I've Got Nothing Better To Do With My Saturday
Okay, so this is only mildly sports-related, but I'm all about the tangential intersections of my interests. I dipped into Dickson St. Bookstore last night for a little aimless browsing with the future Mrs. Sooie before the 9:20 Indiana Jones-fest. I didn't have anything particular in mind, and I'm really pretty determined to make some headway on my bedside stack before purchasing more books. Instead, I ended up buying another spare copy of Arkansas native Charles Portis' Norwood. I like to have extra copies of my favorite books lying around to push on dinner guests and such, since I never lend books but only give them away. (Nothing kills a friendship quicker than resentment over borrowed goods. Something I learned from Norwood Pratt.)
A N Y W A Y S, the copy I purchased happened to be a cheap paperback edition tied into the Norwood film adaptation. Despite being something of an, ahem, "authority" on Southern film (I guest-edited the last OA film issue, I'm at work on the next DVD, and I'm currently about a week behind deadline on turning in the "Southern Film History" entry of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture), I've never seen this notoriously bad movie. My education is always incomplete. Considering the cast includes both Glen Campbell and Dom Deluise, you can cut me a little slack. However, when I was scanning the back of the book, one cast member caught my eye:
"...and introducing Joe Namath."
Broadway Joe is an all-time favorite, least of which for this quote, from an article by the great Dan Jenkins (no relation, obviously):
Despite his dismissal from the last two games of his junior season [he was suspended for "carousing"], Namath worships Alabama and relishes his experiences and successes there. Bryant is the greatest man he has ever known, Joe even had the hint of a Southern accent, his closest friends are from Alabama, and if there is anything that makes him mad today it is the Eastern press, which he calls "the Northern press."
"There's only three things I'm touched about," says Joe Willie, who naturally got that name down South. "One, the Northern press and how it ignores Southern football when I'll guarantee you that a team like Louisiana Tech can beat about 80 of these lousy schools up here. Two is the publicity that Notre Dame gets. And three is a joke about a Hungarian."
PS: One of Joe's most infamous moments inspired the name of one of the web's best sports blogs, Kissing Suzy Kolber.
PPS: Norwood is easily the funniest book ever written. Buy it. Or, if you come over to my house for dinner sometime, steal one of the extra copies off my shelf.
PPPS: The new Indiana Jones is batshit insane.
