There’s a fantastic story by Bryan Curtis on grantland.com about Marv Albert’s childhood preparations to become a sports announcer here. It’s essential reading for anyone who cares about sports media. I knew that Albert was quite young when he began calling Knicks games, but I didn’t realize he began when he was only 21! I grew up watching him as the studio host for NBC’s baseball Game of the Week and listening to him announce football on NBC and the Knicks on WFAN. I remember him returning to announce game seven of the 1994 Stanley Cup Finals on the radio even though by that point Howie Rose was the Rangers’ normal play-by-play man. Albert is a national treasure, and Curtis’s article gives him the honor that he deserves.
Books Acquired Recently
Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. 2011. New York: Anchor, 2012.
I ordered this book at Rocky Mountain MLA last month, and it arrived yesterday. I enjoy Atwood’s fiction and her germinal book on Canadian literature, Survival, and I have been reading more and more science fiction (the “SF” of the title, which is the accepted term in the field, never “scifi”), so I’ve been thinking about buying this book since it came out last year. I finally bought it at the conference because it was available at a sizeable discount.
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009.
I just received a desk copy of this book from the publisher. I’ll be using it in my Literary Criticism and Research course next semester. I’m drawn to it as a teaching resource because it is recent, comprehensive, and reasonably priced (around $20.00 new) rather than being priced like a textbook. Kudos to Manchester University Press for taking the high road and caring about student budgets.
On another note, I haven’t written in nearly a week because I’ve been busy reading applications for a job opening in my department. This is the first time I’ve ever served on a search committee; it’s so fascinating! I am enjoying getting to learn about other people, reading their writing, and seeing how they approach the elusive, mysterious genres of the C.V. and the cover letter. I love encountering other’s ideas about what they think an academic should be.
Books Acquired Recently
Cortázar, Julio. Hopscotch. 1963. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Pantheon, 1966.
I will be teaching Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters next semester, and its blurb claims that it is inspired by Cortázar’s novel. So I thought I would read it as research for teaching Castillo. Hopscotch is nearly 600 pages long in the edition I bought, and The Mixquiahuala Letters is less than 200, thus I assume that the inspiration is thematic rather than formal, which makes me sad since my favorite thing about Castillo’s book is the way it requires the reader to play a role in forming the text by choosing from three different reading paths.
Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York: New York UP, 2010.
I bought this book because it touches on two of my favorite research interests: it has a chapter on Samuel R. Delany and also examines BDSM in African American literature as a whole. I can’t wait to read it!
Both books purchased on amazon.com.
Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton
I just finished reading Salman Rushdie’s new memoir Joseph Anton, which is primarily about the years after the fatwa was issued against his life in 1989 in response to the publication of The Satanic Verses. Rushdie writes eloquently about his most depressing emotional moments during the thirteen years when he had to live under police protection, but he also offers beautiful, inspiring tributes to all of the people (especially his protection team and many of his fellow writers) who supported him, as well as offering the book as an impassioned defense of free speech. Happily, most writers were both privately and publicly supportive of Rushdie, including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Buford, Martin Amis, and Kurt Vonnegut, though a few–including, sadly, Roald Dahl–were not. Shamefully, The Satanic Verses‘ publisher, Viking-Penguin, refused to issue a paperback of the novel, though they kept the hardcover in print. Many bookstores (including many stores in the U.S., who took out an ad in the New York Times when the novel was published here to say that they would stock it), courageously made the book available to the public even though several were bombed by religious fundamentalists.
Joseph Anton is a masterpiece, and is necessary reading for anyone who cares about literature. It should finally persuade the Nobel Prize committee to award Rushdie their literature prize. It is over 600 pages long–Rushdie’s joyful prolixity surfaces once again–but every page is compelling and intense. I found that I was only able to read about seventy-five pages of it per day because it got me so worked up, but this visceral reaction is a testament to Rushdie’s gifts as a writer. He is a hero for anyone who truly cares (i.e., not most American politicians) about freedom.
Book Acquired Recently: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. 1953. New York: New York Review, 2012.
I first became interested in acquiring this novel after reading a post about it at A Little Blog of Books and Other Stuff. Shortly thereafter, I saw that New York Review Books had just come out with a new edition. I love NYRB’s books because they are elegantly designed with a minimalist aesthetic that pleases me.
This evening I was shopping at my local independent bookstore, The King’s English, because a colleague had given me a gift certificate as thanks for doing some proofreading. While it is always satisfying to go to a bookstore with a purchase in mind and find the book on the shelf straightaway, I also love going book shopping with nothing particular in mind, letting the store’s selection lead me to something unexpected. The King’s English is a fabulous bookstore for this activity. I always find something there that excites me; it is the best new book independent bookstore I have ever been to. I was browsing their fiction section when I came across Lucky Jim, and immediately decided that it would be my purchase for the night. The store had both the NYRB edition and the Penguin Classics edition, and while I love Penguin Classics even more than I love NYRBs, and both copies were virtually the same price (the Penguin was $15.00 and the NYRB was $14.95), the Penguin’s spine was a little worn, so I went with the newer NYRB.
Thoughts on Chelsea-Manchester United: Reds Lucky Yet Deserving
Manchester United’s 3-2 win at Chelsea today involved some beautiful soccer and quite a bit of controversy in the second half. Here is my take on the three crucial officiating decisions midway through the second half when the match was tied 2-2:
1. Branislav Ivanovic’s red card for taking down Ashley Young was the correct decision. Young was clear on goal and Ivanovic was the last defender. He made his tackle from behind and got the man, not the ball. The referee’s decision to give him a straight red is mandated by the rulebook. Kudos to Ivanovic for realizing that he was in the wrong and not making much of fuss before leaving the pitch.
2. Fernando Torres’s second yellow card and subsequent sending off was harsh, though it could have been prevented if Torres did not have a deserved reputation for diving. The referee was in a bad position, and from his angle one could see how it looked like a dive because there was only slight contact from Jonny Evans. It certainly looked like Torres embellished a bit from any angle. I do not think he deserved a card, but again, it was Torres reaping a bit of what he’d sown in the past. I suppose this sounds like blaming the victim, but I would rather have referees err on the side of punishing diving too much rather than too little. These two decisions by the referee are ones that rarely get made (even the correct first decision); I was glad that he had the courage to make them, and wish that more referees would.
3. Javier Hernandez’s game-winning goal was clearly offside. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.
Books Acquired Recently: Desk Copy Edition
Baldwin, James. Another Country. 1962. New York: Vintage, 1993.
I will be teaching Baldwin’s and Castillo’s novels in my Introduction to Literature course next semester. Another Country has been one of my favorite books since I first read it three years ago, and I have finally decided to teach it despite its length. At 436 pages in this edition, it’s rather long for an undergraduate general education course, but I think it is compelling enough that students will be able to handle it.
Castillo, Ana. The Mixquiahuala Letters. 1986. New York: Anchor, 1992.
I read this book at the end of the summer and loved it! I always like to teach at least one novel that forces students to question issues of form as this one does: it asks readers to choose the order in which they read the chapters depending on what type of personality they have. Students will therefore have read different novels because none of the sequences include every single chapter. The class discussions should be interesting!
Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. 1989. New York: Random, 2008.
I am using Rushdie’s and Shelley’s novels in an Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism class next semester. They are both incredibly rich texts, and thus serve well as primary sources for reading and writing criticism.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. 1818. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 2012.
I love Frankenstein, and the Norton edition is perfect for teaching because it includes a wide range of critical responses. I have used the Norton first edition several times; the new edition just came out. I am happy to see that it includes some of my favorite pieces of criticism from the previous edition as well as some newer perspectives.
Alfred Slote’s Jake
There’s a new short film on grantland.com by Jonathan Hock about Alfred Slote’s children’s novel Jake, with a great introduction by Bill Simmons here. Like Simmons, I read Jake and one of Slote’s other novels, Hang Tough, Paul Mather, over and over as a boy. They were perfect because they used baseball, something which I and many other American boys were passionate about, as a channel through which to teach us about the difficulties of life. I picked up the books because they were baseball books, but, in hindsight, I kept going back to them because they taught me about compassion. Apparently they are now out of print, which is a tragedy. They are timeless.
Book Acquired Recently: Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit Hole
Villalobos, Juan Pablo. Down the Rabbit Hole. 2010. Trans. Rosalind Harvey. New York: Farrar, 2012.
Last night I attended a reading by the Mexican novelist Juan Pablo Villalobos (who was educated in Spain and now lives in Brazil), his first ever in the United States. He read from Down the Rabbit Hole, a 70-page novella about a Mexican boy, Tochtli, who is the son of the head of a drug cartel. I read it last night after buying a copy and getting it signed. Villalobos was one of the best readers I’ve ever seen as far as engaging the audience. He insisted on a Q-and-A session after he finished reading that was not originally part of the program, and was very gracious after the reading, happily autographing books and posing for pictures. I bought the book more because I liked him as a person than because I was interested in the book itself; I wanted to have a memento of the occasion.
It’s a good story on the surface, with just enough humor to help readers get through its crushing sadness. Tochtli is desperately lonely because it’s unsafe for him to leave his father’s compound, so he finds solace in collecting hats and reading the dictionary. Of course I loved these quirks as someone who loves words and has always enjoyed collecting. But the value of the novella is in its political message, summed up in Tochtli’s assertion that “Mexico is a disastrous country” (14). The drug war is making life in Mexico less and less tenable, but most people in the U.S.–including many politicians–are ignorant of this fact, and of the role that U.S. laws surrounding drug consumption play in perpetuating the situation. The violence already affects U.S. border cities such as El Paso, Texas (see Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood and Ana Castillo’s The Guardians for well-researched fictional depictions of this violence), and it will only continue to get worse.
Richard Hugo’s Poetry
I just finished reading through Richard Hugo’s Selected Poems, and the collection is an excellent one. I love the sense of place in Hugo’s poems, whether he is out in nature fishing, or sitting in a small town cafe, or writing about his travels in Italy, or describing his life in Montana. In “Letter to Kizer from Seattle” he writes about “the primal source of poems: wind, sea / and rain,” and while as a city person I am not especially enamored of nature, I appreciate the way Hugo speaks about it in his poems because it is always a specific place rather than a general force. I can always visualize the nature in his poems, unlike its depiction in the work of other nature poets such as Galway Kinnell or Mary Oliver. I like many poems in the collection because they evoke place so well, even when they are about other subjects. For instance, “Letter to Kathy from Wisdom” is a love poem, but it is inspired by “this town I’m writing from, where we came lovers years ago to fish.” “Kennedy Ucciso” is about John F. Kennedy’s assassination on the surface, but really it is about being an American who feels like an outsider in Italy. Hugo’s poems pay homage to their settings, showing that geography can be just as important in poetry as it is in fiction.
Daniel Shank Cruz 