→ August 26, 2010
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Charity & relocation.

I wrote last month about running a single sponsored tweet on my Twitter feed, asking for your feedback, which came back overwhelmingly in favor. The $244.53 payment arrived earlier this week, and I rounded up to $250 and donated it to Childrens Hospital Boston with my gratitude for the great care they’ve given my daughter over the last three years.

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Speaking of charitable donations, Amiel Sawdaye, the scouting director for the Red Sox, is participating in the New England Parkinson’s Ride this year, with proceeds going to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research. I know many of you are Red Sox fans and I offered to pass along the link where you can make a donation to help Amiel reach his goal of $10,000. He’s already halfway there and I gave $100 myself just before writing this.

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So I mentioned in passing today that my family and I are leaving Massachusetts next month after eleven years year, nine in the same house, to relocate to Arizona. I’ll probably have more to say about it later on, but for now, I wanted to answer the two main questions that came up in the chat.

The only change you’ll see in my work at ESPN is more coverage. I’ll get more games while cutting my travel, which has been a major goal of mine for the last year and a half or so. I’ll get to more Fall League games and more spring training games, as well as seeing instructional league action for the first time and having better access to the Pac 10 and to all the great high school prospects in southern California.

The second question I was asked today was why the move, and the simple answer is that everything pointed the same way. We’ve spent the month of March in Arizona the last three years and have grown to like the area. Neither my wife nor I is actually from Boston – although the frequency with which I’m “accused” of being a Bostonian/Masshole/Red Sox fan is absolutely hilarious – and we are here largely because of a career I abandoned nine years ago. I have never liked winter or the cold one bit, even as a kid in New York, and the climate here hasn’t been great for my daughter, who has inherited my seasonal allergies and is prone to croup and even a little asthma. We’ll get more house for our money in Arizona, of course, and it’s one of the few places in the country where there’s a major league club, minor league activity, and access to good college and high school baseball. Most importantly, though, you never have to shovel sunshine.

Of course, it’s an enormous change for us, and we’re leaving our comfort zone here in Boston, as none of our friends or shops or routines will fit in the moving van. If you live in the East Valley and have a shop, a restaurant, a farmstand, a local product or service, anything you want to recommend, please send it my way.

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→ August 24, 2010
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Unaccustomed Earth.

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, and her writing revolves around Bengali families in the United States who retain at least some of their non-American identity, but her writing is more American than most fiction by contemporary authors born in this country. Lahiri’s stories are richly textured, written in intelligent yet easy prose, showcasing her incredible skill at encapsulating human emotions through plot events large and small, and her overarching theme of Bengalis feeling adrift in a foreign country and culture seems central to the American experience regardless of the characters’ nation of origin. Her first published work, the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and if anything, her second story collection, 2008’s Unaccustomed Earth is even better, more assured with stronger characterization.

The title story, which leads off the collection, is one of the most subtle stories in the book, dealing with Ruma, an Indian mother married to a non-Indian man, whose widowed father comes to visit her in her new home in Seattle. She is still grieving from the sudden loss of her mother, and now must deal with the question of whether to invite her father to stay with her, per Indian (or perhaps Bengali) custom, even though she has never had a close relationship with him and believes her husband is less than thrilled with the idea of having his father-in-law living in their spacious house. Ruma’s father, meanwhile, has begun a quiet affair – so quiet it barely merits the term – with another Bengali woman, also widowed, and does not wish to reveal it to his daughter or to give up his peripatetic new lifestyle. Lahiri allows both characters to narrate the story, creating two distinct voices, moving the story along by magnifying tiny events in their lives during the father’s visit and establishment of a new relationship with his grandson, surpassing anything he ever developed with Ruma. The story’s conclusion is extremely un-Hollywood, yet more effective for its realism.

Unaccustomed Earth closes with a three-part novella titled “Hema and Kaushik,” which returns to the twin perspectives of the collection’s title story by tracking two young Bengalis through three stages of their lives – a brief period in their teen years when Hema’s family housed Kaushik’s on the latter’s return from India to Massachusetts; Kaushik’s difficulty in adjusting to a major change in his family situation while he’s in college; and an unlikely reunion between the two in Rome with the two in their late 30s. The novella is more about Kaushik (the boy) than Hema, with the latter serving more as a lens to examine Kaushik’s character, and how a few major events in his life shape his choices in adulthood, including his inability to grieve and his difficulties in forming lasting relationships with women.

As much as I may praise “Hema and Kaushik,” it wasn’t the star of this particular show. I don’t read many short stories because I often find it hard to get emotionally invested in a character or a plot in ten or twenty thousand words, but “Only Goodness” was easily the most affecting short story I’ve ever read, for personal reasons. The story opens by telling us that “It was Sudha who’d introduced Rahul to alcohol,” a clue to the guilt the sister would later carry for her brother’s alcoholism, even though the addiction and downward spiral was almost certainly inevitable. An uncle with whom I always felt close was a lifelong alcoholic, something I didn’t know until late in my teens, and his periods of recovery never lasted and were punctuated by disappointment and frustration on the part of the rest of his immediate family. I remember too well the phone calls I’d get from him at odd hours in the late 1990s, about some get-rich-quick scheme he’d found or a penny stock on which he wanted my opinion, and the fact that I was not equipped to handle him in those states, or even fully aware of what the calls truly signified. Eventually, I drifted out of contact with him, talking maybe once or twice a year, hearing of him through my parents, until the day in spring training of 2005 when I got another call that he had taken his own life the night before. Rahul lives to see the end of “Only Goodness,” but Lahiri paints an accurate portrait of the devastation a grown child’s alcohol problem can cause and the false hopes and crushing disappointments it can cause, while still giving the reader enough insight into Rahul to feel some empathy, until the climactic event that caps the story.

“A Choice of Accommodation” chronicles the gradual decline of a “mixed” marriage (between an Indian man and a non-Indian woman) by watching the couple over the course of a single day and night at someone else’s wedding; I’ve criticized many writers here for badly-written sex scenes that feel like they were written by teenaged boys, but Lahiri wrote one of the few I’ve ever read that didn’t make me cringe – perhaps it simply needed a woman’s pen – although as the conclusion to this story the device felt a little hackneyed. “Nobody’s Business” is actually told from the perspective of the shy American roommate of an Indian woman on whom he probably has a small crush; he finds out her mysterious boyfriend is having an affair and is left trying to decide whether and how to tell her about it. The story itself works, with a technologically quaint solution, but the constant parade of suitors that the girl, Sang, faces – all men seeking an arranged marriage through her parents – provided a level of exasperating comic relief. The weakest story for me – still above-average if you’re looking for grades – was “Heaven-Hell,” told by an Indian girl about her mother who, trapped in a loveless arranged marriage, develops a crush on a Bengali graduate student who rooms with the family for several months, and even thatt story features a classic Lahiri oh-by-the-way twist at its end.

Interpreter of Maladies was brilliant and worthy of the recognition it received, but I can’t say I was as moved or involved in its stories as I was in those of Unaccustomed Earth, and her ability to create tension in short stories that revolve around emotions rather than action is astounding, reminiscent of the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the novels of Marilynne Robinson, two of the best American writers of the last hundred years. And I think it’s fitting that someone of a non-traditional background should emerge as one of the brightest voices in 21st century American literature, one who speaks to the experiences of an entirely new wave of immigrants who spend much of their lives living in one country while trying to maintain the cultures and traditions of others.

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Before Unaccustomed Earth, I read John Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel, the first part of his U.S.A. trilogy. However, it’s not a complete, standalone novel; it weaves together the stories of five people in the U.S. in the late 1910s, but their paths just start to cross near the book’s end and nothing is resolved enough to merit a real review. I’ll write them up when I finish all three parts, which appear as a single entry on a few of the greatest-books lists I follow.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s final novel, The Golden Spur.

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→ August 16, 2010
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Prime Obsession.

I admit it: I am not afraid of math.

And if you’re not afraid of math either – in this case, some fairly heavy math – you might enjoy Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics as much as I did. It’s a book about an obscure question in the field of number theory, one that remains unsolved after 150 years and probably has little to no practical application, but John Derbyshire manages to give the subject some real personality while doing his best to make it accessible to readers who haven’t taken a lot of advanced math classes or who, like me, are a good 13 years removed from their last one.

The subject of Prime Obsession is the Riemann Hypothesis, which states that the non-trivial zeros of Riemann’s zeta function are half part real. “Non-trivial zeros,” in this case at least, are complex numbers (a + bi, where i is the imaginary number defined as the square root of negative 1 and b is nonzero) that give the result of 0 when plugged into the zeta function. “Half part real” means that a in that complex number is equal to ½.

The zeta function is the crux of the matter, the sum of the following infinite series:

That is:

Riemann posed his hypothesis when studying the Prime Number Theorem, which states that for any random number N, the probability of N being prime (and thus the frequency of primes around N) is roughly equal to the reciprocal of the natural logarithm of N, that is, 1/ln(N). In his one paper on the subject, he hypothesized that the frequency of primes and the differences between the actual frequency and the predicted frequency in the Prime Number Theorem was connected to the zeros of this zeta function. He couldn’t prove it at the time, and even though David Hilbert declared it one of the great mathematical problems of the 20th century in 1900, one of a list that has seen all but two of its number* solved, and in 2000 the Riemann Hypothesis was named one of the Millennium Prize Problems by the Clay Mathematics Institute, it remains unsolved. Prove or disprove it and you’ll get a cool million bucks for your trouble.

As you might imagine, solving the problem isn’t easy; indeed, it stands unsolved more than a decade after Sir Andrew Wiles’ solution of the equally perplexing problem of Fermat’s Last Theorem, one that required the development of an entire new field of mathematics (topology) unknown to Fermat at the time that he wrote that he had a “truly marvelous proof” to the problem. (Current thought is that whatever proof he had was incomplete.) The difficulty of proving or disproving the Riemann Hypothesis has led many of the major figures in mathematics, particularly in number theory, to attempt to tackle all or part of the problem or to work on further theorems and conjectures that build on the assumption that the “RH” is true. (And it has at least held true so far for very large numbers, which is not a proof but is weak evidence in its favor.)

Derbyshire’s main difficulty, beyond the lack of a clear resolution to the story, is making the solution of a potentially useless mathematical conundrum interesting; Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem was momentous and newsworthy, but the practical applications have been nil – it’s merely interesting to people who like numbers. Proving the Riemann Hypothesis would likely have a similar lack of real-world effects, and the hypothesis itself is a lot harder to grasp than Fermat’s Last Theorem was; the latter problem had an incredibly complex solution, but the question itself was easy for anyone who’d taken algebra to understand. Derbyshire does a masterful job of walking through the history of the Riemann Hypothesis, from earlier work on prime numbers, including the PNT, through Riemann’s brief life and career in mathematics to the major developments in the 151 years since his seminal paper appeared.

The book alternates between chapters walking through the math and chapters on the history and personalities involved in the hypothesis’ history. Carl Friedrich Gauss has a starring role early, while G.H. Hardy, Leonhard Euler, J.E. Littlewood, Jacques Hadamard, and Hilbert appear at some length later on. Derbyshire sprinkles stories of their peculiarities, senses of humor, and non-mathematical interests to keep the text lighter while also highlighting the chance occurrences that made some of the progress on the proof possible and regularly pointing out the remarkable longevity of most of the major mathematicians he mentions.

His math writing, while clearly geared to a lay audience, still got fuzzy for me when he got deeper into the zeta function as he tried to map it to the complex plane. Derbyshire relies on these “visual” interpretations that don’t correspond to any sort of plane or graphs that I’ve seen elsewhere, and I felt it was the one time he presupposed some familiarity with higher math on the part of the reader. But to his credit, he relies largely on algebra and gives a brief (re-)introduction to differentiation and integration for the short periods where calculus is necessary to move the math story forward. He also hits many major touchstones that will unlock memories for those of you who took and enjoyed lots of math classes, from the Sieve of Eratosthenes to the amazing Euler’s Identity, the latter of which states that

And if you look at that formula and are amused, fascinated, or just generally intrigued, Prime Obsession is a book for you.

I also recommend a book about one of the mathematicians who makes a cameo appearance in Derbyshire’s book, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erd?s and the Search for Mathematical Truth. Erd?s was a Hungarian-born savant who lived most of his life out of a suitcase, traveling the world, arriving at the doors of mathematicians he knew and announcing that “my brain is open,” after which he’d settle in for a few days or weeks and embark with his host on a streak of problem-solving and paper-writing. He had his own peculiar vocabulary, consumed large quantities of caffeine and later amphetamines, and combined brilliance and prolificacy (that’s peak and longevity for you Hall of Fame watchers) to the point where other mathematicians are referred to by their “Erd?s number,” where a person who co-authored a paper with Erd?s has an Erd?s number of one, while others are marked by how many papers you must go through to create the shortest possible chain back to Erd?s.

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→ August 12, 2010
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Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs.

I wouldn’t have characterized myself as a huge Arcade Fire fan before last week – I’d heard several singles, liked most of them, but never ran out to download one of their albums or thought of them as one of my favorite artists. When Amazon.com ran a $3.99 promotion on mp3 downloads of their new album, The Suburbs (now $7.99), I bought it just on the assumption that there would be four or five songs worth having, more than justifying the cost. As it turns out, the album blew away my modest expectations, even with some unevenness, a 64-minute story of regret and frustrated hopes set to a pastiche of references and nods to new wave, post-punk, and alternative music from the 1980s.

After an introductory track that sent me for the fast-forward button, “Ready to Start” showed the Arcade Fire I know from their best prior singles, such as “Keep the Car Running” or “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out),” a foot-stomper with a driving bass line behind an understated vocal that mixes the yearning for an independent artistic life in a culture that seems (in Win Butler’s eyes) to reward the corporate life instead. “Empty Room” starts with a crazy violin intro – which continues behind the wave of guitars, creating an effect that reminded me of My Bloody Valentine, but without the latter’s excessive distortion; both that song and “Month of May” give the album its highest-energy moments to sustain the listener through the more subtle (and occasionally soporific) songs that dig more deeply into the decline of culture in the suburban sprawl.

The slower-tempo tricks are more of a mixed bag, but offer the album’s best overall songwriting. “Half Light II (No Celebration)” calls to mind New Order, or even Joy Division, with an anthemic lament with a lush arrangement behind dark, defeated vocals about the loss of nature and open space, while “Modern Man” channels Roxy Music, although the latter’s cliched moaning about the people in line behind him “can’t understand” typifies the song’s lack of concrete imagery.

“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” is the final full track (there’s a 90-second reprise of the opening song after it), and one of the most devastatingly complete songs on the record, building to a crescendo that never quite arrives while growing into a sprawling (pun intended) homage to the classic new wave/synth-pop songs of the mid-1980s. I don’t care for Regine Chassagne’s voice, but her delivery of the song’s critique of the sprawl of the song’s title, that uniquely American creation of suburbs that go on forever, with “dead shopping malls” that “rise like mountains beyond mountains,” bringing excesses of light (I keep picturing car dealerships at night, sucking down energy to light up football fields of metal boxes) but lacking the edginess or openness of urban culture.

But the song I keep coming back to again and again is the spare, slightly uptempo yet haunting “City with No Children,” the title line itself (“Feel like I’ve been living in/a city with no children in it”) evoking images of deathly quiet, or even destruction – it brought to my mind the scene from The Road where they see “the little boy” in the window of a building in an otherwise abandoned city. The hand-claps stand in place of almost all typical percussion, while the predominant guitar riff is dampened, as if it was played through a pillow, creating a stunning contrast between the song’s pace and its melancholy production.

The Suburbs is far from a perfect album – there are too many “skip” tracks for me to slap an 80 on it, including the dirge-like “Wasted Hours,” “The Suburbs,” and “Sprawl I (Flatland),” and the slow rocker “Rococo,” with a staccato vocal line I just found irritating – but it’s far more than the standard three-singles-and-some-filler album template, a style that should be long dead in an era where the album is finally unbundled for consumers to purchase individual tracks. It’s the kind of album that would earn Grammy nominations if the Grammy Awards weren’t still based on wins, saves, and RBI.

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Amazon.com has another 1000 albums available for $5 apiece as mp3 downloads through the end of the month. Two I’ll recommend: Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More, which I reviewed (glowingly) back in April; and Radiohead’s OK Computer, one of the five or ten best albums in the history of rock.

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→ August 6, 2010
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Burger Joint & the small Dominion expansions.

I received a review copy of the two-player game Burger Joint from Rio Grande a few weeks back, but wanted to play it a few more times before offering my thoughts. The game is extremely simple and the mechanics work well, but my wife and I didn’t find it engaging and thought the number of usable strategies was limited; however, it might be an ideal game for younger players because it’s so clean and simple to pick up and involves (mostly) things with which they’re already familiar.

The game’s concept is that two restaurateurs are competing to be the first to build a chain worth 12 total victory points, achieved by upgrading burger or pizza joints to diners and diners to bistros. He builds or upgrades these restaurants by taking resources – cubes in six different colors which loosely parallel ingredients you might find in burger or pizza joints – which are placed in the center of the game at the start of each turn, allowing players to select the cubes by alternating selections one by one. A player may store a maximum of seven of these cubes at the end of each turn, and since the requirements for a diner (four cubes of four specific colors, differing slightly for each player) differ greatly from those for a bistro (three cubes of each of two specific colors), there’s some resource management involved from turn to turn, possibly the most important part of the game.

Bistros are potentially worth the most points but the player can sacrifice some of those points to acquire a bistro with a special skill, such as the ability to exchange one or two cubes for a random cube from the bag, or for a cube of a specific color; one bistro is worth 0 points, one is worth 3 and has no special ability, and several are worth 2. Diners are worth one point apiece. A player’s third, fifth, and sixth burger/pizza joints are each worth one point, although a player may lose those points by upgrading some of those buildings to diners.

There’s one other way to obtain points – buying “publicity,” which utilizes cubes that the player doesn’t need for buildings (but that the other player does). Each level of publicity purchased allows the player to steal one cube from his opponent, but it takes several levels of publicity to get just one victory point and twelve to get to four victory points.

The cube requirements to build each building type and to obtain publicity are extremely well-balanced, and even with the randomness of drawing eight cubes from the bag each turn to split between the two of us, we didn’t finish any game with a score more lopsided than 12-10. The rules are well-written and very straightforward, and other than one quirk in how cubes are distributed to the central board from the bag – each player has exclusivity over certain colors depending on which diners each player owns at that moment – there’s no forced complexity to balance the game or make it harder for one player to pull ahead.

That extreme balance may be part of why we didn’t fall in love with the game, though. There seemed to be one basic strategy, and by the third game we noticed we’d converged on the same set of decisions. We both felt publicity wasn’t worth the heavy resource expenditure, which would probably mean eschewing the 2-point plays available in the bistro column. Each level of publicity requires three cubes, and on average it’s nine cubes per publicity point, while a bistro that might be worth 2-3 points only requires six cubes, and a one-point diner requires four. Because the colors required for publicity differ so heavily from those required for diners or bistros, it’s largely one or the other, and we didn’t feel like the publicity track was a good investment.

As a result, we just played for bistros, and the only real decisions there were when to go for the higher-point ones as opposed to the lower-value ones with better cube-exchange abilities. There’s some strategizing involved in cube selection, but again, we both figured it out fairly quickly…

…which makes me think this game might be ideal for younger players, for whom the level of strategic thinking required is just right. I can’t imagine that it would take an eight- to ten-year-old more than a few minutes to grasp the basic concepts here, and the short game time (under a half hour) is perfect for the attention span of a child*. It’s also very portable, with three small game boards (one per player plus the central board for cubes) and a bag of wooden cubes, and simple to set up and put away. For adults, however, I just think it’s a little light and ended up feeling repetitive after a few plays.

*Admission: I have a short attention span, which is why my blog posts are roughly 1/3 to 1/2 a posnanski in length.

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One of you commented on my Small World review that the BoardGameGeek store – which looks like they hired a bunch of Geocities customers to do their web design – sells some limited-edition expansions for that game and for Dominion. I ordered them all and we’ve used the Dominion expansions, comprising three new cards, several times already.

The best of them by far is Black Market, a Kingdom card where you create a separate “black market” deck that includes some selection of Kingdom cards not in use in the current game – so if you decided to leave out Market in the ten cards you’re using, you could stick a market or two in the black market deck and still have them available. When you play a Black Market card, you draw the top three cards from the black market deck and may choose to purchase one of them; whether you purchase it or not, you get +2 coins for that particular turn, so the downside is still solid.

The Stash card is a new treasure card with value 2 and cost 5; when you reshuffle your deck, you can place the Stash card wherever you want. I could see someone buying a few of these and loading the top of the deck with them to ensure they come up in the next draw, but buying just one or two didn’t make much of a difference because you never know the order of the rest of the cards in the deck.

The Envoy card was our least favorite. You draw the next five cards and one of your opponents gets to select one for you to discard, after which you take the remaining four. How this is preferable to Council Room or even Smithy is lost on me, and the fact that Envoy doesn’t give additional actions isn’t helpful.

It looks like at the moment you have to order the Dominion expansions through some eBay listsings accessible through the BGG Store link above. If you’re a regular Dominion player as we are, the Black Market card is worth trying (and it comes with Envoy), but I’d probably give Stash a pass.

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→ August 4, 2010
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Scout, Atticus, & Boo.

New post on the draft blog for Insiders: Cape Cod League top 30 prospects for 2010. Also, no Klawchat this week due to the start of the Area Code Games.

—

I’m a big fan of To Kill a Mockingbird, placing it at #4 on the Klaw 100, but unlike most readers I came to the book relatively late in life, reading the book for the first (and only, for now) time at the age of 29. It was never assigned in school – when I think back on the garbage we had to read for some English classes in lieu of important classics of American and British literature, I wonder what the hell my parents paid property taxes for – and I actually wasn’t an avid reader of fiction between graduation from college and the turn of the century*. When I shifted from non-fiction – and just not reading that many books to begin with – back over to novels, I decided to fill in the gaps in my cultural literacy by reading as many of those “name” books as possible. They didn’t all measure up to their reputations, but Mockingbird exceeded them, and was one of a handful of books that accelerated the renewal of my interest in reading non-comic fiction.

*The book that turned me back on to fiction, putting me on a decade-long tear that saw me read roughly 400 novels across ten years? Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, of course.

Documentary writer and producer Mary Murphy seems to feel much the same about the only literary output of one Nelle Harper Lee and assembled a book called Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird that comprises interviews with 26 writers, celebrities, a politican, and a few people connected with Lee herself on the book, its legacy and the enduring mystery of Lee’s silence, both in her lack of output and her four-decade-plus refusal to give interviews. (Needless to say, she’s not one of the 26.)

Richard Russo, one of my favorite writers, had for me the most interesting essay because of how he talks about the art of writing, not just in how Mockingbird influenced him, but in how a technical analysis of the book misses its greatness – “Great books are not flawless books” – and what aspect of the book hit him the hardest. James McBride, an African-American novelist and musician, offers a passionate defense of the book as great literature, one of the questions Murphy must have posted to every interview subject, while also drawing parallels to John Coltrane when answering the question of why Lee might have chosen to stop writing after one book.

The most fun interview of all of them is Alice Lee, Nelle Harper’s older sister who, at the time of the book’s writing, was still working in her law office every day at the age of 98. With the author herself unwilling to give interviews – she reportedly was upset that one or more interviewers misquoted her in the 1960s and put words or even thoughts into her mouth, but has also indicated that she believes the author should be more or less invisible behind her works – Alice gives some insight as to Harper Lee’s childhood and what aspects of the book are grounded in real people or places.

I was surprised to find that one of the most enjoyable interviews in the book was Oprah Winfrey, whose responses may be the most personal, from her identification with Scout to an encounter with Gregory Peck (“he will always be Atticus to me”) to her plan to persuade Harper Lee to come on the show (fail). Her quote from her lunch with Lee is too priceless for me to repeat here, but it’s quite telling about the author’s attitude towards the celebrity she has so consistently declined. If you want to bounce around Scout, Atticus, & Boo, Andrew Young, James Patterson (really), and Anna Quindlen also offered interesting or insightful comments on the novel.

The introduction, written by Murphy, includes heavy quoting of the 26 essays that follow, and I found that reading it first scooped a number of the most interesting quotes from the interviews; if you pick this book up, skip straight to the first interview, with the actress who played Scout in the film version. If you haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird, you should do so, and then watch the film, and then read this book if you enjoyed those two works as much as I did.

Next up: John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, about the still-unproven (or disproven) hypothesis that bears Riemann’s name.

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→ August 4, 2010
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Legend of a Suicide.

David Vann’s story collection Legend of a Suicide has won a slew of literary awards and plaudits, including the Grace Paley Prize and appearances on 25 “best books of the year” lists, as well as becoming a critical and commercial success in, of all places, France. It’s a highly autobiographical book built around the suicide of Vann’s father when the author was just 13.

Legend is built around a central, two-part novella, “Sukkwan Island,” with three very short stories before it and two after; those five stories tie together closely, but the novella shifts two major plot details in a way that prevents reading the set as a single, linear story that would probably qualify as a novel. The five stories are well-written and useful for setting the scene, but I found the shift in “Sukkwan Island” jarring not just for its shock value but because the three stories that preceded that one had set me up for a different path.

In the early short stories, Vann’s alter ego, Roy, watches his father’s demise into depression and bad life choices from something of a distance, but in the alternate reality of “Sukkwan Island,” Roy chooses to spend a year in Alaska with his father, living survivalist-style in the woods on a remote island, only to witness Jim’s downward spiral up close. (In real life, and in the two stories that end the book, Roy/David declined to go to Alaska, after which Jim killed himself.) Roy dies in Alaska, and Jim’s depression and anxiety after his son’s death take on more corporeal form as he tries to survive, to cover up what happened, and to escape responsibility. Even Roy’s death could be a metaphor for the death of Vann’s relationship with his father – sensing that his father was headed for an inevitable tragedy and fearing the darkness and mood changes of crippling depression, perhaps David pulled away from his dad, convincing him to decline the invitation to spend a (miserable) year in the wildnerness with an unstable parent. Jim’s eventual death in “Sukkwan Island” is simultaneously a form of revenge on his father and a form of forgiveness, a glimmer of understanding that despite the inherent selfishness of suicide*, someone in the grip of that type of depression isn’t fully in control of his actions.

*Yes, I’ve lost a close relative to suicide, as has my wife. I speak from some experience, although nothing comparable to Vann’s.

Jim’s descent, fueled by despair, grief, fear, and self-doubt, is gripping and difficult to read; by putting Jim in the position of a father whose son has died and who bears at least some responsibility, Vann gives the reader more reason to empathize with the character, perhaps even to pity him, and thus makes his late father more than just a personal mess who screwed up his life and then screwed up his son’s by killing himself.

In the concluding stories, Roy – very much alive – goes to Alaska and attempts to piece together a little of his father’s legacy, only to find that the world there has changed so much during his own emotional stasis:

Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.

He remains emotionally paralyzed by his father’s suicide, and while that’s probably realistic, it doesn’t make for much of a story. I was looking for some kind of conclusion – not a happy ending, not even closure necessarily, but some sort of event to guide me out of the book. Roy goes to visit one of his father’s mistresses, only to find himself unable to ask her anything about his dad, a perfect vignette in a larger book but very unsatisfying as the basis for a short story.

Vann’s prose is easy and earnest, so much so that it’s uncomfortable at times to see through a window that clear, but a book about depression and suicide can’t be anything but brutally honest – if a novel or story on the subject doesn’t make the reader at least a little uncomfortable, it failed in its mission. If anything, Vann could have delved more deeply and continued any of the stories, or expanded “Sukkwan Island” into a longer novel, and found more material to mine in the complex, broken personality of his father and his own complex, even warped relationship with him, and the material would have remained compelling because he writes so well about these stark emotions. The first half of “Sukkwan” is the strongest material in Legend because that honesty is blended with the child’s view of his father breaking down, a mixture of confusion, fear, and stop-and-go sympathy from a boy in a position that would be difficult for an adult to handle. The second half of the story does suffer slightly from Roy’s absence.

If you don’t mind a bleak read, one where endings are few and never happy, but one that’s unsparing in its look at a fairly common mental illness that went untreated and ended in tragedy, Legend of a Suicide does an outstanding job of handling the subject. It’s uneven but introduces a talented writer who’s able to write about tough emotions, and I’m hopeful that in his upcoming novel, Caribou Island (due out in January), he’ll make the adjustments to tell a more complete story without compromising his emotional honesty.

Next up: Mary Murphy’s Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird. I received complimentary review copies of both that book and Legend from the publisher.

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→ July 31, 2010
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Another music update.

I’ll be filing reaction pieces all day as we learn about trades (but only when we know all the parts). Keep an eye on my twitter feed for links to articles as they go up.

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I’m not sure if my tastes are narrowing as I get older, or if there really just isn’t as much great new music coming out now as there was five to ten years ago, but I’m definitely not spending as much on music as I did early in the last decade. Here are ten songs I’ve heard this year – not all are new releases, and one is from 2006 – that are in heavy rotation for me at the moment.

Manchester Orchestra – “I’ve Got Friends”

At the Team USA trials in July and the Tournament of Stars before that, both held at the USA Baseball complex in Cary, the music played during BP and between innings was mostly atrocious, including crap like the Veronicas’ “Untouched” and OneRepublic’s “All the Right Moves,” which includes the line “All the right friends in all the wrong places.” Of course, that just put me in mind to hear Manchester Orchestra’s similarly-worded song, which has the chorus “I’ve got friends in all the right places/I know what they want, and I know they don’t want me to stay.” There’s a tension in the music and vocal style that matches the desperation of the lyrics, and it’s the best new (to me, that is – it’s from 2009) song I’ve heard all year.

Tame Impala – “Solitude is Bliss”

Only available on iTunes right now, as far as I can tell. It’s an Australian trio with a psychedelic edge to most of their songs, but of what I’ve heard from them, this is the one track with a real hook that made me want to hear it again. The layered production hides a minimal instrumental approach, and the idiotically-simple guitar riff in the chorus gains a new currency from effects that make it sound like it’s enveloping your head. The video is by turns comical and disturbing – and doesn’t the lead singer remind you of Dave Grohl?

Features – “Lions”

Reminds me of a cross between the Arctic Monkeys (first album) and the Black Keys, combining the shout-along chorus of the former with slower, sly verses where the singer is apologizing for something … without really apologizing.

Neon Trees – “Animal”

I have a feeling I’m going to be sick of this song in about six months, as it’s already crossing over, and I’m generally not a fan of this slightly nasal style of vocals, but it’s a pretty strong pop-alternative track if you can get past the cheesy lyrics.

Broken Bells – “The High Road”

I’m pretty sure that for my debut album I’m going to have to work with Danger Mouse. I do love the lines “The dawn to end all nights/That’s all we hoped it was,” with the unspoken fear that it’s something a lot worse, and the way James Mercer sings in two different voices that seem like they couldn’t have come from the same person.

Pinback – “From Nothing to Nowhere” (right-click to download the song free from their official site)

From 2007, but I first heard it the weekend I went to see Stephen Strasburg pitch in Altoona in early April. Pinback’s music is mostly understated emo, not exactly my style, but “From Nothing to Nowhere” has some velocity to it that’s missing from other songs I’ve heard by the group, making it a great driving song. I’m still skeptical of the lyrics I found online for this song – it sounds like he’s saying “who sung my lyric?” rather than the bizarre “co-sign my letter” listed on all the lyrics sites. The visual effects behind the band in the official video elevate it beyond the usual mailed-in band-playing-song clip. I have no idea why Rob Crow wanted to look like the Unabomber without his hoodie, though.

Alkaline Trio – “Help Me”

Power-pop is kind of a lost art right now, and this wouldn’t stand up to the 1990s stars of the genre like Sugar, Jellyfish, or Sloan, but there’s something about Matt Skiba’s singing on this track that got stuck in my head, even though the lyrics are nothing special. I did like it better when I thought I caught the word “jejune” in the line right before the chorus, even though I knew that was about as likely as a Jason Tyner shot to the upper deck.

Muse – “Supermassive Black Hole”

This song should have been on my top songs of the 2000s – a list I’m going to have to revise at some point – but it came out right three weeks after I quit the Blue Jays to join ESPN … and four weeks after I became a father. I was oblivious to just about anything that happened that summer, whether news or popular culture or non-baseball sport, so this song, an obvious homage to vintage Prince, escaped my notice, and I didn’t hear it until this spring. I’m sure Muse fans would disagree, but this is the best song I’ve heard from them since their debut album, with the incomparable “Sunburn” and “Muscle Museum,” purposefully over-the-top without the derivative feel that’s ruined a lot of their recent work for me, featuring a slithering guitar riff behind a falsetto vocal that will call to mind the Purple One at his peak.

Arctic Monkeys – “From The Ritz To The Rubble”

The second-best song off their 2006 debut album, when they were still ultimately a punk band with intellectual stylings and the appropriate sneer the critics wanted to see. The brief up-to-11 guitar lick leading into what you might call the chorus – the song defies conventional structures – grabs you up front, but the way Alex Turner turns shouted lyrics into another instrument is what hooked me, and how could you not like a song that rhymes “this one’s a scary’un” with “totalitarian?”

Cold Cave – “Love Comes Close”

This is so close to early ’80s new wave that it almost feels like parody – is it Joy Division? Camouflage? Early Ministry? I’m not in love with the vocal style – it reminds me of the guy from The National – but Cold Cave just nailed that new wave/synth-pop sound in a way that would fit perfectly on a compilation CD from that era.

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→ July 30, 2010
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The Patron Saint of Liars & The Whore’s Child.

Ann Patchett’s debut novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, showcases the kind of insightful, compassionate writing that helped make her magnum opus, Bel Canto, such a critical and commercial success, although Liars lacks the same degree of storycraft found in Bel Canto or in The Magician’s Assistant. It is, however, one of the best sad books I have ever read, as the story of a woman who is hopelessly broken inside and yet can’t help but damage the people close to her through her inability to deal with her own fears and insecurities.

The primary liar in the book is Rose, who flees a comfortable marriage in California when she discovers she’s pregnant and “realizes” – or decides? – that she isn’t actually in love with her husband. She ends up at a Catholic home for pregnant girls who want to have their babies and give them up for adoption, but Rose ends up staying on well past her ninth month – and keeps her daughter as well, only to find herself unable to be a mother to her child or even much of a wife to her second husband. Patchett gives us a window into Rose’s sadness but never much of an explanation for it beyond the death of her father in a car accident when Rose was three. Her own daughter, Cecilia, reaches her early teens before her mother leaves the picture, but Rose is unable to mother her and Cecilia ends up forming bonds both with the nuns who run the facility and the girls who come in for six or seven or eight months and then mostly disappear from her life.

The book comprises three sections, and though Rose is the central character in the book, she only narrates the first third, and her motives for lying and leaving were never fully clear to me. Son, the groundskeeper she meets and marries at St. Elizabeth’s, narrates the second part, and Cecilia handles the third, and both were more compelling, deeply drawn characters with the ability to process and communicate their own complex emotions in ways that Rose’s character cannot. And Sister Evangeline, a sort of grandmother-figure/mystic in the group of otherwise grey, dour nuns is a scene-stealer whenever she appears.

The Patron Saint of Liars is a sad book, but not a bleak one. Rose is clearly depressed and her lack of progress or recognition is heartbreaking, especially as it threatens the lives of those closest to her. But there are streaks of hope not for Rose but for Son and especially Cecilia, who wants her mother to be a mother but has also has the strength to find that nurturing from others and is, at the book’s end, developing into a healthier, fuller person than her mother ever was. It is imperfect, from Rose’s scant motives to her ambiguous fate in what becomes Son’s and Cecilia’s story, but Patchett writes about emotions so clearly and empathetically that I moved through the book’s pages as I might through a novel of action.

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Richard Russo’s first short story collection, The Whore’s Child and Other Stories, feels almost like a collection of rarities and B-sides, with a few outstanding entries that, in total, wouldn’t be enough for a full volume, so the publisher stuck in a first draft and a few throwaways to provide some bulk, although the hardcover edition still barely reaches 200 pages even with generous line spacing. The highlights are vintage Russo, though, and it’s worth going through the collection to find those stories and moments.

The main thrust of these stories seems to be failure, especially confronting failure of the past with the uncertainty of the future among his mostly middle-aged protagonists, many of whom are professors, writers, or other sorts of artists. The title story is told by a creative writing professor who has an unusual student auditing his class, one who becomes the star of the show for her brutally honest writing that turns out to be an exploration of her own sad childhood. Several stories revolve around failed marriages – I found “Monhegan Light,” in which a successful cinematographer chooses to meet the man who cuckolded him, only to find himself the loser in the confrontation, very disturbing – and “The Farther You Go” is the ancestor of his novel Straight Man, condensing the story of the narrator’s daughter throwing her husband out of the house.

My main problem with the novel is that the inherently brief nature of the short story limits Russo’s ability to introduce the local color of side characters and the comic relief of subplots and running gags. Instead, we’re left with a sort of stark, gloomy fatalism about lives lived wrong without hope of a turnaround or just a temporary uptick. Only the final story, “The Mysteries of Linwood Hart,” brought that mix of humor and sadness in a sort of of coming-of-age story with a number of baseball-related scenes, but the attempts to decipher a complicated adult relationship through the eyes of the ten-year-old title character felt blurry.

I’ve enjoyed the five Russo novels I’ve read, especially Empire Falls and The Risk Pool, but I’d recommend The Whore’s Child for completists (like me) only, as the title story alone isn’t enough to justify buying the whole book.

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I received a review copy of a new short story collection by Justin Taylor called Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, but the collection doesn’t live up to the title. I found the stories crude and immature, with the young writer’s obsession with sex (and with using sex as the primarily vehicle for meaning in the lives of his characters) and an evident lack of life experience. The characters were uninteresting, sometimes two-dimensional and largely self-absorbed, and their actions struck me as forced.

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→ July 26, 2010
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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

My Dan Haren analysis is up for Insiders, and I’ve got another post up on Omar Vizquel’s Hall of Fame case with some other notes and links.

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Who actually wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare? Is it possible that an uneducated moneylender and son of a Stratford glover could write over thirty plays that display the knowledge of a world traveler and the vocabulary of an alumnus of Oxford or Cambridge? This question has interested critics and scholars for two centuries, a story recounted in Columbia professor James Shapiro’s book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, a thorough and surprisingly balanced look at the controversy and the cases for the two major alternative candidates, Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere.

Shapiro explains in the introduction that he believes that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were, in fact, written by the glover’s son, but he presents the cases for Bacon and de Vere thoroughly and fairly – I might even say a little drily – before providing his rebuttals to each. He also lays out the arguments for Shakespeare and explanations why the doubts about his authorship are likely unfounded, based on erroneous assumptions about Shakespeare’s life and the times in which he lived. Even though I’m only somewhat familiar with Shakespeare’s works – I’ve only read three of his plays and have seen stage or film adaptations of three others (including the impeccable Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing) – I didn’t find that a handicap in reading or enjoying the story, which lays out a little like a mystery and a little like a psychological study of the people who so readily embrace conspiracy theories about why Shakespeare’s name appears on 33 plays and dozens of sonnets that he didn’t actually write. Along the way, Shapiro tells the story of the American Delia Bacon, of no apparent relation to Francis, whose support of her namesake became the monomaniacal focus of her life; of Sigmund Freud’s own obsession with the authorship question and belief that the Stratford man didn’t write his plays; and of the fact that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights on at least five of his plays, a point that poses many problems for proponents of alternative candidates.

One of the funniest parts of the case for Edward de Vere is the inconvenient truth that he died in 1604, yet as many of nine of Shakespeare’s plays didn’t appear until after that date, one of many problems with so-called “Oxfordian theory” (de Vere was the Earl of Oxford) that Shapiro says de Vere’s supporters handwave away or spin in a way that supports their man. There’s even a corollary to Oxfordian theory that has de Vere as both the son of Queen Elizabeth and her lover, and the two as the parents of the Earl of Southampton, which brings to my mind the funny image of a bunch of Elizabethan-era Britons running around with tin foil hats over their powdered wigs.

Despite Shapiro’s embrace of the glover’s son as the man behind the quill, he does acknowledge some of the aspects of the case that have led to the rise of alternative theories. There’s a lack of documentation of Shakespeare’s life; his books and manuscripts are gone, and much of what we do have about his life pertains to his work as a moneylender and investor. His plays have a worldly quality that he himself seems to have lacked, although that objection may arise from our own tendency to assume his world was far more like ours than it actually was. Difficulty reconciling what we do know of Shakespeare the man with what we see in his works has led to the search for other candidates, but Shapiro slyly demonstrates that such sentiments arise from conscious or subconscious class prejudices – how could an uneducated man, the son of a working-class father, have written such beautiful, erudite plays and poems?

Shapiro does mention some of the other proposed candidates for authorship of the play, but there are over fifty and the number seems to keep growing, so he focuses on the two with the strongest cases and most devoted followings. The argument for Bacon has lost steam over the last fifty years or so, and I found the lengthy explanation to get a little dry in spots, but the case for de Vere is more complex and unintentionally fun while also allowing Shapiro to delve more into the psychology of his supporters and the way that changes in how information is disseminated have allowed fringe theories to prosper, such as the “fairness” rules in media and the rise of sites like Wikipedia, where expert opinions and amateur opinions sit side by side without extra weight on the former. (For a funny, uneven, but thought-provoking polemic on this very subject, check out Andrew Keen’s 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur.) I entered this book with no knowledge of the authorship question beyond the question’s existence, but Shapiro sets up the cases for Bacon and de Vere and knocks them down in a way that I imagine would make it hard for those candidates’ proponents to recover without adding another layer of foil to their headgear. He does veer a little too deeply into explanations of “textual analysis,” which seems like extremely dangerous ground that leaves the door open for almost any interpretation the interpreter likes, but as someone who enjoys analyzing meaning and metaphor in literature I found the explanation of how attempts to identify Shakespeare’s works as inherently autobiographical led scholars down the slippery slope into thinking that space aliens from Phobos wrote them sobering. It won’t change anyone’s enjoyment of the plays, but Contested Will is an intelligent look at one of literature’s most enduring controversies.

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