YPTR has one hell of a scoop on a recent Michael Chabon appearance in Denver.
Year / 2005
Excerpt from Jose Canseco’s New Book “Bright Lights, Big Baseball Stadium”
You can knock any ball out of the park. But you look at your biceps and you see that they’re lacking. You want muscles, the same way that young teenage girls want personal shoppers. You had a personal shopper once, but she didn’t like it when you ran around Saks Fifth Avenue with your shirt off.
So it’s come to this. Hank and his secret stash. You stop studying your credit card statements. You look at the needle and you stick it in your arm and you feel your muscles expanding. You know that you’re a better baseball player, a better man, and that you can stop anyone’s heartbeat with a single thought.
You’re unstoppable, kid. Who cares if you’re growing older?
Your friends think you’re out of control. But the nice thing about steroids is that you can get new friends. Glitzy people who will nod their head and tell you that your deltoid muscles are the Eighth Wonder of the World. And the locker room groupies arrive more frequently. You feel impotent, but you don’t care. They’re caught in the moment. And besides there’s that penis pump you borrowed from Number 34.
Steroids will cure disease. Steroids are your true compadre. Good thing you can operate as an athlete. Because the last thing you need is some bullshit allegation that you’re not a team player.
I Should Probably Sleep, But…
- While we’d never expect USA Today to give us a call (we’d probably spend most of the time making fun of the infographs), we’re nevertheless delighted to see some of our favorite blogs get recognition.
- And speaking of newspapers, we’re still wondering how the folks at the Scotsman find their fey subjects. A recent profile chronicles Francis Ellen, an author who has created a novel with music performed by the characters. The Samplist is expected to launch at the London Book Fair and a CD tie-in will feature a computer-generated, counterfeit piano piece.
- Sarah Crompton wonders if anybody’s going to say anything bad about Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Saturday. Give it time, Sarah. Give it time. The minute Leon Wieseltier, Joe Queenan or Dale Peck get their grubby little hands on it, the reviews are almost certain to tip into the sensational. I suspect it’s a Yank thing.
- We’d be terribly remiss if we didn’t remind folks that The Collected Stories of Carol Shields are now available, with an introduction by Margaret Atwood. In other Shields news, her daughters say that they learned a good deal about their mother working on their respective projects. (In Anne Giardini’s case, it’s a first novel.)
- The word that appears the most in Birnbaum’s latest, an interview with Eva Hoffman: passport.
Formula for Dependable Novel: Gangbangs by Chapter Five
The incomparable Ms. Breslin, who has been posting portions of her novel, Porn Happy, over the past few months, has channeled her inner Gerard Jones and chronicled the history of getting this puppy published. Among some of the changes:
Last weekend, I reorganized the first fifty pages–again. I reorchestrated it such that the gangbang scene is now the, shall we say, climax of the first fifty pages, and, frankly, that seems, well, far more fitting.
We’re waiting to see what’s on page 69.
And the Angst Goes to…
While Gil Cates is a terrible director (prima facie: Oh God, Book II) and a spotty producer of televised awards ceremonies, and while we wish to make it clear in almost every way that we are not, by and large, Gil Cates fans, we must applaud his efforts to cater to the basest audience impulses by publicly shaming Oscar nominees. Apparently, Cates’ plans involve having some of the nominees schlep on stage, whereby the winners will step forward while the runner-ups will be forced to stand in darkness.
Walter Murch is the strongest opponent of the plan: “To apply some kind of PMI (People magzine index) to the nominees and make this the criterion for whether they get to go onstage or not and speak to the Academy is disgraceful to the Academy.”
Murchie, love your work on Coppola’s films and your Touch of Evil restoration, but I got news for you, pal: The Oscars are all about PMI.
We applaud this in the most strenuous manner. Catfights, bad fashion decisions, crudely uttered stump speeches and televised spats are, after all, what the Oscars is all about. Affluent, well-coiffed and vacant-brained starlets pulling hissy fits when they aren’t LUVED by the Academy (a term, we might add, which has absolutely no educational or platonic value) are what we watch this silly ceremony for. Between this and Chris Rock hosting, Cates seems to be gearing us for a fantastic televised shitstorm.