Jordan Poole is impossibly fast on the court where his athleticism goes with a sweet touch (he’s the best free throw shooter in the world), genius passes, and stop-start gambits as flashy as his eye-moves above.
Culturewatch
The Depp Heard Trial
She fears abandonment, his mom abused him.
Love twists into bitter repetition.
Thereâs always a deeper layer of pain,
a wound beneath the urge to hurt.
Blade
Hunter Harris and the rest of us who laugh along with her may need help at the Pearly Gates. Until then, though, bless Ms. H. for failures to forbear such as the following…
Normalize Being Hot And Not A Poet
Kacey Musgravesâ boyfriend, Cole Schafer, is a poet (derogatory). The poetry is not what I would describe as âgood.â He appears to be releasing more of it:
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Hoping this is a promise!
False Memory
For members of my generation, tales of the Mustang they should have hung onto are almost as heartfelt as those of the Mickey Mantle cards their mothers tossed. So nothing about Maggieâs story surprised me, until her assertion that hers was a â63. âThe first Mustang was a â64 ½,â I told her. A couple days later, she came back to the cafĂŠ and asked, âDid Pontiac have a Firebird?â
Indeed, Pontiac did â but it debuted in 1967.
Butt Beautiful
Back in the day, the New Yorker was set to run the following letter in praise of an article on women’s basketball, but it got squeezed out. Still seems on point so…
What’s New (Always)
My Brilliant Friend has returned. Beyond love this show. What women say to each other when only they bare speaking, what they feel about each other throughout their lives, the prints they leave on the skin of other women, there is no more interesting contemplation. A world that is the world behind a door, past a clearing, down a ravine. Lenuâs mother, pointing to her belly while her daughter stares off, smoking a cigarette, âYouâre not better than us, you came from here. Where do you think your brains come from? I could have done what you did if Iâd had your opportunities. I would have done better.â A few moments later to the daughter, âYou canât stand me.â Lenu, âYes.â The mother, âMe, neither.â
Soul Show in the Underworld
You would think Hell eviscerates individuality. Sinners lose their mobility. They do not eat. They do not rest. Their human complications are boiled down to one wrong. They are forced to repeat an action or exist in the same state for eternity: the indecisive souls’ chase has no finish line, and fire and ice never let up for those in lake and lava. Hell’s project is to stratify and simplify, in short, to dehumanize humans. But, the underworld is full of souls with immutable characters and distinct ways of responding. Dante doesn’t chat with muttering masses. Instead, he charms, listens, recoils from the passionate and demure alike. Ulysses upholds curiosity, Master Adam is combative, Francesca refuses to renege on her love, and Farinata’s and Cavalcante’s differing physicalities embody confidence and diffidence, respectively. Their individuation/human expression is a form of resistance to Hellâs order.
Faith in Smith
One afternoon the mid-sixties my soon-to-be wife and I were in Seattle visiting Hazel, her old Graduate Art School advisor when, in the late afternoon, there was a knock at the front door. âGet that would you please, Michael?â Hazel asked. âDianeâs there. She has a fish for usâ. Diane, the student at the door, was clearly of Mediterranean decent and so beautiful that I caught my breath. âHiâ, she said, âthis is for Hazel. Tell her that I canât stay because I have a few more fish to deliver.â On that she turned and went down the stairs to the street. I closed the door and stared at the salmon wrapped in wet newspaper that Dianeâs boyfriend had just caught a few hours earlier in Elliot Bay.
Sometime later when I finally met Jim Smith he was working as a shipwright and had this small boat he fished off of in the waters of Elliot Bay, and its surrounds, which formed the liquid edge of downtown Seattle.
The first thing I remember about Jim was his apology. He would begin many conversations with people he didnât know by apologizing for having such a common name. The irony was that he was one of the most uncommon guys Iâd ever met.
The Way We See (and Hear) Now
“Westside Story 2021.” A yes for me. We watched it through, surprised and moved by crazy young love brought vividly to life in this cast’s Tony and Maria. I kept thinking, no, they have a chance, they’ll get out of the Shakespeare play they were born in, like the street where you were raised and the language that formed you. Valentina will give them bus fare and Anita will not betray them after she is almost gang raped. Justin Peck’s balletic remastering of the Robbins dances. The screenplay by Tony Kushner. The Spanish spoken throughout without subtitles. Spielberg’s camera adds wings to the play, turning it into a movie that’s a play set in the way we see things now. Every story is about the time it’s told in, not the period depicted, and this one is about something’s coming. Gustavo Dudamel conducts the rapturous, jazzy Bernstein score that doesn’t get old. And never will.
Hunt and Pecker
From the department of don’t stand near me because I’m vomiting. In the current New Yorker, from a profile of Wendell Berry by Dorothy Wickenden, subtitled, “Wendell Berry renounced modernity sixty years ago, but his ideas have never been more pressing.”
Coming Out is Going Home
As much as I like to fancy myself an expert in all things basketball — among the sportâs cognoscenti — there are lacunae, areas of ignorance my son made me aware of as he morphed from being my (forgive me) beautifully instructed phenom into a college player, and I receded into the ranks of high school assistant coaches.
Nightmare Scenarios and Beamish Projections
Linguistics Professor and author John McWhorter (McW hereafter) is many things. He is an elegant and effective writer and perhaps an even better talker. Moreover, he knows his way around an argument and is often on the right side of one. And not least of all, he can be wickedly funny as anyone who has seen him on cable TV harpooning Donald Trump and others surely knows.
These days though, he is increasingly a man on a mission. In Woke Racism (2021), his recent crusade (sadly, it is hard to term it anything else) against those who would sound the alarm about the continuing impacts of racism in America, even at his best, he fails to put his points about the excesses of âAnti-Racismââmany of which are spot onâinto the broader context of all that ails us today. At worst, e.g., when branding what he calls âThird Wave Anti-Racistsââlike prominent authors Ibram Kendi and Ta-Nehesi Coatesâas âhigh âpriestsâ in an âideological reign of terrorââ and âgruesomely close to Hitlerâs racial notions in their conception of an alien, blood-deep malevolent âwhitenessâââhe has, I fear, gone off the rails.
McWhorter’s Rare Dare
The second and third volumes of Stoppardâs trilogy on 19th C. Russian revolutionaries, The Coast of Utopia, is mostly set in exile, but Voyage, the first volume, is set in Russia. A brilliant speech opens its second act: Alexander Herzen, appearing for the first time, addresses the audience, explaining both a childrenâs game and picture book titled âWhat is wrong with this picture?â and the situation of Russia under Nicholas I. Herzen gives some examples of what is horrifically wrong under Nicholasâs autocracy, and concludes âSomething is wrong with this picture. Are you listening? You are in the picture.â It is the most theatrically brilliant moment in the trilogy. Herzen suggests that we do not seem to take in the grotesquerie of what is happening, or are perhaps merely afraid to speak of it. I think he is also implying that whichever is the case, in not noticing what is supremely visible and in not speaking about what is clearly outrageous we are to a degree complicit in such things, also more vulnerable to them happening to us.
This is pretty much John McWhorterâs strategy in Woke Racism:Â How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
Ashes (& Fetishes)
..The ultraleft poets, former readers of Tiqqun (turned towards moralism, though occasionally they would still say liberals, put a bullet in your head), were bitching about a cringe and morbid poem written by a Seattle doctor about his âfriendâ the maintenance man, his âfriendâ Juan, dead of Covid on the couch before he was even fifty: a necropolitical dirge for the working class, a poem written to bury, not to praise, the working class, etc. The good doctor knew enough to ask what right have I to write this poem? But this only infuriated the ultraleft poets more. As did the admittedly offensive and aesthetically appalling image contained in the line I who will not see him in his uniform of ashes (the doctor must have thought he was channeling Paul Celan), which made me wonder if the doctor thought janitors are buried in their uniforms, condemned to the pyre in their subordinate social role. The ultraleft poets were not happy with this poem. They asked when one has the right, ethically, to mourn, in a poem, another over whom one holds power in a hierarchical relationship. I thought it must be tiring to live this way, to create art this way.
In Praise of Secular Jewish American Lyric Commentary: Why Bob Dylan and Louise GlĂźck are 21st Century Nobel Laureates Â
Seven decades after what Benjamin Schreier calls, âthe dominant event of Jewish American literary history,â which is the ââbreakthroughâ â the irruption in the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley into the heart of American cultural scene,â two Jewish American lyricists have received the Nobel Prize for Literature in a span of four years: Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941) in 2016 and Louise GlĂźck (born in New York City in 1943 and raised on Long Island) in 2020 (Schreier, 2).
Way Down Yonder
On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine of skittish enough character to have defected both to and from the Soviet Union, was arrested for assassinating John F. Kennedy by firing three shots from the Texas Book Depository building in Dallas, Texas, as the president rode in a motorcade below. Two days later, Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner, killed Oswald. A commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson and chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded Oswald a solo act. This conclusion launched a thousand books, several films, and not a few careers selling counter-theories as to who the actual perps â CIA, FBI, Mossad, Mafia, a military-industrial consort, pro-and anti-Castro Cubans â had been and what role, if any, Oswald and Ruby played.