“Nineteen seventy-three. In the public imagination it was as fraught a year as you could name: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, withdrawal from Vietnam. Gravity’s Rainbow. Was it also the year that Prufrockian paralysis went mainstream–the year it entered baseball? It made sense that a psychic condition sensed by the artists of one generation–the Modernists of the First World War–would take a while to reveal itself throughout the population. And if that psychic condition happened to be a profound failure of confidence in the significance of individual human action, then the condition became an epidemic when it entered the realm of utmost confidence in same: the realm of professional sport. In fact, that might make for a workable definition of the postmodernist era: an era in which even the athletes were anguished Modernists. In which case the American postmodern period began in spring 1973, when a pitcher named Steve Blass lost his arm.”

                     --Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding, 2011

“NOTHING ELSE NEED BE SAID. JERICHO DRUMM GRASPS THE CANVAS SACK–AND, HIS HAND TREMBLING ALMOST IMPERCEPTIBLY, SPILLS ITS CONTENTS TO THE HARD-PACKED EARTH–THEN, MOST REVERENTLY, HE STOOPS TO GATHER HIS BROTHER’S BLACKENED BONES! NOW, VOICE FIRM AND DETERMINED, HE INVOKES HIS BROTHER’S NAME–AND THE BRIGHT EVENING SKY, ONCE DAPPLED WITH STARS, GROWS AWASH WITH EBON CLOUDS–NOW THE DANCE BEGINS, RICH, FULL, SENSUAL, TO THE POWERFUL BEAT OF PAPA JAMBO’S DRUM–THE DANCE BEGINS–MADNESS UNBRIDLED–THE DANCE–FLINGING SOUL-PRAYERS TO THE STORM-STREAKED SKY–THE DANCE–THE RENDING OF ONE’S LIFE-PULSE–THE DANCE–CHANTING–GYRATING–BESEECHING–UNTIL THE SKY PICKS UP WITH A MUSIC ALL ITS OWN!”

                     --Len Wein, STRANGE TALES, Vol. 1, No. 170, 
                             "Baptism of Fire!" 1973