The collected thoughts of sportswriter, bookworm, & food critic Keith Law
The first article in the top prospects series is up on ESPN.com; I think the top 10 are free and the remainder is Insider, although I’m not certain.
Tomorrow’s content includes the global top 100, with capsules on each player (averaging 190 words per player); the top 5-10 prospects in each organization; and the top 10 by position. I’ll also be chatting in English at 1 pm EST and in Spanish on ESPNDeportes.com at 4 pm EST.
So someone pointed out that my blogroll didn’t make it through the database export/import, which means the list of reader blogs is kaput. If you’re a regular reader/commenter and your blog was listed in my old blogroll – or should be in the new one – drop a comment here. As long as your content isn’t obscene or highly objectionable, I’ll add it.
…to get your tongue stuck to a metal light pole.
It’s worse when the incident makes the news.
Klawchat today at 1 pm EST.
The International Baseball Federation has released its first-ever baseball rankings, by country.
I can’t believe they put Thailand 26th – that’s an outrage – and there will be rioting in Lahore when word gets out that Pakistan ranked last.
I’m still rebuilding the site, so bear with me.
So you may have noticed some problems on the site today – a corrupted database was at fault, and right now, the last five weeks of posts and comments are gone, and I can see that a good chunk of comments from before that are toast as well because the backup file was partly corrupted too. I can restore some, if not all, of the posts, but the comments are probably gone. C’est la Web 2.0, I guess.
If there’s something you know I posted since 10/30 that you want to see restored, leave a comment on this thread. You may also want to ignore some of what shows up in your RSS reader for the next day or so.
If anyone can explain to me why you don’t pinch-hit for J.P. Howell there in the 7th inning, I’m all ears, because the mere sight of it made my brains start to leak out my nose.
Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer
The book’s real subject, title and dust-jacket description notwithstanding, is depression. Both the main character, Jack “Binx” Bolling, and his cousin-by-marriage Kate are struggling with what would now be called depression, although Kate’s affliction is described by her family as a nervous disorder. Binx is aimless; he’s thirty years old, a World War II veteran with a good white-collar job that holds no interest for him, no immediate family to anchor him, and only a love of the movies as anything that animates him. He mentions a search for something – he’s looking for religion, but talks himself out of looking too hard – and instead he … goes to the movies. But again, the movies are an off-page character in this book.
Percy spends most of the book inside of Binx’s mind, but our windows into Kate’s illness are foggy and often closed, even though she’s the more intriguing character. She was about to get married several years before the time period covered by the book when her fiancé was killed in a car wreck that she survived. She’s about to get married again to a cipher of a man who is obviously not equipped to help her deal with her depression. Yet all we get of Kate are her occasional tangents to Binx, which employ a lot of rationalization to cover the emptiness she’s feeling inside (an emptiness that only becomes apparent in the book’s final 20 pages).
Books about alienation are all over most of the greatest book lists I have mined for reading material, but in general, I haven’t enjoyed them because the alienated characters were dull or annoying or both. Here, we have two alienated characters, but the author focused on the dull one rather than giving us more of the interesting one … who may simply be interesting because we don’t know enough about her to call her dull. At the same time, the book’s treatment of depression is just dated, perhaps a reflection of the time period in which it was written; it’s more a description of ennui than a psychological novel that looks into the abyss.
I read lots of novels, mostly ones that are considered by someone to have great literary merit. I find that I enjoy a significant number of these novels, and have discovered many that ended up on the Klaw 100 because I stepped out of my comfort zone and read a book I didn’t expect to like, or had never heard of, or thought too long. But there is no doubt that I’d be perfectly happy spending all of my time reading books like Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall
Decline and Fall is a nonsense novel along the lines of Scoop, with a faint underpinning of seriousness, as opposed to a more overtly serious work like Brideshead Revisited
The serious underpinning is a sort of latent nihilism and futile search for meaning (one character says he walked away from a career in the ministry not because he couldn’t believe in God, but because “he couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all”) and, along the way, a dissatisfaction with the answers one finds. Waugh was a misanthrope’s misanthrope, and it’s not clear what he hated more: the world around him, or himself. Pennyfeather accepts the seeming randomness in his life, although much of what appears to be “random” is actually due to the machinations and screw-ups of the people around him; one might argue he should choose better company, but either way, his reluctant acceptance of whatever comes his way, without ire or desire for revenge, is one way to cope.
For a little more on Decline and Fall, The Guardian’s books blog has a note from March of this year bemoaning the lack of appreciation of the novel today, 80 years after its publication.