→ July 31, 2010
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Another music update.

I’ll be filing reaction pieces all day as we learn about trades (but only when we know all the parts). Keep an eye on my twitter feed for links to articles as they go up.

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I’m not sure if my tastes are narrowing as I get older, or if there really just isn’t as much great new music coming out now as there was five to ten years ago, but I’m definitely not spending as much on music as I did early in the last decade. Here are ten songs I’ve heard this year – not all are new releases, and one is from 2006 – that are in heavy rotation for me at the moment.

Manchester Orchestra – “I’ve Got Friends”

At the Team USA trials in July and the Tournament of Stars before that, both held at the USA Baseball complex in Cary, the music played during BP and between innings was mostly atrocious, including crap like the Veronicas’ “Untouched” and OneRepublic’s “All the Right Moves,” which includes the line “All the right friends in all the wrong places.” Of course, that just put me in mind to hear Manchester Orchestra’s similarly-worded song, which has the chorus “I’ve got friends in all the right places/I know what they want, and I know they don’t want me to stay.” There’s a tension in the music and vocal style that matches the desperation of the lyrics, and it’s the best new (to me, that is – it’s from 2009) song I’ve heard all year.

Tame Impala – “Solitude is Bliss”

Only available on iTunes right now, as far as I can tell. It’s an Australian trio with a psychedelic edge to most of their songs, but of what I’ve heard from them, this is the one track with a real hook that made me want to hear it again. The layered production hides a minimal instrumental approach, and the idiotically-simple guitar riff in the chorus gains a new currency from effects that make it sound like it’s enveloping your head. The video is by turns comical and disturbing – and doesn’t the lead singer remind you of Dave Grohl?

Features – “Lions”

Reminds me of a cross between the Arctic Monkeys (first album) and the Black Keys, combining the shout-along chorus of the former with slower, sly verses where the singer is apologizing for something … without really apologizing.

Neon Trees – “Animal”

I have a feeling I’m going to be sick of this song in about six months, as it’s already crossing over, and I’m generally not a fan of this slightly nasal style of vocals, but it’s a pretty strong pop-alternative track if you can get past the cheesy lyrics.

Broken Bells – “The High Road”

I’m pretty sure that for my debut album I’m going to have to work with Danger Mouse. I do love the lines “The dawn to end all nights/That’s all we hoped it was,” with the unspoken fear that it’s something a lot worse, and the way James Mercer sings in two different voices that seem like they couldn’t have come from the same person.

Pinback – “From Nothing to Nowhere” (right-click to download the song free from their official site)

From 2007, but I first heard it the weekend I went to see Stephen Strasburg pitch in Altoona in early April. Pinback’s music is mostly understated emo, not exactly my style, but “From Nothing to Nowhere” has some velocity to it that’s missing from other songs I’ve heard by the group, making it a great driving song. I’m still skeptical of the lyrics I found online for this song – it sounds like he’s saying “who sung my lyric?” rather than the bizarre “co-sign my letter” listed on all the lyrics sites. The visual effects behind the band in the official video elevate it beyond the usual mailed-in band-playing-song clip. I have no idea why Rob Crow wanted to look like the Unabomber without his hoodie, though.

Alkaline Trio – “Help Me”

Power-pop is kind of a lost art right now, and this wouldn’t stand up to the 1990s stars of the genre like Sugar, Jellyfish, or Sloan, but there’s something about Matt Skiba’s singing on this track that got stuck in my head, even though the lyrics are nothing special. I did like it better when I thought I caught the word “jejune” in the line right before the chorus, even though I knew that was about as likely as a Jason Tyner shot to the upper deck.

Muse – “Supermassive Black Hole”

This song should have been on my top songs of the 2000s – a list I’m going to have to revise at some point – but it came out right three weeks after I quit the Blue Jays to join ESPN … and four weeks after I became a father. I was oblivious to just about anything that happened that summer, whether news or popular culture or non-baseball sport, so this song, an obvious homage to vintage Prince, escaped my notice, and I didn’t hear it until this spring. I’m sure Muse fans would disagree, but this is the best song I’ve heard from them since their debut album, with the incomparable “Sunburn” and “Muscle Museum,” purposefully over-the-top without the derivative feel that’s ruined a lot of their recent work for me, featuring a slithering guitar riff behind a falsetto vocal that will call to mind the Purple One at his peak.

Arctic Monkeys – “From The Ritz To The Rubble”

The second-best song off their 2006 debut album, when they were still ultimately a punk band with intellectual stylings and the appropriate sneer the critics wanted to see. The brief up-to-11 guitar lick leading into what you might call the chorus – the song defies conventional structures – grabs you up front, but the way Alex Turner turns shouted lyrics into another instrument is what hooked me, and how could you not like a song that rhymes “this one’s a scary’un” with “totalitarian?”

Cold Cave – “Love Comes Close”

This is so close to early ’80s new wave that it almost feels like parody – is it Joy Division? Camouflage? Early Ministry? I’m not in love with the vocal style – it reminds me of the guy from The National – but Cold Cave just nailed that new wave/synth-pop sound in a way that would fit perfectly on a compilation CD from that era.

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→ July 30, 2010
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The Patron Saint of Liars & The Whore’s Child.

Ann Patchett’s debut novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, showcases the kind of insightful, compassionate writing that helped make her magnum opus, Bel Canto, such a critical and commercial success, although Liars lacks the same degree of storycraft found in Bel Canto or in The Magician’s Assistant. It is, however, one of the best sad books I have ever read, as the story of a woman who is hopelessly broken inside and yet can’t help but damage the people close to her through her inability to deal with her own fears and insecurities.

The primary liar in the book is Rose, who flees a comfortable marriage in California when she discovers she’s pregnant and “realizes” – or decides? – that she isn’t actually in love with her husband. She ends up at a Catholic home for pregnant girls who want to have their babies and give them up for adoption, but Rose ends up staying on well past her ninth month – and keeps her daughter as well, only to find herself unable to be a mother to her child or even much of a wife to her second husband. Patchett gives us a window into Rose’s sadness but never much of an explanation for it beyond the death of her father in a car accident when Rose was three. Her own daughter, Cecilia, reaches her early teens before her mother leaves the picture, but Rose is unable to mother her and Cecilia ends up forming bonds both with the nuns who run the facility and the girls who come in for six or seven or eight months and then mostly disappear from her life.

The book comprises three sections, and though Rose is the central character in the book, she only narrates the first third, and her motives for lying and leaving were never fully clear to me. Son, the groundskeeper she meets and marries at St. Elizabeth’s, narrates the second part, and Cecilia handles the third, and both were more compelling, deeply drawn characters with the ability to process and communicate their own complex emotions in ways that Rose’s character cannot. And Sister Evangeline, a sort of grandmother-figure/mystic in the group of otherwise grey, dour nuns is a scene-stealer whenever she appears.

The Patron Saint of Liars is a sad book, but not a bleak one. Rose is clearly depressed and her lack of progress or recognition is heartbreaking, especially as it threatens the lives of those closest to her. But there are streaks of hope not for Rose but for Son and especially Cecilia, who wants her mother to be a mother but has also has the strength to find that nurturing from others and is, at the book’s end, developing into a healthier, fuller person than her mother ever was. It is imperfect, from Rose’s scant motives to her ambiguous fate in what becomes Son’s and Cecilia’s story, but Patchett writes about emotions so clearly and empathetically that I moved through the book’s pages as I might through a novel of action.

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Richard Russo’s first short story collection, The Whore’s Child and Other Stories, feels almost like a collection of rarities and B-sides, with a few outstanding entries that, in total, wouldn’t be enough for a full volume, so the publisher stuck in a first draft and a few throwaways to provide some bulk, although the hardcover edition still barely reaches 200 pages even with generous line spacing. The highlights are vintage Russo, though, and it’s worth going through the collection to find those stories and moments.

The main thrust of these stories seems to be failure, especially confronting failure of the past with the uncertainty of the future among his mostly middle-aged protagonists, many of whom are professors, writers, or other sorts of artists. The title story is told by a creative writing professor who has an unusual student auditing his class, one who becomes the star of the show for her brutally honest writing that turns out to be an exploration of her own sad childhood. Several stories revolve around failed marriages – I found “Monhegan Light,” in which a successful cinematographer chooses to meet the man who cuckolded him, only to find himself the loser in the confrontation, very disturbing – and “The Farther You Go” is the ancestor of his novel Straight Man, condensing the story of the narrator’s daughter throwing her husband out of the house.

My main problem with the novel is that the inherently brief nature of the short story limits Russo’s ability to introduce the local color of side characters and the comic relief of subplots and running gags. Instead, we’re left with a sort of stark, gloomy fatalism about lives lived wrong without hope of a turnaround or just a temporary uptick. Only the final story, “The Mysteries of Linwood Hart,” brought that mix of humor and sadness in a sort of of coming-of-age story with a number of baseball-related scenes, but the attempts to decipher a complicated adult relationship through the eyes of the ten-year-old title character felt blurry.

I’ve enjoyed the five Russo novels I’ve read, especially Empire Falls and The Risk Pool, but I’d recommend The Whore’s Child for completists (like me) only, as the title story alone isn’t enough to justify buying the whole book.

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I received a review copy of a new short story collection by Justin Taylor called Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, but the collection doesn’t live up to the title. I found the stories crude and immature, with the young writer’s obsession with sex (and with using sex as the primarily vehicle for meaning in the lives of his characters) and an evident lack of life experience. The characters were uninteresting, sometimes two-dimensional and largely self-absorbed, and their actions struck me as forced.

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→ July 26, 2010
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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

My Dan Haren analysis is up for Insiders, and I’ve got another post up on Omar Vizquel’s Hall of Fame case with some other notes and links.

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Who actually wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare? Is it possible that an uneducated moneylender and son of a Stratford glover could write over thirty plays that display the knowledge of a world traveler and the vocabulary of an alumnus of Oxford or Cambridge? This question has interested critics and scholars for two centuries, a story recounted in Columbia professor James Shapiro’s book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, a thorough and surprisingly balanced look at the controversy and the cases for the two major alternative candidates, Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere.

Shapiro explains in the introduction that he believes that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were, in fact, written by the glover’s son, but he presents the cases for Bacon and de Vere thoroughly and fairly – I might even say a little drily – before providing his rebuttals to each. He also lays out the arguments for Shakespeare and explanations why the doubts about his authorship are likely unfounded, based on erroneous assumptions about Shakespeare’s life and the times in which he lived. Even though I’m only somewhat familiar with Shakespeare’s works – I’ve only read three of his plays and have seen stage or film adaptations of three others (including the impeccable Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing) – I didn’t find that a handicap in reading or enjoying the story, which lays out a little like a mystery and a little like a psychological study of the people who so readily embrace conspiracy theories about why Shakespeare’s name appears on 33 plays and dozens of sonnets that he didn’t actually write. Along the way, Shapiro tells the story of the American Delia Bacon, of no apparent relation to Francis, whose support of her namesake became the monomaniacal focus of her life; of Sigmund Freud’s own obsession with the authorship question and belief that the Stratford man didn’t write his plays; and of the fact that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights on at least five of his plays, a point that poses many problems for proponents of alternative candidates.

One of the funniest parts of the case for Edward de Vere is the inconvenient truth that he died in 1604, yet as many of nine of Shakespeare’s plays didn’t appear until after that date, one of many problems with so-called “Oxfordian theory” (de Vere was the Earl of Oxford) that Shapiro says de Vere’s supporters handwave away or spin in a way that supports their man. There’s even a corollary to Oxfordian theory that has de Vere as both the son of Queen Elizabeth and her lover, and the two as the parents of the Earl of Southampton, which brings to my mind the funny image of a bunch of Elizabethan-era Britons running around with tin foil hats over their powdered wigs.

Despite Shapiro’s embrace of the glover’s son as the man behind the quill, he does acknowledge some of the aspects of the case that have led to the rise of alternative theories. There’s a lack of documentation of Shakespeare’s life; his books and manuscripts are gone, and much of what we do have about his life pertains to his work as a moneylender and investor. His plays have a worldly quality that he himself seems to have lacked, although that objection may arise from our own tendency to assume his world was far more like ours than it actually was. Difficulty reconciling what we do know of Shakespeare the man with what we see in his works has led to the search for other candidates, but Shapiro slyly demonstrates that such sentiments arise from conscious or subconscious class prejudices – how could an uneducated man, the son of a working-class father, have written such beautiful, erudite plays and poems?

Shapiro does mention some of the other proposed candidates for authorship of the play, but there are over fifty and the number seems to keep growing, so he focuses on the two with the strongest cases and most devoted followings. The argument for Bacon has lost steam over the last fifty years or so, and I found the lengthy explanation to get a little dry in spots, but the case for de Vere is more complex and unintentionally fun while also allowing Shapiro to delve more into the psychology of his supporters and the way that changes in how information is disseminated have allowed fringe theories to prosper, such as the “fairness” rules in media and the rise of sites like Wikipedia, where expert opinions and amateur opinions sit side by side without extra weight on the former. (For a funny, uneven, but thought-provoking polemic on this very subject, check out Andrew Keen’s 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur.) I entered this book with no knowledge of the authorship question beyond the question’s existence, but Shapiro sets up the cases for Bacon and de Vere and knocks them down in a way that I imagine would make it hard for those candidates’ proponents to recover without adding another layer of foil to their headgear. He does veer a little too deeply into explanations of “textual analysis,” which seems like extremely dangerous ground that leaves the door open for almost any interpretation the interpreter likes, but as someone who enjoys analyzing meaning and metaphor in literature I found the explanation of how attempts to identify Shakespeare’s works as inherently autobiographical led scholars down the slippery slope into thinking that space aliens from Phobos wrote them sobering. It won’t change anyone’s enjoyment of the plays, but Contested Will is an intelligent look at one of literature’s most enduring controversies.

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→ July 23, 2010
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What the Dog Saw.

I really enjoy Malcolm Gladwell’s writing, since even when I disagree with the conclusions he presents, his writing is interesting and thought-provoking, and he is unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom by looking at the underlying data. His most recent book is a compilation called What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, bringing together nineteen essays from Gladwell’s tenure at the New Yorker, uneven as compilations typically go, but anchored by several very strong essays that, again, challenge some pretty basic assumptions of our society and daily lives.

The most relevant essay to my day job was “Most Likely to Succeed – How Do We Hire When We Can’t Tell Who’s Right for the Job?” which is available, like all essays in this book, for free on Gladwell’s site. The essay deals with the difficulty in hiring for certain positions where the qualities required for success are either poorly understood or difficult to measure in candidates, with a focus on teachers and on NFL quarterbacks. (That intertwining of two seemingly unrelated stories is a Gladwell conceit, and, from a narrative perspective, a highly effective one.) NFL scouts have a hard time evaluating amateur quarterbacks because the college game is so different from the professional game, and that difference is most pronounced in areas that directly affect the quarterback, notably the style and quality of opposing defenses. Gladwell mentions the Year of the Quarterback draft in 1999, where just one of five first-round QBs (Donovan McNabb) had a first-round career, and cites a study by two economists (David Berri and Rob Simmons) that showed neither Wonderlic scores nor draft position had any correlation to NFL success for quarterbacks. (For more on this, there’s an excellent blog post by Jason Lisk at pro-football-reference.com.) And he carries the analogy back over to the teaching world, where hiring criteria like master’s degrees have done nothing to improve teacher performance.

There is, of course, an obvious parallel in baseball to what Gladwell calls “the quarterback problem:” The fact that most high school and college baseball programs use composite metal bats, making the amateur game (exclusive of top summer leagues and showcase events like ESPN’s Area Code Games) substantially different from the professional game. Scouts from MLB clubs (and non-scout evaluators like me) are always grappling with the question of whether a particular hitter’s swing will translate to pro ball, or which pitchers will take advantage of the ability to pitch to the inner half when the sweet spots on hitters’ bats are reduced by more than half with the switch to wood. Amateur catchers almost never get to call their own games, as pitches are called from the bench, while ignorant college and high school coaches employ brain-dead small-ball strategies completely unsuited to the high-scoring environments of metal-bat baseball. And, as the guys at CollegeSplits have shown us, there are often large differences between the pitcher a hitter faces on Tuesday night and the one he faces on Friday night. It’s not the same game, and those differences are part of what makes the MLB draft seem, at times, like a “crapshoot.”

There’s another sports-related essay on the difference between choking and panicking, starting with the story of Jana Navotna’s epic collapse in the 1993 Wimbledon women’s singles final and ending with Greg Norman’s final ten holes at the 1996 Masters. (He mentions another collapse by Novotna in the 1995 French Open, but omits her 1998 Wimbledon title, and doesn’t mention Norman’s two British Open championships, which both raise the question of how deep the psychology of “choking” runs in any individual.) More interesting within this essay, to me at least, was the issue raised of “stereotype threat,” where an individual’s performance on a task or test may be negatively affected by stereotypes of his or her ethnic/racial/gender group:

Garcia gathered together a group of white, athletic students and had a white instructor lead them through a series of physical tests: to jump as high as they could, to do a standing broad jump, and to see how many pushups they could do in twenty seconds. The instructor then asked them to do the tests a second time, and, as you’d expect, Garcia found that the students did a little better on each of the tasks the second time around. Then Garcia ran a second group of students through the tests, this time replacing the instructor between the first and second trials with an African-American. Now the white students ceased to improve on their vertical leaps. He did the experiment again, only this time he replaced the white instructor with a black instructor who was much taller and heavier than the previous black instructor. In this trial, the white students actually jumped less high than they had the first time around. Their performance on the pushups, though, was unchanged in each of the conditions. There is no stereotype, after all, that suggests that whites can’t do as many pushups as blacks. The task that was affected was the vertical leap, because of what our culture says: white men can’t jump.

Gladwell goes on to explore some of the psychological reasons why we see these significant correlations – and no, it’s not because women are naturally bad at math or white men really can’t jump. In baseball, scouts often have players run the 60-yard dash and perform other athletic tests, often in groups at showcases … but what if the “stereotype threat” is in effect? Are we getting bad reads on white or black players because of this psychological issue?

The second essay in the collection explores, of all things, the markets for condiments, asking why we have many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup. The answer to that specific question isn’t all that interesting – in a nutshell, Heinz has struck a nearly perfect balance across various dimensions of flavor that appeals to a mass market because it doesn’t stand out in any one dimension – but the discussion of the science and statistics of taste was. Gladwell veers off into a conversation with Howard Moskowitz, a researcher in the realm of psychophysics, who uses taste tests and user feedback to identify clusters of taste that might be targets for new variations on existing products, such as the “extra-chunky” tomato sauce category he uncovered through research for Campbell’s to fix its flagging Prego brand in the 1980s.

Other essays of note include one on Nassim Taleb, an investor now known as the author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness; puncturing the myth that genius burns bright when young but fades early; and calling the entire field of criminal profiling into question. The essay on the hair dye industry covered a couple of very interesting characters, but the essay on Cesar Millan managed to make him – and the subject – boring. (Disclaimer: I’m not a dog person.) Gladwell gets personal with one section on a case of plagiarism that involved the use of material from one of his articles in the Broadway play Frozen, but I couldn’t quite come around to his ultimate conclusion that we are too protective of authors’ intellectual property rights.

I listened to the audio version of What the Dog Saw, read by Gladwell, who has a fantastic voice for reading audiobooks and, of course, can always use the perfect tone for what are, after all, his own words.

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→ July 21, 2010
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March.

One of you tweeps sent along this Financial Times article on board games, which gives a nice overview of the current state of the industry for those of you wondering why I make such a fuss over these games.

I’ll be on ESPN Radio tonight at 5:40 pm EDT and again on the Herd at some point on Thursday, followed by a Klawchat around 1 pm EDT.

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Geraldine Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with March, a work of derivative historical fiction that tells the story of the father (Mr. March) from Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Women, although he’s absent for the first half of that book and more of a background character in the second half. Brooks chose to follow March during his tour as a chaplain for the Union Army in the south, with flashbacks to his life in Concord before the period covered by Alcott’s work.

I am generally not a fan of parallel novels or continuations because of the difficulties in maintaining consistency with a character of someone else’s creation and the change in prose styles, although the latter wasn’t likely to bother me in this case since my only experience with Little Women was in one of those abridged Moby Books versions, which I read close to thirty years ago (along with most of the titles in that series). But the lack of continuity in March’s character was apparent because of the way Brooks infused him with some distinctly modern ideas and sensibilities, and I found Brooks’ depictions of other characters to be thin, such as the southern plantation owner whose racist views and animalistic treatment of his slaves, while probably well rooted in history, came straight out of central casting, and made March’s reactions to him trite as well.

Perhaps more infuriating is Brooks’ fabrication of a weird, pseudo-love triangle subplot where March has romantic feelings for a slave he met – in an extremely unlikely coincidence – twice across a period of nearly two decades on two separate journeys to the American south. The improbable nature of the romance is bad enough, making it seem as artificial as it is. But when March ends up in a Union hospital in Washington and his wife travels from Concord to see him – all of which occurs in Little Women – Brooks uses a miscommunication device better suited to a Wodehouse novel, and not for comedy, but to create a lasting crack in the foundation of the Marches’ marriage – one that doesn’t (to the best of my recollection, or my wife’s, since she read the unabridged original work) exist in Alcott’s novel.

So … why did it win the Pulitzer? I’ve read about 40% of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, including the ten winners prior to the most recent one (Tinkers, on my shelf now), and there seems to be a recent trend favoring books that dwell heavily on race or ethnic identity. You might argue that that subject is central to the American experience, so an award given to an American novel each year should rate those books highly. My personal view is that a book on race or racism can indeed be a compelling read, but not if the author crams the Big Obvious Idea (“Slavery … is bad!”) down the readers’ throats or wraps it up in stock characters who sit firmly on one side or the other of the question. Brooks’ characters lacked complexity in their moral worldviews, making the book seem inconsequential as a whole; the most believable character, in a strange way, was John Brown, one of a few historical figures to appear in the book (Thoreau and Emerson also have cameos), as Brown’s monomaniacal view on slavery and liberation was built on a nuanced rationalization of killing to save others from being killed. Brown only appears briefly – Brooks postulates that the Marches’ financial run came from supporting Brown’s endeavor – but his was, for me, the most interesting passage of the book.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s The Patron Saint of Liars. And yes, I’m several books – not to mention a game and a few songs – behind in my blogging.

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→ July 19, 2010
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Small World.

A few readers have recommended the game Small World, which won GAMES Magazine’s Game of the Year award in 2010. It’s from Days of Wonder, the manufacturer of the Ticket to Ride series (which I often recommend), and the game itself is a remake of an earlier game (that I’ve never played) called Vinci. Small World has been a big hit so far, as it’s a short game once you know the rules, pretty easy to pick up, and offers slightly different game play each time.

I’ve seen and heard Small World described as similar to or influenced by Dungeons & Dragons because Small World involves selecting various races, including orcs, halflings, and elves, familiar to anyone who’s played fantasy role-playing games. It’s incorrect for two reasons. One is that anyone who’s seen Lord of the Rings knows about orcs and elves. But more importantly, the fantasy aspect to the races is almost completely irrelevant to gameplay – you’re not pretending to be any of these things, but are instead using these races to try to capture spaces on the map.

The game comes with two double-sided boards, giving maps for two, three, four, and five player games, and as the name implies, there’s not a whole lot of room on any of these maps. There’s a stack of twelve races and sixteen skills which are combined into random pairs at the start of each game, after which each player selects one race-skill combination and uses it to start to take over territories on the board. Each race-skill combo brings a fixed number of race tokens, which are then used to take and hold those territories. At the end of a player’s turn, he earns one victory point for every map space he occupies, as well as various bonus points depending on his race and skill at that time.

The big twist in Small World is that you aren’t going to have enough tokens to take over many spaces, and while you need to expand to keep accumulating points, at some point you’ll become overstretched and will need to push that race-skill set into “decline”, giving up one turn of potential moves and gains for the right on the following turn to pick a new race-skill combo, acquire a stack of new tokens, and wreak havoc somewhere else on the map while still grabbing a few points for the civilization you just put into decline before those spaces are captured by others.

Each race has a special benefit attached to it, some simple (Ratmen start with two more tokens than any other race; Humans get an extra point for every farmland territory occupied) and some complex (Trolls get to place “lairs” on their spaces, making them harder to capture, and the lairs last even when the civilization is in decline). The skills* work similarly, such as awarding bonus points for occupying certain spaces, allowing moves that might otherwise be prohibited, or allowing a player to go into decline on a turn where he’s already made moves, thus saving a turn that would otherwise be lost.

*We played this as a three-player game, but haven’t tried it with just two players yet. There’s one skill that looks to me like it’ll cause trouble in a two-player game: the Diplomatic skill, where a player can declare that an opponent whom he hasn’t attacked this turn may not attack him on the next turn. With two players, that means one can force peace as long as he doesn’t attack the other one. I’m not sure if that makes him invincible, but it would seem to create a substantial imbalance.

The fact that players receive points for occupying territories temporarily rather than receiving points at game’s end makes the game play different from most of the other games we’ve tried in that there’s a clear benefit to doing something that you know is likely to be undone quickly by your opponents. For example, in one game we played, I had Pillaging (skill) Orcs (race), giving me two bonus points every time I conquered an opponents’ region, so my ideal strategy was to abandon regions I already had, taking those tokens to take over new ones, gaining 3 points for each new region instead of 1 point for a region I already held.

Each race/skill combination brings its own strategic implications, and some are going to be more desirable than others (there’s a payment system similar to that in other games, where passed-over combinations start to accumulate victory points to make them more attractive). There’s also a lot of interaction between previous moves and your choices going forward, because a civilization you’ve already put into decline is removed from the board if you put a second one into decline (with one or two exceptions), leaving you with a quick cost/benefit analysis to estimate when you’re considering whether you can wring one more turn out of the race-skill combo you’re using.

After our first game, where we screwed up several rules (almost inevitable when we play a game for the first time), we found we could get through a three-player game, which lasts ten rounds, in 20-30 minutes. Setup only takes five minutes or so, as you shuffle the races and skills and place a handful of tokens on the map, then placing about 20 other items on the side of the board for when certain races are drawn. The game is brightly colored and the drawings of races have a slightly silly bent, although one flaw we found was that when tokens are flipped over to show that that civilization is in decline, the grayed-out images of races all tended to look alike, making tallying points after each turn a little trickier.

I hesitated on Small World because I saw and heard the Dungeons & Dragons references and, since I never got into D&D or other role-playing games, didn’t think it would appeal to me. However, with no real significance to the use of dwarves or sorcerors or ghouls, there’s no fantasy aspect to Small World – just think of each race as a set of tokens conferring some specific benefit to you and you won’t have to spend the game worrying about your street cred. It’s one of the best “family strategy” games I’ve seen – below the hardcore strategy level of Puerto Rico and Agricola, smarter than Thurn und Taxis, comparable to one of our all-time favorites, Stone Age – without feeling dumb or luck-driven, and the ability to rip through a few games in an evening makes it better for a casual game night than the two-hour commitment of those complex strategy titles.

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→ July 14, 2010
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The Unconsoled.

New blog entry on some Red Sox and Mets prospects in the NY Penn League is up. My hit from this afternoon with Colin Cowherd is also online. I’ve filed my reaction to the Blue Jays/Braves trade, so it should be along shortly.

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One of you warned me about Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, but I believe I already had it on my shelf at the time and I’m pretty stubborn about at least trying books once I’ve obtained them. And it was a pretty quick read given its heft. But not only is it my least favorite of the four Ishiguro novels I’ve read, it’s just a conceptual mess that takes an interesting premise reminiscent of Philip K. Dick and forgets to flesh it out into a complete story.

The plot revolves around Mr. Ryder, a renowned concert pianist who has just arrived in an unnamed Central European town for a performance, only to find himself sidetracked by an endless series of errands and other unfinished business, because the town is populated by people he’s met before, even including a girlfriend and a sort of stepson, but he doesn’t remember any of this. Time bends in odd ways, people act and react strangely, and monologues go on for pages and pages. And the town seems to define its identity by the status of its best musicians, having cast one aside when his style fell out of vogue and a new star arrived, only to find the latter to be a broken man and a drunk.

It seemed clear to me from early on in The Unconsoled that Ishiguro was writing a realistic novel within the world of dreams – the abrupt transitions from scene to scene, the fact that two buildings on opposite sides of the town turned out to be one and the same, the way items could change within a room over the course of a conversation, and the frequent situation that should be familiar to all of you of Ryder’s inability to get to someone he’s left behind or forgotten about or just needs to reach. If that was the author’s intent, he was successful, as I was off balance almost the entire novel because various conventions of the realistic novel no longer applied.

But the execution suffered in two ways: One, Ryder’s actions became extremely frustrating. He’d fail to say or do obvious things to alleviate bad situations, such as the time a childhood friend wants to show him off to her snobby friends who doubt she knows Ryder, only to have him come along but do nothing to reveal his identity. He’s rude and even cold to the boy, Boris, to whom he is something of a father figure, and often leaves Boris on his own inappropriately. It was maddening, even more than in a novel where the main character is simply unlikeable. In this novel, he’s unreadable.

Two, the end of the novel does not answer the key question: If this is all a dream for Ryder, what on earth does it mean? Are all of these people real, or merely manifestations within his brain of stages of his life? Stephan, a young pianist, can’t seem to satisfy his parents through his music, as they insist on seeing him as a disappointment; is that Ryder’s own experience as a young man? Why does Ryder spend much of the novel fretting over the arrangements for his parents, who are coming in to see the performance, only to find out (or be reminded) that there’s no evidence they’re coming at all? Why are there at least four or five of his friends from his youth in England living in this small Central European town, all acting like little time has passed? I read the book expecting some kind of a resolution at the end, either an explicit one (e.g., Ryder wakes up) or an implicit one (e.g., Ryder starts to identify some of the parallels between the dream-world and his own past), but I got nothing, not even hints at Ryder’s pre-visit life to help me make the connections myself.

I love Ishiguro’s prose, but in The Unconsoled his dialogue was out of control, with the aforementioned long monologues (one lasted at least five pages, with not so much as a paragraph break) and very frequent repetition of phrases or meaningless points. His prose was far more in control in The Remains of the Day, and after The Unconsoled he wrote another altered-reality novel that was tighter and much more compelling, Never Let Me Go.

Next up: Geraldine Brooks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning March.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 13, 2010
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Midnight’s Children.

Futures Game recap is up, as well as a video of me & Jason Grey talking Futures Game.

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In autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe.

My only knowledge of Salman Rushdie prior to beginning his much-lauded novel Midnight’s Children was that he was the subject of a fatwa for The Satanic Verses and that somehow he’d managed to bag, even temporarily, Padma Lakshmi. His public image and the controversy over the latter novel gave me the impression that he was a dour, serious writer, and I was only reading this work because it appears on the TIME, Modern Library, and Radcliffe top 100s through which I’m gradually working my way. (It also won the Man Booker Prize in 1981, and in 1993 won the Booker of Bookers, given to the best winner from the first 25 years of the award.)

As it turns out – unsurprisingly to me, and probably to you as well – I’d sold Rushdie short. Midnight’s Children is inventive, sprawling, witty, satirical, acerbic, gross, and, in many ways, important. I wouldn’t say I loved the novel, for a few reasons I’ll get into, but I don’t think I have to love reading a book to recognize it as great literature. It is, in many ways, the Indian One Hundred Years of Solitude, not quite as compact or as immersing, but with the same combination of wide and narrow scopes while using magical realism to tell its story.

The narrator of Midnight’s Children is Saleem, born at the stroke of midnight at the precise moment that India earned her independence from Great Britain, a date that has symbolic significance as well as plot significance within the novel. The symbolic significance is obvious, as Saleem’s story parallels and intertwines with the history of India, not just as a country but as a people struggling to figure out the whole independence thing, while the plot significance derives from the fact that each of the 1,001 children born in India within the hour after independence develops some particular magical skill or power, with Saleem eventually – in rather crude fashion – discovering that he has the ability to read or even enter other peoples’ minds.

The story of the novel spans three generations, going back to his grandfather and his peculiar courtship of his wife – originally his patient, as he was the town’s one doctor, sent to Germany for his education – through his own parents’ unusual union, with each marriage, courtship, or broken heart sowing the seeds of future calamities. As Saleem’s mother gives birth, a Christian nurse with anarchist leanings switches his tag with that of another baby born simultaneously, altering not just their fates but, in Saleem’s story, at least, that of India as a whole. Saleem leaves India for Pakistan and returns after two separate exiles, leads a mental conference of the thousand and one children of midnight, becomes an ascetic with a preternatural sense of smell, falls in love with an illusionist, becomes a father and a widower, and ends up with a strange wasting disease that leads him to write down the story of his life, one that cannot be untangled from the story of India from its independence through the novel’s present day. His dabblings with various forms of extremism all lead to disaster, not just for him but for anyone who comes near him – he is convinced that he is the cause of the misery – standing in for India’s own unfortunate swings toward communism or religious hatred.

Rushdie’s prose is at once maddening and magical, maddening because of stylistic quirks like strings of three adjectives without interruption of comma or conjunction, magical in passages like this one, where he introduces one aspect of the novel’s altered reality where the emotions of a cook enter her food and the bodies of those who consume it:

And, now restored to the status of daughter in her own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people’s food seeping into her – because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes umbued with the personality of their creator; Amina ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination.

(The meatballs of intransigence. I worked for someone once who ate too many of those.)

I’m only superficially familiar with Indian history, although I hit Wikipedia many times to check and see if events described in the novel were taken from real life. (Unfortunately, most of them were.) But it’s clear that Rushdie intended to satirize many aspects of Indian culture, society, and especially its government; his comments on Indira Gandhi led the despot to sue him for libel when the book was published. Saleem and his family – included a number of cousins, uncles, and aunts who are various shades of wacko – seemed to me to stand in for various problems or crises of India as a whole, writ smaller and often with comic effects.

I could even see this book used in a class on comic novels – I took such a class in college, where I first encountered The Master and Margarita and If on a winter’s night a traveler – because of Rushdie’s use of farce and dry, sidelong wit, including this almost throwaway line where he pokes fun at Saleem’s innocence as the character walks through a dirty city street:

…and Japanese tourists who all (on this occasion) wore surgical face-masks out of politeness, so as not to infect us with their exhaled germs;

There were a few plot twists that didn’t sit right with me, generally characters making decisions that made little or no sense to me. There’s also a passage where a magician who specializes in making things or people disappear is presumed killed, but it’s not clear why she wouldn’t have used her power to save herself; I imagine it was necessary to have her killed or removed from the story, but the manner in which Rushdie did so felt incomplete, and I was half-expecting her to resurface.

Finally, I found the meandering story of the plot, especially its jumps back and forth in time, to be very distracting, since the transitions often weren’t clear and much of the present-day content was completely ancillary to the main storyline. I thought Rushdie may have even acknowledged the nonlinear, tangential nature of the book through the voice of his main character:

This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

But I may be erring by putting words in the author’s mouth when they only emanated from that of one of his creations. It was a tough read – not Tolstoy tough, but maybe Faulkner tough – but the creativity, the humor, and the borderline insanity of the book was remarkable, and as a window into a country and culture with which I wasn’t that familiar, it was an educational read as well.

It’s worth a mention that the witch with whom Saleem falls in love is named Parvati, while his second wife, who appears as audience and muse when he steps back from writing/telling his life story, is named Padma. So perhaps J.K. Rowling, in addition to reading A Dance to the Music of Time and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, read Midnight’s Children and threw in a reference via the names of two of her characters.

Next up: Kazuo Ishiguro’s frustrating, dreamlike novel The Unconsoled.

Filed Under: TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ July 11, 2010
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Cary/Raleigh eats, part two.

Two new articles up on ESPN.com: Cliff Lee trade breakdown and brief reports on all of the players in Sunday’s Futures Game.

I took a few of your suggestions for Q and sushi in the Traingle area and stumbled on very solid frozen custard joint for my second run through North Carolina.

I’ll start with the sushi: Waraji seems to be, by acclamation, the best sushi place in the Triangle, and it may very well be that, but it’s not very good. Better than Little Tokyo, but still not good. The fish was completely tasteless; one fish, “white fish,” recommended by the chef who served me, was chewy and sinewy; they don’t offer anago or tai and were out of kanpachi; and they charged me for a nirigi I ordered but never received. The seaweed salad cost $8 and was really portioned for two, although it was the greenest I’ve ever seen, making me wonder about its legitimacy.

I tried Allen & Sons and The Pit for Q, and would unequivocally vote for the latter despite its inauthentic setting. The Pit is the only upscale Q joint I’ve come across in my travels – they even have a wine collection – and the place was filled with businessmen and -women at lunchtime. I ordered a combination plate at my server’s suggestion, getting the St. Louis ribs, the pulled pork, fried okra, and collard greens; the platter also comes with a biscuit and hush puppies, so I was full enough that I didn’t need dinner for about eight hours. The pulled pork was dry but both meats had a nice, subtle smoke flavor, and the ribs were fall-apart tender*. The okra was excellent – I’m starting to like eating in the south for the fried okra more than for the Q – and for about $12 the quantity of food was a little absurd. It’s not wow barbecue, and had a little bit of the feel of mass-smoked meat, as opposed to some guy in a shack who does it one pork shoulder at time, but it was very solid.

*There seems to be some real disagreement over whether ribs of any animal should be smoked till the meat falls off the bone. I’m in the “yes” camp, as ribs have a lot of connective tissue that I have no interest in eating. When the meat falls off the bone, the connective tissue will be largely gone. This, to me, is the entire point of low-and-slow cooking, whether it’s smoking or braising.

Allen & Sons looks good in the uniform, but the tools didn’t really play. It’s in a run-down building just off I-40 in Chapel Hill, and the menu is limited to “Carolina pork” and ribs, with the pork as their signature item. What came looked like some had scraped it off the wall after a pig exploded, an oily, vinegary, sloppy mess that tasted only of vinegar and not in the least of smoke. The best thing I can say about the dish is that it came with five hush puppies, as even the cole slaw was drowning in a mayo-vinegar slurry. It’s too bad, since that’s the sort of place where I’d expect to find the sort of artisanal work I thought the Pit’s pork lacked, but if you’re not going to put smoke flavor into the smoked meat, you might as well stick the thing in an oven.

Goodberry’s is a local chain of frozen custard shops that I think would stand up well against the competition of Milwaukee, still the capital of frozen custards as far as I can tell. Goodberry’s felt a little richer, with more butterfat, but the texture was an 80 and the chocolate, despite being a little light in color, had a rich natural cocoa flavor. They offer vanilla, chocolate, sugar-free vanilla, and a rotating flavor of the day; I was disappointed that coconut wasn’t coming until the 16th, since that + chocolate is one of my favorite ice cream flavor pairings. They also offer a long list of toppings, including freshly roasted nuts (I don’t think they’re roasted on site, though), so I’ll recommend the chocolate with Oreos and almonds combo. The location I went to, on Kildare Farms Road in Cary, has no indoor seating but there are tables with umbrellas for shade.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ July 9, 2010
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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.

John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English (I linked to the hardcover edition because it’s actually cheaper than the paperback at the moment) bounces back and forth between wonky linguistics stuff and more plebeian arguments about how we use the English language today. I found the former stuff interesting but a little puzzling because McWhorter is arguing against a conventional wisdom that seems to ignore the facts (a familiar story), but that conventional wisdom was completely new to me, and I thought McWhorter didn’t give quite enough background in the current thinking in the History of English field to set the stage for his epic takedowns. The latter half was far more accessible even to someone who doesn’t share an interest in languages or linguistics, and a little more relevant to the current state of English.

McWhorter’s more academic arguments take aim at the intransigence (in his view) of History of English scholars who refuse to see what he considers obvious influences on the language by the Celts and, oddly enough, the Vikings, that explain our unusually simple grammar. English is part of the Indo-European language group, in the Germanic family, but unlike its Germanic siblings or most of its cousins within Indo-European, it has retained very little of the grammar of its proto-language ancestors. English doesn’t decline its nouns (as Slavic languages do) or its articles (as German does), and our verb conjugations are incredibly simple – we add an -s in the third person singular, and that’s pretty much it, with just a few irregular verbs. Why has English grammar become so much simpler than the grammars of its close relatives? According to McWhorter, the History of English groupthink has it that these changes happened spontaneously, without outside influences, but he feels that that’s nonsense because of the obvious similarities between English and Celtic. The language that became English came to the British Isles with the invaders who subjugated the Celts, and McWhorter attests that the Celts, rather than finding their language wiped out by the invasion, gradually melded their language with the proto-English spoken by the invaders, leaving vestiges like what the author calls “meaningless do” (our use of “do” with present participles, as in, “Do you like baseball, Adam?”). The Vikings, meanwhile, left their imprint largely in the simplification of our grammar, ignoring grammatical elements that their language lacked and “battering” English to lead it to drop verb and noun endings that most other modern languages have retained for centuries. If you’re wondering why we find Russian so hard to learn, or why English doesn’t have gender or noun cases or tables upon tables of verb endings, McWhorter lays out a compelling explanation.

The more accessible portion of the book comes in McWhorter’s discussions of what it means for a language like English to have a simpler grammar, and whether there is ever such a thing as “proper” grammar as long as meaning isn’t sacrificed. He turns his guns on linguistic anthropologists who’ve argued that language and grammar reflect thought, such as certain Native American tribes whose grammars lacked the future tense or specific numbering systems. But where I took issue with McWhorter’s views was in his criticism of what we might call the Lynne Truss school of grammar – the idea that language, written or especially oral, that does not hew tightly to the strict rules of English grammar, is inferior to “proper” English. He points out how supposed errors like ending sentences in prepositions actually date back centuries in common usage

There is, of course, a self-serving aspect to proper grammar – signalling. It’s difficult to gauge someone’s educational background without seeing a resume, and difficult to gauge someone’ s intelligence without extensive conversation (if it’s even possible then), so we send out and read signals that become proxies for things like intelligence, education, or even old-fashioned notions like “good breeding.” Attire is one. Accent may be another. Grammar is a third. When you meet someone who speaks proper English, you will likely notice, even subconsciously, whereas someone who can’t match verb and subject – even though the meaning of “he don’t got” is perfectly clear – will drop a notch or two in your estimation, whether you know it or not. Good grammarians, recognizing this, may seek to protect their turf by defending grammar as necessary to the survival of the language. McWhorter says, with some merit, that this is absurd: As long as meaning is clear, grammar isn’t that critical, and besides, all languages evolve over time, both in grammar and in vocabulary, so what is considered bad grammar today could easily become accepted usage in a few decades.

But beyond that, there’s value in having a standard grammar and insisting on some level that people hew to it, for simple reasons of comprehension. A universal set of rules for a language allows us to communicate effectively through written and oral means because we use grammar to fill in the missing context in sentences that are either complex or that leave out details provided in early sentences or paragraphs. In Italian and Spanish, the speaker/writer can omit the subject pronoun because the ending on the verb makes it clear who the subject is. Make the grammatical error and you lose clarity, so the reader has to go back to figure out who’s verbing, or the listener has to either accept his confusion or stop the speaker to ask for clarification.

I have also generally found text with bad grammar cacophonous, making it both slower and less pleasant to read than “proper” text. A misplaced modifier usually means I have to re-read a sentence, and an incorrect word choice – say, “flaunting” the rules rather than “flouting” them – is sort of like hearing a glass shatter in the background as I’m trying to read. We become accustomed to seeing or hearing the language operating within the rules of its grammar, and when someone flouts them (sorry), it affects our ability to understand or to move smoothly through the spoken or written text.

Our Magnificant Bastard Tongue does lapse occasionally into linguistics jargon, and I could see the Celtic/English chapter being dull to anyone not interested in languages, but McWhorter tries to keep it light with some humor and a healthy dose of snark directed at linguists who (in his view) refuse to see the obvious signs of connections between English and Celtic and English and the Vikings’ language.

Back before the dish existed – B.D.? – I reviewed McWhorter’s The Power of Babel, a more general-interest book on the history of human languages.

I’m all screwed up in terms of what I’m reviewing next, but I am almost halfway through reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Filed Under: Languages, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , ,