Infinite Summer

Gigi, 39, St. Paul, MN. First time reading Infinite Jest...at this point more overwhelmed by this forum than by the 1,079 pages of the novel. I'm an English major from years ago, working on my MN teaching license (grades 5-12). My 19-year-old daughter is in Turkey until August so I have lots of time to savor this novel. I'm so excited and inspired by all the responses I've read here...ahhhh, summer.

This is the voice of Aaron Lazenby, 36yo married white male from the central coast of CA. Writer/editor of a business/technology magazine/website for a big software company. Host, as DJ Yuri G, of the Psionic Dehiscence radio show on San Francisco's Pirate Cat Radio. Second attempt at Infinite Jest...one of those brutal mid-100s endnotes KOed me the first time. Reading this time on a Kindle, which seems the perfect fit.

Twitter: @alazenby

Hey, I'm Dylan, a college student and future educator. Second readthrough feels like watching the Criterion collection of your favorite movie, what with all the subtleties you never noticed before and excellent commentary tracks you didn't have access to your first time viewing. My job as a camp counselor doesn't start for a bit yet so I'm spending my days staying up late thinking about Infinite Jest and then waking up to go over to the Dunkin Donuts terrace early in the morning and read Infinite Jest. It's a great summer.

Hi, I'm Olja.
Born in ex-Yugoslavia/Croatia, first twenty-ish years spent there (minus 6 months in Seattle as an exchange student, on a scholarship), graduated from Theater Studies in Italy, which is where I live now.
After years of wandering am now re-learning to write as in fiction and read as in seriously, while starting to publish some magazine articles - a good research-synthesis-writing exercise as well.

Favorite writers include James Joyce ("A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and "The Holy Office" got me through puberty, then I encountered "The Dubliners" and tried reading "Ulysses", soon to forget about it while spending years trying to be cool and extroverted, now picking up where I left off), Margaret Atwood (was given one of her books while in Seattle, have been slowly catching up with the rest of it ever since), Allen Ginsberg (been unsystematically browsing through his writings when I felt like it, so far), Samuel Beckett, Federico García Lorca (adored and influenced by as a kid, which won me a poetry award now that I think of it), etc.

Recently focusing on Italo Calvino (in Italian), Jean Genet (in Italian, so far, but learning French), Raymond Carver ("Cathedral"! "Soda Crackers", also!) and David Foster Wallace, amongst others.
Still confused about DFW and about what to make of him (in my own personal namespace(s)).
Reading "Infinite Jest", London, Abacus, 2009.

I'm Jamie, I'm 20 years-old and starting the final year of an English Literature degree in London this september. Literature has been my primary love for as long as I can remember and, though I have eternal favourites (Joyce, T.S Eliot, Shakespeare, Dante, Yeats), my tastes are restless and I'm always dipping into unknown territory. To this end, my journey with David Foster Wallace started, sadly, with his death. I had been aware of him beforehand but had never read anything besides his essay on Roger Federer and perhaps some of the Harper's articles.

A few days after his death the Guardian newspaper ran an article from one of their columnists who seemed not just sad about a literary hero having died but genuinely moved on a personal level, as if this was a man with whom he had developed an emotional attachment through his work that made his untimely death a personal loss. This is the kind of thing I live for when it comes to literature so I made a mental note to check out more of Wallace's work and subsequently found out about Infinite Jest. Surprisingly, since it seems to have a reputation as THE serious novel of the 90s in America, it's not particularly well-known here, unless you actively seek out these kinds of things. It looked intriguing but I felt like I didn't want to read the book because Wallace had just died so I waited a while, until the beginning of last month actually (yes, sorry, I've cheated. I'm 700 pages in now) before I started on the novel. I'm glad I did, and I'm glad there is this forum here to discuss it.

I don't know about the rest of you but so far this book has me by the throat and won't let go. I've been reading some of Wallace's other stuff online and have bought and dipped into A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and am almost positive I have found a new favourite

Hi,

I'm Ben, a 28 year-old grad student living in Houston. My goal is to get into teaching and maybe some coaching too. I decided to read IJ kind of randomly...last summer I saw one of my best friends lugging the book around and wondered what it was and why anyone would want to read such a big book. After reading a few essays from Consider the Lobster I started to see why, and after reading the first 100 pages or so I'm really starting to see why. I'm looking forward to this!

Howdy, I am Michael, a 33-year-old English instructor at NDSU and MSUM who teaches mostly first-year writing and early American literature. I purchased my copy of IJ at a Barnes & Noble in El Paso for $1.88 in July of 1998 while following Phish. I never made it through this book more than once for various reasons, mostly dedication. However, I enjoyed everything I have read so far. I feel I know some of these first chapters very well... I started IS a week late and am slowly catching up (still behind but ahead of schedule had I started when I was supposed to start).

IS was sort of serendipitous opportunity for me. On the night of June 27th while talking books at a party, IJ came up. I stated that I liked what I have read but never finish. Continuing, I said that it would be great to do it on a reasonably-paced schedule with a group of people--a pace that would not let me burn out. Well, on June 29th a friend randomly introduced me to IS. By June 30th I was back reading IJ.

I asked and I received.

Cheers,
mt

Hi, Dorothy W. here (my blogging pseudonym). I'm a 35-year-old community college English instructor and became a DFW fan after reading Consider the Lobster last year. I have A Supposedly Fun Thing lined up next. I'm a huge essay fan and thought DFW's essays were absolutely amazing, especially the one on dictionaries. I'm very glad there is so much DFW writing out there that I haven't yet read. Here's my blog:

Joe here. Failed English teacher. Non-smoker. Thirty pounds overweight. Balding. Not only broke but $30,000 U.S. in the hole for thinking the leaning and overzealous tendency toward reading/writing lent itself most naturally toward a life of tortured pedagogy teaching Darles Chickens in the Virginia Public School System, the teaching of which, I've since learned, has absolutely nothing to do with reading and writing and almost everything to do with the scientific management of a mass population. So now I'm approximately thirty-six years old, I construct CAD maps for a local engineering firm in an 8X6 beige cubicle, I remind folks on the other end of the speakerphone who sit, quite possibly, eight feet away from me that I never was, nor am I currently in the business of correcting grammar—write your own sentence however the fuck you want, thank you very much (though I am also pained by the likes of sentences on top of p.89, 1st ed.)—there's the off chance that I drink too much bourbon at a place called Jazz Street Grill, the establishment of which built a deck, two years ago, that juts out into the trees and remains empty for most of the afternoon enabling one who can leave work at work to sit in relative peace with large books kind of lost in the Blue Ridge sipping Maker’s Mark, I've got nothing even resembling the how can I say it capitalist virility that apparently gives my long lost companions—the ants from the Aesop tale scratching their heads wondering why I’m still living in this wrecked turn of the century house with children! children! in a bad part of town this many years after that much money for grad school trading lawn mowers away for canoes and rubbing my legs together like a grasshopper while summer slips away—the gumption to go forth into the world and make lots of money and do lots of fun things, and I am wide-awake-aware, almost to a debilitating psychedelic degree, that we not only do a shitpile of measuring during any given day, but that every human measurement contains error.