After Yeats

When I am old and using Revlon hair dye
and am sucking up my pharmacopoeia,
and can drink but Sanka--
when I don't have too many friends anymore
and the bathroom is a place of loneliness--

Yes, when I am old and Revloned and hypnogogic
and nodding at the wheel,
take down this book
and read of one who phoned you less and less,
but who dug you and remembered
your elegant hand
and somewhat geeky look.

A Defense of Poetry -- Gabriel Gudding

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Samuel Johnson

Stephen, struck by his tone of closure, reopened the discussion at once by saying:

—I fear many things: dogs, horses, firearms, the sea, thunderstorms, machinery, the country roads at night.

—But why do you fear a bit of bread?

—I imagine that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear.

—Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious communion?

—The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set in in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.

—Would you, Cranly asked, in extreme danger commit that particular sacrilege? For instance if you lived in the penal days?

—I cannot answer for the past, Stephen replied. Possibly not.

—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

—I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

A Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
1916

Boston

"Back in the mid-'80s, every time the Celtics walked off an opposing floor after a hard-fought road victory, a giddy Kevin McHale clenched his fists, raised his Frankenstein arms above his head and showed off his victorious armpits. This was the hairy victory cigar of the Bird era."
-Bill Simmons, ESPN
(I read this in class last night and started to laugh, which was hard to hide as there are only six of us in there)

Carmelo Anthony and a Nation at War

"Carmelo Anthony and a Nation at War"

It's a familiar story, but I'll tell it again. The year is 1993, and the Knicks have taken a 2-0 lead over the Bulls in the Eastern Conference finals. Starks has made history with a single dunk, the power forwards stalk the paint like hunger stalks men, and Ewing's patrol of the baseline has never been more inscrutable. Then…Charles Smith. That anyone not debilitated or otherwise womanly can miss 4 consecutive lay-ups is enough to strain credulity. That a professional basketball player in his franchise's most defining game can do it strains a whole lot more.
At twelve years old, I had lost my faith. Just as the Israelites of my Torah portion wandered a godless desert, and so judged the sky likewise without, I looked up that night with tears in my eyes and saw nothing but the empty dark. If God wasn't in game five, where was he? Months later, this was the question I asked before Jerusalem's Wailing Wall. And so a boy became a man, and a faith was forged in the cold heart of America's greatest game.

That was a time when professional basketball, eschatology, and the human experience were one indivisible whole. We shivered together in the wake of the cold war, and discovered both our doubts and our solace in the singularity of a game. But as the 1990's dragged on, basketball became as pedestrian as our president's lies. Michael Jordan may have been born again, but the game remained atrophied in its nation's perpetual peace. And so I do not believe it a coincidence that in the fear and trembling of 9/11 we should find the kernel of sport's renewal.

In the preemptive hagiography of Lebron, the whispering prophecy of Darko's otherness, and, most importantly, the heroic cheeks of Carmelo, America is searching for its new religion. And so do I, a man who had turned his back on the game, likewise search. Indeed, it was Carmelo's performance in Syracuse's improbable March – my senior year of college, and a time of great angst and worry – that once again reminded me of Basketball's healing grace. He is a symbol of what the game once was, and a soothsayer of what it might be again. He is my signature player. Thank you.

FreeDarko.com (thanks to MDD for pointing in me in the site's direction)

Flaubert's Parrot

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't...Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.


Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes
1984

The Use of Passions

Reason therefore will have us believe that there is but one passion; and that hope and fear, sorrow and joy are the motions or properties of love.


The Use of Passions, Jean Francois Senault
1649

Bouvard and Pecuchet

On a horizon that receded further each day, they glimpsed things at once strange and wondrous. Admiring an old piece of furniture, they regretted not having lived at the time it was used, even though they knew absolutely nothing about the period. Certain names evoked images of countries that were all the more beautiful in that they could say nothing specific about them. Books whose titles were unintelligible to them seemed to contain untold mysteries. And, having more ideas, they suffered more acutely.


Bouvard and Pecuchet, Gustave Flaubert
Unfinished at his death in 1880

During an open practice for season-ticket holders in 2005, Robert Levy (a season-ticket holder) testified he witnessed Thomas placing his arm around Browne Sanders' shoulders and remarking, "it was distracting working with someone easy on the eyes" as an uncomfortable Browne Sanders pulled away. In Isiah's defense, he pulled the exact same routine with Rick Mahorn in 1989.
-Bill Simmons, ESPN

Agamemnon

We are the old, dishonoured ones,
the broken husks of men.
Even then they cast us off,
the rescue mission left us here
to prop a child's strength upon a stick.
What if the new sap rises in his chest?
He has no soldiery in him,
no more than we,
and we are aged passed ageing,
gloss of the leaf shrivelled,
three legs at a time we falter on.
Old men are children once again,
a dream that sways and wavers
into the hard light of day.


Agamemnon, Aeschylus
Translated by Robert Fagles