31 Jan 2011, by Eric
The end is now for Walkoff Walk, one of our favorite baseball blogs to say the least. Seems important that we honor this occasion with a picture of a pelican eating a shrimp. Rob and Kris have started a Food Tumblr called Eatoff Eat. Drew Fairservice will continue to write at Ghostrunner on First. Dan stays at Philadelphia Will Do (his own Tumblr), and as for 310toJoba, well, who knows.
Fellas, thanks for the memories.
Also: this means we can finally steal their tagline, "On baseball and the human condition," without feeling so guilty.
28 Jan 2011, by Eric
As of late this blog has been an Alex Belth and FreeDarko appreciation space. That will continue below. Alex wrote a post on the Banter called “The Power and Beauty of Restraint.” He takes as his starting point a blog post by Esquire's Chris Jones. Because I cannot resist a craft discussion, in I jump.
Jones:
We’re taught to believe that words have a value, a power, a weight. Logically, then, the more words, the better the sentence or paragraph or story. But writing isn’t always a logical exercise. Sometimes—most of the time—it’s about things that are harder to measure.
Belth:
Man, you’ve got to be ruthless to murder your darlings. It is nothing short of inspiring when the great talents have the conviction to do just that.
The whole essay is worth a read. Glenn Stout brings up poetry: “it not only teaches tangible things like economy, sound and rhythm, but it also teaches that the negative space in writing.” Belth himself brings up painting.
These are much better venues than sports writing to immediately appreciate the value of economy. I had a poetry professor in college named Richard Kenney. He's a damn fine poet, and one of the best teachers I've ever known. If you had a problem – as Belth puts it – murdering your own darlings, then Rick did not. He dismissed stray words and sentences with an executioner's seething glee.
But it was all for a purpose. The only poems he killed were mercy killings. Rick pruned the excess. He questioned the purpose. He demanded the most. He made us memorize Auden and Keats and Rilke. The first Rilke poem I read with him, “The Legendary Torso of Apollo” serves as an apt metaphor here. It's a short poem about a statue that over the centuries somehow lost its head. But its decapitated state only serves to strengthen the remaining torso. Apollo's head is more powerful in absence:
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Poetry does not get more economic than that last line: “You must change your life.” There is little economy in what I'm doing right now, which is blatantly appreciating economy. But this is a blog, and it's my blog, and I have the right. So I continue with Belth's visual example.
I'm a big fan of the painter Caravaggio and the technique of chiaroscuro which employs stark light/dark contrasts. Caravaggio's paintings use the negative space, the darkness, the way that great writers can use the space between words and sentences. You can also see this technique in film – especially with a lot of noir stuff. Think about the negative spaces onscreen next time you watch “The Godfather.” Certain scenes resonate visually in almost the same way works by a totally disparate talent like Ernest Hemingway resonate.
I end with Hemingway here because to many people he is an icon in word economy. His story “Hills Like White Elephants” is assigned in college English classes for the clever way it approaches a subject without ever broaching it. His books are easy to read and manage to say a great deal in a small space. Fortunately and unfortunately, his iceberg theory holds up as a modus operandi for students in fiction writing workshops everywhere.
Jones, in his blog post, writes that “we are taught to believe that words have a value, a power, a weight.” I was lucky. I was taught by my father that for this very reason, words are to be dispensed with great care. If you can't say something succinctly, don't say it at all. Or as Ted reminds me sometimes when I send him drafts of long essays, “try harder.”
In this vein, we must all be careful not to use economy as a crutch. I know I have a tendency to do this. Instead of pushing an idea further, to the brink of collapse, I fall back on minimalism. The less you say, the less you are responsible for. This has mostly been an appreciation for Belth's “power and beauty of restraint.” But I hope it can also be a warning to myself and to others: don't use restraint as a tool for cheating. And don't use it for gimmickry either.
Hemingway approaches gimmickry with “Hills Like White Elephants.” But he gave this advice as well as anybody could have. And his iceberg remains the apt metaphor:
If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
27 Jan 2011, by Eric
I was interviewed about P&P by Phil Bencomo for The Baseball Chronicle podcast. We talk about the origins of this blog, the American Sports Blogging Experience, the past/future of the whole writing and sports writing thing, and more. As the singer of one of my once-favorite bands said "if you ain't got roots, you ain't got shit."
Phil asked smart questions, and if you're into that sort of thing it's worth a listen:
The Baseball Chronicle Podcast
Thanks Phil, for having me on.
26 Jan 2011, by Eric
In my day job as managing editor of Jew-ish.com, I had the pleasure of speaking with Bethlehem Shoals of the awesome FreeDarko about hoops, Judaism, and Seattle. Check it out.
Also, I may post some more about FreeDarko soon. They are a big influence on P&P and once upon a time we joked (joked!) about calling this blog FreeGarko. The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History is tremendous.
20 Jan 2011, by Ted
In doing some research on goodness knows what, I came across a few paragraphs by the scholar of ancient literature Edith Hamilton, in her book The Greek Way. Hamilton loves the Greeks, and has not much fondness for the Egyptian approach to intellectual freedom, or the lack thereof.
She describes the class of priests, for whom knowledge and discovery were only a means to strengthen their hold on their power over the common person. "Great men must have built up that mighty organization," she wrote, "but what they learned of old truth and what they discovered of new truth was valued as it increased the prestige of the organization."
She goes on to describe how, in maintaining their power, the priesthood had to closely guard its knowledge and keep it from getting to the outside. "To teach the people so that they would begin to think for themselves, would be to destroy the surest prop of their power." Ignorance breeds fear, she says, and, according to Edith, "in the dark mystery of the unknown a man cannot find his way alone." Who is available to guide him, but, oh hey look, a priest!
"The power of the priest depended upon the darkness of the mystery."
Now granted, these are issues that humankind has struggled with for millennia: freedom of speech, the spread of knowledge, etc. But it's always nice to stumble across a reminder that the days we live in now are monumental. Information is everywhere, and the means and tools to achieve and disseminate insight feel infinite.
Hamilton's words caused me to take pause for a moment or two and acknowledge the remarkable work of the sabermetricians around the world who labor towards deeper insight for no other reason than to advance the level of discourse for everybody. They don't do it for profit or for private power, but for the power of the community, as specific as it may be.
The sense of expectation that comes off as arrogance is not, I don't think, arrogance, but a demand for a higher level of discourse, and a battle against ignorance. That's a far cry from the Egyptian priests and their covetous protection of knowledge and insight.
And you've got to hand it to the courts, too, for opening up sports statistics to the wide world and the world of profit, enabling outfits like Stats Inc. to flourish, and for powerhouse analysis machines like Fangraphs to spread crazy quantities of knowledge to baseball fans and other analysts.
So let's take a day and declare amnesty for the feisty sabermatrician. On this day, we'll forgive the acerbic commentary on unenlightened fans, we'll assume that every sabermatrician has the good of the sport in mind, and that he or she doesn't live in anybody's basement.
Sabermatricians, you are keeping us all free from baseball ignorance, lighting the dark and mysterious hallways of the mind and granting power to the people.*
*This refers, of course, to the period before they sign on with a front office and put their once-democratic insights on lockdown.