The spectacle of human beings fighting each other for whatever reason, including, at certain well-publicized times, staggering sum...s of money, is enormously disturbing because it violates a taboo of our civilization. Many men and women, however they steel themselves, cannot watch a boxing match because they cannot allow themselves to see what it is they are seeing. One thinks helplessly, This can't be happening, even as, and usually quite routinely, it is happening. In this way boxing as a public spectacle is akin to pornography: in each case the spectator is made a voyeur, distanced, yet presumably intimately involved, in an event that is not supposed to happening as it is happening. The pornographic "drama," though as fraudulent as professional wrestling, makes a claim for being about something absolutely serious, if not humanly profound: it is not so much about itself as about the violation of a taboo. That the taboo is spiritual rather than physical, or sexual--that our most valuable human experience, love, is being is being desecrated, parodied, mocked--is surely at the core of our culture's fascination with pornography.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following roun...d, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological... paralysis, more than it is about winning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've been complimented for my scorekeeping, and sometimes it's hard to tell whether it's a backhanded compliment or not. Are the m...en surprised when a woman does a good job as a judge?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of ...an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Directors like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors preci...sely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except fo the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Confidentiality refers to the boundaries surrounding shared secrets and to the process of guarding these boundaries. While confide...ntiality protects much that is not in fact secret, personal secrets lie at its core. The innermost, the vulnerable, often the shameful: these aspects of self-disclosure help explain why one name for professional confidentiality has been "the professional secret." Such secrecy is sometimes mistakenly confused with privacy; yet it can concern many matters in no way private, but that someone wishes to keep from the knowledge of third parties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »