Recent quotes:
Game Of Thrones brutally asserts that the game in question will have no winner (experts)
It’s not that the final season is failing to live up to my specific expectations of what was supposed to happen, which I avoided having for that reason. It’s that the final season is failing to live up to what I believe a final season should do: enriching the show that came before it. And while the notion that power corrupts has always been at the heart of this story, the way it manifests here feels like a simplification of the show and its ideas, as opposed to a culmination of its larger journey.
I
remember the heavy gentle lift at my thighs and the ball curving back closer
and my passing the ball and beating the ball in flight over the horizontal net,
my feet not once touching the ground over fifty-odd feet, a cartoon, and
then there was chaff and crud in the air all over and both Antitoi and
I either flew or were blown pinwheeling for I swear it must have been
fifty feet to the fence one court over, the easternmost fence, we hit the
fence so hard we knocked it halfway down, and it stuck at degreesntitoi
detached a retina and had to wear those funky Jabbar retina goggles for
the rest of the summer, and the fence had two body-shaped indentations
like in cartoons where the guy's face makes a cast in the skillet that hit him,
two catcher's masks of fence, we both got deep quadrangular lines
impressed on our faces, torsos, legs' fronts, from the fence, my sister said
we looked like waffles, but neither of us got badly hurt, and no homes got
whacked--either the thing just ascended again for no reason right after,
they do that, obey no rule, follow no line, hop up and down at something
that might as well be will, or else it wasn't a real one. Antitoi's tennis
continued to improve after that, but mine didn't.
Angell made terrific use of his skill as a perceptive, sympathetic reporter when he was spending time with Steve Blass, an ace Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who mysteriously lost the ability to throw strikes after the 1972 season. By the time Angell met with him for a 1975 profile, “Down the Drain,” Blass was out of the game entirely, four years removed from pitching the winning game of the 1971 World Series. Other writers had approached him, trying to crack the mystery of how he had suddenly lost it, but he understood that Angell would reach for more than a story about “a guy who could pitch and then suddenly couldn’t pitch.”
It took some thought and imagination for Angell to come up with an ending. There was still a pitcher in Blass, or a man who thought like a pitcher, he reasoned. And so, for the story’s final scene, in Blass’ living room, Angell asked him to “pitch” an imaginary inning against the mid-seventies Cincinnati Reds, the greatest-hitting team of its era. Blass described his thought process as he worked his way through the inning, batter by batter, and, with it, they had written the hardest part of the story—the ending—together.