'The Iliad' includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure.
— Katherine Dunn
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'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.
An intimate core of my being recognizes that there is nothing in me that can go on: there is no spark; there is no infestation of vaporous miasma that has the capacity to continue, and there is nothing in me that wishes to continue. This moment is, for me, all that there is, and I'm willing to accept it. I'm a worm; I have no soul.
I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.
A film adaptation is, I hope, the director's version. A new creation.
Some writers get snooty about what happens when their books are adapted to film, but I don't feel that way.
I'm like every waitress in every diner; I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all.
It is time to recognize the variability of females, just as we do males.
Fiction, even when it's grim and hard, is fun.
I thought if I just told the truth, the human truth, it'd be the truth for everyone.
We're living in a high-tech world. So much of our stimulus and entertainment comes from things that are quite abstract and disembodied.
A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
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.
People have been trying for centuries to manipulate genes, enhance certain traits, and achieve racial purity, even in humans. And of course I thought of the Nazis and their efforts toward Aryan magnificence.
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.
Boxing gyms are more than training facilities. They are sanctuaries in bad neighborhoods for troubled kids and shrines to the traditions of the sport. The gym is home. For many, it's the safest place they know.
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.
I know that some of the finest writing I've ever read has been sports writing, whatever the topic was, whatever the sport they were writing about. It seems to be an area where people are allowed a little more leeway than when they're reporting on traffic jams and city-council meetings.
In boxing, it just seemed to me from the time I was a very small child, we have a peculiarly civilized form in that boxers don't screech and holler. They don't use weapons. When the bell rings, they fight; when the bell rings again, they stop.
I think it is the natural and innate function of certain organisms to secrete beauty in permanent forms we call artworks, to respond to beauty by answering its discovery with a new beauty.
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.
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.
In a really good, closely matched situation, the style of the boxer is every bit as explicit and specific to him as a painter's hand.
We live with a distinct double standard about male and female aggression. Women's aggression isn't considered real. It isn't dangerous; it's only cute. Or it's always self-defense or otherwise inspired by a man. In the rare case where a woman is seen as genuinely responsible, she is branded a monster - an 'unnatural' woman.
Women are real. Our reality covers the whole human megillah, from feeble to fierce, from bad to good, from endangered to dangerous. We don't just deserve power, we have it. And power in this and every other society is not just the capacity to benefit those around us.
Non-fiction is a big responsibility. Rationality. Facts. The urgent need to reflect some small aspect of reality. But fiction is a private autism, a self-referential world in which the writer is omnipotent. Gravity, taxes, and death are mere options, subject to the writer's fancy.
The things we do to our children - most of the evil in the world is not done with bad intentions but with the best intentions ever.
Behind every locked door on Skid Road are a thousand stories.
My dad was a third-generation printer and linotype operator, by all accounts a fabulous ballroom dancer. He was jettisoned from the family before I was 2, and I have never met him and have no memory of him.
I don't like to see anyone suffer, and there's a very, very fine line between being healthy and working and totally down and out.
We came to Portland because there was a good alternative public school. Friends who lived there told me about it, and my son loved it. I left his dad and went to work slinging hash in a breakfast diner and working nights tending bar in a biker tavern.
I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.
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.
Though 'Fat City' was written long before cellphones or the Internet, its human apparatus is state of the art.
I'd always been fascinated by boxing and became very engaged with it through my husband, actually. But I started to write about it because so many decent, righteous people wanted it banned.
I thought that was actually kind of boring, that search for perfection.
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.
Film is a different art form with its own demands and its own riches.
I'm just a regular Joe.
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.
No, I've never competed. I did, however, train in a boxing gym with a good coach beginning in 1993. I'd been writing about the sport for a dozen years by then and wanted to know what boxers endured, what it felt like. I was too old to compete when I started, but I sparred enough to get a taste.
It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, 'Truck,' to my third, 'Geek Love.'
Boxing is a formal, ritualized creation of crisis.
There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.
My mother is an escaped farm girl from North Dakota and a self-taught artist and painter.
I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.
Sometimes we followed the crops, doing migrant labor. We did several years of tenant farming in Western Oregon starting in the early '50s. Later, my stepdad managed gas stations in a small town near Portland.
A boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to one another.
