Brief Attention Span Library

From Wired, a collection of 6-word science fiction stories by some of our favorites. None, perhaps, as good (and by that I mean as sad) as the famous Hemingway example ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn") which inspired the piece, but enjoyable nonetheless, and the reading goes quickly. Via metafilter.

The World Series is Almost Over

And then you won't have to listen to me talk about baseball anymore. But until then, and in lieu of writing about Kenny Rogers's suspiciously dirty hands, can we just discuss this? Major League Baseball and Holiday Inn's efforts to honor the overlooked player of the year. Or, as they put it:

Behind every great team on the diamond, lurking in the shadow of baseball superstars, live the role players who sacrifice for their team in often unrecognized effort. Which of these role players' best deserves recognition for their contributions as the Holiday Inn Look Again Player of the Year?

Let's pause to notice that only two, out of thirty nominees, are not white. I guess for "baseball superstars," we can read "black and Latin players who are good" and, for "role players," we can read, "white players who might be kinda good or might be completely washed up but nevertheless deserve a pointless and not at all pity-motivated award." I'd say more, but Fire Joe Morgan did it better (if you don't mind some totally appropriate David Eckstein hate.)

Updated to add: Deadspin also has a good take on this. If he still cares, this must be making William Rhoden really angry.

And the agony of defeat.

(In a statement that is no way related to anything, it strikes me that I have been a little tightly wound lately. This is in no way related to being angry about a certain baseball team failing to get it together for even ONE GAME in a certain American League Championship Series. Or, you know, feeling pressured about finally finishing a project I have been working on for nigh on ten years now. Tendency to fly off the handle in no way related to either of those things. Yes.)

Anyhoo, this post is about sports. But it's also about a book! William C. Rhoden's Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete. This book, within the terms it sets out for itself, seems unassailable. There is something profoundly awry in a system where many black men (and women) work for the profit and at the behest of a few white men (and no women), even if those men are themselves well-renumerated for their efforts. It is all the more profoundly awry when viewed through the long lens of America's slave-holding history. (See also, Brown University.) So far, so good. In fact, maybe I should stop the post right there, because it seems that the far more common reaction to this book is: how can there be a problem when the salary check says $40 million? This is kind of like the time my co-worker told me that Hollywood couldn't be racist because Oprah went to the Oscars. (Not to be confused with the time my other co-worker told me to avoid Chinatown because the women there were all carrying puppies and kittens in plastic bags home for dinner. What a pleasant workplace!)

Still, I have to say that Rhoden's parameters left me frustrated sometimes. Yes, all of American sports is a big topic, and yes, all of the twentieth-century and then some is a long time. But given the big talk of the title, how can the book cover the Negro Leagues in detail and yet decline to investigate baseball's current conditions? The dynamics of racial identity on display when you put together, say, African-American Gary Sheffield, Panamanian Mariano Rivera, biracial "sweetheart" Derek Jeter, and biracial "villan" Alex Rodriguez (now there's a quartet that's not getting as much press as it oughta!) is simply more complicated than Bud Selig versus Barry Bonds. If baseball is a sport that black and Latin men play and white men watch, why is that so? There's more at work, I think, than the loss of the Negro Leagues here. Also, I often wished Rhoden take a larger view. Surely the problems with the NCAA and its policies are legion (see also, Reggie Bush), and it doesn't appear that Michael Lewis is planning to cover them. Yet where is the perspective from outside that system? What alternatives might there be to the general linking of a college education with a national athletic organization--that might work for both HBCs and the land-grant universities?

Maybe my strongest question for the book was one directed at Rhoden himself. He's a self-concious author surely, and one concerned with the perception of athletes as unfit representatives of the race (see, for example, Michael Jordan), but he soft-pedals the biggest question of them all: why should we keep trying to make this broken car go? Why should we, as inviduals and as a society, keep letting a system that has devastated so many lives (see Maurice Clarett and other cases too numerous to mention) go on? Why should we wait until next year? I guess I don't have any good answers for that either. I root for the A's for many reasons, but none that are part of my essential self. It's fun, and funny, to play the aggrieved or elated sports fan, and so I do and I will, and it's also fun to watch a well-played game, and to discuss it afterwards, again, and again, and again. I get mad when they lose, and feel entitled to stomp about, because, after all, it's not the fate of the nation here. But, and I suppose Rhoden would agree, maybe it is.

Sweets before Halloween

Look who's gotten hold of Daily Candy Philadephia! I ask you, why is this not on Daily Candy Everywhere? And DC Travel? And DC Kids? Let it be known to the whole empire and beyond! Shopaholics, take pause, and consider the miseries of youth. Then go back to shopping, to dull all the pain of that remembering.

Yes, We're On a Break

It has recently come to my attention that my transcripts of conversations with my children and records of Amazon orders may come across as nonsensical. (And, indeed, they certainly are.) To eliminate excessive nonsensicality, I am moving such writings (if they can be dignified with that term) to a new blog: sapandpablum.blogspot.com, something I really should have done a while ago for the mental health of my co-bloggers. Please join, or avoid, me there.

In book-related news, It's A Book Club will continue to record book-related comments by whoever cares to make them. Though the writing and publishing of books appears, ironically, to be greatly inhibiting the process. We'll see you when we see you, then.

Yeeee-Hawwww

Greetings from Amazon.com.

We thought you'd like to know that we shipped your items, and that this
completes your order.
.....
The following items have been shipped to you by Amazon.com:
------------------------------

---------------------------------------
Qty Item Price Shipped Subtotal
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon.com items (Sold by Amazon.com, LLC):
1 Get Down : Stories $13.65 1 $13.65

Shipped via Airborne Home (estimated arrival date: 21-October-2006).

On Good Intentions.

With our governor offering the enchanting proposal to arm classroom teachers as an attempt to combat school shootings, the following conversation this morning takes on particular, if surreal, weight.

Me: OlderKid, it's time to go to school. Put away your Legos.
OK: Wait, Mama, I am finishing my shooter!
Me: You're making a shooter? Are you playing with shooters at school?
OK: No. Me and [redacted] just played shooters at school after nap.
Me: Is there a rule at school about shooters?
OK: Yes. We don't play with shooters.
Me: Do you know why there is that rule?
OK: The rule is we don't play with shooters.
Me: Because shooters might hurt people.
OK: Well, I'm just going to use the shooter to get the bad guy.
Me: But how do you know who the bad guy is?
OK: If I don't get the bad guy with my shooter, the batteries might run out.
Me: What? Okay...um, what's going to happen when you get the bad guy?
OK: He's going to rush very quickly into this part of my shooter. Then we will play together.
Me: [at a loss for words.]

Yes, that blanket rule about no gun-play seems to be working perfectly.

P.S. Does there seem to be an eerie blankness about this post? As if something were going on, something significant for some kind of competitive sports team? Something like horrible humiliation on a national stage? But it's so unbearable to watch or talk about that it's been completely repressed? Hmmm, okay. I guess it'll come to me, then.

Things that are happy. (Even if some of them are sad.)

• Fun Home, A Family Tragicomic. Despite being deeply suspicious of English teachers, this is a book that's in love with reading almost more than anything else, and that's excellent by me.
• District B13. The characters and plot are mostly (entirely) ridiculous, but the fighting is swell and how often do you get to see a French action movie about urban planning anyway?

• A's WIN! A's WIN! A's WIN! Remember, you can't spell ALCS without "A-t-h-l-e-t-i-c-s"!!

P.S. Why is someone named Joe Croker emailing me lyrics of his song about the evils of the British Empire? No, really, why?

Glimmery

On Sunday OlderKid and I went to the playground while YoungerKid and Peter slept in the car. (They were exhausted from a full morning of orienteering--more on that in a minute). While we were playing--okay, while OK was playing and I was slumped on a park bench--a chatty little girl about OK's age and her dad showed up. The girl was talking non-stop to someone named Kristin, and after an embarassingly long time I finally realized that this Kristin was not, you know, real. The dad was clearly long familiar with Kristin and her imaginary-ness as he was happily serving Kristin and the girl custard, cheering them as they went down the slide, etc. OK, like me, was initially clueless. After a fascinating session of cross-play, in which OK dangled daringly from the monkey bars yelling things like "Hey, look at me! Do this with me!" and the little girl yelled back things like "Wait for Kristin! Kristin wants more custard!" OK had finally had enough. From the top of the climbing gym he looked over his shoulder at the little girl, who was struggling to persuade Kristin to climb up the rungs with her and said down in a voice of cutting scorn: "Hey--YOU'RE JUST ONE PERSON!"

Zing.

On Friday afternoon I saw only part of a Pam Houston lecture (sorry, Pam, but the 5 pm daycare pickup deadline is pretty much written in blood) in which she discussed her writing process and described the feeling of experiencing a moment she wanted to write about as a "glimmer." I don't know that I really like this term, and apparently she doesn't either, but she's absolutely correct about certain moments just having that feeling about them--that they ought to be written down and put in a story or retold somehow. It's partly intellectual--even as I was apologizing to that poor imaginative girl's father, I was already thinking about how symbolically apt OK's comment was on so many levels. But it's emotional too; the put-down made my heart hurt, and not just because of its blunt pragmatism.

And maybe it was because of Pam's lecture, or maybe it was because of the turn from September to October (thanks, Green Day), or maybe I'm just always like this, but this weekend seemed to have a lot of these glimmer moments. Like Sunday morning, when we decided on the spur of the moment to go to the park to check out the collapsed rock cave and found ourselves being hustled into participation in an Orienteering Race. Four waivers of liability later, we had numbers pinned to our shirts, a compass and a contour map in hand, and we were off into the woods. Everyone handled the excursion characteristically. YoungerKid took the entire course at an all-out run and fell frequently but without complaint. OlderKid shuffled dreamily down the path and also stopped frequently, not to fall, but to draw pictures all over our map. I spent a long time turning the compass around trying to make North line up with the directions on the map before I remembered that I'm not very good with compasses. And Peter brought up the rear and solved everyone's problems, including pointing out that we had been walking/running all this time in the completely wrong direction and were now off the map entirely. Like I said, symbolically apt.

We weren't the only people reading the race on different metaphorical levels; a "Pathfinder" youth group from a local church was there, and I'm pretty sure Jesus didn't literally expect people to use compasses to find their way to him. Still, looking at my family there, wandering around in the autumn woods with the leaves changing but the air still heavy and warm like summer, laden down with equipment we either didn't know or didn't care to use, I felt especially full with the significance of it all. Make a note of this, I thought to myself. And so here it is.