Echopraxia

Some wise and relevant words on the subject of America's pastime:

The only "problem" with major-league baseball as a consumer product is that, with the exception of the Detroit franchise, most of these guys actually know how to play the game, and now and then you want to see some Keystone Kops action in the field. Happily, the problem has a simple solution: get in the car and proceed to the nearest minor-league venue. It looks enough like baseball to count as going to a game, but it's much cheaper than going to a big-league game (especially the parking), and a grown man is going to step on his own foot and fall down. No, listen to me -- it is going to happen.

Posted by zerlesen at 3:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (70)

Heute nicht auf Deutsch. I am slowly plowing through William Vollmann's latest characteristically terrifying novel, though, the action of which is split more or less evenly between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia in an attempt to demonstrate that they were both really depressing.

I was afraid that Vollmann ran out of tricks about ten years ago, but (happily) he seems to have entered some kind of career renaissance, one in which he no longer feels compelled to write quite so many gigantic books about whores. Meanwhile, professional reviewers of novels seem to have come to terms with the fact that no matter what they say, basically nobody is going to read him, which gives them license to throw their hands up and start saying things like:

I've reviewed nearly all of Vollmann's books over the years and am running out of superlatives...

Posted by zerlesen at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Previous post heading is meta, but not purely so - crickets - or locusts, or something with an exoskeleton - are massing in the trees, making an insurrectionary noise like a few thousand tiny buzzsaws. I keep expecting to hear falling timber.

So, then: after much pain and many deaths, I am back in the US. Elvis Costello once wrote an entire song about how much the city I'm sitting in sucks, but that's neither here nor there. Nothing is moving on the street except for the great North American flannel-shirted cicada, or whatever the hell those things are.

Posted by zerlesen at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Posted by zerlesen at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)