Status Updates From String Theory: David Foster...

Ok, I now understand that David Foster Wallace's brilliant String Theory prose is best enjoyed and can only approach digestion when exuberantly read aloud in a strong, steady voice. Try it. It's exhilarating.

I just finished the one on Michael Joyce, and let me just pause to appreciate these lines:
1. "...[John McEnroe, as he prepares to serve, looks like a] figure on an Egyptian frieze."
2. "[Krajicek] rushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid crane.”
3. "[Pete Sampras] is mostly teeth and eyebrows.”
4. And this one re: Andre Agassi: “...about as cute as a Port Authority whore.”

"Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable. To be a top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves." (How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, p. 27)

"...we were both in the fugue-state that exhaustion through repetition brings on, a fugue-state I've decided that my whole time playing tennis was spent chasing, [...] hypnotic, a mental state at once flat and lush, numbing and yet exquisitely felt." (Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley, p. 20)

Unbelievably great essay on Roger Federer. I've always loved him, now I understand why. Beautiful descriptions that capture the game and the man perfectly. Wallace may be the Federer of the written word. Graceful, pushing boundaries, revolutionizing his craft, eloquent, magical.

I think I've read four of these five essays, but it's nice to do so again as a bigger fan of tennis. I long for a DFW analysis of Djokovic or Murray.

Dr Earls would love his style