Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

by David Foster Wallace

And this dislike pretty much torpedoes Toward the End of Time, a novel whose tragic climax is a prostate operation that leaves Turnbull impotent and extremely bummed.

It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.”

Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called compression—for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader.

Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.

It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get—the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have.

To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward—we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.

might appear to be pro-McCain. It’s not, though neither is it anti-; it’s just meant to be the truth as one person saw it.

(because I happen to have dogs with professionally diagnosed emotional problems who require special care, and it always takes me several days to recruit, interview, select, instruct, and field-test a dogsitter)

In fact the article’s editor pointed out that running the whole thing would take up most of Rolling Stone’s text-space and might even cut into the percentage of the magazine reserved for advertisements, which obviously would not do. * And so at least half the article got cut out, plus some of the more complicated stuff got way compressed and simplified, which was especially disappointing because, as previously mentioned, the most complicated stuff also tended to be the most interesting.

he is capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest.

This doeent prrve that, there are extrinsic explanations

Or maybe both the truth and bullshit—the man does want your vote, after all.

Krispy Kremes are sort of the Deep South equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts, ubiquitous and cheap and great in a sort of what-am-I-doing-eating-dessert-for-breakfast way, and are a cornerstone of what Jim C. calls the Campaign Diet.

But we don’t care, evidently, and so neither do the networks.

This is probably because it’s next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he’s not interested in something.

Now there’s something to lose, or to win. Now it gets complicated, the campaign and the chances and the strategy; and complication is dangerous, because the truth is rarely complicated. Complication usually has more to do with mixed motives, gray areas, compromise.