Quotes from book
Consider the Lobster

Name: Consider the Lobster
Author: David Foster Wallace

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays is a collection of essays by novelist David Foster Wallace. It is also the title of one of the essays, which was published in Gourmet magazine in 2004. The title alludes to Consider the Oyster by M. F. K. Fisher.

“The American Academy of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves. With kitchen tools, usually sometimes wire cutters. In answer to the obvious question, surviving patients most often report that their sexual urges had become a source of intolerable conflict and anxiety. The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.”

David Foster Wallace book Consider the Lobster

Big Red Son
Consider the Lobster (2007)

“It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you’ve seen perform in hard-core porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise erectile size, angle, and vasculature are known to you. That strange I-think-we’ve-met-before sensation one feels upon seeing any celebrity in the flesh is here both intensified and twisted. It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline HEART BREAKER on her right buttock and a tiny hairless mole just left of her anus.”

David Foster Wallace book Consider the Lobster

Big Red Son, p. 16
Consider the Lobster (2007)

“A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange - of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow's abstract cost.”

David Foster Wallace book Consider the Lobster

Big Red Son, on Las Vegas, NV
Consider the Lobster (2007)

“So much about today’s adult industry seems like an undeft parody of Hollywood and the nation writ large. The top performers are comic-book caricatures of sexual allure. The prosthetic breasts and lifted buttocks and (no kidding) artificial cheekbones are nothing more than accentuations of a mentality that yields huge liposuction and collagen industries. The gynecologically explicit sexuality of Jenna, Jasmin, et al. seems more than anything like a Mad magazine spoof of the “smoldering” sexuality of Sharon Stone and Madonna and so many other mainstream iconettes. Not to mention the fact that the adult industry takes many of the psychological deformities that Hollywood is famous for—the vanity, the vulgarity, the rank commercialism—and not only makes them overt and grotesque but seems then to revel in that grotesquerie.”

David Foster Wallace book Consider the Lobster

"Big Red Son", p.29-30
Consider the Lobster (2007)

“Not unlike urban gangs, police, carnival workers and certain other culturally marginalized guilds, the US porn industry is occluded and insular in a way that makes it seem like high school.”

David Foster Wallace book Consider the Lobster

Big Red Son
Consider the Lobster (2007)

“In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of self.”

David Foster Wallace book Consider the Lobster

Big Red Son, p. 9
Consider the Lobster (2007)
Context: Nor let us forget Vegas's synecdoche and beating heart. It's kitty-corner from Bally's: Caesar's Palace. The granddaddy. As big as 20 walmarts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, carpeting you can pass out on without contusion, 130,000 square feet of casion alone. Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of self.