Watching another old veteran go down with an injury causes our narrator contemplate the hidden truths of the game he plays.
(from Fiction, Vol. 19, Number 1)
More than anything else, this story instilled in me the belief that sports is not a tired idea, that there are still philosophies and aspects and characters and uncarved niches to be created within the genre, if sports fiction is even a genre. It’s not all cliché yet. “Who Weeps…” delves a lot deeper than that, however, as the narrator, himself an aging baller, lets his mind wander to places it’s been before, but maybe didn’t linger this long. Everything sails, untethered by quotation marks and question marks, but never drifting recklessly.
And the language. I will now type for you a part of the story which has little to do with basketball, which only tangentially relates to the plot, just because:
sprouting wings and rising. Birdfish, fishbirds, leaping,
bodies arched like rainbows, their feathers or gills or hide
or shell, whatever you’d call their wrappings for which
there are no words, glisten, shimmer like metal, like wind,
like water, thousands of messages, thousands of tiny faces
climbing, row after row, from courtside to rafters,
tiers of eyes circling the arena.
I’d never read John Edgar Wideman before, but I’m certainly going to make up for it at some point. Here‘s a Salon interview with him in which the lower majority of his body is replaced by his first initial. A man becomes a J like that. I don’t know why, but he does.
Damn. It is really raining outside.