Lobster, Considered

I really didn't want to read this book. Or at least I wasn't supposed to.

Now don't get me wrong, I love David Foster Wallace. I think he was one of a kind, which is why it pains me every time I decide to read one of his books. Because I know there are a finite number of them; once I've read the last one, fin. ...I suppose that's true of many authors, including the classics', but the circumstance and timing of DFW's death make it feel relatable, more familiar. In reading his work, I've found myself upset that I'll never know his insight on the current time period--on Obama or Twitter or the Biebs, on Shake Weight, or Watson or 3D movies--because I know his humor, his neurotic thoroughness and unrelenting cynicism, would have made that insight so unique and perfect. Instead I soak up his inner monologues on things like McCain's 2000 campaign, and pore over his descriptions of a fictional futuristic world eerily like our actual present. And really wish he was still alive to write.

Sigh. Back to the task at hand. So reading any DFW book feels moderately epic. In addition, though I'm a fan of his short stories and novels, I'm partial to his nonfiction books, of which Consider the Lobster is one. Not one, but my last, because I am weak-willed and powerless over a good essay. Also, there's a lobster on the cover. I can't be held accountable for that kind of temptation.

Long story short, I've decided to drag this one out an extra week, a decision aided by the fact that DFW frequently includes half-page footnotes in footnote-size typeface, and that these footnotes frequently themselves have footnotes in even smaller typeface, so that one feels they've read entire pages when they've really just managed three lines of a footnote's footnote. But also, because I want to enjoy it.

The Imperfectionists: An FAQ

"Once at the boarding gate, Abbey falls into her customary travel coma, a torpor that infuses her brain like pickling fluid during long trips. In this state, she nibbles any snack in reach, grows mesmerized by strangers' footwear, turns philosophical, ends up weepy. She gazes at the banks of seats around the departure lounge: young couples nestling, old husbands reading books about old wars, lovers sharing headphones, whispered words about duty-free and delays.
    She boards the plane, praying it won't be full. The flight from Rome to Atlanta is elven hours, and she intends to stretch out--she'll work and sleep, in that order. From the corner of her eye, she spots a man pausing at her row, consulting his ticket. She glares out the window, imploring him away. (Once, she allowed a fellow passenger to engage her in conversation and it became the longest flight of her life. He made her play Scrabble and insisted that 'ug' was a word. Since then, her rule has been to never talk on planes)."

"What is wrong with guys? Half are molting; half are nothing but undergrowth."

"'I got myself into a tangle. I tied myself in knots. I built and I built--heaven knows I have done that well.  Those skyscrapers, full of tenants, floor after floor, and not a single room containing you.'"

"Europeans Are Lazy, Study Says"

There's a reason they tell you to write what you know.

Tom Rachman, whose The Imperfectionists was my read this week, was a Rome correspondent for the Associated Press and an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris; all of which goes a long way towards explaining why his debut novel--a glimpse at the "topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters and editors of an English-language newspaper in Rome"--succeeds so well.

I picked up The Imperfectionists on a whim last weekend, while killing time in Penn Station. (You're welcome, Hudson News. I imagine not everyone is still impulsively spending $40 on books they don't need). "Spectacular," screamed a review on the cover; "magnificent," "beguiling." (Beguiling?) Even the back cover is filled with glowing endorsements of the book, including two from different New York Times reviews. Ever a sucker for such professional votes of confidence, I decided to satisfy my curiosity--and justify my spontaneous purchase--by reading the book right away.

It's immediately obvious why not much space was warranted for any sort of Imperfectionists plot summary. Though the book's various characters are related--all affiliated with the newspaper in question, which is only ever referred to as "the newspaper"--their stories are presented as vignettes, a dozen or so pages each for a handful of the paper's employees, and even in one case (my favorite vignette) an elderly reader struggling to keep up with the news (on Feb. 18, 2007, she is reading an issue from April 1994). In between these vignettes are even briefer glimpses at the founding of the paper and its evolution from a frivolous collection of briefs into a publication with a real voice and reputation, and back to a budget-starved anachronism in the world of online journalism.

A Book on the Internets, In Hardcover

Clay Shirky

It was with a bit of nostalgia for my college days (where I majored in media theory) that I picked up Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus for this week. Were Clay and I friends, I might tell him he could have picked a less intimidating title, one that wouldn't make people frown when I tell them what I'm reading. The name won't scare off anyone who picked up Surplus for the author himself (or anyone who makes a habit of reading manifestos on the merits of new media), but it might scare off some readers who would otherwise be greatly served by hearing what Shirky has to say.

If you've got even a little inner media wonk, this is a truly fascinating book. If you don't, or if you're turned off by a title that includes the word "cognitive," then just hang around me, as I've spent the better part of the last week describing Shirky's central ideas to friends, most of whom have at least pretended to find them interesting. Without going into too much detail, the gist of Cognitive Surplus is this: Over the last 50 years, we've had a steady increase in free time, most of which we've spent watching television (oh, sweet television). It's only in the last five or so years that we've seen the proliferation of media that doesn't command passive viewership, but rather engagement. In the short term—and for those people who still insist Twitter is about 140-character sandwich descriptions—this just means a lot of frivolity online. But it can also mean great things. If every person in the world has one hour of free time per day, the power of all that time combined is pretty enormous. And if each of those people spends that hour engaging/interacting/contributing instead of consuming, we get things like Wikipedia. Like Twitter-enabled political unrest. Like nonprofits soliciting donations from a worldwide fan base. Like CouchSurfing.com. In other words, it doesn't all have to be about what you're eating.

By Nightfall: An FAQ

That stands for "Favorite Awesome Quotes." Here are mine from By Nightfall. These are, I should note, prettay prettay long. It's the kind of book that gets you with entire paragraphs.  

"He's one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won't, possibly can't, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time."

"There's New York, one of the goddamnedest perturbations ever to ride the shifting surface of the earth. It's medieval, really, all ramparts and ziggurats and spikes and steeples, entirely possible to see a hunchback cloaked in a Hefty bag stumping along beside a woman carrying a twenty-thousand dollar purse. And at the same time, overlaid, is a vast nineteenth-century boomtown, raucously alive, eager for the future but nothing rubberized or air-conditioned about it, no hydraulic hush; trains rumbling the pavement, carved limestone women and men—not gods—looking heftily down from cornices as if from a heaven of work and hard-won prosperity, car horns bleating as some citizen in Dockers passes by telling his cell phone 'that's how they're supposed to be.'"