Le Merle – Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley (1990)

By turns Nigredo-black and battlefield, transductive and future-promising, a turnstile of lived and real abstractions—the question of value can be dizzying, but sometimes it also opens onto new virtualities. Somewhere between art and finance, at the crux of governance by debt and the new vantages afforded by blockchain technologies, this issue raises questions about what accrues in claims and debts, and focuses on what, resisting measurement, uses itself up without keeping count. The key question: how do we stay with the financial trouble?

Unless you’re one of those rare mutant virtuosos of raw force, you’ll find that competitive tennis, like money pool, requires geometric thinking, the ability to calculate not merely your own angles but the angles of response to your angles. Because the expansion of response-possibilities is quadratic, you are required to think n shots ahead, where n is a hyperbolic function limited by the sinh of opponent’s talent and the cosh of the number of shots in the rally so far (roughly). I was good at this. What made me for a while near-great was that I could also admit the differential complication of wind into my calculations; I could think and play octacally. For the wind put curves in the lines and transformed the game into 3-space. I had developed a sort of hubris about my Taoistic ability to control via noncontrol. I’d established a private religion of wind. (…)  ¹

«Derivative Sport inTornado Alley» is an autobiographical essay by David Foster Wallace that was originally published in Harper’s in 1992 as “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornados.” The essay describes the rise and fall of Wallace’s junior tennis career as a young teenager growing up in the Midwest (Philo, Illinois, to be exact). Wallace explores in this essay what made him “near-great” (3), or, to put it differently, what prevented him from becoming a truly great tennis player.→