Mathematics geek clock1/9/2024 ![]() She sat through more than an hour of intense mathematical and philosophical discussions to extract a grand total of forty-five seconds that she thought might be of interest to me. A few years after his death, his interviewer Caleb Crain, who regularly reviews books for The New Yorker and has written a few novels of his own, posted an audio recording of the entire conversation he had with DFW on his blog. Right around its date of publication, in October 2003, an interview with DFW appeared in the Boston Globe, in which the “two dreadful books” that he reviewed for Science are mentioned in passing, though not by name, sparing Full o’ Bull and that other guy further humiliation. Three years after trashing Full o’ Bull’s novel in Science, DFW’s own book on mathematics came out, entitled Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. That wasn’t the only juicy bit of information Linda found. In the same article, he goes on to review another mathematical novel, Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture, by Apostolos Doxiadis, explaining that it, too, was pretty bad, though not as awful as The Wild Numbers. In fact, it’s a textbook example of a hatchet job, DFW going to great lengths to demonstrate to the readers of Science what a ridiculously bad writer Full o’ Bull is, in every possible way. That’s right, I forgot to tell you: it’s not a very nice review. “No comment,” he said, adjusting the knob to a finer setting before once again feeding the dough through the opening. ![]() Wearing his chef’s apron, Full o’ Bull was at work at the dining-room table, feeding a portion of dough into his pasta maker while turning the crank. “Gosh, Full o’ Bull,” I said, as I burst into the dining room, “I didn’t know The Wild Numbers had been reviewed by David Foster Wallace in Science. Rather than weighing in on his drastic final deed with some half-baked theory, like far too many self-proclaimed psychologists who hardly knew the guy have been doing, as a fellow writer I prefer to honor my illustrious predecessor’s legacy by limiting myself to his writing, more specifically, to his review of my dear host’s fledgling novel. Tragically, on September 12, 2008, Wallace, or DFW, as he is fondly remembered by his fans and in keeping with his own fondness for acronyms, lost a long battle against depression and took his own life. A visionary.ĭo those qualifications sound at all familiar? That’s what makes Linda’s scoop doubly cool: I’ve been hailed as Wallace’s heir apparent, even as his reincarnation, albeit in a less highbrow and heavy-handed version. As for the reviewer, the writer David Foster Wallace, does he even need an introduction? He was a literary genius. That’s a damned prestigious scientific journal, right up there with Nature and The Lancet. She discovered a review of Full o’ Bull’s first novel, The Wild Numbers, in an old issue of Science. Linda, my personal assistant, just struck gold.
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