I don’t even disagree with all of his opinions, but he is so pretentious that I want to. The McCain essay was interesting if you ignored whole paragraphs at a time. The dictionary one was possibly the worst thing I’ve ever read, and for some reason he thought his opinion on abortion was relevant? The one on the sex industry almost made me stop reading altogether because it was so awful.

my replacement glasses finally came in so i could finish this! (trying to read dfw’s notorious footnote yapping while holding a book a cm from my face simply wasnt the loveliest reading experience lmfao). i know he gets shit for it but i actually enjoy the footnotes. maybe it’s because the pacing of the interjections feels conversational to me rather than annoying but i can understand why it wouldnt be everyone’s cup of tea (the host essay especially jdjkfjs the arrows were sending me

Wallace is encyclopedic and so well spoken he can write about a dictionary and make it entertaining and enlightening at the same time...

He can even go on extended rants about some abstruse philosophical point that occurs to him in the progress of his reviews and go through 2 or 3 pages of a footnote while being entirely even and approachable so that by the end of it you see what kind of amazing and fascinating detail he can summon.

The thing is, honestly, he's humbly trying to just get to the bottom of things. He's spellbound by the stuff he's trying to explain, and he lets his personality shine through, which is a damn good thing since he wants to be your friend. He'd be the perfect guy to smoke with or have for dinner. His prose is inviting, rich, erudite as hell but never tries to out do you or have a chip on his shoulder.

He knows friggin everything and he writes because he is endlessly curious and talented and he sincerely is trying to communicate.

He can write about Dostoevsky, porn, John McCain, it doesn't matter. Your mind is opened tenfold after one of his exhausting workouts with his chosen subject. He doesn't intrude, he is patient and kindhearted.

perfect stuff for the over intellectual geek in everybody!

Here's my review for Flak Magazine:

http://www.flakmag.com/books/thelobst...

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.

BREAK ON THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE


The Lizard King, il Re Lucertola.

Nel 1966 i Doors debuttarono con il disco omonimo.
Un capolavoro. Undici canzoni indimenticabili. Eterne, semplici e raffinate, banali e rivoluzionarie.
Usavano motivi latini (bossanova) e soul, ma poi anche Brecht & Weil, non usavano il basso, almeno in concerto, e a coronare tutto c'era lui, Jim Morrison, insuperabile rettile e crooner.
Fu una rivoluzione.
Tuttora, il disco è fantastico, attualissimo e per tanti versi, ancora anticipatore.

DFW mi ci ha fatto pensare.


In questo libro si parla anche dell’edizione 1998 degli Adult Video News Award. Qui una foto scattata all’edizione #29 del 2012: da sinistra a destra Kaylani Lei, Jessica Drake, Stormy Daniels, Alektra Blue.

Penso che DFW sia stato nella letteratura come Morrison nella musica (moderna? Contemporanea? Rock? Pop? Per me, musica tout court), e le sue opere siano arrivate come arrivò il primo disco dei Doors: metà meteora metà bomba. Un incontro ravvicinato del terzo tipo, che è diventato amicizia.

Quando lo leggo, mi sento come in cima a un faro, e chi mi frequenta sa che ho la passione per questo luogo e architettura e simbolo: con un libro di DFW in mano sono in un posto che svetta su tutto senza ostacoli aperto a 360°.
DFW apre una finestra alla volta, con ogni narrazione (saggio, racconto, romanzo, son tutte narrazioni), allarga l'orizzonte, attraverso il suo punto di vista si riesce a vedere la terra che finisce e là comincia il cielo (per esempio, la sua visuale sull'11 settembre 2001).


In questo libro c’è anche un capitolo intitolato “Alcune considerazioni sulla comicità di Kafka che forse dovevano essere tagliate ulteriormente”.

Altro aspetto molto interessante delle opere del nostro affezionato è che l'argomento che affronta non ha la minima importanza: cosa può interessarci del resoconto di una crociera nei Caraibi, o dell'analisi critica dell'autobiografia di Tracy Austin, per non parlare della minuziosa disanima di un nuovo dizionario della lingua inglese?! Meno di niente ovviamente.

Errore.
O meglio, errore parziale: all'inizio non ce ne importa nulla ed è giusto - poi man mano che DFW parola dopo parola, rigo dopo rigo, nota dopo nota e pagina dopo pagina, ci assorbe cattura trasforma ammalia, di quegli argomenti lì ci interessa moltissimo e vogliamo che continui a parlarcene.

Oppure, ci interessa semplicemente che ci parli, che si rivolga a noi, perché quello che conta è la sua voce più che le cose che dice.


Il magnifico capitolo intitolato “La vista da casa della sig.ra Thompson” sull’11 settembre, e il fiorire di bandiere americane esposte ogni dove.

Anche perché il fatto che scrivendo si rivolga spesso direttamente a noi lettori, davvero a noi come fossimo persone, adulti intelligenti e degni di rispetto (e non all'astrazione demografica che potremmo rappresentare, e qui uso e gioco con le sue stesse parole) non è un vezzo, è proprio vero: DFW scrive per noi. Per lui noi siamo fondamentali, non si prende mai sul serio ma prende noi lettori dannatamente sul serio.

Forse se continua a parlarci, a interessarsi a noi, prima o poi ci illumina del suo immenso, ci rende un po' più intelligenti colti ossessivi maniacali ironici divertenti brillanti...


In questo libro c’è anche un capitolo dedicato alla tennista Tracy Austin intitolato “Come Tracy Austin mi ha spezzato il cuore”.

Mi piace il suo coraggio, il suo non nascondersi, non tirarsi indietro, il suo mettersi in gioco e in discussione, il suo spaccare il capello in 44, il suo trasformare sabbia in oro...

Un'altra cosa che mi ha colpito è che con DFW ho messo da parte la matita: o sottolineavo e chiosavo tutto, o nulla, come ho subito capito che era meglio fare.

Oh, sì, certo, le note e le note dentro le note sono una meraviglia, parte integrante del testo, niente marginalità – e gli acronimi sono un piacere distillato, la prefazione che lui definisce “facoltativa” è invece esilarante e mette su una gran voglia di sapere il resto, di più, di più, sempre di più, oltre ...


Considera l’aragosta: il racconto della Fiera dell’astice del Maine.

Ko voli Volasa, naći će za sebe svašta i u ovoj zbirci eseja. Ispostavilo se da sam po raznim internet-budžacima pročitala već gotovo pola knjige, ali je i ovako bilo prijatnih iznenađenja, recimo sasvim neočekivano relevantan prikaz Mekejnove kampanje za predsednika iz 2000. (Nije mi samo jasna tendencija da se knjige priča ili zbirke eseja naslovljuju po upadljivo slabijim tekstovima - ovde je naslovni esej uglavnom o tome kako jastozi strašno pate kad ih ubace u kipuću vodu, dobro ajde, pate, takav je život, idemo dalje.)

I must confess that I am not one of the cult of DFW followers that wallow in his genius ramblings; I honestly appreciated, though did not love, his (universally acknowledged) masterpiece: "Infinite Jest"; despite its raw humor, it rambled and meandered WAY too much for me to get a feel for his true storytelling talent. It seemed almost as if he was using his (arguably infinite, or at least infinitely superior to my) intelligence to slap the reader insensate. (Part of this feeling was no doubt due to my not heeding Dave Eggers' caveat at the beginning of IJ: It's a book that requires 100% of your concentration and attention to fully appreciate it...and I tried plowing through it with a 2-year-old vying for my attention...but still...) I couldn't shake the feeling that he was mocking the unsophisticated reader with his lofty, circuitous (and unfathomable) wit.



After reading this collection of essays by DFW, consider me a newly converted devotee. "Consider the Lobster...", a collection of essays mostly reprinted (in unexpurgated form) from magazine articles from 1996-2004, is (like IJ) a daunting work to plow through, but it (unlike IJ) takes a modicum of effort to decipher the message(s) propounded, and realize just what a flipping genius DFW was.



The collection is a motley assortment that runs the gamut from coverage of the AVN Adult Film Awards (the porn Oscars, if you will), to a detailed diatribe on Standard Written English, hidden within a review of a dictionary. (Sounds dull? Trust me, it's not.) There's a book review of darling tennis player of the 80s Tracy Austin's abysmally written autobiography (totally hilarious, but not in a mocking kind of way); a view behind the scenes of John McCain's 2000 Presidential bid against GW Bush for the GOP nomination (the worst of the collection, but still quite good); an essay on the titular crustacean and the annual Maine Lobster Festival (as featured in Gourmet Magazine in 2004...an article which I can't help but imagine that, if indeed published, singlehandedly led to the n  deathn of Gourmet Magazine in 2009...it's that brutal...not to mention f***ing hilarious). My favorite of the bunch, though, is the last one in the book, and it is a doozy. Entitled "Host", it focuses its attention on (conservative) talk radio, specifically in Los Angeles (my former home town) at KFI (the second-most popular talk radio station in the US)...DFW, subtly, gently yet decisively CASTIGATES the entire industry in what is arguably the best essay/opinion piece I've ever read. It's a stunner.



There's even a "where was I when..." article of his experiences immediately following 9/11 while living in Bloomington, Indiana...an article that (for me, anyway) served to humanize DFW, and brought tears to my eyes. This is rather macabre, but at this point in reading I leafed through what I'd read and looked for signs presaging his bout with depression, and ensuing suicide. Much like IJ, "Consider the Lobster" (despite its lofty narrative) is imbued with an underlying, palpable sadness that provides (this reader, anyway) an humanistic poignancy that will resonate a very long time. In a word: brilliant.

Not his best for the following reasons:

1.tWe know what we know now of how his life was cut short. So why the hell did someone, in retrospect, choose to send the great American writer to a bloody lobster festival? To a pornography awards show? At any rate, all this ended up revealing was that DFW was the real world Buzz Killington- he starts his porn award article with genital mutilation statistics, and implores of the readers of some gourmet food magazine to consider the pain and suffering of not just lobsters but many kinds of animals in the cruel food market. I empathise with his inability to stop taking things seriously.
2.tThe essays I was interested in reading failed to come to any satisfactory conclusion (Dostoyevsky and 9/11). At least with 9/11 having read Bleeding Edge recently, it appears that the guess of the great novelists is as good as ours.
3.tSome of it I wasn’t interested in reading in the first place (John McCain) and something about a dictionary which was almost unreadable.

Although the best part of not his best was that he seemed really human. Sometimes sneering or judgmental, just like you and me. One of DFW’s idols, Gaddis, was reluctant to interview because he believed his best work was in his novels, and it makes perfect sense that a good novel can be left alone without explanation from the artist. Yet as DFW expands upon his work in interviews, he has clearly managed to observe and articulate effectively the problems with the modern condition, yet, and as I suspect with most artists, some of his writing style here suggests to me that he hasn’t managed to escape the issues himself. DFW is treated as some sort of prophet, and I for one was jealous of how he seemed to know how to live. Knowing how to live and living it are two different things entirely, and I have now realised that if someone is capable of imparting real and effective advice, it may well be because they are unable to take it themselves. I really love the epiphany that we’re all human- I would love to have it more often.

Most importantly for writers, his grasp of the English language is blisteringly impressive, but I would argue unnecessary for the purposes of most prose. I mean to say that if I categorically sans nom de guerre use such a foray of tumescent language [1] to the palpable degree of yr. avg. miscreant, does it not evince in the reader [2] a tangential feeling that the chintziness of the hyperbolic prose borders on satyriasis? That the clerestorical phallocracy of language usage [3] and the postmodern pseudo-anxiety of yr. writer will not let a single sentence be de facto luxated? Does it really allow for ample and correct communication [4] to be written in such a format?

I don’t think so.

[1] (and footnotes which appear entirely in brackets. Yr. reviewer trusts yr. writer implicitly and that his klieg-glare into the dark corners of Standard Written English (a) that his grammatical prowess can indeed illuminate, and yet this hypomanic usage of brackets within footnotes creates a spiriferous subcategorisation of text to the point of turgitidy.)
(a)tHeretofore unmentioned, henceforth “SWE”.

[2] ie. The reader of this document, by which I mean the review.
[3] And just when you were honestly, bare-bones and “all on the table” trying to interpret a sentence successfully, a quizzically extraneous footnote which breaks the reading flow of even the most exalted DFW savant that you later decide has next-to-nothing to do with the sentence in which it sub-prolegomenously interjected eg. Here is a poem I wrote about some dreams I had:

I had a dream
That I took Kirsty Alley to a MILF bar
Harry Styles kept stealing my doritos
Then the government blew up two planets close to Earth like moons
The chain reaction accidentally exploded Venus and sent us into the sun and I
Woke up

I had a dream
That Tina Fey was in an army vehicle in a Ziggy Stardust outfit
She sang glam rock into a speakerphone that shot
Multicoloured ice like a stained glass window from a cannon
At an Asian teen down one of those angled San Francisco streets

I had a dream
That ice propagated from the school janitor
In the centre of the blaes pitch
I tried to get away but got trapped on the fence
At home the microwave froze and stung my fingers to touch it
I looked back and it was normal
I opened it and a thawed human ear attached to a cuboid of human material
Like a cross section through the head
Was inside

Try to remember WTF yr. writer was talking about after finishing that footnote! At this point you’re straddling two layers of text in your head and trying to remember how they match up, but have more importantly declaimed to yourself all future footnotes to be exformative.

[4] Says yr. formerly 100% fully sponsorial reviewer.

Considera la vita.

Cos’altro si può dire a proposito di questo autore che non sia stato già ribadito più volte e meglio?

Intanto assolvo al compito di citare i saggi che mi hanno maggiormente colpito in questa raccolta (il mondo delle talk radio, la biografia della tennista, la cerimonia degli awards del cinema porno e il saggio che da’ il titolo al libro, ma soprattutto il pezzo sulla campagna elettorale di McCain, davvero magistrale!) e quelli che invece ho trovato meno digeribili (il saggio sulla linguistica in particolare, davvero ostico al punto che ero ansioso di terminarlo, incapace di assimilare alcunchè per intere pagine!).

Detto questo, mi rendo conto che ancora una volta la lettura di DFW mi lascia non solo ammirato e appagato, come mi accade con altri seppur pochi scrittori, ma anche influenzato, in qualche modo che non riesco a definire meglio, nel modo di osservare le cose, gli avvenimenti, i fenomeni della nostra epoca e di valutarne gli effetti sulla mia sensibilità e in definitiva sulla mia vita.

Vedere la tv, leggere i giornali, guardarsi attorno, “sotto l’influsso” della lettura di Wallace come si fosse sotto l’effetto di una sostanza psicotropa, approfondisce l’acume della propria percezione, esercita lo sguardo all’ironia (e all’autoironia), a cogliere l’aspetto esilarante dei comportamenti così come a percepirne i risvolti spaventosi e angoscianti, a cimentarsi nel distinguere dietro le apparenze gli innumerevoli strati dei significati nascosti come in una serie di matrioske.

Insomma, un toccasana contro la superficialità cui ci spingono i ritmi della nostra realtà quotidiana, l’ingozzarsi di nozioni senza ragionarci su più di tanto, senza metterle alla controprova, senza neppure sentirne appieno il sapore nè il retrogusto, acido, squisito o velenoso…

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.

Polishing off the remainder of DFW's works has been a treat this year. I began by listening to the author-read audiobook, then picked up the paperback where the audio left off.

What an astounding journalist he was. "Consider the Lobster" is an in-depth look at a lobster festival. "Big Red Son" is a porn industry inside scoop. But like most of his books, the surface narrative and the snarky commentary enlarge upon grand and universal themes. The omnipresent wit and sophistication is never absent, though the subject matter is rather specialized. Shock and awe are two of the many techniques Wallace employed sentence by sentence.

Included are also reviews of an Updike book, Kafka's aesthetics, and Joseph Frank's 5-volume Dostoyevsky biography. All of them offer unique approaches to the book review form, while maintaining traditional appeal and technical proficiency.

Ever the perfectionist, DFW does not write a poor sentence. Many of his long footnotes are demanding, even bound to be irritating, and he does not restrain himself in this collection. "Authority and American Usage" is a tough expose on an obvious topic. DFW flexes his linguistic skills but strains the reader's patience if they are more inclined to read for plot and character. I always prefer his fiction, but there are few nonfiction books I enjoyed more than this one.

Totally in character, he provides a review of an abysmal tennis biography, which is also a resounding meditation on sports biographies as an industry. An impressive article. Then "Up, Simba," a very long and ultra detailed recounting of his campaign coverage for McCain, destined to become dated in future generations, but displaying many of his writerly strengths. For someone who is not immersed in politics, it makes for a difficult read, but rewards as it demands, like the best of his output.

If you can't get enough DFW, pick up this book. You won't be disappointed.

126th book of 2021.

Actually bumped this to 4-stars after a few days of reflection. Back to Wallace which means back to footnotes in this review as I've done (twice) before [1]. Wallace's essays have a similar feel to Infinite Jest: he's wildly intelligent but his intelligent discourse is riddled with words like 'FYI' and 'pussyfooting' to undermine it all at the same time. The 3-star rating looks like I was unimpressed, I wasn't. I thoroughly enjoyed some of these essays, but some I did not. Frankly two fairly long essays within ("Up, Simba" and "Host") failed to interest me despite Wallace's warm and witty prose. The former is about John McCain and the latter about the radio host John Ziegler, and written in a style that, like Infinite Jest is sometimes fun and sometimes sadistic [2]. The other long essay within is "Authority and American Usage", which is a pretentious dream, but I'll get to that.

I've been reading this for a while actually on and off, started a long time ago, did some serious reading of it in Tottenham [3], and then finished it the other day after forgetting it again between other books. The first essay, which I read in Tottenham, "Big Red Son" is all about the porn industry and as you can expect, is filled with Wallace humour. He shies from nothing and so we read things like 'I'm a little fuckhole' in this essay understanding that in the next one we will be reading about John Updike. The greatest line in the essay is perhaps this,
n  

There is something deeply surreal about standing behind a female performer in hot-pink peau de soie, a woman whose clitoris and perineum you have priorly seen, and watching her try to get a microwaved egg roll onto her plate with a cocktail fork.

n
He spares us nothing which makes it a brilliant essay. Everything is reported with a sly sort of humour that makes it doubly enjoyable.

The essays on writers, "Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think" (on John Updike) and "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed" (you guessed it, on Kafka) and "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" (you guessed it again, two in a row, on Dostoevsky) were naturally what I was looking for in the collection and the latter two are brilliant. I'm yet to read Baker's U&I but I'm imagining Updike has some great stuff written about him from these postmodernists (in the same way Kafka does, if you count the essay here by Wallace and Borges' essay, “Kafka and his Precursors”). Despite the shortness of the Kafka essay, Wallace still hands us sentences such as these, 'It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humour but that we've taught them to see humour as something you get—the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have.' [4]. And the essay ends with this:
n  

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.

n
His review of Frank's giant Dostoevsky biography brings up a lot of biographical snippets about the man, which, as a fan, were valuable. It's all the usual gossipy stuff about writers that make them interesting beyond their fiction;
n  

It's a well-known irony that Dostoevsky, whose work is famous for its compassion and moral rigor, was in many ways a prick in real life—vain, arrogant, spiteful, selfish. A compulsive gambler, he was usually broke, and whined constantly about his poverty, and was always badgering his friends and colleagues for emergency loans that he seldom repaid, and held petty and long-standing grudges over money, and did things like pawn his delicate wife's winter coat so he could gamble, etc.

n [5]

Ignoring the other essays that I didn't enjoy as much that leaves us with the titular novel, Consider the Lobster, one of my surprising favourites. Wallace intellectually tackles Maine's 2003 lobster festival and with it begins to question things like, Do lobsters feel pain? (Or more specifically, he asks, 'Is it right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?') This is actually a very fitting and current question even now as last week I was reading an article about the act of boiling lobsters alive being made illegal here in England. Wallace, for some reason surprisingly for me, comes down hard, it seems, on the side of it being wrong. Again, he shies from nothing and as I read some bits aloud to my mother, she begged me to stop. This paragraph struck me as it correlates exactly with a poignant moment in my own life regarding animals [6]:
n  

In any event, at the MLF, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World's Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they're unhappy, or frightened, even if it's some rudimentary version of these feelings . . . and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who's helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in?

n
But, the part my mother couldn't bear to hear and cut me off from reading is this,
n  

The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came home in . . . whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous a lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you're tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container's sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle's rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster's fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature's claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it's in terrible pain, causing some books to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven-timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.

n

This essay apparently caused a lot of controversy among the readers of Gourmet magazine where it was originally published and I see why, Wallace goes for it, and it's brutal insightfulness made it one of the most fulfilling and interesting essays of the whole lot, even around Dostoevsky, 9/11, and whatever else included. I originally planned 3 stars for the collection as I read the ones I liked the least last but actually, as I reconsider the others for the review, I remembered how warm, funny, honest and intelligent this whole collection was. Wallace deserves 4 for that.
____________________________________

[1] (1) Infinite Jest (2) The Mezzanine.

[2] Case in point:


[3] This essay collection was the forerunner to a strange night sleeping on a kitchen floor with my brother. The neighbours (all uni students) were impossibly loud and burning bank statements in their garden, one of the flat owner's cats continually woke us up by sitting on us, licking us (at one point my brother opened his eyes to the cat's face staring into his and started so hard that he woke me up and sent the cat bolting from the room), and so we spent the night waking up every hour, still drunk through the whole of it, oddly hot and achy on the paper-thin roll-mats we had laid out.

[4] In a module in university, "Modernism to the Present", we studied "The Metamorphosis" and not one student appeared to identify any humour in the story, me included. I don't remember if the lecturer identified it for us but it seems likely that he did as we had the ginger-haired enigmatic Dr. Quinn, whose lectures were split 50/50 with talking to us, the class, and himself—the latter of which always seemed to be more enjoyable to him [a].

[a] The highlight of my university career was actually making Q. laugh, something no one had ever seen before. Why this comment of all comments made him laugh remains a mystery. In a presentation on Narnia (now referring to a "Fairy Tales" literature module I took) I referred to Lucy's healing potion as Calpol. All heads turned to the back of the room where Q. was leaning against the wall and tittering to himself.

[5] A few times I've debated with a friend about the idea of 'goodness' and creativity. It always seems to me that the greatest artists are the 'worst' people. I believe there is perhaps a correlation between the two things. My friend thinks not, though when we considered examples I can't say we found any. There are, undoubtedly, thousands. But I stand by it in a strange way, that to be truly brilliant you must be awful. My mother, on the other hand, believes to be truly brilliant you must be mad. Either one works for me.

[6] My second time in Rome I sat in a cafe opposite the Colosseum with a then-girlfriend and could not for the life of me look away from the lobster tank in the window. They were exactly, uncannily, as Wallace describes them in the quote below this footnote. Sea creatures generally perturb me, crabs I dislike, lobsters I find kind of repulsive too, but I couldn't stop staring at these guys in the tank and feeling completely empty at the thought of them in there till someone bought them and they were killed and eaten. Their disgusting scrabbling and apparent terror, their aliveness, haunted me for some reason.