Attention as the essays' method and moral unit — dropping every filter, examining one's own templates, and the PETA…
echoes
From: DFW on Consider the Lobster — Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt, KCRW (March 2, 2006)
- Early text:
[scene] Wallace's account of what the essays provide:
somebody who pushed himself to the limit, stripping away every
filter, straining to register everything at once — his own reactions
and ideological presets included — to work out where the truth lay
[19:39]; and his account of the lobster piece's real subject: the
festival was boring, and the piece became the collision between the
event's own template for the experience of eating lobster and the very
different template the PETA people offered for looking at the same
thing [11:17]
- IJ echo: the everybody-worships / default-attention argument of the
2005 Kenyon address (this-is-water), which the archive treats as the attention-side key to IJ's addiction-and-worship
material; this interview was taped within a year of that speech.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation