"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
The funniest book ever written is
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. It famously went to print-- in 1980-- eleven years after its author had committed suicide. Toole's mother, Thelma, had persistently pushed the completed manuscript upon another New Orleans writer, Walker Percy, and after inspiring him to find a publisher, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.
Its protagonist is like none other. In the foreward of the book, Percy calls Ignatius J. Reilly a "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one-- who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age." (People always quote this line, I believe, because the character is so difficult to adequately outline that its easier to stick with the first interpreter's description.) Ignatius loudly criticizes as perverse television programming aimed at youth, yet watches these programs every day without fail. Well educated and literate, he nevertheless lives slovenly at home with his mother, upon whom he is almost completely dependent. "I dust a bit," he tells a police officer. "In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip."
Confederacy has been been stuck in cinematic purgatory for decades, but may be at least coming to the stage. John Belushi, John Goodman, Chris Farley, John Candy, Will Ferrell, and Philip Seymour Hoffman were all linked to the starring role at one time, but in April, Nick Offerman took the role in "an industry-only reading of the project" in New York with an eye towards taking the story to Broadway. Zach Galifianakis, incidently, was the man born to play the part.
Here's a favorite passage of mine from
A Confederacy of Dunces. In this scene, Ignatius has stepped into a parking garage and samples a hot dog from a vendor.
"My," Ignatius said to the man after having taken his first bite. "These are rather strong. What are the ingredients in these?"
"Rubber, cereal, tripe. Who knows? I wouldn't touch one of them myself."
"They're curiously appealing," Ignatius said, clearing his throat. "I thought that the vibrissae about my nostrils detected something unique while I was standing outside."
Ignatius chewed with a blissful savagery, studying the scar on the man's nose and listening to his whistling.
"Do I hear a strain from Scarlatti?" Ignatius asked finally.
"I thought I was whistling 'Turkey in the Straw.'"
"I had hoped that you might be familiar with Scarlatti's work. He was the last of the musicians," Ignatius observed and resumed his furious attack upon the long hot dog. "With your apparent musical bent, you might apply yourself to something worthwhile."
Ignatius chewed while the man began his tuneless whistling again. Then he said, "I suspect that you imagine 'Turkey in the Straw' to be a valuable bit of Americana. Well, it is not. It is a discordant abomination."
"I can't see that it matters much."
"It matters a great deal, sir!" Ignatius screamed. "Veneration of such things as 'Turkey in the Straw' is at the very root of our current dilemma."
"Where the hell do you come from? Whadda you want?"
"What is your opinion of a society that considers 'Turkey in the Straw' to be one of the pillars, as it were, of its culture?"
"Who thinks that?" the old man asked worriedly.
"Everyone! Especially folksingers and third-grade teachers. Grimy undergraduates and grammar school children are always chanting it like sorcerers," Ignatius belched. "I do believe that I shall have another of these savories."
After his fourth hot dog, Ignatius ran his magnificent pink tongue around his lips and up over his moustache and said to the old man, "I cannot recently remember having been so totally satisfied. I was fortunate to find this place. Before me lies a day fraught with God knows what horrors. I am at the moment unemployed and have been launched upon a quest for work. However, I might as well have had the Grail set as my goal. I have been rocketing about the business district for a week now. Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today's employer is seeking."
A statue of the fictitious Ignatius stands today in the 800 block of
Canal Street in New Orleans, outside the former D. H. Holmes department
store, which stood during the time the story is depicted in the early
'60s and beside which Ignatius "(studies) the crowd of people for signs
of bad taste in dress" and nearly gets arrested during the novel's opening
chapter. In bronze, Ignatius still scowls disapproving at passersby,
and the Chateau Bourbon hotel takes him down each year during the
Carnival celebration to avoid damage by drunk and disorderly pedestrians
of whom Ignatius would no doubt disapprove.
The 'F' word
St. Louis Cardinals fans are an increasing unpopular group. They're generally considered baseball's best fans, routinely voted as such by all sorts of separate populations (players, sportswriters, fans, etc.) as the game's most dedicated and informed. And we're not modest about owning the claims. As the franchise enjoys more success on the field (last year's league pennant was its fourth in a decade, and the team finished within a combined three games of two more), that general feeling of public love that the organization and its fans have for
each other starts to grate.
I'm told.
Milwaukee Brewers Jonathan Lucroy, flavor of the month in the championship-starved city of his employment, along with his team,
released a video last week promoting the backstop's candidacy for the National League All-Star team ahead of Cardinals catcher- and field general-- Yadier Molina. The video, inspired by the mudslinging political ads on TV that we're all familiar with, and that make us weep for the dream of a better America, features both a crying baby (spooled over an image of Molina) and a voice message promoting the fact that Lucroy "does not play for the St. Louis Cardinals." It caps with Lucroy stating off-camera, "I approve this message." Not funny exactly, but maybe
baseball funny. Like when an announcer says to another, "When
you played, the hide of the ball was still a horse."
Anyway, I'm not here to make the case that Cardinals fans are the
best fans. I'm here to make the case that Cardinals fans are, in a sense, the
only fans. Because, you see, I believe the Cardinals organization should feel a sense of proprietorship over the word "fans." We invented it.
In 1883, a gentleman manager for the old St. Louis Brown Stockings named Timothy Paul "Ted" Sullivan, from County Clare in the old country, coined the phrase. The Browns were the forerunner of the Cardinals in a circuit known as the American Association. Their revival of the game in Mound City during that decade created the recipe for a new breed of addicts. According to Edward Achorn's marvelous book "The Summer of Beer and Whiskey" (2013), Sullivan encountered a man hanging around the club's downtown headquarters one day that spring eager to show the baseballer that he "knew every player in the country with a record of 90 in the shade and 1,000 in the sun." According to Sullivan, "he gave his opinion on all matters pertaining to ball. There was no player but he had a personal acquaintance with." (Sounds like some of my fellow Cards rooters today.)
When the man left the office, Sullivan asked his coworkers, "What name could you apply to such a fiend as that?... He is a fanatic." He then shortened it to "fan," and whenever that same gentleman was seen at headquarters, or around the Browns' park on Grand Avenue on the city's west side, "the boys would say 'the fan' is around again."
It would be the turn of the century until the word fully caught on around the country, emerging, as they say, as an "Americanism." Until then, the preferred word continued to be "crank," and even "fanatic," which is rarely used in the sports context today and mostly reserved for people who violate the prevailing social norms. (Beyond a simple eccentricity.) By the dawn of the 20th century, the Browns were eight-year, merged members of the National League. In the spring of 1899, after short stints as the "Maroons" and "Perfectos," they had adopted the name "Cardinals," which has also sort of caught on, when you think about it.
So, in a way, we're really sharing the word with the rest of you. If it weren't for us, you would probably still be satisfied with "cranks," or "rooters," or maybe "supporters," as it is with a politician or political party and
used to be for the game of baseball when it was still almost exclusively a club sport. Today, there would be no Yankees
fans, no Cubs
fans, no Jonathan Lucroy
fans. No Steelers or Cowboys
fans. No
fans of soccer
or futbol
. Hell, there would be no Star Wars
fans, no Beatles
fans. There would be no such thing as a "fandom," as "fan fiction" or "fan art," and there would be some really lonely "fan clubs."
Sullivan's Brownie boss Chris Von der Ahe, a German immigrant and a larger-than-life figure who owned a prosperous grocery and Biergarten in St. Louis in addition to the ballclub, introduced two major concepts: beer at a baseball game and the idea of Sunday games (there was major opposition to both at the time), so that same 1880's club is collectively responsible not only for two of the elements we love most about sports-- suds and one of the best days of the week to enjoy the experience-- but it also provided the common-usage name for the loyalists that keep our entertainment industries so prosperous and influential in the English-speaking world.
You're welcome.
The Art of Hitting
Pictured: Tony Gwynn, during a Sporting News photo shoot with Stan Musial (foreground), 1997
I remember hearing that Tony Gwynn was ill. I think. He has been out of the baseball spotlight, privately battling cancer in his cheek, and it sounds as if he didn't have an easy go of it. He died early this morning after that four-year battle. The world's greatest
Padre died an hour after Father's Day at the age of 54.
Tony Gwynn filled a definitive role in baseball during the 1980s and '90s. Base hit machine. The high-average guy, singles and doubles. Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Rogers Hornsby, Stan Musial, Pete Rose, George Brett, Wade Boggs. There's a lineage. He was that guy of his generation that
might hit .400 this year.
If anybody playing today can do it, it's Gwynn in San Diego. The older he grew, the heavier he got, which didn't seem to slow down his swing, and which made him even more likeable perhaps to the fans and the sportswriters, more relatable--you know, the way we all have this idea in our head that any average Joe could succeed in baseball, yet somehow
almost 100% of us don't.
I came to appreciate Gwynn's extraordinary hitting talent in an usual way late in his career. With a baseball board game called APBA (American Professional Baseball Association), I replayed the 1987 National League season "on dice." I only recast the Cardinals games, but after each one, I would enter the statistics from the other five games as well from that date in N.L. history, sourcing the original box scores from back issues of The Sporting News. What did
you do for fun in college?
Gwynn was the premiere hitter in the league, for my money, in '87. It was a year in which he batted .370 (incidentally, only the third-highest single-season mark of his career). He won his second of what would later be
eight National League batting titles. Eight being one more than even Musial, a man to whom he has often been compared, in the batter's box and in life. Reviewing those numbers night-by-night, game-by-game, makes you appreciate how baseball differs from every other sport in the way that it rewards daily devotion. The numbers need time to compile. To simmer. A .338 lifetime batting average over 20 seasons and 9,288 at-bats is no joke. Tony could have kept playing beyond his last season, 2001, gone oh-for-his-next-1,182 and still finished above .300 for his career.
Major League Baseball doesn't have a player like Gwynn around anymore, a guy that you can count on to hit .350 in a good year, .315 in the down years-- never lower than that, and never striking out more than 40 times over the six-month marathon. For that, I blame the destruction of that figurative wall that separated the two leagues in style and substance for decades. The American League is still the American League, but now the National League is too. Middle infielders in both leagues swing for the porch and might strike out 150+ times over a summer. Tony had eight seasons-- six in a row-- in which he struck out fewer than 20 times. Ninety-seven active Major League hitters struck out 20 times--
last month!
In the day, it wasn't uncommon for a National League batter
in the three hole to double fewer than 30 times in a year, triple 15 times, and knock fewer than ten out of the park. A fat guy with bad knees-- like Tony Gwynn-- might steal 30 bases. And these men I'm describing never once were penciled in at that prostitute and counterfeit field "position" known as the "designated hitter."
Tony's death makes me long for the 1980s. It was the best decade in baseball history during which to grow up. I'm convinced of that. There was extraordinary parity between teams. The World Series were epic, serving up Fernando Valenzuela, Kirk Gibson, Don Denkinger, Bill Buckner, and then Kirk Gibson again. The playoffs weren't watered down then, but they added to the drama, and the division alignment protected the pennant races. The best players were the best guys, the smartest guys, the most entertaining personalities-- Gwynn, Brett, Rose, Ricky Henderson, Robin Yount, Cal Ripken, Ryne Sandberg, Ozzie Smith. They were quite literally franchise-defining players.
Gwynn was that and more--
unquestionably he is "Mr. Padre" to this day. "Mr. San Diego," even. He played for the team during both of its World Series appearances, 14 years apart. Combined, the Padres lost eight of the nine Series games, but Gwynn hit .371 for those nine games. Naturally.
He registered 94 career at-bats against that other historical curiosity of his generation, Greg Maddux, and racked up 39 hits against him. That's a .415 clip. Maddux struck out 3,371 batters during his career. Tony Gwynn wasn't one of them. Not in 107 plate appearances. Maddux only faced eight batters in his career more often than he faced Gwynn.
Maddux joins Gwynn in the National Baseball Hall of Fame this summer. Upon the announcement of such back in January, Maddux posited that his success on the pitcher's mound was based on the premise that each hitter can be tricked by the speed of a pitch. "Helpless," he explained of them, "limited by human vision... except for that fucking Tony Gwynn."
What I've been thinking
I'm close to despondency on matters related to American politics. The meter doesn't even move these days on radical political action. Let's just say that it's shaping up to be something less than a replay of the Summer of Love. The Supreme Court is dismantling nearly every political achievement of the last century that the United States of America can be justly proud of. Obama is running out the clock, a victim of the dishonest posing of his opponents on the right and his own lack of imagination. His presidency has slipped activists into an outright coma. Republicans-- those not too embarrassed to count themselves as such-- are nothing now but a gaggle of Randian cultists. The prospect of a Democratic Party primary cycle over the next two years with only Hillary Clinton and her husband's penis on the ballot is about as appetizing as a skinny-dip in an Indonesian river. Or reading Hillary's book.
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I like
Orange is the New Black just fine, but it borrows
a lot from the show
Oz structurally and thematically-- the entry character for white, middle-class viewers (above), homosexuality, race, religion. The parallels deserve some recognition
. I hear and read raves over
Orange, and I'm positively certain that almost none of these people (Facebook friends, this is you) have seen a single episode of its prison-set predecessor of the 1990s. I'm just saying that, if they had, the definitive "it" show of this moment would not seem quite so ground-breaking.
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I'm still waiting for William and Kate to renounce their thrones. I guess they really like the attention.
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And now the deal is off again
. Donald Sterling is such a drama queen.
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I've got nothing against Britney Spears really. But
a "role model" for single working mothers is a single working mother that goes to work even though she has a job that is
not fun.
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I don't want to say that I've been ignoring professional golf, but I saw a story this week in USA Today about Payne Stewart, and I wondered to myself: Is a guy like that still on the regular tour or retired by now to the senior tour? The story revealed that he's been dead since 1999.
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USA Today is still going though.
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This is my laziest title ever. I really hate writing them. I should just use the date of the post. Or name them like hurricanes.
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Here's the late Bob Welch striking out Reggie Jackson to end Game 2 of the 1978 World Series. Nothing but fastballs and Reggie was overpowered with each one. Welch is not mixing in cripple pitches like Dennis Eckersley did to Kirk Gibson, or Mark Wohlers did to Jim Leyritz. More guys should do that. Hitting a moving baseball is plenty hard.
All sports are not created equal
Baseball has always marched to the beat of its own drummer, a dazzling masterpiece of original invention in a world of homogenized athletic competition. Football, basketball, hockey, and soccer-- even polo, dry and wet-- are all variations of a game I like to call "defend the goal," each with its own rigidly drawn dimensions and each complete with its own version of an "offsides" penalty born of necessity. With these inferior and shockingly-similar sports, you've got your "defend the goal" played only with feet, the one exclusive to giants, the one played on ice, and the one where the competitors dress up like gladiators and give each other brain-killing headaches. Baseball does its own thing. It's characteristics entirely unique, the dimensions of its action, to the spectators, only as limited as the strength and talent of its participants.
Baseball, also distinctive by its "home and away" rule differences and the tradition of a mid-game sing-along by the fans, lays claim to the superiority of its weather as well. In the United States, the professional seasons of football, basketball, and hockey end at absurd times. (I'm not sure when the soccer season s
tarts or
ends.) Football wraps at the beginning of February, when outdoor activity
of any kind is out of the question for half the hemisphere. Your Josefina Average Fan is stuck inside her house, with nothing else to do, which helps greatly, admittedly, in boosting television ratings for football's "Big Game," but makes a neutral, temperate climate necessary for the championship. Hockey and basketball both wrap their seasons in June, which is equally ridiculous. Who wants to be sitting in an ice box-- or even indoors for that matter-- when summer comes calling north of the equator?
The story of the week in American sports was Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Thursday. The air conditioning conked out at
NSA Arena in San Antonio, fans sat in thorough discomfort, children cried, and superstar LeBron James (picture above) took off most of the fourth quarter complaining of cramps. If the Finals were held in April, as they should be, the temperature at center court likely would have been quite balmy, air conditioning or not. The very concept of a live sporting event-- good health, good spirit, and all that-- should act in opposition to the burning of fossil fuels.
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My entertainment bookends for this weekend were the movie
A Million Ways to Die in the West and the television series finale of FOX's
Cosmos. Completely disparate, both thoroughly enjoyable, both delivered to us by a unique talent named Seth MacFarlane. The movie was funny, and the TV show as epic. Bravo, Seth.
War and larceny
The Bowe Bergdahl controversy is a tailor-made one for the chicken hawks. Those that have never served, like Sarah Palin and Mike Rogers, can freely criticize Bergdahl for reportedly "going AWOL" before his capture by the Taliban when they never faced the horrors of war themselves. They can criticize the president for "negotiating with terrorists" in trading for Bergdahl's release, when we know they would be criticizing him just as loudly and pointedly if he had "left
this American behind." They can criticize Bergdahl for statements he reportedly made condemning America's war policy-- even the ones he made on video after he was captured by the Taliban-- hoping they can blur the line between what was real and what was coerced. Allen West can criticize the negotiations and demand that the president be impeached, but he was released from military duty himself charged with violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Bergdahl's desertion, if true, did not cause the deaths of eight U.S. soldiers, as some of his former platoon-mates contend. The
War on Afghanistan caused the death of those soldiers. I give Obama credit here for negotiating the release of this brave soldier as the president's war winds (too slowly) to a close. From a practical standpoint, I commend the
details of the swap. I think we fleeced 'em. For Bergdahl, Obama traded five "terrorists" that aren't really terrorists. If Guantanamo prisoners were really terrorists, they would get trials.
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Happy Primary Day, Iowans. This is the designated time every two years in which state taxpayers foot the bill for the Republican and Democratic Parties' candidate selection process. (The average cost of these elections, per state, per cycle, is $33 million.) Since you have to switch your voter registration from Independent, Green, or Libertarian to Democrat or Republican to participate (in Iowa), the fix is most definitely in. It's certainly unconstitutional, and probably unlawful. Unaffiliated citizens are basically ponying up to promote the reality that the Oligarchy is now-- and may
forever be-- their only electoral choice. You won't catch me participating. To borrow from Philip Berrigan - If voting made any difference, it would be illegal.
