Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

David Foster Wallace, more so than any other person, makes me laugh and cry, in other words, feel deeply. Which is a good thing, I think--which is the other thing he makes me do--think. And all that is as he intended if I am interpreting his writing accurately--which is as he posits, not possible--to know how a reader will react to what it is you write; but writing, as Wallace says, is nothing but, " ... an act of communication between one human being and another ... " [From "Greatly Exaggerated" in the Harvard Book Review (1992) reprinted in A supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997). Essentially this is what troubled Wallace throughout his life--all these little contradictions that abound everywhere if you take the time and spend your attention looking. Which is what he did better than anyone I have ever read or listened to. He was an expert observer by his own criteria which is to be passionate about what you care about. And yet, his observations were often dispassionate, or better, more clear because he did not allow his passion to cloud what it was he saw. And then could he write? Better than anyone else I've read, because he had a mastery of words and language. He was a self acknowledged "SNOOT," or an extreme word usage fanatic (fn. pg. 69 in "Authority and American Usage.") Which is a book review of an American language usage dictionary, wrote in 1999, that had me laughing out loud, which is not an easy thing to do. A lot! So, besides dispassionate (mostly) he observes and writes objectively (as much as this is possible) in beautiful, unambiguous, extraordinarily detailed prose. If you are not curious and not open-minded, Wallace's writing will disturb you. And if you are curious and open-minded his writing will blow your mind and really, really disturb you. If you are the former, however, you don't have to read him and probably won't, and things will go on as they always have. But if you are the latter - you must read him - and then things might never be the same. So that is a general review of what you're in store for in Consider The Lobster. Slightly more specifically. The non-fiction essays were written (except for one in 1994) from 1998 through 2005. The subjects are: Words, language, literature, teaching, writing, thinking, lying, entertainment, sports, celebrity, politics, food, small towns, Las Vegas, pornography, morality, talk radio; and of course the people and personalities that make up those places, industries, and things ... in other words: What it is to be human in America at the turn of this millennium. Do I always agree with him? No. For example, in "Up, Simba," about John McCain and the GOP primary of 2000 he writes about the decision to vote or not (something I have written about myself) and I agree with him--not voting is actually a vote for the status quo. And this, in the same essay, hits home: " ... getting lied to sucks - that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world. Especially if the lies are chronic, systemic, if experience seems to teach that everything you're supposed to believe in's really just a game based on lies." (pg. 189) Yes, David; but just what game are you talking about? ( I was living just a few miles away from him when he killed himself. And before his death I had never heard of him. I feel - like I lost something, something that I'll never have the opportunity to experience ever again.) [If you're into the ins-n-outs of lying, check out my blog @ markjabbour.com (coming in mid July 2011). Lying is one of my favorite subjects.] So how does Wallace reconcile that with this: The senior ladies, his neighbors in Bloomington, Indiana, on September 11, 2001 were innocent. He says. Not stupid but innocent. I get his point, but I disagree. No adult in America is innocent. Children are innocent; but in a democracy that stands for freedom and equal rights, every citizen, especially the older you get and the more you benefit from that freedom - is not innocent but responsible. Ahhh, but these are the contradictions that drove Wallace, ultimately I think, to take his own life. He asked questions, the right questions, he studied the problems and asked more questions. And more than any other, he could put it all down on paper so as not to offended or rankle or make defensive - but to make people think. Which is, arguably (which he does) a good thing, right?

If you've read anything by David Foster Wallace (henceforth DFW), you'll know exactly what you're getting with this collection of essays and whether or not you want to read more from him. Thus, I will assume that you have not read anything by him previously. Consider the Lobster is a collection of ten essays, five of which I would call major essays (50+ pages), and the other five are significantly shorter. When at his best, DFW is the best American writer of his generation. You have to go back to McCarthy and Pynchon to find someone who surpasses him. However, he does not always write at his best, and Consider the Lobster reflects that. To understand both my praise of some essays and my letdown with regard to others, you'll need to understand what DFW is doing with these essays. DFW takes a seemingly uninspired banal topic and uses it as a launch point to discuss issues which would be very difficult to discuss directly or without a great deal of context. For example, in the essay How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, DFW begins by reviewing the insipid sports autobiography of Tracy Austin. However, he uses that as a lunching platform to discuss the nature of sports genius- what separates a Tracy Austin or Tom Brady from every other athlete? Also, why are athletes so inarticulate about the nature of their ability? My personal favorite, Up, Simba, details the 2000 John McCain Republican Nominee race against George W. Bush. The essay interlaces mundane detail of the day-to-day happenings of the campaign with astute observations about the nature of political advertising, whether or not its possible for a candidate to be genuine (in what may have been the single best insult I've read, DFW describes Al Gore as "surprisingly life-like"), and why young people seem so disengaged with politics. His writings and observations about marketing, political leadership, and the political ennui many young people feel are relevant considering how young people overwhelmingly supported Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders (ideologically polar opposites whose only connecting feature is an apparent genuineness.) DFW has some ideas that are pervasive in this book and some of his other writings (such as his magnum opis, Infinite Jest). He is concerned with the interplay of marketing, entertainment, the insularity that this allows individuals and communities of people to exist in. These are all deeply important topics to modern (as in, right now) American culture and Western Culture in due time. About seventy percent of the essays in this book are of elite quality. They are deep, refreshing, and I fell enriched for having read them. With such a high bar set, it's not surprising if some essays fail to measure up. The opening major essay "Big, Red, Son" is a expose of the porn Adult Video Network award ceremony. I would have thought this topic would be a veritable gold mine in the hands of a writer and observer like DFW. He could have written about how porn has warped (mostly young mens') aesthetic sensibilities of sex and women all the while not sounding preachy or condescending. Or perhaps he could have written about the escalatory nature of media and our viewing habits. Porn must become increasingly extreme, outlandish, etc. in order to keep male viewers, thus exacerbating those warped sexual sensibilities. With all this potential material, the essay defaults to "the people are crude and wholly without a sense of decency". The essay falls flat for the time it takes to read it. Overall, this is a good book, and 70 percent of it is great.

David Foster Wallace reachs new heights in this brilliant collection of essays. Although uneven, as is much of his work, the best of these essays set new recent standards for this art form. In the finest works of this collection, he truly does achieve art with non-fiction writing. Imagine a critique of a new academic work on English grammar usage that is too fascinating to put down, and frequently too humorous to not have to stop reading while your laughter subsides. His points are made without his ever becoming preachy, and are all the more convincing for it (c.f. the title essay). His mastery of understatement serves to place a new emphasis on events of chilling importance by observation of events seemingly mundane. His use of sarcasm and irony when appropriate remains as adroit as ever. For those who are already Wallace fans, I recommend this as my favorite of his collections of non-fiction. For those who have never encountered him before, I think this is the best introduction to his non-fiction work (and that is high praise indeed, as his other collections are wonderful). This book serves to remind us of the tragic loss to American arts and letters caused by Wallace's untimely passing. I mourn his absence, and am deeply saddened by the void he leaves behind. Treasure these works, he was unique and nothing quite like him will come again. LJS

David Foster Wallace's work always shows a multi-centered consciousness (see esp. his masterwork Infinite Jest), but isn't he crossing a red line when he takes the point of view of the lowly lobster in his 'gonzo' reporting at the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival that was first published in the August 2004 issue of Gourmet magazine? Yes, lobsters have pain neurons and they try to crawl out of the pot when placed live in boiling water (cf. Woody Allen's bit with the live lobster in the film Annie Hall with Diane Keaton), unlike clams and mussels which also are also lowly but aren't arthropods. We do the same to other sea creatures that are more intelligent, such as the octopus and cuttlefish. What is it particularly about the lobster that attracts DFW's literary attention? Curiously, Colin Farrell's character tells the interviewer in Yorgos Lanthimos' dystopian epic The Lobster (2015) that if he fails to find a new mate within the required 45 days that he would like to be turned into a lobster, not a dog as most people choose, citing the lobster's longevity and loyalty to its undersea mate. Perhaps it is just that the lobster is fascinating because it is so unobtrusive (just like the meek character David that the usually rubber-faced Farrell plays in The Lobster). The essay "Up, Simba" chronicles John McCain's 'Straight talk Express' from the 2000 primary campaign. "Big Red Son" is gonzo reporting on the AVN awards (the 'Oscars of porn') at Las Vegas in the late 1990's. He reviews John Updike's last book as an exemplar of the end of the GMN's (Great Male Narcissists), who are a literary contrast to DFW's multi-centered fiction writing. He reviews (and trashes) the trendy ghostwritten sports biography in "How Tracey Austin Broke My Heart." In "Host" DFW profiles a conservative radio talk show host's manipulation of listeners' emotions. DFW also celebrates the new translation of Kafka's The Castle and the new biography of Dostoevsky - two of DFW's favorite writers. Check out these wide-ranging essays by a great American thinker. Also look into the essays in his earlier collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Cheers!

David Foster Wallace This book started out the way most brilliant pop psychology books start in that it teaches you aspects of life from an angle you may have never considered before. Since this book is a collection of divurgent essays, it must be reviewed chapter by chapter, or essay by essay. The first chapter "Big Red Son" involves comedic talk of the porn industry. To be fair to the author, David Foster Wallace, this essay was first written in 1998, and some may decide it unfair to declare it dated, but I didn't read this until 2012, so I am forced to say that this material has been mined for all its worth at the time of my reading. (See Chuck Palahniuk's Snuff.) The second chapter "Some Remarks on Kafka's funniness..." whets the appetite. The general idea of this chapter is that humor is not very sophisticated today has been mined by those of us obsessed with pop culture, but Wallace does get some points for listing the current sense of humor that is on parade today that doesn't understand the sophisticated and subtle humor of a Franz Kafka. He says that "Kafka's humor has almost none of the particular forms and codes of contemporary US amusement." This launches the author onto a detailed list of complaints about contemporary humor brought to the homes of TV watchers. The chapter is worth reading not for its "When I was a kid, we had to walk ten miles to school" style complaints about the youth of the day, but the illustrative manner in which Wallace complains about humor in general. A complaint this author laments may not be generational. The fourth chapter may be the selling point for this book. In it, Wallace describes a war that has been occurring in the English language for a couple generations now. Wallace calls it a Usage War. The Usage War describes how one side, the more traditional side, the prescriptive side pleads for a return to traditional English. He talks of the other side, the more modern side that describes itself as a more scientific study of the language, updating our usage on a more inclusive plane. The latter, called the descriptive side, calls for more political correctness in its language. It calls for a more comprehensive list of words and usage that incorporates styles of language such as Ebonics and words that are more commonly used, such as "irregardless". Previous to this reading, I heard that tired phrase "everything is political", but I had no idea that that phrase could extended to dictionaries. The author's reporting on this subject is excellent. It is informative without being biased, and it is subjective with enough objectivity to present both viewpoints in a manner that allows you to decide which side is more conducive to progress in our language. Wallace is not as unbiased in his John McCain chapter however. He makes sure, in the opening portions of this Rolling Stone article, he was hired to write, that his colleagues know that he is not a political animal (i.e. he is stridently liberal). He lets them know he voted for Bill Bradley. Other than the requisite need all writers at Rolling Stone feel to display their liberal bona fides, it's not clear why Wallace would include his opinion in a piece that purports to cover an election campaign. If I were granted the honor of being paid to cover a Nancy Pelosi campaign, for example, I would not begin this piece with a couple of paragraphs describing how I feel about her or politics in general, but such is the state of journalism in America today...particularly in the halls of Rolling Stone. To have such an article begin with a political screed that is different than mine, would normally turn me off, but I've grown used to it. (I know, I know, there is no bias.) The real turn off occurs after the reader wades through the partisan name-calling, when they are treated to a languid dissertation on the minutiae involved on a campaign bus. If you're ever aching to know what goes on in a political campaign, I mean really aching to know, this is the chapter for you. I would say that most are curious about the machinations that occur behind the scenes, but I would say that most of those same people would have their curiosity tested by Wallace's treatment here. He says that the editors at Rolling Stone edited the piece. He says that he always wanted to provide his readers a director's cut. After reading through the first twenty pages of this chapter (eBook edition), I was mentally screaming for that editor to step in and assist me through the piece. It's not that it's poor writing, nor that it's entirely without merit, but you REALLY have to be one who aching to know the inner workings of a campaign. You have to want to know bathroom difficulties--such as keeping a bathroom door closed on a tour bus--you have to want to know what reporters eat, why they eat it, and when. You have to want your minutiae wrapped in minutiae, until your eyes bleed with detail. It's a cardinal rule of mine to never skip passages. I live with the notion that I can learn something from all authors I deem worthy, and I deem Wallace to be a good writer with an adept and varying intellect, but I had to break my cardinal rule with this chapter. It was too painful a slog. As for the chapter on Tracy Austin, Wallace laments the fact that championship level athletes aren't capable of achieving a degree of articulation that he wants when he purchases one of their autobiographies. Tracy Austin, for those who don't know, was a championship level tennis player. Wallace purchased her autobiography hoping that, as an adult long since removed from the game, she would be able to elucidate the heart of a champion. He hoped that Austin would be able to describe for us what went through her mind at the moment when she achieved the pinnacle of her career, and he wanted to know what she thought about the accident that led to her premature demise. He wasn't just disappointed, he says, in the manner he is disappointed with sideline interviews that are loaded with "we give it 110%, one game at a time, and we rise and fall as a team" style clichés. He sums up his disappointment with the following: "It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must (out of necessity) be blind and dumb about it--and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence." In other words, we are able to express these ideas based on the fact that we concentrate on the arena of the mind, and their concentration lies in the heart of athletic competition. We, non-athlete types, think about the things they do, we fantasize about them, and they do them. We think about how glorious it would be to sink that championship shot over Bryon Russell, Michael Jordan just does it. We think about that incredibly perfect and physically impossible baseline shot of a Tracy Austin, Tracy just does it. We see the replays of their exploits endlessly repeated on Sportscenter, and we hear almost as many different analyses of them. We then think about these plays from all these varied angles that are provided, and we project ourselves onto that platform. We don't think about all the rigorous hours a Michael Jordan spent in gyms preparing for that moment, we simply think about that moment, and what it would mean to us to have conquered such a moment. So, when one of these athletes steps away from that stage to offer us a few words about that moment and those few words center around the "I just did it" meme we are profoundly disappointed. To paraphrase Yoda, "they don't think, they do, or they do not." They use the force granted to them though spending a greater percentage of their lives in gyms, on tennis courts, and in weight rooms. They concentrate on muscle memory to prevent the mind from interfering with their eventual completion of the act. If we, non-athlete types, were in a similar situation, we would think about the significance of the history of the game, the profundity of the moment, how this moment may affect the rest of our lives, how many people are watching us, if Bryon is a better athlete than we are, and will he block our shot, what the fellas are going to say about this play after the game, and we would become so immersed in the moment that we probably wouldn't make the shot. The point is that they've made that shot so many times, in so many different ways and games, that they simply reply on muscle memory to make the championship shot. They may think about that shot, as long as it takes them to project it, but once they step on the court, they go on auto-pilot to complete the mission. They would love to give Hemingway-esque descriptions of their game, that satisfied us all, and landed them a weekly spot on Pardon the Interruption, but for all the reasons described here they are simply incapable of it. I used to wonder what announcers were talking about when they said, "He's too young to understand what this means." This kid, as you call him, has been playing this game his whole life, and he's lived the life of the championship level athlete, which means sacrificing the norms of daily life that his peers knew, and he's done all that for "this" moment. What do you mean he doesn't know what it means? It dawned on me, after a couple struggles with it, that "this kid" doesn't know what this moment would mean to that announcer...or those of us at home watching. In that post-game interview, then, we're looking for something, some little nugget that we can identify with. When we get phrases from the cliché vault, we're so disappointed that they didn't put more effort into identifying with our sense of their glory. We're frustrated that they couldn't reach us on our level. Yet, as Wallace states, it is the essence of a championship level athlete to be "blind and dumb" during the moments that define them, and we all know this to one degree or another. We've all seen these championship level athletes being interviewed about their individual moments thousands of times, so why do we continue to be so frustrated with them, and does this continued sense of frustration begin to say more about them or us?

DFW has an unbelievable knack for making the most distasteful of subjects riveting. The topics of some of his essays, oh let's say, for instance, Big Red Son, are not something that I would necessarily, ordinarily seek to read on my own, but his thorough depiction and analysis of this, well, interesting subculture is so top notch and fascinating that I found it impossible to put down. Politics isn't my cup of tea either. Yet his essay on McCain's 2000 bid for the Republican nomination just sucks you right in. His keen understanding what makes both things and people "click," of human nature, outweighs that of any other author I believe I have ever read. He's definitely become one of my favorite moderns authors, along with Jonathon Franzen, Jose Saramago, Zadie Smith, and Dave Eggers. I just read The Broom Of The System, which grant you is really rather weird. I'm not sure I "got" the ending-- only maybe I did-- and am now happily devouring Oblivion, so it is clear that he can broach both nonfiction and fiction with equal aplomb. Sadly and sorely missed you are, DFW.

DFW's essays are the pinnacle of writing-as-art -- they're entertaining, hilarious, and make you think. (Reminds me of the vibe of South Park.) But the Kindle Edition (at least) has a serious flaw. One of the essays hinges on misspellings of words, but when Amazon created the Kindle version, someone **ran the whole thing through autocorrect!!!**. Which obviously destroys the author's intentionally misspelled content. The reader can reconstruct what DFW intended in some cases, but others are totally lost. Perhaps it was an unintended artifact of some optical-character-recognition process, but either way I'd expect a little more care in the process -- when Amazon is advertising the Kindle Edition as the same as the book, there needs to be a human who looks at cases where a word's spelling is being changed (or where OCR has low confidence).

We lost him far too soon. If, like me, you were discouraged by the elaborate "Infinite Jest" and gave up after a hundred pages or so, you should give Wallace the non-fiction writer a shot. He is wonderful: these essays are personal, often providing close-to-the-ground daily accounts of raw experience, vivid, diligent in research, and often profound in examining the ramifications of the subjects reported. And appealingly idiosyncratic in a way that only a writer of with a strong, confident persona can be. As with Gore Vidal, I wasn't transported by his fiction, but his journalism is pure gold. This, before I actually confronted the disappointment of Hunter S. Thompson's essays, was what I pictured Gonzo Journalism to be. I could assess the quality of Wallace's essay on the 2000 McCain campaign because I wasn't really interested in the subject; but he made it compelling, fascinating. And his insight into the differences between a true leader and a mere salesman as commander-in-chief was worth the price of the book itself. The essay on dictionaries, and by extension on prescriptive and descriptive approaches to the English language as it develops here, I had read before, but it is a treat for anyone who cares about accuracy of communication. The title essay expanded into divagations on American eating habits, vegetarianism, animal cruelty and other musings, but always engagingly and informatively. Wallace describes the trauma of 9/11 as it affected the heartland in snapshots that are as understated as they are affecting. I KNEW I wasn't interested in the annual porn awards presentation, but Wallace made it fun. I am flummoxed at the reviews here that are less than glowing, that nitpick and hedge their appraisals. Maybe Wallace shares the fate of many a stand-up comedian with mixed audience reaction who is "too smart for the room." In the genre of journalism, this has to be as good as it gets.

Great collection of essays by an excellent writer, I do not always agree with the points he is making or even in some cases the questions he is asking... but the subjects are entertaining the writing itself is truly great.

What a stunning collection of essays. I'd never heard of DFW (yes, I know, where have I been all my life? Well, for starters Australia - and then a couple of decades in Japan) until reading a review on a friend's blog - since which - and while reading these essays - references to DFW have been in half-a-dozen places. Presidential campaign politics, language, sex-toy conventions - nothing seems to have been beyond his genius. This book is un-putdownable!

Ted Kluck is one of my favourite writers, and one of Ted Kluck's favourite writers is David Foster Wallace. Thus it was that I picked up this collection of essays by the late Wallace, and I am so glad I did. "Consider the Lobster" is one of ten essays in this book, whose subjects range from the sublime (a thoughtful review of Professor Joseph Frank's biographical works on Dostoevsky) to the faintly ridiculous (the titular essay referring to a lobster food festival). What I really love about every single one of these essays is that Wallace's tone and voice is so clear in every one, even though the subjects and styles of essays are so different. While some of the subject matter is pretty risqué (the first essay is an account of a visit to a major porn industry convention), Wallace writes with such humanity and desire to see the heart behind what often seems heartless (another essay deals with politics, with Wallace joining the McCain2000 campaign for a week). Stylistically and artistically as well, these essays are a joy to read: "Authority and American Usage" is an essay reviewing Bryan A Garner's 'A Dictionary of Modern American Usage', and is hilarious in its intelligence and (not particularly) gentle mocking of the very concept of a book describing the American use of language. Not that he doesn't see the need or interest in such a volume, but rather Wallace makes a point of using as much language as physically possible. Any good artist makes you want to be a better artist yourself, and this collection of writing both shows how writing can be great and entertaining no matter what the subject, and makes me want to be a much better writer and thinker. Wallace wrote thoughtfully and (I think) with fairness and clarity, and ten years after his tragic death, it's a real shame that he is not here to try and dissect the world as it looks now. I enjoyed these essays very much and am looking forward to getting a hold of more of Wallace's writing as soon as I can.

Obviously, David Foster Wallace was some kind of extraordinary wit, intellect and observer. His command of the English language is truly overwhelming and delightful in the most subtle of ways. As a reader, you've got to pay attention, but you are rewarded with an extraordinary view into the mind of a kind of genius who looked at the world around him with crystal clarity, obsessive honesty and his feet planted firmly on the ground. He spins and twirls webs of meaning around the most common events, exploding little epiphanies in your mind as he wades through the absurdity of his own perceptions.

DFW utiliza sua graça, estilo e linguagem para trazer reflexões, risadas e imersão na realidade que está descrevendo e analisando. Ensaios maravilhosos sobre os mais variados assuntos: a aparente vacuidade das biografias de atletas, a ética de comer animais, a política e ética nas normas de linguagem, a loucura de uma eleição, o surrealismo do pornô, o ethos de programas políticos de rádio, entre outras coisas. Vale a pena comprar a edição física, pois o último ensaio “Host” é diagramado de uma maneira que não se transpõem no kindle e, por isso, não está presente ali.