100 games a season: Gare Joyce's puck blog

Just like being in the scouts' & press' lounge, without the bad coffee and day-old Timbits

Name:
Location: Toronto

I've written for ESPN The Magazine and espn.com the last five years. My work has made the "notable" list of the Best American Sports Writing seven times and won four Canadian National Magazine Awards. My most recent book is Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts. I've written three other sports books: When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game; Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm; and The Only Ticket Off the Island: Baseball in the Dominican Republic.

Friday, January 26, 2007

Literary Criticism of 100 Games: Joycean, Sez He ...

Many thanks to James Mirtle who gave this blog a nice little shout-out today.

http://mirtle.blogspot.com/

It's all rather stream-of-consciousness at this point, and not really at all like the at-a-distance sermonizing you often see when mainstream-media types take up the medium. One thing I can say for sure is that it doesn't quite read like any other hockey blog out there, as evidenced by this bit of wisdom from earlier this week:
European pro league games are like European art-house films. If you can say that you've seen them, you might get points for a broad world view--but you wonder if it was really worth it.


Stream of consciousness ... well I hope it's closer to Ulysses than Finnegans Wake. Personally, I've always thought that Dubliners was JJ's best and that what followed was his descent into madness or a cruel joke on the literary dilettanti ... I've never been able to get past 15 or 20 pages of FW.

I've always been more of a fan of Flann O'Brien than Joyce. And in tribute to F O'B (whose act has been shamelessly [Sheamusly?] stolen by John Doyle in the Globe), a regular entry on this blog will be set in a draughty den that I frequent.