“Don’t Stop” is a one-night event about the language of the early 1990s.

This series of readings and performances by writers and artists will explore writing in the US from 1992–96, just before the 1996 publication of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, that brilliant and dystopian summation of a technophilic, drugged North America, in which time itself receives corporate sponsorship. The 1992 election and early Clinton years clearly mark a shift in mood; the ’80s were over, but what exactly did this mean? As the US approached the day in 1996 on which Bill Clinton would proclaim that “even my cat has its own [web] page,” how were audiences for cultural content being formed and informed, by which technologies and which actors?

Participants in “Don’t Stop” select a text, published during the years 1992–96, from which they read or to which they respond with a short text of their own devising. Television and film scripts, song lyrics, found text, and tabloid prose exist alongside classic ’90s novels and poetry.

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