The Man Who Blew It for Us
Shea Swaps Book Pick
Two days ago, Mr. Bryant thought to mock the good Mets fans within the litblogosphere. Oh, but what a difference a few days make! In light of the 13-0 win over the Marlins and the — *ahem* — LOSS of the Phillies against the Nationals yesterday, I’d say we have ourselves an interesting situation here. A very interesting situation indeed. As a result, Flushing Meadows has changed its book club selection:
[UPDATE: As of 2:00 PM on Sunday, things aren't looking very well. The Marlins are leading 7-1 against the Mets. The Nationals are losing 0-1 to the Phillies.]
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.
More Egregious Than a Balk
Troy Tulowitzki
Chipper Jones pops the ball. It looks like it’s going to be your garden-variety line drive. But Tulowitzki’s on it, rushing to second base before you can comprehend that he’s about to make the thirteenth unassisted triple play in baseball history. It’s that great leap of the arms to Edgar Renteria that gets me, flying forward like the dangling entrails of a muskrat punctured by an interstate semi. A balletic burst, the flicker of tendrils, just to get that improvised third out. It all goes down in a blink. It’s an Aristotlean plot structure unfolding in seconds. Renteria knows it. He stops in his tracks and Tulowitzki is simply too fast, too ambitious, too in the moment to not seize the nanosecond.
Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
