Lobster Pomodor

So YPTR has purchased the August 2004 issue of Gourmet and skimmed the DFW contribution, "Consider the Lobster." Here's the preliminary assessment:

--DFW attends the Maine Lobster Festival with "one girlfriend and both his own parents--one of which parents was actually born and raised in Maine...."

--Essay is similar to "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" from Harper's/Supposedly Fun Thing--i.e., conversational (at times, aw-shucks) tone, hyper-detailed, generally humorous although things turn a little macabre (about which more below).

--Includes Fun Facts: "Up until sometime in the 1800s...lobster was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats."

--"CtL" has footnotes! Further, it includes this familiar, weary & mock-fatalistic DFW-gambit: "But, since this note will almost surely not survive magazine-editing anyway, here goes..." (as if there was a chance in hell his footnote would be edited out).

--Said footnote, which of course survived, includes DFW's views on intranational tourism: "...radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way--hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all...[t]o be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience...[a]s a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."

--Ah, now we're getting somewhere, Dave. Excellent. But the real lovely turn comes just a few paragraphs down, when Mr. Wallace admits that the "animal-cruelty-and-eating issue" is complex and makes him "uncomfortable." (Natch!) Thereafter, the essay is a tour-de-force of DFW-ian worry & dissection, in which he discusses PETA, chicken debeaking, brain chemistry, Mary Tyler Moore, zoological minutiae relating to the lobster, Peter Singer & Animal Liberation, meat euphemisms for edible mammals ("beef," "pork"), Decartes, pain responses, value theory, epistemology, metaphysics, Aztec sacrifices, and his desire not to sound "shrill" & personal confusion re: this "issue" as a whole.

--It's hard to measure exactly, but it should be noted that the examination of the "animal-cruelty-and-eating issue" takes up at least 1/2 of the article. Say what you will, but that seems mildly subversive and makes YPTR oddly happy.

So.

Rake sez: Awesome. On first blush, I'd call this damned near essential if you enjoy David Foster Wallace (and/or his essays) in any way. It's US$ 3.99 and on newsstands now.

Comments

[CAAF]

Excellent! I'll hit the newstands this evening ... I do wish he'd cut the "this will prob. be edited out" schtick, though.

[kate]

What's odd about DFW is he seems to hit this same set of themes over and over, essay after identical essay, as if afraid he'll die without having convinced the world. But by writing in this same damned manner over and over, he's guaranteeing that the only people who'll continue to read him are the one's who've already got it.

If that makes sense.