"Consider the Lobster"

[fiefoe]

It turns out that I've already read a good portion of this essay collection. Even with the rest, it's not ground David Foster Wallace hasn't covered before. As in 'How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart':

__ To be a top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves.
__ the seductive immortality of competitive success and the less seductive but way more significant fragility and impermanence of all the competitive venues in which mortal humans chase immortality.

On lobsters:
__ The Maine Lobster Festival's democratization of lobster comes with all the massed inconvenience and aesthetic compromise of real democracy.

On Kafka:
__ This is why we tend to call even Kafka's weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
__ [Kafka:] "There is hope, but not for us."
__ Our culture has trained (children) to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance... We've taught them to see humor as something you get - the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have.
__ When a solipsist dies, everything goes with him.

'Up, Simba'

• McCain is in fact the campaign's Chinese boxes' central and inscrutable core box.
• McCain's resume and candor... promise not empathy with voters' pain but relief from it. Because we've been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It's ultimately just about that complicated: it hurts.
  
• The way the techs handle deep boredom is to become extremely sluggish and torpid, so that lined up on the ottoman they look like an exhibit of lizards whose tank isn't hot enough.
  
• Diabetes is apparently the Black Lung of political journalism.
• The chain hotel's central paradox: the form of hospitality with none of the feeling - cleanliness becomes sterility.
  
• The McCain2000 campaign has got to spin today's retaliation the same way nations spin war
• What's the difference between hypocrisy and paradox?