Baseball

There are 2 posts tagged Baseball (this is page 1 of 1).

Buy me some peanuts

I’ve been trying to think of what, exactly, it is about Dorothy Parker’s writing that I like so much. I touched on it briefly yesterday when I wrote about a New Yorker style of writing, but I think there’s more to it. These things can often be indescribable, however, so you’ll have to take this with a grain of salt.

First of all, I think I read from the perspective of a writer. I’m not as interested in character and plot as I am in how the author presents those things. (This is largely why I never mind spoilers — knowing the end makes the journey more satisfying to me.)

One question I always ask myself when I’m reading is this: “If I were writing this same story, is this how I would approach it?” When the answer is “yes,” I feel a quirky sense of camaraderie with the author, as if we’re reaching across great gulfs of time and space to give each other a spectral high-five. “I see what you did there!” I say to them. “You and I are on the same wavelength!”

Dorothy Parker starts stories the way I start stories, she writes dialogue the way I try to, and all of her endings are satisfying. I feel like a baseball enthusiast watching a pitcher completing a perfect game. I know just enough to recognize how cool it is, even if I can’t accomplish the same feat myself.

While I appreciate authors whose sense of style jives with my own (like Parker, pictured above suddenly realizing the photographer was totally nude), it’s not that I can only enjoy authors who write the same way I write, or that I think those are the only good writers out there. Far from it.

To stick with the baseball metaphor, sometimes books can be more like, say, a hockey game. As a baseball enthusiast, I can appreciate the athleticism and the teamwork and the speed of a hockey match. I can even marvel at how violent everything is and how suddenly, as if by magic, teams seem to score. Hockey games can be wonderful to watch and I’m sure I’d have a great time if I went to more of them. But, no matter how good the game is, I’m still a baseball guy.

I enjoy reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, but I would never write the way he does. The same thing goes for Thomas Pynchon and Gene Wolfe — they are fantastic authors that I always return to, but they have vastly different sensibilities than I have.

Dorothy Parker just plays my sport, and she does it awfully well.

(In that same metaphor, reading Salman Rushdie feels like watching a variation of Polo that was only popular in a specific region of Kashmir during the early 1970s, and I’m stuck watching the match while sitting next to a guy intent on elbowing my ribs and explaining why the whole sport is actually about religion.)

I had another observation at school today, which basically means I had an administrator sit in on my class with the sole purpose of giving me an assessment. (Huzzah!) That makes a total of … five times this year that I’ve had some sort of observation. It is unusual to have that many, and I’m not a huge fan, especially considering one of those observations was done by our district superintendent, but it’s not as if there’s a lot that I can do about it.

Some teachers point out that professional development meetings and classroom observations are the means by which administrators justify their jobs. Even though, quite frankly, I don’t know who is arguing that we should have fewer administrators. Schools need more people in nearly every position — you could double the number of admins and it wouldn’t hurt at all, as long as they were doing useful work.

More to the point of today’s evaluation: I don’t like how administrators evaluate teachers like college professors who say, “It’s impossible to get a 100% in this class.” It’s a stupid philosophy that is only ever brought up by people who are experts in their field, but not experts at teaching. (Hear that? It’s the sound of hundreds of engineering department heads mouthing, “Who, me?”)

We’re evaluated in a number of areas on a scale that goes from “Poor” to “Exemplary,” and from my understanding, nobody every gets an “exemplary” on any part of it. What I’ve been told is that “the wording of ‘exemplary’ on the rubric makes it nearly impossible to attain.”

Am I exemplary? I doubt it. But I am “proficient” enough to recognize that you shouldn’t build a rubric with unattainable levels of scoring. Because what is the point of that? It’s like not handing out a gold medal for the long jump because nobody at the Olympics can jump 50 meters.

Is it supposed to make me feel like I have room to improve? I always feel that way. Most teachers do; we don’t need a reminder. We constantly evaluate and improve our plans and strategies. That’s baked in.

Am I supposed to think that administrators are evaluating us based on faulty perceptions of what “good teaching” is because nincompoops at the department of education are forcing them to? Because that is what’s happening, and that doesn’t make anyone look good.

Anywho. I’ll probably have one more observation this year, and I’ve decided that it’s not worth worrying about. (I’ll still worry about it, of course, but I’ll feel silly for doing so. (Put something to that effect on my tombstone.))

Nick Hornby likes sports too much

I’m about half-way through Ten Years in the Tub, and I’m realizing that it’s a lot like a collection of poetry or the dictionary — you really shouldn’t read the whole thing all at once.

Each chapter is a monthly article from The Believer (which is still a magazine and Nick Hornby is still a contributor), and the articles span from 2003 to 2013, so reading several of them at once is a lot like fast-forwarding through the reading habits of a British novelist, unapologetic football fanatic, and guy who’s trying to quit smoking.

The problem is the articles are good. Too good. I feel guilting reading a whole year’s worth of articles in one sitting, like I’m like a rich boy stuffing little, expensive bonbons of humor into my mouth. Sarah has to come into the office and nanny slap them out of my pudgy hands. “Your mother will be just horrified if you spoil your dinner again!”

I mean. It’s not that I need to worry about my waistline in whatever metaphor I’m concocting here — my blood sugar won’t actually spike if I read the whole book in one go — but the articles are written in a style that is best consumed month-by-month: Short and sweet and each discussing four or five books that I might conceivably want to read. That’s how you avoid the literary spare tire.

Here’s another way of putting it: Even if your pastor writes absolutely fantastic sermons, you wouldn’t want to listen to 12 of them in a row. You’ve got to space that shit out.

I did get a really good idea while reading Ten Years in the Tub, though. Well, Nick Hornby had a good idea and I am brazenly stealing it:

Make a book list of books that have years in the title. Like, one book that has “2024,” one that has “2023,” etc. The books can be about anything, fictional or non-fictional; every genre is fair game. Then, what you do is start in the present and work your way backwards until the year you were born.

Bam! It’s a reading list as arbitrary as the one I’m currently tackling. Plus, us old folks, who are way better at reading than you goddamned youngsters with your TikToks and vape pens and functioning friend groups, will have longer reading lists, while someone who is, say, 3, will have a pretty easy time of it. (Little Suzy will just love Gravity’s Rainbow! Get her started now.)

I’ve begun compiling my list already, starting with the year of my birth. (What year is that, you wonder? I’ll never tell!)

#1: Split Season: 1981: Fernandomania, the Bronx Zoo, and the Strike that Saved Baseball

Apparently there was a baseball strike in 1981. Who knew? The Dodgers were probably upset that I had just been born and wasn’t yet old enough to understand the rules of the sport, so they refused to play. “We should wait,” their manager informed the league in writing. “Wait until the Toad is old enough to come and watch.”

Only after realizing that I was both in rural Nebraska (statistically the farthest from away from any professional sport franchise one can be in the lower 48) and in an incubator did they finally relent and agree to take the field. And, even then, grudgingly. “Make sure someone is taping this,” they said.

And they did.

I’m going to keep with it, though. I’m going truck right on through Ten Years in the Tub, and by the end of it I’m going to be carrying more articles than a coffee table at a dentist’s office.

I will, however, be starting another book as well. This one was selected from THE LIST completely at random and ahead of schedule (simply because I like having an audiobook to listen to while I’m bumbling around, and Ten Years isn’t an audiobook):

It’s Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, an author that I know a bit about but haven’t read. As I recall, Rushdie wrote a book called The Satanic Verses that upset a lot of religious fundamentalists who threatened his life, the lives of his publishers, and the lives of anyone who gave the book a favorable review on Goodreads (anything above 3 stars). Things got so bad that Rushdie went into hiding, where he got so good at Nintendo they made a little video about it. (Not joking.)

He seems like a literary try-hard. That’s harsh, but just look at that picture of him on that cover — it’s like the photographer was snapping his fingers going, “Salman! Over here, Salman! Look at the camera!” but Salman Rushdie was distracted by a rogue moral allegory that went scampering by.

I haven’t read The Satanic Verses, but I’m pretty sure I have a copy floating around. I think I bought it used because I liked the title and it was cheap.

I suppose that doesn’t matter much, because Midnight’s Children is a totally different book, and it’s a book that faced no strong religious or political backla . . . wait, the Indian Prime Minister said what about it?