- If cursory glances at MSNBC headline tickers on the flight over are anything to go by, the Judeo-Christian world seems to be up in arms with Rosie O’Donnell and Cindy Sheehan. Given the relatively ridiculous nature of both figures, I hope you’ll pardon my own similarly pedantic concerns with Giants pitcher Armando Benitez, who deserves a serious reaming for last night’s abysmal performance. The man blew a potential twelfth inning victory over the Mets by serving up not one, but two balks. I watched this game, wondering if I might be easily converted from the Giants to the Mets through this rather uncanny propinquity of two teams playing for two towns I’m currently more or less in between. Alas, I learned that a Giants partisanship is a difficult personal persuasion to shake. The median arrogance expressed by certain Mets players, which outdid even Barry Bonds’ strut and swagger, dissuaded me, as did the Giants’ fantastic field work. If one is to choose a relatively trivial topic to become obsessed with, well then I choose baseball. Bluster from the likes of Rosie O’Donnell is predictably and unfathomably one-note. When one considers that Rosie O’Donnell’s career has essentially been predicated upon a shaky talent for chatting and bluster, one wonders why anyone would pay millions of dollars to provide such “entertainment” to the masses. It’s almost as bad as paying out a few million to a hothead kid who wants to play ball.
- Carolyn Kellogg cracks the LATBR.
- The Best Novels You’ve Never Read. My own picks (if we’re talking the last ten years) is Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish and Rupert Thomson’s The Book of Revelation.
- If you can get past Silverblatt, he’s talked with John Banville.
- Speaking of literary interview craziness, the Segundo backlog stands at around fourteen, including a special two-parter and all the APE nonsense. And I haven’t even started with BEA. Please bear with me. I sent off the last of about thirty boxes to FedEx yesterday.
- I guess nobody told Gabriel Garcia Marquez that you can’t go home again.
- I could care less whether Peter Carey’s Theft is a thinly veiled attack on his wife or not. Shouldn’t the bigger question be whether or not it’s a good book?
- Lots of Pessl discussion at Callie’s.
- Also, far too much information for me to sort through. Will try for another roundup later. BEA reports are forthcoming tomorrow!
Roundup
– May 30, 2007Posted in: Roundup
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
Whoa whoa whoa … Jose Reyes managed to actually *force* a game-losing balk, and you are not amazingly impressed? Arrogant, sure … because they earn it with resourceful stuff like this.
I like the pictures of the article in El Tiempo better:
http://www.eltiempo.com/cultura/2007-05-30/ARTICULO-WEB-NOTA_INTERIOR-3576287.html
It’s a much more gleeful story down here…nothing dour or business-as-usual about it. (There were even yellow butterflies painted on the train…people were happily waving from the windows… It was a marvelous sight. )
I’m not sure any team carrying Barry Bonds can complain re: the arrogance or questionable game play of others.
True on Bonds. He is a ridiculous although necessary presence. I suppose it as Levi suggest: transferring arrogance factors in one team to arrogance factors in another.
I would go as far as saying that his decade plus of being a basic jerk has rendered his chase, steroids or no, a non-event in the eyes of many. Anyway, back to literature.