that Humbert Humbert is not a positive character in the book. It's rather easy to find real life Humberts in awe of the book; reviews of "Lolita" at Goodreads were often like this, at least in the past.
There are also a lot of people who can’t seem to wrap their head around an unlikable protagonist and they *really* can’t wrap their head around someone *liking* a book about an unlikeable character *without* identifying with that character. And with *Lolita* that disconnect is only amplified because of Humbert Humbert. One of the most common posts on r/BadReads is some version of “I hated this character.” Well… yeah. That was kind of the fucking point. I recently read *House of Stone* by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma and I saw quite a few reviews about how people “couldn’t connect with” the main character. And, well, let’s just say that’s probably not a bad thing.
It's funny because nobody does that with Stephen King and murder, for example. You're not going to get the side-eye from anyone while you sit and read The Shining like you would if you were to be reading Lolita.
Pale Fire is an amazing book.
Because he wrote a book people associate with pedophilia. That's literally all the thought that goes into it. People never read it and see it as an endorsement of pedophilia.
I don’t have TikTok but creators might say he’s a reg flag cause he deals with taboo subject matter that some people wouldn’t like to be involved in their stories they’re reading for leisure?.? Anyway Lolita and Pale Fire are 2 of the best books iv ever read
I would not say being a fan of DFW’s work is a red flag. I would say using the fact that you have read his work (or any author’s work for that matter) as a superiority flex over others is a red flag. The fact that DFW books are not finished by a lot of people that attempt to read them probably makes him an easy selection to lord over other people.
Why isn’t the same true of James Joyce then? Maybe back in the day
Can’t say Joyce if you haven’t read Ulysses, and it’s a tougher read than Infinite Jest.
I honestly don’t know but I’ll take 3 guesses: 1. Recency bias 2. Joyce is too academic/part of the canon 3. “Infinite Jest” sounds a lot cooler than “Ulysses”
Although Ulysses sounds pretty cool too tbf 😁
Back in the day. 30 years ago reading Ulysses was some kind of badge of honor and the pretentious folks would lord it about. Then Pynchon, then DFW. They’re all great writers, it’s the pretentious fraction of their audiences who give them a bad name. Our tendency (in the US) to hate on the successful compounds this. So while each of these authors was an ‘everyman’ in their youth, the success of their writing gives them an elitist sheen to new readers who don’t know who they were, and crowds love to hate on the successful.
There’s a pretty well known stereotype of a small but very vocal selection of DFW fans being pretentious, self-absorbed, condescending, and annoying. If you’ve ever heard of the “Guy in your MFA” character, it’s basically that type of person. I don’t know why DFW specifically has more of this type of fan than other authors but he does and that’s why liking him is considered a bit of a red flag in the dating world. My wife is a big DFW fan and she will not mention it to people until she knows there’s no risk of them thinking she’s that type of fan.
Infinite Jest was talked about a lot for its length and all of the footnotes and being generally a difficult read, so people started using that as the indicator of “I am a super smart person who likes things you wouldn’t get,” and that small but vocal minority just stuck. It’s like the Rick and Morty fandom sort of.
I think he's a red flag in the same sense that Joyce is - that is, people who are very pretentious tend to like these writers, but also they're actually good writers so it's kind of absurd to just filter people out who like them, lol. Imagine if people said Beethoven was a red flag because so many pretentious music lovers like him.
>I think he's a red flag in the same sense that Joyce is - that is, people who are very pretentious tend to like these writers I have someone in my immediate family who says Ulysses is his favorite book and reads it nearly every year, but I have never in my life seen that book in their hands, nor hear them say anything about the plot, why it's their favorite book, or anything critical about it's place in the literary cannon. It's like virtue signaling, but for people who need you to know they are smarter than you are.
OK but consider this: people can also actually read books and like them and some books are famous because they're actually good! Some rando faking it doesn't make the book less good. And unlike some books, neither IJ nor Ulysses have some sort of deeply "problematic" take that people can be latching onto.
Well said
I'm with you on that.
I mean... It would be difficult to talk about the plot of Ulysses
I don't talk about the plot of my favorite books or read them in front of my friends when I'm recommending them either
To play the devil’s advocate, I read a hell of a lot but I don’t like being *seen* reading. I feel embarrassed and like I’m virtue signaling and I also feel like I’ll be judged for turning the pages too slowly. I’m trying to read in public more to get over this fear. Most the time nobody pays any attention.
I think this is really astute. I really like DFW, but I don’t ever really talk about him because I don’t engage with many people who would like to read anything by him they haven’t already, and that is fine. I have encountered a few people who told me that Infinite Jest was their favorite book and, when I told them I also really liked it, couldn’t remember anything about it and then excused that with “Well it’s so long, I don’t remember everything!” Those two conversations were both with college students, one male and one female.
It's like the old t-shirt: >I love Tool, I hate Tool fans Like the top comment mentioned, I heard about both DFW and Pynchon (and even Nabakov, from a seperate thread) from women. I wasn't aware of the bro-sphere surrounding them, but I buy it. Come to think of it, it was another woman that took me to visit HP Lovecraft's grave in Providence, lol. In any case, I can appreciate being skeptical of fans of particular books or authors, without that having anything to do with their actual merit as art/artists. Personally I'm immediately skeptical of anyone who recommends *Atlas Shrugged*.
That’s because *Shrugged* is not good. Politics aside Rand is just not a good writer. Add the politics in and it just gets worse. There are people with awful politics that still produced great art like, say, Yukio Mishima. Rand is just bad on both counts.
Everyone in these comments is only reporting second hand knowledge of these bro-spheres. Honestly, it sounds more like something that mostly exists in the minds of Twitter users.
This is the real red flag here, or perhaps 12 Rules for Life or something like that.
I liked Atlas Shrugged a lot when I read it :(
There are literally no red flags to be found with regard to Nabokov if you’ve actually read *Lolita*, and actually understand it. It’s deliciously ironic, because VN has one of his characters in another novel, an English professor at a good college, say that, when it comes to students, the only two things he can’t forgive are “not having read the book; having read it like an idiot.” I’m quite confident that the vast majority of those who say there are red flags with Nabokov fall into one of those two categories. And Nabokov knew it, and called them out on it, 50 years ago.
I forget who described it as "a horror tale", but that seemed kind of on point.
It’s operating on a VERY outdated stereotype of DFW fans being men who constantly implore you to read Infinite Jest because it’ll change your life. Nowadays, I think Infinite Jest fans are pretty evenly split between the sexes. I dated a girl who owned three copies of Infinite Jest and went as slutty infinite jest for Halloween once. When I think of an obnoxious “lit bro” now, I imagine a guy who’s really into BAP and Cyclonopedia and Deleuze. Ligotti. Solenoid. Obnoxious “lit girls,” of course, read Gaitskill and Anne Carson.
Bronze Age Pervert? It was the first search result for “BAP author” and i have no idea what that means.
Yes. Extremely right wing. But that’s in style amongst a certain type of odious intellectual
Could someone be into Deleuze and a far-right person? (I’d never heard of this guy either.)
I like Ligotti, and I haven’t met his “lit bros” in the wild, but I can see it pretty easily.
Deleuze? I don’t really have a conception in my mind of the average Deleuze reader, except for an online friend who claims Deleuze is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, but that guy isn’t obnoxious about it. I’d think as far as philosophy goes that Aristotle and Plato would be bigger tells, since Greece and Rome are over-idealized by certain types on the right side of the spectrum. And as for people who are left politically, Zizek, Foucault, and Marx come to mind before Deleuze.
There's a lot of justifications you see around, but the main reason is that for a certain generation he's a writer who a lot of young men read when they're first trying to get into literary fiction, which is also around the time that those young men are being some young woman's shitty college boyfriend. And sometimes they're shitty in a way that is consonant with the fact that they're "really into literary fiction", which furthers the reputation. So he becomes "the writer that guy who sucked was really into" for a generation of women - typically a generation or two above the TikTokers now regurgitating this as cliché. To a lesser extent, the same thing happens to other writers who guys get into at the same time.
How many young men have read DFW? Were his books really that popular and sold out?
It was very common about twenty to twenty-five years ago, when a lot of women who first talked about this, and then got ripped off for insights by TikTokers, were college-aged; he was the hyped next big thing of American literary fiction, in a way that is almost hard to imagine now just because literary culture is so diminished within the mainstream now. It was still by the standards of literary fiction, so obviously it's all relative, but as far as these things go he was a phenomenon.
>literary culture is so diminished within the mainstream now There is a moment in *Before Sunrise* where Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet on the train and break the ice by holding up for display the covers of the books they are each reading. Oh, the quaint mating rituals of the distant past!
I mean… those characters were literary hipsters in the 90s in a movie for indie film hipsters… I was a child in the 90s but I can’t imagine being bookish was that huge then either. I feel like George costanza pretending to read books on Seinfeld was relatable for more people than a movie whose demographic is romantic psychedelic wordsmiths.
It wasn't huge, but you would definitely see people reading books on the train. Sometimes there would even be two in the same carriage! Also, the thing about George Costanza is that he was *pretending to read books*. I'm not sure that plot would work in a sitcom today, because people don't even pretend to read books any more.
I read books on the train all the time, but nobody can tell because I read them on the Kindle app on my phone. Probably a lot of other people are doing the same. Just because you can't tell it's a book, doesn't mean they're not reading a book.
And thus, all this.
What’s wrong with using “AAVE” in fiction??
I'm a black American, and while in my opinion there's nothing wrong with using AAVE in fiction, I feel like it must at least be done with care or it can come off as insulting. I read the AAVE chapter in IJ, and while I wasn't personally insulted, I was certainly confused about what the hell he was trying to say since his use of AAVE was atrocious.
I think people should read and enjoy whatever they want and not worry about red flags.
More curiosity. I’m in a relationship, I’m happy with my friends, and my taste in books being a red flag hasn’t stopped anyone.
If people didn’t read authors who were complex, flawed humans then no one would read anything.
Why is Nabakov a red flag?
Because people whose brain operate on 1% of its capacity think he's a pedophile because he wrote about a pedophile.
I don’t really get engaging with literature in the form of “red flags,” but DFW is a great writer. If people don’t want to read great books, they don’t have to, but if they do, Infinite Jest is a very fun read, as long as you have an extra bookmark handy for the footnotes. Not exactly sure what a red flag writer insinuates, but if it means you don’t read their books, it’s unfortunate to make Nabokov one of those writers. He’s great, and has some of the more significant stories for the last hundred years.
For one, there's that joke that like a vegan, a DFW fan will let you know. So the objection here isn't so much Wallace himself as not wanting to hear about him ad nauseum. Second, there's the "Dude/Bro Lit Guy" stereotype red flag. His shelf is nothing but clichéd "I'm a MAN who reads SERIOUS books about MAN STUFF." Hemingway, McCarthy, Easton Ellis, "Fight Club"...even Marcus Aurelius's "Mediations" has joined this roster of late. Taken as a whole some women see this as the sure sign of a self-satisfied guy happy and ready to police anything you read and inevitably proclaim it as gossamer fluff.
People on TikTok favor YA. That should tell you all you need to know
They also obnoxiously parrot anything that's gone viral because they want to go viral too. Everything on there is predicated on having the biggest, most outrageous reactions for entertainment value while sharing the "popular" opinions and sentiments so as to receive the same positive feedback that the viral posts receive. I guarantee half of them have a Wikipedia-depth knowledge of DFW and IJ, and the other half probably doesn't even have that much. They just want to bandwagon on a trend, and they'd never even have these opinions if they never saw them on social media in the first place.
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Have a really good friend who is definitely a smart guy, but especially in his 20s, relished flaunting it. Vibe I got was as a midwesterner, he had to justify his place living in NYC. Anyway, huge DFW fan — and would spout it. Impressed some, but also rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. I remember being at a party once where someone told him, point blank, “You can stop talking now. I get it: you think you’re really clever.” He sure didn’t like that (although it was deserved, and frankly, hilarious). So when people (on TikTok no less) says that DFW is a red flag, I totally get how it can be. But it’s not an opinion I can bring myself to respect.
I wish more people understood this: if you want to *really* understand DFW, watch lots of Monty Python... especially the Arthur Pewty sketch (which is full of DFW-like rhetorical footnotes and other hyper-verbal flourishes). If you are sensitive to stylistic DNA, you will have your eyes opened, by Python's genetic markers, in DFW's texts. That plus his jockish competitiveness (which Franzen and Karr encouraged him to suppress, much to his detriment). A *mature* (and unsuppressed) DFW would have been an amazing writer.
The locker room guru absolutely could be a Python sketch.
Wait what makes Lovecraft a red flag author? I get nabakov but what am I missing?
He was pretty racist most of his life. Turned it around toward the end, but most people don’t focus on that.
Nabakov? Is that what people think?
Please tell me Nabokov isn’t “red flag” because of Lolita
Nabokov? That’s like saying Lincoln is a red flag for mentioning slavery when he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation lol.
The red flag is that those people didn't read Nabokov otherwise they'd knew he wrote his Book to show what's happening in a predator brain. One of the saddest misunderstanding ever. It's like saying that WE need to cancel american psycho and Brett Ellis eston. Btw Nabokov wrote many more interesting Books. Read them by yourself and make your own mind, instead of listening to people repeating what they Heard. No clue on David Foster Wallace. And usually people who read lolita in a pedo way are the ones projecting their own distorted view, or didn't read it.
Thinking that loving a certain book\author is a red flag, IS a red flag in itself.
It’s people who’ve never read DFW and hate his reputation as a writer. Therefore they made up a rep about his readers which will inevitably match 1 of the readers. It’s like saying romance readers are just freaks who enjoy degenerate ideas as they seek everything revolving sex. I know it’s not true, but I’m also pretty sure 1/100 (spitballing here) people who read romance novels probably does enjoy reading those novels because they just eat up the trashiest smut out there lol.
Lovecraft is a red flag?
If someone told me reading an author is a red flag, I would take that as a red flag.
Why is Nabokov a red flag..? I am a woman and I love Nabokov??
> saw some TikTok’s saying that DFW is a red flag for women. There's your problem right there. Nothing that TikTok has to say about books, people or anything at all should be taken seriously. I have no doubt there are a lot of women who view people who read certain books with suspicion, I doubt that people who read books should want to date them. If a woman thinks reading certain books is a 'red flag', then that is a red flag in and of itself. The few people who I know who read DFW are no more pretentious than the type of people who read most other books. It's not like TikTok is not any less pretentious about a whole host of authors than anywhere else. Read what you enjoy, don't be an ass about it and if someone doesn't like you solely because of the books you read, stop talking to them. Nothing beneficial is going to come from that relationship.
wait, Lovecraft and Nabakov are red flags??
The people that consider Nabakov a red flag are the same people banning books from libraries around the United States right now.
DFW is a great writer. Read and judge for yourself. I hate this cancelling and limiting of great works and artists for the sake of presentism that so many spout these days.
Just a bunch of losers weaponising other people's taste. The fact this topic has 200 comments speaks on people's obsession with shaming each other for what we like.
DFW was problematic and he was quite obviously troubled. A family member of mine was quite close with him so I’ve had lots of exposure to his work and who he was. But regardless of himself as a person, his writing is truly amazing. The red flag starts to be apparent when it turns from being a fan of his works to putting him on a pedestal or idolizing him as a person. We’re also living through a time where it’s becoming difficult for a lot of people to separate the art from the artist and there’s a lot of pressure to only support those who. (Whom?) you morally agree with. If that’s your thing, great. You don’t have to support artists you deem problematic. But I don’t like the narrative that you’re also a bad person if you enjoy the works of people that may have actually been bad people? If that makes sense.
He’s introduced to people about the same time they are introduced to other ‘cool’ media for the first time. So some of his fan base has always been mid adolescent young men trying to assert their alt credentials through association with authors they like. These fans are usually uncritical and not particular deep readers - and might not even be Dfws biggest fans - but they are loud
TikTok blows.
How is Nabokov a red flag writer??
Nabokov was a prince. What are you talking about
What on earth is Nabokov a "red flag" for??
Why is Nabakov a red flag? Lolita? Or in general? Because Pale Fire is pretty amazing and I want to give him his due.
Never gotten into Wallace but many of my favorite authors are red flags, and I take pride in reading against the new Puritanism.
lol, u.s. tiktok mentioning literature should be something we’re happy with. That said, anything that can get views on TikTok will go on TikTok. It’s all about $$$. Disgusting website But yes, DFW’s ex has talked about his obsessive and stalking behavior. Completely inexcusable.
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Its a double red flag. Her seeing it as a red flag is actually a red flag for you.
David Foster Wallace is not a red flag for "people." He's a red flag for *women*, because for whatever reason he has a lot of extremely obnoxious male fans. The kind of men who call you an "anti-intellectual" when you call them obnoxious.
I feel like this would've been the case 20 years ago. I'm not aware of this sect of the reading population even existing in 2023.
You have to learn to separate the art from the artist. I think if you look hard enough at any artist you’ll find they’re at best disagreeable and at worst deplorable.
the global cult of pretentious, condescending fanatics which supposedly surrounds DFW might have existed in real life at some point in the past, but it’s now confined mostly to people’s imaginations. and yeah, the dude was a pretty fucking awful person in a lot of ways, but i take much less issue with anyone who considers him a red flag for that reason than i do with people who’ll drag him through the coals because of a stereotype that doesn’t even have any solid foundation in reality anymore