the last book I ever read (Buzz Bissinger's Father's Day, excerpt eight)

from Father's Day: A Journey into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son by Buzz Bissinger:

We head for the Santa Monica Pier. We go through a piss-scented tunnel. We set foot on the pier and are hit with the scent of creosote and suntan lotion and funnel cakes and sausages pinging and popping on greasy grills. There is a flow of a breeze. We stop and take the breeze in, as we lean against the pier railings out over the water. The view stuns me because I never associate Los Angeles with the ocean. I forget it is there like you tend to forget that most of Los Angeles is there. People move through the sand with surprising lightness and agility playing volleyball. Others stretch themselves out to the anatomical limit to sunbathe, their own torture rack. Others walk along the edge of the beach in sundresses to immerse their toes in undulating waves creased with soft silver. They look incredibly happy, kind of like Bette Davis at the end of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? after she has buried her sister in the sand. It is still California.

the last book I ever read (Buzz Bissinger's Father's Day, excerpt seven)

from Father's Day: A Journey into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son by Buzz Bissinger:

The Hearst Castle was a maze of narrow stairways. The physical exertion was becoming difficult for my mother. There was an elevator, but she refused to take it, just as she refused her usual impulse to stay in her hotel room and take to her bed. She wore her Gloria Vanderbilt hat. She spent hours applying makeup. In watching her navigate those narrow steps with both hands on the lifelines of the guardrails, you could see the fight still within her.

On the trip back to Los Angeles from San Simeon, she rode in a car with Lisa and my sister and niece. She regaled them with her wit and trenchant observations of others and word games and songs from Broadway musicals. All the best of her was on display in that car.

The day before my parents left, we went to Universal Studios. We insisted to my mother that she stay behind to get some rest. She refused again. As we were about to get on the Back to the Future ride, she announced that she wanted to join us. She was adamant. She said it looked like fun. We believed her because we so wanted to believe her.

Midway through the ride, she began to panic. “Get me the hell out of here!” she grimaced. There was nothing we could do. My sister held her hand and coaxed her the rest of the way. My father asked her how it had been. “Awful,” she spat out. It became clear that she had no idea why she was on the ride, and where exactly she was.

ever been Lambchop curious?

it's the last few days of Amazon's August $5 album offerings.

and besides Green Day and the xx and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and the newest Centro-matic (one of my favorites) there is lots and lots and lots of Lambchop.

the last book I ever read (Buzz Bissinger's Father's Day, excerpt six)

from Father's Day: A Journey into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son by Buzz Bissinger:

When you have a child like Zach, you do feel as if you own his life, that he is obligated to reveal whatever he thinks and feels on demand. This belief is understandable because you do literally own him as a result of the court-ordered process of guardianship, in which your child answers questions from the judge with a quiet “yes” and doesn’t fully grasp that he’s giving up every right he has, usually to his parents. Some of those rights must be given up, financial decisions and health decisions and decisions of where to live to make sure he is in the best environment. But it should not equate to the entire loss of his individuality. It was only a moment at a restaurant last night overstocked with banal noise, but Zach cordoned off a part of himself with yellow police tape. The issue of sex was something he did understand, at least on the surface. But the issue also bewildered him and made him nervous and perhaps most of all embarrassed him. By asking me to stop bringing it up, he was telling me not to embarrass him anymore. In his quiet and nonconfrontational way he was asserting himself as a young man, not a man-child to be picked at and forever probed, not to be deprived of trying to make himself whole.

the last book I ever read (Buzz Bissinger's Father's Day, excerpt five)

from Father's Day: A Journey into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son by Buzz Bissinger:

I knew it was going to be a story unlike any I had ever encountered.

It only built from there—the injury to Boobie in which he tore his anterior cruciate ligament and you knew his life had changed in the freak millisecond of his cleats getting caught in the turf in the twilight. Added to the book were the ingredients of the open racism, the surreal travel of the football team to away games on chartered jets, more money spent on athletic tape than on new books for the English department.

Friday Night Lights went on to sell close to two million copies. It became the film, then ultimately a long-running TV show. It was the story I was destined to write like every writer has a story he or she is destined to write, the one you have inside you because you only really have one inside you. I knew when it was published I would never top it no matter how hard I tried, and after almost twenty years, I still have not topped it. It all happened when I was thirty-five. The success opened all sorts of avenues, but it also hung over me. It was a wonderful thing to be known for something that had happened so long ago. It sounds like self-pity, but it wasn’t self-pity. It was the fear of being tapped out and topped out, the rest of my life a vain search.

the last book I ever read (Buzz Bissinger's Father's Day, excerpt four)

from Father's Day: A Journey into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son by Buzz Bissinger:

We’re also going to see Boobie Miles in Odessa, the Great Black Hope running back I wrote about whose high school career ended with an injury before the season even started. He was the book’s essential character, a figure of tragedy because of his shattered dreams, scorned by the town of Odessa with epithets of “nigger” after he got hurt and no longer mattered on the football field. Because of the book, he achieved a fame so at odds with the desperations in his own life and only intensified by the 2004 film were celebrity re-occurred. I have been close with Boobie ever since the publication of the book, a relationship going on two decades. I have become a surrogate father and he has become a surrogate son. I have received hundreds of calls from him and in almost all of them I have heard the genuine pain in his voice—unable to hold a job, unable to pay the rent and the electric bill, in and out of hail for petty offenses for which he can’t afford minimal bail, hit in court with overdue support payments. There is love between us. But there is also the subtext that what he really wants from me is money, and I am only enabling his self-destruction.

the last book I ever read (Buzz Bissinger's Father's Day, excerpt three)

from Father's Day: A Journey into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son by Buzz Bissinger:

We are headed for Six Flags today. Zach has forever felt liberation in amusement parks, his primal screams unplugged, his dance upon the moon. The ratchet of the roller-coaster cars to the top before the perpendicular plummet. The loops upon loops upon loops in increasingly perilous circles. Right side up. Upside down. Compressed. Contorted. It is all part of his rush.

I like them as an uprising against middle age. Unlike my son I am not fearless. There is no rush, just the hiccupping heart and the churning stomach straight to the rooftop restaurant of the throat. Some of the rides, named after a natural disaster or a misshapen comic book villain, accompanied by the ennui of teenage operators in striped shirts and scratched-at pimples most likely distracted by trying to come up with new slogans for the front of black T-shirts, offer neither sympathy nor solace.

The 49ers, #6: John Flansburgh

In early 2010, Rob Trucks began a series of conversations with 49-year-old Americans. For eighteen months, until the eve of his own 50th birthday, Trucks interviewed over 200 men and women. This is one of those interviews:

John Flansburgh stands as the younger, more bespectacled half of They Might Be Giants, a Brooklyn-by-way-of-Boston band he has been playing in for more than half his life. Their most recent release is the aptly titled Album Raises New and Troubling Questions.

We spoke in late April, 2010, one week before Flansburgh’s 50th birthday.

* * *

I think because I’m musical partners with someone who’s 50 [that’d be TMBG cohort John Linnell], I’ve thought a little bit about where we land generationally. Both John and I are younger brothers, and I think, having been born in 1960 or 1959, which is really the tail end of the Baby Boom, and being a younger sibling, it’s a very singular place to be in American culture, because you saw the entire melodrama of the ’60s and ’70s as kind of a passive observer. You know, you were just the kid in the back of the car listening to the yelling. The babysitter who saw Easy Rider and then hitchhiked to San Francisco was in your life. And everything about the Vietnam War and rock music exploding and the Yipees, all this stuff of hippie culture was very tangible and very real. Even Mad magazine or Roadrunner or Bugs Bunny or all these kind of anti-authority type cartoon characters. Even Peanuts, to some extent, had this kind of anti- quality to it. All this mainstream culture with all this heavy, heavy anti- stuff was happening in your childhood, and I think it informed the way we approached the world. We didn’t go through a lot of changes in the ’60s. We were just kids. But we saw it all. And I think that that really changed the way we approached culture and culture-consuming and culture-making, and it just made us different. I feel like we were sort of media literate in a way that people before us weren’t.

Thanks for stopping by.

This offer is no longer available in the State of New York and the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

May we suggest The 49ers interview with Alison Bechdel at Jezebel?

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the last book I ever read (Buzz Bissinger's Father's Day, excerpt two)

from Father's Day: A Journey into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son by Buzz Bissinger:

But I lived inside my head and I could not get outside. Work and the pursuit of success formed my only true identity. I was terrified of what I would be without it. Now I was scared about everything—my career, my children, my notion of fatherhood that had been obliterated. I had always been scared. My self-confidence was a come-on. I hid my insecurity and fear behind a barrage of angry outbursts at editors and friends and wives and waiters. I was tender and kind on many occasions, but then darkness prevailed. Success had been the only constant in my life. It was an addiction. My drug. Until like all drugs it wore off suddenly, and I needed some more.

The birth of the twins only multiplied my sense of inadequacy and yearning for success. We knew they would be premature, but still I fantasized that they would be buoyant, healthy babies handed over to Mom and Dad in soft blue blankets. I wanted congratulations instead of condolences. I wanted the joy of new life, not the threat of sudden death. This was a disaster. This was complete fucking failure. It could have happened for only one reason. I deserved it. Without ever intending it, I lived to destroy. My pessimism had become lethal. In the heat of that shower I knew without knowing it that my wife and I would never last.

I guess that’s life.

the last book I ever read (Buzz Bissinger's Father's Day, excerpt one)

from Father's Day: A Journey into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son by Buzz Bissinger:

I am not going to expose Zach to something he silently hates. But I still think about the trip. I wonder if there is a way to structure it, not to treasure the county’s epic attractions but to give rebirth to his past, go back to the present because of the way his mind works. I still think about the moment on the ground floor of Brooks Brothers in the after-Christmas emptiness when he asked the salesman for a pocket square so he could look like his unfortunately named Uncle Winkie. I always will see it folded into the breast pocket like a church spire.

There was a spark inside Zach at that moment. Maybe it is a spark that rises like a busted firework, only to drain thinly back down to earth with a diminishing whistle. Or maybe I waved the surrender flag too long ago on my son, gave in because it was easier to give in.

Zach and I are driving cross country.

the last book I ever read (Instant Replay, excerpt nine)

from Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap:

The other day, I saw a film called Cool Hand Luke, and Paul Newman played a wild character who courted disaster all his life. He had no goal, no fear, and toward the end of his life he escaped from prison two or three times. The last time he escaped, he came upon a church and went in and got on his knees and said something like, "Old Man, whadaya got planned for me? What's next, Old Man? Whadaya want me to do? What did you put me on earth for, Old Man?"

I ask the same questions. I often wonder where my life is heading, and what's my purpose here on earth besides playing the silly games I play every Sunday. I feel there's got to be more to life than that. There's got to be some reason to it.

Many people never take control of their own lives, never say this is the way it's going to be, and maybe I'm one of them. I didn't come up with any answers this morning. I just thought about it for a while.

the last book I ever read (Instant Replay, excerpt eight)

from Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap:

I honestly think their safety, Larry Wilson, is the finest football player in the NFL, and he fired up their whole team. He blitzed. He shot. He red-dogged. He hurled himself through the air to make tackles. His enthusiasm was infectious.

When the Cardinals went ahead 23-17 in the last quarter, I felt we were in real danger. But then they kicked off, and Travis Williams, playing on the kickoff return team for the first time because Adderley had bruised his hand, took the ball and headed straight up the middle. I was on the front line, nearest the Cardinals. I hit one guy with a forearm and knocked him backwards, then took about four more steps toward another guy. Suddenly, I felt Travis breeze by me, zip, zip, zip, zip, like I was standing still. He went all the way for a touchdown, 93 yards, and we were back in the lead.

Even after we opened the gap to eight points, 31-23, with only a few seconds to play, Larry Wilson wouldn't quit. We were just running out the clock, and Larry, instead of staying back at his safety position, moved up like a linebacker and began leaping over people, throwing himself at the ballcarrier, trying to steal the ball. Two, three, maybe four times in a row, as the game came to its end, Larry made tackles at the line of scrimmage. It was a bewildering feeling, seeing a safety practically toe-to-toe with a defensive tackle. We don't have any blocking plan to cover a suicide situation like that. Wilson's all football player; I'm kind of glad that he's from Idaho.

the last book I ever read (Instant Replay, excerpt seven)

from Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap:

I saw the play that gave me the concussion. I cut down the defensive end, Ed O'Bradovich, and I rolled over on my back and, as I raised myself toward a sitting position, Dick Evey, Chicago's right tackle, started to jump over me. I came up, and his knee caught me flush between the eyes. I went down like a shot, but then I got up and went back into the huddle. I played a few more plays in the second quarter, then sat out the whole second half. The moment it happened, I knew I had a concussion. I knew I was in a world of trouble. Physically, I felt all right, but I knew I couldn't think straight. Four or five years ago, against the Los Angeles Rams, I played most of a game with a concussion. Forrest Gregg told me what to do on every play. He said, "Block the tackle," or, "Pull and block the end," and I actually played fairly well. I did what I was supposed to. Between college and the pros, I've had four or five concussions now, and I supposed I'm getting used to them.

the last book I ever read (Instant Replay, excerpt six)

from Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap:

One little incident demonstrated the importance of studying the movies carefully. On pure passing situations--on third down with ten yards to go, for instance--the Giants often use what we call a tackle-end twist. The end, instead of rushing his normal way, will cut inside the tackle's rush, and the tackle, of course, will come outside. They reverse positions, trying to confuse the offensive line. About four years ago, Forrest Gregg noticed that whenever the Giants did this, Jim Katcavage, their left end, would put his right hand down on the ground, instead of his left hand. For at least four years, Katcavage has had this absurd habit, and, apparently, no one on the Giant coaching staff has ever warned him about it.

On a second-and-nine situation in the first half tonight I came up to the line of scrimmage and looked over and, sure enough, the Kat had his right hand down. Forrest, playing next to me, didn't notice it. I said, "Forrest, be awake, baby." Then Forrest looked up and saw what I meant. We stopped the Kat and Moran without much trouble, but maybe Katcavage caught my little comment. In the second half, they used a tackle-end twist again, and the Kat had his left hand down. I wasn't in the game then, but Forrest told me about it.

The 49ers, #188: Anita Stansfield

In early 2010, Rob Trucks began a series of conversations with 49-year-old Americans. For eighteen months, until the eve of his own 50th birthday, Trucks interviewed over 200 men and women. This is one of those interviews:

Anita Stansfield, a mother of five and grandmother twice over, has been known as “the reigning queen of LDS romantic fiction” for more than 15 years. A lifelong resident of Utah, she has published more than fifty works of fiction, including her latest, The Wishing Garden.

We spoke on July 15, 2011, five days before her 50th birthday.

* * *

Health issues have been one of my great trials for many years. I had my last baby when I was almost 38. She was due on my 38th birthday, actually, and was born early because I got preeclampsia and they had to deliver her so I wouldn’t die. And I never got healthy after that.

I started getting migraines and just having overall challenges in many respects, and spent many years trying everything, all kinds of medical avenues - holistic, homeopathic, energy medicine - everything you could imagine to try to solve these problems.

Thanks for stopping by.

This offer is no longer available in the State of New York and the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

May we suggest The 49ers interview with Alison Bechdel at Jezebel?

Or visit our Facebook page for the latest news on The 49ers.

the last book I ever read (Instant Replay, excerpt five)

from Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap:

Vince has always chewed Fuzzy and me pretty hard, and once we stopped and figured out why. First, Vince was an offensive coach before he was a head coach, so he's tougher on the offense. Second, he played the line himself, so he's tougher on linemen. Third, he was a guard, so he's tougher on guards. And fourth, from my own point of view, he was a right guard, so he's tougher on me than anybody.

In 1959, his first year, he drove me unmercifully during the two-a-days. He called me an old cow one afternoon and said that I was the worst guard he'd ever seen. I'd been working hard, killing myself, and he took all the air out of me. I'd lost seven or eight pounds that day, and when I got into the locker room, I was too drained to take my pads off. I just sat in front of my locker, my helmet off, my head down, wondering what I was doing playing football, being as bad as I was, getting cussed like I was. Vince came in and walked over to me, put his hand on the back of my head, mussed my hair and said, "Son, one of these days you're going to be the greatest guard in the league." He is a beautiful psychologist. I was ready to go back out to practice for another four hours.

the last book I ever read (Instant Replay, excerpt four)

from Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap:

Dick Arndt, the big boy from Idaho, survived the cut without much difficulty. He's a nice kid, with a real good attitude, a real willingness to work, and I'm pretty sure that if he doesn't make our club, he'll play somewhere in the league. The coaches tried him our first at offensive guard, then at offensive tackle, and now they're going to give him a shot at defensive tackle. I'll try to help him, try to give him a few pointers, because I've played against defensive tackles for ten years and I know how they can give a guard the most trouble. But the situation's touchy. First, when Dick was playing offense, he was competing against, besides me, Fuzzy Thurston and Forrest Gregg and Bob Skoronski, and these guys have been my friends for ten years. How am I going to coach this kid to take their jobs? I like the kid and he's close to me and I'm going to try to help him, and yet if I help him too much, these guys are going to start looking at me out of the corners of their eyes. Now, with Dick playing defensive tackle, Henry Jordan's my neighbor and he's been there ten years. I don't think there's any danger of Henry getting cut, now that he's made up his mind to play, but there could be if this kid came on strong, looked great. Then Henry'd never forgive me. The whole relationship between veteran and rookie is strange. You can help to a certain extent, but you can't go overboard.

the last book I ever read (Instant Replay, excerpt three)

from Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap:

Fuzzy Thurston was sneaking us ice. They keep ice out on the practice field in case of fractures and sprains and things like that, so Fuzzy put some chips of ice in a towel and stuck it under his sweat jacket and hobbled out to us on his bad knee and gave us the ice, and it was like the sweetest thing I ever tasted.

Somebody once said that a person lives from want to want, or from pain to pain, or something like that. I don't know exactly what he said, but I know what he meant. When you want it desperately, the smallest pleasure, a sip of Pepsi, a sliver of ice, can be so beautiful. You savor it so much. It tastes so fantastically delicious. I can take a sip of Pepsi and almost go into an ecstatic state. It just is unbelievable, the pleasure you get when you're so hot and so dry and so tired, and you get ice-cold Pepsi and you just roll it around in your mouth, and it's like one of the sweetest things that ever happened to you.

the last book I ever read (Instant Replay, excerpt two)

from Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap:

Vince reviewed the training rules and the club rules and the league rules, all of which I think I've heard a million times. He warned us against fraternizing with unknown individuals; they could be gamblers. "You don't sit down and have a drink with somebody if they come up and want to chat," he said. "If they say they're from your home town, and you don't know them, don't associate with them. As simple as that. And don't talk about injuries to anyone, not to your neighbor, not to your father, not to your brother. Don't even tell your wife. Keep your mouth shut."

We've got a saying posted on the wall in our locker room: WHAT YOU SAY HERE, WHAT YOU SEE HERE, WHAT YOU HEAR HERE, LET IT STAY HERE WHEN YOU LEAVE HERE. Vince means that, very, very much, especially when you're talking to the press.

He lectured for a while about the importance of conditioning, about his desire to have every man in top physical shape. "Fatigue makes cowards of us all," he said, quoting his favorite source, himself. "When you're tired, you rationalize. You make excuses in your mind. You say, 'I'm too tired, I'm bushed, I can't do this, I'll loaf.' Then you're a coward." He said that when we don't use our ability to the fullest, we're not only cheating ourselves and the Green Bay Packers, we're cheating the Lord; He gave us our ability to use it to the fullest. "There are three things that are important to every man in this room," Lombardi said. "His religion, his family, and the Green Bay Packers, in that order." Vince means just what he says, but sometimes I think he gets the order confused.

the last book I ever read (Instant Replay, excerpt one)

from Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap:

Lombardi thinks of himself as the patriarch of a large family, and he loves all his children, and he worries about all of them, but he demands more of his gifted children. Lee Roy Caffey, a tough linebacker from Texas, is one of the gifted children, and Coach Lombardi is always on Lee Roy, chewing him, harassing him, cussing him. We call Lee Roy "Big Turkey," as in, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you big turkey," a Lombardi line. Vince kept saying during the drill today that if anyone wanted to look like an All-American, he should just step in against Caffey.

"Look at yourself, Caffey, look at yourself, that stinks," Lombardi shouted. Later, Vince added, "Lee Roy, you may think that I criticize you too much, a little unduly at times, but you have the size, the strength, the speed, the mobility, everything in the world necessary to be a great football player, except one thing: YOU'RE TOO DAMN LAZY."

Tell Me When It's Over, #21: Mac Wilkins

turn out the lights
the 2012 Olympics party is over
(they say that all good things must end. . . )

the third and final Tell Me When It's Over with an Olympic gold medalist popped on Deadspin earlier this week.
and I'm very happy I had the chance to talk to discus legend Mac Wilkins.
.

The 49ers, #114: John Blair

In early 2010, Rob Trucks began a series of conversations with 49-year-old Americans. For eighteen months, until the eve of his own 50th birthday, Trucks interviewed over 200 men and women. This is one of those interviews:

Writer John Blair has published two novels, a book of poetry and a short story collection, American Standard , which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 2002. He holds degrees from Florida State and Tulane, and now teaches at Texas State University.

We spoke in March of 2011, just about halfway between his 49th and 50th birthdays.

* * *

It just seems like another birthday. It doesn’t really seem like much of an impending doom sort of thing. I’m just cooking along.

I think I had my big crisis back around 45. It definitely wasn’t any chronological thing. It was just sort of a really coming to consider the fact of mortality thing. At some intellectual level, of course, I always realized that, but it really kind of hit home. And for no particular reason. It just seemed suddenly to become more of a significant thing than it had been before.

Thanks for stopping by.

This offer is no longer available in the State of New York and the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

May we suggest The 49ers interview with Alison Bechdel at Jezebel?

Or visit our Facebook page for the latest news on The 49ers.

the last book I ever read (Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King, excerpt five)

from A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers:

If he got out of this alive and unharmed, Alan vowed to be better. He would have to be stronger. His mother had tried to rally his strength, inspire him. She would read him passages from the diary of some distant relative, a woman living in the woods of what was now western Massachusetts. She had watched her husband and two of her children murdered by Indians, and had herself been abducted. She lived with her captors for almost a year until being returned to her people. She was reunited with her daughter, the only survivor of the attack, and they commenced to build a thriving dairy farm over six hundred acres of Vermont. She survived a heavy winter where the snow collapsed her roof, a beam falling on her leg, which was soon amputated. She survived a smallpox plague that took her daughter, who had just gotten engaged. The fiancé moved onto the farm and ran it when she died, at ninety-one. Would you rather be here, now, Alan’s mother liked to say, or abducted and living in the woods with one leg? She had no tolerance for whining, for any sort of malaise in the midst of the bounty of their suburban life. Forty million dead during World War II, she would say. Fifteen million during the war before. What was it that you were complaining about?

the last book I ever read (Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King, excerpt four)

from A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers:

Alan slept well, not knowing why, and when he woke, the hotel phone was again blinking red. Alan listened to the message, from Yousef. He was leaving for a while, he said, and wanted to come by and say goodbye. He’d be there that morning unless he heard otherwise. Alan’s relief was great. A feeling of dread had crept up on him overnight, a sense that something had happened to his friend. This is the peculiar problem of constant connectivity: any silence of more than a few hours provokes apocalyptic thoughts.

Alan dressed and dropped through the atrium to the lobby.

the last book I ever read (Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King, excerpt three)

from A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers:

--Boston, Alan said.

--Boston. Boston, Yousef said, tapping the steering wheel. I’ve been to Alabama. One year of college.

Against his better judgment, Alan continued talking to this lunatic.

--You studied in Alabama? Why Alabama?

--You mean, because I was the only Arab for a few thousand miles? I got a scholarship for a year. This was Birmingham. Pretty different from Boston, I’m guessing?

Alan liked Birmingham and said so. He had friends in Birmingham.

Yousef smiled. –That big statue of Vulcan, right? Scary.

--That’s right. I love that statue, Alan said.

the last book I ever read (Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King, excerpt two)

from A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers:

Alan was happy for the work. He needed the work. The eighteen months or so before the call from Ingvall had been humbling. Filing a tax return for $22,350 in taxable income was an experience he hadn’t expected to have at this age. He’d been home consulting for seven years, each year with dwindling revenue. No one was spending. Even five years ago business had been good; old friends threw him work, and he was useful to them. He’d connect them with vendors he knew, pull favors, cut deals, cut fat. He’d felt worthwhile.

Now he was fifty-four years old and was as intriguing to corporate America as an airplane built from mud. He could not find work, could not sign clients. He had moved from Schwinn to Huffy to Frontier Manufacturing Partners to Alan Clay Consulting to sitting at home watching DVDs of the Red Sox winning the Series in ’04 and ’07. The game when they hit four consecutive home runs against the Yankees. April 22, 2007. He’d watched those four and a half minutes a hundred times and each viewing brought him something like joy. A sense of rightness, of order. It was a victory that could never be taken away.

the last book I ever read (Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King, excerpt one)

from A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers:

They said it was a tragedy what had happened to Charlie Fallon. Charlie Fallon froze to death in the lake near Alan’s house. The lake next to Alan’s house.

Alan was thinking of Charlie Fallon while not sleeping in the room at the Jeddah Hilton. Alan had seen Charlie step into the lake that day. Alan was driving away, on his way to the quarry. It had not seemed normal that a man like Charlie Fallon would be stepping into the shimmering black lake in September, but neither was it extraordinary.

Charlie Fallon had been sending Alan pages from books. He had been doing this for two years. Charlie had discovered the Transcendentalists late in life and felt a kinship with them. He had seen that Brook Farm was not far from where he and Alan lived, and he thought it meant something. He traced his Boston ancestry, hoping to find a connection, but found none. Still, he sent Alan pages, with passages highlighted.

The workings of a privileged mind, Alan thought. Don’t send me more of that shit, he told Charlie. But Charlie grinned and sent more.

So when Alan saw Charlie stepping into the lake at noon on a Saturday he saw it as a logical extension of the man’s new passion for the land. He was only ankle-deep when Alan passed him that day.

The 49ers, #3: Wayne Coyne

In early 2010, Rob Trucks began a series of conversations with 49-year-old Americans. For eighteen months, until the eve of his own 50th birthday, Trucks interviewed over 200 men and women. This is one of those interviews:

After a near-death experience in the back of an Oklahoma City Long John Silver’s, Wayne Coyne has spent almost three decade making music, movies and sundry other conceptions involving disco balls, balloons, parking lots and human hamster balls as the leader of the Grammy-winning Flaming Lips. His group’s most recent release is The Flaming Lips & Heady Fwends

Coyne, who turned 50 on January 13, 2011, still lives in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

* * *

Oh man, when I read obituaries . . . Sometimes you’re going through the paper and you just go, I wonder how old these people are. I often run across people who are just dead for no apparent reason. They were old, and they were only 51. And I’m 49 and so I think, ‘Wow, I guess if I was in my 20s, I might think being 49 is pretty old.’ But, you know, once you get there it doesn’t feel like you’re at the end of your youth in a way.

As you get older, you try to find more and more examples of people who are older than you who still seem to be alive and smart . . .

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the last book I ever read (Off Balance, excerpt three)

from Off Balance: A Memoir by Dominique Moceanu with Paul and Teri Williams:

The National Team Training Camp at the Karolyi's ranch was where gymnasts would basically "try out" to compete at the Elite level and, ultimately, for the National team. To attend the Karolyi camp, a gymnast had to submit a video demonstrating her skills, and if Marta, the National Team Coordinator, approved of the video performance, then that gymnast could enroll (and pay the $240 weekly fee per coach and gymnast). Once the gymnast was at camp, Marta, and sometimes a panel of National team staff members under her supervision, would evaluate that gymnast's "physical abilities" and skill level and determine if she would be allowed to compete in an Elite meet. Gymnasts who were not given high enough marks at camp, or gymnasts who were denied enrollment to the Karolyi camp altogether, were less likely to secure roster spots at subsequent Elite competitions unless they qualified at one of the Elite qualifier competitions. In essence, the Karolyi training camp was the gateway to becoming an elite gymnast in the United States, and if the gatekeeper, Marta, didn't believe in you, or disliked you for whatever reason, then your chances of moving forward at the Elite level were very slim.

The entire process was extremely subjective and contrary to the methods used to select athletes in other national sports. In the United States, a female gymnast's future, in large part, teetered on Marta's opinion of her skills, her physique, or her opinion of the gymnast in general. I didn't know of any other Olympic sport that was controlled so subjectively, and it seemed crazy that gymnastics' governing body allowed Elite women's gymnastics to fall under the control of one person: Marta. In my opinion, there seemed to be very little oversight and no legitimate system of checks and balances. The governing body and Marta seemed to arbitrarily apply "official" criteria and standards on an ad hoc basis simply to justify their selections at the time.

the last book I ever read (Off Balance, excerpt two)

from Off Balance: A Memoir by Dominique Moceanu with Paul and Teri Williams:

Tata was ecstatic at the opportunity to have the most famous gymnastics coaches in the world coach his daughter. Mama later described how they were "swollen with pride" that the Karolyis had accepted their daughter to train with them. I figured if my parents truly believed it was the right thing to do, then I had to believe it, too. I was a kid who had just turned ten, after all. How much of an opinion could I really offer? I knew they wanted me to be an Olympic champion, and in their minds, they believed Bela and Marta Karolyi had the coaching and political power to help make it happen. They had coached the iconic Nadia Comaneci, also a Romanian, so my parents thought they would be a perfect fit for me. Why wouldn't they? On the surface it appeared to be the perfect move.

Tell Me When It's Over, #20: Dominique Moceanu

continuing with today's theme: our second Tell Me When It's Over with an Olympic gold medalist.
now it's back to work or the third won't show until football season.

the last book I ever read (Off Balance, excerpt one)

from Off Balance: A Memoir by Dominique Moceanu with Paul and Teri Williams:

To better understand my parents today, we have to look back to their homeland, Romania. Situated north of the Balkan Peninsula in Central Europe, Romania is a country well known for its history of hard-line communism. It fell under communist control in 1947, after the previous ruler, King Michael, was driven into exile. My parents grew up under the brutal dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu, who rose to power in the 1960s and continued to rule until the Romanian Revolution in 1989. Romania's economy fell apart under Ceauşescu's reign, leaving most citizens starved for food, work, and a sense of hope. Meanwhile, Ceauşescu himself lived lavishly and misappropriated the country's resources for his own benefit. Ceauşescu's secret police (the Securitate) regulated almost every aspect of daily life--from deciding who could have children to who was permitted to own a typewriter. Human rights violations under Ceauşescu were legendary.

It's not every day you meet someone who was raised in a communist country during a period referred to as the "reign of terror," let alone when they happen to be your parents.

the last book I ever read (Man Hunt, excerpt eight)

from Man Hunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter L. Bergen:

Despite the abject failure of al-Qaeda's strategy on 9/11, a number of prominent writers, academics, and politicians in the West claimed that the attacks on Washington and New York were the beginning of a war with a totalitarian ideology similar to the murderous ideologies the United States had done battle with in the twentieth century. Certainly "Binladenism" shared some commonalities with National Socialism and Stalinism: anti-Semitism and anti-liberalism, the embrace of charismatic leaders, the deft exploitation of modern propaganda methods, and the bogus promise of utopia here on Earth if its programs were implemented. But Binladenism never posed anything like the existential threat that communism or Nazism did. Still, the conviction that "Islamofascism" posed as great a threat to the West as the Nazis or Soviets had was an article of faith for some. The influential neoconservative Richard Perle warned that the West faced "victory or holocaust" in its struggle with the Islamofascists. And the former CIA director James Woolsey because a constant presence on television news programs after 9/11, invoking the specter of World War IV.

But this was all massively overwrought. The Nazis occupied and subjugated most of Europe and instigated a global conflict that killed tens of millions. And the United States spent about 40 percent of its GDP to fight the Nazis, fielding millions of soldiers. Communist regimes killed 100 million people in wars, prison camps, enforced famines, and pogroms.

The threat posed by al-Qaeda is orders of magnitude smaller. Despite bin Laden's hyperventilating rhetoric, there is no danger that his followers will end the American way of life. In almost any given year, Americans are far more likely to drown accidentally in a bathtub than to be killed by a terrorist. Yet, few of us harbor an irrational fear of a bathtub drowning. Al-Qaeda's amateur investigations into weapons of mass destruction do not compare to the very real possibility of nuclear conflagration the world faced during the Cold War, and there are relatively few adherents of Binladenism in the West today, while there were tens of millions of devotees of communism and fascism.

Despite the relative insignificance of the threat posed by al-Qaeda and its allies, the War on Terror was a bonanza for the American national security industrial complex. On 9/11, the annual budget for all the U.S. intelligence agencies was about $25 billion. A decade later it was $80 billion; and by then almost a million Americans held Top Secret clearances, and six out of ten of the richest counties in the United States were in the Washington, D.C., area. If the War on Terror was, in the end, as much about bringing bin Laden to justice as anything else, it is sobering to observe that American intelligence agencies consumed half a trillion dollars on their way to that goal.