Things I read

Magically, moving has found me more time to read that I ever did in Missouri. This probabaly has much to do with the fact that I no longer have cable and watch stupid Adult Swim shows during the wee hours of the night. Anyhow, here's a few things I've been reading as of late:

•Baseball biographies, including this great one on Satchel Paige and another on pre-1940's ballplayers (just re-released after being out of print for years, apparently).

•Harvey Pekar. I tried in vein to find some American Splendor comics at bookstores but everyone was sold out (or did not carry them). Instead, I bought his graphic history of the Beats. A re-reading of On the Road follows.

•My recent (a few months ago, that is) discovery of Longform.org has fueled my interest in long journalism (obviously). Some recent highlights have included the story of Paris' most secret society, TV's Crowning Moment of Awesome and The Mark of a Masterpiece.

•Most significantly, though, is the David Foster Wallace piece "Consider the Lobster". This because, I had somehow forgotten about DFW. The man wrote possibly one of my favorite sports pieces ever, on Roger Federer. (I'd also read the piece "Host", which appeared in the Ira Glass edited New Kings of Nonfiction.)

After reading the lobster piece, and because I had a $25 gift card to Barnes and Noble for my birthday, I decided to give his collection of essays (also called Consider the Lobster) a go. Recommended, for two main reasons: the piece on the national porn convention and the piece on the McCain2000 campaign. Unfortunately, the Federer piece is not in there but I think that might be one of the very last things he published. Thank god for the NYTimes archives (and, again, R.I.P. Play magazine). The point here is, DFW seems like the kind of guy I should have known about forever, yet I know painfully little about him.

My next question is figuring out if I want to attempt his fiction, and if I will like it. Lots of footnotes work for certain pieces of nonfiction, but I'm wary about authors who like incorporating them into 1,000+ page works of fiction. Any insights?

•There happens to be another short piece in Consider the Lobster on Dostoevsky, which convinced me I need to start re-reading Crime and Punishment (a book I never actually got around to finishing). Wish me luck. (Edit: This would probabaly be easier if I could find my goddamn copy of the book.)

Reflections on my job

Gary Cartwright, 1969 in Harper's:

Still, ethics is a nebulous question to a profession that has never really defined its purpose. To report? To expose? To speculate? To entertain? To criticize? To subsist and endure? A good sportswriter does it all. I do not know a sportswriter who would accept, say, one hundred dollars to print something he did not believe.

Also:

Many times I put out the paper alone. All the sportswriters did. We staggered in, tore the night’s run of copy from the United Press machine, selected the stories according to the page dummies supplied by the advertising department, assigned headlines and wrote them, clipped box scores and other trivia from the morning Star Telegram, selected pictures and sent them to the engravers, made up the cutlines, then hurried to the composing room where a printer named Max would be waiting to change everything. Like Charley, Max was a professional. All he ever said was, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

We survived on the assumption that no one read our paper anyhow. It is the same feeling you get on a college newspaper or on mind-expanding drugs. There are no shackles on the imagination; there is no retreat, only attack. One of my jobs was to make up little “brights” or boxes:

John Doughs made a hole-in-one yesterday at Glen Lakes Country Club when a snake swallowed his tee shot, a dog swallowed the snake, and an eagle carried off the dog, dropping him in the cup after colliding head on with a private plane flown by Doughs’s maternal twin.

We went heavy on the irony. Under these circumstances you might think we. got a lot of letters to the editor, but I don’t remember any.

-from "Confessions of a Washed-Up Sportswriter" by Gary Cartwright. Required reading for all sportswriters (and journalists, for that matter). In this book, which is well worth getting.

More retooling

I am in the process of doing away with my other blog, which was set up solely for the purposes of having an online clippings archive. But I decided to consolidate. I wanted more people to see the stuff I was doing there (all journalistic) as well as the stuff I am doing here (mostly for the purposes of more literary endeavors and music criticism). Hopefully I can make the transition smoothly. Either way, I'll be posting more of my newspaper work on this site and hopefully, more of the other (non-work related) stuff here.

Guitar Man Upstairs

This guy makes me happier than words. Also, his bandmate kind of looks like Dr. Reist.

Looks like Christmas has come to Waynesville.

The business

Do you wanna be in the business? (The business)
The ups and downs with the hoes (The business)
Always gettin' fronted on at shows (The business)
People gotta stick their nose (In the business)
-A Tribe Called Quest

How succinctly A Tribe Called Quest describes my line of work. Well, maybe the hoes are a bit of a stretch. And I haven't been fronted on yet. But yes, thank you, I do want to be in "the business." The journalism business, that is.

The first two weeks are easy. Nothing's going on, I cram my page with filler and AP wire stories about the St. Louis Blues and the Missouri Tigers.

I work late (until 8 or 9). But I don't have to come in until 10. Or 11. Or 12. Whatever. I wear jeans to work 3 out of 5 days. I listen to co-workers, mostly women, talk about men and shopping for toys for their children. Then they poke fun at me for being the only guy around. I laugh along with them. Yes, the business is easy, so far.

***

Except now that basketball season starts. I cover 10 high schools to varying degrees. The big high school gets an automatic bid and onto my "SportsTime" page. They play in a large league with eight other big high schools. Four of them are from the metropolis of Springfield. Then there's Joplin (a good two hours, basically the Oklahoma border), Lebanon (pronounced "LEH-banin"), Rolla (RAWL-a), Camdenton, West Plains.

The Springfield media turns its nose up at those other hillbilly teams from the rest of the Ozarks. Which is ironic, because the St. Louis and Kansas City media does the same to the Springfield teams. I only have to cover them when my team plays one of them. Which give me an excuse to go to "Stick It In Your Ear" record store/ head shop every once and a while.

***

The other schools I cover are small. Really small. Like 100-300 students. They're all at least 10 miles from homebase, in small communities nestled in the Ozarks. They don't have football teams, so they like their basketball. And baseball. Fall baseball, in fact, is a Missouri-sanctioned sport.

But how do I get there? Because I still have trouble driving on Ozark highways at night. They're all two lanes back here, save I-44, and the prospect of going 55 on a winding two-lane highway with no light of any kind from Waynesville to, say, Crocker (11 miles away) sort of frightens me.

Who knows what kind of turn is going to come out of nowhere and trip me up? Sometimes there will be four "s" turns in a span of 5 miles. One wrong flick of the steering wheel and I'm colliding with sedimentary rock.

Even the interstate winds much more than normal interstates should. On the way to Rolla there's this community called Devil's Elbow, which is little more than a service station and a shack. Named such because of its place on a particular harrowing turn on the Big Piney River, the engineers who constructed the highway apparently didn't realize that it's a bit more dangerous for automobiles to go 75 miles an hour on the same type of turn.

Huck and Jim might have been able to do it on a raft, but a lumbering semi-truck? Not so much.

"Looking for the right kind of live free or die..."

"Switching it over to AM
Searching for a truer sound
Can't recall the call letters
Steel guitar and settle down
Catching an all-night station somewhere in Louisiana
It sounds like 1963, but for now it sounds like heaven"
-Son Volt

I listened to the Son Volt album Trace about 5 times during my Missouri sojourn. They're from Saint Louis, so I thought it appropriate. Saturday was the best travel day, through Southern Oklahoma (which kindly reminds travelers about once every twenty miles, "DO NOT DRIVE INTO SMOKE") and the entire north-south length of Texas. By "best" I mean I was able to find the best radio stations, since the scenery itself is kind of drab.

Seriously. When I left Tulsa, there were three Big Twelve football games going on. Somehow Tulsa is placed just so perfectly that I was able to get the radio feed for all six teams that happened to be playing at that time (Kansas, Nebraska, Baylor, Oklahoma, Texas Tech, Kansas State). I liked the Kansas station the best, because a) they didn't have Southern accents and b) it wasn't the flagship station I was hearing but rather an obscure country station from Pittsburg, Kansas and advertised many things from the Pittsburg area that would normally have little interest to me. Like furniture and jewelry, Pittsburg style. Somehow, though, I was fascinated by all of it.

But this happened at noon. Selecting a radio station at noon is a straightforward affair: you hit seek and you have a very strong signal for a decent amount of stations, especially in a city.

At night, though, it becomes mysterious. One can pick up strange radio stations playing strange things from literally any part of the Western Hemisphere. Most of the stations you want to listen to don't come in very strongly so you'll hear two or three voices talking at the same time, unintelligibly, over music. You'll hear Spanish and French or sometimes, at least in Houston, nebulous Asian languages. You'll hear Coast to Coast AM. Coming from millions of different cities.

The light lingers for a bit longer in Texas. It's a pale blue in October, and it stays lit for a pretty long time until at some point everything clicks and it's pitch black. Sometimes there will be an Exxon on the side of the road giving some light, but usually it's just you, the road, and the lights from other cars behind you, which can be deceiving in the mirror.

I found myself radio-hopping from Dallas to Houston. The Longhorns game, to which I had been intently listening (did I mention how I think college football is second only to baseball in "best sport to listen to on the radio"? No? Well, I did now...) had ended and the sky was that pale blue and I tried listening to music but nothing seemed appropriate. So I attempted to find various sporting events, maybe a Rockets game or a Houton Cougers game. No cigar. No Houston stations to be found, actually. All were garbled with static and faint hints of music.

Somehow, though, I managed to hear this: "...and you're listening to the voice of the Chicago Blackhawks, WGN Radio 720!" Fuckin' hell, that's far. They were playing the Red Wings. I listened until it faded, and then found some Cajun guy talking about LSU football, a Colorado Buffs game, Notre Dame, Grande Ole Opry radio, a Spanish soccer game, and what I think was a Canadiens game in French. And a long infomercial for this hot tea made from cocoa that's supposed to be the best drink ever.

It almost makes me want to never listen to music in the car again.

(PS, I got and took the Missouri job, I'll be moving in about three weeks...)