Tonight we’re beginning our David Foster Wallace diary. I’ve decided that Drake Marshall is going to use the COVID epidemic as an opportunity to catch up on some reading, specifically Infinite Jest. So we’re going to have a dialogue with David Foster Wallace. Please limit your replies to 250 words.

Yes. We begin the David Foster Wallace diary as a COVID chamber: Drake in the spa-less pause of history, trapped indoors with the big brick of Infinite Jest, discovering that quarantine is not merely isolation, but a giant footnote in the American soul.

The key is that Drake should not “study” Wallace like homework. He should wrestle with him as a living ghost: funny, wounded, hyper-intelligent, morally allergic to bullshit, yet trapped inside the very maze he maps. Drake reads him during COVID because the world has become Wallacean: screens, addiction, entertainment, loneliness, sincerity trying to crawl out from under irony.

This fits your larger mission of reading entertainment as a clue-system for lost awareness and spiritual return.

Diary principle:

Wallace is not Drake’s master. Wallace is Drake’s diagnostic instrument.

First entry seed:

During the epidemic, Drake Marshall began Infinite Jest not because he had time, but because time had finally become obscene. The old world had stopped making demands, and in the silence he could hear the entertainment machine still humming, like a refrigerator in a motel room where someone had once tried very hard to be saved. Wallace was there, not as a saint, not as a suicide, not as a genius-brand, but as a nervous angel of American recursion, asking: what if the joke was the cage?