By Bart Barry-
Editor’s note: Since 2016 we’ve allowed Bart Barry to interview himself about the state of the craft once annually when he is particularly bereft of ideas for his weekly column. Each week since March 23 we’ve expected him to request a self-interview opportunity (yes, he uses a proper hyphen when he emails). This week it came.
BB: We only get to go to this well once every –
BB: Let’s not begin with a cliché, kid.
BB: Surprised it took this long to revert to form?
BB: A little, yes, but you do realize, right, there’s no need to use prepositions when we interview ourselves?
BB: Surprised it took long revert form?
BB: Much better. The prepositions are for others’ clarity; when we picture a glass of TexaCola we never need of in the picture.
BB: Frankly –
BB: It’s a glass with TexaCola, obviously, not a glass constructed of cola.
BB: Be neither tedious nor insipid, lad.
BB: I loved last week’s column. I love Kevin Barry. He’s the writer who comes nearest the ideal of writing in the mind’s proper code.
BB: An Irishman, naturally.
BB: Land of James Joyce, but oh so much more enjoyable.
BB: Twas a legendary matchmaker who set the hands on the Joyce clock for us –
BB: Denver weighin –
BB: Sweatbox firehazard –
BB: “You know anyone who’s ever enjoyed Ulysses?”
BB: Literature for people who enjoy feeling smart more than reading.
BB: What’s this, then?
BB: Easy to write.
BB: Does that inoculate it?
BB: One hopes. Anything th’t can be written fastly and funlike can’t be too Joycean.
BB: How’s quarantine, son?
BB: Lovely, if I’m honest. Haven’t read so much in 20 years.
BB: Tell me about American energy.
BB: I love that we can use italics here instead of quotes because I can’t make myself put the punctuation mark inside the quotation marks. It looks all wrong to me. Looks fine in dialogue; looks awful elsewhere. I assume it’s a vestigial ask from some 18th-century typesetter.
BB: Tell me about “American energy”.
BB: Peggy Noonan used that term recently in a column, or quoted someone who did, and it struck me like a perfect euphemism for desperate anxiety. Even in its context – a man whose wife won’t let him quarantine peacefully on his La-Z-Boy but instead remands him to Home Depot – it reads like desperate anxiety.
BB: One man’s desperate anxiety be another man’s entrepreneurial zeal.
BB: Lockdowns have shown us what’s what. Revenge of the unenergetic, as it were. Good to see the hyperactive boys, be they 15 or 75, trying to sit still, and they can’t. All that hyperbolic bullshit about “hustle” we’ve been hearing from them for centuries –
BB: Turns out it wasn’t ever the choice they credited themselves with making.
BB: Monkeys moving wood.
BB: “You don’t think I’d like to just sit around all day on my couch doing nothing?”
BB: Turns out, dude, you can’t sit on your couch in your own home in the presence of your own spouse and offspring for a full hour, can you?
BB: Sounds like someone’s dad yelled at him for not sprinting from the dugout each inning.
BB: You miss him?
BB: Nope.
BB: What about her?
BB: This is the second Mother’s Day since her passing – though there’s not been the void we were raised to expect. I miss none of the zaniness, and all her best qualities are somewhere in her daughters already, so . . .
BB: Whither our beloved sport?
BB: I credit it with staying for the most part quiet, with recognizing there’s no optimization right now, and thus no reason for selfimprovement or willful change.
BB: Boxing ain’t been on its grind.
BB: All the better.
BB: Tis a bit of a surprise. One’d’ve thought callouts and socialmedia threats’d’ve been at record highs, right?
BB: Bullied into silence, a little, methinks. When they show us Ali marathons or Tyson clips or items from the Pacquiao and Mayweather vaults, it quiets them, even the dummies.
BB: What does the return look like?
BB: Ask someone knowledgeable.
BB: Right.
BB: I’m not sure I’ve the imagination for that even if I thought about it in selfinterested terms for a month, and I damn sure have not.
BB: Empty arenas?
BB: We’re well-practiced at that. Even our best ideas –
BB: The DAZN tournament, the one with the –
BB: The one Usyk won –
BB: And Callum Smith and Inoue –
BB: World Boxing Super Series!
BB: There you go.
BB: Even that had its prelims go off in what were effectively cavernous television studios. Just bring them inside the studio. Surprised Top Rank hasn’t built that yet.
BB: Or PBC. It’s what they’ve been after for years.
BB: Do you miss traveling?
BB: Not nearly so much as previous years’ expenses predicted.
BB: I don’t miss any of it. I didn’t prepare for this, but I’m well-prepared somehow. The music stopped, and I like the chair I find myself in.
BB: Tell them a secret.
BB: We didn’t expect to be doing this, still, in 2020. There was a final interview with the boxing writer by the boxing writer tacitly planned for last December then the new job fell through and with it the relocation and a justification to end all this, and here we are, sans regret.
BB: And still kicking long enough to write a review of Carlos’ book and Jimmy’s.
BB: I’ve not had a regret since puberty, but in November I felt a twinge of disappointment I’d not have the column when those guys’ books got published.
BB: Reading takes care of its own.
BB: Every experience in every life is equal parts impossible and inevitable.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
