#tobyreads: Oceans, Sonic and Otherwise

  It took a  lengthier-than-expected  internal debate to convince myself that I shouldn’t name this week’s column for Isis’s 2002 album Oceanic, if only because I’d wager that most of you would look at me (or this column) with some bafflement. “Yes, Toby, we get it–but what do whaling disasters have to do with experimental metal bands?” So instead: metaphor, unreliable narrators, Aphex Twin, and cannibalism.

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Poetry in Motion: The 9 Sports Books Coming in 2014 That Will Murder You if Not Purchased

Checkers: 5,000 Years of Blood, Concussions, and Mayhem by T. Thaddeus Muffintop (March 11; Piddle & Sons, $24.95) Once thought a light-hearted romp of jumping and “Crowning”, the game of Checkers has in recent years revealed a dark side.  T. Thaddeus Muffintop (of the popular Grantland column “Butterscotch-Fueled Outrage”) goes undercover to reveal a underground culture within professional Checkers, rife with brutal thumb violence, narcotics inhaled off game boards, and one elite player’s deadly addiction to that other Checkers: the […]

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