Political theory and practice – Thinking and doing

Blue Snow and ice.

The Year of Blue Snow (2013) editors Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin.

Good Reads meta-data is 351 pages, rated 3.77 by 13 Philly Phanatics.

Genre: Non-fiction; Species: Baseball.

Verdict: It still hurts!

Tagline: Perfect hindsight.

Cold weather came early and a curtain of freezing snow fell on warm summer dreams when Chico Ruiz stole home on 21 September 1964. So the end began, after leading the National League for 150 days, World Series tickets already printed in the city of Brotherly Love (and are now in mint condition on Ebay where I got mine to fulfil a vow I made in 1964), the bottom fell out. This tale of woe is the baseball season of the Philadelphia Phillies, a sect which I followed as devotedly as any believer in miracles. Then came the fall of the curtain and no cognitive dissonance could disguise the crush of reality.

This compendium offers brief and anodyne biographies of every member of this team on the roster even if only for a few days, including coaches, radio announcers, general manager, and owner. The groundskeepers are not included, though one is pictured. These sketches were compiled from the biography project of the Society for American Baseball Research web site, from whence comes the neologism ‘sabermetrics.’ It is a bland biographical reference work in the main. Most of these individuals have Wikipedia entries from the same source, like manager Gene Mauch, Congressman Jim Bunning, Chris Short, Ed Roebuck, Tony Gonzales, Rubén Amaro, Dick Allen, John Herrnstein, John Callison, Art Mahaffey….

At the back it includes several essays second guessing with the unerring perception of fifty years of hindsight every move, starting lineup, call, and choice during the downfall. Management decisions, roster changes, use of relief pitchers, catchers, pitch selections, signals to bunt, rotation, stolen base attempts, steps off the first base bag, and more are considered in a forensic investigation to find fault, apportion blame, and mourn. The result is thoroughgoing but superficial. For even more gruesome detail see John Rossi, The 1964 Phillies (2005). Then there is Greg Glading’s unintelligible 64 Intruder (1995). This latter seems to have been translated from Klingon by a Romulean.

Although the most fatuous assertion, with statistical analyses and diagrams, proves that Ruiz should not have tried to steal home. None go quite so far as to say that he did not steal home, but that will surely come in our world where truth is fiction and fiction truth, as the Post-Modernist of Hollywood have it.

Elsewhere Ruiz is defended with footnotes: https://sabr.org/journal/article/1964-phillies-in-defense-of-chico-ruizs-mad-dash/

The fact is the St Louis Cardinals had more stamina, and they had Bob Gibson. Enuf said!

Ruiz acted on Fate’s initiative, not the manager’s. A runner on third in the 6th inning of a scoreless game with two outs and the team’s best hitter at bat down two strikes means stay put. According to that same conventional wisdom the pitcher used a windup not a stretch. And yet…. At that moment the Phillies were leading the league by 6 1/2 games. Yet they finished third by losing this one and the next 9 games in a row, ten straight. Two wins in those 10 would have been enough. Even one might have led to a playoff game. At the time it was the longest leading margin that late in the season to fail but fail it did.

Pedant’s corner: ‘Blue snow’ is a rare optical effect of deep and dense snow drift seen in slanting light. In this case the remark is attributed to Gus Triandos, number two catcher for the team. He meant that it was a rarity for a team like the Phillies to do as well as they did, when a number of average players combined to have exceptional seasons. Certainly, it is true that this season was a career best for several of them, hereafter the only way was down.

On the experience of the failure, one of his teammates likened it to swimming in a long, long lake for a long time and then, within sight of the further shore, cramping and drowning. That was Octavio Rojas, outfielder.

That capped a summer in which my first serious girlfriend unexpectedly dumped me, I broke my arm through my own stupidity, my first car bit the dust after two weeks, and there was no joy from Mudville to salve those wounds and woes, but rather it compounded them.

Grin and bear it.

Anni Ultimi (2011) by Allan Scribner and Douglas Marshall, eds.

Good Reads meta-data is 181 pages, rated 3.89 by 18 litizens.

The book consists of the two editors’ introduction and commentary on Seneca (4BCE – 65AD) the Roman Stoic thinker, imperial advisor, speech writer, exile, essayist, satirist, together with a selection of Seneca’s letters concerning old age, retirement, and death. Born from Seneca the Elder in Cordoba Spain where I once saw a statue of him, he lived most of his adult life in Rome.

Seneca knew how to talk a good game: the letters selected are replete with insights, pearls of wisdom, and sound reasoning. Seneca sees nothing to fear in death since it extinguishes consciousness just as we were before birth. We knew no pain, suffering, or fear before we were born, so there will be none in death.

Old age has its infirmities, and if we dwell on them, they are magnified. Ergo, best to soldier on as though on campaign. (Truly the voice of a man who was never a soldier.)

Retirement signals a state of equilibrium. One is no longer striving for things. Ergo, now one wants nothing. (Was his retirement funded by a defined benefits superannuation scheme as mine is?) Each day of life is a celebration of the senses. In retirement keep learning, observe the world around, appreciate the skills of others, and put things in perspective.

This is the same Seneca who was complicit is several of Nero’s murders, like that of his mother Agrippinna, nor did Seneca scruple to amass enormous wealth during Nero’s reign.

If anyone wonders about the connection between this person and the Great Hill People of Western New York, there is none. The Dutch called then Sinnekars and when the English arrived that became Seneca. So says Wikipedia.

Scribner has published a series of krimis set in the Rome of Marcus Aurelisius and I have read at least one with satisfaction.

Dinner is served.

Anka Mühlstein, Balzac’s Omelette (2010).

Good Reads meta-data is 231 pages, rated 3.38 by 184 litizens.

Genre: Non-fiction; Species: Gourmet.

DNA: Gallic.

Verdict: Erudite, witty, and insightful.

Tagline: What, where, and when you eat reveals your identify.

Across the panorama of La Comédie humaine, Balzac uses food to evoke character, to establish atmosphere, to reveal social class, to suggest conventions, and more. He is credited in these pages with being the first author to bring food and eating into fiction.

The timing was right for this excavator of humanity to do so. Prior to the French Revolution there were no restaurants (in our sense of the word). Dining was done at home, but the Revolution rendered unemployed ranks of chefs, pastry cooks, soup specialists, providores, butchers, gardeners, and the like who had ladened the tables of aristocracy, nobility, and royalty. From these ranks a couple of enterprising souls opened an eatery. Prior to that coffee houses, which occasionally offered bread or biscuits, table d’hôte, inns, or street vendors were the only meals available to someone away from home.*

The talkfest that the aftermath of the Revolution unleashed in Paris brought thousands of men to the capital, and they had to eat. There was the demand to be supplied by all those unemployed caterers.

The word ‘restaurant’ comes from restore, and originally the nascent restaurants offered restoratives, that is, light meals to tide one over until the evening meal. But unlike the establishments mentioned above in a restaurant, one could eat at a time of choice and select what to order and only pay for what was consumed (not a fixed price), while sitting down inside. It was a culinary revolution that quickly developed.

Balzac often describes meals but he seldom includes the menu, but rather concentrates on the manners and mores, the spectacle, the tableware, the candles, the ostentation or humility, the occasions, the aftermath, the subtexts, the verbal sparring, that is, he treats the meal as a mis-en-scene. He himself had a vexed relation with food (like everything else), while in the throes of composition to generate income to defray creditors and buy food and wine, and, oh, pay some of the arrears in rent, he did but drink coffee. He said it was fifty (50) cups a day, and ate very little, or nothing.

Then when the cheque came in he would bust loose with a gigantic feast, inviting all and sundry, and a barrel of the best Bordeaux to mark his achievement. The result of this manner of living was the corpulent character we know from cartoons, though he despised his own fat he made no systemic effort to reduce his weight except for that coffee. There is a strain of self-hatred in him that shows in his novels.

No sooner would he recover from such an excess than the knock of the bailiff would drive him into another composition.

*A table d’hôte at the time referred to to a boarding house meal, where a stranger might enter, and if a place was free, take a meal plonked down. In such a case this stranger ate what was put on the table. Paid for it whether he ate it all or not and left. The term today means a menu fixé for a fixed price. In an inn one ate at a fixed time, for a fixed price, and took what was offered. No choice. Inevitably stew of some kind.

P.S. Street food — the crèpe — was more varied and available at all hours, but of course there was nowhere to sit, and one was exposed to the elements.

The Decalogue violated

Sins for Father Knox (1973) by Josef Škvorecký

Good Reads meta-data is 272 pages rated 3.56 by 124 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Czech (via exile in Canada)

Verdict: A puzzler, indeed.

Tagline line: Who dunnit? How d’ya know?

Accomplished Czech crime writer Škvorecký offers ten short mystery stories after a foreword about Ronald Knox’s decalogue. In anticipation of this volume, there is an earlier post setting forth Knox’s ten commandments. That is the homework.

Each of these stories illustrates the contravention of one of these ten commandments. That is, each story shows the importance of each commandment by its absence, so that when it is violated the story is less than satisfactory.

About 80% through each story there is a pause to allow the reader to infer who did it and how and ponder on which commandment has been compromised.

The stories are amusing, though contrived for didactic purposes, and, sorry to say, they become repetitive because the recurrent character is described every time in some detail: her alluring scent, her plunging décolletage, her blonde hair, her hourglass figure, her shapely legs revealed by a maximum mini skirt, and so on, again and again. Likewise, her repeated and successful efforts at repelling boarders from the barflies that are drawn to her as per the previous description.

Some readers may be interested to know that one story offers a mathematical proof to identify the murderer. Sort of.

The sequence is not in numerical order of the decalogue, nor otherwise ordered by difficulty, or length. This reader discerned no order at all.

Only one of the stories is set in Czechoslovakia as it was then. Some are in Sweden and most in the USA as our heroine is a traveling artiste singing in nightclubs. Škvorecký’s Lieutenant Boruvka does make an appearance in the last story along with the songbird whose feminine attributes are once again detailed.

Dream a little dream….

Frontera Dreams (1990) by Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

Good Reads meta-data is 120 pages, rated 3.65 b 274 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Mexico.

Verdict: Self-indulgent.

Tagline: World Weary.

Along its 3000 kilometres that frontier of dreams between the United States and Mexico is a land of magic realism where strange things may happen then as now. Tec is retained to find a Mexican soap opera actress, his high school squeeze, who has gone missing. Last seen in Baja (California). So Tec takes to the road to track her down and find why she ran away. The trail takes him back and forth across northern most Mexico in the hazy twilight of dreams.

Did I mention it? No? The detective is named Shayne like that wisecracking Irishman. Too exhausted by life, he does not crack wise. Along the border legends still live of Pancho Villa, the times of Juarez, Zapata, and the lost Mexican lands to the north. There is also the cruel reality of the narcotraficantes, then as now meeting American demand.

Did she flee from an ardent suitor? Was Harvey Weinstein involved? Or is it all a plot device to allow the author to pontificate on the state and fate of his country in that Northern shadow? You be the judge!

***

Known by his initials as PIT, there are ten novels in this Shayne sequence. Over the years I have read some others: An Easy Thing, Return to the Same City, and Shadow of a Shadow. Not sure if I have read all these titles, though they are in my data base, since I do not find them congenial in the elliptical style that seems lazy to me, the absence of a plot, and transparent characterisations. In fact, I am not sure I have read them since I have notes only for one. Strange.

OA, The

The OA (2016-2019)

IMDb meta-data is 16 episodes of 1h each, rated 7.8 by 119,000 cinematizens

Genre: Sy Fy

DNA: USA

Verdict: All trip, but what a trip.

Tagline: The Living Dead.

She went out to get a bottle of milk, and disappeared for seven years. Not quite, but something like that. Then she came back.

But is it she? The returnee is different yet undeniably her. Where had she been? What did she do in those years? Why is she different?

That is the kick off and flashbacks unravel her story.

There are things to like about it. The pace is slow and the telling is convoluted. Some of that is a gimmick to keep the viewer coming back episode by episode and not necessary to the plot or character. Still it is in no hurry unlike to many breathless presentations that go nowhere fast. I also like the gathering a multi-generation group. Because several of them are young, we also see the mental and moral growth of a couple of them as they participate in the quest for meaning. After all, what does ‘OA’ mean? I think I got it but….

I was less enamoured of the mad scientist and his elaborate set up. The actor is great at it but why is he there at all.

My track record with television series is poor. I usually give up after three episodes of so when the attenuated trivia and clichés become too great, e.g. For All Mankind, Mars, Beacon 23, War of the Worlds, Infiniti, and others now forgotten down the memory hole are instances of this viewer’s fatigue.

I chose this one because I have seen other films from this duo, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, starting with Another Earth (2011) and The Sound of My Voice (2012). Two of the most original and arresting films I have seen. Their kinship to The OA is palpable but the connective tissue is stretched very thin.

Sicilian krimi

The Day of the Owl (1961) by Leonardo Sciascia

Good Reads meta-data is 136 pages, rated 3.73 by 15,672 litizens.

DNA: Italy; Species: Sicily.

Genre: Krimi; Species: Mafia.

Verdict: Lean and mean.

Tagline: It starts with a bang. Well, two bangs.

A man in a business suit waiting to board a bus in a village outside Palermo is shot dead. The bus load of witnesses disappear even as he fell to the ground. When the carabinieri arrive no one saw anything, indeed, there is no one there to see or be seen. Captain Bellodi investigates out of curiosity, not because he thinks he will accomplish anything. As he does, others observe and comment.

The result is a travelogue of 1950’s Sicily, its dialect which sometimes mystifies Bellodi (from Parma), its poverty makes cigarette smuggling attractive, its distance from Rome measured in lightyears, its many divisions between christians, socialists, communists, villages, clans, and most of all, outsiders, its mafia or is that just a figment of overwrought journalism. All done in a spare prose.

In due course, despite the evidence, Bellodi is transferred and the case closed when an innocent man is framed for the deed in order to forestall investigation of this thing called the Mafia.

All in all, it is a confirmation of the North/South divide that is still noteworthy in Italy.

***

The best of his oeuvre, they say. Sciascia (1921-1989) was a man for many seasons: a novelist, essayist, playwright, and member of the chamber of deputies, and the European parliament as a communist. Only a few of his many titles have been translated into English.

Adieu, Ted.

Hub Fans Bid the Kid Adieu: On Ted Williams (2010 [1960]) by John Updike.

Good Reads Meta-data is 64 pages, rated 4.46 by 329 litizens.

DNA: Baseball.

Genre: Belle lettre.

Verdict: One of a kind, both subject and author.

Tagline: It’s gone and so is he.

28 September 1960 the Green Monster hosted an historic occasion, one of many over the years. As totemic as it was, this essay, appearing in the New Yorker afterward etched it into the stone of memory. It has been reprinted with supplementary material in a small book.

Oh, the occasion? The last home game for that rarity, Ted Williams.

In the eighth inning of a meaningless game that became meaningful, Ted Williams (1918-2002), came the plate for what would obviously be the last time at Fenway Park. At 42-years old he was baseball elderly. By that day the record books were full of his extraordinary accomplishments with the bat. All the more remarkable considering that he missed parts of five seasons in his prime to war service where he flew combat missions in the Pacific and Korea. The only thing he could not do with a baseball bat was carry the Boston Red Sox to championships.

There is no doubt the Red Sox Nation depended on him and they, like many drug addicts, hated him for that dependence, and he reciprocated. Long before Steve Carlton made an art form of refusing to speak to journalists, Ted let his bat do the talking. He would not do interviews. Period. It was his reaction to some early print criticism and once he set out to do it, he stuck to it. Stubborn does not begin to describe the man.

There was a similar pique with the bleachers whose denizens had occasionally booed him when he played for himself and not the team, and he did do that. Thereafter, he never acknowledged the fans. Never. He did not look into the stands. He was alone in the crowd, long before David Riesman coined that phrase.

The baseball convention, for the benighted, is that when the crowd cheers a player, he tips his cap to the crowd. Williams’s accomplishments often brought cheers but no cheers ever brought a tip of his cap in more than two decades.

Not even on that day of days in late September 1960.

When he came to bat in the eighth inning, the members of the crowd rose to their thousands of feet to cheer this wayward idol, but he steadfastly looked at his shoe-tops and took his place. In a similar valedictory at bat before taking position, Babe Ruth took off his cap and did a 360 turn to take in all the crowd. Ditto many others from the pantheon. Not Ted. He took his stance and waited as though he was alone, just him and the pitcher in that forever war across the no man’s land between batter’s box and pitcher’s mound.

The young fast baller on the mound, one Jack Fisher by name, a stripling at 21, reasoned that the old man would be tired late in the game and distracted by the occasion and the noisy crowd, so he decided to get to work with his tool of choice. He drilled a fastball and Williams swung and missed, clearly off in his timing. Puffed up with satisfaction, Fisher supposed what worked once would work twice, and served up another fastball high and in.

The rest is history. A William of old seemed to emerge and with that effortless and economical swing planted a home run into right centre. The crowd went crazy. Video of the event can be found on You Tube.

Now some players would have savoured this victory lap in a slow trot, lapping up the adoration of the crowd. But Williams never did that and he did not do it now. As always he ran it out. Head down.

Another player would have looked up at the crowd and acknowledged the ovation after scoring, or upon entering the dugout. Not Williams he ran into the dugout never to reappear. Another player would have emerged from the dugout to tip his cap, and, indeed, to his credit Fisher paused to allow this to happen, but there was no hat tipping now or ever. ‘Boo me once and I will never ever forget or forgive,’ was the subtitle of this final aria.

The next day I read the line score for this game in the Hastings Tribune. It seemed fitting that ‘Teddy Baseball,’ as he was sometimes called, and not always affectionately, should leave on own his terms. He did play for himself but not always. In his playing days he drove the Jimmy Fund in Boston for children with cancer and his Cooperstown induction speech advocated the inclusion of the greats from the Negro leagues into that temple.

A final note, in retirement this Achilles did do interviews and once an interviewer said to him, ‘I saw you hit a home run on a certain date years ago.’ Ted, who was a close student of his game, replied that in that at bat the pitcher was Bob Shantz, the count was 2-2, and he threw a fastball low and away. ‘I pulled it down the right field line into the third or fourth row.’ We idolators were convinced that he could recite the particulars of each of his 521 home runs, none chemically assisted as so many have been since his days.

See also Howard F Mosher, Waiting for Teddy Wiilliams (2005) a novel.

My recent baseball reading led me to revisit this diamond on the diamond. Updike was never better. To this reader his essays have more depth than his fiction, or that small part of it which I have read. Some have said that this essay is the best thing ever written about baseball, others say it is the best single thing Updike ever wrote. Both could be right.

All rise!

High Rising (1933) by Angela (née Mackail) Thirkell (1890-1961).

Good Reads meta-data is 233 pages, rated 3.71 by 2632 litizens.

DNA: Little England.

Genre: Chick Lit.

Verdict: Amusing, but hollow.

Tagline: Anti Incubus.

The village of High Rising is not to be confused with that of Low Rising, Castle Rising or even Far Rising, still less with Late Risen. Much yeast in this locale an hour by train from the Biggest Smoke. Among the villagers the author writes chick lit to make a living and observes those around her, including a ponderous biographer in love with the sound of his own voice, a diffident doctor, her own publisher who chivvies her along on visits, daughters, sons, nieces, nephews, servants, and others.

Into the carefully curated ruts of this assortment comes the Incubus, a new secretary for the biographer to note and then type his dictation, file his voluminous correspondence, stroke his throbbing ego. In executing all these duties superbly New Secretary goes even further and seems intent on displacing biographer’s daughter as both the apple of his eye and mistress of his mansion. Could it be a wedding, even?

To prevent such an incursion on the ordered world, Author assembles her coven to eject this intruder ever so gently. All is done with smiles and politesse drawn over the rancour, ambition, and dislike. That makes it a comedy of manners,

It is the first in a series set among these Risings. That is why I chose it in the hope that it might relieve my withdrawal symptoms from Staggerford, and, moreover, Thirkell was, in the publicity for a reprint, likened to the singular Barbara Pym. I can see those comparisons but I did find it hard going. Whole, long chapters, of the neighbour biographer spouting learned nonsense while author indulges him. Equally long passages of her spoiling her youngest, still-at-home son with his train set.

This is volume one of the Barsetshire Chronicles which ran to twenty-nine titles in all, the last published in 1961. (Yes the echo of Anthony Trollope was intended.) Wikipedia lists seven other books on diverse subjects. Admiring her industry, nonetheless, this one suffices for me.

On the bright side, the characters are distinct and well drawn. The village comes alive, but they do prattle on and on and on some more. These are not Somerset Maugham’s flesh and blood beings driven by their own uncontrollable emotions, lusts, ambitions but talking heads that talk and talk. Indeed, I kept hoping Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby, either one, would arrive to sort things out. In Midsomer where they know how to deal with an incubus: the story would have opened with her gruesome murder. Still and all, at the end it does for a few chapters have a mystery to resolve with detective work of a kind. Despite the distracting verbiage, there is a plot and it does come full circle.

Willa can do it!

On the Rocks (2013) by Sue Hallgarth

Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages, rated 3.06 by 70 litizens.

DNA: O’ Canada.

Genre: Krimi.

Verdict: Willa can do it!

Tagline: Button, button, who’s lost a button.

It is the summer of 1929 and Pulitzer winning novelist Willa Cather and her paramour Edith Lewis escape New York City’s heat and humidity by retreating to a cottage they have built over the years on Ile de Grand Manan of New Brunswick (which has the distinction these days of being the only Canadian province that is legally bilingual). Others also flee summer heat to areas and islands in the vicinity like Campobello. (If you know, you know.)

While the resident islanders (numbering about 3,000 per Wikipedia today) don’t always like these outsiders, their money is good and they don’t stay long. Ergo there are accommodations and supplies for them. Since most, if not all, the outsiders are women, many islanders resent them even more for having money, wearing trousers, drinking alcohol, building their own cottages, driving cars, smoking cigarettes, and breathing. Still a truce obtains most summers.

That truce is strained when an American stranger just off the ferry falls to his death and the Republican rumour mill runs over time blaming his demise on the coven of witches that are everywhere, among them Cather and Lewis. ‘They caused his death, and that is murder,’ is the text. Not that any of these rumour-millers knew or cared about the victim, but his demise offers an excuse to vent their pent-up animosity.

The local plod is on his own and though level-headed he cannot do everything at once: keep the peace, investigate the death, fend off bootleggers, interview twenty of more people who may have seen the victim on the day, go over the ferry records of passengers, and more. Yes, in 1929 exporting forbidden alcohol to the United States is big Canadian business. Fortunately, unbidden, he gets some help from the energetic Lewis and the insightful Cather.

While I found the start slow with its perseverating asides on literature, social mores, and history tedious, even though I found most of them sympathetic, they were not why I was there, yet I stuck with it and was glad I did. It had some very nice touches.

Warning SPOILERS ahead: the surrender of the torch was one, another were the many loose shirt buttons. There were also some nice images as in overhearing ‘a silent conversation.’ It makes sense in context.

I bought this book at the Willa Cather Museum in Red Cloud (NB) nearly ten years ago and finally got around to reading it. There is another novel featuring this duo by Hallgarth.

By the way, I am sorry to say that on Hallgarth’s website Cather’s Red Cloud home is said to be in MN (Minnesota), whereas in fact it is in NB (Nebraska). (Yes, I know, there is a Red Cloud in Minnesota, but that is not where she lived.)