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Photos from the ATP World Tour Finals now playing in London

The valedictorian always has the perfect hair and suit.

This one’s corny but cute. Why do I think Novak Djokovic wants to be in show business?

Living Tennis Players Society.

Write me a caption for this.

Either/Or: Sports, sex, and the case of Caster Semenya by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker.

In the (alleged) words of Vilma Santos: Been there, been that.

They’re Raymond Carver and John Cheever, two masters of the American short story (In the case of Carver we’ll have to read his recently-published Collected Stories, the versions he wrote before Gordon Lish took a cleaver to them), drinking buddies, and spectacularly unhappy men.

Stephen King reviews Carol Sklenicka’s biography of Raymond Carver, A Writer’s Life, in the NYT. “Writing talent often runs on its own clean circuit,” King writes, “but writers whose works shine with insight and mystery are often prosaic monsters at home.”

As brilliant and talented as he was, Ray Carver was also the destructive, everything-in-the-pot kind of drinker who hits bottom, then starts burrowing deeper. . .And until mid-1977, Raymond Carver was out of control. While teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he and John Cheever became drinking buddies. “He and I did nothing but drink,” Carver said of the fall semester of 1973. “I don’t think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters.” Because Cheever had no car, Carver provided transportation on their twice-weekly booze runs. They liked to arrive at the liquor store just as the clerk was unlocking for the day. Cheever noted in his journal that Carver was “a very kind man.” He was also an irresponsible boozehound who habitually ran out on the check in restaurants, even though he must have known it was the waitress who had to pay the bill for such dine-and-dash customers. His wife, after all, often waited tables to support him.

Colm Toibin reviews Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey in the LRB.

Cheever was good at blaming people; so skilled did he become at it that he sometimes went as far as blaming himself. Since he never had a job or went out much, and mainly saw his family and his family only, he specialised in blaming them. He blamed his father and his brother for not playing ball with him when he was small. He blamed his father for losing his money, his brother for leaving home. He blamed his mother for many things, but mainly for opening a giftshop to keep the family going and making a success of it. . .When he read Freud, Cheever also discovered that his family was a ‘virtual paradigm for “that chain of relationships” (weak father, dominant mother) “that usually produces a male homosexual.”’ Thus they didn’t just make him poor, they made him queer, and he spent the rest of his life resenting them.

Carver was a violent drunk whose wife supported him for 25 years. She got nearly nothing in the divorce settlement, and even less in his will. Cheever was a mean drunk, a snob, and a secret homosexual who hated homosexuals. (Remember that Seinfeld episode where Kramer accidentally burns down his girlfriend’s family’s cabin in the woods, and the only thing he manages to save is a box of explicit letters from John Cheever to his girlfriend’s father?)

I would’ve liked to listen in on their drunken sprees, but after the initial burst of alcoholic cleverness they were probably as tedious and boring as other drunks.

But their stories: Beautiful.

Nancy Drew was the first detective I’d ever met, not counting Charlie’s Angels who were on TV at the time. In the fifth grade I read all the Nancy Drew mysteries by Carolyn Keene—there were 51 at the time—and the occasional Hardy Boys mystery. I borrowed half of them from classmates and the STC library; the rest my mother bought me at Alemar’s on Quezon Avenue, Rustan’s supermarket in Cubao, and Makati Supermart. They cost about P11 each.

When I took my ancient hardcover Nancy Drews out of the box last year I was pleased to find them in pristine condition, pages still white—they must’ve used acid-free paper. My Star Trek books (the adaptations by James Blish) from that period, as well as the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs from the following year are all brown now.

Book series are very comforting: you get more and more familiar with the habits and quirks of the main character until she or he feels like an old friend. You’re developing a personal relationship with a fictional creation. Detective series are particularly compelling because you want to make sure your old friend survives his/her dangerous investigations.

If you like detective fiction and food, you need to get to know Inspector Montalbano, star of the series by Andrea Camilleri. His stomping ground is Sicily, where he deals with ruthless mobsters and bureacrats, constantly finds excuses not to marry his longtime girlfriend, and rhapsodizes about food. “The smell of fresh fish mingled with that of tangerines, boiled lamb entrails sprinkled with caciocavallo cheese, a dish called meusa, and fritters, all of them fusing into a unique, almost magical whole.”

(If you’re planning a trip to Italy, read the detective novels of Michael Dibdin and Donna Leon to get familiar with the city layouts.)

I read John Burdett’s Bangkok Haunts on the plane to Bangkok, and it made that city even more exciting for me—even if it describes grisly, horrific crimes. On the very first page of Bangkok 8, an American soldier is killed by a snake bite. On his eyeball. When they get to the crime scene the snake is still there. Dangling from his eyeball. And that’s just the opening, wait till the third book with the elephants and the very angry ghost. Detective Jitpleecheep, the half-Thai, half-American son of a former prostitute who now owns a bar, is the one honest cop on the force. A former monk, his Buddhist beliefs give a fresh and unexpected perspective on his investigations. “Sometimes our sins are a compulsion of karma: the Buddha rubs our face in it until we are so sick of our error we would rather die than go that way again.”

Here’s a ready-made true-to-life plot for a detective novel: In Peru, Gang ‘killed victims to extract their fat’.

The Smiley books by John le Carré are the top of the genre, but Alan Furst’s espionage thrillers set in World War II have their own charm. The period detail is stunning: Furst lingers over the architecture, curtains, tableware, and sometimes I hear myself yelling, “Where’s the body?” The atmosphere thick with romance and intrigue is reminiscent of Casablanca or Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious—Why have these novels not been filmed?

The first two books are the best in the series. Night Soldiers has an indelible beginning: the would-be spy watches as his brother is kicked to death by Nazis. They will pay. The middle books are still good, especially the two novels featuring the French movie producer trying to survive in Occupied Paris. From Blood of Victory onwards they start feeling like remakes. The Foreign Correspondent reads like an inferior Dark Star, whose main protagonist is also a journalist. But even when he’s repeating himself Furst is riveting. I just got the tenth novel, The Spies of Warsaw, at National Bookstore.

Friends recommend Colin Cotterill’s Dr. Siri Paiboun series featuring the septuagenarian chief coroner of the Pathet Lao. It opens with The Coroner’s Lunch. After Spies of Warsaw I’m starting on Boris Akunin’s Erast Fandorin series set in 19th century Moscow. Maybe if I read enough novels set in Russia I will get to Russia.

How I spent my Saturday night: craning my neck at the World Pyro Olympics at Bonifacio Global City.

The friends of friends booked a table outside Stock Market to get a clear view of the fireworks. It would’ve been a good view except that it rained so they put out the awnings, blocking our line of sight. (The food: edible. The desserts by Ice Cream Bar: brilliant.)

Up first were Germany and China. Their pyrotechnics were fairly spectacular but geometrically-challenged: all globes and the occasional starburst pattern. I was hoping for dragons and elves, but a cube or dodecahedron would’ve been welcome. Or a tesseract.

Remember that movie Lukas Moodysson shot in the Philippines, starring Gael Garcia Bernal? Mammoth. It just opened in New York. Manohla Dargis’s review in the NYT.