Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays (book)

-
Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays (Written by David Foster Wallace)/2005

I think it is time to admit to myself that I just do not enjoy David Foster Wallace’s (DFW) novels that much. I tried to read Infinite Jest twice and both times picked up another book about a third of a way through. My kindle tells me I have read 68% of Pale King, but I feel I have had enough of that too.

DFW’s novels do not follow the usual temporal course: they bounce between characters and times in history, creating a feeling of a time and place rather than following a character through the temporal flow of past moving into future. They are novels that create a feeling and make a moral statement through a buildup of people and events: we, as readers, become immersed in the atmosphere rather than the story.

I think at a certain point in these novels I had absorbed the message DFW was trying to make and didn’t need any more evidence. As I was pretty sure there would be no grand conclusion or surprise ending I did not feel the need to read any more. Maybe that is OK: maybe his novels should be approached more like a set of short stories and essays grouped together around a central theme, which the reader can pick up and put down when the desire strikes.

In contrast to his novels, I really enjoyed his collection of essays. I find he is at his best in them: funny, detailed without being tedious, and confined to the necessary space to make his point.

Consider the Lobster is a good place to start for someone interested in DWF. We find in this collection of essays a person with a deep curiosity about many things and an uncanny ability to move from the seemingly unimportant to the deeply philosophical.

The collection opens with DFW exploring the Adult Movie Awards. I laughed my way through this piece as the quirky, curious DWF rubs shoulders with famous porn stars and becomes acquainted with the lingo. In one scene he goes to a party filled with porn stars; he notes his irrational expectation to find them suddenly stripping off into a massive orgy, when in actuality they sit after a tiring day "at the office" watching re-runs of Seinfeld. In the usual DFW turn of mind, he uses all this to reflect on the role of entertainment in American society, and compares the AMAs with the Academy awards in an insightful manner.

In ‘Up Simba’ we find DFW on the campaign trial with John McCain. This essay is interesting due to his fascinating observations of all the different types of people that are involved in the campaign. Moreover, it focuses on modern cynicism towards politics, and DFW’s attempts to interpret the enigmatic McCain: an actual prisoner of war that wants to run an anti-political campaign that is equally political in its own way (or is it?). DFW throughout this essay is genuinely struggling to ascertain whether a modern political candidate can be authentic, and to what extent the contemporary cynicism towards politics is justified or a manifestation of a misguided mind set.

The main essay in this collection is the title piece ‘Consider the Lobster’. Here DWF travels to the Maine Lobster festival. Like all of his essays, he entertains the reader with his observations of people and the effects the things around him have on his sensitive disposition. Ultimately, we find a man struggling with different arguments raised in regard to animal rights and the spectrum where a being becomes deserving of these rights. How can we watch lobsters being tipped into huge hot pots of water to be cooked alive when in dropping them into the water they are desperately trying to escape? Surely, the desperation to escape indicates some awareness of the extreme pain that awaits them. DFW does not pontificate, but is clearly someone struggling with the notion of what a good person should do in a world without clear moral truths.

Popular posts from this blog

The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (book)

-
Image
History rhymes: it moves in cycles of growth, destruction and then further growth; we see intense conflict followed by loving peace, leading to complacency and the withering of what brought the beauty and success to begin with, only to give birth to something greater. Another common historical rhyme is that each age has a wealthy establishment which attempts to suppress information or people that threatens its control: Emperors, Tsars and tycoons. Any serious student of world history, mythology and ideas knows these things to be true.                                                                                                               The Nag Hammadi Scriptures have captured the imagination of seekers around the world because their story and content exemplify the points raised above. In brief, they represent a type of Christianity that flourished between approximately 70 AD to 400 AD but ceased to exist thereafter. They are called gnostic which generally means a direct knowledg
Read more

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (book)

-
Image
Humanity tends to scapegoat individuals or groups to water the thirst for collective violence or to resolve tensions and angst. The scapegoating mechanism is at the heart of the Western canon: both Socrates and Jesus were put to death to appease the inflamed crowd. According to French American thinker Ren é  Girard, these are extreme, archetypal versions of a phenomena that plays out in lesser forms throughout human life. Girard sits at the crossroads of various traditions but is uniquely brilliant when discussing the role collective violence has in human communities. At the heart of Girard’s work is the notion of mimetic decision-making. By this he means that humans by nature imitate what they see, hear, and read, including in what they desire. The imitators inevitably begin to go after the same things in a world of scarce resources, which increases tensions in the community. Eventually, the tension becomes too great, and the individual or group is selected for scapegoating, whereby t
Read more

The Secret of Light (book)

-
Image
One of the most beautifully written and accessible mystical texts of our time is The Secret of Light by Walter Russell. It captures the truths of esoteric Christianity (such as that found in the sermons of Meister Eckhart), and the Hindu Upanishads, without getting bogged down in unapproachable terminology or culturally-specific mythology.                                                                                                                                                                                                    The essence of Russell’s text is that each human is an eternal consciousness that both experiences and is the manifestation of a single, eternal God-Mind. A human being is a conscious mind that experiences separate physical forms via waves and pulses of light which create the electrical charges governing her body and thoughts. As Russell puts it, “Electricity expresses the desire in the God-Mind for creative expression by seemingly dividing the One still ligh
Read more