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I’m so happy that you give a chance for Ben to come back because I would love for people to go out and buy his collected stories and to look at his work and for him to be acknowledged as a master of Irish literature. If there’s any one writer that I would like to sort of sing back into a good place, it would be Ben.

- novelist Colum McCann, speaking to New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman after reading Benedict Kiely’s “Bluebell Meadow” on the magazine’s monthly fiction podcast.

I can’t even say why exactly, but I’m particularly grateful for this bit of the story:

They hold hands regularly. Lofty can read palms, a variant reading every time. They have kissed occasionally, when the children who are always there have been distracted by a water-hen or rat or leaping fish or a broken branch or an iceberg of froth from the falls.

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This article originally described the ball as gaining momentum as it travels across the field. The ball would actually lose speed gradually as it travels.

- a correction and physics lesson grafted to the end of slate.com’s “The Craziest Men in Sports”

It’s about hurling in Ireland. Anyone who read “Does Football Have a Future?” in the 1/31/11 New Yorker will wince at the Slate article’s (probably unintended) implication that rich American athletes can buy their way out of head trauma, but it’s a worthwhile article for sobering passages such as:

What sets hurlers apart from their hockey counterparts is their ingenuity in dealing with helmet hatred. Using a hacksaw and filer, Maguire has removed the two problematic horizontal bars from his helmet while keeping a third, vertical bar that runs from his forehead to his chin. Maguire is not the only goalkeeper who has taken to redesigning his facemask. According to Christy O’Connor, who played 20 seasons in goal and wrote about the culture of hurling in The Club, the majority of today’s best goalkeepers “are definitely playing without some of the bars.” …

The decision to alter a facemask isn’t one hurlers take lightly. As soon as they modify their helmets, players become ineligible for insurance coverage. This is a bigger deal than it would be for top American athletes: Since hurling remains an amateur sport in Ireland, none of its star players have a lot of money to burn. (The very few players that have endorsement deals earn roughly 5,000 euros per season, O’Connor estimates.) While the GAA maintains a small fund to help defray healthcare costs, players with serious injuries are likely to be responsible for at least some portion of the cost of treatment.

To learn more about all this, follow The Concussion Blog. See also the 2/19/11 NYT article that starts like this:

Before he shot himself fatally in the chest Thursday, the former Chicago Bears defensive back Dave Duerson sent family members text messages requesting that his brain tissue be examined for the same damage recently found in other retired players, two people aware of the messages said Saturday night.

the latest “Stare and Write” posts

Thanks to those who submitted work as well as those whose words I found and couldn’t not reblog, If you like what you read, please help keep this going. Submit your true people-watching stories here. No more than 200 words please.

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In we went, ten men on bikes, past the rust-eaten gates of Shantallow, under the big trees that marked the houses of the planters, crunching over the few patches of gravel that were left on the road. I cycled at the pace I’d have taken through Strokestown at noon — this was a confidence-building exercise — and they followed me. It was a noise you never caught in the city, the whirr of bike chains in action together. It was one of the great sounds of the war.
- from Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry, a splendid novel I finished last night