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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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This is becoming one of themotte's great long-running arguments. I'm mostly in the Skill Issue camp, but it does forget the critical role that individual taste plays - I love Infinite Jest, but also put down Gravity's Rainbow. If you can handle McCarthy you can pretty much handle anything DFW throws at you (the main difference is IJ's nonlinear structure, both temporally and with the footnotes). You should consider picking up The Passenger/Stella Maris and seeing if you hate it.

Edit: my other advice is that you appear to have come away from Infinite Jest with pretty much the same critique of postmodernism that DFW makes in his essays on the topic. He Has Noticed The Bodies, and IJ is a kind of desperate thrashing against the limits of postmodern literature (the Pale King, too, and far more tragically). I think this is one reason that IJ is so long, because even with its postmodern style it's nearly impossible to finish the book without coming away from it with the kind of genuine love and care for its characters that postmodernism apparently forecloses. Every time I finish IJ, it feels like the end of a lengthy trip visiting good friends in a foreign country.

I don't know why your comment was the reason, but it made me remember that I did really enjoy Sadly, Porn by The Last Psychiatrist / Edward Teach.

It is drastically non-linear and starts with several dozen pages of footnotes that are longer than the primary text. I think you could call it something like "postmodern meta-psychology analysis" or something. And yet, I did find it good, readable, and deep.

Maybe that's the whole point of postermodernist literature? Different elements of it are highly resonant with a reader while others are not. It's less a bellcurve (like, say, 18th century American literature) and more of a stochastic matching algorithm.