BG: A Book of Essays by David Foster Wallace

30 May 2023

The book is titled A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, 1997; I read it with my book group.

Favorites are *’d

* Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley

Harpers, 1990 — 3

A nice essay. A lot of good bits of description and nice turns of phrase. Discusses Foster’s ‘career’ as a ‘near-great’ high school tennis player, something which he made interesting to me in spite of the topic. I thought the beginning was brilliant, making a connection between the midwestern landscape and geometry, which is then further pursued in tennis. Here’s a sample from the beginning:

College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids – and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child’s play.
—David Foster Wallace, Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley, 3

w/KC: Three Essays [Florida] by E. B. White

May, 2023

From the book “Essays of E. B. White.“

Part IV: Florida

I wonder a bit about the connection between E. B. White and Florida. His three essays — that span three decades – seem to me to paint it as a depressing and morally derelict place. Yet here he is, and here he stays…

On a Florida Key

This essay did not thrill me, but it did one thing of note. It began with about two pages of description of the rented cabana in which White and his wife were staying. While it did sketch a good picture of the place — how could it help it after piling detail on detail on detail — I rapidly became restless and hoped that it would add up to something. But it really didn’t, not even at the end of the essay.

The bit I liked was anchored by this:

In the kitchen cabinet is a bag of oranges for morning juice. Each orange is stamped “Color Added.” The dyeing of an orange, to make it orange, is man’s most impudent gesture to date. It is really an appalling piece of effrontery, carrying the clear implica-ton that Nature doesn’t know what she is up to.
E. B. White, A Florida Key (in Essays of E. B. White, p 173

ILSG 2023 Conference Notes

April 23-26, 2023

I attended the Institute of Lake Superior Geology meeting from April 23 to 26, 2023. I provide a brief description of the field trips in my Journal blog entry for May 1. These are notes I made during (and sometimes but not always about) the conference talks.

The conference papers were, for me, something of a mixed bag. Some were a bit too abstruse for me to follow, some ventured in to extreme detail on subjects I didn’t care so much about, but others introduced me to interesting comments, or provided provocative perspectives on what I had imagined were settled matters.