Bibliofreakblog

Consider the Lobster & Other Essays by David Foster Wallace

I started planning this blog when I was reading this book.  Because I vacillated so much, if not with every page, then certainly with every essay, between liking and despising DFW, I cooked up all sorts of things to say about him.  How Gen X he is, with his Eddie Vedder hair, what a holier-than-thou-smarter-than-you-and-there’s-nothing-you-can-ever-even-do-about-it type guy he is, how what he really needs is a good editor to pare down his shit and get rid of some of those footnotes, but how if I were a single woman, would I fuck him?  Well, yeah, O.K., probably.  But then when I was about halfway through the book, I found out he killed himself last year.  And I was like, well, fuck, I can’t say those things now.

But then I thought, jeez, he killed himself?  I mean, I knew that he was all Gen X and shit, but still.  Not to say that he wasn’t legitimately depressed or anything, but seriously, who kills themselves any more?  And really, does that mean that I shouldn’t be critical of his work just because he took his own life?  If that’s the case, I may never get around to posting anything on Plath’s The Bell Jar.  

So on I will continue.  Besides, I think that he would have wanted it this way.

And the first thing I want to point out, is that he is wrong, when he states in the title essay that the lobster is “biologically so much older than mammalia they might as well be from another planet.”  Lobsters have had just as much time to evolve as any other creature around today.  Were DFW not dead, I’d recommend The Ancestor’s Tale  by Richard Dawkins.  Though after reading that particular essay, I did have quite a hankering for some lobster, myself.

There are a couple other essays in particular that I want to point out the good, bad, and boring.  I would have written w/r/t the good, bad, and boring there, as DFW is so fond of doing throughout this book, but I don’t want to come off as more of an overeducated douche than I already am.  

The first essay in Consider the Lobster starts out great.  I was sitting in an airport bar with some friends (all males) when I opened it up and read aloud:

The American Academy of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves.  With kitchen tools, usually.  In answer to the obvious question, surviving patients most often report that their sexual urges had become a source of intolerable conflict and anxiety.  The desire for perfect release and the real-world possibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.

The essay goes on to detail DFW’s attendance of the 1998 Adult Movie Awards, for which judges must watch hundreds of hours of porn from all genres.  DFW hypothesizes that becoming such a judge is far more preferable, and most likely a better cure for men with such conflicts as above-stated, than chopping off one’s dick.  The whole essay uses footnotes and intellectual language to get at the really nasty business that is the porno industry.  Brilliant, I thought.

Then I realized that DFW wasn’t doing anything novel, because that’s just how he writes.  Lots of big words.  Lots of footnotes.  Lots of being smarter than the rest of us.  And I kind of consider myself to be pretty smart.

Which sort of brings me to my next point.  DFW reviews Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern American Usage, a dictionary.  I’m not being sarcastic when I say reviewing dictionaries is really interesting, and I’d never heard of a book review of one.  DFW outlines the battles between the prescriptionist and descriptionist camps when it comes to the English language (I myself fall somewhere in between).  Now, I love language.  I love grammar.  I love linguistics.  I love usage.  But OMG, I got bored and wished he’d just STFU.  

Now, I realize that I am running a little long here myself.  Brevity has never been my forté, either.  Though I do think I might start using footnotes more because it is a really good way to go on tangents without getting off target.  That last sentence would have made a good footnote, itself.  O.K., but my point…

My favorite essay illuminated for me the reason that one very intelligent friend noted on FaceBook that he’d recently read and quite enjoyed Consider the Lobster.  My friend happens to be getting a PhD in Central Asian Studies (I know, right?  We wonder the same thing), and is a big Russian lit fan.  So for him Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky, towards the end of the book, was the selling point, I think.  I myself, for all of my reading, am not all that up on my Dostoevsky.  But irksome as I thought this book was, I wanted to go plunge in to some Dostoevsky.  

And that really says something about DFW.  He came come off as a condescending jackass, but in the end, you might be convinced to not cut your dick off and to go read The Idiot.  What more could you ask?
Buy Consider the Lobster and Other Essays on Amazon

If you like this author/book, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher
The Search for the Perfect Language by Umberto Eco
Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories Chuck Palahniuk
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Garner’s Modern American Usage by Bryan Garner
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
How Fiction Works by James Wood
The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry by Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osborne, and Peter Pavia
The Stories of English by David Crystal 
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester 
The First Word  by Christine Kenneally  
The Trial by Franz Kafka 
Words to the Wise by Michael J Sheehan 

Other Works by David Foster Wallace:

Girl With Curious Hair
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity 
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope 
The Broom of the System
Infinite Jest
Oblivion: Stories
This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

With Mark Costello:

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present