Un saggio e sono poco usa a leggere saggi.
Complicata cerebrale meravigliosa mente geniale di Wallace che solleva i coperchi che coprono di banalità e superficialità il modo in cui recepiamo i fenomeni: che sia l’ultimo pensiero che attraversa il nervoso carapace dell’aragosta prima di essere buttata nella pentola bollente alla fiera dell’astice nel Maine, o l’autocontrollo richiesto ad un campione di tennis nei secondi che precedono la battuta del suo probabile match-point o ancora le dinamiche di un talk–show radiofonico Wallace, o la comicità di Kafka (!?) si muove agile e arguto, scava in profondità e svela aspetti nascosti rendendoci più consapevoli dell’ovvietà del reale che accade o ci circonda.
Occhio indagatore, profondamente americano ma anche puntuale critico del proprio paese e dei suoi costumi.
Un’esperienza di lettura ardua (confesso che ho saltato non poche pagine pagine) pur tuttavia molto stimolante.

After promising myself for years and years that I would dive into the essays of David Foster Wallace, I did. Like all of his works, this is humorous with more than a hint of deep thinking melancholy. A project that began as an essay for GOURMET MAGAZINE (the essay "Consider the Lobster") spins itself into a book of beautiful prose and empathy for the voiceless amongst us. Sometimes I find myself wondering what he'd make of this busy world of apps and heightened political division, were he still with us today. Just something else to consider.

If you haven't read David Foster Wallace, this is a wonderful place to begin. I seem to have worked my way backwards. It's not the infamous and Herculean effort of "Infinite Jest." This is not a twelve course meal of a tome like his others. I found it interesting, sincere, and another demonstration of why perhaps such an introspective soul found it impossible to live out his natural course on this earth. ~ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

More journalistic assignments than essays. Rolling Stone sends him to the US annual porn awards. It's kind of shocking that he has nothing of interest to say about porn. There's a lot of cataloguing of surface detail, like a novelist recording research for future use. In fact, there's a sense this might be his idea and he's saving all his comic insights for his fiction. The same dynamic was evident when he wrote about a cruise in his other book of essays.
He's hilariously scathing about a new John Updike novel. Along with Mailer and Roth, Updike is referred to as the great American narcissist and his generation as the most self-absorbed in the history of the world. I didn't know Updike had written a dystopian novel - except, apparently, it has the same protagonist and sex obsession as all his other novels. Foster Wallace produces some statistical evidence to discount the publisher's claim that this is a departure for Updike. Turns out there's less than a page about the cause of the changed world but 86 pages about the flora in New England and the view of the ocean in different seasons, not a single page about radiation sickness after the nuclear exchanges but 10 pages about his protagonist's penis and 15 pages about golf. Foster Wallace does though honour him as one of the best sentence writers of the 20th century.
There follows sixty pages (boring as hell) about a new dictionary; more tennis; an account of spending time with John McCain's election campaign team; time spent with an outspoken right-wing radio talk show host (another potentially brilliant character for a novel); the most passionate piece is about the Maine Lobster Festival. All his sympathy is for the lobsters. He makes you wonder if in the future we will be considered barbaric for eating animals and sea creatures.
On the whole there's the sense Foster Wallace gives about 30% of himself to these writings. They make you feel very sad that we will never have more of his fiction to read. Like I said there's some fabulous comic material waiting to be alchemised into a novel here.

Poi ognuno dà le risposte che vuole, ma intanto sono importanti le domande. Per esempio, in uno di questi articoli-saggi, quello che dà il titolo alla raccolta, avendo osservato e ben descritto “quel coperchio sbatacchiato freneticamente e quel patetico aggrapparsi al bordo della pentola”, D. F. Wallace - non da animalista radicale, ma solo da uno con testa e cuore – chiede ai lettori di “Gourmet - La rivista del vivere bene” e a ogni altro suo lettore: quando la metti a bollire viva, consideri l'aragosta?

Brilliant, edgy, witty essays.
The most unusual subjects in the world examined from every possible angle.
Topics from the insignificant to the sublime dissected by a philosopher.

But a benevolent god on Mt. Olympus created the footnote.
It was meant to be a gift to mankind. An aid to knowledge.
Wallace took the footnote and clutched it to his bosom.
He did not comprehend its capacity to annoy.
So every brilliant, edgy and witty essay he ever wrote thereafter turned to a big
steaming pile of footnotes. Footnotes within footnotes. Don't-step-in-it-footnotes.
Often, the footnotes took up more of the page than the actual text - not joking.

Everything he touched ?
Yup: footnote.

David Foster Wallace will be missed.
Died much too young.

But not the mind-numbing, migraine- inducing, footnote-laden writing style that the
U.S. Surgeon General determined to be the #1 cause of 'agida' in people who read.

David Foster Wallace is a self-described SNOOT, the sort of person "who watched The Story of English on PBS (twice) and read Safire's column with their half-caff every Sunday." So, he's a bit of a know-it-all, and if you're like me, you'll feel like you're out of your league trying to keep up with him when it comes to grammar and all things English.

But that's okay, because he's also witty and self-deprecating, and interested in not just English usage (thank goodness!), but also politics, lobster festivals (warning: after reading his essay on the preparation of lobsters I'll never eat lobster again, and more power to you if YOU can), Dostoevsky (again, out of my league), pornography conventions in Vegas, and talk radio, among other things.

His observations are full of extra bits of information, presented in a surfeit of footnotes. In fact, there may be more footnote than text. But again, that's okay, because they are almost always interesting. Okay, not always, and yes, he goes overboard sometimes in trying to be clever with them, especially in his essay "Host" about a talk radio host in Los Angeles. On the other hand, his insights into what drives talk radio (not politics, but ratings) make up for any excess in presentation.

This was my first exposure to Wallace, who I know has many fervent fans among Goodreaders, and I can see why. I enjoyed his voice a lot, if not always his choice of subjects to cover. This is a good introduction to the author. Recommended.

O que há de mais estimulante em ler David Foster Wallace é, sem dúvida alguma, o fato de que estamos diante de um escritor com um projeto literário muito, muito claramente articulado. Não restam dúvidas de que, na prosa de DFW, vibra aquele que talvez seja o traço mais eloquente da literatura contemporânea (sobretudo pós-Joyce, pós-Woolf): a ambição de produzir parágrafos excessivamente conscientes de si mesmo, parágrafos que sejam também meta-parágrafos; a intenção de desenhar uma linguagem que se vire pelo avesso no mero ato de se imprimir sobre o papel.

Isso é verdade tanto na ficção quanto na não-ficção do autor, que nos deixou precocemente em 2008. Eu ainda não li o Infinite Jest, mas, dentre os contos que compõem Oblivion ou Girl with curious hair, por exemplo, não há um único que se acanhe nesse sentido. Alguém poderia dizer que DFW é um escritor experimental, e decerto teria razão até certo ponto, mas eu prefiro enxergá-lo como alguém que gosta de tensionar todas as frases que escreve. Pense em Flaubert, que dizia que o inimaginável esforço por trás da escrita deveria estar oculto, invisível ao leitor: DFW é o oposto. O seu jogo é o de canalizar em cada frase, em cada nota de rodapé, cargas maciças de intensidade cômica ou trágica. Seus textos só se mantêm unidos por um esforço tremendo de magnetismo, já que tudo sinaliza a iminência de um desarranjo.

É exatamente isso que temos em Consider the lobster and other essays, uma coleção de ensaios originalmente publicada em 2005. Os textos agregados foram publicados em revistas norte-americanas de grande circulação, e versam sobre uma miríade de temas. Aliás, eis aí outro traço estarrecedor em se tratando de DFW: a sensação de que ele pode e consegue escrever sobre absolutamente qualquer coisa, não importando quão exótico ou truculento ou refinado ou randômico o tema. Quaisquer que sejam os contextos e as provocações, o intelecto de Wallace entrevê um convite e a possibilidade de uma perspectiva. Sempre há uma história a ser contada, uma moralidade a ser debatida, um humor a ser cuidadosamente redescoberto.

Essa consciência da diversidade caleidoscópica do mundo, e da necessidade de revivê-la na literatura, está nos seus contos, e está também aqui. “Big Red Son”, o ensaio de abertura, é um longo relato da visita de DFW aos AVN Awards – algo como o Oscar da indústria pornô; “Authority and American Usage” é uma longa meditação-meets-resenha sobre as guerras ideológicas por trás da indústria de publicação de dicionários; “Host” é um gigantesco perfil de John Ziegler, um comentarista conservador de grande projeção na cena radiofônica de Los Angeles. E, claro: “Consider the lobster”, o ensaio-título, versa (fundamentalmente) sobre a ética de se lançar uma lagosta viva dentro de uma panela e fervê-la até a morte, para então consumi-la tão fresca quanto possível.

O tom de Wallace é o de um amigo extremamente inteligente e mordaz que resolve nos direcionar a atenção para coisas que, grosso modo, passaríamos a vida inteira ignorando. O livro é entrecortado por afirmações muito categóricas – não raro escamoteadas nas numerosas notas de rodapé –, mas há algo em Wallace que o impede de soar arrogante. A sua dicção (1) é a de alguém cujo raciocínio se move com tanta agilidade e em direções tão imprevisíveis; cuja argumentação é tão rica em factoides e pequenos detalhes pavorosos, que praticamente não há tempo para desafiá-lo. Wallace se move com a rapidez de um trovão, e a sua prosa só não nos imobiliza, não nos toma de pânico por completo porque a ironia dele o autossabota – ou o redime. Se alguém resolvesse explorar os mesmos temas em um tom sombrio e solene, o livro provavelmente seria intragável.

É uma leitura cansativa, mas só porque DFW de alguma forma se agiganta, e, no contra-movimento, nos diminui. É impossível não se sentir reduzido, e não ter a sensação de que estamos diante não só de um tipo diferente de escritor, mas de um tipo diferente de ser humano.

(1) Wallace em “Joseph Fank’s Dostoevsky”: ”That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell, often within a couple paragraphs, that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozich. This quality’s almost impossible to describe or account for straight out – it mostly presents as a vibe, a kind of perfume of sensibility – and critics’ attempts to reduce it to questions of “style” are almost universally lame.”
-> Pergunta-se: será que ele se deu conta de que poderia incluir o seu próprio nome na lista?

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.

Kakav čovek! Kakvi eseji! Kakve teme!

Neverovatna je Volasova maksimalistička elegancija. I erudicija, razume se.
Ono što je najveći kvalitet ovih eseja može biti ujedno i mana - zabavni detalji, digresije-u-digresiji-u-digresiji, interno-kulturološka pozadina, ali kad se čitalac "našteluje" na ovaj način pisanja - zadovoljstvo u tekstu je višestruko. Oduvek sam bio sklon obeleženoj leksici, a Volasova leksika je raskošna (u svakom smislu), a stil ingeniozan. Tematski raspon je zapanjujuć i neočekivan. Od dodele nagrada za izuzetan uspeh u pornografskoj industriji, rasprave o prisustvu/odsustvu humora kod Kafke, razmišljanja o Dostojevskom, (zlo)upotrebi rečnika, sve do (mogućih) patnji jastoga koji se živ krčka u loncu; Volas ocrtava jedan katalog profanih bizarnosti - opipava puls podivljalog sveta, sveta na steroidima. A u svakom eseju na kraju će isplivati jedna vrsta sofisticiranog intelektualnog rada - Volas nije opsenar ili kavgadžija (dve kategorije koje neguju današnji srpski esejisti/blogeri/kolumnisti) već potkovani, osetljivi i pažljivi posmatrač koji unosi izuzetnu živost u ono što piše.

Takođe, svaki ljubitelj fusnota treba obavezno da baci pogled na ovu knjigu. (Fusnota-u-fusnoti - hiperfusnote - fusnote koje ugrožavaju glavni tekst i prelaze na narednu stranu...)

Raspričani i retorični eseji o temama koje me uglavnom nisu previše zanimale.

I just finished reading Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace. What I'm left with is an absolute amazement at the immense amounts of knowledge related in the essays. It's like DFW had - or did enough research - to fill a set of encyclopedias on each topic, and then whittled it down to the presented short-storyish length.

In "Big Red Son", an essay about the Annual AVN Awards (that's Adult Video News, by the way) I learned more about the adult entertainment industry than I ever thought possible. In addition to covering the event, DFW covered so many other aspects of the industry that it's almost overwhelming, and almost every page of the essay is accompanied by copious footnotes. Anything you've ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask? PM me.

He brought the same level of detail to an article about John McCain that was originally written for Rolling Stone Magazine, but is presented in the book in its unabridged form. Following him on the 2000 campaign trail (before he was knocked out of the race by Bush) I was presented with so much interesting information on John McCain that I have to admit that I have more respect for him now. I'm not voting for him, but I can respect him, and that's mainly because DFW objectively presented him to me in a way that I haven't really seen in other media coverage. Don't get me wrong - he doesn't let him off the hook for anything - but his exhaustive coverage and his further analysis of his own coverage made for some really interesting reading in light of the current presidential campaigns.

"Consider the Lobster" is simply hilarious when you think about the fact that he wrote it for Gourmet Magazine, and pretty much calls readers' attention to the plight of the lobster as it's cooked alive. He was sent to cover a lobster festival in Maine, and I hope that the editor of the article knew what he was getting himself into when he hired DFW to cover it, or he might have been pretty surprised when the copy arrived. I'm sure it's not the angle most writers would've explored for a magazine whose readers enjoy eating gourmet foods. Like lobsters. And who probably don't want to think about them screaming in the pot.*

I could go on and on about the essays, but what struck me most was his exhaustive knowledge of their subjects. This was a man who left no stone unturned. I'm amazed by how his mind must have worked to capture, compile and translate everything he learned and experienced into his work.

His death - what a loss to the literary world. And the world, period.

*That's a myth by the way - it's just steam escaping from the space between the lobster's flesh and it's shell. (Just one of the million things I learned from reading this book.)

Consider The Essay

This is a fine collection of essays. It does not seem to be put together following any particular collective logic, but all the essays seem to be good advertisements to DFW’s intuitively imaginative, explorative and curious writing method. Would need to read more of DFW’s essays to be able to comment on the logic of this particular set of essays inhabiting the same book. It is, however, vintage DFW and hence cannot be rated below 5 stars, even if a couple of essays were so-so.

n  n    Interpolation:n  n  
n  
n  For practical purposes, everyone knows what an essay (or a book review) is. As usual, though, there’s much more to know than most of us care about—it’s all a matter of what your interests are. n

The first extremely explicit essay on an inside look into the Porn industry turned this reviewer off slightly (being the prude that I am) but from then on it was increasingly easy to figure why so many of my most respected friends have such an intellectual crush on DFW. I have too now, I guess. Or maybe it is puppy love. Hard to know for sure. IJ is such a bad place to first encounter DFW, he is all infinite there (with no restrictions on his interpolative imagination), the finite essays are so much more fun, accessible and lovable and most importantly, imitable (at least in intent, if not in style). The biggest crush-inducer, however, is how many of DFW’s sentences and ideas you actually want to remember and use for yourself. Therein lies the most important reason to fall in love - he is really placing himself at a level that you can aspire towards. Not too difficult, not too complex, but deliciously complex enough to stretch comprehension and understanding. It is not terribly difficult to fall in love from there.

n  n    Interpolation:n  n  
n  
n  This reviewer acknowledges that there seems to be some, umm, personal stuff getting worked out here; but the stuff is, umm, germane.n

As you get into the essays, you will find that the jungle of footnotes and the sub-foot-notes (and sub-sub… well no point in scaring off potential readers) will soon become a veritable tangle. Not to mention the thicket of interpolations - interpolation upon interpolation upon interpolation, ad infinitum. I had read a New York Times piece with a great quote from DFW in reference to his endnotes: "Most poetry is written to ride on the breath, and getting to hear the poet read is kind of a revelation and makes the poetry more alive. But with certain literary narrative writers like me, we want the writing to sound like a brain voice, like the sound of the voice inside of the head, and the brain voice is faster, is absent any breath, and it holds together grammatically rather than sonically."

n  n    Interpolation:n  n  
n  
n  Not sure if this applies to his fiction as well but, if you happen to miss the footnotes, you would miss half the fun, not to mention half the book.n

This reviewer was never able to figure out if DFW is showing off or if he just couldn’t help being a genius. It was a source of constant amazement to observe how DFW uses a review (or any given essay) to explore every pet topic imaginable. It was even more amazing to imagine how his editors let him do that.

In illustration of this amazement:

n  For it turned out that the more interesting a […] happenstance was, the more time and page-space it took to make sense of it, or, if it made no sense, to describe what it was and explain why it didn’t make sense but was interesting anyway if viewed in a certain context that then itself had to be described, and so on. With the end result being that the actual document delivered per contract to Rolling Stone magazine turned out to be longer and more complicated than they’d asked for. Quite a bit longer, actually. In fact the article’s editor pointed out that running the whole thing would take up most of Rolling Stone’s text-space and might even cut into the percentage of the magazine reserved for advertisements, which obviously would not do.n

Surely, you get the drift...

n  n    Interpolation:n  n  
n  
n  On ‘DFW’: 'David Foster Wallace' is a pretty long name. David, Foster or Wallace, however, by themselves wouldn’t be enough to indicate who you are referring to. Hence it has to be the whole name - David Foster Wallace, which being too long is ‘DFW’ - the best option for fans who want to talk about DFW often enough.n

In sum, give DFW any topic and he will conjure out of it the angst of the modern condition, link it with some fundamental disconnect and manage to be completely non-pretentious and genuine while doing that. He suspends your inner cynic. That is genius, whatever else you might say.