By coincidence, I (drunkenly) ordered David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster from Amazon the very same night he hanged himself. My morning-after hangover was a bit more bittersweet than usual. After reading his blunt 2005 commencement speech and catching so many blurbs about the man’s brilliance, I felt a need to jump on that bandwagon and get in touch with the hype.
I was not left disappointed. You can’t really talk about the man’s writing without mentioning his style. As a reader, you better enjoy establishing a thorough context for every idea because Wallace uses footnotes almost to the point of abuse. How about footnotes within footnotes within footnotes, all cited mid-sentence? He even goes as far as to devote a few pages to defining acronyms and slang so he can continually use these terms to make the writing more succinct. Luckily these bits are largely hilarious and insightful. He seems obsessed with leaving no path left untraveled so at no point do you think he has a hidden agenda. It’s cynical and self-deprecating while still filled with curiosity and hope.
Consider the Lobster itself is a collection of articles he has written for different magazines, including the self-titled essay meant to cover a Maine lobster festival that instead ends up exploring the ethics of boiling a lobster alive. There are three book reviews that cover a male author’s outlandish misogyny, the legitimacy of established authorities for language (“I know you’re hella stoked about duder marveling at the chucklefuck’s kicks while broseph chows down on some ‘za”. Why do I comprehend what this sentence states?), and the banality of athlete Q&A clichés when the truth stares us right in the face. The highlights for me were his coverage of John McCain’s 2000 campaign that exposes the charade of modern US politics along with the final essay about a right-wing talk-radio host and the daily forces/motivations of all parties involved in the whole corporate enterprise.
You can read “Consider the Lobster” and “Host” online while the book itself is well worth its affordable price. I found that David Foster Wallace has a rational take on all subjects similar to myself, but he’s a fuckbunch more thorough and eloquent.
For some further reading on his background and works:
- The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace
- Getting to Know David Foster Wallace
- Remembering David Foster Wallace
- David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46
- An Appreciation: Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok
- The genius of David Foster Wallace and the ugly monster of depression
- Sam Anderson Remembers David Foster Wallace
- Federer as Religious Experience
I don’t wish to start Infinite Jest for the fear it will take a decade to plow through the 1,000+ page opus.
In lesser news, The Alexandria Link was thrown in as a stocking stuffer last Christmas and I’ve been pecking at this book since mid-summer. Conspiracy theories, cold-blooded murder, and global locales described in vivid detail as the non-fiction with dramatic embellishments of religious history covers a power struggle of political intrigue !! Some friends becoming enemies? Some enemies becoming friends? Even down to the book cover, this story couldn’t try any harder to ride off the thriller coattails of The Da Vinci Code’s success. Every chapter ends with a clever one-liner. What is this? CSI: Miami? YEAHHHHHH! I read the story cover to cover.
I’ll now move on by font nerding it up with The Manual of Typography and getting in touch with fucking protein shakes by finishing up Starting Strength. Jägerbombs. Jägerbombs.
- Law prof and cop agree: never ever ever ever ever ever ever talk to the cops about a crime, even if you’re innocent
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Blu-ray is dead – heckuva job, Sony!
According to Digital Content Producer Blu-ray doesn’t cut it for business:
- Recordable discs don’t play reliably across the range of Blu-ray players – so you can’t do low-volume runs yourself.
- Service bureau reproduction runs $20 per single layer disc in quantities of 300 or less.
- Hollywood style printed/replicated Blu-ray discs are considerably cheaper once you reach the thousand unit quantity: just $3.50 per disc.
- High-quality authoring programs like Sony Blu-print or Sonic Solutions Scenarist cost $40,000.
- The Advanced Access Content System – the already hacked DRM – has a one-time fee of $3000 plus a per project cost of almost $1600 plus $.04 per disk. And who defines “project?â€
- Then the Blu-ray disc Association charges another $3000 annually to use their very exclusive – on 4% of all video disks! – logo.
That’s why you don’t see quirky indie flicks on Blu-ray. Small producers can’t afford it – even though they shoot in HDV and HD.
- How to be a good client (original PDF)
- Strategies for successful client relations
