March report

To quote one of the poems I listened to at the Dial-A-Poem (1968/2012) installation at MoMA, “we’re getting rid of the habit we had of explaining everything.”1 This is the March report, as we know, but today is April 1, the start of Poetry Month. So if you call to listen to a poem or two, I’d love to know about what you heard.

What I read in March:

Andre Agassi with J. R. Moehringer, Open (2009)—As a person with a history of abandoned interests2 and also a record for sticking with things for long periods of time,3 I find narratives about lives devoted to singular pursuits fascinating. What an alien experience, taking something up at a very young age and doing that thing so relentlessly that you become better than anyone else in the world at that thing.

I think people have raved about Andre Agassi’s memoir since its publication because he foregrounds how miserable and lonely that path can be. Because he hates tennis so much—hated it from the start—and not only stuck with it but came back to it and became the number one player again after a very public, years-long spiral of self-destruction. His is the story of a curious and thoughtful boy forbidden from thinking by a rageful, tennis-obsessed father, the final chance for Mike Agassi to transform one of his four children into a global sport phenom. By the time Andre was physically far enough from his father and old enough to comprehend his situation, he could see that as a high school dropout, his opportunity to do anything else but turn pro was nonexistent. Hating tennis at first because he could not escape his tyrannical father’s dream/training regimen and then because he had no other means to make a successful living doing anything else provides a lot of narrative drama. And tennis is HARD, a notoriously physically and mentally demanding sport whose professional ranks are filled with extremely skilled and motivated athletes. Agassi could have flamed out at so many points in his career before he actually did in 1996-1997.

I’m a tennis casual. Reading Open, I recalled how in my early adulthood I would sometimes wish that my parents would not have let me quit so many things as a child. I used to think that if they’d made me stick with certain extracurriculars, I’d have been a more disciplined person and athlete. But even when I did play tennis, I only ever got close enough to that world to know that I didn’t want to be a part of it on any kind of competitive level. Traveling around to different local public courts with my teacher, only ever hitting with her, is how I stayed a casual and also stayed liking tennis. Because my parents let me quit after a few years, I now still love going to my neighborhood courts on the first spring day to just get the ball over the net and keep it within the lines.

Agassi’s story is riveting and, at the end, a little cheesy. After hating tennis for so long, once he retired he was able to discover for the first time true joy in the sport by playing at the local public courts with his wife—literally one of the greatest tennis players of all time—Stefanie Graf. I love that for him.

What I didn’t finish reading in March:

Deborah Jackson Taffa, Whiskey Tender (2024)4—Every day I am learning. Sometimes I even learn something about myself. For example, I learned that as with Victorian novels, I can’t read 2 memoirs in a row. Jackson Taffa’s memoir ticks all the boxes—well written, ties the personal to the larger historical context that produced the subject, interesting (for lack of a more precise word). But it just wasn’t the right time for me to read it all the way through. I think it’s that memoirs are kind of like psychological novels. They ask you to enter the mind of the “protagonist.” And I’m too much of a head suspended above a curtain of mist to be able to feel comfortable inhabiting a different first person perspective for a sustained period of time. This book was good! I just . . . . already read a memoir this month.

What I didn’t start reading in March:

Lauren Oyler, No Judgment: Essays (2024)—We all have one wild and precious life. Reviews/criticism help us determine where to direct our attention, whether we really want to devote x-many hours to a particular book. If enough people make a similar and compelling enough argument, I’m inclined to believe them!

It’s conceptually difficult for me to decide against reading Oyler’s latest publication. She’s “my favorite critic”!! But it really sounds like No Judgment isn’t what I imagined it would be—a collection of new and previously published literary criticism. Instead, it appears to represent Oyler’s expansion into more general cultural criticism, the reading of societal trends themselves vs close reads of literature that yield greater observations about the way we live now.

Here’s the thing: Oyler is kind of mean. In her reviews of literature, that meanness is often funny and it’s funny because she’s punching up and because her arguments are grounded in rigorous analysis backed by textual support. But it sounds like in No Judgment Oyler’s rigor and support are absent. It’s hard to write strong, supported analyses of intangible things like gossip—the subject of her first essay in this collection and also my object of study for my dissertation—but it’s not impossible, not even close to impossible to do. I’ve read enough about this book to know that the other essays also lack the things I most admire about Oyler’s literary criticism.

Being mean when doing criticism is bold! The minute you don’t present a strongly supported argument? Well, someone like Becca Rothfield of The Washington Post will be ready to apply a taste of that infamously critical rigor to your own writing.5 I might have still given No Judgment a chance after reading Rothfield’s review, but Friend of the Report, Sarah, had a more kind but no less convincingly similar assessment.

That’s all I needed to know! I’m sad about not reading it, but I feel pretty secure that I’m less sad than I’d be if I actually read this collection.

What I’m looking forward to reading in April:

Helen Oyeyemi, Parasol Against the Axe (2024)

Elspeth Barker, O Caledonia (1991/2022)6