Category: lit

Book­ish stuff, includ­ing things that relate to the writ­ing, read­ing or dis­cus­sion of literature.

Categories
baseball lit reviews

Books / Game of Shadows

I was just watch­ing ESPN's Open­ing Day cov­er­age of the Braves-Dodgers game, and the con­ver­sa­tion between com­men­ta­tor Erik Kar­ros (wasn't he Rook­ie of the Year like 5 years ago?) and Rick Sut­cliffe turned to steroids. Kar­ros couldn't con­tain him­self. He blus­tered and ram­bled for a while, crit­i­ciz­ing those who demand­ed an inves­ti­ga­tion, and basi­cal­ly rehashed Mark McGwire's non-denial denial to a Sen­ate sub-com­mit­tee: Steroids were abused in the past; the league has adopt­ed a stricter pol­i­cy; let's all move on. The mes­sage was uno­rig­i­nal — a lot of cur­rent play­ers don't want to dwell on this unsa­vory devel­op­ment — but the air of defen­sive­ness mixed with dis­dain seemed odd­ly reminscent of anoth­er guilty, defi­ant per­son — Don­ald Rumsfeld.Anyway, over the past cou­ple of days, I tore through Game of Shad­ows, the recent­ly pub­lished steroids expose by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. After a month of PR build-up and pub­lished excerpts, there weren't many surprises:

  • Bonds availed him­self of steroids. One might say, a but­t­load of steroids.
  • So did Mar­i­on Jones.
  • They're both liars.
  • So are a lot of pro­fes­sion­al athletes.

Bonds is the big sto­ry in Game of Shad­ows. If you couldn't already tell by his car­toon­ish­ly swollen neck/head and his late-career pow­er explo­sion, Bonds hasn't been play­ing fair. He admit­ted to a grand jury that he allowed his train­er (a known juicer) to place droplets of an "unknown" chem­i­cal under his tongue, and to rub an "unknown" cream on his joints. Bonds thought that these were legal sup­ple­ments — the drops were "flaxseed oil" — yeah, he actu­al­ly said that — and he implied that he'd nev­er inject­ed any­thing. Uh-huh, yeah. I'm a fan of the flaxseed oil, and I can tes­ti­fy that it doesn't make your head become like 5x big­ger. Plus, Bonds has always been a con­trol freak. Is it even remote­ly pos­si­ble that he didn't both­er find­ing out what his train­er was stick­ing in his mouth?The book reveals the Bonds was on a steroid reg­i­men that includ­ed more than "flaxseed oil," mak­ing it seem even more like­ly that Bonds per­jured him­self in front of the grand jury. Sources close to him indi­cate that he was on all sorts of injectable crap, includ­ing Decadurabolin (in the butt) and human growth hor­mone (in the stom­ach). He want­ed us to believe that it was all free weights and sprints and vit­a­mins, but it makes a lit­tle more sense that there was some secret sauce in the mix.A per­son­al note: Bar­ry, dude, seri­ous­ly. Just freakin admit it. You're like a lit­tle kid sit­ting in a pile of cook­ie crumbs, cry­ing and claim­ing that you didn't eat any cook­ies. It's undig­ni­fied, real­ly. Say "I took steroids because I want­ed to win, because every­one else was, because it's what I had to do." Fans under­stand com­pet­i­tive­ness, and you're a com­pet­i­tive guy, and steroids weren't against the rules any­way. So just fess up, you big baby. At some point, you could even ask for our for­give­ness. I mean, it's pos­si­ble. You always claim that you're not giv­en the respect you deserve. Here's your chance to earn it.

Categories
lit

Truth, fiction, the Village Voice, Sylvestergate

Vil­lage Voice writer Nick Sylvester joins the ranks of defamed young jour­nal­ists with his recent for­ay into research fab­ri­ca­tion — i.e., he basi­cal­ly invent­ed a (most­ly unre­mark­able) scene that neat­ly summed up his thoughts in an arti­cle on Neil Strauss's The Game and its effect on NYC dat­ing cul­ture. The obvi­ous­ly weird thing is that the "research" he faked was the kind of thing that most young reporters would not even think of as "research." An assign­ment requir­ing lots of time in bars and night­clubs, watch­ing peo­ple hit on each oth­er? That's the kind of embed­ded jour­nal­ism that a (now for­mer) music writer should be able to han­dle, right?Disappointly, he doesn't real­ly do much with the lies and deceit, mak­ing Sylvester the writer rough­ly 2000% less inter­est­ing than Stephen Glass who at least endeav­ored to write a riv­et­ing sto­ry with his fak­ery. It's also clear that Jayson Blair's jock­strap is still in need to trans­port when one finds that Sylvester quotes real peo­ple who he nev­er, umm, inter­viewed. A note of real­i­ty: It's worth point­ing out that the juve­nile bs foist­ed upon us by Pitch­fork­ers past and present sim­ply enhances the excel­lence of jour­nal­ism that mat­ters from peo­ple like him, her, and her.

Categories
lit tip

New Yorker cartoon formula exposed!

Flickr photo

Take one char­ac­ter each from col­umn A and col­umn B, place them in one of col­umn C's set­tings, and voila! You have the mak­ings of a New York­er car­toon. Sup­pos­ed­ly, this was the doing of a group of NYer car­toon­ists at a recent festival.

Categories
lit reviews

Termites eat New Orleans

After Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na, the recent Harper's mag­a­zine fea­ture about the uncon­trol­lable, unfath­omed ter­mite infes­ta­tion of the French Quar­ter seems down­right eerie. Equal parts infor­ma­tion and med­i­ta­tion, Dun­can Murrell's "The Swarm" is an effec­tive, mov­ing blend of first-hand report­ing on bliz­zard-like ter­mite swarms, spooky inter­views with insect experts, and gen­uine South­ern goth­ic moments:

Where the For­mosans are for­ag­ing — in the studs of a wall, for instance — the car­ton some­times takes the shape of the very thing they're eat­ing. Pest-con­trol oper­a­tors in New Orleans told me many of sto­ries of rip­ping out dry­wall to expose what looked from a dis­tance like sol­id two-by-four fram­ing pieces, only to find that they were look­ing at car­ton nests, the ghosts of a wall long since consumed.

It also pro­vides a peek into the world of the ter­mi­tol­o­gist, touch­ing on the trag­ic tale of a man­ic-depres­sive South African ento­mol­o­gist who became so obsessed with ter­mites that he began to view their behav­ior in per­haps over­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed terms:

[Eugene] Marais believed that colonies of ter­mites were dis­tinct, com­pound organ­isms not unlike the human body, that every com­po­nent from queen to work­er served a func­tion not just anal­o­gous but iden­ti­cal to the func­tion of our own hearts and liv­ers and brains and blood cells. Marais thought that the ter­mite colony lacked only the pow­er to move togeth­er as one organ­ism, and that some­day they would devel­op even that skill.

Next on my read­ing list: Marais's "clas­sic work of obses­sive obser­va­tion," The Soul of the White Ant.

Categories
lit reviews tip

Nurse! Get me Rolling Stone on the phone!

Has there been a more thank­less task in mod­ern lit­er­ary his­to­ry than edit­ing Hunter S. Thomp­son? Accord­ing to for­mer Rolling Stone edi­tor Robert Love, the mag­a­zine actu­al­ly assigned junior edi­tors the task of babysit­ting Thomp­son as he approached his dead­line. (Okay, there are worse junior edit­ing tasks than that; I've done them). In a recent in the Colum­bia Jour­nal­ism Review arti­cle, Love dis­cuss­es this and much more in his essay about edit­ing the good doc­tor at Rolling Stone. Charm­ing rev­e­la­tion: HST's blus­ter and bom­bast attained read­abil­i­ty only after long, hard edi­to­r­i­al over­sight. The kind of over­sight that involves tear­ing the thing apart and and reassem­bling it sen­tence by sentence:

So, a flur­ry of man­u­script pages would arrive, buzzing with bril­liant, but often dis­con­nect­ed pas­sages, inter­spersed with what Hunter would him­self call "gib­ber­ish" (on cer­tain days) and pre­vi­ous­ly reject­ed mate­r­i­al, just to see if we were awake. "Stand back," the first line would inevitably say, announc­ing the arrival of twen­ty-three or twen­ty-five or forty pages to fol­low in the fax machine. Soon there were phone calls from Deb­o­rah Fuller or Shel­by Sadler or Nicole Mey­er or anoth­er of his stal­wart assis­tants. We always spoke of "pages," as in "How many pages will we get tonight?" "We need more pages than that." "Can you get those pages marked up and back to Hunter?" Pages were the coin of the realm; mov­ing pages was our mis­sion. I would mark them up, make copies for Jann, and then send them back.

The issue for the mag­a­zine was nev­er that Hunter wasn't the fun­ni­est, clever­est, most hilar­i­ous writer, sen­tence to sen­tence or para­graph to para­graph. The editor's role was get­ting those sen­tences to pile up and then exhib­it for­ward momen­tum. (Hunter called this process "lash­ing them together.")

  • Heard about this from the fun­ny folks at The Morn­ing News. Thanks, guys.
    • Categories
    lit reviews the ancient past

    Reflections on my Pynchon obsession

    Book­fo­rum recent­ly pub­lished a trib­ute to Thomas Pyn­chon called "Pyn­chon from A to V," writ­ten by crit­ic and Pyn­chon mani­ac Ger­ald Howard. Most Pyn­chon fans dis­cov­er that their love dare not speak its name because when it does, it instant­ly labels one as a lit­er­ary snob and smar­ty­pants. Like expe­ri­ence in armed com­bat, love of Pyn­chon and Gravity's Rain­bow is best deliv­ered in the for­mat of mem­oir, and Howard's affec­tion­ate tale of his own Pyn­chon obses­sion inspired me to recon­sid­er mine.Let's first get the unavoid­able and unfor­tu­nate real­i­ties out the way: Gravity's Rain­bow is dense and unfriend­ly. Pynchon's char­ac­ters appear from nowhere, have biz­zare names, and dis­ap­pear with­out a trace. Poof! Gone. Most vex­ing of all, read­ing Pyn­chon in gen­er­al, and GR in par­tic­u­lar, requires wran­gling zil­lions of intri­cate con­spir­a­cies with­in con­spir­a­cies, many of which seem to have no bear­ing on the Point of the Book, what­ev­er the heck that may be.Howard's GR expe­ri­ence was sim­i­lar to mine, a kill-or-be-killed, fin­ish-or-die-try­ing affair. I read GR when I was 23. It was a time of con­fu­sion, blus­ter, dis­trust, cut with con­fi­dence that my recent­ly-acquired BA in Eng­lish had giv­en me unique insight into the world; in oth­er words, I was GR's ide­al read­er. It could be argued that few read­ers who aren't young, male lit majors would sub­ject them­selves to a 760 pages of pun­ish­ment thin­ly masked as intrigue. Who else would have the faith, or time, to read and re-read page after page, mem­o­riz­ing seem­ing­ly point­less details because any detail may sud­den­ly become some­how rel­e­vant? At the time I read GR, I had just moved to a big city that seemed pop­u­lat­ed by the very peo­ple who pop­u­lat­ed Pynchon's pages — shad­owy peo­ple with sin­is­ter secret lives. Per­haps their shad­owy, sin­is­ter appear­ance was a result of the fact that I didn't know any­one, had a ter­ri­ble job, no girl­friend, no band and very lit­tle mon­ey. More­over, I didn't know what I want­ed to be doing, who I want­ed to be. Like the pro­tag­o­nist Tyrone Slothrop, I was filled with unease and con­cern. And yet at the same time I was hav­ing TONS of fun. Doing absolute­ly noth­ing except mar­veling at the mys­ter­ies of every­thing around me. I loved it, but I want­ed it all to end, and I want­ed to fig­ure it out — all at the same time. And the book! The book pro­vid­ed a very faint hope of actu­al­ly under­stand­ing some­thing, any­thing. Immersed in the world of GR, all of life was a puz­zle to solve, a knot to unrav­el, a refined and glam­or­ized ver­sion of my own world. Slothrop was me: a con­fused mix of unease, hope, and good times. Of course, vast sec­tions of the book near­ly crushed me. I often com­plete­ly for­got what had hap­pened on the pre­vi­ous page, or who a char­ac­ter was. I must have re-read enough pages to read the book twice.But I was pro­pelled by the illu­mi­nat­ing, invig­o­rat­ing pas­sages that laid bare the ele­ments that so many recent bach­e­lors of arts seek to under­stand — the imper­son­al forces at the heart of civ­i­liza­tion, the greedy cor­po­ra­tions gov­ern­ing our dai­ly lives, the evil truth behind the hap­py facade. Pyn­chon brings these things to life in pas­sages of over­whelm­ing, all-encom­pass­ing knowl­edge (nowa­days imi­tat­ed by the likes of JFranz, DFW, etc), and with­in them exists a char­ac­ter quite famil­iar to my younger self — a hope­ful, curi­ous guy who wants to know the answers but can do no more than uncov­er mys­ter­ies of greater magnitude.Readers rebuffed by its com­plex­i­ty might argue that GR's great­ness is a col­lec­tive delu­sion of the few read­ers will­ing to endure the pun­ish­ment, the end­less parade of biz­zare­ly-named char­ac­ters, the nar­ra­tive digres­sions lead­ing to fur­ther digres­sions that ulti­mate­ly become the nar­ra­tive, the prob­lem of the pro­tag­o­nist dis­ap­pear­ing some­where around page 500 — the list goes on. To them I say this: You real­ly need to make it to the end to under­stand. Bet­ter yet, don't expect to real­ly under­stand any­thing. Then you'll be ready to start. 

  • Book­fo­rum: "Pyn­chon from A to V."