Prospect Magazine 25.05.11
Prospect used to be cool. It used to offer articles on a whole bunch of interesting stuff, often by interesting people, and with no particular political bias between issues, or articles. You'd have 'Red Tory'-scum Philip Blond one month, mental Libertarians talking about grand new schemes to build their own islands (just get a boat) another. Then there was a change of editorship (new ed: Bronwen Maddox, and I'm sure there'll be more to come from her) and it swung very firmly to the right (no, not 'right', 'Optimist'). Recent articles have asked such BRAVE, BOLD questions as 'Why has Europe spent so long cowtowing to eastern dictators?' (because we haven't always been quite as warmongery as we are now...) and made INTELLECTUAL and IMPORTANT proclamations such as 'Fossil Fuels won't run out' (not in ANY WAY related to the consequences of the previous example, no sir).
To get to the point: the article flagged out today is much more innocuous than any of that. It's written by Geoff Dyer ("national treasure" - Zadie Smith) and it's about tennis, out to coincide with Wimbledon. Here's a link: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/05/geoff-dyer-tennis-beautiful-game-federer. There's a nice picture of Roger Federer to help.
If you're done, or can't be arsed, here's a paragraph breakdown:
- Everyone likes tennis.
- People who are good at tennis are good because they learned young, just like pianists (and nothing else).
- How to serve.
- Hitting the ball does stuff.
- Professional players who play tennis are playing tennis. Kind of like non-professional players who play tennis.
- This is why tennis is exciting.
- Tennis became popular because of tennis players being assholes (plus a three-line joke about not saying the word 'asshole').
- Blahblahblah.
- Some tennis players "fist pump" in celebration.
- Blahblahblah.
- "This is not intended to be an abbreviated history of the game; it's just a prelude to making a point" (would you believe it, and with only two paragraphs to spare). Oh, and some players are very good at tennis because they're good at tennis in different ways.
- Playing gracefully is effective.
- "At his peak—a peak which has probably passed—Federer represented an apotheosis of tennis-ness."
There it is then. Roger Federer's tennis-ness, and a 1,500 word pre-amble to. More of a half-baked statement than a "point" but whatever.
So Geoff Dyer wrote a crap article about tennis. So what. Hardly matters, does it? So what if he got a few hundred pounds (or whatever) for crap work denying someone promising and/or talented invaluable print space, happens all the time.
Well... he wrote this thing about David Foster Wallace earlier this year, which tells us more... http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/03/geoff-dyer-david-foster-wallace-pale-king-literary-allergy/. To cut to the chase Dyer says, "I am interested in a lot of the stuff he wrote about. Tennis, particularly. There are so few decent things written about tennis that I’m grateful to him for adding substantially to a small corner of the bookshelves." The final paragraph of this essay goes into considerably more detail on Dyer's views on tennis and Roger Federer, despite being a redundant comparison between Wallace's writing and Federer's between-games seating arrangements.
The article on Wallace, if you're interested, essentially argues that Wallace is irritating and difficult to read, therefore not worth the bother. He finds Wallace's colloquialisms contrived (only calls them "grunge affectations": worth remembering next time you're talking to your friends down the pub. It's not talking, it's grunge affectation), particularly when followed by long words. The one nod to self deprecation claims kinship, "As a writer, I seem to have occasionally generated this feeling myself—how else to interpret the blogger’s declaration that he wanted to headbutt me?" probably because you celebrate ignorance, Geoff. Qv. the comments box full of people expressing gratitude for validating their own impatience with long words and books they haven't read. I hope that crap about tennis was somehow transcendent for them.
Wallace's own articles on tennis, if you're interested, actually say stuff.
Dyer's is a banal, mediocre article, apparantly undamaging, but a part of his ongoing war against critical thought and literacy, and in a magazine which claims its articles are from "the sharpest minds on the events and ideas that define the modern world."
We're all doomed.
