12 Oct 2011, by Eric
Find more of Megan Wells at Around the Horn from Aerys Sports.
Noted things:
- Pella does everyone else's half of a fight for them. Chef Spirodocus didn't even know he was in a fight, and seemed pretty unfazed; but her father and Mike both seemed pretty unsatisfied by the arrangement.
- The notable exception to this proclivity appears to be David.
- I don't think I've ever heard "The Waste Land" and the word "natch" uttered side-by-side before. It made me want to punch David in the face.
- UMSCACs is one of those acronyms that causes an obsessive-compulsive hitch in the flow of my reading, because I'm not sure how to pronounce it in my head. The best I've got is Ummskaks, which sounds like some kind of Nordic animal.
Because I was covering it for Around the Horn, I was required to watch all of last night's NLCS Game 2. As a lifelong Cubs fan, this was pretty painful to begin with; but it became merciless when the Cardinals offense wound up being a virtually unstoppable juggernaut.
Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer--you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error.
Said juggernaut was, predictably, anchored by a four-extra-base-hit performance from Albert Pujols - nicknamed "the Machine." At what point - or for which players - does the elimination of error become a thing of inspiration? Can a player turn becoming a machine back into an art?
12 Oct 2011, by Eric
Bryan Harvey, who has previously written here about Brian McCann and Jason Heyward and John Henry, is a high school teacher and poet, who writes for The Faster Times and The Lawn Chair Boys. His poetry has appeared in the Cold Mountain Review and DeckFight Press released his eBook, Everything That Dunks Must Converge, in April..
The great dilemma for just about almost every character in The Art of Fielding is that they can't seem to make up their mind if they love or hate something enough to continue it or let it go, from baseball, to women, to men, to men’s beards. Westish College is home to everyone, no one wants to leave it--whether they'd be leaving for law school or the minor leagues--and this refusal to leave is so strong that individuals might even sabotage their own dreams and futures to keep living what they've always been. It's about a fear of success. It's about a fear of the unknown. It's about boys refusing to be men--the President of the college basically lives in a dorm room--and it all seeps out of the idea that what's familiar, repetitive, and habit forming is simultaneously beautiful and neurotic. In other words, this book is very, very modern, but we all knew that. In fact, this book is so modern that, at times, I feel like I've already read it, yet my familiarity with its themes, plot, and characters isn't ruining it for me--it's actually enhancing my appreciation of Harbach's talents:
It's one thing to name a bunch of great books, but it's another thing entirely to make it appear as if your book belongs alongside with them, like it was already a part of the canon.
The Art of Fielding makes explicit nods to Melville's Moby Dick, is reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and carries with it the dull Midwest of Fitzgerald's imagination, but the book also makes subtle nods to Hemingway, like in Chapter 34 when Schwartz and Pella break up. She obviously feels that Henry is a wedge between them, and Schwartz senses that friction: "She was trying to insert herself into his relationship with Henry " (239), which actually makes her the wedge. And then Harbach even drops the phrase “the end of something” (280), in reference to Affenlight and Owen’s relationship, which has gotta be an allusion to Hemingway's short story of the same name, or at least one hell of a coincidence, seeing as how it follows six chapters worth of Schwartz and Pella stewing over what went wrong between them. I mean, Hemingway’s story features Nick Adams breaking up with his girlfriend, Marjorie, by a river, that flows on by as he sits stagnantly on the bank with Bill (who comes out of nowhere) eating a picnic basket of food that most people would have eaten with their girlfriend. Replace the river with Lake Michigan and Henry/Schwartz/Affenlight with Nick, and Hemingway's story becomes Harbach's, minus a Melville statue that is more capable of attaining happiness than any of the characters in either story appear to be.
So, I guess aside from seconding Pete Beatty's earlier question (does the midwest make you gay?), I'm wondering how others are perceiving the sheer been-there-done-that modernity of the book? Is it bloody brilliant, or is it off putting? Does it ring true, or does it feel like Harbach is overreaching, forcing comparisons to past greats that would be unwarranted if he didn't keep reminding us of the similarities? And why is it okay for a writer to do this, but if, for lack of a baseball example, Kobe Bryant or LeBron James were to wag their tongue like Michael, we’d all become anal retentive?
And no matter what your answer is, if you're like me, you've become just like the characters and are procrastinating against reading the rest of the book, not wanting it to end, peering out onto whatever body of water just happens to be the closest to you, wishing it were an escape route.
10 Oct 2011, by admin
Matt Christman is a freelance writer, film critic, and exiled Brewers fan living in Brooklyn.
Due to its draconian penalties against excessive celebration and general horsing off, some wags say that “NFL” stands for “No Fun League,” but that’s actually a much better label for Major League Baseball. At least in football, joyless uniformity of behavior is enforced by the Commissioner’s office. In baseball, the players do it themselves.
Over the past few seasons, the Milwaukee Brewers have gained a league-wide reputation as a gaggle of cocky jackasses. It all started during the 2008 season, with the infamous celebratory untucking of jerseys on the field that caused Tony LaRussa to drop his monocle. Since then, Prince Fielder earned a lifetime of beanings from the San Francisco Giants for a choreographed home run celebration. Now the antics of Nyjer “Tony Plush” Morgan, who has turned his season into a piece of fan-interactive performance art, have defined the Brewers and riled up opposing teams.
Over the course of the season, Morgan raised the ire of Giants fans with intemperate hand gestures in center field, and he won the hearts of Brewers fan with stunts like going to Twitter to ask Milwaukeans what he should do with an off day, getting a response of “go fly a kite,” and then going to the Milwaukee waterfront to ACTUALLY FLY A KITE (and posting the photo evidence on Twitter, of course). He’s introduced “Beast Mode” to the vocabulary of Brewer players and fans. “Beast Mode” involves Brewers players signaling the dugout with monster claws and screeching and general boisterousness. This has led to Brewers players celebrating extra base hits with a theatricality usually not found on a baseball field. The Cardinals have, of course, been the most vocal detractors of the Brew Crew, with manager Tony LaRussa tut-tutting about decorum and even complaining about the brightness of the scoreboard lights at Miller Park.
[caption id="attachment_4277" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Beast Mode"]
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Yet nothing the Brewers have done on the field would raise an eyebrow in any other team sport. That’s because baseball isn’t really a team sport, it just pretends to be one. When a wide receiver dances a jig in the end zone after a touchdown it’s a way for an individual player to break out of the faceless eleven man herd and assert his personal achievement. In baseball, even standing in the batter’s box for a second too long after hitting a home run is like spitting in the pitcher’s face. Giving up a touchdown is a failure of the entire defensive unit. Even if a cornerback gets completely torched, it’s unlikely he’s the only defender on the field who screwed up. In baseball, the failure is all on one man, standing all by himself on a big pile of dirt in the middle of the field. Any kind of exuberance on the part of a hitter reads as a personal insult. So baseball players maintain the illusion of teamwork in a covertly individual game by protecting their teammate’s egos, marking showboaters for future retaliation.
What folks like Tony LaRussa and other defenders of baseball’s unwritten rules don’t realize is that the high stepping of the Brew Crew has nothing to do with the chump on the mound who just got lit up. Untucked shirts and Beast Mode serve the same purpose for the Brewers that ordering Jason Motte to plunk Ryan Braun does for LaRussa. These rituals are a creative alchemy meant to turn nine individual players with nine individual stat lines and responsibilities into an actual team, just like retaliation, but more fun for the players and the fans. Do any of these team-building shenanigans actually make a difference on the field? Probably not. But it’s a blast to watch, and more importantly for fans, it takes the often remote and characterless assemblage of millionaires that make up a baseball team and gives them a collective personality that’s captivating to watch because it supplies the game with narrative and personal context. In a time when massive player salaries and social networking sites like Twitter have simultaneously make baseball players more remote and more accessible to the average fan, the Brewers approach to the game is the only viable one. If fans can’t relate to baseball players as people, if teams can’t “brand” themselves based on the personalities of said players, then there simply is no future for major league baseball.
This week’s National League Championship series is ground zero for baseball’s kulturkampf. The flamboyant Brewers are facing off against what Nyjer Morgan has called the “Plain-Jane Wonderbreads” of Saint Louis and their skipper, Captain of the S.S. NoFun, Tony LaRussa. It’s hard to imagine that any fan without a rooting interest in either team could look at the matchup and actually prefer the Cardinal’s joyless Mechan-o-Men to T. Plush’s irrepressible cohorts. What’s more likely to capture the imagination of the general viewer: Beast Mode or Albert Pujols’ dead-eyed stare? The key to winning the undying devotion of the sporting public is giving them something to root for other than a uniform color. So my advice for the next pitcher who gets red-assed over some Tony Plush hijinx is this: instead of just grimly plunking the next batter for the effrontery of his teammate, strike him out and make up your own damn celebration.
07 Oct 2011, by Eric
David Matthews is a former Deadspin scribe and nnow one of those freelance writers in Brookly. Durng 90s First Basemen Week, he wrote about the stylish Fred McGriff.
Through the first 230 or so pages, The Art of Fielding has introduced me to a wonderful small community (near Door County, Wisconsin, where I have summered before--if one can call getting drunk with high-school friends at or around bonfires, sneaking into resort pools, and playing far too much mini-golf “summering”) in Westish College. I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting and spending time with these characters and relating to them--Pella's inner monologue concerning whether or not she should clean Schwartzy's dishes perhaps most of all. I admit it, I am a fussbudget. While it sucks for them, watching Henry and Mike deal with disappointment is nothing short of compelling. As much as I have wanted to race ahead of this reading club, I am holding back in order to prolong this reading experience (and also because I share Pete's sentiment that things are going to get exponentially worse before returning to the brightness that peaked with the montage of both Henry's and the Harpooners' rapid ascension--I mean, I hope).
However, something has been nagging at me thus far: This novel’s striking familiarity, the small-town setting, the host of characters dealing with their own struggles amidst their standing within the greater community, etc. What I'm getting at is the book reminds me a whole hell of a lot of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. According to Bartleby, that work "allows us to enter the alternately complex, lonely, joyful and strange lives of the inhabitants of the small town." If that doesn't describe a wunderkind shortstop coming down with the case of the yips, an eloper attempting to make up for lost time, and a preeminent Melville scholar holing up (?) at a small liberal arts college in rural Wisconsin, I don't know what does. Where Anderson was focusing on the loneliness and isolation of living in a small town, Harbach is probing the very same among an even smaller set of people: A father and daughter who might only be connected by a tattoo, friends whose relationship resembles a teeter-totter, one that is just now starting to change direction.
Most of all, I am reminded of the character George Willard, the young man about town and central character in Anderson's collection. I see parts of him in the relationship between Guert Affenlight and Owen Dunne. The George who is looking for sexual experience and later wants to fall in love in order to have material for a short story. Guert seems in a state of infatuation with Owen, and it would be sweet if it was May-December love, and not a last-semester fling. Like George Willard eventually does, I feel Guert will also find Owen, or someone else, to stimulate him in a multitude of ways, and Harbach’s laid the groundwork for that to occur.
However, and I may just be thinking this to support my own theory, Owen reminds me of the darker side of George Willard. The one we meet much earlier who acts superior to his surroundings. Whereas George just sort of wants to hightail it to the big city, and get laid if he can, Owen seems to have undergone trauma before having his cheekbone crushed by an errant throw. We don't know all that much about Owen's breakup, but it seems like he may be playing with Guert thus far, something Pete seems to have seen as well. I hope I am wrong, but I am reminded of the following passage in the "Nobody Knows" section of Winesburg, Ohio, where Willard takes advantage of a young woman named Louise in order to lose his virginity:
"He remembered the look that had lurked in the girl’s eyes when they had met on the streets and thought of the note she had written. Doubt left him. The whispered tales concerning her that had gone about town gave him confidence. He became wholly the male, bold and aggressive. In his heart there was no sympathy for her. “Ah, come on, it’ll be all right. There won’t be anyone know anything. How can they know?” he urged. They began to walk along a narrow brick sidewalk between the cracks of which tall weeds grew. Some of the bricks were missing and the sidewalk was rough and irregular. He took hold of her hand that was also rough and thought it delightfully small. “I can’t go far,” she said and her voice was quiet, unperturbed."
Now, Owen is by no means a virgin, and unfortunately for both men, he currently cannot open his mouth, but their secret affair or courtship rings out when I reread this passage. Is Owen, someone for whom everything comes easy, tired of moderating the Prison or High School games and looking for a new challenge before heading off to Japan for his prestigious fellowship? Or something else entirely?
So am I grasping at straws with these comparisons? Is the Guert-Owen relationship just the normal fumbling and bumbling that comes with new love, or are we on the cusp of seeing immeasurable heartbreak handed down on one or both of these men? Bigger picture-wise: do you think Chad Harbach is going to be inducted into the American literary canon? Is such even possible anymore?
07 Oct 2011, by Eric
Dayn Perry is a senior writer at NotGraphs and skilled Reggie Jackson biographer.
My thoughts on Phase Two of the novel that binds us? I have little to add that hasn’t already been laid out on these pages by previous, smarter readers. I do, however, suspect that Pella and Henry will have, at they very least, a romantic dalliance in the pages to come. The problem is that any plot turn that I can anticipate is likely too obvious by half, so part of me hopes this doesn’t come to pass. Besides, I have already developed an unhealthy interest in seeing Schwartz and Pella work things out to my satisfaction.
Anyhow, instead of regaling you with my lack of insight, I’m going to cast “The Art of Fielding: The Movie.” Since I’m but halfway through the book, I reserve the right to fire any and all cast members should circumstances dictate. For now, though, I decree the following:
Henry Skrimshander - Jesse Eisenberg
He’s gangly, awkward and withdrawn. I have no idea if he can feign the necessary athleticism, but that’s what body double David Eckstein is for.
Mike Schwartz - Chris Pratt
The unimpeachable CelebHeights.com tells me that Mr. Pratt is 6-foot-2. He also seems capable of thesis-beard growth and related bearishness.
Owen Dunne - Thomas Hobson
If Jeffrey Wright were, say, 15 years younger, I’d bestow my casting blessings upon him. Things as they are, however, I am mandating, in my Judge Lance Ito fashion, that Mr. Hobson be given the job. And, yes, my spawn inflicts Nick Jr.’s “Fresh Beat Band” upon me, which is why I’m familiar with Mr. Hobson’s work in the first place. So Hobson is the choice. Hobson’s choice. Ha!
Guert Affenlight - Victor Gerber
When I think of "accomplished third-generation cracker with sublimated homosexual longing," I think of James Mason. But then I remember than James Mason is dead and also terribly British. So then I think of Victor Gerber.
Pella Affenlight - Greta Gerwig
Effortlessly attractive, smart, complicated without striving to appear so … Also, I believe I’m in love with her. Greta, that is, not Pella. Yet.
Genevieve (What’s her surname?) - Lisa Gay Hamilton
The hair works, as does the yoga-toned body. She also seems capable of playing a television anchor who is orders of magnitude more lucid than you’re garden-variety television anchor.
The floor is now open for complaints, well-mannered or otherwise.