Links to My Writing on the Web

I don’t post here anymore because my interests (or the ones I have time to look into) have found homes elsewhere, so I’ll use this site as a links page. There’s still a lot of older pieces on this site though, for better or worse. Links: Poetry: In The Puritan; In CV2; In the Toronto […]

The NHL is Set to Dis Hockeytown, and Send a Message: Take Your Outrage and Shove It, but Not so Far that You’ll Stop Watching

Non-Detroiters don’t get Detroit. That is not news. But it is why few outside of the Detroit media seem to have noticed how disrespectful it is that the Winter Classic will, reportedly, be held outside of Hockeytown, USA. Instead of highlighting Detroit with a Classic in one of the greatest hockey cites on Earth–not to […]

LMFAO: Masters of Constraint?

Near the end of a night of slow drinking, conversation and the occasional Youtube video, an interesting argument emerged between two friends of mine. The subject was LMFAO, whose “Party Rock Anthem” had followed a cascade of “is this good, or is this horrible/is this a farce or serious” music videos, including “Pound My Muffin,” […]

Nickelback, Black Friday and Stompin’ Suh: What’s Good?

People love to simplify America. People love to simplify everything, but the tendency seems especially pronounced when it comes to the USA. Naturally, this leads to oversimplified pronouncements of the “land of opportunity and freedom” or “the land of corporate control, materialism and moral relativity,” yata-yata-yata…leading the more subtle-minded to conclude that the truth of […]

The Money Changers Use Tim Tebow to Make a False Temple

When he was still at Florida, I was bothered by his religiosity. Or, I was bothered by how his religiosity was covered. It was incoherently mixed into the patriotic matrix that big time corporate sponsored sports foists upon its audience members, who either enjoy it or are willing to endure it, because beneath all the […]

We’ve Taken Down the Wall Street-Corporate Fat Cats, Now it’s Time to Mess with Texas

  Some only slightly out-of-place motivations that can supplement your support for the Detroit Tigers The Detroit Tigers took down the New York Yankees just after the Occupy Wall Street protests elbowed their way into the national consciousness. How appropriate. The Yankees are the baseball equivalent of the mega transnational corporations and financial institutions that […]

Game 5: October Rain

April is not the cruelest month, as the quote goes. If T.S. Eliot, who made that first claim, hadn’t turned his back on the St. Louis of his birth to become a fascist in the  Old World,  maybe his ghost would be agonizing over his Cardinal’s game 5 tomorrow, because he would’ve come to know […]

EMN Game One Preview:

All day, I’ve been trying not to think about baseball. I have work to do, even as I write this, but I have to relieve this repression and focus my baseball thoughts before I can finish off the day and watch the game. First off, no one who claims to be a baseball fan can […]

The Unendable AL MVP Debate and the Spirit of the Times

Picking a Most Valuable Player is always frustrating and unstatisfying, but this year’s AL MVP race has everyone grappling especially hard with that timeless question: how do you measure value? With Granderson, Bautista, Verlander, etc., etc., all having incredible, MVP-caliber years, most commentators are either lost in a sea of indecision or tenaciously tethered to […]

Watching Football on 9/11 and the Place for Fiction

The overlap of the NFL’s opening Sunday and the tenth anniversary of 9/11 made for a profound and somewhat strange emotion. The two events are as unrelated as they are intractably intertwined. On one hand, football is a supreme national diversion, a construct that’s so big that it’s pretty much a national holiday. 9/11, meanwhile, […]