Let it be known, I LOVE David Foster Wallace, in a big bad way. On the day he died, I was in grad school. I found out while picking up lunch for my now-wife and driving out to see her for between grad school (me)/ work (her) meeting in the park. I stopped off at our apartment to grab some lunch things when I noticed my brother was online. He told me David Foster Wallace died over AIM, and I immediately checked wikipedia to confirm. I drove to my wife in a daze and told her the news. She knows I like him but that's as far as her knowledge goes. She gave me a "that's too bad" response, but I was crushed. I was in a depression for months. Since then, I have gone on a full fledged craze to acquire everything I could by him. Every stray article. Every book. Then somewhere in the midst of this I caught myself and realized that this man's body of fantastic work has now become radically finite, and I need to meter out what I have left over the span of my remaining days. I've tried to read Infinite Jest a handful of times and always lost interest about 300 pages in or so. The first three hundred pages are fantastic, and I go through the full range of emotions during the read, including side splitting laughter that has gotten me several glances in public places. I'm not exactly sure why I lose interest, but for now, I am much more interested in Wallace's non-fiction. During my grad school days, I donated plasma to help subsidize the pittance I was given as part of a research assistantship (for which I will be forever grateful, but realistically it wasn't a lot of money). I devoured A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which was a recent Christmas acquisition. It is by far my favourite thing I've ever read, especially the title story.
Recently my friend JB told me he had bought some DFW books for some bathroom reading. This spurred me to cruise the DFW wiki, which I do every couple of months or so. I found out that there was a new Simpsons episode entitled "A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again". I had to see it. I'm not sure what I was expecting to find. In the past I've been a massive hater of all things Simpsons. I'm more of a Seinfeld guy. However, the fact that they would do a show that even referenced my favouritest of people was worth looking into. The episode was actually pretty funny. Being a new father, I saw Homer's rant about going on vacation being a "24-hr babysitting job" in a totally different light than I would have at any other point in my life. There were only two DFW references in the whole show, one of which was the title, and the other being another bum cruise ship the Simpsons are almost coerced to taking, which was named the Nadir. It was excellent. Then, somewhere in the middle of the show, I saw DFW sitting at one of the tables in the dining room of the cruise line. It made me light up quite a bit. DFW, you will be missed.
This blog will be one of the many facets of the 2.718281828 Productions banner. Here I will discuss things that come under my radar and come out through my prism. This will come primarily in the form of reviews of various forms of media I've been digesting in recent years. Hopefully I will be able to review new products, but I also plan to delve back into my archives and tell stories of music and other media that has profoundly shaped me throughout the years. I hope anyone who comes across this site can enjoy these stories and share how these same pieces have affected their lives in different ways. I tend to have a very sarcastic tone, but believe me, it is always meant in the same way a young boy is mean to the girl he likes the most.
