Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.
by Edward Champion

The Bonds Scenario

I’ve been torn on the whole Barry Bonds thing, because I feel that I have been conned and that I’ve known all along that I’ve been conned and that the only way to go about getting excited about baseball was to remain hoodwinked. Because this sort of thing comes with the territory when we talk baseball. Bonds’s achievement is anticlimactic, because we all know that he was going to do it. Yes, I’m a Giants fan and I tried to see as many games as I could. And while I could not accept Bonds’s hubris through a television, I somehow found myself chanting “Barry!” with the fans in the bleachers every time I saw his lumbering presence in left field. Because let’s face the facts. The Giants need a blustering presence like Bonds in order to matter.

But since 756 was caught by a Mets fan, and since I have spent the past two months attempting to shift my Giants allegiance over to the Mets, this has only confused matters. On the plane ride over, my peremptory pilgrimage from San Francisco to Brooklyn, no turning back, there was a game I was able to access through the JetBlue LCD screen. They have those little teevees, you know. And since I don’t watch the boob tube, it was a bit of a luxury. Sure enough the Giants were up against the Mets. And Armando Benitez fucked up a perfectly good game by balking twice. Such horrendous mistakes like this were enough to maintain my Giants partisanship and accept the troubling enigma known as the San Francisco Giants.

But I felt nothing when I heard the news about Bonds. And I suppose my true feelings concerning plate armor and steroids came through in that moment. Perhaps it was distance from my former hometown. Or perhaps I finally recognized Bonds as a fraud of the first order.

I accepted Bonds because he reflected that dismaying corruption that rides like an apocalyptic horseman through San Francisco. If ever there was a batter who represented San Francisco’s strange duality, it was most certainly Bonds. He was the Gavin Newsom who schtupped his campaign manager’s honey. He was the Willie Brown who oozed with corruption. He was the drifter who managed to dupe an overly trusting city.

Not that you can’t find that kind of duplicity here in New York.

But I accepted Bonds because he was part of the team. He provided a rallying cry, a center of gravity. And before he signed that contract with the devil, he was a good player.

So I’m glad that Bonds has finally done this. Because it means I can restore my baseball partisanship to its default setting — which involves rooting for the hometeam.

Now I turn to the Mets. They’re the team for me. But I won’t be able to shake off the Giants so easily.

One thing’s for sure: the Los Angeles Dodgers are not to be applauded, celebrated, or regarded at all costs.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • James Wood has jumped ship from The New Republic to The New Yorker. Said Leon Wieseltier: “The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom The New Yorker can eventually staff itself.” This may be a wild stab in the dark, but I don’t think Wieseltier plans on tap dancing anytime soon over this.
  • So if the publishing industry is dying, why is Jane Friedman so convinced that it is “the healthiest I have seen it in a very long time?” HarperCollins has seen its annual revenue shift from $737 million to $1.3 billion. But how much of this comes from gutsy instincts? And how much of this comes from business consolidation? We’re not getting anything close to the whole story here. (via Written Nerd)
  • Richard Nash announces that there will be a brand new Donald Barthelme collection! Flying to America, containing 45 pieces of previously uncollected pieces, is coming. In the meantime, if you need a Barthelme primer or pick-me-up, Jessamyn West’s page is a good start.
  • Michael Blowhard has some significant beefs with tables of contents in magazines. But if you want to talk about labyrinths contained within magazines, let’s talk about all those goddam ads you have to flip through to get to the TOC page. I’ve often found myself flipping through about forty to fifty pages of ads just to find the TOC. To add insult to injury, the TOC is often staggered across multiple pages without so much as a helpful notation as to where to find the second page. Which means something like this: TOC Page One, 12 pages of ads, TOC Page Two. And this is the seminal idea that Michael hasn’t considered. Magazines are now designed to be completely unnavigable for the reader. It is now almost impossible for a reader to not get lost within several pages of advertising. Thus, the marketing team can pride themselves on a design in which advertising comes first and content comes second. But the magazine design and navigation fails as a result. The advertisers are favored more than the readers, because they bring in more revenue for the magazine. (Or did you honestly think that all those cheap magazine subscriptions were pulling in most of the income?) In fact, the situation is so tilted in favor of the advertisers that it’s quite possible that magazines may very well be doing the work of advertising agencies. Which makes me wonder why we don’t just call the chief offenders “adazines” — a soporific drug compelling people to buy stuff they don’t need disguised as a journalistic endeavor.
  • Books are like a box of chocolates. You never know what lamebrain movie star you’re going to get. (via Romancing the Tome)
  • Sorry for failing to report this, but the Man Booker longlist is here, if you care. Normally, I’d get excited. But this is such a safe and predictable series of titles.
  • Dan Green offers a quasi-contrarian take on Jamestown.
  • 2006 Congressional revolution? Far from it. The Democrats are a bunch of weak-kneed lilies who represent the people’s interests as much as a Coca-Cola billboard. Pete Anderson has a list of the Demos who thought that busting up what little remains of civil liberties was a pretty nifty idea. The time has come to let these assclowns know that they must tread delicately or face repercussions from the people who elected them.
  • One of Levi’s major causes — hell, he brings the subject up every time I see him — has been the pricing disparity between hardcover and paperback. He’s now enlisting readers and bloggers to begin the discussion to end all discussions on this subject. So go over to Litkicks and feed him all sorts of info on the subject.
  • Jonathan Rosenbaum on Bergman. Not the tribute you were expecting. (via James Tata)
  • The San Francisco Chronicle has let loose a considerable number of journalists. (via Frances)