Nancy Pearl

Was glad to see several members of the writers' group at the Nancy Pearl chat at the PD on Aug. 20. Wasn't she terrific. I've decided that my doorway into books is language/prose/writing.

The Girl in the Window

As a reminder that we still need newspapers to do the kind of good, important work no one else will do, here's a poignant narrative that ran in the St. Pete Times last week:

http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article750838.ece

It says so much in so few, simple words

This NY Times Sunday Styles story hooked me from the start. You can just see this ditzy girl, representing the entire trend of low-key turns party hot spot.

By ALLEN SALKIN
Published: July 6, 2008
Montauk, N.Y.

Lauren Morris’s gold lamé high heels kept getting stuck between the planks of the patio deck.

A male friend who shares her rental house in Southampton had warned her on a recent Saturday night to wear flats to Surf Lodge, the trendy new nightspot for the Hamptons crowd. But she was not the type of woman to have packed party shoes without heels.

Her only alternative were flip-flops, which she only wore “to not touch the floor in my share house,” said Ms. Morris, an account executive in a fashion showroom. “They’re gross.”

Wearing a sun-yellow tube dress, Ms. Morris held a glass of champagne, with a blueberry, a blackberry and a strawberry floating in it, and surveyed the scene. A reggae-influenced band played loudly as young men in pressed oxford shirts and jeans with complicated back-pocket designs were sprawled on ottomans. Eyeing them were tan women in skimpy floral-print sundresses.

“I’ve been coming to the Hamptons for years,” Ms. Morris, 29, shouted. “This is my first time in Montauk.”

That’s right, Montauk, known as “The End.” Not Bridgehampton, East Hampton or Southampton, where the thumping fabulousness on display at the Surf Lodge has long been a mark of summertime. Montauk, the easternmost tip of Long Island, is a town that has for generations been distinctly, and proudly low-key, the un-Hampton, where commercial fishermen live and work, and where middle-class families could afford hotel rooms, miniature golf and soft-serve ice cream.

Read the whole story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/fashion/06hampton.html?scp=1&sq=montauk&st=cse#

Another good story

I'm trying my best to turn this into a sportswriting blog! Here's a another good story I found on espn.com, this is about the death of Len Bias to a cocaine overdose 22 years ago. If anyone is any kind of sports fan or even was around then, this is a story that impacted so many people. It's the first sports story I really remember.

This has an interesting structure. The writer uses first person in a couple sections, and I think it's done in a good way -- it really drives home how this story impacted everyone, even the writer when he was just 13 years old.

Here's the first-person passage I liked:

I do not know whether Len Bias was a martyr, or whether in death, as his mother often says, he has brought life. I do not know whether, as Jesse Jackson claimed in eulogizing Bias -- likening him to Martin Luther King Jr., Mozart, Gandhi and Jesus -- that the Lord "sometimes uses our best people to get our attention." I do not know whether Len Bias died for any reason at all, divine or otherwise, beyond the fact he ingested a massive amount of dangerously pure cocaine in a brief period of time, short-circuiting the electrical impulses to his heart muscle. I do not know whether, as many claim, the Boston Celtics would have extended the Bird-McHale-Parish dynasty by several seasons if Len Bias had lived. I do not know if he was the catalyst for another decades-long New England curse. I do not know whether he would have been better/as good as/in the same stratosphere as Michael Jordan if he had lived to play in the National Basketball Association. We can argue these issues all we like, but I believe that, because the answers to such questions can never be determined, the questions have become irrelevant, obscured by the mythology that Autopsy No. 86-999 has engendered.

I do know death -- especially sudden and premature death -- has a way of obscuring many truths (see: Dean, James; Cobain, Kurt; et al.).

I do know I was 13 when Len Bias died, and it scared the hell out of me. It was supposed to scare the hell out of me; this was a moralistic passion play, an after-school special come to life.

I do know the public narrative was deceptively simple: Len Bias had just experienced the most euphoric moment of his life, and he had an unquestionably bright future, and he had chosen to experiment with illicit substances for the first time -- perhaps, some errant rumors went, it was crack cocaine -- and in a freak occurrence of bad karma, his heart had stopped.

And I do believe that because of this public narrative and the consequences of this narrative, the death of Len Bias can be classified as the most socially influential moment in the history of modern sports.


The whole story is really long, so I'll just post the link here:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=bias&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab1pos1

A week off

It's summertime in the city, and we're taking a week off from the Writers' Block for July.

Figuring few people want to talk shop on July 3 (the first Thursday of the month and the beginning of a perfectly good long weekend), we're pushing our meeting back to July 10. Scott Stephens will lead, and rumors are, we'll be in the private room upstairs at Great Lakes Brewery in Ohio City.

We'll cancel July 17 and resume meeting the first Thursday in August.

So until then, happy writing!

Up next: metaphors and similes

To warm up for next week's (June 19) session, here's my favorite simile of all time, courtesy of Anna Quindlen's "Object Lessons."

"Her children slipped out of her as easily as if she were a water slide into the crowded pool of their household."

Some good writing

Just because I feel like we need a post to liven things up, and because there is not nearly enough sports in our lives, here's a column from Rick Reilly, new to ESPN. Debut columns are so tough -- even though he's not exactly an unknown coming from Sports Illustrated -- but I really loved how he used his father to introduce how he became the man and writer he is now. It's touching.


THE LIFE OF REILLY
By Rick Reilly
Since this is my first column for The Magazine, I figure I should introduce myself. And maybe the best way to tell you who I am is to tell you about my dad, Jack. He was an Irish tenor, a yarn spinner, a songwriter, a father of four, a crack golfer and a first-class drunk.

As kids, we blamed golf. We thought the game made him meaner than a dyspeptic rattler. We were sure it was more important than we were, or why was he never around? More than once he asked me, "What grade are you in again?"

He'd always come home drunk after playing golf, except for the times he'd come home dripping drunk. Then he'd be looking to bust something, maybe a lamp, maybe somebody's nose; my mom's, once. To this day, the sound of spikes on cement sends a shot of ice through me. That was him coming up the sidewalk.

In alcoholic families, the youngest kid becomes the mascot. That was me. I became the funny one, comic relief, third-grade vaudeville—anything to keep the furniture where it was. When he'd eventually stagger into bed, the rat in my stomach would finally stop gnawing.

When I was about 10 or 11, I started working through the thing backward. If I could play golf with him, maybe I could keep him from drinking. I'd be the hero! So I started asking him to take me. He did once, but my fear of him was so paralyzing that any instruction he gave sounded like a shotgun blast in my ear. After about three holes, I stormed off the course in tears and waited in the car.

I didn't play again until high school. I did it partly to understand what was so wonderful about a game that would keep a man from coming to his kids' games and piano recitals and birthday parties.

And I was happy to find out it wasn't the Titleist clubs that made him so mean, it was the Canadian Clubs. It was the whiskey. Golf was this green-and-blue launching pad for little white rockets. Golf taught me the lessons my dad never did, including the best one: You play life where it lies. You hit it there. You play it from there. Nobody threw you a nasty curve or forgot to block the defensive end. I learned that my mistakes were mine alone, not my boss', not the cop's and, as much as I hated to admit it, not my dad's.

And then one day, out of the blue, maybe 25 years ago, my dad went to one AA meeting and quit drinking. Never had a drop after that.

It was five more years before I finally believed it. Then I invited him to the Masters. He was 70, I was 30. And it was on that two-and-a-half-hour ride from Atlanta to Augusta that we finally met.

He told me his life story, how he drank and fought to get the attention of his distant father, how he'd kept from us that he'd been married before, and how sorry he was to have let his family grow up while he was holding down the 19th hole with his elbows.

He apologized and cried. I forgave him and cried. I never dreamed I-20 could be that emotional.
Suddenly he understood. He went home to Boulder, Colo., and apologized to my mom and my brother and two sisters. They finally got to tell him how much he hurt them. He wrote us a poem about his love for us and his shame and why nobody would cry the day he died.

It took a lot of guts and a lot of courage, and the only lousy part was that it came so late. By the time I saw him for who he was—a strong man who took most of a lifetime to understand his crushing weakness—I was ears deep into my own family and career. So we didn't play much golf together before the warranty on his heart started to expire. I never got to really see the swing that won all those trophies. By then, the only time he used his putter was as a cane.

Two months ago, on the final night of his life, I sat alone in a chair next to his hospice bed, holding his hand and a box of Kleenex and proving how wrong poems can be sometimes.

As I looked at him, I realized that for better and worse, he'd shaped me. I think I'm a good father borne of his rotten example. I'm a storyteller out of surviving him. I'm a man with more flaws than a 1986 Yugo, but I try to own up to them, because a very good Irish tenor showed me how.

And that's what I call a very good save.