DFW reads Consider the Lobster (audiobook recording)

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TL;DR

The Consider the Lobster audiobook recording of the title essay (Gourmet magazine, on the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival), complete through the famous closing interrogation of the gourmet reader. No Q&A. Canonical text is in Consider the Lobster.

What's read / asides

Notable spoken preface on audio footnotes: an audiobook, he observes, has no bottom of the page for the footnotes to go to; the solution is a second, processed "smaller" voice for footnote text — and listeners who hate the whole idea are asked, jokingly, not to blame him for it. A neat real-world solution to the double-consciousness-on-the-page problem he describes in the WPR 1997 interview.
Then a straight reading: festival logistics, the old local line about Camden being by the sea and Rockland by the smell, the World's Largest Lobster Cooker, nociception and preference arguments, and the ending's direct challenge — does the refusal to consider all this stem from genuine thought, or merely from not wanting to consider it? — closing on "There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other."

Why it matters here

The mature DFW ethical move — refusing both PETA shrillness and gourmet complacency, ending in honest confusion — applied to pleasure that requires suffering. Methodologically continuous with IJ's refusal to resolve its own binds.

Cross-references

Consider the Lobster: canonical text.
This Is Water: attention to the discomfort one would rather skip; same ethical engine.
WPR 1997: footnote poetics; the audio-footnote scheme literalizes it.
IJ connections: pleasure with a hidden cost (the Entertainment); engineered mass fun venues (festival ↔ fair ↔ cruise trilogy).