Knockout Punches and Barroom Weepers: Writing About Sports and Music

Join the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities for a talk that considers how boxing and country music challenge writers to find the words to describe them and what they might mean. Guest lecturer Carlo Rotella says the essential thing about each that makes it so appealing–bodies moving in space, sounds moving in time–is nonverbal, even anti-verbal. So it’s hard to express in words what matters most about sports or music, one reason why both subjects attract so much cliché and inspire other sorts of expressive response, like high fives and dancing.

Rotella is a scholar and veteran writer for the New York Times Magazine and other publications. He is the author of books about cities, boxing, blues, and other subjects, the most recent of which is “The World Is Always Coming to An End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood.” He contributes regularly to the New York Times Magazine, and his work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post Magazine, and The Best American Essays. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship and the Whiting Writers Award, and he is a professor of English, American Studies, and Journalism at Boston College. He’s currently at work on a book about teaching freshman English and a book about blues and country music.