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.

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.