Welcome to Issue #034 of Zen in the Art of Fighting

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Five Things Worth Sharing

1. One Good Picture: Bachelorette Weekend

As I write this, I am in a cabin in North Georgia with very shoddy wifi and service. Alas, I can't open all the pictures from group chats and shared albums from the weekend, but if I was only able to download one picture for this newsletter, this is a great one featuring everyone who flew into Georgia from out of town to celebrate my final months of unmarried life.

2. Something I'm Writing: "As Competition Career Winds Down, Márcio André Is Building A Larger Legacy" (FloGrappling)

This piece took roughly two months, end to end, to pull together, and ended up being more ambitious in scope than I had planned. When my editor and I first spoke about the piece, the intention was for it to be a feature, but a simple two-part piece: the first part focused on Márcio's career as a competitor, the second part focused on Márcio as a coach. But when I interviewed the members of his competition team and learned more about their backstories, the piece expanded into something bigger and (I like to think) better.

I'm proud of how this came out (roughly four thousand words later 😅) and think there's some general appeal of this particular piece beyond the realm of jiu-jitsu. To me, it is a piece about two things, inspired, respectively, by two of my favorite pieces of sportswriting by Wright Thompson and Buzz Bissinger:

1. It is a piece about accepting the passage of time and coming to terms with where you are in your life and career: specifically, how athletes cultivate a new professional identity and nurture a new relationship with their sport after their time-bound window of competitive prime and excellence inevitably closes. Wright Thompson's essay on Michael Jordan was heavy on my mind as I drafted this piece, down to a sample title for the piece.
2. It is a piece about the rich stories that can be found about interesting communities in an unexpected place: specifically, of young jiu-jiteiros in a city that is not synonymous with jiu-jitsu. Though Phoenix, Arizona is not Odessa, Texas, I definitely aimed for a bit of a Friday Night Lights feel to the athlete-specific sections. I cared a lot about trying to capture the unique story of each athlete along with the universal mixture of earnestness, ambition, and uncertainty that are part and parcel of any young, hopeful-professional athlete's career.

3. Something I'm Reading: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang​

This book has been making the rounds on Twitter and among folks in the book industry--and with good reason. I am told that it's a very on-point satire about the nature of the publishing gauntlet, and as someone who has taken the first step into that gauntlet (I recently securing representation from a literary agent!), I had to pick it up.

The basic premise is June steals a deceased frenemy's manuscript, rebrands herself to fit a certain image to better sell herself (and the stolen manuscript), and what happens when that house of cards comes tumbling down. I am totally hooked on it. The writing is rock solid, the voice of June, the protagonist, is intoxicatingly irreverent, and I can't wait to see how the rest of the plot unfolds. The book has been both been breezy and gripping enough for me to be picking my Kindle up compulsively throughout my bachelorette weekend.

4. Something I'm Listening To: "Construção" by Chico Buarque

To this day, I find it amusing that my interest in Brazil did not originate deliberately from training jiu-jitsu but from falling in love with Portuguese in college and spending a fair bit of time studying Brazilian music and cinema.

The artist I most come back to over time is Chico Buarque, a stalwart of Brazilian popular music in the 1960s-1970s. A talented singer and brilliant lyricist, Buarque wrote classic pop songs that could be fully interpreted as songs protesting the government. Despite the political overtones of his music, Buarque frequently managed to elude the government censors in the years of the Brazilian military dictatoroship because he was so lyrically clever. As an example, one popular hit of his, "Apesar de Você" (which translates to "In Spite of You"), reads perfectly both as a breakup song written for an ex and as a f***-the-government anthem.

A class studying the song "Cálice" was what ultimately made me decide I wanted to minor in Portuguese. The song that I have been listening to again of late is "Construção," a weird, haunting, jarring, and work of art. I highly recommend clicking the links referenced in this paragraph to learn more--they're worth a skim.

5. Something I'm Watching: Demon Slayer​

It's not the first time you've seen me bring up an anime here, and it won't be the last. For a quick synopsis: the hero's whole family gets annihilated by a demon except for his sister, who is transformed into a demon. The hero, Tanjiro, joins the Demon Slayer Corps and embarks on a quest to avenge his slain family and find a cure to make his sister, Nezuko, human again.

What I like most about this series is what I like about a few others in the genre (shonen anime): what makes Tanjiro and his friends powerful isn't just training hard and refusing to give up against an enemy. Their ability to capitalize on and cultivate what makes them unique is what allows them to grow and extend their powers.

This is true in Demon Slayer, but also in series like Avatar: The Last Airbender and even in Harry Potter. A deep understanding who you are--from what makes you tick to what brings out your best--is what allows you to bring your best gifts to the world. In the case of these heroes, that self-knowledge empowers them to save the world.

That's all I've got for this edition.

See you in two weeks,

EZ

PS: It's been a hot minute since Memorial Day Weekend, but this is how I spent mine: taking the hot dogs onto a lazy river, and all three of us almost drowning in it. Thank heavens for (matching) life jackets.