→ August 25, 2015
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NYC eats, August 2015.

I’ve got two posts up for Insiders today, one on sustainable breakthroughs so far in 2015 and one on this weekend’s Metropolitan Classic high school tournament.

I had quite a run of food in the city (that’s New York for all you non-New Yorkers; the qualifier simply isn’t required for the rest of us, nor is capitalization) over the weekend, between a pizza pilgrimage, an artisan coffee roaster, and a restaurant crawl with the O.G. Top Chef Harold Dieterle.

Pizza first … I’ve heard for years about Paulie Gee’s, a small pizzeria in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that’s only open in the evenings and can easily run two-hour waits. They’re considered one of the best pizza joints in the country, including a spot on that 2013 Food and Wine list that I’ve been using as a sort of travel guide. (I’ve now eaten at 25 of the 47 that are still open, including all but one of the NYC entries.) By going solo I was able to get right in and sit at the bar, which had a rather convenient reading light right by my seat. The pizza is thin-crust, cooked in an Italian-built wood-fired oven, with various preset options ranging from the traditional to the bizarre. I went with a mostly traditional option of fresh mozzarella, arugula, and prosciutto, but – and I know I won’t get a good reaction from the crowd with this – the pizza was overcooked. The edges were too charred, and there were small parts of the center of the dough that were burned underneath. I have no complaints with the toppings and it probably would have been outstanding had it come out of the oven as little as 20 seconds sooner. Fortunately for me, they’re planning to open a second location in Hampden near Baltimore, so I’ll get to try them again.

The coffee spot was Blue Bottle, a roaster based in San Francisco with a couple of outlets in the city, and that is some damn good espresso. They offer a number of varietals in pour-overs, but as I was pressed for time both mornings (and particularly desperate for caffeine on the second morning), I went with espresso, which they make with blends rather than single-origins. Their roasts are light (“third-wave”) so you can still taste the flavors of the beans.

Harold Dieterle, the winner of the first season of Top Chef, is a huge Mets fan and reader of my stuff, so we’ve been in touch for a while and trying to get together for a food crawl in Manhattan, which finally happened on Friday night. The first stop was Cata, a tapas place on the Lower East Side where the alcohol consumption began – they specialize in gin and tonics, and I got one with Fever Tree tonic and lavender – and we had a handful of small plates. I’m pretty sure this was the first time I’d had jamón iberico, the Spanish version of prosciutto made from black Iberian pigs, often fed just on acorns. It’s less salty than prosciutto and the meat has a luxurious, buttery character with a distinct nutty flavor. It’s carved to order from a leg that’s sitting on the bar counter and costs $29 for a plate. We tried a handful of other tapas, best of which were the smoked oysters, the patatas bravas (fried potatoes, but not really French fries) served with an aerated aioli, and the marinated anchovy toasts.

Danny Meyer’s restaurant empire continues to grow, as the entrepreneur best known for creating Shake Shack is behind the new place called Untitled at the Whitney Museum. Head chef Michael Anthony (not the guy from Chickenfoot, although that would be cool) has created a vegetable-focused but not vegetarian menu that changes very frequently to reflect whatever’s most in season. We had at least a half-dozen dishes, some of which were gifts from the kitchen (for Harold, not for me), and the standouts included a tomato/melon “sashimi” that highlighted the spectacular tomatoes with just a little salt and I presume olive oil; a plate of grilled pole beans with squid and toasted hazelnuts, presenting a vegetable I rarely see in a way I hadn’t tried before; nectarine “toasts,” again taking a central item from the produce section and making it the runaway star; pork fritters, opulent little balls of shredded pork shoulder just barely breaded and fried, served over a corn relish; and duck sausage with mustard sauce, which turned out to be the second-best duck dish I had on the evening. The only dish I didn’t love was one of their most famous, the smashed cucumbers with black sesame seeds and soba noodles, which ended up lost in the sea of liquid underneath it, a hazard of working with high-quality in-season cukes. The space itself is very cool, with high ceilings and long pendant lights, plus lots of glass looking out on Gansevoort. Chef Anthony came out to chat and is an incredibly nice guy who’s a fairly serious Reds fan.

The last spot, and the most decadent, was Cosme, a Mexican-inspired upscale restaurant that, according to Harold, has one of the best duck dishes in the city: Duck carnitas, a whole braised duck leg served in a cast-iron skillet with thinly sliced onions and radishes, served with blue-corn tortillas, salsa verde, chile de arbol salsa (I tried it; it’s hot), and lime wedges. The duck shreds like smoked pork shoulder, but has a softer, smoother texture, and it stays moist between the braising and the way it’s served under the browned skin. It’s more than enough to share, but it’s also a steep $59. Whether that’s worth it depends on your budget, but I will say it’s probably the best duck dish I’ve ever had in a restaurant.

We also had Chef Enrique Olvera’s now-famous dessert, a pavlova he calls “Husk Meringue with Corn Mousse,” with burned and powdered corn husks in the giant meringue, which is served cracked in half so that the corn mousse (made with mascarpone) appears to be spilling out of the center. You can see pictures of both dishes in the glowing NY Times review from February. If Olvera’s name rings a bell, he appeared as a judge in one of the Mexico City episodes of the last season of Top Chef.

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→ August 22, 2015
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Saturday five, 8/21/15.

My short series on the best tools in baseball continued with my ranking of the players with the best hitting tools and the best fielding tools in the majors. I also had two draft blog posts, one on the Perfect Game All-American Classic and one on the Under Armour game.

I was the guest host of the Baseball Tonight podcast on Wednesday, with guests Tim Kurkjian and Alex Speier.

Chat is still down, so I did another Periscope video chat instead.

And now, this week’s links… saturdayfive

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→ August 15, 2015
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Saturday five, 8/15/15.

My one Insider piece this week covered my opinions on the best pitcher tools in baseball. ESPN’s chat software was inaccessible this week, so my Klawchat has been postponed to next Thursday.

And now, the links…

  • Minneapolis Star-Tribune writer Amelia Rayno
    tells how disgraced former AD Norwood Teague harassed her. There’s no way his superiors were unaware of this activity, right?
  • One of the most famous longreads in history – written before “longreads” was a term or even a concept worth mentioning – is now online, John Hersey’s 1946 New Yorker piece on Hiroshima survivors. Hersey had just won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for A Bell for Adano, which is on my to-be-read shelf right now.
  • Why are we letting infectious diseases make a comeback? This story isn’t about vaccines, but about our lack of preparedness for new diseases creeping up from warmer regions.
  • This isn’t new, but it came in handy with a Facebook argument with a high school classmate who threw out a little climate-change denial: The polar ice caps aren’t “recovering.”
  • The FDA doctor who blocked thalidomide’s rubber-stamp approval died at 101 this week. Frances Oldham Kelsey – yep, a woman doctor, the kind that chauvinist José Mourinho has such a problem with – said “no” in the face of resistance from multiple sides. Only seventeen cases of thalidomide-related deformities were reported in the United States, compared to thousands in Europe.
  • If you’ve seen Going Clear and want to see the IRS revoke Scientology’s bogus tax exemption, former Scientologist Tony Ortega tells you what to do. I sent one; the more of us send it … well, we can only hope we get some response, as a $3 billion for-profit entity shouldn’t have any tax exemption.
  • Miles Teller’s publicist might want to find a new client after this self-immolation in Esquire. I don’t feel great about the writer’s role, either, as she takes a pretty slanted view of him even considering his boorish behavior.
  • Pedro Moura, one of the best beat writers in the country, has a series on Brazilian baseball, looking into why a country that has a baseball tradition and produces tons of athletes for other sports hasn’t become a huge MLB pipeline. Hint: It’s corrupt as hell.
  • The New England Journal of Medicine came out in support of Planned Parenthood, and against the “radical antichoice group whose goal is the destruction of Planned Parenthood” which “continues to twist the facts to achieve its ends.”
  • Tiling the plane – gleaming the cube, but for math majors – is at the heart of a series of unsolved problems in mathematics, but a recent advance found a new solution among convex pentagons, the first such discovery in decades.
  • Via my friend and frequent dining partner Kiley McDaniel, a piece on how restaurants can’t find enough cooks, a phenomenon that’s at least partly the result of a drop in immigration from Mexico to the U.S.

So I finally saw Birdman yesterday, and thought it was full of great performances but the story was hackneyed at many points, while the ending didn’t work for me at all. I’m sure many if not most of you have seen it already; what did you think? Did this deserve the Best Picture win, or was it a combination of a movie about movies that used a cinematography/editing gimmick that won the prize? And what, if anything, happened at the end?

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→ August 9, 2015
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In the Land of Invented Languages.

Arika Okrent explores the strange history of artificial languages – Esperanto, Klingon, and other doomed projects to create a “universal” or other constructed language for people to ignore – in her lively 2014 book In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius, taking a surprisingly neutral view of the topic that dances around one very obvious truth: These people are weirdos. Some are just eccentric, while others are batshit insane, but the one thing they all have in common is the delusion that any of this is a good idea.

That makes the subject even more interesting, and Okrent, a trained linguist who happens to be the niece of Nine Innings author and original rotisserie league player Dan Okrent, surveys the field by examining the stories of five of the most significant “conlangs” in history: the Philosophical Language of John Wilkins, Esperanto, Loglan (and its offshoot Lojban), Blissymbols, and Klingon. No one here comes off particularly well, although Esperanto creator L.L. Zamenhof doesn’t fare that poorly. Loglan ended up the subject of a lawsuit over who “owned” the language, while the inventor of Blissymbols exhibited symptoms of bipolar disorder, and the folks who learn Klingon … well, that’s its own kind of insanity, given that the language’s designer deliberately made it difficult to learn and pronounce.

One of the most interesting aspects of Okrent’s book is how it sheds light on the evolution of natural languages and why “intelligent design” makes no more sense in linguistics than it does in evolution. Multiple efforts to craft artificial languages have failed for consistent reasons: Either the creator tries so hard to make the language cover everything that it becomes unusable, or the creator fights the natural process of change that accompanies any language when even a small community begins to use it. (Esperanto, the closest thing the conlang world has to a success story, has seen evolutionary changes in the language over its century-plus of existence, such as the decline in use of the -n to mark a noun in the accusative case.) There’s a third obstacle, in my opinion, which is that almost every conlang seems to fall in love with accent marks, such as the are-you-shitting-me P@x’áãokxáã language … which is only an extreme case, as conlangers abuse the umlaut more than bad metal bands, and the orthographical nightmares are compounded by overuse of q, x, and z, often adjacent to each other.

Okrent’s own hypothesis on why artificial languages fail seems to consider the inextricable link between language and culture, something she explores in a few chapters that discuss the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, leading into the section on “Loglan,” a logical language that James Cooke Brown (inventor of the boardgame Careers) created to test that hypothesis in a laboratory setting … but that was or turned into a massive ego project for him, spurring a lengthy battle between him and the small number of people who bothered to learn this thing, causing the latter group to split off and create the language Lojban. If this sounds like a couple of kids fighting over corners of the same sandbox, you have the right idea. But in Okrent’s view, the fascination these strange little subcultures hold doesn’t supersede the fundamental problems that any fake language will have taking hold – the lack of any cultural connection or foundation to tie people to the language and the language to their everyday lives and needs. The work involved doesn’t help either, especially since many of these languages forsake accessibility for “completeness,” but we have seen natural languages take hold in non-native places for cultural or business reasons. We don’t need an artificial universal language because we have English, which has supplanted French (the previous “universal” language) in international business and diplomacy and has been spread globally by the United States’ entertainment industry.

Okrent has many interesting tangents in the book beyond the chapters on crazy Charles Bliss (who sued the school for disabled children that adopted his language of symbols, extorting $160,000 from them to make him go away) or the social outcasts who attend Klingon language conferences. She gives the most concise explanation I’ve ever seen for why irregular grammatical forms persist in modern languages (it’s another evolutionary explanation), describes another failed Sapir-Whorf experiment built around a feminist conlang called Láadan (again with the accent marks), and discusses how the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out of J.R.R. Tolkien’s own language-invention efforts, one that involved building not just a single language but a whole taxonomy of them that led to the elves of Middle Earth. Tolkien, at least, comes off better than most of the nuts who populate the book, idealists, dreamers, egotists, and just plain old oddballs who ignore the history of well over 500 attempts to build an artificial language that people will actually use with a grand total of zero true success stories in the list. Speaking as someone who’s found lots of ways to waste his own time on frivolous pursuits, the invention or study of a fake language strikes me as even more wasteful and frivolous than most.

Next up: Steven Millhauser’s Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1997.

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→ August 8, 2015
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Saturday five, 8/7/15.

This week’s Klawchat transcript is up, and I also reviewed Broom Service, a fun family-strategy boardgame that’s been nominated for the Spiel des Jahres award, for Paste.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

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→ August 7, 2015
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The Buried Giant.

I held a Klawchat on Thursday, and I reviewed the Spiel des Jahres-nomianted family boardgame Broom Service for Paste.

Kazuo Ishiguro wrote two of my all-time favorite novels, the very British stiff-upper-lip story The Remains of the Day and the brilliant dystopian tragedy Never Let Me Go, along with a handful of lesser books that featured his gorgeous prose but couldn’t match the two peaks for storycraft. His latest novel, The Buried Giant ($5.99 for Kindle right now), is a welcome return to form for the English author, offering a plot of simple scenes that lends itself to vast philosophical interpretation, in an unfamiliar milieu that blends beautifully (if anachronistically) with his classical prose.

The Buried Giant takes place in pre-medieval England, where the Saxons are gradually taking over from the native Britons and the land is shrouded in a mist that has caused all people enveloped within it to lose access to many of their long-term memories. An old couple within one settlement, built into a hillside network of caves, sets off on a journey to visit their son, who has moved to another village for reasons no longer clear to his parents, Axl and Beatrice. The pilgrimage goes awry quickly – unsurprising, as the pair don’t even know where their son might be – as they’re co-opted into a larger endeavor involving the warrior Wistan, a mysterious orphan Edwin, the Arthurian knight Gawain, and a dragon whose actual existence is unclear until the very end of the book.

Ishiguro’s Victorian phrasings are stilted in the mouths of his Germanic and Celtic characters, but the language seems to fit his fabulist aims – and, of course, an accurate rendering of their language would leave the book unreadable. Fable it is, however, without the pedantry of traditional fables, instead opening up ruminations on the weight of cultural trauma, coming to grips with the sins of the past, and our individual and collective abilities to move on with or without those memories. Is our ability to forget, at least at a superficial level, an asset or a liability? Is there true reconciliation without reckoning?

Axl and Beatrice end up in between two forces taking contrary approaches to these questions, one seeking to lift the fog, the other to preserve it, and are given the choice of sides to support, knowing that neither option is perfect. Choosing to lift the fog may advance the cause of the people of the region, but expose dormant conflicts between the two of them that have been lost to the mist. It’s the question every country’s leaders face after some horrible internal conflagration or genocide: will the long-term gains from a “truth and reconciliation” commission exceed the short-term pain and renewed enmity from reopening wounds so recently closed?

Ishiguro paints his characters in broad strokes here because the mist he’s created all but demands it; the characters feel round but vague, as if the mist itself is between the reader and the page. The precise, modern English in which the characters speak only adds to the perceived distance from us to the action – and there is action, by the way, not just a Tolkienesque walk through New Zealand landscapes with a lot of talking. Ishiguro plays with his narrative prerogative, shifting his view at times away from Axl and Beatrice, although they remain at the heart of the book, such as scenes that serve to emphasize the objection entrenched forces might have to any reexamination of the past. Oligarchy takes a beating here, but The Buried Giant is no polemic, so while Ishiguro concludes the book with a firm decision by the main characters, the ending is neither happy nor straightforward, much as post-war authorities must struggle with the question of lifting the fogs over their battered nations and dealing with the sins of the recent past.

Next up: Anita Okrent’s book on artificial langages (like Esperanto and, yes, Klingon), In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius.

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→ August 3, 2015
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July 2015 music update.

I think this is my longest playlist to date, at least by number of tracks, and that’s after a handful of deletions that didn’t make the ultimate cut. A lot of these are preview tracks from albums due out in the next two months, so it seems like we’re headed for a great fall of new music.

CHVRCHES – Leave A Trace. They’re back with one of their best songs yet; the new album, Every Open Eye, is due on September 25.

Boxed In – Mystery. Boxed In is the stage name of solo artist Oli Bayston, who used to be in a band called Keith (great name, lads), who were joint winners in a 2006 competition with Bombay Bicycle Club, which is the band I first thought recorded this song because it sure sounds like their work. Turns out Bayston’s self-titled debut has been out for months, but this single, a minimalist, offbeat dance track, is just starting to get some airplay over here.

Prince – Stare. I’ve come to grips with the reality that 1980s/1990s Prince is gone, but “Stare” might be my favorite song from him since The Hits/The B-Sides came out in 1993. Prince at least seems to be trying to recapture the golden era of funk influences that informed his earliest recordings, something that comes through even with the sparse production that’s characterized most of his self-recorded albums from the last ten to fifteen years.

Foals – Mountain At My Gates. When these guys rock, they’re among the most interesting bands out there, but when they drift too far over toward their dance/electronic leanings, I start to fade out. This song rocks.

Superhumanoids – Anxious In Venice. Their song “Come Say Hello” was #62 on my top 100 songs of 2014, but it looks like this new track might be their breakout song – or at least the first to garner some mainstream attention, at least. They’re all about lead singer Sarah Chernoff’s voice for me, as she has tremendous range and can go from seductive to soprano in the space of a measure, but what sets “Anxious in Venice” apart is the throbbing electronic beat behind her, one of their best pop hooks ever.

Wavves/Cloud Nothings – No Life for Me. The title track from the “collaborate album” by Wavves and Dylan Baldi (who records as Cloud Nothings) is … well, actually what you’d expect if you mashed these two artists up, in a really good way. Wavves tend toward a cynical/dissonant sound, while Cloud Nothings can be monotonous, but here the two artists seem to mitigate each other’s worst tendencies for a track that’s a little bit poppy and closes out before the hook starts to wear.

Swimm – All the Time. An indie-pop duo from Florida, Swimm calls their sound “genre-blurred” on their bandcamp page, but I think it’s quite clearly electronic pop music like Grouplove or Tanlines, here boosted by a high-flying chorus.

Atlas Genius – Stockholm. There’s more great music coming out of Australia right now than any other place on earth. The brothers Jeffery (not to be confused with Jeff the Brotherhood) will put out their second album of quirky alt-rock gems later this month.

The Libertines – Gunga Din. Try not to act too surprised, but the Libertines’ big comeback song is all about getting wasted. Enjoy them while you can.

Wilco – You Satellite. Wilco’s unexpected album Star Wars (still free on amazon) also seemed, to me as a non-Wilco fan, one of their most accessible to date, but it’s the sprawling five-minute rocker “You Satellite” that grabbed me rather than the more radio-friendly “Random Name Generator.” This song’s syncopated drum line and mournful guitar lines seem more like something out of Wooden Shjips or Slowdive than classic Wilco, but instead of devolving into stoner-rock nonsense the song completes its orbit (pun intended) with a more majestic finish.

The Sword – High Country. Speaking of stoner-rock, we have The Sword, which sounds like the spiritual descendants of Deep Purple and Rainbow, losing some of their Black Sabbath inclinations here on the title track from their upcoming fifth album, due in late August.

Orchid – Helicopters. Sign of the Witch, the new four-song EP from San Francisco-based Orchid, continues down its own Sabbath-inspired path – they chose their name from an instrumental track off Sabbath’s Master of Reality – starting with this track, sort of like “War Pigs” as reinterpreted by Jim Morrison.

Years & Years – Worship. Years & Years’ debut album, Communion, came out last month and debuted at #1 on the UK charts, even reaching #47 here without a lot of radio support. It’s a safe record, like Hot Chip distilled for broader appeal, with very few moments that stood out as worth replaying. This track was the album’s highlight.

Tove Styrke – … Baby One More Time. Styrke, a Swedish pop artist, takes a pop song (and, if you remove the hypersexualized underage girl from the original’s equation, a good one) and makes it into something new, with a darker twist to the song and a synth line that sounds like a Lo-Fi All-Stars riff. It’s far better than the other cover running around this month, Nekokat’s perfunctory, cash-grabbing cover of the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.”

Passion Pit – Until We Can’t (Let’s Go). These guys seem to be good for one great track per album; this is the one from their April release Kindred.

Metric – Cascades. The third single from their upcoming album isn’t as immediate – ugh, I can’t believe I used that word – as “The Shade,” but it’s a similarly mature track from the Canadian outfit whose early stuff drove me up a wall.

The Helio Sequence – Battle Lines. This Portland duo’s eponymous sixth album came out in late May on Sub Pop but I missed it in all the draft prep I was doing at the time. “Battle Lines” is a dreamlike, textured track that has a hint of melancholy in the reverbed vocals and a tropical underpinning in the drum line, probably a shade too long at 4:20 (heh).

Mimicking Birds – Dead Weight. These guys seem too smart for even the smarter (if more self-important) corners of popular and “alternative” music, especially in the lyrics to this track, which read more like poetry than rock lyrics. It’s mournful and immersive until the odd smooth-jazz outro.

Telegraph Canyon – Why Let It Go. Arcade Fire with a tinge of country? They’re called “Americana” in reviews, but that’s not only a subtle insult, it diminishes the breadth of their sound and the members’ prodigious technical skills.

Houndmouth – Say It. Now this is more Americana, right? Or maybe alt-country or roots-rock. I’ve noticed “Sedona,” which appeared on my April playlist, is getting a little mainstream airplay, so, you know, way to catch up.

Cloves – Don’t You Wait. I can’t quite get my head around Cloves’ bizarre pronunciations (what she does to the word “better” might qualify as vandalism), but her voice is haunting and strong, reminding me of how I felt when I first heard Fiona Apple’s “Shadowboxer” and couldn’t get over that voice coming from an eighteen-year-old.

Chelsea Wolfe – After the Fall. I don’t know what to make of this song, but it creeps me out. She cites lots of dark influences, including black metal acts, but the morbid feel of “After the Fall” comes from atmosphere rather than blast beats or death growls.

Telekinesis – In a Future World. This song from Portland indie rocker Michael Benjamin Lerner is so new his own website doesn’t mention it, but it’s the lead single from his upcoming album Ad Infinitum, due out on September 18th. It’s a departure from his power-pop output to date, instead drawing heavily on early 1980s synth-pop and new wave, and I think the best song I’ve heard from him.

Shura – White Light. Aleksandra Denton has yet to produce a full-length album, with this track coming from her first EP release, itself just three songs long. It’s electro-pop more than “alternative,” with a definite R&B influence underneath her vocals, which are reminiscent of Leanne Macomber’s.

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→ August 2, 2015
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Colorless Tzukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

Haruki Murakami wrote one of the best novels I’ve ever read, his magnum opus The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a masterful blending of reality and dreamlike sequences (some literally in characters’ dreams) that combine to explore Japan’s trouble dealing with its brutal legacy from World War II. It’s #16 on my top 100 novels of all-time list. He followed that up with another tremendous novel, Kafka on the Shore, in 2002, another book that deals with the philosophical aftermath of the second world war, weaving a brilliant twin narrative that also delves into dialectics, the dream/reality divide, and “really good dumps.”

Since Kafka, however, Murakami has written just three novels, none up to the level of those two works. After Dark was short and felt unfinished, while I never bothered with his thousand-page tome 1Q84 due to its heft and comments from friends that it wasn’t worth the time required. Given the positive press around his latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, I at least had some optimism that Murakami was getting back to peak form, but after ripping through it last week, I am sorry to report that this book sucked. It’s a cold, aimless, distant, unsatisfying novel that takes Murakami’s frequent theme of alienation to the extreme of alienating the reader from the book itself.

The title character is seriously bummed out, with good reason: once part of an extremely tight-knit quintet of friends, he found himself abandoned and shunned by the other four without reason or warning, entering a period of suicidal depression for six months before emerging a very different person on the other side, although his life afterwards remains monotonous and largely friendless. Now in his late 30s, Tsukuru, an engineer who designs railway stations, finds himself in the first serious relationship of his life, but his semi-girlfriend, Sara, insists that he confront his four friends to deal with the unresolved sadness and angst that is blocking him from fully committing to their (or any) relationship.

It’s a solid premise for a book, but what happens next is a whole lot of nothing. Tsukuru visits his friends one by one, eventually going to Finland for the last of the encounters, and gets factual answers to his questions of why he was excommunicated, but only in the most superficial way. He learns about two crimes committed against one of the friends, the first of which was loosely connected to his banishment, but Murakami never bothers to go into those in any detail, much less tell the reader who committed them. While the novel ends with Tsukuru obtaining a sort of closure, it’s a thoroughly unsatisfying variety at least for the reader; there’s no cathartic event, but there isn’t even enough of an explanation to justify Tsukuru feeling any resolution of what’s “blocking” him. He believes he’s “colorless,” but why did the novel about him have to be that way too?

Next up: Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel The Buried Giant.

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→ August 1, 2015
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Saturday five, 8/1/15.

So I was kind of busy this week, writing these pieces for Insiders on the major trades leading up to Friday’s trade deadline.

• Yoenis Cespedes to the Mets
• Mike Leake to San Francisco
• Latos/Olivera/Wood three-team trade
• David Price to Toronto
• Joakim Soria to Pittsburgh
• Carlos Gomez/Mike Fiers to Houston
• Brandon Moss to St. Louis
• Cole Hamels to Texas
• Jonathan Papelbon to Washington
• Ben Zobrist to Kansas City
• Troy Tulowitzki to Toronto
• Tyler Clippard to the Mets
• Johnny Cueto to Kansas City
• Several smaller trades
• The Mets/Carlos Gomez trade that didn’t happen

I also have a scouting post up on some Mets and Yankees AA prospects.

And now, the links… saturdayfive

  • Earlier this month, a fan at a Brewers game was hit in the face by a line drive, severely injuring her and missing killing her by centimeters. There’s a fundraising page for her medical bills if you’d like to donate.
  • Twitter is now hiding plagiarized jokes and other tweets if the original authors file complaints. It’s a minor issue compared to some of the abuse hurled at women and minorities on Twitter, but I’ll take any step toward greater editorial control on Twitter as a positive.
  • Molly Knight talked to Lasorda’s Lair about her book on the Dodgers and her history of anxiety disorder. If you haven’t yet, you should buy her book.
  • The Shreveport Times has a sharp opinion piece on how the Lafayette massacre won’t change anything. The piece specifically singles out Louisiana’s “weak and non-existent gun control.” It’s on us, though; you vote for candidates who take money from the NRA, this is what you get. If you don’t like it, get out there and campaign for the other side.
  • Is the song “Happy Birthday” still protected by copyright? It appears it may not be, although we’ll need the judge’s ruling to be sure. There’s a big fight coming in 2018 over expiring copyrights, one that puts me (in favor of putting many older works in the public domain) on the opposite side from my employer (Disney, which has a fair concern about Mickey Mouse falling into p.d.).
  • The Fibonacci shelf takes the mathematical sequence and turns it into stackable furniture. I want this.
  • Three “next-level” recipes for rum punch. That first one, a planter’s punch with homemade grenadine, sounds right up my alley; planter’s punch is the first strong (may I say “grown-up?”) cocktail I liked.
  • Go ahead, be sarcastic, at least with people you know well: it can boost creative thinking, according to a new study by three business school professors.
  • A fantastic profile of prodigy turned mathematician Terry Tao, considered (per the piece) “the finest mathematician of his generation,” and more broadly a piece on number theory. I share Tao’s love of the original computer game Civilization and the difficulty in putting it aside; it occupied a huge portion of the fall semester of my junior year of college, unfortunately. That said, it kills me that the article’s author felt that “prime number” required a definition. You shouldn’t be able to get to high school without knowing what that means.
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→ July 29, 2015
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The Goldfinch.

I have Insider posts up on Troy Tulowitzki trade, the Ben Zobrist trade, and the Jonathan Papelbon trade.

Donna Tartt’s nearly 800-page bildungsroman The Goldfinch won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, sparking an ongoing controversy over its worthiness, with some highbrow critics arguing that its prose was too pedestrian while other critics and authors railed against the inherent elitism of those claims. I think I come down in the vast middle between the two camps: It’s a good novel, certainly not dumbed-down for anybody, elaborately plotted and written in an adult voice, yet it finishes weakly and doesn’t seem to fit the admittedly vague guidelines for the Pulitzer (“for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life”). It is, however, one of the only books I’ve ever read that seems to take a serious view of post-traumatic stress disorder and tries to bring it to life in an empathetic yet unstinting fashion.

Theo Decker, the protagonist and narrator of The Goldfinch, is a typical, bookish thirteen-year-old boy, living in Manhattan with his adoring mother after his alcoholic father walked out on them a few months earlier, when the two of them are caught in a terrorist attack on an art museum that’s exhibiting Dutch painter Carel Patritius’ (real) painting of the book’s title. The blast kills Theo’s mother, while Theo, in another room at the time of the explosion, tries to comfort an older man who’s dying near him and who tells Theo to take The Goldfinch from the wall, perhaps to protect it. Theo ends up carrying the painting with him for years, a physical manifestation of the PTSD (reminiscent in a slight way of Emma Sulkowicz’ Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)) from the attack, which he chooses to self-medicate via substance abuse and reckless behavior. The story takes him from New York to Las Vegas back to New York and eventually to Amsterdam, where the novel makes a sharp left into this weird noir-ish crime-story territory, losing much of the emotional impact from the first five hundred pages or so, losing the thread of the PTSD exploration in favor of, I think, finding a way to wrap up the book.

Some critics called the portion of the ending that eventually gets the painting back to the authorities too obvious/predictable, something Theo should have done far earlier, but I think that ignores or dismisses the idea of the painting as a symbol of Theo’s PTSD – he can’t get rid of the painting just by wishing to do so, but has to find some way to start to heal himself before he can do so. I could argue that Tartt fails to establish his healing well enough by the ending, but then again, the book was already too long by a third and by that point the escapade around the painting’s theft was approaching the ridiculous.

Theo is a flawed character but a well-developed one, and with almost 800 pages to spend in his head we get a full picture of his personality and his struggle to come to any kind of grips with the death of his mother and everything bad that comes after. He’s the only character in the book to get that treatment, however, as everyone else has a two-dimensional quality, from his angelic mother to the similarly wispy Pippa (a crush who is, herself, tied to the museum bombing and thus remains in a tangible way just beyond his reach) to the furniture restorer Hobie who becomes a surrogate parent to Theo in the latter half of the book. Even Boris (why always Boris?), Theo’s best friend during his time in Las Vegas, is half character and half caricature, not to mention capable of consuming unfathomable quantities of drugs and alcohol … although fictional Russians have a preternatural capacity to metabolize vodka.

The Pulitzer committee gives only a terse explanation for each winner’s selection, so we’re left guessing what they saw in The Goldfinch that many critics didn’t see or didn’t value. The only explanation I can conceive that fits the guideline about “American life” is the PTSD angle: the National Center for PTSD says about 8 million U.S. adults suffer from PTSD in any given year, with causes ranging from military combat to rape to disasters like the book’s museum bombing. PTSD isn’t quintessentially American, but it is a fact of life all over the world today, and it’s increasing in our consciousness if not in prevalence, especially with soldiers returning from lengthy tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan with the disorder. If that’s the book’s greatest strength, however, the slapdash finish undermines the exploration of the disorder and its effects. Theo’s recovery, such as it is, is unsatisfying from a reader perspective and, I’d guess, from a clinical one too. The Goldfinch spends two-thirds of its bulk as a serious literary work, but by its final pages it has devolved into a smart page-turner, diluting the impact of its more ambitious passages.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

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