Archives for October 29, 2007

Baseball is done for the season — sad, but also a relief as it had become like a vortex that sucked three to four hours out of each day. A side observation: If you’re a writer who struggles with titles (“‘Smoke.’ No, wait: ‘Revelation.’“), you might want to turn on a game. Over the past few weeks I noticed that good novel titles were just tripping off the tongues of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver (particularly McCarver’s), and I began to wonder if generating novel titles is perhaps a natural gift of sports broadcasters, one that waits to be tapped by arty America.
Admittedly, Buck and McCarver’s titles are a little repetitive in construction, but they show a good sense of the commercial market, and, if you’re really blocked, Joe and Tim are even kind enough to sketch out a rough storyline that could be used as a starter to get you typing. Thanks to them, I now have an idea for a ranging baseball trilogy, along the lines of William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle, composed of these titles:
• The Wildness of Fausto Carmona: A Thorn Birds-y saga of innocence lost at the ALCS.
• The Free Spirit of Jonathan Papelbon: They tried to tame him. They failed.
• The Unpredictable Strike Zone of Chuck Meriweather: A heavily philosophical novel, almost Eastern European in tone, exposing a universe where a capricious god rules from behind the plate.
I haven’t yet watched a football game with this theory in mind, but I’m looking forward to hearing what novel titles Madden comes up with. With Vitale, of course, all you’d get is Diaper Dandy and everyone knows Dick Lit doesn’t sell.

I flew back from Smalltown, U.S.A., on Saturday night, and was reunited with Mrs. T (whom I hadn’t seen since our honeymoon, arrgh) shortly thereafter. This afternoon I’m headed for Washington, D.C., the last in a more or less nonstop series of out-of-town trips that got underway two days after our wedding.
I like travel, especially when I get to see good shows on the road, but right now I’m so tired of living out of a suitcase that I could just…well, unpack. I’m equally tired of blogging in departure lounges, writing columns in hotel rooms, and reading review copies on airplanes. I’m not exactly a homebody–I actually get a kick out of staying in hotels–but I miss sitting on my couch and looking at the art on the walls. I miss sitting in my nice black Eames chair and listening to mp3 files on my Bose speakers as I click away at my MacBook. I miss popping over to Good Enough to Eat in between deadlines. I miss Central Park. I even miss my gym.
Alas, I’m going to have to keep on missing these things until Friday night, for I have to attend a meeting of the National Council on the Arts in Washington. The good news, however, is as follows:
• Mrs. T has recovered from her virus and will be accompanying me.
• I’ll be taking her to the Phillips Collection (it’s her first visit!) and the National Gallery (we’re going to look at the Turner and Hopper retrospectives) in between NCA sessions.
• Ms. Asymmetrical Information, whom we last saw at the wedding, is throwing us a small dinner party.
Would I rather stay at home–or, better yet, in Connecticut, eating Mrs. T’s cooking and working on my Louis Armstrong book? You bet. But since we’ve got to go, we’re going to make the most of it, after which I plan to stay in New York for two whole weeks.
More as it happens….

“Do you happen to know the year when your father was born?” I asked my mother the other day.

“No, I don’t,” she said after a moment’s thought. We then spent the next half-hour sifting through various stacks of papers in a vain attempt to pin down the date. My guess, though, is that he must have been born some time around 1900, since my mother, the fourth of six siblings, was born in 1929.

Here are some other things that happened in 1900:

• William McKinley was elected to a second term as president of the United States. (He beat William Jennings Bryan.)

• Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Sullivan died.

• Aaron Copland and the Ayatollah Khomeini were born.

• Carrie Nation smashed up twenty-five saloons.

• Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams.

• Joseph Conrad published Lord Jim.

• Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca was premiered in Rome.

• Kodak introduced the Brownie, the first hand-held camera.

• Construction began on the New York subway system.

My mother’s life, in short, is a bridge between two profoundly, almost unimaginably different worlds. A child of the Great Depression, she was raised on a farm and baptized in a river, and has lived long enough to watch me talk on a computer screen, though she’s never owned a computer of her own. Cake mixes and air conditioning are more her speed. The most recent inventions of any significance that she embraced wholeheartedly were the answering machine, the ATM, and the VCR. (She has a DVD player but never uses it.)

I suppose we all reach a moment in our lives when we lose interest in the new, and I suspect that moment comes sooner for technology than for art. For now I seem to be staying fairly open to new things–my experience as a blogger suggests as much–but I have yet to send my first text message, nor does my somewhat superannuated cellphone contain a digital camera. On the increasingly rare occasions when I feel the need to take a picture of something, I buy a disposable film camera, the postmodern equivalent of a Brownie, at the corner drugstore.

I have, alas, no children to take pictures of, but I do have a nineteen-year-old niece, and I wonder whether her offspring (assuming that she has children and that my life overlaps with theirs) will be no less bemused to recall that they once met a man who was born in the same year that Elvis Presley recorded “Heartbreak Hotel.” Somehow I doubt it, and it’s by no means certain that they’ll remember anything about me at all. My mother’s father, after all, died when I was six years old, and I have only the vaguest and most shadowy memories of him. He played the banjo, but I never saw him do so, nor do I remember the sound of his voice. I wish I did, for my mother loved him very much and still speaks of him with a warmth undiminished by the passage of time.

Philip Larkin wrote a poem called An Arundel Tomb that reflects on such memories, and its last line often comes to my mind now that I’m middle-aged:What will survive of us is love. That is all that survives of Albert Crosno, my banjo-playing maternal grandfather: love, three living children, and a few faded photographs. I can think of worse legacies.

“Reading is rapture (or if it isn’t, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). A felicitously turned sentence can induce it. Or a description. Or unexpected behavior. Or ordinary behavior raised to the nth degree. Or intolerable suspense, as with the second half of Conrad’s Victory. Or the forward movement of prose that is bent only on saying what the writer has to say. Or dialogue that carries with it the unconscious flowering of character. Or, sometimes, a fact.”
William Maxwell, The Outermost Dream (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)