Infinite Jest, David Foster Walace’s massive 1,079-page tome, is one of the most beloved books of this millennium, but it is also one that through sheer dint of its size has taken on almost religious reverence. Perhaps through a sort of literary Stockholm syndrome, people that read Infinite Jest tend to worship it afterwards; it becomes an accomplishment and source of perpetual reference-dropping, because if it didn’t achieve such heights, well, that was a huge waste of time.
Comedian Jamie Loftus has spent a large amount of time consuming Infinite Jest, too, in a delightful performance piece that seems engineered to enrage the book’s acolytes. To celebrate one year of slowly eating the book she cut together a video of her slowly eating the book. Here, watch her eat the book:
She eats it out of a bag. She eats it at night. She makes sandwiches with it. She makes bog-standard vlogs about it. She dips it into coffee. She does some pretty fucked-up shit with the book, to be honest, which she makes a point of displaying her total ignorance of.
Will she eat all 1,079 pages of the beloved postmodern saga of addiction, tennis, pop culture, and lust? You can follow her progress via the hashtag #eatinfinitejest, which, so far, mostly contains full videos of her eating the book over the past year. It’s a crazy goal but probably more achievable than that of the guy who was eating a picture of Jason Segel every day—which, by the way, he quit doing.
Some people just have more dedication to their art, apparently.