LOS ANGELES — While there are many details in the life of Michael Schur, the co-creator and show runner of the NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation,” that convey his obsession with the David Foster Wallace novel “Infinite Jest,” perhaps the most salient is that his wife once forbade him from discussing that 1,079-page-long work of fiction at social gatherings. “If you were at a cocktail party and you go, ‘Oh, you’re a person who’s into this?’ ” Mr. Schur said recently at his office in Studio City, “now I know what you and I are doing for the next two hours. We’re talking about this.”

That fixation never fully subsided, and Mr. Schur has recently been reimmersing himself in “Infinite Jest,” Wallace’s 1996 opus about a near future of alienation, drug rehabilitation and calendar years sponsored by corporations.

His literary mania has been put to productive use in a new music video that Mr. Schur directed for the Decemberists, the Portland, Ore., rock band, set to its track “Calamity Song.”

It is a project that so fully combines Mr. Schur’s favorite book — the first he ever read that he felt was written the way he thought and spoke — and favorite band, he says he would have been crushed if anyone else had gotten the assignment.