Beautiful Loser's blog

A few notes:

The biggest question lingering around is “what is the island?” I think it’s a door. Or a house with a door. Or doors. (And anyone who knows my fondness for House of Leaves should see the significance I place on houses and doors.) It is a point of transition, a place people pass through before moving on to somewhere else. Similar to an airport terminal. Where people move on to isn’t really the relevant question. It isn’t itself purgatory, or limbo, but more like a contact point; a place where the walls between places become thin and there are, again, doors, and, importantly, where there is the choice of whether to move through the door or not, and when to do so. If we continue with the house metaphor, then we can think of the sidewise-universe (what my friend Cheryl calls, and so will I, “limbo”) where the characters find themselves is at most a room within the house. 

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Yesterday as the 35th anniversary of a Clevelander event so awesome that it is only topped by setting the river on fire.

Ten-Cent Beer Night at old Municipal Stadium between the Indians and the Rangers.

It has its own Wikipeida page.

While crappy Indians teams may be a constant, I'm really amused that for the cost of one beer at the park today, you could have had seventy-five on that spectacular evening.

I feel like the guy whose idea this was is a spiritual forefather for us all.

So I was in Ann Arbor last weekend for a Comparative Literature conference on the abnormal since Foucault. Presented a paper on Djuna Barnes and Georgio Agamben. Slept on a futon. Gave the Big House my regards. Not a bad weekend.

RIP David Foster Wallace. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

I don't know how to react to this. I still feel like it has to be some fucking awful joke. I feel like this can't be true. Whatever faith I have in grace and order tells me this shouldn't be true. My love for DFW is greater than my affection for any other author, and as I write this I am palpably impacted by how feeble a connection this bond may be. His word have literally shaped the way I conceptualize life. I am not being generous when I say that, had I never listened to him, I would be a much more shallow and sad human being. As a graduate student, I teach composition at a major research university, and I have recently centered my courses around the Commencement speech he gave to my graduating class at Kenyon in 2005. On that day he spoke about our ability to control what he refered to as "the default setting," and to approach the world as a place where each of us are not the only meaningful being in existense. That is to say, that with a little extra effort on each of our parts, we could realize that the people around us have lives that are fully realized and fully separate from us, and that with a little extra effort we could consider the people around us as reacting to their own lives, and not existing only in the form which they affect out own lives.

Which is to say, that even as his suicide this evening affects me painfully and potently, I am trying to concieve of this event in a way that does not anchor around my personal feelings of loss and confusion. I am heartbroken that he will never write another story or essay, and I am also heartbroken that he will not have the opportunity to impact others  with new ideas the same way he has impacted me. But I am also grieved that he felt his life had devolved to the point where he felt the only option was to end his own life. He taught me that I am in control of what I decide is worth thinking about, and I mourn that DFW arrived at a place where he felt he had lost that control. I do not know what he was thinking about in his last moments, but it seems that whatever it was, it did not bring him peace. I can only pray (something I rarely do) that his words demonstrate for many of us a philosophy that guides us in positively evaluating how we lead our own lives.

Thank you for what you have taught me. May you find the peace and clarity you seek.

Te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt nefas est.

I know that many of us have been very influenced in our life outlook by similar books. Among these are Infinite Jest by DFW and Fight Club by Chuck P. I propose this as a space to bring up other books that may be of great interest/benefit to the Norton cohort.

I won't mention the Danielewski Double (House of Leaves/Only Revolutions) at this point.

I submit "Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates."

It features: contradictions, the CIA, South America, faith, beauty, lust for 16 year old girls, lust for nuns, prophecy, Catholicisim, and a generally wholesome and productive philosophy of life.

Love,

Me.

The moment where I was the most caught off guard this summer was when the first comments a friend of mine had after we saw The Dark Knight together were: "Its too bad the whole thing is an advertisement for the Patriot Act."

I spent the past summer working at an academic summer camp, which is why I haven't been around. The staff was a group of very nice people, and I liked them very much. However, they are also perfect examples of why I view a politically engaged life as a good life spoiled (much like golf and good walks). These perfectly nice people would rant about how CNN is horrifyingly racist and conservative. They would then watch FOX News and hunt for things to be pissed off about. I did not then and do not now understand why they spent so much of their free time seeking out things to complain about. They're feeling guilty about having nice lifestyles based off of imperialism, or some bullshit like that. I myself try to focus on things that I like, and spend as much time as I can talking about them. Which is how I found myself, to my amazement, spending my summer defending The Dark Knight movie.

While not a perfect film (Two-Face going after Gordon's family was very predictable, and the whole scene with the bombs on the boats was a lazy and tired cliche) I think it is a notable achievement in a lot of ways. It provides some very interesting complications to the "Batman as inspirational symbol" motif of the previous movie. In particular this occurs in moments in the story that trouble the social role of Batman as that of a "hero" by contrasting him with the civil authorities, which are themselves the the social slot which we as a civilization invest with the authority to seek and defend "justice," that is, invest with the role of the hero. This is a story about the relationship of the lawful hero to the unlawful hero, and in particular of the grave moral issues that arise when the "antihero" finds itself transformed into the show-room floor model of the ideal 21st century hero. It is a story about how the most crucial struggle that faces human society today is the preservation of our grace: the quality that allows the human being to change, to transcend all the numbers and biology and economics and history and to become more than what the sum of our parts say we should be. It is a story about the crisis of idealism in a cultural postmodern moment where the fundamental shallowness that characterizes the relationship of the individual to culture reduces ideals to slogans and campaign posters and advertisements that are so startlingly fragile because ideals cannot be perfect, but are only presented as perfect so that the public will consume them more earnestly. It is a story about how civil rights are not "rights" at all, but are privileges bestowed by the communal choice that their enforcement and protection are important, and how society at times needs to be reminded of its power to choose by being presented with figures who choose not to respect those rights (of which Joker, Batman, and Two-Face are all equally guilty). It is a story about psychological trauma, about the lie that is the dichotomy of good and evil, about the choice that is order, and the fact that disorder is a choice made by someone we do not know.

It is not simply a subconscious advertisement for a policy of a political administration. It can be that, if one wants to simply accept Batman as the model of a hero because he is alive at the end, his name is on the movie, and he seems to have genuinely nice motives, but it can also be exactly the opposite if one reads the character as an unlawful force that usurps civil authority for the moral solipsism of might-makes-right and inspires others to follow his example. It can be any number of things. This is the trouble when marxism or postcolonialism or liberalism or conservatism or any other type of politics becomes more than a footnote beneath an examination of what the text might be telling us about the human soul. A text can be no more limited by what one moment suggests it might be than can the course of a man's life be predetermined by the presence of a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. What makes these texts relevant aspects of human culture, and not more mere symptoms of physical life, is that they can remind us that we have the grace to be more than we are, not less. To define it as any one thing is a wilful ignorance on the part of the one offering the definition, or worse, to be succored into a joke by getting all worked up over the trivial. After all: "Why so serious?"

And while it should come as no surprise to the good people of Ohio, to whom Tebow did a good deal more than nip the tip of our manhood two title games ago, the big goofball spent his spring break doing this. (Wizard of Odds].

I can only hope a conversation like this happened at some point:

TEBOW: Howdy Susan! Good to see you. How was your break?

SUSAN: Oh, hi Tim! It was great! I went down to Mexico, had some tequila, some sex. I think my friend Betsy is still down there with some really hot members of a drug cartel. I think it might work out for them in the long run. How was your break?

TEBOW: I spent it circumcising Asian children.

SUSAN: ...

TEBOW: It isn't the kind of thing you can do legally in the US, so I had to go all the way to the Phillipenes to do my part.

SUSAN: ... I guess I never thought you would take the Gator Chomp quite so literally...

The Cleveland Indians have an off day today as they travel to New York. After arriving in the Big Apple, several members of the team took a tour of HBO studios (which I assume are in NYC), and bumped into Buzz Bissinger, who was roaming the hallways muttering to himself. Several members of the Tribe, being the big-hearted guys they are, guided the obviously confused elder gentleman to a comfortable chair in a lobby. By what can only be divine coincidence, Bob Costas was also sitting in that same lobby.

COSTAS: Hey guys! The way your season is being framed by your home fans is "Hey, whats the problem with having more runs and quicker access to them? What is the trouble with somebody just being able to cross home plate?" They're right that you don't need to be the '27 Yankees to say "The Indians should have pinch hit for Delucci in the 8th," but those are not the worst of the reasonable criticisms against the Indians' offense. The reasonable criticisms are against the tone of gratitutious failures to produce runs and meanspirited at bats, those are the reasonable criticisms

TRIBE: Well, of course i realize that any time you... um... its a different thing, its not news to say that people are different in the batter's box than they are in in the cages, there are many different pitches that we might swing blindly at in on the field that we would not spit at in the cages...

BUZZ: I'm just going to interject because i feel very strongly about this, I really think you're full of shit. Because I think that your at-bats are dedicated to cruelty, dedicated to athletic dishonesty, to speed. I am over 50. [Thinks to himself: "I'm a man!"] Do you who W.C. Heinz is? Have you ever read him?

TRIBE: Some of us have read The Professional. Those of us who can read English. It was about boxing, though, and we don't --

BUZZ: Have you read his sports columns, in the newspapers? Tell me who has a better ability to evoke a game and a moment and what it what it means to knock in a key two-out RBI: Heinz, one of the greatest writers ever, or this guy on your lineup, whats his name, Pronk Deep? And it really pisses the shit out of me. "You don't need to see C.C. Sabathia's tits to know how he's pitching," and this is really fucking clever, in parentheses, "though I hear his tits are amazing." How can you be proud of this shit?

TRIBE: Its a new season --

BUZZ: You think that's a new season? Then its a disgusting season.

TRIBE: Well maybe you think so and some other people think so. Who are you to decide what is palatable? Baseball is a meritocracy, players who don't produce aren't going to be in the bigs very long. Its hard goddam work to start a late game rally.

COSTAS: Some of the comments from fans following your games are affecting the tone of the season. "Nice strikeout, fuckface," "What are you swinging at, you fetus-faced windbag," and "Good luck managing a Dennys, douchebag."

[Braylon Edwards wanders down hallway.]

BRAYLON: I know this is LeBron's city, but I will not witness this again.

[Braylon flees.]

TRIBE: You can make an argument for our at-bats resembling Matt Leinart and Ben Cheeseburger awkwardly pawing at drunken jailbait being news. No one out there is going to think "I like the Indians, I enjoy the baseball they play, but now that I see them playing like inebriated NFL quarterbacks, I can't cheer for them anymore." We think this comparison with frailty and imperfection actually humanizes us. Also, it's just damn funny seeing Grady play like Willie Mays Hayes in the first half of Major League.

BUZZ: It makes you look human. I may be over 50, but i'm not that stupid. You're humiliating yourselves --

TRIBE: Oh come on!

BUZZ: "Oh come on" my ass!

COSTAS: A recent internet study concluded only 19% of Cleveland fans are hopeful for a World Series title this year.

BUZZ: Maybe that's why i'm so angry, that teams like this are the future. They play glib, profane, quick. There are some good games, but they are few and far between. The quality of approaches at the plate are despicable, as a writer who has spent his life trying to perfect the craft, you give me nothing positive to write about. You're like Rick "Wild Thing" Vaughn on Percocet. You're proud not to be in the lead because scores "get in the way." We have scores to give us a certain vantage point. I just don't know where you're coming from. The future in hands like yours will put us so far behind in the division we can't recover.

The Indians, at this point very confused as to why this man is so angry at them, are relieved when he suddenly stand up and starts wandering the halls and muttering to himself again.

TRIBE: What the hell?

The internet is "buzz"ing (yes I made that pun) today about the televised conversation between Will Leitch at Deadspin and Buzz Bissinger, which you can (and should) watch over at Awful Announcing.

Now, I don't think that Bissinger came across quite as poorly as the rest of the sports blog universe seems to think. I think legit questions were raised about a few issues, such as where final responsibility rests for things said in the comments section. The site hosts do not write the comments, but I think they are responsible for establishing what the standard of acceptable discourse is. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be vulgar comments, just that hosts don't have the right to throw up their hands and say "it wasn't me" if they allow a certain type of humor to flourish in their comments. Fire Joe Morgan has comments disabled for a reason, same as Deadspin has a comment moderator for a reason, just as rivals.com message boards are useless to all but the most irritating sort of rablerouser. On the other hand, comments also often contain some of the funniest, most insightful ideas, for, as FireJoeMorgan wrote in reference to using a handful of comments to discredit the entire medium (and I paraphrase): "picking up a romance novel in an airport, and saying 'this novel sucks - fuck you Tolstoy, your medium is worthless!'" Comments are vital to, well, the "vitality" of the blog experience

I am currently teaching Bissinger's Friday Night Lights in my Freshman Composition class, and have spent a decent amount of time recently thinking about the craft, controversy, and ethos of that text. I'm really not willing to just dismiss Bissinger as a cranky grandpa yelling for the damn kids to get off his lawn. I think the criticisms he has of the directions in which sports journalism, and by extension journalism in general, are heading need to be addressed. These criticisms seem to me to center around a shift in how narratives of all kinds are interpreted in contemporary culture.

To simplify, Bissinger really believes in the "Grand Narrative"; in the form of interpretation that values above all else the existence of a central, "true" meaning. He believes that things can be understood in a unified manner. There is a start, an end, and the journey from one to the other combines like a puzzle, along a recognizable path. In cultural theory, examples of these Grand Narratives can be found in colonial Europe's belief in their duty of spreading the light of reason, religion, and industry to the the backwards savages of Africa, India, and Latin America, or in the Marxist belief in the inevitability of the social revolution of the oppressed labor class against the bourgeoisie and the establishment of an economy based on equality. They felt these processes to be destiny, that nothing could prevent these goals from being realized. In a more literary focus, Grand Narratives include tales of the son growing up and escaping his father's influence, to prosper or fail on his own, by his own sins and virtues. Sports too lend themselves extremely well to these narratives (excepting college football, more on that later). Seasons begin, they proceed along a regimented schedule, and they conclude with a champion. The seasons can be understood in terms of a narrative: the the unstoppable force of the '85 Bears, the the dramatic tragedy (or comedy) of the '07-'08 Patriots, the victory of the underdog with '85 Villanova, etc. The way that sports are structured makes it easy for these narratives to be read in a common way.

What Bissinger does not seem to want to acknowledge is that these narrative readings are not at all organic, self-evident, or "true." Consider the variable reading as tragedy or comedy of the 18-1 New England team this past year. All the game itself gives to us is data, just stats, and nothing about those stats can explain the variety of meaning ascribed to the game. The failure to go undefeated is just as easily tragic as it is comic, and neither reading is any more or less "true" than the other, nor are the readings limited to this binary. He believes that it his responsibility, his duty, to determine the best, most "meaningful" meaning, and then to find the appropriate way to interpret and present the data so as to create this narrative reading. But it is still created. The Pats season can be seen as the failure of something grand, the vanquishing of an evil conquering army, the general absurdity of fate that Tom Brady was beaten by, of all people, Eli Manning, or fair judgment upon a team that cheated its way to the top and was lead by a deadbeat dad, or even a bloody-minded universe reminding Brady that hubris strikes down 1st and 6th round draft picks alike, and that no one is on top forever. None of these is fair. None of these can be proven wrong. Further, Friday Night Lights is not the last, or only, word on Odessa, Texas. While his narrative is truly and beautifully moving, am authentic artistic accomplishment, it is not, and can never be, "truth." Truth does not exist beyond stats.

Leitch, and more directly Deadspin.com, completely de-emphasizes the idea that finding the correct "Grand Narrative" is what makes sports important and meaningful. There is rarely any attempt to interpret for the public what any of their stories means on a deep level. On a fundamental philosophical level Leitch differs from Bissinger because the structure of his site allows the creation of meaning to be democratic, individual, and contradictory. As a result of this, Deadspin.com comes across as much more focused the absurd, surface level chaos. Odd facts, like the party habits of young, wealthy NFL quarterbacks, deny the creation of these grand, transcendent meanings because they ironize, trivialize, and mock; they make the narratives unstable. Many want "their" team to be lead by a golden-boy, in order to make their own narrative a moral vindication, but athletes are people, not moral embodiments, and will always deny the transformation into avatars.

This is a mircocosm of the contemporary conflict of modernism and postmodernism, between the desperate struggle to create meaning and the carnivalesque revelry in denying the possibility of "true" meaning at all. Real lives cannot be easily conscripted into a desired narrative without some serious editing. These edited, repressed parts of the individual tend to be attractive to other people at the edges of the creation of "Grand Narratives" by the Official Journalists, namely the fans, the barbarians and visigoths attempting to bring down the Evil Empire.

I love Hersh. He was the face of veteran leadership on the Indians teams of the mid 90s. Pitched well in the 97 postseason, though he went 0-2 against Fat-Cuban-Fuck Livan Hernandez in the Series, and was involved in back-to-back-to-back home runs against he Yankees in Game 1 of the ALDS. So all my prominent memories of Hersh's playing days at the corner of Carnegie and Ontario are bad, yet I still am very fond of him. He moved on following the Series Tragedy, and eventually retired. I wished him well and generally find his announcing vastly preferable to Joe Morgan.

However...

Living in Cincinnati now, I don't get to see the Tribe on TV that often, so when ESPN picks up the game, its an event, an event usually commented upon by Hersh. In the first game, against the Sawx, I actually found it somewhat endearing when Hersh mentioned two or three times how he is still haunted by losing that Series, how he still hates to even look at a Marlins uniform, and so on. I feel the same way. It was a reopening of old wounds, but done by someone who loves me, and was ripping off his own scabs at the same time. This made is somehow better, though also infinitely more creepy. Hersh is back in town to do a game in the Yankees series, and again he brings up his lingering pain from the 97 season, in part of a montage of the general futility of Cleveland sports. It was 11 years ago. Can we please stop mentioning it? It is nice to spend a night every decade or so amongst a community of the survivors of tragedy, but to make such a place one's home is to at best to become as crazy/scary/cool as the Israelis, and at worst as crazy/crazy/crazy as Buffalonians.

Edgar Renterina is the only man other than my father, my brother, and myself who I have seen make my mother cry, but I can't change that he brought in that Series-clinching run (though I do continue to wish ill upon him and every single last member of his genetic family tree).

Can't the dead just leave us in peace?