1. Hartford, I was recently informed, is “the world capital of closeted insurance executives.” Sweet.
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2. An excerpt of the letter follows. Note: In a misguided effort to endear myself to Vonnegut, I addressed him as Mr. Rosewater, a reference to the benevolent protagonist of his novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
As fate would have it, I’ve just been asked to write an appreciation of your work. I wondered if you would be willing to be interviewed. I have read most everything you’ve ever written. I became a writer, in large part, because of my admiration for you. My own books (three fiction and one nonfiction) all express the essential notion that our species will perish if we do not awaken our mercy.
You must be good and tired of people asking you for things aside from your work. I am sorry to trouble you. I wouldn’t ask if I thought my proposed book, or the world, could do without you.
Steve Almond
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3. It should be noted, as well, that the median age of our current celebrities is roughly nineteen.
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4. From Slaughterhouse-Five:
Wherever you went there were women who would do anything for food or protection for themselves and their children and the old people…the whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It’s always the men against the women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves…the ones who pretend the hardest get their pictures in the papers and medals afterwards.
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5. For the record, Vonnegut has seven kids, three of whom he adopted after his sister died of cancer and his brother-in-law died in a train wreck.
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6. Asked about her interest in boxing, Oates insisted she was drawn to subjects “very different” from herself. I immediately pictured her in silk shorts and a mouthpiece, working the speedbag. I recognize that this image is both gratuitous and erotically disturbing. It should be taken as a measure of my frustration with her comments on the panel, and not (I should emphasize) a dismissal of her fiction, which I admire precisely because it exposes our shared lust for mayhem.
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7. Weiner later posted a summary of the evening on her blog, here excerpted:
Mr. Vonnegut didn’t appear to have much use for authors who hadn’t figured out a cogent philosophy of life, on par with his “just get off the planet” line—and I would have paid good money for a snapshot of the high school students’ faces when he informed them that human beings are a disease on the face of the planet and the best thing they can do is not reproduce and leave as quickly as possible….
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Note how incredibly classy Weiner is—not at all bitter or defensive, as you might expect from someone who got punked in front of 2,700 people.8. I would be remiss if I failed to mention this quintessential Weiner moment: Oates had named Emily Dickinson as her favorite writer, and was in the midst of discussing Dickinson’s work, when Weiner piped up with the following question: “Did you know that you can set ‘Because I Would Not Stop for Death’ to the tune of ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’? Have you ever done that?” Weiner then began chanting the words of the poem in a frantic, square-dancey cadence.
Regrettably, I am not making this up.
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1. No idea who he is, or what his first name might be.
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2. Ditto.
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3. Actually, I did read the first hundred pages of Booth’s very thick and impressive-looking volume The Rhetoric of Fiction, and I derived a great deal of pleasure from carrying it around with me, on the off chance that some New Critical thug wanted to throw down. (None did.)
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4. I believe the Chief Curator had this neologism in mind when she used the adjective plucky, though perhaps she realized—as I did not, obviously—that realismo is an actual word in Spanish.
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5. I fantasize on page one of the thesis about the prospect of meeting Vonnegut, though I stop short of cataloguing what I might wear.
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6. I cannot begin to describe how pathetic it was to serve in this capacity for a Division Three liberal arts college. I would compare it to carrying a spittoon for one of the minor dwarves, such as Sneezy. The memory that leaps to mind is of an away game against our archrival, Amherst. The halftime score was, if memory serves, 51–0. I am talking about football, though we broadcast other sports, too, such as women’s field hockey. I was privileged to be one of the broadcast team who worked the famous Wesleyan-Colby bloodbath of 1987, a match that took place in a persistent drizzle and which was, inexplicably, a home game.
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7. I dutifully referred to members of the opposite sex as womyn, this being linguistically preferable to the suffixally oppressive women.
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1. Why 5:30 A.M.? This will be hard to answer without calling into question my competence as a planner/husband. Briefly: I figured I’d need at least two days to look over Vonnegut’s papers, but I was also psychopathically in the thrall of the World Cup and needed, or felt I needed, to reach Boston by Saturday afternoon, when France played Brazil, which would only happen, based on my calculations (again, questionable) if I squeezed in Day One of the excavation after driving from St. Louis.
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2. Taylor told me that the Sylvia Plath collection actually got a lot more requests. I was devastated.
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3. You can stop laughing now. I am merely suggesting that—so far as Ms. Taylor was concerned—I might very well have been a scholar (i.e. I was wearing chinos, my shirt was tucked in, etc.).
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4. I should mention that I was, to this point, reading as fast as I could and tapping out notes on my computer while also fretting over how little time I had, an activity to which I devoted nearly as much time as the actual note taking. This, if I may be frank, is called Judaism.
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5. As far as I can tell, this is the raison d’être of all writers.
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6. How familiar this all seems to me! The strutting tone, the inside jokes, the desperate whiff of personal ingratiation. How many letters like this have I written to editors over the years?
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7. Vonnegut’s 1956 letter to Karl Saalfield (president of Saalfield Games) is a classic. It includes twenty pages of specs for “General Headquarters,” a troop warfare game best described as a cross between chess, Stratego, and quantum mechanics. On the other side of one particularly baroque diagram I found this oddity, jotted down in Vonnegut’s elegant chicken scratch:
In 1925, Hal Irwin had a contractor build him a French Chateau out at 57th and North Meridian Street in Indianapolis.
There’s still old Metzger pear trees out through there, and a lot of em would still bear, if somebody’d think to spray em—hard little pears, taste like rock candy and lemon juice…. Hal had had Ella the cook out there, on her days off, rehearsing it
The story stops right here. Vonnegut must have been struck by the idea in the midst of his diagramming. That’s the scenario I like best, that his imagination dragged him away from matters of money and war, back to the tawdry precincts of human desire.
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8. Ten years ago, when I was applying to grad school, I very nearly decided to attend the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, because I became hopelessly enamored with the idea of driving from my home in Miami Beach to Fairbanks, the northernmost hub of America if you don’t count Barrow, which (my apologies to the brave residents of that city) I don’t. The route ran 5,021 miles. It was a great plan, very cinematic, its central flaw being that it would oblige me to actually live in Fairbanks, which is a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle and dark up to eighteen hours a day and where—according to a newspaper clipping sent to me by the Chief Curator at the inception of the plan—perfectly innocent citizens are occasionally killed by moose.
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1. Campy remains my favorite baseball player of all time. A few inches shy of six feet and 160 pounds, he was a shortstop by trade, though he is the only player in the history of the game to have played all nine positions in a single game, including pitcher. He did this at the behest of the team’s cockamamie owner, Charles Finley, who was crazier than any other man alive on the earth at that time.
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2. It should also be mentioned (though not dwelled upon) that I slept with a miniature kelly green bat under my pillow through my early childhood.
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3. Murphy is to be forgiven, at least by me, for helping to fund and produce MC Hammer’s first album.
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4. Or, as my colleagues referred to her, Billie Jean Rug Muncher.
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5. I would later conduct an interview with Canseco himself, the full text of which, in the interest of historical exactitude, I now proffer:
Canseco: “What the fuck are you?”
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6. The current figure is closer to 137,000, as Gibson’s homer has become inarguably the most popular highlight in the history of baseball. It is clearly a sickness that I cannot stop myself from watching these replays, and in particular that each time I see the play, some small, pathetic cavern of my heart truly believes it will turn out differently, that Gibson will swing through Eck’s lousy slider or send a harmless pop-up into shallow right.
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7. Anyone who knows the history of the Warriors—a franchise that had not, until this season, smelled the playoffs since the early Clinton years—will confirm the idiocy of my conduct. Rooting for the Warriors is like dating a Mormon with bad breath.
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8. If the Reagan presidency marked the apotheosis of politics as entertainment, the reign of Bush II has marked the ascendance of politics as sport. The man himself, a failed athlete and baseball owner and a notorious cheat, has shown an astonishing talent for reducing the complex realities of the modern world into the only duality he cares to understand: the win/loss record. His manner—the cocksure gait, the coy bullying, the juvenile solipsism—derives not from the frat house he commandeered in college, but the locker room he wished to occupy in those years that he was (let us pause to remember) a cheerleader. To speak of his political philosophy is foolish, for he has none. He follows the code of honor held to by all failed athletes: It’s not how you play the game, it’s whether you win or lose. Iraq, he felt, would be an easy win. Viewed in this context, one can see his Mission Accomplished photo op for what it was: a premature end zone dance.
Yes, I’m aware that was a political rant; that’s why I snuck it into a footnote.
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9. The key single supplied by Erubial Durazo, whose mellifluous name I sang in my head for the next thirteen hours.
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10. Varitek is often referred to as “the heart of the Red Sox.” I think of him, however, as “the thigh of the Red Sox,” owing to the Hendersonian dimensions of his quadriceps. In moments of morbid speculation, I have wondered whether these thighs are larger than my own torso. Those who detect an immature ad hominem in the foregoing observation, please note that Varitek’s physical deformity plays a central role in the drama about to unfold.
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11. I realize you expect me to launch a diatribe here about how modern sports culture—with its implicit reliance on aggression to generate unholy profits—marks a precise repudiation of the moral code Jesus expressed in the Beatitudes and, in this sense, a vital adjunct to the perversion of His message being carried out by the medieval bigots who populate the Christian Right of this country, but I’m not. So there.
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12. It would emerge that Hudson had sustained the injury the night before the game, during an altercation at a bar where he and another player had gone to unwind, apparently unaware that opposing players who enter Red Sox Nation surrender their civil right not to be hassled by shitfaced asshole fans.
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13. In his recent Sox hagiography, Feeding the Monster, author Seth Mnookin portrays Ortiz as a locker-room clown who regales the press with prognostications such as “We’re going to kick their ass, drink their beer, and rape their bitches.”
Adorable!
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14. It struck me as plausible that his feeble swing in the fourth was in fact a setup, a point Young Bull and I argued to the point of causing Tim to place his head on the bar and attempt to sleep.
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15. This is what we in the lit game call hyperbole, for Bush/Cheney were—even as the series was being played—rapaciously ruining democracy as we know it, whereas the Sox/Yanks were merely ruining a week of my otherwise frittered leisure time. Still, I trust that A’s fans will understand what I mean.
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16. I say none of this in an effort to whitewash the future of our nation. Our obsession with sport is clearly a symptom of imperial doom. We must remember: All that held Rome together at the end was spectacle.
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1. Last winter Sarvas sold his first novel. Mazel tov, mon blogamour! Here’s to the hope you take up fiction…full-time.
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1. Who can blame her? One minute you’re a fish, happily afloat in a warm dark sea, the next you’re a shivering mammal, shoved into the bright cold beyond. Is it any wonder the Bible is so much about exile?
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2. Point of clarification: I press the Help button every seventeen minutes.
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3. My score on the 1984 Advanced Placement Physics Test (on a scale of 1 to 5): 1.
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4. No it doesn’t.
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5. At home, my wife will express awed disgust at the extent of my thievery. She will, for instance, remove a small pink plastic dish from my haul and hold it up for my consideration. “Did we really need a bedpan?”
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6. A loaner necessitated by the fact that Erin refused to see the sense in storing the child—at least for the first month or two—in one of the sturdy plastic bins that I occasionally remove from beneath public mailboxes, a bin that, as I’ve pointed out to her repeatedly, could easily be scrubbed and filled with clean blankets.
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7. This circumstance will come to be known in our household as Code Brown. Curiously, shit no longer bothers us. Just the opposite. In these early days of child rearing, our interest in her feces borders on the fetishistic. We are overjoyed on the occasion of her first projectile defecation and brag about it to friends for weeks.
Me: I’m telling you, this kid is a powerhouse. Two feet she shat!
Erin: All the way to the laundry bag!
Me: That’s over the lip of the changing table.
Erin: So, when do you want to come see her?
Friend: [More silence]
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1. My parents—who read this essay for factual content and have reserved the right to take legal action—would like it noted that we never actually ate ham during Chanukah.
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2. For those of you keeping score, that’s one great-grandfather for God, one against, and no (thank God) they were never in the same room.
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3. As for Almond—a name that doesn’t exactly scream Jewish—it was a naked bid at assimilation on the part of rabbi David after his emigration to London. Our name had been Pruzhinski.
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4. My father recently presented me with a copy of my bar mitzvah speech, a document I presumed to have died of shame sometime in the early 1990s. The document, which is allegedly about the Covenant with Abraham, reveals a predictable fascination with genital mutilation:
In another story God asks Abraham to have all of his men circumcised. Here we find out that God wants to distinguish his people from all others by permanently altering a semi-noticeable [!!!] part of the body. This is a very strong commitment because it can never be changed. This is not found in most other religions. Circumcision is metaphoric of the all-out commitment that began with the covenant.
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5. I did briefly consider moving to Israel, but I’m afraid that had more to do with the native female population, lady soldiers with big hips and thick hair and rifles. Yum.
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6. As a good Catholic girl, she had a crucifix on her bedroom wall. “Not just the cross,” she notes. “The body was on it, too.” This, I believe, helps explain her attraction to me: She grew up worshipping a half-naked Jewish man.
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