The Hamlet Project

I read David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus which gets its title from this line. And still I’m not entirely certain why he called it Infinite Jest (maybe I did figure it out while reading it but if so I already forgot). The only thought I had is that it does rather seem to be an unending joke. It circles round and round, like a mad merry-go-round – sometimes a story about a tennis school, sometimes a story about a 12 step program, sometimes a story about French-Canadian spies, sometimes just footnotes.

And several of the ideas stick with me, even as the book as a whole faded.

1) The Entertainment – a videotape that entertains people to death (also, perhaps, an example of the aforementioned Infinite Jest) and
2) The Corporate sponsorships of each year – this future in which we mark time with products instead of numbers. As in the Year of Depends Undergarments.