D's Notebook

Month: November 2009 (Page 2 of 2)

1979 Stolen Base Leaders

November 5, 2009 /

Thank goodness the World Series is over. I watched a total of five minutes of the six games. Just couldn’t take A-Rod and the Yanks winning. It made me sad that Pedro couldn’t get it done last night. It’s always disappointing when a guy who was as good as he was loses it. I was hoping for one last classic performance from him.

The one upside to the Series was how it brought up discussion of Willie Wilson and Willie Mays Aikens. The most excellent Cardboard Gods site shared some thoughts about Willie Wilson. I was watching Sportscenter at the gym the other day and they had a feature on the Philadelphia Eagles’ DeSean Jackson. That kid is fast. And they have Jeremy Maclin, too? Yikes.

Anyway, between the Jackson feature and Willie being a topic of discussion, I’ve been remembering Willie fondly. He’s legitimately one of the fastest guys to ever play baseball. But, he also benefits from the classic “great athlete when you’re a kid” syndrome. To me, and a lot of people my age, Willie will always have superhuman speed, speed that no current athlete can touch. When you’re eight or nine and you hear announcers and fans talk about speed or power or some other physical attribute, it is always magnified. I’m glad it’s Willie that I think of first when I think of fast baseball players. And when I think of him, I think of him either sliding into second – was he the last super-speedster who consistently slid feet-first? – or racing around third, his hands in the air in triumph, when he scored the winning run in game four of the 1980 World Series. On a hit by Aikens, by the way.

1979 Stolen Base Leaders

Wilson, forever the fastest man in the baseball universe inside my skull, if not in the baseball universe itself

Reader’s Notebook

November 3, 2009 /

In lieu of the regular Reader’s Notebook entries I provide monthly, it’s time for an update on my progress with Infinite Jest.

I won’t lie: it’s been a slow go. And I’ll also admit for all the excitement of beginning the book in September, I was also kind of dreading it. I’m used to reading books that fall in the 250-400 page range. Books I can knock out in 36 hours if conditions allow, or more likely inside a week. Books I can easily carry anywhere I go, open for ten minutes, and make some progress on. Infinite Jest is none of those things.

I’ve already shared how the book is long: well over 1000 pages. But it’s also big. It measures 9″ x 6″. The font is fairly small. The spacing between lines isn’t the most generous cushion I’ve seen. So not only are there a lot of pages, but there’s a hell of a lot of material packed into those pages.

It also doesn’t help that David Foster Wallace’s writing style is the polar opposite of, say, McCarthy or Hemingway, authors known for their spare use of language. Wallace throws everything at you. In a description of an AA meeting, he goes into every detail of every item in the room, how people get there, what they’re all thinking, and on and on. He does this often without the benefit of paragraph breaks. You’ll be reading some of this small text on a huge page and realize you’ve gone almost three pages without the benefit of a paragraph break to give you a breather. It can be taxing.

And then there are the footnotes. I just passed the dreaded footnote that stretches on for 17 pages. It’s an extremely interesting footnote, to be sure, but it also takes away from whatever momentum you’ve built up in the main body of the story.

So all of this might make it sound like I’m not enjoying Infinite Jest. Not true. I am enjoying it. There are some fantastic parts that have made me laugh out loud. There are some sections that are so well written that it almost hurts to read them. And then there’s Wallace himself. Dude was smart. Not only was he smart, he most have done amazing amounts of research to write this book. It kind of makes you feel dumb, to be honest.

Am I loving it? Not yet, but I’m holding out hope. Everyone says the first 200 pages are the hardest to slog through. I got through those a couple weeks back and have finally started to get a feel for the book. It’s still hard to read for more than an hour at a time, so my progress continues to be slow. But I’m getting there.

I should mention that I changed my reading strategy before I began. I’m still using the Infinite Summer guidelines as road marks on my way through the novel. Just before I began, though, I read another “How to Read Infinite Jest” article that suggested, when reading it for the first time, setting aside all the added materials others recommend. Put the guides away, forget about Hamlet, don’t worry about anything but the novel itself. Just read. If you like it, come back in a year or five or ten with the guides, a healthy understanding of Hamlet, and then try to break it into its component parts.

So that’s what I did. I’m just reading. And hoping it’s all worth it and I will want to take another crack at it one day, then with the goal of really digging into it and figuring out what everything means.

My goal was to finish by the end of the year. I’m a little off track, but picking up speed. Hopefully I’ll be able to crack open the new Bill Simmons book right after the holidays.

❖

How To Use An Apostrophe

November 3, 2009 /

I’m thinking about using my next check from work to print a few hundred of these to distribute, randomly.

How To Use An Apostrophe

It reminds me of the days when I worked in a warehouse. After paying my dues and working there, oh, for five years or so, I moved to the night shift and got to spend a lot of time driving a stand-up forklift around.* One of our duties was to replenish the stock pulled by the dayshift. They would give us paper tickets noting the items that needed to be refilled, we would dig the product out of storage, resupply, and then return the ticket to the appropriate work area.

What does that have to do with apostrophes? I had a habit of correcting the spelling and grammatical errors of my coworkers when I returned their tickets. Not everyone took it in the good-natured manner it was intended. I heard the term “Fucking college boy” once or twice. Good times.

(That’s right, I can drive two kinds of forklifts. I’m a bad ass.)

Worth A Look

November 2, 2009 /

As you might imagine, I’ve been thinking about the last ten years a lot lately. I’m nothing if not a sucker for the end of decades, since they are loaded with opportunities to make <em>best of</em> lists, consider the ways life has changed, and in general have an excuse to remember the past.

What I’ve been struck by while thinking about the 00s is how fast they’ve gone. Seriously, it seems like just yesterday we were preparing for the big Y2K meltdown. Events that happened in 2000 or 2001 or 2002 don’t seem that long ago. I suppose much of that is due to the stability being in your 30s brings. There’s a huge difference between being 18 and 28, as I was in the 90s. Sure, I got married and became a parent and went through some other major changes this decade, but the gap between 28 and 38 seems a lot more manageable.

I don’t expect to do a full-decade retrospective here on the blog in the next two months. You should expect to see an essay about the decade in music at some point, and my top 30 songs of the decade around Thanksgiving. I might make another list or two, but as of now, have no major plans to honor the first decade of the millennium.

In lieu of my own extended breakdowns, check out the site I link to below. I’ve just quickly looked through the archives and it is kind of fun remembering some of the defining elements of the decade.

You AUGHT To Remember

 

Halloween 2009

November 1, 2009 /

Halloween was a success. Well, an <em>A-</em> I suppose. Mostly good with a few of the standard issues that are known to plague the holiday.

Our girls went as Dorothy (M.), the Wicked Witch of the West (C.), and the Cowardly Lion (L.). “Big fans of the Wizard of Oz?” you ask. No. In fact, our girls have never seen the movie, although we’ve read part of the original book. Two of M.’s classmates announced they were going to be Dorothy about a month ago*, and she quickly hopped on the bandwagon. S. figured this might be the last year we can control how they all dress, so the two younger sisters got Wizard of Oz costumes as well.

(One of those girls dressed as St. Dorothy for All Saints Day Friday. Obsess much?)

We did a dry run Friday so we could go to the grandparents’ house and show off the costumes there. That ended up being a good call, but more on that in a moment. Everyone was happy and excited to be in their costumes. M. didn’t ever want to take hers off again. We told her after Saturday night, she could sleep in it all she wanted.

Saturday the girls were bouncing off the walls all day. M. and C. didn’t talk about trick or treating all day, but you could tell they were wound up because of what was to come. S. was working so they were driving me crazy.

When it came time to get dressed, it was the standard herding cats routine. M. and C. couldn’t calm down and would race throughout the house. L., who refused every opportunity to nap all day, was suddenly rubbing her eyes and whining. When S. was ready to braid M.’s hair, she refused to go into the bathroom. C. refused to have her face painted, so the pictures we took Friday will serve as our official pics, I suppose.

We finally got everyone in their gear and headed out. Within five minutes C. was complaining about being cold. It was a bit brisk, but I think she was just stressing about having to deal with strangers and wanted to get home and dig into her candy. S. ended up taking her and L. home a few houses early.

That left M. and I, and she got all kinds of raves from the people at the remaining houses we visited. Unlike C., she was digging the attention. We generally only go to a handful of houses, and after we had hit all the usuals, she said, “Dad, we could go to a couple more houses.” What an idea! I agreed, but before we could cross the street, she decided she was cold and wanted to go home, too.

Once we got home, ate some dinner, and they checked out their treats, both girls were very happy. L.’s mood improved greatly once we took her costume off. Like the past couple years, M. and C. were really into handing out candy. They even went out on the front porch with their aunt for about 30 minutes and waited for kids to come by. So much for being cold.

We probably had the fewest trick or treaters we’ve ever had. I think part of it was the cold, this was probably the coolest Halloween since we’ve lived here, and a neighborhood party that preceded trick or treating that may have wiped some kids out. Also, not knowing a lot of people in the neighborhood and living in a cul-de-sac always keeps the numbers down. When M. was handing out candy, she told a group of pre-teen girls that they could take four or five pieces. One of the girls was shocked by that, and my sister-in-law said that not many kids had visited. The girl looked at her friends and said, “I TOLD you there would be more candy back here!” So I guess we pleased a few people.

A good holiday, once we got past the afternoon and into the evening activities. I’m wondering if next year M. will want to branch out and visit more homes, weather permitting, and if C. will be comfortable enough around strangers to want to tag along. And I also wonder what M. will be choosing for her costume then. I doubt we’ll have much input on the concept.

One last note. I had no idea this is the 70th anniversary of the Wizard of Oz until I saw a display at Barnes and Noble in Kansas City last week. Every place we went on the Plaza seemed to have Wizard of Oz displays or trinkets for sale. M. was amazed by them. She kept asking why there were so many Dorothys in Kansas City.* I reminded her that Dorothy was from Kansas. “Oh yeah!” she would laugh.

(The girls club she and her friends put together last Friday at the N’s featured two other preschoolers who were dressing as Dorothy this weekend. What’s the deal with girls that age and Dorothy? Is it just the shoes?)

And now we get to start working on the Thanksgiving menu and Christmas lists.

❖

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