Month: July 2003

At around eleven o’clock this morning, my novel began its trek eastward to New York City to find its fortune. Of course, it’s only a portion-and-outline and not an entire manuscript, but I’m thinking that the lack of flab compared with all the other full manuscripts out there will help it stand out.

As the envelope containing the three chapters and outline hit the bottom of the mail basket, sporting its spiffy new postage label, its contents could be heard distinctly singing: “If I can make it there, I’m gonna make it anywhere….”, until a pile of pithy greeting cards were dumped on top of it, each of them saying, “Shut up, you.”

It’s a hard life, I guess, being a manuscript…but even as I send him out into the cold, cruel world, I take solace in the fact that at least he’s not just a bill.

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Holy Crap!

In writing the sports-related post below, I indulged in a bit of comic-book trivia hipness, and I had to go look for a link to support it. In so doing, I came across www.marveldirectory.com, which is apparently exactly what the name suggests: an online version of those grand old Official Guide to the Marvel Universe comics. I haven’t done much digging here — well, none at all, actually — but it’s just gotta be cool. Check it out!

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Sports stuff:

:: Ah, July….when ballparks across the nation are alive with the sound of the grilling of hot dogs, the crack of bats, the creaking of thirty-six year old relievers’ knees, and….the Pittsburgh Pirates having a fire sale. Come one, come all!

Peter Gammons says it’s not so much a firesale as coming to grips with a failed rebuilding project, and maybe he’s right, but this is getting pretty frustrating, nonetheless. Since 1993 this is, by my count, the third failed rebuilding undertaken by the Pirates, and this is the one that was supposed to work — a new park last year and solid, young players coming of age were suppose to add to a run at .500 this year. Instead, the Pirates once again return from the All-Star Break to play out the string. (Gammons also identifies owner Kevin McClatchy as the Pirates’ General Manager, which is odd considering that the actual GM’s picture — Dave Littlefield — appears right next to the graf in question.)

:: Ah, July….when college athletic fields across the nation are alive with the sound of NFL players enduring the dreaded two-a-days, except the ones smart enough to hold out until after two-a-days are over. (“Two-a-days” refers to the early days of training camps, when practices are held twice daily. They are dreaded by players.) I won’t be doing my second annual NFL Preview Post until much closer to the actual start of the regular season, but still — it’s getting closer, baby! News on the NFL’s proudest franchise, the Buffalo Bills, can be found here. Go Bills!

(By the way, one of the many new faces this year is defensive line coach Tim Krumrie, whom I remember for his godawful injury in Super Bowl XXIII, when he played for the Bengals. This was one of those Joe Theismann-like leg breakings, where the extremity bends in a direction that would be painful for Reed Richards, and of course is replayed over-and-over by the network….)

:: In a column extolling the wonderment that is Lance Armstrong (AOL exclusive, so I can’t link it, sadly), sports writer John Feinstein makes this larger point:

Those who mock bike racing and claim it is somehow not a “real” sport should try someday to ride a bike straight up a mountain in searing heat for 100 miles or so. Beyond that, there’s simply no need for those who aren’t fans of the sport to mock it or attempt to belittle it.

The constant bickering among sports fans about which sport is better or tougher or more dramatic strikes me as silly. Every sport has a niche and a component to it that draws those who love it to care about it. I don’t pretend to understand cricket, but seeing the passion of those who do, I respect the passion and understand enough to know that to play it at the highest level takes great skill.

The flip side of the argument is that it is equally foolish for those who do love a sport to put down those who don’t. If you love soccer and see beauty and artistry in a 0-0 tie, that’s wonderful. But to claim that those who don’t see the game the same way as you are somehow inferior makes no sense at all.

Indeed.

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Brad DeLong looks about for a left-wing analogue to Andrew Sullivan, in terms of disconnect with reality, and comes up with…Noam Chomsky. Now, I’m not nearly familiar enough with Chomsky to know if this is a good comparison, but that in itself strikes me as interesting. I’m not the most active leftist out there, but I’m reasonably informed, and yet I have absolutely no idea where I’d go if I wanted to read Chomsky’s regular political thinking, whereas Sullivan is quite easy to find. I don’t recall ever seeing Kevin Drum, Atrios, Matthew Yglesias, or any of the other left-wing biggies whom I read regularly cite a Chomsky essay or book, and I don’t see Chomsky’s name mentioned much on the op-ed page unless someone wants to throw his name out there as the standard far-left bogeyman. Just who is it that’s taking Chomsky so seriously, anyway?

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A couple of notes resulting from two recent posts over at Reflections in d minor:

:: Lynn gives several choice quotes from Sir Thomas Beecham, one of the finest orchestra conductors to ever come out of England. Beecham was one of those erudite wits who seem to breed like rabbits in England. I first read about Beecham in Harold Schonberg’s book The Great Conductors (now out of print, I believe), and two of the Beecham quotes related by Schonberg have stayed with me years after reading that book.

To a trombone player Beecham suspected of lackadaisical effort: “Are you certain that you are producing as much sound as is possible from that piece of antiquated plumbing which you are applying to your face?”

And to a tenor while rehearsing an operatic love-making scene: “Observing your grave, deliberate motions, I am reminded of that quintessential quadruped, the hedgehog.”

:: Lynn also points to an article denoting the stages of classical music collecting. These stages really do exist – – I’ve had to explain to other people just why I own five different recordings of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, for example – – and it certainly is true that after you spend a number of years exploring music far and wide, you do return to the Beethoven symphonies or the Bach Masses or the Mozart concertos or the Strauss tone poems and recognize them anew for the works of genius they are.

What differentiates some collectors, in my view, is how willing they are to roam afield. Some classical collectors will pretty much stick to the Germanic symphonic tradition, and restrict their “roaming afield” to lesser works by the greats in that one tradition. Others will take in more – – adding the Russian Nationalist tradition, or the English tradition, or French Impressionism, or twentieth century serialism, and so on. Still others will divulge even farther afield, taking in film music as well, and trying to come to grips with that genre’s peculiar set of demands and constraints. Or you can note the rise of nationalism in classical music, and delve therefore into the folk and native traditions on which the nationalist schools are based, thus coming to study Celtic and world music. And then one can leave Western cultures entirely, and take in the fascinating world of Asian classical music as well. Or one can move forward instead of backward, and see how Celtic music has influenced American folk music, and then country and rock in turn.

Many collectors tend to be insular, deciding that once they’ve reached a certain point, they’re happy to set up their boundaries and stay within them, achieving a depth of familiarity with a relatively small number of works. Others take a much wider approach, preferring to know a smattering about a wide variety of music. Both approaches work, and it’s a shame that often members of each camp will look down on the other.

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It’s that time again: FilmWise has some new quizzes up. I plug this site every few months, because it’s just so much fun!

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Out of Lascaux should be back to normal posting, I assume, now that Alexandra’s done with her math test. But reading her update, just the phrase “Factoring of polynomials” is enough to send me into shivers. My high school algebra teacher was a nice guy, and he really was a pretty good teacher. But he had one odd failing that manifested when I choked on polynomials at the outset: he assumed that my sudden tanking on a couple of tests meant that I wasn’t doing the homework, and proceeded to impose a daily checking of my homework under threat of detention if it wasn’t done. I had been doing it, but for me, polynomials were one of those things that upon first encounter is rather like Roy Neary’s first encounter with the alien spaceship in Close Encounters, without the sunburn on the right side of my face. It was his personal attention and help with the subject that got me up to speed (and once I got there, I was fine), not his Draconian “You’re a slacker!” bit.

I’m not sure I had a point here, but there it is. I report, you decide, if you haven’t nodded off first.

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Somehow I totally missed this, but congratulations to Yar on the occasion of his successful spawning. (Actually, his wife probably had more to do with it.)

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Bob Hope was never much on my radar screen, for some reason. I haven’t seen any of his movies (strange, since my parents have always loved Bing Crosby), and when he was on TV with regular specials, he never made much of an impression on me. But still, it’s sad to see him go.

(I learned of Hope’s passing on The Today Show this morning, when the guy who did the news headlines — not Matt Lauer or Al Roker, but some other guy who’s been on NBC for a while but whose name I can never recall — suddenly said, “We’re just learning that Bob Hope is dead. We’ll have details later on.” Cut to commercial. I don’t know — I understand why they did it this way, but it just seems a tad heartless, you know?)

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Joseph Duemer has some neat photos posted of doors in Hanoi. That’s right, doors. And they’re beautiful.

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