Reports of Their Demise

Let me recommend a visit to Obit magazine, where you’ll find a very nice essay by David Wallis on premature obituaries. I especially liked the accompanying photos of Mark Twain, Alfred Nobel and Abe Vigoda, all of whom were once declared to have ceased existing before they were, in fact, dead. It’s an impressive trio, but Vigoda might be most impressive of all, because—as Wallis reports and the ever-vigilant site AbeVigoda.com confirms—he is still with us, some 27 years after being prematurely dispatched by People magazine. Viva Vigoda.

A Brief History of Living Room Furniture in Naval Warfare

From a piece by Colin Thubron on the 16th century Battle of Lepanto in the New York Review of Books: “Yet the Ottomans were uneasy on the sea.”

And the daybeds refused to leave the shore at all.

March Gladness

So earlier this week my son, who’s in second grade, filled out his first NCAA tournament bracket. As rites of passage go, this might not seem all that profound, but I have to admit that it made me a little proud when he asked me which of the 12 seeds I liked. Not eight years old yet, and already he knows to watch out for that 5-12 matchup.

He’s in school today, missing some of the first round, but according to this story, some men will go to great lengths to stay home and watch the tournament. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that guys are timing their vasectomies so they’ll be home for March Madness during their recoveries. The story says that one clinic offered a “Vas Madness” special: “Lower your seed for the tournament.” Men who signed up got free pizza and frozen peas.

Goaltenders

Every once in a while, in a fit of self-improvement, I’ll set some personal goals for myself. Sometimes I’ll even write them down. Months later, I’ll find these long-forgotten and still-unrealized goals, and I’ll have to wonder what I was thinking. Learn to play guitar? Renovate home office? Shave time off my running pace? Why would I want to do any of these things? When I think about how unworthy some of these goals are, it makes me glad that I lacked the fortitude to follow through on them.

So of course I liked this piece by Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe that asks if setting goals can sometimes be a bad idea. He writes that “management scholars are looking deeper into the effects of goals and finding that goals have a dangerous side.” He cites as his prime example GM’s goal to capture 29 percent of the American auto market, which he says distracted the company from the more important long-term job of designing better cars. But he also looks at psychological research that points to the importance of goal-setting for personal motivation: "we concentrate better, work longer and do more if we set specific, measurable goals for ourselves."

So should I make it a goal to set more goals? I’d argue that most of us could learn a lot from Mike, a grade-school kid in Padgett Powell’s novel Edisto, who has written on a small banner in his bedroom: “MY GOAL IN LIFE: NOT TO BE AN IGNORAMUS.” That's a goal worth shooting for, even if it’s a stretch for some of us.

Recession Drinking

We all have our own ways of coping with the economic mess. My wife has pretty much stopped reading the front page and business section of the paper. I have abandoned mindfulness training in favor of a new approach that focuses on the therapeutic power of constant hand-wringing. And just in time for all this weekend’s shindigs, the New Yorker and Dave Hanson offer a menu of cocktails for the recession. Can I get you a Nasdaiquiri? Or maybe you’d prefer a Princeton Bitters: “Pour two ounces of vodka into a cocktail shaker. Lament fact that you moved into a smaller house to pay for your son’s college education, and, since he couldn’t get a job and he’s now twenty-six, he’s living on your couch. Eying your son as he works his Wii, pour two more ounces of vodka into shaker. Serve with a grimace.”

Lecture Hall

Let me just admit that even in college I had a geek’s fondness for the old-style, stodgy lecture class—you know, a professor at the front of the room droning on for fifty minutes about something like the Federalist Papers. It’s not that I was the kid sitting in the front row paying scrupulous attention and taking notes. What I liked about the lecture format was that it provided a kind of soothing background noise, the ideal accompaniment for staring out the window, zoning out and filling my notebook with drawings of my favorite NBA team logos.

The Boston Globe’s Brainiac blog comments on a story from the Chronicle of Higher Education about a community college in New Mexico that has introduced microlectures—prerecorded one-minute bursts of insight for use in online courses. Brainiac is interested in the pedagogical issues. But my problem with the idea is that a one-minute lecture isn’t nearly long enough to achieve the kind of transcendental boredom that I used to get from some of my most monotonous profs.

I still spend a lot of time in college classrooms, and I’d still rather sit through a lecture than a seminar-style discussion. I don’t mean to disrespect the whole Socratic give-and-take, but mostly it makes me uncomfortable. Too often the professor seems desperate to draw any kind of response out of his students, and too often the students seem to be trying too hard to tell the professor what he wants to hear. It’s as if they’ll say anything to get him off their backs and onto the next student. It’s like being in the middle of a really awkward dinner-party conversation.

Lectures spare you that kind of cringe-worthy academic interaction. This is what I miss about lectures: the Zen-like calm of a single, stupefyingly boring, professorial voice droning on.

Barthelme and Baseball

Just finished Tracy Daugherty’s new biography of Donald Barthelme, Hiding Man, and it’s got me thinking about baseball.

The book is a good one, unapologetically affectionate, but spoiled a little by an epilogue that strains too hard to fight lit-crit battles over postmodernism. The best thing about reading it, though, was that it kept reminding me of DB stories that I hadn’t looked at in too long--like “Chablis” or “Jaws,” probably the best story ever written about marriage counseling at the A&P. (I always get the feeling, when I read reviews or criticism of Barthelme, that I like the wrong stories. A lot of my favorites come from his late period, when he was supposed to be in decline and his stories growing sentimental. But I love the world-weary humor in some of these stories.)

And then there’s “The Art of Baseball,” from the anthology, The Teachings of Don B. I don't know how to explain it or label it, except to say that the premise is that “a number of this century’s most famous artists were also, at odd moments in their careers, baseball players.”

Example one is T.S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land “is without doubt the most thoroughly studied, carefully annotated, and nitpickingedly commented-upon poem in the language. What has been missed. . .is that the poem is essentially about the St. Louis Browns of 1922, a team for which Eliot, back from Britain in that year, briefly starred at short.” The line “April is the cruelest month,” apparently was originally “August is the cruelest month,” referring to a “dreadful set of games the Browns dropped to the Yanks. . .a setback that removed them from serious league competition.”

But as a lifelong White Sox fan, I especially like the story of Susan Sontag, who is said to have played for the University of Chicago in 1959, even though the school didn’t have a baseball team. A White Sox scout discovered Sontag “and a group of similarly baseball-mad graduate students” playing “in the vast heating tunnels under the university’s South Side campus. . .Transfixed by the dark-haired beauty’s luminous activities at first, he inked her to a Sox pact immediately” and she went on to play as S. Sunday for the ’59 Sox team that lost to the Dodgers in the World Series.

Since this season will be the 50th anniversary of that team, I'd look for the White Sox to hold some sort of special Sontag Day at the ballpark. Maybe anyone who comes to the park with a copy of Regarding the Pain of Others gets in half-price.