bytimbritton

[bytimbritton]

Brevity is the  soul of lit...reviews -- 2016 Part 1

City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg (2015)

"You are infinite. I see you. You are not alone."

I was as excited about Hallberg's debut novel as any in a long time, going back to my appreciation for his criticism over at The Millions. But his 911-page tome dedicated to 1970s New York tries so hard to say anything meaningful that it doesn't really care what that meaningful thing is. Hallberg set out to write a big ideas book without grounding it in any worthwhile ideas.

I read this shortly after watching Master of None, and I was thinking a lot around that time — maybe too much — about whether art earns its message; i.e. does it construct the foundation well enough to merit a cathartic payoff? (In Master's case, I thought not, contrary to most popular opinion.) Similarly, the connections Hallberg fosters among his diverse characters seem haphazard and rarely come together meaningfully. His thesis is this above-quoted line, which concludes the novel and, if we're being frank, is rather passé. I mean, this is the thesis of an awful lot of art (and a lot of awful art), and much of it earns it in a more fulfilling and cathartic way than City of Fire.

The narrative voice is inconsistent; teenage Charlie, in particular, uses a whole host of words I have a hard time seeing teenage Charlie actually using — things like après-ski and sepulchral and "the chaotic stalactites of the sprayed-on ceiling texture." The writing often reeks of effort, with batting gloves "scrunched scrotally" at the base of a nightstand or summer "like a flash of thigh beyond a janitor-propped door." No thanks, on both of those.

This is all coming across rather harsh, when the fact is I read these 900+ pages rather quickly. I don't think Hallberg is a bad writer by any stretch of the imagination. I felt while reading this the way I felt while reading something like Franzen's Twenty-Seventh City. This is the rough draft for what will be a much better and more fulfilling novel.

S by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst (2014)

S is a wonderful idea and engrossing project that, like The Usual Suspects, falls apart with the more scrutiny you apply to it. The dual explorations of a literary mystery and an incipient relationship through the marginalia of a bygone novel? Sign me up.

But by its end, S becomes a victim of its conceit. You can't make the suspense of Jen and Eric's literary discoveries linger if you tell the whole story non-chronologically — as the writing in the margins purports to do. The way around that, then, is to unrealistically limit their most revelatory commentary to the latter stages of Ship of Theseus. It's here where it crosses the line from just contrived enough to too.

The stakes of the literary mystery, which seem so high starting out, gradually decline throughout as you realize Jen and Eric will always be fine, and that the dangers they face can never actually be shown, only told.

Nevertheless, this was as engrossing a book as I read this year.

The Game by Jon Pessah (2015)

Read this in the spring considering it was a CBA year, and it was a fascinating glimpse at the behind-the-scenes owner-union dynamic around the '94 strike. Pessah doesn't hide his allegiances much; I doubt he'd have voted Bud Selig to the Hall of Fame, if you know what I mean. I learned a lot that I didn't know about how Selig gained power, how owners found their way to public money for stadiums and how they played the public relations game when it came to steroids.

My only problem was the incorporation of well-reported though seemingly irrelevant details about George Steinbrenner and the Yankees dynasty.

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano (2000)

"It's good to love. It's bad to be impressionable."

It has less to do with poetry or The Church than I expected, as it focuses more on the culture of acquiescence, even among artists, around the Pinochet Coup. I won't pretend to know enough about Chilean history — let alone Chilean literary history — to fully absorb the incisiveness of the satire. But holding soirees — and I know it's translated, but man is that the perfect word for the juxtaposition — a floor above torturous interrogations makes for a delicious critique.

Like some of Dostoevsky's works, Bolano can fall prey to a rambling, unlikable protagonist. In this one, though, that comes with the conceit.

Despair by Vladimir Nabokov (1965)

"I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously."

Nabokov is that wonderful mix of fun and literary high-mindedness — an author who never bogs you down while delivering masters courses in how to craft a story. His protagonists make their monstrousness more relatable and often even palatable through their overwhelming self-centeredness — who can't relate to that? — and hilariously searing criticisms of others. Despair is not a masterpiece like Lolita, but it's still a damn good time.

10:04 by Ben Lerner (2014)

"Prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all."

Like the best shuffleboard players, Lerner pushes right up to the threshold of being too meta without ever falling over the edge. 10:04 starts then to serve as an insight into the writer's process, with its excerpt that was used in The New Yorker explicitly mentioned as being used in The New Yorker. There are still individual scenes that don't work — I don't think I ever like hallucination sequences — but they don't detract from the overall contemplation of conscious experience — what's authentic, what matters.

Lerner's also just really fun and insightful to read. He describes staring straight ahead past a friend as "a condition of our most intimate exchanges," alcohol as a hedge "so that whatever happens only kind of happened" and how "nothing in the world is as old as what was futuristic in the past." An exegesis of Reagan's Challenger speech speaks to the power of words (and to Lerner, poetry) while a scene in which the protagonist donates sperm would fit neatly in a DFW short story.

Of our time, but maybe it transcends it, too.

1984 by George Orwell (1949)

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."

You will gradually notice a theme emerging in my choices this year, and you will connect it quickly to 2016 events. I'd been meaning to read 1984 for years, and by February, I figured there would never be a better time to digest it.

I don't know what exactly I anticipated, but I know I didn't expect it to be quite this good. I suppose my reservations going in revolved around whether Orwell could construct realistic characters in his world, and whether that world was extrapolated properly.

Orwell does both to a remarkable degree. The manner in which 1984 builds its own vocabulary — and explains its principles in a simplistic appendix — is outstanding and terrifying in its external validity. Crimestop and doublethink seem particularly plausible concepts these days (as do its ideas of "rectifying" the past through historical revision and stripping war of its danger by making it neverending).

The entire novel contains this ambience of utter hopelessness, evidenced by the way parents grew scared of their children's potential as informants or how emotions in general became sterilized over time. Winston and Julia's rebellion is a small transgression, because they knew they couldn't beat the entrenched system.

This was depressing, just like the year was. I was kind of scared before reading 1984 and really scared after it.

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie (1935)

Man, sometimes after spring training, when you haven't had time to sit down and read something cohesively in a while, you just need a boost. Reading a Christie mystery in an afternoon or two has always done that for me, even if this one isn't as good or as interesting as I remembered from the first time I read it.

The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas (1961)

"At times to be silent is to lie. For silence can be interpreted as acquiescence."

The reason I hadn't read anything cohesively in a while? Because I was trying to tackle this large history of a time period I knew next to nothing about. (My interest in the Spanish Civil War basically dates back to someone justifiably pointing out my extreme ignorance about it — and its impact on the FC Barcelona-Real Madrid rivalry — in a blog comment some years back.)

My main error, if you want to call it that, in choosing this specific history of the war is that I probably didn't need this much depth to satisfy my curiosity. But that's obviously a strength and not a flaw of the book. Thomas places the events in Spain within the larger context of Europe's imminent disintegration, showing it as the proxy/practice war that it was. He's withering in his criticisms of the other powers and their willful impotence: The non-intervention committee among other nations "was to graduate from equivocation to hypocrisy" while the US practiced a policy of "moral aloofness."  

Thomas does his best to keep the dozens of sides involved in the conflict in order; reading this over the course of two and a half months made that very important indeed. He shows how each side was able to drum up such hatred for the other that compromise was rendered impossible — boy do Catholic murderers come off poorly here — and he's able to draw as straight a line as possible through the convoluted causes and effects during the war, explaining how and why Franco was eventually able to emerge as the key and victorious figure.

The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer (2005)

Reading Moehringer is always fun, but if I'm being honest, I found it hard to justify spending time reading a memoir about him. The stories are excellent, but I just didn't care enough about him or the bar.

[bytimbritton]

It’s a hard story for journalists to tell. Journalists are, despite their political reputation, fundamentally conservative. The only way to keep explaining what’s happening in the world, day after day, is to rely on some basic frames. Cause and effect have to unfold within stable institutions, according to accepted rules.

A story that falls outside the everyday frames—The mayor is a crackhead who leaves a trail of violence where he goes, say, or This beloved entertainer is accused of being a serial rapist—requires a radical shift of perspective. Possibly the best and truest part of the movie Spotlight was how much of the Boston Globe’s investigation into the Catholic Church’s secret sexual abuse came out of the Globe’s own morgue. The paper had already written the story, piece by piece. It just hadn’t read it.

[bytimbritton]

Hall of Fame (adj.)

This is something I wrote last July for Baseball Prospectus’ special-edition magazine on Pedro Martinez.

Hall of Fame, as a noun, is rather straightforward. It is a concept reified with a brick-and-mortar address, a place you can go to and prove you went to with sundry souvenirs.

Hall of Fame, as an adjective, is where things get tricky. Defining who is and who isn't a Hall of Fame player has evolved into some nebulous combination of mathematics and morality, which are two of the things you become a sportswriter to avoid confronting.  

Thankfully, Pedro Martinez is a Hall of Famer, and we've somehow agreed to this without much controversy. But what defined Martinez as such? What made his case particularly easy?

There is a myriad of ways to concisely summarize Martinez's career mathematically. You can start from a macro perspective and just take the career numbers: a 219-100 record that’s remarkable even if you don’t care for records, the 10 strikeouts per nine, the strikeout-to-walk ratio that’s better than four or the WHIP that barely climbed over one across 18 years.

Then you can dig in a little closer, focusing on that ridiculous stretch from 1997 through 2003 where Martinez led the league in ERA five times, several of which weren't even close. His ERA+ over that seven-year stretch exceeded 200, he struck out nearly one-third of the batters he faced and his team won almost 70 percent of the time he started.

In 1999 and 2000, the distance between Martinez and the game's next-best pitcher was perhaps greater than at any other point in baseball history. This was true even though he pitched next to historical lions like Maddux and Johnson and Clemens.

But, to quantify Martinez in this fashion is like explaining Dostoevsky's greatness by diagramming his sentences; it removes the artistic dignity that elevated the whole beyond the brilliance of its constitutive elements.

For me at least, the epitaph for Martinez's career won't be whatever numbers adorn his plaque in Cooperstown. It will be the night I watched him when I was 12 and tangibly understood what Hall of Fame meant in a Potter Stewart, I-know-it-when-I-see-it sort of way.

Now, there are always dangers to using a single day as a proxy for a man's greatness, especially in baseball. Philip Humber threw a perfect game. Kerry Wood was somehow better than that, at 20. Mark Whiten hit four home runs. Would that we could all be judged by our very best days.

That Martinez has submitted a host of such candidates throughout his career — the perfect game that went too long in Montreal, the night he struck out everyone in attendance at Yankee Stadium, the time he Bumgarnered the Indians right out of the Division Series — helps ease this trepidation. But while any Martinez start lifted the game out of its quotidian banality and turned it into an event, it was his penchant for living up to and exceeding even unreasonable expectations that made him so special.

And thus what else is a better entry point to the magic of Martinez — that concoction of brilliance and showmanship — than the greatest six-batter stretch in baseball history, even if it came in a game that didn’t count?

Martinez starting the 1999 All-Star Game at his home park is the kind of serendipity that justifies the continued existence of a game that engenders more vitriol than affection these days. To see a pitcher at the height of his powers confront a half-dozen transcendent hitters in their own primes is, quite simply, why All-Star games exist. Talk about reforming or cancelling the Midsummer Classic all you want, and I'll still mumble back, "But…'99…Pedro."

Over the last 15 years, the game has regressed back and beyond the mean of a normal run-scoring environment, and already the ludicrous offensive numbers of Martinez's time have faded some in our memories. But let's remind ourselves just how stacked the deck was against Martinez in his time and that night.

In 1999, the average team scored 5.08 runs per game. The average team in 2014 scored an entire run fewer per game. There were more than 5,500 home runs hit in '99; there were fewer than 4,200 in 2014. The average ERA in 1999 was 4.71; it was 3.74 in 2014.

Thirty-nine players had 30 homers and 100 RBIs in 1999. Thirty-nine! Guys like Tony Batista and Jay Bell and Eric Karros and Fernando Tatis were 30/100 players. Seven did it last season.

In the All-Star Game, though, Martinez was not facing that class of hitter — guys who had latched onto the rising tide of offense across the game. He was going up against guys who were closing in on 30 and 100 at the All-Star break. He was encountering four of the previous five National League Most Valuable Players, a group of six stars who at that point had combined to appear in 37 All-Star games. Over their career, they all posted Hall of Fame statistics, but as we've discussed, that’s not the entirety of the equation anymore.

"I remember sitting in my office with Jimy Williams and my brother-in-law, who said, 'Wow, look at that lineup the National League has,'" said Joe Torre, managing the A.L. squad. "And I said, 'Pedro will strike them all out.' He said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'He'll strike them all out.'"

"When I took the mound, I was in command of my everything that year," Martinez said.

First up was Barry Larkin, the 1995 MVP, appearing in his 10th All-Star Game. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2012. Larkin was hitting .312 with 52 RBIs for the Reds at the break. He battled Martinez for eight pitches before finally succumbing on a changeup away.

"I really enjoyed that at-bat. I enjoyed being that first guy to face Pedro in his park in front of all those fans," Larkin remembered. "I'm trying to take him deep, and he's trying to strike me out. That’s what it's supposed to be about.

"I never felt good about striking out, but I understood Pedro was certainly on top of his game. I'm not too upset I was the first one to strike out. There were plenty of great players who struck out behind me."

Next was Larry Walker, the 1997 MVP, in his fourth All-Star Game. Walker was hitting .382 with 25 homers and 77 RBIs midway through the season. He took a 1-2 fastball on the black away for strike three.

Sammy Sosa, the 1998 MVP and in his third All-Star Game, had 32 home runs and 74 RBIs at the break. He swung through a 96 mile-per-hour fastball. No one had ever struck out the side in the first inning of an All-Star Game before.

"I felt like he was a little more amped, probably throwing a little bit harder, a little more deception to his changeup," Larkin said of Martinez that night. "He was just on top of his game."

Another swing-and-miss fastball felled Mark McGwire, who had 28 homers and 72 RBIs at the break and was playing in his 11th All-Star Game. And then, calamity: Matt Williams, with his 23 homers and 82 RBIs earning him a fifth All-Star appearance, put a first-pitch fastball in play. Roberto Alomar booted the routine ground ball; the fans groaned less at the error than at the contact.

"I've never been happier to hit a weak ground ball to second," Williams said. "At least I was able to put it in play."

Martinez went to a full count on 1994 NL MVP Jeff Bagwell (28 homers, 78 RBIs) before striking him out with a changeup. Williams ran on the pitch, and Ivan Rodriguez pegged him out at second.

In two innings, Martinez threw 28 pitches — 16 fastballs, seven changeups and five curveballs — and got seven swing-and-misses. Only Williams put the ball in play. Only Walker even fouled off another pitch.

"They were absolutely dominant and beautiful," said Martinez. "I went by those two innings like I didn’t feel it."

"I don't think we said 10 words during the first two innings that he was on the mound, because the place lit up," said Joe Buck, who called the game for Fox alongside Tim McCarver and Bob Brenly. "It was just dominance."

Martinez did that against six hitters who would slug exactly 2,600 home runs over their careers. It's his Grand Inquisitor.

"In his prime against guys in their prime, he showed why he was such a tremendous competitor and pitcher," Williams said. "He had all the pitches, and he showed them off that night."

"I didn’t really stop to realize who I was facing and what kind of material in the future those people were going to be," said Martinez.

"Sometimes I would lose myself in the game as a fan rather than as a player. I would marvel at what he's doing, and sometimes the ball would be hit and, 'Oh, I have to make a play,'" said Nomar Garciaparra, who played shortstop behind Martinez that night and for all but two months of Martinez's tenure in Boston. "I'm just watching one of the greatest of all-time do what he does."

This was one of those times at Fenway Park when Martinez didn’t feel as if he were competing against the Devil Rays or the Yankees or even the National League. He was contending with history, his starts a conversation with the ghosts of Johnson or Koufax or Gibson. What is it like to be so clearly the best of your time, to be arguably the best of any time?

"I didn’t realize that I was better than anybody," Martinez said, though it's hard to believe him. "I never wanted to call myself good. I just didn’t think so. The minute you start calling yourself good or special, someone makes you look like crap, and there you go. So I remain humble instead and just take the game seriously and forget about that appreciation and all that. I just go by as the game allowed me to go."

(Martinez's humility in that instance doesn’t suit him. This is a man who called himself "at times the most influential player that ever stepped in Yankee Stadium" and then added, in case you were worried about hyperbole, "I can honestly say that.")

That night in July of 1999 at Fenway Park? That’s what Hall of Fame is as an adjective. That’s when it quits being an accumulation of whispers and instead smacks you in the face. That’s when it's no longer about math or morality and it becomes a piece of art that's magical, nearly inexpressible — better to relive than to bother to explain.

That’s Pedro Martinez.

[bytimbritton]

“We all die in the thick of becoming, so we had better hone in on what counts.”

[bytimbritton]

“It’s the Canada we like to tell ourselves we are.”

[bytimbritton]

Brevity is the soul of...lit reviews: The Idiot

"Is it really possible to be unhappy?"

The last of Dostoevsky's major novels I've gotten to — and maybe the last of his novels I ever read for the first time, depending on whether I deem Netochka Nezvanova worth it — The Idiot took me aback. It played against many of my initial expectations, often in unpleasant ways. Prince Myshkin was far from the embodiment of purity that I expected him to be, and there are times where he blends too closely with Generic Dostoevsky Protagonist (cf. Raskolnikov, Underground Man, Goliadkin) — an especially annoying criticism in a book so keen on originality. (To be called "unoriginal" is a deep and frequent insult in The Idiot.)  

In its exploration of the Prince's various loves during his immersion back into society, it is much darker than I expected it to be. Indeed, it might be the darkest of Dostoevsky's major novels, and the other ones are about patricide, murder for psychological sport and revolutionary terrorism.

At times, it feels rushed or incomplete, probably owing to Dostovsky's insistent financial woes. (He was writing it at a relatively desperate time, having characteristically gambled away all his money.) The first two parts are strong, and then it meanders in the middle. That lack of cohesion hurts the spoiler-alert very important character of Nastasya Filippovna. Held up as perhaps Dostoevsky's finest female character and the driving force behind the novel's action, she's undercut by a lack of development in its middle third.

Furthermore, there are some narrative inconsistencies. It's never really clear who or what the narrator is and what his/its limitations are. This happens time to time in Dostoevsky.

This isn't to say that I disliked it. It's a reminder of how funny Dostoevsky can be. I enjoyed its staunch stance against the death penalty — which was initially outlawed in Russia in 1753, by the way. And it contains probably my favorite line in all of his canon, when Aglaya flirtatiously asks the Prince, "Did you receive my hedgehog?" Worth reading for the context of that alone.

[bytimbritton]

Brevity is the soul of lit...reviews: The Recognitions

"Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of…recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it and, it shouldn’t be sinful to want to have created beauty?"

Were The Recognitions written today instead of 60 years ago, it would be hailed as the defining novel of the Millennial generation. It's a tale about authenticity and the ways in which we forge it — in artwork, in drama, in social interactions. There's Otto testing out lines for his play in real life, or Wyatt's forged masterpieces, or Feddle's bookshelf full of his own novel just with different book jackets. Characters "reek" of honesty or sincerity, and the distinction between the two is rendered rather pithily ("Sincerity becomes the honesty of people who cannot be honest with themselves").

We are all, always, performing. The novel at one point speaks of the consciousness of being looked at, and it explores at all points the obfuscation that occurs when one works so hard at an inauthentic portrayal of himself that it morphs into the authentic. This is salient stuff in the 21st century.

The Recognitions is nearly perfect on a technical level; Gaddis' control of language, of punctuation, of characters is all on point. There are dozens of turns of phrase I want to steal: the way genius is "disheveled insanity suddenly assembled," how Stanley wants "everyone to be like I want to be," a gun as "the manhood implicit" in a jacket pocket, or breasts as "cumulous embankments." Open up to any of its 956 pages and you'll find writing to admire.

This was, without a doubt, the best book I read in 2015, and one of the three to five best American novels I've ever read.

[bytimbritton]

Sentences about War

“How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.            

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing; — it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?”

--All Quiet on the Western Front

***

“Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?” Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. “This long.” He snapped his fingers. “A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you’re an old man.”

“Old?” asked Clevinger with surprise. “What are you talking about?”

“Old.”

“I’m not old.”

“You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?” Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.

“Well, maybe it is true,” Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. “Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?”

“I do,” Dunbar told him.

“Why?” Clevinger asked.

“What else is there?”

--Catch-22

***

"Who are they? Why are they running? Can it be they're running to me? Can it be? And why? To kill me? Me, whom everybody loves so?"

--War and Peace

***

“Is it an anti-war book?”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”

“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”

“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”

“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead.”

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.

--Slaughterhouse-Five

***

“War. All our philosophies, religions, arts, techniques and trades lead to nothing but this. The finest flowers of civilization. The purest constructions of thought. The most generous and altruistic passions of the heart. The most heroic gestures of man. War. Now and a thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. No, it’s not a question of your country, my German or French friend, or yours, whether you’re black or white or Papuan or a Borneo monkey. It’s a question of your life.”

--Moravagine

***

“But that was it: men had lost arms and legs in sawmills; old men had been telling young men and boys about wars and fighting before they discovered how to write it down: and what petty precisian to quibble about locations in space or chronology, who to care or insist Now come, old man, tell the truth: did you see this? were you really there? Because wars are wars: the same exploding powder when there was powder, the same thrust and parry of iron when there was not—one tale, one telling, the same as the next or the one before.”

--The Unvanquished

***

“War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.”

--War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

***

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

--The Things They Carried

***

“Miss Sasaki, who had become convinced that she was dulled to pain, discovered that she was not.”

--Hiroshima

***

“If we are to be crushed, let us be crushed gloriously.”

--Baron de Bassompierre, The Guns of August

***

“Hour after hour of battle gave the living and the dead the same gray pallor on Hill 875.”

--Peter Arnett, Associated Press

***

“One thing it is not good to think about is the fact that it would be even thus on the day when, finally, as has already happened to 799 other American aviators, radar-intercept officers, and helicopter crewmen, your hide is blown out of the sky. That day, too, would begin within this same gentlemanly envelope.

“Fliers with premonitions are not healthy people. They are known as accidents waiting to happen. Now, John Dowd and Garth Flint are not given to premonitions, which is fortunate and a good sign; except it won’t make a great deal of difference today, because this is that day.”

--Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine

***

“I realized that the only corpse I couldn’t bear to look at would be the one I would never have to see.”

--Michael Herr, Esquire

***

“He thought it disproportionate in its violence considering the fragility of us.”

--In Parenthesis

[bytimbritton]

The country must resist the temptation present in anesthetic innocence. It must reject the false comfort of learned disbelief and the narcotic embrace of concocted surprise.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35793/charleston-shooting-discussion/?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1456_195657991

[bytimbritton]

“I know that they are criminal scum, and I’ve known it for years. And that is a thoughtful summation. That is not an insult. That is not throwing about wild words.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/03/how-a-curmudgeonly-old-reporter-exposed-the-fifa-scandal-that-toppled-sepp-blatter/?postshare=2621433336415569

[bytimbritton]

Ten Years Ago

           Brother Andrew, Brother Ralph, Brother James, Mr. Santanello, faculty, family, friends, and finally, my fellow graduates: I must start by congratulating my compadres clad in blue tonight—I know how much it took to get here and how good this night feels.  It is also necessary to congratulate our teachers, the entire faculty of Christian Brothers Academy, our friends, and last and probably not least, our families. This is a communal celebration of a collective achievement, and none of what we, the Christian Brothers Academy Class of 2005, have accomplished would have been possible without you.  I must also tell you how much of an honor it is to stand before you tonight, given the privilege of addressing you, and, perhaps, hopefully, of saying something meaningful.

           One of the harshest facts of life is its transience.  Things change, people change, we change.  It seems like the only constant in life is change.  And change always seems to occur at the most inopportune moments, namely, when we are most comfortable in our surroundings.  Change happens when we don’t want it to happen.  Thus, change is met more or less with ambivalence. Change is positive, because without it life would become monotonous and lack adventure.  But change is also negative, because it takes us out of our comfort zone and thrusts us into new and often awkward situations.  Nowhere was this abrupt and dramatic nature of change more apparent in our lives than our first weeks at CBA.  We, the Class of 2005, not only faced the usual obstacles of beginning high school—the confusing 6-day schedule, the intimidating upperclassmen, and on a personal level, the complete inability to open a locker—but also the challenges presented by a dynamically changing world around us.  To put it simply, the world is not the same place it was when we crossed anxiously through CBA’s front doors and gathered as a class for the first time on September 6, 2001.  How do we cope with such sudden change?  The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “It is in changing that we find purpose.”  Change, particularly the comprehensive kind that collided with us four years ago, forces us to reevaluate ourselves and our lives.  It challenges us to gain a renewed perspective on what really matters, to befriend others, to explore our souls, and to discover who we really are.  And in the wake of such change, we often find new life.  

           Four years later, we are presented with even greater change, that of living and studying without parental motivation and with female companionship, seemingly at the moment we’ve become accustomed to our last transition.  We’ve finally calculated the exact time we have to wake up to arrive in Homeroom precisely at 8:20, we’ve finally mastered the game of ping pong in the senior lounge, and I finally can open my locker—provided I remember my combination. Today marks a definitive turning point in our young lives, as we move from youth to adulthood, from boys to men. Now it is time to put ourselves and our experience at CBA to the test.  On the precipice of this ultimate metamorphosis, we discover what we have learned during the last four years.  What has CBA taught us?  And how are we different today than we were that first day we stumbled in to the building and assembled in Henderson Theater?  Our simple presence here tonight is evidence of our change, of our rising to the challenges presented by this institution—in the classroom, on the fields, and beyond—,  and of our giving ourselves wholeheartedly to the principles for which it stands: the tenets of faith, service, and community exhibited by each of the Brothers and the entire faculty.  We are stronger mentally, physically, spiritually, grammatically because of our time at CBA.  We are men formed in the LaSallian Tradition, that is, forged with a foundation of character, of dedication, and most importantly, of love.  These qualities have been emblazoned upon us and, regardless of the obstacles and challenges thrust before us in the future, they will never waver.  

           But before we take this step into manhood, let us look back one last time.  It’s not often that we get the opportunity to gainfully reminisce: most of life leaves no time for petty nostalgia.  Now, after the fact, what stands out most about our CBA experience?  Is it the idiosyncrasies of a unique teacher? Perhaps it is our participation on a record-breaking sports team.  Or maybe even the undeniable excellence of one Colt Morning Sports Reporter.  When we reflect, we find that our failures fade to the background, themselves steps toward future success.  The seemingly endless nights of studying are recalled with a smile and not a sigh.  And singular moments, those baby steps toward reaching this ultimate goal of graduation, are indelibly marked in our memories.  While our manifold accomplishments shall remain with us, it will be these individual moments—the satisfaction of a hard-earned A, the euphoria of a last-second score, the spontaneous laughter of a classroom of friends—that will echo through time, that will bring a smile to our faces, and that will forever remind us of our CBA experience.  And that will never change.

           So, as we go our separate ways on this journey of life, I implore you, my fellow classmates, to embrace change, to see it not as an obstacle, but rather as an opportunity.  Change is the vehicle on the path to ultimate success and a means of strengthening our character and building upon the firm foundation laid by our education at CBA.  I leave you tonight with the words of the one, the only, anonymous: “Change is the essence of life.  Be willing to surrender what you are, for what you could become.”

           Good luck and Godspeed.

[bytimbritton]

Brevity is the soul of lit reviews: The End of Days

"A day on which a life comes to an end is still far from being the end of days."

The idea — five stories, each describing the death of the same protagonist, albeit at different time periods and in different contexts — is my favorite for a novel in a really long time. That probably adds to my overall feeling of disappointment, since I found it merely decent and not anything more. Through much of it, the novel felt almost too sparse, too implicit. I would have loved to see Erpenbeck spell out and explore the evolutions in H.'s character that come along with the shifting sociopolitical context of 20th century eastern Europe. It could have been a real history of that tumultuous time period instead of something that falls back to unstructured musings on destiny and death a bit too much.

[bytimbritton]

DFW

[bytimbritton]

"Yes, I know Junot Diaz writes for Esquire. *I* am a novelist."

--You're the Worst

[bytimbritton]

You're the Worst

"Aren't we lucky we're both in professions where we can day-drink?"

"Are you in a profession where you can day-drink?"

"They all are -- if you want it bad enough."

[bytimbritton]

Lost Game Stories: White Sox, 4 Red Sox 3

BOSTON — The Red Sox lost on Wednesday for the eighth time in nine games, falling one run shy against Chicago lefty Chris Sale 4-3. That wasn’t really the point.

For Boston, Wednesday was a pivot point. If one were to be blunt, it was the first game in an extended 2015 preseason. The afternoon designation for assignment of catcher A.J. Pierzynski, which led to the promotion of 23-year-old catcher Christian Vazquez, signaled the end of Boston's title defense. The 2014 season is, for all intents and purposes, over.

With the focus shifted to 2015, the significance of each game similarly changes. The result no longer matters as much as the process does. Sure, that’s far from ideal, but hey, seasons like this are what make 2013 so exceptional.

Wednesday was the first of 72 games to evaluate just what the Red Sox have and what else they'll soon need. That’s why rookies comprised a majority of the starting nine, with Vazquez joining Brock Holt, Xander Bogaerts, Jackie Bradley, Jr. and Mookie Betts. You can throw starter Rubby De La Rosa in there as a near-rookie, as well. This is what the rest of the season is liable to look like.

In that regard, Wednesday was a greater success than you could tell by looking at the line score on the Green Monster. In yet another home loss, Boston would have to hang its hat on the little things its lineup did against Sale — if not an All-Star, then as much of an All-Star snub as there exists these days.

Vazquez at the very least made solid contact twice, flying out to deep right and lining to short. Making your major-league debut as a defensive-minded catcher against Sale is a bit like swigging vodka for your first drink. Man, it'll burn, but everything after will be better by comparison.

Betts, complimented routinely over his first week in the majors for his ability to manage his at-bats, produced Boston's best off the lanky Chicago lefty. After striking out on seven pitches his first time up, Betts took everything Sale had his second time up before ripping the 11th pitch of the rendezvous off the Monster for a double.

His final at-bat against Sale was his most electrifying, as he beat out a ground ball to deep short by a step, then alertly raced to a second base left uncovered by the White Sox defense. It was ruled an infield double. It helped end Sale's night and sparked a three-run rally off reliever Jake Petricka. Mike Carp, pinch-hitting for Bogaerts, grounded out with two in scoring position to end the inning.

Bradley provided the defensive highlight of the evening, the week, the month and probably the season with an eye-popping diving catch in right-center of Tyler Flowers' second-inning fly ball. It was the finest play yet by a center fielder who makes fine plays on the daily.

A 1-8 homestand has afforded little room for optimism, but Bradley's defense continues toward the transcendent while his offense has started to come around.  

And so, on another night where a lineup starring five rookies failed to produce a run, Boston could hang its hat on little things. Jackie Bradley, Jr. made yet another eye-popping defensive play — a diving catch in right-center field that may have been his finest highlight yet.

On the mound, De La Rosa was fairly unremarkable. He allowed a pair of home runs to center field — one on a first-inning changeup to Jose Abreu, the other on a second-inning fastball to Conor Gillaspie. Chicago nicked him for a third run when Mike Napoli was victimized by a bad hop. De La Rosa struck out three and didn’t walk a man.

Unlike in his last full minor-league start, De La Rosa returned to relying more on his fastball, throwing it nearly 65 percent of the time.

Sale allowed a run on four hits in 7 2/3 innings, striking out six.

Twitter: @TimBritton

[bytimbritton]

"What you hoped Tony Gwynn was like, he was like."