Holding Court

Hey there, everyone. I hope you had a good weekend and that you're poised for a good third week of teaching (it feels like it has been a long time since we were all together!). I don't know how many of you might be tennis fans, but my task on Monday morning will be to bounce back from the deflated feeling after watching Agassi lose to Federer in the U.S. Open final on Sunday. For a while -- and quite improbably -- it looked like Agassi actually had a chance to win, and, gosh, it would have been such a feel-good sports story (I think I would have traded Lance Armstrong's seventh Tour de France win for this one!).

What does this have to do with ... uh, writing? Well, not much, I suppose! But in listening to Dick Enberg, Mary Carillo and even Agassi himself in his interviews, one does encounter a facility and an elegance with language that one rarely encounters in this "genre." At one point during Sunday's match, Carillo responded to Agassi's desperate pursuit of a nasty drop shot by offering this stunning sentence (well, I can't remember how the sentence ended, but here's the best part of it): "Agassi, striving to meet the emergency of that slice, lunged ..." Wow! What a clause to roll out spontaneously during a sports broadcast. How often does one hear a sports commentator find language that defamiliarizes the mundane iteration of another drop shot?! After this moment, I started to think about Agassi's reputation for being a master of constructing a point: every shot means something, every shot has a pre-meditated connection with three or four or five shots yet to come, every shot is supported. There's an architecture to his individual points. When all is said and done (hopefully with a winner or an opponent's error), Agassi has deftly managed the rhythm, economy, power, stealth, wit, and final flourish of the point. Somewhere in there is a justification for comparing tennis (at least Agassi's masterful version of it) and writing, but since the hour is late I will stop there. (If nothing else, maybe this will motivate you to work especially hard with those students who just try to go for the blunt force of the ace every time they strike a ball!). Happy Monday y'all.

Parlor Talk

Greetings colleagues! It's hardly a jazz-soaked coffee house, but here's a place for us ("somewhere, a place for us"). For now, perhaps that Kenneth Burke passage from The Philosophy of Literary Form offers the appropriate sentiments for launching our new Composition blog:

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got here, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. "