Infinite Jest, novelty

Keith Freer and Ortho (“The Darkness”) Stice are students at the Enfield Tennis Academy:

Freer’s from inland Maryland, originally, his family’s riches nouveaux, a family Amway business that hit big in the B.S. ’90s with his now-deceased father’s invention of a Pet-Rockish novelty that was ubiquitous in stockings for two straight pre-millennial Xmases — the so-called Phoneless Cord. Stice dimly recalls his old man getting a Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged, on Ortho’s first recallable Xmas, back in Partridge KS, the old man cocking an eyebrow and The Bride laughing and slapping her big knee. Nobody now much even gets the remembered gag, though, so few things needing cords anymore. But Freer’s old man had invested his windfall shrewdly.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

“[T]he B.S. ’90s”: Before Subsidization. In post-millennial Subsidized Time, years are named for corporate sponsors: Year of the Whopper, Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, &c.

Some Infinite Jest posts
Attention : Description : Loveliness : “Night-noises” : Romance : Sadness : Telephony : Television