Proposals: Books as Author, Essays
Proposals: Books as Author, Poetry & Fiction
Proposals: Books as Editor
Proposals: Performances
Proposals: Exhibitions
Proposals: Media Commissions
Proposals: Misc.

Proposal for Sports & Sportsmen

This book would collect essays written over the past three decades about sports and sportsmen. It would reprint a New York Times Magazine profile of the legendary orthopedic surgeon James Nicholas, long the team physician for the New York Jets, as well as the profile of Detlef Schrimpf, long the foremost European professional basketball player in America, “Working/Playing a Long Way from Leverkusen.” The book would also contain an appreciation of European soccer and a critique of a patently under-researched book about baseball in Latin America. I want to include two essays on the esthetic and the esthetes’ appreciation of spectator sports——”Artistry in Football,” “The Opiate of the Intellectuals.” Sports and Sportsmen would differ from previous collections of sports writings in including the author’s art about sports--a widely reprinted four-page visual poem, “Football Forms”; a numerical poem documenting “Olympian Progress”; and the complete elaborate visual-verbal score to his hour-long audio composition, Americas’ Game (1988), whose audio (composed at the Electronic Music Studio of Stockholm) will appear as a CD from Tomato Records sometime soon. What can be added here is the DVD of my imaginative video accompaniment to this electro-acoustic piece. The book will open with a new essay, written especially for this volume, on why sport should be considered as much a part of culture as, say, poetry and fiction and, by extension, why sport has become the only popular culture to prompt the development of disciplined thinking. The material appeared not only in the Times Magazine but in Art & Artists, Liberty, The Humanist, The Pushcart Prize, and several anthologies of contemporary poetry. Though Sports and Sportsmen covers familiar subjects, the approach is so unique that the book would gain readers from the latter distinction. Publishers interested in considering a typescript of all but the introduction are advised to contact the author. Thank you.