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| Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi Amid Andre Agassi's self-serving revelations about drugs and his rivals, Geoff Dyer finds some thrilling insights into the game of tennisNorman Mailer reckoned that, as big fights loomed, great boxers "begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville". If Andre Agassi's Open is anything to go by, great tennis players begin to have minds like JR Moehringer. Um, who? He's Agassi's collaborator, the guy who turned hundreds of hours of taped conversations into plausible prose. I agree, this does come as a disappointment, even if we accept that it's as unreasonable to expect Agassi to sit down and actually write a book as it is to expect Martin Amis (to whom we shall return) suddenly to make the Wimbledon finals. We are dealing, let's not forget, with someone who had roughly the same formal education as Wayne Rooney or Gazza.Agassi credits the dramatic, mid-90s revival in his fortunes to his new coach, Brad Gilbert, author of Winning Ugly. The problem with JR, Andre's book coach, is that he makes Writing Easy. His hand is too obviously dab. It's not that Open reads as if it's been written with a view to a lucrative serial deal (normal enough); it reads as if it's already a serialisation of itself with potential headlines (Agassi took crystal meth!) and pull quotes ("I always hated tennis") thrown in. Perhaps this is why, strangely, it rings least true at moments of maximum declared honesty. "I've always been a truthful person," Andre confesses while preparing a singularly unconvincing lie to explain how he tested positive for meth.It might be true that, after arranging "a nest egg of Nike stock" for a friend's sick child, Andre learned that "the only perfection… is the perfection of helping others", but, put like this, it sounds like he's just signed a new endorsement for Compassion Inc. Speaking of which, after shooting himself in the foot with a Canon campaign based around the slogan "Image Is Everything", Agassi feels "betrayed by the advertising agency, the Canon execs", by everyone "who treats this ridiculous throwaway slogan as if it's my Confession". That's the spin he puts on it. But in this Confession – a confession in danger of being reduced to the slogan "I hated tennis and took meth" – maybe we should have been told approximately how many millions it took to lure him to participate in this betrayal in the first place.Since the autobiography of a tennis player is, by definition, self-serving, it's worth bearing in mind a 1996 essay in which the late David Foster Wallace wrote that he "loathe[d] Agassi with a passion" and found him, in person, "about as cute as a Port Authority whore". So maybe the opprobrium wasn't all about a look – "fluffy, spiky, two-toned mullet, with black roots and frosted tips" – which, in fairness, seems far more preposterous now than it did at the time. Even then, one suspected that Agassi's rebellious image was partly manufactured in consort with his sponsors.Still, it comes as a shock to learn that by 1990 the hair itself was manufactured. Yes, he was wearing a hairpiece, which disintegrated in the shower the night before the final of the French Open. It wasn't until 1994, by which time he had won titles at Wimbledon and the US Open and was living with Brooke Shields, that Agassi plucked up the courage to show his fuzzy skull to the world. Quite a change: having thought about nothing but hitting tennis balls, he now starts looking like a tennis ball!The final incarnation – duck-waddle Buddha, oldest surviving veteran of the war of attrition known as the ATP Tour – is still some way off. Before that, he plummets to 146 in the world rankings, takes meth and splits from Brooke. After that, as we all know, he bounces back (that's what tennis balls do), wins more Slams, courts and marries Steffi Graf, has kids and sets up an entirely admirable educational foundation in his home town, Las Vegas. By the time he takes his final, tearful bow at the US Open in 2006, he is universally and understandably adored. Defeated, he goes back to the locker room where players past and present stand in spontaneous applause. All except Jimmy Connors, face blank and "arms tightly folded".Andre first hit with Connors when he was four and encountered him regularly thereafter. His dad used to string Jimbo's rackets and would ask Andre to take them over to him, an experience rendered mortifying by Connors's boorishness. The young Andre is similarly wounded by the "big, stupid Romanian", Ilie Nastase.Nobody, however, wounds Andre like his dad. Maniacal Mike Agassi customises a tennis-ball machine so that it sprays thousands of balls at his boy, yelling at him – this will become Andre's counter-punching trademark – to hit the ball hard and on the rise. But he is not the only crazy parent – and Andre is not the only precocious talent – on the circuit. As Agassi makes the rounds, there are intriguing early glimpses of his rivals: cheating Jeff Tarango (later to achieve fame by storming off court at Wimbledon) and, at the Bollettieri Academy ("a glorified prison camp"), future world number one Jim Courier.Waiting in the wings is Agassi's nemesis, Pete Sampras. In tennis terms, theirs was a great rivalry, undermined, in spite of Nike's best efforts – remember the ad in which the pair of them sling up a net and start duking it out in the street? – by the fact that a gibbon with a racket would have brought more to the part than "Pistol" Pete. Unlike Agassi, Sampras is content to be magnificent at tennis and totally uninterested in everything else. The perpetually tormented Agassi envies him his "dullness" and "spectacular lack of inspiration".The deepest – ie most venomous – rivalry turns out to be with Boris Becker. Irked by Becker's bitching in the press about Agassi after the Wimbledon semi in 1995 (a match Becker actually won), Andre and Brad plot revenge on a "motherfucker" who, in Gilbert's view, "tries to come off as an intellectual, when he's just an overgrown farmboy".Let's take a verbal-injury time-out here. Reading Open, one is insistently reminded of a piece by Martin Amis in the New Yorker. Uncomfortable with talk of the need for "personalities", Amis decides that "personality" in tennis is "an exact synonym of a seven-letter duosyllable starting with 'a', ending with 'e' (and also featuring, in order of appearance, an 'ss', an 'h', an 'o' and 'l')". Nastase and Connors come top of Amis's list of "personalities", so it's gratifying to find that Andre's impression of Connors chimes not just with Amis, but with everything Agassi heard about him "from other players. Asshole, they say. Rude, condescending, egomaniac prick". Amis was writing in 1994 when the Agassi personality cult was near its peak, but even then Amis detected "tell-tale signs of generosity – even of sportsmanship".No such signals emanate from Becker, who would be a worthy recipient of a BBC Sports Personality Lifetime Achievement award. Two sets down in the revenge match, the "Kill or be Killed" US Open semi, "this fucking German" starts blowing kisses to Brooke in Agassi's box. Agassi gets so angry that he loses the next set. But he has a trump up his sleeve – he's worked out Becker's serve: "Just before he tosses the ball, Becker sticks out his tongue and it points like a tiny red arrow to where he's aiming." Now, that is genius of a Joycean and Tolstoyan kind!Reading about this encounter is as thrilling as watching it on TV. So is the blow-by-blow recreation of the 2006 match against Baghdatis – more physically bruising than the one against Becker, but with the added appeal of mutual respect and graciousness thrown in. Watching even low-ranked pros, one is amazed by the way they have time to compose themselves when the ball is fizzing back and forth so quickly. For Agassi, time expands to such an extent that, in the penultimate victory of his career, against James Blake in 2006, it takes half a paragraph to itemise decision-making processes that last for the microsecond that the ball is in flight.And here is the not entirely unexpected irony of Open. For all the lurid revelations, despite the overarching story of personal growth and the struggle for self-awareness, the most enthralling parts of the book are all about… tennis.Sport and leisureAndre AgassiGeoff Dyerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Inside the mind of an actor (literally) How does an actor engage with the part they are playing? Fiona Shaw undergoes a brain scan while reciting TS Eliot to help shed some light on the mystery'My bra! My bra! I have to take off my bra!" yells Fiona Shaw, running past me into a changing room. She sounds like Richard III after the battle of Bosworth Field: "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" What a top thesp Shaw is: even when she's in a panic about her underwear she sounds Shakespearean, such is her actorly grasp of prosody.And this is no small matter. Shaw has come to the basement of London University's psychology department to be analysed by cognitive neuroscientists. Today's experiment will find out what – if anything – goes on in actors' brains when they perform a role. "I'm sure there's some sort of muscle," says Shaw. "I'm sure I'm using the wrong word – some sort of muscle in an actor's brain which is extended."But why does Shaw have to take off her bra? Because it's underwired. Metal plays havoc with the huge magnet used in the machine that is going to scan her brain. There have been accidents involving highly magnetised flying oxygen canisters – not here but in scanning rooms in other parts of the world.Before Shaw is allowed into the operating room, she has to field queries from cognitive neuroscience researcher Carolyn McGettigan. "Do you have an Oyster card?" "No." Any piercings? "No." Removable dentures? "Not yet." And in she goes to the operating room, lies down on a bench that is winched up and then slowly reverses under the scanner.Shaw has chosen to recite lines from TS Eliot's The Waste Land. She will recite two-line bursts from section two of the poem A Game of Chess. Why that section? "Because there's a shift between characters even in the middle of lines and because it's just a fantastically aggressive conversation between man and wife," says Shaw.Shaw has acted in weirder circumstances. Two years ago she was buried up to her neck every evening, with just her head exposed, when she played Winnie in Beckett's Happy Days.The rest of us observers cram into the room next door and watch her on a monitor. If I had a pound for every time someone said: "Rather her than me," I'd have enough for a ticket to see her at the National Theatre as Mother Courage. All we can see is her right eye, which looks – misleadingly – like a picture of terror, while the microphone strapped to her mouth makes her resemble Ving Rhames or Bruce Willis in the torture scene from Pulp Fiction.Shaw, in her magnetised sarcophagus, intones the wife's words: "Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak / What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / I never know what you are thinking. Think."And then the husband's reply: "I think we are in rats' alley / Where the dead men lost their bones."Between each couple of lines, she counts numbers on a screen in front of her face: "21, 22, 23, 24 . . ." Why has Professor Sophie Scott, the psychologist heading the experiment, decided that counting aloud should alternate with recited poetry in the experiment? "We wanted some speech that was semantically very empty but there's a grammar to it; a structure," she explains. "But counting aloud shouldn't engage emotional or memory parts of the brain in the way reciting poetry does."The experiment is the latest in which Scott has explored the different ways our brains control our voices. "In the past, I've worked with impressionists to see what happens in their brains when they impersonate people's voices. The literature in psychology on faces is huge, but there's a lot less work on voices – partly because when we talk about speech, we go straight to focusing on language itself."Fiona is going to perform some lines from a text she's familiar with [Shaw performed Eliot's epic poem 13 years ago in a production directed by Deborah Warner, and will reprise that performance at Wilton's music hall in London next month]. She's conveying different people by the way they speak, and we're interested in finding out which parts of her brain are involved here."The results will be displayed in new exhibition on identity at the Wellcome Trust. "Voices simultaneously convey a lot of different things about us," says Scott. "If you speak to someone on the phone you can tell if they're a man or a woman, roughly how old they are, roughly where they come from in the country, if they're ill, if they're in a bad mood – that's all there. But also voices change a great deal so I sound different speaking to you than if I'd just been arrested."I'm very interested in how we're doing that, how we're fitting our voices into different registers in different social settings. I'm starting to do this with people who vary their voices professionally. What I'd like to get at is understanding the normal variation in our voices on a minute-by-minute basis."A few days later, Scott has the results of the scan. "I'm relieved," she says, "because Fiona was using more brain areas when she was reciting the poetry than when she was counting. I was worried that wouldn't happen."But what really excites Scott is the parts of the brain Shaw was using for the poetry. "In addition to all the parts of the brain associated with motor skills, like moving the tongue or lips, she used a part of the brain associated with analysing or doing a complex transformation of a visual image. If I told you to imagine the figure 8, turn it through 90 degrees, and then think of it as a pair of glasses – that's the extra part Fiona was using when she was performing the text."This part of the brain has the funtime name infra parietal sulkus. "Interestingly, it's not the part used by non-professionals when they try to produce a voice," Scott says. "Actors do it in a very different way from you or me. When I started doing this research I came from a phonetics background where you break speech down, analyse it and build it up again. But professionals don't. They're doing something much more visceral and bodily."Indeed, Shaw had an intuition of what she did before Scott performed her experiment. "I think actors' brains are like musicians' in that they've been trained to learn enormous sections of language not by rote but by imaginative association," she told me before going into the scanner. "You're often in a visual architectural space in your head. In order to remember it, I need a visual image in my head."Are all actors like that? "Probably, yes. And people who aren't actors certainly aren't like that because they say things like: 'How do you learn your lines?' Well, you don't learn your lines, you live in the imaginative moment and the line is inevitable in that situation."Of course, that's not the whole story. Sir Ben Kingsley once told me through tears that, whenever he played a role, he always had a little phrase in his head that gave him the key to a character. When he played Anne Frank's father, it was the phrase, "Make me be the best dad in the world to that little girl.""It's not remotely intellectual, what I do," Kingsley said.The same may be true of Shaw. Even so, there's a great deal going on inside her head. She swivels around in her chair to look at the cross-section of her brain on the computer."What a beautiful brain!" she says, pulling on her coat and heading off to play Mother Courage. If Scott's experiment is right, it's certainly very different from that of ordinary mortals.• Identity: Eight rooms, Nine lives opens at the Wellcome Collection in London on Thursday. For more details about The Identity Project see theidentityproject.org.ukNeuroscienceTS EliotPsychologyStuart Jeffriesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Andy Warhol's genius, eccentricities just 'Pop' It was always clear that Andy Warhol was weird and a genius; now it's apparent just how strange he was. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
5 questions for Larry McMurtry Larry McMurtry, the author of 30 novels, including the Pulitzer-winning Lonesome Dove, plus 30 screenplays, has much to say at ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Generosity by Richard Powers Tim Adams enjoys the marriage of chemistry and mystery in Richard Powers's story of a geneticist, a writer and the search for the happiness geneA few years ago I spent an afternoon with James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix of DNA. While most scientists might make an effort to be carefully circumspect about the possibilities of eugenics, Watson was emphatically not. He was in no doubt that genetic manipulation had the potential to deliver human happiness. At one point I wondered of him whether he ever felt his peers were in danger of playing God. He slapped his hand on the table: "If scientists don't play God, who will?" he roared. And then: "Some people say it would be terrible if all girls were made pretty. I say it would be great!"I was reminded often of Watson's words while reading Richard Powers's compulsive new novel Generosity (the first four letters of that title are no evolutionary accident). In an era of increasing specialisation of knowledge, Powers, a winner of every significant award that the American cultural establishment offers, persists in an heroic attempt to be that mythical being, a modern Renaissance man, as at home in the language of science as in the laboratories of literature. In previous books he has essayed virtual realities and neurology; it was inevitable that he would confront the fatefulness of our biology sooner or later.Generosity proceeds through polarities. On the one hand, Powers gives us the urbane geneticist Thomas Kurton, supremely confident that the future belongs to him. On the other, the failing writer (is there any other kind?) Russell Stone, who after a brief flirtation with fame, now finds himself teaching creative writing at a second-rate Chicago college. The pair represent CP Snow's two rival cultures, and their division is at its most stark when they come to argue about what makes us happy.Kurton has no doubt that happiness is just a brain chemical. He believes that negativity and depression are hangovers from the Stone Age need for anxiety, which is hard-wired into our genes and eradicable. Stone, meanwhile, is suitably more Neanderthal in his take on human character; that is to say, he thinks like a poet. Powers, who intervenes in the narrative from time to time to talk to his reader, describes Stone as "the kind of guy who might not know what his pleasures are. He's not alone. No one does… we're shaped to take only the briefest thrill in getting. Wanting is what having wants to recover."Generosity is full of passages like that. It's a meditation on the human condition as much as a plot-driven novel, a crucible for a particular preoccupation, which boils down to a single question: what will happen when geneticists believe they have identified the code for happiness?The guinea pig in Powers's fiction is a young Algerian woman, Thassa, who is a student in Stone's creative-writing class. A refugee from her country's civil war, Thassa is, none the less, possessed of what appears to be an infinite capacity for joy. She lights up the world. Her elation starts off as a fascination for Stone, intuitive observer of human frailty, and through a series of events ends up as a subject for Kurton, who wants to study her brain chemistry to discover the source of her unflagging spirit.Thassa presents a challenge not only to Powers's protagonists but also to the novelist himself. How do you portray a character who is all positive energy, who has no capacity for sadness? The writer's solution is to give us not Thassa's own radiant philosophy, but the responses of the people around her. She moves through the book like an irresistible hug.Powers is always at pains to weave new technologies into his old-fangled novels of ideas. Thassa, or "Jen", as she is known in Kurton's scientific reports, fast becomes an internet phenomenon. News of her off-the-scale predisposition for joy infects chatrooms like a pandemic. She starts off as a textable adjective, "u r so jen" and quickly becomes a verb: ''I jen you not." Inevitably she ends up on a talkshow, which threatens to expose her to the spectrum of irritation before she counters it with an impromptu sermon on human wonder – "her enzymes aligned, she began to speak, and in one surge her easy tide lifted all the boats". Her speech becomes a YouTube sensation.In parts of his book, Powers himself seems swept away on Thassa's hopeful tide, enthralled by the possibility of human perfectibility; in the arguments between chemistry and mystery he finds it hard not to side with the former. Something always snags though, something in the structure of his fiction – or perhaps in his writer's DNA – which makes such faith seem suspicious. For all his speculative science, his edgy thinking, his novel ends up dramatising, with newsworthy urgency, an age-old problem: why would anyone believe in happy endings?Tim Adamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |