The collected thoughts of sportswriter, bookworm, & food critic Keith Law
They’re hard to find with the new site format, but I have a draft blog entry up on Shelby Miller and Everett Williams, with a video available of Miller (from the side) as well. Both appear to be behind the Insider wall.
EDIT: The Miller video isn’t playing properly. I’m told that the tech guys are working on it. I’ve also uploaded videos of Matt Purke and Cameron Coffey and have filed a draft blog entry on those two kids as well as Randal Grichuk.
I saw the title of David Denby’s new polemic, Snark
Snark‘s biggest problem is that it’s not clear on its subject: Denby struggles to define snark, and redefines it on the fly as the situation suits him. Denby gives examples of what he considers snark, but he is using “snark” as a catchall term to identify and sequester anything he doesn’t like. It seems to me that snark, to Denby, means any content or commentary that insults its target or adversary; any content or commentary that is maybe kind of unfriendly or might hurt someone’s feelings; any content or commentary that slanders or libels its target; and any content or commentary that criticizes Barack Obama. Insults and calumny are their own categories, and they likely have no defenders; a book that says “slander is bad” is somewhat tautological in nature, as no one is running around saying that it’s good, and slander is bad as much as water is wet and David Denby is confused about snark. Unfriendly content is snark, in Denby’s world, when he decides that it’s snark; he makes a point of excusing several snarky pundits whose snarktacular ways are an essential part of their popular appeal, such as Steven Colbert.
I have no objection to Denby taking the opportunity to praise the best satirists and ironists out there, but his inability to pin down snark – and the ways he takes pains to say that he recognizes the benefit of some forms of what can only be called ridicule – frustrates the entire work. It’s best encapsulated in the schizophrenic chapter on Maureen Dowd, the vitriolic and popular Washington-based writer for the New York Times. I’m no fan of Dowd’s, but Denby’s complaint – in short, that she can be cutting in ways that don’t necessarily inform the reader – is weak, and once again, he seems to be most up in arms when she’s attacking Democratic candidates, particularly Obama.
The book is short and is unbalanced in its approach to dissecting snark or whatever it is that Denby is dissecting. An early “fit” (what Denby calls his chapters – I suppose that’s supposed to be cute, but it came off as pretentious) describes the history of snark, with a long tangent on Juvenal, perhaps the progenitor of snark or at least one of its earliest practitioners. He deserved a mention, not a long digression with samples of his work (which, by the way, sounded a lot more like crude insult than snark). Similarly, the passage on the origin of the word “snark” – from Lewis Carroll’s epic poem “The Hunting of the Snark” – doesn’t have much bearing on the current meaning of the term. I think Denby’s real motivation for spending so much time on the poem is that he likes saying “Boojum.”
I’m not the only one who thought Snark to be a waste of a few hours; it received a strongly negative review from the Times, and I found this point-by-point review of Snark that viewed the book as validation for the snarkers.
Next up: I’m a little backlogged on writeups – I just finished Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
Had to go to Manhattan for a meeting on Monday and then walk ten blocks to do a TV hit, and in between the two was a Cuban place called Sophie’s, one of a chain of six in midtown and downtown Manhattan. It compares favorably to Versailles in Los Angeles, which (according to several of you) is itself a pretty good spot for Cuban food.
Sophie’s has a funny setup – the one I went to, on Lex between 40th and 41st, has a small seating area with table service, but also has a cafeteria-style line for people who want their food to go. I sat down and ordered one of their regular platters (as opposed to one of the four specials, which vary depending on the day of the week), the roast pork. Most of their platters include a meat and two sides for $8; I went with yellow rice and black beans, and then ordered a dish of maduros on the side for another $1.50. The pork had outstanding flavor and I got plenty of end meat, although the center was a little bit dry. The pork at Versailles came in a tart mojo sauce, which probably was the reason the meat there didn’t dry out in the middle. The yellow rice was … well, it was rice, but it was fresh rice, and didn’t have any hard or dried-out grains because it had been sitting for too long. The maduros weren’t hot, but were sweet and well-browned. They serve the fruit/dairy concoctions called batidas, but I was only willing to be so full before going on TV.
Also worth mentioning – the Mississippi Mud Pie from the Little Pie Company. It’s sort of like the darkest, richest brownie batter you’ve ever tasted, served in an Oreo cookie crust. A bit outrageous at $22 for an 8″ pie, but it is decadent and there’s no trace of milk chocolate (better known as “chocolate for people who don’t like chocolate” or “sissy chocolate”) anywhere in it.
Most of you have probably caught this, but we have a new blog going at ESPN.com covering the MLB Draft. The blog will (I’m told) be entirely Insider and will include scouting reports from me as I see players as well as daily updates from Jason Churchill on what went on the night before and what’s coming up, as well as scuttlebutt he and I pick up from industry people with whom we speak.
I did a Q&A with Nats Farm Authority. As you might imagine, the comments are a mix of good feedback and whining. By the way, the Nats blogosphere has been going nuts the last week or so; Fire Jim Bowden is all over the Bowden scandal, and Kristen at We’ve Got Heart has been providing roundups.
Several people have asked what I’m doing for spring training. I’m going to Arizona next week and will be there for most of the month, mixing pro coverage (mostly prospects) with amateurs (including, at some point, a trip to see Strasburg). If anyone has any new food rec’s for the greater Phoenix area, I’m all ears.
In a comment on my October 2007 post listing my 25 favorite nonfiction books, reader Dennis suggested Julian Rubenstein’s Ballad of the Whiskey Robber
The book tells the true story of a Transylvanian man who escapes Ceaucescu’s regime and ends up in Budapest, where he becomes a pelt smuggler, pen salesman, Zamboni driver, backup hockey goalie, and, in the end, the most successful bank robber in Eastern Europe, all while Hungary is undergoing the painful transition from communist rule to democracy and a market economy. It is a non-fiction novel of the highest order – by all accounts, completely true, and yet built around a character so rich and fascinating that he seems like he had to have come from someone’s imagination.
The “Whiskey Robber,” Attila Ambrus, was so named because he would get hammered on whiskey before each bank job, but was also a meticulous planner and athletic enough that his hockey teammates referred to him as the “Chicky Panther.” He’s the protagonist and hero, but isn’t entirely sympathetic; aside from the whole stealing thing, he’s a spendthrift, a gambling addict, and an alcoholic, and he becomes reckless with his gun in the last few robberies before he’s captured. He’s struggling to overcome a lousy start in life – his mother walked out when he was one, and his father was cold, distant, and would beat Attila when drunk – but also has strong powers of rationalization. He’s clever and charming – many tellers whose employers he had robbed wouldn’t testify against him or testified that he was kind and courteous during the robberies – but, of course, he’s a thief.
Rubenstein balances Attila’s story with that of the Budapest police force, which chased Attila for six years, during almost all of which time they had little idea of who the Whiskey Robber was. Rubenstein depicts the police force as undermanned and underfunded, a popular second-guessing target for politicians in Hungary’s ever-unstable governments, asking for help from above and from the FBI’s office in Budapest but never receiving it. Attila became a particular thorn in the police’s side thanks to Kriminalis, a popular TV show in the mid-1990s that discussed major criminal cases of the day, a sort of Hungary’s Most Wanted but with a more tabloid feel; the show made Attila into a folk hero, as did Hungarian rapper Ganxsta Zolee*, who (without realizing he was already friends with the Whiskey Robber) recorded a popular song that proclaimed “The Whiskey Robber is the king!”
*The video in that link isn’t for the song about the Whiskey Robber, which I couldn’t find, but Zolee’s entire look in that video is just priceless. I’m sure Cypress Hill would be flattered.
The book’s greatest strength is Rubenstein’s apparent thoroughness. To construct this narrative, covering six years of robberies plus Attila’s life before his first bank job (which was actually in a post office), he would have had to talk to an inordinate number of people involved in the saga, from Ambrus himself to his ex-girlfriends to his hockey teammates to the detectives who came and went while Attila kept on robbing. The level of detail gives the story a rich, novelesque feel and that plus its scoundrel hero are probably what has given the book such a strong cult following.
I listened to the audio version of Ballad, which was the subject of a story in the New York Times a a few years ago because it was a DIY project: The publisher of Ballad didn’t want to pay to produce an audiobook, so the author cobbled together a cast of famous fans of the book and some studio time and did it himself. In some ways, it’s a blast: The characters, particularly Attila, develop more personality over the course of the book because they’re voiced individually.
I hate to criticize Rubenstein, since he read the book himself out of necessity rather than choice, but his oral style is not ideal. He reads the book in a drab, descending tone, even during chase scenes or other exciting sequences. He also mispronounces a lot of English words, like victuals (he says it as it’s written), closeted (“cl?-ZEHT-t?d”), and the old Italian currency lire (“leer”), which had me wondering whether he’d mispronounced any of the Hungarian words and names as well. These things bug me. YMMV.
Incidentally, Attila now has a myspace page. He can’t use a computer or receive mail in prison, but he apparently updates this during his allotted phone time by telling whoever’s updating the page what to write. There’s not that much of interest on there other than a video allowing you to see what a Chicky Panther looks like. I do like that he lists I, Claudius as his favorite book; I wondered if the prison library also has the sequel, Claudius the God.
I don’t read enough nonfiction to update that top-25 list often, but if I was to redo it today, I’d slot Ballad second, behind only Barbarians at the Gate.
I’m going to bet that of all the books on the Klaw 100, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
*I’m going to steal a page from JoePo today and insert some asides. I was accused in chat in a question I didn’t post of being “anti-cliché” because I didn’t like Catcher. I don’t really know how those two things are connected – neither Salinger nor his novel seem clichéd to me – but, more to the point, is anyone actually pro-cliché? Romance-novel publishers? Slasher-film producers? Actually, a few mainstream sportswriters come to mind so I’ll stop here.
Catch-22 is now one of only a handful of novels I’ve read twice, a list that also includes Pride and Prejudice (didn’t like it in high school, read Emma as an adult and loved it, re-read P&P and realized I’d missed all the wit the first time), Things Fall Apart (first read it at 13, didn’t get the point at all), and The Great Gatsby (just because). I think Catch-22 earns the prize for the longest gap between readings – I first read it in the fall of 1989*, which means it’s been an almost-unthinkable almost twenty years since my first trip through the dystopian anti-war masterpiece.
*I can tell I’m going to beat this gimmick into the ground. I first read Catch-22 by choice, but as it turned out, it was an assigned book during that same school year in AP Lit. We actually had a choice of three novels – this one, Slaughterhouse-Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next – and while I eventually read all three, I took the easy route and wrote my paper on Catch-22.
The funny part of this story is that that class, taught by Mrs. Glynn, was a substantial learning experience for me beyond the books we were supposed to read. I skipped several of the books assigned in that class, including Tess of the d’Urbervilles (rented the movie, then read the book in 2005 and loved it) and An American Tragedy (800+ pages of tiny print and I know the SOB gets it in the end, I’m all set with that, used the Cliffs Notes), and consistently scored 5’s on the papers, which Mrs. Glynn graded on the AP scale. Catch-22 was one of only two books I really read word for word and cover to cover in that class, the other being Ellison’s Invisible Man. Unfortunately, while the paper was in Mrs. Glynn’s hands, she overheard me bragging to a classmate that I hadn’t read the majority of books in her class, and sure enough, on that paper, I got a 3. The lesson I took was that it doesn’t actually matter whether you do the work as long as you act like you did and present it well. I sleepwalked through college on this newfound confidence, only really working hard in math and foreign-language classes. There may also have been a lesson in my AP Lit experience in the value of keeping my mouth shut, a lesson I have never learned and promise you all that I never will.
My memory of Catch-22 was that it was a hilarious, often absurd anti-war romp, almost like an angrier, funnier Vonnegut. I remembered anecdotes, like Nately’s whore, Milo the entrepreneur, and cracks about flies in someone’s eyes. What I didn’t remember – or perhaps didn’t realize the first time through – was that it is a profoundly cynical book, satirizing and savaging more than just war, with democracy, capitalism, government, religion, and often just plain ol’ humanity all taking it on the chin and ending up bleeding on the floor. The plot is pretty thin; the novel itself is more a meandering collecting of anecdotes told in a nonlinear fashion, an effective technique for humor that left me often confused as to the order of events*, although to read and enjoy this book you don’t really need to worry too much about sequence.
*Well, except for when someone was killed – that sort of cleared things up a bit.
In fact, I’d argue that even considering the book’s deft wordplay and ironic humor, the book’s greatest comedy comes from Heller’s scene-shifting gimmick: In the middle of dialogue between two people about a third person, Heller will jump to the third person discussing the same subject without any transition whatsoever. The quotes themselves are usually funny, but the momentary disorientation – hey, he wasn’t in the room a moment ago – increases the humor.
I’ve read one of Heller’s other novels, the unusual God Knows
*From Heller’s obituary in the New York Times: “When an interviewer told Mr. Heller that he had never written anything as good as Catch-22, the author shot back, ‘Who has?'”
Next up: A collection of Raymond Chandler’s short stories, The Simple Art of Murder
I’ve been sitting on a writeup of Eyeless in Gaza
I’ve read two other Huxley books – the dystopian classic Brave New World and the social satire Antic Hay – but Eyeless bears no resemblance to either work. The protagonist, Anthony Beavis – no, no sign of Butthead, sorry – is a morally rudderless libertine who lost his mother at an early age and was raised by an emotionally distant father who rebounded into a second marriage. He goes to college where he befriends a shy, religious boy named Brian, only to betray him a few years later by seducing his intended. Some years later, Anthony has an existential crisis while trying to write a “sociological” book that is more of a philosophy of life.
The clever device was the weaving of multiple timelines together without destroying the feel of the narrative. You know from early in the book, for example, that Brian is dead, because it’s revealed in the latest timeline, but because Huxley has chopped up his story into four or five timelines and cycles among them as they converge towards the book’s end, the how and why comes out in stages. It’s not the only book to use this method of telling a story, but the separation among storylines is more severe than in any other book I can remember, I don’t believe I’ve read an earlier book that used this device.
Beavis, however, is indeed a butthead. His betrayal of Brian is really just the icing on the cake, although it certainly colors one’s opinion of him to know that he betrayed his best friend and in possibly the only genuinely good person in the book. Everyone else is rotten and/or broken, and when one character threw another overboard or under the bus, I just greeted it with a shrug.
Eyeless in Gaza is part of the Bloomsbury 100, but that seems like a questionable call given the more enduring influence and popularity of Brave New World; in fact, Eyeless seems to be out of print in the U.S.
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I’m scheduled to be on the FAN 590 in Toronto on Wednesday at 6:05 pm, and we appear to be on for a 1 pm Klawchat on Thursday.
I did a Q&A with Atlanta blog Talking Chop, on the heels of a Rangers Q&A last week at Baseball Time in Arlington.
Sandra Lee’s new publication – magazine or giant brochure for highly processed food products?
I don’t know if any of you have bought the Peter Reinhart books I recommended last month, but if so, I’ve noticed that the quantity of water required for the whole-grain breads seems to depend on the grind of your whole wheat flour. I buy the Whole Foods bagged flour, which is a fairly coarse grind, and have had to increase the water to get a proper dough. And, on an unrelated note, the pain a l’ancienne recipe in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice
This recipe is adapted from one at smitten kitchen, which is the best-looking food blog I’ve ever seen. The photographs are simply amazing. The recipes are nearly all taken from well-known magazines and cookbooks, slightly modified and rewritten. (This, by the way, is completely legal; you can’t copyright a recipe, although you can copyright the specific text used to describe a recipe.) She does do some things that make me nuts, like measuring baking ingredients by volume rather than weight or “discovering” something that’s not that new (as with the rebrowning step in her short ribs recipe, describing a technique that’s been in Joy of Cooking for at least ten years), but it’s one of only four or five food blogs in my RSS reader because the photos inspire me and every once in a while there’s a recipe I want to make. Like these cupcakes.
I made the cupcakes for company this weekend, skipping the ganache filling step because of time constraints and using a Kahlua/cream blend in lieu of Bailey’s in the frosting (which isn’t actually buttercream since it lacks eggs). The results were very, very good – dark, moist chocolate cakes with that intense flavor you only really get from cocoa, cut nicely by the coolness of the frosting. I’m probably going to experiment with this further, but for those who saw my twitter about these cupcakes and asked for the recipe, here you go. I’ve rewritten this to measure the dry ingredients by weight, added vanilla extract to the cupcakes, and made the aforementioned change to the frosting. Oh, and I don’t use cupcake-pan liners. Who the hell uses liners? It’s 2009. Buy a nonstick pan and some baking spray.
For the cupcakes:
1 cup stout (such as Guinness)
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 cup neutral-flavored oil (such as canola)
80 g (about 3/4 cup) unsweetened Dutch-processed cocoa powder
300 g (about 2 cups) all purpose flour
400 g (about 2 cups) sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
2/3 cup sour cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1. Preheat the oven to 350° F (about 175 C). Prepare two 12-slot cupcake pans with baking spray or with nonstick spray and cocoa powder*.
2. Combine the butter and stout in a medium saucepan and bring to a bare simmer over medium heat. The goal is to melt the butter, work the carbonation out of the stout (we’ll add lift chemically), and combine the two. Remove from the heat and whisk in the cocoa powder and oil until smooth. Set aside to cool until just warm to the touch.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk the flour, baking soda, and salt together.
4. In the work bowl of your stand mixer (or in a large bowl suitable for a hand mixer), combine the eggs and sour cream and beat with the whisk attachment until more or less blended. Add the vanilla and sugar and blend further.
5. With the beater(s) running on low speed, slowly pour in the warm cocoa-stout-butter mixture. Increase the speed and whisk for thirty to sixty seconds until combined.
6. Add the flour in two to three installments, beating thoroughly after each addition until the mixture is homogeneous.
7. Pour or scoop the mixture into the prepared pans, filling each compartment about ¾ full. A #20 disher gave me 20 cupcakes.
8. Bake 15-17 minutes, switching and rotating the trays at the eight-minute mark. Remove them from the oven when a toothpick inserted into the middle of a cupcake (not one on the edge of the oven) comes out just barely clean. A few crumbs clinging to the toothpick would be ideal. Cool thoroughly on a rack before frosting.
* Baking spray is regular spray oil with flour mixed into it. If you don’t have it, spray the pan with regular canola-oil or vegetable-oil spray, and put a little cocoa powder in each compartment, tilting the pan to cover the bottom and sides of each compartment. Yes, a nonstick pan should release the cupcakes anyway, but why take chances?
For the pseudo-buttercream frosting:
About 3 cups confectioners’ sugar
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperatue
1 Tbsp heavy cream
2 Tbsp Kahlúa® or other coffee-flavored liqueur
1. Combine the cream and liqueur in a small measuring cup and set aside.
2. Using the paddle attachment on your stand mixer, beat the butter for about two minutes or until thoroughly broken down into a smooth paste.
3. Add the sugar one heaping tablespoon at a time, allowing each to be mostly integrated before adding the next spoonful.
4. When the mixture starts to stiffen, add about half of the liqueur/cream mixture and beat in on low speed. If the frosting is still too stiff to spread or pipe, add the remaining liquid until you reach the desired consistency. Use immediately, because it gets stiff quickly even at room temperature.
I’ll be on ESPNEWS today just after 5 pm EST, and I’m taping a brief hit for the 6 pm Sportscenter as well.