w/CS: Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, by Cal Flyn

September 2023

Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, by Cal Flynn, 2021.* This book looks at how nature — fungi, plants, animals – are re-colonize landscapes that have been destroyed and abandoned by humans. Examples include massive slag piles, nuclear test grounds, etc. It examines both how primary succession occurs in unpromising circumstances, and how the absence of human presence facilitates re-wilding. In the introduction, the author notes that we are now in the midst of a vast self-directed experiment in re-wilding, driven in part by the concentration of people in cities (and a soon-to-be-decreasing population), and in part by the depletion of non-sustainable natural resources that leave ‘waste lands’ behind.

Post-reading comment: There are three or four chapters in the book that are great, and really align with the aims laid out above. Unfortunately, more of the chapters, particularly as one progresses in the book, are more in the line of what I would call disaster tourism: lyrical descriptions of degraded environments and terrible situations, with little or no mention of how the ecosystem has adapted or not.

* Reading with CJS, fall of 2023

w/KC: The Immense Journey, Loren Eisley

May 2023; July 2023

Essays by Loren Eisley, first published in 1946. Although an independent book, I am reading these essays (with KC) in a two-volume edition of his complete works, so the page numbers in the quotes may not align with Immense Journey.

So far, I have enjoyed all the essays. While I would say “The Snout” is my favorite, I think “The Flow of the River,” is the one I’d most recommend to others… and it may well turn out to be my favorite. At this point I’m only about six essays into the book,

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

EP #5*: Favorites from the Golden Age of the Am. Essay** 1945-1970

2023

Favorites:
An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, Norman Mailer
Writing about Jews, Philip Roth
The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter
The Twenty-ninth Republican Convention, Gore Vidal
One Night’s Dying, Loren Eisley

Writing Exercises, 1 (From OBE)

I am trying to focus more on applying what I notice in reading essays to my own writing. Here are a set of prospective exercises I’ve generated after re-reading selections from the Oxford Book of Essays with KC :

Superposition. Providing differing points of view on the same thing/event/space to convey uncertainty/ambiguity. [cf. The Haunted Mind, Note 3, offers alternate PoVs: Is the sound of the bell from the dream or the world? Is the author is in the space of the dream or are the dream figments in the bedroom?]
Minor Key Interlude. A description of a train of thought, or conversation, that in response to some happenstance moves into a minor – dark, distressing, depressing – mode, and then, through more happenstance or perhaps intentional effort, moves back out of it. Attend to the inflection points. [cf. The Haunted Mind, Note s 6 & 7, where hypnagogic turn dark when being swaddled in bedclothes evokes a corpse in a shroud, and then attention to everyday objects serves to vitiate that line of thought].
Animated Trajectory through Three-space. Convey the sensation of a 3D environment by allusions to its structure; by agents moving through it; by objects falling and bouncing; by sound. [cf. The Acorn-Gatherer, Note 2, on the rooks moving about in the tree].
Persuasion via vivid description and inserting oneself into the scene. Vividness, particularity and layering of detail makes a description more convincing, and then with the describer injects themselves into the scene as describes themselves in the act of seeing and feeling. [cf. The Clergyman (Beerbohm)]
Zoom in from Safe Distant Anonymity to Too-Close Intimate Proximity. Zoom in on people interacting. Begin with a comfortable distant overview (e.g. momentary distant glimpses), and then zoom in to show the fine-structure of intimate and not-entirely-easy interaction, whether wanted or not (e.g. continuous up-close eye-contact). (cf. Insouciance.)

EP #3*: Favorites from Best American Essays of the 20thC

Thursday, 25 August 2022

My favorites from the Best American Essays of the 20th Century:
The Brown Wasps, Loren Eisley – 1956
Perfect Past, Vladimir Nabokov – 1966
Stickeen, John Muir – 1909
The Search for Marvin Gardens, John McPhee – 1972
Total Eclipse, Annie Dillard – 1982

And essays which weren’t quite favorites, but which I found instructive:
Pamplona in July, Ernest Hemingway, 1923
Putting Daddy On, Tom Wolfe, 1964
The White Album, Joan Didion, 1970

EP #2*: Favorites from Best Am. Essays of 2020

Friday, 27 August 2022

Favorites:
A Street of Splendid Strangers, Leslie Jamison
Driving as a Metaphor, Rachel Cusk
How to Bartend, Rabih Alameddine

Spring 2022 Reading Projects

Friday 22 April 2022

Reading Projects as of Spring 2020:
Survey of English-language Essays, with CT
‘Best of’ Essays – with a focus on the Craft of Writing, with KC
Project 3: Otherlands – Lyrical Science, with CS
Project 4: Smellosophy – Neuroscience, with RB

Things I learned from the 2021 Loft Essay course

16 August 2021

Things to pay attention to:

Telling details: One telling detail is preferable to many details
Embodiment. Emotions and actions work best when embodied: gaze, gesture, posture, proprioception, proxemics
Scenes. Scenes should vary in length, and be interleaved with summaries. This gives rhythm and weighting. Think of a scene as a spotlight.
Language: avoid ‘to be’s. Avoid “is” “are” “have” etc. and limit use of adjectives.
“To be” is the weakest verb. Not “He is tall” but “He smacked his head on the door frame”
Language: avoid distancing: Avoid habitually using filtering/distancing language such as “I noticed,” “I heard,” “I saw,”
(That said, sometimes you may want to use it to distance yourself, as when you are uncomfortable and don’t want to be in it.)
Language: avoid adverbs. Use actions and embodiment rather than adverbs:
“Yeah,” she said, stroking his bare arm, “that’s what I heard.” vs. “Yeah,” she said gently, “that’s what I heard.”
Support reader inference. There is something about readers being able to figure something out on their own that is very rewarding.
Revising Tricks: Print it out in a different font. Read it out loud and notice where you stumble, speed up, lag, etc. Replace “to be’s”

What I’ve Learned from Critiquing SF&F

Wednesday, 21 July 2021

These are observations on what works, from critiques I made during my Summer 2021 Worldbuilding Course

Essays: G. K. Chesterton: family & sociability

Thursday 6 July 2021

I also read CK Chesterton’s essay on the family as an institution. I’d dipped into it before, but read it all the way through and now have my own copy of the book to mark up. He has some funny and acute observations:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In large community we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us.
GK Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity – On Certain Modern Writers, p 10-11

Essays: On first reading G K Chesterton

29 June 2021

Well, it is not my first reading. Long ago, and once or twice since, I’ve read a short story of his in an anthology of fantasy and science fiction. But I had set out to read stories, not Chesterton, and while the story was curious enough to make me remember the author’s name, it did not cause me to seek him out.