About book Consider The Lobster And Other Essays (2005)
What can I say? Another brilliant set of essays.1. Big Red Son - at the AVN (Adult Video News) Awards. An insightful and amusing look at the porn industry. For a regular civilian male, hanging out in a hotel suite with porn starlets is a tense and emotionally convolved affair. There is, first, the matter of having seen the various intimate activities and anatomical parts of these starlets in videos heretofore and thus (weirdly) feeling shy about meeting them. But there is also a complex erotic tension. Because porn films' worlds are so sexualized, with everybody seemingly teetering right on the edge of coitus all the time and it taking only the slightest nudge or excuse—a stalled elevator, an unlocked door, a cocked eyebrow, a firm handshake—to send everyone tumbling into a tangled mass of limbs and orifices, there's a bizarre unconscious expectation/dread/ hope that this is what might happen in Max Hardcore's hotel room. Yr. corresps. here find it impossible to overemphasize the fact that this is a delusion. In fact, of course, the unconscious expectation/dread/hope makes no more sense than it would make to be hanging out with doctors at a medical convention and to expect that at the slightest provocation everyone in the room would tumble into a frenzy of MRIs and epidurals. 2. Certainly the End Of Something Or Other, One Would Sort Of Have To Think - book review, John Updike's Toward the End of Time. Here is the upshot, although Wallace is a fan,Toward the End of Time concerns an extremely erudite, successful, narcissistic, and sex-obsessed retired guy who's keeping a one-year journal in which he explores the apocalyptic prospect of his own death.Toward the End of Time is also, of the let's say two dozen Updike books I've read, far and away the worst, a novel so clunky and self-indulgent that it's hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.3. Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get—the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward—we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.4. Authority and American UsageLove, and do what you will - as applied to grammar. This is a very complicated review of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan Garner.Bryan Garner is a genius because he just about completely resolves the Usage Wars' problem of Authority. The book's solution is both semantic and rhetorical. 5. The View From Mrs. Thompson'sLOCATION: BLOOMINGTON, ILLINOISDATES: 11-13 SEPTEMBER 2001SUBJECT: OBVIOUS What these Bloomington ladies are, or start to seem to me, is innocent. There is what would strike many Americans as a marked, startling lack of cynicism in the room. It does not, for instance, occur to anyone here to remark on how it's maybe a little odd that all three network anchors are in shirtsleeves, or to consider the possibility that Dan Rather's hair's being mussed might not be wholly accidental, or that the constant rerunning of horrific footage might not be just in case some viewers were only now tuning in and hadn't seen it yet. None of the ladies seem to notice the president's odd little lightless eyes appear to get closer and closer together throughout his taped address, nor that some of his lines sound almost plagiaristically identical to those uttered by Bruce Willis (as a right-wing wacko, recall) in The Siege a couple years back. Nor that at least some of the sheer weirdness of watching the Horror unfold has been how closely various shots and scenes have mirrored the plots of everything from Die Hard I-III to Air Force One. Nobody's near hip enough to lodge the sick and obvious po-mo complaint: We've Seen This Before. Instead, what they do is all sit together and feel really bad, and pray. No one in Mrs. Thompson's crew would ever be so nauseous as to try to get everybody to pray aloud or form a prayer circle, but you can still tell what they're all doing.6. How Tracy Austin Broke My HeartA review of the Tracy Austin autobiography, Beyond Center Court: My Story. The book is bad, but hey,...maybe we automatically expect people who are geniuses as athletes to be geniuses also as speakers and writers, to be articulate, perceptive, truthful, profound. If it's just that we naively expect geniuses-in-motion to be also geniuses-in-reflection, then their failure to be that shouldn't really seem any crueler or more disillusioning than Kant's glass jaw or Eliot's inability to hit the curve. 7. Up, SimbaWith John McCain on his campaign bus in 2000. He gives a mini biography of McCain's experience as a POW with gruesome detail, and his refusal to be released without the other POWs, This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. And yes, literally: "moral authority," that old cliché, like so many other clichés—"service," "honor," "duty"—that have become now just mostly words, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us. 8. Consider the LobsterWallace covers the Maine Lobster Festival, 2003. Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? Lobsters don't have much in the way of eyesight or hearing, but they do have an exquisite tactile sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that protrude through their carapace. "Thus it is," in the words of T. M. Prudden's industry classic About Lobster, "that although encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armor, the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin." And lobsters do have nociceptors, as well as invertebrate versions of the prostaglandins and major neurotransmitters via which our own brains register pain.9. Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky - A review of Joseph Frank's five-volume Dostoevsky. The thing about Dostoevsky's characters is that they are alive. By which I don't just mean that they're successfully realized or developed or "rounded." The best of them live inside us, forever, once we've met them. Recall the proud and pathetic Raskolnikov, the naive Devushkin, the beautiful and damned Nastasya of The Idiot, the fawning Lebyedev and spiderish Ippolit of the same novel; C&P's ingenious maverick detective Porfiry Petrovich (without whom there would probably be no commercial crime fiction w/ eccentrically brilliant cops); Marmeladov, the hideous and pitiful sot; or the vain and noble roulette addict Aleksey Ivanovich of The Gambler; the gold-hearted prostitutes Sonya and Liza; the cynically innocent Aglaia; or the unbelievably repellent Smerdyakov, that living engine of slimy resentment in whom I personally see parts of myself I can barely stand to look at; or the idealized and all-too-human Myshkin and Alyosha, the doomed human Christ and triumphant child-pilgrim, respectively. These and so many other FMD creatures are alive—retain what Frank calls their "immense vitality"—not because they're just skillfully drawn types or facets of human beings but because, acting within plausible and morally compelling plots, they dramatize the profoundest parts of all humans, the parts most conflicted, most serious—the ones with the most at stake. Plus, without ever ceasing to be 3-D individuals, Dostoevsky's characters manage to embody whole ideologies and philosophies of life: Raskolnikov the rational egoism of the 1860s' intelligentsia, Myshkin mystical Christian love, the Underground Man the influence of European positivism on the Russian character, Ippolit the individual will raging against death's inevitability, Aleksey the perversion of Slavophilic pride in the face of European decadence, and so on and so forth....The thrust here is that Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that's really important. He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.10. Host - Read it here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a... An article on John Ziegler and talk radio. Whatever the social effects of talk radio or the partisan agendas of certain hosts, it is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue. The conservatism that dominates today's AM airwaves does so because it generates high Arbitron ratings, high ad rates, and maximum profits.Wallace discusses Consider the Lobster with interviewer Michael Silverblatt.http://youtu.be/IhCfHSVzTkI
Full disclosure: I have a major intellectual crush on David Foster Wallace. Yes, yes, I know all about his weaknesses - the digressions, the rampant footnote abuse, the flaunting of his amazing erudition, the mess that is 'Infinite Jest'. I know all this, and I don't care. Because when he is in top form, there's nobody else I would rather read. The man is hilarious; I think he's a mensch, and I don't believe he parades his erudition just to prove how smart he is. I think he can't help himself - it's a consequence of his wide-ranging curiosity. At heart he's a geek, but a charming, hyper-articulate geek. Who is almost frighteningly smart.The pieces in “Consider the Lobster” have appeared previously in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Observer, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Harper’s, Gourmet, and Premiere magazines. Among them are short meditations on Updike’s ‘Toward the end of Time’, on Dostoyevsky, on Kafka’s humor, and on the ‘breathtakingly insipid autobiography’ of tennis player Tracy Austin. An intermediate length piece describes Foster Wallace’s (eminently sane) reaction to the attacks of September 11th. Each of these shorter essays is interesting, but the meat and potatoes of the book is in the remaining five, considerably longer, pieces. They are: Big Red Son: a report on the 1998 Adult Video News awards (the Oscars of porn) in Las Vegas.Consider the Lobster: a report on a visit to the annual Maine Lobster Festival (for Gourmet magazine).Host: a report on conservative talk radio, based on extensive interviews conducted with John Ziegler, host of “Live and Local” on Southern California’s KFI.Up Simba: an account of seven days on the campaign trail with John McCain in his 2000 presidential bid (for Rolling Stone).Authority and American Usage: a review of Bryan Garner’s “A Dictionary of Modern American Usage” , which serves as a springboard for a terrific exegesis of usage questions and controversies.Here’s what I like about David Foster Wallace’s writing: I know of nobody else who writes as thoughtfully and intelligently. That he manages to write so informatively, with humor and genuine wit, on almost any subject under the sun is mind-blowing – it’s also why I am willing to forgive his occasional stylistic excesses. (Can you spell ‘footnote’?) You may not have a strong interest in lobsters or pornography, but the essays in question are terrific. The reporting on Ziegler and McCain is amazingly good, heartbreakingly so, because it makes the relative shallowness of most reporting painfully evident. Finally, the article on usage is a tour de force – when it first appeared in Harper’s, upon finishing it, I was immediately moved to go online and order a copy of Garner’s book (which is just as good as DFW promised). How can you not enjoy an essay that begins as follows? Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near Lewinskian scale? ....... (several other rhetorical questions) ...... Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly? And which later contains sentences such as: Teachers who do this are dumb. , This argument is not quite the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it’s still vulnerable to objections. and – my personal favorite – This is so stupid it practically drools. Not everyone will give it 5 stars, but I do.
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I didn't know much about David Foster Wallace when I cracked open this collection of his essays, so the first piece on the Adult Video News Awards caught me rather by surprise. Within just a few paragraphs, however, the sheer and utter brilliance of this fascinating and yet also erudite and intellectual examination of the porn industry left me with little doubt that DFW's reputation as one of the smartest and funniest writers of my lifetime is well-deserved.Prior to this book, if you had told me that I would soon find myself reading—and enjoying—a sixty-two page essay that is at its heart a review of a dictionary, I would not have believed you. But like the other essays in this book, that piece is about so much more than just its surface topic. I walked away from it with insight and understanding into issues of language usage I had never troubled myself to think about before.There is no question that DFW's style is on the unconventional side; while it's not always easy on the eyes to follow the two-page footnotes with footnotes of their own, or the tangent boxes that decorate his piece on a right-wing radio talk show host, it is usually worth the effort. I will confess, however, that I did skip one piece in this collection. Despite my newfound appreciation for the author's talents, I simply haven't yet sufficiently recovered from the trauma of the recent election season to spend seventy-nine pages with him as he recounts his time following John McCain's failed 2000 bid for the Republican nomination. So I shall have to save that one for another day.It's a terribly bittersweet experience to fall in love with an author you learned about only because of his tragic suicide. But as I mourn Wallace's untimely passing, I am grateful to know he has left behind so much work for me to discover and explore.
—Lena
DFW wrote adrenaline-fueled, almost manic, hyper-insightful, exuberant prose mixed with street slang and professorial footnotes. His curiosity and knowledge were encyclopedic, probably due being a prodigy and to his double major in philosophy and English. He had a way of making you see very mundane things in an entirely new light. DFW believed that our passions were no longer our own; we were all being manipulated by a very sophisticated media. He argued that television had a great seductive power and had ‘appropriated’ the rebellious irony of our writers and created a kind of institutional irony that created uncommitted, distanced and self-absorbed personalities, especially among writers and artists. He felt it was time for his generation to confront our need for values. He found writing nonfiction to be a pleasure and something he could do with ease. I sensed some similarities with Hunter Thompson as DFW became an engaged, passionate yet irreverent guide, leading the reader as Virgil would through the levels of hell, the whole time intimately communicating directly with us about what he is observing. He purposely called his stories essays and not journalism. If he used hyperboles, it was to help get us closer to the subjective truth, closer to what was beyond mere appearances.DFW is an expert ethnographer of the absurdities of contemporary American life. He quickly moved the articles to a big picture perspective, the Tracy Austin piece becomes a discussion of how mastery of one’s craft is similar to a temporal connection with the Greek gods; John Updike’s novel becomes a discussion how individualism and sexual freedom of the 1960s can devolve into joyless self-indulgence; a week on the road with the John McCain campaign in 2000 becomes a discussion of why the young are starved for authenticity in leaders.When you strip away the incredible writing, what you have left is a rather unsettling lack of conclusions. He never tells us whether or not we should eat lobster given the pain they likely experience, he never tells us if John McCain is an authentic leader based on his war record in captivity or is he a political salesman who discovered a new market niche. I believe this is because DFW had too much respect for our intelligence - he wanted to give us all the information – even insights we normally would not have, and have us think it through for ourselves.One reason why I believe this because DFW has told us in interviews that political reporting has become reductionist. “The writer has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. . . Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil . . . . (Although) the questions that we face are all massively complicated. . .well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way . . . but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community . . . We are unable to countenance the fact that some problems are simply beyond the ability of a single ideology to represent accurately.” He wasn’t here to provide us with easy answers, but to help force us to be engaged and think for ourselves.How should DFW’s suicide at age 46 color our view of his work?Until I spend 30 years in clinical depression, take antidepressants for 20 years, commit myself to mental institutions a number of times, voluntarily undergo electric shock therapy (multiple times), commit myself to drug rehab programs (he was self-medicating himself since age 15), struggle with writing something equal to the magnum opus written in my 30s and trying to live up to a reputation as a genius, I should withhold any judgment because I can have no real idea what he went through. His friend from college said writing was a desperate enterprise for him meant to stave off collapse.Students and faculty members who were interviewed followed his death, almost unanimously described him as a gentle soul, but a tormented one – and one of the kindest persons they knew.I would highly recommend this book.
—Jan
What I look for in a David Foster Wallace book is not so much his much-talked about brilliance, but his humanity. Under the verbal and visual tricks, there was a sensitive man who thought and felt deeply about everything he experienced. He was not what I expected from a "post-postmodern writer," which is to say that he was earnest and genuinely funny, and his writing style seems to be an organic representation of how his brain works, rather than something consciously literary. Reading him feels real. So, this book. I enjoyed every essay, while also thinking that I maybe liked A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again better. The bulk of the essays in that book felt more substantial than the selection here, though "Up, Simba" is fantastic. DFW had a real talent for giving fair consideration to people he might disagree with, unless those people are blowhards with few redeeming qualities (i.e. Max Hardcore). That talent came in handy for this book -- at least four of the essays had some sort of political bent.DFW is at his best, I think, when you can see clearly his struggle between his desire for openness/sincerity and his natural cynicism/skepticism/anxiousness. This inner conflict comes out a lot when he profiles people, and is generally why his nonfiction is so great, why Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is so great, and why this book might have been stronger if there were fewer lit crit pieces. At this point, I've got three more of his books to read before I have read everything he had ever written and now, will ever write. This is a sad, sad thought not because I or the world will never have another DFW reading experience, but because there is such humanity and curiosity in his work that makes you think (irrelevantly, in vain) that maybe working through his thoughts in writing could have made him want to stay here. Or maybe not, but it's a shot.
—rachel
