A Few More Things: Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 5

I have officially run out of gas on my self-appointed task of doing a blog post a day for five days, and so I turn to the last refuge of the lazy writer: a list. It’s a catalog, an odds-and-ends, a deadline listicle...it’s Johnson’s Veritable Miscellany!

So anyway, here’s ten more things I have found vaguely pleasant amidst this (insert your favorite synonym for “bad”) year:

*Dragon Inn 3’s cover of Fountains of Wayne’s “Sink to the Bottom.”

*The fact that the Rutgers tomato plant Ruth bought for our garden is actually producing tomatoes. We buy a Rutgers tomato plant every year, because I love the Knight life, but usually our Rutgers plant does about as well as a drunk freshman trying to hold down his first Fat Darrell. But this year our plant is a suitable tribute to the Garden State.

*Rhea Seahorn’s performance as Kim Wexler on Better Call Saul. 

*Bear Review editor Marcus Myers’ recitations of his favorite poems by Kansas City poets (which he recorded and posted during the late spring). It was a lovely celebration of great writing, and introduced me to a lot of stuff I didn’t know.

*The book came out 30 years ago, so it’s only a 2020 thing for me, but a few weeks ago when I just needed to read a damn novel, I finally got around to reading AS Byatt’s Possession. It’s outstanding—lots of po-mo research/mystery novel stuff a la Nabokov or Pynchon, but put in the service of a more realist and even humanist aesthetic sensibility. I dug it.

*Joshua Weiner’s new translations of Nelly Sachs’ poetry (which appeared in Poetry in April—the full book comes out next year). I wasn’t previously familiar with Sachs, which is kind of embarrassing—she won the Nobel Prize in 1966—but I’m glad to be introduced to her elegiac, formally inventive poems. Anyone who is interested in the modernist literary response to WWII, or in Jewish literature in general, should give her a read.

*The takeout Easter dinner from Pot Pie. Ruth and I got like four meals out of that thing. I flash back to the lamb whenever I need to go to my happy place. Which I guess means I think about the lamb a lot.

*Having friends who bought a house with a pool. Folks, swimming in a pool you do not have to maintain is truly the American Dream.

*My students in the spring semester. I’ll forever be sad that the in-person semester was cut off in the middle, as all of my classes had students who were thinking, saying, and writing interesting things, and I really enjoyed our discussions. That said, I still got to read a lot of very interesting papers my students wrote even after we went virtual. They did good work, and I learned a lot from them.

*Sporting KC signing a competent striker. Who could have guessed that paying for talented attacking players would lead to more goals?

*And finally, this picture of my dad’s quarantine hair:

Christian Pulisic: Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 4

Yesterday, when I wrote about the poet Carl Phillips, I quoted the following from his poem “Archery”: “To have timed your arrow/ perfectly meant watching the air for a moment/ seem stitched throughout with a kind of/ timelessness.”

I very much doubt that Phillips had English soccer even the slightest bit in mind when he wrote those lines, but I’ll admit that when I read them, one of the first things I thought of was this:

Talk about timing your arrow perfectly.

I promise I’m not going to go the full John Updike and pretend that sports are literature. That said, if you’re a fan of either soccer or poetry, you’re deeply familiar with the experience of feeling time grind away as you watch ideas come to nothing and real risk get eschewed for easy, cynical ploys. Trust me: any lover of poetry or soccer who has read Longfellow or watched the Colorado Rapids knows this shit can be boring. But if you’re into it, you keep waiting in the hope of some moment of grace—the perfectly-weighted pass, the unexpected turn of phrase—that will make time jump and stand still all at once. The page and the pitch are blank, brutal spaces, but every once in a while someone transforms that nothingness into beauty.

Over the past few weeks, as the Premier League has started up again in empty stadiums in England, one of the best players in the world has been an American: Chelsea winger Christian Pulisic. Just watch what he does here against a Manchester City team that gets paid roughly $200 million in total salary:[1]

On the occasions when American players have done big things in big games—both men’s and women’s—they have tended to rely on sheer physicality and effort: the speed of Landon Donovan, the strength of Abby Wambach, the tenacity of Clint Dempsey. And while Pulisic is a remarkable athlete, possessed of excellent speed and agility, what jumps out in this clip is his tactical foresight, his well-timed risk-taking, and how calm he is finishing a high-pressure shot. And yet, somehow he’s from Hershey, Pennsylvania rather than Argentina or Italy.

2020 has been a sad, tragic, and embarrassing year in America. I can’t imagine you need me to list the reasons why. And of course the fact that a kid from Pennsylvania is good at soccer changes absolutely none of that. But still, it’s been nice that for a few hours each week, at least one American is excelling on a global stage.

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[1] Just so we’re clear, Chelsea pays its players around $165 million. No one in that clip is poor.

Carl Phillips' "Archery": Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 3

A few days ago, my friend and colleague Jenny Molberg pointed out that the July/August issue of Poetry magazine has quite a few excellent poems (also excellent, btw, is Molberg’s new poetry collection Refusal, which is one of the best things I’ve read in 2020—in fact, go read this poem now). Jenny specifically praised Rosebud Ben-Oni’s excellent “Poet Wrestling with Blood Falling Silent,” which is one of the first published poems I’ve read that deals with the Covid epidemic. There’s plenty of other good stuff in the issue as well, including a poem I particularly liked by Erika Meitner that uses the image of a gilded mammoth skeleton near the receding coastline of Miami as the centerpiece of a reflection on climate change and geological time.

The piece I keep coming back to, however, is a poem by Carl Phillips called “Archery”.[1] It is at least in part a love poem, and like so many love poems it is also (and perhaps “really”) about time. Like so many poems about time it is pulled gravitationally toward thinking about death, and like so many poems about death it considers one of the oldest impulses of lyric poetry, which is to imagine aesthetic perfection or permanence as an alternative to or end-run around mortality. That description, though, makes “Archery” sound like a rehash of a Renaissance sensibility, which it definitely is not—the speaker is too skeptical for that, too aware that a poem can’t be at the center of the universe any more than we can, even if a poem can be at the center of one or a few of our own little moments.  

The first stanza (of six) is the only one that actually talks about archery, most notably in this sentence: “To have timed your arrow/ perfectly meant watching the air for a moment/ seem stitched throughout with a kind of/ timelessness.” This jumps out for a few reasons, not the least being that it is surrounded by sentences that are filled with commas and parentheses. The sentence with the arrow, though, flies directly to its conclusion as it describes a breathtaking moment when some well-calculated action is performed “perfectly,” and thus seems to freeze time.[2] Then the next line mentions a lover, which implicitly brings into the poem the idea of cupid’s arrow (another version of breath taken, time frozen). And so the idea of momentary perfection is introduced, and will eventually be echoed near the end of the poem.

But the center of the poem is far more vexed. In the second stanza time becomes murky, as a new lover mumbles in half-sleep things you would expect to hear from an old lover. Phillips echoes this murkiness in a shift from past tense (“meant”) to present continuous (“he’s mumbling”) even though we are (I think) in the same scene with the same two people in those sentences. Then, the third and fourth stanzas widen to a more panoramic scope:

     All those hours spent trying to outstare the distance

of what the days must come to,

and pretending a choice to it: now the shadow-script

that willows and hazel trees mark the barn’s western

face with; now the wind-rippled field, like a lesser version—tamer,

tameable—of the sea, for movement (same infinite

pattern, and variation; randomness and intention; release;

restraint—that kind of movement) ...

If Phillips stopped at the colon (after “choice to it”), this would still be incredible stuff. Those three lines powerfully evoke the effort it takes to ignore how little control we have over the end-points of our lives’ trajectories. But the next five lines are the heart of the poem. They give concrete imagery to Phillips’ decidedly metaphysical concerns, yet they resist becoming some symbol that lets us pin down the poem. One way to read everything after the colon is that the two clauses beginning with “now” are the options in the choice we pretend to have—specifically, a choice between shadows on a barn or ripples in a field, which is arguably no choice at all. But perhaps there is some solace that the choice we pretend is between two beautiful things, and arguably even two meaningful things (one is “shadow-script,” the other might have “intention”), though again, that meaning might be something we project. Does nature signify, or do we see what we want? Phillips doesn’t posit an answer so much as he makes us experience the question, in lines that catch and sway like the oceanic field he describes.

There is, though, another way to read those two “now” clauses—not  that they are options (“on the one hand this, on the other that”), but that they are two points in a temporal sequence (“now it is this, and now it is that”). In this reading, the speaker is elaborating not the choice we pretend, but the “distance” we try to “outstare.” And if these lines are about trajectory across a distance (as so much of the poem has been), the trajectory leads from something relatively human-scaled—the barn and the trees—and out into the field that moves in “infinite/ pattern, and variation.”[3] The field is more “tameable” than the sea, but at the extreme edges of our vision, it becomes pure motion, an abstract suggestion of nature’s grandeur, or even just the grandeur of physics.

In any event, the poem pulls back to shorter, tighter phrasing after this. Phillips is loose with grammar throughout the poem—there are more fragments in it than complete sentences—but that is especially true in the last two stanzas, where the clipped statements read as the speaker trying to get things under control after the sweep of the fourth stanza. This is apparent in the statement “To sing a song/ of water, and not drown in it,” which perhaps nods to the way that the poem itself sunk into abstraction right after it mentioned the sea.

But if you can sing of the sea and not drown, you’re onto something: “Some calling that/ a good trick. And some calling it// mastery.” Phillips undermines the authority of the word “mastery” a bit by putting it right after a rather abrupt stanza break—certainly he’s setting the word apart to make us think about it. But these lines are also reminiscent of the lines about archery from the start of the poem. One “good trick” is a perfectly aimed arrow, and another is the trick of the artist able to dabble in danger, to think hard about darkness, but then execute an escape and not dwell there permanently.

The last three lines of the poem execute their own elegant escape, and they’re beautiful in a way that I’m reluctant to tread upon with some reading of what they’re “about,” though surely they’re about love, death, and a dream of renewal. I’m struck by the degree to which archery and the image of an arrow color my thinking all the way through the poem, even though Phillips only actually uses the word “arrow” once, in the very first line. Yet it is a powerfully resonant image across the text, able to call to mind love’s arrow, but also time’s arrow, and perhaps even the arrows of Artemis, goddess of the moon, “mute arbitress of tides.” Which is to say you can make archery represent time moving forward, or time cycling, as you see fit. But ultimately, Phillips uses the image of the archer to reflect upon the probably naive, possibly pyrrhic effort a poet makes to create a focused, time-pausing moment amidst the sway and muddle of life: the trick of propelling some piercing phrase along a perfect line.  

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[1] I suppose I should note, in the interest of full disclosure and humblebragging, that Phillips was one of my professors at Wash U twenty-plus years ago when I was a floppy-haired English major. He was an excellent teacher, but completely apart from that, his poems always floored me. Judging by his wikipedia page full of awards, I’m hardly alone in that judgment.

[2] The line breaks here are impressive, and impressively varied: ending on “arrow” propels; ending on “for a moment” urges a pause in tension with the enjambment; ending on “kind of” builds tension via interruption.

[3] There’s a comparison to be made here to Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop For Death,” which also moves in a trajectory from the human-scale to something much larger. Indeed, one hesitation I have about my reading of these lines in “Archery” is that I worry I’m just superimposing Dickinson over Phillips.

Drinking in the Yard at Night: Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 2

I haven’t done much in the way of going to bars this year. I’m relatively certain that my last bar visit was when I was in Louisville for a conference, and I can at least take solace in the fact that Louisville has several bars worthy of distinctions like “the last bar I went to” and “the last bar I remember going to.” But since March, I’ve done none of that, which is too bad, since I like a good bar. As the esteemed John Greiner said the other day, “I miss drinking with people I only kind of know.”

John uttered that particular bit of wisdom while sitting fifteen or so feet away from me in my backyard one evening a few weeks ago. This summer, if you’re being at all responsible, that’s the socializing you can do—sitting outdoors, reasonably distanced from the people in your life that you’re relatively certain have not been making out with strangers at Buzzard Beach.

If there’s any solace in this, it’s that once the evening rolls in and you’ve got a bit of shade, drinking in the yard with a couple of friends is not half bad. And once the stars come out, it’s downright lovely. I’ve even learned a bit of astronomy. You want to know where Arcturus is? Get a couple cocktails in me, and I’ll be happy to point it out. When it gets to the wee hours, you can see Saturn chase Jupiter across the southern sky. I’m told there’s a comet knocking about, but there are trees to the northwest of my yard, so I wouldn’t know.

To be certain, I enjoyed a good drink in the yard at night long before 2020 rolled around, but only in 2020 has drinking in the yard at night become a health-conscious expression of one’s commitment to civic duty. And you know how I am about health.

So I recommend you get out there. The wi-fi signal is terrible, and when the wind blows in the trees, it sounds like any other year.

The Mountain Goats' "Exegetic Chains": Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 1

This is the first of a series of essays discussing things I have actually liked about the year 2020. 

Back on April 8, I took a walk on an eerily quiet night, and then I wrote the following:

In years to come, there will be poems and movies and novels and songs about these weeks, but if they don’t at some point try to evoke that silence, they won’t be capturing the truth of this moment, which has not shocked us with explosions or rubble, but has pressed down like a smothering pillow.

It’s tempting in reading that to wish that I’d cut everything after “moment,” since violence and anger became the news of the day just a few weeks later. But I think I was right that the heavy silence of early April is as much a part of the truth of this year as the incendiary summer and ominous autumn that will probably dominate historical memory.

Surprisingly, though, it took only eight days for me to hear a new song that answered my hope for something that would “evoke that silence.”

The Mountain Goats’ album Songs for Pierre Chuvin, which came out in mid-April, is a big deal if you happen to be a fan of John Darnielle, who effectively is the band. For the first several years of the Mountain Goats’ existence, Darnielle recorded all of his material solo on a Panasonic boombox, culminating in the 2002 lo-fi masterpiece All Hail West Texas. After that album, though, the boombox got put away and Darnielle began recording with a full band. Plenty of the full-band material is good, and a little of it is great, but if you got into Darnielle’s songwriting through the scratchy, warts-and-all sound of those early albums, the Mountain Goats with a rhythm section and studio engineers wasn’t quite the same, even if Darnielle’s major themes remained constant: hope despite sadness; troubled grubby teenagers; spectacularly failed marriages; everyday beauty.

Like the rest of us, Darnielle had to stay home beginning in mid-March, and he used this as an opportunity to get out the old boombox. He wrote and recorded a song a day based on a book by the French historian Pierre Chuvin called A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, which according to its blurb at Harvard University Press is “a history of the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire as told from the perspective of the defeated: the adherents of the mysteries, cults, and philosophies that dominated Greco-Roman culture.” Honestly, that’s about all you need to know to get the gist of the album. I’m sure there are nuances you could pick up by reading the book, but a couplet like “Me and my pagan crew/ We will deal with you,” or, in a very different register, “Return the peace you took from me/ Give me back my community” pretty well speaks for itself.

So, yeah, it’s a concept album. Moreover it’s a concept album about the last of the ancient Roman pagans. If this sounds Rush-level dorky it probably is, but Darnielle is able to use this concept to create something remarkably moving. These are small songs about enormous loss. They are quiet, meditative, and almost reticent in their accounts of state-sponsored violence being used to stifle a culture of inestimable richness. They are songs about powerful Christians ruining everything. They make a lot of sense in 2020.

My favorite song on the album, which is also my favorite song I’ve heard anywhere this year, is the closer “Exegetic Chains.”[1] “Favorite” isn’t exactly the right word—it’s more that I haven’t heard another song that does a better job of sounding the way that 2020 feels. It is muffled and repetitive, centered on a few spare chords. There’s a lot of “space” in the recording, as they say. Darnielle singing is restrained, almost sotto voce, like he wants to make sure he’s heard but not overheard.

The singing style fits the theme of hidden messages that fills the verses. Darnielle sings about echoes of old myths you can find “in the shadows on the ground beneath the trees”; secrets whispered in city squares; or the warmth inside the “panasonic hum” of the song itself. The title “Exegetic Chains” gives us some clue as to what he’s up to with all this cryptic evocation of things cryptic, since exegesis is the act of critical interpretation or explication—we’re being asked, in a sense, to parse mysteries.

But then there’s the second word in the title: what’s going on with these “chains”? One the one hand, a chain can be a series of connected links, even connected historical links, as in the European transition from paganism to Christianity. But chains are also restraints. Indeed, in rock music, chains are almost never good things, whether it be a “Chain Gang” or a “Chain of Fools” or “Battleship Chains” or the chain that keeps Fleetwood Mac together.

Here’s what Darnielle does with the chain image in his chorus:

Say your prayers to whomever you call out to in the night.
Keep the chains tight.
Make it through this year
If it kills us outright.

The line “keep the chains tight” comes right after a line about saying your prayers in the night, in a spot where you would expect the thing you hold tight to be a blanket or a loved one. One way to read this is as violence or threat—presumably you would keep the chains tight to control a prisoner, which is jarring in a song that otherwise feels a bit ethereal. It could also be read as a directive to “keep it together,” whether metaphorically as in keeping a family or community linked together or literally as in keeping a mechanism or tool functioning.

Then the last two lines of the chorus are a tip of the cap to Mountain Goats fans. Darnielle alludes to one of the band’s most popular songs, the rousing sing-along “This Year,” which is basically “I Won’t Back Down” for white Gen Xers with literature degrees. In that song, written fifteen years ago, the chorus is joyously defiant: “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.” Last summer, when I was in a good deal of pain and taking more vicodin than would be ideal, I listened to “This Year” a lot. But fast-forward to 2020, and in “Exegetic Chains” the same words slightly rearranged read more as stoic than joyous, and more cognizant of the possibility of absolute defeat.

“Exegetic Chains” is a song about fear, loneliness, and watching an era end in calamity, which is as relevant to the 21st century as it was to the 5th. But in the last line of the last verse, the speaker says that he is “headed somewhere better if I have to crawl there on all fours.” Here’s hoping.

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[1] That title, to be sure, transcends Rush-level dorkiness to achieve Yes-level dorkiness. Nevertheless, the song works.

A City of Fountains

A little over a year ago I had major foot surgery, and as a result, I spent most of last summer migrating back and forth between our guest room and the couch. Thank the Lord and his prophetess Megan Rapinoe that the Women’s World Cup was entertaining, because outside of that, my June ’19 was quite a bummer. As I named constellations in the ceiling tile and counted the hours to my next vicodin, I got through it all in part by imagining all the fun stuff I was going to do when Summer 2020 rolled around.

Sigh.

To be clear, I’m not complaining or woe-is-me-ing to any great degree. Given the state I was in a year ago, I’m one of the few people on earth for whom May 2020 was less challenging than May 2019, even if my dreams of busting out of the house for concert-going and sports-shouting haven’t panned out. There’s nowhere to go, but at least I can walk there.

One thing I have done to pass the time this summer is sit next to fountains. Oft can I be found next to fountains old and new, functional and not, public and private, urban and Kansan, cloistered and vista’d. Perhaps I do some reading; perhaps I plan a class; perhaps I just watch the water circulate. It’s a nice enough diversion, and I live in the right place for it, because Kansas City is bananas for fountains.

Plenty of articles recirculate the claim that the KC area has “more than 200 fountains,” though the original source of this statistic is not clear. Still, the number passes the sniff test, and if anyone did a census that included things like fountains in people’s yards or the little waterfalls framing the signage of office parks, the number would undoubtedly be far higher. A visitor to KC who did only the most basic tourist stuff—shop the Plaza, stroll the galleries at the Nelson, take in a Royals game—might notice that they’ve rarely been more than a couple blocks from a fountain during their trip. And the thing is, while the Plaza is almost comically dense with fountains, the rest of the metro area, even down to residential neighborhoods, has an uncommonly high number as well.

The map of KC fountains maintained by the City of Fountains Foundation is impressive. It chronicles fountains as far-flung as the “Kids at Heart” Fountain in Lee’s Summit and, 43 miles north, the abstract unfinished-billboard-esque monstrosity that welcomes travelers to KCI. But if you know KC in any detail, you realize pretty quickly that when you look at the map of fountains, what you are really looking at is a map of money. There are more fountains west of Troost than east; more in Johnson County than Wyandotte; more in northeast Johnson County than Olathe. Even where fountains exist on the East side of KCMO, many of them (especially along the Paseo) were built roughly a century ago when the neighborhoods that hold them were wealthy and white. So the map of KC fountains is not only a map of money, but also a map of the history of money.

The architect of KC’s fountain disparities—as he was of so many of KC’s disparities—was the early-twentieth-century real estate developer JC Nichols. Residential neighborhoods throughout the KC metro have fountains, but the neighborhoods that Nichols developed in the 1910’s and 1920’s are absolutely teeming with them.[1] For instance, a walk down a one-mile entirely-residential stretch of 69th Street from Ward Parkway to Rockhill takes one past four fountains. And that’s just on the Missouri side—Mission Hills is even more saturated with fountains.[2] As the architectural historian Sara Stevens writes, fountains were an essential part of Nichols’ development strategy:

Nichols’s landscape architects also used another kind of design—statuary fountains—to sell buyers a vision of high-end suburban living. The neighborhood’s traffic-directing street layouts created small, postage-stamp sized parks, islands surrounded by roads. These Nichols turned into selling points by filling them with fountains and sculptures. He collected the art on trips to Europe, adding to the general cachet of the endeavor, and held receptions to unveil new acquisitions. More than mere ornaments in the landscape, Nichols believed these objets d’art established an aesthetic tone that reflected the street design, and helped build a long-term vision for the quality and financial stability of the area.

Fountains were not, however, the most important driver of Nichols’ economic success. That, without question, was the use of racially restrictive deeds to create exclusively white neighborhoods. Advertising signs for Nichols’ neighborhoods referred to them as “Protected Residence Property.” It doesn’t take much intuition to guess from whom the developer promised to protect the buyer. That coded language, which was printed on billboards in a larger typeface even than the phrase “Attractive Prices,” makes clear that the exclusion of African-Americans was a core selling point—perhaps the core selling point—of southwestern Kansas City during the city’s interwar boom. Nichols laid out the racial and economic divides that still shape Kansas City a century later, and tragically, his influence extended far wider. As Stevens points out, he was the founding president of the National Association of Home Builders, and his restrictive deeds the model that the Federal Housing Administration recommended to developers in the 1940’s.

Photo credit: State Historical Society of Missouri

I live in one of the neighborhoods that Nichols developed, and in spite of the fact that the restrictive deeds he used were finally made fully illegal 52 years ago, it is uncommon for me to see any African-Americans when I walk around my neighborhood. My neighborhood has a variety of public spaces scattered among its private residences, and more than anywhere else I have ever lived, people actually use those public spaces. But when Nichols designed those public spaces, he did so in a way that aggressively policed who gets to count as part of “the public,” and that legacy is still visible today. And yes, one could state truthfully that anyone is allowed to walk down the street and sit on a bench in my neighborhood. But the blunt fact is that only someone who looks more or less like me is likely to feel fully comfortable doing so. The restrictions Nichols designed, and which generations of white Kansas Citians bought up with enthusiasm, still define the daily lived experience of this city.

The most famous and photographed fountain in Kansas City was named to honor JC Nichols. It sits off of Main Street at the entry to the Plaza, and features statues of four horses which are meant to symbolize “the four mighty rivers of the world,” all of which are located in Europe or North America. The Nichols Memorial Fountain is featured in countless Kansas City postcards, it is virtually guaranteed to make an appearance when any Chiefs game comes back from commercial, and I suspect that most Kansas Citians have a picture of themselves standing near or in front of it. I didn’t even realize that I had one until I went scrolling through my facebook photos, but there I am, eleven years ago. 

Photo Credit: Anne Twitty

Unlike the smaller fountains in residential neighborhoods, the Nichols Fountain is a public space used by all sorts of people, and it has long been a key location for political protests, including the recent Black Lives Matter protests. More than anyplace else in the city, the Nichols Fountain is Kansas City’s town square.

The news came out today that the Parks Board is going to remove Nichols’ name from the fountain. Good. And I’m sure that someone will argue that this constitutes “erasing history,” but that’s ridiculous. Nichols’ influence is so wide-ranging and profound that to erase his history, you would have to erase Kansas City itself. We live our lives along geographical lines he quite literally drew, and it will take a lot more than altering the name of an equine fountain to erase that. But Kansas City cannot continue to honor him. Taking his name off a fountain is of course entirely symbolic, but it is a symbolic action this city has to take if we want our next 100 years to be defined by something other than the sins of the past 100 years.   

Further reading: If you're interested in knowing more about the history of Nichols' role in Kansas City, the article I cite by Sara Stevens is well worth your time. Whitney Terrell's novel The King of King's County deals with a fictionalized version of the Nichols family, and Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge, probably the most important novel ever written about Kansas City, depicts life in Nichols' Country Club District in the 1930's.

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[1] I was going to say “overflowing,” but I have too much respect for you, dear reader.

[2] Sorry—couldn’t help that one.

Forced and Erroneous: 16 Notes on the 16-Year-Old Movie "Wimbledon"

Last night, as I contemplated falling asleep, I instead stumbled upon the movie Wimbledon. Then I woke up and wrote the following, which I believe constitutes the most time anyone has spent thinking about Wimbledon since it came out sixteen years ago.

Spoiler alert: In the text below, I discuss many “plot points” from the “film” Wimbledon.

1. The meet-cute in the 2004 romantic comedy Wimbledon happens the day before Wimbledon begins, when our male lead, the never-quite-made-it-big British tennis player Peter Colt (Paul Bettany), is assigned the wrong hotel room, and accidentally walks in on rising American tennis star Lizzie Bradbury (Kirsten Dunst) while she is the shower. Lizzie is surprisingly chill about this situation—she never for a second seems even vaguely surprised or worried. I get that the screenwriters are trying to suggest that she’s cool as a cucumber and doesn’t have hang-ups about her body or whatever, and later it’s revealed that she knows who Peter is because she’s seen one of his matches. But I have to think that even a super-sex-positive, tennis-aware woman with icewater in her veins is going to display at least a moment’s shock when a tall male stranger walks into her hotel room. Regardless, the audience reaction to a meet-cute probably shouldn’t be “why the hell isn’t this woman calling security?”

2. Lizzie Bradbury would be a much better name for a girl detective than a women’s tennis player. 

3. A young Jaime Lannister appears in the movie in the “wisecracking buddy” role. He’s supposed to be German, but I initially thought he was trying and failing to sound Irish. Just let the man be pretty and English—that’s why God put him on the Earth.  

4. Any sports movie is going to face the problem that Hollywood actors aren’t actually built like athletes, but sometimes it’s at least plausible—Kevin Costner as a minor-league catcher; Denzel Washington as a aging playground hoops legend; Geena Davis as a line-drive hitter—these are concepts you can believe if you squint. As for Wimbledon...yeesh. Paul Bettany is tall, so that’s good, but he’s more than a little doughy if you mentally compare him to Rafa Nadal. And Dunst, God love her, was far too much the ingénue circa 2004 to be believable as an elite athlete, particularly in a sport that requires the raw explosiveness of 21st-century tennis.

5. And then there’s the problem of Dunst’s tennis form, which is terrible. During the tournament montages, they mostly mask this problem with clever editing, but there’s a scene where Dunst and Bettany play flirtatious pantomime tennis in the park, and when she fake-serves it looks like the Elaine Benes dance from Seinfeld.  

6. There’s a whole plotline about how we know that Peter is a good guy because he looks worried when ballboys get hit by errant serves. That seems a low bar to clear.

7. Peter and Lizzie spend a lot of time driving around England on picturesque dates. To be clear, they are doing this in the middle of the Wimbledon tournament. I know that players have off days, but I really doubt that Roger Federer is taking romantic strolls through the countryside the day before the quarterfinals.

8. In real life, ten out of the eleven tournaments staged between 2000 and 2010 featured at least one Williams sister in the Wimbledon final. On four occasions Venus and Serena played each other in the final round, including the two years immediately before this film came out. I bring this up because I cannot recall a single black person appearing in the movie Wimbledon.

9. It’s a romantic comedy, so there is of course an airport scene early in the third act (Lizzie and her father are flying home while Peter plays in the men’s final). Bear in mind that this is an airport scene in 2004, depicting two people waiting to board an international flight from Europe to the US. Now consider that Lizzie and her father just straight-up abandon their bags in the terminal. I was genuinely more interested in knowing how long Heathrow got shut down for the bomb-sniffing dogs than I was in who won the match, but alas, my questions were never addressed.

10. Late in the second act, Lizzie tells Peter that she does not want to continue seeing him because tennis needs to be her first priority. After some hijinks involving trellis-climbing, he breaks into her apartment the night before a big match and she seems...surprisingly okay with it. Being down with having her privacy violated appears to be a core trait of Lizzie Bradbury’s character. Anyway, the next day she plays badly and gets knocked out of the tournament, at which point she breaks things off with Peter and leaves town. Later, Peter gives her a big public apology, but the apology is quite vague, and it could easily be read as him apologizing not for breaking into her apartment, but for rocking her world so thoroughly that it made her bad at tennis.

11. Indeed, to that last point, the question of how sex the night before a match impacts one’s tennis performance is discussed frequently in the movie. The film suggests emphatically that sex makes men better at tennis, but it makes women worse.

12. At least that’s its opinion regarding hetero relationships. The film has gay and lesbian characters, but they are all queer quippy sexless sidekicks of the sort that future film historians will be led to believe were omnipresent from 1998 to 2005.

13. Peter wins the Wimbledon final. His opponent is portrayed as a bad guy, though his bad guy bona fides are that he is cocky, he is slightly less concerned than Peter is when ballboys get hit in the face, and he makes a pass at Lizzie at one point (though unlike Peter he stops pursuing her when she says she’s not interested). He also has really good hair. He is, to put it mildly, a poorly realized villain.

14. I would not have guessed at the time that the actor in Wimbledon who would have the most Hollywood success over the next sixteen years would be Jon Favreau. But then, who could have foreseen Baby Yoda? I also don’t think I would have guessed that Kirsten Dunst would end up engaged to Landry from Friday Night Lights. Crucifictorious forever!

15. Both our leads have “wacky families.” There is the inevitable wisecracking sibling, and an overprotective yet wise father. Also, Peter’s parents are in the middle of a madcap marital dispute that has led to Peter’s father living in a treehouse—that’s like ten percent of the film. The movie would have been much better if most of the family stuff had been removed, in no small part because then it only would have been about forty minutes long.

16. The sports movie/rom-com hybrid is truly a mutant hellbeast, combining as it does two of the most formulaic movie genres. Bull Durham is the only example I can think of that is especially good. So is Wimbledon more successful as a rom-com or sports movie? It’s honestly a tough call. What it has to say about romance is more offensive, but the way it imagines sports is considerably dumber. Guess we’ll just have to score it a deuce.