tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68496624241520156412024-03-04T22:31:56.173-08:00David Roth, The WriterThe online place in which I compile the different things I write for the different people and places for which I write them. Also videos of my parents' new dog, when possible.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.comBlogger142125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-29745558836476921412014-06-15T14:18:00.002-07:002014-06-15T14:19:09.886-07:00Day Of The Dad<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Nothing is perfect, really, or nothing big. We assuredly are not, and the things we make and do assuredly are not, which adds up to us, in our world, trying to be good when we remember to and generally seeking some sort of safe place.<br />
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My father is not any more perfect than anyone else, and he and my (equally imperfect, equally loved) mother worked together to raise some imperfect kids. We love each other a lot, all of us in all of our own imperfect ways, and we do our best to communicate this in between the general terrors and troubles of our lives.<br />
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It is nice to have days on the calendar that remind us to do this, and I am fortunate to have a wife (I could stop here) who is good about buying cards and reminding me to write in them. But I am better at remembering to be grateful for all this -- for the good fortune of having an imperfect man as a father who did his best, in word and deed, to show me how to be the best imperfect man I could be -- than I am at remembering other things. I can't forget it, because I live in this example every day. I do my best, because my parents showed me how to do it.<br />
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Also if there is indeed anything perfect in the world it is the way my parents laugh at their (effectively feral) dog. I've had this video on my phone for a while, I think at least since the Jewish high holy days, but I'm glad to finally have a place for it. I don't need the reminding to be grateful for these two good people, but it's nice to be able to remind myself anyway.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-6891249902075042862014-04-10T23:05:00.000-07:002014-04-10T23:05:58.337-07:00The Internet Inside<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If you couldn't guess from the above image of a digitized VR Jeff Fahey from <i>The Lawnmower Man</i>, this is about a strange and not necessarily pleasant thing. All respect to the unfadeable Mr. Fahey, of course. I know he's a fan of the site. Anyway, this isn't about Jeff Fahey. It is, maybe, about a dream I had.<br />
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I write 'maybe' only because I'm not sure that I was dreaming. I was asleep -- asleep after a fairly typical late night shift, in which an hour or so of frenetic writing followed another hour of less-frenetic (leisurely, even) scotch-drinking and non-writing. When it got late enough that it was transparently very stupid for me to be awake, I went to bed. This is not unusual. This is, for better or worse, the life I've got. It's pretty good, honestly. There's a pretty lady in the bed when I finally get there, I'm no longer drinking scotch that comes in shatterproof plastic jugs -- it's still a Utility Scotch, but I'm treating myself to big glass bottles these days -- and I like what I'm writing and who I'm writing it for. The next part is the unusual part.<br />
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That part was three hours later, when I was jolted awake by... I'm not sure, really. Everything, maybe? Anyway, these things happen. What had not previously happened, in this respect, was that, after waking up -- it was 5:02am, which is about as unappealing a time of day as our shared 24 hours afford us -- I was confronted with a deafening barf-wash of internet noise every time I closed my eyes. It was silent, in the same way the internet is silent, but it was deafening -- if my eyes were open, I saw my bedroom's ceiling in the pre-dawn dark. If I closed them, I saw a screen filling with bad news and noise. Angry @-messages of indistinct letters, gchats and personal messages and emails, all of them converging on the "why" and the "where is this" and implying not just You're Fired but You're Awful, Jesus, You're Awful.<br />
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This was, in retrospect, probably something like a panic attack. Despite periodic use/abuse of panic-related medicines in the past, I don't know that I'd ever really experienced the Actual Thing for which these medicines are generally prescribed. If this was indeed it, I now understand why these particular medicines are so intense and narcotizing. Because this actual thing <i>sucked</i>, and because being awake for it -- suddenly, in this case, although I can't imagine a gradual slipping into such a thing -- was just fucking terrible.<br />
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It did not, I should note, come from nowhere. I was not in a panic-mode about anything in particular, although I was going to sleep on deadline as I do most nights -- and as, indeed, I probably need to do in order to actually write anything -- and also had some other longer-horizon things hanging around in open tabs and unanswered emails, daring me to go another 24 hours without paying attention. This is not cool or good or fun, but it is also not unusual.<br />
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All of this, every bit of it, lived in my computer as much as it did in my mind; none of it would or could be resolved through anything that did not involve accessing the internet through my computer, the thing on which I am writing this other thing. That truth is not just implied, although it's implied. My whole professional life is here. If anything is going to wake me up, it would be -- and in all fairness should be -- this. Our nightmares should match our lives, I suppose, and this is where my life is.<br />
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And yet, holy shit, what an awful way to be awake. I woke to my own pounding heart, and took the requisite deep breaths. I got up and walked around. I got back into bed. And every time I closed my eyes it was there again -- a blast of undifferentiated internet noise, those metastatic retweets and angry messages and emails I needed to answer but couldn't. Everything I wouldn't see until too late, or couldn't or wouldn't be able to handle even if it arrived on time. Deafening and characteristically quiet, every time I thought I was calm or reconciled or at least sleepy enough to close my eyes.<br />
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I don't even know, really, what all of it was -- this was some days ago, and I was tired in the way that people who would rather be sleeping tend to be. I was also probably still moderately drunk and also What The Fuck Was Any Of This. I am not sure there's any reasonable explanation for the internet blundering into one's dreams and then screamingly vandalizing them.<br />
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But I recall and can attest that whatever it was that woke me up sounded and looked like INTERNET: a big crushing high-peaked wave of things unfinished and unfinishable and too-big and rageful, all in the colors and shapes and style of my internet life. It was awful, and it took at least a half hour of haunted noisy attempts to get myself back to sleep; in retrospect, I just needed to be too tired for this particular anxiety to register, and then I slipped back under. I woke up when the alarm went off, as usual, and I got back to work.<br />
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But yes, all that sucked, and in retrospect all I can think about when I think about it was that it was miraculous that it took so long for this sort of thing to manifest in this sort of way. It all suggests that it would be good for me to find some way to prise my mouth off this foie gras feed-funnel for at least a few hours every day, or failing that to find some way to convince myself that to be away from this computer and this keyboard is not to derelict in some fundamental human duty. That all seems clear enough. I should probably get to work on that. I will put it on the list. I will work my way down to it, I guess.<br />
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<br />David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-30479282103679381052014-01-29T23:43:00.001-08:002015-01-27T21:50:05.132-08:00In A Big Country<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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My friend Molly died tonight, which was more of a shock than a surprise. It was both, really -- she was 33, and people are not supposed to die at that age, not people as wildly vital as she was or people who are any other way -- but the surprise was mitigated by a friend calling me on Monday to tell me that she was suddenly, shockingly ill. Her mother took over her Facebook account that night to confirm as much. It is hard to know how sudden all this really was -- she left town several years ago, boyfriend by her side, to return to the city of her birth; my relationship with her became almost entirely virtual afterwards, and vague even at that. I saw her at a wedding and we were both drunk, and we hugged. A way to say hello when you aren't talking so good, no way at all to say goodbye.</div>
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I don't know how long ago that even was -- I am pretty sure we saw each other at that wedding, although my wife is not so sure, and she was also there -- but anyway all those days collapsed at once and as one earlier this week. My friend called; Molly was sick, really desperately sick, on a respirator and in multiple failure and it was bad, it was really bad. The boyfriend was in jail, had been for how long I don't know and would be for how long I don't know. In however long it had been out of sight and mostly out of mind, the bottom had fallen out of their lives and they had fallen and fallen. I hadn't heard, I hadn't seen. I hadn't looked. I hadn't thought. I hadn't thought any of this was possible.</div>
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But more to the point: her liver failed, and then her kidneys. There were some short spikes of hope in the short time after that -- her blood pressure was briefly high enough for the hospital to attempt dialysis, which was important. If that worked, they would be able to attempt a liver transplant. If that worked, she might live. If she lived, we might get to see her again. It was all so contingent on such a thin fiber, but it was enough for a day or so. One hopeful email, forwarded, and there is our comeback trail, there is our fighter -- this was no stretch: she was truly tough, someone I would count out of no real or metaphorical fight -- and here was her fight. I know her, I knew her. I would not bet against her, against any odds or any opponent. </div>
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But it was not really a fight, really, by the time she was in it. She was taken off dialysis. She was never off a respirator, as far as I knew. I don't know how or if she suffered and I don't know if I can bear to know. Friends started calling me: what is happening with Molly, when and how and holy shit. I was probably telling one of them what little I knew -- more than my friend knew, but not a lot and not up to date -- when she passed. When I got off the last of those calls there were already eulogies showing up on her Facebook page and my wife, tearful but weirdly purposeful, was refreshing the page. A click and the cascade poured on. </div>
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Other people's mourning, let alone in public and with a LIKE option underneath it, feels and looks like any other thing; this is the queasily Aspergersian essence and definitional emotional bug of Facebook, that everything looks like everything else and can only be consumed or engaged in the same way and only in that way. Look at these updates, the same shape and color as ones complaining about traffic or sharing some fatuity or other, and the old reflexive alerts fire: buddy, you mean "you're" not "your" or vice versa; there is the hard secular impulse against trite spiritual treacle. Lord, all of that response-to-the-response so fucking shameful, so inadequate and so distant in this context. But also easy, also comfortingly familiar in the long shadow of the rest of it, which is so enormous and final.</div>
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It feels even worse in retrospect, this retreat into the editorial in the face of the inarguable and unwinnable. This is it, this is it. There is nothing to say about it, and anything and everything said about it -- sorry for you're (sic) loss, another angel in the choir, a beautiful person who sang of life's sly fun and bright purpose in every wild moment spent with her -- is all true. That is all, this is all, everything means goodbye, and goodbye is the sum and pale essence of anything that can be said. This is certainly not a perfect forum, either. I am saying goodbye now, but I can't quite quit saying it. When I am done, I will be done.</div>
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Look, look: I do not know how all this came to pass, how what failed came to fail so finally. It seems like things turned for her in her last days in New York, and didn't turn once she and her boyfriend moved home to Tennessee; I don't really know what she was doing there. I know that Molly's father fought and was finally undone by addiction. I worked with him briefly, during my time at Topps; this was a job I found for him through her, and he authenticated various autograph signings throughout the southeast, and was the best and best-loved at that strange gig for some giddy months; football players, especially, loved the man. He went, rather quickly, from being a star to being a late-arriving problem to being utterly lost and unreachable to being all the way gone in dreadfully rapid time. Her death would seem to have something to do with substance abuse. I don't know, and I don't know why I'd need to write about it here, except maybe for how all that reflects off me and my fears about myself and my appetites, and my fears of dying too early, of dying before I'm finished. And this is a retreat, honestly: back to me, into me, the questions of what I might or could or should have done, all those safe trails back home from this cruel outland and this cold permanence, the place from which my friend will not come back.</div>
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But here is a thing to remember, among all the other things, the many conversations and subway rides and baseball games and other insignificances that added up to this unscalable and unavoidable thing looming ahead. But this is a thing, when I talked about this with Kate, that as it turns out we both remembered. It was not a moment from any of the Mets games we went to with her, any of the many art shows or music shows or random nameless nights at various since-closed bars. </div>
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As it turned out, we remembered the same thing, from the same party -- a going-away party, as it turns out, for friends who were leaving New York -- at Molly's apartment on Smith Street in Brooklyn. There were giant plastic jugs of shitty booze and a fridge tippy with pyramids of bodega beers; the floor was wet and the air was dense. The buzzer honked with new visitors throughout the night. Some friends got open-container charges on the stoop, other friends kissed each other for the first and last time -- "she's no-nonsense," one said to me later, "and I am interested in nonsense" -- and people danced and drank and talked and fought and made-out. It was one of the last peaks, in retrospect, of that part of our lives. People left the city after that, as well they might've, first a little and then all at once. This was one of the last times we were all together as those versions of ourselves.</div>
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What Kate remembered, and what I remembered, too, was Molly commandeering the stereo later in the night, to play a song that she loved a lot as many times as she felt it deserved to be played. The song was "In A Big Country," by the band Big Country. I always liked it well enough, and I assume I danced -- or, more likely, just sort of danced and sort of made out with Kate, which I realized later in our relationship was a thing I could do instead of awkwardly dancing -- while it played. Molly played it maybe twice, maybe three times, and everyone laughed at that familiar willfulness and kept dancing. It was her party, and she danced and laughed, too.</div>
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I don't remember how many times she ran the song back, exactly. I haven't forgotten, either. Some things stay with you, like the song says. These are the better things, the things closest to the heart, which are the last you let go. Those are what you keep, and you hold them close and tight. You hold them, I still hold them, because it is not nearly time to let them go, and because of the late realization that they're worth so much more than they seemed to be, back when we spent them so readily in the belief that there were years, yet, in which to spend them. I cannot give all that up, not yet. I am crying because I have to do that.</div>
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I can only wish her and her family and Tim some peace. I, we, can only love each other as much as we can; this is always true, of course. What is out of our hands is out of our hands. What we can do, we have to do. Good lord, rest for the weary, comfort for all of us, and only please as much life as we can take, and no more. It's enough. It's never enough. It's not enough.</div>
David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-87500015877883838752013-12-11T14:06:00.002-08:002013-12-11T14:07:12.430-08:00A Charge To KeepThe person who crafted this powerful image -- a reminder not just of the Reason For The Season, but that there are those out there who would take Christmas from us and replace it with, like, improved mass transit and a single-payer health care system -- has disavowed authorship of it. No doubt because he (or is it a he?) (it's a he) does not want the ACLU and Van Jones and The Girl From The Healthcare.gov Website and So On showing up at his home. I post it here because it is important to remember what's important. Also because I <a href="https://twitter.com/david_j_roth/status/409786079022039040">specifically requested it on Twitter</a> and I really and truly appreciate him doing it.<br />
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Brian McCann is something of a hero of mine, and not just because of <a href="http://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2013/10/7/4798780/atlanta-braves-party-police">his record of protecting things from other things</a>. The rest of the image speaks for itself. Eloquently. Loudly. There is some spittle involved. Okay now it is becoming less eloquent.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-5582562578772775252013-12-03T14:21:00.000-08:002013-12-03T20:49:55.556-08:00Living in Chloe's City<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/East_Village_Second_Avenue.jpg"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/East_Village_Second_Avenue.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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There are these words to describe a functioning city, now. They're not new, exactly, although their usage mostly is, or is at least new enough to sound strange. These are George Saunders-style buzzwords, half military-grade technical and half willfully opaque MBA jargon—Vibrant and Sustainable (in its non-ecological application) and Creative (as a noun) and Scalable and so on—that have taken on a weird and unearned status as terms of art when used to describe a city being a city. Everyone knows these words, though no human uses them in conversation. They are mostly void of meaning but also vaporously ubiquitous enough that you might be forgiven for thinking, while walking past some gallery openings on a block you remembered as a group home for stray cats, Wow, How Vibrant.<br />
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All of these terms are faintly consultantish in the sense that they are all to some extent ways to describe a city's relative economic health that have been built to sound as if they are describing something more complicated and human and less readily quantified. Which is another way of saying that they're insultingly abstracted—"what a vibrant home you have," try that sometime—and so sort of sad. They are the sound of a well-educated person doing a drive-by on you with one of those supermarket price-tag guns. <br />
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At some level, where New York City is concerned, you are right to maybe have a hard time mustering much response beyond the classic j.o. gesture. As if the city was ever dedicated to anything but wringing as much from every resident as possible, as if this or anyplace was ever an okay or fair or un-scary place to be not-rich. There is no home on a precipice's edge, and this city more than others has been built, higher and higher and further and further out, on concrete levered over miles of steep air. You wake up, buffeted by the din of new construction, in a place vibrant and scalable, in a place that used to be your home. Under your door comes a note: it's about the rent. <br />
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But this is old, and idle. I'm not leaving. But I have wondered, in the days since I heard that she'd passed, would Chloe move here today? <br />
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And after that: what if she hadn't? And after that: why would anyone want to be in a city where Chloe could not live, or would not want to live? What would be the point of that? <br />
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In <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/books/david-bowman-author-of-let-the-dog-drive-dies-at-54.html?_r=0">the New York Times obituary for her husband</a>, the novelist David Bowman, Chloe was identified as a "performance coach." This is not so much wrong as it is just a space-saving way of saying "a woman who taught the Alexander Technique and also taught acting classes at some point." But it's also unfortunate, another bit of simultaneously over-precise and obscure linguistic inexactitude. It's easy to imagine some hard-eyed Manhattan elite reading it and wondering if what this city needs is fewer performance coaches and more bold real estate visionaries or app-extruding thinkfluencers or whatever a city is supposed to want, whichever unit of person or flavor of Creative might most enhance Scalable Vibrancy. <br />
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But of course there are not two words to describe Chloe, just as there aren't for anyone else. She taught the Alexander Technique—a sort of physical practice that might be described as A Better Way To Stand Up And Walk Around. The method was the brainchild of an eccentric Aussie actor of the late 19th century whose last name you can probably guess, and while I can't know quite what resemblance Chloe's practice had to F.M. Alexander's, I would wager that it was not great. What she taught was hers, and if some of the principal ideas came from Alexander—adorned with things learned over her various years spent in meditation and invariably presented as ways to play around with A Thing She'd Been Thinking About—the way in which Chloe shaped and delivered them in turn was what brought me back to her studio for years. I'm not a performer, and as such didn't really need a coach. I went to see my friend, who helped me. <br />
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That we were able to do this for years owed somewhat to me, and my uncanny ability to find new ways to express anxiety or distress through contorted posture. And some of it is external, just the pressure of New York making defective diamonds of everyone here. Look around you on the subway or the sidewalk and see what this looks like. There are those of us, crumpled in the city's pitiless green fist, who wear that mangling on us, as us; there is the weird puffed physicality of those seeking to project that they are not, all those Potemkin chests and jutting crystal jaws. There are the people who are, usually for very good reason, slow and collapsed. Everyone wears everything.<br />
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To learn Alexander is in some sense to crack a code. You see, in the posture of others—the angle of Ted Cruz's head, the set of Michael Bloomberg's shoulders—a certain sense of that person. Chloe, I remember, was fascinated by the predatory bounce of the former Knicks forward Latrell Sprewell. She couldn't figure him out, but knew he was unique. We talked about him long after he was out of the NBA. <br />
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Mostly, though, I went because Chloe helped me. She helped me implant a signal in my head that told me when I was hunching or slumping, and maybe why I was doing it, and she gave me the means to correct it; she gave me the means to walk around as myself. But that was not necessarily how our classes went. I would come in, cramped and scrambled after a week of my life, and we'd talk and she'd tell me about a thing she'd been thinking about of late, or tell some sort of story, and then make a few suggestions that would lead to me somehow popping my spine open like a champagne cork, picking up a few inches of height and blooming out in my chest and otherwise shedding my crabbed self. <br />
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I would look in the mirror—she had a big one in her old studio, and a smaller one once she started teaching out of her East Village apartment after her husband passed—and I'd see someone who only sort of looked like me. It was still me, of course, but a version of me filled out and filled up, tenuously un-kinked. I saw her, always, in the early evenings and late in the week. In that stretched-out light, I looked like some other person, a person who lived only in Chloe's presence, and who smiled in a way I have not seen myself smile in pictures. <br />
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And we would get there, oftentimes, by way of the most outrageous metaphors, all of which she chirped out, smiling, in an almost comically honeyed Carolina Low Country accent. The top of my head popped open and a geranium bloomed out of it. I dropped things into the chasm of my chest and they burst into flame. My toes and fingers opened up and blasted light out into the apartments below, energy bouncing out towards the Bowery. My skin went permeable and the room and the city around it came in and I achieved a bright and blinking equilibrium. I have taken a number of the drugs that are supposed to do this for you, and there was nothing that worked like this. <br />
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And then I'd pay her, generally in cash, and say hello to the next student up—I remember all of them, if not their names—and would walk out into the city. It was stunning, always: the airlock between the building's buzzers and then the shock of New York felt so fully—the air so strange and loud and sweet, the movement through it so fluid and light, the first sip of beer afterwards so bizarrely alive. I'd close back up, in time, and then go back the next week to unlock something else. I sense, given <a href="http://finslippy.squarespace.com/blog/for-chloe.html">the way that Chloe's other students have written about her</a> since her passing, that this is what everyone got from it. You went up the stairs yourself and walked out better. You left the sleepy sanctity of her studio and walked into the city and felt it immensely, if only briefly, and understood the thrumming awesome greatness of it—not the notional vibrancy, but the actual loud vibration of it. <br />
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The thing that changed you was Chloe, who was just a person—a woman born in 1947 on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, who moved to New York after college and worked briefly at HBO in its early years and was a friendly-enough acquaintance with her ex-neighbor Tom Noonan, who played the towering killer in Michael Mann's <i>Manhunter</i>. She would tell stories about herself or others or append names to things—the cold weather hunch you do was The Chicago Syndrome, for instance—and they were either true or they weren't. She was performing, but she was also just herself, blasting her miraculous singularity outwards in a helpful way as, I sense, she would have had there been no one else there. <br />
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Her husband, whose fantastically strange debut novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Let-Dog-Drive-David-Bowman/dp/0814712053">Let The Dog Drive</a></i> I somehow read when I was in high school, was always sort of sick; he died suddenly in 2012. And then Chloe was suddenly, shockingly sick—a massive dodgeball of a tumor, out of nowhere—and there was carpet-bomb chemo and recovery, and she was back, smaller and hurting but still herself. She moved her classes into her apartment, where she was assisted by her dog, a gangly sad-eyed Pointer that skittered across the wood floors. When she was sick, I took the dog for walks in the neighborhood. He looked up at me with the sad eyes of a thousand-year-old sage while he took robust dumps on East 11th Street. <br />
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There were problems with her medication, and then some mixed diagnoses, and then some canceled sessions. I rang the buzzer one Friday and she told me she wasn't well enough to teach. I offered to take the dog for a walk and she thanked me and declined. She was, at that point, apparently already refusing treatment on the thing that had reared back up. She didn't tell anyone about any of it, just stopped seeing almost everyone. I called her, what I now know to be right around the time of her death, to tell her I was thinking of her and let her know I'd be ready to start up again whenever she was. I hope I told her I loved her, although I probably didn't. I know the apartment where she died and have thought about it a lot since then. A tiny television; books crawling over every wall, with more books atop those; old tenement fixtures; that loving, loping dog wrestling his toys in the long light from big windows. <br />
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To believe in the promise of this city, or any city, is to believe that—for all the churlish churn on the streets, the neighborhoods turning over and upside down, the way that it throws off and throws out people—there are still some apartments yet unvisited, and that those apartments might have people like Chloe in them. It's to believe that there are still doors that could be opened to reveal people as wise and generous as she, people whose sweet vastness can prise you open, head and heart. It's to believe that there are people who can and will pour great goodness through you and leave something behind even as their wild, laughing love beams from you in every direction at their happy behest, their bright beauty bounding down Second Avenue in the twilight and then out, everywhere.<br />
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David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-54398385104836002352013-09-11T08:52:00.003-07:002013-09-11T08:52:46.551-07:00Hey WowI'm obviously not writing any of these posts about finding lawyers. That's obvious, right?David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-40012730511258341582013-02-04T09:33:00.000-08:002013-02-04T09:33:00.541-08:00The (Super Bowl) Week That Was<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So. Hello. I'm going to start trying to round up all the writing I do over the course of the week and put it in a post. Some of this is for my personal accounting, so that I can have both a sense and a record of how ridiculously many words I'm writing per week. The rest of it is a belated attempt to bring this site back to its original non-dog-video purpose, which was for me to put the stuff I write. As that column on the right is already both overloaded and outdated, I figured maybe this is the best way. Anyway, we'll see if I can keep it up. But yeah, here is what I did on Super Bowl Week. (The picture of Rickie Weeks is because his last name is Weeks.)<br />
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I wrote about Alex Rodriguez, sad robot and totally opaque human being, for Sports On Earth. The commenters there, as is their wont, didn't like it. I was too hard on A-Rod, or defended him too much; I "obviously don't watch baseball." So all in all a success. Anyway, <a href="http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/41271754">I liked it</a>:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To live in that moment of command -- and yes, even A-Rod makes an out more often than he doesn't, but the game is incalculably easier for him than it is for most humans who have ever lived -- must be strange, like a dream of flying that somehow never ends. It seems reasonable to assume that this would do some things to a person's sense of self. In a way, the things we revile about A-Rod -- his prickly superiority and relentless rule-flouting, and the presumption of personal impunity from which those behaviors spring -- all have their basis in a sort of fact. He actually is superior in the ways that matter most at his workplace, and he has effectively bent or broken rules without consequence; we may not like the way that he presumes he can lie or cheat or gamble or otherwise act like A-Rod, but his entire career stands as proof that his arrogant presumption of impunity is not exactly false.</blockquote>
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I also wrote about Breitbart Sports, the new and familiarly bilious vertical at the late conservative media mogul's website for raging right-wing mutants, <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/the-mercy-rule-why-breitbart-sports-will-fail-i-hope">at Vice</a>:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The genius of Breitbart was that he greeted the acolytes in his comment sections as revolutionary brothers at the bottom of those low and fatuous trenches he dug; he encouraged them to get to know each other, loosen up, and maybe scream at each other about how there should be a White History Month. Breitbart didn’t discriminate on ideology in this respect; he helped create the Huffington Post, too. Breitbart was in the echo chamber business. His job was creating spaces where people could agree with each other stridently and mostly wrongly about various easy outrages, safely out of earshot of those who disagree. It’s only fitting that after a career spent treating politics like a long football game between Black Nazi Communists and the Founding Fathers, Breitbart has posthumously lent his name to a sports-news website.</blockquote>
... and about how a Mardi Gras float featuring a giant, awful-looking vulva consuming NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is more than just a terrifying thing that really exists, <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/whats-eating-roger-goodell">for The Classical</a>:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This still seems something like the right float at the right time, and not only because, as Guidry says, "If you ask just about anyone on the streets of New Orleans, 'Would you like to watch the demise of Roger Goodell by a giant man-eating vagina?' Their answers would be 'yes.'" There is that, of course, but there's also everything else.</blockquote>
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Among the not technically columnar writings were two Daily Fixes (<a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/2013/01/28/boston-celtics-life-without-rajon-rondo-less-fun/">Monday</a> and <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/2013/02/01/san-francisco-49ers-baltimore-ravens-the-fix-picks-the-super-bowl-3/">Thursday</a>) for the Wall Street Journal, one <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/2013/02/01/san-francisco-49ers-baltimore-ravens-the-fix-picks-the-super-bowl-3/">amusing enough but typically erroneous prediction column</a> in the form of a discussion between me and co-Fixer (and fellow supershitty prognosticator) Jeremy Gordon, and a goofy little thing for Joshua David Stein on <a href="https://www.archetypeme.com/article/primer-super-bowl-party-etiquette?">proper Super Bowl Party Etiquette</a> to which he added rather more French and wine-friendliness than was in the original, and improved somewhat in that way. Also I wrote about Chris Culliver, no-homo nickelback of the San Francisco 49ers, and <a href="http://theclassical.org/theclog/almost-one-million-chris-culliver-followers-cant-be-wronglegitimate">his 750,000 fake Twitter followers</a>, for The Classical. I wrote some other stuff that isn't published yet, but I'm going to limit this to bylines-of-the-week. The total is eight. The word count for all those is depressingly large, the amount invoiced poignantly small. You might as well just infer that part going forward.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-33324044017234293882012-12-25T12:36:00.000-08:002012-12-25T12:36:07.622-08:00Nothing Ends/Happy Holidays<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This morning, for the first time in my life, I came down the stairs to find a large, lavishly decorated Christmas tree with carefully wrapped gifts arrayed around it. This wasn't totally surprising -- the tree was there when I went to bed, and I did not awake suddenly at my apartment in New York to find stairs and a second, more rustic story below. I am at my in-laws in Maine, they decorated the tree, the staircase was theirs and so on. It was snowing outside, big fat festive flakes.<br />
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<a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/silent-nights-and-days">The Classical is resting</a>, but there's still work to be done, because there's always work to be done, but I felt a sort of comfort and relief I haven't felt all that often of late. Not just because of the usual stress and strain, although there's that -- I finished this week's column for Sports On Earth, <a href="http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/40788834/">on Kobe Bryant's vampirically batshit and typically fascinating team-hijack in Los Angeles</a>, at the Portland Jetport Monday afternoon. Mostly because these are deeply uneasy times, even by the usual standards for this. Maria Bustillos and I talked about this at The Awl, <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2012/12/the-great-forgotten-sci-fi-novel-about-the-end-of-the-world">with regard to the wonderful and way out-of-print dystopian Catholico-baseball apocalypse novel <i>The Last Western</i></a>.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Maria:</b> So do you think the world is going to end, David? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>David:</b> I'm of two minds on the apocalypse. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>David:</b> (I just wanted to type that.) I certainly have a difficult time, looking at the things that are wrong and the responses they're engendering, feeling too optimistic about solutions. The abstraction and the deep and dimly understood grievances and the distance, all these different types of retreat: those are a bummer both because they give us a shitty discourse and stupid art, but also because problems as big as ours require non-individuated solutions, and a basic recognition that other people are as important as we are, and that we all ought to be thinking about each other a bit more. And working on that. <a href="http://www.davidroththewriter.com/2012/12/bigger-and-bigger-you-and-me.html" style="color: #1b3a74; text-decoration: none;">Current events</a> and all. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>David:</b> But on the other hand: we're still here. People can be great. And the alternative to not fixing things is not tenable. The status quo is not tenable. People seem to be realizing this. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>David:</b> It's difficult not to. I just can't see how that translates, or what it translates into. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Maria:</b> Well, here we are, agreeing about that, so there is a chance; where two or twenty or two thousand can agree, so can multitudes. Sometimes I fancy I can almost feel the change coming. I do not believe the world will end anytime soon, in part because it's been ending my whole life. There are always surprises, fair and foul. Things are dire, certainly, but I have what I am going to have to call faith.</blockquote>
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Maria is smarter than me, and most anyone else. It can be difficult to have faith. I have difficulty with it myself. But it is nice to wake up someplace safe, with nothing to do, surrounded by people you like. It's restorative, and I hope you're there, too, today and tomorrow and for as long as you can be. Take care of yourself.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-91299939195696700432012-12-14T23:46:00.003-08:002013-09-16T20:40:48.387-07:00Bigger and Bigger, You and Me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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You don't need me to lifehack this shit for you, presumably, but here is a thing to do on one of those days when some robustly armed narcissistic mutant turns peak military kill-technology on a crowd of innocents: stay the hell off of social media. This isn't the worst advice most days, and should be even more so on days like today that are so much worse than most. Today a 20-year-old in Connecticut killed his mother, took her car and her .223 assault rifle, drove to an elementary school, and killed 18 children and a handful of teachers, a principal and a school psychologist, then killed himself. This is not even the first time <i>this week</i> that something like this has happened, as a similarly well-armed kid <a href="http://www.oregonlive.com/clackamascounty/index.ssf/2012/12/clackamas_town_center_shooting_31.html">killed two and shot others at a mall in Oregon</a>, then killed himself. That was four days ago. Everyone caught something of a bleak break in that case, as the shooter's gun jammed and as police had trained for just such a scenario and responded quickly.<br />
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That this is the sort of thing police must train for is sobering enough. That it keeps happening is sobering enough. That every time it happens it is followed by queasy condolences and teary commemorations and nothing at all else is the worst. Well, it's not the worst. The worst is individuated, unimaginable, crushing, and it's happening in Connecticut today and Oregon earlier this week and Colorado before that and Arizona before that, and there is nothing much to say about it except that it is terrible. That is one kind of horror, and that it is not ours in particular is occasion to feel whatever we may feel about that. A guilty blessedness or big-hearted anger or nothing much in particular.</div>
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But that is what one person feels. It's relevant and revealing as far as that goes, but only that far. The fact that this keeps happening, and happening everywhere -- in gun-saturated states like Arizona and gun-averse ones like Connecticut and everyplace in between -- suggests that this is not a one-person issue. This is a problem for all of us, everywhere. And what spending time on social media in the wake of something like this reveals, the killing thing, is how profoundly difficult it is to think of these shared things in that way.</div>
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What you get, on Twitter -- in this case and, in general -- is the one-person bit. One side abstracts the other unto/into parody: kooks and communists, gun-nuts and libtards, grenades into opposite trenches forever. Crack that nightmare ceiling and we're still there: the robust defense of abstractions, one way or the other -- rights or non-rights, bickered and dickered over until muscle failure -- and various huffy responses to other huffy responses. A cycle of individuated offense, impregnable, forever and ever. There are ghouls with spammy Twitter feeds looking to leverage it; there are the inspirational fake-celebrity feeds popping off ponderously on it, an army of Not Really Will Smiths getting serious about a really real thing; there is some two-fisted foof from Esquire bringing the fatuous Writerly Imagery that no one needs at this moment; peevish strident certitude on peevish strident certitude. All of them on their own turf, tooth and nail after their abstractions of choice. Little arguments to distract from the big ones, everyone great and small letting their personal trolls out. </div>
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Yeah, that never got answered. It's not about answers, really. It's about assertions, and it's about on to the next one. Points and points and points, fresh takes and bold stands all the way into this endless living oblivion; this violence and these deaths as a fact of life, everyone getting very sad when the situation demands, which is often enough that you'd remark upon it. Nothing changing, or even really coming terribly close to changing. All these values that can't or won't reconcile with others, and the colossal waste of real human lives as the collateral damage from all that righteous abstraction.</div>
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As it happens, I've filed a .223 rifle. I wrote about it a little bit last year, in <a href="http://www.davidroththewriter.blogspot.com/2011/09/from-prose-orphanage-912-project.html">something I wrote about the tenth anniversary of September 12, 2001</a>. It's a terrifying and weirdly exhilarating experience; it's quite a machine, and it kicks out the endorphins whether you want it to or not. I believe that there's no reason why a non-infantryman should ever hold one of these weapons; <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/12/15/yes_we_can_have_sane_gun_control/">a lot of Americans are broadly cool with that</a>, and with making the ownership of such a weapon somewhat harder. </div>
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I don't trust President Obama, who did seem legitimately moved -- and maybe legitimately chastened by what a decade of tactical neglect on this issue has given us all -- to do much beyond responding to this, as he put it, as a father. As a father, he is doubtless painfully aware of the stakes today. But if he wanted to react to this as a President and as a politician, he would have to negotiate with people whose sole selling point to their constituencies is their supreme intransigence. To have that discussion, and win it, Obama would have to set out to sell something that people may not want to buy; he would need to ride for a value beyond mature and equitable process, which seems to be the value he relates to most innately. He might lose. That last bit has, for the most part, been enough to keep him out of similar fights in the past.<br />
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This is a failing on his part, or would be. But the greater failing is ours, and it's there on Twitter and Facebook and anywhere else online where we can declaim into ether. Guns kill people. People kill people. Our desperate false certainties and righteous umbrage and personalized pieties, our dedication to not talking about what is: all of these things are killing us. There is indisputably a problem, and we can either solve it or we can't.<br />
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But we -- not a nation of lone strapped-up heroes defending shrinking homesteads, standing our ground and wild of eye and scared as shit, but a nation fully and full-stop -- will have to be the ones to solve it. It's not about me or you or our various offended values or deeply held personal beliefs or feelings or metaphors on the issues of the moment, although of course good luck with all those. It's about us, kids and grown-ups, armed and un-armed, all of us together and working to prevent the devastation to come, or it's all of us lost in it, hunted by what we are too vain or blinkered or scared to face. It's as big as all of us, no smaller. It can be figured out, but not if we can't talk about it.</div>
David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-49734084511011221272012-12-10T11:37:00.003-08:002012-12-10T11:37:24.810-08:00A Curious Bird<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Sports columnists are about the easiest characters in all of media to goof on. ESPN, which does them the great disservice of putting them on television and encouraging them to shout things they may or may not actually believe, deserves much of the credit for that, but columnists have done their part, too. Lord knows I will indulge in some columnist-goofing, and will almost certainly continue to do so as long as your Woody Paige and Bill Plaschke types are drawing breath/paychecks for bombastically writing things they haven't thought about on topics they don't care about, or don't believe are true but do believe will agitate people, and/or all of the above. It won't have any impact on them, or on anything else, but it's easy and gratifying and seems like the right thing to do. I've got my own column inches to fill, after all.<br />
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I'd like to say that I have some more appreciation for the columnists I joke about since becoming a columnist myself; I'm now doing two columns per week, one for <a href="http://www.vice.com/author/david-roth">Vice</a> and one for Sports On Earth (which doesn't have an author page for me yet; I wrote <a href="http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/39628036">this</a> and <a href="http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/40013450">this</a> and <a href="http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/39842176">this</a> and <a href="http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/40395542">this</a> and <a href="http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/40542218/">this</a> for them). I enjoy it as an exercise and a job, although it's clearly easier some weeks than others. Last week, for instance, was not an especially news-y one, and the absence of actual incident made it difficult to have a take -- HOT, LOUD AND FIRST on some Skip Bayless shit, or really even at all -- worthy of a column. It's on those sorts of weeks that I understand, and come as close as I come to appreciating, how difficult and unpleasant it can be to be a columnist, and to have been a columnist for a long time, as the worst columnists typically have been.<br />
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The job doesn't change from week to week. The job is to discuss a thing that everyone is already discussing, whether you want to or not, in a way that will stand out for one reason or other from the dense discussion that's already happening; the deadlines are non-negotiable, the outlines are non-negotiable, and the fact that there are only so many things to say about the SEC's dominance of college football or LeBron or whatever doesn't matter at all, really. Do this for a few decades, and it's easy to see how a person could become as curdled and distant and broadly bummed/bummer-inducing as many columnists have. I don't know that I can imagine doing this for decades, although thinking in terms of decades makes me dizzy anyway. I'd like to think that I'd either stop if I didn't like what I was writing about anymore, or that I'd find some enduring meaning in it somehow. But who would want to think about the alternative? (There are, thankfully, some examples of people who love sports enough to keep it fun for the rest of us; see what I wrote about <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/bill-raftery-and-the-power-of-love">Bill Raftery</a> and <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/goodbye-to-all-that">Bob Ryan</a> at The Classical, for instance)<br />
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So last week, with nothing much to write about, I wrote for Vice <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/the-mercy-rule-the-pelicans-grief">about the New Orleans Hornets maybe changing their name to the New Orleans Pelicans</a>. It had a lot of jokes in it, many of them centered around the team name of the Utah Jazz, and one of which was brought to glorious life by the internet mega-hero <a href="http://sorryyourheinous.tumblr.com/">Sorry Your Heinous</a> above. I was not necessarily relishing writing a column during a week that didn't quite offer anything column-worthy, but I wound up liking the piece a lot; it's one of my favorites to run at Vice in some time, actually.<br />
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Writing columns isn't as difficult or unpleasant as it can be made to look; it's not really all that easy, either. But for all the grousing I do about this work and the things that are wrong with it, I keep coming back to a sort of tired-out gratitude. <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/one-year">The Classical is a year old</a>, and as punishing and demanding and wonderful as any one-year-old could be; I'm very proud of it, and cautiously but hugely hopeful of what it could become. Writing columns about sports can be a pain in the ass, but is also finally more or less paying my bills, and is something I like doing. I can complain. I can always complain. But lord knows I've had worse jobs.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-83945310150015316802012-11-11T08:41:00.001-08:002012-11-11T08:51:32.567-08:00It's Real Out Here<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbict1Gq8P6liBy6ACaO-RWIcd8m-Y_CmG3xWsRy1cbo4FiL-ey1OBu3MQlKe4oANfw28YBGXKd-UaMQxuNNH3lnZdmdFoQ7ixCl6UCUnYFSBJMhWiY4JzY5aVTzDLUmfVWVsA65uW_S-J/s1600/AhSpike.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbict1Gq8P6liBy6ACaO-RWIcd8m-Y_CmG3xWsRy1cbo4FiL-ey1OBu3MQlKe4oANfw28YBGXKd-UaMQxuNNH3lnZdmdFoQ7ixCl6UCUnYFSBJMhWiY4JzY5aVTzDLUmfVWVsA65uW_S-J/s400/AhSpike.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
I just never do this anymore, I guess. This is easy enough to explain, as I'm writing as hard and as fast as I can all the time, but also impossible to guess from the site I made explicitly to put all that writing in one place, and which I haven't updated since Week 15 of the 2010 NFL season. If you were reading this site as your sole source of football news, you'd have no idea that the Cincinnati Bengals did indeed win the Super Bowl last season in what's still known, even all this time later, as The Bernard Scott Game. That would be terrible for you, not to know that. I'd be so sorry if that were the case.<br />
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Anyway, I haven't written here not because I don't like it -- I do, I like writing and I like writing about myself -- but because I've been writing and editing too much elsewhere to do much else. The editing is all for T<a href="http://theclassical.org/">he Classical</a>, which continues to be the cause and solution of all my disillusionment about writing words on the internet; our NBA preview, which is not really a preview at all now that the league is back and once again being bent to the iron wills of Kyle Lowry and Andrei Kirilenko, is called <a href="http://theclassical.org/tags/why-we-watch">Why We Watch</a>, and it takes up a lot of my time, and I love it and am proud of it. In recent weeks, I've done <a href="http://theclassical.org/theclog/philip-rivers-is-like-a-fond-look-back-at-philipriversexperience">some meme-ing</a> and <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/distance-running">some actual writing</a> there, too, although the balance of my time has been devoted to learning on the fly how not to edit like a total bigfooted, ham-fisted doof.<br />
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The other writing is in the usual places, and not at some of the old usual places; I haven't written for The Awl in too long, which bums me out because I love that site and the people who edit and read it, but is easy enough to understand in that I've been trying to get paid for my writing, and that the current rates I get for my writing require me to do it as much as possible so that all the $75 and $150 and $250 paydays add up to the right amount at the end of the month. I've been able to do that, to a decent extent, at GQ and <a href="http://www.gq.com/about/david-roth">GQ.com</a> and <a href="http://www.sportsonearth.com/search?query=david+roth">Sports on Earth</a> and <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/david-roth.html">The Daily Beast</a>, among other places, of late. I wrote two things for New York Magazine that were fun, one of them about longtime hero-antagonist <a href="http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/guy-fieri-2012-9/">Guy Fieri as a literary figure</a>, and one about a thing I actually love, which is <a href="http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/tomatoes-2012-9/">tomatoes from New Jersey</a>. There's always the Wall Street Journal and there have been some highlights at Vice, which continues to let me do writing I care about, like <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/the-mercy-rule-mnf-election">this</a> and <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/the-mercy-rule-the-jets-are-americas-team">this</a> and <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/the-mercy-rule-adopting-october">this</a>. This bit, which I wrote for the excellent Capital New York site <a href="http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2012/08/6338168/pronouncing-judgment-bruce-springsteen-above-without-irony">about Bruce Springsteen and Chris Christie</a>, is one of my favorites. I've been busy, which is good because the alternative is being stressed out and not being able to pay rent, whereas the present is more about being stressed and being able to pay rent.<br />
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You might have noticed the constant, above. Which is, I suppose, the freelancer's lot, especially when the weekly bedrock gigs pay as little as mine do; the rest of it, the stuff that makes things like going out to dinner on occasion and being able to pay for cable possible, is all on me to find, pitch and write. That's exhausting and often disheartening, it shrinks each week down to a sum of billed work at its end, and it does do a lot to take the fun out of this thing I love so well. It makes it difficult for me to write for free, for instance, or even to do the basic professional maintenance that'd be wise to do here, because I am already writing as many words as I can each week, so that I will make enough money to live. But it is also exactly what it is, which is something I knew about, and the state of the industry, and the state of a lot of industries and as such something probably best addressed in a bigger context than My Anxious Life, at a blog with my name in the URL.<br />
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So, it's all good, mostly. I'm still up against it financially more often than I'd like, and there are a lot of things I'd like to write or do that I just can't, for various stubborn and stubbornly tangible reasons. But I'm writing stuff I care about, and some of it is good, and all of it is better than the alternative. You've no doubt learned, over these months of me not doing much of anything here, either to look for my writing on your own, or look elsewhere for your meat similes and free-associative politi-sportswriting. I'm still here, though. I'm working a lot. But I'm still here, and I appreciate you being here, too. None of this would make even the modicum of sense it does if I didn't think you -- or somebody -- might want to read it.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-26258530301508327202012-09-10T14:36:00.001-07:002012-09-10T14:36:28.587-07:00The VanishingOh, hi. This is mostly a test, as this blog appears to have disappeared -- not in a metaphorical "I never post about pizza no more" sense, but in a no-longer-findable by way of any browser for some reason -- and I'm checking to see if this post helps with that. If you're reading this, I'm happy that you are able to. I hope you're well. You look great. I love that top.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-21484585787720892062012-06-24T08:04:00.001-07:002012-06-24T08:13:33.249-07:00The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMPsP-w3Tyx3WvjQm0LhfdfZsg0Cv-XyEE9itkfeKd6xVOMENnMKzNdV5DjLC9pTATi9Fxh-AUf9Omp8dKDLRAFUMvRO54xs0GDWKmLgO5i8ZH4AmvUM2-VAfssf86cnKzQEqlLX0Z8b7-/s1600/MarvinsRoommate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMPsP-w3Tyx3WvjQm0LhfdfZsg0Cv-XyEE9itkfeKd6xVOMENnMKzNdV5DjLC9pTATi9Fxh-AUf9Omp8dKDLRAFUMvRO54xs0GDWKmLgO5i8ZH4AmvUM2-VAfssf86cnKzQEqlLX0Z8b7-/s400/MarvinsRoommate.jpg" width="300" /></a>From page 69 of "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Cats-Creators-International-Seller/dp/0811824152">Dancing With Cats</a>" (Chronicle Books, 1999):
<br />
<blockquote>
MARVIN's sessions with Missy are full on. "Most afternoons when the neighbors are at work, I pull down the shades, wind up some classic Springsteen, and we both bust out and go ballistic. It's ten minutes of high voltage and romp and stomp. Really letting go, letting it out, and letting it in. It's better than any chemical substance because you're high on pure energy.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
"Other cat dancers I've talked to on the Web use Heavy Metal, Techno, and World Beat. One guy says he uses Marley to build up such strong vibrational levels in just five minutes that they last for days. But you have to be careful; sometimes the energy is so powerful I worry about overstimulating my aura. At those levels, an unstable etheric oscillation could collapse into an astral vortex and suck my spiritual reserves into a state of negative sub-matter."</blockquote>
And so my advice is to be careful, dear readers. Updates coming, I hope.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-45422526915463670162012-03-01T21:13:00.007-08:002012-03-01T22:42:54.650-08:00Enter The Bad Vibe Zone<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0tUd8KoRDUQkgLKqh9UaAv_RPlgOMDgPSO01sdC-sLZPduEmxurAs38TRTwbjQk50r-T5WnCEJWwHS8nwHRW0VzT1MC417sjPBOzUkRkv4WKDyOQ7tJEQDGs3mb-qZli-i1TgncGX4DtK/s1600/CuckooBananas.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0tUd8KoRDUQkgLKqh9UaAv_RPlgOMDgPSO01sdC-sLZPduEmxurAs38TRTwbjQk50r-T5WnCEJWwHS8nwHRW0VzT1MC417sjPBOzUkRkv4WKDyOQ7tJEQDGs3mb-qZli-i1TgncGX4DtK/s400/CuckooBananas.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715165041507167442" /></a>Great news! My roommate of 15 months moved out on March 1st -- those are the last three posts on her Twitter feed, and I assure you that they are more or less representative of the person I lived with for over a year. Or representative of that minus the fact that she yelled at me for an hour because she was enraged that my Christmas vacation was shorter than I'd told her it would be (I had to come back and work, although she was able to figure out that I'd really done this to ruin her week off from her job), wouldn't make eye contact with me for two months, and then moved out today after giving me 12 hours notice, via email. An email in which she explains that she is moving out on less than a day's notice because, "a friend of mine has been going through a rough time and needs my help. Which means I will need to move out to help her... I guess it’s true what they say, things happen for a reason."<br /><br />This is not so good, obviously, especially because my request that she kick in a third of a month's rent to make up for the ridiculously abrupt end to our co-habitancy went ignored (via email), then dismissed (in conversation, because she was "so busy") and finally unheeded. The advice I would give to anyone renting a room to someone via Craigslist is that they should ask for and check references, and also draw up a contract, and also maybe be wary of a grown-ass woman who has both a copy of Paul Reiser's autobiography and the <a href="http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=1097692">Music From and Inspired By <span style="font-style:italic;">Mad About You</span></a> CD in her collection, and finally and most importantly also not to ever under any circumstances <span style="font-style:italic;">ever</span> rent a room to [redacted]. So, much of this happened because I was stupid enough to assume that this person could be dealt with reasonably, as I'd dealt with previous roommates. But because I am angry and also on multiple other deadlines even now at 12:30am and thus obviously do not have anything better to do, I wrote [Redacted] an email that my wife has advised me not to send. So I am not sending it, and am instead putting it here, until I decide to take it down. The key is to surf the vibes! That is my last bit of advice. Here is something I won't send. <br /><br /><blockquote>Thanks again for doing the right thing in agreeing to pay me a small portion of this month's rent after moving out the way you did. It was clearly the right thing to do after giving me 12 hours notice and then moving out on the first of the month. For that reason, and because you have demonstrated again and again these last months the sort of insight, perspective and basic decency that you have, I knew that I'd find that smallish check from you when I returned home from my meeting. Thank you for not disappointing me, and for demonstrating what kind of person you are. Thanks, too, for not proffering some half-assed falsehood about why you had to move out as you did, and for being so adult and responsible and kind about the whole thing. Again, that is the [Redacted] I know.<br /><br />Honestly, I believe that years from now, we'll laugh about all this together. "Remember when I moved out of your apartment, after 15 months of living there, and gave you roughly 12 hours of notice?" you'll say. "Remember how I, who would not so much as make eye contact with you or your wife for three months, somehow made it seem as if I -- I who was, as you recall, the person moving out of an apartment on less than a day's notice, without offering any financial consideration at all -- was somehow the victim in this whole scenario? And offered nothing like an apology, or thanks for over a year of living together? Remember all that? How <span style="font-weight:bold;">demonstrably mentally ill</span> was THAT?" And we'll laugh and laugh, because it is fucking hilarious.</blockquote><br /><br />Anyway, so my advice is to be careful. Also I have a room open if you're interested.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-56521532419373477182012-02-14T19:17:00.000-08:002012-02-14T22:56:56.431-08:00Dogged Out, Except Not<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSUcMEbTPP4JhybzqAcPRMfBrvGC3gL7lKW5xxjzLSo_5Eswv9XaUWntYgkYmFKEgZ-Rk2hNfv4ANj29rG3g_Qi-CI2YXmGOwvp0C22fty4dna1rU70o4lDpKea1GLZMPU6XURiSgc8xRM/s1600/CorgiConga.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSUcMEbTPP4JhybzqAcPRMfBrvGC3gL7lKW5xxjzLSo_5Eswv9XaUWntYgkYmFKEgZ-Rk2hNfv4ANj29rG3g_Qi-CI2YXmGOwvp0C22fty4dna1rU70o4lDpKea1GLZMPU6XURiSgc8xRM/s400/CorgiConga.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5709201907509243170" /></a>I don't like getting up early, and not only because of how much better I am at staying up late than I am at getting up early, which is a lot. But on Monday, I got up very early by my standards, and not-really-all-that-early by general Monday standards, so that I could get to Madison Square Garden in time to get myself settled and onto the Garden floor in time for the 8:30am Basset Hound Best In Breed round at the Westminster Kennel Club's 136th Annual All Breed Dog Show. I did not quite make it in time for that -- although I did see some Basset Hounds as they hobbled Basset Houdily from Ring One after their circuit, so I was both close and close enough to see those baleful wonders up close for at least a moment -- but I was in the Garden for eight-plus hours on Monday, in the service of The Classical. My previous post w/r/t workload is my previous post w/r/t workload, but this was an assignment I didn't mind at all. There are only so many opportunities in one's life to spend all day kicking it with Bouviers des Flandres. This was one, and I don't regret it at all.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif3iwZJJdBINhcPhuUBA2oGGBmp6xmhgwFC0EpD4dmR8y_EMEuHyABRNCmJSi7PoBBhLeach5-QJ8NW1WwPptKk-TZLKl7TRWPTmj35KF-0OlgB-XuZZyyZtCIezzpvcUGUNpy0PszVX0U/s1600/Bouviers+des+Flanders.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif3iwZJJdBINhcPhuUBA2oGGBmp6xmhgwFC0EpD4dmR8y_EMEuHyABRNCmJSi7PoBBhLeach5-QJ8NW1WwPptKk-TZLKl7TRWPTmj35KF-0OlgB-XuZZyyZtCIezzpvcUGUNpy0PszVX0U/s320/Bouviers+des+Flanders.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5709249024338319026" /></a><br />We'd originally obtained a press pass for the estimable Julie Klausner, but she got another assignment, which led to Bethlehem Shoals overnighting me her credential and me (um) clearing my schedule and setting an earlier-than-usual alarm for Monday. My mandate was her mandate: go there, deal with the allergies and insanity, take some pictures, and generally just do my best to absorb as much goofery as possible. I did my best, throwing up a couple of photo-heavy blog posts during the day -- <a href="http://theclassical.org/theclog/westminster-kennel-club-2012-fluff-pieces">this here</a> and <a href="http://theclassical.org/theclog/westminster-kennel-club-2012-scenes-from-a-dog-show">this slightly longer one here</a> -- and then eating a hilariously expensive sandwich at Manganaro's (it was delicious, but prosciutto + mozzarella + roasted peppers ≠ $14, at least in a functioning sandwich market) and coming home and... not writing much else. Which is fair enough, I guess. My eyes itched. I needed to do laundry. There are only so many things to write about Affenpinschers in such a short period of time.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQFBahqgpGtnW-JmheHo7xXUZwOLKm7leGgUdnYNKlWjgShJOkBImHJhqqwBS-KmoskamuFK6ioFiOAqPuzA_UCukJOPsR1jEUzozWw7x9joQg1OhNK88ThyphenhyphenedRTwvJWySEg2JwYYCvipn/s1600/FluffAssault.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQFBahqgpGtnW-JmheHo7xXUZwOLKm7leGgUdnYNKlWjgShJOkBImHJhqqwBS-KmoskamuFK6ioFiOAqPuzA_UCukJOPsR1jEUzozWw7x9joQg1OhNK88ThyphenhyphenedRTwvJWySEg2JwYYCvipn/s320/FluffAssault.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5709252116652895634" /></a>But eventually I got back into it, and wrote a column today on the WKC that I'm pretty pleased with. It's <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/dog-people">here</a>, and I hope you'll read it. There are more photos, if that makes it any more enticing, but there's also a posi-core love vibe that has been missing from everything I have written for... well, for a really long time, at least until I <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/the-mercy-rule-the-linsanity-defense">happily made my peace with Jeremy Lin</a> at Vice last week and <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/bill-raftery-and-the-power-of-love">got crushtarded on Bill Raftery</a> at The Classical the week before that. I may be a happy dude yet. Or it might just be that spending this much time around affectionate fuzz-beasts is good for a body. We'll see, I suppose. For now, though, I'm a little sinus-y and a lot happier for the experience of spending all those hours around all those endearingly doggish (if spectacularly fluffed-out) dogs and endearingly dog-positive individuals. Given the choice between a headache and the broader, deeper aches that afflicted me in weeks before that, I'll absolutely take it.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-56806575134297602392012-02-11T12:16:00.000-08:002012-02-12T12:30:01.591-08:00Out of Not That Terribly Great Silence<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzSD4o3Jfedi3XgFgnJSNqc1yBWPiunxS6M4W4zQ6hEJoOtsvpwCRNQZgA8QRBRt1S-8-mUKymgNlHZFcjR1RpYpUmG779-jFPKGYUA_SM20KtfkjVpK1d0kyTBr3lzesAZQpGw2sfXY5I/s1600/intogreatsilencecoc.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 270px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzSD4o3Jfedi3XgFgnJSNqc1yBWPiunxS6M4W4zQ6hEJoOtsvpwCRNQZgA8QRBRt1S-8-mUKymgNlHZFcjR1RpYpUmG779-jFPKGYUA_SM20KtfkjVpK1d0kyTBr3lzesAZQpGw2sfXY5I/s400/intogreatsilencecoc.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5707983789145492946" /></a>Oh boy. There are times in life when one -- in this case, "one" being me -- does not have the time to do basic things. Not basic like shower or shave; once a week for each, and I've managed to maintain that even during periods of high stress. But stuff like updating this blog after I write something was, for a little while, something I didn't feel like I had time to do. I was, and to a certain extent still am, pretty much typing all the time every day, which made the prospect of doing more of it, here or anywhere, pretty unappetizing. And then there was the next stage, or time in one's life or whatever, when it had been so very long since the last time I updated anything here that the idea of doing it grew daunting and huge and cf. above in re: pretty unappetizing. <br /><br />And so here we are, on a Sunday. I'm in New Haven with my wife, doing laundry, and the website that I have not really mentioned at all on this my personal blog is now over two months old; if you count our November preview period, it's been something more like three months. That website is The Classical, <a href="http://theclassical.org/">this website right here</a>. While the maintenance and development of and crafting of content for and frantic sporadic attempts to improve that website is certainly the greater part of the reason why I haven't been doing much at this one, it's also more than that. The successful Kickstarter campaign that funded the site was and remains one of the most thrilling and humbling moments of my professional life -- we asked the internet to help us do this thing with small donations, and we got those donations from people who wanted us to do it, and we did the thing. <br /><br />At the same time, The Classical has been humbling in another way: the site doesn't work as well as we want it to just yet, and the pace of improvement -- and, to go back to why I haven't put so much as a link up here in months, the capacities of the editorial team to do the writing and editing we need to do on what amounts to our bathroom breaks and pre-sleep hours -- is frustrating. Not difficult to anticipate, but also and all the same unanticipated. It's difficult, and while I'm delighted and honored to do it, it is also difficult. Fitting all of that into a life that, due to my current prevailing rate of pay, already demands a huge amount of writing in order to pay the usual bills and such, is also difficult. It is worth it, thousandfold. I am happy to be doing it, and proud to be doing it. But it has occasioned a certain drawing back in other aspects of my life. So yeah, less time to put up dog videos here, or sleep, or leave my apartment, or other things of that nature. How very sad for me and us all, I know.<br /><br />Besides the Classical stuff, I've been doing the usual NFL season stuff -- yakkin'-related football activities with the brilliant and delirious <a href="http://thisisjeffjohnson.com">Jeff Johnson</a> at GQ, the weekly "Mercy Rule" column at Vice, the usual Wall Street Journal-based extrusions, and a few other things I'm happy with. Foremost among these is <a href="http://www.gq.com/entertainment/humor/201112/high-bro-year-in-culture">this massive, goofy feature/listicle on the idea of High Bro Culture</a>, from the Man of the Year issue of GQ. It's a masterpiece. Diddy knows what I'm talking about.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHr9Lo7pGkgvtOeGScrDOfpQK4ZH_TjqTySvPgst-jGTpPw_hebEsbgewhIxmF1oV4rIokCzhZSO-7n0HttLMslyIsrlehBtd9LbosVuwkpkVulu0VWiNGhsKqs-IqbUD6Ov5GwqKdWp5h/s1600/diddylisa.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHr9Lo7pGkgvtOeGScrDOfpQK4ZH_TjqTySvPgst-jGTpPw_hebEsbgewhIxmF1oV4rIokCzhZSO-7n0HttLMslyIsrlehBtd9LbosVuwkpkVulu0VWiNGhsKqs-IqbUD6Ov5GwqKdWp5h/s400/diddylisa.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5708333856644467938" /></a><br /><br />Thanks, Diddy!<br /><br />Anyway, all of this is to say that I shouldn't be complaining, and am more or less not complaining except insofar as it's tough for me to explain this without being like "My arms and eyes hurt a lot." But also I shouldn't be complaining because I've done some writing I'm really proud of at The Classical. The <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/college-football-is-rotten">first piece I wrote for The Classical</a>, back in the November preview period and in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky implosion at Penn State, is as vicious as I could've hoped it to be, and I'm still proud of it. My essays on <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/save-the-children">the weirdness of big-ticket high school sports</a> and <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/bill-raftery-and-the-power-of-love">the sublime positivity of Bill Raftery</a> and the <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/scary-good">ulcerous ulcerosity of the Belichick Patriots</a> are all things I'm proud of, and I <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/our-holiday-gift">don't even know what this one is about</a>, besides an elaborate expression of Yuletide exhaustion, but I like it pretty well, too. <br /><br />And I'm even prouder about the stuff that I've had the privilege of editing, by writers I personally <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/the-importance-of-being-ricky">know</a> <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/not-being-fausto">and</a> <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/the-archetype-dane-sanzenbacher-agonistes">love</a> and writers I <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/sick-in-the-head">know</a> <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/the-archetype-duncan-siemens-rides-the-bus">less</a> <a href="http://theclassical.org/articles/i-watched-80-episodes-of-hbos-1st-and-ten">well</a>, and which I've gotten to help make better and in some cases help make great... it's worth it. It's worth it because we are putting very good writing on the site every day, and because whatever success I've had over the past year came because people gave me an opportunity and an online space on which to stretch out and grow and get better as a writer; if it weren't for Gerard at <a href="http://www.cantstopthebleeding.com">Can't Stop the Bleeding</a> and Alex and Choire at <a href="http://theawl.com">The Awl</a> and Stephen at <a href="http://www.greenbuildingsnyc.com/">gbNYC</a>, I would be notably sadder and worse at writing. The opportunity to do the same service to other writers makes me glad and proud all over, always. So, yes, The Classical will continue to be worth it. But, yes, too, it takes up a lot of time that I used to use in different ways. Like maintaining my professional site, or putting up that picture of Diddy, which I've been wanting to get up here forever.<br /><br />I'm going to update the right-hand column with some recent pieces of note, and I'm going to try to get in here more often, because I like it. Talk to you again in three or four months!David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-44999258709046148182011-11-05T12:10:00.000-07:002011-11-27T08:11:07.314-08:00A Month Or So Of Freaky Fridays<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0JTIbDU_TrBseda8zymQY2qqFgHSOuidslN6m_jvgIRF9ZKkwJLSEwhQyTtLJYZXwzh8-0yelL8yjZcCIPhjjRmXkCqBoCUvmmc7L4w4kjQ4Tf4xgrRNyurehaHOwjsh65VfrDH5vnJZ3/s1600/freaky_friday.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 283px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0JTIbDU_TrBseda8zymQY2qqFgHSOuidslN6m_jvgIRF9ZKkwJLSEwhQyTtLJYZXwzh8-0yelL8yjZcCIPhjjRmXkCqBoCUvmmc7L4w4kjQ4Tf4xgrRNyurehaHOwjsh65VfrDH5vnJZ3/s400/freaky_friday.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5671591402920893650" /></a> (Lohan is all like "I'm sorry, HOW MANY HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS ON COCAINE BY THE TIME I TURN 25?")<br /><br />By that headline, I do not mean to say that the reason this blog has been totally silent for over a month has anything to do with me trading bodies with Jamie Lee Curtis (I just feel like, by dint of my youth and good looks and the fact that I've destroyed my health and once-promising career with drugs and alcohol, I have more in common with Lohan than Mrs. Chris Guest). That would be a good excuse, though. I have another good excuse -- which is that I've been writing like 8,500 words of copy a week for the last month, with many of those arriving during one massive byline-pileup on Friday -- but the sorry-but-I-was-Jamie-Lee-Curtis-for-five-weeks one would obviously be better. I'll work on that.<br /><br />I'm not complaining about this, necessarily. In order for me to make enough money to live doing what I'm doing, I need to be writing roughly this much or a little bit more -- that or write less and get paid more which, you know, I've considered. But the last four weeks have all featured Fridays in which I had five bylines at four different venues -- the fourth of those venues has changed week to week, which is nice at least in terms of me not having to make the same sleep-deprivation excuses to the same editors. And it's nice, too, because it means that I'm writing a lot, which is after all the idea. Here, for instance, is last Friday:<br /><br />- The second of the week's two NFL neo-yaks with the esteemed <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/fittedsweats">Jeff Johnson</a>, at GQ. <a href="http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2011/11/physically-unable-to-perform-nfl-week-9-preview.html?mbid=social_retweet">This one</a> involves Troy Aikman getting misty over Bob Seger and Daniel Snyder hiring and then firing Mike Shanahan's grandson. (<a href="http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2011/11/physically-unable-to-perform-the-emotional-palate-cleansing.html">The one from Tuesday</a>, which is maybe funnier, involves a Tom Coughlin campaign commercial I'm rather proud of)<br /><br />- A <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/2011/11/04/bcs-championship-game-take-one/">Daily Fix</a> and a round of (erroneous, indoor-voiced, intermittently amusing) <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/2011/11/04/the-fix-picks-the-nfl-week-9-3/">NFL picks</a> for the Wall Street Journal.<br /><br />- Another conversation-style article, because why not, with the awesome and awing <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/mariabustillos">Maria Bustillos</a>, at The Awl, about <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/adam-gopnik-and-the-bourgeois-guillotine">fancy food and fancy people and gleeful Francophile dorkpie Adam Gopnik</a>.<br /><br />Leave out the Daily Fix, which is kind of a reflex at this point and which I've more or less been doing since Jimmy Carter was President, I'm really pretty proud and definitely pretty happy of all of the above. They also add up to something like 7,000 words of prose. I'm proud/happy about the column I wrote for Vice earlier in the week, as well, which is <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/the-mercy-rule-anger-in-management">about Tony La Russa and what a turd he is</a>. And I was of course delighted to get back to My Life's Work of perseverating on bad pizza and the Chamber of Commerce dingleberries who slang it in <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/better-ingredients-better-country-inside-papa-johns-top-secret-presidential-campaign">this speculative bit of Papa John-related muckraking/muckwallowing</a> at The Awl. Which, for extra creepy We Surround Them verisimilitude, was actually banked by Papa John's ads:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinURBQvNOWnW3dB2Cj2VZKDi85EaQI4w6gYVcdSC7JNBxD4CSC0eeVp4uSbKh9tRNPgvFJQIPq9rJv8LLMuVQbHfc1WDM1QLZ-1wzeAqJ7la2Vn5MXSmYlOR_QU8S3AI77X_gvtcOYnage/s1600/www.theawl.com+2011-11-1+15%253A55%253A56.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 144px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinURBQvNOWnW3dB2Cj2VZKDi85EaQI4w6gYVcdSC7JNBxD4CSC0eeVp4uSbKh9tRNPgvFJQIPq9rJv8LLMuVQbHfc1WDM1QLZ-1wzeAqJ7la2Vn5MXSmYlOR_QU8S3AI77X_gvtcOYnage/s320/www.theawl.com+2011-11-1+15%253A55%253A56.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5672124741303192034" /></a><br /><br />Which was all very nice, and which was all something that happened in one week. (It leaves out, for instance, all the stuff I enjoyed writing the week before that, during the World Series, for <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-world-series">Vice</a> and with David Raposa in our <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/the-view-through-the-nolan-ryan-jowl-cam">baseball yak at The Awl</a> and at <a href="http://deadspin.com/5852192/joe-buck-and-tim-mccarver-live-for-the-littlest-things">Deadspin</a>) I know that "that was nice" is usually something I type after things that are not nice, but that was all actually very nice: I liked the work, I will get paid (some) for (most of) it. The reason you haven't heard about this in this space -- a space which is designed, after all, for the production and distribution of me-spam -- is that I've been too worn out with doing it to reiterate all of it here. <br /><br />I'm going to try to remedy that over the next week or so -- not with more spam so much as with something to put the last few hyperspeed months in some context. I'm aware that this is probably/inevitably going to be more interesting to the guy writing it than to any humans notionally reading the things that will (I hope) get written, but that is also true to a certain extent of most everything I write, both at this blog and elsewhere. The crush of the professional is what I signed up for; the crushing of the personal is not. At the risk of looking at the busiest and most exciting period of my career in the least flattering possible way -- at the risk of not enjoying what I think it was that I wanted 18 months ago -- I want to try to get things back into something like balance. And because I'm a doofus, I think that'll probably mean more Blogging About The Process/My Feelings. So definitely be on the look out for that? If you don't see it, it's because I'm busy or exhausted or drunk or hungover. So, maybe it's not really much of a change at all from the old status quo?David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-11313280294012512502011-10-10T21:47:00.000-07:002011-10-10T23:18:04.592-07:00Altar Egoism<object width="420" height="315"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4IBlRr5_Srs?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4IBlRr5_Srs?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="420" height="315" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object><br /><br />So very much writing of late, so very little of it presently live or worth sharing. I took a big step today towards wrapping up a very big assignment, which I think is at the least going to be pretty funny. And the small assignments continue to pile up -- the last week saw a pair of NFL chats with <a href="http://www.fittedsweats.blogspot.com/">Living Legend Jeff Johnson</a> at GQ (<a href="http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2011/10/physically-unable-to-perform-the-week-the-jets-eagles-and-cowboys-forgot-how-to-play-football.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2011/10/physically-unable-to-perform-previewing-week-five.html">here</a>) and <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/at-least-rudy-giuliani-is-unhappy">another on baseball</a>, with beautiful human <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/falsebinary">David Raposa</a> at The Awl. There was <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/mercy-rule-do-the-collapse-7650981">a Vice column I was kind of proud of</a>, like there always is. A bunch of Daily Fixes and some NFL picks and some other stuff and a couple dozen hours of sleep spread over the work-week. It was an average week, and this one will look a lot like it, albeit with a good friend's wedding at the end and hopefully the last stroke on that big thing for GQ sometime before that. <br /><br />And this is all good: this is where the money (theoretically) comes from, and it keeps me busy and interested and intermittently proud. But there's more than one way to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZieygZyvw4A">Do Me</a>, and doubtless some that allow for more sleep and less stress and all that. This sounds whiny. What I'm saying is that I wish I could be a little more like David Roth The Non-Writer, seen above. Dude's living the life. Stacking coins, rolling up sleeves -- and here I am, blogging. Pimp hard, David Roth. I need you to.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-89544156704896226652011-09-27T09:38:00.000-07:002011-09-27T10:26:15.347-07:0020,000 Different Kinds of Sentimentality<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZnWvRJD9pH8TEA4L-nGc2B-GxhPFsdyFpkyVxi23ZmTsyL9Rf4zzBL_pDa2pX2UIDIjbehSf03-L1dSJsmtN7CFOHfs0qOa2vWrhh5Y-sOAWiQXZmxHTYoavv5aBdbJXtpC4EYgYRpR3l/s1600/Fitzmagical.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 398px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZnWvRJD9pH8TEA4L-nGc2B-GxhPFsdyFpkyVxi23ZmTsyL9Rf4zzBL_pDa2pX2UIDIjbehSf03-L1dSJsmtN7CFOHfs0qOa2vWrhh5Y-sOAWiQXZmxHTYoavv5aBdbJXtpC4EYgYRpR3l/s400/Fitzmagical.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5657089628654801570" /></a><br />So much of what I write at this time of year is about the NFL, and much of what I write about the NFL can be filed under either "<a href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/02/how-much-super-bowl-is-too-much-super-bowl">exasperated/political</a>" or "<a href="http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/the-flavor-of-tom-coughlins-gum">frankly hallucinatory</a>." I have examples of both up today, although the most recent edition of my goof-therapy football-yakking with Jeff Johnson has not yet gone up at GQ as I write this. But this week's Vice column came out pretty well, I think, both in general and as an example of what I do actually think is kind of great about the NFL. As overbranded and generally, half-fascistic-ly dumb as the league is, and as multiply objectionable as it is in so many ways, it's also a great place to project some feelings and get some escapism up in yourself. And when formerly (and possibly still) crummy teams from crumbling cities random pull off upsets and generally don't look terrible... well, you'd have to be a much more serious and well-balanced human than me not to write <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/the-mercy-rule-ball-throwing-hamsteaks">a column about how awesome that is</a>.<br /><br /><blockquote>That both teams are sharing first place at this point in the season makes even non-partisan fans feel good, especially since the Bills got there by knocking off the unctuously sadistic New England Patriots on Sunday in a comeback you’d scoff at for being unrealistic if you saw it in a movie. Whether that success has any greater football significance remains to be seen, although it wouldn't be surprising if it didn’t—Detroit hasn't beaten a good team yet, and Buffalo has trailed by three scores in both of their last two games. And of course, appealing though it is to think otherwise, nothing that either team does will do much to make the cities of Detroit or Buffalo less like their bleak selves.<br /><br />But there's still something worth celebrating here, even if it's illusory and despite the fact that—broadly speaking—it’s all pretty resoundingly insignificant. The NFL's militaristic pomp and goony storylines are not, after all, the only way to understand or enjoy a football game. American culture is currently screaming profanities at itself from the bottom of a canyon-sized rut; everyplace, increasingly, feels like a cross between Detroit and Buffalo. So a stunning comeback win or two from the NFL's ultimate rust-belt no-hopers offers a very in-context type of escapism, and inspires a different and sweeter sort of sentimentality.</blockquote><br /><br />Because of the inherent TL;DR issues at Vice, that's like half the column, but there are jokes en route to the end. This should in no way suggest that I am giving up on seeing the NFL as a giant ass-carnival of bad ideas and bad faith. It still is. But I'm certainly not boycotting a Bills team powered by <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/yakkin-about-football-ryan-fitzpatrick-reads-slate">friend-of-the-program Ryan Fitzpatrick</a>, or a Lions team that wins and plays joyously. The opposite. I am, for all the usual qualifications, LOVING that shit.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-43879479516994545392011-09-15T08:54:00.000-07:002011-09-15T12:01:23.913-07:00Getting Serious About That Roberto Clemente Graphic Bio<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiROrhdurWEB-Xidd7San8Qqubl8nbKAS6LOyPB55S-zDMtReEX2gQ6UlNfkFh_sVOwr75sGWxvmb-1XjinlAOglfMorS-pWBDlKjGLS0FKKabP_-eNjQtheV72fT6_WFjMSGyQqW3JVNbS/s1600/21_Clemente.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiROrhdurWEB-Xidd7San8Qqubl8nbKAS6LOyPB55S-zDMtReEX2gQ6UlNfkFh_sVOwr75sGWxvmb-1XjinlAOglfMorS-pWBDlKjGLS0FKKabP_-eNjQtheV72fT6_WFjMSGyQqW3JVNbS/s400/21_Clemente.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5652615984063235794" /></a><br />For whatever reason, the choice between comic books and baseball cards was indeed and very much a choice in my hometown. There were, presumably, kids who were as obsessive about hoarding and shoplifting and maintaining their comic book collections as I was about my stacks of Phil Plantier rookie cards -- "Call that the college fund/HA HA" -- Young Jeezy on my mindset at that moment. I didn't know them, and I am actually also not sure they really were there in my hometown. And so it never remotely happened for me with comics. <br /><br />I tried to read "Watchmen" after college, because everyone said I should, but it didn't take -- I thought it was creepy and overdetermined and half-fascist and not that good, but mostly that means that it was not for me. So it was that <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1560978929?p_cv&PID=35883">Wilfred Santiago's "21"</a>, which I got sent (twice, as it turns out) to review for the Los Angeles Review of Books, became the only comic in my house, and remains the only one that I've finished, ever, in my life. But while I probably wasn't the obvious choice to review the book, given my nonexistent comics background, my love for writing longish things and books and baseball and my admiration for the new and very cool LARB -- and, more to the point, the help of my Can't Stop the Bleeding associate Ben Schwartz -- helped make it happen anyway. I'm happy with the way the review turned out, and proud to be LARB'ed. <a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/10234337636/household-saint">You should read it</a>, if you want to read it. And now here is a bit of it that will either make you want to read it or not:<br /><blockquote><br />Two generations after his last game as a baseball player and his disappearance into the Caribbean, Clemente endures in the alternately flattering and flattening forbidden zone of baseball mythos: as a name on Major League Baseball’s annual citizenship award, as the subject of a statue outside Pittsburgh’s PNC Bank Park, as a Spanish-speaking stand-in for Jackie Robinson, baseball’s first truly great Latin American star, and finally as something of a cipher. The only player for whom the Baseball Hall of Fame waived its traditional five-year waiting period — Clemente was voted into the Hall in a landslide in 1973, mere months after his death — the Pirates’ star found himself entombed in baseball’s pantheon when he still had plenty of life due to him. He has been locked in there ever since, his goodnesses and greatnesses sanitized and held in air-conditioned suspension in Cooperstown.<br /><br />And so Clemente still exists: his name is on the 304-acre sports campus he built near his hometown of Carolina, in Puerto Rico, and his name is on the pedestrian bridge that fans cross to reach PNC Bank Park on game-days. But, more broadly, the sentimental way in which he has been remembered has made him, if not forgettable, certainly a bit less human: one of the game’s household saints.</blockquote><br />Only you know if that worked or not. But if it did, you should <a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/10234337636/household-saint">click here.</a>David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-15565220976118690362011-09-13T12:29:00.000-07:002011-09-16T21:58:01.809-07:00From The Prose Orphanage: The 9/12 Project<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcRI546SUWMgoy-TicJhqtxN8o74QsDDG-07RYKD3Pgwqj8aHfWIhfx6ThLC5TIyzDNYCJqvXp79sO9iwiS91mbo19fokgw7Q-vFm7OCCEDiw2Q6vUBp7o4HA-Ie03MJ7LUGeUSRn74s0h/s1600/912literature1medjy6.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 355px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcRI546SUWMgoy-TicJhqtxN8o74QsDDG-07RYKD3Pgwqj8aHfWIhfx6ThLC5TIyzDNYCJqvXp79sO9iwiS91mbo19fokgw7Q-vFm7OCCEDiw2Q6vUBp7o4HA-Ie03MJ7LUGeUSRn74s0h/s400/912literature1medjy6.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5651929113461818114" /></a><br />Given that what's below checks in at a mighty healthy word count, I'll keep the introduction brief. Your eyes are too important, and any sort of backstory I give for the piece -- which I started as a blog post on a train ride, repurposed into an essay for The Awl, and then was compelled by bad timing, mostly, and by a lack of other outlets for stuff like this to turn back into a blog post -- isn't important enough. It's about September 11 and September 12, and it is actually rather bloggy in terms of the HERE IS HOW I FELT AND FEEL aspects. But I like it, and I hope you like it, too, and there is no way I am going to let this many adjectives just sit around stinking up my hard drive. And so I give you:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The 9/12 Project</span><br /><br />It is going to be a very full train and everyone on board knows what that means, although I suppose that isn't necessarily a reason not to remind people of what it means. And I suppose, too, that the conductor who gets on the PA to remind everyone what it means, first at Boston's South Station and then three minutes later at Back Bay Station and then five or so minutes after that at Route 128, can't really do anything about the sound of his voice, which arrives to the (very full) train car through his organ-pipe sinuses and the tinny Amtrak speakers. But the words themselves make me recoil, because they are a savage and unwitting parody of the muscled-up, flubby-formal copspeak that has emerged as something like our new national language of authority.<br /><br />You know what this sounds like by now, this opaque and faintly menacing combination of dim authority and flabby extraneousness. The conductor's pronouncements and re-pronouncements – not-really-alerting anyone that the café car is FOR DINING ONLY… AND DRINKING, DINING AND DRINKING ONLY and not for doing your homework or setting up your computer; that it's one seat per ticketed passenger (except at Back Bay, where it's "one ticketed passenger per seat") – are guided home by weirdly formal "in this matter"-s and "for this purpose"-s tacked onto the sentences' end. We are told, for reasons known only to the conductor, that there are a lot of families on board, although context suggests that this may in some way intensify the need to use the café car for its intended purposes (ONLY). <br /><br />The conductor delivers the same bad news over and over – if you are looking to make a connection, you should expect delays (on that matter) because of heightened security concerns (at this time) on New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Railroad. He walks through the train car, which is by now teetering towards Providence, then returns with another conductor. That one has a pair of sunglasses hung backwards, Guy Fieri-style, from his ears. As the second conductor follows his authoritative co-worker out of the car, the sunglasses give his shaved dome a jarring, eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head aspect. Although, really, it was only jarring because all of this happened on September 11, which means I was maybe looking for it and also already kind of jarred. The conductor gets back on the horn to thank everyone for their "voluntary cooperation" on the no-lying-down-on-the-seats issue. Another of his breathy beats. "Please do make it voluntary," he adds.<br /><br />At that time a day earlier I was firing an AR-15 at a gun range an hour outside Boston during a friend's bachelor party. This is the same gun American soldiers carry, our firearms instructor noted. "It's like 'American,'" he said with hand over the AR-15, before dramatically sweeping his hands over to the AK-47 lying next to it, "and 'Taliban.'" Back on the train, I see that the blunderingly authoritative Amtrak conductor's ID swings from a Marine Corps lanyard, which would make him the second Marine to tell me what to do in two days, if also the opposite of the voluble and capable and wildly funny Eddie, who is undoubtedly the guy you should go see if you want to shoot assault rifles in North Attleboro, Mass. So: where is all this going?<br /><br />It is going back to New York, eventually. But first one more thing, please. First let me tell you how I met my wife. It was ten years ago on September 11, on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn. I spent a lot of time there that day. I rode a bus down Fifth Avenue with a roommate that morning, with all that smoke and ash glowering like a grotesque new planet over the river and above the low rooftops. We watched things on television with some other people in downtown Brooklyn, and then I walked back down Fifth Avenue to my apartment, where I got to work on getting drunk. I was nearly there when I walked down Fifth Avenue again – it might help to read this bit in the voice of Grandpa Simpson, but it was 20-odd blocks from my apartment on the fringes of Sunset Park to a decent bar back then. And it was then and there that I met my wife, who was on her way to my place with a friend of hers to watch some more harrowing television with another of my roommates. They were still there after another Fifth Avenue walk, and we watched the commissioner of the New York Fire Department dissolve into tears together. I remember the look on his face as he slid towards that collapse, how he recognized that what he told us would end with him in tears and how he moved on and into it anyway. What I can tell you about Kate, on that night, was that her beauty cut through the doom a bit, that she re-filled the Brita after drinking from it, that she cried at times and laughed at others and was in general as close to a symbol of possibility and hope as anything I would see again until I saw her next, nearly a month later. When I showed my not-then-wife and her friend out at the night's end, we saw that our garbage cans were sugared in pale ash. Scorched bits of paper had settled here and there – singed memos from Merrill Lynch, a page from what appeared to be a computer science textbook. My roommates and I gathered them up and brought them inside.<br /><br />And now maybe we can go back to New York, and towards today. There was, in the days before this most recent September 11, a deep impatience palpable in the city. Which is admittedly not the most noteworthy or novel mood for New Yorkers, but which also seemed a reaction to something more than a desultory bag-check at the subway or the body-armored sentinels with their (oh hey) AR-15's who have faded back up from the background, and whose sunglass-blanked glares have thanked us for our voluntary assistance in this matter for a decade now. There were those most recent maddeningly vague press-conference ominousnesses – regarding what may have sort of been known about terrible things that were or weren't planned for the city on the anniversary – which didn't help. There was also the suffocating pomp and ponderousness of all those looming National Looks Back, and the private memories to face down, in private. But this wasn't that, I don't think. There is a greater, darker persistence, something too big and too present and too awful to Never Forget about.<br /><br />If you were close enough to it, wherever you were, what happened on September 11 is on you still. We wear it as a livid scar or a phantom limb, wrestle it as a nightmare that haunts in daylight or an older ghost that breathes chaos into our dreams at night, but we wear it, we wrestle with it. But for all the shadowy constancy of what September 11, 2001 subtracted and extracted, September 11 is also <i>gone</i>, and all those facile Never Forget rituals only push it more and more profoundly away from us. <br /><br />There are those flags the size of football fields and fighter jet flyovers, the memory-sanctifying resolutions that <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/09/09/congress_911_bill/index.html">sail cheaply through the House of Representatives in shouted unanimity</a>. There's Michelle Tafoya on NBC, asking New York Jets coach Rex Ryan after the team's Sunday night win how the significance of 9/11 "impacted the game," and Newt Gingrich using the word "celebrate" to describe the tenth anniversary of the 11th during a Republican debate a day later. So we haven't forgotten anything so much as we've misplaced nearly everything. And the culture – not you or me or your neighbors or mine, but the bigger thing that is our politics and our economy and the author of the line items of our myriad and massive debts – is now moved not so much by the terrible thing itself or the terrible things that came after, but moved by how moved we are. It's September 12 as I write this, and it has been September 12 for ten terrified, terrifying, mostly terrible years. <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWQ5WKyIL6zkvJIakZanMSVFZDB-UEe_tI4OdgUlPh5L9ENI5IQF701AeHOtkx4jHXhWohWHVoY4OcLKf67WfXje1tLiScvdcs7NMxuOcOz53wHOSvIzZ6UiK3NyIeNUahjw-GaIpuW8jV/s1600/912project.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 250px; height: 193px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWQ5WKyIL6zkvJIakZanMSVFZDB-UEe_tI4OdgUlPh5L9ENI5IQF701AeHOtkx4jHXhWohWHVoY4OcLKf67WfXje1tLiScvdcs7NMxuOcOz53wHOSvIzZ6UiK3NyIeNUahjw-GaIpuW8jV/s320/912project.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5651929193179221858" /></a><br />Among the Perpetual Seether segment of the populace, 9/12 has a resonance that has strangely little and strangely much to do with the day that preceded it. During his weepy, marker-smudged ascent, Glenn Beck asked his viewers and listeners to "remember who you were on September 12" and told them that <a href="http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20100919/LOCAL/309199908">those 9/12 selves were who and how they really were</a>; he held 9/12 rallies and 9/12 groups sprouted on their own and, as usual, he made bank. And Tea Party Astroturf-farming concern FreedomWorks scheduled its watershed Taxpayer March on Washington, with ardent but opaque purpose, for September 12, 2009. <br /><br />Whatever dry-drunk fantasia of righteous purpose Beck associates with September 12, the perverse echo of 1963's March on Washington offered by FreedomWorks in 2009 feels more apt today. In '63, a diverse group of Americans braved the risk-unto-certainty of public- and private-sector violence to voice their belief that America could not be what it should be without the liberation of less-than-free Americans. The group that hit town during both the chronological and constant September 12 a couple years ago did so in fatuous resistance to notional state violence – imaginary tax hikes, a dozen different fantastical and false socialisms – and more generally to argue against the very idea of a common good or shared purpose or responsibility; for all the teary Beck-ian unity talk, this was more the against-them fellowship of the sleeper cell than the gracious and great-hearted and hopeful fellowship of '63. The liberation this new Army of September 12 demanded in 2009 – and which they have already, in many ways, won – was from each other, everyone else, anyone else; they were demanding a safety that they could not have unless or until they were left very thoroughly alone, barricaded and border-fenced and home-protected against everything and everyone else out there. <br /><br />The whole avalanche of bilious bad faith that has followed is, finally, a bleak affirmation of Beck's piteous/cynical soft-sci-fi worldview. That army of the terrified converged on the nation's capital, demanding a permanent September 12, and they have it. We have taken up residence in that long shadow, lived in and with the frantic inertia, the intermittent intimations of something terrible, the inward-turning fear at all those vague but implacable loomings. A new political class of howling, shit-scared know-nothing bullies that believes the only tough-minded response to anything is an unyielding "no;" a popular culture curled babyish around an atomizing and anomic materialism it detests and knows well it cannot afford; a thousand inexpressible and unexpressed fears and mistrusts – how we live now is a disheartening extension who we were then.<br /><br />And for all the frazzled purpose of the first September 12 – the various enrollment and enlistment booms, the desperate searches for a place that would take our blood or somehow let us help – the dominant feeling in the bright, still-burning city in which I awakened that day was finally one of terrible aloneness. Some of the trains were running, and some of the offices were open. I took one to my job around Union Square, and I sent emails to everyone I could, or who I thought might care – to my friends in Washington D.C. asking if they were all right, to my friends elsewhere telling them that I was. And then I let myself out and walked downtown, past one checkpoint at 14th Street and into an emptied-out Greenwich Village. I walked down the middle of the street. I remember being aware of the absent pulse of the subway under Broadway. I remember the streets being harrowingly and absolutely ghostly, and being thankful for the periodic appearance of random people just doing whatever they were out there doing – walking to or from, dazedly riding a skateboard along the double lines in the middle of Eighth Street, signing a piece of paper spread on the sidewalk outside an Army/Navy store. ("Dear Anthony," someone wrote, ten years ago today. "Good luck in the war. I love you, always and 4ever") I remember quiet, and sirens, and the terrible sadness and anger at the lives lost. I remember, too, thinking that it would be nice to see the woman from the night before again, that she seemed kind. I remember how precious that kindness seemed.<br /><br />But mostly I remember, in this most life-full of cities, a profound bottomlessness and emptiness that left me feeling terribly alone on those so-silent streets. You may have been on the streets of your city late at night or early in the morning or after some blanking blizzard, and enjoyed the solitary feeling; I have. This was different than that; this was an aloneness that had a sense about it of the irretrievable and irrevocable. The strange and unfathomable smell and heavy air that pushed uptown and the police officers that finally stopped my ramble southward reminded me of what all this really was, and why it felt so sad. It was the feeling of a drained city, its citizens either fled or locked in or otherwise elsewhere. It was quiet, but it was not peaceful, and it was not home. <br /><br />If we must Never Forget anything from that not-quite-passed present, let it be the actual truth of September 12 and the days after – the way we receded from one another and ourselves, all those great and frightened distances we made, how unrecognizable everything was without everyone else there, and how awful all of that was. The terrified, traumatized non-choices we made then and have made since are not necessarily ones we'd commemorate or honor or (Newt, Newt) celebrate, of course. But memory has a higher purpose than commemoration, doesn't it? Doesn't it have to?<br /><br /><br />Update: Don't worry, everything's cool now. Or... wait, that's not the update at all. What I meant was that the good folks at GoodMenProject.com republished this at their site, <a href="http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/the-912-project/">here</a>. Click the link, enjoy their other tasty prose morsels.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-74579693477258008782011-09-13T09:33:00.000-07:002011-09-13T10:00:07.040-07:00Exercises in Belatedness<object width="420" height="345"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zBv80ufPeIk?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zBv80ufPeIk?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="420" height="345" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object><br />If this is the one place you come for your David Roth news -- and I'd ordinarily recommend making it such, because most of the fansites have a lot of inaccuracies -- I have been letting you down. Of course, there is no one anywhere who pursues "David Roth news," here or anywhere, so I'll assume you've been fine. Things have been happening -- a new series of ridiculousness-powered NFL chats with Jeff Johnson at GQ.com (those so-inclined can catch up <a href="http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2011/09/physically-unable-to-perform-the-afc.html?mbid=social_retweet">here</a> and <a href="http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2011/09/physically-unable-to-perform-an-nfc-preview.html?mbid=social_retweet">here</a>), as well as <a href="http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/richard-florida-2011-9/">another piece</a> for New York Magazine, a few Vice columns I'm proud of (I like <a href="http://www.viceland.com/blogs/en/2011/09/07/the-mercy-rule-every-day-is-911-in-the-nfl/">this one</a> and <a href="http://www.viceland.com/blogs/en/2011/08/29/the-mercy-rule-theres-no-lockout-in-streetball/">this one</a>, and <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/keep-your-football-fetish-to-yourself">the most recent one</a> is at least on the new Vice.com site). <br /><br />I also <a href="http://adult-ed.net/">gave a powerpoint presentation in front of a couple dozen people</a> in a Brooklyn bar during a rainstorm. I helped my wife move back to Connecticut and got sad. The Kickstarter fundraising for The Classical, which was the last thing I did a post about -- <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/101341727/the-classical">ahem</a> -- continued and continues and is doing well. All good. I had some good experiences cooking with kale. All, except for the kale, maybe worth reporting as more than a series of serial hyperlinks, given that this blog exists to catalog the things I do (and, to a lesser degree, how I feel about pizza). I'll do better. Also I'm going to post a 2200-word thing later today which is going to more than get me to my quarterly prose-quota. What a relief, right?David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-26442171626876935232011-09-01T22:39:00.000-07:002011-09-01T22:42:48.714-07:00And Furthermore<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQCG4gcpRhkeimhw4E2iOjqwmGlt0pHQC0U0I1VnlbxvftMLbinCMKsJiVUH7-k8iLSR62AdhGHdvLHlldOCoR4P2j0UPcE0I00WPcm2mFptNXmJpDxpD3P4weIGt__1eVjXSi2gWl4Yo-/s1600/CLASSICAL_Wallpaper_1920x1080.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQCG4gcpRhkeimhw4E2iOjqwmGlt0pHQC0U0I1VnlbxvftMLbinCMKsJiVUH7-k8iLSR62AdhGHdvLHlldOCoR4P2j0UPcE0I00WPcm2mFptNXmJpDxpD3P4weIGt__1eVjXSi2gWl4Yo-/s400/CLASSICAL_Wallpaper_1920x1080.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647632835340430930" /></a>
<br /><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/101341727/the-classical">This</a> is still happening, and now features ill wallpaper art from Jacob Weinstein of Free Darko fame. More art, more writing, more other things will follow from this. The Classical will not change the world, most likely, but we may annoy Gregg Doyel, at the very least. If you will it, it is no dream, dude.
<br />David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-45989688957089552632011-09-01T22:37:00.000-07:002011-09-01T22:38:15.555-07:00What We Talk About When We Talk About Talking About ThingsHere's <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/psychotic-jest-and-infinite-reactions-how-david-foster-wallace-didnt-invent-the-internets-voice/">a very long discussion/dialogue/co-essay I wrote with personal heroine Maria Bustillos</a> at Nieman Lab about whether or not David Foster Wallace is the reason why the internet sounds the way it does. I am very proud of it, and not just because it's a way for me to prove to everyone that I know Maria Bustillos. This is something that's much on my mind, and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/another-thing-to-sort-of-pin-on-david-foster-wallace.html?pagewanted=all">Maud Newton's fine/flawed essay on the topic</a> was something I've thought a lot about. It was bracing and great fun and a bunch of other good things to get to talk about it with someone I love so well, at a venue I respect so much. Here is some of what it looks like:
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<br /><blockquote><span style="font-weight:bold;">Bustillos:</span> (snort.) What this kind of writing comes from, really, is a deep frustration with the establishment. You have this person who can’t be contained in establishment methods or institutions, a status quo that is not speaking to him. Hang the blessed DJ. Nothing more complicated than that.
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<br />Wallace tailored his language very exactly to his meaning. The language may have been sprawling, but for a reason; it was an exact representation of both his thought and his desire for delivering that thought to you, the reader. This is a deliberate strategy. What I think Newton missed is that grabbing all these words and voices and ways of expressing what you want to say from legalese, from advertising, from television, there is a laser-keen purpose to that, which is to make yourself understood outside of the conventional parameters. Not liked, but understood.
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<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Roth:</span> Right: it’s a fireworks show, but it’s also mimetic insofar as he’s turning all these something-from-everything thoughts he’s trying to express into sentences that are more or less as complicated, and comprised of the same weird parts. The thing with the Newton essay that falls short for me — and there’s a kind of funny internal self-critique in this — is the argument itself. Or the idea that there’s an argument like in the sense of a thing-to-dispute. I’m not an editor at the Times, of course, but just identifying the source of The Way The Internet Writes — and I am, and you are, and plenty of other people are borrowing from that voice — is cool to me. I’d want to read about that and I really dug the parts where she wrote about that.
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<br />But the idea that somehow everyone is so awash in their own qualifiers and voice-iness that they can’t make an argument anymore…I don’t know that that’s somehow more true for someone in that voice than anyone writing any other way. And I don’t get the sense even that she was feeling that particular angle as hard. I guess that’s the editorial influence, maybe, the find-a-problem-and-then-solve-it bit. But it’s not inherently a problem that people are trying to get their thoughts out in something more or less approximating those thoughts’ own syntax, and I don’t know that appending all those qualifiers is in some way a weakness. Unless it’s done weakly, but obviously on that.</blockquote>
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<br />It's long enough, for sure, but it covers a lot of ground and I really hope you'll read it. Also there are some pictures, don't worry.
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<br />"Your blog needs to be more visual." -- You. It's cool, you're totally right. Be patient. God.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849662424152015641.post-1647801109415602232011-08-27T17:04:00.000-07:002011-08-27T17:05:49.358-07:00When It Rains A Lot...<object width="420" height="345"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/igOQclFxHAc?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/igOQclFxHAc?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="420" height="345" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>
<br />I always reach for surprisingly muscular guitar jams from surpassingly fey British dudes with drug problems. I have listened to this song many times today.David Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917742851340521929noreply@blogger.com0