If you’ve already read and enjoyed James McManus’
Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker, published earlier this year, pardon me for wasting your time. If not, do. I’ve never played a hand of poker in my life, but I love reading about high-stakes gambling, and this book, in which a teacher who gambles on the side tells how he went to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker for Harper’s Magazine and ended up as one of the finalists, is one of the best books ever written on the subject.
Not the best, you understand. Positively Fifth Street isn’t as lucidly elegant as A. Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town, as desperate as Jesse May’s Shut Up and Deal, or as disturbing as Jack Richardson’s Memoir of a Gambler. McManus’ prose can be ostentatiously eggheady, enough so that I wish the manuscript had been extensively bluepenciled prior to publication. Nevertheless, Positively Fifth Street is still hugely entertaining, especially for those of us railbirds who’ve never gotten any closer to a high-stakes game than renting The Cincinnati Kid, and I recommend it highly.
It happens that I was rereading McManus’ book yesterday, and ran across a passage I hadn’t noticed the first time I read it. He comes by his eggheadiness honestly–he teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago–but I was still surprised by this passing observation. Noting that the World Series contestants are diverse by any possible standard, he adds:
Because the evidence before my eyes says the World Series of Poker has evolved from its good-old-boy roots into a stronghold of, yes, functional multiculturalism, proving if nothing else that there is such a thing. Most of the academic versions, of course, have long since degenerated into monocultural zealotry, diverse as to race or gender but in almost no other respects. The term has even taken a pejorative cast of late, correctly associated with tenured politicians swimming in schools of resentment, apparently aiming to prove that ideology is indeed a form of brain damage.
As my younger friends say, woah! Erin O’Connor herself couldn’t have put it much better.