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5.0
Hays had me at baseball, and then had me at The South, and by the time he was name-dropping Wendell Berry I was already in love. It dethrones Bang the Drum Slowly as my favorite book about baseball, which says a lot.
The music and the laughter and the bus cutting through the Mississippi night had given me as sure a feeling of freedom as I’d had in God knows when. It wasn’t as exhilarating as that time I drove out of Van Buren in a stolen car with three big sacks of a bank’s money riding on a seat beside me. But I’d done that out of desperation, defiance, a need to do something that mattered, one way or another. This singing had nothing of desperation in it, or defiance either, unless you want to say that anything done just for the joy that’s in it is an act of defiance, that all singing and dancing, and laughing, and fucking are ways of pissing on doom.
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