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Catarina Gonçalves catarinagoncalves — I'm bewitched by this glorious magenta cover with yellow starfish and the peculiarly flattened and shaped white font. I don't know why it is, but whenever I purchase the British edition of a book, inevitably I aesthetically prefer its differing cover artwork, layout, colour scheme, blurb text—the whole canoodle is just presented to this set of timeworn eyes in a more attractive package than what is offered from North American publishing houses. Not to mention that they generally even smell better—and if you are one of those weirdos who doesn't sniff your book's pages, well, I'm sure I won't be the first person to inform you that you are missing out on an integral component of the entire reading experience. Bury that nose, Jack. I read the first essay Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley this morning while the fog of sleep was slowly dissipating from my brain—it was a little meatier fare than I had initially expected. Gorgeous opening paragraph, though, ending in the following wonderfully etched phrase that immediately informed me I would need to brew myself up some coffee: The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child's play. Then a very nice essay reflecting upon DFW's childhood amidst the corn-rich, lush black earth of the Illinois segment of the fertile American midwest, told through his formative years as a junior tennis player and framed with the mathematical boundaries of the playing court and the differentiating vectors of the omnipresent flavors of wind that live out their rich aerial life over these flat and fecund fields. Somewhat difficult in DFW's uniquely readable style that forces your mind into a slightly off-kilter rhythm, and with that humorous wit splayed throughout his self-deprecating description of his usage of an enviro-mathematical understanding of the elements—that sky dervish wind most of all—as an integral component of his tennis game, making an ally out of what bedeviled and frustrated his more talented opponents. It gains in power as it moves through its short textual life, ending with a brilliantly conceived depiction of an Alley tornado—or pseudo-tornado—that descended one day, flattening the fields like a titanic, invisible hand brutally caressing its verdant earthly lover. DFW's description of his being lifted from pursuit of the neon tennis ball, overtaking it and then, together with his playing partner and friend Gil Antitoi, being waffle-ironed into the chain-link fence in Warner Brothers fashion, makes for a pitch-perfect ending. It also took me somewhat longer to finish E Unibus Pluram than I had originally anticipated. As a fiction writer—albeit one whose work has an audience of Me, Myself, and I—I can immediately locate myself in DFW's opening description of that kind; and his commiserative outlining of what constitutes a lonely person cuts through in can-opener fashion to expose the roots of self-isolation within awareness using but a few lines of simple truth. This is one of those reading experiences that assembles myriad ideas and thoughts and analyses which one has previously encountered from different sources and writers and coheres them into a whole that is profound, which unfolds with the inevitable logic of a sunrise and casts a new light upon the shadowy world that lies before it. In addition to instilling in me a renewed avowal to tackle DeLillo's White Noise, I thought that his argument was firmly constructed: a walk-through of the way in which the Televisual has co-opted the postmodernist usage of irony, the absurd, ridicule, and self-awareness and managed to inoculate itself from the effects of such criticisms; how this post-postmodernist revolt against the revolution was a logical and foreseeable progression from the literary and artistic tropes of modernism; that one of these linkages proceeds through the cultural and existential implications of mass-communication technologies in which the evolution is from individuals comforted with the illusion of being immersed within the communal masses to that of said masses becoming individualized as unique—and uniquely superior—personalities ironically aware of the sublimating deceptions of the former state but oblivious at the important levels as to the subtle changes at work within the latter, including the immersion of the personality inside the fantasy of the Televisual screen; and that this irony, noninvolvement, and ridicule, whilst entertaining and amusing as put into action by both the Televisual and the literary authors who are endeavoring to undermine it, is ultimately a despairing and stagnant strategy whose end result seems only to be a paralysis towards societal changes. Is the answer to be found in a new generation of young writers willing to commit, to risk the backlash of scorn and mockery for penning characters with ideals and beliefs and writing about them sincerely? A backing away from the Jon Stewartization of liberal news into liberal entertainment, from knowing winks and Geddit?Geddit! nods? I think it's a step in the right direction. But it will be very difficult: in an essay in which he presented the thesis outlined above, he was unable to refrain from indulging in the same ironic awareness, the same refusal to fully commit to a claim (his two or three asides that he wasn't trying to say that television is this or the industry that), and the same (gentle) ridicule, especially present in the tweaking of George Gilder's breathless conservo-libertarian technophilia towards the end of the essay, a subtle choice by DFW, made—and acknowledged afterwards—in order to strengthen his textual argument: that this postmodernist technique has become so prevalent that even an author like this one, aware of its allure, finds it exceedingly difficult to break away from its pervasive influence. A very worthwhile essay, one which I am glad to have finally read and which, it seems to me, has only become more relevant in this new century. At first glance, Greatly Exaggerated doesn't strike one as the kind of essay that would appeal to very many reader's tastes, being a relatively brief review of Morte d'Author: An Autopsy, the commercial print of a Ph.D. dissertation submitted by the enchantingly named H. L. Hix, whom Wallace describes as appearing to have arrived at about the ripe old age of twelve according to the jacket photo. Hix had positioned himself as an adjudicator for the estranged and bifurcated camps of the rather turgid world of literary criticism: the predominantly continental Pro-Death gang—holding the author to be an effect of the text—and the principally Anglo-American Anti-Death crowd, who deem the author to be the cause. I've never taken a university course in my life, nor read any books about literary theory—which, come to think of it, might go a ways towards explaining the content and style of my Goodreads reviews—and what little I've come across describing the strangled arguments of these Poststructuralist and New Critical positions has struck me as labyrinthine and rather immaterial—though Jeff Goldstein, of the US conservative blog Protein Wisdom, had written some very interesting and clarifying posts—before he suffered a meltdown he has never fully recovered from—arguing for the Intentionalist point-of-view. DFW, in the space of a mere eight pages, stakes the positions of the various camps, the combinatory attempt by Hix to reconcile these bickering critical standpoints, delivers a good number of enlightening lines and amusing digs about the entire affair, and closes with a quote from William Gass that seems particularly apropos. Typical to my experience so far with this book of essays, Wallace possesses the arrhythmic ability to switch on a dime from easy, bantering prose to one laden with unfamiliar and daunting words that block the stream and hobble one's pace, jarring the reader out of his comfort zone and forcing him to regroup and concentrate anew upon what Wallace is saying. It can sometimes make for a slower reading experience, but, ultimately, one more enriching. Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Argle-Bargle-Too-Long-To-Type is my favorite essay thus far. I truly love the manner in which DFW writes about tennis, the combination of detached observation, passionate advocacy, breezy and witty analogy, and acute deconstruction of what is taking place both on and off the court that he brings to the task—and the fact that he once attained the ranking of 17th as a junior within the Midwest Division gives him an insider's knowledge of the mechanics of the game—the requisite functional computation of angles and tactics on the run whilst dealing with all of the mental and physical pressures placed upon and within the human frame in trying to chase down and whack a tangerine-sized ball and dealing with an opponent skilled in the same conscious and unconscious calculations and reactions in pursuit of the same seamed neon spheroid—that only adds depth and veracity to his reportage. When Wallace categorically states that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is I admit to full agreement—allowing myself, of course, the hedge of declaring that it shares that summit with ice hockey and football (soccer to us North American philistines); but the latter two are team games, and as far as solo sporting endeavors are concerned, tennis is firmly placed at the aesthetic acme. It was Wallace, after all, who described Roger Federer's mesmerizingly beautiful forehand as a great liquid whip, which is of such an apt, exquisite perfection that it will forever spring to mind when I spy the Mighty Fed cracking winners. Wallace's awe and appreciation of the power and grace, the speed and dexterity, the patience and endurance that intertwine within the world-class tennis professional shine through whenever he writes about tennis, and especially in this essay, in which the then-79th-ranked-and-22-years-old American Michael Joyce, a sturdy, prematurely-balding power baseliner, built in the mold of Agassi—whom DFW loathed—serves as the locus for Wallace's musings about the action underway during the 1995 Canada Masters in Montréal, with a particular focus upon the Qualifying Tournament that preceded the main event, a struggle between sixty-four pros without sufficient ranking to guarantee entry to receive one of the eight available qualifier placements. The few niggardly quibbles I had—in describing the career arc of singles' journeyman Jakob Hlasek, he entirely omitted the latter's fine results in doubles tennis, in which he won the 1992 French Open and reached four other Grand Slam semifinals; his unawareness that each year Toronto and Montréal swap locations for the ATP Men's and WTA Women's events respectively; his much-too-harsh condemnation of John McEnroe becoming a tennis color commentator—are minor ones indeed; this is a wonderfully written tour of the world of men's tennis circa 1995. His descriptions of the tour's players are spot-on and brilliant; his relation of the tawdriness and excitement of the event amusingly excellent; his understanding and analysis of the type of psyches required, the drive of both parent and child to produce such a sleek, athletic automaton, both deep and convincing; his details of the peripatetic lifestyle, the challenges and chill lonelinesses of the low-paid, struggling tennis would-be-stars commiserative and informatory; and his assessment of the newly-emergent and -dominant style of the Power Baseliner—which, by 2004, had effectively eliminated the serve-and-volley game, that of personal favorites such as Sampras, McEnroe, Ivanisevic, Becker, and Edberg, from professional tennis—absolutely nails it, especially his perceptive observation of it as awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty. Preach it, brother.