Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's satirical novel, has gathered something of a mixed reputation in the 21 years since it was first published.
The 1,079-page tome has a huge army of dedicated fans - but it has also come to be regarded as shorthand what The Cut described as a kind of 'literary male chauvinism'.
Jason Segel, who played Foster Wallace in 2015 movie The End of the Tour, gave a flavour of it when he told interviewer Marc Maron about the time he went into a book shop to buy a copy.
“There was like a Ghost World-kind of girl behind the counter,” he said. “I set [the book] down, and she said, ‘Ugh, Infinite Jest. Every guy I’ve ever slept with has an unread copy on his bookshelf.’”
The Cut's Molly Fischer writes: "Make a passing reference to the 'David Foster Wallace fanboy' and you can assume the reader knows whom you’re talking about; he’s the type who’s pestered at least one woman to the point that she quit reading Infinite Jest in public. Infinite Jest — a novel that appears high on the list of 'Books That Literally All White Men Own.'"
One assumes that it is these Infinite Jest fanboys that comedian Jamie Loftus is hoping to annoy with her ongoing project, in which she films herself literally devouring the book.
She's been at it for more than a year now, munching her way through the book a page at a time.
She cooks it.
She makes sandwiches with it.
it's been a while but i can assure u i have eaten 150-200 pages of infinite jest this past year and only have 900 pages to go pic.twitter.com/9Ryha6Oaf2
— jamie loftus (@hamburgerphone) June 13, 2017She eats it everywhere she goes.
Now over a year into her project, she's put together this compilation of her first year of eating Infinite Jest.
To see more clips of Jamie eating Infinite Jest, take a look at the #eatinfinitejest hashtag on Twitter. Be warned: it's hard to stop watching.
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