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More on the NY Times article

Article by the same author here. I can only observe:

1) I inherited my father's detestation for anything that involves injuring horses. Dad was a cowhand when young, down to referring, not to horses, but to cutting horses, etc.. He was angry at bullfights (which used to be televised here), not because of any danger to the matador -- who got paid and knew his chances -- but because the picadors would abandon their horses if the bull attacked them. To him that was like abandoning your comrade while under attack.

2) This is the self-absorbed, narcissistic approach that I so dislike about NPR. A writer must take five paragraphs to describe falling on their butt. The feeling of the air rushing past, the grass rising to kiss their posterior, the experience of butthurt as they sank into the cool turf, etc., etc.

3) The fact that he killed a friend through stupidity gets a few sentences. The impact on his friend gets one sentence: he coughed and said he was hit. The impact on the author gets ten paragraphs. Cripes. Not counting later paragraphs where he talks of having been diagnosed with this or that, and being medicated.

4) I'm getting ill, and haven't even eaten dinner yet. "Self-annihilation is our dream in the West. We don't worship a god; we grieve his murder and our existence itself is complicity in the crime. It is the essence of our tragic nature." "my lungs pressed out all of my air, holding me between breaths for so long it seemed that I might have forgotten how to inhale and start again. I sat there, my head wavering and light on my shoulders, waiting for my diaphragm to work." "Hunters over a kill cannot help but think of their defining act as finality itself, leaving their imagination no productive direction but backwards toward a time primitive enough to erase their presence. Over a kill one cannot help but consider this act the opposite of hope. Rifle shots and hurtling lead possess all the anarchy necessary to marry geography to misfortune." "the medicine served truth, not story and so much truth can grind a man to a nub. " "when I closed my eyes I could sense the earth moving beneath me, inventing time and memory."

I recognize the value of the First Amendment and freedom of expression, but a good case can be made for punishing the writing of this sort of self-absorbed ^%&#^ in the interests of preserving worthwhile literature.