If your summer lacks some sort of overarching goal-oriented self-help/artistic-betterment framework, perhaps you'd enjoy moseying over to Infinite Summer, an online community in the National Novel Writing Month vein, except you have three months and all you have to do is read one.Not just any one, though: Infinite Jest. Yes, the most guilt-inducing book of our generation, equal parts revered and initially impenetrable. These guys have a Twitter, a Tumblr, a Facebook group, essays on why this is necessary, a list of rules (none, really, except no spoilers), etc. etc. June 21 to September 22. Do it.

(If you don't want to do it, the funniest thing in the book is when Canadian John Wayne disparages someone by saying he's the kind of guy who'd go to a Chinese restaurant but refuse to share food or trade food.)

(I might just do this with Gravity's Rainbow.)

Perhaps you'd be intrigued by an incomplete but still pretty comprehensive list of every book David Foster Wallace ever blurbed, mentioned in an interview, or taught in a classroom? Writers plugged include Paula Fox, Jonathan Franzen, David Markson, Evan Dara, and Cormac McCarthy, about whose Blood Meridian Wallace merely says, "Don't even ask." [HTML Giant]

Tremendous interview at the House Next Door between Jeremiah Kipp and Glenn Kenny--who edited two of David Foster Wallace's best nonfiction pieces ("David Lynch Keep's His Head" and "Big Red Son") for Premiere Magazine--covering everything from what Wallace was like to work with to the nuts and bolts of reporting at the AVN convention:

JK: It seems like there were a great deal of behind-the-scenes struggles with running "Big Red Son" in Premiere--what's the story behind this piece?

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How do you turn David Foster Wallace's just-shy-of-4000-words Kenyon commencement speech into a saleable, hardbound book? Sentence by sentence, evidently. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, due from Little, Brown on April 14, devotes one page to each of the 134 sentences that graced the original speech, collectively embellished with a nice uniform wavy line up top. . Footnotes are way more legible, it turns out. Certain zen mantras do gain a certain frisson--"I am not the wise old fish," say. Others--like the page-to-page opposition of the now-famous "It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in...the head. / And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."--are just brutal. The net effect is to imply an entirely different kind of wisdom--of the Tuesdays With Morrie variety--than whatever actual wisdom is contained therein. And from a technical perspective, it couldn't be more backwards: In life, at least, Wallace never was a man to leave a sentence standing alone.

The artwork for the upcoming paperback edition of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is out. It looks familiar, somehow. Our admittedly outsized dislike of this book endures. [Via The Millions]

The Howling Fantods posts a rare, 1993 interview with David Foster Wallace, originally published in Whiskey Island Magazine, the Cleveland State University lit mag. It's remarkably forthright: one thing that occurs is yet another reason Wallace meant so much as a writer to a younger generation is that he candidly and fluently could clarify, again and again, both persuasive reasons for writers to write and the fears and anxieties that bedevil writers when they attempt to do so. And, as always, the loneliness that became so glaring in the aftermath of his suicide lurks here, 15 years before it would swallow him:

There are a few books I have read that I've never been the same after, and I think all good writing somehow address the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We're all terribly, terribly lonely. And there's a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can't be in the real world. I don't know what you're thinking. I don't that know that much about you as I don't know that much about my parents or my lover or my sister, but a piece of fiction that's really true allows you to be intimate with ... I don't want to say people, but it allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with into the real world. I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely.

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In an act that my 16-year-old (and 26-year-old) self can ruefully relate to, Nancy Martira has spent the last few months reading "the works of the late, great David Foster Wallace with a dictionary in hand," untangling the meaning of words like "autotelic" and "sesquipedalian" and posting their definitions on her blog. (For my part, "hieratic" and "hypertrophic" are two I still remember angrily breaking off from the text to go look up.) Today, Martira announces she's quitting:

I've had to abandon this blog to devote more time to Publicly Relating. If you're interested in taking over "Words I Learned From Reading David Foster Wallace," please let me know.

Someone should really think about stepping up and taking over, if only because there's like 1,000 more obscure words to go before this project is really finished...