Zirin Quotes

The building of publicly funded stadiums has become a substitue for anything resembling an urban policy.

The Protectorate—called the Cattail Kingdom by some and the City of Sorrows by others—was sandwiched between a treacherous forest on one side and an enormous bog on the other. Most people in the Protectorate drew their livelihoods from the Bog. There was a future in bogwalking, mothers told their children. Not much of a future, you understand, but it was better than nothing. The Bog was full of Zirin shoots in the spring and Zirin flowers in the summer and Zirin bulbs in the fall—in addition to a wide array of medicinal and borderline magical plants that could be harvested, prepared, treated, and sold to the Traders from the other side of the forest, who in turn transported the fruits of the Bog to the Free Cities, far away. The forest itself was terribly dangerous, and navigable only by the Road.

Solitude is a powerful thing. People who can’t use solitude always have to find some kind of bullshit to do.

I broke into Hollywood the old-fashioned way. I knew somebody.

President Teddy Roosevelt argued that organized athletics could be the means for instilling the character and values deemed necessary to make America a global power in the century to come. Sports could breed a sense of hard work, self-discipline, and the win-at-all-cost ethic of competition. Roosevelt once said, presumably while swinging a big stick,

...it is worth looking closer and remembering something Marcos Alvito told me: Statistics are like a bikini. They show so much, but they hide the most important parts.

Every day, his first task of the morning was to read through the citizen complaints and requests that had been scrawled with bits of chalk on the large slate wall, and deem which ones were worth attention and which should simply be washed down and erased. (“But what if they all are important, Uncle?” Antain had asked the Grand Elder once. “They can’t possibly be. In any case, by denying access, we give our people a gift. They learn to accept their lot in life. They learn that any action is inconsequential. Their days remain, as they should be, cloudy. There is no greater gift than that. Now. Where is my Zirin tea?”)

It continues in new scholarship, such as An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and A People’s History of Sports by Dave Zirin, the album Let England Shake by P. J. Harvey,