DFW reads Big Red Son (audiobook recording)
TL;DR
Audio of DFW reading "Big Red Son" — his pseudonymous 1998 report on the AVN Awards / Adult Video News Expo in Las Vegas — apparently from the Consider the Lobster audiobook (~2.5 hours; full essay, framing music, no Q&A). The canonical text is in Consider the Lobster; use that, not this ASR transcript, for quotation.
What's read / asides
- Brief spoken preface only: the essay, he explains, was first published pseudonymously for weird reasons that equally weirdly can't be changed now — hence the "we" and "your correspondent" apparatus. (It ran in Premiere as by "Willem R. deGroot and Matt Rundlet.")
- Otherwise a straight reading: the auto-castration dedication, the Oscars-vs-AVN-Awards frame ("the whole cynical postmodern deal—but we all still seem to watch. To care." … "there seems to be this enormous unspoken conspiracy where we all pretend that there's still joy"), Dick Filth, the awards-night gauntlet.
Why it matters here
Porn as the limit case of the entertainment economy IJ anatomizes: an industry that delivers pure engineered pleasure, tracked by an awards show that mimics (and unmasks) mainstream celebrity culture's joyless self-congratulation. The opening's tension between "perfect release" and "the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release" is the Entertainment's logic in non-fiction.
Cross-references
- Consider the Lobster: canonical text.
- E Unibus Pluram: watching-while-despising; the unspoken conspiracy of pretended joy is EUP's irony loop in industry form.
- ZDF 2003 interview: "entertainment is so goddamn entertaining" / base-interests-make-us-a-mass.
- IJ connections: the Entertainment as terminal release; shame's removal as market force (cf. the reality-TV "shame hobble" remark in the WPR 2004 interview).