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The Daily

 

  • On Sports

    In the Ninth

    By

     

    On Sunday I went to see the Yankees play the Detroit Tigers. It was a throwback to the Yankees teams of my childhood, with Andy Pettitte on the mound, cap still low, glowering. I’ve always been (and always will be) a Met fan, which is its own portion of anxiety, and the Yankees glittered out there in the Bronx, Pettitte and Jeter and company so much more put together and reliable than the Mets. A note on the gigantic screen in center field informed us that Pettitte had pitched for the Yankees in his twenties, thirties, and forties. My friend sitting next to me noted that you could hardly see what the score was—the numbers were that inconspicuous—though the advertising, of course, dwarfed it all.

    Strangest was watching Alex Rodriguez play, a man who has been so under the popular microscope recently for performance-enhancing drug use as to have articles considering his upbringing. Who thought that steroids were still a discussion? That felt like years ago too. Rodriguez is facing the longest nonlifetime ban in baseball history. But for some time, during this purgatory, until the appeals process wraps up, he’ll be playing nine innings a day in the Bronx and the other cities that this itinerant fourth-place circus travels to. My friend mentioned, as Rodriguez took the field for the first time, that he thought he remembered something about Rodriguez saying how he couldn’t hear the boos in the crowd these days, because they were mixed with so much cheering. Read More

  • Arts & Culture

    Footnotes

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    Like every other person in school, I hated footnotes. That was what you’d be quizzed on and lose out, having watched the soaring bird while forgetting the gnat. They were a trap. Boring. Even the texts were boring (I thought then, along with my teachers being bizarre). I’m not kidding about this: to avoid classroom giggling (or worse), my high school English teacher referred to Melville’s book as “Moby Richard.”

    Of course, now I’m a convert. Recently, there’s been a trend for writers to footnote fiction (Nicholson Baker; Tim O’Brien)–it’s the idea of footnotes as a continuation of the text, or, sometimes, perhaps a preemptive strike, using the gnat-gems to discourage academic pedants.

    I’ve just finished reading (belatedly—it was published in 2007) a book I love, The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman, that wouldn’t be the same book without the footnotes, though they are not Lerman’s, but made by his former assistant, Stephen Pascal (apparently, with help from Lerman’s nearest and dearest, Richard Hunter and Gray Foy), when Pascal put the book together posthumously. In a certain world (primarily New York), at a certain time (from the forties on through 1993), there was hardly anyone Leo didn’t know, or know of, and that is in large part why he had the career he did, at Vogue, Mademoiselle, etc., which were not then the magazines they’ve become. Here, I must digress and say that along with a new enthusiasm for footnotes, I also love the use of brackets. Consider this, from Lerman’s book (brackets added by Pascal), about a once much-discussed writer who resists paraphrase but whose reputation always existed in anecdote, so what the hell: “[Writer Harold] Brodkey came to Diana Trilling bringing [his] forty-page manuscript written in ‘defense’ of her, against critics of her Mrs. Harris. He insisted she read this; she retaliated with the first chapter of her memoir. Harold then told Diana that she had no taste, she lived with ‘mail-order’ furniture, and a collection of ‘cheap’ third-rate drawings and Japanese woodcuts typical of academe house furnishings. He ended, as he left, saying out of nowhere, ‘Give my love to Leo Lerman!’” Read More

  • On the Shelf

    Flannery O’Connor’s Peacocks, and Other News

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  • Anonymouth is a computer program designed to strip text of stylistic markers and, in the words of The New Republic, “turn famous writers into anonymous hacks,” should this be your desire.
  • Meanwhile, libraries are increasingly dependent on computer games to keep the kids coming.
  • Salman Rushdie: “Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look … He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts, and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.”
  • Since 2009, there have been three replacement peacocks at Andalusia (sadly, not actually descended from Flannery O’Connor’s flock): Manley Pointer, Joy/Hulga (who appears to have two working legs), and Mary Grace.
  • The New York Times visits the Chekhov Museum, a testament to dedication.

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