Just wanted to throw up a link to a Q&A with E.L. Doctorow from New York magazine on how he wrote Ragtime
→ April 7, 2008
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E.L. Doctorow on Ragtime.
→ April 7, 2008
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ESPNEWS today.
I’ll be on The Hot List today at 4:20 pm EDT. I should be on again at some point on Tuesday afternoon, but we haven’t fixed a time yet.
→ April 6, 2008
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Kafka on the Shore.
Kafka on the Shore
Murakami’s narrative is split into two, although we know from the start that they will converge near the book’s conclusion. The first narrative, told in the first person, is the story of a fifteen-year-old boy who runs away from home for reasons that are never entirely clear and adopts the pseudonym of Kafka Tamura. Kafka flees to the city of Takamatsu, on the island of Shikoku, largely because there’s a library there to which he is inexplicably drawn. The second narrative, told in the third person, follows a sixty-year-old simpleton named Nakata who can talk to cats and who is either a mystic or a pawn of mystical forces. Kafka is, to some degree, on a quest to find the mother who abandoned him and his father when he was four years old. Nakata ends up committing a crime he doesn’t understand that may have involved an out-of-body experience … and this just skims the surface of the events in the book.
Like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore is a mind-bender with plenty of magical realism and dreamlike passages. And like its predecessor, it has one scene of very graphic violence (this time against animals, not that that’s much easier to tolerate) and lots of slightly awkward descriptions of sex, although confused sexuality is a major theme in the novel, perhaps as a subset of the larger theme of confused identity. Murakami also raises questions about independence and fate, but like any skilled writer, offers little in the way of set answers other than a few platitudes in the book’s closing pages.
What I particularly enjoy about Murakami’s writing is the way he makes coincidence and fate a part of the novel without allowing the characters to ignore it. They’re either amazed by the coincidences, or are pondering whether it’s fate or Fate at work. Even the magical realism elements get mixed reactions, with some characters unfazed but a few always there to offer some double-u-tee-eff thoughts on the matter.
Next up: We’ve had Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist
→ April 5, 2008
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Naked Lunch.
William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch
The book starts out as the disjointed narrative of a well-educated heroin addict who’s fleeing from something, although we don’t find out what until the book’s end. With no obvious transition, we’re shifted into the Interzone, a dystopian North African city populated by deviants, addicts, and at least one Josef Mengele-type doctor, leading to a barrage of stories about orgies and murders, often at the same time, all told in deliberately explicit language reminiscent of the way that kids curse when they’ve learned that certain words are bad and start inserting them at random throughout their speech. There’s an obvious anti-consumerist, anti-conformist message somewhere under the text, but it’s half-formed and is left on the floor under the bodily fluids Burroughs pours all over his text.
If Naked Lunch has a saving grace, it’s that Burroughs could spin a phrase, from the insightful witticism (“Citizens who want to be utterly humiliated and degraded – so many people do, nowadays, hoping to jump the gun”) to inspired silliness (“where they are referred to the We Don’t Want to Hear About It Department”). He was also capable of extending his humor over longer passages, such as the story within the story about a man whose anus learns to eat and then speak, after which it takes over the man’s body. The story implies a question of whether we as individuals are anything more than consumers (and waste producers) within the global ecosystem – reminding me of Robert Rankin’s references to humans as “meat” in The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse
Next up: Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
→ April 4, 2008
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Pittsburgh radio tomorrow.
I just checked my ESPN mailbag, and the one new message was addressed, “dear mr gammons.” How flattering.
Anyway, I’ll be on ESPN 1250 AM in Pittsburgh tomorrow morning at 10:40 am with Joe Starkey.
→ April 4, 2008
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Quick hit – Paschal’s at ATL.
So I’m in travel limbo here, waiting at Atlanta-Hartsfield on a connection that’s already delayed 90 minutes, which will mean I’ll be lucky to get to tonight’s high school game in time for the first pitch, but it did give me time for a proper lunch. I went to the Paschal’s full-service location in Terminal C, and by the depressed standard of airport food, it’s off the charts.
Paschal’s is an Atlanta institution, so applying my philosophy to always start with a signature dish when possible, I went with the fried chicken, getting sides of green beans and black-eyed peas. The dinner comes with a generic house salad and two mini-corn muffins for $9.95. The best part of the meal, unsurprisingly, was the corn muffins, made with stone-ground meal and little sugar, containing plenty of fat (I’m assuming butter, but it could have had some bacon fat mixed in). The fried chicken – a quarter-white, which was a small disappointment because I assumed it would be a quarter-dark – was perfectly cooked, not a bit dry, with a slightly salty crust that didn’t lose its crunch even after ten minutes. The black-eyed peas were delicious but I expected bits of salt pork or ham hock in the mix; the green beans were unremarkable. I also liked the sweet iced tea, even though I normally hate it because it’s too damn sweet. (I take my iced tea unsweetened with a squeeze of lemon.) This sweet tea was too damn sweet, but the flavor of the tea reminded me of Thai iced tea without the sweetened condensed milk. Total bill including a 20% tip was $15.20. I believe there is at least one other Paschal’s location, by the ticketing counters before security, and there may be more in other terminals.
My only real complaint is that the food took a long time to arrive, since airport restaurants tend to move quickly, but I suppose that’s the price of getting true fried chicken.
→ April 3, 2008
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The 13th Element + the return of KlawChat.
Phosphorus is highly toxic and flammable, forms compounds that explode on contact with oxygen, is the key ingredient in detergents and nerve gases, and is absolutely essential to life. It’s good fodder for what amounts to a biography of a chemical element, and John Emsley’s The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus
Emsley focuses on four areas of phosphorus’ story: Its early history and manufacture, its valuable commercial uses, its less benevolent uses in explosives and chemical weapons, and its environmental reputation (not entirely deserved). The narrative is a bit clunky, and Emsley tends to veer off into list mode, rattling off a number of famous murder/poisoning cases involving phosphorus in one of the book’s later chapters, and one chapter seldom connects to the next. But most of the book is highly readable, with some of the more technical content siphoned off into sidebars, and it was news to me that phosphorus’s rap for causing eutrophication wasn’t entirely fair, and the history of phosphorus’ use in chemical weapons, including nerve gas, is sadly relevant today.
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I’ve got a 1 pm chat today on ESPN.com, and you can also hear a few minutes with me on today’s Baseball Today podcast.
→ April 1, 2008
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On race and baseball.
This BP Unfiltered post from Kevin Goldstein is a must read.
My own experiences inside the game did, unfortunately, expose me to some of that unpleasant side of human behavior as well, and I was glad to see Kevin address it head on as he did.
→ April 1, 2008
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ESPNEWS today.
Last-minute request from the ESPNEWS folk – I’ll be on at 3:20 EDT, less than an hour from now.
→ April 1, 2008
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