Hannah Swithinbank

witness my apparently surprising lack of surprise

So, Andre Agassi has admitted that he took crystal meth while he was still a tennis player, and then lied about it to the tennis authorities.  I have to confess to being baffled as to why anyone is really surprised by this.  If any top player in recent memory was likely to have taken drugs recreationally  it was going to be Agassi, and it was going to be in that period when his career was on the slide.  I think if the story had broked come out at the time, it would have been hard for me to think much worse of Agassi than I did back then, because he annoyed me for his behaviour and the way he seemed to be wasting his talent – I should point out I have no knowledge whatsoever about the potential performance-enhancing qualities of crystal meth, if it does have performance enhancing qualities then I might have thought worse of him, though I’d probably have had a hard time believing that was why he took it.  It also doesn’t make me think any the worse of him now, or be any less impressed at the way that he rebuilt his life and his career, or lessen my appreciate his tennis in the second phase of his career.

I’m not surprised he lied – I’d be surprised and impressed if any tennis star *didn’t* try and get themselves out of such a situation by any means necessary.   I’m inclined to be pretty digusted at the tennis authorities effectively blinking the other way – but I’m not that surprised either: Agassi wasn’t winning anything at that point in time, but he could still make money for tennis.  I hope they tested him regularly once he did make his comeback  – in the same way that I hope they test all of the big names.  But they have far more questions to answer than Agassi does.

I’m also not surprised that he included the story in his autobiography; no, Boris, and no Rafa, I’m really really not – and it’s not damaging modern tennis *players* (they can do that quite effectively themselves) and it’s not like we didn’t all know the authorities had questions to answer about the drugs testing/appealing/banning process (hello, Gasquet case).  For a start, it’s an autobiography – what would you expect?  Sports autobiographies are normally duller than a very dull thing (see for example, Wallace, David Foster, ‘How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart’ in Consider the Lobster) – my personal desire to sleep through very dull books by sportsmen I have a lot of time for reached its zenith when reading Jason Robinson’s autobiography.   Agassi’s life and career are actually autobiography worth at this stage (unlike, say, that of Andy Murray…), and might actually be worth thinking about in relation to the problems that face some tennis players.   Jennifer Capriati’s could be worthwhile for the same sort of reasons.

I’m inclined could be a good thing for Agassi for him to admit to this – he’s been sitting on it for a while.  Isn’t honesty supposed to be part of the healing/recovery process?  Would we really think better of him if he hadn’t admitted to it and then it came out later?  I have a lot of respect for Agassi for admitting this – he’s taken a personal risk, and not, I think, just to sell copies.    He’s a hero and example to a lot of kids as a tennis star, and I’d rather see him openly admmitting he made mistakes and what the repercussions were – I think it’s better than glossing over the ugly bits.  So good on him.

something I have been waiting my whole life for.

Well, ok, not my whole life, but the last month and a half at least. You may have noticed my burgeoning affection for David Foster Wallace, and his wonderous writing, since I discovered him at the end of last year. Now there is MOOOOORE.

Acutually there probably is more, lots more, since there are probably humungeous numbers of his essays and short stories out there uncollected, not to mention whatever else he was working on. But this isn’t about that. This is about Tennis. Or DFW and Tennis.

David Foster Wallace having been a junior tennis player, properly (as opposed to those of us who just played junior tennis for shits’n'giggles), gets tennis and is pretty much one of the best writers about the game I have ever read. His essay ‘How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart’ started my affection – because it is just so true. Really great sports people can’t explain it. It’s why the best sporting autobiographies are by the slightly less brilliantly talented. Why Will Greenwood’s autobiography is better than Jason Robinson’s, and so on. And then I came across his essay ‘Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness’ (which was originally an Esquire article called ‘The String Theory’), which became the best essay on tennis I’d ever read, despite his lack of affection for Andre Agassi.(1) I read Infinite Jest, which gave me a whole new appreciation for junior tennis, and made me wonder, whilst watching Wimbledon whether the likes of Murray, Monfils, Federer and those other former junior stars were ever as loopy as Hal, Pemulis, John-no-relation-Wayne, et al.

Which note brings us to Federer. There was something odd about reading Infinite Jest, which is that it’s dated. It was written in the mid-90s, and set in the future. In fact, The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment may actually be this year. But of course, the world has changed rather dramatically since the mid-90s, w/r/t the international situation in particular, and so at times the Infinite Jest version of the future strikes you as a bit odd. Not false odd, or anything like that, it’s just that you know we didn’t end up where IJ posited we would, and there’s no way DFW could have known that, and it’s a bit bizarre, like looking at an alternate reality. One of the other things that dates it is the tennis references made in the scenes at the ETA. And when talking about tennis and its purveyors and examples of greatness, there is no Roger Federer. And this, after seven years of wonderous Federer domination, periodically makes the tennis-aware reader blink. Clearly in 1994-95 ish, when DFW was writing (the book was published in 1996) Federer wasn’t a blip on the radar spotting potential genius, at least, not in the US. It’s not really suprising, since Federer, who is three month younger than me, would have 13 or 14, and barely getting going on the junior tour (the boys tour being different to the girls). But it is another oddity; another alternate reality. Tennis World without Roger Federer (not nice). And since then, I’ve been wondering, what did DFW think of Roger Federer?

Yesterday, I was absolutely over the moon to discover (thank you Andrew Womack over at Infinite Summer) that not only did DFW think about Roger Federer, he wrote about him, for the New York Times back in 2006, the year Federer destroyed all comers at Wimbledon – even Nadal (who lost the first set of the final 6-0). And now I think that this may be the best essay on tennis ever written (I haven’t read DFW’s essay about the 1996 US Open though, yet, I’m getting to it). It really really gets why Federer is so special. The bit in the middle where he gets all metaphysical is it; the bit that really explains the Federer magic, the idea that, when I try to express it just emerges as, “It’s ROGER FEDERER,” with lots of arm waving. (2) The essay is made more special, to me, because I was at that Wimbledon, and I saw Roger Federer demolish Tim Henman, and my thoughts were (apparently, since I recorded them) “(a) back from Wimbledon, (b)in awe of Roger Federer, (c) feeling slightly bad for Tim, because he played so much better than the scorecard suggests.(3) I over, identify, slightly, with the writer of this essay, because I, too, have sat with my jaw pretty much on the floor, watching Federer break the laws of physics. And David Foster Wallace is the only writer I’ve come across who has expressed what it feels like.

Which, this is about DFW, so clearly there should be footnotes.
(1) Which is a bit odd itself now, the dislike of Agassi, since he has become the Great Legend. I had to think myself back to the mid-90s whilst reading it and try and remember what I thought of Agassi then. And a bit of me would probably have agreed with DFW – I didn’t much care for him in the mid-90s, between his first Wimbledon title, which I really enjoyed, and his re-emergence at the end of the decade. It wasn’t for the same reasons; I never had a problem with Agassi’s game (though I’d prefer not to watch him play Lleyton Hewitt – too much of the same thing, he needs a contrasting player), but I severely disliked watching him waste it for those years there, and I severely disliked everyone who said that he was better than Sampras, when Sampras was practically camped out on Wimbledon’s centre court, and Agassi was wasting his talent. I’d be interested to know what DFW thought of Agassi by the time he retired, actually.
(2) It’s magic itself, and actually explains why DFW is the Roger Federer of writing. He has the special kinesthetic sense of writing, and is exempt from certain rules.
(3) This further illustrates f/n (2).

Infinite Jest

So, in order to Get It Read, I packed David Foster Wallace’s Monumentally Huge Novel Infinite Jest in my bag for Tanzania. And now I find that bunches of other people are also reading it this summer, and blogging about it. For example – here at Infinite Summer, or here at A Supposedly Fun Thing. Matt Yglesias, of Think Progess is reading it too. There’s also an Infinite Jest wiki, and a guide to reading Infinite Jest that I really wish I’d seen in advance – although I would have skipped to page 223, because I am that person.

A little bit of me is doing the dance of ‘I read it first’. Because I have now finished Infinite Jest, so clearly I am ahead of the pack, making me cooler than cool. But a little bit of me is sad, because it is an amazing idea to read Infinite Jest at the same time as a bunch of other people, and share the experience with them. I keep wanting to talk to people about it, and no-one I know has read it. I think I have Eleanor convinced to read it now, because I kept telling her about it whilst we were away. And I know Joe wants to read it, he just needs to find the time. And time is the issue – I wouldn’t have had time to read Infinite Jest over the summer, because I am embarking on the final editing process of my thesis, and Big Fat Absorbing Books are a big no-no. So I’m just going to enjoy watching other people enjoy it. It’s an amazing piece of literature, though, and I’m going to read it again just as soon as I can find the time because I still need to puzzle out the ending a little. I know I love it, even without entirely getting it, but I want to try and get it a little better.

So here’s the story (you sort of need a story about how you came to read Infinite Jest, I feel, it’s just that big a deal). I first picked up David Foster Wallace’s work just before Christmas last year. I’d heard a lot about the guy after his suicide, and though, “Huh, why haven’t I heard of him before.” So I asked Joe if he had any DFW, and Joe supplied a collection of essays, which featured a DFW essay about a Conservative Talk Radio host, and which was, frankly, barnstormingly awesome. So barnstormingly awesome that I went straight out and bought Consider the Lobster, the DFW collection that featured that essay, as well as Up, Simba, his essay about his time on John McCain’s 2000 Straight Talk Express, an essay about the American porn industry, one about the Maine Lobster festival, and another about sports autobiographies entitled, ‘How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.’ And that was it. I was besotted. I scoured the internet for his complete publications, and ordered Infinite Jest.

Then, it arrived, and I picked it up and started. And realised I’d gone not just from 0-60 on DFW, but 0-60 bajillion. It was just out of my world, and it made my head spin – and not just in the ‘this is amazing’ way the essays made my head spin. In the ‘I’ve never read anything like this in my life’ way. It took me the best part of five months to read the first 100 pages. I tried reading it like I would any other big book, a chapter at a time, in the evenings, waiting for it to click with me. But every time it felt like a slightly different book – I couldn’t work out who the hell anyone was, or when anything was or anything, and that’s before the wild use of language kicked in. So I set it aside. I decided I needed a good solid chunk of reading time to get through it, and that I would take it travelling with me.

I picked it up again at the beginning of June, a week into my trip, and started over. Having fought with/read the first 100 pages once, I raced through them second time, and started to get what was going on. By the time I was 200 pages into it, I was hooked. It was my own personal addiction (and it’s a novel about addiction and tennis – amongst a million other things) and I never wanted to leave it. It was a pretty good thing I had a nine hour bus trip from Arusha to Dar es Salaam to read the thing on, and even better that I then spent three days on the beach on Zanzibar just munching my way through the book. I finally finished it on the plane home – it lasted just the perfect amount of time. It wasn’t like reading any other book I’ve read – it was more like falling into a world and watching it unfold around me, but unfold in a spectacularly non-linear way. The level of observational detail in this thing is simply awesome – a bit of me wonders how a reader copes if they have no background knowledge of tennis, but then I think, they probably cope in the same way I coped with the stuff about drugs, you just read it, and your brain picks out the key points in all the colour, the themes if you will.

I almost can’t say what Infinite Jest is about, or what happens in it – I sort of suspect that it’s about different things for everyone who reads it. I tend to describe it as being about addiction and tennis, because that’s an easy description, but it’s not just that. It’s about happiness, and communication, and addiction and tennis, and pressure and relationships and politics and entertainment, and pretty much the whole of humanity. And it nearly broke my heart, but then it did something totally different than what I was expecting, and didn’t quite break my heart, or at least, not in the way I was expecting it to.

See – it doesn’t quite make sense when I say it like this, unless perhaps you’ve read it too. Which is why this whole ‘Let’s all read Infinite Jest over the summer and talk about it’ thing is such a great idea. You may not be able to make sense of the book or your reaction to it and the way it just won’t leave you alone after you’ve finished it. But at least you can not make sense of it with a bunch of other people who are also getting incoherent over it.

Is Back Home

Sitting in front of the tennis watching Federer and ignoring Robson (who isn’t doing herself any harm with her performance, even if she does go down to Hantuchova). I have seventy thousand photos to process still, but that’ll happen (slowly), and seventy thousand words to edit. I have a print out of the thesis-so-far and am wielding the pink muji pen over it to try and sort out the two problem chapters to the soothing sounds of tennis balls being hit too and fro (and this is why I won’t be watching much women’s tennis – the grunting, it is NOT soothing).

Tanzania ended in a Battle Royale with Kenedy (albeit with less blood) which we finally won. Fortunately, Zanzibar is such that it’s appeal can survive even his awfulness in the memory. Dar not so much – but then there is so little to do, and it’s horribly humid, so it’s not so appealing. We spent our last day on the Msasani Peninsula relaxing at Sea Cliff Village. I got very excited because there was a Spur, which I know from holidays in South Africa, and so we ate amazing steak, and waffles and ice cream, whcih meant there was no room for plane food at all, fortunately.

‘Tis graduation this week, so I’m trying to pack in the work between catching up with the boys who have come back from New Zealand, the US and Cambridge for it. It’s quite like old times, bizarrely, except now Gwyn and I are hard at work in the office (at Jamie and Jeremy’s old desks), and we can make them tea monkey for us. So it’s all go, and I just decided to add to my busy by booking some Edinburgh tickets for the summer. I’m off to see Moon on Tuesday, and Adventureland on Friday at the Film Festival. Now I have tickets for Neil Gaiman and for Gerald Scarfe for the Book Festival, and the Early Edition on the Fringe – that’s my August treat to myself, as I’ll be desperately wrapping up the thesis.