Enjoying IJ so far. How long did it take you to finish?

Took me about two months or so. I went through cycles of "this is the worst shit ever written" and "this is fucking brilliant." Overall, it was a pretty great experience.

WARDINE
BE
CRY

this

about one second

I looked at the title (Infinite Jest) and understood the point, which is that it's a big joke and the whole idea is that you're wasting your time reading it. For the full effect, you could go ahead and read the whole thing, I guess.

It took me a year, goddammit. But I did like it very much.

>DUDE TENNIS AND HEROIN LMAO

I only tried reading The Pale King by him, but had to throw it away half way through. Way outdated, and not a genuine example of accountants.

Literally this.

>first time
april 2nd - may 15th 1996
>second time
jan - feb 1999
>third time
june 10th - july 1st 2000
>forth time
june 21st - august 25th 2009
>fifth time
june 14th - august 20th 2015
>sixth time
june 3rd - continuing

DFW was a psychopath. He actually convinced MILLIONS of people to sympathize with him. Think about that in context of how he behaved in "real life". He drags his sister through dog shit, does as mentions, then tells you "I really just want to connect with common people in a real way"? Yeah, really compassionate guy. If you ever read about con-artists, you'll see how many of the behaviors of one he can check-off.

1. Impulsive behavior (think about his lifestyle, without making excuses, and you realize he's just winging it)
2. Drug abuse (very common among psychopaths and con-artists)
3. High IQ (again, evident from an early age, read his biography)
4. Emotional manipulation (if you listen to his radio interviews, the entire time he's appealing to both the listener's and interviewers emotions, rarely making a logical argument and always trying so hard to "connect" with people)
5. Verbosity* (this is an important one, for some reason, almost all con-artists are "talkers" and have huge vocabularies)
6. Early (not sure if this was confirmed) and frequent Sexual activity (was confirmed)
7. Narcissism (which funnily enough almost always ends up stemming from extremely LOW self-esteem, something he was famous for having)
...

If you actually take the time to read about who he was, you'll see it all come together.

I don't expect anyone to agree with this either. Most people deny that they've ever been the victim of a con-artist. For some reason it's too traumatic to admit you were wrong when everything about your intuition told you that you were right. It feels good to be conned, so I sympathize if people don't like to admit it. It's like having a warm blanket being taken away from you in the middle of winter. You want to believe everything is okay, when in reality, you were really just having the rug torn out from under you.

what's your point?
He was a good writer... that's all I really give a shit about.

Writers throughout history have proven themselves to be some pretty disgusting people... artists in general

thanks for the list though... real cute

>He was a good writer
kek

feb to may

He's not just a con artist, but a con artist with the backing of the publishing industry.

Except maybe emotional manipulation, most writers display these characteristics. Verbosity? Come on.

it only took a couple months for me cuz im not a bitch like yall

I put the novel down halfway to focus on college and finished the rest the following summer. It took me the back half of the first summer and about a month of the following summer.

eat shit

Sources? Psychopaths tend to not really get depressed though and by the sounds of it he spend long periods in pretty bad states? I did find anyone who spoke about him after his death seemed weirdly unmoved, to me anyway. Would like to read about the sexual stuff.

I'm the guy who you quoted earlier, who was saying he's such not a great person. Another thing I forgot to mention is that this girlfriend who he abused... Before they dated, she was married and she kept rejecting him, and he wouldn't take no for an answer and ended up getting her name tattooed on his body. Then after that he plotted to kill her husband. There's an apology letter on record where he said he was sorry for plotting to kill that man to the administrators of the halfway house he was living at. This isn't just hearsay.

Also, in regards to his girlfriends and pieces of ass on the side/students, he was known to be a pretty hardcore stalker.

Another choice bit I read:
>Wallace had called the female fans who attended his book tours “audience pussy,” that he had referred to one of the many women he bedded as “a three-day weekend I’m still paying the credit card bill on,” and that he had confessed to wondering whether his sole purpose in life was to “put his penis into as many vaginas as possible

I think you might be onto something. I'd say though that he was more of a sociopath than a psychopath. I still like his writing though. I don't think he really necessarily conned everyone into thinking his supposedly bad writing was good just because of his charming personality or what have you. His personality isn't really seen as "charming" to most people anyway, he was kind of archetypal depressed introvert underdog that some people, like those here, tend to cheer on.

You need to be able to separate the artist from their art, but sometimes people turn out to be such deplorable pieces of shit that it no longer makes sense to call yourself a fan.

usually takes me about 15 minutes to finish

>less than one hour

Or rather he sort of vacillated between this sort of depressed introvert shtick and would start abusing drugs and alcohol and fucking strangers etc and become a sort of different form of himself. Guy here earlier said that narcissistic folks tend to vacillate between extremely inflated sense of self and low self esteem, and I think that was the case with Wallace. I think he might have been bipolar or had borderline personality disorder. It's hard to say. It's difficult to pathologize someone who did so much to present a sort of alternate facade for who they were.

>tend to not really get depressed though

No, it's the opposite. Psychopaths are psychopaths because* they are depressed. That's where the thrill-seeking comes from. When you're depressed, you need excitement to get yourself up to a "normal" level where you feel things like everyone else.

Also, DFW did a lot of shrooms in college. Psilocybin done in large doses and repeatedly permanently damages your ability to produce serotonin (just many drugs do to it's corresponding neuro-transmitter when abused), as well as permanently impairing judgement, problem solving abilities, planning, coherent thinking, etc. Read his biography- he did A LOT of shrooms when he was at amherst- more than what I did and I was hospitalized (so was he but still, I never became a popular author).

also
>Sources?

Give me a fucking break. Figure it out yourself if I'm lying or not. Use common sense. I'm not going to pull up pubmed and show you my matlab plots just because you're not satisfied with my lack of citations.

>Verbosity? Come on.

Check your assumptions there kiddo. Being a good storyteller doesn't mean you have a "bigger" vocabulary than everyone else- it's *supposed* to mean that you're good at communicating an the meaning of something that has happened, is happening, or will happen, i.e., you're a good communicator. Most of the best communicators I know, all of them also good story-tellers, rarely use more words than they need, and often do not generally have exceptionally large vocabularies, unlike DFW, who clearly had an enormous vocabulary but clearly had no idea how to use it and was a terrible communicator. Great at manipulating, terrible at communicating. They're not always the same thing.

Thanks for expanding. Appreciate the input. I think you're right about him being less of the traditional charmer archetype and more of the underdog that people root for, which imo, was something he was fully aware of.

also, I will post some prose of his from the pale king I liked. One of the benefits of his quantity over quality style is that it gives me the opportunity to mine it for nuggets, which he does have. I think I would have respected him more if he just wrote comedy. I can't take anything he writes seriously because I know it's just a joke (on the reader). I don't care if comedians are assholes, in fact, I like it when they are.

he was probably not a psychopath, but if he was a con man he was a pretty shit con man. i don't sympathize with him or his world view, and the most he got out of me was like 10 bucks, most of which went to his publisher

my personal record is like ten seconds

hes a little mannered

My first read took about 4 days. I read similar to bloom, I.e. at a glance, but I don't think I'm quite as talented as he is.

Subsequent reads i have accomplished within a day usually. Sometimes two when I'm lazy. I've probably read the book 6 times in the past 2 years. One of my favorites.

ive been on the second page of the second chapter for about 5 years now.

>Not pouring water on the book and absorbing it through osmosis

Pleb

XD

got to around 300 last summer and put it down until this april and finished it yesterday!

and I seriously regret not making notes! Repeat reading is necessary. Also read E Pluribus unum. The genius of IJ is indeed fucking staggering

About a month and a half. Probably 5 weeks for the first 500 pages, and one week for the next 500.

took me about two weeks. i skipped the endnotes gimmick, though.also I skimmed over the pointless 'encyclopedic' parts of the book like the descriptions of pill bottles and other gratuitous shit

Almost 3 weeks

A couple hours after I decided I didn't want to finish it.

Infinite Jest is a steaming pile of shit.