for the lobsters

This entry, though it’s gonna be about writer David Foster Wallace (and me, since I’m intrusive), is not an obit. Every major news outlet in America supplied one of those in the days following his death, so to attempt another would be redundant. I’m writing about Wallace because he’s blown my mind twice in the last month.

I’ve never read Infinite Jest, Wallace’s tree-killing doorstop, though I intend to do so soon. On two recent occasions—once with Marlo on a bench at Black and White tavern, the other with Travis over a burger at Applebee's (har har)—I’ve been alerted to his genius by literary people I know and trust. Bolstered by their endorsements, I pounded a fist in my brain on a table in my brain and shouted, “that settles it! I’m gonna read David Foster Wallace, that guy who wrote that freakin’ humongous book! Infinite Jest, you scare the balls offa me, but I’ll soon be cracking your spine.” Maybe he’s worth checking out after all, I thought. Maybe the hype is actually well-deserved, unlike, say, the curious praise for another Dave, Dave Eggers, and his Incredible Staggering Pregnant Ego novel of Genius, which—if I may borrow a few words from comic Lisa Lampanelli—sucks out loud. Eggers, you owe me $16.21 and an explanation.

My first exposure to Wallace’s writing came in a very unlikely way. While working at Fordham University back in September (this was a week after he commited suicide at 46), I sat around one afternoon on a plastic chair in a windowless room, bored as shit. My task that day had been to deliver mail to all the law professors, but when that wrapped at two pee em I had very little else to do so I flipped through a newspaper that I rarely understand and almost never read: The Wall Street Journal. That day's Journal ran Wallace’s commencement speech to the 2005 Kenyon College graduates on the back page. Here’s a passage:

“…our present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The real important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race”—the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing…”

Before the day was up I’d read the speech four or five times, awed by Wallace’s intellect, message and choice of subject matter. Rather than offer up a generic, inspirational speech—“many of you will go on to do great things, the torch has been passed,” etc.—Wallace spoke frankly and matter-of-factly about the world, warning of pitfalls ahead and encouraging the graduates to subvert those “default-settings” we’ve been programmed with from birth.

There will be days, he said, when you’ll find yourself in a poorly designed supermarket, vexed and impatient. The overweight woman blocking the narrow aisle with her cart (and her body) slows your progress. You snatch at seemingly random items—some you need, some you surely don’t—and transfer them to a handcart, finally returning to the front of the store after fifteen minutes spent slaloming around oblivious housewives, crying children, teens broadcasting inanities into a cell phone...but wait! Your troubles have only just begun, because now you’re queued behind half a dozen sad-faced simpletons hoarding their pathetic, non-nourishing items (which they sadly load onto the sad conveyor) as the sloth behind the register receives on-the-job training. The music bleating out from overhead—a soulless, plasticine, FM-friendly waltz of death—sucks, all the lighting is yellowed and artificial and unflattering to the skin, and you want nothing more badly than to be home, away from it all. To top it off, the check-out line is six or eight carts deep and the woman in front of you has about twenty coupons in her white-knuckled fist.

Here, Wallace argues, choice enters the equation. You can CHOOSE how to approach this situation…it’s all a matter of perspective. Our first instinct, as anybody knows, is to damn the vile scenario and curse beneath our breath. We’ve cursed it before, and we'll curse it again. Sun rises, sun sets. However, Wallace points out, it’s actually

“…within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it…”

A valid point. We spend most of our lives operating on autopilot. To approach a potentially awful situation with wide-eyed wonder (after all, we’re aLIVE!) is not easy, but should we defy all odds and pivot that scene for the better, we've succeeded in conquering the moment. On those rare, rare instances where I’ve been in a “consumer-hell” situation and marvelled at the wonderful madness of it all, I’ve known what it is to be a fully autonomous human being, ecstatic and fully sated.

I recommend you all check out the Kenyon speech, which can probably be found online somewhere.

Then I read Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster,” his 2004 essay for Gourmet magazine, which is all sortsa brilliant. He was assigned to cover the Maine Lobster Festival, an event held every July in the state’s midcoast region. As you might expect from a writer of his intellect and ingenuity, Wallace submitted a highly unconventional article, one that almost didn’t go to press.

Now, I’ve never read Gourmet, but I’m assuming it’s a relatively straightforward cooking mag for food aficianados. In all likelihood, its readers are not after dense, challenging literature...what they're after are fresh recipes (looking back at these last two sentences, I realize Wallace would have tsk tsked my journalistic passivity). Wallace’s article on lobster was a dense, challenging dissertation of the highest order. Anything you’ve EVER wanted to know about lobsters was included within—anatomy, mating habits, history in the culinary arts, brain capacity, pain threshold, preparation of, etc. Brilliant approach, for two reasons:

1) Wallace researched his ass off for this article. You have to admire the guy for his commitment to furious study.

2) His decision to cut straight to the lowest common denominator (lobster, obviously) is what separates him from many of his contemporaries. Let's face it: most writers assigned to such a festival would likely provide a detailed piece concerning the menu, venue, crowds, ambience. Not Wallace. When his brain runs off, he encourages (rather than apprehends) his spastic imagination, which accounts for nearly 80 percent of this article being about a crustacean, not a festival.

To top it all off, Wallace fades out with an open-ended ethical question involving lobsters and their ability to feel pain. Many cooks prepare lobster by dropping the still-living creature into a pot of scalding water, a process that may or may not torture the soon-to-be entrée. Wallace points out that we really don’t know enough about the inner wirings of the lobster to determine their capacity for discomfort, or whether they even "feel" discomfort in the traditional sense of the word. Though he doesn't chastise those who feast (Wallace himself is not a vegetarian), I applaud his decision to explore the issue. Once more, he's encouraging us to adopt an alternate perspective, if only for a brief while.

See ya, David. I’m gonna read your big-ass book soon.
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