I'd like to revisit this, as awhile back (this summer) I was praising baseball as a sport. I'd like to take a moment now to rescind those nice things I said about baseball. Let's refresh our memories to my words:
"You guys are crazy, baseball is amazing, problem is it hasn't been the same since the great strike-shortened season of 1994. That killed baseball for so many hardcore fans, including me, for a very long time, and it still hasn't recovered. Now, baseball is tainted by steroids, free agency/overinflated contracts, A-rod egos, ridiculous marketing tactics (interleague play) and Kenny Rogers blowups. You guys obviously didn't enjoy baseball in its heyday, and now it's soiled, so you're understanding a different kind of baseball that what I grew up with loving. Fact remains though, baseball is the real thing."-AES June 18, 2007
Now, lets fast forward a few agonizing baseball-following months to my new philosophy on baseball:
"Baseball sucks the life out of humanity.” –AES October 5, 2007
Ok, so this may seem like a rash decision, but trust me, it’s the product of months and months of soul-searching, guided by the fleeting joy, pain, frustration, and all other accompanying emotions that come with being a Philadelphia Phillies fan. Throughout the summer and into the fall, I’ve been following baseball, reading articles, watching games when I can, checking the Gamecast. All for what? For Nothing. No bliss, no championship, no celebration, no champaign. Only a feeling of despair and nothingness. So, screw it, I’m done with you baseball.
Arguments for my renunciation of baseball:
1) Season Too Long
162 regular season games (per team). Seriously, there is non-stop baseball from April to October. It’s too much, trying to watch every game is enough to make any sane man crazy. Think about this, the avg. game lasts about 3 hours and 30 minutes. If you made an effort to watch every game of a particular team, say the Phillies, that would total 567 hours per season watching baseball, or roughly 24 days! 24 days of straight baseball watching in a season. Seem ridiculous, it is. Get a life baseball fanatics!
But here’s the thing, because the season is so dreadfully long and there are so many games, each individual game is essentially deprived of any substantial value. So how can a sport that is made of a collection of insignificant parts be of significance as a whole? Fact is, it can’t. And I didn’t even get to the part about how a quarter of the team are out of playoff contention by the All-Star break anyways, what we’re left with is tons and tons of hours of meaningless baseball (see all games played between the Nationals and Marlins since June).
2) Playoffs Too Short
So, the baseball season is way too long which brings me to my second point: the playoffs are way too short. Now, I’m not going to argue that we should let more teams in, we don’t want the playoffs to become a joke, letting just about every team in (see NFL or NBA). No team with a losing record should ever make the playoffs (again NBA and NFL), so I think 4 per division is a perfect number. However, if we’re going to only let 4 teams in, can we please at least give the first matchups a god damn 7 game series! What the Fuck! These 5 game series are a joke, pathetic and disgraceful. For a sports like baseball that plays so many damn games in the first play (see argument #1), why must be all of the sudden we get all stingy with the number of games once the good part of the season gets here. For a team like the Phillies (or Yankees) this year, who’ve worked so hard to overcome the Mets all season, to see their season finished after just 3 playoff games makes baby Jesus weep. A travesty.
3) Tickets Too Expensive
Pretty self-explanatory. You would think that the basic laws of free-market capitalism, supply and demand, would be adhered to with regards to baseball ticket price. Nope. An overflow of baseball games does not equal cheaper tickets. A losing record, no hopes of playoffs, playing for nothing, waste of space game does not have discounted prices. What The Fuck. Hmm, what else can I buy for the price of decent seats that would otherwise be empty at a 3.5 hour meaningless baseball game? Let’s see: 10 monster burritos (20 meals), or 5 days at Sunsplash, or 7 12-packs of Schlitz beer, or 4 new records, etc etc etc. Do I really even need to weigh that option? No way in hell I’m picking the baseball game. Fuck You Bud Selig.
4) Mets fans
Likely the Worst bunch of fans in all of sports. If I never had to hear another one of these people pretend to know something about baseball again in my entire life, I’d be a slightly less-disgruntled man.
5) God hates me
Self-explanatory
Okay, so to wrap up my break-up with baseball, I'd like to give one last shout out to the Phillies.
"No disrespect Phils, we’ve had a good run together (remember '93), but I’ve shed too many tears for you, so we’ve best go our separate ways. "
So long baseball. Actually, let me change that ending to something more fitting. Screw off baseball, I hope I never see you again in my entire life.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Saturday, June 23, 2007
“It is not the ending we need but the beginning”
It worries me sometimes that we are going back in time, instead of forward. Because, for instance, I want to know about the relationship between Nick and Klara, and give that woman a chance of becoming interesting and smart, and get more information that allows me to put together the Nick of the first chapters and this new Nick that killed a man and stuff, but I also want to know what happens with ((Marian + Brian) + Nick) and we are already way too back in time for that, aren’t we?
I am not the only one obsessed with plastics. I can’t believe he used “polymerized hairpiece” for a toupee.
I love the episode with that woman, Donna. All the conversation about what sex is, and if it has to be kept secret and if it makes educated and uneducated people equal, poor and rich (like death). And Marian crying, that was sweet. T, do identify with Nick more or less than before? With the lontananza thing? With the “You withhold the deepest things from those who are closest and then talk to a stranger in a numbered room”? A stranger in a numbered room.
A part of a poem by San Juan de la Cruz, translated into English by someone
Upon an obscure night
Fevered with love in love's anxiety
(O hapless-happy plight!),
I went, none seeing me,
Forth from my house where all things be.
Much more beautiful in Spanish though. Con ansias en amores inflamada = fevered with love in love’s anxiety… it looses much of the musicality.
En una noche oscura,
con ansias en amores inflamada,
(¡oh dichosa ventura!)
salí sin ser notada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
Read it anyway, here.
off topic: I will try to keep up with the reading but i am pretty sure that i won't be able to post next week because i am busy, busy, busy. I miss Eric. I hope that he is fine.
I am not the only one obsessed with plastics. I can’t believe he used “polymerized hairpiece” for a toupee.
I love the episode with that woman, Donna. All the conversation about what sex is, and if it has to be kept secret and if it makes educated and uneducated people equal, poor and rich (like death). And Marian crying, that was sweet. T, do identify with Nick more or less than before? With the lontananza thing? With the “You withhold the deepest things from those who are closest and then talk to a stranger in a numbered room”? A stranger in a numbered room.
A part of a poem by San Juan de la Cruz, translated into English by someone
Upon an obscure night
Fevered with love in love's anxiety
(O hapless-happy plight!),
I went, none seeing me,
Forth from my house where all things be.
Much more beautiful in Spanish though. Con ansias en amores inflamada = fevered with love in love’s anxiety… it looses much of the musicality.
En una noche oscura,
con ansias en amores inflamada,
(¡oh dichosa ventura!)
salí sin ser notada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
Read it anyway, here.
off topic: I will try to keep up with the reading but i am pretty sure that i won't be able to post next week because i am busy, busy, busy. I miss Eric. I hope that he is fine.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Thoughts from inside my private fort.
I guess I identify with Nick Shay, isn't that the point? Aren't we supposed to identify with the "main" character of the novel? That's not a rhetorical question. Really, are we supposed to identify with Shay? I feel like we are, but I'm rebelling against it, if only because I feel like that's what Delillo wants from me. He wants me and everybody else to feel Nick’s pain, reflect something in our lives that relates to his past relationship with Klara or his current one with Marian. I feel Delillo is trying to get everyone to identify with Nick through his relationship with the ball/Dodgers, his relationship with brother/mother/wife/co-workers, his thoughts on his father.
Maybe I ought to stop fighting this pervasive feeling that I’m being taken for a ride by Mr. Don. It’s not that I don’t want to be taken for a ride, on the contrary, I do, that’s why I read literature (at least I think). But I want to ride the Underworld ride the way I set it up for myself. I don’t want to ride the same one as everyone else. Reading this aloud, it sounds pretty vain, like I’m above the common man identifying with these petty characters, like I can see through the façade and get to the real depth of Underworld (a weak pun). But that’s not my objective, I guess I seek to know how others think. Case in point, I don't identify with Brian Glaser, in fact I despise Brian, think he's a real dick, and selfish. But is that how everyone else feels? Is that what Delillo wants us all to think in how he paints Brian's character? I’m clueless I really am. Maybe I need to stop looking for a “point” and just read and absorb and be entertained. I have a quirk with literature, in that I always feel I have to over-analyze everything I read. There are never things that I can read in the way that I would watch a stupid movie, mindless, enjoying, yet non-stimulating.
ps. All the women in this book are disgusting me.
Maybe I ought to stop fighting this pervasive feeling that I’m being taken for a ride by Mr. Don. It’s not that I don’t want to be taken for a ride, on the contrary, I do, that’s why I read literature (at least I think). But I want to ride the Underworld ride the way I set it up for myself. I don’t want to ride the same one as everyone else. Reading this aloud, it sounds pretty vain, like I’m above the common man identifying with these petty characters, like I can see through the façade and get to the real depth of Underworld (a weak pun). But that’s not my objective, I guess I seek to know how others think. Case in point, I don't identify with Brian Glaser, in fact I despise Brian, think he's a real dick, and selfish. But is that how everyone else feels? Is that what Delillo wants us all to think in how he paints Brian's character? I’m clueless I really am. Maybe I need to stop looking for a “point” and just read and absorb and be entertained. I have a quirk with literature, in that I always feel I have to over-analyze everything I read. There are never things that I can read in the way that I would watch a stupid movie, mindless, enjoying, yet non-stimulating.
ps. All the women in this book are disgusting me.
This book is so weird. I change my opinion every two paragraphs. At the beginning of a chapter, I think the book is boring, infantile, misogynous, mushy, condescending and pretentious, a vulgar simplification; at the end of the same chapter I think that it is really intelligent, complex, deep, beautiful and revealing. On the one hand, I think that it is written with such an attention to the selection of words that it makes it cold and empty, and at the same time I think that words, sentences and paragraphs have been thrown into the page with no interest at all. There is only one thing I know for sure: I won’t know whether I like it or not until I finish it, and maybe not even then. I have just read that “our hero” is being betrayed by his wife and I love that.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
cat with a q-tip
I haven't finished reading the second part (haven't read the last two chapters) but i want to post today anyway. I can't not read now because i have a terrible hangover. But i will catch up during the week. I promise (this is so american).
A sentence: "You don't usually call your wife over to the TV set. She has her programs, you have yours". I know it is still too early to say, but this might be my favorite sentence in the book. And i don't think that it is satiric. All the writing about the video tape is what i liked the most in this part of the book. A question: is it possible that they broadcast something like that? is it not prohibited to put real deaths in TV? I think it is. I have to admit that i felt sick reading about it, what is weird, because it is fiction, i mean, it is reality inside of a fiction, thus fiction, but i felt as if i were reading about something that had actually happened.
My answer to LD's question about what the book is nostalgic for is youth. "youth, divine treasure / you leave not to come again / when i want to cry i don't / and sometimes i cry without wanting to", that's an old spanish poem (translated by me...). "Strangers would come to wash his genitals", "he would forget how to eat, how to say simple words". Getting old and useless is one of the things humans are more scared of, more than dying. My girlfriend was telling me this week how one of her patients, a very old woman, (she is a psychologist treating old people) started having panic attacks when her son threw a "suicide pill" she had been keeping from the 2nd world war (in case you got caught by the enemy) in the garbage. Supposedly, there are a lot of those pills running around in this country. My friend says that old people's suffering when they realize they can not take care of themselves anymore is such that many would prefer to die, but of course we won't permit that, will we?
Ok, i have a problem with women in Underworld. I am still not completely sure why or how, but in general i am much more interested in men in the book. Hey, everybody using latex globes in the book... i had to think of the two american girls who where staying for a while at my place last autumn. They had some kind of hand cleaning lotion in their purses, so each time when we went out eating we could nicely clean our hands. I was fascinated. Even if they were aware that their fear to dirt and infection or whatever it is, was being used to make them consume, they couldn't stop it anymore.
A sentence: "You don't usually call your wife over to the TV set. She has her programs, you have yours". I know it is still too early to say, but this might be my favorite sentence in the book. And i don't think that it is satiric. All the writing about the video tape is what i liked the most in this part of the book. A question: is it possible that they broadcast something like that? is it not prohibited to put real deaths in TV? I think it is. I have to admit that i felt sick reading about it, what is weird, because it is fiction, i mean, it is reality inside of a fiction, thus fiction, but i felt as if i were reading about something that had actually happened.
My answer to LD's question about what the book is nostalgic for is youth. "youth, divine treasure / you leave not to come again / when i want to cry i don't / and sometimes i cry without wanting to", that's an old spanish poem (translated by me...). "Strangers would come to wash his genitals", "he would forget how to eat, how to say simple words". Getting old and useless is one of the things humans are more scared of, more than dying. My girlfriend was telling me this week how one of her patients, a very old woman, (she is a psychologist treating old people) started having panic attacks when her son threw a "suicide pill" she had been keeping from the 2nd world war (in case you got caught by the enemy) in the garbage. Supposedly, there are a lot of those pills running around in this country. My friend says that old people's suffering when they realize they can not take care of themselves anymore is such that many would prefer to die, but of course we won't permit that, will we?
Ok, i have a problem with women in Underworld. I am still not completely sure why or how, but in general i am much more interested in men in the book. Hey, everybody using latex globes in the book... i had to think of the two american girls who where staying for a while at my place last autumn. They had some kind of hand cleaning lotion in their purses, so each time when we went out eating we could nicely clean our hands. I was fascinated. Even if they were aware that their fear to dirt and infection or whatever it is, was being used to make them consume, they couldn't stop it anymore.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Things I thought about while reading Part 2
*The first chapter is often anthologized as a short story....Interesting.
*DeLillo is kind of fascinated with video footage which relates both to issues of authenticity and of framing.
*I love the description of my hometown in chapter two
*With the introduction of Marvin I started paying a lot of attention to the way in which the individual characters speak. Marvin is always forgetting words and Brian fills them in for him. Later in the exchanges between Nick and Matt, Matt repeats nearly everything anyone says. The Texas Highway Killer has really awkward syntax.
*Keeping objects and understanding history through them is a death of sorts and yet possessing the past through objects wards off death. History serves a similar purpose in warding off death.
*The book is nostalgic. What is it nostalgic for?
*"He wants me to go to the zoo because the animals are real. I told him these are zoo animals. These are animals that live in the Bronx. On television I can see animals in the rain forest or the desert. So which is real and which is fake..." (207). Ha! Love it.
*All the discussion of time in chapter seven makes me think that history is also a way to defeat time. So is fiction.
*There is a lot of interesting gender stuff going on. Impotence seems to be a major theme, and fatherlessness. Women often play the role of savior.
*The Texas Highway Killer is obsessed with a fantasy of wholeness and only sees himself in terms of others and as a part of the history of others. Perfect for Lacanian analysis, using Zizek. Also interesting that he has trouble finishing his sentences. The copycat shooting is also a very complicated issue for the creation of his identity.
Sorry this is a pretty lazy post. Lots of unfinished thoughts.
*DeLillo is kind of fascinated with video footage which relates both to issues of authenticity and of framing.
*I love the description of my hometown in chapter two
*With the introduction of Marvin I started paying a lot of attention to the way in which the individual characters speak. Marvin is always forgetting words and Brian fills them in for him. Later in the exchanges between Nick and Matt, Matt repeats nearly everything anyone says. The Texas Highway Killer has really awkward syntax.
*Keeping objects and understanding history through them is a death of sorts and yet possessing the past through objects wards off death. History serves a similar purpose in warding off death.
*The book is nostalgic. What is it nostalgic for?
*"He wants me to go to the zoo because the animals are real. I told him these are zoo animals. These are animals that live in the Bronx. On television I can see animals in the rain forest or the desert. So which is real and which is fake..." (207). Ha! Love it.
*All the discussion of time in chapter seven makes me think that history is also a way to defeat time. So is fiction.
*There is a lot of interesting gender stuff going on. Impotence seems to be a major theme, and fatherlessness. Women often play the role of savior.
*The Texas Highway Killer is obsessed with a fantasy of wholeness and only sees himself in terms of others and as a part of the history of others. Perfect for Lacanian analysis, using Zizek. Also interesting that he has trouble finishing his sentences. The copycat shooting is also a very complicated issue for the creation of his identity.
Sorry this is a pretty lazy post. Lots of unfinished thoughts.
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