2 Read

There's probably something longer to write about this, being as how much I absolutely adored Infinite Jest [1] & pretty much everything else that David Foster Wallace has written, but I just love DFW writing about tennis, and his "Roger Federer as Religious Experience" fit the bill for a good Sunday morning read. (via Kottke)

Crossworld

And as for books: I've been intermittently reading Marc Romano's Crossworld over the past couple of weeks [2], and it's good, though not great. But I sat down & finished it this weekend, and really, really enjoyed the following passage.

The scene is that the publisher of Games magazine, where Will Shortz was working, set up a meeting between Will and Bill Clinton, while Clinton was running for president. For the meeting, Will prepared a fifteen-by-fifteen crossword puzzle. Clinton warned that he was busy with the campaign & wouldn't have much time for the meeting, but:

Once Clinton saw that Will was in earnest, he agreed to doing the puzzle. He told an aide that only the most urgent calls were to be passed through, clicked the timer on his wristwatch, and set about solving Shenk's grid. Will fell silent, but Clinton said, "Go ahead; don't stop asking me questions," and he answered them as he filled in the puzzle. About three minutes into the proceedings, the phone rang; Clinton clicked the timer off and answered the call, which was long and involved. (Will later found out it was from the Reverend Jesse Jackson.) When he was done, he clicked on the timer again and finished the puzzle--in six minutes fifty-four seconds. When the meeting was over, Will and Shenk looked at Clinton's answers. They were 100 percent correct.

Yet another reason to love Bill Clinton: he's brilliant at crosswords!

[1] a summer reading project, if there ever was one, and it was, most definitely, for me, back in college.

[2] hoping for something as brilliant as Stefan Fatsis's Word Freak, but never really finding it, in Crossworld.

Comments

[Noam]

That article was awesome. Funny that it made it to digg and delicious/popular.

[precipice]

I was really down on Crossworld.  I really wanted it to be good, but it just wasn't.  The author was way too infatuated with the idea of the book and not nearly enough with telling good stories about people other than himself.

I liked the crossword documentary currently playing -- Wordplay.  Well worth seeing.

[Carlo Felice Dalla Pasqua]

Envy. I still cannot show my italian books since they're not sold by Amazon... Great book, however (Crossworld, I mean)

[Dinah]

I'll second that recommendation for Wordplay. Neat bit with Clinton in it, actually. Be forewarned, it oddly comes to a dead stop tempo-wise partway through and then picks right up again. Strange, clearly intentional, unusual editing choice.