May 2009
2 posts
A Certain Blindness
Studying for the Hist and Lit orals has reminded me how much I love the pragmatists in general and William James in particular. Here are some passages from James’ great 1899 essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”:
Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situation that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us...
Forget 'Bull Durham'
I’ve recently begun to get really interested in minor league baseball. And with all the info out there on the internet, it’s pretty easy and fun to follow your team’s prospects — in more ways than one.
For example: any Cub fan who follows the minors has gotta be pretty excited about Tony Thomas, a 22-year-old second baseman from Florida State who’s currently hitting...
April 2009
11 posts
Hardcore Harvard →
This was one of my favorite stories to report: I had a lot of interesting talks with current and former Record Hospital DJs (including Zach Baron, who then started a conversation me about writing in general and freelancing and his first years out of college that was probably as long our interview, and Pete Rojas, whose RCRD LBL is, I’m sure, known to at least one of the three people who read...
The Dowd Zone
The Twitter dudes are pretty hilarious in this piece, but what I can’t get over is this: how genuine were Maureen Dowd’s questions? Even though I’m never positive she’s entirely earnest, I generally assume she’s not being ironic — just dumb.
Take her last column, a true Dowd gem. Look, I love talking about Star Wars at least as much as the next guy, and...
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Fragmented
Still, I don’t consider my thesis the culmination of my intellectual journey at Harvard—not by any means. In the abstract sense, it combined a lot of my interests—theory and philosophy, matters of race and pluralism in an American context, 20th-century American literature, popular culture—in a way that I found both interesting and necessary, but in another sense, it felt like one more paper (a...
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The Most Wonderful Time
My favorite player just drilled the second pitch of the Cubs’ season out to left-center off Roy Oswalt.
It feels good to watch baseball again. God I love Opening Day.
Bad Omens in a Bad Economy
My friends are afraid to borrow my books. They’ve always been afraid to borrow my books.
Other than the ease with which the covers flip open, you can hardly tell I’ve read them — no creases, no folds, no scratches; only the lightest of pencil marks pops up every now and then, but it’s always out of the way, carefully skirting around the printed words so they won’t be...
Pie Chart
Approximate breakdown of my last 24 hours:
Time spent watching Angels in America on the Loeb Mainstage: 7 hours (29%)
Time spent finishing My Name Is Red: 7 hours (29%)
Time spent thinking, reading, and fantas(y)izing about Opening Day: 3 hours (13%)
Time spent on miscellaneous activities (eating, showering, going to class, spacing out and daydreaming, etc.): 5 hours (21%)
Time spent...
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Enishte Effendi:
“Over long years, as we gaze at book after book and illustration after illustration, we come to learn the following: A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with his masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds. Once a miniaturist’s artistry enters our souls this way, it becomes the criterion for the beauty of our world. At the end of...
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Reticent [Student] Talks Baseball, Not Books
I’m obsessed with the way so many (male) American writers possess a long-enduring fascination with baseball. Considering that I’m a bookish twenty-something who’s equally obsessed with American culture, American literature, and the American pastime, this composite obsession should come as no surprise.
It’s always reassuring to find another kindred spirit to have a mental...
March 2009
10 posts
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Naperville's Finest
Brains, beauty, and a badge… In each episode of Female Forces, viewers ride shotgun with the female officers from the Naperville, Illinois Police Department as they fight a full gamut of big city crime in the suburbs of Chicago.
It was only a matter of time before a reality TV show was set in my hometown. Two years ago, a Naperville girl finished ninth on American Idol. Not long after,...
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Sammy and Albert
I still remember watching Sammy Sosa hit a home run when I was 13 and on a school trip to Wrigley Field. I remember him hitting a walk-off home run and the Cubs winning a thrilling game, in fact. It didn’t quite happen that way — the box score says he actually hit a solo shot in the fifth with the Cubs already up by one, and after he did, Florida came back to win the game 9-4 —...
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Sears Sadness
The Sears Tower is about to become the Willis Tower. As when Macy’s took over Marshall Field’s, this isn’t just a name change for me. (By the way: they saw sales decline upwards of 10% after that and even more at the historic State Street store. We’re a proud people, Chicagoans. Don’t fuck with our history.)
No, this is Chicago-born, Chicago-based Sears, Roebuck...
Apologies
I know I write things that take up big chunks of everyone’s dashboard. I can’t help myself sometimes. The concept of micro-blogging is lost on me. Is there any way to include jumps on tumblr posts?
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Passionate Virtuosity
“‘Making love and telling stories both take more than good technique — but it’s only the technique that we can talk about.’
The Genie agreed: ‘Heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal, Dunyazade; so does heartless skill. But what you want is passionate virtuosity.’”
I’m a fan of John Barth’s “Dunyazadiad,” from which the above...
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The Kid
He wanted fame, and wanted it with a pure, hot eagerness that would have been embarrassing in a smaller man. But he could not stand celebrity. This is a bitch of a line to draw in America’s dust.
— Richard Ben Cramer on Ted Williams (via Poz)
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J-Roll's D and America's Pastime
Traditionalist baseball folks like to talk about “intangibles,” those little things that don’t show up in the box score or on the highlight reel, and we got a real example of that in Team USA’s thrilling 6-5 World Baseball Classic victory over Canada in front of a boisterous crowd of over 40,000 in Toronto’s Rogers Centre. I’m not talking about Derek...
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"The Unfinished" - The New Yorker on DFW →
For anyone interested in Wallace’s life and career, or in the future of literature — for anyone who reads seriously, really — the article should be addictive and rewarding. I would’ve read, ecstatically, another 12,000 words. —Sam Anderson
You probably don’t need me to lead you to it, but this piece is worth noting and preserving — if not for you, then at least for me.
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The Breakfast Club
Few things express end-of-college angst as well as 80s movies about end-of-high-school angst.
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February 2009
16 posts
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Despite Ehsan’s ambivalence, I really love...
How to Procrastinate Like Leonardo da Vinci →
Fun procrastination reading!
Then again, I’ll read just about anything that justifies all the hours I spend spaced out and pacing in my room.
givemesomethingtoread:
Leonardo was the kind of person we have come to call a “genius.” But he had trouble focusing for long periods on a single project. After he solved its conceptual problems, Leonardo lost interest until someone forced his...
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Variations on a Romantic History
From drunken conversations comes self-analysis and something that looks a bit like self-understanding.
Let’s begin with the pseudo-poetic:
My romantic life is a series of meaningful almosts and meaningless weres.
It’s full of implication and vagueness; those “almosts” and “weres” encompass many possible meanings. But it feels maladroitly poeticized, a...
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Bringing home the BACON - Statistically Speaking →
An interesting look at the potentially meaningless effect of steroids by one of my favorite statistically literate Cubs bloggers. Jives really well with earlier observations that A-Rod’s home run rate wasn’t altered by steroids. As Keith Law so tactfully framed the question of PEDs, “Every writer who talks about HGH as a PED is a moron - the available studies say it doesn’t enhance...
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Sherwood Anderson's Naperville, Illinois
About a century ago, it seems, a certain type of American writer liked to explore the grotesque underside of the idealized small-town heartland.
Today, I think, he could do no better than to look at the materially secure, socially transient, spiritually listless exurbs.
The black clouds settled down and it began to rain. I wanted to go at a terrible speed, to drive on and on forever. I wanted...
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Victim in a Vacuum!
All together now, all you masochists out there, specially those of you don’t have a partner tonight, alone with those fantasies that don’t look like they’ll ever come true — want you just to join in here with your brothers and sisters, let each other know you’re alive and sincere, try to break through the silences, try to reach through and connect…
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On the subject of hyper-emo mix CDs: The...
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The Age of A-Rod: A Rambling, Borderline...
“The symbol of his age”: I can’t help but think that, of all the sentiments that get repeated about A-Rod, that’s the one that’s gonna stick. He wasn’t the 30 year-old slugger trying to jack a few more (McGwire), the all-century player envying the attention being showered on homer-happy lesser lights (Bonds), or the psychopathically competitive pitcher unwilling...
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My Recession-Proof Career
On the advice of a friend, I’m going to turn my love of completely ordinary food into a lucrative food-writing career.
My column will only cover banal culinary experiences.
It will be written in the style of a Dashiell Hammett or a Raymond Chandler.
It will be called: The Hardboiled Egg — a no-nonsense look at everyday dining.
I walked into the Leverett dining hall around 9:40. Too...
A-Something » Joe Posnanski →
Amid all the clutter you’re gonna find about this A-Rod thing — all the derivative, sanctimonious, overdetermined screeds that we’ve read so many times before — Joe Posnanski’s latest blog post will definitely stand out. Few others can just muse on something with such a readable mix of analytic logic and literary empathy.
EDIT: He apparently took the post down...
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It never ends
Fine fine FINE. I’m not done with you, Tom. I guess I never will be. Why, you ask?
Well, the young’uns dropped their first issue today, and the cover story headline is: “Welcome to the Reel World.” AH! The reel is the real is the reel is the real……it never ends for me, really.
The only continuity has been her name, and Zwolfkinder, and Pokler’s love...
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'It feels, at least, like everybody came together'
Ain’t that right, Tyrone?
Like the ballroom in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, there is none in these trousers here, and Slothrop’s hardon, enlarging, aches like thunder.
Question
Who’s had a greater influence on my ability to see dick jokes wherever I look: Thomas Pynchon or Michael Scott?
I know we’re on different sides here, but if we’d just look each other in...
January 2009
7 posts
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My Kind of Team
Rob Neyer provides some perspective on the Yankees’ consideration of adding “non-disparagement” clauses to future contracts in order to prevent tell-all books like Torre and Verducci’s:
As a sometime historian, I can’t help thinking that nondisparagement clauses would be a terrible thing. As a sometime consumer of baseball books, I can’t help thinking that...
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Sunday Sunday Sunday
Joe Posnanski: A reminder that there are still sports writers who don’t just provide fodder for FJM (RIP) and, apparently, a huge Springsteen fan who knows how to get me excited.
At one point, when someone asked him how he planned to pack all of the intensity of a three-hour Bruce show into a 12-minute halftime show, he went into a classic meandering Bruce story. Bruce asked people to...
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13 Ways of Looking at a Guy Spilling Coffee
Inspired by the Boston Globe photo essay “A Spectacular Slide” and, to a lesser extent, Gromit’s sidekick.
I
Among twenty snowy cars,
The only moving thing
Is a man skating on heels.
II
He falls.
His coffee ejaculates.
III
Dunkin’ Donuts?
Nice choice.
IV
I hope his bones have the strength
To survive this fall.
The cream and sugar in his coffee
Suggest...
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“It is an essentially lonely game.”
– Adieu, kid.
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Charles Krauthammer - The Obama Inaugural: Hail... →
I actually thought Krauthammer had some worthwhile insight here, particularly in the first half. But I want to take issue with — or at least complicate — this bit:
Obama’s unapologetic celebration of Washington and the Founders of the original imperfect union was a declaration of his own emancipation from — or better, transcendence of — the civil rights movement. The...
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My Madeleine(s)
I know it’s somewhat banal and cliche, but I was thinking yesterday about how, as much as anything else, food is what reminds me of home. I swung by Portillo’s the other day for a Chicago hot dog in classic fashion: at the last minute, cutting from the left lane of Route 59 over to the far right and, in the process, cutting off at least one car. (This of course caused me to text Matt...
December 2008
1 post
the best of btz
A collection of posts that I happen to like more than others and feel like storing in one place.
13 Ways of Looking at a Guy Spilling Coffee (1/29/09 — a yummy pastiche)
My Recession-Proof Career (2/10/09 — hardboiled, yet soft and cuddly)
The Age of A-Rod: A Rambling, Borderline Incomprehensible Look at Steroids, Postmodernism, and the Fonz (2/12/09 — as promised, rambling...