Mark Kram was a tortured, hard-drinking, racehorse-betting, keraunophobic who wrote some of the best pieces on boxing imaginable during the 1960s and 1970s. He was fired from Sports Illustrated for taking kickbacks in 1977. Once, Sonny Liston got so pissed off at Kram that Liston threw him headfirst into a snowbank. Today’s writers are too dull and stupid to even take a kickback…they lick dog bowls and print propaganda for free (and for press passes to bullshit shows)….

Kina Malpartida is not, in my opinion, as hot as Holly “The Hottie” Holm, who is #1 P-4-P on TCS. Malpartida is all right, but she has a ways to go….

TCS Please write something on Kina Malpartida!
She is hot and Peruvian!

No, that was not Mamet-like at all…you need a couple of more Jamesons before the muse strikes….Alfred Hayes was probably the most prominent Hemingway knockoff in America during the 1940s, along with Robert Lowry and Merle Miller. The Girl on the Via Flaminia takes place during the Allied occupation of Italy in 1945. An American soldier takes up with a bereft young Italian woman in a house of dubious reputation, trading material comfort for intimacy. They have a hate-hate relationship until things get even more complicated. Hayes was a committed Marxist–as well as a proletarian poet in the 1930s–which means he is never less than schematic and it’s easy to see the American soldier as representative of barbaric American capitalism and the girl as a stand-in for soon-to-be corrupted Italy itself. Hayes has a good ear for dialogue (he was also a screenwriter), can deftly sketch a character with a few details, and works hard for dramatic effect, but his Hemingway pastiche prose is really a little too much and there are times when the book is overwhelmed by a dated, dogmatic approach. For novels on WW II Italy, not many compare to those of my man Cesare Pavese.