Culture
Will You Fall in Love With This Poem? I Did.
Let’s talk about love. That’s what the people in this poem seem to be doing. The author and her friend, a scholar, are debating the crushworthiness of a certain “Romantic Poet.”
Keats was one of the pillars of British Romanticism, and a romantic figure in other ways as well. He was only 25 when he died, in 1821, of tuberculosis and also — according to legend — of the side effects of a brutally negative review.
A portrait of John Keats on his deathbed.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
He is remembered as a paragon of suffering and sensitive creativity, a fragile hothouse flower whose poems are marvels of exquisite lyricism. He wrote intoxicatingly beautiful poems about the intoxicating power of beauty, which was one of his favorite words. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” he wrote. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
“Ode to a Nightingale,” which Keats wrote in 1819, gets at the strange, uncanny effect that art (especially music or poetry) can have on us, deranging our senses and disordering our consciousness. This is how it starts:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, —
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
What’s going on here? The song of the bird induces in the listener a pleasurable, painful, narcotic reverie. The full-throated music of the poem might have a similar effect on the reader. The cascading rhymes and trippy images conjure a kind of aesthetic rapture that’s not so different from falling in love.
With the poem or the poet? Is it always so easy to tell? Diane Seuss’s crush on the actual John Keats is a matter of poetic record. In another of her poems, the similarly titled “Romantic Poetry,” she writes about visiting the house in Rome where Keats died and making out with his death mask, imagining how “auspicious, / rare, lush, / bizarre, kinky, transcendent” it would be “to cradle him / in my arms.”
Keats isn’t the only romantic poet in “Romantic Poet.” The title fits Seuss too.
MEDLEY, Fla. — On the eve of WNBA free agency beginning last Tuesday, several league decision-makers gathered under the same roof.
Inside Unrivaled’s Wayfair Arena, Las Vegas Aces coach Becky Hammon sat next to a basket stanchion with team president Nikki Fargas to her left, watching the end of the 3×3 league’s opening weekend. Dallas Wings front office members observed the action across the court from them. Seattle Storm brass sat off the floor in one corner of the show court, and the Los Angeles Sparks representation was a few rows up. The Atlanta Dream contingent watched closer to center court.
WNBA teams attended to support their players as well as the launch of a new league that could shift historic offseason routines and keep more star players in the U.S. during the offseason. But there was other work in Florida: Free agency negotiations officially began Tuesday.
With some convenient scheduling, Unrivaled became the epicenter of all the chatter, gossip and deal-making.
“This is the best place to be able to recruit free agents,” said Phoenix Mercury guard Natasha Cloud, who is playing on Unrivaled’s Phantom Basketball Club.
The beginning stages of Unrivaled overlapping with WNBA free agency wasn’t one of the league’s original goals, co-founder Napheesa Collier said. But it’s undoubtedly added to early buzz — Satou Sabally, for instance, used her first Unrivaled media availability to share with reporters that she had told the Wings she wanted to be traded — and it’s increased convenience for free agents, coaches and GMs.
Courtney Vandersloot is an unrestricted WNBA free agent, playing with Unrivaled Mist Basketball Club. Her first true free agency experience came after the Chicago Sky’s 2021 title. That offseason, she was playing in Russia, at UMMC Ekaterinburg, taking remote evening meetings after long practice days. “It was late nights. You’re relying on technology, hoping that the internet works,” Vandersloot said. “It doesn’t feel very personable.”
Now?
WNBA teams have posted up at hotels across the Miami area, squeezing in meetings after Unrivaled practices and around players’ schedules.
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Eight WNBA free agents, including those who are cored and restricted, are on Unrivaled rosters. Sabally, Vandersloot, Alyssa Thomas, DiJonai Carrington and Brittney Griner highlight the list. Others could potentially be on the move via trade, too. Jewell Loyd, a member of Unrivaled’s Mist Basketball Club, is on the move to the Aces, in a deal that seems likely to have a domino effect throughout the league.
Leading into Unrivaled’s opening weekend, multiple players were light-hearted about the implications of being together in one place during free agency. Vandersloot said anyone who gave her a pack of IPAs “might have a head start” in recruiting her. Sabally joked that she had already received a few cups of coffee.
Cloud said she wants what’s best for Sabally. But she added: “If that is Phoenix, I will literally tell her I will give up my apartment if she wants that too.”
As Feb. 1, the date deals can be announced, approaches, the reality of negotiations looms larger, and the quips have dissipated.
“It was a total shift. People are lingering in the hallways, having full-blown conversations,” one player granted anonymity to speak freely about the recruiting process said. “We’re not joking anymore.”
The WNBA is preparing to enter its 28th season, but robust free-agency recruiting is still a relatively new part of the winter. Aces guard Chelsea Gray said in an Uninterrupted mini-documentary about her 2020 free agency: “You hear about it happening on the men’s side. Why not have it happen on the women’s side? Why not have people be like, ‘You need to fly her out?’”
Two offseasons ago, Istanbul, Turkey, became the crossroads of the cycle as the New York Liberty, Washington Mystics, Minnesota Lynx and Storm tried figuring into the Breanna Stewart sweepstakes. A team traveling abroad demonstrated interest in building a relationship.
Now, Unrivaled is that crossroads of the free agency world, and players can conveniently build relationships with each other. Peer connections are the benefits of everyone gathering in one place.
“You’re able to talk to other players directly, and you can figure out what type of resources, how important is their team to the owners? If you have an owner of a team that doesn’t prioritize the women’s team, they’re going to talk about it, and that’s a place where I would (be) less likely to go,” Sabally said.
Players can cross-pollinate their thoughts on facilities. Multiple players at Unrivaled, both free agents and players signed to deals, said that topic had come up in the meal room, sauna and weight room.
“It’s been fun hearing players trying to get certain players to join teams. You’re kind of just able to hear other people’s experiences as well,” New York Liberty star Sabrina Ionescu said.
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Not every franchise flocked to Florida right away. Minnesota Lynx head coach and president of basketball Cheryl Reeve and assistant coach Eric Thibault were spotted at last Wednesday’s EuroLeague game between Fenerbahçe and Umana Reyer Venezia. Free agent bigs Emma Meesseman and Tina Charles play for the Turkish club as does former Minnesota forward Nina Milić.
But by Friday night’s Unrivaled action, they had arrived in Florida.
Lynx guard Courtney Williams said she wasn’t planning to recruit free agents. But Williams admitted that could change in an instant.
“If (Cheryl) gives me a call,” Williams said, “I’m gonna start chatting.”
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)
SHATTERED: A Memoir, by Hanif Kureishi
In December 2022, in Rome, fate took Hanif Kureishi by the wrong hand. He was sitting in the living room of his girlfriend’s apartment, watching a soccer game on his iPad. Suddenly he felt dizzy. He leaned forward and blacked out. He woke up several minutes later in a pool of his own blood, his neck awkwardly twisted.
Kureishi was 68. He was rendered, instantly, paralyzed below the neck, able to wiggle his toes but unable to scratch an itch, grip a pen or feed himself, let alone walk. Kureishi, who is British Pakistani, is a well-known screenwriter and novelist. His paralysis made international news, and many began to follow his updates on his progress, which he posted via dictation on social media.
Now comes a memoir, “Shattered,” with further updates. The news this book delivers, as regards his physical condition, is not optimistic. He has progressed little. He wrestles mightily with who he is, now that he must rely on others for nearly everything except talking and breathing. His memoir is good but modestly so. It contains a great deal of black comedy but its most impressive emotion is regret — for things undone and unsaid earlier in his life.
It’s hard to get across how counterculturally famous Kureishi was in the 1980s and ’90s. He wrote the screenplay for Stephen Frears’s raffish art-house film “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985), about a young Pakistani man who is given a derelict laundromat in London by his uncle and hopes to turn it into a success.
That movie arrived in the wake of Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” (1981), the most influential novel of the late 20th century. Both were fresh and sharply drawn works about postcolonialism and its discontents, a topic that Rushdie and Kureishi dragged, alive and squirming, to the forefront of the culture. The men became friends.
Kureishi photographed a bit better than Rushdie did. With his lion’s mane of dark curls, he resembled a pop star or a hipster prince more than a writerly mole person. Thus, it is one of the jokes in “Shattered” when Kureishi recalls the time a nurse asked, while plunging a gloved finger into his backside: “How long did it take you to write ‘Midnight’s Children’?”
He replied that if he’d written “Midnight’s Children,” he would not be in the care of England’s public health system.
In a darker parallelism, Rushdie too has written a recent memoir of horror and recovery.
Kureishi wrote the screenplay for Frears’s next movie, the romantic comedy “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid” (1987), and then published his first and best-known novel, “The Buddha of Suburbia,” in 1990. He has since written many more screenplays and novels but none have so captured the conversation.
When the press began to write about his accident, Kureishi says in “Shattered,” he began to feel like Huck Finn at his own funeral. Most of the accounts of his life and career were flattering. There is a bit of that life and career in this memoir, but more often we are in the present tense, as in: “Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now.”
Bodily eliminations are a central topic. He learns to get over the humiliation of not being able to cope with these on his own. Caregivers always seem to be feeling around back there. At one point Kureishi cries out to his readers, “I now designate my arse Route 66.”
The importance of touch, of small physical kindnesses, is felt in nearly every paragraph. It has ever been true: Kindness is the coin of the realm, accepted everywhere. Looking back at his life, Kureishi writes: “I wish I had been kinder; and if I get another chance, I will be.”
Remorse runs through this memoir’s veins like tracer dye. Kureishi stares hard at himself; he studies the blueprint of his own heart; he does not always like what he sees. He recalls being spoiled and self-centered and not, for example, welcoming the arrivals of his three sons. He hated taking them to sports events; he was used to doing what he wanted.
While his girlfriend and later wife, Isabella, cares for him in his new state, he wonders if he would have done the same for her. He was often distant, to her and others. His injury has brought him so much good will from so many people; he wonders if he would have reacted similarly.
Kureishi comes to feel “like a Beckettian chattering mouth, all I can do is speak, but I can also listen.” His favorite visitors are big talkers. Speaking takes a lot out of him. He remarks that “becoming paralyzed is a great way to meet new people.”
While he is in rehab, trying to regain motor skills, Kureishi confronts the contingencies of all our lives. Those around him have suffered motorcycle crashes, falls from ladders and trampolines, dives into empty swimming pools, sports injuries, a litany of freak and not-so-freak accidents.
Many incapacitated people, including famous ones like Christopher Reeve, have written books. The paralysis memoir with the most sophistication and sensitivity, that constantly taps into life’s mother lode, is “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (1997), by Jean-Dominique Bauby. He was 43, the editor of Elle France, when he suffered a brainstem stroke. He wrote his sumptuous book by blinking to select letters while the alphabet was recited to him.
“Shattered” does not reach such heights. We confront the bare wood beneath the bark of Kureishi’s best earlier writing. But he is good and bracing company on the page. His book is never boring. He offers frank lessons in resilience, about blowing the sparks that are still visible, about ringing the bells that still can ring.
SHATTERED: A Memoir | By Hanif Kureishi | Ecco | 328 pp. | $28
Culture
Scott Boras defends process after Mets owner Steve Cohen calls Pete Alonso talks ‘exhausting’
NEW YORK — Pete Alonso loomed over the New York Mets’ Amazin’ Day at Citi Field on Saturday without attending the event.
Just before Mets owner Steve Cohen answered a question about where things stand with Alonso, a homegrown star and free agent first baseman, during a panel discussion, a spirited crowd began chanting, “Let’s Sign Pete! Let’s sign Pete! Let’s sign Pete!”
Another chant then started, “Pete Al-on-so!”
Cohen then quipped, “Hold that for the end, OK?”
Cohen followed with a blunt assessment.
“We made a significant offer to Pete,” Cohen said. “He’s entitled to explore his market. That’s what he is doing. Personally, this has been an exhausting conversation and negotiation. I mean, Soto was tough — this is worse.
“A lot of it is, we made a significant offer … I don’t like the structures that are being presented back to us. It’s highly asymmetric against us. And I feel strongly about it. I will never say no. There’s always the possibility. But the reality is we’re moving forward. And as we continue to bring in players, the reality is it becomes harder to fit Pete into what is a very expensive group of players that we already have. That’s where we are. And I am being brutally honest.
“I don’t like the negotiations. I don’t like what’s been presented to us. Listen, maybe that changes. Certainly, I’ll always stay flexible. If it stays this way, I think we are going to have to get used to the fact that we may have to go forward with the existing players that we have.”
The crowd applauded the answer.
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Generally, from a star player’s perspective, a short-term deal can be seen as a concession. Therefore, for three years, there might be a preference from the player’s side to have only player opt-outs and no deferred money. In Boras’ four shorter-term deals after the 2023 season, none included deferred money. On the other hand, from the team’s perspective, they may prefer more optionality on their side.
“Pete’s free-agent contract structure request are identical to the standards and practices of other clubs who have signed similarly situated qualifying-offer/all-star level players,” agent Scott Boras said. “Nothing different. Just established fairness standards.”
Last week, the Mets made a counteroffer of three years to Alonso and Boras. It was rejected.
The Mets withdrew that specific offer after it was turned down, sources familiar with the matter said. However, it’s unknown if the Mets and Alonso have since re-engaged. So whether the door is open under similar or different parameters remains a question.
The crowd at Amazin’ Day started chanting “We want Pete!” as soon as Cohen, president of baseball operations David Stearns and Carlos Mendoza took the stand for a panel hosted by SNY broadcaster Gary Cohen. When the broadcaster began asking a question about Alonso, he referred to it as “the elephant in the room.” Chants of “Pe-te” then continued.
“We all love Pete and we’ve said that many times,” Stearns said, receiving cheers. “As we’ve gone through this process, we’ve continued to express that. And we also understand that this is a business and Pete, as a free agent, deserves the right and earned the privilege to see what’s out there.
“We also feel really good about the young players who are coming through our system who have the ability to play at the major-league level.”
That’s when fans met Stearns’ words with groans and boos.
“We saw that last year. And that’s not always the most popular opinion,” Stearns continued. “We saw that last year and we will this year again.”
Without Alonso on the roster, the Mets would most likely look internally for a solution at first base. Earlier this month, Mets officials told third basemen Mark Vientos and Brett Baty to start taking reps at first base with Alonso’s future and the position for the club uncertain.
Vientos broke out as the Mets’ third baseman last year, supplanting Baty at the position. Scouts said Vientos improved defensively but still has plenty of room to grow. In the minor leagues, he also played first base.
“I love playing third base, but right now my main focus is, ‘What can I do for us to get to the World Series and win a championship?’” Vientos said. “That’s what I want.”
At Amazin’ Day, Baty sported a new jersey number — No. 7. He previously wore No. 22, meaning he needed a new number as soon as the Mets signed Juan Soto. Baty landed on No. 7 because he grew up rooting for José Reyes and Joe Mauer.
Might a new position be next?
Baty recalled Stearns telling him a couple of weeks ago, “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” and to start taking reps at first base. The next day, a first baseman’s glove arrived in the mail.
Unlike Vientos, Baty is a neophyte at first base. He last played first base sparingly as a sophomore in high school. He’s so new at the position that he said he hadn’t even thought about holding runners on or taking throws from pitchers. He said working on his footwork around the bag is the most challenging part.
Baty sees any chance at first base as an opportunity to enhance his versatility as he tries to win a job in spring training. Third base is Baty’s main position, but he played some second base last year in Triple A following a midseason demotion. In previous seasons in the minor leagues, he also played some left field.
“It’s really fun, honestly,” Baty said. “I’ve always prided myself on being as athletic as I can be. And I think athleticism, you can show it off at any position whether it be first base, second base, third base, the outfield, whatever it is.”
Mendoza stopped short of anointing anyone the first baseman. If Vientos slid over to first base, Baty, Luisangel Acuña and Ronny Mauricio, possibly among others, would comprise a competition for playing time at third base.
“We got options,” Mendoza said when asked if Vientos was the team’s first baseman as things stand. “We also got some depth there. We signed Jared Young, who has experience. Joey Meneses is a non-roster invite who has big-league experience. So we got options there. Guys are going to get the opportunity. We will see what happens.”
Meanwhile, Alonso lingers in free agency. Veteran and clubhouse leader Brandon Nimmo, also a Boras client, said he wasn’t too surprised that Alonso remains on the market because he expects his longtime teammate to take his time with the process until he saw figures to his liking.
“I would love to see Pete back with us, but I also understand that I don’t make those decisions; that’s between Pete and our front office,” Nimmo said. “From what I understand, there have been a lot of talks between them. I’m still hopeful that we will sign him. But we’re really happy with what we’ve done this offseason. We’ve made our team a better team.”
Star shortstop Francisco Lindor added, “He should make the best decision for himself, and not feel like he’s rushed into a decision. And I am sure he will. Pete is smart. And he’s going to get the input from his wife and his family and then make the best decision for himself. As he should. He deserves it.”
In the meantime, less than three weeks remain until the Mets begin reporting to spring training.
Required reading
(Photo: Harry How / Getty Images)
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