Duende: Frazier at 100

Boston newspaper columnist George Frazier would have been 100 years old last month.  To mark the occasion, The Boston Globe ran a great Op-Ed piece.  Check out the entire story here.

Here are a few telling exceprts from the piece...

"Immortality in a business as ephemeral as daily journalism is nigh-on impossible, but every city has a newspaper guy who will be forever identified with that city. H.L. Mencken in Baltimore, Jimmy Breslin in New York, Mike Royko in Chicago, Herb Caen in San Francisco. Frazier, born in Southie 100 years ago last week, is that guy for Boston."


"Why Frazier? Like other writers before me, I’ll lean on Frazier to explain. His signature, and most popular, essays through the years were the ones about duende, that special force or characteristic that makes someone or something irresistibly attractive. “So difficult to define, “ he wrote, “but when it is there it is unmistakable, inspiring our awe, quickening our memory. To observe someone who has it is to feel icy fingers running up and down our spine.’’

Duende, he explained, was what Ted Williams had, even when he was striking out, yet Stan Musial lacked, even while hitting a home run."


"He would be unimaginably huge today. The blogosphere would send his every column around the globe a thousand times over, and cable television would scramble for his services, coveting his wit, his eloquence, and his comfort with controversy, not to mention his natty dress and his theatrical mien.
No one would be more at home in the Internet... And he would have only tweeted if he’d come up with the idea himself, before some editor told him he had to do it.

Yet it’s easy to imagine George Frazier on Twitter, isn’t it? He would have loved the challenge of framing a thought in 140 characters. No one would have done it better; think of all the one-liners in those “Another Man’s Poison’’ columns — “Whenever I take the train to New York, I consider the trip a success if I get there while my suit’s still in style’’ — 140 characters or less, all of them."

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Check out some Frazier excerpts and quotes, including one about duende, here.