Category: Yo Ivanhoe

This guy called me up yesterday and asked me to put together a list of what I thought were the funniest novels of all time. This is the sort of thing that’s usually a piece of cake for me, and I responded with enthusiasm to the idea. I figured I could come up with the…

This poor kid from the secondary division downstairs used to come up to my office all the time and ask me what it was all about. What the hell was I supposed to tell him? He thought he was going places. He thought he was doing something; he thought we all were. So I was…

Early in my adolescence I played baseball one summer on a traveling team with this fat kid from a smaller town fifteen miles from the place where I grew up. I swear, this guy was the funniest, most bitterly cynical fourteen-year-old on the planet. He was also the best hitter I ever played with or…

—Dan Corrigan, “Eddie Potomac,” from the Ballroom Portraits, Rhinelander, Wisconsin. 1978. I worked side-by-side with this guy for seven years. Shooter Devaney. He’d been a hotshot basketball player back in high school, but something went wrong somewhere along the line, just like something went wrong for so many of the guys I grew up with,…

To dine, drink champagne, make a racket, and deliver speeches about national consciousness, the conscience of the people, freedom, and such things, while slaves in tail coats are running round your tables, veritable serfs, and your coachmen wait outside in the street, in the bitter cold –that is lying to the Holy Ghost. —Chekhov, Diary,…

…Baseball owners, writers, fans and lots of others found themselves beset with questions for which nobody has any real answers. Was attendance keeping pace with the population growth? Were ball parks really outmoded? Was the game declining in popularity? Were ball players getting too commercial? Was the game too old fashioned for an audience getting…