He translated the recondite language of Newton's "Principia" into a dialogue format interspersed with amusing digressions.
"Full of amusing digressions and offhandedly sweeping opinions, the book leaps from one discipline to another," Ted Loos said here last year.
It also manages to discuss the history of the art of divination done by examining freshly slaughtered livers (hepatoscopy), just one among many, mostly amusing, digressions.
Along the way, Mr. Tesich injects some amusing digressions, much as he did in his last (and more concrete) play, "The Speed of Darkness". His main concerns include culture, which is presented as an impotent deterrent to modern horrors, and the Second Coming, which is revealed as futile.
But I digress (from my digression).
Korda's life among horse people, and his marriage to one of them, make a straight line of a story woven through with digressions -- some characteristically amusing and some, despite his skill for telling a yarn, arcane, if you aren't a horse person yourself -- about breeding, or "eventing" or (and these are the best ones) Korda's own misadventures on horseback.
These are fine and amusing rambles, but they are full of needless digressions ("Timothy Leary, was he entirely bogus?"), and they lack the detail and verve of, for example, Robert Sullivan's "Rats" or Sukhdev Sandhu's recent "Night Haunts," participatory journalism about the nether ends of New York and London (and two more emblematic works of what might be called psychogeography).
Quick Digression... Looking back... one of the most amusing moments, for me, in the Fillmore East's history was when Bill Graham announced, that due to all kinds of rising costs, ticket prices were gonna go from $5.00 for the orchestra and $4.00 for the mezzanine and $3.00 for the balcony up to the unheard of, the scandalously blatant ripoff prices of, $3.50, $4.50, $5.50.
