Both Flesh and Not: Essays

Notes

1 There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits — every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It’s your body that dies, after all.

There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously — it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies (“I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!” etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important — they make up for a lot.

2 The U.S. media here are especially worried because no Americans of either sex survived into even the quarterfinals this year. (If you’re into obscure statistics, it’s the first time this has happened at Wimbledon since 1911.)

3 Actually, this is not the only Federer-and-sick-child incident of Wimbledon’s second week. Three days prior to the men’s final, a Special One-on-One Interview with Mr. Roger Federer^* takes place in a small, crowded International Tennis Federation office just off the third floor of the Press Center. Right afterward, as the ATP player-rep is ushering Federer out the back door for his next scheduled obligation, one of the ITF guys (who’s been talking loudly on the telephone through the whole Special Interview) now comes up and asks for a moment of Roger’s time. The man, who has the same slight, generically foreign accent as all ITF guys, says: “Listen, I hate doing this. I don’t do this, normally. It’s for my neighbor. His kid has a disease. They will do a fund-raiser, it’s planned, and I’m asking can you sign a shirt or something, you know — something.” He looks mortified. The ATP rep is glaring at him. Federer, though, just nods, shrugs: “No problem. I’ll bring it tomorrow.” Tomorrow’s the men’s semifinal. Evidently the ITF guy has meant one of Federer’s own shirts, maybe from the match, with Federer’s actual sweat on it. (Federer throws his used wristbands into the crowd after matches, and the people they land on seem pleased rather than grossed out.) The ITF guy, after thanking Federer three times very fast, shakes his head: “I hate doing this.” Federer, still halfway out the door: "no problem.” And it isn’t. Like all pros, Federer changes his shirt a few times during matches, and he can just have somebody save one, and then he’ll sign it. It’s not like Federer’s being Gandhi here — he doesn’t stop and ask for details about the kid or his illness. He doesn’t pretend to care more than he does. The request is just one more small, mildly distracting obligation he has to deal with. But he does say yes, and he will remember — you can tell. And it won’t distract him; he won’t permit it. He’s good at this kind of stuff, too.

^* (Only considerations of space and basic believability prevent a full description of the hassles involved in securing such a One-on-One. In brief, it’s rather like the old story of someone climbing an enormous mountain to talk to the man seated lotus on top, except in this case the mountain is composed entirely of sports-bureaucrats.)

4 Top men’s serves often reach speeds of 125–135 m.p.h., true, but what all the radar signs and graphics neglect to tell you is that male power-baseliners’ groundstrokes themselves are often traveling at over 90 m.p.h., which is the speed of a big-league fastball. If you get down close enough to a pro court, you can hear an actual sound coming off the ball in flight, a kind of liquid hiss, from the combination of pace and spin. Close up and live, you’ll also understand better the “open stance” that’s become such an emblem of the power-baseline game. The term, after all, just means not turning one’s side all the way to the net before hitting a groundstroke, and one reason why so many power-baseliners hit from the open stance is that the ball now is coming too fast for them to get turned all the way.

5 This is the large (and presumably six-year-old) structure where Wimbledon’s administration, players, and media all have their respective areas and HQs.

6 (Some, like Nadal or Serena Williams, look more like cartoon superheroes than people.)

7 When asked, during the aforementioned Special One-on-One Interview, for examples of other athletes whose performances might seem beautiful to him, Federer mentions Jordan first, then Kobe Bryant, then “a soccer player like — guys who play very relaxed, like a Zinédine Zidane or something: he does great effort, but he seems like he doesn’t need to try hard to get the results.”

Federer’s response to the subsequent question, which is what-all he makes of it when pundits and other players describe his own game as “beautiful,” is interesting mainly because the response is pleasant, intelligent, and cooperative — as is Federer himself — without ever really saying anything (because, in fairness, what could one say about others’ descriptions of him as beautiful? What would you say? It’s ultimately a stupid question):

“It’s always what people see first — for them, that’s what you are ‘best at.’ When you used to watch John McEnroe, you know, the first time, what would you see? You would see a guy with incredible talent, because the way he played, nobody played like this. The way he played the ball, it was just all about feel. And then you go over to Boris Becker, and right away you saw a powerful player, you know?^* When you see me play, you see a ‘beautiful’ player — and maybe after that you maybe see that he’s fast, maybe you see that he’s got a good forehand, maybe then you see that he has a good serve. First, you know, you have a base, and to me, I think it’s great, you know, and I’m very lucky to be called basically ledyou‘beautiful,’ you know, for style of play. Other ones have the ‘grinder’ [quality] first, [some] other ones are the ‘power player,’ [still] other ones are ‘the quick guy.’ With me it’s, like, ‘the beautiful player,’ and that’s really cool.”

^* (N.B. Federer’s big conversational tics are “maybe” and “you know.” Ultimately, these tics are helpful because they serve as reminders of how appallingly young he really is. If you’re interested, the world’s best tennis player is wearing white warm-up pants and a long-sleeved white microfiber shirt, possibly Nike. No sport coat, though. His handshake is only moderately firm, though the hand itself is like a carpentry rasp (for obvious reasons, tennis players tend to be very callusy). He’s a bit bigger than TV makes him seem — broader-shouldered, deeper in the chest. He’s next to a table that’s covered with visors and headbands, which he’s been autographing with a Sharpie. He sits with his legs crossed and smiles pleasantly and seems very relaxed; he never fidgets with the Sharpie. One’s overall impression is that Roger Federer is either a very nice guy or a guy who’s very good at dealing with the media — or [most likely] both.)

8 Special One-on-One support from the man himself for this claim: “It’s interesting, because this week, actually, Ancic [comma Mario, the towering Top-Ten Croatian whom Federer beat in Wednesday’s quarterfinal] played on Centre Court against my friend, you know, the Swiss player Wawrinka [comma Stanislas, Federer’s Davis Cup teammate], and I went to see it out where, you know, my girlfriend Mirka [Vavrinec, a former Top 100 female player, knocked out by injury, who now basically functions as Federer’s Alice B. Toklas] usually sits, and I went to see — for the first time since I have come here to Wimbledon, I went to see a match on Centre Court, and I was also surprised, actually, how fast, you know, the serve is and how fast you have to react to be able to get the ball back, especially when a guy like Mario [Ancic, who’s known for his vicious serve] serves, you know? But then once you’re on the court yourself, it’s totally different, you know, because all you see is the ball, really, and you don’t see the speed of the ball….”

9 We’re doing the math here with the ball traveling as the crow flies, for simplicity. Please do not write in with corrections. If you want to factor in the serve’s bounce and so compute the total distance traveled by the ball as the sum of an oblique triangle’s^* two shorter legs, then by all means go ahead — you’ll end up with between two and five additional hundredths of a second, which is not significant.

^* (The slower a tennis court’s surface, the closer to a right triangle you’re going to have. On fast grass, the bounce’s angle is always oblique.)

1 °Conditioning is also important, but this is mainly because the first thing that physical fatigue attacks is the kinesthetic sense. (Other antagonists are fear, self-consciousness, and extreme upset — which is why fragile psyches are rare in pro tennis.)

11 The best lay analogy is probably to the way an experienced driver can make all of good driving’s myriad little decisions and adjustments without having to pay real attention to them.

12 (… assuming, that is, that the sign’s “with heavy topspin” is modifying “dominate” rather than “powerful hitters,” which actually it might or might not — British grammar is a bit doar “dgy)

13 (which neither Connors nor McEnroe could switch to with much success — their games were fixed around pre-modern rackets)

14 Formwise, with his whippy forehand, lethal one-hander, and merciless treatment of short balls, Lendl somewhat anticipated Federer. But the Czech was also stiff, cold, and brutal; his game was awesome but not beautiful. (My college doubles partner used to describe watching Lendl as like getting to see Triumph of the Will in 3-D.)

15 See, for one example, the continued effectiveness of some serve-and-volley (mainly in the adapted, heavily ace- and quickness-dependent form of a Sampras or Rafter) on fast courts through the 1990s.

16 It’s also illustrative that 2002 was Wimbledon’s last pre-Federer final.

17 In the ’06 final’s third set, at three games all and 30–15, Nadal kicks his second serve high to Federer’s backhand. Nadal’s clearly been coached to go high and heavy to Federer’s backhand, and that’s what he does, point after point. Federer slices the return back to Nadal’s center and two feet short — not short enough to let the Spaniard hit a winner, but short enough to draw him slightly into the court, whence Nadal winds up and puts all his forehand’s strength into a hard heavy shot to (again) Federer’s backhand. The pace he’s put on the ball means that Nadal is still backpedaling to his baseline as Federer leaves his feet and cranks a very hard topspin backhand down the line to Nadal’s deuce side, which Nadal — out of position but world-class fast — reaches and manages to one-hand back deep to (again) Federer’s backhand side, but this ball’s floaty and slow, and Federer has time to step around and hit an inside-out forehand, a forehand as hard as anyone’s hit all tournament, with just enough topspin to bring it down in Nadal’s ad corner, and the Spaniard gets there but can’t return it. Big ovation. Again, what looks like an overwhelming baseline winner was actually set up by that first clever semi-short slice and Nadal’s own predictability about where and how hard he’ll hit every ball. Federer surely whaled that last forehand, though. People are looking at each other and applauding. The thing with Federer is that he’s Mozart and Metallica at the same time, and the harmony’s somehow exquisite.

By the way, it’s right around here, or the next game, watching, that three separate inner-type things come together and mesh. One is a feeling of deep personal privilege at being alive to get to see this; another is the thought that William Caines is probably somewhere here in the Centre Court crowd, too, watching, maybe with his mum. The third thing is a sudden memory of the earnest way the press bus driver promised just this experience. Because there is one. It’s hard to describe — it’s like a thought that’s also a feeling. One wouldn’t want to make too much of it, or to pretend that it’s any sort of equitable balance; that would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.

1 Hereafter abbreviated “C.Y.”

2 These words are capitalized because they understand themselves as capitalized. Trust me on this.

3 On these, too: they are to Programs what azan are to mosques.

4 Only considerations of space and legal liability restrain me from sharing with you in detail the persistent legend, at one nameless institution, of the embalmed cadaver cadged from the medical school by two deeply troubled young M.F.A. candidates, enrolled in a workshop as their proxy, smuggled pre-bell into the seminar room each week, and propped in its assigned seat, there to clutch a pencil in its white fist and stare straight ahead with an expression of somewhat rigid good cheer. The name of the legend is “The Cadaver That Got a B.”

5 Take your pick of Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, or Richards and insert “feeling,” “freedom from phenomena,” or “relevant mental condition,” respectively, in the space provided.

1 … which succumbs to the hazard of most parody and gets the point of Leibniz’s best-of-all-possible-worlds stuff totally wrong.

2 The word Wittgenstein uses as an example of family resemblance is “game”: i.e., what do soccer, Monopoly, and solitaire, for all their differences, have in common by virtue of which they all correctly take the same four-letter predicate? [Philosophical Grammar, pp.75, 118]

3 Hereafter abbreviated WM

4 viz. Amy Hempel, minimalist ordinaire, in the Review’s 22 May 1988 encyclical.

5 Q.v. “Who’s on First?”

6 Q.v. Audi’s ’89 slogan for print adverts: “IT SETS THE STANDARD BY IGNORING IT.”

7 A distinction of Frege, a Wittgenstein-era titan: to mention a word or phrase is to speak about it, w/at least implicit quotation marks: e.g., “Kate” is a four-letter name; to use a word or phrase is to mention its referent: e.g., Kate is by default the main character of Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

8 Unless you can empty your head of connotation and translate the word literally from the Attic Greek — then it probably has a Marksonian poignancy no other term would have…

9 The ep. is “What an extraordinary change takes place… when for the first time the fact that everything depends upon how a thing is thought first enters the consciousness, when, in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality.”… from “The Task of Becoming Subjective” in the Postscript—maybe worth noting that the form of “change” in the Danish is accusative rather than nominative & that what Markson renders as “extraordinary” appears in some other translations as “terrible” or “of thoroughgoing fear.”

10 … maybe Beckett in Molloy…

11 He pretty obviously never could have had a daughter, either. But he did have intellectual “heirs,” and Wittgenstein’s Daughter would have Kate seem like one — too simple, linear, for so complex a character or her relations to masters. Plus “daughter,” unlike “mistress,” fails to convey the exquisite loneliness of being the linguistic beloved of a man who could not, in emotional practice, confer identity on a woman via his love.

12 … though she never says what’s true: that it was at first for a particular person, her husband, then only eventually for just anyone at all…

13 (data transferred to herself, or her self-consciousness, or to whoever may come down the pike, or to both herself and someone else, or to neither, or maybe all that’s supposed to be left here is the sand of text, awaiting tides)

14 Hereafter abbreviated Tractatus, and the equally famous 1953 Philosophical Investigations just the Investigations, as it’s known in the industry, or PI.

15 E.g., “What is the use of studying philosophy,” Wittgenstein wrote to a U.S. student while working on the Investigations in 1946, “if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?”

16 Scholars tend to schizofy Wittgenstein, counterposing the early” W of the Tractatus and the “late” W of the Investigations, The Blue and Brown Books, and Philosophical Grammar.

17 See the Tractatus; emphasis supplied.

18 this connection-urge more fundamental and scary than the humanistic syrup of Howard’s End’s “Only connect”: the latter refers to relations between persons, the former to the possibility of any extracranial universe at all…

19 plus continual reference to bunches of tennis balls bouncing all over the place made me realize tennis balls are about the best macroscopic symbol there is for the flux of atomistic fact…

20 pp. 88&89

21 Tractatus 1.2

22 Since I can’t find any more graceful place to stick it in, let me invite you, with this line as exemplar, to see another cool formal horizon-expansion Mr. Markson effects in WM—the mode of presentation is less “stream of consciousness” than “stream of conscious utterance”; Markson’s technique here shares the associative qualities of Joycean S.O.C. but differs in being “directed”: at what or whom it’s directed becomes the novel’s implicit, or anti-, plot, & accounts for a “narrative movement” that’s less linear or even circular than spiral.

23 p.62

24 See William Barrett, “Wittgenstein the Pilgrim,” in The Illusion of Technique, Doubleday ’78.

25 Dr. James D. Wallace, unpublished response to his son’s cries for help with Wittgenstein’s Mistress and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

26 Also true that Kate identifies closely with Penelope, Clytemnestra, Eve, Agamemnon, & particularly Cassandra, the mad prophetess who warned about armed men inside empty gifts. But Iebrets.entim thinking Cassandra’s importance is more a function of Kate’s self-consciousness about her own identification with Helen and feminine culpability, about which more below.

27 (the same period of time Kate spent traversing the ancient & modern empty worlds, flopping in museums and “looking” for people)

28 p.59, c.f. 8–9, 22

29 Evidently pretty close for readers: over half the reviews of WM when it came out misnamed the narrator Helen.

30 This is not my analogy, but I can’t think of a better one, even though this isn’t all that good; but I see the point & trust you do — it’s one of those alarm-bell issues where the narrative voice is clearly communicating to a reader while pretending not to, as in like “Lord, Cragmont, the vermilion of your MOTHER tattoo is looking even more lurid against the dead-white of your prison pallor now that the circulation’s returned to the legs you smashed trying to outrun a 74-car grain train in Decatur IL that balmy yet somehow also chill night in 1979”—“clunky” is the best analysis for stuff like this.

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-taker 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.

29 The Daily Drawsheet has the distinction of being the single cheapest concession at the 1995 U.S. Open. A small and ice-intensive sodapop comes in second at $2.50.

30 Even though it’s totally unguarded, people maintain the sort of respectful distance from the plunging Infiniti that one associates with museums and velvet ropes.

31 (… this popcorn being the deep-yellow, highly salty kind that makes an accompanying beverage all but mandatory — same deal with the concessions’ big hot doughy pretzels, Manhattan-street-corner-type pretzels glazed with those nuggets of salt so big that they just about have to be bitten off and chewed separately. U.S. Open pretzels are $3.00 except in the International Food Village on the Stadium’s south side, a kind of compressed orgy of concession and crowded eating, where pretzel prices are slashed to $2.50 per.)

32 Take, e.g., a skinny little Häagen-Dazs bar — really skinny, a five-biter at most — which goes for a felonious $3.00, and as with most of the food-concessions here you feel gouged and outraged about the price right up until you bite in and discover it’s a seriously good Häagen-Dazs bar. The fact is that when you’re hungry from the sunshine and fresh air and match-watching and gushing sympathetic saliva from watching everybody else in the crowds chow down, the Häagen-Dazs bars aren’t worth $3.00 but are worth about $2.50. Same deal with the sodapop and popcorn; same deal with the kraut-dogs on sale from steam-billowing Coney Island Refreshment stands for what seems at first glance like a completely insane and unacceptable $4.00—but then you find out they’re really long and really good, and that the kraut is the really smelly gloppy kind that’s revolting when you’re not in the mood for kraut but rapturously yummy when you are in the mood for kraut. While I grumbled both times, I bought two separate kraut-dogs, and I have to admit that they hit the old spot with a force worth at least, say, $3.25.

I should also add that Colombian Coffee was FREE at all concession stands on the N.T.C. grounds over Labor Day Weekend — part of this year’s wildly aggressive Juan Valdez — marketing blitz at Flushing Meadows. This seemed like a real good deal until it turned out that 90 percent of the time the concession stands would claim to be mysteriously “temporarily out” of Colombian Coffee, so that you ended up forking over $2.50 for an overiced cup of Diet Coke instead, having at this point spent way too much time in the concession line to be able to leave empty-handed. It is not inconceivable that the concession stands really were out of coffee—“FREE” representing the price at which the demand curve reaches its most extreme point, as any marketer knows — but the hardened U.S. consumer in me still strongly suspected that a coffee-related Bait and Switch was in operation at some of these stands, at which the guys behind the counter managed to give the impression that they were on some kind of Rikers Island work-release program or were moonlighting from their real occupation as late-night threatening-type lurkers at Port Authority and Penn Station.

Nevertheless, the point is that every concession stand in the N.T.C. had constant long lines in front of it and that a good 66 percent of the crowds in the Stadium and Grandstand and at the Show Courts could be seen ingesting some sort of concession-stand item at any given time.

33 And in order to be properly impressed by the volume of concessions consumption, you need to keep in mind what a hassle it is to go get concessions when you’re watching a pro match. Take the Stadium for example. You can leave your seat only during the ninety-second break between odd games, then you have to sort of slalom down crowded Stadium ramps to the nearest concession stand, hold your place in a long and Hobbesian line, hand over a gouge-scale sum, and then schlep back up the ramp, bobbing and weaving to keep people’s elbows from knocking your dearly bought concessions out of your hands and adding them to the crunchy organic substratum of spilled concessions you’re walking on… and of course by the time you find the ramp back to your section of seats the original ninety-second break in the action is long over — as, usually, is the next one after that, so you’ve now missed at least two games — and play is again under way, and the ushers at the fat chains prevent reentry, and you have to stand there in an unventilated cement corridor with a sticky and acclivated floor, mashed in with a whole lot of other people who also left to get concessions and are now waiting until the next break to get back to their seats, all of you huddled there with your ice melting and kraut congealing and trying to stand on tip-toe and peer ahead to the tiny chained arch of light at the end of the tunnel and maybe catch a green glimpse of ball or some surreal fragment of Philippoussis’s left thigh as he thunders in toward the net or something…. New Yorkers’ patience w/r/t crowds and lines and gouging and waiting is extraordinarily impressive if you’re not used to it; they can all stand quiescent in airless venues for extended periods, their eyes’ expressions that unique NYC combination of Zen meditation and clinical depression, clearly unhappy but never complaining.

34 The single most popular souvenir at the ’95 Open seems to be a plain white bandanna with that little disembodied Nike trademark wing^* that goes right on your forehead if you wrap the thing just right over your head. A fashion accessory made popular by you know whom. Just about every little kid I spotted at Flushing Meadow was sporting one of these white Nike bandannas, and a fairly common sight on Sunday was a harried parent trying to tie a bandanna just right to position the Nike wing over a junior forehead while his kid stood on first one foot and then the other in impatience. (You do not want to know the retail price of these bandannas, believe me.)

^* The classico-Peloponnesian implications of Nike and of having all these kids running around with Nike wings on their foreheads like Lenten ash seem too obvious to spend much time belaboring.

35 There are at least four of these “U.S. Open Specials at FERON’S” booths at various high-traffic spots all over the N.T.C. grounds. The two distinctive things about the FERON’S clothing booths are (1) that they have separate registers for cash and Major Credit Card purchases, and (2) that none of the employees at any of these registers seems to be older than about eleven.

36 Tickets are sold separately for the day and evening sessions, and there are very complicated mechanisms in place to keep people with day-session tickets from lurking past 2000h. and mooching free evening spectation.

37 New Yorkers also have an amazing ability to mind their own business and attend to themselves and not notice anything untoward going on, an ability that impresses me every time I come here and that always seems to lie somewhere on the continuum between Stoicism and catatonia.

38 You’ll doubtless by the way be happy to know that I did, over half an hour later, find a quiet place to hunch and gnaw supper. One of the gratuitously cool things the ’95 Open does is open up a few of the minor National Tennis Center courts to regular public play once the sun’s gone down. This is why some of the people in the Stadium crowd had rackets, I bet. Anyway, it seems decent of them, and you can imagine what a thrill it must be for a couple of little kids to play on a court with vestigial rubber from an afternoon of pro sneakers still on it — the civilians playing clearly feel important, and they get a lot of attention from passersby on the paths who are now conditioned to watch intently whenever they hear ball sounds, and it’s interesting to watch the passersby’s faces change after two or three seconds when they realize who and what they’re watching. The little sets of bleachers for these minor public-play courts are, understandably, empty; and it was on one such little set of stands that I ate. A thirtyish guy and his wife were playing, the wife wearing a sun visor that looked a little gratuitous, the husband overhitting the way an afternoon of watching pros whale the hell out of the ball will make a man overhit. The only other person in the stands was one of the attractive young P.R. people who’d given me so much free coffee all day out by the M.G., sitting in her Valdez-outline T-shirt and eating something steamy out of a partitioned Styrofoam tray whose attached lid was folded back. Her professional smile and eye-twinkles were gone, so that she looked now more like the hard young New Yorker she was. As she ate she stared impassively at the husband whaling balls at his wife. She was clearly there for the same reason I was, to have some space and quiet while she ate, plus some downtime in which to rest her face from its cheery marketing expression. I felt a kind of bond between us, and from the opposite end of the bleachers where I was eating I cleared my throat and said, “Boy, it’s good to find a place to be alone for a minute, isn’t it?” The lady never looked around from the court as she cleared her mouth and said, “It was until a second ago.”

39 (Both these solicitations had their appeal — the straight-out-bribe one especially — and only a fear of getting caught and of having to inform Tennis magazine that my Media Pass had been revoked because I’d been nabbed renting it out on the black market kept me from making my own stab at ’95 Open free enterprise.)

40 You wouldn’t believe me if I specified what it was, and it’d require a lot of space and context to make sense of, and this in an article that’s already pretty clearly running over budget and straying from its original focused L.D.W. assignment.

41 (More power to him, on my view.)

1 (actually defined in the film as “mimetic polyalloy,” whatever that’s supposed to mean)

2 The ’80s’ other B.U.S.A.M. was Cameron’s second feature, the 1986 Aliens, also modestly budgeted, also both hair-raising and deeply intelligent.

3 (whose initials, for a prophesied savior of humanity, are not particularly subtle)

4 The fact that what Skynet is attempting is in effect a retroactive abortion, together with the fact that “terminate a pregnancy” is a pretty well-known euphemism, led the female I first saw the movie with in 1984 to claim, over coffee and pie afterward, that The Terminator was actually one long pro-choice allegory, which I said I thought was not w/o merit but maybe a bit too simplistic to do the movie real justice, which led to kind of an unpleasant row.

5 Consider, for example, how the now-famous “I’ll be back” line took on a level of ominous historical resonance when uttered by an unstoppable killing machine with a German accent. This was chilling and brilliant, commercial postmodernism at its best; but it is also what made Terminator 2’s “in-joke” of having Ahnode repeat the line in a good-guy context so disappointing.

6 It is a complete mystery why feminist film scholars haven’t paid more attention to Cameron and his early collaborator Gale Anne Hurd. The Terminator and Aliens were both violent action films with tough, competent female protagonists (incredibly rare) whose toughness and competence in no way diminished their “femininity” (even more rare, unheard of), a femininity that is rooted (along with both films’ thematics) in notions of maternity rather than just sexuality. For example, compare Cameron’s Ellen Ripley with the panty-and-tank-top Ripley of Scott’s Alien. In fact it was flat-out criminal that Sigourney Weaver didn’t win the ’86 Oscar for her lead in Cameron’s Aliens. Marlee Matlin indeed. No male lead in the history of U.S. action film even approaches Weaver’s second Ripley for emotional depth and sheer balls — she makes Stallone, Willis, et al. look muddled and ill.

7 (This is a ponderous, marvelously built-looking quality [complete with ferrous clanks and/or pneumatic hisses] that — oddly enough — at roughly the same time also distinguished the special effects in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. This was cool not only because the effects were themselves cool, but also because here were three talented young tech-minded directors who rejected the airy, hygienic look of Spielberg’s and Lucas’s F/X. The grimy density and preponderance of metal in Cameron’s effects suggest that he’s looking all the way back to Méliès and Lang for visual inspiration.)

8 (Cameron would raise the use of light and pace to near-perfection in Aliens, where just six alien-suited stuntmen and ingenious quick-cut editing result in some of the most terrifying Teeming Rapacious Horde scenes of all time. [By the way, sorry to be going on and on about Aliens and The Terminator. It’s just that they’re great, great commercial cinema, and nobody talks about them enough, and they’re a big reason why T2 was such a tragic and insidious development not only for ’90s film but for James Cameron, whose first two films had genius in them.])

9 (So actually I guess it would be more like “Luke Skywalker’s Appointment in Samarra”—nobody said this was Art-Cinema or anything.)

10 (viz., a “neural net processor” based on an “uncooled superconductor,” which I grieve to report is a conceit ripped off from Douglas Trumbull’s 1983 Brainstorm)

11 The Industry term for getting your money back plus that little bit of extra that makes investing in a movie a decent investment is ROI, which is short for Return on Investment.

12 Because a decene Schwarzenegger — compared to whom Chuck Norris is an Olivier — is not an actor or even a performer. He is a body, a form — the closest thing to an actual machine in the history of the S.A.G. Ahnode’s elite bankable status in 1991 was due entirely to the fact that James Cameron had had the genius to understand Schwarzenegger’s essential bionism and to cast him in T1.

13 It augurs ill for both Furlong and Cameron that within minutes of John Connor’s introduction in the film we’re rooting vigorously for him to be Terminated.

14 A complex and interesting scene where John and Sarah actually open up the Terminator’s head and remove Ahnode’s CPU and do some further reprogramming — a scene where we learn a lot more about neural net processors and Terminative anatomy, and where Sarah is strung out and has kind of an understandable anti-Terminator prejudice and wants to smash the CPU while she can, and where John asserts his nascent command presence and basically orders her not to — was cut from the movie’s final version. Cameron’s professed rationale for cutting the scene was that the middle of the movie “dragged” and that the scene was too complex: “I could account for [the Terminator’s] behavior changes much more simply.” I submit that the Cameron of T1 and Aliens wouldn’t have talked this way. But another big-budget formula for ensuring ROI is that things must be made as simple for the audience as possible; plot- and character implausibilities are to be handled through distraction rather than resolved through explanation.

15 (around which the security must be just shockingly lax)

16 That’s the movie’s main plot, but let’s observe here that one of T2’s subplots actually echoes Cameron’s Schwarzenegger dilemma and creates a kind of weird metacinematic irony. Whereas T1 had argued for a certain kind of metaphysical passivity (i.e., fate is unavoidable, and Skynet’s attempts to alter history serve only to bring it about), Terminator 2’s metaphysics are more active. In T2, the Connors take a page from Skynet’s book and try to head off the foreordained nuclear holocaust, first by trying to kill Skynet’s inventor and then by destroying Cyberdyne’s labs and the first Terminator’s CPU (though why John Connor spends half the movie carrying the deadly CPU chip around in his pocket instead of just throwing it under the first available steamroller remains unclear and irksome). The point here is that the protagonists’ attempts to revise the “script” of history in T2 parallel the director’s having to muck around with T2’s own script in order to get Schwarzenegger to be in the movie. Multivalent ironies like this — which require that film audiences know all kinds of behind-the-scenes stuff from watching Entertainment Tonight and reading (umm) certain magazines — are not commercial postmodernism at its finest.

17 (His hair doesn’t catch on fire in the molten steel, though, which provokes intriguing speculation on what it’s supposed to be made of.)

1 These are rich and well-written biographies of the twentieth-century mathematicians Paul Erdos and John Nash, respectively.

2 This classic long essay, originally published in 1940 and re-released by Cambridge University Press in ’92, is the unacknowledged father of most of the last decade’s math-prose. There is very little that any of the receny o byt books do that Hardy’s terse and beautiful Apology did not do first, better, and with rather less fuss.

3 (i.e., the formal study of integers/rationals, the world of Diophantine equations, of Hilbert Problems 9–12, etc. — and also the specialty of both G. H. Hardy and A. Wiles)

4 WN’s cover comes with a blurb from Fermat’s Last Theorem’s Aczel, who must have been on some kind of euphoriant medication—“I have never read a better fictional description of what it’s like to work in pure math”—as well as the breathless marketing tag “THE LINE BETWEEN GENIUS AND MADNESS IS A THIN ONE.” UPGC’s publisher’s big tactic is to offer a $1,000,000 bounty to anyone who can prove Goldbach’s Conjecture before 2002.

5 “Vocational Travelogue” is a very shorthand way of acknowledging that for a long time one reason people used to read fiction was for a kind of imaginative tourism to places and cultures they’d never get to really see; that modernity’s jetliners, TV, etc. have pretty well obsoleted this function; but that modern tech has also created such extreme vocational specialization that few people anymore are in a position to know much about any professional field but their own; and thus that a certain amount of fiction’s “touristic” function now consists in giving readers dramatized access to the nuts and bolts of different professional disciplines and specialties. It is not an accident that the first important Vocational Travelogues, novels like Hailey’s Airport and Hotel and Ed McBain’s “police procedurals,” began appearing in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

6 (Q.v. here WN’s marketing tag about GENIUS and MADNESS in FN4 supra, or UPGC’s flap copy’s heavy description of the novel as “about the search for truth at all costs, and the heavy price of finding it” [sic].)

7 In fairness to all concerned, this variability in readers’ mathematical backgrounds is a problem for pretty much anyone trying to write general-interest prose about math, a problem that Hardy refers to as “the restrictions under which I am writing. On the one hand my examples must be very simple, and intelligible to a reader who has no specialized mathematical knowledge…. And on the other hand my examples should be drawn from ‘pukka’ mathematics, the mathematics of the working professional mathematician.” Note that this sort of thing is a problem even for rather more “special-interest” writing like this book review itself. Is it, for example, necessary to inform or remind the average Science reader that Fermat’s Last Theorem (c. 1637) states that where n is an integer and n > 2, the equation x ⁿ + y ⁿ = z ⁿ has no nonzero integer solutions? or that Goldbach’s Conjecture (or rather the “strong” G.C. as reformulated by Leonhard Euler in 1742) is that every even integer > 4 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers, etc.? As it happens, this reviewer is not certain whether it’s necessary or not, and the fact that these lines have not been deleted by Science’s editors (i.e., that you are reading them at all) may indicate that the editors are not totally sure either.

8 Hardy, whose Apology talks about this better than anything else ever has, explains that “the mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, liktheboue the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”

9 (The assumption here will be that the typical Science reader already knows what “a priori,” “deductive truth,” and “logical proof” mean and is at least roughly familiar with the relationship between pure math and formal logic… if for no other reason than that to gloss tangential stuff like this would take up enormous amounts of space and time and might well also alienate the [presumably large] percentage of Science’s readership who already know the stuff and are apt to find such glosses not only otiose but annoying — this reviewer can actually imagine such readers looking increasingly aggrieved and impatient and saying to themselves, Whom does he think he’s talking to? All this is mentioned only to underscore once again the rhetorical diciness of the whole math-prose enterprise, a diciness that lies at the very center of this review’s criticisms of the actual novels to be discussed, which critical discussions are upcoming very, very shortly.)

10 It’s worth noting that as so much contemporary poetry, classical music, etc. becomes ever more abstract and involute and technically complex, their own audiences get ever smaller and more specialized. With very few exceptions, the people who truly “appreciate” a piece of language-poetry or an atonal fugue are people with extensive educations in the history and theory of these arts. And this increasing exclusivity in the U.S. arts has much less to do with good old “cultural elitism” than with our era’s tendency toward greater and greater specialization — it is not at all an accident that the majority of people who read contemporary poetry are themselves contemporary poets.

11 “Math Anxiety” is now a recognized term in educational psychology, and variants of the “I’m-back-in-high-school-and-sitting-in-my-AP-Calc-final-and-I’ve-forgotten-to-study-or-it-turns-out-all-my-pencils-have-pimento-in-them-instead-of-graphite” nightmare are so common they’re almost clichés.

12 “Average reader” is kind of a synecdoche for “people who read mainly for diversion or entertainment.” These people are American genre fiction’s basic audience. It is true that Hardy’s Apology, as well as novels from Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon have already deployed higher math in interesting and significant ways — but books like these are belle lettres, literature, for which the audience is, again, usually small and rather specialized. Genre books are mass books and are marketed accordingly.

13 The putative author of this problem, one “Anatole Millechamps de Beauregard” (b. 1791), is also fictitious, a kind of biographical hybrid of von Neumann and Galois, on whose florid life story—“Beauregard had a magnetic personality, and his appetite for wine, women and song was as great as for knowledge”; “One of Beauregard’s closest friends caught him in bed with his wife. Blind with rage, he strangled them both”—WN spends most of a chapter. The specular pun of Beauregard’s name, by the way, is not an accident: people in this novel are constantly saying stuff to each other like “Your findings lead directly into the high country of number theory. The view you offer is breathtaking.”

14 Like many of UPGC’s UPGiewsupporting characters, Ramanujan was a real number-theorist, an Indian savant discovered and mentored by Hardy. Robert Kanigal’s The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan is another of the post-Fermat math-bios now on the market.

15 The real source of this insight is Hardy, in his Apology’s famous “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game,” which UPGC’s narrator rips off without any attribution at all (p. 78: “Mathematics, you see, is a young man’s game. It is one of the few human endeavors where youth is a necessary requirement [sic] for greatness”). Actually, this FN is probably the place to point out that Doxiadis’s novel is filled with what appear to be little more than very slight rephrasings of stuff in Hardy’s Apology and/or C. P. Snow’s famous Foreword to it. Flipping through the two books at random, one might, e.g., compare UPGC’s “Anybody who claims that scientists — even the purest of the pure, the most abstract, high-flying mathematicians — are motivated exclusively by the Pursuit of Truth for the Good of Mankind, either has no idea what he’s talking about or is blatantly lying” with Hardy’s “So if a mathematician, or a chemist, or even a physiologist, were to tell me that the driving force in his work had been the desire to benefit humanity, then I should not believe him.” Or see Hardy’s “Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty,” and UPGC’s “Riemann had died at thirty-nine, Niels Henrik Abel at twenty-seven and Evariste Galois at a mere tragic twenty…”; or C. P. Snow’s description of the Hardy-Littlewood team as “the most famous collaboration in the history of mathematics” vs. Doxiadis’s narrator calling it “one of the most renowned partnerships in the history of mathematics.” On UPGC pages 129–30, Doxiadis even cribs nearly word for word a deathbed exchange between Hardy and Ramanujan and tags it with the footnote “Hardy also recounts the incident in his Mathematician’s Apology without, however, acknowledging my uncle’s presence,” which is not only intrusive and irritating but wrong, since it is not in the Apology but in Snow’s Foreword to it that the scene really appears.

It’s hard to know just how indictable UPGC is for its reliance on Hardy. It doesn’t seem like outright plagiarism, because plagiarism implies sneakiness, and Doxiadis has a fully attributed Hardy-quotation right up front as the novel’s epigraph. Plus it’s true that much commercial genre fiction has a long history of liberating stuff from established literary works. For the record, though, it’s still one of the more irksome things about UPGC.

16 The work Isaac’s doing for Arkanov is on “calibrator sets” and “K-reducibility,” two made-up terms that figure prominently in the plot’s math but are never specified or explained.

17 (Here the reviewer’s assumption is that if the T.P.P. is unfamiliar or the analogy unhelpful it can just be passed over with no hard feelings on either side.)

18 Rather than ever being specific about what all the complicated reasoning and complex equations are, WN employs the metaphor of mountain-climbing to try to evoke and describe what it feels like to do higher math. Actually, “employs” is the wrong word; the book repeats, exhausts, strip-mines the metaphor, pounding it again and again—“Every step I took, no matter how small, revealed new mountain- ne the wrongtops and unexpected canyons in this magnificent and bizarre region of mathematics”; “Another part of me had rushed ahead: it stood on the mountain pass, catching its breath as it watched the sun rising over a land that no human eyes had ever yet beheld”—until it becomes first grating—“Having completed the climb, we threw down our heavy backpacks and wiped the sweat from our brows. We were now standing together on the mountain pass, marvelling [sic] at the mathematical landscape”—and finally kind of funny—“Every time, I came tumbling back into base camp, dragging an avalanche of mistaken notions down with me.”

19 (Schogt’s original Dutch prose might, of course, be a thing of wonder)

20 The Wild Numbers’ American publisher seems equally culpable for the prose here. If Four Walls Eight Windows, Inc. is going to let an only semi-bilingual Philibert Schogt translate his own Dutch, why didn’t the FWEW editor bother to tell him that “television mast” should be “aerial” or “transmitter,” that “to pout” is intransitive and “to accommodate” takes a direct object, that phrases like “Shucks” and “city slicker” and “wine, women, and song” are now not idioms but ghastly clichés, or even that — no kidding — contemporary Americans do not bow to each other in formal greeting? Where was the editor? Was there an editor? Who did they think was going to read this stuff?

21 (from the original O Theios Petros kai i Eikasia tou Golbach)

22 And again: where was this book’s editor?

23 (And it’s just about as subtle w/r/t its thematics, with the narrator repeatedly and sans irony describing his uncle as an “Ideal Romantic Hero” [caps his] and saying stuff like “Think of the biblical Tree of Knowledge or the Prometheus of mythology. People like him have surpassed the common measure; they’ve come to know more than is necessary to man, and for this hubris they have to pay.”)

24 There’s a way more grievous example of this sort of thing involving Kurt Gödel and the plot’s first real crisis. Alan Turing (here a wide-eyed undergrad) accidentally exposes Petros to Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem in 1933, whereupon Petros freaks out because he fears that the Goldbach Conjecture may be one of the F.I. Theorem’s “formally unprovable” propositions. This is so implausible and reductive as to be almost offensive. As Science’s own readership is hereby presumed (q.v. FN9) to more or less know already, Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem is concerned with the abstract possibility of Completeness in axiomatic systems, and the formally unprovable propositions it succeeds in deriving are all very special self-reference-type cases — the mathematical equivalent of the “I am lying” paradox. To believe that the First Incompleteness Theorem could apply to actual number-theoretic problems like the Goldbach Conjecture is so crude and confused that there is no way that a professional mathematician of Petros’s attainments could possibly entertain what the novel says is “the one and only, dizzying, terrifying question that had jumped into his mind the moment he’d heard of Gödel’s result…: what if the Incompleteness Theorem also applied to his problem? What if Goldbach’s Conjecture was unprovable?”

But then it gets even worse. Petros supposedly rushes off to Vienna and looks up Gödel

“a thin young man of average height, with small myopic eyes behind thick glasses

“I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove Goldbach’s Conjecture,” he told him in a low, intense voice, “and now you’re telling me it may be unprovable?”

Gödel’s pale face was now totally drained of color [sic].

“In theory, yes—”

“Damn theory, man!” Petros’ shout made the heads of the Sacher café’s distinguished clientèle [sic] turn in their direction. “I need to be certain, don’t you understand? I have a right to know whether I’m wasting my life!” He was squeezing his arm so hard that Gödel grimaced in pain….

Gödel was shaking. “I un-understand how you fe-feel, Professor,” he stammered, “but I–I’m afraid that for the time being there is no way to answer yo-your question.”

25 Some of these footnotes are so weird and U.S.-reader inappropriate that it’s worth giving a concrete example, such as let’s say p. 41’s FN to a line about the narrator enrolling in a U.S. college: “According to the American system, a student can go through the first two years of university without being obliged to declare an area of major concentration for his degree or, if he does so, is free to change his mind until the beginning of the Junior (third) year,” the very meaning of which is anyone’s guess.

26 N.B. here that the following main-text ¶ itself is geared to a very-strong-math-background audience; nobody else is going to get the ¶’s references, and this reviewer has neither the space nor the expertise to elucidate them. So feel free to skip it if you do not fit the ¶’s demographic.

27 Interested Science readers can find a discussion of Schnirelmann’s proof in W. Dunham’s Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics (Wiley, 1990) but will probably have to don a miner’s helmet and go all the way back to Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society Series vol. 2 no. 44, 1938 for T. Estermann’s “On Goldbach’s Problem: Proof That Almost All Even Positive Integers Are Sums of Two Primes.”

28 Unless you are yourself a professional mathematician, the best place to find a nonlethal discussion of this proof (which is known in number theory as “Vinogradov’s Theorem”—that’s how famous this guy was) is in Section C of R. K. Guy’s Unsolved Problems in Number Theory (Springer-Verlag, 1994).

29 N.B.: End of audience-background-and-interest-restrictive main-text ¶.

30 You might further recall (from, e.g., Ovid’s Metamorphoses) that this bull ends up begetting on Minos’s queen the Minotaur, a hideous teratoid monster who has to be secreted in a special labyrinth and propitiated with human flesh, and who basically symbolizes the moral rot at the heart of Minos’s reign. That rot is, as Joseph Campbell describes it, a certain kind of alienated selfishness:

The return of the bull should have symbolized Minos’ selfless submission to the functions of his role. By the sacrilege of the refusal of the rite [of sacrifice], however,iceretur the individual cuts himself as a unit off from the larger whole of the community…. He is the hoarder of the general benefit. He is the monster avid for the greedy rights of “my and mine.”

31 Clearly, Petros’s real “sin” is not “Pride” so much as plain old selfishness, Greed. It’s not clear whether UPGC’s narrator truly fails to grasp this, or whether he is being presented as naive, or whether the whole thing’s just a translation problem.

32 Obvious though it is, Doxiadis appears to fear that his audience won’t get the compact irony here, so he has Hardy then rather sniffily advise Petros “that it might in the future be more profitable for him to stay in closer contact with his scientific colleagues.”

1 (N.B.: from The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition’s definition of “prosaic”: “consisting or characteristic of prose”; “lacking in imagination and spirit, dull.”)

2 (Numerals don’t count as words either, obviously.)

3 N.B. that this sort of problem is endemic to many of the trendy literary forms that identify/congratulate themselves as transgressive. And it’s easy to see why. In regarding formal conventions primarily as “rules” to rebel against, the Professional Transgressor fails to see that conventions often become conventions precisely because of their power and utility, i.e., because of the paradoxical freedoms they permit the artist who understands how to use (not merely “obey”) them.

4 (Imagine offering a gymnast the chance to levitate and hang there unsupported, or an astronaut the prospect of a launch w/o rocket.)

5 Just in case these reasons [as well as the anthology’s real intended audience] are not yet obvious, q.v. the following announcement, variations of which appear in regular font on Best of The P.P.’s editorial page, in bold at the end of Johnson’s Intro, again in bold in an ad for The P.P. after the contributors’ bio-notes, and yet again, in a bold font so big it takes up the whole page, at the very end of the anthology:

The Prose Poem: An International Journal will be reading for Volume 10 between December 1, 2001 and March 1, 2002. Unsolicited work submitted before this date will be returned unread. Please include an SASE and a two-sentence biographical note. Please send no more than 3 to 5 poems.

1 Bonus Factoid and Suggestion: It so happens that you can occupy a bright child for most of a very quiet morning by challenging her to use that five times in a row in a single coherent sentence, to which stumper the solution is all about the present distinction: “He said that that that that that writer used should really have been a which.” (You can up the challenge to six in a row if the kid is old enough to know about the medial-question-mark-in-sentence trick: “He said that? that that that that that writer used should have been a which?”)

1 Of course, Borges’s famous “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

2 Actually, these two agendas dovetail, since the only reason anybody’s interested in a writer’s life is because of his literary importance. (Think about it — the personal lives of most people who spend fourteen hours a day sitting there alone, reading and writing, are not going to be thrill-rides to hear about.)

3 This is part of what gives Borges’s stories their mythic, precognitive quality (all cultures’ earliest, most vital metaphysics is mythopoeic), which quality in turn helps explain how the stories can be at once so abstract and so moving.

4 The biography is probably most valuable in its account of Borges’s political evolution. A common bit of literary gossip about Borges is that the reason he wasn’t awarded a Nobel Prize was his supposed support for Argentina’s ghastly authoritarian juntas of the 1960s and ’70s. From Williamson, though, we learn that Borges’s politics were actually far more complex and tragic. The child of an old liberal family, and an unabashed leftist in his youth, Borges was one of the first and bravest public opponents of European fascism and the rightist nationalism it spawned in Argentina. What changed him was Perón, whose creepy right-wing populist dictatorship aroused such loathing in Borges that he allied himself with the repressively anti-Perón Revolución Libertadora. Borges’s situation following Perón’s first ouster in 1955 is full of unsettling parallels for American readers. Because Peronism still had great popularity with Argentina’s working poor, the exiled dictator retained enormous political power, and would have won any democratic national election held in the 1950s. This placed believers in liberal democracy (such as J. L. Borges) in the same sort of bind that the United States faced in South Vietnam a few years later — how do you promote democracy when you know that a majority of people will, if given the chance, vote for an end to democratic voting? In essence, Borges decided that the Argentine masses had been so hoodwinked by Perón and his wife that a return to democracy was possible only after the nation had been cleansed of Peronism. Williamson’s analysis of the slippery slope this decision put Borges on, and his account of the hatchet job that Argentina’s leftists did on Borges’s political reputation in retaliation for his defection (such that by 1967, when the writer came to Harvard to lecture, the students practically expected him to have epaulettes and a riding crop), make for his book’s best chapters.

5 Be warned that much of the mom-based psychologizing seems right out of Oprah, e.g., “However, by urging her son to realize the ambitions she had defined for herself, she unwittingly induced a sense of unworthiness in him that became the chief obstacle to his self-assertion.”

6 Williamson’s chapters on Borges’s sudden world fame will be of special interest to those American readers who weren’t yet alive or reading in the mid-1960s. I was lucky enough to discover Borges as a kid, but only because I happened to find Labyrinths, an early English-language collection of his most famous stories, on my father’s bookshelves in 1974. I believed that the book was there only because of my parents’ unusually fine literary taste and discernment — which verily they do possess — but what I didn’t know was that by 1974 Labyrinths was also on tens of thousands of other U.S. homes’ shelves, that Borges had actually been a sensation on the order of Tolkien and Gibran among hip readers of the previous decade.

7 Labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, doubles — so many of the elements that appear over and over in Borges’s fiction are symbols of the psyche turned inward.

1 A subcorollary here is that it’s a bit odd that Houghton Mifflin and the Best American series tend to pick professional writers to be their guest editors. There are, after all, highly expert professional readers among the industry’s editors, critics, scholars, etc., and the guest editor’s job here is really 95 percent readerly. Underlying the series’ preference for writers appears to be one or both of the following: (a) the belief that someone’s being a good writer makes her eo ipso a good reader — which is the same reasoning that undergirds most blurbs and MFA programs, and is both logically invalid and empirically false (trust me); or (b) the fact that the writers the series pick tend to have comparatively high name recognition, which the publishers figure will translate into wider attention and better sales. Premise (b) involves marketing and revenue and is thus probably backed up by hard data and thought in a way that (a) isn’t.

2 (usage sic, in honor of the term’s source)

3 For example, from the perspective of Information Theory, the bulk of the Decider’s labor actually consists of excluding nominees from the final prize collection, which puts the Decider in exactly the position of Maxwell’s Demon or any other kind of entropy-reducing info processor, since the really expensive, energy-intensive part of such processing is always deleting/discarding/resetting.

4 It’s true that I got to lobby for essays that weren’t in his 100, but there ended up being only one such outside piece in the collection. A couple of others that I’d suggested were nixed by Mr. Atwan — well, not nixed so much as counseled against, for what emerged as good reasons. In general, though, you can see who had the real power. However much I strutted around in my aviator suit and codpiece calling myself the Decider for BAE ’07, I knew that it was Mr. Atwan who delimited the field of possibilities from which I was choosing… in rather the same way that many Americans are worried that what appears to be the reality we’re experiencing and making choices about is maybe actually just a small, skewed section of reality that’s been pre-chosen for us by shadowy entities and forces, whether these be left-leaning media, corporate cabals, government disinformers, our own unconscious prejudices, etc. At least Mr. Atwan was explicit about the whole pre-selection thing, though, and appeared to be fair and balanced, and of course he’d had years of hard experience on the front lines of Decidering; and in general I found myself trusting him and his judgments more and more throughout the whole long process, and there were finally only maybe about 10 percent of his forwarded choices where I just had no idea what he might have been seeing or thinking when he picked them.

5 I believe this is what is known in the nonfiction industry as a transition. We are now starting to poke tentatively at “Best,” which is the most obviously fraught and bias-prone word on the cover.

6 Can I assume that some readers are as tired as I am of this word as a kneejerd a coverk derogative? Or, rather, tired of the legerdemain of collapsing the word’s neutral meaning—“preference, inclination”—into the pejorative one of “unfairness stemming from prejudice”? It’s the same thing that’s happened with “discrimination,” which started as a good and valuable word, but now no one can even hear it without seeming to lose their mind.

7 Example: Roger Scruton is an academic, and his “A Carnivore’s Credo” is a model of limpid and all-business compression, which is actually one reason why his argument is so valuable and prizeworthy, even though parts of that argument strike me as either odd or just plain wrong (e.g., just how much humane and bucolic “traditional livestock farming” does he believe still goes on in this country?). Out on the other end of the ethicopolitical spectrum, there’s a weirdly similar example in Prof. Peter Singer’s “What Should a Billionaire Give?” which is not exactly belletristic but certainly isn’t written in aureate academese, and is salient and unforgettable and unexcludable not despite but in some ways because of the questions and criticisms it invites. May I assume that you’ve already read it? If not, please return to the main text. If you have, though, do some of Singer’s summaries and obligation-formulas seem unrealistically simple? What if a person in the top 10 percent of U.S. earners already gives 10 percent of his income to different, non-UN-type charities — does this reduce his moral obligation, for Singer? Should it? Exactly which charities and forms of giving have the most efficacy and/or moral value — and how does one find out which these are? Should a family of nine making $132,000 a year really have the same 10 percent moral obligation as the childless bachelor making $132K a year? What about a $132K family where one family member has cancer and their health insurance has a 20 percent deductible — is this family’s failure to cough up 10 percent after spending $40,000 on medical bills really still the moral equivalent of valuing one’s new shoes over the life of a drowning child? Is Singer’s whole analogy of the drowning kid(s) too simple, or at least too simple in some cases? Umm, might my own case be one of the ones where the analogy and giving-formula are too simple or inflexible? Is it OK that I think it might be, or am I just trying to rationalize my way out of discomfort and obligation as so many of us (according to Singer) are wont to do? And so on… but of course you’ll notice how hard the reader’s induced to think about all this. Can you see why a Decider might regard Singer’s essay as brilliant and valuable precisely because its prose is so mainstream and its formulas so (arguably) crude or harsh? Or is this kind of “value a stupid, PC-ish criterion to use in Decidering about essays’ literary worth? What exactly are the connections between literary aesthetics and moral value supposed to be? Whose moral values ought to get used in determining what those connections should be? Does anyone even read Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” anymore?

8 Hence, by the way, the seduction of partisan dogma. You can drown in dogmatism now, too — radio, Internet, cable, commercial and scholarly print — but this kind of drowning is more like sweet release. Whether hard right or new left or whatever, the seduction and mentality are the same. You don’t have to feel confused or inundated or ignorant. You don’t even have to think, for you already Know, and whatever you choose to learn confirms what you Know. This dogmatic lockstep is not the kind of inevitable dependence I’m talking about — or rather it’s only the most extreme and frightened form of that dependence.

9 You probably know which essay I’m referring to, assuming you’re reading this guest intro last as is SOP. If you’re not, and so don’t, then you have a brutal little treat in store.

1 Given the Gramm-Rudmanesque space limit here, let’s all just agree that we generally know what this term connotes — open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist 10, pluralism, due process, transparency… the whole messy democratic roil.

2 (The phrase is Lincoln’s, more or less.)