Eric The Blue

In downtown Minneapolis, 29 June 2013

I was in downtown Minneapolis yesterday afternoon for the Twins game.  Notwithstanding 36,000 mainly straight baseball fans, the alternatives may have been in the majority, what with Pride weekend in full swing and the Lynx, of the WNBA, playing at home before their fans, who could not be mistaken for a regiment of Republican women looking for that place known for its excellent Gin Fizzes. 

The Gay Pride Festival has always been an eye full.  The entertainment was formerly provided by the celebrants, whose spoof on heterosexual wholesomeness was deliberate and funny.  They've gone mainstream, however:  all they want now is to join the military and get married.  Fortunately, their crazed opponents flock to the scene to supply some unintentional comedy.  I do not know why it's true, but still it is true, that people who are trying to be mean, but failing due to a lack of wit, succeed at being funny.  I took some mental notes so that I could research their placards when I got home.  For example, "Jesus Hates Sinners, Hebrews 1:8" seems like an invitation to look up Hebrews 1:8 and be knocked out by the devastating right cross that is therein delivered to the glass jaw of same-sex love.  Here it is:

But of the Son He says, "Your throne, oh God, is forever and ever, and the righteous scepter is the scepter of his kingdom."

So, take that, funny boys! 

The Twins won, 6 to 2. 

Joyce's Dubliners: "The Boarding House"

The trial of the neighborhood-watch champion of Florida has begun, the New England Patriots' tight end has been charged with an execution-style homicide, President Obama has ended his silence about climate change, and the Supreme Court has ruled on voting rights, the Defense of Marriage Act, and California's Prop 8.  Where to begin?  How about with "The Boarding House," the seventh story in Joyce's Dubliners and one of my favorites.

Roaming hither and thither in the critical literature, one forms the idea that "The Boarding House" has been read as another installment in the sequence of "paralysis" stories.  Doran, a tenant in Mrs Mooney's boarding house, takes up with his landlady's 19-year-old daughter.  Mrs Mooney is alert to every new development in her house, but she does not squash the affair until it has reached a point where she calculates that Doran can be confronted and forced to marry the girl.  And she calculates correctly.  Doran feels trapped and wants to fly away, but he fears exposure, publicity,, and the loss of his job in the office of a Catholic wine merchant--a position, we are told, he has held for thirteen years.  So, just as Eveline could not bring herself to leave Ireland for a new and freer life, Doran makes a marriage that is not his but Mrs Mooney's idea, and faces a narrowing, Dublin future.

The main problem with this is that it makes Doran the star of the show.  It also makes Mrs Mooney, who executed the trap that Doran won't escape, a candidate for villainhood.  But here is how the story starts:

Mrs Mooney was a butcher's daughter. She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself: a determined woman.  She had  married her father's foreman and opened a butcher's shop near Spring Gardens.  But as soon as his father-in-law was dead Mr Mooney began to go to the devil.  He drank, plundered the till, ran headlong into debt.  It was no use making him take the pledge: he was sure to break out again a few days after.  By fighting his wife in the presence of customers and by buying bad meat he ruined his business.  One night he went for his wife with the cleaver and she had to sleep in a neighbour's house.

After that they lived apart.  She went to the priest and got a separation from him with care of the children. . . .  Mrs Mooney, who had taken what remained of her money out of the butcher business and set up a boarding-house in Hardwicke Street, was a big imposing woman.

She's not a villain.  She's a woman who's been kocked about some and learned how to take care of herself. There's a detail that, on first reading, is easy to glide past:

Mrs Mooney sat in the straw arm-chair and watched the servant Mary remove the breakfast things.  She made Mary collect the crusts and pieces of broken bread to help make Tuesday's bread pudding.

She's a close calculator and she may not have miscalculated since she married her father's foreman.  I feel about her the way I feel about those weeds that grow up in the cracks of your sidewalk.  You don't like them but your dislike is mitigated by something like admiration. 

Provus and Gladden go to the movies

Since I haven't been posting any of my inimitable film criticism lately, I thought I'd share some I heard on the radio today while running errands and listerning to the Twins.  Apparently Kevin Costner was attending the game, and Cory Provus, the play-by-play guy, and sidekick Dan Gladden began naming movies he'd starred in.  Of course the baseball ones came first.  Then Gladden said he'd always enjoyed Tin Cup.  Provus mentioned Waterworld, which was followed by a few seconds of dead air.  The batter cooperated with the rising drama by not putting the ball in play.  Finally, Gladden spoke.  "Yeah," he said, "Bert Blyleven got me to watch that one."  He paused for effect, then: "You really have to like water to enjoy it." 

As a critical put down, it ranks right up there with Pauline Kael's scoffing dismissal of Dances with Wolves: "This is a nature-boy movie, a kid's daydream of being an Indian. . . .  Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head."

We don't have time for movies at our house.  When the kids have been bathed, read to, and tucked in, I watch the Twins, unless Amanda is watching Bravo, and, if it was a day game, we cue up an episode of Downton Abbey. On Sundays, we watch Mad Men, a long habit yielding diminishing returns. 

About that Twins game.  The  situation was eerily similar to the one I made up for yesterday's post. Twins lead, 4 to 3, in the eighth inning at Cleveland.  Jared Burton is in to pitch, and he gets into trouble.  With two on and two out and Perkins warming in the pen, Burton gets the last out of the inning on a check swing dribbler before Perkins pitches an uneventful ninth.  Twins win!  Gardenhire's a genius!

How not to use the bullpen

Why, when trying to protect a small lead, are the field managers of major-league baseball teams so programmatic in their late-inning choice of pitchers?  If the local nine holds a two-run lead as the opponent comes to bat in the eighth inning, you can bet that the pitcher will be Jared Burton.  He's our "eighth inning guy."  If the lead is still two as the other team prepares to bat in the ninth, Burton will give way to Glen Perkins, our "closer."  Perkins is the closer because he's the best we got.  Burton is the eighth inning guy, also known as the set-up guy, because he's the second best we got.  Almost every team's plan to protect a late-inning lead involves similar "roles" for their relief pitchers.

It seems to me that the strategy rests upon the assumption that games are more apt to be won or lost in the ninth inning than in the eighth.  But that isn't always true, and it's possible to tell beforehand when it's more likely that the eighth inning will be the decisive one.  Suppose the Twins are ahead 5 to 3 in the eighth inning.  Burton enters and the result of the first three at-bats is a loud out and two solid singles. The other team's clean-up hitter is due up. Shouldn't Perkins be the pitcher?  He's the best we got, and it's very much more likely that the next two at-bats will be more determinative than anything that happens in the ninth inning.  If, for some reason I don't understand, Perkins cannot pitch in different innings, then he should pitch for the last two outs of the eighth inning--in this game, anyway.  But that's not the way the Twins play it.  Manager Ron Gardenhire will usually stick with Burton in the eighth, even after he gets into trouble.  If he makes a move, it will be to bring in someone other than Perkins.  And, as I've said, it's not just the Twins who decline to deploy their best relief pitcher with trouble brewing and just one out in the eighth inning.  The closer's job is to get the last three outs of the game.  I'm saying that your best relief pitcher should try to get the outs that matter most and that these aren't always in the last inning.

It's possible that the managers know something that fans like me don't grasp.  Maybe it has less to do with baseball than with social science--economics and psychology.  But it's at least possible that I'm right.  People always act against their interest, like when down-on-their luck southern whites vote Republican, so it would not be particularly surprising if baseball managers regularly turn away from pursuing the optimal strategy.  I've written before about the management professor and football fan who has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that NFL coaches call on their punter way too much.  Notwithstanding his exhaustive and publicized analysis, they continue to punt when they should leave the offense on the field to "go for it" on fourth down.  For what it's worth, my theory of the case is that people who make strategic descisions, whether they be football coaches or baseball managers or your boss at work, have gotten to where they want to be and that pursuing "unusual" strategies is not the best way to stay there.  When you're at the top and the pressure is on, risk aversion becomes a kind of coping strategy, and the merits of a particular question get swamped by a defensive conservatism.  It's the same attraction as religious fundamentalism.  You don't have to agonize over hard questions if you decide beforehand that you will always "follow the book." 

Bloomsday

Another Bloomsday, this one coinciding with Father's Day--which seems poignantly fitting, for Mr Bloom lost a son in infancy and has never fully recovered: it's the main source of his tender, loitering sorrow.  If you've ever thought of diving into Ulysses, generally regarded as the best novel ever written in the English language--and possibly the second most demanding, behind only Joyce's next and last offering, Finnegan's Wake--read this appreciation (especially section 3) from  Michael Chabon to boost  you into the morning hours of Mr Bloom's adventures on the sixteenth of June, 1904, in Dublin. 

Meanwhile, I've been devoting a post to each of the fifteen stories in Dubliners, Joyce's first  and most accessible work.  But in this post I'm going to skip lightly over the fifth and sixth, which are "After the Race" and "Two Gallants."  They aren't my favorites.  The young Joyce despised Dublin, and these are the stories in which his disdain is most thinly veiled.  Moreover the stories bear a weight of symbolic representation that to me seems labored: their three gallants are meant to stand for all Ireland, but they are just three sorry samplings of humanity such as one might meet up with anywhere.  Still: it's only in comparison to the others  that these seem weak.  Here is the interior monologue of one "gallant" as he sits in a cheap restaurant refreshing himself toward the end of his despiciable little adventure:

He would be thrity-one in November.  Would he never get a good job?  Would he never have a home of his own?  He thought how pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit by and a good dinner to sit down to.  He had walked the streets long enough with friends and with girls.  He knew what those friends were worth: he knew the girls too.  Experience had embittered his heart against the world.  But all hope had not left him.  He felt better after having eaten than he had felt before, less weary of his life, less vanquished in spirit.  He might yet be able to settle down in some snug corner and live happily if he could only come across some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready. 

I've indicated that the stories display too crudely Joyce's disdain but you could not fairly say that he sneers.  This sponge's loftiest goal is to make a mercenary marriage and he is at least dimly aware that it would require a simple-minded girl to realize it.  That is all true.  To hate the man, however, you have to be simple-minded yourself. 

Joyce's Dubliners: "Eveline"

Harry Levin once observed that, likely as a consequence of having lived his life in near blindness, Joyce's fiction is of "low visibility."  The other senses predominate, and "Eveline," the fourth story in Dubliners, is suffused with the smell of dusty cretonne and the sound of a street organ.  We may surmise that the cretonne is the material of the draperies in Eveline's Dublin home.  And we're told that when her mother was lying on her death bed in that house, her father had been angered when the sound of a street organ had wafted into the sick room, so that the sound of one now reminds Eveline of her promise to her dying mother to hold the family together as best she could.  But it's a narrow, hard life.  Her father is cruel and drinks too much.  One brother (her favorite) is dead.  Another brother has moved away.  Eveline, who is 19, is responsible for two younger siblings and housework.  She also supplies much of the household income by working at an unrewarding shop job.  The one bright spot is her boyfried, Frank, a sailor.  He has proposed to her and she is weighing an elopement--to Buenos Aires.  Should she stay or should she go?

She has written her letters, and she leaves for the ship.  But then she can't do it.  Probably she should have.  It's not a good sign that the cretonne in the house smells of dust.  She had promised her mother, however.  And this narrow life of unsensational sacrifice is not the worst one to be imagined. 

The central figures in the three earlier stories had been even younger than Eveline.  Joyce did not conceive of these stories as separate but as successive chapters concerning the citizens of Dublin.  In this regard, we might recall that the first one opened with a priest having suffered a stroke, and his young friend wondering at hearing the grown-up word paralysis.  In that first story, the word referred to a physical condition.  As a generalized spiritual malaise, it's the theme of the book, which will end with Gabriel Conroy swooning as he watches the snow, "general all over Ireland," faintly falling and covering everything, "all the living and the dead." 

What the H

Hendrik Hertzberg has put to one side his analyses of the modern Republican party, the fillibuster, and governmental gridlock in order to meditate upon Hell.  I'm going to pretend to refrain from making the obvious joke concerning how actually all these subjects are of a piece.  Since I'm not so willing as he to extend the benefit of the doubt to the pope and his Church, I have to wonder why Hertzberg, a forthright unbeliever, seems so--what's the word?  congenial?--when the topic of popery is at hand.  My theory of the case is that his wife, New Yorker colleague Virginia Cannon, is, as this post suggests, a Catholic, and that to preserve domestic tranquility he is obliged to adopt an accommodating stance toward the Church of Rome, just as I am obliged to keep to myself my opinion about the programming on Bravo.  (I am fond of Andy Cohen, however.)

Anyway, I should think that Hell is a topic, or destination, that the pope might want to avoid.  Assuming that he is not a moron, it must be embarrassing to defend this crazy notion that people survive death and, on account of heretical, or nonexistent, theological views, spend eternity in a Lake of Fire.  Who really believes that?  Hertzberg jokes about whether he is in or out but let us put his case to one side in order to consider some others.  Socrates: in or out?  Spinoza?  Gandhi?  Bertrand Russell?  (Yeah, I know, he's in the lake, obviously, but I assume all the popes are sitting in the vicinity of the Right Hand, and, compared to Russell, you might say of most of them:  "God made him, therefore let him pass for a man.")  I think I remember reading that, according to Thomas Aquinas, one of the perks of paradise is the excellent view it affords of Hell, which allows the saints to indulge themselves neverendingly in the pleasures of Schadenfreude.  Were I a responsible blogger, I'd research this claim to make sure it's true.  But that would involve dipping into the works of Thomas Aquinas, an activity for which earthly life is too short. 

If Hell's proprietor is accepting friendly advice, mine would be to do away with the hot weather.  Instead, imprison the damned in a comfortable library filled only with theological treatises by approved Catholic authors. 

Joyce's Dubliners: "Araby"

The third story in Dubliners is "Araby."  I wrote very briefly about it here.  It's the one you are most likely to have read, for it is frequently anthologized and assigned in literature courses on the short story.  In its favor are its brevity, the youth of the main character, and a theme that one might expect to appeal to college-aged readers.  Updike's "A&P" is popular for the same reasons.  Indeed, "A&P" seems like an updated, American version of "Araby." You can predict the "compare and contrast" essay question on the midterm.

By the time you've finished the first three stories, you have an idea of what Joyce is about in Dubliners.  Things are not stated but suggested.  Hardly anything of note seems to happen.  There is nothing showy about the prose.  All seems calculated to create an aura of gray drabness.  The characters in the stories feel it but can't escape.  What's suggested but not stated in "Araby"?  The narrator's high hopes, the holy feeling he has when thinking of Mangan's sister and of giving her a gift.  O, love!  But when he finally gets to the bazaar, it's late.  The sellers are closing up, counting money.  He overhears bits of coarse conversation.  At a stall, he can barely get the attention of the sales girl, who resents the interruption of her conversation with two boys.  Then the conclusion:

I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real.  Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar.  I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket.  I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out.  The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

The end.  The last sentence calls attention to itself: the mutedness is dropped in favor of a rare statement of strong emotion.  I like the sentence before that one.  The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.  The verbal associations, including how the narrator walks down the center of the bazaar, evoke a religious service in a church.  But it's a market.  Everyone is on the make.  The boy longs for something sacred and is swamped by the profane. 

 

Joyce's Dubliners: "An Encounter"

The title refers to "an encounter" that two Dublin boys have while skipping out of their Catholic school one late spring day.  An older man approaches them in a field, talks aimlessly with them of this and that, then walks away and--well, here, I'll just set down the passage everyone talks about:

After a long while his monologue paused.  He stood up slowly, saying he had to leave us for a minute or so, a few minutes, and, without changing the direction of my gaze, I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the field.  We remained silent when he had gone.  After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:

--I say! Look what he's doing!

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahony exclaimed again:

--I say . . .  He's a queer old josser!

When the man returns to the boys, the one named Mahony runs off, leaving the narrator alone to listen to talk that now seems more menacing.  Boys must not have sweethearts.  They must be whipped if they do, especially if they lie about it.  The narrator stands up and leaves during a pause in the odd monologue.  He joins Mahony and the story ends.

The story had begun with descriptions of the Catholic school routine and the games the boys played when school was out.  The narrator allows to drop his dissatisfaction with his life:

The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself.  But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

The game of hooky thus acquires the aspect of an initial striking out for the territory, but the boys meet up only with ordinary scenes of Dublin life, to which the adjective "squalid" is at one point applied, before the encounter with the old josser.  The story is not an advertisement for Dublin, though the boys' route through the city is carefully, almost lovingly, chronicled, with reference to the actual street names--North Strand Road, Wharf Road (a popular name for East Wall Road)--so that assisted by Google maps one can today trace their steps.

Joyce's Dubliners: "The Sisters"

No one has ever been able to figure out why the first story is called "The Sisters," for it is about the troubled priest, who dies in the course of the very short story, and the boy narrator he has befriended.  The boy lives with his aunt and uncle, so it may not be the first time his life has been affected by death, but it quite likely is the first time he is conscious of his own reaction.  He walks up to the house where the priest lived with his two sisters and thinks of entering to pay his respects.  Then:

I wished to go in and look at him but I had not the courage to knock.  I walked away slowly along the sunny side of the street, reading all the theatrical advertisements in the shop-windows as I went.  I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death.

Later, accompanied by his aunt, he does visit the mourning house.  When the boy first learned that the priest had died, a friend of his uncle's had hinted broadly that there was something the matter with the priest and his relationship with the boy, and the reader therefore strains, during the visit that closes the story, to discover what that might all be about.  One of the sisters tells a story suggesting that the priest suffered from mental illness, but it's hard to grasp exactly what the truth is, and the story ends. 

This was not the method of O. Henry.  While I have no evidence that it's true, it pleases me to think that the title is a literary tip of the hat to a writer whose method may be detected in Dubliners.