{"id":1994,"date":"2008-04-08T17:57:06","date_gmt":"2008-04-08T21:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/stop-trying-to-be-literary\/"},"modified":"2008-04-10T07:04:13","modified_gmt":"2008-04-10T11:04:13","slug":"stop-trying-to-be-literary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/stop-trying-to-be-literary","title":{"rendered":"STOP TRYING TO BE LITERARY!"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article in New York<\/em> on the grotesquerie that is the New York Knicks<\/a> is pretty entertaining. It’s got some great stories about the paranoia and dysfunctional environment of a team I used to follow. Unfortunately, I almost missed the good stuff because I was tempted to throw the magazine across the room several times in the first page or two.<\/p>\n

I’m going to give the writer the benefit of the doubt, and hope that his editor was the one who inserted these bits, in hopes of making the article “literary,” and not just a compelling feature about the decline of a New York City institution.<\/p>\n

Now, it’s one thing to refer to Isiah Thomas as a “$6 million coach [who] counts the days like a guest at Guant\u00c3\u00a1namo”; I’m willing to let that incomprehensibility slide. I mean, you’re writing for an Upper West Bank audience, you need to put some sort of Bush reference in your lede. No, it was the second paragraph that infuriated me:<\/p>\n

As Tolstoy might have observed: All winning teams are alike, but each losing team is wretched in its own special way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What an impossibly wrong cliche to use! All it takes is one look at the league standings to realize that the winning teams in the league aren’t alike at all. Moreover, most crappy teams are characterized by their near-facelessness and lack of identity.<\/p>\n

As near as I can tell, this idiotic statement was meant to show that one can make references to classic literature even when discussing something as stupid as sports! Imagine! Stop trying to be literary!<\/p>\n

I seethed, but stuck with the article. And then the team was compared to — well, I’m just gonna give you the sentence first:<\/p>\n

If Thomas inherited an aging, overpaid roster, he parlayed it into a younger, faster disaster flick, a Kurtzian horror of bloated contracts and hyped ne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122er-do-wells.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So the Knicks, by being overpaid and surly, are somehow comparable to . . . The Heart of Darkness? Stop trying to be literary!<\/em><\/p>\n

The article gets very good after that, bringing in all sorts of good (anonymous) sources, explaining the differences between Isiah (as a player) and Stephon Marbury, the guard he hung all his hopes on. But still, it’s as if the editor can’t resist trying to turn this amazing scene into — well, I have no goddamn idea, after this passage:<\/p>\n

An hour before tip-off, Yao Ming sat in the visitors\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 locker room, all seven foot six of him, massive chin in massive hand: the Thinker. As he fielded queries in two languages, his eyes never wavered from the 36-inch Panasonic that replayed the last Knicks-Rockets game. Yao watched Yao attack New York\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s big men, get slammed, make two perfect foul shots. The art of war.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m down with the Rodin image for Yao. I guess I’m okay with the bizarre “look! he’s watching himself!” language of “Yao watched Yao.”<\/p>\n

But getting fouled by crappy bigs and sinking a couple of free throws is “the art of war”? WTF? If the Tolstoy reference was literary hackery and the Conrad reference was sorta racist, what on earth is this Sun Tzu reference supposed to mean? “Yao’s a chink, so his<\/em> literary basketball reference needs to be Chinese!”? Stop trying to be . . . whatever the f*** you’re trying to be!<\/em><\/strong> Let the story breathe!
\n<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Fortunately, the article hits high gear immediately after this passage, including episodes where the writer finds the opposing team’s scouting report on the Knicks, where he’s convinced that the team’s management is actually bugging the locker rooms, where a beat writer is described as covering the Knicks “out of spite,” and where an opposing center explains how to tell when lard-assed Eddy Curry is tired (“When you run down court and he’s 30, 40 feet behind you.”).<\/p>\n

All of which is to say, this is a really entertaining and informative piece of sports writing by Jeff Coplon<\/a>. It’s a pity someone damaged it by trying to make a good story “literary.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article in New York on the grotesquerie that is the New York Knicks is pretty entertaining. It’s got some great stories about the paranoia and dysfunctional environment of a team I used to follow. Unfortunately, I almost missed the good stuff because I was tempted to throw the magazine across the room several times … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “STOP TRYING TO BE LITERARY!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,32],"tags":[72,71,73],"class_list":["post-1994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball","category-sports","tag-isiah-thomas","tag-knicks","tag-new-york"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-wa","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3158,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/unrequired-reading-jan-2-2009","url_meta":{"origin":1994,"position":0},"title":"Unrequired Reading: Jan. 2, 2009","author":"Gil","date":"January 2, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"It's the first Unrequired Reading of the New Year, dear readers! Enjoy! Do cloned dogs bark in unison? * * * Isiah Thomas did not have an easy job ahead of him when he got the Knicks' GM job in '03. * * * My music pantheon is Sam Cooke,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "basketball"","block_context":{"text":"basketball","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/sports\/basketball"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":300,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/memory-hole","url_meta":{"origin":1994,"position":1},"title":"Memory Hole","author":"Gil","date":"July 8, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Yeah, it's embarrassing that the New York Post ran a front-page headline that John Kerry had chosen Dick Gephardt as his VP candidate, the morning that John Edwards got the nod.But for the Daily News to slam them for it is kinda pissy, especially since the News ran a back\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "basketball"","block_context":{"text":"basketball","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/sports\/basketball"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5737,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/unrequired-reading-nov-12-2010-3","url_meta":{"origin":1994,"position":2},"title":"Unrequired Reading: Nov. 12, 2010","author":"Gil","date":"November 12, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Sorry I haven't done much non-Unrequired Reading posting lately. I've been kinda busy with work, but also back to thinking about writing and other projects. Anyway, enjoy this week's links. I'm off to New Orleans for a conference tomorrow, but maybe I'll come back with a crazy travelogue or something!\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "basketball"","block_context":{"text":"basketball","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/sports\/basketball"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=039333354X","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":410,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm","url_meta":{"origin":1994,"position":3},"title":"NBA Preview: Atlantic Divisionby Gil\u2026","author":"Gil","date":"November 7, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"NBA Preview: Atlantic Divisionby Gil RothBoston CelticsDanny Ainge is a goddamn idiot. For years now, Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks has played a high-stakes game with his players' contracts: he tends to overpay, but at least he keeps enough desirable assets on hand that teams would take\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6813,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/podcast-disarm","url_meta":{"origin":1994,"position":4},"title":"Podcast: Disarm","author":"Gil","date":"January 7, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Virtual Memories - season 3 episode 1 Ron Rosenbaum -\u00a0Disarm Our first guest of 2013 is Ron Rosenbaum,\u00a0one of my favorite living writers!\u00a0This episode of The Virtual Memories Show is The Bomb! I've been a fan of Ron's writing (let's call it \"literary journalism\") since reading Long Island, Babylon\u00a0(originally titled\u00a0The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=voyantpublishing&l=as2&o=1&a=1416594221","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":683,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/2005-nba-preview-western-conference-teams","url_meta":{"origin":1994,"position":5},"title":"2005 NBA Preview: Western Conference Teams","author":"Gil","date":"October 24, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Tom SpurgeonAlthough none of its teams are likely to lose a game to an Israeli club squad anytime soon, the Western Conference of the NBA remains the junior circuit of the two because of history and mythology. A team in Sacramento not only sounds less interesting than one in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "basketball"","block_context":{"text":"basketball","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/sports\/basketball"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}