The Icepick Cometh

Dear readers (both of you),

We're now more or less blogging exclusively over at our WordPress.com site at http://theicepickcometh.wordpress.com.

So c'mon and visit us over there and read The Icepick's new post on the Dark Knight and President Bush, a reaction from a movie nerd to a piece earlier this summer in the Wall Street Journal.

Thanks for reading and for following us over there.
That is all.

Hugs and hisses,
PublisherCat

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Well, glad press freedom battles are limited to Vietnam, and would never happen in America, least of all in this 2008:

• Amy Goodman and Two Democracy Now! Producers Unlawfully Arrested At the RNC
• AP photog arrested while covering anti-war protest
• Update: Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar Released After Illegal Arrest at RNC
• Call for withdrawal of charges against three journalists manhandled and arrested outside Republican Party convention

So glad to see our freedoms are protected here in America, because, you know, the world hates us for our freedoms and all that.
 
 
And while we're at it, stifling Freedom of the Press is not limited to violent means. John McCain's campaign has taken-its-ball-and-gone-home by canceling an appearance on Larry King's show because Campbell Brown at CNN had the nerve to ask some tough questions of a McCain spokesman.

Remember, this too is America:
 

 
and this:
 

 

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Sorry I haven't linked to my man Mark Kriegel as often as I should — I am still having trouble forgiving him for going Hollywood and moving to sunny L.A., to say nothing of his current employer — but he has hit it right on the head with this column, which my Father the Would-Be Sportswriter shared with me.

Kriegel argues that New York has truly become home of the Hedge Fund Class, and its sports teams are reflecting that reality. Forget Gawker's Creative Underclass — they (we) are just the rabble mob muttering underneath this pile of money. Yes, the money has arguably brought a cleaner, safer city, but at the cost of keeping it, and by extension most of the desirable places in the state and the country, nearly unaffordable to the middle class, to say nothing of anyone trying to support a family at a lower rate than that.

It's a weird twist on Benjamin Franklin's famous quote on liberty and safety — the money has brought both (or as much as attainable in these dark days), but at a cost that none but the wealthy can afford.

At least the Yankees are not laying off workers part-time, at least as far as we know. Then again, who knows what Hank Steinbrenner has up his sleeves for the average front-office worker?

Hey, we reached 102! (as in, this is the 102nd published post and you actually read this far).

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My favorite quote after reading the coverage of George Carlin, who died Sunday at age 71:

“Scratch any cynic,” he said, “and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”

My second-favorite George Carlin quote:

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

Not entirely off-topic:

A photo of George Carlin was on the cover of Monday's USA Today with an appetizer of some of his well-known jokes and bits surrounding him — "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television," "JUMBO Shrimp," "Hippy-Dippy Weatherman."

I swear he was either rolling over in his grave or laughing from beyond at the sheer absurdity of the mere existence of USA Today and its corporate ownership, responsible more than any other newspaper for the dumbing down of America, and all it made me want to do is curse Al Neuharth for inventing something as shitty as USA Today and and forever vowing to hold it against any writer who ever worked for Gannett merely for contributing to the lowering of the level of intelligence in this county — something George Carlin couldn't help but laugh and be angry about when he said "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that" — and then I realized that George Carlin is now gone and USA Today is with us forever and I was sad.

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Mighty Mite Mike Lupica unsurprisingly tops New York sportswriters in estimated salary in a post from The Big Lead on the highest paid sporstwriters (Update: The Big Lead posted a follow-up), with former SI and current ESPN Mag thinks-he's-funny-man Rick Reilly topping the estimated national list of sportswriters (broadcasters who think they can write are left off the list).

Gawker links to it, and adds its own chart and commenter-generated snark for these writing men plus one writing woman. Though we'd gladly pay to read Whitlock and Feinstein (and Gary Smith, as noted in the updated post), the list skews heavily toward hack-scribblers with Lupica, Albom, Reilly, Mariotti and (often) Simmons. Bitter/jealous much? Hell yeah, I am!

Continuing on our sports theme, and for our Boston (both current residents and fans of) readership (apparently, there's quite a few of 3 of you): Congratulations! This is for you, beaneaters:

"Boston Just Can't Get Enthusiastic About Sports Rioting Anymore"
(via Deadspin.com)

and this:

Police arrest 23 during Celtics revelry
(link and photo of potential He-Man relative via Boston Globe

Finally, can't Italy win without drama and a dose of skirting failure? Though the Azzuri beat France 2-0 in their final group-stage game in the European Championship on Tuesday in a rematch of the great 2006 World Cup final — of Zidane head-butt fame — both Andrea Pirlo and Snarling Dog Gennaro Gattuso, Italy's star midfielders, got themselves eliminated from the quarterfinal Sunday against Spain by picking up their second yellow cards of the opening stage.

Pirlo's smashing penalty kick in the 25th minute and Daniele De Rossi's goal in the 62rd minute carried the Italians past Les Bleus. Former Fiorentina striker Luca Toni (Number Nyne!) looked great in the first half, just missing wide on at least three sublime touches inside the box. Both goals came after France went down to 10 men, despite the efforts of the unparalleled Thierry Henry.

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Lost, perhaps, in the sad news last week of the death of Buffalo's own Tim Russert was the death of another journalist — Eliot Asinof's passing at 88 a week ago can hardly be called sudden in the way Russert's was, especially because Big Tim was 30 years his junior.

Still, let's not forget Asinof. His 1963 book Eight Men Out, filled with research, interviews and (according to the Times) some fiction was a groundbreaking work, and one of the many influences of The Young Icepick in his quest to become a Writer — I read it at age 15 when an edition was released to coincide with John Sayles' excellent 1988 movie.

Asinof's conceit, hammered home in Sayles' film, is the eight Black Sox of 1919 were victims of a miserly owner and a unionless system that chewed them up with no chance for the freedom that today's free agents enjoy, even though at least five of the eight were in fact guilty of throwing games to the gamblers.

The scandal ruined the lives of many yet, in an ironic way, saved the sport from shadiness by paving the way for Babe Ruth and the needed strong, centralized leadership of baseball's Office of the Commissioner; strong and heavy-handed, and perhaps too heavy-handed at times — Ford Frick helped kill an early Asinof screenplay attempt at the Black Sox story — though Bud Selig has acted like he's been apologetically making up for prior commissioners.

There was much heartbreak on individual lives in the pages of Eight Men Out, from the young boy's plea of "Say it ain't so, Joe," to the sad decline of the talented but naive Buck Weaver, still looking for another chance to play practically until the day he collapsed and died on a street on Chicago's Southside at age 66.

The story gets a lot of justified mileage as a tale of the Loss of American Innocence, coming on the heels of the horrors of World War I and the moralizing by the Baby Booomer-like righteous leaders of Strauss & Howe's Missionary Generation that instituted Prohibition.

Asinof, Bruce Weber's Times obit states, was blacklisted in the 1950s, with Asinof claiming, “after he got hold of his F.B.I. file, the blacklisting came about because ‘I had at one time signed a petition outside of Yankee Stadium to encourage the New York Yankees to hire black ballplayers.’”

The passing of Asinof, who lived in upstate Ancramdale since 1985, near where I cut some teeth covering semi-semi-semi-pro ball in cow country, was sadly missed by my sometimes favorite sports blogs, which shows there is some (some) use for newspapers still. (Though how weak is it that in Chicago, muse of Nelson Algren, home of the Black Sox story itself, the Tribune ran the obit written and distributed by the New York Times, and not by one of its own writers, perhaps highlighting the downward turn of the Sam Zell's Tribune and the local press in general. But again, I digress.)

Happily, I discover via The Google this blog post at Bronx Banter at Baseball Toaster by writer Alex Belth, who quotes Roger Kahn as saying Asinof had "an enduring anger at what he perceived to be injustice" — my kind of hard-working writer.

Belth later quotes Glenn Stout as saying Asinof was one of the first writers (including Al Stump of Cobb fame, another Icepick favorite) to legitimize baseball history as a serious subject.

Meanwhile, the past few days marked another mourning — the end of the annual exhibition Hall of Fame game in Cooperstown. I feel nothing but sadness about this and have nothing but good feelings for Cooperstown and the Hall, but I am currently reading George Vecsey's Baseball (yes, it was a Father's Day gift) and perhaps I am the naive one, but the amount of racism sewn into the fabric of the game's history never fails to amaze me.

The Hall and the Abner Doubleday myth were largely (if not wholly) created by the racist Albert Goodwill Spalding (yes, of the Spalding sporting goods fame) who, according to Vecsey's book, organized an international barnstorming tour in 1888 without any black players, yet took along a black man as a "mascot" who was vulgarly (I had to read this twice to believe it) "paraded around in front of Asians, Australians, Africans, and Europeans with a leash around his neck, a wonderful advertisement for the American character, indeed," Vescey writes.

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Maybe as journalists, would-be journalists, wanna-be journalists, ex-journalists, bought-out journalists, hacks, reporters and disenchanted prematurely retired ex-journalists, perhaps all that is left to cover is ourselves and by extension, our opinions, even if it is only for an audience of one.

And as a seasoned reporter myself — after two whole conventions — I can safely say that you get about as many insights into the hearts and souls of the candidates on the campaign trail as you would watching a plastic fern grow.

—Matthew Klam, Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail, New York Times Magazine, September 2004

The Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy says the same thing, almost four years later, about sports — "That's just the way it is now," he writes — and bemoans the lost access to players the media once had.

Shaughnessy is 100% correct — that's just the way it is now.

To which I say, yeah, it sucks. Just deal with it.

Pat Jordan is worried, too, but he seems to be adapting to it better.

It's been coming to this point for a long time. Thirty-five years ago, Red Smith said it best:

The sportswriter learns to adjust, to make allowances. When you're listening to these people, who are serving special interests, you simply adjust by taking a little off the top.

Pat Jordan might have taken a lot off the top for his Deadspin article, but I applaud the adjustment. After all, it's the future.

As teams, political parties, athletes and candidates continue to control the message (and control the messengers in a growing trend to hire their own reporters), we're seeing the of loss of hard news, which might turn into ceding the coverage of hard news if the media conglomerates see a way to save money out of it.

In the end, it may not be such a bad thing. Instead of parroting the PR-party line coming out of the press conferences, let's let the flacks break their "news" and let the smart media quickly dissect it and turn more toward analysis — it's not the breaking news, itself, that is so important, it's what it means — and, for features, toward what we see in Jordan's Deadspin and Slate pieces: the write-around.

Consider that "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" is thought in some circles perhaps the best magazine article of all time though the subject famously never allowed Gay Talese and to interview him. Instead, Talese talked to Sinatra's acquaintances and just watched the guy.

This, unfortunately, requires time, talent, a sharp eye and a broad mind ("He was, as usual, immaculately dressed. He wore an oxford-grey suit with a vest, a suit conservatively cut on the outside but trimmed with flamboyant silk within; his shoes, British, seemed to be shined even on the bottom of the soles."). These things are in short supply in an MBA-dominated newsroom culture and among J-school educated writers who can't escape the grip of publicists dictating coverage and fear the same thing Shaughnessy wrings his hands over — lost access.

If that wasn't problem enough, would a corporate-owned bottom-line oriented magazine or newspaper even take a chance and dedicate the resources and take a risk on such an article?

So beyond the unusual (unfortunately, investigative reporting is now unusual, given newspapers' bean counting and belt tightening), what's left?

To be sure, Shaughnessy is not explicitly laying blame for this decline on anyone, though he seems to be tipping his Samuel Adams in the direction of publicists and the players who hide behind them.

But the media has its share of blame to shoulder, too. Even Red Smith once said he was admonished by his editor, Stanley Woodward, to "stop Godding up those ballplayers."

It's worse now, even if today's media builds the public's heroes higher only to tear them down later. The press is as complicit as anyone in building sports into an empire; reporters' guilt in this is subtle, but self-serving, and any reporter who complains about how ESPN has ruined sports (and I think it has, to a large extent) ought to remember that the booming Business of Sport also keeps them in business, if only just barely. Call it the Media-Athletic Complex.

(NYT Magazine article via comment on Gawker; Shaughnessy column via The Big Lead; Red Smith quotes from an actual book (yes, printed on paper!), The Red Smith Reader, which excerpted Smith's 1973 interview in No Cheering in the Press Box, neither of which appear to be in print on Amazon, though used copies are available.)

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Finally saw the Buzz Bissinger rant from HBO. Almost a week later he sounds regretful in his tone — even though he was still spoiling for a fight two days afterward in a New York Times story — and I have to agree with him on bemoaning the overuse of gossip on blogs. But whereas David Simon's anger made me want to save newspapers and pray for their survival, Bissinger's over 50 anger made me hope they'd die off, and die quickly.

Perhaps the best point of the reaction to Bissinger's comments is the blogosphere gives hacks and never-was's like me a space to write, even at a table of one. At some point, much like a career minor league pitcher, you realize you've gone as far as you can go professionally. The 25-year-old minor leaguer, of course, has the fear of being cut and finding another line of work. The Single-A journo has these fears, too, in the form of layoffs and buyouts, but can sometimes exist longer, provided he or she has can stomach continuing on in hackdom, but has to give up pretensions of even making it to Triple-A. Otherwise, if the layoffs don't get you, the depression will.

Maybe you had the talent but weren't willing to move to Odessa like brave Bissinger. Maybe you got sick of covering small-town school boards and high school games. Maybe you fell in love with a person, or a place, and didn't want to move but couldn't land a writing gig in that town, and you curse your desire to write while your friends in other professions seem to have plenty of opportunities and earn more than your pittance.

Maybe, hard as it is to realize, you just didn't have the talent, not enough of it anyway.

I'd like to make excuses that it's more competitive in the last 15 years than it ever was for Bissinger, that there were more newspapers and magazines and outlets when he started with fewer writers of all stripes (read: non-white males) seriously competing with him, and when I began trying to land jobs papers were in decline and Al Gore and Kim Jong Il hadn't invented the Internet yet, to say nothing of blogs, and blah, blah, blah.

Maybe W.C. Heinz would've blogged instead, as the Kansas City Star's Joe Posnanski says (link via The Big Lead). Or maybe not.

But there it is: talent, most likely, would have risen anyway, as Bissinger said of Heinz, especially had it been accompanied by greater ambition.

And a willingness to move to Odessa. And a publisher that would even read a query letter. And an ability to have a hiring editor overlook that you have neither an Ivy League pedigree (Harvard, especially, Cornell probably won't do) or an MBA or useless J-School Masters. And a willingess not to eat or support your family while that all goes on. OK, I'll stop.

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Other than the anomaly of the golden year of 2005, what else has this decade given us in film? You got the Lord of the Rings triology and Million Dollar Baby. And then …? The Departed was OK, but it ranks well below Scorsese's other stuff. What else you got? Studios sending out flicks like 21, last week's big money-maker, the film based on that allegedly fictional non-fiction book? (link to Boston Globe thanks to Gawker)

No, this is TV's decade. As I said before, this is decade that's given us great shows, almost all dramas, many of whom I haven't even had the chance to catch up and see yet: “The Wire,” “Mad Men,” “Deadwood,” “The Sopranos” (yes, I know it began in 1999), “Band of Brothers,” “The Shield,” “Rome,” “John Adams,” and even more populist stuff like “Rescue Me,” “Sex and the City,” “Entourage,” “Playmakers” and “Battlestar Galactica.” What else am I forgetting? (“Friday Night Lights,” perhaps, another one I haven't seen.) The jury may still be out on some of the network comedy items — I'm thinking the American “The Office” and “30 Rock” — but it's enough to offset the Reality Crap and make you want to invest in a good DVR.

Why is all this? Well, I'm developing a theory that we're seeing the rise of writers and producers (and especially writer/producers) and the decline of directors, or at least in the power structure. A writer can stretch his or her legs out better over the course of a 7- to 20-episode season than can be done in a 2- to 2½-hour flick.

Sensing this, younger actors with producing ambitions are turning to TV and away from movies. Whereas you have aging and powerful actors like Robert Redford and Tom Cruise turning out panned self-important would-be Oscar bait like Lions for Lambs, you have another set of actors like Denis Leary going for something else on TV. And that's not to say Denis Leary will ever have the chops to compete with a Redford or even (it pains me to write this) a Cruise. But can you see Tom Cruise making a TV series? He's a Movie Star. The only one I can think of capable of crossing over is Tom Hanks, and that's as a producer, not as an actor/producer.

And the great series of this decade has had the net effect of raising the bar for all other dramas, even the overtly action-oriented popcorn ones. You can't just have “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” or even “24” and have them always blowing shit up — well, you can, but you've got to at least attempt to make it so the characters have a little more depth behind them, more than you'd find in a 90-minute action flick. This goes especially for the rich supporting characters that help carry a long narrative arc.

This is, of course, not counting the low-end of the spectrum on TV — your American Idols, your reality shows, etc. But the low-brow was the balancing end of movies, too. For every Godfather, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction and Unforgiven you had your Home Alones and your 8mm's ("Hello, Machine. I'm a big fan of your work").

As it was, the Writers Strike could have been worse for viewers than it turned out to be — and why the Studios, who must know the balance of power is swinging, were lucky it ended as relatively quickly as it did. A few months was more than enough time for the writers to get their points across. If it wasn't for HBO with “The Wire” and “John Adams,” think about how much deeper the void there would have been, and may still be as other shows are just now getting back into new episodes, with the re-start of others pushed back.

Meanwhile, the new auteur age of film ushered in by the ’70s crop of Coppola, Spielberg and Scorsese is, like the Baby Boomers, aging and declining in its influence, Munich and Coppola's wine aside. In fact, other than Munich, Spielberg's greatest impact this decade may well be in his influence on “Band of Brothers” and “John Adams.”

Which brings me to my recent post on “John Adams.” If this is the kind of show that gets panned by critics, then TV is doing something good, because not only is it better than any of the other movies out there, it does takes the dramatic approach that film cannot — the novelistic approach. It's like this year's criticism of “The Wire.” Even in what many considered was an off-year for the final season of the series, it was still the best thing on any screen.

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Now we come to TV, and the “John Adams” miniseries on HBO, which was kind of panned as boring after the first two episodes aired, and then you haven't heard any critical peeps since. And despite the distractingly off-kilter camera work (We get it, Director Man, you're "artsy." Go buy an easel.) this is a fascinating show and continues the decade-long trend of great television.

Stephen Dillane as Thomas Jefferson had a great portrait of the writer in the second episode. After penning the Declaration of Independence, he sits in the same room as Adams and Franklin read over his draft. Dillane has the wounded writer pose down perfectly — uncomfortably sitting as his editors read and perhaps gut his work, legs tightly crossed, attempting to look casual by slightly slouching against a chair-back but his one crossed arm belying his defensive posture trying to graciously accept edits while defending that "every single word was precisely chosen," even as Ben Franklin corrects it: "'Self evident'? 'Self evident' then."

You can't argue about the work of the two primary leads, Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. And in supporting roles as Jefferson and Washington, Dillane and David Morse are great, and even as a hammy Benjamin Franklin, Tom Wilkinson chews his scenes with relish and presumably bad teeth.


This week's penultimate episode leads with now-President Adams and VP Jefferson trying and failing to renew their friendship. It's poignant without reaching. Ditto for the scenes with Adams debating whether to sign the Alien and Sedition Acts. Giamatti plays Adams as a tortured soul here, even as he eventually signs the Acts and Jefferson later chides him as restricting the very freedoms they fought for some 20 years earlier. Can't imagine the current Veep doing that (yes, I know Adams and Jefferson were not running mates in the years before the 12th Amendment).

This show isn't even considered that good by many critics, at least based on their early reviews (the New York Times review has a surprising (or not) pair of fairly obvious corrections that shouldn't have happened), though speculation is that it is Emmy bait.

I have to hand critic Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star Ledger credit for the great line that "'John Adams' often feels like the 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead' of American Revolution stories" — it's a put-down, but I take it as one of the things I surprisingly like about this series.

As we've seen before with “The Wire,” and has been stated elsewhere, it sometimes takes a few episodes to get a series' feet under itself — that's the beauty of HBO, and I think something many critics forget. It's like they're network execs, and if a show doesn't smash them in the mouth from the first 20 minutes, they're ready to cancel it. Usually, the critics (if not the network execs) come around.

This is a show that has me reading and surfing (yes, even real books on my lunch break at Borders and (duh!) The Web) for history that I normally wouldn't have peeked at. The scene in the second episode where Adams runs into Franklin and Washington and Jefferson in the span of, like, three minutes was like a walk into the American Hall of Fame.

And this week, with Adams and Abigail carriage-riding through the clear-cut forest to an under-construction White House among a field of "underfed slaves" was eerie and excellent at once, like a peek at the partially-built Death Star at the end of the third Star Wars (in a pandering bit to the old-school Star Wars fans at the end of an otherwise regrettable prequel series).

Plus, The Wife says John Adams looks like a Hobbit in the preview for the Final Episode. And I can't take that as a bad thing, either.

Is there any greater sign that I have fully, irreversibly corrupted The Wife when she went on to expand on the Adams-as-Hobbit analogy by describing Peacefield as "Hobbit-land" — by which she meant Hobbiton, and more broadly, America.

"He is a Hobbit, always worrying about Hobbit-land."

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This I don't get. Why the hell not just write a fictional novel based on real people, instead of writing a fake non-fiction version of it and get caught? In other words, why not just say up front its made-up, or better yet, label it as fiction and don't say anything at all. That's essentially why Hemingway did with "The Sun Also Rises" and kind of what David Simon and his gang does with The Wire. In fact, Hemingway and his publisher had the opposite concerns — that the characters and plot points in his Roman a clef would be too easily identifiable with real events and real people, who might be easily offended by his portrayal.

Is the label "memoir" so powerful in our times? Are we so caught up in Reality TV and real events that to label something fiction devalues it immediately? Well, how valuable are these fake memoirs now?

Update, 3/10/08 —NPR made the valid point over the weekend that fiction is difficult, and is judged as much by writing style as it is by plot. Non-fiction memoirs, on the other hand, are not judged as much by writing style. In other words, a shitty writer can make up for shitty writing by claiming something is true (i.e., it's a true story by an amateur, so forgive the shitty prose); as a novelist, however, you need some style, as well as a good yarn.

Esquire magazine is trying it, but labeling it as fiction. In their case, it just seems like a bad idea, but at least they're calling it fiction up front.

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I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world — or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin.

Be not afraid — be girthy.

If you’re like us, and your interests include the Sunset of the Empire and Sport (“Gladiators, I salute you”), don't delay. Meet The Girth and Baby Girth. Go click; people, it’s time to get girthy.

The irony. The pity. We’re all in.

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Not so long ago, reporters like Jimmy Breslin would hate being called "journalists" — it was too fancy a word for them. The newspaper business has always been a white collar world, but back in the day, you could make a case to consider reporters out on the beat "blue collar." Many of them didn't have college degrees — shit, some of them probably didn't finish high school. But they were street-smarter and better than most of today's journalists. Instead of looking up to someone like Jimmy Breslin — who learned his trade out on the beat — they now instead learn in the classroom; it's all theoretical and none of it practical. Sadly, none of the MBA-types and Coporate boot-lickers running newsrooms today share this view. Young reporters learned that lesson well — they idolized the Ivy League writers of Washington and flocked to grad school. Now most of them are J-School grads, with a ton of Ivy Leaguers and too many Grad School grads — they're the best classroom-educated bunch of journalists in history — but all they want to write about is Britney and Paris Hilton.

The newspaper world is not a better place for it. It was a better place because of Jimmy Breslin, but he's one of the last of a dying breed of a world long gone.

Here's a good story from the Times: When "how modern journalism became so lame," Breslin replied: “Because everybody comes to work in a suit.”

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If you hadn't heard the news, Lisa Olsen, the Daily News columnist, resigned sometime in between the Jints' NFC and Super Bowl championships these last two weeks. Probably unrelated, but six years ago, Mark Kriegel was fired from the News.

First, to the Olsen resignation: Speculation on two somewhat "meh" sites is rampant that wee author Mike Lupica, the name-brand sports columnist with the Napoleon complex, had a hand in undermining Olsen to the point of making her quit. Without any better sources than the rival New York Post and the sports blog The Big Lead, where this rumor appeared, I'll merely repeat the rumor (I just did), but can't put full stock in it because of the sources (it's like the old journalism saw: It's a story so good, you'd hate to check it out). Olsen (at least, someone claiming to be her) said nothing about this and denied another rumor about mistreatment at the News because of her gender while otherwise confirming her resignation on sportsjournalists.com.

If you remember, more than six years ago, the excellent Mark Kriegel was fired by the Daily News. Rumors then had it that Lupica had "blood on his hands," according to this old New York Observer report (last item in the linked report). Kriegel has since written two well-received biographies (I recently finished his Pistol Pete) and is now a national columnist for Fox Sports online.

To be truthful, I wasn't a huge fan of Lisa Olsen's writing, but I respected her writing, and her reporting skills were said to be top-notch. I read her stuff if I bought the News that day, but didn't seek out her work online. I respected her for persevering after what she'd been through with the Patriots and sexual harassment (and one of the reasons I still dislike the Pats).

Meanwhile, Lupica's work reads like he's writing most of his columns (except for, say, really Big-Ticket events) off the TV coverage from his living room in Connecticut (rather than actually going to the game sites, like, um, a real journo — at least, that's how his columns read to me). Is it me, or when was the last time he had a good quote in the paper that wasn't pulled from a press conference?

Nothing was like the final late-heyday of the News in the late 1990s. Pete Hamill edited it for a time and it was a classy tabloid, a workingman's Times, something it never was again after Hamill was fired. It was a place where the late Mike MacAlary won a Pulitzer (I believe that happened after Hamill's tenure, but I feel his influence lived on). Even still, the sports section still flourished until Kriegel was canned around August 2001. But during that stretch, the Daily News sports section was the newspaper-world version of the Yankees (1996-2000).

If there is any justice on the planet, Kriegel would still be at the News and Lupica would be hanging with Wee Man and trying to land a role in The Hobbit, maybe as Gollum's special private "preciousssss."

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Norman Mailer died last month. I have very little appreciation for him, maybe a little more after reading Kriegel's column. Assigned to read "Why Are We in Vietnam?" in college, I couldn't get past D.J. and the first chapter.

He also had some weird propensities linking sex to everything, and it sounds like that got weirder as he got older (check out this link to Gawker, which references the London Literary Review). Oh, he also stabbed one of his wives (she lives on).

But on Kriegel's recommendation, I picked up "The Fight" and "The Presidential Papers" (the latter I bought used on Amazon — it's out of print). "The Fight" has a great first chapter, and I skipped ahead to the boxing chapters, which are great. The lead-up stuff is worth reading, too. But, as Mailer is wont to do, he bogs his writing down in writing about himself. I can't stand the narcissism in print — it's why I'm skipping around.

Still, as Kriegel puts it, he was right-on about the press, even way back in 1963, in "Ten Thousand Words a Minute." And, from the same piece, even the master narcissist hits it on writing:

"Writing is of use to the psyche only if the writer discovers something he did not know in the act of writing. That is why a few men will go through hell in order to keep writing. … Being a writer can save one from insanity or cancer; being a bad writer can drive one smack into the center of the plague. Think of the poor reporter who does not have the leisure of the novelist or the poet to discover what he thinks. The unconscious gives up, buries itself, leaves the writer to his cliché, and saves the truth, or that part of it the reporter is yet privileged to find, for his colleagues and his friends. A good reporter is a man who must still tell you the truth privately; he has harsh bright eyes and can relate ten good stories in a row standing at a bar."

Does it make any sense or is more coils of excrement? I'd like to think part of it is True. But maybe it depends on the depth of your hangover.

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