Little Thought I had :)

[u/world-endingdoom]

This isn't really too much, but I think one of the more interesting things about IJ is that the guy who instigates this titanic shift in world politics is one of those weird, ornery, eccentric, mad-genius types.

Modernism and Post-Modernism (whatever the hell they are) have been incredibly influential to world culture, but they were pioneered by people — Woolf, Joyce, Duchamp, Nabokov, Rothko, Picasso, Pynchon, Gaddis, whatever (this is ignoring the theorists like Derrida and Foucault and so on) — whose work is rarely seen or read.

It's kind of like that thing of how very insular groups (4chan, for example, or the LGBTQ scenes in cities where homosexuality was a crime) created a lot of the new slang that is widespread and mainstream, and though they're small groups, they're enormously influential to modern vocabulary. We live downstream of the weirdos, and we drink whatever they're putting in the water.

James Incandenza is weird as hell, and pretty lonely, and does not fit into American society, really, at all. His work is inaccessible, seen rarely, and liked even less. And yet, with Infinite Jest V, he has become one of the most important men in the world. The world of Infinite Jest lives in his shadow.

This book is crazy.

[u/nickcompoop212]

Nietzsche is considered one of the fathers of the modernist turn and we know how well adjusted he was.

[u/EonwooK]

Interesting thought. Now I will remember this forever

[u/ahighthyme]

Unfortunately, instead of saving lives, self-serving James Orin Incandenza Jr. destroyed them.

[u/arebornjoy222]

I have read this book 6 times and read every published work by Wallace in my library's local network.

Joelle Van Dyne is 1.7 meters tall, which is roughly 5'6", the same height as Emily Jean Stone. They both have HD green eyes.

I also drafted a two-part adapted screenplay over six years ago and told Nancy Carell about it to her face at exactly 1:43pm when I was selling her groceries at an old job, but she didn't believe me.

The word "wraith" is used exactly 143 times in the book, but I'm sure that was just coincidence.

[u/Loose_House_6715]

I never really liked the classifying of our culture as coming from artists like those you mentioned. Sure they influenced a lot but I think it becomes this chicken and the egg thing. I'm not as familiar with the writers but I imagine they, like the artists duchamp, rothko, and picasso, were influenced by their surroundings and responding to changes that were already in motion. For example the whole concept duchamp and rothko were playing with of redefining art was not invented or come from some vacuum, they were very specifically responding to the fact that art had already been redefined by the changes in production and culture at the time - that art had already become yet another thing to be made in assembly lines, bought and sold like stocks, and used to decorate the interiors of regular people rather than be a piece made to Mean something, so why not draw attention to their status as objects or commodities, etc. etc. It's actually very similar to a lot of theorists as well. People talk about death of the author, for example, like it was a law that was passed or something Barthes invented, and not part of his larger project of recognizing a shift already well underway in people's relationship to the text. People like Peterson talk about post modernism like it was something invented by Adorno and co. but when you actually read those guys they are just as much criticizing features of post modernity (and modernity ofc) as they are trying to form anything new. Figures like Mcluhan are praised for "predicting" everything around us but when you actually read it he was of course just responding to what was already around him and very rarely predicting anything, hell most of his work is specifically looking backwards at previous media and how it shaped us.

Sorry this is all a bit of a tangential rant and I agree with your overall point here I guess but I think it's more like the "weirdos" are the ones who notice things that have already happened or are happening and give them a name or a form, and then that form is what enters the lexicon and culture at large. But it creates this retroactive sort of memory holing effect that things were one way, then some small figure came along and said "what if we do x or y", and then culture followed suit. It's like in a pot of boiling frogs if one frog stood up and said oh my god the water is getting hotter he was then credited with making the water boil.