Paragraph of the Week

From Wyatt Mason's article on David Mitchell, "David Mitchell, the Experimentalist," in the June 27, 2010 edition of The New York Times Magazine:

When writing is great, Mitchell told me of the books he loved as a reader, “your mind is nowhere else but in this world that started off in the mind of another human being. There are two miracles at work here. One, that someone thought of that world and people in the first place. And the second, that there’s this means of transmitting it. Just little ink marks on squashed wood fiber. Bloody amazing.”

America's Soccer Moment

First:



Then:

Reader's Despair Syndrome

Hello, my name is Avi, and I'm a readaholic.

I've always been something of an obsessive reader. I read my first Dave Barry column on January 1, 2000, as the comedy writer presented his summary of the millennium. I proceeded, throughout the course of my high school career, to read every single archived column available on any of the dozens of Dave Barry fan-sites I found. I think I was using AOL search, so I may have missed a few columns, but I did manage to uncover a few hundred pieces.

I repeated this general approach after reading Bill Simmons for the first time.

I still remember that fateful day--I was a senior in college--when I first discovered Google Reader. This is awesome, I thought. Google will deliver updates from any website I want? Awesome. What started off as four or five subscriptions soon ballooned to a dozen. I unsubscribed during those summers when computer access was limited, but resubscribed as soon as I returned to civilization. I currently sit at 36 subscriptions, and that's after pruning three in the last week. I don't read everything written on each of these sites. But I read everything from two dozen of them and I skim the rest. This, as I understand it, is a mild case.

At least according to Leon Neyfakh's article "Feed Me, I'm Hungry," published in The New York Observer:

Legions of jittery, media-conscious New Yorkers are eating themselves alive signing up for feeds they never end up reading  in hopes of becoming better people—more knowledgeable, more fun to talk to, more in control of their Internet consumption. They subscribe to dozens, sometimes hundreds of news sources, each of them added to the list with the best of intentions, motivated by the knowledge that, if they really wanted to—that is, if they had it in them to be disciplined and vigilantly curious—they could know everything there is to know. And so these poor balls of anxiety walk around with a constant awareness of all the hundreds of unread news stories, essays, reviews, and blog posts waiting for them on computers—all the marvels they're missing on Boing Boing and Kottke, all the Marginal Revolution posts, all the oil spill updates from The New York Times' U.S. news feed.

Call it Reader's Despair Syndrome, a condition that is afflicting New York's young and old with equal viciousness, but which tends to produce the most dramatic symptoms in people in their 20s and 30s, who retain hope that they will one day become more productive and virtuous in their Internet reading habits.

I've been thinking about these issues for a while, but it's always nice to both know that I'm not alone and to have these nebulous concepts articulated clearly. I'm not sure that this form of reading is good. Forget about whether RSS reading is healthy. I'm more concerned about what this does to me as a reader. Do I want to feel obligated to read the blogs that I love? Can I keep up with my reading without it feeling like an assignment in need of completion? 

Now, some of these subscriptions are for my blogging gig, so I don't really see a way to do without them. But I'm really curious about how I should treat my recently added subscriptions to The Paris Review Daily and Cardboard Gods. Would I enjoy these more if I visited these blogs only when I was in the mood to read them? I'm not sure what the answers are to these questions.

Are you a readaholic? How has RSS feeds changed the way you read?

Warren Spahn's Zipup Jersey

Warren Spahn was a superb pitcher. The all-time leader in pitching victories by a lefthander, Spahn's greatness holds up even under a more statistically inclined investigation. He never struck out a ton of batters, averaging only 4.4 SO/9 over the course of his career. But this unfortunate tendency to allow batters to make contact with his pitches didn't keep Spahn from compiling ten seasons in which he tallied at least 5 WAR, with a peak of 9.4 WAR in 1953. So yeah, obvious Hall of Famer.

The most surprising thing about Spahn, however, might just be his uniform. Take a look. There're no buttons on his shirt. The thing zips up.

This is crazy to me. I ran across a photo of Spahn in this zipup jersey over the weekend and I'm completely baffled by it.

I can just about picture Eddie Matthews repeatedly unzipping Spahn's shirt in the dugout. Baseball players love pranks.

Was this a standard practice in the early 1950s? Did the entire Boston Braves team wear these uniforms or did Spahn have some sort of aversion to buttons? Anyone have any more information on these shirts?

June 17, 1994: Subtle Choices Are Choices Nonetheless

ESPN's presentation of Brett Morgen's documentary June 17, 1994--part of the sports network's 30 for 30 series--opens with the director addressing the audience, saying:

June 17, 1994 is not your typical documentary. There are no talking head interviews, there's no narration, there's simply my editor, myself, and a bunch of footage. Over the last ten years what I've been trying to do is create non-fiction films that are what I call experiential. They're movies that take place in the past but are presented in the present tense. The reason we chose June 17, 1994 is just about every emotion that one relates to sports took place on that day.

I'm not sure whose idea it was to have Morgen describe his directing style before the start of the film, but that person should be commended. Leaving aside the fact that this introductory remark may provide evidence that there is, in fact, at least one talking head interview included in the film, Morgen's opening explanation is a necessary one. It's the first documentary I've seen that eschews reflective interviews and, even if the audience would be able to follow the action without this documentary staple, it takes something of a mental shift to realize that what we're watching is not a meditation on that June date through the lens of sixteen years of reflection: we're watching the on-the-spot reactions of those who witnessed these events unfold in real time. Morgen's introduction might not be the most elegant way to prepare the audience for this change, but I'll take what I can get from ESPN.

The film follows a single day of events in the sports world. The New York Rangers victory parade down the streets of Manhattan. The opening day of the Chicago-hosted World Cup. Arnold Palmer playing his final round of golf at the US Open. Game 5 of the NBA finals, featuring the Knicks and Rockets. A full slate of baseball games. And, of course, OJ's car chase.

The most interesting part of the film is some really great behind-the-scenes footage of Bob Costas, hosting NBC's coverage of the NBA finals. Costas, in these clips, discusses with his production staff how to handle the uncomfortable need to broadcast what was considered a rather important basketball game during what became one of the biggest news stories of the century. The viewer sees Costas desperately trying to determine how best to introduce the game even while OJ sits in the back of a speeding car with a gun to his head. This, in a nutshell, is the major theme of the movie: it's an exploration of how context and juxtaposition create meaning and how people respond to these juxtapositions. While Costas puts on a professional and appropriate face, Morgen throws everything together, forcing the viewer to assimilate six events at once. Trust me when I tell you that each event informs the others, as everything always does. What's fascinating here is that no one--except maybe those working the nation's newsrooms--could possibly have followed the day's events with a level of attention matched by Morgen's mashed-up day. June 17, 1994 as experienced by an average American bears only a slight resemblance to June 17, 1994 as experienced by the film's audience.

And this brings us back to Morgen's opening claim. Just because Morgen claims that this is a thoroughly experiential film, throwing the viewer back in time to 1994, doesn't mean that we have to believe him. As in all films, what the audience sees on-screen is highly curated. The very editing itself is nothing if not a subtle form of reflection, offering moments of commentary through juxtapositions that are anything but neutral. Jumping from OJ's 1985 NFL Hall of Fame induction speech in which he thanks Nicole for some of the best years of his life to an image of a bloody garment at the Simpson residence in 1994 says something. Bringing together footage of a high-speed car chase and a clip of OJ running through an airport on Hertz's dime says something. Apposing the Rangers Stanley Cup victory parade with the throngs who lined the California freeways to gawk at and cheer for OJ's infamous white Bronco says something. Of course, films are supposed to say things. That's the point. And no, this documentary does not faithfully represent how anyone actually experienced that warm June day, but, again, this is the point of film: to selectively tell a story, bringing together diverse elements while omitting needless ones. Morgen does that in spades.

Recommended.

Paragraph of the Week

Lorin Stein, writing on the excellent The Paris Review Daily blog:

The best thing that ever happened to me as a would-be writer was reading Infinite Jest. I was also twenty-four and spent my days sitting in front of an empty screen, full of a sense of duty and despair. That book cured me. It said all the things I'd have wanted my novel to say—things I'd never have dreamt up on my own in a million years. Keep reading and you will find the book that lets you off the hook. The world doesn't need your fiction. The question is whether you need it, and over time that question will answer itself without interference from you.

Paragraph of the Week

A selection of Roger Birnbaum's interview with The New Yorker's editor-in-chief, David Remnick, published in The Morning News:

RB: How much is the New Yorker a barometer, a thermometer, litmus test, measuring stick of cultural developments in the United States? Does the ongoing success of the New Yorker say anything about literacy, book-buying, things like that?

DR: Well, if that were the case than it would defy all [the] dark imaginings of all the prognosticators, because our circulation seems to go up. I have to tell you—one of the good parts about traveling or getting out of the house and the well-worn groove between my apartment and the office, and meeting people at this event or that event, is the number of people who come up and, in a non-routine sort of way, almost with an urgency, tell me how important the magazine is to them. Not me, not any single writer, even the enterprise by itself and its constancy. Not because it’s unfailing or because it’s perfect—that’s too ridiculous to hope for—but because of its ambition. I don’t think we are all alone, by the way. There are a number of magazines I really admire and respect that are quite different from ours. But I remember, one week after getting this job, in the almost absurd way I got it, I had to go to San Francisco, and I was at dinner and some guy came up to me. He had been in the Midwest and lived in San Francisco and he came up to the table where we were having dinner and grabbed my arm in a way that was slightly alarming and his message to me was, “Don’t fuck this up!”

RB: (laughs)

DR: “This magazine has meant something to me since I was 14 or 15 years old.” This guy had to be 50 if he was a day, and so his attachment to it was really important to him. And that happens all the time in one way or another.