→ November 3, 2011
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Sugar.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason is up, and I chatted about that and other stuff today as well.

—

I’d had Sugar – the 2008 baseball movie, as there are a few films by that tile – saved up on the DVR for months before finally getting around to watching it last night, since I was distracted by The Wire when I had some free time to sit and watch a show. Sugar might be the best pure baseball movie I’ve seen, except that at heart it’s not really a baseball movie, but a movie about being the ultimate fish out of water, and how baseball exploits one of its most dedicated underclasses.

Miguel “Sugar” Santos is a 19-year-old pitcher in the Dominican Republic with arm strength but no real second pitch who signed at some point with the Kansas City Knights before the movie began for just $15,000. Early in the film, an American scout for the Knights visits the team’s academy in Boca Chica and teaches Sugar how to through a spike or knuckle curve, which becomes a separator for him and earns him an invite to spring training and eventually a spot in the rotation of the Bridgetown (Iowa) Swing, KC’s low-A affiliate. Once there, however, things don’t go as smoothly as Sugar and his family had hoped, either on the field, where a minor injury throws off his entire season, or off of it, where he’s isolated by age, culture, and language.

The film’s pacing was a real strength – there’s no racing through the early stages to rush to get Sugar to the U.S., so viewers unfamiliar with the feeder system in the Dominican Republic see something of where these players come from and how tough the odds are against them even getting to the U.S. This isn’t exploitation along the lines of slave labor or sweat shops, but these players often sign for very little money at 16 because their other economic opportunities are limited or nonexistent. Sugar doesn’t focus too much on the baseball season because the team’s performance is secondary to the story of the players; even when we see game action, it’s backdrop.

(The cinematography during those game sequences was really uneven; close-up shots of players throwing the ball around the infield were jerky and hard to watch, but the shots of Sugar pitching were perfect, right down to the change in angles from showing his face to showing the pitch reach the batter.)

Sugar himself is the only fully-developed character, but unlike many single-character movies, the various side characters who play significant roles still manage to contribute to the story without letting their one-dimensionality get in the movie’s way. Sugar stays with the Higgins family, an older couple on a farm a good distance from Bridgetown, providing the ultimate culture shock for Sugar, establishing just how out of water he is in Iowa and how much he’s hindered by language even in the most basic aspects of life, and adding a few moments of humor (the wife telling him to put “sopa” in the washing machine rather than “jabon”). And when things start to fall apart for Sugar, it’s to the Higgins that he turns, because his family has become so wrapped up in his potential for a lucrative baseball career that they are no longer there to support him. We never learn much about the Higgins’, but we shouldn’t – they fulfilled a critical role without unnecessary tangents.

The actor who plays Sugar, Algenis Perez Soto, wasn’t a professional actor but was seen playing baseball by the directors after their casting call didn’t turn up the ideal candidate. (Or so the story goes.) That use of non-professionals reminded me of City of God, a Brazilian film that also used local kids from the dangerous barrio of that name in Rio de Janeiro in what remains one of the best movies I’ve seen. In both movies, which couldn’t be more different in tone or subject matter, there’s a lack of polish to the central characters that makes them look and sound more real.

I mentioned on Twitter that there were minor inaccuracies, but I was happy to forgive them because they were there in service of a stronger plot and consistent pacing. For a 19-year-old pitcher in the Dominican Republic to pick up a spike curveball one fall/winter, then earn an invite to spring training, and then be assigned to a full-season club as a starter is not impossible, but it’s extremely unlikely – and the type of pitcher who’d travel that path wouldn’t find himself in the position Sugar was in later in the film. And that spike curveball is a problem – Sugar is seen throwing it for strikes once he gets the hang of it, but it’s probably the hardest pitch to command, and very few big leaguers throw it; it’s more common for player development folks to convert pitchers from the spike to a traditional curveball or to a slider because the spike is so often in the dirt. I also found it odd that the Stanford alum was so slow to pick up on Sugar’s lack of English skills, but then again, he was also a really nice guy when we know all Stanford alumni are insufferable.

But the filmmakers here seemed to be in command of the points where they bent reality. Moving Sugar along so quickly is necessary; the alternatives are a much longer film or inserting a “six months later…” gap. The spike curveball isn’t the ideal pitch for that situation, but it has a benefit – the grip used to throw one is so unusual relative to those on other pitches that it would be evident to non-baseball fans that this was a new pitch for Sugar. Even when the waitress in the famous “fren toas” scene read a little false to me when she asked Sugar how he wanted his eggs, but that slight off-note came back around thirty seconds later when she brought the food to the table in one of the best scenes in the film.

It would be impossible to avoid comparing Sugar to that baseball movie that came out earlier this fall, which I didn’t like as a movie or as a baseball movie. Sugar has moments of sentiment, but there’s no manipulation of the audience to create them. The main character’s struggles, even though they will be foreign to most U.S. viewers, resonated far more strongly with me because they get at fundamental human needs – the need to belong, to fit in, to succeed, to live up to others’ expectations. And while Sugar doesn’t have a villain on the order of the fictionalized Grady Fuson, it should open some eyes to how much the current system exploits young Latin American players, particularly Dominican players, and discards them if they’re no longer useful to their parent clubs. Some major league teams are better at assimilating Latin American players – particularly in terms of teaching them English – but some are worse, and I know of none that help players once they’re released. (And don’t get me started on our nation’s immigration policies.) The directors made these issues evident to viewers without letting them interfere with the story. This film is about Sugar Santos and his own personal development because of baseball, for better and later for worse, and it deserves a much, much wider audience than it has received to date.

(I might have been kidding about the Stanford stuff, though.)

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→ November 1, 2011
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Glen More.

Glen More is the first board game from German designer Matthias Cramer, who was subsequently nominated for the Kennerspiel des Jahres award in 2011 for his next game, Lancaster (losing out to one of our all-time favorites, 7 Wonders). I haven’t played that latter game, but Glen More is one of the most interesting new games I’ve come across, second only to 7 Wonders in that department, with particular points for introducing a new selection mechanic for a tile-based game.

In Glen More, players are Scottish clan leaders and begin building their territories with a single village tile and a single clan member (experienced boardgamers will recognize it as a meeple). On his turn, a player takes one or more tiles off a track that goes around the outer edge of the central game board and places it (or them) adjacent to any tile he has already placed. When he places a tile, that tile is “activated” as are any adjacent tiles, meaning the player may receive up to nine actions and/or resources for placing a single tile. Standard tiles may provide resources (wood, stone, cattle, sheep, and wheat), allow for the conversion of resources into victory points, allow for the production of whiskey from wheat, or add new clan members. The game also includes several special tiles that grant bonuses at the time they’re placed or at the end of the game.

The selection mechanic is the biggest difference between Glen More and any other game where players are building territories or edifices independent of other players (such as in Alhambra). Glen More’s track includes twelve spaces, of which eleven are occupied at any time by either a single tile or a single player token. On his turn, the player whose token is at the head of the chain may jump back as far as he likes on to any tile and claim it; therefore, if he is still ahead of all other players in the chain, the player can go multiple times. (Once all players have passed over a particular tile, it is discarded from the game.) Therefore, it is likely that players will receive uneven numbers of turns, something balanced out slightly by a game-ending penalty for players who have more than the minimum number of tiles. The mechanic forces players to weigh the opportunity cost of jumping far back in the chain to claim a specific tile – not only does this leave other tiles to competing players, but it may be a while before the player who moved so far gets to select again.

The other two main strategies in the game involve balancing resource production with conversion into points or whiskey and placing tiles in the most advantageous manner. You need some resources to buy certain tiles, and there are good tile pairings (such as a pasture and/or a cattle tile plus a butcher tile to convert them into … well, delicious victory points) to target. But you can get caught overproducing without enough options to convert or spend those resources, or have the opposite problem where you can’t take certain tiles because you lack the resources. (There is a market to buy and sell goods, but it’s limited, and once three resources of any kind have been purchased by players, the market has no more until a player decides to sell one back.) Whiskey production, while fun on a more general level, also leads to victory points for players who produce more than the player with the fewest barrels has, and can be used to buy certain valuable tiles like taverns, which produce 7-8 victory points whenever they’re activated.

The placement issue is the trickiest one in the game. There are multiple restrictions, but the key one is that a tile can only be placed horizontally or vertically adjacent to another tile with a meeple on it, meaning players must keep their meeples placed to allow for continuous expansion. Village tiles grant “movement points” to allow the player to move his meeples around, or to promote one to chieftain and remove it from the board for future points, but these opportunities are limited. A player also needs to consider the potential for future activations of the tile when placing it – you don’t want to place a tavern at the edge of your territory where you might not activate it again during the game, to pick an obvious example.

Glen More includes three scoring rounds and a final round of additional scoring, much as Vikings did. The intermediate scoring rounds grant points for whiskey barrels, chieftains, and special tiles; the player with the fewest in each category gets zero points, and other players receive 1-8 points depending on how many more tiles they have than the player with the fewest has. A delta of one receives just one point, but a delta of five or more receives eight points. At game-end, players score for their special tiles (some of which carry significant bonuses) plus one point per coin, and then lose three points for every tile they have in their territories above that of the player who has the fewest.

The game is designed for 2-5 players, but with two or three players there is a dummy player represented on the track by a die that has values of 1, 2, or 3. When that die is at the head of the chain, it’s rolled and jumps back over the number of tiles shown on the die. The tile selected is discarded, as well as any others that ended up ahead of all players plus the die in the chain. The dummy-player variant for two players is pretty common – Alhambra and Zooloretto both use it – but in Glen More it works much more smoothly; losing tiles is a bummer, but you’ll adjust your strategy and won’t lose anything too significant along the way. Without the die, tile selection would be way too predictable, and with four players there’s enough variation that that element of randomness wasn’t necessary.

By far the best part of Glen More is the number of ways to win. If there’s a single dominant strategy, I haven’t seen it, and from reading the forums on boardgamegeek I don’t see evidence anyone else has. You can mix it up based on the tiles that come to you, or just pursue a specific strategy (whiskey!) because it’s fun without costing yourself the game. The rules could be a little clearer on activation and player movement, but we figured those out on the fly once it became clear we’d misread them on the first pass. The fact that it plays as well with two as it does with four puts it in very select company among German-style games, most of which don’t scale down to two or only do so with clumsy rules variations. And for whatever reason Glen More isn’t as expensive as most games in the genre – it’s available for as little as $25.50 right now on amazon, including shipping. If you don’t mind a bit of a long ramp-up on learning the rules, I highly recommend it. It’s one of the best games we’ve played on the more complex end of the spectrum, and doesn’t take as long to play (under an hour) as most complex games take.

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→ October 31, 2011
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Lines of Gold app.

Boardgame designer Reiner Knizia has been active in pushing his games into the app space, with at least ten adaptations of existing physical games already available for iOS. He’s also moving into the puzzle-app space, with his latest release the $0.99 app Lines of Gold
icon, one I found strangely addictive even with a heavy element of randomness.

In Lines of Gold, the player has a board of 12 spaces connected in multiple lines of three that run horizontally and diagonally and must place tiles one at a time to try to create patterns where all three tiles match in at least one attribute across those lines. Tiles appear one at a time from the stack, so there’s little advance planning. Each tile has three attributes: color (copper, silver, gold); image (coin, bar/trapezoid, or wine glass); and number of images (1-4). A line with three of a kind earns points or extra tiles in the stack to extend the game; a line of three identical tiles earns a bonus round with entirely random results of more points or tiles.

However, any line of three tiles without any pattern costs the player two ways. There’s the loss of a tile from the stack, and there’s the loss of “pressure.” Every successful pattern moves up two gauges, one for scoring multipliers, another for “pressure” that in turn makes the scoring multipliers gauge move faster. A line without a pattern drops the pressure gauge back to zero – even if the same tile play produced a pattern on another line.

Once placed, a tile can’t be moved for any reason, and the limited number of spaces means you will often be forced to place a tile that will prevent you from creating a pattern on one or more lines. You get new spaces on the board once you fill the bottom two lines plus the left and right spaces on the line above that, at which point the board drops the bottom line and adds an empty line at the top.

At some point – I still haven’t figured out when exactly – a storage area opens up so that the player can store one (and eventually up to three) tiles from the stack, which makes the game play a good bit less random. In the first stage, you’re at the mercy of whatever tile comes up next, so other than understanding what tiles are more or less common (e.g., the copper tile with a single coin is the most common), there’s not a ton you can do to plan ahead. With two tiles available at any moment, you can sketch out a little more of a strategy – but at that point there are more tile types in play, so the game isn’t easier, just more of a thinking game than a quick-move puzzle game.

I certainly got my 99 cents’ worth by playing it four or five times over the weekend – a full game lasts 10-15 minutes once you get the hang of it, and I had one of about 20 minutes that put me (temporarily, I’m sure) on the global leaderboard – but overall I’d rate it behind the other Knizia puzzle app I’ve tried, ClusterMastericon, which is free to download but offers a 99-cent in-app upgrade to get more options within the game. ClusterMaster involves placing pieces of up to three colors on a hexagonal board of hexagonal spaces where you need to organize colored hexes adjacent to each other to make them disappear from the board. The “stress” game only lasts about 90 seconds, and there’s a lot more advance planning involved because of the limited number of shapes you might see and the balance between going for a large bonus (where you blow up a bunch of hexes at once through multiple patterns) and ensuring you don’t run out of room.

* My quick reaction to the Derek Lowe trade is posted now.

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→ October 29, 2011
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The Year of the Hare.

I’ve got a new blog post up on ESPN.com about Aroldis Chapman and Matt Purke with some other AFL/instructional league notes.

Also, congratulations to all of my Cardinals-fan readers. It’s a little scary to think they pulled this off before any of their high-end pitching prospects reached the majors.

And finally, boardgame designer Reiner Knizia has a new solitaire puzzle/game app available called Lines of Goldicon for just $0.99. I’ve played it twice so far and find it surprisingly complex for a simple set of rules; you can play it quickly, but playing it well seems to take a lot of forethought and a little luck.

—

Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare is the most successful novel by Finnish author/poet, more a novella than a full-length novel, telling the story of a journalist who walks away from his life after his car hits and wounds a hare in the forest outside of Helsinki. He spends the next year wandering through the country, headed generally north, encountering eccentric locals and trying to reestablish the priorities in his life.

The protagonist, Charles Vatanen, is a disaffected if successful journalist with a shrewish wife and a boat he doesn’t need, so walking away from his life proves easier than it might for most men of his age. When the car in which he’s riding hits the hare and breaks its leg, he makes a splint for the hare and decides to carry it with him while nursing it back to health. His rejection of modern society and its rampant, empty consumerism leads him to take odd jobs in small towns in the Finnish countryside, including restoring a dilapidated cabin, where he ends up in an extended struggle with a bear who resents the human intrusion into his forest, a chase that goes on for an impossibly long period until Vatanen is arrested by friendly Soviet officials for illegally crossing the border. There’s also an alcohol-induced blackout, a peculiar lawyer, the illegal sale of sunken German munitions, and a wargame put on for the benefit of tourists that leads to a literal and figurative tug-of-war over the hare.

The problem with The Year of the Hare is that it’s more escapist fantasy than actual fable. A fable should have some point, whether it presents a metaphor for some aspect of life or mines humor from parody, but there’s no such cohesion in Paasilinna’s work here. We could interpret the scene in the church, where a priest sees the hare on the altar and ends up chasing it around the building with a pistol before inadvertently shooting himself, as a commentary on the decline of religion in Finland, but I couldn’t read that passage as more than slapstick, with a robed figure running through his own church shooting at a tiny rabbit and putting a bullet through his own foot as well as through the knee of the Christ figure in the apse. Vatanen isn’t running away from anything except the vapidity of modern urban life – something I think many readers can respect and understand regardless of wehre they live – but he’s not really running towards anything. It’s one thing to check out, but another to live as a vagrant without any kind of plan for survival once the cash runs out.

I can’t be certain of this but I believe the translation did Paasilinna no favors. Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language, like Hungarian (Magyar) and Estonian, completely unrelated to the Indo-European languages (including English) that dominate Europe, which might make the translation more difficult. Regardless, referring to a helicopter as a “warplane” or saying that, “The hare was rather nervous; the raven had evidently been molesting it while Vatanen was away working,” is like playing a piano that’s out of tune; either the translator doesn’t speak colloquial English, or Finnish is the weirdest language on earth.

Italo Calvino is probably the best fabulist I’ve come across, and while it’s not my favorite work of his, Marcovaldo: or the Seasons in the City is probably the best collection of fables I’ve found. The blurb for The Year of the Hare compares it to Life of Pi, but the latter book is far superior whether read as a fable or merely for entertainment, with plenty of room for differing interpretations of its meaning and its endnig. As for the comparison offered to Watership Down, putting a a bunny in your book does not make you Richard Adams.

Next up: George Gissing’s novel about struggling writers in late 1800s London, New Grub Street (also available free for the Kindle). Too bad Grub Street is long gone or else we might see an attempt to occupy it.

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→ October 25, 2011
→ By

Poodle Springs.

I’m generally not a fan of continuations or parallel novels where one author attempts to complete or extend the work of another. Very few such works earn any kind of critical acclaim; I think Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre that tells the story of Rochester’s first wife before madness overtakes her, is the only one I’ve read that is considered a strong work of literature in its own right, and it was more a work of social criticism than a narrative.

Continuations are, in my view, tougher than “authorized” sequels or prequels, because they stitch together two different prose styles and require the second writer to guess at the intended direction of the first – or to ignore it altogether. I’ve read the most popular continuation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon* and found it utterly lifeless; where even a bad Austen novel has its memorable moments, usually humorous ones, all I recall of the completed Sanditon is a lot of walking around on the rocks.

*It’s funny how often these final, unfinished novels are proclaimed by fans of the authors in question as potentially the authors’ best work; you’ll certainly hear how Sanditon, which Austen abandoned after eleven chapters due to ill health, signaled a new direction for her writing, blah blah blah – just look at the unsourced praise in the Wikipedia entry on the book. This is nearly always wishful thinking on the part of fans, combined with the fact that a fragment of a novel is miles away from a completed book.

This is the long way of telling you that I entered Poodle Springs, in which Robert Parker (creator of the Spenser character) starts with the four short chapters left behind by Raymond Chandler and builds a Philip Marlowe novel on that scant foundation, with some skepticism. Chandler is, in my view, a prose master (although novelist Martin Amis would disagree), and his style is often imitated but never matched. Take the sparse, clipped phrasings of Hammett and add some of the greatest similes ever put to paper and you might build a reasonable fake, but Chandler’s writing remains unique in this or any genre. I gave Poodle Springs a fair shake, but at the end of the day it is just a nice detective novel, nowhere close to any of the five Marlowe books I’ve read.

Chandler’s four chapters include a shocking opener – Marlowe is married to Linda Loring, who first appeared in The Long Goodbye
 and seems as ill-fitting a wife for the loner detective as any candidate. They’ve moved to a tony California hamlet called Poodle Springs, but Marlowe insists on earning his own living rather than becoming a kept man for his wealthy bride. He’s approached by the proprietor of a local casino of dubious legality, at which point Parker takes over. He wisely dispenses with the Loring subplot (if we can even call it that) for much of the book and focuses instead on the crime story, one that has the typical hallmarks of hard-boiled detective fiction (small number of characters in a tangled web) but with a leering crudeness that is horribly out of place in a Marlowe novel, and prose that simply can’t match the master’s:

There was a big clock shaped like a banjo on the wall back of the receptionist. It ticked so softly it took me a while to hear it. Occasionally the phone made a soft murmur and the receptionist said brightly, “Triton Agency, good afternoon.” While I was there she said it maybe 40 times, without variation. My cigarette was down to the stub. I put it out in the ashtray and arched my back, and while I was arching it in came Sondra Lee. She was wearing a little yellow dress and a big yellow hat. She didn’t recognize me, even when I stood up and said, “Miss Lee.”

That’s a lot of words without telling us anything at all. The waiting room in question has no relevance in the story. Chandler doesn’t normally waste the reader’s time like that, nor does prose ever have that choppy sound like ever period is an obstacle you hit at full speed. Parker occasionally hits with a good metaphor – “Hollywood Boulevard looked like it always did in the morning, like a hooker with her make-up off” – although even that one would never have come out of Chandler’s pen.

Parker’s plot revolves around a bigamist, some nude pictures, and a few people with behavioral issues, standard stuff for this sort of novel, but his obsession with sex borders on the puerile, at least compared to the subtle approach of Chandler, where sex is always under the surface but never out in the open. An exhibitionist wife bares all to Marlowe – who passes because he’s married, so really, what was the point of this? – and we get too much about Marlowe in the boudoir with Linda when she’s not involved in the plot at all, including a tacked-on ending that feels like a nod to Chandler’s stillborn introduction.

Which gets back to the fundamental problem with Poodle Springs: It seems likely that Chandler never intended to finish this book. Marlowe probably shouldn’t be married, and certainly shouldn’t be married to Linda Loring. Perhaps these four chapters were just Chandler exploring an idea; perhaps he realized it wasn’t going to work. Perhaps it was his own depression after the death of his wife Cissy that led him to put Marlowe into a marriage. (He only finished one novel after her death, Playback, which I haven’t read but which seems to be considered his worst completed work.) The continuation of Poodle Springs was a commercial success, but the positive reviews of the time that claim that “you can’t see the seam where Chandler stopped and Parker picked up the pen” are an insult to fans of the master’s work.

Next up: A Finnish novel, Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare, currently on sale through that link for $5.60.

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→ October 24, 2011
→ By

Vile Bodies.

Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies is probably the funniest of the seven novels of his that I’ve read, and certainly the most cynical. Vile Bodies is about upper-class twits in London who aren’t so much vile as venal, often witless, definitely oblivious, living up the good life in the 1920s without apparent purpose or direction other than to get drunk (preferably on someone else’s dime) and have fun.

If there’s a central character at all in this deliberately disjointed novel, it’s Adam Fenwick-Symes, who wants to marry Nina Blount but has no money and, when he does manage to get a hold of some, can’t seem to keep it for very long. Nina’s father has money but is dotty and never seems to recognize Adam from one visit to the next. Adam and Nina travel in a group of friends who encounter Lady Metroland (the madam Margot from Decline and Fall), a strange missionary (parodying Aimee Semple McPherson) and her “angels” who disappear from the novel without much explanation midway through, and a rural auto race of uncommon violence.

Waugh’s most obvious targets are the idle, amoral young rich of the book’s era, but he reserves some of his ire for others, including the idle, amoral old rich, the British government, and the tabloids. Three separate characters fill a role as gossip columnist (“Mr. Chatterbox”) for one of the Fleet Street papers, and all three discharge their duties by fabricating rumors and, in Adam’s case when he’s Mr. Chatterbox, fabricating characters entirely while trying to set off new trends in London fashion. (One is reminded of our current battles over “the narrative” in the highly random world of professional sports.) Every satirical depiction and passage lies on Waugh’s own disdain for the venal nature of his targets: Everyone lies, everyone can be bought, everyone is only out for himself. Even Adam, apparently motivated by love, can’t pass up an opportunity to make more money even if it puts his engagement to Nina at risk. Nina, meanwhile, drops Adam for a man she doesn’t love who has money. Another character, who also disappears midstream, is married off by her rich parents because it’s a “suitable” match over her objections that she can’t stand the man.

Institutions are just as venal as individuals in Vile Bodies. This is spoken by Miles Malpractice, the third character in the book to serve as gossip columnist, visiting Agatha Runcible in a convalescent home after she got drunk and smashed up a racecar she shouldn’t have been driving even when sober:

”Agatha, Adam, my dears. The time I’ve had trying to get in. I can’t tell you how bogus they were downstairs. First I said I was Lord Chasm, and that wasn’t any good; and I said I was one of the doctors; and that wasn’t any good; and I said I was your young man, and that wasn’t any good; and I said I was a gossip writer, and they let me up at once and said I wasn’t to excite you, but would I put a piece in my paper about their nursing home.”

Hey, as long as we get something out of it, feel free to put the patient’s life at risk.

Waugh’s novel proved prescient in some ways, such as the clouds of war putting an end to the gay times of the book, and the tendency of economic boom times to spawn legions of wealthy twits doing twitty things. (Think of all of the famous-for-being-famous “celebrities” of the last dozen years.) And prose this biting – “The truth is that like so many people of their age and class, Adam and Nina were suffering from being sophisticated about sex before they were at all widely experienced” – is my favorite kind of literary humor. But timely satire such as this relies on knowledge of the real-life targets for maximum effect, something few readers today, especially outside of England, are likely to bring to the book. The aspects of Vile Bodies that worked for me were the timeless ones, direct hits to the baser parts of human nature; the silly names and the sendups of politicians, media moguls, and the aforementioned evangelist have lost their power to shock or amuse over time.

The film was later made into a film by Stephen Fry called Bright Young Things, which was Waugh’s original title for the book; the film, available through that link for $4.35 on DVD, had an outstanding cast but garnered mixed reviews from critics who had already read the book.

Next up: Poodle Springs, a novel begun by Raymond Chandler, who had written just four chapters at his death, and completed by Robert Parker, author of the Spenser novels.

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→ October 18, 2011
→ By

The Good Soldier Švejk.

Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished comic novel The Good Soldier Švejk: and His Fortunes in the World War, ranked #96 on Daniel Burt’s Novel 100 and part of the Bloomsbury 100, is a funny, sprawling, slow-reading, and deeply angry look at the pointlessness of war through the eyes of an anarchist soldier who’d be at home in Project Mayhem yet manages to put on a good face enough to keep himself out of harm’s way.

The novel follows the exploits – although given how little he manages to accomplish, we might better call them inploits, or unploits – of the soldier named Švejk (pronounced something like “schwayk”), who finds himself drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army at the dawn of World War I and acts with a single goal in mind, that of his own survival. Along the way, he’s passed from one half-wit superior officer to another, from power-mad lieutenants to drunken chaplains, gets lost (most likely on purpose) in Bohemia in a section ironically referred to as “Švejk’s anabasis,” gets arrested and nearly hung, and always responds to inquiries by telling the absolute truth, embellished with a ridiculous anecdote of someone Švejk knew in his hometown.

The grand secret of Švejk – the character and the novel – is that absurdity is the only viable strategy in the face of the absurdity of a higher authority. Faced with a war that makes survival unlikely, fought over a cause in which none of the fighters has a personal stake, Švejk chooses to “pretend to be an idiot,” playing the part of a perfect innocent who relives what is, in essence, the same episode over and over and always escaping by disarming and/or exasperating those who wish to send him to certain death on the front lines.

If this sounds a lot like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, then you’ve got the idea. Švejk is not a direct antecedent to Yossarian; the latter’s subversion is explicit, while the former works through simpler and more ostensibly innocent means, like taking a direct order a little too literally. Working as batman to the lieutenant he haunts for much of the book, Švejk fulfills his master’s order for a dog by kidnapping one off the street, only to find that the dog’s owner is the lieutenant’s commanding officer, the insane Colonel Kraus, who peppers his harangues by asking his charges if they know what obvious words like “window” or “hoe” mean. Yossarian engages in more active efforts of sabotage – and has plenty of help from his fellow soldiers – whereas Švejk is a solitary operative attempting not to end a futile war but only to get himself to the next sunrise without getting shot.

(I’ve struggled to find a definitive answer on whether Švejk was a direct influence on Catch-22; Wikipedia – which is never wrong – states that it was, probably based on the claim by Czech writer Arnošt Lustig that Heller told him he couldn’t have written his masterpiece if he hadn’t first read Švejk. That seems to be the only source for this assertion; this 2004 New York Times review of a Švejk play states that Heller “ told various interviewers that Céline and Kafka were his most powerful influences and that Švejk was ”just a funny book,’” while a Vanity Fair article from August gives a non-Švejk origin story for Catch-22. I could see a truth in between the two extremes, where Heller, having read the book, was influenced by it on a subconscious level, drawing inspiration from its hero’s response to the war’s absurdity but never returning to the earlier novel in his writing process or alluding to it directly in the text.)

The Good Soldier Švejk is tough to read, even with its humor, for two reasons. One is the translation by Cecil Parrott that has earned criticism for excessively literal, “unimaginative” translations of words and phrases, leaving speech sounded stilted and losing the humor of the original Czech text (that’s the critic’s opinion, not mine). Slavic texts are often tough to read because the sentence structure in those languages differs from ours and because the literary style, especially in the 19th century and early 20th, tended toward long, ponderous passages. The other drawback is that the book is, by design, repetitive. War is stupid, monotonous, and produces entirely foreseeable results. I can’t blame Hašek for making that point through the circular plot, but the feeling that we’re not really going anywhere – combined with the knowledge that the novel is unfinished, so we can’t even get where we might have been going – made my forward progress slow.

Unrelated to any of the above, Hašek talks a lot about food, including jitrnice (a type of Czech liverwurst), goulash, and kolache (a fruit-filled pastry found in parts of Texas where Czech immigrants settled). I was most struck by Hašek’s description of how the insatiable soldier Baloun describes a dish he remembers from back home:

‘You know, at home in Kašperské Hory we make a sort of small dumplings out of raw potatoes. We boil them, dip them in egg and roll them well in breadcrumbs. After that we fry them with bacon.’ He pronounced the last word in a mysteriously solemn tone.

Shouldn’t we always pronounce “bacon” in a mysteriously solemn tone?

Next up: Evelyn Waugh’s biting comic novel Vile Bodies.

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→ October 8, 2011
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Phoenix eats, part 10.

First Arizona Fall League update of 2011 is up for Insiders, leading off with Anthony Gose.

When we first moved to Arizona last year, I grabbed a copy of Phoenix Magazine‘s September issue, which included their annual list of the best new restaurants in the Valley – an impulse purchase that led us to three of our favorite restaurants in the area, The Hillside Spot, Culinary Dropout, and ‘Pomo Pizzeria. This year’s list is now online (although I picked up the paper copy a month ago) and I’ve hit three of the 23 restaurants on their list, including one knockout, the upscale Thai restaurant Soi4.

Located in the Gainey shopping plaza in central Scottsdale, at the intersection of Scottsdale Road and Doubletree Ranch (which becomes Via de Ventura, so it’s close to the Salt River stadium), Soi4 is Thai cuisine, updating classic Thai dishes with modern twists in a trendy Scottsdale atmosphere (if you live around here, you know the positives and negatives in that phrase). Soi4’s take on panang neur uses perfectly-braised short ribs in place of more typical, inexpensive cuts like rump steak. The ribs come with a mixture of chopped red and green bell peppers and cucumbers with a slightly spicy red curry/coconut milk sauce with thai basil. The only better-cooked short ribs I have ever had were at Tom Colicchio’s craftsteak in Las Vegas (twice), and that’s a restaurant that specializes in beef – and costs about three times as much. For an appetizer, I tried their kao pode tod, spiced corn fritters served with a cucumber relish and a spicy clear sauce for drizzling, another traditional Thai dish taken up several notches with stunning presentation, almost a work of art on the plate, with crisp exteriors, bright centers of mostly corn with some minced lemongrass, and no sign of grease or oil on the plate. It’s a little more expensive than your typical Thai place – those two items and a pot of hot tea (bonus points for loose leaf) came to $24 before tip – but absolutely justifies the cost through freshness of ingredients and the masterful preparations.

The Arrogant Butcher, a short walk west of Chase Field, was more middle of the road on my visit, solid food marred by a single kitchen error. It’s yet another outpost from Fox Restaurant Concepts, the people behind Culinary Dropout and Zinburger, this time focused primarily on meats, including charcuterie and slow-cooked meat dishes like the short rib stew I tried on my one visit. The stew was hearty and filling, with small (maybe one-inch) chunks of short rib and red beans, served with a fried egg on top and a rich corn muffin on the side. But the stew contained a large piece of connective tissue – I can’t think of the last time I was in a decent restaurant and had to spit out a piece of food, but this was unchewable and certainly not something I wanted in my stomach. It was just one piece, an oversight by a prep cook, but that undermined the whole meal for me. They offer a strong selection of small sides, including grilled mushrooms, marcona almonds, or the one I tried, roasted red peppers, sliced thinly and tossed in balsamic vinegar.

The third place I’ve tried from that list was Spasso Pizzeria and Mozzarella Bar in Phoenix just off 51, a huge disappointment across the board. The mozzarella is apparently made fresh in house, but for $12, the plate of two cheeses (we also chose scamorza, another cow’s milk cheese that’s dried to produce a harder texture) included just two slices of each plus some very unappetizing-looking, drab/grey roasted vegetables, all unseasoned and undressed. Even the mozzarella itself was unsalted, which is a small crime, and was totally unremarkable in flavor or texture – you can buy equivalent or better fresh mozzarella in any Trader Joes (and there’s one next door!) or Whole Foods. The pizza was entirely ordinary aside from the use of the same fresh mozzarella on top, and everything was inordinately pricey given how inexpensive the ingredients are. Even the crème brulee, which I bought only because my daughter wanted something for dessert, was all wrong, served in a deep ramekin so the ratio of sugar crust to custard was way off. With so many better pizza options in the Valley, I can’t see why anyone would go here and pay more for an inferior product. UPDATE: It appears that Spasso has closed. Can’t say I’m surprised.

That same issue of Phoenix Magazine included a great article on the second act for Chris Bianco, the owner/chef/genius behind Pizzeria Bianco and Pane Bianco. He’s become one of the Southwest’s greatest advocates for local agriculture and biodiversity, an amazing adaptation for a man whose first career, making every pizza by hand, ended abruptly as airborne flour particles worsened his asthma, causing his doctor to give him a “quit or die” warning he had to heed.

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→ October 3, 2011
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Jane Eyre (2011 film).

Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre is #38 on my ranking of the 100 greatest novels I’ve read, a spot that balances the highly improbable plot against the brilliance of its blend of a gothic horror story, a traditional romance (complete with brooding hero), and a portrayal of a smart, independent female heroine. It is so beloved across the English-speaking world that it has received at least eleven adaptations for the big and small screens, including this spring’s version starring Mia Wasikowska as Jane, combining her brilliant performance with a script that’s faithful to the book’s dialogue and characters but upends its narrative structure to negative effect.

If you haven’t read the novel, you should, but here’s a quick summary. Jane Eyre is orphaned and raised by her cruel aunt, shipped off to a strict Christian boarding school, and eventually hired as governess to another orphaned child, Adele, whose guardian, Edward Rochester (played by Michael Fassbender, whom you might recognize from the bar scene in Inglourious Basterds), is that dark, brooding hero. She and Rochester develop a slow-burning romance even as he hides a terrible secret that will prevent them from marrying – and when that secret is revealed, Jane flees in the middle of the night, eventually finding shelter with a rural missionary, St. John, and his two sisters*. St. John (Jamie Bell, better known as the original Billy Elliott) intends to leave for missionary work in India and proposes that Jane become his wife and join him in his work … but, of course, Jane is not finished with Rochester, regardless of her desire to forget him and their tragedy.

*In the book, it’s revealed that St. John and Jane are, quite improbably, cousins. The film dispenses with this, a reasonable choice even though it makes one of Jane’s eventual decisions seem more generous as a result.

Moira Buffini’s script is incredibly faithful to Brontë’s original words, if not the structure as a whole. Many memorable phrases from the book are preserved here either wholly intact or with minor changes in word order or tense, including its best line, Jane’s question to Rochester, “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?” Waskikowska plays Jane as close to her literary counterpart as I could imagine, while Fassbender and Bell both shift their characters one half-step towards the audience – Rochester still broods, but never seethes, while St. John, so austere in the book, shows Jane a quiet affection that one might at a glance mistake for love until Jane calls him out on it. Brontë’s novel gives so much more depth to Jane than to either male character that infusing both with more humanity is actually a welcome interpolation, within the boundaries set by the author but in a way that makes the emotions in the film seem more much real.

Buffini decided, however, that using Brontë’s words she would alter the sequence in which we see the major events: The film begins with Jane’s flight from Thornfield, and has her reliving her story in her mind as St. John and his sisters attempt to restore her to health. The decision to use the hackneyed flashback narrative technique detracted greatly from the film, both up front – where, if you didn’t know the plot, you could easily get lost – and at the end, where the tension of that part of the book is dissipated. In the novel, that last section derives all of its drama and narrative greed from the reader’s desire to see how on earth Jane could be reunited with Rochester after fleeing from Thornfield, disavowing her past, and taking up a quiet life as a village schoolteacher to lower-class girls. Her dull life adds nothing to the tension of the book’s core romance, put asunder by Rochester’s deceit with no apparent way to repair the rift, so it is merely the passage of time, of page after page without progress, that provides any incentive at all to plow through descriptions of her life with St. John (pronounced “Sinjin”) and his sisters. But by shifting half of the time spent on this section of the story to the beginning, and just generally cutting down on the screen time committed to it, there’s virtually no tension left – a viewer unfamiliar with the story would have no idea how close Jane comes to committing to go to India, and the reason for her refusal to marry St. John without love appears to be solely that she still loves Rochester, not that she’s an independent woman who is unwilling to sacrifice her principles for social expediency. Minimizing the portions of the book that focus on Jane’s youth and her time with St. John is an understandable move to fit the novel into two hours, but losing the gravity of the decision she makes with regard to the latter is a major blow.

I’m no Oscar prognosticator, but I would throw out there a guess that Wasikowska might earn a Best Actress nomination for her role here, while the film itself should grab a passel of nominations for costumes, lighting, and scenery. There was a very clear determination to make the film look as authentic as possible, including the use of natural light – meaning candlelight or fireplaces for nighttime scenes, enhancing the gothic feel of the film – at all times. It had to make the production more difficult, but the reward for that effort is evidence throughout the movie.

Jane Eyre also saw a longer adaptation in 2006 starring English stage and TV actress Ruth Wilson as Jane and Toby Stephens (son of Dame Maggie Smith) as Rochester. This four-hour miniseries ran on PBS here as the two-part finale of Masterpiece Theatre (now simply known as Masterpiece), hewing much more closely to the book’s plot structure while altering more of its dialogue and even playing a little loose with Jane’s character, modernizing her in a way that seemed out of place in a work set in the 1840s. Despite that, it is beautifully rendered and the script gives a much fuller treatment to the development of Jane’s relationship with Rochester that simply isn’t possibly in the 120 minutes of the 2011 version.

Also, if you’ve read Jane Eyre or seen any of the film adaptations, you must read Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, a hilarious satirical romp that involves a literary detective who has a special relationship of her own with Rochester and is on the case when a madman makes sure Jane doesn’t wake up in the middle of that one fateful night.

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→ September 30, 2011
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Sid Meier’s Pirates! app.

Amazon has the complete Black Adder series on DVD on sale today for $34. I’ve seen a few episodes and, in what should surprise no one, generally laughed at everything Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry did.

Also, recent stuff over at the Four-Letter: Division Series predictions, scouting Jarrod Parker & Kenley Jansen, this week’s Klawchat, and yesterday’s podcast (I come on the show right around the 14 minute mark).

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Sid Meier’s Pirates! was one of the few computer games I played frequently as a kid, so when I saw there was an iOS app version, there wasn’t really a serious chance that I’d pass on it, especially since it was on sale about two weeks ago (it’s back up to $4.99). It’s a pretty faithful adaptation of the original PC game – I never picked up the 2005 remake so I can’t compare them – and I would say I got my money’s worth out of it, but overall found it simple and repetitive, while the difficulty of one small aspect of the game that’s critical to completing it ended up ruining the experience.

In the game, you play a pirate and spend time sailing around the Caribbean, attacking other ships, plundering small cities, looking for buried treasure, and trying to complete a long list of “quests” that serves as the game’s main storyline. But you spend a ton of time just sailing, even with the new “auto-sail” feature that lets you automatically jump from one city to another as long as you’ve previously visited both of them.

The game itself boils down to a few mechanics:

1. Sailing. This is boring, and once you figure out the ideal way to sail with your ship type, there’s no thinking involved.
2. Fighting ship to ship. Great if you have a fast ship, less so if you have a larger fighter and just need to ram the other ship and engage in sword-fighting.
3. Bombarding a city. This was the most fun for me because you never get a break of more than a few seconds, and have to combine speed and precision while trying not to overuse your artillery, which can leave you defenseless while you reload.
4. Dancing – which is just rhythmic tapping. You can get information by wooing the daughters of the various mayors and governors, but wooing them just means bringing them gifts and dancing well. It’s very silly, and I can’t imagine how this would work for a hearing-impaired player, but if you’re musically inclined at all it’s not that difficult.
5. Sword-fighting – and there is a lot of it. It’s also the one part of the game that just doesn’t work well, but you need to do it to complete the final quest and several of those leading up to it. As your character ages, your sword-fighting ability drops too, making a hard task harder. You swipe a finger across the screen for one of six moves, three attacking and three defending, but I found the app (or the screen) wasn’t responsive enough, so I’d swipe without getting the resulting action on the screen. It’s not a big deal for most of the early fights, because the opponents are so weak, but the closer you get to the end the more critical this becomes.

The game’s central storyline involves you finding four lost relatives who’ve been kidnapped and held in unknown locations around the Caribbean; to find them, you must defeat this one character, Baron Raymondo, sixteen times to get the four pieces of each of the four maps to the characters’ locations. (You may also accidentally come across one of them while landing for some other purpose, which happened to me twice.) There’s no thinking or strategy involved in chasing down Raymondo, and let me suggest that having the player complete the same task sixteen times might be a little over the top.

There are other smaller challenges within the game. Players must recruit crew members and keep them happy through regular plundering and occasional payouts. You can also trade in various goods, although the quantities are small enough that I don’t see how this could be a central part of the game, and can earn huge rewards for finding any of the four lost Indian cities; one of those locations comes from finding your four lost relatives, while the others come from buying certain trinkets that will impress local tribal chiefs, who then will give you parts of the maps … again, no thinking involved, just rote completion of tasks.

And that’s the ultimate problem. A game that I thought was fun when I was 15 because I was happy to just explore the game world and fight some battles seems trite today when I’m looking for more of an intellectual challenge. If the point of the game is just to fight a bunch of battles, then make it shorter so the tasks don’t become monotonous. Otherwise, expand the game world with more cerebral tasks, more character interaction, more purpose to the various smaller settlements that are little more than refueling stops as it stands, anything to give the game some complexity and keep me interested enough to want to play it a second time.

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