Second essay I’ve read today on this topic, and I’m glad. I’ve yet to finish Infinite Jest and have mixed feelings about it on its own merits, but so far my problems don’t seem to match the ones described in discussions of ‘LitBros’, which has gotten in the way of better, more in-depth discussions about Wallace’s merits and limitations. Appreciate the writeup.
I agree actually… I do know men who have read Murakami but I definitely did not think of him as a Serious Guy Writer. It's funny that his "coding" has shifted since whenever I last paid attention to this kind of thing (probably graduating college, so… 2012). Maybe there's hope for DFW yet—one day he too can be for the girls.…
Really appreciate this piece, thanks for writing (you get a sub!). The DFW/ lit-bro thing has always struck me as equal parts strange, and sad, strange because it conflates our consumption of art with morality, and sad because all the debate can ever lead to is dumbing down our capacity to be good readers who accept ambiguity in works of art, which degrades something that is fundamentally human.
Also, you touched on it in footnote 9, but the lit-bro/DFW discourse has similarities to the contemporary aversion to Hemingway, which i think is such a tragedy. EH’s work is not of a man proud and secure in his masculinity; it’s of someone trapped by it, and by the expectations in his time for the kind of person he could be. We lose a lot when we decide that writers & their work are only one thing, & not the sum of messy and complicated people.
Anyways i’ll stop there, but thanks for writing this. Excited to read more of your work!
“...was that your victory lap never ends.” Isn’t that it, though? Not that there can be a “victory” in this (silly) type of discourse, but isn’t its strange era-agnostic circularity and ritualized quality just typical Longhouse/Girardian effigy-burning or scapegoating? Like to make the corn grow.
That’s certainly one way of looking at it. I don’t know that I think it’s *that* conscious so much as basically the same process as all those hippies and then tech guys who never seemed to get the memo that they were the man
Isn't all this discourse a little annoying? Why are we going after men who like to read now? In the Venn Diagram of DFW fans vs. date-rapists, is there really enough overlap to cause concern? It feels like we're extrapolating to the point of absurdity here. I'm 37 (I'm not old) and know only two other people (yes, both male) who have read 'Infinite Jest' from front to back. Now I'm supposed to be ashamed of having read it? What a waste of mental energy all around. I read it. Generally speaking, I liked it. I started reading it knowing it would put me in a very small category of people. Yes, it's part of the reason I read it. SO WHAT? Who cares? Show me someone who truly cares about any of this.
Yes, it is annoying and we seem peculiarly unable to move past it. Probably not and FWIW I certainly wouldn’t feel bad about having read it! I cared about it once, but not anymore lol
Yes, as deBoer (rather spitefully, as is his way) put it. The more I sit with all this, the more I realize the thing I'm actually exhausted by: outrage. In general, I'm exhausted by outrage.
Yes, this whole essay is partly an attempt at expressing that sort of exhaustion and partly a mea culpa for my own anti-lit bro behavior once upon a time
"'Dudes' reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine Pocket notebook." — this is unfortunately me, even though I am not a dude.
"To believe in the autonomy of art is to understand that the text is different from the reader"—I love this point. Thank you for sharing!
Yeah because dudes don’t do this. They don’t exist. I still haven’t met a guy in my life who reads as much as me, and I don’t carry around a damn moleskin notebook and wear circular glasses or whatever this invented stereotype is.
i knew a 2666/ ernst jünger bro once who i (a nonbinary lesbian) shared a lot of common academic/literary interests with once but then he tried to steal my research project on eastern european politics so i think thats interesting
Have been seeing so much lately about the supposed Decline and Fall of the Lit Dude, and this is the first piece I’ve read that I feel like really nails it — instant subscribe
To your point about the modern DFW fan, of the handful of “Jest”-heads I know only one of them is a cis dude and he, to be fair, is very sheepish about it lol
I am not a DFW guy but a Cormac McCarthy guy which, in this day and age, probably puts me in much worse company. Dammit.
I am just now seeing that this post is a year old and I am confused but appreciative, I suppose, of whatever algorithm brought it to me. This was wildly prescient to have been written in ‘23!
‘Infinite Jest’ was a blast to read. It might be because I was procrastinating my ass off but I recall this a very fun week. (I do not think it’s the greatest novel, or that DFW is the greatest genius. But there some parts that are very good.)
I’ve read all the Lit Bro things. I cut my teeth on Roth and Updike and Bellow and Henry Miller and Nabokov. (And Vonnegut, of course.) I adored Denis Johnson and Richard Brautigan. I have even enjoyed a bit of Bukowski in my day. I have recommended books to lit bros.
The one kind of lit bro I could never handle was the Thomas Pynchon lit bro. For some reason. Now I need to go read Thomas Pynchon to see if I’m being knee-jerk about this.
Maybe some guy they met was annoying? Or perhaps several? So this put them off. As a woman, it has always annoyed me how certain men talk to me about literature or movies. Sometimes men don’t WANT you to like it. As if they don’t want you to have concurrent thoughts as themselves. I am sure I could delve into the stupid reasons why that is, but this would be a waste of my time. Nevertheless, it’s irritating. And most of these men who wrote the so-admired novels and poetry (well, some of them, anyway) they had no doubts about the talent or value of things that women wrote.
There is some way people admire or appreciate art which is off-putting. We all have met someone like this, and created a type, based on it. The snob, the gatekeeper, the moralizer. ‘Types of humans who are adjacent to me culturally and socially that bug the shit out of me’—this is not new but it’s become something of a runaway phenomenon in this age of excess hostility. Rarely do people step back and say ‘why are we all so intensely hostile to one another?’ Most people jus use a counter-hostility like they are defending their own essence
Infinite Jest is a blast to read. Not the greatest novel ever, but who cares. It's great. Now, 2666 is one of the greatest novels ever. But I adore long novels -- the longer the better: Underworld, Anna Karenina, Cryptonomicon, Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Gravity's Rainbow, Bleak House.
Second essay I’ve read today on this topic, and I’m glad. I’ve yet to finish Infinite Jest and have mixed feelings about it on its own merits, but so far my problems don’t seem to match the ones described in discussions of ‘LitBros’, which has gotten in the way of better, more in-depth discussions about Wallace’s merits and limitations. Appreciate the writeup.
Thank you! And exactly, I have plenty of criticisms of Wallace as a novelist-they just have nothing to do with lit bros!
Purely anecdotal, but I've never knowingly known a man who read any Murakami, only women.
I agree actually… I do know men who have read Murakami but I definitely did not think of him as a Serious Guy Writer. It's funny that his "coding" has shifted since whenever I last paid attention to this kind of thing (probably graduating college, so… 2012). Maybe there's hope for DFW yet—one day he too can be for the girls.…
Honestly none of the DFW fans I know personally are men, there's still hope!
yeah the biggest DFW fan I know these days is a lady and the biggest hater on moral grounds is a man lol
Biggest Infinite Jest fans I know are women also. I know plenty of men who are fond of the essays though (myself included.)
Really appreciate this piece, thanks for writing (you get a sub!). The DFW/ lit-bro thing has always struck me as equal parts strange, and sad, strange because it conflates our consumption of art with morality, and sad because all the debate can ever lead to is dumbing down our capacity to be good readers who accept ambiguity in works of art, which degrades something that is fundamentally human.
Also, you touched on it in footnote 9, but the lit-bro/DFW discourse has similarities to the contemporary aversion to Hemingway, which i think is such a tragedy. EH’s work is not of a man proud and secure in his masculinity; it’s of someone trapped by it, and by the expectations in his time for the kind of person he could be. We lose a lot when we decide that writers & their work are only one thing, & not the sum of messy and complicated people.
Anyways i’ll stop there, but thanks for writing this. Excited to read more of your work!
Thanks! Yes, Hemingway is a fascinating figure on multiple levels.
“...was that your victory lap never ends.” Isn’t that it, though? Not that there can be a “victory” in this (silly) type of discourse, but isn’t its strange era-agnostic circularity and ritualized quality just typical Longhouse/Girardian effigy-burning or scapegoating? Like to make the corn grow.
That’s certainly one way of looking at it. I don’t know that I think it’s *that* conscious so much as basically the same process as all those hippies and then tech guys who never seemed to get the memo that they were the man
Isn't all this discourse a little annoying? Why are we going after men who like to read now? In the Venn Diagram of DFW fans vs. date-rapists, is there really enough overlap to cause concern? It feels like we're extrapolating to the point of absurdity here. I'm 37 (I'm not old) and know only two other people (yes, both male) who have read 'Infinite Jest' from front to back. Now I'm supposed to be ashamed of having read it? What a waste of mental energy all around. I read it. Generally speaking, I liked it. I started reading it knowing it would put me in a very small category of people. Yes, it's part of the reason I read it. SO WHAT? Who cares? Show me someone who truly cares about any of this.
Yes, it is annoying and we seem peculiarly unable to move past it. Probably not and FWIW I certainly wouldn’t feel bad about having read it! I cared about it once, but not anymore lol
Yes, as deBoer (rather spitefully, as is his way) put it. The more I sit with all this, the more I realize the thing I'm actually exhausted by: outrage. In general, I'm exhausted by outrage.
Yes, this whole essay is partly an attempt at expressing that sort of exhaustion and partly a mea culpa for my own anti-lit bro behavior once upon a time
As a self-identifying lit bro, I thank you for your tolerance.
"'Dudes' reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine Pocket notebook." — this is unfortunately me, even though I am not a dude.
"To believe in the autonomy of art is to understand that the text is different from the reader"—I love this point. Thank you for sharing!
Yeah because dudes don’t do this. They don’t exist. I still haven’t met a guy in my life who reads as much as me, and I don’t carry around a damn moleskin notebook and wear circular glasses or whatever this invented stereotype is.
we gotta let the bros read
i knew a 2666/ ernst jünger bro once who i (a nonbinary lesbian) shared a lot of common academic/literary interests with once but then he tried to steal my research project on eastern european politics so i think thats interesting
Fantastic piece
Have been seeing so much lately about the supposed Decline and Fall of the Lit Dude, and this is the first piece I’ve read that I feel like really nails it — instant subscribe
To your point about the modern DFW fan, of the handful of “Jest”-heads I know only one of them is a cis dude and he, to be fair, is very sheepish about it lol
I am not a DFW guy but a Cormac McCarthy guy which, in this day and age, probably puts me in much worse company. Dammit.
I am just now seeing that this post is a year old and I am confused but appreciative, I suppose, of whatever algorithm brought it to me. This was wildly prescient to have been written in ‘23!
Yeah I don’t know why but people keep finding this post, it’s easily the most popular thing I’ve ever written!
Thank you so much!
‘Infinite Jest’ was a blast to read. It might be because I was procrastinating my ass off but I recall this a very fun week. (I do not think it’s the greatest novel, or that DFW is the greatest genius. But there some parts that are very good.)
I’ve read all the Lit Bro things. I cut my teeth on Roth and Updike and Bellow and Henry Miller and Nabokov. (And Vonnegut, of course.) I adored Denis Johnson and Richard Brautigan. I have even enjoyed a bit of Bukowski in my day. I have recommended books to lit bros.
The one kind of lit bro I could never handle was the Thomas Pynchon lit bro. For some reason. Now I need to go read Thomas Pynchon to see if I’m being knee-jerk about this.
Maybe some guy they met was annoying? Or perhaps several? So this put them off. As a woman, it has always annoyed me how certain men talk to me about literature or movies. Sometimes men don’t WANT you to like it. As if they don’t want you to have concurrent thoughts as themselves. I am sure I could delve into the stupid reasons why that is, but this would be a waste of my time. Nevertheless, it’s irritating. And most of these men who wrote the so-admired novels and poetry (well, some of them, anyway) they had no doubts about the talent or value of things that women wrote.
There is some way people admire or appreciate art which is off-putting. We all have met someone like this, and created a type, based on it. The snob, the gatekeeper, the moralizer. ‘Types of humans who are adjacent to me culturally and socially that bug the shit out of me’—this is not new but it’s become something of a runaway phenomenon in this age of excess hostility. Rarely do people step back and say ‘why are we all so intensely hostile to one another?’ Most people jus use a counter-hostility like they are defending their own essence
Infinite Jest is a blast to read. Not the greatest novel ever, but who cares. It's great. Now, 2666 is one of the greatest novels ever. But I adore long novels -- the longer the better: Underworld, Anna Karenina, Cryptonomicon, Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Gravity's Rainbow, Bleak House.