"Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-​brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-​print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek."

The first sentence of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (via HTMLGIANT)

David Foster Wallace’s copy of Players by Don DeLillo. Wallace’s annotated books.

“Please forgive us.”

Here it is — the video I made with Ariel for MNKINO #6: “FOOD.” The quote above is what Ariel had to say before we screened it last Tuesday.

Making this video prompted a lot of questions and uncertainties for me — enough that I was practically ready to bail at one point (glad I didn’t). Perhaps it’s worth noting that Ariel is a vegatarian and I’m not. One of the first mistakes I made was assuming that if a vegetarian seems OK with going through with this, then I must be too.

So under what circumstances is it acceptable to boil a lobster alive? Can one prove that, although symbolically more difficult than most other ways of killing animals for food, boiling a living creature is actually any worse? Are the ethical considerations of this act changed when one is filming it? What if it never gets eaten (it’s still in my freezer)?

I won’t bother you with any more of my moral hand-wringing, especially since much of it is covered in the David Foster Wallace essay we mention at the beginning of the video.

But I do have one question for you: know any decent recipes for frozen lobster?

Update: Upon re-reading this post, it strikes me as a little melodramatic. Despite my moral quandrifying, I’m happy with how it turned out and glad we did it!