UPDATED2: Aussie Aussie Oy Oy as Wildcards Romp at Brisbane Tennis

Nice win for the Duck, and its cool to see the AU start producing more players who can compete at the ATP level.

January 5th, 2015 at 2:00 pm

I’m very sorry to hear that Vika squandered MP… It will be a slow process, but I hope she has a full injury-free year.

January 5th, 2015 at 3:00 pm

Yolita, I watched the match, Vika is overweight and not fit IMO, also has mental problem to close the match, but by saying that, Pliskova really played nice tennis, was brave and took her chances.
I watched Tomic/Querrey too, Sam was serving aces left and right and when he was serving for the first set he couldn’t buy first serve, same thing happened in TB, he had a mini break just to squander it and the match. It wasn’t high quality match, though if you listened commentators it sounded like Tomik just has beaten top 10 player.

January 5th, 2015 at 3:18 pm

WB:

I notice that you write “Tomik”… Then, I won’t comment… but a nice touch, anyway…

January 5th, 2015 at 4:12 pm

mat4,
I know, you know why I wrote Tomik..
BTW, Nole played doubles with Filip and won, today he is playing first single match against Duci Lajovic.

January 5th, 2015 at 4:27 pm

This is a very usual problem with the pronunciation of foreign words and names. In France, we don’t even know how to pronounce a lot of our own names. I remember one of your compatriot who was proud she knew that Charles Bally was in fact [baji], not [bali]. She didn’t know that in that region (western Swiss, South-Eastern France), at the beginning of last century, it was in fact [baλi], something you would transcribe /Balji/, just like it was /fi:λ/, /fami:λ/. Even Saussure was shocked by the way some people already pronounced, then, [fi:j], [fami:j], which is quite normal in modern French.

BTW, did you know that the most famous linguist of your country was born as Alexander Weiss? I leave you to guess who it was.

January 5th, 2015 at 4:49 pm

Just to add: one of your most famous writer… his real name was Daniel Kohn…

But while the first one changed his name to show his fidelity to the country and the society that adopted him, the other one did it for different reasons — to avoid the fate of many in the WWII.

January 5th, 2015 at 4:52 pm

I will have a wild guess, but only because of surname, they bough sound German (or Jewish) great Serbian lingvist Ivan Klajn?

January 5th, 2015 at 5:05 pm

^^ “bough” should be “both”.

January 5th, 2015 at 5:06 pm

I havn’t seen you post @4:52 when I sent mine, I knew the first one and I loved him very much, great writer and character, Danilo Kiš, but second one was just my wild guess.

January 5th, 2015 at 5:10 pm

mat4, did you take any of Danilo’s advices for the young writer, have a look at some of them, how can one not like Danilo Kiš, wise and witty man, very much so:

http://writingmaniacs.wordpress.com/danilo-kis-advice-for-the-young-writer/

When ever you turn up on TX, we go off the topic, Sean is going to kick us out, right Sean?:(

January 5th, 2015 at 5:29 pm

WB:

Weiss means white… so, just translate it: Aleksandar Belic.

I had the opportunity to meet Kiš’s second wife, Pascale Delpeche, and she send me her traduction of “Chagrins précoces”. She also translated Andric’s novels in French. She works in China, I guess, right now.

January 5th, 2015 at 6:11 pm

I prefer to write about poetry (and grammar) than to argue with a kid about who’s the GOAT…

January 5th, 2015 at 6:14 pm

You know, my worst years were in Romania: it was in an epoch were education and culture meant much more than today. Kids worked a lot, knew French perfectly, but knew that they would never go to France, and never have the possibility to talk with somebody in French. But they knew Eluard, Aragon, and I remember that Marie Laforêt had concerts in Bucharest. Those were the lost poetry years…

January 5th, 2015 at 6:17 pm

Aleksandar Belic, would have never guessed, even wiki doesn’t say it, though it makes perfect sense, Weiss=White=Belo.

Was Danilo burried in Paris? I like the way he explains three cultures and two faiths that made him who he was:

His family house was brimming with fertile atmosphere of Judaism and Orthodox Christianity, a mixture of Hungarian and Serbian culture. He was a writer of vast energy and erudition, of richly layered cultural, historical and linguistic heritages seamlessly weaved into powerful human drama.

Of his Serbian/Jewish/Hungarian heritage, Kis wrote:

“Those two faiths … and the awareness of the dual belonging was like a shock, especially after the war. On the one hand, the epic tradition of the Serbian heroic ethos, passed on to me by my mother, along with the bitter Balkan reality, and on the other, a middle-European literature and decadent and baroque Hungarian poems. Into this mixture, made of clashes and contradictions, my Jewish being will get involved, not in a religious sense, but in the essentially cultural optics, as a researcher.”
I am familiar with Romania too, I love their people, maybe that is why I have soft spot for Simona Halep, hard working, down to earth, honest girl ..to naive too, shouldn’t let Serena playing second match with her.

January 5th, 2015 at 6:56 pm

Novak is not playing well at Doha. He looks just like he still has fever…

January 6th, 2015 at 9:25 am

mat4, how is the court, slow or fast, low or high bounce?

January 6th, 2015 at 9:55 am

Sorry, WB, couldn’t answer right away. After the first few games Novak found his groove and was very dominant until the end of the match, when he lost a bit his focus.

The court seemed to me fast enough, something like Abu Dhabi. Novak played indeed a bit flatter, shorter, and his IO FH made the difference.

Lajovic played well, but he was simply overwhelmed. His main problem is that he plays without aim, purpose — there are almost no clear patterns of play. He is a brave boy (he looks like it, anyway), but nothing changed in his game lately. It is a pity: he has a beautiful backhand when he dares to hit it DTL, he could dictate with his FH, but he seemed very often without plan whatsoever.

January 6th, 2015 at 1:32 pm