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.)

Thoughts on today's World Cup matches

No further commentary needed.

Plagerism

Reebok's new sneaker commercial sounds awfully familiar, no?

Unfortunately, this is not the first time a sneaker company has ripped off aspects of rock and roll culture to sell its wares.

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.

No Love Lost

The description to this video says simply "smoking is cool." And, really, I must agree. Only Don Draper makes smoking look cooler.

Composure

More photos here.

Dear Yo La Tengo...

Dear Yo La Tengo,

Please record an album filled with nothing but wordless instrumental noise jams like this one. I will listen to it every day.

Love,

Jack