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File this under, “Things I wish I had posted while they were still fresh.” Nevertheless: stale bread is still bread.
An online community of “endurance bibliophiles” at the Infinite Summer website has taken the challenge of reading and discussing David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece, Infinite Jest, over the summer of 2009. As seasonal reading goes, Infinite Jest would fill an entire summer’s worth of reading—1104 pages, exhaustively annotated (yes—you should read the footnotes).
Infinite Jest is freewheeling. The novel centers on the Enfield Tennis Academy, tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza (son of the Academy’s founder and filmmaker, James O. Incandenza), Hal’s brother, pro-football punter Orin Incandenza, goings-on at the Academy’s neighboring halfway house, and a thread on violent, wheel-chair bound Quebecois separatists, all set in a parodic future where entire calendar years have corporate sponsors (“Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar”; “Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster”; “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” etc.), a swath of North America (now “O.N.A.N.—the Organization of North American Nations) is cordoned-off due to toxic waste pollution, and the president is a former crooner heartthrob with Howard Hughes-sized germophobia.
September 12th, 2009 marks the one-year anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s untimely death. The Infinite Summer challenge began on June 21st, and runs until September 22 (the first day of autumn)[and one day after the anniversary of bass guitar legend Jaco Pastorius’ untimely death—I’m still fashioning some numerological significance here, my own Infinite Jest tribute]. As noted on the Infinite Summer site, there is still plenty of time for dedicated readers to accept the challenge. No Dove bar, trial-size or otherwise, for completing the challenge.