September 12, 2012 On Sports Stage Struck By Scott Korb Most of what I read about professional tennis, particularly the profiles of the game’s biggest names, appears around the Grand Slams, three of which are played over the summer here in the northern hemisphere. This was the summer of Roger Federer, Andy Murray and his new coach Ivan Lendl, and Venus and Serena Williams. Novak Djokovic, the world’s top men’s player when the summer began, had had his moment in Vogue in May 2011, during a season when, at one point, he’d string together forty-three straight victories and lose only six matches. Near the end of that season, about a month after Djokovic saved two match points against Federer’s serve to win their U.S. Open semifinal, the New York Times Magazine ran an essay by Adam Sternbergh called “The Thrill of Defeat.” The occasion for the piece was the “278 million to 1” odds against the Boston Red Sox’s “epic” collapse during the 2011 pennant race. To a Federer fan looking back to the Open, though, those odds seemed about right. What also seemed right were Sternbergh’s thoughts about the basic absurdity of sports and, my affinity for Bart Giamatti notwithstanding, the “terrible sportswriters” who “argue that sports are a grand metaphor, a stage on which we witness essential narratives about determination, bravery and heart.” Read More
September 12, 2012 Arts & Culture Dead Authors at Fashion Week: Part 1 By Katherine Bernard F. Scott Fitzgerald Attends the Alexander Wang Spring 2013 Show. I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere sit in front of you at the Wang show: —“So sorry, but the front row is reserved for bloggers. Writers are in the second.” “I am most certainly a blogger.” —“What’s your blog?” “It’s called Tumblr. Keeps my readers in high spirits.” [A pause; it endured horribly.] I cannot accept that I’m to be deprived of half the view of a show that endures for a mere five minutes. Not to mention the insult of being told by an intern. In turn, I— —“Hi, can I take a quick picture of your style for my blog? ” “Oh, absolutely!” —“Wait, don’t smile.” “Oh, no, of course, I’m sorry.” —“And who makes your suit and shoes?” “Happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing. You can just put ‘vintage’.”
September 11, 2012 First Person Letter from Portugal: Sonnets from the Portuguese By Sadie Stein Dollhouse with Portuguese tile, Museu Do Brinquedo Sintra. You will have heard of Sintra. A stunning enclave some forty minutes outside Lisbon, filled with palaces and piles and follies of every era, Lord Byron called it “Glorious Eden,” and started “Childe Harolde” at Lawrence’s Hotel, on the Rua do Consiglieri Pedroso. (There is now an Escadinhas Lord Byron just outside its doors.) Tourists have been flocking there ever since. We visited the Palácio da Pena with its majestic views, and the pink-hued Palácio Seteais, and the fourteenth-century Palácio Nacional de Sintra and the Gothic pleasure gardens of the Regaleira Estate, rich with grottoes and gargoyles and secret passages. We ate at the Queijadas de Sintra. It was very much the Lucy Honeywell school of tourism, but wonderful all the same. We were part of a multinational throng. I was vaguely aware of being a failure as someone who experiences life to the full, and probably the worst kind of American imperialist to boot. I studied my vocabulary list diligently. In the afternoon, I visited the Toy Museum, lured by the sight of a six-foot Playmobil woman beckoning me in from a wrought-iron balcony. Some visitors seemed disappointed by the somewhat haphazard collection (“Where are the teddy bears?” demanded one disconsolate British tourist. “Where are the rocking horses?” implored her companion.) Read More
September 11, 2012 Bulletin The “American Idol of Microfiction” Gets a New First Prize By The Paris Review How fast can you tell a good story? Three times a year, NPR’s “Three-Minute Fiction” challenges listeners to send in the best stories they can write—and read out loud in less than three minutes. So far, more than 45,000 contestants have taken the challenge. It is, in the words of host Guy Raz, the “American Idol of microfiction.” This Saturday kicks off a new round of “Three-Minute Fiction” with guest judge Brad Meltzer. And with a new first prize—publication in The Paris Review. That’s right: the winner will appear in our Winter issue. So sharpen your pencils, eliminate your unnecessary words, and get ready to write. Click here for details—then tune in to All Things Considered this Saturday (5 P.M. EST) to hear the rules for the latest round. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
September 10, 2012 On Sports 1, Love By Ross Kenneth Urken At its best, my slice backhand follows the flamboyant path of a violin virtuoso’s bow striking the climactic note of a concerto—from above my right shoulder plucked diagonally down to my left shoestring. The ball’s tone is a hollow pok on hard courts and a chalky chh-chh on clay that dies on the second bounce. All these dramatics—mere vestiges of a time when I wanted to impress Angela, my middle school crush. Angela played number one singles on the undefeated coed spring team at our private school in Princeton, New Jersey. Her long Italian American locks springing along with her high jumping-forehand, her second serve ball tucked in the spandex beneath her pristine tennis skirt—she was a vision of beauty to watch. Her movement around the court traced the Etch A Sketch path of someone fully in control of the game’s portrait. In Lolita, Humbert Humbert describes how Dolores Haze plays singles at least twice a week with a classmate, Linda Hall, employing teasing tactics against her and “toying with [her] (and being beaten by her).” The particular beauty of Dolores’s tennis game is, for Humbert, a prerequisite for an amenable afterlife, or so he whimsically hyperbolizes one crisp afternoon as Dolores plays in Colorado: “No hereafter is acceptable if it does not produce her as she was then, in that Colorado resort between Snow and Elphinstone, with everything right …” Read More
September 7, 2012 Windows on the World Sheila Heti, Toronto, Canada By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. Can you see that beautiful shrub? It has no bald patch, right? That’s because the shy, moustached, Portuguese man, who seems to live in that house alone, has spent the last six years standing in front of the hedge, where there was, for so many years, a bald patch. He’d stand before that patch, staring down at it for hours every day, even in the wintertime. When I’d come home from my errands and lock my bike to the pole, he would be there. When I went outside to check my mail, or if I looked up over my laptop, he would still be there. At first I thought he was crazy. Then I began to think of him as more profound than other men. Why should we look at everything all around us? There is enough in a shrub. This summer, the patch filled itself in. I guess he knew all along that it was not lacking water or fertilizer or chemicals or conversation. All it wanted was his attention. Now he stands at another empty patch. I sit in a room lined with books, at a round, teak dining table, on the second (top) floor of a Victorian house. He stares at his shrub as I stare at my computer. His body faces me and mine faces him. Our bodies are opposite each other every day, and we stare at things, and wait for the emptiness to fill in. —Sheila Heti [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]