RIP John Updike

NYTimes: The author at the Boston Public Library in 2006.

John Updike died yesterday at the age of 76. My favorite piece of his -- my favorite piece of sportswriting ever -- was on the final game of Ted William's career:

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

NYTimes: A Relentless Updike Mapped America’s Mysteries

Obituary: John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Ordinary, Is Dead at 76

The New Yorker: John Updike Short Story Archive

Sherman Alexie on Colbert (Updated)

Here's the link to the entire show; Sherman Alexie comes on at @16.00 minutes, after the second blank bar on the bottom line. You can push the play button there to watch. (You have to watch a 30-second ad, and the play button jumped around on me, but it's worth it.)

Updated: The video:

Sherman Alexie Silences Colbert (Updated)

I will post video when it's up. Sherman Alexie! (A favorite author.)

Updated: The video:

Sad News

** This is an undated file photo provided by HarperCollins of author Tony Hillerman. Hillerman, author of the acclaimed Navajo Tribal Police mystery novels, died Sunday, Oct. 26, 2008, of pulmonary failure. (AP Photo/HarperCollins/Kelly Campbell/FILE) (Kelly Campbell - AP)

No more Jim Chee or Joe Leaphorn novels; their creator, Tony Hillerman, has died.

WaPo: Acclaimed author Tony Hillerman dies at 83

International Herald-Tribune: Tony Hillerman, novelist, dies at 83

Biography of Tony Hillerman

wikipedia: Tony Hillerman

What Books Did Mayor Sarah Palin Want To Ban?

Report on the subject by ABC. Palin's Assembly of God church was big on book-banning, so the test would have been a religious one. I bet Harry Potter was on her list.

Nick Hornby Has a Blog

Nick Hornby

Today's rant is about the EPL being taken over by multi-billionaires.

A Cartoon for Readers

Readers of books, that is: Compulsory Reading.

hat tip to Lawyers, Guns & Money

Nixonland

Nixonland by Rick Perlstein is the next political book I want to read.

Here's the Amazon.com review:

Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: How did we go from Lyndon Johnson's landslide Democratic victory in 1964 to Richard Nixon's equally lopsided Republican reelection only eight years later? The years in between were among the most chaotic in American history, with an endless and unpopular war, riots, assassinations, social upheaval, Southern resistance, protests both peaceful and armed, and a "Silent Majority" that twice elected the central figure of the age, a brilliant politician who relished the battles of the day but ended them in disgrace. In Nixonland Rick Perlstein tells a more familiar story than the one he unearthed in his influential previous book, Before the Storm, which argued that the stunning success of modern conservatism was founded in Goldwater's massive 1964 defeat. But he makes it fresh and relentlessly compelling, with obsessive original research and a gleefully slashing style--equal parts Walter Winchell and Hunter S. Thompson--that's true to the times. Perlstein is well known as a writer on the left, but his historian's empathies are intense and unpredictable: he convincingly channels the resentment and rage on both sides of the battle lines and lets neither Nixon's cynicism nor the naivete of liberals like New York mayor John Lindsay off the hook. And while election-year readers will be reminded of how much tamer our times are, they'll also find that the echoes of the era, and its persistent national divisions, still ring loud and clear. --Tom Nissley

He was on Morning McCain on MSNBC and went toe to toe with Nixon henchman, racist Pat Buchanan. Watch the video here.

Digby loved the book.

The New York Times assigned George F. Will to review it. Guess what he thought? Read his scathing review here.

If George Will hates it, I need to read it.

Read From the Left

Two new books deconstruct the arguments from the right that have distorted our national discourse on two important topics: science and politics.

"Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health" (Oxford University Press, 2008) by David Michaels.

From the author himself, writing at The Pump Handle:

In Doubt, I recount how the strategy of manufacturing uncertainty was pioneered by the tobacco industry. Clearly successful, it has been adopted by the asbestos, beryllium, chromium, and pesticide industries, among others, and it is the strategy used by global warming deniers. There are few industries that haven’t tried it - Andrew Dressler at Grist has a new piece on how the Indoor Tanning Association is trying to convince the public that “there is actually no evidence linking sun exposure with cancer.” (I talk about that in my book, too.)

"Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics" by Glenn Greenwald:

From the time I began blogging in October, 2005, I've written about many different topics, but almost all have a similar undercurrent: the Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox-News right-wing faction that controls the Republican Party and has dominated our political life for the last 15 years, and the multiple ways that our political institutions -- and particularly the Drudgified establishment press -- enable them. Marketing packages aside, this book is about them; how they function; the weakness-driven bloodthirstiness, dishonesty and sleaze which defines them; the indispensable eagerness of the establishment media to be used by them; and what can be done by those opposed to them to change all of that.

All of the radical and reprehensible events of the last eight years -- the commencement and endless prosecution of an indescribably disastrous war, the accelerated dismantling of our Constitutional framework, the creation of a lawless Surveillance State and a virtually omnipotent President, the legitimization of truly grotesque torture and detention regimes, the complete corruption of our political discourse -- have individuals and a political movement behind them, causing all of that to happen. They have cultivated the ability to manipulate media behavior, largely as a result of a media eager to help. But what they do not have is popular support for virtually anything they are doing. And yet they continue to win elections.

How and why that happens -- the deceitful electoral tactics and manipulative personality-based myths the Right has perfected and continuously deploys to win elections, and the ways in which our slothful, vapid and complicit establishment press propagates those myths -- is the principal subject of this book. And understanding and exposing that right-wing/media partnership is a necessary precondition for weakening it.

Good Reads

NYTimes: Pete Hamill Downtown, on Downtown

I just finished (I say "finished", not "read", because I listened to the book on tape) Pete Hamill's novel North River, set in New York City in 1934. It's a love story set within Pete Hamill's love of New York City and the people he grew up with. Recommended.

Nick Hornby's New Audience

The British author of such bestsellers as "High Fidelity" and "About a Boy" -- whose main characters resist the conventions of grown-up life -- has now turned to the young adult literature market.
Photo Credit: By Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post
Teens, with his new novel Slam marketed to the so-called 'young adult' market. I'm a big fan of Hornby, starting with High Fidelity, and of course Fever Pitch. The Arsenal fanatic is missing three games to do his US book tour.

WaPo: A New Shelf Life Begins
To Find Nick Hornby's Latest Novel, 'Slam,' You Have to Think Young

Married in Massachusetts

Patricia Cornwell, author.

Who knew? (Well, I knew, but that was because of my law school friend who had gone to Davidson.) I like these "now I can finally be happy" gay marriage stories. Heartwarming! Wingnuts, go grind your teeth elsewhere.

I'm on a Break

SI Neg. 78-19159. Date: 1978...Malachite, a copper mineral with swirling patterns of bright and dark green, is often used for jewelry. This specimen, from Zaire, is from the Gem and Mineral collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. ..Credit: Dane A. Penland (Smithsonian Institution)
flckr

I'm taking a little time off from the blog. Busy making pieces for my five-week, 10 class raku class, and catching up on a little summer reading. Right now I'm in the middle of Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, and Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command. Highly recommend all three, as well as the other political book I just finished, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq'a Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

Regular posting should resume next week.

Oh, and here are three new additions to the blogroll:

Chad Finn's Touching All the Bases
Describes itself as "Commentary from a New England sports journalist who remains a fan at heart." Good writer and posts great old baseball cards.

The Soul of Baseball
Describes itself as "A blog dedicated to the memory of John "Buck" O'Neil - player, manager, scout, coach, spokesman and friend. The book, "The Soul of Baseball," is in bookstores now." But it's so much more. He goes all over the place and you'll enjoy the trip.

Group News Blog
A group blog started by the readers of Steve Gilliard's The News Blog who kept the blog going during his illness.

RIP David Halberstam

Horst Faas/Associated Press

His reporting for The New York Times from Vietnam left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. For that work, Mr. Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964.

David Halberstam wrote three of my favorite books: The Best and the Brightest, The Breaks of the Game, and The Teammates, about my favorite topies: politics and sports. He died yesterday in a car accident in California, on his way to interview Y.A. Tittle, the former quarterback of the New York Giants. I would have liked to read that book. When I was a kid I had the famous picture of Y.A. Tittle's last game, bloodied and bowed, on the door of my closet:


David Halberstam books are books I passed around, or bought to give as gifts. In my mind, reading The Breaks of the Game is inextricably tied with the 1980s Larry Bird Celtics. All my Celtics fan friends read the book, and we marveled at the writing and at the insider's view. I listened to The Teammates a few years ago as a book-on-tape and was brought to tears several times (always dangerous while driving!) as he described the life-long devoted friendship between Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doerr, and Dom DiMaggio. I will miss his writing. Here's a piece he wrote for the Boston Globe about Red Sox Nation (hat tip, A Red Sox Fan in Pinstripe Territory):

David Halberstam, Boston Globe, 8/29/03: Facing the Nation
Up-close look at the Red Sox fan base finds it is as passionate as ever

For a Citizen of the Nation, beating the Mariners or A's is merely winning a baseball game, while beating the Yankees is the very essence of life itself....

[]

It's a condition, being a Red Sox fan, not a cult, nor a religious affiliation, although there are on occasion certain religious experiences. (Think Yaz in '67, and Fisk in the World Series in '75.) Most Americans are relatively indifferent to the past, believing that America is so powerful that history does not matter, that our nation is so strong and energetic, that we can mold the present to our needs, despite the burdens of the past. Not Red Sox fans: They know the past matters, and they know as well that you are, more than you realize, a prisoner of it. In a country where there has been an amazing run of material affluence for almost 60 years with the expectation built into the larger culture that things are supposed to get better every year, citizens of RSN know better. They know that things do not always get better. They know that the guys in the white hats do not always win in the last five minutes of the movie. They know the guys in the black hats have plenty of last-minute tricks, and that they can pick up just the right player off the waiver list in the waning days of a season (think Johnny Mize, 1949).

The Red Sox fan knows that the fates can be cruel. Never mind the Babe. Just think a mere 31 years ago -- why it was like yesterday: Sparky Lyle for Danny Cater. A 27-year-old lefthanded reliever, who had pitched in 184 games in the previous three years, and had saved 16 that year (and would save a league-leading 35 the next year) for a 32-year-old first baseman with up to then 52 career home runs. Oh dear.

David Halberstam, ESPN Page 2: One Splendid day [with Ted Williams]

David Halberstam, ESPN Page 2: Sports can distract, but they don't heal

David Halberstam, ESPN Page 2: Thanks, soccer, see you in four years

salon.com: David Halberstam, 1934-2007
In a host of Salon interviews, the great journalist talks about the depths of his work and passions, from Vietnam to Michael Jordan.

WaPo: David Halberstam, 1934-2007
Author Uncloaked Vietnam Blunders

NYTimes: David Halberstam, 73, Reporter and Author, Dies

San Francisco Chronicle: DAVID HALBERSTAM: 1934-2007
Author was on his way to an interview
He was to meet with Y.A. Tittle to talk about football

San Francisco Chronicle: DAVID HALBERSTAM: 1934-2007
Car crash ends award-winning writer's life

SFGate.com: Friends and former colleagues remember David Halberstam

Academy of Achievement: The David Halberstam Interview

wikipedia: David Halberstam

RIP Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was the first author that after I read a book (Cat's Cradle, I think) I bought all his other books and read them, too. He hated assholes. Of course, that means he hated Bush.

NYTimes: Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84


In These Times: Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@ (2003 interview)

Q: Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq?

A: That they are nonsense.

Q: My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we’ve lost reason to hope?

A: I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

The Salon Interview: Kurt Vonnegut (1999)

News Liverpool Fans Can Use

Highlights from Liverpool Arsenal yesterday. Bonus Scotsman commentary.

All hail Crouchie! Peter Crouch returned from surgery on his broken nose yesterday to score a 'perfect hat trick': Left foot, right foot, header! (Favorite headline: CROUCH OUTDRAWS GUNNERS AT HIGH NOON, Football 365)

The Independent sez, McLaren, use Stevie G. in the middle, drop Limp, you idiot. Or something like that. Stevie G., only #10 on the list of the Top Ten Highest Paid Footballers. No one is more valuable than Sir Stevie. Those in the know know Stevie G. should be England captain, too.

Also in the Independent, an article about Zenden and the Holland team.

John Arne Riise has been declared bankrupt by a court in Liverpool. Maybe that is why Bellamy went after him with the golf club? Apparently his former agent invested his cash in some bad deals. Riise was very young when he made all that money (he's only 26 now) and hasn't always had the best judgment.

Maybe Riise should have read more books before he hired an agent. The Premier League has a charity called "Reading Stars" (pdf link), and every year every team selects a player who selects a book. This year's Liverpool player is Jermaine Pennant, and his book is Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo. A book about an English soldier in WWI. Doubt he chose it, but there it is.

Found a new Liverpool blog: The Offside Liverpool; and a new American soccer blog: Who Ate All The Cupcakes?

Vacation Book Report #10

The Bright Forever (2005) by Lee Martin


**** out of five

Coach Mom received this book from my sister for Christmas and it is just not her cup of tea. She told me she couldn't read it because it was "all over the place, a different chapter for each character, and the first chapter is just two sentences. What kind of writing is that?" While all these statements are true, the cover also said it was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for fiction, so I gave it a go.

The story: In a small midwest town, a nine-year girl disappears after riding her bike to the library after dinner to return her overdue books. Her math tutor and his down-on-his-luck neighbor are suspects. The suspects and the girl's family tell their stories of what happened, as do many others in the community.
The book got me through our flight from the Bahamas to Ft. Lauderdale, a two-hour layover, and most of our flight to Boston. I felt warmly towards the book while I was reading it, but it seems less substantial as I think about it today. Partly I liked it because it was set in a small town in 1971, and I knew all the references, from pop culture to the security of small town life. I had pretty much figured out whodunit 3/4 of the way through, but wanting to know exactly what happened kept me reading. The prose is a lot leaner than the last two lush fiction writers I read.

Final stats:

10 books read;

2 nonfiction, 7 fiction, 1 falsely labeled nonfiction but mostly made up;

authors: 4 female, 6 male;

rankings: one 5-star, two 4 1/2 star, two 4 star, one 3 1/2 star, two 3 star, one 2 1/2 star, one no star.

Vacation Book Report #9

The Lady and the Unicorn (2004) by Tracy Chevalier

*** out of five

Did you read Girl With a Pearl Earring? Then you've read The Lady and the Unicorn. The artwork in question is a tapestry, not a painting; the setting is France and Belgium, not Holland; the guilds are the weavers and the dyers, not the painters; but other than that, this is the same novel. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it; but having read the earlier novel, this is a rewrite, wonderfully elegant, but disappointing for its sameness.

Vacation Book Report #8

The Memory Keeper's Daughter (2005) by Kim Edwards

**** 1/2 out of five

I didn't think I'd like this book because the premise is so bizarre. A young doctor's wife goes into labor during a freak snowstorm in Kentucky, and he is forced to deliver his own baby with the help of a nurse. His son is born healthy, but a second child is delivered; a daughter with Down Syndrome. The doctor's own sister died of Down Syndrome when she was a teenager, and to save his wife the pain his own mother suffered he hands the baby to the nurse with instructions to take the child to an institution. The nurse, who is secretly in love with the doctor, takes the child, moves away, and raises her as her own. The doctor tells his wife her second child was born dead.

Completely implausible, but according to the author's notes, this is based on a true story told to her by a minister. The writing is beautiful, lush and lyrical. Even the doctor who gave away his own child becomes a sympathetic figure. It's the second book I've read here that reduced me to tears.

I return to the frigid north tomorrow, so only one more book to be read here on the pink sand beach.

Vacation Book Report #7

Friday Night Lights (1990) by H. G. Bissinger

**** 1/2 out of five.

Friday Night Lights was approached from my low expectations. I had seen both the movie and the TV show, and felt that they glorified racism, sexism, and football as religion. Turns out that is because the film and the television version stripped the book's exploration of those factors and reduced this fine complex book to the simple story of Permian High School's 1988 football season. If you've seen the celluloid versions, you must read the book.

Racism? From the book I learned that Odessa, Texas public schools were not integrated until 1982. 1982! 28 years after Brown v. Bd. of Education was decided. 19 years after George Wallace blocked black students from entering the University of Alabama, and John F. Kennedy sent in the National Guard. In 1982 I was 25 and had graduated from integrated public schools and college. I couldn't have imagined that segregated schools still existed in the USA.

Sexism? Pressure on girls at Permian High School to conform was so intense that girls scored on average 75 points below the boys on scholastic aptitude tests.

Football as religion? It's the whole book, but especially the chapter near the end about how Permian's foe in the state semi-final game changed their entire grading system to ensure that no football player would be suspended for failing to maintain a 70 average. And woe to those who challenged the orthodoxy. A 35-year teacher, Will Bates, who refuses to give a star football player a grade he didn't earn, is drummed out of the school.

And as a bonus, I enjoyed the chapter about the great oil bust of the 1980s, which led an anonymous Texas oilman to say: "After all, we're just another Middle East war away from another boom." (p. 230)

Odessa is just 15 miles from Midland, Texas, where Chimpy McFlightsuit grew up.

On to the next tome!