Letters & Essays of the Day
Tennis Is the Opposite of Death: A Proof
By Joy Katz
Tennis is not the only sport with skew angles. Pool has skew angles and spin and backspin. But pool is murk, pool is cramped in the dark.
Tennis is not the only sport with skew angles. Pool has skew angles and spin and backspin. But pool is murk, pool is cramped in the dark.
I think I need to figure out what I was doing, what I really felt I was up to, as a kid when, overwhelmed by some enthusiasm, some new all-consuming fascination, I’d require it to be fully expressed at once. I’d have to slap together something out of household odds and ends, available parts, to represent whatever it was. And generally leave it at that.
I am cleaning out the storage space that’s under the stairs but accessed from outside—a steel door somewhat strangely opening onto the grass. Twenty years of stuff diverted here. Not quite tossed out. You never know.
Our house on Emerald Isle, The Sea Section, is divided down the middle, and has an E beside one front door and a W beside the other. The east side is ruled by Hugh, and the bedroom we share is on the top floor. It opens onto a deck that overlooks the ocean and is next to Amy’s room, which is the same size as ours but is shaped differently.
I believe I wrote, ‘And on with you now from this new nought anew.’
What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.
The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century.
My father’s opinion is that my judgement is sound most of the time but given to the occasional psychotic break. This evaluation’s based heavily on a travel decision I made as a thirteen year old that lopped a few years off his life. As is often the case, he didn’t know the half of it. That half went like this:
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was born and died near Paris (May 27, 1894-July 1, 1961). Of his books and pamphlets, some eighteen appeared in his lifetime, some six remained unpublished. His principal works were ‘Journey to the End of Night’ (1932), ‘Death on the Installment Plan’ (1936) and 'One Chateau from Another' (1957).
In the winter of 1972, our entire family went to Rome with a client named Basil so my father could take care of a small legal task for him. Basil was a marijuana dealer, and my father was a criminal-defense attorney, but the legal matter was commercial and took only a few days. Then we drove around the country looking at artistic treasures, which my mother believed essential to our development.
I awoke early in my apartment and rested quietly for an hour. Then I phoned my office to say that I would be in. Lucky, my secretary, was pleased, and said that she was thinking of getting married.