David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Bookworm
KCRW
4.5 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2006
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David Foster Wallace insists on a conversation where what can be said must be said honestly (along with a sidebar defining honesty), sincerely (ditto defining sincerity), and with full consideration of how media affect honesty and sincerity (ditto media). Given these requirements, we discuss Wallace's new collection of essays with an eye to how he attempts the nearly impossible task of telling the truth.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. |
| 0:06.9 | You are a human animal. |
| 0:11.1 | You are a very special breed. |
| 0:14.9 | Or you are the only animal. |
| 0:18.2 | Who can think, who can reason, who can read. |
| 0:21.6 | From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt and this is Bookworm. |
| 0:26.6 | Today I'm really happy to have as my guest, David Foster Wallace, and his book, Consider the Lobster and other essays, which is published by Little Brown. |
| 0:36.6 | We haven't seen each other face to face in a couple of years, and it's been a while since he's been on the show, but he's been on the show from the very beginning. |
| 0:46.4 | I'm particularly happy because this book reprints some of the essays that had been excluded from earlier books like an essay on Dostoevsky |
| 0:55.5 | and a lecture on Kafka, but also has a fabulous and scabrous essay on the pornography business |
| 1:04.9 | and one of its conventions called Big Red Sun. |
| 1:08.8 | It's got the famous review of John Updike. It's got a long debate, a report on the |
| 1:17.1 | debate about American usage in grammar and vocabulary, authority in American usage, an essay on |
| 1:25.4 | 9-11, The View for Mrs. Thompson's, an essay on sports biography, |
| 1:31.1 | How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart. |
| 1:34.3 | David followed the McCain campaign, but the Rolling Stone only printed a sliver of his |
| 1:41.4 | essay. |
| 1:41.9 | Here it is in fall called Up Simba, a gourmet magazine essay |
| 1:46.8 | Consider the Lobster, and a very, I think, brilliant and moving essay called host on political |
| 1:54.9 | talk radio. Now, as I was reading, it seemed to me that these essays really have a deep logic to them. |
| 2:12.5 | That I'm going to start with that essay host, that they begin by correcting the premises of previous |
| 2:23.9 | commentators. |
... |
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