Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
As promised1 in my last post, here’s a post about the first essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again* by David Foster Wallace. This essay is about tennis. Specifically, it’s about how DFW played tennis (and was highly ranked) as a youngster in Central Illinois.2 There’s a funny bit about him and his friend practicing when a tornado is nigh3.
Ha! This is great! My footnotes might be longer than the text. hee hee.
So anyway. I didn’t come across too many words that made me wish I had a dictionary next to me. And it was fun to read something about stuff that happened not too far from where I lived.4 That’s a really kind of weird and not very specific way to say I really loved reading it.
This is the second post in a series.
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
- Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
- E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
- Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All
- Greatly Exaggerated
- David Lynch Keeps His Head
- Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again… Again
Photo Credit: “Heather Bradley Photography”http://www.flickr.com/photos/senzenina/3787553493/
1 I said I’d write a post for each essay in the book. But I didn’t say anything about what the posts would contain. I’m thinking they won’t be like summaries or "book reporty” things… Maybe just my impressions. Or maybe some jokes. Or a limerick or haiku. Or some random tree babbling that has little to do with the subject of the essay. Guess you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out, won’t ya?
2 He grew up in Philo, Illinois, which is pretty close to Champaign-Urbana, and about, what, an hour or so away from my hometown of Springfield, Illinois.
3 pp. 17–20
4 You know, Springfield, Illinois. And by the way, I would have been between the ages of maybe like 5 and 10 when most of the events in the narrative took place.