International David Foster Wallace Diversity Committee

Looking for an encyclopedic work of metafiction which uses its footnotes and formal qualities in an innovative manner? Say no more - Spooky Infinite Jest* is here for you!

Omg Bandcamp/Youtube link if it’s available? :O 

There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It’s not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us — these are just the hazards of being free.

How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose? What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it? Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art—change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go.

“But here is a problem or a question or a caveat or what have you. If you are Schopenhauer, or David Foster Wallace, or even Professor Vermeule in her office on the eve of a young person’s graduation day, and if you think that consciousness might open you up to a distinctive kind of pain, or even worse if you intuit that consciousness might cause a distinctive kind of pain, why spread the news? If consciousness is nature’s nightmare, why ask people to confront the hideous fact, to, as it were, consider how the lobster suffers too? Wallace developed a niche as an essayist. He wrote about “supposedly fun” things—a cruise, a lobster festival, a college graduation. And he agonized about them. He wrote incredibly funny, wise, intelligent things about his agony. I don’t want to step all over this kind of joke by analyzing it to death. I love the joke. I love it when Schopenhauer does it and I love it when Wallace does it—and yet. Part of Wallace’s dare I call it shtick involves inserting his own suffering consciousness into the middle of other people’s fun times and watching as the fun slowly circles the drain—in this light, the Maine Lobster Fest “begins to take on the aspect of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.”