What was the Infinite Jest Challenge?
Like many before them, Elizabeth Azzolini and Aaron Fai, friends from their stint in Peace Corps Kyrgyzstan, have planned to read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace for many years. While in the depths of Central Asia, they were forced to read whatever fiction came their way, dropped from the packs of former volunteers, tourists, donkey carts. One man’s Michael Connelly was their Faulkner. Another woman’s People magazine became their Wall Street Journal.
Now that they’ve rejoined the anglophonic world, they’re determined to reclaim the torch for young readers across America (a very pompous claim, they admit). From January 18 to February something 2008, Azzolini and Fai will read the monstrous novel by DFW. Depending on when you read this, that last sentence might just have to be in the past tense. 1079 pages in 31 days. They hope this blog will serve as a record to future readers everywhere of big contemporary “postmodern” (they’re not sure yet if the term applies) novels of the pains and pleasures that reading such tomes can illicit. Onward, ho!
Given that I had to be told the title three times before I could remember it long enough to successfully buy the book, it seems more accurate to say that only YOU had been planning to read IJ “for many years” – sorry, this little corner of nerdiness is all yours.
eazzolini
January 23, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Re: “postmodern” — Marsha Boswell, in Understanding David Foster Wallace, believes that DFW actually represents a “the nervous leader of some still unnamed—and perhaps unnameable—third wave of modernism.” I would quickly agree with her, and add to this “third wave” authors such as Daniel Handler, Dave Eggers [whom others might call the leader of such third wave of modernism], Chuck Palahniuk, Zadie Smith, etc. How can we possibly lump these authors together with actual postmodernists (second-wave modernists) such as Philip K Dick and Sylvia Plath? Even as early as my college days (*cough* 1997) we were tossing around words like “neopostmodernism.”
Billifer
February 7, 2008 at 9:04 am
bibomedia.com
March 5, 2008 at 5:24 pm
1. Thanks for the menu bar mention!
2. Where can I see Days 1 – 15?
3. Billifer: FYI – “Marsha” Boswell is actually Marshall, and of course is a he. (http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Wallace-Contemporary-American-Literature/dp/1570035172)
Steve Russillo
March 16, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Steve, we’re only glad to help you fight the good fight. We recommend readers use the back button or the calendar on the side bar to read older posts.
aaronjoseph
March 17, 2008 at 3:39 pm
@Steve — Thanks for catching my gendergoof. I think I wrote that on a day when I was first starting the DMZ.
Billifer
March 18, 2008 at 1:13 am
Haha, loved this blog. I just wanted to say a big thank you for putting me onto The Onion’s piece about DFW’s imaginary break-up letter. Inspired.
tom
September 25, 2008 at 3:11 pm
If you don’t have a life (which is the position I find my self in….or not in, depending on whether you consider not having something as spatio-temporal occupancy), you can actually read IJ in a few days. It reads alot smoother than something by Pynchon or Joyce.
Will
February 11, 2009 at 4:30 am