This blog periodically notes echt-DeLillo deaths in this country, deaths that often involve that icon of affluent leisure, the golf ball. Read the opening pages of Players, or note the many pages of White Noise and other novels of his that mark the untimely death of someone while at play, or the mix of fatal violence and golf.
This is a very Don DeLillo photograph.
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If you doubt the cultural centrality of golf balls in America, read this front-page article in the New York Times, which ominously reports that errant golf balls breaking windows in retirement communities is “an increasingly prominent problem.”
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So a recent alleged murder at an expensive neighborhood in Atlanta seems to feature an attorney so incensed that someone threw a golf ball at his $60,000 Mercedes CLS 550 (no damage to the car was found, so it’s not clear anything was in fact thrown) that he took his massive car and ran down and killed a guy (a real estate investor) he thought threw it.
Scripted by DeLillo.
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UPDATE: A reader reminds me that DeLillo was far from the first. Many of us will recall this amazing little poem by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn:
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
August 24th, 2019 at 6:10PM
“The links were built quite close to the mill
And almost everyday
The laboring children could look out
And see the men at play”
August 24th, 2019 at 6:45PM
Matt: Thank you for this. Details on the poem here.
August 25th, 2019 at 6:46AM
That is a remarkable photograph from the Guardian.
August 25th, 2019 at 7:29AM
I remembered it a little incorrectly, I see. Quite powerful.