Are black people conscious of how excruciatingly self-conscious white people have become in their every interaction with black people? Is this self-consciousness an improvement? Maybe not, because I'm thinking of people in categories rather than as people, which is a famously dangerous thing to do.
— David Shields
Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art - underprocessed, underproduced - splinters and explodes.
A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.
Flipping through the channels late at night, I'll come across 'The Longest Yard' and not be able to get up off the couch until Burt Reynolds has scored the winning touchdown.
My particular demigod is the Sonics point guard Gary Payton, who is one of the most notorious trash-talkers in the National Basketball Association. He's not really bad. He's only pretend bad - I know that - but he allows me to fantasize about being bad.
Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal.
Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule.
The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional.
Considering the relatively brief careers of professional athletes, teenagers who are good enough to play at the highest level should be able to exploit that market.
In a way, it's taken me 25 years to acknowledge that I am from the West Coast. I was always sort of pretending I was bicoastal or that I really belonged on the East Coast.
We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.
During Ronald Reagan's administration, '60 Minutes' ran a segment about the difference between Reagan's rhetoric and Reagan's actions. The show thought it had produced a hard-hitting piece; Reagan's team called up '60 Minutes' to thank them for the 15-minute commercial.
If the bus driver is black, I thank him... when I get off at my spot, whereas I would never think of doing this if the driver were white.
As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.
Sports movies are often very good at dramatizing the intersection of public and private realms: the body politic.
I'm a sucker for sports movies.
Sports passion is deeply, infamously territorial: our city-state is better than your city-state because our city-state's team beat your city-state's team. My attachment to the Sonics is approximately the reverse of this.
From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn't fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched.
The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn't matter anymore that I have or am on a network.
I suspect the real reason the N.F.L. and N.B.A. don't want high schoolers and college underclassmen to play with their ball is that they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with National Collegiate Athletic Association, which serves as a sort of free minor league and unpaid promotional department for the pros.
You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing.
I worry that I am not really a person anymore: I'm more of just a writing machine. I wonder what that has done to either my life and or my art.
Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.
All art is theft.
In the NBA, as in nowhere else in America, white people are utterly beholden to black people, and they're not about to let us off that easily. It's a kind of very mild payback for the last 500 years.
I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.
The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity.
The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses.
I went to graduate school in Iowa City, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where the most passionate thing I did was attend University of Iowa basketball games.
I like art with a visible string to the world.
The individual has now risen to the level of a mini-government or mini-corporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mini-network.
The N.F.L.'s rule on underclassmen should be abolished, and the N.B.A. should be discouraged from adding an age limit.
Seattle is still more Caucasian than most medium-sized cities. The sort of psychosexual politics of white fandom in context of black athletes who are also both very rich and slightly angry is just, to me, bottomlessly fascinating.
The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.
The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition.
