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Ami Dar's avatar

IJ aside, I would only add that he was a very good essayist. I will never forget his piece about going on a cruise, or the one about Federer, and others as well. Liking that side of him should be 100% not controversial (I think).

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Clayton Davis's avatar

To borrow a term familiar to this blog, dunking on Infinite Jesters has always been about displacement.

It's fun to forget that our literary culture's impact on the world peaked around your parents' childhood and has been steadily declining ever since, and it's fun to forget that casting down David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, and all the other white maximalist lit-bros of the 90s and 2000s did not create a glorious opportunity for young minority writers, but only increased the amount of neurons in the average American brain free for Internet memes and TV shows. It's fun to forget that the United States can only financially support five literary novelists under 45, and that you are not Ocean Vuong, Sally Rooney, Hanna Yanigahara, Ottessa Moshfegh, or Ben Lerner; that there is only room for one poet, and you are not Amanda Gorman, who is half your age; that the most popular American short story of the 21st century was thought by 80% of its readers to be a #MeToo memoir. It's fun to forget that you have dedicated your artistic life to finding a seat on a sinking ship, and that you have dedicated your career to selling tickets for that same ship to people younger and cooler than you. It is fun to forget that the literary publishing world is driven by mercurial politics, tenuous bubbles, and TikTok trends that are completely uninterested in you, and to forget that you didn't even have the ingenuity to think like Wendy Ortiz and claw your way into publicity by accusing a white lady of stealing your memories. It's fun to forget that it's no longer 2005, when your biggest concerns were judging the lit-bros you date by their bookshelves and maybe one day writing the biggest breakout novel of 2011.

Thank god we can at least signal to each other how much we get it by dunking on DFW and his dweeby fans.

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