July 2011
23 posts
Charles P. Pierce on The Man
The Man can’t stop our music.
- Charles P. Pierce
This is his motto posted on his blog page on Boston.com
Black Jesus on The Man
The Man has got you beat .
-Black Jesus
Saw this written on a Priority Mail sticker posted inside a L.A. Times newspaper box in Venice, Calif.
Jeffrey Gettleman on Somalia
Abdio Ali Elmoi clutches her son, Mustapha, whose eyes are dimming. Her face is grooved with grief. She has already lost three children to gaajo, or hunger, a common word around here.
“I walked all day and all night,” she whispered, barely able to speak. “Where I come from, there is no food.”
Somalia is once again spewing misery across its borders, and once again man-made dimensions are making...
Warren Vieth on journalists losing friends in...
As a journalist, I have developed my profession’s trademark callousness toward the horror and tragedy spawned by such events. How senseless, how sad, we say to each other, shaking our heads before turning our attention to the next big development. But this was no ordinary earthquake victim, no routine battlefield casualty. This was my best friend, and I don’t make friends that easily.
...
John Steinbeck on truth, courage
An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There’s a punishment for it, and it’s usually crucifixion. I haven’t the courage for that.
- John Steinbeck’s character Samuel in “East of Eden” in the scene in which Samuel, Lee and Adam name Adam’s twin boys
(Kudos to Matt Carney for...
Cormac McCarthy on Chigurh shooting Wells at the...
He did close his eyes. He closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him.
-Cormac McCarthy from No Country For Old Men
Jimmy Cannon on Babe Ruth
He ate more and drank more and was more dramatically profane and threw more money away and had more fun and fell sicker and tipped higher and drove a car faster and laughed more and blubbered more fat man’s beery tears and was kinder and knew more priests and visited more orphanages and hospitals and grabbed more tips and staked busted guys more and made more people happier and bet horses...
Dan Shaughnessy on Mr. Van Hoogen
Mr. Van Hoogen’s right arm was useless due to a childhood bout with polio, but it wasn’t much of a handicap. With help from our catcher, the man could hit one-armed fungoes and smoke a cigarette simultaneously. He also had a spectacular vocabulary. More than once I raced home to crack open our family dictionary and learn the meaning of “nefarious” or “cahoots.”
...
Richard Donovan on Satchel Paige
“Rising six feet three and a quarter inches on semi-invisible legs, with scarcely 180 pounds strung between foot and crown, he sometimes seems more shadow than substance. His face mystifies many fans who peer at it to discover the secrets of time. Head on, it seems to belong to a cheerful man about thirty. From another angle, it looks melancholy and old, as though Paige had walked too long...
Colson Whitehead on poker
I was gonna play in the Big Game and give it my best shot. It was not the National Series of Poker, it was the World Series of Poker, and I would represent my country, the Republic of Anhedonia. We have no borders, but the population teems. No one has deigned to write down our history, but we are an ancient land, founded during the original disappointments, when the first person met another...
Lawrence Wright on Scientology
Last April, John Brousseau, who had been in the Sea Org for more than thirty years, left the Gold Base. He was unhappy with Miscavige, his former brother-in-law, whom he considered “detrimental to the goals of Scientology.” He drove across the country, to south Texas, to meet Marty Rathbun. “I was there a couple of nights,” he says. At five-thirty one morning, he was leaving the motel room where...
Jeanne Marie Laskas on coal miners
“Now, a buddy of mine, Robby Dutton, he’s dead,” he said. “We were pretty good friends. And we was on the same crew. And the miner, there was something wrong with it, a hose was leaking, and they were turning it and a bit got caught and come down and mangled his leg. We had to drag him outta there on a stretcher, all bleedin’ bad. Aw, he was…we thought he was gonna die. Huh. But he didn’t die.”
...
Jason Fagone on Marvin Harrison
Piece of shit is a versatile bit of law-enforcement slang. It can mean something as specific as “hustler with a record” or it can mean something rounder, like “person who won’t cooperate with us” or “person who lied to us” or “person who will not be trusted by a jury.” All of the witnesses, for various reasons, could be grouped under this same...
Frank Deford on Kirby Puckett
Maybe all this stuff was a burden. Especially after he woke up one bright spring morning in 1996 and thought he’d slept funny on one eye, only it was glaucoma, and so never again could the Puck stand in against horsehides flung 90 to 95 mph. Just like that, no warning, he had to hang it up. Then he wasn’t a ballplayer anymore, let alone a whale of one. Then he was just back to being...
Mike Armstrong on the horrors of downtown Los...
A few months ago I arrived home to find a body on the pavement a few feet from the front door of our building. According to one of the cops on the scene, he was a jumper from the hotel across the street.
-Mike Armstrong
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-armstrong-downtown-20110717,0,2469792.story
Bob Friel on Colton Harris-Moore
AROUND 10 A.M, everything went to shit. Sixty-mile-an-hour wind gusts grabbed the little Cessna 182, shook it, twisted it, threw it down toward the jagged peaks of the Cascade Range, then slammed it back up again.
Pilots of small planes obsess about the weather. Ill winds, icing, poor visibility all can bring a flight to a terminal, smoldering conclusion. However, when you’re a...
Skip Hollandsworth on gangs of SW Houston
“Then what, Alex?” asks Julian, one of the homeboys. Julian is only thirteen years old. He was “clicked in” to the gang a couple of months earlier, and he worships Alex. At his middle school, he proudly tells other students that he is part of Alex’s “crew” and that he is doing “missions” with him. (When I had first met Julian, I had asked him what those missions were. He had grinned confidently...
David Von Drehle on the deadliest tornado to rip...
All around, there were voices calling for help and other dazed survivors creeping from belowground or picking their way through the ruins from closets and bathrooms. The smell from ruptured gas mains was overpowering. A house thundered into flames. Would-be rescuers dodged utility lines to reach loved ones. Jim Winters — Joe’s dad — paused on his way to Hounschell’s house to help a...
Tom Wolfe on Junior Johnson
Ten o’clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua aqua, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry. Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to...
Ian Frazier on the czar of typewriters, Martin...
Several afternoons last spring I sat on a swiveling typing chair by the clear space on the table where Mr. Tytell lets people test their typewriters before taking them home, and he and Mrs. Tytell and I talked. “People get very emotionally involved with their typewriters,” Mr. Tytell said. “I understand it — I talk to typewriters myself sometimes. On the one hand, you have...
Rick Wilson on owning guns
“My home?” Rick asks, sounding flabbergasted. “That’s my home. I own a small amount of firearms legally, most of which are locked in an extremely secure gun safe in an unloaded manner. I’m a man from Oklahoma,” he continues, “and there’s no such thing as a man from Oklahoma who doesn’t own a firearm or two. Even thehippies own guns.”
-...
Charles P. Pierce on Pedro Martinez
“Jesus, did you see that pitch?” It is a cloudless day in City of Palms Park in Fort Myers, on the west coast of Florida, the sky a brilliant blue that seems to have its origins somewhere between Tierra del Fuego and Avalon. The Baltimore Orioles are taking their third-inning swings against the Boston Red Sox, and the Baltimore hitters are stepping around in the batter’s box as...
Raymond Chandler on Hollywood
“I suppose the truth is that the veterans of the Hollywood scene do not realize how little they are getting, how many dull egotists they have to smile at, how many shoddy people they have to treat as friends, how little real accomplishment is possible, how much gaudy trash their life contains. The superficial friendliness of Hollywood is pleasant - until you find out that nearly every sleeve...
