As my time in Würzburg teaching English was winding to an end, I was seeking a longer text that could challenge my advanced class of juniors. We had spent almost a year (two for some of them) reading political articles and random current events, but I wanted to find something literary, something that had some level of merit. I also wanted something that would be interesting and hopefully draw them in.
My first thought went to Kurt Vonnegut. Not only was his writing amazing and funny and poignant, but having died recently, the media was full of articles singing his praises, which I thought I could use to pique my students’ interest. Unfortunately, in the end, I wasn’t able to find a piece of suitable length with a suitable vocabulary.
After further consideration, my mind went to David Foster Wallace. Of course, his >1000 page tome wouldn’t do, but his much shorter essay on the ethics of eating/cooking/celebrating lobster fit the bill for length and humor well.
We started reading it and soon enough we were immersed in a world of lobster fests, melted butter, … and footnotes. DFW is famous for his footnotes and although I tried to stress the importance of the footnotes and the suggestion that they should be read with the text, I never quite convinced the students to give them the respect they deserved.
On my last day of class at Siebold Gymnasium, we only had another page or two to read. It was definitely a length that we could have tackled in the hour that we had. However, the students had other plans and we ended up celebrating my departure with two cakes, one in the shape of… a lobster. Little did I know, but in the weeks that we had read the essay, the students had started to wonder if I had some kind of lobster fetish.
This is why it’s especially sad to read today that DFW hanged himself last night.
