Les Habitants

“It is easy to say that a fan can stay at home, or at home he can change a channel and watch something else. But it isn't as simple as that. A sports fan loves his sport. A fan in Toronto loves hockey, and if the Leafs are bad, he loses something he loves and has no way to replace the loss.”

Ken Dryden

The Game

They Fade, Sad Phantoms

"The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of generations that have lived. A region where grey twilight ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. She follows her mother with ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms are they, yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They fade, sad phantoms: all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is no more. And on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion, the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come trooping to the sunken sea, Lacus Mortis. Ominous revengeful zodiacal host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned, the giantantlered, snouter and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning multitude, murderers of the sun.

Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood. And the equine portent grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven’s own magnitude, till it looms, vast, over the house of Virgo. And lo, wonder of metempsychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride, harbinger of the daystar, the bride, ever virgin. It is she, Martha, thou lost one, Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant. How serene does she now arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour, shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call it gossamer. It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents of the cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling, writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till, after a myriad metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus.

Francis was reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at school together in Conmee’s time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades, Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call?"

James Joyce

Ulysses

as if it wasn't broken already

Tackling Ulysses:

"But the worst of all, Mr. Power said, is the man who takes his own life.

Martin Cunningham drew out his watch briskly, coughed and put it back.

The greatest disgrace to have in the family, Mr. Power added.

Temporary insanity, of course, Martin Cunningham said decisively. We must take a charitable view of it.

They say a man who does it is a coward, Mr. Dedalus said.

It is not for us to judge, Martin Cunningham said.

Mr. Bloom, about to speak, closed his lips again. Martin Cunningham's large eyes. Looking away now. Sympathetic human man he is. Intelligent. Like Shakespeare's face. Always a good word to say. They have no mercy on that here or infanticide. Refuse Christian burial. They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken already. Yet sometimes they repent too late. Found in the riverbed clutching rushes. He looked at me. And that awful drunkard of a wife of his. Setting up house for her time after time and then pawning the furniture on him every Saturday almost. Leading him the life of the damned. Wear the heart out of a stone, that. Monday morning. Start afresh. Shoulder to the wheel. Lord, she must have looked a sight that night Dedalus told me he was in there. Drunk about the place and capering with Martin's umbrella.

And they call me the jewel of Asia,
Of Asia,
The Geisha,

He looked away from me. He knows. Rattle his bones.

The afternoon of the inquest. The redlabelled bottle on the table. The room in the hotel with hunting pictures. Stuffy it was. Sunlight through the slats of the Venetian blind. The coroner's sunlit ears, big and hairy. Boots giving evidence. Thought he was asleep first. Then saw like yellow streaks on his face. Had slipped down to the foot of the bed. Verdict: overdose. Death by misadventure. The letter. For my son Leopold.

No more pain. Wake no more. Nobody owns."

- James Joyce

The Jester

Like a jester at the ball

Rub my shoulders with the kings

And I was draped in gold and velvet

Bathing in applause

While I was jumping through the rings

And then the cooks would sound a bell

And all the kings would lick their lips

But I couldn't find a placemat

The dinner table's full

And there's no room for me to sit

Is there anybody out there looking out for me?

Just say you want me, just say you need me

Is there anybody out there looking out for me?

Does anybody need me?

Is every last soul just fucking me over?

With tears on their shoes and ice on their shoulders

Is their anybody out there looking out for me?

Lord I live to entertain

All my pride is in my praise

I hum along with this vibration

And I hope to God I make it, mmh

If any chord that I could strum

Made me feel less like a man

I'd slam my fingers in the doorway

And shatter all the bones

Badflower

"The Jester"

Sept

Last weekend I balled when I saw the way you had so recklessly thrown my whole life into a storage unit. I cried when I said goodbye to the house I loved and Lake Superior, my rock over the past 3 years. This weekend I threw out all the lies in your love letters and found out another girl I once loved has a kid now. Earlier today I said goodbye to Michigan football because everything is dead and black, after all, but I hope your September has been just peachy.

"When the child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."

John Steinbeck

East of Eden

Sittin' round here in the campfire light, searchin' for the ghost of Churchill

"But in those shabby years his Majesty's government believed that there were some things the country ought not to know, and their policy of duplicity -- which at times mounted to conspiracy -- would be vindicated in the end. [Neville] Chamberlain would be the scapegoat of appeasement, and before the year was out sackcloth would be his shroud, but he was only one of many. Baldwin, for example, bore a greater responsibility for weakening Britain's defenses when Hitler built his military juggernaut. The appeasers had been powerful; they had controlled The Times and The BBC; they had been largely drawn from the upper classes, and their betrayal of England's greatness would be neither forgotten nor forgiven by those who, gulled by the mystique of England's class system, had believed as Englishmen had believed for generations that public school boys governed best. The appeasers destroyed oligarchic rule which, though levelers may protest, had long governed well. If ever men betrayed their class, these were they. 

Because their possessions were great, the appeasers had much to lose should the Red flag fly over Westminster. That was why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driving force behind their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up to the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, Anti-Semitism, the Reich's darker underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So, with their eyes open, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its iniquities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse until, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, they led England herself into the cold damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel. Their end came when the House of Commons, in a revolt of conscience, wrenched power from them and summoned to the colors the one man who had foretold all that had passed, who had tried, year after year, alone and mocked, to prevent the war by urging the only policy which would have done the job. And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death."

William Manchester

The Last Lion: Volume II: Alone, 1932-1940

1996 WCF

Quite suddenly, in double overtime, Steve Yzerman put a jolt into Millwood that pierced the night sky. Dad and I both jumped to our feet, thrusting our hands into the air, shrieking with joy, not caring if we woke the rest of the house up. I swore I heard the voices of Steve and his dad celebrating across the neighborhood too. Steve Yzerman had blasted a sixty foot slap shot over the right shoulder of Blues goaltender Jon Casey just a minute and fourteen seconds into double overtime. “Score! Steve Yzerman! Detroit wins!” the television announcer exclaimed emphatically, drawing out his vowels in a release of all tension. I’ve watched replay of that goal so many times that I sometimes have heard those words in my sleep or in some drug-induced flashback. Whenever I see a replay of it, perhaps the most famous goal in Yzerman’s illustrious career, I don’t just think about that semi-charmed ‘96 season, I think about fathers and sons, and about the way we were then. The only thing preventing it from being the most memorable goal in Red Wings history is that the Red Wings subsequently failed to reach the Stanley Cup Finals. In a twist of fate, Detroit earned the rites to play Patrick Roy and the Colorado Avalanche in the Western Conference Finals, a series in which Roy, en route to the Conn Smythe Trophy, would get his revenge for the nine-goal drubbing he had received at Detroit’s hands months prior in Montreal.

Visions of Yzerman

Ch 6

Nocturnal

the smell of michigan when i was a boy

"I had been drinking Bulmer's Dry Cider, which I had found to be a marvelous drink. G.C. had brought some in from Kajiado from the Stores. It was very light and refreshing and did not slow you down at all shooting. It came in full quarts and had screw-in tops and I used to drink it in the night when I woke instead of water. Mary's extremely nice cousin had given us two small square sacking-covered pillows filled with balsam needles. I always slept with mine under my neck or, if I slept on my side, with my ear on it. It was the smell of Michigan when I was a boy and I wished I could have had a sweet-grass basket to keep it in when we traveled and to have under the mosquito net in the bed at night. The cider tasted like Michigan too and I always remembered the cider mill and the door which was never locked but only fitted with a hasp and wooden pin and the smell of the sacks used in the pressing and later spread to dry and then spread over the deep tubs where the men who came to grind their wagon loads of apples left the mill's share. Below the dam of the cider mill there was a deep pool where the eddy from the falling water turned out back in under the dam. You could always catch trout if you fished there patiently and whenever I caught one I would kill him and lay him in the big wicker creel that was in the shade and put a layer of fern leaves over him and then go into the cider mill and take the tin cup off the nail on the wall over the tubs and pull up the heavy sacking from one of the tubs and dip out a cup of cider and drink it. This cider that we had now reminded me of Michigan, especially with the pillow."

Ernest Hemingway

True at First Light

Next Stop: Keeweenaw

aurora borealis

If Charley hadn’t shaken and bounced and said “Ftt,” I might have forgotten that every night he gets two dog biscuits and a walk to clear his head. I put on clean clothes and went out with him into the star-raddled night. And the Aurora Borealis was out. I’ve seen it only a few times in my life. It hung and moved with majesty in folds like an infinite traveler upstage in an infinite theater. In colors of rose and lavender and purple it moved and pulsed against the night, and the frost-sharpened stars shone through it. What a thing to see at a time when I needed it so badly! 

John Steinbeck

Travels with Charley in Search of America

Once a bum always a bum

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable."

John Steinbeck

Travels with Charley in Search of America

I'll get you down if you don't

One time when it was the first of the month and there 
were curt notes from the water company and the rent wasn’t 
paid and a manuscript had come back from Colliefs and 
the cartoons had come back from The New Yorker and 
pleurisy was hurting Tom pretty badly, he went into the 
bedroom and lay down on the bed. 

Mary came softly in, for the blue-grey colour of his gloom 
had seeped out under the door and through the keyhole. 
She had a little bouquet of candytuft in a collar of paper 
lace. 

‘‘Smell,” she said and held the bouquet to his nose. He 
smelled the flowers and said nothing. “Do you know what 
day this is?” she asked and thought wildly for something to 
make it a bright day. 

Tom said : “Why don’t we face it for once? We’re down. 
We’re going under. What’s the good kidding ourselves?” 

“No we’re not,” said Mary. “We’re magic people; We 
always have been. Remember that ten dollars you found in 
a book — ^remember when your cousin sent you five dollars? 
Nothing can happen to us.” 

“Well, it has happened,” said Tom. “I’m sorry,” he said. 
“I just can’t talk myself out of it this time. I’m sick of 
pretending everything. For once I’d like to have it real — 
just for once.” 

"I thought of giving a little party tonight,” said Mary. 

“On what? You’re not going to cut out the baked ham 
picture from a magazine again and serve it on a platter, 
are you? I’m sick of that kind of kidding. It isn’t funny 
any more. It’s sad.” 

“I could give a little party,” she insisted. “Just a small 
affair . Nobody will dress. It’s the anniversary of the found- 
ing of the Bloomer League — ^you didn’t even remember 
that.” 

“It’s no use,” said Tom. ‘T know it’s mean, but I just 
can’t rise to it. Why don’t you just go out and shut the 
door and leave me alone? I’ll get you down if you don’t.” 

She looked at him closely and saw that he meant it. Mary 
walked quietly out and shut the door, and Tom turned over 
on the bed and put his face down between his arms. He 
could hear her rustling about in the other room. 

Steinbeck, Cannery Row

"It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much.

The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.

It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's the primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and move spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely.

Robert Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Welcome Home Stevie Y

On a Slushy April Night

"Oliver rose next morning, in better heart, and went about his usual occupations, with more hope and pleasure than he had known for many days. The birds were once more hung out, to sing, in their old places; and the sweetest wild flowers that could be found, were once more gathered to gladden Rose with their beauty. The melancholy which had seemed to the sad eyes of the anxious boy to hang, for days past, over every object, beautiful as all were, was dispelled by magic. The dew seemed to sparkle more brightly on the green leaves; the air to rustle among them with a sweeter music; and the sky itself to look more blue and bright. Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercise, even over the appearance of external objects. Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision."

Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist

Visions of Yzerman

"It's an adolescent representation, and when a person delves into his subconscious all the symbols from adolescence return. . .

Medical science knows next to nothing about it. It's disappointing to read the books that mention delirium tremens; they explain patients' physical disorders but turn their backs on interpreting the images. To this point, it has been a disorder for psychiatrists. I learned that a man died during an attack because of muscle contractions. You see? We don't know what he was seeing or hearing. Nevertheless, no medication can stop that flow of images or voices, and sometimes even odors, that place the patient squarely into hell. Well, there is one, as you probably know, but a drink condemns the patient to more delirium. It's a vicious circle in which the illness is the remedy. . .

The images of delirium are like a pump that purges guilt. The experience is so profound that afterwards the alcoholic understands things he didn't understand before and can therefore change his life. Maybe it isn't too different from what happens, in another way, to those who try LSD. The vision transforms, seemingly with no remedy. Things that make up part of daily life -- love, hate, sex, fear -- are experienced during delirium tremens and go beyond their usual limits."

"With his hypersensitivity, I could imagine the deep depressions he must have had when he was drinking."

Ignacio Solares

Delirium Tremens

The rain acted as a catalyst in the stew of the Rouge, making the river steam like a potion; it emanated a foul, trash-like smell throughout the woods that smelled distinctly of childhood. The potholes on the dirt road puddled with mud. I found my truck in the spot underneath a hanging branch where I left it, climbed in, and hunkered down in the storm with the radio on, taking a swig of my blue liqueur.

An hour later, when the rain let up, I found myself wandering the trails near my cousin Frank’s old house -- namely the trails to and from the old sandlot baseball diamond where we'd spent every waking hour as teens. I explored mini-trails I’d never known before. The bottom ends of my jeans were browned from mud, adding to an already disheveled general appearance, and for that reason I prayed I didn’t run into a jogger, or worse, another crazy hermit. I went to the stone bridge over the Rouge River behind Frank’s old house. The Rouge there had flooded from the rains, pooling up to form a bubbling brown pond on one end of the bridge. It was the spot where we’d played truth or dare with Dawn and Jenny, public school girls from Frankie’s neighborhood, and I was lost in drunken nostalgia when something moved out of the corner of my eye. It was a coyote sitting in mud in the swampy underbrush -- I was sure of it. It stared back at me with yellow glowing eyes, a look of empathetic pity in its gaze, and, although it showed no signs of aggression, I scampered back towards my car in terror. When I got to my truck, it occurred to me that the coyote might well have been a hallucination, a symptom of my worsening withdrawal, but I felt certain it had been real. Either way, the encounter spurred me into action; I needed fresh beer to keep the withdrawals at bay.

Ch. 29

Liam Brady

"Just seven months after losing Liam to Inter Milan I lost my girlfriend to another man, slap-bang in the middle of the first dismal post-Brady season. And though I knew which loss hurt the most -- Liam's transfer induced regret and sadness, but not, thankfully, the insomnia and nausea and impossible, inconsolable bitterness of a twenty-three-year-old broken heart -- I think that in some strange way she and Liam got muddled up in my mind. The two of them, Brady and the Lost Girl, haunted me for a long time, five or six years, maybe, so in a way it was predictable that one ghost should melt into the other. After Brady had gone Arsenal tried out a string of midfield players, some of them competent, some not, all of them doomed by the fact that they weren't the person they were trying to replace: between 1980 and 1986 Talbot, Rix, Hollins, Price, Gatting, Peter Nicholas, Robson, Petrovic, Charlie Nicholas, Davis, Williams and even centre-forward Paul Mariner all played in central midfield.

And I had a string of relationships over the next four or five years, some serious, some not. . . the parallels were endless. Brady's often-rumoured return began to take on a shamanistic quality. I knew, of course, that the bouts of vicious, exhausting depression that afflicted me in the early-to-mid eighties were not caused either by Brady or the Lost Girl. They were to do with something else, something much more difficult to comprehend, and something that must have been in me for much longer than either of these two blameless people. But during these terrifying downs, I would think back to times when I had last felt happy, fulfilled, energetic, optimistic; and she and Brady were a part of those times. They weren't entirely responsible for them, but there were very much there during them, and that was enough to turn these two love affairs into the twin supporting pillars of a different, enchanted age."

Nick Hornby

Fever Pitch

Highbury

"There is a short story by the American writer Andre Dubus entitled 'The Winter Father', about a man whose divorce has separated him from his two children. In the winter his relationship with them is tetchy and strained: they move from afternoon jazz club to cinema to restaurant, and stare at each other. But in the summer, when they can go to the beach, they get on fine. 'The long beach and the sea were their lawn; the blanket their home; the ice chest and thermos their kitchen. They lived as a family again.' Sitcoms and films have long recognised this terrible tyranny of place, and depict men traipsing round parks with fractious kids and a frisbee. But 'The Winter Father' means a lot to me because it goes further than that: it manages to isolate what is valuable in the relationship between parents and children, and explains simply and precisely why the zoo trips are doomed.

In this country, as far as I know, Bridlington and Minehead are unable to provide the same kind of liberation as the New England beaches in Dubus's story; but my father and I were about to come up with the perfect English equivalent. Saturday afternoons in north London gave us a context in which we could be together. We could talk when we wanted, the football gave us something to talk about (and anyway the silences weren't oppressive), and the days had a structure, a routine. The Arsenal pitch was to be our lawn (and, being an English lawn, we would usually peer at it mournfully through driving rain); the Gunners' Fish Bar on Blackstock Road our kitchen; and the West Stand our home. It was a wonderful set-up, and changed our lives just when they needed changing most, but it was also exclusive: Dad and my sister never really found anywhere to live it all."

Nick Hornby

Fever Pitch

It was October and the leaves were quaking. Dusk was beginning. The sun had gone, the western ranges faded in chill purple mist, but the western sky still burned with ragged bands of orange. It was October.

Eugene walked swiftly along the sinuous paved curves of Rutledge Road. There was a smell of fog and supper in the air; a warm moist blur at window-panes, and the pungent sizzle of cookery. There were mist-far voices, and a smell of burning leaves, and a warm yellow blur of lights.

Thomas Wolfe

Look Homeward, Angel

Need a little excitement?

But he became passionately bored with them, plunged into a miasmic swamp of weariness and horror, after a time, because of the dullness and ugliness of their lives, their minds, their amusements. Dull people filled him with terror: he was never so much frightened by tedium in his own life as in the lives of others -- his early distaste for Pett Pentland and her grim rusty aunts came from submerged memories of the old house on Central Avenue, the smell of mellow apples and medicine in the hot room, the swooping howl of the wind outside, and the endless monotone of their conversation on disease, death, and misery. He was filled with terror and and anger against them because they were able to live, to thrive, in this horrible depression that sickened him.

Thomas Wolfe

Look Homeward Angel