Posnanski and the Paterno book

How many of them claim to be scholars of Virgil and Hemingway and Fitzgerald? Paterno does, and I have no reason to doubt him. So, that being the case, I'm surprised at the lack of introspection. There is some cognitive dissonance.

And besides, even if Paterno's lack of introspection is typical, it still hurts the finished product. It's not Posnanski's fault that Paterno isn't thoughtful in that way, or at least was not by this point in his life. But it still hurts the finished product, particularly when it's essentially, like a reviewer wrote, a one-source story.

 

Building the interior life of the subject is the very definition of 'biography.'

So maybe this was never meant to be a biography at all.

Also, why wouldn't you doubt Paterno's claim to literary/classics scholarship?

 

Posnanski reports some details that convince me that Paterno genuinely loved literature. I will pull some brief examples later today or tomorrow.

 

OK.

That being the case, why assume a love of literature is evidence of an introspective nature?

 

I don't assume such, but my intuition is that a love of literature TENDS to correlate with an introspective, thoughtful nature, particularly as regards mortality.

 

Does a "an introspective, thoughtful nature" as indicated by a love of literature tend to correlate with the ability to express an introspective, thoughtful nature?

Or do bookish people tend to be shy in their expression of their interior lives?

 

Is it possible too that Paterno was simply too far gone, mentally, to respond in an introspective way that was needed? I feel like, if you're going to argue one one hand that he was slipping and not all that attentive to matters of extreme importance (like Sandusky) late in his career, it would be hard to imagine him also grasping any larger meaning about his life when his neurons weren't firing at light speed anymore.

But maybe it was all bullshit, to be honest. Maybe Joe Paterno just really loved football.

A friend of mine who covered Paterno said something to me in an email exchange I thought was really interesting.


Maybe Paterno used his "academics first" mission to hide the fact that what he mostly cared about was beating Notre Dame or Alabama. And in many ways he was quite crass about this. When people asked why he wouldn't retire, he honestly told them that he didn't know what else to do with his life. Really? Joe the English major from Brown who loved to quote poetry or Latin epics could not think of one other thing to do?

Think about how competitive you have to be to want to coach at the level Paterno did for all those years. And Paterno drove much of what we consider the norm in college coaching ... the relentless film study, the endless recruiting, the wooing of the media to get us to spin the right tale (that one most of all.) Joe Paterno loved football. He probably loved football more than anyone ever has. He loved football so much, and was so smart, that he did everything he could to make his love of football seem like something bigger than it was, so as to build a cocoon around his love of football, because that way when his teams went 4-8 or his players started getting called out on being campus bullies he could say that Penn State was "different."


I thought that was a really perceptive way of looking at him.

 

What do we make of the "Grand Experiment," then?

 

Because you internalize the words?

 

You two can be so opaque.

 

I think it's reasonable to believe Joe Paterno convinced himself what he was doing had some larger, grander purpose, that he believed it with every bone in his body, but it was also a way for him to justify the simple fact that he loved football the same way Bill Parcells did. In the end, they were no different, Parcells just didn't need to dress up his obsession as something noble.

 

He wrote a cowardly biography. I hardly see much of a difference.
Nobody needs to lavish praise on someone for taking a lazy way out.
The prose itself is being ripped, so he's not even getting a pass on that.