Why are you so obsessed with Free Darko, Burl Ives, Richard Jefferson, Tim Duncan, Sean Elliott, etc., Alex? I want to hear about actual basketball in an objective and fun way, not about these strange, baroque character sketches with Lovecraftian and otherwise surreal undertones.
That's a good question, Alex. Let me answer your question in order.
1. Bethlehem Shoals (and to a lesser extent Eric Freeman) of Free Darko - Much of the first half of this blog can be read as a surreal parody of Free Darko (SEE: Every use of 'dialectic'). This is because he generally knows his stuff, but often lets his off-beat (though often moralistic or political) character sketches and writerly fixations on interesting narratives take the place of his judgment, like Bill Simmons crossed with...a grad student in journalism or library studies. Granted, he's certainly capable of the occasional "Eff You" short essay, and the clarity of some of his images is often called for. Something that makes Shoals better...or worse...than many other NBA scribes is his (how else shall I say it?) deliberate forgetfulness. It only matters marginally how he characterizes, say, the 2011 Suns when writing about the previous year's or next year's squads. He forgets, for the most part, everything he has written before when the new writing begins, only seeming to explicitly remember them again in the course of writing them. If the 2011 Nash was, say, "Bean from Ender's Shadow," then the process of trading Nash can be "Madame Bovary looking for a suitor" and Shoals will find no need to attempt to reconcile these images. This forgetful approach, without an overarching schema of images, seems cosmically wrong and is infuriatingly vague on occasion (...to the extent anything on the Internet actually infuriates people, a.k.a. annoyance with marginal moral outrage). But it's hard to argue with the results, which are generally successful. There is no ideology, and no bias, to Shoals, which makes his already-nebulous offering of a "unique take" blend further into the surrounding blogosphere, leaving as residue of the apparent uniqueness only the quality of the writing which implies a lifetime of thought and experience that is not perhaps unrivaled but is, still, unique.. Shoals is like a disembodied hand with no accountability, no memory, and no identity, but in the meantime has forged himself as a premier NBA writer. I have high respect for his craft, but his weird ability to co-opt any subject and lend his voice to any narrative he happens to encounter is kind of eerie, and I don't say that altogether respectfully. That fascinates me.
That's a good question, Alex. Let me answer your question in order.
1. Bethlehem Shoals (and to a lesser extent Eric Freeman) of Free Darko - Much of the first half of this blog can be read as a surreal parody of Free Darko (SEE: Every use of 'dialectic'). This is because he generally knows his stuff, but often lets his off-beat (though often moralistic or political) character sketches and writerly fixations on interesting narratives take the place of his judgment, like Bill Simmons crossed with...a grad student in journalism or library studies. Granted, he's certainly capable of the occasional "Eff You" short essay, and the clarity of some of his images is often called for. Something that makes Shoals better...or worse...than many other NBA scribes is his (how else shall I say it?) deliberate forgetfulness. It only matters marginally how he characterizes, say, the 2011 Suns when writing about the previous year's or next year's squads. He forgets, for the most part, everything he has written before when the new writing begins, only seeming to explicitly remember them again in the course of writing them. If the 2011 Nash was, say, "Bean from Ender's Shadow," then the process of trading Nash can be "Madame Bovary looking for a suitor" and Shoals will find no need to attempt to reconcile these images. This forgetful approach, without an overarching schema of images, seems cosmically wrong and is infuriatingly vague on occasion (...to the extent anything on the Internet actually infuriates people, a.k.a. annoyance with marginal moral outrage). But it's hard to argue with the results, which are generally successful. There is no ideology, and no bias, to Shoals, which makes his already-nebulous offering of a "unique take" blend further into the surrounding blogosphere, leaving as residue of the apparent uniqueness only the quality of the writing which implies a lifetime of thought and experience that is not perhaps unrivaled but is, still, unique.. Shoals is like a disembodied hand with no accountability, no memory, and no identity, but in the meantime has forged himself as a premier NBA writer. I have high respect for his craft, but his weird ability to co-opt any subject and lend his voice to any narrative he happens to encounter is kind of eerie, and I don't say that altogether respectfully. That fascinates me.
