DFW on Consider the Lobster — Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt, KCRW (March 2, 2006)

TL;DR

A 28-minute radio conversation about Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, recorded for the book's early-2006 tour — Wallace's fifth and last Bookworm appearance, ten years almost to the month after the famous 1996 Infinite Jest episode with the same host. The ground is entirely the essay collection: the talk-radio piece, Tracy Austin, the lobster festival, the essays' awareness of the magazines they ran in, and a long closing exchange about morality, sentimentality, and what public art can still get away with. Infinite Jest is never named on tape — no retrospective statements about the book at all, a decade on — so the yield is oeuvre-level rather than plot-level: Wallace's fullest spoken statement of his nonfiction service-industry persona, firsthand venue-rhetoric testimony, and the sentimentality-versus-cynicism argument in its mature 2006 form, restating the program the archive holds from 1993 and 1996. One caution for anyone returning to the recording: the transcript breaks down across the mid-show break, so a short stretch between the break announcement (shortly after [12:01]) and the resumption at [12:52] is not represented here.

Key claims

• Silverblatt's opening frame [00:00–02:28]: he introduces the collection as reprinting essays excluded from earlier books (the Dostoevsky essay, the Kafka lecture) alongside the porn-convention piece Big Red Son (garbled on the transcript as Big Red Sun), the Updike review, Authority and American Usage, the 9/11 essay The View from Mrs. Thompson's, How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, the full Up Simba (of which Rolling Stone printed only a sliver), Consider the Lobster, and Host. His organizing read: these essays open by overturning the assumptions earlier commentators had brought to the subject — Host argues that liberal critiques of right-wing talk radio miss because they treat it as journalism when the stations treat it as entertainment, built on anger and stimulation rather than facts [01:10–02:28].
• Wallace on the two-camp trap [03:37–04:54]: the long pieces share a concern with ideology. His research reading on talk radio split neatly into apologists and opponents — organs like The Nation, Dissent (the transcription renders it Descent), and Harper's run blistering attacks focused on what is pernicious or factually loose, while conservative organs answer that radio was ideologically guided for decades without anyone saying so, and that voices on the right are merely correcting a liberal bias. He compares the two sides to an old married couple in which everybody has a point but no meaningful conversation is happening. His stated project: rhetorically, to produce at least the appearance of being more fair and broad-minded toward right-wing talk radio than it is toward its own opponents [04:54].
• The Tracy Austin exchange [05:57–11:17]: Silverblatt paraphrases the essay's arc — the as-told-to autobiography contains nothing of what athletic genius feels like from inside, and the essay concludes that such genius may preclude articulating it, the body responding without the mind's intervention [05:57–07:26]. Wallace does not restate that conclusion on air; he deflects the compliment (Silverblatt describes these things better than he would) and explains the piece's construction instead: from a literary standpoint the book is a train wreck — banal, insipid, in places incoherent — and that point plus examples fits in two paragraphs, so the essay had to become about something else: why he expected the book to be better, given his guilty addiction to sports memoirs and their reliably bitter disappointment for somebody who played sports as a kid [09:36–11:17].
• The service-industry self-description [08:41]: he disclaims knowing much about nonfiction or journalism as fields, and says the way he understands his own essays is as a kind of service industry: they let a reader watch a moderately bright, otherwise average person attend to something far more closely, and dwell on it far longer, than ordinary daily life leaves room for.
• The lobster festival was boring [11:17]: there was little to write about except the spectacle of an entire event devoted to the pleasures of boiling lobsters alive and eating them — with PETA activists on the margins holding out a wholly different frame for making sense of the same event; that collision became the piece.
• Venue-awareness [12:52–15:02]: Silverblatt points to the lobster essay's direct address to the Gourmet reader — who could be expected to care more about the animal's pain, if the reader wants to be informed? [12:52–14:02]. Wallace builds on it: Gourmet's subtitle — the magazine of good living — turns out to be interpretable in several directions, and three or four pieces in the book are nearly inexplicable unless the piece frequently acknowledges the organ it is appearing in (Rolling Stone and the McCain piece is his other example). The magazines that commissioned and chopped the pieces were, he says, somehow allergic to an article discussing its own venue and the demographic and rhetorical considerations that follow; the book is the only place he has space and permission for that — at which point, strangely, the piece is no longer in the organ it discusses [14:02–15:02].
• The avatar-of-the-post-moral-age exchange [15:02–18:44]: Silverblatt frames the essays as unfolding into subjects larger than their occasions — morality in a largely post-moral age — and casts Wallace, whom one might have expected to be a spokesman for that age, as instead parsing moral distinctions on the page [15:02–16:15]. Wallace's first response is to dispute being a young writer at all, and to ask what moral and post-moral even mean [16:15]. Silverblatt answers with a reader's confession: until this book he did not know where Wallace stood politically, and the 9/11 essay's visit to a churchgoing neighbor surprised him — he had not pictured the author of such apocalyptically complex fiction as someone who attends church and watches a neighbor's TV [16:15–17:35]. (That inference is Silverblatt's, drawn from the printed essay; Wallace neither confirms nor discusses it on tape.) Wallace then resists both labels: moral connotes self-righteousness and judgment to him, while post-moral sounds like amoral; and he observes that since around modernism, literary art has become an almost exclusively aesthetic enterprise [17:35–18:44].
• The service idea restated [18:44–19:39]: thinking about it while driving the terrifying local freeways, he frames the nonfiction as a service in a second sense: the ordinary person goes to the Maine Lobster Festival to rest and escape, with kids tugging at their pant cuffs, and has no time to sit and puzzle over what the experience is like, what assumptions they bring, what conclusions follow. For the handful of Americans inclined toward that kind of exercise, 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, and doing his utmost to work out where the truth lay [19:39].
• The Dostoevsky exchange and the editor [19:39–22:04]: Silverblatt says the Dostoevsky essay — older than the rest — ends by asking how a novelist today might aspire to the ethical, moral, and spiritual authority Dostoevsky attained, and whether that is even possible; along the way it identifies Wallace as someone who finds fiction considered solely aesthetically insufficient, yet struggles to take on the large questions in Dostoevsky's blunt, extreme manner. Bringing the essays to the ethics of the community strikes Silverblatt as heroic and beautiful [19:39–20:46]. Wallace, asked whether he wants to argue with that, says the Dostoevsky piece is in the book in part because — true of his last several books too — he has a genuinely good editor, and the pieces are selected and ordered to establish connections that may be obvious to nobody but the two of them [22:04]. (The editor goes unnamed on tape; contextually this is Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown.) He also reaches for Stanley Cavell's idea of the conditions of an audience's willingness to be pleased [22:04].
• The two problems [23:06–25:27]: words like moral and ethical, he says, connote the era of Dostoevsky or the Romantics — the artist as a lone, heroic soul grappling inwardly and forging that struggle into art. Having been born in 1962 and grown up with no memory of life without television, he sees two related problems instead. One is the classic problem: deciding what it is to be a human being, how to accommodate being an individual and self-centered while belonging to a larger group and loving people — all the old Romantic stuff. The other is rhetorical and technical, and barely discussed in any era before the postmodern one: works of art are public documents, not just spontaneous effusions from an individual soul — communications designed to please, gratify, and edify other human beings — so the question is not only what is true for the writer but what will hit readers' nerve endings as true in 1995, 2000, or 2006 [24:24].
• The sentimentality close [25:27–26:39]: the setting in which our nervous systems now take in such communications strikes him as far knottier, harder, more jaded, and more hyped than in earlier times. His standing classroom example: today's writing students dread seeming sentimental much more than seeming twisted, obscene, or gross — the reverse of the old shames. What makes sentimentality risky is that it has become mainly the instrument of cynical marketing and mass-entertainment devices built to manhandle the feelings of large, inattentive audiences — so the most urgent themes, like mourning the loss of somebody deeply loved, have been so adulterated by treacly, cynical, commercial art that finding a way to talk about them that is not just more of the same has become very, very difficult [25:27–26:39].
• Biography and publication facts scattered through: Wallace had been on Bookworm from the show's very beginning, and host and guest had not met in person for a couple of years [00:00]; he gives his birth year as 1962 [23:06]; the Dostoevsky essay is older than the other pieces [19:39, 22:04]; Rolling Stone ran only a sliver of the McCain piece [01:10]; magazines chopped the pieces and resisted venue-discussion [14:02]; credits name associate producer Melinda Siegel, technical director Mario Diaz, production assistance Alan Howard [26:39].

Theories & evidence

CONNECTION: The sentimentality-versus-cynicism argument in its mature 2006 form — sentimentality colonized by cynical commercial art, making the most urgent human themes nearly untreatable, with public art judged by what hits nerve endings as true

• Crux: cynicism-naivete
• Early text: [scene] Wallace argues the reception environment for art has grown vastly more cynical and overhyped [25:27]; his writing students fear seeming sentimental far more than seeming twisted, obscene, or gross [25:27]; sentimentality now belongs mainly to cynical marketing and mass-entertainment devices that manhandle inattentive audiences' emotions, so genuine treatment of grief and loss has been adulterated almost out of reach [25:27–26:39]. The frame is his two-problems account: alongside the perennial what-is-it-to-be-human problem sits a rhetorical/technical one — art as public communication designed to please, gratify, and edify, answerable to what will land as true in a given year, not only to what is true for the writer [23:06–25:27].
• IJ echo: the announced-key passage on hip cynicism versus the fear of being really human (p. 694 per the archive's entry for this crux), plus the E Unibus Pluram sentimentality/anti-rebel program the archive pairs with it (e-unibus-pluram).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Post-IJ source, so the wire is continuity, not prefiguration — the same argument the archive holds from McCaffery 1993 and the 1996 Bookworm episode, restated a decade later with the classroom datum sharpened (sentimental now scarier to students than obscene). Filed once, here: the material equally brushes sincerity-definition and irony-vs-recovery, but a single passage triple-filed would inflate the popularity axis; those slugs are named so the theory record pass can weigh them. Attribution: the post-moral framing is Silverblatt's; the sentimentality argument is Wallace's own, and he resists both the moral and post-moral labels before making it [17:35–18:44].

THEORY: Wallace's nonfiction persona — the reasonably bright but reasonably average observer, a service industry for readers with no time to pay attention — is his own deliberate self-framing, articulated twice in one interview

• Crux: nonfiction-persona
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] The direct statement: he thinks of the essays as a bit of a service industry: a chance to watch a fairly bright but otherwise ordinary person attend to things much more closely, and mull them over much longer, than most of us ever get the chance to in everyday life [08:41]
  • [author] The restatement: the ordinary festival-goer is escaping a stressful life and has no time to puzzle over the experience; the essays supply somebody who went to the wall, dropped all the attention filters, and interrogated even his own responses and ideological templates in pursuit of the truth [18:44–19:39]
  • [author] The rhetorical-construction admission: he describes the talk-radio piece's project as producing, rhetorically, the appearance of being more fair and broad-minded toward right-wing radio than it is toward its opponents — fairness as a designed rhetorical effect, in his own framing [04:54]
  • [author] The expertise-abrogation performed live: he prefaces the service-industry account by disclaiming knowledge of nonfiction and journalism as fields [08:41], and deflects Silverblatt's muscularity compliment by saying the host describes these things better than he could [07:26–08:41]
• Notes: The scholarly program behind this slug reads the average-guy abrogation as disingenuous; this source is the abrogation performed in real time, recorded without support-judgment. In-source tension worth preserving: minutes after disclaiming expertise he delivers a fluent demographic-and-rhetoric analysis of magazine venues [14:02–15:02] and cites Stanley Cavell [22:04] — the modesty and the command sit side by side on tape. First [author]-grade sighting for a crux previously carried by secondary scholarship.

CONNECTION: Talk radio analyzed as entertainment rather than journalism — anger and stimulation as entertainment products, factual critique beside the point — the E Unibus Pluram move applied to 2005 political media

• Crux: eup-connection
• Early text: [scene] Silverblatt's summary of Host: liberal critics err by treating the stations as political commentary and journalism when the stations treat themselves as entertainment, so political and factual arguments are beside their real concern, which is turning anger and stimulation into entertainment [01:10–02:28]. Wallace's own gloss: the pieces are about ideology; the two camps argue like an old married couple, each with a point, no conversation occurring; his contribution was structural fairness where the medium itself offers none [03:37–04:54].
• IJ echo: E Unibus Pluram's argument that entertainment logic restructures American discourse and self-presentation (e-unibus-pluram); IJ's Entertainment as that logic's terminal case.
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Post-IJ continuity: the entertainment-first analysis EUP ran on television in 1993 applied to political talk radio in 2005–06. Attribution split recorded: the entertainment-not-journalism thesis is voiced by Silverblatt summarizing the printed essay; Wallace's on-tape additions are the two-camp trap and the fairness project. Deliberately not filed at media-prescience, which is scoped to reception-side claims that IJ's tech satire came true — nothing here is about IJ's predictions.

CONNECTION: Attention as the essays' method and moral unit — dropping every filter, examining one's own templates, and the PETA lens as a rival template for the same experience — a year after the everybody-worships speech

• Crux: worship-attention
• 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
• Notes: Continuity, not prefiguration. The template vocabulary — choosing which lens to construe an ordinary experience through — is the Kenyon speech's machinery applied to magazine work; recorded here because the phrasing is Wallace's own and contemporaneous. The attention material overlaps the persona block's evidence at [19:39]; the two blocks claim different things (self-framing there, attention-as-method here) and the shared locator is flagged so the theory record pass counts the passage once per claim, not twice per slug.

No other blocks. The interview takes no position on any IJ plot crux: Infinite Jest is never named on tape, and there is no retrospective material on its composition, cuts, reception, or what he would change — honest thinness recorded as such for a source one might have hoped would carry a decade-later register on the book. The nearest brush is Silverblatt's aside about the apocalyptic complexity of the fiction [17:35], which names no title.

Themes

Entertainment and cynicism (talk radio as anger-entertainment; the overhyped reception environment); sincerity and sentimentality (the students' inverted shame; grief adulterated by commercial art); attention as ethics and method (the filters-down service account; the PETA template); communication versus expression (art as public communication that must land as true, not private effusion — the 1996 conversation-between-humans program in rhetorical dress); morality and its vocabulary (the resisted moral/post-moral labels; Dostoevskian authority as an open question).

Cross-references

• silverblatt-bookworm-1996 — same host, ten years earlier, IJ tour: the quotable anchor for this pair. The 1996 worry about being co-opted by commercial like-me seduction becomes 2006's sentimentality-colonized-by-marketing argument; the loneliness/conversation account of art's point becomes the two-problems rhetorical frame. Read together they bracket the decade.
• mccaffery-1993-interview — the 1993 program (fiction against loneliness; the coming rebels who risk sentimentality) restated in its late form; the students-fear-the-sentimental datum is this interview's sharpest new phrasing of it.
• city-arts-lectures-2004-kipen — the adjacent late-period spoken source: its expressive-versus-communicative teaching distinction is the same two-problems split made pedagogical; its nonfiction-origins testimony (Harper's, the early-90s poverty) backstops the service-industry account here.
• e-unibus-pluram — the entertainment-logic analysis this interview applies to talk radio, and the sentimentality/ anti-rebel program behind the closing argument.
• this-is-water — the attention/template machinery, one year before this taping.
• infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij — the editor testimony at [22:04] (selection and ordering of the last four or five books to establish connections) from the editor's side.
• video-reading-consider-the-lobster, video-reading-big-red-son, video-reading-up-simba, video-reading-mrs-thompsons — DFW reading the same essays aloud; the print layer for anything quotable.