In boxing, they say it's the punch you don't see coming that knocks you out. In the wider world, the reality we ignore or deny is the one that weakens our most impassioned efforts toward improvement.
Every doorway, every intersection has a story.
Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.
The metaphor of the subterranean is at work in a lot of Northwest writers and artists. Zooming in closer and closer and closer, then below, to the worms and the centipede.
We're living in a high-tech world. So much of our stimulus and entertainment comes from things that are quite abstract and disembodied.
Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.
The denial of female aggression is a destructive myth. It robs an entire gender of a significant spectrum of power, leaving women less than equal with men and effectively keeping them 'in their place' and under control.
I've met some of the most interesting, dimensional, and kind people of my life in that subculture and around the sport. And it seems to me that boxing is one of those structures that is designed to promote harmony. I think that it is a stove that contains that fire in us and makes it safe and useful.
My background is standard American blue collar of the itchy-footed variety. We're new-world mongrels. The women in the family read horoscopes, tea leaves, coffee bubbles, Tarot cards and palms.
Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.
A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of a child or a monster, a lunatic or an animal. I immediately expect a nasty coyness of tone, cheesy artifice, the world through cardboard 3-D lenses.
American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.
At its heart, 'Fat City' is not about boxing. It is a universal story of grim realities and toxic delusions. It is awash with awareness of chances blown, dreams stymied, precious time wasted, and all future prospects scorched to ashes by the process.
It's not unfair, I think, to describe boxers as a demographic little given to literary entanglement. In general, with exceptions, they prefer movies.
I'm like every waitress in every diner; I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all.
Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.
Though 'Fat City' was written long before cellphones or the Internet, its human apparatus is state of the art.
My own theory about the phlegmatic qualities and properties of the English is the mountain of pure white sugar hydrocarbons they consume every day bloody day of the year - the stiff upper lip is petrified sugar; that's Bermuda's revenge, the with death, the rotting future square in the teeth of it.
Donald Westlake's lean prose and deadpan delivery are engaging, as always.
