There is a long piece by Dana Goodyear in the New Yorker this week about a shrink to the stars. I didn’t get much out of it, but this did speak to me:

By far the most common problem afflicting the writers in Michels’s practice is procrastination, which he understands in terms of Jung’s Father archetype. “They procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write,” he says. “Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he’s answerable to, but it’s not human. It’s Time itself that’s passing inexorably. That’s why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you’re defying this authority figure.” Procrastination, he says, is a “spurious form of immortality,” the ego’s way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death. He gives procrastinators a tool he calls the Arbitrary Use of Time Moment, which asks them to sit in front of their computers for a fixed amount of time each day. “You say, ‘I’m surrendering myself to the archetypal Father, Chronos,’ ” he says. ‘I’m surrendering to him because he has hegemony over me.’ That submission activates something inside someone. In the simplest terms, it gets people to get their ass in the chair.” For the truly unproductive, he sets the initial period at ten minutes—“an amount of time it would sort of embarrass them not to be able to do.”

Good looking to Long Form Reads for linking to Hilton Als’ 1999 New Yorker profile of Richard Pyror:

Pryor’s art defies the very definition of the word “order.” He based his style on digressions and riffs—the monologue as jam session. He reinvented standup, which until he developed his signature style, in 1971, had consisted largely of borscht-belt-style male comedians telling tales in the Jewish vernacular, regardless of their own religion or background. Pryor managed to make blacks interesting to audiences that were used to responding to a liberal Jewish sensibility—and, unlike some of his colored colleagues, he did so without “becoming” Jewish himself. (Dick Gregory, for example, was a political comedian in the tradition of Mort Sahl; Bill Cosby was a droll Jack Benny.) At the height of his career, Pryor never spoke purely in the complaint mode. He was often baffled by life’s complexities, but he rarely told my-wife-made-me-sleep-on-the-sofa jokes or did “bits” whose sole purpose was to “kill” an audience with a boffo punch line. Instead, he talked about characters—black street people, mostly. Because the life rhythm of a black junkie, say, implies a certain drift, Pryor’s stories did not have badda-bing conclusions. Instead, they were encapsulated in a physical attitude: each character was represented in Pryor’s walk, in his gestures—which always contained a kind of vicarious wonder at the lives he was enacting. Take, for instance, his sketch of a wino in Peoria, Illinois—Pryor’s hometown and the land of his imagination—as he encounters Dracula. In the voice of a Southern black man, down on his luck:

Hey man, say, nigger—you with the cape. . . . What’s your name, boy? Dracula? What kind of name is that for a nigger? Where you from, fool? Transylvania? I know where it is, nigger! You ain’t the smartest motherfucker in the world, even though you is the ugliest. Oh yeah, you a ugly motherfucker. Why you don’t get your teeth fixed, nigger? That shit hanging all out your mouth. Why you don’t get you an orthodontist? . . . This is 1975, boy. Get your shit together. What’s wrong with your natural? Got that dirt all in the back of your neck. You’s a filthy little motherfucker, too. You got to be home ’fore the sun come up? You ain’t lyin’, motherfucker. See your ass during the day, you liable to get arrested. You want to suck what? You some kind of freak, boy? . . . You ain’t suckin’ nothing here, junior.

Als contends that Pryor’s two greatest albums are “That Nigger’s Crazy,” and “Bicentennial Nigger.” I love the former but think the later is not nearly as good as “Is it Something I Said?” and “Wanted: Live in Concert.” But I do think that Pryor at his peak reached a place that no comic has ever approached, before or since.

[Picture by Ken Taylor]

Writing ain’t easy…even for Tina Fey.

There was a good piece on why writers abandon novels in the Book Review last Sunday. I like this bit from Stephen King: ““Look, writing a novel is like paddling from Boston to London in a bathtub,” he said. “Sometimes the damn tub sinks. It’s a wonder that most of them don’t.”

Charles Pierce is the latest in Chris Jones’ compelling Five for Writing series:

At one point in one of the stories, Sherlock Holmes tells Watson that he is related to a famous French painter named Vernet. Watson expresses surprise that Holmes is not a painter himself. “Art in the blood,” Holmes tells him, “takes the strangest forms.” My grandfather was a sign-painter and a landscape artist. One of his best hangs in my living room. His daughter, my mother, played piano in a saloon. I do what I do. Art in the blood takes the strangest forms.

Shouldn’t we find the art, or love, or whatever you want to call it, in everything that we do? From they way we look, and see things to how we treat people? From the work that we do–no matter what it is–to the way we cut an onion and prepare a meal. That’s why life is art and vice versa.

We listened to some of Steve Earle’s records last week. Yesterday, I caught a piece in the L.A. Times about Earle’s first novel:

It took eight years, on and off, for Earle to finish “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” writing between tours and recording sessions, backtracking and revising when necessary, getting back in the groove. “I hope it’s like the Huck Finn effect,” he jokes. “Twain stopped writing in the middle of the book and went on a lecture tour, and the difference between the first and second halves make it the great American novel.”

But more to the point is how the novel ties into the larger pattern of his career. In late April, Earle will release his 14th studio album, also called “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” and equally focused on issues of life and death.

“They were written at the same time,” he declares, “so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they’re about the same thing” — and if this is the first time he’s tied two projects together so directly, it only highlights what he’s been doing all along. “I’ve always written stories,” he says. “My songs are stories. A lot of people wonder how to write a story in three minutes. With a book, you have to figure out what to prolong and what not to.”

Still, he admits, “Wrestling a novel to the ground was about 100 times harder than I expected. In the middle of it, I swore I’d never do it again. But now that it’s done, I’ve got another idea.”

[Photo Credit: American Songwriter]

Over at Pitchers and Poets, Eric Nusbaum picks up on the conversation started by Chris Jones and furthered in this space yesterday:

Jones, in his blog post, writes that “we are taught to believe that words have a value, a power, a weight.” I was lucky. I was taught by my father that for this very reason, words are to be dispensed with great care. If you can’t say something succinctly, don’t say it at all. Or as Ted reminds me sometimes when I send him drafts of long essays, “try harder.”

In this vein, we must all be careful not to use economy as a crutch. I know I have a tendency to do this. Instead of pushing an idea further, to the brink of collapse, I fall back on minimalism. The less you say, the less you are responsible for. This has mostly been an appreciation for Belth’s “power and beauty of restraint.” But I hope it can also be a warning to myself and to others: don’t use restraint as a tool for cheating. And don’t use it for gimmickry either.

When I was doing a lot of drawing, I had a linear style that bordered on minimalism. On one hand, I was interested in capturing gesture and feeling by indicating a figure with the fewest amount of lines possible. When it worked, as I think it does in the pictures here, I was pleased with the results. Eventually, though, I knew that I was cheating. I stopped looking at the subject, really looking, and let my hand do all the work. Then I’d get halfway through a drawing and stop. I’d fall in love with what I’d done and didn’t want to push myself, try harder. In other words, I became overly self-conscious, even precious, and the minimalism became an excuse to avoid failure.

I was more concerned with the finished product  than the process, and ultimately, I hit a dead end. Which reminds me of something an old friend once said, “If it’s easy, you aren’t doing it right.” At times, a drawing or a sentence will come easily, and that’s fine, but if the process becomes too easy, you are probably cheating.

Check out this fine post by Chris Jones at his blog, “Son of Bold Venture” (named after a horse in W.C. Heinz’s classic column, “Death of a Racehorse”).

Here’s Jones:

It’s probably the hardest lesson in writing: learning when you’ve already written enough.

We’re taught to believe that words have a value, a power, a weight. Logically, then, the more words, the better the sentence or paragraph or story. But writing isn’t always a logical exercise. Sometimes—most of the time—it’s about things that are harder to measure.

My editor, Peter—he will hate that I’m about to praise him in public—is one of the best in the business. He’s particularly good at carving the little excesses from a story that might either push it into sentimentality or turn the screw a little too hard. Because I’m often writing about emotional subjects, I’m especially dependent on Peter’s eye and knife. He just seems to know when even the smallest trim will serve the story. Peter understands restraint. He knows the value and power and weight of the words that aren’t there.

The older I get, the more I am drawn to restraint in cooking, moviemaking, music, and writing. It takes courage and discipline, not to mention confidence, to show restraint, to leave things out.

I e-mailed Glenn Stout, editor of the Best American Sports Writing series, about Jones’ post. He replied via e-mail:

Well, I’ve always thought it important to note that “In the beginning was the word…” Not “In the beginning was the words…” Although I wouldn’t necessarily say that more stories are ruined by underwriting rather than overwriting, because I see a lot of work in which the writer appears to have missed an opportunity, I will say that more ambitious stories could probably use more restraint. That’s one of the reasons I think that writers of any stripe should read poetry – it not only teaches tangible things like economy, sound and rhythm, but it also teaches that the negative space in writing – what’s not there, and the heartbeat of recognition that takes place over the empty space at the end of a line or a phrase – is as important as what is on the page. The way we connect with a piece of writing is how our brain fills in the blanks.

It’s like backing away from a painting rather than standing too close.

I understand negative space when it comes to painting, like in Giorgio Morandi’s wonderful still life pictures, but have only recently come to appreciate it in writing as well. Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy expressionists, just that I am more drawn to writers like Heinz and Pat Jordan, Elmore Leonard and Pete Dexter.

My pal John Schulian also sent the following e-mail:

The interesting thing about this is that Chris Jones writes with such restraint in the first place. For him to go public with a confession that even he needs an editor to keep his prose from going over the edge is truly remarkable. And instructive. Every writer caves in to his worst instincts sooner or later. Problem is, not every writer has an editor as sharp as Jones’s Peter (I assume he means Peter Griffin, Esquire’s deputy editor). Also, not every editor is working with a writer as wonderful as Chris Jones. Not that the wonderful-ness of a writer would stop some editors from screwing up their prose. But the trims that Peter made were as artful and restrained as what Jones wrote. They eliminated the unnecessary and, just as important, preserved the rhythm of Jones’ prose. Peter heard the music and left no fingerprints, and that, perhaps, is the ultimate proof of his artistry as a line editor. No wonder Jones saluted him.

It is not easy to find a good editor. Jones has it good and seems to know it. Perhaps the most instructive book I’ve read about editing is Susan Bell’s “The Artful Edit.” It’s an essential guide for me and rests next to “The Elements of Style” on my night table. Bell uses the relationship between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor Maxwell Perkins throughout her text.

Dig this one example from “The Great Gatsby.” First, from a rough draft:

They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just blown in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments on the threshold, dazzled by the alabaster light, listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.

And then revised for the the final version:

They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.

Fitzgerald dropped “dazzled by the alabaster light…” a vivid, but ultimately, distracting flourish. Man, you’ve got to be ruthless to murder your darlings. It is nothing short of inspiring when the great talents have the conviction to do just that.

[Painting by Girogio Morandi]

I don’t know from Jane Smiley’s work, but I dig her advice to writers over at Fictionaut:

Any favorite writing exercises?

Eavesdrop and write it down from memory–gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop! Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works. Write everyday, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later. Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.

Write everyday. Every. Day. Show up. Do the work. Show up.

Forgive me, I’m thinking out loud. But hey, I’ll take inspiration wherever I can find it.

My old man didn’t own any rock records. He had original cast recordings of Broadway shows. That was his thing, that’s what we heard around the house. My twin sister Sam really took to musicals. I liked some but never caught the bug.

I appreciate and admire the art form but I’m not much of a fan. Still, I read Paul Simon’s review of Stephen Sondheim’s new memoir (the first of two volumes), “Finishing the Hat,” with interest because I’m a nerd for guys talking shop.

This caught my eye:

“Finishing the Hat” — a fascinating compilation of lyrics, commentary and anecdotes, covering the years 1954 to 1981 — is essentially about process, the process of writing songs for theater. Performing acts of literary self-criticism can be a tricky business, akin to being one’s own dentist, but Sondheim’s analysis of his songs and those of others is both stinging and insightful. Nevertheless, he successfully avoids the traps of a self-inflated ego.

…Sondheim quotes the composer-lyricist Craig Carnelia: “True rhyming is a necessity in the theater, as a guide for the ear to know what it has just heard.” I have a similar thought regarding attention span and a listener’s need for time to digest a complicated line or visualize an unusual image. I try to leave a space after a difficult line — either silence or a lyrical cliché that gives the ear a chance to “catch up” with the song before the next thought arrives and the listener is lost.

Love this comment. It’s like knowing how to pace a laugh in a movie, how to let it breathe. Then, there’s this:

…I saw “West Side Story” when I was 16 years old, and I have two vivid memories of the show. One, I didn’t believe for a minute that the dancers were anything like the teenage hoods I knew from the street corner, and secondly, I was completely overwhelmed by the beauty of the song “Maria.” It was a perfect love song. Sondheim was less enamored with the lyric he wrote for Bernstein. He describes it as having a kind of “overall wetness” — “a wetness, I regret to say, which persists throughout all the romantic lyrics in the show.” Sondheim’s rule, taught to him by his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, is that the book and composer are better served by lyrics that are “plainer and flatter.” It is the music that is meant to lift words to the level of poetry.

Sondheim’s regret about “Maria” reminded me of my own reluctance to add a third verse to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I thought of the song as a simple two-verse hymn, but our producer argued that the song wanted to be bigger and more dramatic. I reluctantly agreed and wrote the “Sail on silvergirl” verse there in the recording studio. I never felt it truly belonged. Audiences disagreed with both Sondheim and me. “Maria” is beloved, and “Sail on silvergirl” is the well-known and highly anticipated third verse of “Bridge.” Sometimes it’s good to be “wet.”

Roger Ebert gives us another loving tribute to his old friend, the great take-out writer, Bill Nack. If you’ve never read Nack’s book, “Secretariat: The Making of a Champion”, do yourself a favor–it’s a classic.

Two two chums got together recently and Nack told Ebert stories about perhaps the greatest champion of them all:

Here is Nack’s wonderful story, “Pure Heart,” on the death of Secretariat (Sports Illustrated, 1990):

Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stallion barn, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his jugular. Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion collapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Kentucky, where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse’s vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.

“We were all shocked,” Swerczek said. “I’ve seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I’d ever seen compared to it. The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told us why he was able to do what he did.”

The great Elmore Leonard turns 85 today.

Hope he enjoys it. Lord knows how much pleasure he’s given us.

If you’ve never read it, dig Leonard’s 10 rules of writing.

There was a terrific article on Wayne Thiebaud in the Times yesterday:

Jock Reynolds, now the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, recalled his first day of class, when Professor Thiebaud asked his students to produce a pencil and paper. “What followed was a remarkably lucid lecture on where to buy the best and cheapest salami, cheese, coffee, fruit, bread, cakes, and wine, things he insisted would significantly enrich the quality of our lives,” Mr. Reynolds said.

Later Mr. Reynolds realized that his professor was sharing more than a shopping list. “He was giving his students direct insights into the very subject matter that was inspiring his own art; the frosted cakes, cream pies, lollipops and the trays of herring and sardines he was transforming, through the skilled application of paint onto canvas, into the most tactile and sensuous visual compositions imaginable.”

Mr. Thiebaud’s favorite class to teach was Beginning Drawing. “You really see people transformed,” he said. “Teaching it has a big fatigue factor. But once they get a sense of it, it’s like heroin.”

Malcolm Gladwell on “The Twitter Revolution”:

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”

These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all?

Because I just can’t get me enough of Jeff Bridges, here’s some more on the favorite to win the Best Actor Oscar next weekend…from Manohla Dargis in the Sunday Times:

In the early and mid 1970s he played a wide-eyed boxer, a sly con artist, a moonshiner turned car racer, a squealer turned suicide, a thief and a cattle rustler, working with veterans like John Huston (“Fat City” in 1972) and newcomers like Michael Cimino, who, for his 1974 debut, directed Mr. Bridges alongside Clint Eastwood in the crime story “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.” The critics had started to pay attention. “Sometimes, just on his own,” Pauline Kael wrote of his performance as a stock-car racer in “The Last American Hero” (1973), “Jeff Bridges is enough to make a picture worth seeing.” Notably, she also compared him to Robert De Niro, who was about to set fire to screens in Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets.”

“He probably can’t do the outrageous explosive scenes that Robert De Niro brings off in ‘Mean Streets,’ ” she wrote. “But De Niro — a real winner — is best when he’s coming on and showing off. Jeff Bridges just moves into a role and lives in it — so deep in it that the little things seem to come straight from the character’s soul.”

I worked as an assistant film editor on The Big Lebowski which was cut on film and not a computer. During the shoot, our main responsibility in the cutting room was to mark-up the sound track and the picture and synch the footage that was shot the day before–these are called “rushes” or “dailies”, which would be screened for the directors later that day. We’d check the synch by screening the footage on a Steenbeck.

Watching Bridges work was a revelation–he simply was the Dude. Some actors need a bunch of takes before they really hit their stride but Bridges was that character, and in each take he gave a subtle variation on a line reading or a physical gesture. You could tell that he had a background in TV and film and not the theater. His approach and rhythm was different from most everyone else in the movie. He was so natural and extremely intelligent, providing the directors with all the material they’d need to piece together a winning performance.

Back to Dargis now, writing about Lebowski:

Whether shuffling around in a bathrobe or dropping a lighted joint in his lap, Mr. Bridges’s timing is brilliant. But it’s his ability to convey a profound, seemingly limitless sense of empathy that elevate the Dude beyond the usual Coen caricature. By facing every assault — repeated beatings, a friend’s death, the theft of a rug — with little more than an exclamation (“Man!”) and a toke, he and the Dude affirmed that an American hero doesn’t need a punch, just a punch line, something that Judd Apatow’s merry band of potheads know well.

In some respects “The Big Lebowski” was Mr. Bridges’s “Raging Bull,” a defining movie. He never established a long working relationship with a director as Mr. De Niro did with Martin Scorsese. Mr. Bridges has worked with significant filmmakers, just not necessarily in their finest hour. He has made questionable choices, but he has had a breadth of roles that should be the envy of most, and a depth few achieve. And he has staying power. It takes nothing away from his work in “Crazy Heart” to note that the film’s success and profile probably owe something to “Iron Man,” the 2008 blockbuster in which he pulled a Lex Luthor to play the villain and which gave him his highest-profile role in years. He was hilarious, absurd, necessary, and to watch him in that movie as well as in “Crazy Heart” is to be reminded yet again of how he abides.

Dargis singles-out Cutter’s Way (pictured above) and that’s a movie worth watching if you’ve never seen it. Terrific-look. The only drag is watching John Heard chew-up the scenery, but otherwise, it’s a good movie.

Finally, my boy Joey La P, sent me a link to this interview with Bridges on KCRW.

Been thinking a lot about the term “recluse” this weekend. There is such a negative association with it. But is it such a bad thing? Anyhow, this caught my eye–a short interview with the “reclusive” creator of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, Bill Watterson, in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved — and are still grieving — when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?

BW: This isn’t as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say.

It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.

I think this is a rare quality in a writer, columnist, artist, you name it–the ability to leave sooner rather than later, especially when you are a success. I was duly impressed with the visual wonder of Avatar but I would have been that much more impressed if the movie was an hour shorter.

There is a long interview with Gay Talese in the new edition of The Paris Review. This caught my attention:

INTERVIEWER: Are you equally interested in everyone you meet?

TALESE: One of the key facts of my life is that I was raised not in the home, but in a store. My father had been an apprentice to his cousin, a famous tailor in Paris who had movie stars and leading politicians as clients. My father left Paris in 1920 on a ship to Philadelphia. He hated Philadelphia and developed a respiratory problem, and someone suggested he move to the seashore. In Ocean City, New Jersey, he bought an old store on Asbury Avenue, the main business street, and he opened the Talese Town Shop. On one side of the store he set up a tailor shop. On the other side my mother, who had grown up in an Italian American neighborhood in Park Slope, Brooklyn, opened a dress shop. Above the store my parents had an apartment.
       The tailor business never really worked out. The craftsmen were fine, but there weren’t quite enough people in Ocean City who wanted to pay for handmade suits. So my mother became the wage earner. All the money we made was because of my mother selling dresses. She was successful because she had a way of getting women to talk about themselves. Her customers were, for the most part, large women, women who did not go to the beach in the summertime. My mother would give them clothes to try on that made them look better than they thought they had any right to look. She wasn’t a hustler. She made her sales because they trusted her and liked her, and she liked them back. I was there a lot—folding the dress boxes, dusting the counters, doing chores—and I learned a lot about the town by eavesdropping. These women, telling my mother their private stories, gave me an idea of a larger world.

…INTERVIEWER:  When did you realize that you had talent?

TALESE: Never. All I have is intense curiosity. I have a great deal of interest in other people and, just as importantly, I have the patience to be around them.

Talese has been one of my inspirations because he’s always been fascinated by the characters on the margins, and because of his unyiedling curiosity. I am a great fan of his journalism, particularly during his glory days at Esquire in the Sixites.

Earlier this year, Jonathan Van Meter wrote an excellent profile of Talese and his wife Nan, the celebrated book editor, in New York magazine. Talese does not come across as being sympathetic, but the piece provides a sharp look at his career, which imploded during and after the writing of “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” a book that became Talese’s “Apocalypse Now.”

Talese has a new book coming out about his marriage. I have no idea if it will be worth reading; I thought his last effort, “A Writer’s Life,” was meandering and dull.

If you are not familiar with Talese’s work, here is a selection of his essays, including Looking for Hemingway, a takedown of George Plimpton and his Paris Review crew, and perhaps Talese’s most celebrated story, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.

This was the game I thought the Yanks were going to have on Monday. A night where nothing goes right. Instead it happened tonight. For every sloppy play the Yankees made the Rays countered with a slick one. Moving to his right, Carl Crawford closed quickly on a line drive robbing Alex Rodriguez of an RBI base hit. Later, BJ Upton glided back and nabbed a shot hit by Jorge Posada. (They are a wonderful contrast in styles–Crawford, powerful and aggresive but not graceful; Upton, smooth like butta.)  Jason Bartlett also made a couple of nifty plays at short.

Meanwhile, Derek Jeter and Rodriguez had throwing errors (Rodriguez’s mistake led to a run), Mark Teixeira mistimed a jump on a line drive allowing another run to come in, and Nick Swisher had two adventurous plays that he’d soon like to forget (the first one included an ill-advised and unnecessary dive). Hideki Matsui drove in the Yankees’ first run and then got picked off after misreading the throw from right fielder Gabe Gross.

Nobody helped CC Sabathia, who was far from terrific anyhow–he gave up some shot to Evan Longoria. Scott Kazmir, on the other hand, was excllent, allowing one run over 7.1 innings as the Rays cruised, 6-2.

And so the Yanks went kerplunk. Sometimes things just don’t go your way. Just ask Buster.*

(more…)

What does it all mean?

Fiorello LaGuardia reads Dick Tracy:

Many years later, Double D and Steinski sample LaGuardia on their Lesson records:

Then, Prince Paul nabbed the bit on the first De La Soul record (dig the weird video mix):

One of the reasons I enjoy reading Joe Posnanski’s blog is because he relishes talking about sports the way fans do. He takes bar room topics, often in list form, and riffs, with reason and humor and a sense of fun. Who was the best so-and-so, what was the greatest such-and-such. The enthusiasm he shows for this kind of banter is what makes Pos so appealing–and he’s as well-liked a sports writer as I’ve ever met. The sabr-numbers crowd dig him and the mainstream guys like him too.

I was in Pos-mode the other day when I read Chris Ballard’s SI cover story on LeBron James. King James is only 24, a man-child, physical-mental freak of historically great proportions. The guy is twenty someodd pounds shy of 300, for crying out loud. I had no idea he was that big. And he’s so fast. He could play strong safety in the NFL.

Along with Kobe Bryant, James is the greatest player in the game and he’s only getting better. So I thought, when we talk about the greatest basketball players in the post-Jordan Era, it’s got to be Shaq, who you can’t really compare with Jordan because of the position; Kobe, who has won three titles and is certainly great, but not at Jordan’s level, especially off the court in terms of mainstream popularity and influence; and James.

Of course the league has been filled with other iconic players since Jordan level, including Allen Iverson, Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett, but not ones whose appeal crossed over to a wider audience. They are just hall of famers in the game. Nobody has reached the level Jordan attained. Jordan followed the greatestness of Magic and Bird seemlessly and he brought it to a crescendo that was peerless.

I thought about guys on that level—Jordan and Tiger Woods, Babe Ruth—as I read an old GQ article by the novelist William Kennedy. In 1956, Kennedy was a kid reporter working for the Albany-Times Union when he interviewed Louis Armstrong, who was in town for a gig. Kennedy went up to his hotel room and talked with him for an hour and a half. He wrote a short nothing piece on it for the paper but saved his notes.

My awe and reverence for Louis continued to grow through the ensuing years, and somewhere in the late 1970s I conducted an after-dinner poll as to who was the most valuable person who had ever lived, and Satchmo won, with five votes. William Faulkner got four, Michangelo three, Beethoven, Muhammad Ali and Tolstoy two each, and Dostoyevsky and Busby Berkeley one each.

…He was a giant in his youth: the first major soloist in jazz, the man to whom every last jazz, swing, modern jazz and rock musician after hism has been and is indebted, some via the grand-larceny route. Music has changed radically since the seminal days of jazz, but Satchmo’s achievement has not been diminished. No one has superseded him in jazz eminence the way Crosby superseded Jolson and Sinatra superseded Crosby and the Beatles superseded Elvis, and I will never know who or what really superseded the Beatles.

Who else, in sports, in the arts, in popular culture, is on this level?

(more…)

Unlike many of my contemporaries, I did not grow up reading Bill James. I wasn’t familiar with James’ Baseball Abstracts until my cousin gave me his collection in 2002, but in many ways, Bill James is the Internet–the outsider, the guy writing in his basement, intellectually curious, irreverent, superior, caustic and funny. The guy who doesn’t have to actually face the athletes, who really doesn’t have any interest in talking to them.

There have been other writers who played a big part in influencing the current generation of baseball writers–from Tom Boswell and Peter Gammons to James’ protogee Rob Neyer and Bill Simmons.

But for me, the early role model was Roger Angell because he was a writer and a fan. Here is Angell discussing his first baseball assignment for the New Yorker in the spring of 1962 (from a wonderful interview conducted by Jared Haynes “They Look Easy, But They’re Hard,” originally published in Writing on the Edge in 1993):

I was in my forties–I was forty-one–and I knew enough to know that I didn’t know a great deal about baseball, even though I was a true-blue fan. I’d followed baseball all my life. But I was wary of talking to players; I felt nervous about that.

…And also, although it was not a conscious plan, I wrote about myself, because I was a fan. It set a pattern for me. I am a fan, I refer to myself as a fan, and I report about my feelings as a fan, and nobody else, to my knowledge, does that. It’s not great thing, but those old restrictions on reporting seemed to say that you can’t put yourself in the piece and you can’t betray emotion. It’s funny, because most of the beat writers are just as much fans as the rest of us, or more so. If you sat up there and didn’t care about baseball in some personal way, it would be a deadly assingment, I think, year after year.

Angell is an editor first and a writer second. So who influenced his approach to writing about baseball?

A great model for me was Red Smith, who was a model for almost every sportswriter. The great thing about Red Smith was that he sounded like himself. His attitude about sports was always clear. He felt himself enormously lucky to be there in the pressbox. He was not in favor of glorifying the players too much–Godding up the players, in Stanley Woodward’s phrase. But was Red Smith in every line. You knew what he had read and what his influences were.

I don’t try to be a literate sportswriter; I try to be myself. It’s as simple as that. Everybody’s got to find what their voice is. You’ve got to end up sounding like yourself if you’re going to write in a way that’s going to reward you when you’re done. If you end up sounding like somebody else, you’re not going to be any good. You won’t get anywhere. Readers are smart. They will pick up whether the tone is genuine or not. Tone is the ultimate thing writers have to think about. You could write on a given subject–a ball game or a national crisis or a family crisis–in twenty or thirty different ways. You only have to pick what you want people to make of this.

Words to live by.  Angell has often said that writing and baseball may look easy but they are both extremely hard. I try to never forget this because neither gets easier with practice.  I can’t get away from the reality with writing because I do it regularly, but it’s more tempting to lose track of how hard it is to play the game.  

I’ll always be grateful to Angell for making this clear.  And for setting a wonderful example of the writer as fan.