by Ben Rogers
I always wanted to be a racehorse. You probably won’t understand. Maybe when you were in elementary school you used to dream of being a cheetah or something. Oh, they’re so fast! Seventy miles an hour and all that. Only in bursts, my friend, only in bursts.
I don’t do bursts. I’m 290 pounds. Racehorses go the distance. Forty-five miles an hour for a mile. The whole time. Cheetah’s sitting over there on the sidelines, unzipping his warm-ups, doing calisthenics in front of the crowd. Sure, sprinters get the shoe sponsorships, the photo ops. Fine. But racehorses, they only pose for photo-finishes. That’s because they have heart. When Secretariat died they cut him open. He had the heart of a whale.
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Tagged as:
New Literature Online,
Short Story
One Close Call Too Many
The tragedy in Haiti has us thinking about close calls. We’ve been lucky. Hell, with our family’s history, we feel fortunate just to be alive. Our great-grandfather disembarked the Lusitania in New York in April of 1915. The Lusitania’s next voyage was its last, sunk by a German sub. Our grandfather was minutes from boarding a ship in Brooklyn. It was torpedoed days later. And just over five years ago we were steps away from visiting Ko Phi Phi, the island off of Thailand destroyed by the December 26, 2004 tsunami. It’s hard for us to think of these things and then move into Tuesday’s Literary Briefing. But we soldier on. Here’s a Wall Street Journal excerpt from Brian Dillon’s forthcoming book about tormented artists. The Guardian looks at Antonia Fraser’s memoir of her late husband, Harold Pinter. Polaroids have come and gone, writers adopt English as a second language, and an interview with Irish novelist Colum McCann. Finally, Stephen Elliot shares stories from his DIY book tour. Here’s to close calls and good luck. – Andrew Geer
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Tagged as:
Literature in the Media,
Tuesday's Literary Briefing
by Ben Rogers
