Sometimes, among all the wretched things that happen in this world, there comes along a headline that renders you speechless. A woman is eating Infinite Jest, page by postmodern page, and I have no idea what to say about that.
A lot of things have happened in the 21 years since Infinite Jest was published. Relatively immediately — in the literary scheme of things — the novel took on a life of its own, joining the canon of college literature in what The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed "Wallace studies." Infinite Jest made TIME's 2005 list of the 100 Best Novels published since 1923. Author David Foster Wallace passed away in a tragic suicide 12 years after his novel took the literary world by storm.
The A.V. Club speculates that Jamie Loftus might be eating Infinite Jest "to enrage the book’s acolytes." The comedian has spent a year working her way through the 1,079-page tome, putting it on sandwiches, dipping it in coffee, and even enjoying it straight from a Lay's potato chip bag. All of Loftus' antics are tagged with the #eatinfinitejest hashtag, which means you can follow along with her calculated destruction of Wallace's celebrated novel wherever you go.
The world is a strange place.
