The Poker Project (playing and writing about poker in the U.S.)
05-19-2014
, 10:54 AM
Positively Fifth Street and Literary Journalism
Only ten years young, James McManus's Positively Fifth Street (2004) is already a poker classic. As poker narratives go, I'd award it second place behind The Biggest Game in Town. But these are two very different books; ideally you should read both. Plenty's been said about the book, so what follows are a few observations related to my last post about literary journalism.
For those unfamiliar with the plot, here's a blurb from Amazon: In the spring of 2000, Harper's Magazine sent James McManus to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker, in particular the progress of women in the $23 million event, and the murder of Ted Binion, the tournament's prodigal host, purportedly done in by a stripper and her boyfriend. But when McManus arrives, the lure of the tables compels him to risk his entire Harper's advance in a long-shot attempt to play in the tournament himself. This is his deliciously suspenseful account of the tournament--the players, the hand-to-hand combat, his own unlikely progress in it--and the delightfully seedy carnival atmosphere that surrounds it. http://www.amazon.com/Positively-Fif.../dp/0312422520
Creative reconstruction: the opening of Positively Fifth presents the murder of Ted Binion in full, gory detail (death by burking, yuck). Out come nipple clamps, handcuffs, a hundred Xanax tablets, a gun—then Ted’s dead. After pages of vivid description and dialogue, we finally we get an explanation of where this account comes from. “This is how I imagine Ted Binion’s murder and its immediate aftermath,” say McManus (11). McManus was never at the scene, he never interviewed Sandra Murphy or Rick Tabish, he doesn't "know" what happened—and that’s ok. Later in the book, when he describes The Master of Go, an account of a famous contest between a Japanese master and young challenger, the book is described as “a faithful chronicle-novel…embroidered or colored but essentially nonfiction all the same” (229). This, of course, is also a description of Positively Fifth Street.
Literature and life
McManus is a literary man. He’s a graceful, if flamboyant, writer and he’s read a lot—the book is filled with quotes from both high and pop culture. Like the parallel with The Master of Go, McManus often aligns himself with particular literary traditions. Here’s one not-so-subtle example: “I’m further inspired, I guess, by the fact that Hunter S. Thompson stayed two floors below me while covering the Mint 400 motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated back in ‘71” (38). Are we reading poker’s version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?
Then there’s the connection to Dostoevsky, who wasn’t just a famous gambler but also, like McManus, a man who found love in a second marriage.
Creative Structure
To me, McManus’s major achievement is his ability to weave together at least four stories into a gripping narrative: (1) the Ted Binion murder trial; (2) the WSOP main event; (3) his family life; and (4) the history of poker. The WSOP narrative dominates, as it should. The fact that McManus made it so deep sets this book above similar accounts by Anthony Holden and, yes, Colson Whitehead. You can’t fake this kind of drama.
Poker Literature and Life
The author’s deep run sets up yet another parallel between poker literature and life. Throughout the book McManus details his studying habits, which also allows him to explain the game to novices. T.J. Cloutier’s Championship Hold’em is a favorite resource, creating a nice meta-game and meta-fictional moment when, at the final table, the two authors tangle with each other in a pivotal hand! You can’t make this stuff up, as they say.
The hand itself seems poorly played: McManus raises with AK, TJ reraises in position, McManus just calls (leaving himself a potsized bet behind) and check/calls for his tournament life on a 254 board. TJ flips A9off and loses. My book didn’t teach you that, boy, snarls TJ.
McManus's amateur status isn't just a punch-line, it's a rhetorical strategy. He plays up the fact that, just like the rest of us, he's no poker savant. This brings us closer to him and connects us to the narrative. As readers we fumble alongside this poet-journalist-pokerplayer, feeling what it's like to battle TJ and other pros.
Notes and Questions
Poker and baseball: “Between sixty and eight million Americans play poker, making baseball the second great American game” (27)
In both contests position, aggression, and stealing are critical, but patience is what turns out to be the most necessary virtue” (27)
***
“There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker…Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kindhearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a ‘flush.’ It is enough to make one ashamed of one’s species.” Mark Twain
Poker (and all competitive activities, from bball to poetry writing) increase testosterone levels (26). On ego: who’s the MAN? (26)
***
Colson Whitehead up next.
Only ten years young, James McManus's Positively Fifth Street (2004) is already a poker classic. As poker narratives go, I'd award it second place behind The Biggest Game in Town. But these are two very different books; ideally you should read both. Plenty's been said about the book, so what follows are a few observations related to my last post about literary journalism.
For those unfamiliar with the plot, here's a blurb from Amazon: In the spring of 2000, Harper's Magazine sent James McManus to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker, in particular the progress of women in the $23 million event, and the murder of Ted Binion, the tournament's prodigal host, purportedly done in by a stripper and her boyfriend. But when McManus arrives, the lure of the tables compels him to risk his entire Harper's advance in a long-shot attempt to play in the tournament himself. This is his deliciously suspenseful account of the tournament--the players, the hand-to-hand combat, his own unlikely progress in it--and the delightfully seedy carnival atmosphere that surrounds it. http://www.amazon.com/Positively-Fif.../dp/0312422520
Creative reconstruction: the opening of Positively Fifth presents the murder of Ted Binion in full, gory detail (death by burking, yuck). Out come nipple clamps, handcuffs, a hundred Xanax tablets, a gun—then Ted’s dead. After pages of vivid description and dialogue, we finally we get an explanation of where this account comes from. “This is how I imagine Ted Binion’s murder and its immediate aftermath,” say McManus (11). McManus was never at the scene, he never interviewed Sandra Murphy or Rick Tabish, he doesn't "know" what happened—and that’s ok. Later in the book, when he describes The Master of Go, an account of a famous contest between a Japanese master and young challenger, the book is described as “a faithful chronicle-novel…embroidered or colored but essentially nonfiction all the same” (229). This, of course, is also a description of Positively Fifth Street.
Literature and life
McManus is a literary man. He’s a graceful, if flamboyant, writer and he’s read a lot—the book is filled with quotes from both high and pop culture. Like the parallel with The Master of Go, McManus often aligns himself with particular literary traditions. Here’s one not-so-subtle example: “I’m further inspired, I guess, by the fact that Hunter S. Thompson stayed two floors below me while covering the Mint 400 motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated back in ‘71” (38). Are we reading poker’s version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?
Then there’s the connection to Dostoevsky, who wasn’t just a famous gambler but also, like McManus, a man who found love in a second marriage.
Creative Structure
To me, McManus’s major achievement is his ability to weave together at least four stories into a gripping narrative: (1) the Ted Binion murder trial; (2) the WSOP main event; (3) his family life; and (4) the history of poker. The WSOP narrative dominates, as it should. The fact that McManus made it so deep sets this book above similar accounts by Anthony Holden and, yes, Colson Whitehead. You can’t fake this kind of drama.
Poker Literature and Life
The author’s deep run sets up yet another parallel between poker literature and life. Throughout the book McManus details his studying habits, which also allows him to explain the game to novices. T.J. Cloutier’s Championship Hold’em is a favorite resource, creating a nice meta-game and meta-fictional moment when, at the final table, the two authors tangle with each other in a pivotal hand! You can’t make this stuff up, as they say.
The hand itself seems poorly played: McManus raises with AK, TJ reraises in position, McManus just calls (leaving himself a potsized bet behind) and check/calls for his tournament life on a 254 board. TJ flips A9off and loses. My book didn’t teach you that, boy, snarls TJ.
McManus's amateur status isn't just a punch-line, it's a rhetorical strategy. He plays up the fact that, just like the rest of us, he's no poker savant. This brings us closer to him and connects us to the narrative. As readers we fumble alongside this poet-journalist-pokerplayer, feeling what it's like to battle TJ and other pros.
Notes and Questions
Poker and baseball: “Between sixty and eight million Americans play poker, making baseball the second great American game” (27)
In both contests position, aggression, and stealing are critical, but patience is what turns out to be the most necessary virtue” (27)
***
“There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker…Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kindhearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a ‘flush.’ It is enough to make one ashamed of one’s species.” Mark Twain
Poker (and all competitive activities, from bball to poetry writing) increase testosterone levels (26). On ego: who’s the MAN? (26)
***
Colson Whitehead up next.
05-19-2014
, 03:16 PM
The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 2014)
“Poker was the perfect game for me, as I didn’t have to speak. It was like Disneyland for hermits. I had found the place where I could go out among the humans, elbow to elbow for hours, and not say a ****ing word” (85).
Misanthrope Meets Vegas
Book summary: “‘The Noble Hustle’ is, as its subtitle, "Poker, Beef Jerky and Death," suggests, a witty, wandering book about poker and anything else that floated through Whitehead's consciousness during its composition, some of which is funny or interesting. The book expands articles commissioned for the ESPN-associated sports blog Grantland, which in 2011 supplied him a $10,000 buy-in for the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas in exchange for a report on his experience.” (http://www.arcamax.com/entertainment...iews/s-1516929)
Let’s start with the good: The Noble Hustle is effing funny, and Whitehead can write. The book is filled with hilarious observations, wry humor, punchy one-liners.
On old people: “We passed the geriatric zombies in tracksuits installed at the slots, empty coin buckets overturned on their oxygen tanks. These gray-skinned doomed tugged on the levers, blinked, tugged again. Blink. Tug. Blink” (106).
On coach (and fellow writer) Helen Ellis: “She’d teach me things. About poker. About life. It’d be like one of those racial harmony movies I never go to see, like The blind Side, where a Southern white lady instructs a weirdo black guy in how to use a fork” (65)
On poker strategy: “Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.”
The whole book is like this—a wry, funny mock-epic in which Whitehead laughs at poker players, old people, writers, readers, and—above all—himself. We learn that the author hails from The Republic of Anhedonia, that miserable place where no one can feel pleasure. (“an-he-donia,” the epigraph reads, “the inability to experience pleasure”). Fitting, then, that the author is drawn to two other seamy stops on the map: Atlantic City and Vegas. Back in the day, when a younger Whitehead bussed to AC for weekend jaunts, casinos were different. Now they’ve been thoroughly commercialized, transformed into “Leisure Industrial Complexes”: “The contemporary casino is more than a gambling destination; it’s a multifarious pleasure enclosure intended to satisfy every member of the family unit” (8). It’s nice that casino offers a bit more buff and sheen than in the past, but it’s also confusing. “Where have all the molesters gone, the weenie wagglers and chicken hawks? Whither the diddlers?” (5). The answer, it turns out, is among poker players. Whitehead enters the poker room at the Tropicana, takes a look at the grubby clientele, and sighs a sigh of relief: “I found my degradation” (9).
Writing as Consolation
“I had been here before, in American cities of a certain size, a bunch of gnawed wing bones before me. Drinking beer alone among flat-screens and dead eyes. What happen in Vegas stays in Vegas, because in the end, whatever goes down, whatever you get up to, your triumphs and transgressions, nobody actually understands what it means except for you. What did it mean to you in your secret heart to win that money or lose that money, to hold that person. To see them walk away. It is unshareable. No one to narc on you to the folks back home: the only narc here is you” (18).
There’s a confessional impulse in this book, a veiled anguish that never finds expression. Whitehead writes vaguely about his (unnamed) wife and kid and divorce, about agony and depression and beef jerky. Ultimately, though, the narrator prefers to hide behind his “half-dead mask” (1).
How can writing be a consolation? I'm reminded by a quote from DFW:
“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves…We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside” —David Foster Wallace
Writing to feel less alone: this is what Wallace and, I believe, Whitehead are trying to do. Poker is odd in that it’s a deeply social game—talking, laughing, drinking—but it’s also filled with hostility, camouflages, “masks,” the feeling that you’re alone in a crowd. The narrator of The Noble Hustle surrounds himself with “losers,” with Big Mitches, Robotrons, and Methy Mikes—all cartoon characters, abstractions—who hide behind “wretched camouflage[s]” and surely feel as alone as the foreigner from Anhedonia.
Whitehead may be trying to work out, through writing, his relationship to these people, and to the way in which they (and we) are linked through shared experience. As Wallace put it,
“I just think that to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I’m going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.”
One of the incredible things about Wallace's fiction is that it enters into many kinds of minds—both attractive and repugnant—with respect and an uncanny degree of understanding. Every kind of person was of interest to him. With that said, I don’t think he—or Whitehead—are able to achieve this kind of intimacy in their nonfiction. How much can you know about someone you just met? How much can you know about someone who's wearing shades, a hoodie, and is trying to deceive you? I’d say that Wallace's and Whitehead's nonfictional personas are pretty similar: an intelligent outsider (and a bit of a smart-ass) who’s writing about some weird subculture with curiosity and awe.
AC, Vegas, Busto!
The book moves in three acts: a “training trip” to AC, where Whitehead tests his mettle and explains the rules of Hold’em; (2) a visit to and history of Vegas, which reads like a kind of preamble to the tournament; and (3) the Main Event, where our humble author strives, and fails, to advance deep. The shadow of McManus looms large in this final section (and Whitehead mentions him more than once). How the hell do you outdo an author who not only writes eloquently about poker’s main event in 2000, but who nearly won the damn thing?
You don’t, it turns out. The downside of The Noble Hustle is that it lacks substance—Whitehead knows little about poker strategy or history, and joking about his ignorance gets him only so far—and an exciting plot: Whitehead busts quietly, undramatically, and leaves without a gripping story to lean on. With nothing much to write about, Whitehead turns to humor, observation, and witty prose—and, for me, that’s enough.
Notes and Questions
Poker and the writing life (86)
Clicking chips, a cricket symphony (119)
***
Next up will be Brooks Haxton's Fading Hearts on the River.
Thanks, Russell. Interesting that you prefer McManus. I think the two books are great complements to each other--in certain ways they couldn't be more different.
“Poker was the perfect game for me, as I didn’t have to speak. It was like Disneyland for hermits. I had found the place where I could go out among the humans, elbow to elbow for hours, and not say a ****ing word” (85).
Misanthrope Meets Vegas
Book summary: “‘The Noble Hustle’ is, as its subtitle, "Poker, Beef Jerky and Death," suggests, a witty, wandering book about poker and anything else that floated through Whitehead's consciousness during its composition, some of which is funny or interesting. The book expands articles commissioned for the ESPN-associated sports blog Grantland, which in 2011 supplied him a $10,000 buy-in for the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas in exchange for a report on his experience.” (http://www.arcamax.com/entertainment...iews/s-1516929)
Let’s start with the good: The Noble Hustle is effing funny, and Whitehead can write. The book is filled with hilarious observations, wry humor, punchy one-liners.
On old people: “We passed the geriatric zombies in tracksuits installed at the slots, empty coin buckets overturned on their oxygen tanks. These gray-skinned doomed tugged on the levers, blinked, tugged again. Blink. Tug. Blink” (106).
On coach (and fellow writer) Helen Ellis: “She’d teach me things. About poker. About life. It’d be like one of those racial harmony movies I never go to see, like The blind Side, where a Southern white lady instructs a weirdo black guy in how to use a fork” (65)
On poker strategy: “Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.”
The whole book is like this—a wry, funny mock-epic in which Whitehead laughs at poker players, old people, writers, readers, and—above all—himself. We learn that the author hails from The Republic of Anhedonia, that miserable place where no one can feel pleasure. (“an-he-donia,” the epigraph reads, “the inability to experience pleasure”). Fitting, then, that the author is drawn to two other seamy stops on the map: Atlantic City and Vegas. Back in the day, when a younger Whitehead bussed to AC for weekend jaunts, casinos were different. Now they’ve been thoroughly commercialized, transformed into “Leisure Industrial Complexes”: “The contemporary casino is more than a gambling destination; it’s a multifarious pleasure enclosure intended to satisfy every member of the family unit” (8). It’s nice that casino offers a bit more buff and sheen than in the past, but it’s also confusing. “Where have all the molesters gone, the weenie wagglers and chicken hawks? Whither the diddlers?” (5). The answer, it turns out, is among poker players. Whitehead enters the poker room at the Tropicana, takes a look at the grubby clientele, and sighs a sigh of relief: “I found my degradation” (9).
Writing as Consolation
“I had been here before, in American cities of a certain size, a bunch of gnawed wing bones before me. Drinking beer alone among flat-screens and dead eyes. What happen in Vegas stays in Vegas, because in the end, whatever goes down, whatever you get up to, your triumphs and transgressions, nobody actually understands what it means except for you. What did it mean to you in your secret heart to win that money or lose that money, to hold that person. To see them walk away. It is unshareable. No one to narc on you to the folks back home: the only narc here is you” (18).
There’s a confessional impulse in this book, a veiled anguish that never finds expression. Whitehead writes vaguely about his (unnamed) wife and kid and divorce, about agony and depression and beef jerky. Ultimately, though, the narrator prefers to hide behind his “half-dead mask” (1).
How can writing be a consolation? I'm reminded by a quote from DFW:
“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves…We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside” —David Foster Wallace
Writing to feel less alone: this is what Wallace and, I believe, Whitehead are trying to do. Poker is odd in that it’s a deeply social game—talking, laughing, drinking—but it’s also filled with hostility, camouflages, “masks,” the feeling that you’re alone in a crowd. The narrator of The Noble Hustle surrounds himself with “losers,” with Big Mitches, Robotrons, and Methy Mikes—all cartoon characters, abstractions—who hide behind “wretched camouflage[s]” and surely feel as alone as the foreigner from Anhedonia.
Whitehead may be trying to work out, through writing, his relationship to these people, and to the way in which they (and we) are linked through shared experience. As Wallace put it,
“I just think that to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I’m going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.”
One of the incredible things about Wallace's fiction is that it enters into many kinds of minds—both attractive and repugnant—with respect and an uncanny degree of understanding. Every kind of person was of interest to him. With that said, I don’t think he—or Whitehead—are able to achieve this kind of intimacy in their nonfiction. How much can you know about someone you just met? How much can you know about someone who's wearing shades, a hoodie, and is trying to deceive you? I’d say that Wallace's and Whitehead's nonfictional personas are pretty similar: an intelligent outsider (and a bit of a smart-ass) who’s writing about some weird subculture with curiosity and awe.
AC, Vegas, Busto!
The book moves in three acts: a “training trip” to AC, where Whitehead tests his mettle and explains the rules of Hold’em; (2) a visit to and history of Vegas, which reads like a kind of preamble to the tournament; and (3) the Main Event, where our humble author strives, and fails, to advance deep. The shadow of McManus looms large in this final section (and Whitehead mentions him more than once). How the hell do you outdo an author who not only writes eloquently about poker’s main event in 2000, but who nearly won the damn thing?
You don’t, it turns out. The downside of The Noble Hustle is that it lacks substance—Whitehead knows little about poker strategy or history, and joking about his ignorance gets him only so far—and an exciting plot: Whitehead busts quietly, undramatically, and leaves without a gripping story to lean on. With nothing much to write about, Whitehead turns to humor, observation, and witty prose—and, for me, that’s enough.
Notes and Questions
Poker and the writing life (86)
Clicking chips, a cricket symphony (119)
***
Next up will be Brooks Haxton's Fading Hearts on the River.
Thanks, Russell. Interesting that you prefer McManus. I think the two books are great complements to each other--in certain ways they couldn't be more different.
05-20-2014
, 03:19 AM
05-21-2014
, 12:55 PM
Happy Anniversary, Thanks!, from Poker Project to Poker Book
One year ago tomorrow marks the anniversary of this goals thread. A big THANKS to everyone who's been following, responding, lurking. I've learned a lot about poker in one short year, and you guys are a big reason for that.
I've learned a lot about myself in the last year, too. Forcing myself to read and write about poker, literature, and craft--especially about developing my "voice"--has made me even more curious and excited about my job. I can say with confidence that I've escaped the "burn-out phase" that often follows graduate school.
This year has also given me a sense of purpose about the kind of work/writing that I want to pursue, although that purpose is something that I would never have predicted: I'm going to write a book about poker players.
Yes, a book! With, like, a plot and characters and setting and stuff. The book's conception and structure is still hazy, but I can say this much about it. (Cliffs of this whole thread). As I read about poker over the course of the year, I realized that I do want to write about poker but not in an academic context. What I want to say won't work in that form. I want to write a book of narrative nonfiction, set in New Orleans, that tells the story of a poker room and its players (I have personal and aesthetic reasons for setting the book in nola, many of which will come out in this thread, I'm sure). There will be elements of ethnography to it--especially interviewing and extended participant-observation--but my model isn't David Hayano; it's Al Alvarez. Although my subject and approach will be different (and there's no way in hell I can write like him), I love how Alvarez uses scenes and dialogue to tell the story of Vegas and its highrollers. So I plan to move to New Orleans, teach, get involved in the poker community, and write this book.
Now that I've found a direction and a preferred mode of writing, the content of this blog will change as needed. This will mean more poker content. It will also mean fewer book reviews, at least for now. "Reading is the great escape from writing." I can still remember this comment from a lunch meeting in graduate school, when a senior scholar was instructing us newbies on how to be productive. What this means for me now, I think, is that I need to worry less about what others have written and focus more on improving my own writing, which has a long way to go.
Also, I have a twitter account. BOOM
https://twitter.com/beeteesax
Onward!
One year ago tomorrow marks the anniversary of this goals thread. A big THANKS to everyone who's been following, responding, lurking. I've learned a lot about poker in one short year, and you guys are a big reason for that.
I've learned a lot about myself in the last year, too. Forcing myself to read and write about poker, literature, and craft--especially about developing my "voice"--has made me even more curious and excited about my job. I can say with confidence that I've escaped the "burn-out phase" that often follows graduate school.
This year has also given me a sense of purpose about the kind of work/writing that I want to pursue, although that purpose is something that I would never have predicted: I'm going to write a book about poker players.
Yes, a book! With, like, a plot and characters and setting and stuff. The book's conception and structure is still hazy, but I can say this much about it. (Cliffs of this whole thread). As I read about poker over the course of the year, I realized that I do want to write about poker but not in an academic context. What I want to say won't work in that form. I want to write a book of narrative nonfiction, set in New Orleans, that tells the story of a poker room and its players (I have personal and aesthetic reasons for setting the book in nola, many of which will come out in this thread, I'm sure). There will be elements of ethnography to it--especially interviewing and extended participant-observation--but my model isn't David Hayano; it's Al Alvarez. Although my subject and approach will be different (and there's no way in hell I can write like him), I love how Alvarez uses scenes and dialogue to tell the story of Vegas and its highrollers. So I plan to move to New Orleans, teach, get involved in the poker community, and write this book.
Now that I've found a direction and a preferred mode of writing, the content of this blog will change as needed. This will mean more poker content. It will also mean fewer book reviews, at least for now. "Reading is the great escape from writing." I can still remember this comment from a lunch meeting in graduate school, when a senior scholar was instructing us newbies on how to be productive. What this means for me now, I think, is that I need to worry less about what others have written and focus more on improving my own writing, which has a long way to go.
Also, I have a twitter account. BOOM
https://twitter.com/beeteesax
Onward!
05-22-2014
, 12:06 AM
05-22-2014
, 03:47 AM
05-22-2014
, 04:28 PM
Interviewing a Poker-Playing Poet
A month or so again I stumbled across this article on Joel-Dias Porter, a poet and former DJ who left a job teaching middle-schoolers to play poker in Atlantic City, where he's been for the last fifteen years: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/243666#article.
I like the article but don't think it does justice to either the poker side of Joel's story or the milieu of AC (why AC? How has the city changed in the last 15 years?).
Well, I've decided to talk to Joel myself. I'll be in AC for 4-5 days--from Sat night to Thursdayish--and will write an essay, based primarily around his words, that narrates our encounter. I hope to provide readers with an update on Joel's progress and also delve into the poker side of his story.
Some questions that I plan to ask:
*How different are you from the self you were a decade or two decades ago?
* How has poker played a part in this change?
* How does Joel's poker-playing impact his art?
* (Dr TJ's question): whether Dias-Porter still saw himself primarily as poet or a poker player, or whether, and perhaps more likely, he regarded such a hierarchical classification of his identity mistaken.
*who will win the NBA championship?
If you could talk to Joel, what questions would you ask him?
I'm looking forward to this opportunity. Joel has been very generous with his time so far and I look forward to meeting him.
A month or so again I stumbled across this article on Joel-Dias Porter, a poet and former DJ who left a job teaching middle-schoolers to play poker in Atlantic City, where he's been for the last fifteen years: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/243666#article.
I like the article but don't think it does justice to either the poker side of Joel's story or the milieu of AC (why AC? How has the city changed in the last 15 years?).
Well, I've decided to talk to Joel myself. I'll be in AC for 4-5 days--from Sat night to Thursdayish--and will write an essay, based primarily around his words, that narrates our encounter. I hope to provide readers with an update on Joel's progress and also delve into the poker side of his story.
Some questions that I plan to ask:
*How different are you from the self you were a decade or two decades ago?
* How has poker played a part in this change?
* How does Joel's poker-playing impact his art?
* (Dr TJ's question): whether Dias-Porter still saw himself primarily as poet or a poker player, or whether, and perhaps more likely, he regarded such a hierarchical classification of his identity mistaken.
*who will win the NBA championship?
If you could talk to Joel, what questions would you ask him?
I'm looking forward to this opportunity. Joel has been very generous with his time so far and I look forward to meeting him.
05-24-2014
, 06:42 AM
06-01-2014
, 09:12 AM
Quote:
The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 2014)
“Poker was the perfect game for me, as I didn’t have to speak. It was like Disneyland for hermits. I had found the place where I could go out among the humans, elbow to elbow for hours, and not say a ****ing word” (85).
“Poker was the perfect game for me, as I didn’t have to speak. It was like Disneyland for hermits. I had found the place where I could go out among the humans, elbow to elbow for hours, and not say a ****ing word” (85).
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/bo...g&pgtype=Blogs
06-10-2014
, 05:01 PM
07-03-2014
, 05:48 PM
Hello from Milledgeville!
Pokering has been on hold lately, since I've been in rural Georgia for a month-long seminar on Flannery O'Connor. For those who aren't familiar with her, she's a damn good short story writer who lived in Milledgeville in the mid-twentieth century.
Just got back from a visit to Central State Hospital, or the "lunatic asylum," as it was called years ago. Creepy place.
Hope you're all enjoying the summer--and the WSOP, if you're playing or railing.
Pokering has been on hold lately, since I've been in rural Georgia for a month-long seminar on Flannery O'Connor. For those who aren't familiar with her, she's a damn good short story writer who lived in Milledgeville in the mid-twentieth century.
Just got back from a visit to Central State Hospital, or the "lunatic asylum," as it was called years ago. Creepy place.
Hope you're all enjoying the summer--and the WSOP, if you're playing or railing.