Word: rope
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What do you do when you wake up one morning convinced that the intangible hipness on which you based your enormous professional success no longer exists? If you're hotel impresario Ian Schrager, you replace the proverbial velvet rope with a comfy velvet cushion...
...sandy arena out the back of Rockhampton's Great Western Hotel on this Saturday night, 45 cowboys in cocky white straw hats and cautious padded vests will lower themselves onto the back of a close-penned bull, wedge one hand under the rope around its chest, an`d wait for the ring-ward side of the pen to be pulled open. But only 11 will ride the bull, and only four will know the glory of doing it twice. The rest will-in the time it takes several hundred steak-sandwich-chomping onlookers to gasp-be tossed...
...debutants. He attended the M.F.A. program of hard knocks. If his author's bio is to be believed, he was a taxi driver, saloon keeper, bullfighter (really?) and, most notably and relevantly, a boxing trainer and cut man. Toole (a pseudonym) was also the author of the story collection Rope Burns, best known for the short story Million Dollar Baby, which became a movie of the same name. Rope Burns was Toole's literary debut...
...what he would have called a bum ticker, leaving behind the manuscript of a novel called Pound for Pound (Ecco; 366 pages). Under the circumstances, it's a pleasure to say that Pound for Pound is not a rough, unfinished, posthumous collection of jottings, nor was Rope Burns a fluke. Pound for Pound is that most rare and absorbing of pleasures, a great boxing novel...
...surprisingly, difficult to get Daryl Hannah to take you to her bed. We're still broaching the subject when she violently shakes my crotch, inspects my carabiners and tells me to try to relax. Then, in the darkness, I grab a rope and inchworm 50 feet up the almond tree she's been sleeping in for more than two weeks. To see Angelina Jolie's bed, you must have to pole vault an elephant...