{"id":109830,"date":"2017-04-12T09:14:14","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T13:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109830"},"modified":"2017-04-12T10:27:04","modified_gmt":"2017-04-12T14:27:04","slug":"thats-one-uncomfortable-switch-hitter-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/12\/thats-one-uncomfortable-switch-hitter-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"That\u2019s One Uncomfortable Switch-Hitter, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_109831\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/switchhitter.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-109831\" class=\"wp-image-109831\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/switchhitter.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"719\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/switchhitter.jpg 1500w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/switchhitter-300x216.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/switchhitter-768x552.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/switchhitter-1024x736.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-109831\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Topps trading card from the sixties.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Pity the switch-hitter, baseball\u2019s ambidextrous magician, for he is divided against himself. Sure, he can hit right-handed, he can hit left-handed\u2014he seems, on the face of it, a living testament to the falseness of binaries\u2014but those gifts are taxing to the soul. What I\u2019m trying to say is, it\u2019s really, really hard to be a switch-hitter. Sam Anderson, reading the memoir of the Atlanta Braves\u2019 third baseman Chipper Jones, finds it unexpectedly wise: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/04\/11\/magazine\/new-sentences-from-ballplayer-by-chipper-jones.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmagazine&amp;_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">Switch-hitting requires constant struggle and discipline<\/a>. The brain always wants to default to the familiar \u2026 So much of what is worthwhile requires us to choose discomfort: to learn a foreign language, speak to a stranger, resist the potato chips, start a difficult conversation with someone we love. Eking out even the smallest progress means repeatedly forcing ourselves to risk failure, disappointment, and humiliation. And so the sports memoir transforms into an accidental self-help manual: Living, like switch-hitting or flossing or answering our email, is a decision that we have to make over and over again.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Selin Thomas moved to gentrifying Harlem with a \u201ckind of guilt\u201d\u2014and she discovered from a ship\u2019s manifest that her father\u2019s grandparents, free blacks, had arrived to the same neighborhood more than a century earlier, a distance that haunts her and speaks to Harlem\u2019s vexed and singular history: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.villagevoice.com\/news\/running-from-and-back-to-ralph-ellisons-harlem-9872047\" target=\"_blank\">Their nearest relative and friend in the U.S. is listed, an Afro-Caribbean man called Percy Edmead. The manifest shows they stayed with him, in a brownstone at 138 West 131st Street, ten blocks from my own apartment<\/a> \u2026 In these square blocks are a fogged-up, choked-up pluralism and a potential born of the irony of the black American existence, both the resentment of the land of one\u2019s birth and the need to identify with it. That\u2014a split constitution\u2014is the conflict within any descendant of America\u2019s sordid oppression, but in Harlem this fantastic complexity is manifest in sharp relief. A man at 116th can sometimes be found screaming that he knows the smell of blood. A barbershop man called Morris Bone, perpetually unable to pay rent for all his sixty-plus years, is regarded by his grandchildren through the lens of their high degrees in social science. Women shrouded in black cloth but for their gated eyes, meeting yours, float by in groups of three and four \u2026 Harlem\u2014this vortex\u2014is more than ever that scene and symbol of the black American\u2019s persistent and even inherent estrangement from his own country.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In Chekhov, the doctor who became a writer whose \u201cclinical humanism\u201d launched the modern novel, Siddhartha Mukherjee sees a model for escaping our apathy: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/love-in-the-time-of-numbness-or-doctor-chekhov-writer?mbid=social_twitter\" target=\"_blank\">What\u2014<em>how<\/em>\u2014shall we write during this time of numbness<\/a>? \u2026 It is humbling to recall the breadth and depth of our literary debt to a thirty-year-old physician who set out to cure his anesthesia. The opposite of \u2018anesthetic,\u2019 we might recall, is \u2018aesthetic\u2019\u2014a word that originally referred to whatever could be perceived or felt but that came to refer to the nature of beauty.\u00a0Beauty, in all its myriad forms, can only be created in opposition to numbness. That, at least for me, serves as a quiet manifesto for our times.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>What happens when sharp critics write memoirs? If those critics are Lee Siegel and Daphne Merkin, they end up producing some of the finest books of their careers, Christian Lorentzen writes: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.vulture.com\/2017\/04\/book-review-daphne-merkin-this-close-to-happy-lee-siegel-the-draw.html\" target=\"_blank\">Merkin\u2019s book is an essay turning over the question of why she sometimes wants to kill herself. Siegel\u2019s tells the story of how he became what he is, a critic<\/a>. Both books are haunted by other, unwritten books. Merkin cites \u2018that Ur-document of unfulfilled creative talent,\u2019 Cyril Connolly\u2019s 1938 hybrid of criticism and memoir,\u00a0<em>Enemies of Promise<\/em><em>.<\/em>\u00a0(One of those enemies is book reviewing.) But Merkin and Siegel grew up in what counts as a golden age of criticism\u2014Wilson, Fiedler, Hardwick, Kenner\u2014and came to occupy enviable perches in what seemed a diminished field, which then seemed to diminish further. But just as\u00a0the novel\u00a0is always dying, the literary sky is always falling, and yesterday\u2019s wunderkind critics go on to become middle-aged memoirists reviewed by those who showed up after everything was supposedly already over \u2026 It wasn\u2019t simple for these children of the baby boom, both of whom spent too much time as children reading about the Holocaust, to figure out how to tell the worst stories about themselves. They both know that the mirror is the place to be merciless.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>You could read regular <em>Dracula<\/em>. That\u2019s fine. No one is going to tell you not to. Or you could read Icelandic <em>Dracula<\/em>, which came three years after the original and took some curious liberties with the story. Now finally translated into English, it plays with Stoker\u2019s vision, Frida Isberg writes: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.the-tls.co.uk\/articles\/public\/dracula-in-iceland\/\" target=\"_blank\">In 1986, the <em>Dracula\u00a0<\/em>scholar Richard Dalby discovered an original preface to the Icelandic version; and in 2014, Hans Corneel de Roos, intrigued by the preface, found out that dramatic alterations had been made to the story itself<\/a>.\u00a0What is more, many of the plot\u2019s mod\u00adifications fitted Stoker\u2019s early preparatory notes for\u00a0<em>Dracula<\/em> \u2026 Several new characters have been added to the story: a female deaf-mute housekeeper works in the castle \u2026 Instead of three female vampires, there is one\u2014Josephine\u2014who is yet harder to resist, and who succeeds in seducing and \u2018kissing\u2019 Thomas. And the climactic chase \u2026 happens in London, not Transylvania. Furthermore, Dracula is now a power-seeking villain with ambitions to make the world \u2018bow before the strong ones,\u2019 and representing ideas that resonate with Nietzsche\u2019s master-slave morality.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: an unexpectedly wise sports memoir, the rise of Icelandic Dracula, Chekhov\u2019s enduring lesson, and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[21440,15196,4738,375,4454,16586,28318,28315,12582,1214,27640,6699,7711,1822,2179,14128,125,28317,85,28316,28314,530],"class_list":["post-109830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-ancestry","tag-anesthesia","tag-anton-chekhov","tag-baseball","tag-bram-stoker","tag-critics","tag-daphne-merkin","tag-discomfort","tag-doctors","tag-dracula","tag-ellis-island","tag-gentrification","tag-harlem","tag-iceland","tag-lee-siegel","tag-neighborhoods","tag-new-york-city","tag-numbness","tag-sports","tag-sports-memoirs","tag-switch-hitters","tag-translation"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Want a Metaphor for Life? 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