Both Flesh and Not: Essays

by David Foster Wallace

  31 Q.v. in this respect:

  After he knew that he had fallen, outward & down, away from the Fullness, he tried to remember what the Fullness had been….

  He did remember, but found he was silent, & could not tell others.

  He wanted to tell others that she leapt farthest forward & fell into a Passion apart from his embrace.

  She was in great agony, & would have been swallowed up by the sweetness, had she not reached a limit, & stopped.

  But the Passion went on without her, & passed beyond the limit.

  Sometimes he thought he was about to speak, but the silence continued.

  He wished to say: strengthless & female fruit.

  —w/emphasis supplied, from Valentinus’s AD 199 Pleroma, part of the Neo-Platonic Gnosticism that functions as a metaphysical counterpoint to the anti-idealism of the Tractatus, & signals nicely Markson’s artistic ambivalence about whether Kate’s bind is ultimately Hellenic or Evian.

  32 this community being nothing other than sexual society as limned by the males who wrote scripture & epic, these males themselves interpreted & transfigured by Mr. Markson…

  33 p.9

  34 p.24

  35 p.52

  36 p.225

  37 “The world is everything that is the case. The world falls apart into facts.”

  38 Very cool elaborations on this sort of move are observable in J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words & Stanley Cavell’s “Must We Mean What We Say?”

  39 Q.v. PI I, 23…

  40 Q.v. Alan Parsons Project’s dirge-like “Time,” late ’70s.

  41 Tachyons & causality violations & the Superposition Principle all complicate W’s point quite a bit, and actually there’s very interesting stuff starting to appear in industrial mags about deep affinities between ordinary-language temporal locutions & cutting-edge quantum models… but anyway you get the idea.

  42 the famous & infamous Familienahanlichkeiten (no kidding)—c.f. The Blue Book 17 & 87 & 124 or Philosophical Grammar 75 or PI I, 67. For equally famous stuff on games & rules see PI I, 65–88.

  43 PI I, 109…

  44 PI I, 123, a profound little offering meaning roughly to point out that we are now & forever “down here” in language, inside it, on ground-level, & thus have no better a view of the Big Picture than someone earthbound in contrast to someone aloft who can look down at the earthbound guy & the terrain around him, discerning patterns against backdrops of other bigger patterns, seeing them as patterns of something larger instead of as the -bound man’s terrain, maze, world, total…

  45 note in passing that themes of nomination-as-enfranchisement, presence-as-privilege, also run through much of the feminist theory with which this novel’s author reveals himself familiar…

  46 i.e., she’s doing it for mental survival, not for interest or acclaim or tenure…

  47 I keep waiting for feminist theorists to start talking about deterioration as a textual phenomenon; it would be the sort of wry joke that captures truths: “deterioration” is essentially “deconstruction” made passive, observed rather than performed, the reader the ultimate “absentee” in the post-structural totem of absence: one of the things Kate’s story unpacks is the terrific power of writer-as-witness, utterly passive, unheard: it might be this more than what’s argued in the main body below that’s skepticism’s feminist vishna.

  48 I won’t waste anybody’s time shouting about what a marvelous inversion of the Cogito & Ontological Argument this is.

  49 !!!!!

  50 Tractatus 6.54

  51 from my male p.o.v….

  1 “A U.S.T.A. Event.”

  2 Actually, if you count the Grandstand Court’s annex, the whole thing looks more like an ablated head w/neck-stump.

  3 There’s always something extremely delicate and precarious and vulnerable-looking about the umpire’s shoes projecting out over the court from a height in little metal stirrups—the blend of authority and precarious vulnerability is just one of the things that makes a tennis umpire such a compre verelling part of the whole show.

  4 The tentish tops and near-Bermuda-length shorts of M. Jordan and the NBA have clearly infiltrated tennis. Nearly half the men in the 128 draw are wearing clothes that seem several sizes too big, and on players as fundamentally skinny and woebegone-looking as Sampras the effect is more waifish than stylish—though I have to say that weirdly oversized clothes aren’t near the visual disaster that Agassi’s new clunky black sneakers (also imported from basketball fashion) are.

  5 (looking more like ball-grad-students, here, actually—several have earrings and leg hair, and one on the south side’s got a big ginger beard)

  6 The Open’s crowds, I know, are legendary for being loud and vulgar and generally psycho, but I’ve got to say that most of the audiences for most of L.D.W.’s matches seem like people you’d be proud to take home and introduce to the folks. The odd bit of audible nastiness does sometimes issue from way up top in the Stadium’s bleachers, but then usually only when there’s been some missed call or flagrant injustice.

  7 Females in the crowds of this year’s Australian Open apparently screamed and fainted and made with Beatlemania-like histrionics whenever Rafter or Philippoussis appeared, and it’s true that on the court they are both extremely handsome guys; but it’s also true that Mark Philippoussis, close up, looks amazingly like Gaby Sabatini—I mean amazingly, right down to the walk and the jaw line and the existentially affronted facial expression.

  8 The Open’s slow DecoTurf, which various rumors allege has had some kind of extra abrasive mixed in to make it even slower for the Open, favors the power-baseline game of Agassi, Courier, et al.—even netophiles like Edberg and Krajicek have been staying back and whaling through the first two rounds.

  9 The Open’s administration is smart about providing the right visual backdrop for world-class play. The Stadium Court at the du Maurier Ltd. in Montreal this July had yellow bleachers at the north end that, according to players, made it tough to track balls coming from that end, whereas the N.T.C.’s Stadium’s got blue tarps and white chairs and gray chairs, and even the bleachers are high-contrast red—there’s nothing even close to the YG part of the spectrum unless you count the pale-yellow shirts of the Security guys who stand court-side with the crossed arms and beady eyes of Secret Servicemen. (I’ve got to think the whole Seles thing is behind the high-profile Security here.)

  10 The tarp ads around pro tennis courts function like ads on subways, I think. Ads on subways exploit the fact that subway rides present both a lot of mental downtime and a problem with what to look at—the windows are mostly dark, and looking directly at other people on the subway is an action that the lookee can interpret in a number of ways, some of which are uncomfortable or even hazardous—and the ads up over the windows are someplace neutral and adverting to rest the eye, and so they usually get a lot of attention. And tennis is also full of downtime—periods between points, changeovers between odd games—where the eye needs diverting. Plus, during play, the tarp acts as the immediate visual background to the players, and the eyes and cameras always follow the players—including TV—so that having your company’s name hovering behind Sampras as the camera tracks him is a way both to get serioh talwus visual exposure for your company and to have that name associated, even on a subliminal level, with Sampras and tennis and excellence in general, etc. It all seems tremendously sophisticated and shrewd, psychologically speaking.

  11 See FN#1 again—the strong sense I got was that you are never to say “The U.S. Open” in any kind of public way without also saying “A U.S.T.A. Event.” Let’s let the U.S.T.A.’s promotional appendix be implicit from now on; I don’t feel like saying it over and over. The United States Tennis Association gets something like 75 percent of its yearly operating revenues from the U.S. Open, and it’s probably understandable that it would want to attach its name like a remora to the tournament’s flank, but the constant imposition of “A U.S.T.A. Event” all over the
place got a little tiresome, I found, overtaxing the way relentless self-promotion is overtaxing, and I have to say I got a kind of unkind thrill out by the Main Gate’s turnstiles when so many people coming in for the evening session of matches pointed up at the big sign over the Main Gate and asked each other what the hell “USTA” was, making it rhyme with a Boston pronunciation of “buster” or “Custer.”

  12 The names of all the various sponsors are on a big (very big) blue board just inside the National Tennis Center’s Main Gate, with the bigger events’ “presenting sponsors” on the left in huge caps, and in smaller caps on the right the names of pres. spons. of smaller events—Men’s 35s Doubles, Mixed Doubles Masters—as well as other sponsors whose role is unclear beyond having paid a fee to sell concessions where appropriate and/or to have a PR booth on the grounds and a venue to call their own inside the Corporate Hospitality Areas (plus of course having their name on the v.b. blue board). Here’s the whole sign’s program, much reduced in scale: in the middle (natch), “1995 U.S. OPEN—A U.S.T.A. EVENT”; on the left: Infiniti, Redbook, Prudential Securities, Chase Manhattan, FujiFilm, MassMutual; on the right: American Express, AT&T, Ben Franklin Crafts, Café de Colombia, Canon, Citizen Watch Company (Citizen also has its name on all the big real-time and match-duration clocks on the Show Courts), Evian Natural Spring Water, Fila U.S.A., The Haägen-Dazs Co. Inc., Heineken, IBM, K-Swiss, The New York Times (which one kind of wonders, then, how objectively or aggressively the paper could report the facts if like the tournament this year were really boring or poorly managed or crooked somehow, etc.), NYNEX, Pepsi-Cola, Sony, Tampax (which, now that Virginia Slims finally got PC’d out of sponsoring the WTA, put in a bid to be the tour’s new sponsor but was turned down, for reasons that haven’t been made publicly explicit but are probably amusing), Tiffany and Co., Wilson Sporting Goods, good old Tennis magazine (which is itself owned by The New York Times Co., so that the Times sneakily gets on the Board twice), and something called the VF Corporation.

  13 Another sort of endearing thing about Sampras is the way he always sweats through his baby-blue shorts in an embarrassing way that suggests incontinence and lets the world see just where his athletic supporter’s straps are (i.e., after a while the whole upper part of the shorts is sweated through except for a drier area that’s the exact shape and size of a jock). This even TV’s crude pictures can capture, and I think I like it so much because it humanizes Sampras and lets me identify with him in a way that the sheer preternatural beauty of his game does not. For me, similar humanizing foibles in transcendent players included McEnroe’s irrational fits of pique, Lendl’s and Navratis eaulova’s habit of every once in a while getting so nervous and choking so badly on a point that they looked almost spastic and the ball would actually hit the ground before it reached the net, and Connors’s compulsive on-court touching and adjustment of his testes within his jock, as if he needed to know just where they were at all times.

  14 According to M. Chang’s limo driver, it’s been, like, the longest rainless interval of the century for NYC. I don’t know whether that’s true or whether New Yorkers are being enjoined from watering the mums in their window boxes or whatever, but I do know that there hasn’t been one rain-delay in the whole tournament so far, and the upper-management guys from both CBS and the U.S.T.A. are going around looking pleased in a way that’s just short of gloating.

  15 Ascending in the Stadium goes like this: past ten rows of dark-blue seats—actual plastic chairs, the Box Seats—then fifteen rows of light-blue seats, then eighteen rows of noticeably less comfortable gray molded-plastic seats, then (the steps by now so steep they feel the way staircases feel to a small child) uncountable rows of plain red bleachers, the land of backward Mets caps and tattoos and hightop sneakers w/laces untied, the thick honk of Brooklyn accents, a great mass clicking of empty breeze-blown Liquor Bar cups on the cement of the bleachers’ aisles… it’s a climb during which the ears actually pop and the O 2 gets thin and the perspective on the court below becomes horrific, like a skyscraper’s, the players looking insectile and the crowd moving and heaving in a nauseous way that makes the place’s whole structure seem slightly to heave and sway.

  16 (sic—no kidding)

  17 Agassi’s 1995 cybercrewcut, black sneakers, and weird new French-Resistance-fighter-style shirts have, at this year’s Open, made him way more popular with male fans and only slightly less fascinatingly sexy for female fans. (Agassi’s sex-symbolism’s a phenomenon of deep mystery to most of the males I know, since we agree that we can all see clearly that Agassi’s actually a runty, squishy-faced guy with a weird-shaped skull [which the crewcut’s now made even more conspicuous] and the tiny-strided pigeon-toed walk of a schoolkid whose underwear’s ridden up; and it remains completely inexplicable to us, Agassi’s pull and hold on women.)

  18 The National Tennis Center Box Office opens at 1000h., and people start lining up as early as 0600 hoping to get one of the day’s Grounds Passes, and the various incentives and dramas in this AM line of street-savvy New Yorkers are a whole other story in themselves.

  19 (no kidding: miles and miles on Northern through the long intestine of Queens, NY, at least fifty traffic lights)

  20 This is the actual name of the park that the U.S.T.A.’s National Tennis Center is in, a name almost perfect in its unconscious capture of northeast Queens’s summertime essence, connoting as it does equal parts urban sewage, suburban pastora, and bludgeoning sun.

  21 Scalpers are asking and getting $125 for a Grounds Pass and (in at least one case) twice that for an eleventh-row Stadium seat for the afternoon’s matches. The last straightaway of the walkway to the Gate has its healthy share of scalpers making their elliptical pitches from the grassy edge, but (weirdly) thereweihe are just as many furtive-looking parties standing at the edges asking loudly whether anyone passing by has an extra ticket for sale, or would like perhaps to sell their own, as there are scalpers. The scalpers and weird people asking to be scalped seem not even to notice one another, all of them calling softly at once, and this makes the last pre-Gate stretch of the promenade kind of surreally sad, a study in missed connection.

  22 (Knowles has the same sort of perpetually aggrieved emotional style J. P. McEnroe had, except in McEnroe the persecution complex often came off as the high-tension neurosis of a true genius, whereas with Knowles it comes off simply as whiny snarling churlish foul temper. All summer, following the Tour, the Mad Bahamian has been the only ATP player I would watch and actually hope he got beat, badly.)

  23 (Nestor seems like a pretty good egg, though.)

  24(wise king of Pylos and all that)

  25 In 1979 I once played two best-of-five matches in one day in a weird non-U.S.T.A. junior thing in suburban Chicago, and one match went five sets and the other four, and even though I was just seventeen I walked like a very old man for days afterward. And since emotional flexibility is almost impossible for a jr., I remember noticing that all of us who’d played 3/5’s left the site looking utterly wrung-out emotionally, hollow-eyed, with the 1,000-yard stare of pogrom-survivors. I’ve had a special empathic compassion for male players in Slam events ever since, when I watch.

  26 Sampras has a way of making it look like he hits a shot and dematerializes and then rematerializes someplace else in perfect position for the next shot. I have no theories about how he does this. Ken Rosewall is the only other male player in my memory who could seem to flicker in and out of existence like this. (E. Goolagong could do it, too, but not consistently.)

  27 NYC being one of the most turnstile-intensive cities in the world, New Yorkers push through turnstiles with the same sort of elegantly casual élan that really top players evince when warming up.

  28 This ticket-taker, who emerged as without a doubt my favorite character at the whole ’95 Open, agreed to a brief interview but wanted his name withheld—the tournament apparently really does have shadowy Olympian upper-management figures whose wrath the employees fear. This ticket-ta
ker is sixty-one, has worked the “ ’stiles” (as he calls them) at every U.S. Open since Ashe’s stirring five-set defeats of both Graebner and Okker at Forest Hills in ’68, thinks the Flushing Meadows N.T.C. inferior in every conceivable respect to good old Forest Hills, claims that the new half-built Stadium looming over the southern horizon is grotesque and pointless since its size will place the cheap seats at the very outer limits of human eyesight and a match seen from there will look like something seen from an incoming Boeing, plus that the new Stadium’s been a boondoggle from the get-go and is lousy with corruption and malfeasance and general administrative rot—the guy is incredibly articulate and anecdotal and downright moving in his fierce attachment to a game he apparently has never once personally played, and he definitely in my opinion deserves a whole separate Tennis magazine profile next year. His stint at the Open each year is his two-week vacation from his regular job as a toll-taker at the infamous Throgs Neck Bridge between Queens and the southern Bronx, wthe Hishich fact may account for his flinty resolve in the face of intimidating tactics like somebody brandishing a cellular phone at him.