It’s the Season of the Lists. Every year around this time, some middle-class survival instinct kicks in (or is it just a siege mentality?) and I go around making lists of the things that have to be done before the long winter comes: Gutters to be cleaned, leaves to be burned, trees to be cut back. This goes back to my childhood, I suppose, when I used to help my dad change out the screens for storms on lead-sky autumn Sundays with the Bears on the radio. To this day, I associate most domestic chores with the image of Bobby Douglass running for his life.
At the top of my list this weekend was installing a new chimney cap, a job that involves me climbing up on the roof. I hate climbing up on the roof. I’ll do it when I have to, but first I have to psych myself up a little, talk myself into it, a little like a parachutist getting ready to jump out of a plane. The payoff, though, is the view. You can see a stream cutting through some woods behind our house and a chain of ponds off in the distance and an old barn and, on days like yesterday, smoke rising from a few burning leaf piles around the neighborhood. I was checking all this out, when I started to hear a strange racket coming from the woods, just 30 yards or so from the house. It sounded like grunting pigs. A few seconds later, a doe came tearing out from behind a tangle of honeysuckle, full speed. She was sprinting like a thoroughbred, ears back and eyes wide. Charging after her were two grunting bucks. They looked—-well, let’s just say they looked determined. It’s mating season. The doe led them in a loop around our yard, jumped over the stream, and doubled back into the woods. Then I lost sight of the chase, though every once in a while I could hear some thrashing in the woods and more grunting. I guess that doe was on the bucks’ to-do list.
I’m a little compulsive about making my lists, but not always so successful at actually completing them. I find my lists all over the house. Lists of calls to return, lists of books to look for at the library, lists of things to buy at the grocery store. The really old lists that turn up inevitably seem a little pathetic, with their outdated priorities. They’re like a record of the futility of my days. But I suppose lists are hopeful things, too. As long as you’re making lists, you can’t be totally sunk in despair. (Umberto Eco in a recent interview: “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”)
I knocked a few things off my list yesterday (Watch horny wild animals get busy? Check.) and let a few more slip. I’ll make a few more lists today. It’s on my list of things to do.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The Gales of November
When I was a kid, I thought Gordon Lightfoot’s "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" was the most epic and heartbreaking piece of music I would ever hear. I suppose this is what happens when you grow up listening to your big brothers’ Fairport Convention records.
Today is the anniversary of the Fitz going down off Whitefish Bay in 1975 with 29 men on board. WDCB marked the occasion by playing about a half-dozen cover versions of "The Wreck," nearly back-to-back. That's an awful lot of mournful maritime folk, even for me. I still think it’s a really good song, but I'm not sure I really need to hear it again until next November.
Today is the anniversary of the Fitz going down off Whitefish Bay in 1975 with 29 men on board. WDCB marked the occasion by playing about a half-dozen cover versions of "The Wreck," nearly back-to-back. That's an awful lot of mournful maritime folk, even for me. I still think it’s a really good song, but I'm not sure I really need to hear it again until next November.
Friday, November 6, 2009
On Not Sleeping with Audrey Hepburn
Stuck in another episode of middle-of-the-night sleeplessness last night, I turned to TCM to find that “Roman Holiday” was on. Forget space travel and wireless communications; I say the greatest achievement of our age is the availability, at 3 a.m., of Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn to keep even the most miserable insomniac company.
Even better, I happened to turn the movie on right at the point where Peck, finding himself unable to sleep, leaves his apartment and goes out for a walk. I felt strangely reassured. That’s an example of what my hero Walker Percy would call a certification--the process whereby a movie confers a kind of psychic legitimacy on your otherwise ordinary existence. Granted, Peck couldn’t sleep because he had a heavily sedated Hepburn in his room, whereas my case was more your standard-issue middle-class-anxiety insomnia. Still, I felt Peck and I understood each other.
Today, though, I’m fighting an inexplicable urge to run out and buy a Vespa scooter.
Even better, I happened to turn the movie on right at the point where Peck, finding himself unable to sleep, leaves his apartment and goes out for a walk. I felt strangely reassured. That’s an example of what my hero Walker Percy would call a certification--the process whereby a movie confers a kind of psychic legitimacy on your otherwise ordinary existence. Granted, Peck couldn’t sleep because he had a heavily sedated Hepburn in his room, whereas my case was more your standard-issue middle-class-anxiety insomnia. Still, I felt Peck and I understood each other.
Today, though, I’m fighting an inexplicable urge to run out and buy a Vespa scooter.
Monday, November 2, 2009
The Goalie Mask: Fifty Years of Pucks to the Face
Turns out I missed an important anniversary yesterday. The goalie mask made its debut in the National Hockey League fifty years ago, when Jacques Plante of the Montreal Canadiens wore one in a game on November 1, 1959.
Hockey fans--and slasher film devotees--rejoice.
This story from the Chicago Sun-Times has all the details, including a quote from current Blackhawks goaltender Cristobal Huet on what would happen if he tried to face down a slapshot without his mask (“I’d be dead right now") and a mention of the wonderfully named anti-mask Montreal coach, Toe Blake.
But how does one celebrate an anniversary like this?
Hockey fans--and slasher film devotees--rejoice.
This story from the Chicago Sun-Times has all the details, including a quote from current Blackhawks goaltender Cristobal Huet on what would happen if he tried to face down a slapshot without his mask (“I’d be dead right now") and a mention of the wonderfully named anti-mask Montreal coach, Toe Blake.
But how does one celebrate an anniversary like this?
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Essayists in the Outfield
Now that it’s World Series time—finally—I have a pretext for linking to this essay—finally--by Tampa Bay Rays outfielder Fernando Perez, from the September issue of Poetry magazine, about the alienation that poets and ballplayers share. Perez may have had a lousy year at the plate (.206 in 18 games) but his essay gave him the major-league-lead in appearances in prestigious literary journals. It also got him a lot of attention. A story on NPR called him, not quite correctly, “baseball’s poet.”
Most professional athletes don’t keep well-thumbed volumes of John Ashbery poems in their lockers. So it’s not such a surprise that Perez's essay and his reading habits made news. What’s remarkable is that his literacy hasn’t made him a clubhouse pariah. Perez’s writing places him in the long and troubled tradition of the Literate Jock--athletes whose literary inclinations won them public notice, but also alienated them from their less-literate peers.
The tradition dates back at least to boxer Gene Tunney, who in the 1920s famously corresponded with George Bernard Shaw and lectured on his favorite play, “Troilus and Cressida,” at Yale while he was heavyweight champ. (He compared the dimwitted Ajax to challenger Jack Sharkey.) His literary interests—or pretensions, as many said—were sensationalized in the press as something of a carnival sideshow, and the New York Times, put a report of his Yale lecture on its front page. But Tunney’s reputation as the brainy boxer only distanced him from boxing fans and writers, and he ended up ridiculed as a “phony intellectual.” “His aloofness from the sport…coupled with his literacy, scholarly bent and wealth, damn near made him a pariah,” wrote biographer Jack Cavanaugh.
The perils of jock literacy are even more evident in team sports, where one guy reading a book in a locker room tends to be seen as the sort of stunt that will upset team chemistry. In his seminal 1960 book, The Long Season, Jim Brosnan, who pitched for the Cubs, Cardinals and Reds in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, writes about confounding his teammates by reading a book on a team flight. They took to calling him “Professor.” When Brosnan’s own book appeared, it was seen as an outright provocation, a violation of the sanctity of the clubhouse. In the preface to a 1975 new edition, Brosnan explained the problem: "As an active player on a big-league team I had seemingly taken undue advantage by recording an insider's viewpoint on what some professional baseball players were really like. I had, moreover, violated the idolatrous image of big leaguers who had been previously portrayed as models of modesty, loyalty and sobriety -- i.e., what they were really not like. Finally, I had actually written the book by myself, thus trampling upon the tradition that a player should hire a sportswriter to do the work. I was, on these accounts, a sneak and a snob and a scab."
By then at least one other pitcher-author could commiserate. After former New York Yankee and Seattle Pilot Jim Bouton published his tell-all Ball Four in 1970—curse words included--the first stop he had to make was at baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s office. He was asked to repudiate his own book. Ball Four became a number-one bestseller, but that only seemed to aggravate Bouton’s offenses in the eyes of other ballplayers. He'd told clubhouse secrets and, maybe even worse, he'd engaged in the intellectual pretense of writing a book - and he wasn't even a star. When batters knocked his pitches all over the park, as they increasingly did, the catcalls came from the opposing dugout: ''Put that in your book, Shakespeare.” (My old essay on Bouton from the New York Times Book Review is here.)
Even before the book came out, Bouton’s interest in reading and writing separated him from his teammates. He wrote of his teammates trying to sneak a look at the notebook he kept with him, and of a teammate asking him if reading makes him smarter. Nothing in Ball Four is more touching than Bouton's take on the lot of the outsider on a baseball team, traveling for six months with two dozen men who have little use for him: ''I know about lonely summers. In my last years with the Yankees I had a few of them. You stand in a hotel lobby talking with guys at dinnertime and they drift away, and some other guys come along and pretty soon they're gone and you're all alone and no one has asked you what you're doing about dinner. So you eat alone.''
Given the history of literate jocks, you might expect Perez to be in for a similarly cold shoulder. It’s not so much that Perez published (after all, sports memoirs are now legion, of course, and so are jock-blogs) but that he’s so unapologetically bookish. He writes in “Para Rumbiar”: I’m not especially touched when a poet deals with a ball game; I’m not especially interested in having one world endear itself to the other. Right now I need them apart, right now I’m after displacement, contrast. The thick wilderness of, say, late Ashbery, can wrangle with the narrowness of competition.”
That doesn’t sound like anyone’s idea of clubhouse banter, but Perez’s erudition—like Brosnan, he has been known to keep books in his locker-- hasn’t seemed to alienate him from his teammates. A scout quoted in a New York Times profile called him a “clique-breaker,” the kind of player who gets along with all the factions that tend to form in a big-league clubhouse. Nor has he run afoul of the authorities, like Bouton. Perez was the subject of an admiring story on Major League Baseball’s website, the kind of attention that doesn’t usually come to weak-hitting outfielders who spend much of the season recovering from wrist surgery.
Not that I mean to suggest that Perez is wiping out anti-intellectualism in sports. Locker rooms are not turning into libraries. And the next time you hear an ex-jock broadcaster use a multi-syllabic word on the air, you will also more than likely hear his partner bust his chops for it. What’s different about Perez’s essay is that, even though it’s written by a baseball player, it’s not really about baseball at all. “Para Rumbiar” mentions three poets—Ashbery, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg—but not a single major leaguer. That may be one reason Perez has avoided the trouble other Literate Jocks have found. His essay didn’t bother the baseball world because it didn’t hit close to home.
But then, that’s what makes it worth reading. Perez in “Para Rumbiar” tells us less about playing baseball than about some of the psychic states—exhaustion, isolation, idleness—that go along with the job. It took a Literate Jock to notice that these are the places poetry often comes from, too.
Most professional athletes don’t keep well-thumbed volumes of John Ashbery poems in their lockers. So it’s not such a surprise that Perez's essay and his reading habits made news. What’s remarkable is that his literacy hasn’t made him a clubhouse pariah. Perez’s writing places him in the long and troubled tradition of the Literate Jock--athletes whose literary inclinations won them public notice, but also alienated them from their less-literate peers.
The tradition dates back at least to boxer Gene Tunney, who in the 1920s famously corresponded with George Bernard Shaw and lectured on his favorite play, “Troilus and Cressida,” at Yale while he was heavyweight champ. (He compared the dimwitted Ajax to challenger Jack Sharkey.) His literary interests—or pretensions, as many said—were sensationalized in the press as something of a carnival sideshow, and the New York Times, put a report of his Yale lecture on its front page. But Tunney’s reputation as the brainy boxer only distanced him from boxing fans and writers, and he ended up ridiculed as a “phony intellectual.” “His aloofness from the sport…coupled with his literacy, scholarly bent and wealth, damn near made him a pariah,” wrote biographer Jack Cavanaugh.
The perils of jock literacy are even more evident in team sports, where one guy reading a book in a locker room tends to be seen as the sort of stunt that will upset team chemistry. In his seminal 1960 book, The Long Season, Jim Brosnan, who pitched for the Cubs, Cardinals and Reds in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, writes about confounding his teammates by reading a book on a team flight. They took to calling him “Professor.” When Brosnan’s own book appeared, it was seen as an outright provocation, a violation of the sanctity of the clubhouse. In the preface to a 1975 new edition, Brosnan explained the problem: "As an active player on a big-league team I had seemingly taken undue advantage by recording an insider's viewpoint on what some professional baseball players were really like. I had, moreover, violated the idolatrous image of big leaguers who had been previously portrayed as models of modesty, loyalty and sobriety -- i.e., what they were really not like. Finally, I had actually written the book by myself, thus trampling upon the tradition that a player should hire a sportswriter to do the work. I was, on these accounts, a sneak and a snob and a scab."
By then at least one other pitcher-author could commiserate. After former New York Yankee and Seattle Pilot Jim Bouton published his tell-all Ball Four in 1970—curse words included--the first stop he had to make was at baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s office. He was asked to repudiate his own book. Ball Four became a number-one bestseller, but that only seemed to aggravate Bouton’s offenses in the eyes of other ballplayers. He'd told clubhouse secrets and, maybe even worse, he'd engaged in the intellectual pretense of writing a book - and he wasn't even a star. When batters knocked his pitches all over the park, as they increasingly did, the catcalls came from the opposing dugout: ''Put that in your book, Shakespeare.” (My old essay on Bouton from the New York Times Book Review is here.)
Even before the book came out, Bouton’s interest in reading and writing separated him from his teammates. He wrote of his teammates trying to sneak a look at the notebook he kept with him, and of a teammate asking him if reading makes him smarter. Nothing in Ball Four is more touching than Bouton's take on the lot of the outsider on a baseball team, traveling for six months with two dozen men who have little use for him: ''I know about lonely summers. In my last years with the Yankees I had a few of them. You stand in a hotel lobby talking with guys at dinnertime and they drift away, and some other guys come along and pretty soon they're gone and you're all alone and no one has asked you what you're doing about dinner. So you eat alone.''
Given the history of literate jocks, you might expect Perez to be in for a similarly cold shoulder. It’s not so much that Perez published (after all, sports memoirs are now legion, of course, and so are jock-blogs) but that he’s so unapologetically bookish. He writes in “Para Rumbiar”: I’m not especially touched when a poet deals with a ball game; I’m not especially interested in having one world endear itself to the other. Right now I need them apart, right now I’m after displacement, contrast. The thick wilderness of, say, late Ashbery, can wrangle with the narrowness of competition.”
That doesn’t sound like anyone’s idea of clubhouse banter, but Perez’s erudition—like Brosnan, he has been known to keep books in his locker-- hasn’t seemed to alienate him from his teammates. A scout quoted in a New York Times profile called him a “clique-breaker,” the kind of player who gets along with all the factions that tend to form in a big-league clubhouse. Nor has he run afoul of the authorities, like Bouton. Perez was the subject of an admiring story on Major League Baseball’s website, the kind of attention that doesn’t usually come to weak-hitting outfielders who spend much of the season recovering from wrist surgery.
Not that I mean to suggest that Perez is wiping out anti-intellectualism in sports. Locker rooms are not turning into libraries. And the next time you hear an ex-jock broadcaster use a multi-syllabic word on the air, you will also more than likely hear his partner bust his chops for it. What’s different about Perez’s essay is that, even though it’s written by a baseball player, it’s not really about baseball at all. “Para Rumbiar” mentions three poets—Ashbery, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg—but not a single major leaguer. That may be one reason Perez has avoided the trouble other Literate Jocks have found. His essay didn’t bother the baseball world because it didn’t hit close to home.
But then, that’s what makes it worth reading. Perez in “Para Rumbiar” tells us less about playing baseball than about some of the psychic states—exhaustion, isolation, idleness—that go along with the job. It took a Literate Jock to notice that these are the places poetry often comes from, too.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Gone Mad
I know I might have my Cultural Literacy card revoked for admitting this, but I’ve never succumbed to Mad Men mania. I’ve seen bits of the show, but after a few minutes I start to catch an offputting whiff of easy cliché. (Ah, postwar suburban ennui, how many souls must you kill?) Still, it’s not the show itself that turns me off as much as it is the relentless evangelization on its behalf. (Slate, New York Times Arts section, I’m looking at you.) I went through the same experience with The Sopranos and The Wire, other hour-long TV dramas that once dominated discourse among the kinds of people who pride themselves on their good taste. I can’t help thinking of these kinds of shows as something like highbrow versions of “Dancing with the Stars:” You have to watch them if you want to participate in your clique’s water-cooler conversation. There gets to be something cultish and compulsory about the whole thing. Sorry, but I’d rather just watch the Blackhawks—or as I’ve been doing the last few nights, reading Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. (I’ve checked the index, and Don Draper doesn’t seem to make an appearance.)
MM gets another thumbs up from Benjamin Schwarz in the current Atlantic, but he also faults the show for getting some period details wrong. What made me sit up and take notice of Schwarz’s take on the show, though, was his invocation of one of my lifelong TV loves: The Dick Van Dyke Show. He speculates that many Mad Men maniacs are viewers “whose notions of the glamour of adult life, of Manhattan, and of 'creative careers' were shaped by endless reruns of three sitcoms with concrete ties to Mad Men’s particular milieu: The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewtiched and That Girl.” Schwarz writes that Mad Men is “those shows grown up, grown hard and, in ways that flatter its writers’ and viewers’ images of themselves, grown wise.”
It’s a provocative, slightly counterintuitive point, but I haven’t seen enough of MM to know if it’s on target. (Any thoughts, lovers of Mad Men?) Still, I have to like any essay that argues, in effect, for the timeless relevance of Mel Cooley.
MM gets another thumbs up from Benjamin Schwarz in the current Atlantic, but he also faults the show for getting some period details wrong. What made me sit up and take notice of Schwarz’s take on the show, though, was his invocation of one of my lifelong TV loves: The Dick Van Dyke Show. He speculates that many Mad Men maniacs are viewers “whose notions of the glamour of adult life, of Manhattan, and of 'creative careers' were shaped by endless reruns of three sitcoms with concrete ties to Mad Men’s particular milieu: The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewtiched and That Girl.” Schwarz writes that Mad Men is “those shows grown up, grown hard and, in ways that flatter its writers’ and viewers’ images of themselves, grown wise.”
It’s a provocative, slightly counterintuitive point, but I haven’t seen enough of MM to know if it’s on target. (Any thoughts, lovers of Mad Men?) Still, I have to like any essay that argues, in effect, for the timeless relevance of Mel Cooley.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
(Locked In) A Room of One's Own
Around our house, we don’t talk as much about writing as we do about not writing. My wife and I like to take turns complaining about how little we’re getting done. We also take turns offering each other advice on ways to be more productive. I don’t think I need to tell you how that usually goes over.
It’s never uncomplicated when writers try to help other writers write. When the writers are married to one another, it gets really interesting. Christopher Benfey gets at this in a review of Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers in the New York Review of Books. Showalter’s book, a history of American women writers, mentions that Mary McCarthy was urged into fiction writing by her second husband, critic Edmund Wilson, who “shut her up in a room for three hours and ordered her to write a story.” For Showalter, it’s a paradox that “during the time when she was most dominated by a man, McCarthy began to create a new image for American women.”
But Benfey writes: “Where is the paradox? Wilson’s insistence that McCarthy allow time for her writing was overbearing, perhaps. . .But wasn’t it better to shut her up in a room with a typewriter than to hand her a broom and dustpan?”
For the record, neither my wife nor I have ever ordered the other into a room to write. Nor do we do much handing out of brooms and dustpans. But I’m not sure Benfey’s distinction matters much. Whether you’re handing someone a typewriter or a broom, you’re still taking upon yourself a position of authority--the assigner of tasks.
I’m also unconvinced about magic happening whenever you lock a writer in a room. A while back I mentioned the story of Hitchhikcr’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams being locked in a hotel room by his impatient editor. “I sat at the desk and typed and he sat in the armchair and glowered,” Adams is supposed to have reported. Maybe if my wife and I tried something like this, we’d be more productive. But I’m not sure we’d survive all the glowering.
It’s never uncomplicated when writers try to help other writers write. When the writers are married to one another, it gets really interesting. Christopher Benfey gets at this in a review of Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers in the New York Review of Books. Showalter’s book, a history of American women writers, mentions that Mary McCarthy was urged into fiction writing by her second husband, critic Edmund Wilson, who “shut her up in a room for three hours and ordered her to write a story.” For Showalter, it’s a paradox that “during the time when she was most dominated by a man, McCarthy began to create a new image for American women.”
But Benfey writes: “Where is the paradox? Wilson’s insistence that McCarthy allow time for her writing was overbearing, perhaps. . .But wasn’t it better to shut her up in a room with a typewriter than to hand her a broom and dustpan?”
For the record, neither my wife nor I have ever ordered the other into a room to write. Nor do we do much handing out of brooms and dustpans. But I’m not sure Benfey’s distinction matters much. Whether you’re handing someone a typewriter or a broom, you’re still taking upon yourself a position of authority--the assigner of tasks.
I’m also unconvinced about magic happening whenever you lock a writer in a room. A while back I mentioned the story of Hitchhikcr’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams being locked in a hotel room by his impatient editor. “I sat at the desk and typed and he sat in the armchair and glowered,” Adams is supposed to have reported. Maybe if my wife and I tried something like this, we’d be more productive. But I’m not sure we’d survive all the glowering.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
