JST, or, Kulturkampf on Ice

I’ve been playing a lot of hockey lately, and I have only abject failure to show for it. On Sunday, my ice hockey team was beaten 9-0 by the Wharton School of Business team, an experience which is all the more disheartening because I have delusions about these games serving as verdicts on the cultural affinities of their participants.

This has left me feeling nostalgic for the Free Agents, so named because we were the players no one else wanted on their low-intensity intramural team. For a year and a half, we were truly terrible, beaten even by the marching band’s team. I suggested that we call ourselves The Wretched of the Ice, but no one else on the team had read Fanon, and they didn’t think it was funny.

Why did everything change? According to the traditional narrative, we would have acquired self-belief, some cool new jerseys, and a back-to-basics work ethic. Instead, our path to success was far easier: like Emilio Estevez scouring the Dickensian alleyways of Minneapolis-St. Paul for defensemen with booming slap shots, we acquired JST, who looked and played as if he had stepped straight onto the ice from the Deep Springs ranch, Hegel in hand. Politely declining to show up on time, change out of his skinny jeans, or pass the puck, he scored at will, completely changing the fortunes of our team.

His defining moment came after an overtime playoff victory over the field hockey team and its male hangers-on, in which JST nearly got into a fight and, rightly ignoring high-pitched complaints from the opposing team about the inexperience of its goaltender, showed her no quarter. Thanks to a quirk of History, both teams had to share a single locker room after the game. The other side (rather loudly) looked to Fish Co. (or as they called it, “Fishies”) for consolation; JST was busy enlisting Brandon and me for the May 1, 2006 march for immigrant rights.

Scott Rolen, or, Against Identity Politics

Since my affinity for professional athletes is purely egocentric, I had expected to find myself drawn this October to the exploits of David Eckstein, the Cardinals’ plucky, diminutive shortstop. But Eckstein seems to revel in the novelty of his shortness, even going so far as to permit the Austin Powers theme song to play over the Busch Stadium loudspeakers before his at-bats (alluding, one assumes, to the character Mini-Me). For some, this may be called ‘having a sense of humor,’ but to me it is tacky, even complicit. Dennis Wise and Theo Fleury remain far better models of short sportsmen, for the simple reason that their example encourages me to regard my five feet and seven inches as a weapon, not a joke.

But right there, in the Cardinals infield, is an able substitute for my affections: Scott Rolen. Bitter, inscrutable, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mark Loretta, his unsmiling success in the past three games has kept me interested in the World Series, very much against the odds. Like Philip Marlowe (or Mark Loretta) in southern California, Rolen makes the intolerable landscape of a Red Sox-less playoffs seem acceptable, even meaningful.

Orhan Pamuk

Not enough nice things are being said about Orhan Pamuk. Some think that the Nobel Prize is inconsequential, and its selection committee driven by politics; others, in the vein of Edward Said complaining about V.S. Naipaul, would rather debate the politics of audience and representation than recognize good writing. I, on the other hand, read Snow and half of My Name is Red (it got boring), and decided that even if Pamuk isn’t an amazing writer -- at least in translation -- the mere presence of his roguish photograph in the newspapers, not to mention all the talk he’s incited about a renaissance of the political novel, makes me happy. That may sound like highly qualified praise, but I have to start somewhere.