→ July 8, 2009
→ By

Loving.

Henry Green was an unusual man who wrote unusual books, nearly all with one-word titles ending in “-ing.” One of his best-regarded novels, Loving, made the Modern Library 100 (#89) and the TIME 100. It has little plot and can be hard to follow, but the depiction of class differences in World War II Ireland (featuring an English family trying to escape the war and their English and Irish servants) is clever, incisive, and sometimes quite funny. The scattered, snobbish matriarch refers to all butlers as “Raunce,” regardless of their actual names; constantly loses items; and is completely oblivious to the fact that her daughter-in-law is shagging another man under the same roof. The butler who ascends to the title when the previous one dies is a money-grubbing, status-conscious, fatuous man, and is the closest thing the book has to a protagonist. One of the female servants is in love with Raunce; the other seems to have no idea with whom she’s in love, but wants to be in love with someone.

The plot is paper thin; it would be more accurate to say it comprises several subplots, including a lost or stolen sapphire ring, the romance between Raunce and Edith, and stories like the daughter-in-law’s affair that are almost background noise behind the nonstop dialogue among the servants. Green’s writing style is peculiar, with abrupt transitions from subject to subject and speaker to speaker and a cavalier attitude towards punctuation:

‘Now me lad she wants that glove and don’t forget.’
‘What glove?’
‘The old gardening glove Edith went birds’-nesting with,’ Raunce replied. ‘Holy Moses look at the clock,’ he went on, ‘ten to three and me not on me bed. Come on look slippy.’ He whipped out the decanter while Bert provided those tumblers that had not yet been dried. ‘God rest his soul,’ Raunce added in a different tone of voice then carried on,
‘Wet glasses? Where was you brought up?’

And the setting and subtle humor are reminiscent of Waugh and Wodehouse, two of my favorite authors, although I found Green’s prose a bit offputting until I got used to it.

Next in my queue is Green’s first novel, Living. For more on Green, this review of a biography of Green offers quite a bit of detail on his life and writing career.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 7, 2009
→ By

Commenting guidelines.

The “world’s best fans” are showing up here in droves in my comment moderation queue (okay, by droves, I mean maybe ten), and unfortunately, I’ve had to delete the majority of the comments left.

There are three pretty simple rules for commenting here:

1. Do not insult me.
2. Do not insult other commenters.
3. Use a valid email address.

You may criticize my views all you like, but anything personal will be deleted. I reserve the right to delete any and all comments that I don’t think fit the congenial atmosphere that my readers have helped build here over the last two-plus years.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ July 7, 2009
→ By

Radio, podcast.

Jason Churchill and I talk regularly, and we decide to make one of our regular conversations into a podcast, which starts at 11 am EDT and is available here.

My hit on the Brian Kenny show last night is here. I am tentatively scheduled to be on Baseball Tonight in the 7 pm EDT hour tonight.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ July 6, 2009
→ By

Monday hits, podcasts, etc.

By now you’ve probably seen my annual breakdown of the All-Star rosters. If you’re here, you probably already know that I think the All-Star Game is just a marketing event and I haven’t watched it in 2003, so the outrage in the article is just for fun. The Futures Game is where the action is, at least to me. Anyway, the Conversation below that article has been insane.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS this afternoon, probably around 3:30 pm, but we’re taping just before the show starts so that time may change. I’ll also be on our St. Louis affiliate at 11:20ish CDT today, and on the Brian Kenny Show at some point this evening (also taping before it starts, so I can watch Team USA tonight).

You can download my Friday hit on the V Show in two parts here and here. My Friday night hit with Seth Everett on our NYC affiliate is here.

Filed Under: Appearances
→ July 4, 2009
→ By

Matt Wieters Facts: The T-shirt.

I’m sure a few of you have seen the Matt Wieters tribute site, Matt Wieters Facts, which includes a quote they pulled from one of my chats: “Sliced bread is actually the best thing since Matt Wieters.” The guys at MWF threw that quote on a T-shirt with a graphic of sliced bread (of course), and they’ve agreed to donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the shirt to the GlobalGiving project to help disabled children in Kenya.

That was some pretty good bread, though.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,
→ July 3, 2009
→ By

ABC News.

I’ll be on ABC News in about a half an hour (around 6:45) discussing Aroldis Chapman, and then on ESPN 1050 in New York at 8:25 pm. I’m also going to tape a hit for The V Show tonight on ESPN Radio.

Filed Under: Appearances
→ July 3, 2009
→ By

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game.

Recent radio: My first-ever appearance on the BS Report; today’s hit on our Seattle affiliate; yesterday’s hit on Mike and Mike in the Morning (complete with goofy custom song).

I’ll be on KTAR Phoenix tonight at 7:10 pm local time, and on ESPN 1000 in Chicago at 9:40 pm local time.

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game is the second book in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle, which started with Legs (which I didn’t like) and continues with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed. Legs was a fictionalized story of bootlegger Legs Diamond’s rise and fall in the Albany underworld, but the use of a real person limited Kennedy’s ability to craft an actual plot, leaving him instead to fit his words around actual events. In Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Kennedy can create something from whole cloth – the story of the title character’s unwilling involvement in a major Albany kidnapping, his fall from grace, and his surprising redemption.

Although the setting is the 1930s, evoking thoughts of hard-boiled detective novels, Kennedy’s style is more expansive than the typical dry hard-boiled writer’s, from longer sentences to allusions to music, novels, and poetry, such as this passage where one character, a playwright, quotes Yeats:

Young people rode together in the summer in open carriages. They held hands and walked around the spectacular Moses fountain. Martin’s father stood at the edge of these visions, watching. This is no country for old men, his father said. I prefer, said Edward Daugherty, to be with the poet, a golden bird on a golden bough, singing of what is past.

The passage is a memory of Martin Daugherty, a friend of Billy’s and the second protagonist in two plot lines that intertwine throughout the book. Martin’s is more introspective and sentimental, while Billy’s has more action, relatively speaking, although the bulk of the big action takes place off-screen. Both characters face existential questions, revolving around family, both real and the constructed “family” of the McCall crime organization.

Kennedy’s prose is strong, and was markedly improved over that of Legs. He provides just enough imagery to set the scene and evokes that hard-boiled feel with text that’s one step above sparse. Billy Phelan’s also has more comic elements, and Kennedy is certainly not above a bit of slapstick or even bathroom humor, including the book’s funniest passage, one that has nothing to do with the main plot:

And Cottrell and Leonard and the mannequins in the window. Two bums broke that window one night, drunked up on zodiac juice, everybody’s bar dregs, beer, whiskey, wine, that old Lumberg kept in a can and then bottled and sold to the John bums for six bucks a gallon. When the cops caught up with the bums, one of them was dead and the other was screwing the mannequin through a hole cut in its crotch.

After fighting my way through Legs, I tore through this book, and was even satisfied by the unconventional (and slightly ironic) ending.

Next up: Back to the TIME 100 with Henry Green’s Loving, part of a three-book volume that includes his earlier novels Living and Party Going.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 1, 2009
→ By

The Old Man and the Sea.

Podcast links – I was on The Herd yesterday and Baseball Tonight last night. Still working on last night’s Fan 590 Toronto hit, and the Mike & Mike hit should be up later today.

It would be fairly easy to write a note about Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea that is actually longer than the book itself, but I’ll resist the urge. I don’t care for Hemingway, having read three of his novels before tackling this novella (#32 on the Radcliffe 100 and winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Really Short Books of Five-Word Sentences Fiction); his prose style is detached, and I can’t relate to the casual nihilism of many of his main characters. The Old Man and the Sea differs from the other Hemingway novels I’ve read in the latter respect, since it’s more of a fable than a novel, and the title character dares to hope.

The main question around the novella seems to be the symbolic value of the sea and/or the giant fish that the old man catches. These were some possibilities that occurred to me as I read the book:

* The fish represents happiness: You can catch it and hold it for a short period of time, but like all else in life and this world, it will pass. This would mean that Our Lady Peace had it slightly wrong, since happiness would indeed be a fish you can catch, but not one you can keep.

* The fish represents man: King of his little universe until some higher force (fate, God, two-headed aliens with probes … okay, the last one might be a stretch) intervenes. And subjects him to a humiliating, painful decline. This is Hemingway we’re discussing, so you can’t rule that out.

* The sea represents life or fate: Pretty obvious. Man struggling against a force beyond his control and beyond his ability to perceive it, refusing to surrender or accept inevitable defeat.

* The fish and the sea together represent the upper and lower bounds on man’s life. Man can tame or defeat some aspects of his world, but ultimately there is an upper bound on our existence.

We read A Farewell to Arms in AP Lit – I was so pissed at the ending that I threw the book across the room – but never Old Man, which seems to be unusual given how many people tell me they read it in school. Hemingway strikes me as an author best read in an academic setting because his works lend themselves so well to this kind of simple literary analysis. I don’t enjoy his prose, and his stories and characters don’t grip me the way that Fitzgerald’s or Faulkner’s do.

Next up: The second book in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game. I can already tell you it’s better than Legs.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 30, 2009
→ By

Kingdom of Rust.

I’ll be on the Herd today at 12:25 pm EDT, and am tentatively scheduled to appear on Mike and Mike tomorrow morning at 7:24 am EDT. My hit on Phoenix’s KTAR from yesterday morning is downloadable here.

I’ve been a Doves fan since 2000 or so after hearing a few tracks from their debut album, Lost Souls, which they followed with one of the best albums of the decade, the epic The Last Broadcast, which was a huge hit in the U.K. but got very little airplay here outside of a car commercial that used one of the album’s singles, “Words.” Their newest release, Kingdom Of Rust, doesn’t quite live up to the peaks of The Last Broadcast but is more consistently above-average and improves with each listen.

Kingdom contains two standout tracks, several more strong ones, and a little bit of unfortunate filler (although I doubt Doves views them that way). The first standout is the title track, a rockabilly-meets-shoegazing track with mournful singing over an upbeat drum pattern – a juxtaposition that more or less defines Doves’ sound over their four studio albums. The other, oddly enough, is a download-only bonus track, “Ship of Fools,” with an intro that borrows from Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” (but not from World Party’s one real hit) before expanding into a less folky, more rock-oriented song with a haunting minor piano riff.

“House of Mirrors” has a late-60s, Pink Floyd in the Syd Barrett era feel, while “Compulsion” revolves around a late-70s/early 80s funk-meets-new-wave drum-and-bass combination. The opener, “Jetstream,” harkens back to their dance-oriented roots as one-hit wonder Sub Sub, with an insistent, sparse guitar lick that takes over the song halfway through and compensates for the under-sung vocals. The driving “The Outsiders” sounds more like a leftover track from Lost Souls, a song filled with thick, fuzzy guitar work that make the entire song crackle with energy. The only real duds are the album’s closer (sans bonus tracks) “Lifelines,” musically and lyrically a complete drag; and “10:03,” which doesn’t kick into gear until shortly before the three-minute mark and has some nails-on-the-chalkboard vocals from Jimi Goodwin. The lapses are more than covered by the two bonus tracks, the aforementioned “Ship of Fools” and the plaintive “The Last Son.”

The one thing that ties Doves songs together is an emphasis on atmospheric music that still drives forward, a musical equivalent to the narrative greed that sets great novels apart from good (and lousy) ones. When they nail a riff on top of that base of sound, as they do about a half-dozen times on Kingdom of Rust, they’re one of the best bands going.

If you’re not familiar with Doves’ work, you could also start with the following singles: “The Cedar Room” and “The Man Who Told Everything” from Lost Souls; “Words,” “There Goes the Fear,” and “The Pounding” from The Last Broadcast; and “Black and White Town” from Some Cities.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With:
→ June 27, 2009
→ By

Ghost.

I have a new post up with some notes on non-Bryce-Harper players I saw at the Tournament of Stars this week.

River Ave Blues looked at the final mock drafts of the major draft analysts, and they ranked mine as the most accurate.

I’m holding the review of Word Freak for now, as Stefan agreed to a brief Q&A about the book and his current Scrabble habits and I’m waiting for the response.

—

Alan Lightman’s slim, quick-reading 2007 novel Ghost revolves around a very ordinary man, David Kurzweil, whose life is turned upside down when he sees something out of the corner of his eye that he can’t identify or explain. He ends up at the center of a public controversy over the existence of the supernatural, turning his life upside down as he struggles to decide what exactly he saw, and what it might mean.

The ostensible subject of the book is that battle between faith and skepticism, and Lightman – the first professor to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities at MIT – limits the phony dialogue and extended narrative digressions that can easily ruin a book like this, instead creating a raft of secondary characters to represent many different views on the subject. (Oddly enough, the one role he omits is the traditionalist – at no point does David seek counsel from clergy of any faith.) Lightman also cleverly confounds any attempt by his characters to provide a clear resolution to the question, as proving or disproving the existence of the supernatural is not his aim.

I think the book’s ultimate theme – or perhaps moral – is that, in the small view, it doesn’t matter whether David’s experience represented a genuine contact with the supernatural, but whether he fully believes in it himself. David doesn’t see any meaning in life, so he lives a life without meaning. He has a job that, at the time he takes it and even at the time that he sees whatever he sees, is just a job. His love life is in shambles, with a divorce that he hasn’t emotionally accepted after eight years and a girlfriend to whom he can’t fully connect. As he finds himself forced to defend what he saw from skeptics and from co-opters, his personality begins to emerge from a hibernation that may have started when his father died when David was still a child. He has shied away from real relationships for at least the eight years since the divorce, and perhaps for longer (the marriage did fail, after all), and suddenly is forced to deal with people and to define himself along the way. Whether the supernatural exists is not Lightman’s question; he’s exploring what would happen to an ordinary man placed into an extraordinary situation that has the potential to change his life in either direction.

Next up: One of those books that people can’t believe I haven’t read previously – Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: ,