Please wait until I've been dead for 100 years

Apparently Samuel Langhorne Clemens (pen name: Mark Twain), author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and other giants of the American canon, demanded that his autobiography not be released until at least 100 years after his death. Well, since he kicked the bucket in April of 1910, publishers are preparing to release the first volume of his 500,000 word autobiography.

I'm not particulary interested in poring over 5000 pages of Twain's twaddle, but it's really interesting that he would make such a stipulation in his will. Anyway, he was interesting, candid, controversial and funny in his time, so I'm sure that his autobiography will not disappoint.

The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day

By Haruki Murakami. It's the best short story I've read in a long while. Head on over to my friend Dustin's blog for the full text.

"...what matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely. When you do that, it is always the first time and the last."

The Last Great American Hero is Junior Johnson

I thoroughly enjoyed this famous Esquire piece by Tom Wolfe. Yes!

The legend of Junior Johnson! In this legend, here is a country boy, Junior Johnson, who learns to drive by running whiskey for his father, Johnson, Senior, one of the biggest copper still operators of all times, up in Ingle Hollow, near North Wilkesboro, in northwestern North Carolina, and grows up to be a famous stock-car racing driver, rich, grossing $100,000 in 1963, for example, respected, solid, idolized in his hometown and throughout the rural South, for that matter. There is all this about how good old boys would wake up in the middle of the night in the apple shacks and hear an overcharged engine roaring over Brushy Mountain and say, "Listen at him -- there he goes!", although that part is doubtful, since some nights there were so many good old boys taking off down the road in supercharged automobiles out of Wilkes County, and running loads to Charlotte, Salisbury, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point, or wherever, it would be pretty hard to pick out one. It was Junior Johnson specifically, however, who was famous for the "bootleg turn" or "about-face," in which, if the Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were too close behind, you threw the car into second gear, cocked the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and made the car's rear end skid around in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about-face, and tore on back up the road exactly the way you came from. God! The Alcohol Tax agents used to burn over Junior Johnson. Practically every good old boy in town in Wilkesboro, the county seat, got to know the agents by sight in a very short time. They would rag them practically to their faces on the subject of Junior Johnson, so that it got to be an obsession. Finally, one night they had Junior trapped on the road up toward the bridge around Millersville, there's no way out of there, they had the barricades up and they could hear this souped-up car roaring around the bend, and here it comes -- but suddenly they can hear a siren and see a red light flashing in the grille, so they think it's another agent, and boy, they run out like ants and pull those barrels and boards and sawhorses out of the way, and then -- Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong! -- gawdam! there he goes again, it was him, Junior Johnson!, with a gawdam agent's si-reen and a red light in his grille!

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

Gay Talese flew to Los Angeles to write a feature about Frank Sinatra, but soon discovered that Old Blue Eyes wasn't receptive to an interview. Talese hung around near Sinatra for many months and talked with his closest family, friends and business associates, and ends up painting an unbelievably rich portrait of the man. The imagery of Sinatra swaggering through The Sands with Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin is cartoonishly debonair.

By four A.M. Frank Sinatra led the group out of The Sahara, some of them carrying their glasses of whisky with them, sipping it along the sidewalk and in the cars; then, returning to The Sands, they walked into the gambling casino. It was still packed with people, the roulette wheels spinning, the crapshooters screaming in the far corner.

Frank Sinatra, holding a shot glass of bourbon in his left hand, walked through the crowd. He, unlike some of his friends, was perfectly pressed, his tuxedo tie precisely pointed, his shoes unsmudged. He never seems to lose his dignity, never lets his guard completely down no matter how much he has drunk, nor how long he has been up. He never sways when he walks, like Dean Martin, nor does he ever dance in the aisles or jump up on tables, like Sammy Davis.

The Breaks of the Game

Why did I just read 450 pages about the 1979 Portland Trailblazers? Because David Halberstam is one of the most magnificent writers of the 20th century and he beautifully tells the tale of a young team and a tumultuous season that transcends American sport. This is the story of a Trailblazers organization that is just two years removed from a magical championship season, and is now being torn apart due to trades, injuries, contractual strife and racial acrimony.

My favorite contemporary sports writer, Bill Simmons, often raves about The Breaks of the Game as being the finest sports book ever written. I agree. We'll probably never again see such a comprehensive study of a professional American sports team. Players can't be bothered with extended interviews and organizations are far too guarded to grant even a legendary journalist the kind of access that Halberstam had - the stakes are just too high now.

Anyway, if a 450 book by Halberstam seems like a bit too much, I'd recommend reading one of the last articles he wrote before he passed away in 2007. It's a Vanity Fair piece called The History Boys, and it's one of my all time favorites. Enjoy.

I Wish You Way More Than Luck

My little sister is graduating from high school this weekend, and I intend to give her this. It's a commencement speech that David Foster Wallace delivered at Kenyon College in 2005. I've passed this on to several friends, and they have all enjoyed it very much.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Depraved Decadence

Watching the Kentucky Derby this Saturday reminded me of one of my favorite articles of all time: The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, by Hunter S. Thompson (full text here).

How often does the written word elicit a belly laugh? I wish I'd taken better note of this through the years, but I do know that this is an article that certainly made me laugh out loud more than once.

For another laugh-out-loud piece, try David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The chess scene always cracks me up.

French on US

The feature length content in Harper's Magazine has been hit or miss the last couple of years, but I consistently enjoy the short stuff at the front - the Index and Readings. This month, I was struck by a snippet by French essayist Charles Dantzig entitled “Liste des Américains," from his Encyclopédie capricieuse du tout et du rien, published in France last winter by Grasset &
Fasquelle. The encyclopedia explains the world in a series of 800 lists."

They are a people without balconies. Yet they cannot help interfering in other people’s business, according to the Protestant custom. And on courthouse steps one sees people brandishing signs that say, as if they knew, GOD HATES ABORTIONISTS. It is a country fascinated by lust.

Americans spend less time arguing over things than over the right to speak about those things.

It is the only country in the world where no one remains a foreigner. A person can go by the name of Zgrabenalidongsteinloff and no one will raise an eyebrow. “In New York there are no impossible names,” as I was told by a novelist whose name
raised the eyebrows of elegant racists in Paris. This is what makes everything possible. They walked on the moon because they are the moon. One admires their courtesy.

Anecdotal generalizations like this are usually specious and almost always obnoxious, but I found Dantzig's observations both insightful and charming.

His entire list is well worth reading, but unfortunately I can't link to it because it's behind a subscribers-only wall.

Oscar Wao

This book is about storytelling. It's told in the earnest, authentic vernacular of a Dominican immigrant with a flair for urban slang and science fiction allusions. Poorly executed, such a voice would come across as gimmicky and ineffective, but Junot Diaz assures that the narration is both heartfelt and real.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao chronicles the tragic love story of Oscar de Leon, as well as the cursed fortunes of his ancestors. While Oscar is the focal point of the novel, the story interweaves the heartbreaking tales his elders who endured great suffering under the despotic regime of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

A few things:

• Rafael Trujillo was a ruthless dictator that ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. I'm sorry to say that I knew very little about La Era de Trujillo despite the nation's proximity and the fact that I have many Dominican friends. His regime was a classic cult of personality.
• The historical perspective coupled with a conversational tone create a rich and personal history of Oscar's family. Effectively, the reader feels the weight of three generations of anguish culminate with Oscar's demise. Very moving.
• I loved the fantasy and sci-fi allusions. Some of them I didn't get, but most of them were very effective. Diaz described a character as "taking Gollum-like pity" on somebody.

A worthy winner of last year's Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

Harlem Renaissance

I just rediscovered a wonderful poem by one of my favorite poets.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

Langston Hughes wrote this in 1951, and it feels like it could be the birth of hip-hop. If it's not the birth, then perhaps it conceived the first MC.

Ali Rap.

Just 6 Words

Ernest Hemingway's writing is forthright and simple. There are no superfluous words or punctuation, and his sentences tend to be short and blunt. His distinctive style is typically attributed to his brief stint at the Kansas City Star, whose style manual states: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."

Taking this directive to the extreme, Hemingway famously created a powerful story in just six words:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

I love this concept, but I've never had much of a knack for creative writing, so I'm afraid I've don't have any examples of my own. There is however, a pretty neat blog that collects user entries, so if you've got a story that can be told in half a dozen words, then I suggest you submit it. In fact, send it to me too!

Also, check out Wired Magazine's collection of six word stories from dozens of famous writers including Margaret Atwood, Stan Lee and Kevin Smith.

And what made me think about Hemingway this afternoon? Baby shoes of course. WTF? Probably not what Hemingway had in mind.

The Crying of Lot 49

I just finished my first Pynchon novel today and can now cross another book off of the list.

Oedipa Maas is living a life of quiet desperation, when she suddenly learns that she’s been named the co-executor of the estate of her wealthy ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. When Oedipa sets out to investigate the affairs of Inverarity, her life spins quickly out of control as she becomes entangled in a centuries-old conspiracy involving rival courier companies named Thurn and Taxis, and Trystero. Oedipa becomes obsessed with uncovering the mystery of this underground mail system and encounters a host of strange characters, odd coincidences and compelling tales. However, just as the pieces begin to come together, Pynchon sows seeds of doubt in the reader’s mind and we’re left to wonder if the entire conspiracy is nothing more than an elaborate hoax, or if Oedipa is just plain crazy.

To understand The Crying of Lot 49, one must understand postmodernism (which I do not). The best way I can describe postmodern literature is that it’s self aware. I mean this in the sense that the author is not simply telling a tale, but rather, writing about a story. If this seems confusing it’s because it is, and I think that’s what makes Lot 49 so challenging. Every sentence seems extremely deliberate, and it’s as if Pynchon is using each paragraph to do much more than simply advance the narrative. I think if you take absurdity, satire, literary conventions, and contemporary culture, you end up with a postmodern novel.

Then again, I’m not an English professor.

Stat Ball

There's a long but very interesting article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about Shane Battier and the application of advanced statistics in basketball.

First, here are Battier's career stats:

10.1 points | 4.8 rebounds | 1.8 assists | .447 FG%

These are very unremarkable numbers, yet this article argues that Battier is one of the most efficient players in the NBA today. Take a look at this:

The Grizzlies went from 23-59 in Battier’s rookie year to 50-32 in his third year, when they made the N.B.A. playoffs, as they did in each of his final three seasons with the team. Before the 2006-7 season, Battier was traded to the Houston Rockets, who had just finished 34-48. In his first season with the Rockets, they finished 52-30, and then, last year, went 55-27 — including one stretch of 22 wins in a row.

Obviously there are any number of other factors at work here, but it would appear, at least anecdotally, that Battier's presence significantly increases a team's winning percentage.

In the article, Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball and Liar's Poker) talks about how the Houston Rockets are successfully utilizing new statistical models that emphasize a player's unselfishness and overall efficiency. They argue that in basketball, the goals of the team and the individual players are not necessarily aligned. The key to the Rockets' personnel model is that "...there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly." This means that the traditional stats, like the ones I've quoted above, are not the best way to gauge a player's overall effect on the winningness of a team.

I found this to be a pretty interesting, but not particularly revelatory; this is the era of sports stats after all, and we've heard about these types of things before. What really blew my mind was the more granular application of these statistics on Shane Battier's defensive gameplanning. Battier, who typically guards the opponent's most dangerous scorer, is given a dossier before each game that outlines that player's most efficient tendencies. For example, is he more effective off the dribble or pass, when he drives to his right or left, or when he shoots from the baseline or the elbow. When a supremely intelligent player like Battier assimilates this information, he is able to put together a gameplan that allows him to dramatically reduce the efficiency of a player like Kobe Bryant or LeBron James. If he's doing everything correctly, Battier is essentially playing the most statistically effective defense possible given the opponent and his own physical abilities.

As I said, it's a long article, but it's definitely worth a look. I'll leave you with one more interesting little tidbit that will slightly diminish the joy of watching a live basketball game:

One statistical rule of thumb in basketball is that a team leading by more points than there are minutes left near the end of the game has an 80 percent chance of winning.

Don't you wish you sort of wish you didn't know that?

Lawdy Lawdy

After the Thrilla in Manila:

His eyes were only slits, his face looked as if it had been painted by Goya. "Man, I hit him with punches that'd bring down the walls of a city," said Frazier. "Lawdy, lawdy, he's a great champion." Then he put his head back down on the pillow, and soon there was only the heavy breathing of a deep sleep slapping like big waves against the silence.

Man, I love Muhammad Ali but this classic Sport Illustrated article made me better appreciate Joe Frazier and the magnitude of this epic rivalry. These men fought each other three times, and their final battle in The Philippines brought them both to the brink of death. Oftentimes we watch a boxing match, or any sporting event for that matter, without much thought about the post-event physical effects. This article paints an elegent picture of this bloody bout, but it also describes the sorry state of Ali and Frazier later that evening; the champ could barely chew his dinner and his opponent was rendered nearly blind.

A hat tip to my favorite contemporary sportswriter Bill Simmons for rattling off a list of his favorite sports journalism of all time in a recent column. I've been having a lot of fun tracking down and reading this stuff.

Updike on The Splinter

I realized that I wrote an entire Updike post without including any quotes, which seems criminal, but I also don't have my copy of Rabbit, Run handy. Instead, I'm including some lines from Updike's famous article entitled Hub Fans Bid Kind Adieu. It's one of the finest pieces of sport writing of all time.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.

What a perfect description of Fenway. I don't think it's possible to improve on any word in these two sentences.

Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh-colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead, came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those frowning, chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen, often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone. He did not once open his program but instead tapped it, rolled up, on his knee as he gave the game his disconsolate attention.

You really feel like you're sitting down next to these people. Again, perfect.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

This is such a poignant observation and it's something that any sports fan can attest to. There are times when a game, or a storyline or a season seem to play out in such a way, that if it were a film, it would be dismissed as saccharine, or unbelievable or completely far fetched. It's as if the players, fans and officials have a sense of the moment that transcends the actual game, and there is a collective, subconscious effort that impels the chain of events to dramatic perfection.

The above quote describes the buildup to Ted Williams' final at-bat of his career, where he smashed a monstrous homerun into the bullpen at Fenway, and then famously refused to acknowledge the crowd or tip his cap. He never emerged from the dugout again.

Rabbit, Run

I had wanted to read Rabbit, Run for years, and I finally got around to it this past summer. I found the book to be a bit laborious to get through the first time around and I've not reread it for this post, so let this serve as a disclaimer that my plot synopsis may not be spot on.

Rabbit, Run is the first in a quartet of novels about an erstwhile small town high school basketball star, Rabbit Angstrom, and his personal struggles with the confines of middle class American family life. One day, Rabbit is driving home from his job selling kitchen utensils when he realizes that he can't stand his life anymore. He decides that his wife is a dolt, his young child is obnoxious, his in-laws are jerks and his life is just unbearable overall. With this in mind, and little else, he keeps driving past his house, onto the Pennsylvania highway and beyond. His road trip is brief and it fails to satiate his itch for change, so he eventually makes his way back towards his hometown where he seeks out his old basketball coach, Marty Tothero, who now lives at the YMCA.

As is evident from his living arrangements, Coach Tothero isn't doing very well for himself and definitely shouldn't be looked to for guidance and advice, but that is exactly what Rabbit does. Soon, Rabbit and Coach Tothero double date (with prostitutes we later learn) at a local Chinese restaurant. Despite his date's caked-on makeup and rotund figure, Rabbit is smitten and makes a series of very strange sexual advances seeking validation, conquest and adventure from an ugly prostitute. Well played Mr. Angstrom.

For several weeks, Rabbit actually shacks up with Ms. Unattractive Prostitute lady (her name is Ruth) and, ironically, they live life like a married couple. This goes on for a while and Rabbit tries to coerce his concubine into performing certain sexual acts. Her reluctance is somewhat odd considering she is a prostitute. Well, Rabbit finally gets what he wants (spoiler: it's a blow job) and then learns that his wife is having their second baby, so he rushes to the hospital to be with her.

Rabbit is accepted back into his former life by his dimwitted wife and snooty in-laws who are mostly just concerned about how embarrassing this whole ordeal has been. Rabbit sticks around for a while but eventually runs back to Ruth. His wife, who thinks he's left her for good, gets roaring drunk and accidentally drowns their infant baby in the bathtub. Rabbit returns home, believing that the death of his daughter was in no way his fault. Oh, and then he finds out that Ruth is pregnant and she wants him to either file for divorce or else she'll have an abortion. The novel ends with Rabbit running again. For like, the third time.

Alright, that was a glib plot overview, but in my mind there are a few important points to be made about Rabbit, Run.

Style

Rabbit, Run is a gorgeous piece of writing; a 300 page clinic on rich, highly descriptive storytelling. However, the price of such detailed exposition is tedium, and throughout Rabbit, Run, you can't help but think that Updike could have described a scene in one page instead of five.

Updike

When a literary legend passes away, you can always count on an abundance of terrific essays and retrospectives to appear. My favorite piece on Updike appeared in New York Magazine. It was short, simple and focused on the two words that best describe the man (you could also include "misogynist", but these pieces tend to be very kind when dealing with the departed¹).

1) Prolific

The man wrote three pages a day, five days a week for 50 years. I probably write more than three pages of email per day, but this man cranked out thousands of words of elegant, timeless, Pulitzer Prize winning prose. In his lifetime, he published over "twenty-five novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books."

2) Belletrist

I had to look this word up when I was reading the New York Magazine piece, and after I learned the etymology and definition, I can see why it was used several times to describe John Updike.

belletrist

1. literature regarded as a fine art, esp. as having a purely aesthetic function.
2. light and elegant literature, esp. that which is excessively refined, characterized by aestheticism, and minor in subject, substance, or scope.
Origin: belles-lettres; French: fine letters.

Updike is a master of observation and Rabbit, Run reads like a stream-of-consciousness novel in many ways because the descriptions of people, places and feelings are so copious. No minutiae is spared from Updike's elegant treatment and the weight of these observations can sometimes be crushing. At time it can feel like we're privy to too much narration and inner monologue and the story can get bogged down a bit. Ultimately, this is a small price to pay for some of the finest American writing of the twentieth century. The man was a virtuoso wordsmith.

Morals

A man leaves his pregnant wife and young child to shack up with a shady prostitute.

This would appear to be a black and white case of unscrupulous behavior, yet Updike manages to insert all sorts of shades of grey into this tale, and actually paints Rabbit as a somewhat tragic figure.

Aside from the excellent descriptive writing, I think this is the most incredible aspect of Rabbit, Run. What should be a clear cut ethical transgression is somehow transformed into an interesting debate about the stifling confines of middle America and the "American dream." Is Rabbit's philandering and restlessness a heroic rebuke of the shackles of small town American family life? Perhaps Rabbit is a tragic character because he is true to himself, albeit in a grotesquely irresponsible way. There's something loveable about this man even though there almost certainly shouldn't be.

Conclusion

Read Rabbit, Run because it's a classic, but don't expect a page-turner. It takes some work to get through this dense novel, and it's easy to let your mind wander, but try to be mindful of the richness of the descriptions and the power of Updike's observations.


1. I'm basing this off of a terrific essay by David Foster Wallace. And yes, the use of a footnote here is itself an homage to DFW.

Reading List

My approach to reading is a bit weird. I love to read, but I don't necessarily do it for entertainment, I do it for enrichment. Many times I've found myself trudging through a ponderous novel that requires a considerable amount of mental exertion and focus, and asked myself, why?.

Why? Probably due to a mix of obsessive compulsive disorder and a lifelong pursuit cultural literacy.

To this end, I'm usually reading at least three or four books at a time, and a one them is usually from a list I found called "Time Magazine's All Time 100 Novels: English Language Works From 1923 to the Present." So far I've read 21 of the books on the list (22 when I finish The Crying of Lot 49). I'm going to start writing mini-reviews of the novels on the list, along with a few others, in no particular order. I've read some of these novels very recently, some more than once, and others have not been read since high school. I'll try to focus on the ones that are freshest in my mind first.