Carlo Rotella is Director of American Studies and Professor of English at Boston College. His books include Cut Time (2003), Good With Their Hands (2002), October Cities (1998), and, most recently, Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories (2012). He writes for the New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post Magazine and is a columnist for the Boston Globe. Rotella is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and The American Scholar’s prizes for Best Essay and Best Work by a Young Writer. Born in Chicago, he now lives in Boston.
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Playing in TimeEssays, Profiles, and Other True StoriesFrom"The Prospect"
Like most of the fight world’s habits, hand wrapping is both practical and ritual. Done properly, it protects the hands from damage without giving a fighter an unfair advantage. Like boxing gloves or a football helmet, wrapping functions as both armor and sword, a protective measure that allows you to hit harder and more frequently than you could without it. One of the officials murmured, “That’s beautiful.” Colonna said “Thank you” without looking up from his work.
Playing in Time:Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories -
Playing in TimeEssays, Profiles, and Other True StoriesFrom"Someone Else’s Chicago"
The Polkaholics, sweating like stevedores, are in fine ironic form, decked out in white shoes, black pants, white ruffled shirts, and stunning leopard-print vests with matching oversize bow ties. All wear thick-framed glasses, and anyone standing anywhere near the stage can smell the torrent of Old Spice with which they douse themselves, Method actor style, before a show. They do not play polka versions of rock tunes, an ill-advised crossover strategy that has produced far too many bizarre novelty songs by polka bands. Rather, they play original songs and well-chosen polka covers that make use of rock sensibilities, winkingly sampled classic-rock phrases, and bursts of the jet-engine guitar whine common to certain forms of punk and heavy metal—all undergirded by drums and bass playing straight-ahead, hurry-up polka rhythms.
Playing in Time:Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories -
Playing in TimeEssays, Profiles, and Other True StoriesFrom"Un Clown Biologique"
Tom C. cultivated a morbid fascination with clowns. Instead of merely doodling in class, he created obsessive dossiers of clown types: the savage Jester, the crocodile-teared Sad Clown, the enigmatic Bowler Hat, the rare Plume Clown, the annihilating Whiteface. He practiced different stylized ways of saying the word clown—drawing it out, barking it sharply, stretching his rubbery features to make a demented face while he said it, adopting a strangled or a booming voice—as if he could figure out what was hiding in the word by turning it inside out. He drew up clown scenarios and composed clown ditties, and invented ancient traditions to which they belonged. He tried to figure out if it would be worse to wake up one night to find a clown at the foot of your bed or to think you had dreamed it and then find a deflated balloon in your room the next morning.
Playing in Time:Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories
"The strength of his new essay collection comes from the odd places he finds these headliners: on the suburban D.C.-area blues circuit, in Chicago’s polka clubs and at fantasy jazz camps in the Northeast. But like other greats of the nonfiction craft—Joan Didion, John Jeremiah Sullivan—Rotella’s own personality eventually comes through." —Time Out Chicago [on Playing in Time]
"A wonderful book . . . Cut Time is aimed at everyone, even readers who can't imagine that they could ever learn anything from men slugging it out in a ring. They can." —Gordon Marino, The Wall Street Journal
"Rotella sets out to accomplish something refreshingly simple, accessible and deliciously raw. He glides with language and delivers his words with what boxers call 'quick hands.' Reading his words is a pleasure, but absorbing their underlying force, and the dark things they sometimes suggest, can be bruising . . . Rotella shows that he's not just an excellent reporter, keen writer and an acute observer, he's a hell of a teacher to boot." —Mark Luce, The San Francisco Chronicle [on Cut Time]
Selected Works
