Degeneration

I automatically prefer tennis players with a one-handed backhand, as that’s how I play[ed]; but how do you choose when both hit that way (which is increasingly rare)? The five-set match between Djokovic and Robredo yesterday seemed to show the latter at a severe disadvantage because of his one-handed backhand, but I didn’t watch enough of it to be sure. And then there was Gonzalez v. Roddick last night.

The trade-off seemed to be, as I understood it from the tennis literature I used to read, that the one-handed backhand provided a more natural volley and slice, at the expense of a perhaps weaker return and more difficulty hitting the ball off the rise. Since almost no one plays a serve-and-volley game anymore, it surprises me that there as many one-handed backhands in the pro game as there are. Imitations of Federer probably result in most of the ones seen in the junior levels now (as did Sampras when I was in high school. I think I modeled mine on Edberg. Could either of them be successful in the current game with a continental grip on the forehand?)

The Shortest Distance between Two Pints Is A Strayed Lion

The title phrase comes from one of Pynchon’s letters to Kirkpatrick Sale in the Harry Ransom Center. I won’t tell you the lead-up, but rest assured that it is every word the groaner you think it might be. (A letter from Phillip Roth to DeLillo in the same archive advises him against using Pynchon’s blurb for Mao II: Roth writes that it has something like five cliches in seventy words.)

Thoughts on The Fifth Season of The Wire

I don’t know if the fatuous documentary on the final disc, starring Joe Klein and Jacob Weisberg, left an unduly bad impression; but the institutional portrait of the media in the final season was disappointing. Simon, of course, knows this estate better than the show’s other broad subjects, but the Sun as shown lacked any human variability or social depth. The sympathetic characters were consistently so, the others irredeemable fools. How many times did the executive editor have to describe something as “Dickensian” before we get the point? The fabricator too was devoid of interest, and his fabrications were thin fare (esp. compared to, Glass’s, for instance). A wasted opportunity to write his character as such a cipher, when the parallel between him and McNulty had so much potential.

A Mailing

I received a letter from one of our insurers recently addressed to

That is all for now.

Music Notes

I’ve been suffering under the delusion for days now that Jackson Browne’s album Lawyers in Love was in fact the soundtrack to the film Legal Eagles, which I think I thought was titled as above. I remember seeing Legal Eagles in the theater, though I don’t think any of us knew that it was a thinly veiled retelling of the goings-on surrounding the Mark Rothko estate or that an alternate ending with Darryl Hannah convicted of one murder shows even to this day on syndicated television stations across the land. (And speaking of which, I saw Roadhouse on AMC the other night. AMC, not TBS. It was an estranging moment.)

Opsimathy

I applaud the OED lexicographers who cite the recently departed Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration in the entry for “opsimath.” They believe that everything rational must come into being.

My own opsimathy will extend to botany, as I have decided that I want to be able to identify every plant species growing in my yard, out of some proto-Adamic impulse or another. I hope to be able to fold the taxonomic aspects of this learning into a project on the cladistics of genre and narrative technique, such speculations suggested originally by Moretti’s GMT.

More Trevor-Roper

I had earlier noted his mordant article on Toynbee, but I just learned from this piece that

He enjoyed sending mischievous, pseudonymous letters to newspapers; like the solemn inquiry, published in The New York Review, purporting to come from one “Miss Agnes Trollope” of “Buttocks, near Ambleside,” asking Lawrence Stone for documentary evidence of the prevalence of coitus interruptus in Caroline England.

I look forward to an upcoming research trip to the HRC in Austin. I invite food recommendations.

El Panóptico

A footnote in the August 2002 memo attributed to John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee regarding the distinctions between cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and torture and promulgating the interpretation that, according to the prevailing constitutional interpretation, the President in wartime was free to ignore any statutory niceties regarding these distinctions—a footnote in this memo references Kodak Eastman v. Kavlin to claim that the court there found that the arbitrary imprisonment of a Kodak employee in a difficult* prison with murderers and bribe-expectant guards did not meet the definition of “torture.”**

Cultivation

Salvia surrounded by crepe myrtle seedlets:

A religious caterpillar on my mint:

John from Cincinnati

That it was cancelled, I now think, after watching the first six episodes, was a disaster. But if you’re looking for some humor in the situation, I’m not sure that watching the actors listen to Milch explain to them the artistic theory of the dream sequence in the sixth episode is likely to be beat. (Rebecca De Mornay’s* expression, in particular, is matchless, though Dayton Collie seems to rival her for mute and increasingly hostile** incomprehension.)