In honor of Super Saturday at the Open, DFW on playing tennis...in the wind...

From his essay "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" from the essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace talks about the challenges of playing tennis in the wind (as Murray and Berdych are attempting to do right now):

"Wind did massive damage to many Central Illinois junior players, particularly in the period from April to July when it needed lithium badly, tending to gust without pattern, swirl and backtrack and die and rise, sometimes blowing one direction at court level and in another altogether ten feet overhead.  The precision in thinking required one to induct trends in percentage, thrust, and retaliatory angle--precision our guy and the other townships' volunteer coaches were good at abstracting about with chalk and board, attaching a pupil's leg to the fence with clothesline to restrict his arc of movement in practice, placing laundry baskets in different corners and making us sink ball after ball, taking masking tape and laying down Chinese boxes within the court's own boxes for drills and wind sprints--all this theoretical prep went out the window when sneakers hit  actual court in a tournament.  The best-planned, best-hit ball often just blew out of bounds, was the basic unlyrical problem.  It drove some kids near-mad with the caprice and unfairness of it all, and on real windy days these kids, usually with talent out the bazoo, would have their first apoplectic racket-throwing tantrum in  about the match's third game and lapse into a kind of sullen coma by the end of the first set, now bitterly expecting to get screwed over by wind, net, tape and sun." (page 9).

Think positive thoughts for Nole this evening!!!!

Coming next week...

Sorry for the lack of daily posting this week.  I've been spending my evenings watching the morning's Olympic tennis matches!  Of course, I've been pulling for John Isner (who I caught live at the US Open last year and who is also unfortunately out of the running for gold) and Serena Williams and the Bryan brothers, but my heart and allegiance belong to Novak Djokovic and his ridiculous ability to DOMINATE the court...sigh...

(I studied dance for 13+ years and was NEVER that flexible...)

 (I love how, even from this far away, his calf muscles are INSANELY defined!)

(He's so dreamy...)

Semifinals are this morning...REALLY looking forward to catching the Murray-Djokovic match on DVR after work.  But I promise, once Men's and Women's Singles gold medals have been awarded (hopefully Serbia and America respectively will come out on top) you will have my undivided attention again ;)

Here's what to look for on the blog next week:

1) Review of Understories by Tim Horvath

Summary (from the Strand website):  "What if there were a city that consisted only of restaurants? What if Paul Gauguin had gone to Greenland instead of Tahiti? What if there were a field called Umbrology, the study of shadows, where physicists and shadow puppeteers worked side by side? Full of speculative daring though firmly anchored in the tradition of realism, Tim Horvath's stories explore all of this and more? blending the everyday and wondrous to contend with age-old themes of loss, identity, imagination, and the search for human connection. Whether making offhand references to Mystery Science Theater, providing a new perspective on Heidegger's philosophy and forays into Nazism, or following the imaginary travels of a library book, Horvath's writing is as entertaining as it is thought provoking."

2) Ask and ye shall receive!  I was recently asked by a reader to share my thoughts on Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad, a book I've mentioned several times here but never formally reviewed...so look for that next week as well!

Summary (from the Strand website): "'Time's a goon,' as the action moves from the late 1970s to the early 2020s while the characters wonder what happened to their youthful selves and ideals. Egan takes the music business as a case in point for society's monumental shift from the analog to the digital age. Record-company executive Bennie Salazar and his former bandmates from the Flaming Dildos form one locus of action; another is Bennie's former assistant Sasha, a compulsive thief club-hopping in Manhattan when we meet her as the novel opens, a mother of two living out West in the desert as it closes a decade and a half later with an update on the man she picked up and robbed in the first chapter. It can be alienating when a narrative bounces from character to character, emphasizing interconnections rather than developing a continuous story line, but Egan conveys personality so swiftly and with such empathy that we remain engaged. By the time the novel arrives at the year '202-' in a bold section narrated by Sasha's 12-year-old daughter Alison, readers are ready to see the poetry and pathos in the small nuggets of information Alison arranges like a PowerPoint presentation. In the closing chapter, Bennie hires young dad Alex to find 50 'parrots' (paid touts masquerading as fans) to create 'authentic' word of mouth for a concert. This new kind of viral marketing is aimed at 'pointers,' toddlers now able to shop for themselves thanks to 'kiddie handsets' the preference of young adults for texting over talking is another creepily plausible element of Egan's near-future. Yet she is not a conventional dystopian novelist; distinctions between the virtual and the real may be breaking down in this world, but her characters have recognizable emotions and convictions, which is why their compromises and uncertainties continue to move us.Another ambitious change of pace from talented and visionary Egan, who reinvents the novel for the 21st century while affirming its historic values."


I'm almost finished both Claire Vaye Watkin's powerhouse of a short story collection, Battleborn, and Ben Marcus' The Flame Alphabet, so reviews for those should be up soon as well!