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

EP #9*: On the Move: A Life, Oliver Sacks

*On the Move, Oliver Sacks, 2015.

These are my notes on On the Move, Oliver Sacks autobiography (billed as volume 2, but the publisher, volume 1 being Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, written a couple of decades earlier). This is part of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ These are not, of course, essays, but we have become interested in Sacks, and it is interesting to see the essays against a fuller narrative of his life.

EP #8*: Oaxaca Journal, Oliver Sacks

Oaxaca Journal, Oliver Sacks, 2019.

These are my notes on Oaxaca Journal, by Oliver Sacks, 2019. This is part 8 of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ Strictly speaking, these are not essays but rather chapters — or daily entries – from a journal he kept of a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, with the American Fern Society.

Introduction

Sacks opens by writing of his love of the Natural History journals of the nineteenth century, and their blend of the personal and professional. He notes that most of the naturalists were essentially amateurs, self-taught, and feeling their way before or as biology and botany were crystalizing into sciences. He adds:

This sweet, unspoiled, preprofessional atmosphere, ruled by a sense of adventure and wonder rather than by egotism and a lust for priority and fame, still survives here and there, it seems to me, in certain natural history societies, and amateur societies of astronomers and archaeologists, whose quiet yet essential existences are virtually unknown to the public. It was the sense of such an atmosphere that drew me to the American Fern Society in the first place, that incited me to go with them on their fern-tour to Oaxaca early in 2000.
Oliver Sacks, Oaxaca Journal, p xiv

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 #7* – Everything in Its Place, Oliver Sacks

April – June, 2023

Everything in its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, Oliver Sacks, 2019.

Favorites
Waterbabies, 1997
Remembering South Kensington, 1993
Travels with Lowell, 1988
The Lost Virtues of the Asylum, 2009
Botanists on Park, 2009
Orangutan

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

EP #6*: Favorites from the Contemporary American Essay

April-May 2023

Thomas Beller, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bagel, 2005
Aleksandar Hemon, The Aquarium, 2013
Leslie Jamieson, The Empathy Exams, 2013
Karen Russell, Beeper World, 2014
John McPhee, Draft #4, 2017
Floyd Skloot, Gray Areas: Thinking with a Damaged Brain, 2003

* Part 6 of the Essays Project: A course of reading conducted with Charles Taliaferro. Note that these are my particular favorites and views, not CT’s, though no doubt some are influenced by him.

** The Contemporary American Essay, edited by Philip Lopate

w/CS: The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, David Quammen

January – April 2023

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, David Quammen, 2018. These are my chapter by chapter notes. Besides having very good reviews and being by a well-regarded author, this book got a (rare) very high rating from Reid Priedhorsky…

Read this with CS.

EP #4*: Five Essays by Chesterton

Thursday, 6 October 2022

* Part 4 of the Essays Project: A course of reading conducted with Charles Taliaferro. Note that these are my particular favorites and views, not CT’s, though no doubt some are influenced by him.

This entry contains thoughts on five essays by Chesterton:

A Defense of Rash Vows
A Piece of Chalk
On Lying in Bed
Dreams
On the Thrills of Boredom

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

w/CS: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, Thomas Halliday- Introduction

Tuesday 15 March 2022

LATER: This is the best science book I have ever read; I have a 20+ page document of notes on both the content and the lyrical writing. I regret that I had not systematically started keeping notes in this blog at the point we were reading this.

This morning CS and I meet to begin our discussion of the book Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday. Halliday is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who investigates long-term patterns in the fossil record; he appears to be quite young, but has already won a raft of awards for his scientific work as well as one or two awards for his writing. A riffle through the book leaves me with high expectations. I note with approval that it has about fifty pages of notes, all pointing to various scholarly articles and books. The front matter includes an abbreviated chart of geolgical eras (mostly the Phanerozoic eon, presumably indicating the time-span covered in the book); I do like it that the book works backward in time rather than oldest first.

EP #2: Best Am. Essays of 2020 – First look…

Wednesday 9 March 2022

It’s a cold day, in the teens, with a some faint wisps of cirrus clouds in a whitish blue sky. As the temperatures have fallen over the past few days, puddles have solidified, breeding long spear-like ice crystals. There are ice crystals in the sky as well — they make up the Cirrus clouds and distinguish them from most other types of clouds which are made of water droplets. Cirrus clouds occur during fair weather, which this is; they sometimes herald warm fronts, but not this time.

I have just come from my weekly meeting with CT, where we discussed essays. We have finished the Oxford Book of Essays, and embarked on a new book: The Best American Essays, 2020. After the Oxford book, whose most recent essay was authored in 1984, we wanted to get a sense of the state of the art. For this session, we read the Foreward, Introduction, and first three essays of BAE2020.

EP #1*: Ten Favorites from The Oxford Book of Essays**

February 27, 2022

Favorites:
The Haunted Mind, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835
The Acorn-Gatherer, Richard Jefferies, 1884
Cordova, Arthur Symons, 1898
A Clergyman, Sir Max Beerbohm, 1918
The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf, 1925
Insouciance, 1928, D H Lawrence
The Toy Farm, J. B. Priestly, 1927
The Snout, Loren Eisley, 1957
The Crisp at the Crossroads, Reyner Banham, 1970
La Paz, Jan Morris, 1963

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.