San Diego Padres

If I were a less disciplined blogger, I would write something mean about the Philadelphia Phillies. Instead, I'd like to praise the San Diego Padres, my hometown club.

I haven't really cared about the Padres since 1998, the year they made it to the World Series (only to be swept by the Yankees, of course). In fact, I didn't really follow them throughout the 1990s, either -- the high point of my fandom was in kindergarten, when Bip Roberts and Steve Garvey came to my school to present me with the first of my many Citizen of the Month awards.

This weekend, however, the Padres have been in town to play the Phillies. They've won twice, in dramatic and controversial fashion, and I can only hope that they prevail again tomorrow. Yesterday, there was nearly a brawl after Carlos Ruiz slid in high on Marcus Giles, and today Milton Bradley -- who's hit three home runs so far this weekend -- called hitter-friendly Citizens Bank Park "a joke." Best of all, though, the Padres' home runs off of the vile Brett Myers occasioned the following:

After the game, Myers got into a shouting match with a reporter and had to be restrained by teammate Pat Burrell.

When Myers was asked about the two home runs, he said they were really "just pop ups."

A reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer questioned whether Myers really thought they were pop ups, and Myers got angry.

"You're not even a beat reporter, you're a fill-in, you don't know anything about baseball," said Myers, who then called the reporter "retarded."

The Inquirer reporter asked if Myers could spell retarded, and Myers stood up. Burrell then restrained Myers, and Myers refused to speak any further.

I'll never understand why Phillies fans hate Pat Burrell -- who, though overpaid and indifferent, seems like a decent guy -- but have no problem with Myers.

Fennesz + Sakamoto

I'm not usually thrilled by Christian Fennesz's collaborations. But Cendre, his new album with Ryuichi Sakamoto, is quite a pleasure. Its mournful piano-and-white noise texture reminds me, more than anything, of the soundtrack to the best Final Fantasy game never made.

Pac Sun

It brings me great pleasure to know that I can walk into a mid-sized mall in an exurb of Philadelphia and purchase a short-sleeved Western-style shirt of the type that I once assumed was unique to my home region, and which is perfectly suited for such summer pastimes as:

• skating at the mini-mall
• driving to the beach
• chilling with one's bros

Beverages

This past weekend in Providence, I ate in the basement of Apsara, surrounded by friends and a modest selection of beverages. I don't particularly enjoy consumption per se, but I love having a wide variety of beverages--preferably at least four of five of them--arrayed at my fingertips. BYOB restaurants like Apsara are the perfect venues to satisfy this urge, as I can set up my hoard of beverages, in quasi-feudal style, wherever I please, and in ridiculous quantities. In an ideal world, I would prefer to have before me not four or five but rather dozens of types of beverages, particularly the following:

• Tap water, with ice, in a plastic cup, preferably poured from a pitcher (for ease of refill).
• Hot green tea, poured from a pot, in a small porcelain cup.
• Coke (not Pepsi), with ice and a slice of lime or lemon, in a plastic cup.
• Iced coffee, with ice and milk, in a pint glass, with a straw.
• Orange juice, no pulp, with ice, in a large glass.
• Inexpensive, and preferably regional, lager beer, such as Yuengling or Narragansett, from a pint can.
• Imported beer, variety depending on mood and season, from a pint glass.
• Red wine, in the $15-$30/bottle range, from a wine glass.
• Hot coffee, nearly black with a drop of whole milk, in a mug.
• Syrupy, cognac-based liqueur, from the bottle.
• Inexpensive bottled water, chilled, from the bottle.
• Orange Vitamin Water, from the bottle.

Michael Nutter

In my life, I've made campaign contributions to just three candidates: Paul Wellstone, David Segal, and Michael Nutter. After this Tuesday's election, Nutter is now set to become the next mayor of Philadelphia. He polled strongly in the white liberal enclaves of Chestnut Hill, Mt. Airy, and my office, but he also crushed Chaka Fattah in West Philly. Whether or not he'll be able to make a dent in Philly's current problems is another matter.

By the numb3rs

Last May, I set a goal: Henceforth, I would read about 30 to 45 books per year, or 10 to 15 per "season" -- the three seasons in my system being January through April (Spring), May through August (Summer), and September through December (Fall). Over the past year, I kept a list of books read, along with pertinent information about each book:

2006-2007 STATISTICS

Total books read: 41 (14 in Summer 2006/16 in Fall 2006/11 in Spring 2007)
Books read per month: 3.42
Books read per week: 0.79
Books read by category:
Literature: 9 (4/2/3)
History: 7 (2/2/3)
Theory and Criticism: 7 (1/3/3)
Misc. Nonfiction: 6 (1/4/1)
Political Science: 4 (1/3/0)
Urban Studies: 4 (2/2/0)
Genre Fiction: 4 (3/0/1)
Books read by publisher:
All trade and non-UP academic: 27 (13/6/8)
All university press: 14 (1/10/3)
Penguin: 6
Vintage: 5
Penn Press: 5
Norton: 3
Chicago: 3
Cornell: 2
Random House: 1
Pelican: 1
Harper & Row: 1
Mariner: 1
Viking: 1
Verso: 1
Knopf: 1
Westview: 1
Modern Library: 1
New Directions: 1
Ace: 1
Continuum: 1
Monthly Review: 1
Princeton: 1
Yale: 1
Harvard: 1
MIT: 1
Books read by binding:
Cloth: 15 (36.59%, 3/8/4)
Paperback: 26 (63.41%, 11/8/7)
Duration in possession before read:
Less than one month: 30 (7/14/9)
One month to six months: 5 (3/0/2)
Six months to one year: 1 (1/0/0)
More than one year: 5 (3/2/0)

There's something pleasing about rendering reading in terms of numbers and categories. To be sure, part of the pleasure comes from violating the unspoken taboo against treating reading as a quantifiable activitity (Full disclosure: Moneyball was one of the 41 books I read last year). But making this list also helped me reflect on what I've read, and why, and how my reading habits are changing over time.

The New NHL

I'm on record as a fierce critic of the NHL's post-lockout rule changes. While I still agree with much of what I wrote in that angry, convoluted missive, I have to admit that the "new NHL" hasn't turned out as badly as I'd feared. In fact, for the first time in almost a decade, I'm actually excited about the start of playoff season. Two of the league's recent moves have been particularly reassuring: first, in contrast to stodgy old Major League Baseball, the NHL has not just tolerated but in fact actively encouraged the dissemination of game footage online; second, Gary Bettman has reiterated that fighting remains an important part of the game, despite recent debate about abolishing it. After all, as long as there's room in hockey for nice guys like Georges Laraque, fans like Lil' Jon and myself will show up to watch.

#5: Times Literary Supplement

Compare to: As-yet-nonexistent American Review of Books

But not: Myopic New York Review of Books, Middlebrow New York Times Book Review

From the letters section of a recent issue:

"Sir, -- Paul Barker (February 9) places Brown University 'on Rhode Island'; Diana Edwards (Letters, March 2) doubts that there is any such island. They are both wrong. ..."

Paul Robeson

A couple days ago, there was a piece on the radio about Paul Robeson, the performer, activist, and lawyer. I was planning to write at length about his life -- and this stately mural, which is located a couple blocks from my apartment -- but I decided that was a little too easy. In fact, the only non-nice thing anyone can say about Robeson is that he wasn't quick enough to criticize Stalin, and I find that kind of post-Cold War anti-communism a little suspect. Necessary, perhaps, but still suspect, even if Robeson singing the Soviet national anthem does make me cringe.

One thing I learned about Robeson from the radio program is that the US government revoked his passport because he refused to swear that he was not a communist -- hence, I suppose, the mural's claim that Robeson was a "Citizen of the World." Call me nostalgic and insufficiently anti-communist, but if the spirit of an age is reflected in its singer-activists, I'd much rather live in Robeson's time than Bono's.

Good

I could say all sorts of mean things about Good magazine's list of the top magazines of all time, but that would be silly and, well, mean -- and thus contrary to the generous spirit of this blog. Instead, allow me to congratulate them on having devised a much-del.icio.used feature, and thank them for having inspired me to come up with a magazine list of my own.

Mine is much shorter, since I limited myself to magazines to which I have subscribed, or which I bought (or continue to buy) consistently on newsstands. Since this is a great opportunity to write nice things about periodicals I love, I plan to post about these magazines from time to time.

Dudes among dudes

I've grown fond of most of the guys I play hockey with, but two deserve special mention: JL and PH.

- On a Penn roller hockey team filled with future (and present) physicians and nanotube-obsessed engineering students, JL stands out nearly as much as I do. Recently he tried to bring up dialectics as part of the locker room conversation, and I was the only one who knew what he was talking about. He lives in a bizarre condo development in New Jersey.

- My ice hockey team is remarkably diverse, at least by the standards of the sport, which often seems to be the exclusive province of boorish, middle-class white men. Our squad boasts women, senior citizens, accountants, and honest-to-God POCs (myself not really included). But the most unlikely team member of all is PH, a Russian history professor at Penn, whose father translated Mikhail Bakhtin's major works into English. I sometimes wonder whether PH is a better player than the 'sphere's most famous hockey-playing academic, and given that he's scored three goals in the last two games, I'm inclined to say yes.

Some books

I've been thinking of applying to graduate school in English, and by way of weighing my options, I've been thinking about examples of literary scholarship I admire. Here are some nice things about four of them:

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

A few weeks ago, I brazenly touted Postmodernism as the most important book I’d ever read, but JHB was right to point out my error. For world-swallowing ambition, sophistication of argument, and sheer beauty, the first chapter of The Political Unconscious is second to none in the (admittedly small) body of recent literary scholarship I’ve read. In Jameson, the subordinate clauses are what hurt, and they never hurt so good as this:

Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it.

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

I’ve never been terribly interested in the First World War, and I’m not sure the British poetry associated with it is all that worthwhile. But Fussell’s book is a fine model of how to write convincingly about the confluence of literature and history, and one comes away from this book understanding as much about the lived experience of soldiers in the trenches as one does about, say, Siegfried Sassoon. Fussell also has an abiding fascination with Gravity’s Rainbow, which looms in this book as something like the absurd culmination of a modernity birthed from the blood and mud of Passchendaele.

Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel

Even more so than the underwhelming (but brilliantly titled) Graphs, Maps, Trees, this book is truly exhilarating. Written in choppy, effervescent prose, Moretti’s book is an insightful investigation of genre and geography, and it sketches a genuinely new approach to literary history -- one which provides far more questions than answers, and which manages to make these questions seem worthy of a lifetime of investigation. Atlas of the European Novel is also the book that first whet my appetite for the “big” later novels of Dickens: Bleak House, Little Dorritt, and Our Mutual Friend.

Robert Scholes, Textual Power and The Rise and Fall of English

Anyone who thinks that literary theory inevitably leads to pretention and irrelevance would do well to read Scholes, who approaches abstruse theory and practical pedagogy with equal seriousness. What unites these two books -- aside from a prose style which radiates decency -- is a belief that studying literature and literary theory can be a useful -- and indeed empowering -- experience for students. In The Rise and Fall of English, Scholes provides a sobering account of the present state of English as a discipline, but it is an account which nonetheless leaves me half-convinced that becoming an English professor might not be such a bad idea.

Eight Below and The Terminal

I like to watch movies on the bus. Sleep, cell-phone chatter, and headphones inevitably interrupt my viewing, leaving the plot denatured and the dialogue incomplete. In 2003, for example, on a bus to and from the anti-war protest in New York, I watched Crocodile Dundee and When Harry Met Sally in this fashion. (I was lucky; on the ISO-chartered bus, the riders were subjected to documentaries about Palestine.)

This weekend, traveling to and from New York again, I watched two more films, about which I'd like to say a few nice things. Eight Below, in which the huskies out-act Paul Walker and the dude from American Pie, is a triumph of extreme anthropomorphism, radically familiarizing the Antarctic landscape fully as much as the dogs. In The Terminal, Tom Hanks, whose character's accent now seems like a bizarre imitation of Borat's, gives us a bumbling, tragic portrayal of statelessness, and bare life appears in the guise of romantic comedy.