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Hey, I just read this 1991 article from Harper's by DFW: "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes":
My apologies if this has been discussed already, but wow there's some great background stuff in there:
1) It describes in more detail than I have found elsewhere, DFW's early tennis career and playing style, which informs how we writes about tennis in his later work.
2) Apparently the Hal-Avril-mold-eating anecdote is based on a true story which DFW witnessed at a neighbor's house - a lot of the writing in IJ seems to be lifted almost verbatim from this story.
3) DFW's tennis pal and foil in his adolescence was apparently named Gil Antitoi, descended from Quebecois Canadians, who lived near him in East Central IL.
4) It describes his early fascination with mathematics and how it relates to the landscape.
I can confirm a lot of the background details that DFW alludes to in this piece because I spent 4 years in college in Urbana, IL at the University of Illinois, where DFW's father, James Wallace, was a philosophy professor. I note in passing that Peter Beak, a minor ETA student in IJ, is also the name of a chemistry professor at the U of I - not sure if that means anything.
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