My 2010 Predictions post is up, including standings, playoffs, MVPhe/Cy winners, and a top 3 for each RoY award. There’s also a straggler post from Arizona on Fabio Martinez and two other Angel prospects, and I did a chat on Friday afternoon.
I’m scheduled to be on the Herd on Monday morning, but the weekly ESPNEWS hit is off next week.
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James Michener won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his short story collection Tales of the South Pacific
*I actually had no idea that “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” was from South Pacific until I sat down to write this post. I figured it wasn’t originally from that hair-coloring commercial, but I couldn’t have even guessed what musical contained the track.
Some scattered thoughts from this book:
* This had to be an inspiration for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in multiple ways. I could imagine Heller writing his novel as a sarcastic, almost angry response to Michener’s somewhat antiseptic take on a brutal war – but at the same time, Michener mined subtle humor from incompetent officers, and the character Tony, who flies all over the Pacific trading one good for another in pursuit of liquor, seems like a precursor to Heller’s Milo.
* Tales of the South Pacific would never win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction today. The first 30-odd years of the award largely rewarded novels told stories highly illustrative of some aspect of the American experience. If you look at recent winners, particularly the last ten years, the emphasis has been on edgier fare – Oscar Wao, Middlesex, The Road, even the blacks-who-owned-slaves backdrop of The Known World – with the occasional exception for an old-school winner like Empire Falls (which handled several major and very modern themes) or Gilead (I imagine the gorgeous prose and raw emotion won out). Michener’s novel today is almost more like a smart beach read, enjoyable, set in a serious time, but not a novel for the ages.
* The mere title of this novel reminds me of the best musical that never existed, found in an episode of the TV series Amazing Stories called “Gershwin’s Trunk,” in which a songwriter with writer’s block uses a psychic to contact the ghost of George Gershwin, who provides him with (among others) a song called “I Discovered You,” leading with the couplet: “Balboa thought it was terrific/When he discovered the Pacific.” Twenty-five years I have had that song in the back of my brain. It’s a hell of an episode.
Next up: A book written by a reader! Richard Dansky’s first novel, the ghost story Firefly Rain