david foster wallace: classic or dud

the way he builds the tension in this story should be taught in classrooms

this, absolutely. the whole thing is so obscenely dense with that kind of dry technicalese/marketing speak that it should deflate the momentum of the narrative but somehow it makes it even more tense. he's the only guy i know who could fill made-up sales reports for a fake cupcake company with the same dread as a horror movie.

que, did you happen to read that looooooooooong essay/appreciation of "mr. squishy" blake butler did on htmlg a while back? (i thought i remembered you positively mentioning scorch atlas on that old "why kant shakey mo read" thread.) apparently there were supposed to be more "elizabeth klemm" stories in the manner of "mr. squishy." i kinda wish he'd pursued that instead of tpk sometimes.

Finished Infinite Jest on the train this morning, absolutely loved it. I know I mentioned it being a slog at one point, still a valid criticism, but the entertainment I got from the other 7/8ths of it more than made up for it. What should I read next?

all the essays except for "greatly exaggerated", then oblivion.

if you get bored amidst the tv essay just drop it.

Are footnotes a pain on the Kindle? When I was test-driving a Kindle that was one feature I never tried out, they are a breeze with the Nook.

Yeah they're a pain.

Anyone read the infinity book? I have it, somewhere.

That sucks, I can't imagine trying to read a book like IJ without the Nook's use of footnotes.

i think the infinity book is the one thing by him i haven't read--it would be wayyyyyyyy over my head

que, did you happen to read that looooooooooong essay/appreciation of "mr. squishy" blake butler did on htmlg a while back? (i thought i remembered you positively mentioning scorch atlas on that old "why kant shakey mo read" thread.) apparently there were supposed to be more "elizabeth klemm" stories in the manner of "mr. squishy." i kinda wish he'd pursued that instead of tpk sometimes.

i saw it, meant to read it, never did. i will go back and read. a whole bunch of klemm stories would have been a real gas.

That sucks, I can't imagine trying to read a book like IJ without the Nook's use of footnotes.

i can't help but feel that reading IJ without having to lug it around and use two bookmarks is somehow cheating, or at least missing part of the experience

i don't use bookmarks ever for some reason so sometimes when i was following cross-references i had like three fingers slipped into the book separated by hundreds of pages; it is a sensual reading experience

pale fire, too

i'd read "a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again" after infinite jest

I've read that one already, that was actually the first DFW I read.

ah oops what other ones have you read?

Just that one and IJ for sure. I've read a couple of his other essays a long time ago, but its been long enough that I can't recall which ones.

maybe go consider the lobster or oblivion then?

could prolly go either to consider the lobster or oblivion from here depending on whether you feel like fiction or non. lobster's highs aren't as high as the cruise ship but it's probably a more even collection than fun thing.

oh hey xp.

Haha, nice. I'll start with one of those two. Thanks for recommendations. I feel like I'm late to the game with DFW considering I spent so much time in Champaign in the 1990s.

i've never read the debut or the first short-story collection though! i have read brief interviews and for me it was like well i <3 you so i'll hang out with you but this is one of our more exasperating days together.

After Infinite Jest I knew I'd probably want to read everything by him, so I started with Broom of the System and moved forward from there. I'm happy I did it that way, but I'm not sure I'd really recommend BotS to anyone except for those who are really interested in DFW. I loved all the short story collections, though.

really a bummer to hear that Kindle is bad w/ bookmarks, my wife has one and i was thinking about urging her to use it to finally read IJ.

been thinking about doing a 'best DFW book besides IJ' poll, you think that would be worth doing?

one wonders whether those were found integrated with the rest of the novel, actually; whether it's an artifact of the editing process that those sections show up like they're part of the same draft, the same angle of attack as the rest of the stuff in the book

like i can't remember whether 'David Wallace' shows up in the non-memoir segments, actually. maybe he did.

― thomp, Monday, August 22, 2011 9:31 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

he definitely shows up (albeit briefly/peripherally) in other chapters

I tried to read the infinity book and gave up halfway through, I'm not a complete maths dumbass (just about 60%) but I had lost track and there didn't seem to be any way back. It seemed a bit on the unnecessarily technical side.

see I am a bit of a math dork ("my" "field" is computer science) and I have heard that the book gets some of the technical details plain wrong which makes me hesitant to read it despite my DFW fannishness

also the diagonal proof of the uncountability of the reals is awesome in its own right and is basically the genesis of modern mathematics and eventually theoretical computer science, I recommend learning about it elsewhere if DFW didn't do it for you

i remember finding his elucidation of same awesome, but i can't even remember it works anymore. which is a shame, this is why you should not stop studying math at 18

i actually found it stuck a really great balance in terms of biography and larger mathematical import and micro-level 'how this stuff works' stuff: like, it made me wish that a lot more math was written like that. but that's obv in large part a knock-on effect of liking his approach to everything anyway, as a dfw stan.

I've never liked this guy's work

helpfulposts4u

i've never liked your face

I have heard that the book gets some of the technical details plain wrong which makes me hesitant to read it despite my DFW fannishness

i might cautiously suggest that this could reflect the myopia of the ppl you heard from? by which i mean: getting plain-wrong some of the technical details about something as ~far-out~ as number theory seems like a p excusable offense if the book is otherwise educational and enjoyable? seems like a bit of pred ship train spotting, its not like spreading falsehoods about global warming or evolution or something

then again i'm not even sure i used 'number theory' right just there, so feel free to ignore me

i still haven't read Signifying Rappers for the same reason that i don't want to deal with the disappointment of DFW mishandling a subject that is near and dear to my heart

oh shit i forgot about that one.

that book has a thesis which is pretty undergraduate but it is by no means entirely awful

yeah Georg Cantor was a set theorist, and set theory is way more far out than number theory, which tends to deal with integers which are things people are pretty conceptually ok with. In set theory you get ~far out~ things like the Banach-Tarski paradox, which says that you can take a ball, cut it into pieces, and reassemble the pieces into two balls that are each identical to the first ball.

This doesn't make any sense in terms of our physical reality but mathematically it is equivalent to something called the axiom of choice, which pretty much says that if you have a bunch of boxes with a bunch of balls in each box, you can select a ball from each box. That doesn't sound controversial, right? But it leads to things like Banach-Tarski which can make people very upset.

N.B. I don't know how the equivalence between the axiom of choice and Banach-Tarski works, or really anything about set theory beyond the commonplaces that one picks up while studying CS. Still though: wild!

ha i was hoping you could gloss this review for me - http://www.ams.org/notices/200406/rev-harris.pdf

Also I will recommend the recent graphic novel Logicomix as a fun and informative read for anyone interested in the foundations and philosophy of mathematics and the weirdness of infinity.

xp I'll take a look

mainly this:

Most mathematicians are aware that Cantor was led to develop set theory in the course of his work on pointwise convergence of trigonometric series. Cantor’s Uniqueness Theorem asserted that two trigonometric series that converge pointwise everywhere on the unit interval to the same function have the same coefficients. His subsequent generalizations of this theorem replaced the condition “everywhere” by the complements of certain kinds of subsets of the real numbers, and in order to state his theorems he therefore requires theories of the real numbers and the subsets thereof. Though pointwise convergence of trigonometric series is a topic of little obvious metaphysical interest and is no longer as central a preoccupation as it was in Cantor’s day, Wallace spends nearly half his book preparing for, stating, and concluding (on pp. 233–234) with an irrelevant argument purporting to be a proof of, the most general form of Cantor’s Uniqueness Theorem.

The New York Times reviewer may have had these sections in mind when he admitted, in the course of a generally positive review, that it contains “a smattering of technical infelicities.” A mathematician reading E&M is unlikely to be so forgiving of DFW’s blunders. Some examples: The Weierstrass approach to limits is illustrated by a solution to Zeno’s dichotomy paradox in which δ = 1 for any  (p. 190 ff). The Extreme Value Theorem is used to prove, Zeno be damned, that on any time interval (t1, t2) the “time function” (sic) has an absolute minimum tm which is “mathematically speaking, the very next instant after t1” (p. 190). Although the continuum hypothesis is a principal theme and although it is correctly stated several times, DFW also claims three times that the cont i n u um h y p o t h e s i s i s t h e a s s e r t i o n t h a t t h e continuum has the cardinality of the power set of the natural numbers. A spurious distinction is drawn between “point-set theory” and “abstract set theory”; a presentation of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory somehow fuses the Axiom Schema of Comprehension (which he calls the Limited Abstraction Principle) with the Axiom of Infinity; Kronecker is said to be most famous for his Delta Function (“which in some ways anticipates the binary math of modern digitation” (sic)); Dedekind is identified as a prototypical Platonist but also quoted to the effect that “Numbers are free creations of the human mind”; Cantor and Gödel are asserted to be respectively the most important mathematicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

i am told the authors of logicomix are jerks

ij > oblivion > biwhm > gwch > tpk > bots

imo

lobster over fun thing, also imo

thomp: don't know dick about Cantor's Uniqueness Thm and have not heard of it, likely for the reasons the reviewer indicates: it's not metaphysically interesting or really mathematically relevant, but was a historical waypoint towards Cantor's innovations in set theory. quick googling reveals a treatment of this theorem in a real analysis textbook which is not a class I have taken--like I said I'm in CS not math.

Some of the "niggles" from the second paragraph:

- the delta-epsilon definition of limits (you forgot this after your shitty calculus class) basically states that a function F has a limit k at x if you can pick points w arbitrarily close to x and have F(x) continue getting arbitrarily closer to k. Wallace apparently screws up a technical detail here about what "for every epsilon there is a delta" means.
- there's no mathematical "next instant" in the real number line, that's part of the point of the whole book innit, what the density of the real number line entails. So yeah that's just nonsense about the EVT.

…more coming

Oh the thing about the continuum hypothesis is just him misstating what the continuum hypothesis is.

CH is basically: you can have sets that are as big as the natural numbers (0,1,2,3,…) and sets as big as the real number line, and there are no sets that are any size in between.

This remains a hypothesis, and it has in fact been proven to be independent of the usual axioms of set theory: it can't be proved or disproved using those axioms. What this ~means~ is up in the air ofc.

Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is a set of axioms for sets that mathematicians sort of generally agree on as the right ones, since they give us the right answers. If you add the axiom of choice to those, you get ZFC. The reviewer's complaint is that DFW somehow combines a couple of the axioms of ZFC, to wit:

- The axiom of infinity, which states that a set with infinitely many elements exists.
- The axiom of comprehension (or of Separation or of Subsets), which states that if you have some property (i.e. a true-false proposition) P and a set of candidates X, there's a subset Y containing all the candidates x in X where P(x) is true. (This exists in its form in part because of Russel's paradox which you may know something about!)

Anyway yeah somehow conflating those two things would be strange, since I don't think one follows from the other directly or anything.

- Kronecker is probably most famous for having allegedly said "God made the integers; all else is the work of man" but I honestly don't know anything about him

- Platonism in mathematics is the metaphysical view that numbers and other abstract objects have a reality that is prior to our mathematical fiddling with them, and that facts we discover about mathematical objects are in fact facts about the world. The sentiment that "Numbers are the free creation of the human mind" is decidedly anti-Platonic. Hence the contradiction.

- The most important mathematician of the 19th century was Lewis Carroll, the most important of the 20th was Alan Turing, everyone knows that, duh.

as for the authors of logicomix being jerks, who cares, I think it's a pretty good book, which is pretty up front about the historical/biographical liberties it takes. It's probably in Your Local Library and takes like a few hours to read, your time won't be wasted.

Any errors or omissions in the above are of course my own and I defer to real mathematicians on all points.

oh wow amazing, thank you! i am too tired to process/respond, but more in the morning, maybe

i probably will actually read logicomix -- does it have any scenes of russell and wittgenstein being politely baffled by each other

yes!

well maybe not super-polite but they do chill out together

and definite bafflement ensues

logicomix is good, recommended to read. from a comix/graphic novel standpoint it's execution leaves a lot to be desired, but the subject matter is so interesting on its own (if you're into intro to set theory, i guess) that it's worth a look.

IT IS EXECUTION