Consider the Lobster (2006) (edit title/settings)

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Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

• John McCain: Republican U.S. Senator from Arizona and candidate for the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination. In Wallace's Up, Simba, the person of the narrative's interest during the Senator's GOP Primary campaign for the 2000 Presidential election.
• John Ziegler: conservative talk-radio host
• Bryan Garner: According to the chapter Authority and American Usage, Garner authored A Dictionary of Modern American Usage
• John Updike: 20th century U.S. American author of fiction, most notably of the Rabbit Run franchise
• Franz Kafka: author
• Max Hardcore: U.S. video pornography producer
• Mike Murphy: Add a description of this character.
• Harold Hecuba: In Big Red Son, Harold is identified as a pornography industry journalist. He accompanies the narrator throughout the duration of the essay.
• Dick Filth
• George W. Bush: former U.S. President. In Wallace's Up, Simba, the subject of the narrative--Senator (AZ) John McCain--is campaigning in the GOP primary against Bush (who is also attributed nicknames like "Dubya" or "Bush2" or "the Shrub")
• William J Clinton: former U.S. President
• Chris Duren
• Mrs. Thompson
• Philip Gove: In Authority and American Usage, Gove is identified as the author of Webster's Third <Dictionary>. Credited/blamed for pioneering the attempt to apply value-neutral principles of structural linguistics to lexicography. His inclusion and arguments to justify words like "OK" and "ain't" led to the coinage of partisan labels such as "Prescriptivists" (i.e. conservatives who disclaimed such words) and Descriptivists (i.e. liberals who supported the inclusion of those words).
• O.J. Simpson: U.S. sports figure and controversial media figure
• Joseph Frank: According to Wallace's essay entitled Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky, one of the leading biographers of Fyodor Dostoevsky. According to the essay, Frank embarked upon his journals of Dostoevsky when Frank was serving as a Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton and encountered Notes From Underground. In the essay, Frank is attributed with the following biographies of Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 (1976); The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 (1984); The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 (1986); and The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871 (1996)
• Katie Couric: national television news journalist
• Rush Limbaugh: conservative nationally-syndicated talk-radio host
• Dr. Laura Schlessinger: conservative nationally-syndicated talk-radio host
• F.J. Lincoln: In Big Red Son, he is identified as a Director and AVN Hall-of-Fame inductee
• Joey Silvera: In Big Red Son, he is referred to as a "veteran woodman." Is that a euphemism for something in the pornography industry?
• Jacklyn Lick: In Big Red Son, she is identified as a "porn starlet." She suggests to the narrator that the pornography industry succeeds in the U.S. because the industries fans are "very lonely people."
• Alison Mitchell: New York Times correspondent who, in Up, Simba, follow Senator John McCain during the latter's GOP Primary campaign for the 2000 Presidential Election
• Wendy: In Up, Simba by David Foster Wallace, Wendy is the personal assistant to Mrs. McCain--as in the wife of GOP Presidential candidate 2000 hopeful Senator John McCain. Wendy has "electric-blue contact lenses and rigid blond hair and immaculate makeup and accessories and French nails and can perhaps best be described as a very Republican-looking young lady indeed."
• Lisa Graham Keegan: In Wallace's Up, Simba she is identified as "AZ's education superintendent." She is identified as being Cindy McCain's friend who accompanied Mrs. McCain on the 2000 GOP Primary campaign
• Jonathan Karl: According to Wallace's Up, Simba, a CNN correspondent who--like Wallace--accompanied Senator John McCain during McCain's GOP Primary campaign. Wallace describes Karl as "look<ing> eleven."
• Jim McManus: According to Up, Simba, a CNN field producer who--like Wallace--accompanied Senator John McCain during the Senator's 2000 GOP Primary campaign. Wallace describes McManus as "look<ing> eleven."

Quotes edit see section history

• “A more serious rejoinder to Philosophical Descriptivism: from the fact that linguistic communication is not strictly dependent on usage and grammar it does not necessarily follow that the traditional rules of usage and grammar are nothing but 'inconsequential decorations.' Another way to state this objection is that something's being 'decorative' does not necessarily make it 'inconsequential.' Rhetoric-wise, Pinker's flip dismissal is very bad tactics, for it invites precisely the question it's begging: inconsequential to whom?”

• “The truth is that most US academic prose is appalling - pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipidelian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead.”

• “Descriptivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively - via 'freewriting,' 'brainstorming,' 'journaling' - a view of writing as self-exploratory and expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology. For another thing, the very language in which today's socialist, feminist, minority, gay, and environmental movements frame their sides of political debates is informed by the Descriptivist belief that traditional English is conceived and perpetuated by Privileged WASP Males and thus is inherently capitalist, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, elitist: unfair.”

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• exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

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• anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself.

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• It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it—and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

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• To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward—we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.

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• It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.”

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• Rampant or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the novel’s first page. It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.

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• The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it’s also wrong.

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• His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.

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• In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.)

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Bloomington
• South Carolina: In Up, Simba,one of the major stopping points during Senator John McCain's 2000 GOP Primary campaign
• Michigan: Specifically Flint and Saginaw. In Up, Simba, one of the major stopping locations during Senator John McCain's 2000 GOP Primary campagin
• New York
• Louisville
• Hollywood
• Los Angeles
• Vietnam
• Charleston, SC: In Up, Simba, one of the major stopping locations during Senator John McCain's 2000 GOP Primary campagin
• Washington
• Maine: In Consider the Lobster, the essay that bequeaths the title to Wallace's collection, the setting of the Maine Lobster Festival
• New England: In Consider the Lobster, the essay that bequeaths the title to Wallace's collection, the setting of Maine and the Maine Lobster Festival
• Raleigh
• Southern California
• Spartanburg, SC: In Up, Simba, one of the stopping locations mentioned that occurred during Senator John McCain's 2000 GOP Primary campagin
• Las Vegas: In Big Red Son, the setting of the AVN awards. Distinguished as three cultures: Old Town Vegas, Popular Vegas, and New Vegas.

Organizations edit see section history

• H.W. Folwer Society: Referenced in the chapter Authority and American Usage in reference to one Bryan A. Garner, the author of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Described in the following terms: "a worldwide group of usage Trekkies who like to send one another linguistic boners clipped from different periodicals."

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. David Foster Wallace (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 814.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Not for children. Complexity. Adult language. Adult Content and Themes

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( W ) › Wallace, David Foster
• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › United States
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Essays

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Maine Lobster Festival: The homepage of the annual Maine Lobster Festival

More Books Like This edit see section history