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It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of the bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of.

- John Updike in the 10/22/1960 New Yorker*, witnessing Ted Williams’ final at-bat

A bit further on, Updike writes something that Aaron Carroll’s post about endings surely primed me to notice:

Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent in the smoke of Williams’ miracle.

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* Updike’s piece is behind the magazine’s paywall. I put the link up for subscribers, who have access. My Kindle subscription doesn’t give me access. Click here and scroll down for a longer excerpt that would have denied me the pleasure of typing out Updike’s words. I read the piece in a library copy of The Only Game In Town: Sportswriting From The New Yorker. You can buy an ebook version here and support my great neighborhood bookstore, which doesn’t know I’m doing this and certainly isn’t paying me to put up the link.

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UPDATE (1:52 p.m.): Everything I read today seems determined to dance with Aaron’s post, which hinges on a Stephen King ending. This is from Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer:

In horror fiction, the monster often threatens a comeback in a coda at the end: not truly defeated at all but only waiting for the sequel. Descartes did not want sequels. He thought he had covered up the abyss forever, but he had not; his reassuring ending fell to pieces almost at once.

You may remember that I hassled you to shell out actual money to read a New Yorker investigation about “allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents.” If you read it, thank you. If you didn’t, you have a fresh chance. Some wise person at newyorker.com sprung the article from behind the magazine’s paywall. You can read it here. In a related link, the image above comes from a redacted U.S. Department of Homeland Security “Significant Incident Report.” Mattathias Schwartz, who wrote and reported the New Yorker story, has posted the incident report to his site. It’s here. This story is gnawing at my conscience. It’s partly because there’s a significant U.S. component. As I wrote in my one previous post about this, “my government is sitting on a copy of a video that ‘could corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents.’ Morally, if not legally, this amounts to obstruction of justice. Crap like this is why Wikileaks enjoys legitimacy.” If you make time to read Schwartz’s story and emerge sharing my sense that the U.S. government should help confirm or refute these ghastly allegations by releasing its surveillance footage, please consider blogging, Tumblring, Facebooking, tweeting, etc. about the case. I’m groping my way toward trying to get something started via Twitter. Even simply retweeting this tweet of mine would be a help. I’m hoping any tweets about this push to release the video can include the hashtag #JamaicaMassacre and mention the president (@BarackObama). If you have any ideas for how to do this better, please get in touch here or via quiggblog [at] gmail [dot] com. Thanks. Click for high-res photo

You may remember that I hassled you to shell out actual money to read a New Yorker investigation about “allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents.” If you read it, thank you. If you didn’t, you have a fresh chance. Some wise person at newyorker.com sprung the article from behind the magazine’s paywall. You can read it here.

In a related link, the image above comes from a redacted U.S. Department of Homeland Security “Significant Incident Report.” Mattathias Schwartz, who wrote and reported the New Yorker story, has posted the incident report to his site. It’s here.

This story is gnawing at my conscience. It’s partly because there’s a significant U.S. component. As I wrote in my one previous post about this, “my government is sitting on a copy of a video that ‘could corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents.’ Morally, if not legally, this amounts to obstruction of justice. Crap like this is why Wikileaks enjoys legitimacy.”

If you make time to read Schwartz’s story and emerge sharing my sense that the U.S. government should help confirm or refute these ghastly allegations by releasing its surveillance footage, please consider blogging, Tumblring, Facebooking, tweeting, etc. about the case. I’m groping my way toward trying to get something started via Twitter. Even simply retweeting this tweet of mine would be a help. I’m hoping any tweets about this push to release the video can include the hashtag #JamaicaMassacre and mention the president (@BarackObama).

If you have any ideas for how to do this better, please get in touch here or via quiggblog [at] gmail [dot] com. Thanks.

how to hand your bank a sack of manure

From James Surowiecki’s “Financial Page” column in the current New Yorker:

Paying your debts is, as a rule, a good thing. But the double standard here is obvious and offensive. Homeowners are getting lambasted for doing what companies do on a regular basis. Walking away from real-estate obligations in particular is common in the corporate world, and real-estate developers are notorious for abandoning properties that no longer make economic sense. Sometimes the hypocrisy is staggering: last winter, the Mortgage Bankers Association—the very body whose president attacked defaulters for betraying their families and their communities—got its creditors to let it do a short sale of its headquarters, dumping it for thirty-four million dollars less than the value of the building’s mortgage.

… Strategic defaults would help distribute the pain more evenly and, if they became more common, would force lenders to be more responsible in the future. It’s also possible that a wave of strategic defaults—a De-Occupy Your House movement—would get banks to take mortgage modification more seriously, which would be all for the better. The truth is that banks have been relying on homeowners to do the right thing. It might be time for homeowners to do the smart thing instead.

The data Surowiecki cites about how steadfastly homeowners try to meet their mortgage obligations echoes what Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus describes in his book, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty. This passage by Yunus shows how it might sound if American banks modified home loans more readily and took a compassionate, pragmatic approach to this crisis:

We may be accused of being naive, but our experience with bad debt is less than 1 percent. And even when borrowers do default on a loan, we do not assume that they are being malevolent. Instead, we assume that personal circumstances have prevented them from repaying the money. Bad loans present a constant reminder of the need to do more to help our clients succeed.

Surowiecki cautions that defaulting on a home mortgage “is still a lot of trouble, and to most people it’s scary.” Still, read his full column, seek other advice, think it all through, and permit yourself to act with the cold-blooded rationality of a corporation.

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Tomorrow, we can expect to see not only the obvious faces—civil-society activists, liberally inclined journalists—but investment bankers and even bureaucrats. The spirit of the last week has been surprising and moving in a way that an objective reporter should not admit to being moved by. But even without rooting for either side, and with the full understanding that these protests may easily come to naught, one can’t help but marvel at the spontaneous, utterly organic outburst of civic feeling, and the fact that, for lack of a better term, a point of no return has very clearly been passed.


… All the government’s resources have kicked into panic mode, it seems. The police have leaked reports saying that the protests will be scoured for those dodging Russia’s military draft. Those arrested will also be drafted. Suddenly, Saturday has been made into a mandatory, full day of school for Moscow high schoolers. To ensure attendance, students will be given an important Russian test. (This after reports that students were forced to populate pro-United Russia protests on Tuesday instead of going to school.) Most bizarrely, the health minister has warned people to stay home lest they go to the demonstration and catch the flu.

- Julia Ioffe reporting from Moscow for newyorker.com

I can’t be sure that my pulse actually spiked as I read Ioffe’s latest dispatch, but I did catch myself breathing far faster than makes sense for a person at rest.

One way or another, this is history happening. Ioffe is @ioffeinmoscow on Twitter. I also recommend “The Decembrists,” a piece she wrote for Foreign Policy this week. My 3/29/11 post on Ioffe — and, among other things, the eccentricities of her Twitter feed — is here.

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Unarmed men of fighting age were interrogated on the spot, and more than a thousand were sent to detention centers, from which they were released a few days later. Mickey Freeman was one of dozens allegedly shot to death in custody.

A year and a half later, the Jamaican government has refused to make public what it knows about how the men and women of Tivoli Gardens died. So has the government of the United States, despite clear evidence that the U.S. surveillance plane flying above Kingston on May 24th was taking live video of Tivoli, that intelligence from the video feed was passed through U.S. law-enforcement officers to Jamaican forces on the ground, and that the Department of Homeland Security has a copy of this video. The video could corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents, and could help identify the alleged killers.

- Mattathias Schwartz in a piece from the current New Yorker that’s, unfortunately, behind the magazine’s paywall.

To summarize, my government is sitting on a copy of a video that “could corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents.” Morally, if not legally, this amounts to obstruction of justice. Crap like this is why Wikileaks enjoys legitimacy.

Paywall or not, I urge you to read the piece. It’s on newsstands. There’s a Kindle edition, an iPad edition. You can probably find a copy in a library or the waiting room of a nearby dental office.

Do seek it out. This passage especially got to me:

A suitcase on top of a bedroom dresser holds what remains of her old life. When she wants to explain who she once was, she will carry it to the kitchen table, spill out a bundle of loose papers, and begin picking out the vital documents—identification cards, letters of reference, phone numbers of supervisors who will attest that Mickey Freeman was a good man.

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UPDATE (12/15/2011): The story is now free to read on newyorker.com. Here’s a link!

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I almost feel sorry for the two administrators who have been arraigned—not for their behavior, which disgusts me, but for their apparent surrender to the notion that football was bigger than them. Did they worry that, if they brought a complaint to the proper authorities, they would be pariahs? Think of the lost income! The outraged alumni! The lost television revenue!

- from Susan Orlean’s “Football U.”

Read Kasey Anderson, too. Same subject. His post is here.

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I’m so happy that you give a chance for Ben to come back because I would love for people to go out and buy his collected stories and to look at his work and for him to be acknowledged as a master of Irish literature. If there’s any one writer that I would like to sort of sing back into a good place, it would be Ben.

- novelist Colum McCann, speaking to New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman after reading Benedict Kiely’s “Bluebell Meadow” on the magazine’s monthly fiction podcast.

I can’t even say why exactly, but I’m particularly grateful for this bit of the story:

They hold hands regularly. Lofty can read palms, a variant reading every time. They have kissed occasionally, when the children who are always there have been distracted by a water-hen or rat or leaping fish or a broken branch or an iceberg of froth from the falls.

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There are too many zoos breeding too many animals (baby animals are a huge draw, so most zoos simply can’t resist producing them). The surplus animals end up in mostly unregulated auctions where anyone at all can buy them. It’s appalling. In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them. The money we’d spent or donated to all the closed zoos—and whatever public money had supported them—would instead go to animal sanctuaries and research programs and habitat preservation in the animals’ natural environment, and to fund documentary films that would show us the way animals live when they are free. These films would fill us with awe and respect and even a little bit of fear, which is what we should feel about these creatures. Love that is used to justify ownership isn’t love at all.
- Susan Orlean considers a “small, drowsy town in Ohio, a pile of dead Bengal tigers.”
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The standouts in this collection are those that behave just as you’d expect them to, yet leave you in a place that you weren’t expecting to be left. They almost operate like practical jokes — luring you in with clean, unadorned sentences and then plodding along from one paragraph to the next. If you’re not paying much attention you can lose yourself in the structure and just kind of float to the end, only later realizing that you’ve been had — tugged along through a story without any real conflict or resolution to speak of. There’s something about Gray’s humor that simply is, and therein lies the beauty of this new thing the kids are doing.

- from “This other thing the kids are doing,” my cousin Dave’s review of Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird

Another excerpt:

If Barthelme is an influence here, then his influence is a mixed blessing, for his legacy, really, is most visible on some of the weakest links in this collection — stories in which Gray jettisons tradition altogether and revels in the fragmentary, in the inscrutable. Whereas humor in Barthelme is a means to an end, Gray’s humor, at its best, is the end.

This reminded me of something Salman Rushdie said on the latest New Yorker fiction podcast:

There is a danger of Barthleme’s that he makes you think you can do it and actually you can’t do it. … I remember as a young person finding myself doing what was clearly an imitation of Barthelme and having to stop myself. Hemingway’s like that, too. You think you can imitate him and you can’t. Barthelme’s even more idiosyncratic, of course … You have to leave it to him to do it, and even sometimes he couldn’t do it. 

… Certainly, when I was a young writer reading the magazine, the stories of Barthelme were the things that really leapt out. Not always successfully. Sometimes they were just so weird that you couldn’t go along with them. But very often they were kind of mind-blowing because they were so odd and because his way of telling a story was so oblique and so indirect that you had to really, really pay attention just to find out what was going on. And they’re funny, too. 

Tuck away Rushdie’s “even sometimes he couldn’t do it” and “sometimes they were just so weird that you couldn’t go along with them.” These are ideas worth remembering whenever a critic stamps “Influenced By ______________” on a contemporary writer and faults her for not living up to the legacy of the supposed influence. I welcome the humble “If” in Dave’s “If Barthelme is an influence …”

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Clouds in the staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. All around him, there are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away.

- from Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs.”

Read it here. Listen to Mary Gaitskill read it and discuss it with Deborah Treisman here.

“Symbols and Signs” shows how much an offstage character can dominate a story. Nabokov also shows the power of treating a character’s perceived reality as fact. We’d be able to shrug off “He thinks coats in store windows want to lynch him.” But we’re forced to share a sweaty straightjacket with “others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart.”

One other thing. This one is the shakiest.

Nabokov writes that the institutionalized son has “referential mania” and “imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence.” This immediately made me think of Charles Kinbote from Nabokov’s Pale Fire. “Symbols and Signs” is from the late 1940s. Pale Fire is from the early 1960s.

Twice, toward the end of “Symbols and Signs,” a woman dials the wrong number and asks to speak with someone named Charlie. Charlie Kinbote? Probably not. But Nabokov was crafty enough to make me wonder. I got chills.

Played 12 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Rushdie reads Barthelme’s “Concerning the Bodyguard” for this month’s New Yorker Fiction Podcast.

I listened to this last night and might listen to it again today. What a strange, potent story.

Lillian Ross on Hemingway and “the first modern magazine profile”

He might sign his letters ‘Ernest’ or often use one of his own joke names, like Huck van Hemingstein. Once he wrote to me and said, “I usually introduce myself as Hemingstein when meeting known anti-Semites and their friends.”

Transcript here. More than an hour of video below or here.