Bill Torgerson

Welcome to the Torg Stories Podcast. On this episode, Anne and I are discussing the David Foster Wallace essay titled, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” Anne, if Wallace was a less creative writer, he could have called this “Playing Tennis in Central Illinois.” 

Acceptance is its own verve -DFW

• The graphic in the featured image was by Julianna Brion and appeared in a The New Yorker piece titled “David Foster Wallace’s Perfect Game” by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Click here to connect with that.

Breaking down the title:

• I take that word “derivative” to be a math term and this essay is loaded up with math words and phrases and math metaphors. 
• Something for a writer to consider: When I make choices about what words to use and what metaphors I will employ, from what world will I draw? For example, if I’m writing about an Indiana basketball player, then word choices and metaphors might come from those worlds: like a ball swishing through the net or his face was as red as a barn. 
• Derivative sport speaks to tennis being a game of geometry, a game of angles. You have the boundary lines, you have the angle the ball is coming in and going out, and you have other variables such as wind. 
• Here is the National Centers for Environmental Information on tornado alley: Tornado Alley is a nickname given to an area in the southern plains of the central United States that consistently experiences a high frequency of tornadoes each year. Tornadoes in this region typically happen in late spring and occasionally the early fall.
• I hadn’t really thought of tornado alley as in Illinois but I did find this on WCIA out of Champaign, IL: The Insurance Information Institute said Illinois topped the list as the U.S. state with the most tornados in 2023, with 136 touching down. Alabama came in at second with 101 tornadoes.

Discussion questions: 

How would you describe David Foster Wallace to someone who has never heard of him? How would you tell someone about this piece? 

• I came to him through his essay “The View from Planet Trillaphon as Seen in Relation to the Bad Thing.” I think he wrote it as a student at Amherst. Click here to read. Then I just went on a reading binge and especially liked his nonfiction such as “A Supposedly Fun Thing…” and “Ticket to the Fair.” 
• I read a biography about him Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by DT Max. 
• Also, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky (2010). 
• That was also a movie in which Jason Segel plays Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg plays Lipsky. 

From the biography I read: 

• There was a moment in many of his fellow students’ lives when they realized Wallace was not just smart but stunningly smart, as smart as anyone they had ever met. One friend remembers looking over his shoulder in a class on twentieth-century British poetry after the professor returned their essays on Philip Larkin and seeing on Wallace’s, “A+—One of the finest pieces of writing I have ever read.”
• He did a double thesis at Amherst. One in philosophy and one in English. The bio on the English thesis: Wallace’s thesis panel gave Broom an A-plus, and Wallace matched Costello double summa for double summa. But he had also discovered something more important about himself—he knew now what he wanted to do. Fiction held him as no other effort had; it took him out of time and released him from some of the pain of being himself. He told his roommate that when he was writing, “I can’t feel my ass in the chair.”

What are the themes in this?

• Childhood 
• Acceptance as its own verve AND Stoic cheer 

Some Golden Lines from the piece:

• P. 6 for this description of the town he lived in: Philo, Illinois, is a cockeyed grid: nine north-south streets against six northeast-southwest, fifty-one gorgeous slanted-cruciform corners (the east and west intersection-angles’ tangents could be evaluated integrally in terms of their secants!) around a three-intersection central town common with a tank whose nozzle pointed northwest at Urbana, plus a frozen native son, felled on the Salerno beachhead, whose bronze hand pointed true north.
• P.7: The best planned, best hit ball often just blew out of bounds, was the basic unlyrical problem. 
• P. 7 a question for Anne: I, who was affectionately known as Slug because I was such a lazy turd in practice, located my biggest tennis asset in a weird robotic detachment from whatever unfairnesses of wind and weather I couldn’t plan for. Question: Anne, would you say you were a lazy turd in practice? 
• P. 7 Acceptance is its own verve, and it takes imagination for a player to like wind, and I liked wind; or rather I at least felt the wind had some basic right to be there, and found it sort of interesting, and was willing to expand my logistical territory to countenance the devastating effect a 15- to 30-mph stutter-breeze swirling southwest to east would have on my best calculations… 
• P. 14: Houses blew not out but in. Brothels were spared while orphanages bought it. Dead cattle were found three miles from their silage without a scratch on them. Tornadoes are omnipotent and obey no law.

What do I appreciate about Wallace’s essay? 

One, the mind at work with the knowledge of math being applied to tennis with the ability to put all kinds of sentences together that I could never think of and balance sophisticated word choice with just an easy going funny voice. 

Makes me nostalgic for my own Midwestern days playing sports outside, in barns, on the golf course, running the wind for cross country. 

• Those from IN/WI/Northern IL think of their own Midwest as agronomics and commodity futures and corn-detasseling and bean-walking and seed-company capps, apple-checked Nordic types, cider and slaughter and football games with white fogbanks of breath exiting helmets. 

Wallace is funny!

• The Midwest as a person when it comes to weather and “our own personal unsheltered asses.” p. 3
• Starts a paragraph this way: Still strangely eager to speak of weather, 

As a midwesterner who grew up playing sports, what do you connect with here? Does Wallace offer you anything new? 

• Riding my bike to Twelve Mile, riding to Curt Kline’s house. 
• Playing golf at Pond View in the wind, running back to school in the wind during cross country
• Thinking of Jeremy Vogt and Scott Blum and Matt Painter

Vocab words I had to look up (definitions from Webster’s) 

• Conferva as in conferva-choked ditches: any of various filamentous algae that form scums in still or sluggish fresh water
• Detente as in the opponent smelled some breakdown in the odd detente I’d had with the elements: detente as in the relaxation of strained relations or tensions
• Threnody as in the two sirens in Philo weave in and out of each other in a godawful threnody: a song of lamentation for the dead, as in an elegy 

Wallace writes about two things he is pretty good at: tennis and basketball. 

What would be my two things? 

• I need a synonym for basketball as in his “derivative sport” and I need a second synonym for where I grew up as in his “tornado alley.” 
• Blacktop Basketball in The Winamac Town Park 
• Playing Fours in Basketball and Watching Out for Telephone Poles 
• What adjective before basketball? Outdoor, Park, Rom Com
• What phrase for Winamac, Indiana? 

What about the state of our games when we were in high school is gone now? What do players have today that we didn’t have then? In short, how have sports changed since we played in the 80s and early 90s? 

• Back then: team shoes, knee sleeves, wristbands, short shorts, park and barn basketball
• Now: travel basketball, trainers, social media, the full leg or arm sleeve, music during practice

Anything else you want to say about this? 

• Philo, IL (about which Wallace writes) is 150 miles southwest of where we grew up in Winamac, Indiana. 
• The 23 line second to last sentence that precedes the last sentence: Antitoi’s tennis continued to improve after that, but mine didn’t. 

Thanks for checking out the podcast episode!

Have you heard about HBO’s television show The Rooster? On this episode, Anne and I discuss episode 1 of the show that stars Steve Carell as the writer Greg Russo. He’s a bumbling, gold-hearted author who says he writes the kind of novels people like to read at the beach. The show follows Greg as he heads to an elite East Coast college under the guise of a doing a reading. In reality, he’s there to check on his daughter Katie, whose life has spiraled after her husband Archie (played by Ted Lasso’s Phil Dunster) cheated on her with a graduate student.

The episode, titled “Release the Brown Fat,” introduces us to a quirky cast of characters at Ludlow College, from John C. McGinley’s eccentric, sauna-obsessed President Walter Mann to Danielle Deadwyler’s aggressively forward and hilarious poet, Dylan Shepard.

We compared the show to another Bill Lawrence project, Ted Lasso, noting the show’s massive heart and 80s and 90s infused soundtrack. While it shares that signature Lasso warmth and a focus on the wages of divorce, Rooster carves out its own identity through Carell’s portrayal of social discomfort and use of his “shot in the face” metaphor for heartbreak. We cover the “Hot House Rules” of the sauna and that shocking ending involving a first-edition Tolstoy and a house fire.

Is this show worth a watch? (Spoiler: at least for Bill Torg, it definitely is!)

Thanks for checking out the episode!

In this episode of the Torg Stories Podcast, my sister Anne and I discuss the men’s and women’s basketball Final Fours. It was a Big Ten takeover as both Michigan and UCLA won national titles, though the headlines were just as much about some of the coaches as they were about the games. We dive into the physical battle between South Carolina and UConn, Geno Auriemma’s controversial exchange with Dawn Staley, and how Michigan’s was able to secure their first championship since 1989.

Beyond the box scores, we discuss the mass exodus at Tennessee on the women’s side to Mike Malone’s move from the NBA to the ESPN studio to UNC. I also share a few stories from my own trip to the 1997 Final Four in Indy and reveal my updated list of coaches I admire.

Thanks for checking out the episode!