A writer could almost envy Louisville’s sports journalists. The whores, the bribery, the coaches, the chiseling ex-president – it’s almost too good. Tim Sullivan takes full advantage, in passages like this one:

At a time when it has been absolutely essential for [the University of Louisville] to be beyond reproach, it appears to have strayed beneath contempt. Lecturing the NCAA Committee on Infractions on precedent and proportionality from such a disadvantageous position risks being received as the epitome of arrogance and the nadir of self-awareness. It’s like complaining to a cop about being cited for speeding upon crashing into a parked car.

Nice. This is also good:

“At bottom, the penalty the COI imposed is simply unfair,” U of L’s appeal reads. “It wipes away the collegiate careers of numerous student-athletes because they were unwillingly drawn into McGee’s schemes; ignores the University’s efforts to investigate and redress McGee’s misconduct; and imposes one of the most severe sanctions possible – the vacation of a Division I NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship, two Final Four appearances and multiple seasons of competition – because of the participation of a handful of student-athletes who did little wrong.”

The problem with this account is that it paints members of the 2013 team as unwitting innocents — this though Powell has described several of them as enthusiastic regulars. At least two of those players – Chane Behanan and Montrezl Harrell – were formally disassociated from U of L for failing to cooperate with its investigation.

If your goal is to depict players as having sex foisted upon them, their active participation could pose a high hurdle.

LOL.

Some good writing from an Alabama scribe. ‘Course it’s about ol’ Roy.

UD loves this sentence from Edmund Wilson’s 1938 essay about Edith Wharton. Maybe because UD is such a tea drinker.

Here are the exact phrases that prompted her to laugh; the laughpoints, call them:

his ‘80s teen movie villain sons

the accused serial sexual harasser/lardass

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Hm. A close reading reveals four uses of the word ass, and two of the word dick… Make of this what you will… But UD will say that the combination in strict proximity of a high class word and a low class can be very funny. Example here: consummate douchebag.

Also – a pile-up of adjectives is often funny (bloated loudmouth dick’s, bloated [hey, there’s another repetition] woman-terrorizing ass).

A New Yorker writer remembers Trump’s most recent wedding.

Extremely good writers can take what you know, re-charge it, and scare you.

Because this is a blog that appreciates word play.

In coming weeks more GOP leaders could decline to support [Trump]. The awkward pose of polite distance could turn into a stampede — or to change the metaphor, ships deserting a sinking rat.

Colorful writing from a University of Wisconsin sophomore.

From a Ben Brantley review of “Thérèse Raquin,” a play on Broadway.

The sex scenes between Laurent and Thérèse are so brief and blunt that they hardly seem worth killing for. Like these characters’ lives, their erotic encounters are nasty, brutish and short. That’s a fair description of the play in which they appear, except for the short part.

A former meerkat expert at London Zoo has been ordered to pay compensation to a monkey handler she attacked with a wine glass in a love spat over a llama-keeper.

Now, this is how you write.

But before I get to that – Let me just say how much SOS likes it when she is brought, through idle online pecking, to a piece of writing that she loves. The last piece of writing she liked as much as Drew Jubera’s essay for GQ on southern-football junior colleges was about trailer parks, and she lighted on that piece in the same way.

The specific trail that took me to Jubera’s piece involved UD‘s interest in Zeke Pike. Zeke Pike is a superfuckup who plays really good football. Quarterback even. Plus Zeke has a great football name.

Zeke has now flushed out of three RDQ (Rapidly Descending Quality) schools onaccounta the fuckupery (do you really, at this point, need details?) — Auburn, Louisville, and Morgan State. UD was going to write a post speculating about the fourth school Zeke will attend (possible post titles: SNEAK PEAK, ZEKE. IS PIKE PAST PEAK?) (Pike’s Peak: Get it?), but she was having trouble coming up with the next RDQ school…

Then she read this comment on the article about him to which she linked up there.

They are desperate for a QB in East Mississippi.

So off she Googled to East Mississippi Community College, star of Jubera’s GQ piece. SOS offers some excerpts. Watch carefully. The guy knows how to write.

First paragraph – Setting the scene.

The landscape is drunk Faulkner: small and spooky and piss-poor. Piney woods run deep enough to hide whatever you don’t want found. What passes for the old downtown is one side of one block. Five brick buildings still stand; another four are gone, just disappeared, as if by cremation — nothing left but rubble and little piles of red dust. Drive by most days and the only open business is a working Coke machine on the sidewalk.

With the next excerpt, you note that one of the things Jubera’s got going is a wonderful back and forth between highfalutin (Faulkner) and lowfalutin (piss-poor). See how he continues the trick.

To local existentialists, it makes perfect sense. “There’s a lot to offer in Scooba, Mississippi. Want to know what it is?” Nick Clark, a white-haired former Lion who works in the school’s development office, asks me from across his desk.

I allow that I am totally stumped.

“There are no distractions!”

Existentialists. We’re going to keep this going, this glorious juxtaposition – not just because it’s funny and rich, suggesting at once the reality of the place, and the consciousness ol’ Jubera (and his readers) are bringing with them when they visit Scooba, but because many of the people Jubera talks to are self-conscious at quite a high level about their existence.

[The school’s] roster does tend to over-represent the discarded and dispossessed: lawbreakers, rule-benders, dropouts, dipshits, potheads, and assorted other screwups — almost all of whom can flat-out ball. Coaches recruit kids from houses without food, without parents, without floors. One coach sat across from a mother who stared back at him with four eyes. “She had a pair of eyeballs tattooed right over her titties,” he told me. “It gets surreal sometimes.”

Noticing some similarities to the article on trailer parks UD also loved? And notice too how the high/low thing keeps working: dipshits/surrealism.

Now to meet the coach:

The glassy eyes of an eight-point buck stare me down from a back wall as Buddy greets me from a big padded chair behind his big wooden desk. Buddy is big, too: A former center, he’s short and wide and rounded off at the edges. One of his chins sprouts a white goatee.

Buddy spits Red Man tobacco into a Diet Coke bottle. Originally from Alabama, he’s still Bama enough to name his yellow Lab Bama. Now 49, Buddy has said he got into coaching because he wasn’t smart enough to do anything else. He’d really like you to believe that. Tucked between the sports books on his shelves: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

A typical Buddy takeaway: “As a rule of thumb, big fish eat little fish.”

… “I try to be self-actualized enough,” [Buddy later] says, “to realize I’m an asshole.”

Can Jubera sketch a character in six sentences? Are you fucking kidding me? And another existentialist/surrealist! (Would have been even better if the book were Trout Fishing in America. Higher-level surrealism-consciousness.)

And again: Lyrical plus sordid:

Later that evening, in heavy air that feels more like bathwater, [the] players jog onto a practice field they share with the adjoining agricultural high school. The cornfield across the road and the little Baptist church beside it turn gold, then pink, then indigo in the sun’s lowering light.

It’s still football: Coaches bark insults, players run into one another, fights threaten to break out. A fat kid bends over after running gassers and pukes.

Gassers and pukes. The sun’s lowering light. Can you get enough of this stuff? SOS can’t get enough of this stuff.

*************************

Update: The notorious woman-beater De’Andre Johnson has “made his way to East Mississippi Community College.”

The reality of a comic-book villain Latino-basher dominating their party’s communications is a nightmare [Republican strategists] never contemplated.

Fox News is probably trying to freeze Trump out of its debates by requiring that all candidates file paperwork. Many people believe Trump has exaggerated his net worth and won’t be willing to expose his empty boasts by disclosing his actual net worth. But many of us also believed Trump would never declare a campaign. He has already proven his willingness to act irrationally. Trump has blown up a lucrative commercial brand as a loudmouth pitchman and embodiment of vulgar wealth (a hardy American trope) and traded it for Pat Buchanan’s brand — which is also a hardy American trope, but with far more limited opportunity for commercial exploitation.

They go to these things, they pack their colons full of poorly-prepared meat products, they get cripplingly drunk, they slur along with the chorus of some moronic alcohol anthem, they get into their minivans and pick-ups, they drive home arguing the whole way and they hit a tree five blocks from their house and die instantly.

Straight out of Flannery O’Connor.

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But hey you can’t argue with this local commenter’s math.

If 53000 people attended and 300 were ejected that is less than 1% of the attendees. Which means 99% of the crowd behaved, were not drunk, were not making fools of themselves. Where is that story?

“The North Adams Police Department is urging everyone to NOT chase bears through the woods with a dull hatchet, drunk,” the post said.