Radar LARB

Image: M. Goetzman

Literature and Sport from Ford to Foster Wallace by Jason Cowley: "I used to think that a choice had to be made between sport and literature; that you couldn’t be both a sportsman and a book man. They represented two separate and distinct cultures, the life of the mind and the life of action, and there was no connecting bridge between them... I was wrong, of course, but it took me many years and the emergence of the new memoir-writing about sport, inspired by Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Pete Davies’s All Played Out in the early 1990s, to understand why."


Pico Iyer: An advocation of the long and meandering sentence: "Nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the 'gaps,' as Annie Dillard calls them — that don't show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker... Enter (I hope) the long sentence..."

David Shields: An advocation of a newer, more immediate fiction: "Books, if they want to survive, need to figure out how to coexist with contemporary culture and catalyze the same energies for literary purposes. That cut-to-the-bone, cut-to-the-chase quality: this is how to write and read now."


Ta-Nehisi Coates on Jennifer Grotz's poem "Poppies": "When I first read Jennifer Grotz’s 'Poppies' all I could tell you was that I liked its sound. I didn’t have any idea what the poem was about. I just liked letting the words fall off my tongue when I read it aloud. It was elemental, and I think almost every poem I love is like that for me. At a base level it just sounds good... But then I went back and I saw the philosophy at work."

[excerpt] Michael Schulman on Polari, "once the jabberwocky for British gay men": "The existence of a 'gay language' is not well known, even in the U.K. A poll of British gay men in 2000 revealed that half of respondents had never heard of it. If Polari is known outside of England, it is most likely because Morrissey once titled an album Bona Drag, which means 'nice outfit.' And there is a brief Polari scene — with subtitles — in the 1998 film Velvet Goldmine ('A tart, my dears, a tart in gildy clobber!'). But you’d have to scour a lot of pubs to find anyone who still uses it in conversation. When the Cambridge list came out, Paul Baker, the leading Polari scholar, was surprised that it had been considered endangered, not extinct."