Philip Roth on Getting it Wrong the Right Way

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be…and yet you never fail to get them wrong.

You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.

And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims?

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong, and then on careful consideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.*

*Excerpt from Philiip Roth’s American Pastoral.

DeBrusk, Cassidy and Boston’s Ugly Hockey

There’s a lot of chatter about Nazem Kadri’s retaliatory cross-check on Jake DeBrusk, an ill-advised moment to be sure. But let’s be clear on this – DeBrusk never should have been on the ice at that point, given his deliberate knee-on-knee hit against Kadri the previous period.

That is a five-minute major, game and suspension right there, yes?

Straight from the NHL rules handbook. So what about it, ref?


Nope. No call at all. According to Morgan Riley, the ref said Kadri “jumped in the air”. Or more laughably, Bruins Bruce Cassidy stated flatly, “The hit was shoulder to shoulder.It’s Kadri’s prerogative to stay down.” Let’s look at those images again.

As much as I’d like to meet Cassidy halfway, feel his heartbeat, hug his pillow and all, but he’s as close to the truth as Albuquerque on that one.

The Bruins brand of hockey is an embarrassment to the league as is DeBrusk’s knee-on-knee hit, as are Cassidy’s passively unpleasant comments as are Boston’s ‘energetic’ fans.

Did Kadri deserve a penalty? Yes. Did DeBrusk. Yes. And so…what is this then? There better be a better answer sometime soon – read NHL hearing for DeBrusk – or else it seems that the league has a bigger problem. (Hint: It rhymes with Zenophobia.)