Bob Schwartz

Category: Literature

September 12, 2013

Are Presidential Comparisons Odious?

Lydgate - Horse, Sheep and Goose
Comparisons are odious.

This phrase, roughly meaning that comparing people and situations can be unhelpful and counterproductive, is centuries old. It is variously attributed, but as good a source as any seems to be medieval British writer John Lydgate. It comes from his poem The Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep (1436–37).

(For those concerned that this blog just makes stuff up, be assured that scholarly authorities have been consulted. Maura Nolan’s John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (2006) was not read in its 290-page entirety, but it was used. Consider this pertinent passage:

Lydgate’s debt to Gower in this passage is obvious; though he has clearly read both Isidore and Higden’s accounts (and possibly Bromyard’s as well), he takes from the Confessio Amantis the notion that the vagaries of Fortune constitute the lesson of the exemplum, a lesson he later directly applies to present-day rulers, ‘‘wise gouernours of euery londe and region’’ (65, lines 25–26). Note: Lydgate makes a similar point in ‘‘The Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep,’’ dated 1436–37 by Pearsall ( John Lydgate (1371–1449), 51), telling his readers that ‘‘thees emperours . . . with ther victories & triumphes’’ (lines 638–39) are subject to Fortune and fall. The political message is explicit: ‘‘Beth war, ye pryncis, your suggettis to despise’’ (line 643). See MacCracken, ed., Minor Poems of John Lydgate, part 2, 539–66)

(Please feel free to show off to your friends and colleagues who wonder if your liberal arts degree, if you have one, is worth anything. Knowing that “In the fifteenth century Lydgate was the most famous poet in England, filling commissions for the court, the aristocracy, and the guilds. He wrote for an elite London readership that was historically very small, but that saw itself as dominating the cultural life of the nation” should impress them.)

About Presidents and odious comparisons: In the many crises of his presidency, including the most recent, President Obama has endured more comparisons than perhaps any other President. Just in the past few days, we have heard about Woodrow Wilson, George W. Bush, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy, and in this very blog, Harry Truman.

Comparisons are natural for a few reasons. It is an office that has been held by a relatively small number of people over more than two centuries, and so how you do the job is defined as much by what others did as some sort of abstract definitions and expectations. There is also the flawed logic: the United States is the greatest country in the world, the President is the leader of the United States, therefore the President is the greatest leader in the world. At moments yes, but please check history, the sometimes impossibility of situations, and the nature of imperfection of all powerful humans. Finally, Obama is so unlikely, if not unlike any of his predecessors, that you almost want to jump to comparisons.

My best attempts to find out what the horse, sheep and goose were debating about six centuries ago, and what it has to do with comparisons, have come up empty. So I do have had to make this part up. If the debate was about which one is superior—whether a horse, sheep or goose is better—the answer is elusive and equivocal. This is in no way to cut the current President the slightest bit of slack, as readers of the blog already know. But the presidency is not a single job, even in more stable and simple times, which these are not. So compare away, but don’t let those comparisons obscure clear thinking and distract us with reveries (or lingering antipathies) about this leader or that. That would be odious, in a country and world with odium enough.

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August 13, 2013

Jane Austen To Be American Idol Judge

Jane Austen

Jane Austen is actually dead; has been for almost two centuries. Whether or not that would stop American Idol from circulating rumors about her possible addition to the ever-changing panel of judges is unknown.

There is a new Idol connection to one of the most popular of British authors. The headline from the Daily Mail:

Anonymous donor gives $150,000 to stop U.S. singer Kelly Clarkson buying Jane Austen ring and keep in the UK

An anonymous donor has handed a Jane Austen museum £100,000 so that it may try and buy one of the author’s rings back from U.S. singer Kelly Clarkson who wants to take it out of Britain.

Earlier this month, the British government placed a temporary export ban on the gold-and-turquoise ring in the hope that money could be found to keep it in Britain.

The Jane Austen’s House museum said it had raised £103,200 of the £152,450 asking price since launching a fundraising campaign on Friday, most of it from a single anonymous donation.

Clarkson, a big Austen fan who reportedly owns a first edition of Persuasion, was top bidder for the ring in a Sotheby’s auction. The museum appreciates that the attention of an adoring pop star will help further raise awareness of the already-trendy author (see the newly-released indie film Austenland). But it also bemoans how much of Austen’s legacy has already left Britain, and how little remains there.

Two of the many thoughts this sparks:

Is there an Austen-inspired Kelly Clarkson single or album in the offing? One can imagine tracks inspired by each of the novels.

Should American Idol give up on judges with musical backgrounds (or in at least one case, a comedy/talk show one), and go instead with literary types? It could be current authors (J.K. Rowling, for example). Deceased authors may be out of bounds, although technically they could go with holograms or “tribute” judges pretending, i.e., if Kelly Clarkson won’t be a judge as herself, she could appear as Jane Austen. Given some of the judging antics past, this sort of thing might not be a reach too far.

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July 18, 2013

Relying on Ourselves and Not Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone - Tsarnaev

This is what upsets us? This magazine cover is our biggest problem?

As of today, some retailers—of those retailers who actually sell paper magazines any more—are refusing to the carry the new issue of Rolling Stone with a cover showing a youthful and attractive photo of Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. They, along with maybe millions in the socialsphere, are making a statement.

But what exactly is that statement, and why are they making it?

If it’s about not giving any more publicity to him, along with any coverage of the Boston bombing and the upcoming trial, you can make a case that that might be healthy for all of us. But since there’s been no call for less coverage, that can’t be it.

If it’s about continuing the coverage, but making sure the coverage only reflects one particular approach, what approach would that be, exactly? And if it’s about not “glamorizing” him, where is the directorate that is going to make sure that all photos, cover and otherwise, of the most despicable people look suitably evil and ugly?

We have reached a point, not unique in history but maybe more now than ever, where reaction to everything is often overtaking thought about everything. The theory of “the wisdom of crowds”—that individuals can be wrongheaded, but heads put together are self-correcting and frequently right—needs to be reconsidered, if not thrown out the window.

If this Rolling Stone cover is a threat to anything, we have a problem. If we think that this cover makes mass murder look “cool” and is a contributor to our social difficulties, we really don’t know what those difficulties are. If we think that we shouldn’t have magazine covers with social and political miscreants, the Magazine Cover Authority will have to make a much broader review of all publications, before they pass them on to the Magazine Content Authority.

We have to start relying on our own thoughts, and when that careful thinking leads to conclusions, on our own abilities to directly address what we find. If a Rolling Stone cover with Tsarnaev is emblematic of anything, it is that Tsarnaev is here, he did what he did, and we should be working on that, and not on choices that magazines make.

For more on self-reliance, you might read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s classic essay of the same name. There was a time when Emerson’s essays were widely taught in schools—back in the Stone Age, before America got so smart and well-connected, before we realized that science and technology were the key to the future, and that the musty, fusty words of some old fart from Boston really had nothing to offer us.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-Reliance (1841)

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May 22, 2013

Speed Men

Don Draper on Speed
Definition of Phantasmagoria
1. An exhibition of optical effects and illusions
2. A constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined
3. A bizarre or fantastic combination, collection, or assemblage

The latest episode of Mad Men, Crash, is not the first to involve a car crash or the use of drugs. But it does use both as a device and as prefiguring of what is down the road for Don Draper and company.

Previously on Mad Men, besides the limitless consumption of alcohol and tobacco, in this late 1960s era there has been the increasing use of marijuana, and a few LSD experiments. This time, though, the drug of choice is speed.

Chevy is the agency’s new and prized client. Ken takes the Chevy guys out for a booze-fueled night, and drunken speeding results in a crash that leave’s Ken’s leg injured. Chevy is placing impossible demands on the agency, and so a weekend of work is ahead for the creatives and the account people. A sort-of doctor is brought in to inject the senior staff with a sort-of “stimulant”—a combination of vitamins and speed.

Speed heaven and speed hell break out. People are racing each other down office aisles and over desks, playing William Tell by throwing sharpened pencils at each other, wanting sex, talking nonstop. Don has two distinctive reactions. On the mental side, he seems  on the brink of a breakdown. His mind flows back to his growing up in a whorehouse, where we learn the possible origins of his sex addiction and other problems. He loses track of time, something that has happened before.

On the creative side, he has a breakthrough, the kind that speed can convince you (often falsely) that you are having. Don is obsessed by an old agency campaign for soup that he is sure holds the key to Chevy. He ultimately finds the ad, though it is for oatmeal; the soup is from his memory of a prostitute who nursed him back to health and was his first sexual experience. The headline says, “She Knows What You Want”.

But when Don calls everybody in to announce his creative triumph, the speed speaks, pontificating that, no, he hasn’t solved the Chevy puzzle—he has solved the big puzzle of life itself.

Events in and out of the office keep spinning. The speed has apparently “cured” Ken’s injury, as he throws away his cane and starts tap dancing. Don has left his children alone in the apparent, and an older black lady who calls herself Don’s Grandma Ida breaks in, confronts Don’s daughter Sally, and steals some of Don’s watches. Sally doesn’t believe Ida is Don’s grandmother, but since Sally doesn’t really know anything about Don’s real background, anything is possible.

The speed crash comes on Monday, and it is different than any other of the post-drinking hangovers that Don has ever suffered through. We can’t tell exactly what has gone on in his head, or what combination of murky and clear is operating, or whether he has really figured anything out. But he does something he has never done before, because being creative—making things up—is what his adult life has been about. He relinquishes creating for the Chevy account, and says he will only serve as creative director, managing what others come up with.

At this point, as he has a few times before, Don is seeing that if he keeps moving the way he has, he will crash. But he thinks that if he stops moving, he is dead. Of course, Don Draper is dead, killed accidentally and indirectly in Korea by the young Dick Whitman. Just as Draper’s suicidal younger stepbrother Adam Whitman was killed indirectly by Don, as was Draper’s suicidal partner Lane Pryce.

If it doesn’t stop on its own, maybe the uncaring laws of life and physics will take over. Maybe there will be a much more serious crash.

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May 15, 2013

Shavuot and Ruth

Chagall - Naomi and Her Beautiful Daughters

Today is the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. It is said so often that Shavuot is “lesser known” that maybe it is now better known for being lesser known.

Its low profile outside the Jewish communities doesn’t mean it is insignificant, or that a host of meanings and traditions aren’t attached.

Shavuot began as an agricultural celebration. The name literally means Festival of Weeks, one of the three pilgrimage holidays, along with Passover and Sukkot. The Bible commands the counting of the omer, the days from the second day of Passover. After seven weeks, on the fiftieth day, a grain offering is to be made at the Temple. As a harvest celebration, Shavuot is also known as the Day of the First Fruits. If you’re into borrowing food traditions, Shavuot is a dairy holiday, and cheese blintzes and cheesecake are always appropriate.

Shavuot also celebrates the giving of the Ten Commandments and the Torah, the central event in Jewish life. Some make the case that dating this event on Shavuot is biblical. But attaching this event to the holiday seems more a matter of tradition than biblical precision. After the destruction of the Temple, agricultural pilgrimages ended.  This new tradition arose, a tradition that remains at the heart of the modern Shavuot celebration. Among the observances, some people gather and stay up all night reading the Torah, along with other scripture and literature.

There is a holiday calendar mashup surrounding Shavuot. Shavuot and Christian Pentecost often fall within a few days of each other—this year Shavuot starting on the evening of May 14 and Pentecost on Sunday May 19.

There are some holidays on the Jewish and Christian calendars that based on history and theology have a real and important relationship, such as Passover and Easter. There are holidays that may coincide on the calendar but have little to do with one another. And then there are Shavuot and Pentecost, which have an usual relationship.

To begin with, the holidays share the same name, sort of. As a festival marking seven weeks, Shavuot became known as Pentecost among Greek-speaking Jews, because it marks the “fiftieth” day from the second day of Passover.

Pentecost is a major feast on the Christian liturgical calendar. It represents the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles and others, on the fiftieth day (Pentecost) after Easter. It is often considered the birthday of the Church.

It is relatively straightforward to deal with the nexus between the events of Holy Week and Passover. There is evidence in the Gospels, and the weight of opinion is that the Last Supper was indeed a Passover meal. But the dueling Pentecosts, and the attempts to harmonize them, have caused nothing but confusion.

It is certain that the Jews of Jesus’ time would have celebrated the agricultural holiday of Shavuot. But beyond this, we have Christians who try to make the case that Christian Pentecost is “historically and symbolically” related to Shavuot, though it isn’t clear exactly how. On the other side, there are a few Jewish writers who claim that the name Pentecost was unknown to Jews, even Greek speakers, and that the name was given to Shavuot by Christians.

Finally, there is this coincidence. In Reform Judaism, youth confirmation is often held on Shavuot, in recognition of the giving of the Torah. In many Christian denominations, youth confirmation is held on Pentecost, in recognition of the work of the Holy Spirit.

If you take a big picture view, you can probably connect the dots and come up with a relationship between Shavuot (Pentecost) and Pentecost. This is especially tempting when the two holidays coincide so closely. But they are two distinct holiday, and harmonizing is a stretch.

As far as Shavuot traditions, maybe the most heart-lifting is reading the Book of Ruth. Separate from its religious meaning, this is a great piece of literature, a short story about unyielding devotion, commitment and loyalty to family—and one of the first and most famous to affirm the family of women. It is the touching antidote to every caustic mother-in-law joke that has ever been told.

In Ruth, the mother-in-law Naomi loses her husband, as her daughters-in-law lose theirs (above, Chagall’s Naomi and Her Beautiful Daughters). Seeming to have little else in common than her sons, Naomi urges them to leave and get married again. One does leave, but Ruth refuses, in words that are sometimes used to signify the power of Ruth’s conversion of faith, but that are a much more universal expression of devotion as solid as that of any marriage:

She then decided to come back from the Plains of Moab with her daughters-in-law, having heard in the Plains of Moab that God had visited his people and given them food. So, with her daughters-in-law, she left the place where she was living and they took the road back to Judah.

Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, ‘Go back, each of you to your mother’s house. May God show you faithful love, as you have done to those who have died and to me. God grant that you may each find happiness with a husband!’ She then kissed them, but they began weeping loudly, and said, ‘No, we shall go back with you to your people.’

‘Go home, daughters,’ Naomi replied. ‘Why come with me? Have I any more sons in my womb to make husbands for you? Go home, daughters, go, for I am now too old to marry again. Even if I said, “I still have a hope: I shall take a husband this very night and shall bear more sons,” would you be prepared to wait for them until they were grown up? Would you refuse to marry for their sake? No, daughters, I am bitterly sorry for your sakes that the hand of God should have been raised against me.’

They started weeping loudly all over again; Orpah then kissed her mother-in-law and went back to her people. But Ruth stayed with her. Naomi then said, ‘Look, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her god. Go home, too; follow your sister-in-law.’

But Ruth said, ‘Do not press me to leave you and to stop going with you, for wherever you go, I shall go, wherever you live, I shall live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Where you die, I shall die and there I shall be buried. Let God bring unnameable ills on me and worse ills, too, if anything but death should part me from you!’

(Ruth 1:6-17)

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May 7, 2013

The Great Gatsby and the Great Draper

Gatsby and Draper
At this point, the reviews of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby are mixed, which isn’t surprising. His love of over-the-top spectacle is not to all tastes, and has a tendency to obscure story for fireworks. (His best movie may be his first, most personal and sweetest, the little and lovely 1992 romantic comedy Strictly Ballroom).

Literature to film goes in all directions. Small gets bigger as even the shortest stories are adapted. Big gets smaller, given the need to cut out sometimes huge chunks of narrative. Big gets bigger, as in Gone with the Wind. Big stays big, trying to preserve and show everything, as in Peter Jackson’s still-not-completed Tolkien opus.

The Great Gatsby is a little book. You can read it, even out loud, in a few hours. What has made it endure as one of the great novels is how much Fitzgerald packed into it. Word for word, it is one of the best fictional descriptions of a moment in history; not just that critical moment of the early 1920s either, but maybe every time the country is changing radically, as fortune swings in a blink between good fortune and bad.

Gatsby is not about the parties or the mansions. You can argue that the colorful wildness and glamour and licentiousness make the tragic end starker, so that when narrator Nick Carraway announces that the party is over, we get it. But we can miss the point.

Gatsby is a touching little story about a lost soul in a lost time. The only two ways to tell this story on film are to keep it small, or to actually rewrite and expand the story beyond its outline, to hours and hours of film.

The expanded story is already being made, by Matthew Weiner. Mad Men is the extended, history-spanning story of a fatally charismatic and ambitious man, so ambitious that in keeping with the dynamic times he lives in, he sheds his entire early life and identity to become a successful man of mystery. But he never stops trying to fill the holes that he knows are still there.

Every man wants to be him, every woman wants to have him, nobody knows him. The only difference between James Gatz/Jay Gatsby and Dick Whitman/Don Draper is that so far Draper has managed, somehow, to outlive his younger manhood to reach his middle years without crashing—but coming close almost daily. So just in case the Baz Luhrmann Gatsby doesn’t prove satisfying, don’t worry. The murky madness and capriciousness of Gatsby’s go-and-stop American dream is on view in the epic of Mad Men.

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April 19, 2013

Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment
It is just like a movie, some are saying.

No, like a novel.

Two brothers. The older one dead, run over by the younger. The younger on the run—maybe caught or even dead by the time this is read.

In the media, fragments of information are spun into explanations, like Rumplestiltskin’s straw into gold. It is the job of experts to provide answers, and when pieces are missing, to speculate. Can they be blamed?

Writers are the real experts at helping us on this. In 1962, when Truman Capote applied his considerable skill as storyteller to a pair of real-life cold-blooded killers, the book In Cold Blood became something new: the non-fiction novel. Critics celebrated, but others complained that the humanizing of evil made the author an accomplice.

A century earlier, Fyodor Dostoyevsky took an even deeper look at the mind of the killer, a fictional one, in Crime and Punishment. He did not minimize the horror of the crime or humanize the killer for purposes of sympathy, empathy or excuse. He instead set the standard for psychological depth and ambiguity that is the hallmark of modern literature since.

Standard or simplistic explanations and labels fit many needs, including the need of broadcasters to fill dead air while an extended manhunt and its aftermath proceed. But Dostoevsky demanded a trip on the subtle dark seas of family, society and the mind. That’s not just a way we understand the bad actors. It’s how we understand ourselves, even when our own seas are not nearly so dark.

From Crime and Punishment, as Rodion Raskolnikoff  pursues his plan to kill the moneylender Alena Ivanovna. He walks down the street, when someone remarks about his unusual hat:

“I knew it,” he muttered in confusion, “I thought so! That’s the worst of all! Why, a stupid thing like this, the most trivial detail might spoil the whole plan. Yes, my hat is too noticeable…. It looks absurd and that makes it noticeable….With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any sort of old pancake, but not this grotesque thing. Nobody wears such a hat, it would be noticed a mile off, it would be remembered…. What matters is that people would remember it, and that would
give them a clue. For this business one should be as little conspicuous as possible….Trifles, trifles are what matter! Why, it’s just such trifles that always ruin everything….”

He had not far to go; he knew indeed how many steps it was from the gate of his lodging house: exactly seven hundred and thirty. He had counted them once when he had been lost in dreams. At the time he had put no faith in those dreams and was only tantalizing himself by their hideous but daring recklessness. Now, a month later, he had begun to look upon them differently, and, in spite of the monologues in which he jeered at his own impotence and indecision, he had involuntarily come to regard this “hideous” dream as an exploit to be attempted, although he still did not realize this himself. He was positively going now for a “rehearsal” of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more and more violent.

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April 15, 2013

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore
Take a break with Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).

He was a Bengali poet, essayist, dramatist, composer and philosopher, and is the most esteemed creative artist of modern India. He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

A brief introduction is Stray Birds (1916), which consists of 326 very short verses—each one usually one or two sentences. Below is a selection of them. Among the many online items by and about Tagore there is a 1961 documentary about Tagore by Satyajit Ray, India’s most celebrated film director. Here is a PDF of Stray Birds as originally published, with a translation from Bengali to English by Tagore himself.

These literary stray birds may seem at first glance to be mere poetic aphorisms. Taken together, though, this is a worldview of inspired simplicity.

From Stray Birds by Rabindranath Tagore

1
Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away.
And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.

2
O troupe of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words.

6
If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.

28
O Beauty, find thyself in love, not in the flattery of thy mirror.

35
The bird wishes it were a cloud. The cloud wishes it were a bird.

36
The waterfall sings, “I find my song, when I find my freedom.”

40
Do not blame your food because you have no appetite.

43
The fish in the water is silent, the animal on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing,
But Man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.

45
He has made his weapons his gods. When his weapons win he is defeated himself.

48
The stars are not afraid to appear like fireflies.

52
Man does not reveal himself in his history, he struggles up through it.

58
The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of its tail.

62
The Perfect decks itself in beauty for the love of the Imperfect.

75
We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

88
He who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open.

121
I carry in my world that flourishes the worlds that have failed.

123
The bird thinks it is an act of kindness to give the fish a lift in the air.

128
To be outspoken is easy when you do not wait to speak the complete truth.

130
If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.

141
When I travelled to here and to there, I was tired of thee, O Road, but now when thou leadest me to everywhere I am wedded to thee in love.

146
I have my stars in the sky,
But oh for my little lamp unlit in my house.

156
The Great walks with the Small without fear.
The Middling keeps aloof.

158
Power takes as ingratitude the writhings of its victims.

161
The cobweb pretends to catch dew-drops and catches flies.

166
The canal loves to think that rivers exist solely to supply it with water.

169
Thought feeds itself with its own words and grows.

178
It is the little things that I leave behind for my loved ones, –great things are for everyone.

184
He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.

193
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.
It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

207
Praise shames me, for I secretly beg for it.

208
Let my doing nothing when I have nothing to do become untroubled in its depth of peace like the evening in the seashore when the water is silent.

210
The best does not come alone. It comes with the company of the all.

235
Do not say, “It is morning,” and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a new-born child that has no name.

243
The stream of truth flows through its channels of mistakes.

248
Man is worse than an animal when he is an animal.

258
The false can never grow into truth by growing in power.

280
Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love.

296
Blessed is he whose fame does not outshine his truth.

317
Man’s history is waiting in patience for the triumph of the insulted man.

319
I long for the Island of Songs across this heaving Sea of Shouts.

323
I have suffered and despaired and known death and I am glad that I am in this great world.

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April 1, 2013

The Year Begins with Baseball

Mom Marlins
The New Year finally begins. It is Opening Day for Major League Baseball.

Non-baseball people are turning away with a lack of interest or understanding. Even non-sports people know that football long ago took over as America’s pastime. The Super Bowl v. the World Series? Who are you kidding? When’s the last time the Rolling Stones performed at a World Series halftime. (Note: There is no halftime in baseball. Just a brief break known as the seventh inning stretch, where we sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame, not a Stones song.)

If baseball has somehow been eclipsed, it may be symptomatic. Whatever it is that has made football more popular than baseball might not be such a good thing. There are tomes by eminent scholars written about this. The time element alone is telling. Those leaning towards short attention spans and busy lives like football because something is always happening and it is time-constrained by a clock. For non-baseball fans, there are long stretches where nothing seems to be going on in a baseball game, except most of the players just standing around. Games can theoretically go on forever, and sometimes they seem to, exceeding five hours. Once again the chorus asks: Who are you kidding?

George Carlin, one of the sharptest and funniest observers of American life, focused on the differences between baseball and football. You can read the complete text and listen to a recording. Here’s an excerpt:

Baseball and football are the two most popular spectator sports in this country. And as such, it seems they ought to be able to tell us something about ourselves and our values.

I enjoy comparing baseball and football:

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle….

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dying.

In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap….

In football you receive a penalty.
In baseball you make an error.

In football the specialist comes in to kick.
In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.

Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness.
Baseball has the sacrifice….

And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different:

In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.

In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! I hope I’ll be safe at home!

There are dozens of books containing art, poetry and writing about baseball. The other sports may have some, but not of the quantity or the caliber of these. As pointed out before, and it will be pointed out again, for a brief moment in the late 1980s, cut tragically short by illness, A. Bartlett Giamatti was the Commissioner of Major League Baseball. Bart Giamatti was the President of Yale University, a professor of literature, and a writer of note. When and only when the NFL, NBA, NHL, or any other sports league decides to appoint a person of equal credentials as their commissioner, then and only then will it be worth having a conversation about the big picture relative merits.

Bart Giamatti also wrote the quintessential essay about baseball. The Green Fields of the Mind is written not about Opening Day, but about the last day of the season for his beloved Boston Red Sox in 1977. He didn’t live to see that one of baseball’s most hapless teams would go on to become a championship powerhouse years later.

The essay is a poetic take not only on the refrain of baseball fans everywhere—“wait until next year”—but on the way that refrain works in our lives. It reflects the progress from the hopes of spring to the dimming of prospects in the fall, but only in the meantime. There is no justice in an excerpt of it, but here is one anyway:

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.…

That is why it breaks my heart, that game–not because in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.

Finally, a rare personal note. Many, many families have memories tied up with sports. I am no exception. Those memories aren’t important because the game is, just as the game isn’t important because of the memories. They are just tied up in a package that you open on occasions. Opening Day is one of them. Above is a photo of my Mom, a few years before she passed away. She is watching a Marlins game. As Bart Giamatti wrote, “there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts.”

That’s another reason we love baseball and are happy it is Opening Day again.

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March 15, 2013

The Ides of March

Julius Caesar - Mercury Theater
Today is the Ides of March, which is the 15th of March in the Roman calendar. (The Ides are a monthly mid-point, between the Nones early in the month and the Kalends on the first day.)

It is the day of Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE, made forever famous by Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, where the Soothsayer warns him (twice) to “beware the ides of March”. It did turn out to be a bad day.

Above is a scene from the Mercury Theater’s legendary 1937 presentation of the play in modern dress and sensibility, set by director Orson Welles in Fascist Italy. The theater company was organized by Welles and John Houseman, and this was their first play. In the photo above, Marc Antony (George Coulouris) kneels over the lifeless body of Julius Caesar (Joseph Holland).

Welles was only 22 at the time, but already a rising star. The Mercury Theater, intended as an independent answer to the restrictions placed on Welles by the Federal Theater Project, was really the launch pad for his fame and infamy as a world class artistic iconoclast.

For an entertaining look at this Mercury Theater production and company, at Orson Welles, and at the promises and disappointments of being young, in love, and working for an impossibly wonderful/horrible genius, see Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (2008).

The movie is underrated and did very poorly at the box office (as did most Welles films). It is a fully-realized and charming fictionalization of a real cultural milestone, with  recreated scenes from the Julius Caesar production and great ensemble acting. The star turn, appropriately, is from Christian McKay as Welles. There have been other attempts to play this part, which is a double challenge, since the Welles persona is so huge and Welles himself did such a good job of playing Orson Welles. McKay is near perfect, for the part and the story; maybe not “Daniel Day Lewis is Abraham Lincoln” (which he was), but still impressive from such a young actor. McKay is currently listed in five movies in production, which he deserves to be.

Christian McKay - Me and Osrson Welles

There is no special Roman designation for the 16th of March, so enjoy the ides while you can.

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