The collected thoughts of sportswriter, bookworm, & food critic Keith Law
Mike and Mike this morning. Waiting for the Herd clip to post.
Division Series previews:
Plus the eighth advance report, on theMinnesota Fundamentalists Twins. The Conversation is pretty hilarious – angry Twins fans wielding batting average and fielding percentage.
And two more mental_floss quizzes:
I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 2:40 pm EDT.
My “scouting reports” on the seven playoff teams are now up:
I’m working on the individual series pieces, but I’m hoping to slip the DC eats post in later today.
UPDATE: I forgot to include links to my new quizzes on mental_floss, where I’m a guest quizmaster again this week. Today’s is name the 22 non-metal elements, and yesterday’s was name the original seven cast members of Saturday Night Live.
My introduction to Kingsley Amis came through his comic novel Lucky Jim, but Amis was also a prolific columnist on the subject of alcoholic beverages. Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis
Each essay or column is built around a specific topic, usually a specific drink or class of drink, with digressions on topics like how to drink without getting a hangover, how to stock a liquor cabinet, or the decline of the English pub (so strongly felt that he delivers the same rant twice). Amis’s chief skill in writing these essays, aside from an apparently indefatigable liver, is blending strident opinion with direct advice so that his lectures don’t become shrill or dull.
His essay on liqueurs, for example, starts with an explanation of where that class of beverage originated (from preserving fruits in spirits) to discussions of a few major types to a digression on Southern Comfort, including his discussion of a drink called a Champagne Comfort:
Champagne Comfort is not a difficult drink to imagine, or to make, or to drink. My advice is to stop after the first one unless you have the rest of the day free.
Amis lays into any practice of which he disapproves, referring to lager and lime as “an exit application from the human race if ever there was one” (it’s listed in the index under “lager and lime, unsuitability for higher primates of, 170”) or as a Harvey Wallbanger as a “famous or infamous cocktail … named after some reeling idiot in California.” He expounds on Champagne as “only half a drink. The rest is a name on a label, an inflated price tag, a bit of tradition and a good deal of showing off.” There are several columns and one section on how to stiff your guests by shorting their drinks or by fawning over their wives so the women will defend you to their grousing husbands on the drives home.
While Amis is busy amusing you, he’s educating you on the history and processes of drink as well as offering suggestions and recommendations, even on wine, a beverage he professes to dislike. Understanding drink means understanding ingredients, processes, industrial practices, and accumulated wisdom of old sots like Amis. He writes that it’s best to keep seltzer or sparkling water outside the fridge, as refrigeration kills the bubbles. Why isn’t Jack Daniel’s technically considered a bourbon? (Because it’s made in Tennessee, not in Bourbon County, Kentucky.) What do (or did) winemakers in Bordeaux do in poor harvest years? (Import grapes from Rioja, a region in Spain that’s a major producer of red wines, particularly from the Tempranillo grape.) And he won points with me with several mentions of Tokaj azsu, the sweet wines of Hungary made from grapes affected with the “noble rot” fungus.
He also includes numerous drink recipes, including a few of his own making, one of which is, in fact, named “The Lucky Jim,” a dry martini with cucumber juice. I’ll trust one of you to give that a shot and report back to me.
Next book: Hangover Square
Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness
Charlie Carmody, the family patriarch, invites Father Kennedy to his 81st birthday party, making the priest a witness to his continued psychological tormenting of his children while also bringing him back into contact with Charlie’s son John, a priest in Kennedy’s old parish; and daughter Helen. O’Connor manages to flesh out those two characters – Charlie is basically a one-note curmudgeon, but responsible for a fair bit of black comedy – while using all of his secondary characters to help unfold Kennedy’s story and lead him to realize why he isn’t fulfilled in his current life.
It’s not an overtly theological or religious novel, although of necessity we get some internal monologues from Father Kennedy, including one on the difference between rote and thoughtful prayer:
The mechanical act of falling upon one’s knees and saying The Lord’s Prayer every day is one thing and a simple thing, but to say even the first half-dozen words of that prayer with the attention they deserve is quite another and not at all so simple. I think every prayer well said is a shot through a barricade…
Father Kennedy also breaks with the conventional fictional portrayals of priests as angry drunks, molesters, or insipid ciphers. He’s well-developed and reflective, with a sharp, almost sarcastic sense of humor:
“I mean, if you cut your hand off, it hurts; it doesn’t hurt any less simply because a thousand other people may have cut their hands off before you.”
“No, but if you remember all those other hands you may be prevented from hiring a hall and giving a short talk on ‘How I Cut My Hand Off.'”
Where the novel might fail to appeal is its almost complete lack of plot. There’s a long flashback to Father Kennedy’s battle with the bottle, including his time at a rehab facility in the Southwest (where he runs into one of those aforementioned stereotyped priests, perhaps O’Connor’s way of parodying other portrayals), and one major event at the end of the book (and if you don’t see it coming, you’re not paying attention), but the novel is introspective and dwells on its main character and narrator. I found him interesting because he was written realistically and because I found his soliloquies worth reading, but it can be slow and O’Connor’s writing did occasionally drift into wordiness.
Next up: A little light nonfiction – Kingsley Amis’s Everyday Drinking
I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 3:10 pm EDT. And yes, there will be a DC food post sometime soon.
My take on the NCAA’s latest anti-player/anti-agent move was posted yesterday morning. My on The Herd yesterday is also up. The transcript from Thursday’s chat is up, even though we suffered a bit of chattus interruptus, and once again the new chat software ate a question and double-posted some of my answers. Incidentally, when I highlighted Latos as “legit” among the sea of Padre suspects who’ve debuted this year, I didn’t mean to dismiss Kyle Blanks by omission.
And my blog entry on Ross Detwiler, Ian Desmond, and Chad Billingsley went up earlier today.
Klawchat at 1 pm EDT today. Tentatively scheduled to be on the FAN 590 in Toronto at 6:05 pm.
I’ve been promising this writeup for months but there always seems to be a book or a trip in the way, which is a shame, since Carcassonne
Carcassonne’s concept is very simple, generally a hallmark of good boardgames. All players build the board as you go, using a collection of square tiles that depict various pieces of roads, cities, and pastures. You keep no hand tiles, drawing one piece per turn and placing it immediately next to one or more pieces already on the table. You must make sure that the edges match – if a tile has a city on one edge, that edge can’t be placed next to a road or a pasture – which limits your options. Along the way, you place your followers, known as “meeples” to hardcore Carcassonne players, on cities, roads, or farms that you build to try to earn points, with bonus points awarded for completing cities, using city tiles with pennants, and for certain tiles available in the many expansions to the core game.
It’s an easy game to pick up but the changing board and the fact that your opponents are simultaneously building, often nearby, make gameplay different every time. You can play a solitary game, especially if you’re just playing one other person, but you can also play in a way that tries to steal points from your opponents by merging one of your cities with one of theirs, since the points for a completed (“closed”) city go to the player with the most meeples occupying tiles in that city.
The trickiest part of the game is the use of farms, which can be more valuable than cities if played properly. When you play a meeple on a city or road, you get the meeple back to redeploy once that city is closed or that road is completed. When you play a meeple on a farm, however, he’s there for the rest of the game. When the game ends, a player gets points for each closed city that his farm abuts, but a player often doesn’t have much control over how his farm grows, and a player can end up with nothing for one of his meeples if farms merge as the board develops and he’s outnumber on that farm when the game ends. As a result, when and where to place meeples is the main strategic decision for Carcassonne players, since you have no control over what tiles you draw but have complete control over meeple placement.
We’ve played with two to four players; four players can take a while, but two player games run under a half hour for us, especially since my wife and I tend to play apart from each other on the board. I’ve played online a few times, including two games against players who spent all of their time trying to glom on to my cities (by creating a new nearby city and attempting to merge the two), and not only was the strategy annoying, it didn’t seem to work – you can keep the game close that way, but you can’t get ahead without building some cities and farms of your own, so I never pursue this strategy myself.
We’ve used two Carcassonne expansions. The game currently comes with the first River expansion, twelve tiles that you use to start the game; it provides some structure and helps break up farms, but it doesn’t substantially change gameplay. The second, Traders and Builders
I’ll do one more game post in the next few weeks, updating the top ten and reposting the comments lost from the original thread last fall.
My column on the 18U Team USA trials went up the other day. You can hear my hit from Mike & Mike in the Morning today and from AllNight last night. Both were recorded on the same phone but I sound quite different in each hit. Go figure.
Richard Russo was already one of my favorite novelists after I’d read just two of his books, Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool*, but The Risk Pool
*Apropos of nothing, I read Nobody’s Fool right before reading William Kennedy’s Legs, then read this book right after reading Kennedy’s Ironweed, with all four novels set in upstate New York. This wasn’t a plan to read novels in geographical order – it just sort of happened.
The Risk Pool is the story of the relationship between Ned Hall and his parents, the shiftless, irresponsible Sam Hall and the wife, Jenny, he abandoned – mostly – when Ned was born and Jenny’s father died. Ned spends his childhood shuffled from Jenny to Sam and back to Jenny again, through Jenny’s mental collapse (caused in no small way by Sam) and Sam’s movement in and out of jail, sobriety, and the town (Mohawk) where Ned grows up.
Although the story is told by Ned and populated by Russo’s regular crew of local wackos, the star of the show is Sam. The elder Hall comes back from World War II a changed man, living entirely in the present, abandoning his responsibilities toward his strait-laced wife and newborn son without actually skipping town or exiting their lives entirely. Russo could easily have made Sam a villain, or just written about him with derision or obvious distaste, but Russo always embraces his flawed characters, and you can see that he enjoyed crafting Sam and putting him into odd situations to see what he’d do.
Ned finds himself torn physically and emotionally between his two parents, feeling more affection toward his father than he does toward his fragile, smothering mother, while trying not to become too much like either parent. His success or failure in this endeavor isn’t revealed until the final few pages of the book, but that question – how will Ned turn out – has a strong narrative pull in a book that doesn’t offer many unresolved questions to drag you forward. The story is driven by the characters, and because the characters are interesting, that’s just about enough.
The two Russo novels I read both had plenty of humorous moments, but The Risk Pool was definitely the funniest, both in situational comedy but also in Russo’s prose. There’s an extended riff when Ned ends up with the prim wife and timid daughter of one of Mohawk’s wealthiest families where Russo’s prose style emulates Wodehouse’s for a half-dozen pages, mostly as Ned mentally mocks the older woman’s bizarre mannerisms:
She discovered the lights at the same instant the strangling Lincoln gave a violent lurch forward, coughed once, and died.
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Ward, as if she could imagine no way out of this unforeseen circumstance and suspected that they would now have to purchase a new car.
If The Risk Pool has a flaw, it’s Russo’s excessive use of disposable characters. In his later books, Russo uses slightly fewer side characters and integrates them more fully into the main plot, whereas The Risk Pool has more characters that Russo shunts aside when he’s done with them. I also found the relationship between Sam Hall and his on/off girlfriend Eileen – and Eileen’s son, Drew – a little unclear in the end, particularly where Sam and Eileen had stood before Sam married Jenny and went off to war. Whether this was a deliberate omission on Russo’s part or a minor plot hole he didn’t close isn’t clear (and I can’t say more without spoiling one of the book’s few mysteries).
Next up: Edwin O’Connor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Edge of Sadness
I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 2:40 pm EDT, talking Tigers/Twins, a few playoff-bound teams, and maybe Milton Bradley.
New column on the Team USA 18U trials last week, and a quick comment in Rumor Central on Buster Posey’s outlook for 2010.
I have never been a big cola drinker, and only seldom drink soda of any sort (although I do love Thomas Kemper’s vanilla cream soda), but I hate the idea of a government tax on soft drinks or any other foods that the Food Police deem bad for me. What’s next – bacon? Butterfat? I maintain a healthy weight and have low cholesterol despite consuming both of those items. I can make my own food choices, thanks, Sam.
Oh, and if you haven’t seen Kseniya Simonova, the sand artist who won Ukraine’s Got Talent this year, she’s pretty impressive.
Klaw links: Yesterday’s chat transcript. Yesterday’s hit on Mike & Mike in the Morning. A quick take on Pittsburgh’s 2010 rotation and on the Angels’ complaints about Wednesday’s umpiring.
William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Ironweed
The novel, set in 1936, shows Francis as an itinerant bum with an alcohol problem, surrounded by other bums in various stages of inebriation, several of whom are racing headlong for the grave. Francis himself played for the Washington Senators, but his career was bookended by two tragedies in which he had a hand – the death of a strikebreaker before he started playing, and the accidental death of his two-week-old son after – which drove him to alcohol and to abandon his family and hometown. Now, twenty years after his son’s death, Francis has returned to Albany to try to make peace with his past:
The latter name suddenly acted as a magical key to history for Francis. He sensed for the first time in his life the workings of something other than conscious will within himself: insight into a pattern, an overview of all the violence in his histroy, of how many had died or been maimed by his hand, or had died, like that nameless pair of astonished shades, as an indirect result of his violent ways.
Those shades, two of many Francis sees, are people in whose deaths he played some small part, as well as some people he otherwise wronged. They only appear to Francis, but whether they are ghosts or visions or hallucinations is never explained, nor does Kennedy need to do so. Francis has to deal with them regardless of their state before he can make any attempt to reconnect with the family he left behind. The themes that develop from there are somewhat obvious, such as Francis needing to forgive himself before he can seek forgiveness from anyone else, but the way that Kennedy unfolds them was both novel and gripping in a way that most emotion-driven books are not for me.
Next up: Richard Russo’s The Risk Pool