[Subject line from Marc Cohn's "Walking to Memphis"]

Just got back from Memphis, where I spent the week watching, writing, and thinking about tennis roughly 16-20 hours a day. At some point, I'll compile and tidy up my reports and archive them somewhere besides the TennisWorld forum; the short version is, to quote Nesby Blanchard (another volunteer at the tournament), "Tennis is about more than just who won."

(Nesby was nifty to chat with -- we had a great conversation over Thursday night supper which ranged from the matches we'd seen (he was impressed by Rendy Lu's valiant effort against Andy Roddick) to the origin of sports, and from coaching kids to choosing lower-impact activities with an eye towards better quality of life in one's dotage.)

Snapshots (usual caveats about amateur quality in effect):
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday and Thursday
Friday

(Haven't organized/captioned the ones from Saturday or Sunday yet.)

I squeezed in some reading during my practice court shifts and meals. Levels of the Game is a sportswriting classic (1969) that may be of interest to those of you interested in texts about race. It's about Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner's 1968 match at the US Open, and among other things, it discusses the expectations placed on Ashe ("The more he wins, the more people look to him for words and acts beyond the court. The black press has criticized him for not doing enough for the cause..."). As a book written more than forty years ago, it contains terms and phrases and cadences that would not appear in a book published now; after I'm caught up on sleep, I want to ponder the concept of "datedness" some more -- the interplay between a book's value as a snapshot of its time, its relevance to readers of a later generation, and beyond that, the charm, allure, and pitfalls of reading English in another key (be it a text from another era or a highly stylized subgenre. More on that in a sec).

Another library book I toted along with me was Paul Fein's Tennis Confidential (2002), which is itself dated: the subtitle is "Today's Greatest Players, Matches, and Controversies." Roger Federer appears in the index once. Rafael Nadal doesn't appear in it at all. Players projected as potential multiple Slam winners have since retired with none. It brought home rather brutally just how short tennis careers tend to be. (David Martin, a player who asked me about the book when I had it out, was still in college when the book came out.)

Yesterday, after watching David and his partner play doubles with a pair from UMemphis yesterday, I ordered some Chinese takeout, took it back to the hotel, and read the November/December 2009 issue of STAR*LINE. (I'd skimmed it a while back and decided to save it for closer reading.) The poems that stood out for me were Matt Betts's "Godzilla's Better Half," Rachel Manija Brown's "Three Letters to the Prince of Falling Leaves," and Steve Rasnic Tem's "The Sadness." Some of the other poems just didn't click with me syntax-wise -- too Renaissance Faire-y, or an adjective on the wrong side of a noun, or an adjective that didn't fit the moment in the poem, all IMNSHO.

The thing is, though, at least with the efforts at high fantasy, I lap up that stuff and bathe in it and write it myself when the wind is high and my skirts are long and the ghosts of morose Scottish spies skulk around my liquor cabinet. (You see?) So I want to relish what I come across, but it's kind of like high-risk ice dancing (cf. Moir and Virtue last night) -- when it clicks just so in every respect, it's dazzling, and when something's a beat off or a fraction too much, it's a nail dragged across a chalkboard. It can be such a fine line, though -- I was going line-by-line through some of George Meredith's castles-and-swords epics earlier this month, and thinking about how they were sort of working for me but not entirely: I kept reading because I wanted to know what happened next, but poetically nothing that made me want to revisit it. (What it really did, actually, was make me think of digging out my old copy of "Modern Love," the better to shiver again at "Dear guests, you now have seen Love's corpse-light shine.")

Going back to STAR*LINE for a sec, the issue also contained Joshua Gage's review of Matt Betts's See No Evil, Say No Evil. I am going to order it as soon as I finish this post, because it contains a poem called "Elvis and Gretel in the Woods beyond the Railroad Tracks" (with Elvis = witch). This I have to read.

And going back to tennis for one more sec, my piece Point by Point is up at the Penny Experiment.