→ February 9, 2010
→ By

Mrs. Dalloway.

Virginia Woolf ripped James Joyce’s Ulysses when it was first published, but liked the idea of a single-day novel enough to use it in a novel of her own, one that hews more closely to the conventional novel form and appears to be something of a rejoinder to Joyce’s genre-busting efforts: Mrs. Dalloway. Unfortunately, a straightforward novel about quotidian life is about as interesting as you’d expect a novel about the mundane thoughts of ordinary people to be; that is, it’s boring as hell.

Woolf’s gambit is to spend most of the novel inside the heads of her characters, with jarring, unannounced transitions from head to head, sometimes within a room (almost as if you had a sudden camera change, from behind one character’s eyes to behind another’s), sometimes to a separate time and place through the slimmest of segues. Only one of her characters might qualify as interesting, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith, who today would be diagnosed with post-tramautic stress disorder and possibly treated, thus making him relatively uninteresting for the novelist’s purposes. The contrast between his futile attempts to make sense of a world gone mad – he’s a World War I veteran who hears voices and suffers paranoid delusions – and the utterly insignificant thoughts of the vapid upper-class characters in the rest of the book is shocking, but Woolf spends too much time with the well-heeled and not enough with Septimus.

The one wisp of intrigue in the book comes from the hints at romantic tension between Clarissa Dalloway and her former flame, Peter Walsh, once a boy of some promise but now a man whose progress has been hindered by his own poor choices. The sight of Clarissa still stirs old passions in Peter, reducing him to tears or boiling him in rage … but nothing much comes of it and Clarissa’s party, the goal of her day, goes off as planned. Her own existential crises – mostly a fear of death or simply regret that all this must one day end – seem so much less serious given how she chooses to spend her time or emotions.

Peter does have one small episode that stood out, for me, for its sheer darkness, as he stalks – there’s no better word for it – a young woman in the streets of London for several blocks before giving up:

Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms – his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought – making oneself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share – it smashed to atoms.

Up next: I’ve taken a few days off from reading, but I’ll start Edward P. Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World later this week.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ February 8, 2010
→ By

Thurn and Taxis.

We finally played the boardgame Thurn & Taxis with more than two people last night – we had a Game Night on Game Night with a couple of friends – so I’m confident enough to review and recommend the game. It’s fun, it’s quite simple to pick up, and it moves quickly; it’s probably most comparable to Ticket to Ride among games I’ve reviewed before, but with a little more complexity in scoring, allowing for more ways to win the game without the rigidity of fixed routes.

T&T, which won the Spiel des Jahres in 2006, is played on a map of southern Germany and the borders of a few nearby countries, with 24 cities marked on the map across nine different regions. The object of the game is to amass points by building, turn by turn, postal routes (the House of Thurn und Taxis* ran a postal company in north-central Europe for over two centuries) that connect these cities based on cards drawn from the main deck of 72 cards (3 of each city), with six cards visible at any time. Routes must run at least 3 cities, and you must add to your route each turn or “close” it, placing houses on the cities in the route and collecting any point bonuses; if you can’t add to an open route on your turn, you must discard it and start over, an often fatal error. But your ability to place houses on cities in a route you close is limited by a rule that says you may only place one house per region in a closed route, or place houses in only one region of the route, meaning that a route of seven cities across three regions is inherently inefficient, as is a route that includes many cities in which you’ve already placed houses.

*Yes, I’ve read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and no, I neither liked nor fully understood it, two things that are most likely connected.

The bonuses are the key to winning the game, of course, as you earn points by placing houses on all cities in a region (or pair of regions in the case of smaller regions with one or two cities each), by placing at least one house in all nine regions, or by building routes of five or more cities. Each bonus declines by a point when each player achieves it. There’s also a sequential series of bonuses, where you receive a carriage card for building routes of at least 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 cities, in order, without skipping any of the cards, with the points ranging from two points for the three-city route to ten points for the seven-city route. When a player gets the 7-city carriage card, or places the last of his 22 houses, the game ends, with each player taking one more turn.

Those are almost all of the rules of the game, summarized in under 400 words, but those rules allow enough different strategies to keep the game interesting. You have enough houses for all but two of the cities, so you can try to win by placing all your houses first (there’s a penalty of one point per house left in your pool at game end), but have to sacrifice one or two of the regional bonuses to do so. You can try to race to the seven-carriage card, but may be short in region bonuses, or be late for the long-route bonuses. And you’re always at the mercy of the cards in the pool and the deck.

That proved to be the major wrinkle between two- and four-player games. In the two-player game, I found it easy to look ahead a few turns, because I knew what city cards were likely to be available to me the next time around. In the four-player game, not only is that impossible, but the player who chose cards right before me was executing a similar strategy and going after similar routes, so if a card I needed was in the pool, he’d have a chance to grab it, and I clearly wasn’t fast enough to make the mid-game adjustment. (Also, it is absolutely the wrong game to play with your friend the operations research consultant, even more so if he’s the player going right before you, doing critical-path modeling in his head while he steals the cards you need. But I’m not bitter.) Those adjustments aren’t required in a two-player game, so while the two-player game is fun, there’s a solitaire-ish element to it, while the four-player game has just enough randomness to throw a wrench in your strategy and force you to rethink plans on the fly. Like Stone Age, it seems to me to have a good balance of luck and strategy for this type of game. It’s definitely a good starter game for any of you looking to jump into German-style board games, with enough sophistication to satisfy someone who’s already into the genre.

—

Some of you have asked me questions, here, on Twitter, and in chat about games by skill or complexity level. Our collection of German-style games has grown to the point where I think I could categorize them roughly for you by my perception of their complexity, both in terms of learning the game for the first time and in terms of repeated play. Links are to reviews on this site or to the top ten rankings for three games (Babel, Metro, Settlers) that I only wrote up there.

Lowest complexity:

Moderately low complexity:

Moderate complexity:

  • San Juan (long, complex rules, but very simple to play after that)
  • Stone Age (moderately complex rules, a few simple strategies)
  • Babel
  • Carcassonne (simple game, complex scoring strategy)

Moderately high complexity

Highest complexity:

  • Puerto Rico (played twice, many rules, long setup, complex strategy)
Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 6, 2010
→ By

Game Six.

I received a review copy of Mark Frost’s Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America’s Pastime in October, but just got to it now because my book queue at the time was running around 3-4 months. (Thanks to Ulysses and Christmas, it’s now closer to six.) I started it right after finishing Mrs. Dalloway (more on that book later) and put it down before I got to page 20, because it is garbage – florid prose with huge, unsourced, inaccurate statements on baseball would kill even a great story, which I’m not sure Game Six even offers. The phrase that killed me was in a fanboyish passage on Fred Lynn: “what was beyond dispute the most sensational rookie season of any player in the history of pro baseball…” If Frost wants to argue that Lynn had what was – to that point, I assume – the greatest rookie season in MLB history, I suppose there’s a case to be made, and he could probably weasel out of an argument behind his bizarre choice of “most sensational,” which now joins “most feared” in the pantheon of phrases the innumerate like to use to try to argue their way past the stats they don’t understand. But “beyond dispute” set off alarm bells – in a book with no stats or sources, it’s like saying “check my work” – and it didn’t take long to cook up a dispute:

Player Year Age OPS+ wRC+ wOBA
Ted Williams 1939 20 160 168 .464
Dick Allen 1964 22 162 167 .403
Fred Lynn 1975 23 161 163 .427

(OPS+ from Baseball-Reference; wRC+ and wOBA from Fangraphs.)

So Ted Williams – who, by the way, played for one of the two teams in Frost’s book – had 37 points of wOBA+ over Lynn despite being three years younger during his rookie season. But it is “beyond dispute” that Lynn’s season was the “most sensational” ever by a rookie? Okay, sparky. I’ll just put the book down now, because when I read a baseball book, I want it to at least get the baseball stuff right.

That quote wasn’t the only problem I found in the first fifteen pages; Frost is clearly out to lionize his subjects, including the reporters who covered the game, and he prints inner monologues from long-dead people that have to be his own interpretations or creations, which had me questioning every statement that wasn’t backed up by an actual quote from someone involved in or covering the game. If this was a book about a famous soccer match, perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed these inaccuracies or errors and just kept right on moving, but knowing a little about the game and even knowing some of the people mentioned in the book (or at worst being two degrees away), I found it unreadable.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , ,
→ February 4, 2010
→ By

A few stragglers from the 2000s.

So while compiling a list of songs for an eventual post of my top 100 rock tracks of the 1990s – the pool is over 200 and still growing by one or two a day – I came across some odd tracks that I either forgot about when working on my top 40 songs of the 2000s; they probably wouldn’t have all made the list, but they were worth mentioning, and I don’t feel like writing up another post on Ulysses.

LCD Soundsystem – “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House.” Kind of an alternative novelty hit, but it is catchy enough that I’ve caught myself singing it a few days after hearing it. I’m still waiting for the sequel, “Daft Punk is Playing Settlers of Catan at My House.”

Ryan Adams – “New York, New York.” The video and the timing made it an unlikely hit, but I found this to be one of Adams/Whiskeytown’s most accessible or mainstream songs. Speaking of Whiskeytown, “Don’t Be Sad” was recorded in the 1990s but wasn’t released until 2001, so it qualifies through the back door, although it’s a little too folky for me.

Starsailor – “Good Souls.” I actually saw these guys live in 2002, so there’s no excuse for forgetting the best song from their debut album, but for some reason I mentally had them pegged in 1999. It’s just a well-constructed song – you don’t notice the great foundation from the bass guitar until it’s alone in the final few measures – reminiscent to me of the slower material on Radiohead’s The Bends.

Basement Jaxx – “Where’s Your Head At” A phenomenal video and one of the best electronica songs of the decade, but my faulty memory put it on their 1999 debut album, Remedy. And hey, isn’t that Patton Oswalt? (No – no, it’s not.)

The Beautiful South – “Closer Than Most.” Kind of a straight song from an ordinarily snarky band (“36D” and “Ol’ Red Eyes is Back” come to mind in the latter category), “Closer” features one of my favorite lyrics of any era:

You dashed pretty’s only chance of a compliment
And gave the plain the blues
Turned supermodel into last year’s pull
And got her down shinin’ your shoes
Now I don’t mean to be hod carrier
Of other folks’ bad news
But tell Miss World to fly to Mars
If she really doesn’t like to lose

Air – “Cherry Blossom Girl.” I’m not quite sure what to call Air – “Radio #1” was sort of alternative rock-ish, but “Girl” is this soft, ethereal ballad that might fit on adult contemporary radio. I give them credit for making an X-rated video that 1) wasn’t going to get any play anywhere and 2) uses pornography in a way that seems anti-pornographic. Apparently the video was directed by a porn director noted for his idiosyncratic style, making it more impressive that he would paint such an unflattering view of his own industry.

Presidents of the United States of America – “Some Postman.” Never got into their 1990s stuff, when they were one of a dozen snotty faux-punk joke bands (Tripping Daisy, Hagfish) to infect alternative radio, but this one track from their 2004 album Love Everybody hit the mark, telling a funny story instead of throwing out ridiculous lines in search of a laugh.

BT featuring Doughty – “Never Gonna Come Back Down.” Very Crystal Method-ish, with a guest vocal from one of my favorite songwriters from any decade. “I’m just gonna … say this/To the people, not so much the people in the audience as the people sitting in my mind.”

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 3, 2010
→ By

More thoughts on Ulysses.

So I suppose a book as heavily analyzed as Ulysses is worth a second post. There were some interesting responses in the comment thread on the last post, and I wanted to respond to two of those here. First, from Jay:

Also, there’s a lot more good in Bloom than you give him credit for. He’s a very good father, and a better husband in most respects than the typical Dubliner like Simon Deadalus. He’s a progressive free-thinker (which often makes him seem out of step with the other characters). He’s also financially successful despite having changed jobs so many times. To be sure, he has his strange sexual interests, but these have a bearing on his past and only add to the very interesting Molly/Bloom puzzle. To characterize him as “pathetic, a deviant, simpering ne’er-do-well” is not fair. (You can also let this rant serve as evidence that the book can inspire some intense loyalty among some readers).

This seems to be a common view, that Bloom is a better character than I saw; Blamires called him Joyce’s “Everyman” and other critics just marvel at how well fleshed-out he is. Here’s what I saw, beyond his perverted sexual tastes. He’s not, in my view, a good husband; he’s a provider, yes, and that puts him above the median in Joyce’s Dublin, but he is emotionally tone-deaf and has allowed his marriage to atrophy after the death of their 11-day-old son. At a time when his wife needed him to step up, he appears to have done nothing, and while he’s not happy with his non-conjugal marriage and frequent cuckolding, he’s not doing jack about it, and if anything seems to be ignorant of the fact that things he does and says drive Molly further away from him. Perhaps the marriage is beyond repair, but given what I could glean from Molly’s soliloquy at the end of the book, I don’t think so. I also saw little evidence either way on the quality of his parenting or relationship with his daughter; he cares about her, which, again, may put him above the median for fathers in Joyce’s Dublin, but while that’s a necessary condition for good parenting, it’s not sufficient. And even his efforts to help Stephen Dedalus are rooted in self-interest, mostly the prospect of financial gain, not in genuine interest for the boy. His progressive, free-thinking philosophy has just shifted its locus from God to money.

Another reader pointed to this story on the first Chinese translation of Ulysses, from the Atlantic Monthly. Even if you haven’t read Joyce’s book, it’s a great article, and it gives you some flavor for the wordplay in the book, which leads me to this comment from one of the many of you referring to himself as “brian:”

if you go into ulysses (even moreso finnegan’s wake) expecting plot, narrative, story, then you’re missing a large part of what the novel is trying to do. it brings language….sound, rhythm, cadence to an equal field with what we expect from an a-b-c story. there are sections of the book where it is perfecly advisable (and enjoyable!) to remove your critical mind from understanding the characters and their relationships and the plot from its movement to simply ‘hear’ the words and their sounds in a new way.

I understand, and understood from early on in Ulysses, that the play is not the thing – the language is. That’s great. It’s not what I like to read. I love getting lost in a good story – it doesn’t have to be a happy one, or a funny one, or a fast-paced one, as long as it’s a compelling one that’s well-told, with characters I can understand and with whom I can empathize. It’s analogous to the handful of you who criticized my omission of any Radiohead tracks from my list of my favorite songs from the 2000s, but Radiohead’s electronic, sparse, 2000s sound, while critically acclaimed, is just not what I like. I like guitars. I like plots. Sue me.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ February 2, 2010
→ By

Ulysses.

James Joyce’s Ulysses, to me, is not a novel. It is a puzzle, or a set of puzzles, or even a grand intellectual adventure, but when writers discuss how Joyce subverted the novel form or changed how writers thought of the novel, they are covering for the fact that Joyce wrote an enormous work of fiction that is only characterized as a novel because our language does not have an adequate word to describe it. It’s not a short story, and it’s not quite a collection of short stories, since the eighteen sections of Ulysses share characters and occur in chronological order. It’s hardly non-fiction despite Joyce’s meticulous attention to detail in his settings and historical references. It’s epic in scope and vision, but not in story. The book really has nothing resembling a plot, as Joyce chose to focus on the minutiae of quotidian living without any overarching storyline or narrative greed to drag you through its verbal quagmires. It is its own category. It’s … ulysseian.

The reactions of contemporary writers to its publication were sharply divided, and many authors we still read and respect today though the book was awful for one reason or another. Daniel Burt’s essay in The Novel 100 on Ulysses – in my opinion, the best of the 73 essays in that book that I’ve read so far – quotes many of the critics:

Resisters of Ulysses have some distinguished company. D.H. Lawrence found int he book “Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.” H.G. Wells called Ulysses a “dead end,” and Virginia Woolf labeled it “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man.” Wyndham Lewis could detect only a vacuum at its core, “An absence of meaning, an emptiness of philosophic content, a poverty of new and disturbing observation” … After violating all of thenovel’s assumptions and expectations, Joyce replaced what was lost with a brilliant technical virtuosity pursued so relentlessly that even a supporter like Ford Madox Ford complained that “I am inclined to think that Mr. Joyce is riding his method to death.” Joyce himself contributed to the notion that the established compact between novelist and his audience has been altered and that his reader must rise to his demanding level, identifying his ideal reader as someone suffering “from an ideal insomnia,” and gleefully proclaiming that he put into Ulysses “so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” Many have been willing to let the scholars tuck in, while looking for their novelistic sustenance elsewhere in books more seemingly designed to be enjoyed rather than studied, to be read rather than reread.

Burt ranked Ulysses as the third-greatest novel of all time, and he clearly does not agree with the various critics of the work even while acknowledging the book’s high rating for difficulty, praising “its status as one of the supreme human documents in all of literature. NO other single day has been as fully or as brilliantly captured than [sic] June 16, 1904, nor has any novelist created a greater protagonist than Leopold Bloom…” I’ll give him the first point, but as for the second, I’m not so sure.

Bloom is fully realized, but he’s pathetic, a deviant, simpering ne’er-do-well with a stunning lack of awareness of the needs or even existence of people around him. Joyce put himself into both Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, but it’s almost as if by splitting his personality in two he created two incomplete characters, as Stephen himself has a dead quality to his moods and speeches, somewhere between disinterest and disengagement, as if he was barely even there to begin with. The lack of any compelling character limited my ability to connect with the book and enjoy the reading, as opposed to the superficial studying tactic I ultimately used.

To understand Ulysses on an initial read without any help, you would have to be an expert in Shakespeare and both books of the Bible, and familiar with English literature prior to the mid-1800s (as many books as I’ve read, I have never read any of what he’s parodied so far in the Oxen of the Sun section), Joyce’s Dubliners and Portrait of the Arist…, contemporary (for Joyce) Irish politics, Irish/English history, Irish slang at the turn of the last century, and Dublin geography. And the Odyssey, of course. And you’d have to have an enormous vocabulary, including a number of words no longer in common usage. It’s a book for polymaths. Or, it’s a book for the people whom polymaths think are “really smart.” I used The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires, an English theologian and literary critic who clearly reveres Joyce’s work, and brings to the reading not just insight and clarity but his own interpretation of religious symbolism and allegory in a work that, to me, was on the whole antireligious.

Joyce shifts styles in each section of the book, often parodying some long-forgotten narrative technique or the overblown vocabulary of an earlier era of literature. That alone makes Ulysses a literary tour de force, as there seems to be little dissent against those who argue that Joyce’s parodies hit their marks, although only two of those sections – those referred to under the Homeric structure as Circe and Cyclops – remained effective and impressive for me. Circe, the longest (by pages) section of the book, is written as a play, in an alley where Bloom’s and Stephen’s paths finally intersect, and where reality and hallucination are interwoven in a way that often leaves the question of what’s real incompletely answered. It’s inventive and crazy and often quite funny, from situation or from simple wordplay:

A PAVIOR AND A FLAGGER
That’s the famous Bloom now, the world’s greatest reformer. Hats off!

(All uncover their heads. Women whisper eagerly.)

A MILLIONAIRESS

(Richly.) Isn’t he simply wonderful?

A NOBLEWOMAN

(Nobly.) All that man has seen!

A FEMINIST

(Masculinely.) And done!

Joyce takes Bloom’s fears, hopes, memories, and dreams and brings them to life in the alley, putting Bloom on trial, making him a world-renowned reformer, giving voice to inanimate objects or form to intangible concepts, and he keeps it interesting by keeping everything moving, in stark contrast to most of the rest of the novel.

In the Cyclops section, meanwhile, Joyce is parodying people, notably the “one-eyed” outlook of extreme Irish nationalists, but even showing Stephen Dedalus (per Blamires) sympathetically while also exposing his inherent egotism and vanity. Joyce interrupts his own narrative with mock-epic passages to announce the arrival of a new character or a faux-newspaper bit about the transformation of a character’s dog. Even without the basis in prior literature* that might have exposed me to the works Joyce targeted, I could still derive humor from the exaggerations and the abrupt changes in tone that allowed me to alter the way I heard the narrator’s words.

The book’s concluding section is legendary for its own difficulty, even more difficult to read than the 700-odd pages that preceded it. It is the soliloquy of Molly Bloom*, eight brobdingnagian sentences that cover 45 pages and include no punctuation marks of any sort. I have to assume that Joyce did this as some sort of reaction to Marcel Proust’s own logorrheaic style (In Search of Lost Time wasn’t published in English until after Ulysses, but Joyce was fluent in French and lived on the Continent while Proust was still alive and writing), but Proust at least used apostrophes and comma and quotation marks, and his sentences, while long, run 70-80 words rather than Joyce/Molly’s 1500-2000.

*Seriously. I’ve read nearly 500 novels, a huge chunk of them English/British, but aside from Dickens Joyce didn’t seem to hit anyone I’ve really read.

There is a substantial amount of wordplay in Ulysses, much of it buried in seemingly innocuous sentences:

There ensued a somewhat lengthy pause. One man was reading by fits and starts a stained by coffee evening journal; another, the card with the natives choza de; another, the seaman’s discharge.

I don’t think I have a dirty mind, but there’s no way you’re convincing me that was accidental. And he’s funnier with double entendres, hidden meanings, or quiet asides than the truly raunchy parts that helped get the book banned in the U.S. for a decade, despite the fact that none of it meets a modern standard for “pornographic;” it includes brief, crude, graphic descriptions of sexual acts in ways that would probably make the typical reader want to never have sex again.

The problem with Ulysses, again, is that there’s no pleasure – for me, at least – in the reading. It was often dull, occasionally excruciating, intermittently funny, rarely quick, and never compelling. I didn’t care at all about what happened to the characters, and I was only interested in the plot during the Circe episode. I consider myself a pretty well-read person, but much of what Joyce was doing in Ulysses flew over my head, and I think the book’s foundations are set in dated materials and events that just won’t resonate with a modern reader. (Exception: Shakespeare, who gets plenty of screen time in Ulysses, but while I enjoy Slick Willie’s plays I’m not an expert on them and have only read or seen six in total.) It was worth reading for all the references and allusions in later works that I wouldn’t have otherwise caught – Berlin Alexanderplatz certainly makes more sense to me now – and for getting to check it off on my various booklists (including the Modern Library 100, where it was #1), but it’s not an experience I’m rushing to repeat.

Next up: Virginia Woolf’s response to Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, her own one-book-in-a-day novel but written in conventional prose with, to my eye so far, lower overall ambitions.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ February 1, 2010
→ By

Alone.

I was reading Joe Posnanski’s post on the Harlem Globetrotters and the brilliant, witty quote from the man who runs the Globetrotters’ patsy opponents, who are apparently going around again under the Washington Generals banner. That reminded me, as every mention or sighting of the Globetrotters does, of the one time I saw them perform live, a day that – for no reason related to the Globetrotters or anything that happened on the court – brings back to me a tremendous feeling of sadness.

It was a small thing, really, over in a few seconds. I was with my parents and younger sister – this was between 20 and 25 years ago – and we happened to have seats on the floor, in the front row, on folding chairs. When we got there, one of the four seats was already occupied by a solitary man, probably in his 20s, a little shabbily dressed – I remember his clothes were largely gray, but not much more about them. My mother got the attention of an usher, who checked the man’s ticket and informed him that he was in the wrong section. He stood up and sort of shuffled off, with a slightly defeated look on his face – not a crushed or devastated expression, but one that seemed to say, “oh, again.” It occurred to me even at the time that he might have some sort of developmental disorder, but the expression and the way he wandered off – shoulders sagging, head down, with no hurry to get to his proper seat before the game started, perhaps with no idea where he was headed – made it seem to me that he was, more than anything else, alone. And I found that state – not just loneliness, but a pervasive, chronic loneliness, a state of being permanently, irreversibly alone – so saddening that it stayed with me through the game, the day, the ensuing days, and twenty-plus years after. I still return to that feeling of sadness for that man every time I see or hear about the Globetrotters, even though I enjoyed the show, and can still remember some of the gags. (Stopping the game when someone left her seat to head for the concourse so one of the players could walk over, wag his finger, and say “I know where you’re going” stands out the most. I’m sure they still use the same joke.) I remember the ride home, wondering about the man in grey, who took care of him – did he need taking care of – where were his parents, or whoever raised him – did he go home to an empty house – was he as sad as he looked. I know I didn’t want this sad, gray man who should have passed in and out of my life in a matter of seconds to be as sad as he looked, because it made me sad, and I couldn’t bear the thought of someone feeling like that all day, every day, for the rest of his life.

There’s one other alone person who has haunted me for nearly that long. My wife and I were shopping at the Worcester outlet mall, which means it was either 1995 or 1996. That place was always depressing, even though the building itself seemed relatively new and in good repair; the lighting was dim, and it was never busy when we were there, even on weekends. It wasn’t easy to get to or find, and once you reached it there was less there than you expected, which sort of describes the city of Worcester as well. And the food court area was particularly poorly lit; I remember being there just after lunch on this one day and finding the whole place in shadow, with just hints of sunlight taunting shoppers – “I’m out today, people, but there is no way on earth I’m coming into that place.”

As we were leaving the food court, my wife spotted an older woman, 80 if she was a day, sitting by herself at a table, sipping one of those tiny cartons of milk from a straw. And my wife asked me if I thought the woman was drinking milk because it was all she could afford. I said no, although I wondered then and still wonder now if that was my instinctive ability to come up with a positive explanation for a probably unpleasant situation, and perhaps we should have done as my wife suggested and offered to buy the woman a meal. At the time, what overwhelmed me, even as I was trying to believe that I wasn’t witnessing the sad poverty of old age, was that the woman looked inescapably alone, and that she herself was drowning in the sadness of solitude. I can still picture her face – not ragged or dirty, but worn, used, with an expression that said she was finished, that she’d had more sadness, more loneliness than one person could possibly absorb.

In the intervening years I’ve certainly seen more alone people, but none have affected me quite like these two did. Maybe I don’t notice them because on some subconscious level I’m trying not to notice them, because I know it can upset me for days. I do tend to walk around with some sort of distraction handy, usually a book but often my Blackberry, so maybe I’m spending less time surveying the surroundings. And maybe it’s because I talk to people when I’m out and about by myself, because while I don’t mind a quiet afternoon with a book or some music, I don’t really like to be alone too much either.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ January 29, 2010
→ By

Power Grid.

The final piece of this week’s package on prospects for 2010, players who might jump on to the 2011 list, is up. If you missed the main list, it starts with numbers 1 through 25. I’ll have one more piece on prospects next week, possibly Tuesday. As for Ulysses, I have four sentences – running twenty-odd pages – to go, so I’m hoping to write it up on Sunday or, at worst, Monday.

I got the board game Power Grid on the recommendations from several of you, and it’s currently the fourth-ranked game on Boardgamegeek. It’s a brilliant game with a few drawbacks that are easily surmounted, fairly simple to learn with some game-to-game modifications, and (as far as I can tell) no easy strategy to win.

The idea of the game is to build a power grid across a map of Germany or the U.S., including power plants and power stations in connected cities. You can have up to 3 power plants that run on coal, oil, garbage, uranium, coal/oil (hybrid plants), or green sources; except for green power, the others require players to purchase resources in each turn to fire the plants and power the cities. The first player to build a network of 17 cities, with the capacity and resources to power them, wins the game, with the magic number varying slightly depending on the number of players.

The great hitch in the game is that the power plants each take different inputs and power anywhere from one to seven cities, and they come up for auction rather than selling for fixed prices, while resource prices vary as well depending on how many players are chasing those inputs, which can change as each player upgrades his plants. It’s a complicated economic question: costs vary, and the marginal revenue from powering another city is positive but declines slightly as the number of cities in a network increases. I imagine that someone could build a model (I’m thinking Monte Carlo simulation) to figure out what these plants should be worth, or roughly what they should be worth depending on when they come up in the game, although I think that might ruin the fun.

With three or more players, two competitive dynamics come into play. One is the map – for the first part of the game, only one player can occupy a city; in “step 2,” it’s two players per city; and it’s never more than three players per city, giving multiple opportunities for a player to block others and prevent them from expanding their networks, deliberately or as part of naturally expanding their own networks. A player could have the money and power plants to expand his network but be slowed dramatically because he has to pay extra – a lot extra on the western side of the map – to go through someone else’s network, and while I’m not sure if it could happen in practice, I think I could see how a player could end up pinned in for several turns while he waits to accumulate the cash to expand out of region. The other is the competition for resources, which are refilled at fixed rates for each step of the game, so they can be depleted if too many players need them to power their plants – in fact, I can’t see how in a five- or six-player game you wouldn’t run into shortages, forcing players to change their plants and perhaps driving up purchase prices. And uranium is refilled so slowly that there’s a severe disincentive for two players to run nuclear plants simultaneously.

I did mention drawbacks. One is that it’s a mediocre two-player game, because the constraints don’t really constrain. You have room on the map, resources won’t be depleted, and the auctions don’t get too crazy – my wife and I engage in de facto collusion, so we buy plants at face value unless it’s a green one. Three works, although I’ve only played two games with three, and I imagine four would be perfect and five-plus would be a little cutthroat. With three players, each game took over an hour, so a five-player game could certainly run two.

Another is that the board is drab. I don’t care that much about artwork, but my wife really dislikes the game because she says it looks depressing – and she’s right about the cards with the power plants on them, which depict varying levels of air pollution. It wouldn’t stop me from playing the game, but it will stop some people, and for what these games cost I think it’s fair to consider the artwork.

And the third is that the mechanics of the game are complex. To keep the game in balance, the game author had to put a number of unnatural rules in place, including artificial constructs like the shift from step one to two (when any player has seven cities in his network) or two to three (when the “Step 3” card comes up in the power plant deck) and a table for how many resources to add back to the resource market at the end of each round … it’s a lot to keep track of over the course of the game, and we usually screw something up, somewhere, like forgetting to put coal back in the market one turn only to wonder three turns later why coal is so expensive. Even the order in which the players go in each round varies – you set a new player order each round, but then for some phases in the round, players go in reverse order. Yeah. I imagine the more you play, the more natural it becomes, but I don’t see it ever become as intuitive as most of the games we enjoy.

I’d recommend Power Grid because I enjoy playing it, especially the economic twist from the power plant-resource interaction, but I know from your feedback that you guys are split between folks who like the quicker-to-learn games like Ticket to Ride or Dominion and those who think I should be playing more Agricola and Puerto Rico. Power Grid, to me, is more for the second camp than the first.

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , ,
→ January 27, 2010
→ By

The prospect package.

My ranking of all 30 farm systems went up this morning, and it will all be followed on Thursday morning by the master ranking of the top 100 prospects plus top tens for all 30 organizations and an article on the ten guys who just missed the main 100. ESPNDeportes.com will have my ranking of the top 40 Latin American prospects in the minors, limited to players born outside the U.S.

I’ll chat Thursday at 1 pm, and I believe we have two other prospects chatting tomorrow, including #1 overall prospect Jason Heyward.

And on Friday, I’ll have an article on at least one sleeper in each organization who could make the big leap on to the list next year; last year’s list had around 32 names in total, and I think 14 ended up on this year’s top 100.

As for the dish, I hope to resume regular blogging tomorrow night, probably with a long-overdue writeup of Power Grid. Thanks for your patience.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ January 17, 2010
→ By

Yeast-raised Belgian Waffles.

I’ve mentioned before that the problem with “Belgian waffles” as currently served by most American restaurants that offer them is that they are only “Belgian” in shape – it’s a regular waffle batter poured into an iron with deeper ridges, creating a dense, greasy, cakey waffle that bears no resemblance to the lighter, crispier waffles that earn the Belgian moniker. I’ve even seen recipes in reputable cookbooks that make no allowance for the different shape of Belgian waffle irons and assume that your straight-up chemically-leavened waffle batter will do the trick. Of course, it won’t.

It’s not clear to me whether there is a single waffle style that qualifies as an authentic Belgian waffle, but everything I’ve read points to the inclusion of one of two methods of introducing lightness into the final batter: yeast or an egg white foam. This recipe, adapted from The 1997 Joy of Cooking, uses both to create a waffle with a light texture and crispy exterior and that brings the virtue of on-the-fly extensibility.

A quick note on equipment: The model I have, from Hamilton Beach, has been discontinued – I got it four or five years ago for $10 on clearance. It has a 7-inch diameter and nonstick grids; they’re not removable, which does make cleanup tricky, but for ten bucks I wasn’t going to be picky. The heat setting runs from 1 to 5, and I found somewhere between 3 and 4 was perfect for this recipe. If you decide to buy a Belgian waffle iron, look for nonstick grids and a variable temperature setting; I vote for a circular grid since it’s easier to spread batter on a circle than on adjacent squares. Always preheat your iron before the first waffle, and after removing each waffle close the lid and allow it to come back up to temperature.

3 cups milk, warmed to 105-110 degrees
3 eggs, separated
11 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled to lukewarm
1 Tbsp vegetable oil*
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour*
2 1/4 tsp instant yeast*
a pinch of cream of tartar

1. Whisk the egg yolks, butter, oil, and 1/2 cup of the milk together in a bowl.
2. Whisk in the sugar, salt, and extract.
3. In another bowl, stir the yeast into the two flours.
4. Alternate adding the flour mixture and the remaining milk (3 installments of flour, interspersed with two installments of milk), whisking thoroughly to combine each addition.
5. In yet a third bowl, beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar until you achieve soft peaks. Fold the foam into the master batter. Seal with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature for about an hour, until roughly doubled, although any healthy rise will suffice.
6. Preheat your waffle iron about 45 minutes after you finished making the batter.
7. Stir the batter to deflate it, then pour enough batter to make one waffle on to the hot iron’s grid. For my 7″ iron, it took about 3/4 cup of batter; Joy says about 1/2 cup, which probably assumes a 6″ grid. Use an offset spatula or heat-proof silicone spatula to spread the batter quickly to the edges, then close the iron and cook until the steaming starts to subside and the waffle is golden brown; this took about two and a half minutes on my iron. Serve immediately; hold in a 200 degree oven; or cool on wire racks before freezing.

* Notes:

  • The vegetable oil will help keep the waffles from drying out. It’s a tiny sacrifice of flavor for greater shelf life.
  • I’m sure this recipe will work fine if you use 4 cups of AP flour, but I like whole wheat flour for both its flavor and nutritional benefit. Not that these waffles would qualify as health food. Pastry flour is lower in protein than regular whole wheat flour and is usually ground more finely.
  • Instant yeast is infinitely superior to the crap they sell in packets as “active dry” or “rapid-rise” yeast. Instant yeast lasts longer – I’ve taken instant yeast that was in the fridge for over two years and baked successfully with it. It doesn’t require you to bloom it separately in liquid. And it uses less packaging than other kinds. Whole Foods sells a brick of the stuff for $5, so if you use yeast even a dozen times a year it’ll save you money. Just dump the contents of the bag into an airtight container and stick it in your refrigerator.
  • If you decide at any point you want to add something to the batter – nuts, berries, dried coconut, chocolate chips (I’d grease the hell out of the iron before that one, though), even crumbled bacon – you can just drop it into the master bowl or even into one waffle’s worth of batter, stir quickly, and pour. Unlike a chemically-leavened batter, this one bounces back quite well from agitation and the resulting waffle won’t be heavier or denser for the intrusion.
Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , , ,