Hey! Nothing like setting modest goals and instantly achieving them. I’ve become a huge fan of World Soccer Daily and resolved to get an email read on the air. After the first two losses by the US, I sent an email about Bradley’s record (which is largely summed up by the last bullet in this post) and was quite happy to receive a positive email back from co-host Kenny Hassan.

After the valiant defeat to Brazil, I sent a second (more inspirational) email to the guys about how the US needs to shake off this heartbreaking loss and focus on beating Mexico at the Azteca next month. Happily, Steven Cohen read it on air during Monday’s show. You can hear it around 1:24:45 on this MP3 version of the broadcast.

Pretty pleased about it.

In footie playing news, I broke my scoring streak at five goals in five matches. My touch left me at the worst possible time as our under-strength team went crashing out of the play-off semifinal two weeks ago against a team we’d beaten 3-0 twice during the season. I had an awful personal outing, but injuries and absences of key players really did us in. Having fewer subs on a scorching hot day (90+ humidity) did not help. So we won the league handily but in the end by a couple points plus a massive advantage in goals scored and goal differential, but all for naught.

In happier news, I scored a hat-trick the following Monday night but it wasn’t much to crow about considering we were playing against 8 men on the other team. Still, three decent finishes if I do say so myself. And two days ago I popped in a dandy of a goal off a corner in the first half, then recorded three saves in a 20 minute stint in goal in a second-half shut out. So four goals in two games? Again, I’ll take it.

I put down Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the book I’ve been reading along with a bunch of graphic novels, because I was having a hard time reading it. I finished Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, which I really started enjoying about half-way through, and I’m midway through The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun. All of these are on my reading list for my preliminary exams.

A plurality of voices and abrupt shifts in time in the narrative (jumping from past, present, and future) are common traits of “magical realist” texts. I’m realizing now that while this technique can be interesting and provocative in a single work, it gets to be a bit much when you see it in book after book after book. I’m ready for a straight up beginning-middle-end novel, thank you.

I’m also trying to figure out the shape of the two courses I’ll be teaching in the fall, one of which is Intro to Creative Writing. After reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and a slew of graphic novels, I’ve decided to work “visual narratives” as part of the course.

I’ve also decided not to make it a separate unit but rather work it in as an option over the course of the semester. I wasn’t convinced about the idea until I started browsing through an examination copy of Creating Nonfiction: A Guide and Anthology I received, and noted that the authors use a number of graphic illustrations featuring nonfiction. By scouring the Internet, I’ve also found tons of PDF copies of graphic novels I admire both for their art and their storytelling, so it will be easy to excerpt sections and share them with the class. I’m excited for it, especially since a quick scan of the class roster revealed that nearly a third of the class are coming from the art school.

Current Mood: Fine, Thanks |

Over the past week or so I’ve read From Hell, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and V for Vendetta. Between Alan Moore and Frank Miller, I find Moore’s work to be far more nuanced and compelling. In undergrad I took a course on comics where we read Miller’s Give Me Liberty and, while I liked the graphic novel’s premise, I didn’t like the execution. I would also say that I had high expectations for Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and felt a little let down. In Miller’s stories, he does a better job with his characters than the worlds he builds, which far too black and white. Media coverage is one-sided and absurd, politicians are narrow-minded and crooked. I also felt TDKR moved at a breakneck speed and could have easily been longer by two or three episodes. I loved the artwork though.

Moore in contrast understands the need for subtlety. The media in V for Vendetta, for example, simply broadcasts the state-scripted news without any hint of the absurd, which makes it more realistic and chilling than the cartoony reporters in Miller’s work. And From Hell is a brilliant and intricate work that places a lot of demands on the reader. Sunday morning funnies this is not. Good stuff.

The silly season began with a bang when Real Madrid made the double swoop for Kaka and Ronaldo. Why do I feel like I’m one of the few people on the planet who were not surprised at all with the Ronaldo transfer? Of all the news reports flying around over the past year, here are the two things that (for whatever reason) I seemed to home in on as being key:

1) Ronaldo wanted to go Real Madrid last year but Fergie, who was resigned to losing him, convinced him to stay for one more year to try and win the Champions League, World Club Championship, and Premier League before he starts blooding a new crop of players.

2) Ronaldo’s petulance at being subbed against Man City felt contrived. In fact, I suspect that his hilarious histrionics over the past year have been intentional in order to further alienate him from Man Ure fans and ease the pain of him leaving.

Will Real’s mad spending spree result in them challenging Barcelona’s throne? I kind of doubt it. It seems to me that they need to be buying the highest quality defenders available rather than buying purely offensive talent. And now David Villa and Franck Ribery are allegedly next? Not a lot of fellows there who enjoy tracking back to get a tackle in.

And let’s spare a moment for poor Valencia, who look to offload their best players in order to stay afloat. Villa, Silva, Juan Mata and Albiol seem pretty certain to leave in order to pay back the club’s debts. Valencia have unearthed some of the most exciting talents in the modern game, and I used to love to watch them play with the likes of Gaizka Mendieta and Joaquín in their heyday.

The US plays Italy today at 1:30. I predict a loss. I watched Brazil and Egypt play an absolute barn burner this morning. The US plays Brazil on Thursday and Egypt on Sunday. I predict… erm… um… a loss and a loss. I would certainly love to be wrong, but the order of the day at the Confederations Cup has been slick, quick passing on the carpet. The US’ long ball schtick will not work. Will. Not. Work. And if Egypt and Brazil play like they did today, they will both shred the US defense.

Spain? OMG. So frigging good it’s sick. Easily the most fun team to watch on the planet. They made the Kiwis look absolutely clueless. Gotta love it.

I scored again last Saturday. That makes it five goals in five games. Mad City United topped the tables with a record of 13-0-3 and will steam into the play-offs as the number one seed this upcoming weekend. If we win that, I will regrettably be out of town for the final the next weekend.

My end of the regular season stats? Six goals in the twelve games I played. Once again, I have to toot my own horn: a goal every other game from the defensive midfield? I’ll take it!

Current Mood: Fine |

In Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, one of the book’s protagonists predicts that sardines and a few mackerel will rain from the sky on Nakano Ward.

And today from the Daily Telegraph: Sky rains tadpoles over Japan.

Current Mood: Hmmmm |

Last week I finished reading Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and, while I liked it, I thought it was interesting after having recently finished The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a novel I found much more appealing.

Everything about Kavalier and Clay is a touchy showy, a bit over-the-top. This applies to the events of Joe Kavalier’s life (his WWII experience on Antarctica was too much for me to swallow) as well as to the sentence-level writing, where Chabon’s descriptions were ornate, elaborate, and at times (dare I say it?) self-indulgent. Maybe this is fitting due to the fact that the book has comics books at its heart, a generally hyperbolic medium but that doesn’t mean that it works in the context of a novel. Even though I greatly enjoyed it and would recommend it to others, I kept thinking it felt a tad bloated. In contrast, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union rarely sets a foot wrong and coincidentally it’s about 200 pages shorter to boot.

However, I shouldn’t be too down on Kavalier and Clay since it’s full of humor and emotion, and you can’t help feeling attached to all the not-so-perfect characters. And it also rekindled my own fond memories of collecting comics, a hobby I had for a couple years clustered around 5th and 6th grade and then again during my junior and senior years of high school. Chabon does a great job explaining how all at once you can love comics and think they’re silly fluff, appreciate what they can do for the imagination while being frustrated by their limitations.

Apropos of nothing, after finishing the book I bought a bunch of graphic novels I’ve been considering getting for years: V for Vendetta, Watchmen, From Hell, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Batman: The Killing Joke. So yes, lots of Moore and Miller. This could be habit forming…

Current Mood: Wiped Out |

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Did the world exist before the Internet? It never ceases to amaze me how much fun stuff I come across—either via searching or stumbling. Top recent finds:

* The Burgomeister’s Books
Tons upon tons of free ebooks. I’m about half-way through The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon and it helps a lot to have an electronic copy on my iPod for those times when I’m pinned under a baby and can’t reach the hard copy.

* My P2P.eu - The last time I tried watching footie over the Internet, I downloaded some glitchy Chinese software that never consistently connected to a live stream. This site is another story. Via SopCast, TVU, and online streams, I feel like I never need any match, anywhere, at any time, ever again. That may be overstating things a little, but by the looks of it not by much.

I got my grades back—two A’s to end the semester. Yippee! Although grading in grad school is something of a joke, some profs use a default of an A- unless you’ve wowed them over the semester, and I’ve heard some dole out B+’s and (shock! gasp!) even B’s if they think you’re dogging it. While having a baby the week before papers are due is a damn fine ace up the sleeve, I definitely did not have the same kind of time to put into my schoolwork down the stretch. I would have understood had either of these profs decided that, baby or no baby, I didn’t quite deserve a full-blown A when I could have elected to take an extension but instead chose to cram it all in by the normal class deadline.

And do good grades help you once you graduate? No, but bad ones can certainly hurt you. Glad that’s put to rest!

Current Mood: Fine |

Last night I finished The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. I loved it. Even though I listened to it on audio, I bought a used hard copy over the weekend so I can review some of the best passages. Chabon has that knack for detail—not just adding detail, but adding the perfect details that simultaneously describe the scene, set the tone, and make you think. Very, very rarely does he make a wrong step in this book.

I’m also about half-way through the author interview they added as additional tracks. The conversation starts with the novel’s genesis (Chabon finding a Yiddish phrase book for travelers) and then turns to the notion of genre fiction. Obviously, this is a detective story and Chabon talks lovingly about Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels, but what truly surprised me was when the conversation turned to other genres. A few times, Chabon specifically invokes Tolkien when he’s discussing building this new world of Jews relocated to Alaska. He refers to building the back story as being Tolkienesque and describes this alternate Alaska as a “fantasy.”

This truly surprised me because it’s not fantasy at all: it’s quite clearly science fiction. The book has almost nothing in common with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings but is incredibly similar to Philip K. Dick’s, The Man in the High Castle. In Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Carl Freedman uses Dick’s alternate history of the Axis having won WWII as one of the exemplary cases of what science fiction does best; this section of the book continually ran through my mind as I listened to Chabon’s novel given the many similarities.

When talking about mixing so-called literary styles with genre, Chabon and Jonathan Lethem’s names always pop up. The genres pretty clearly include fantasy, comic book/superhero fiction, and the detective story, but I find it surprising that Chabon didn’t understand his own novel as inherently science fictional. I don’t think this would have gotten past Lethem, who started his career as a science fiction novelist. (BTW, on this topic I also wonder how much Lethem’s plot may have been influenced by Watchmen, but that’s just an aside).

Anyway, this book was strongly recommended to me by a professor who thought it should be on my preliminary exam, and boy was he right. Careful readers may remember Brian McHale’s thesis that the modernist text foregrounds the epistemological whereas the postmodern foregrounds the ontological; the classic example of the modernist text is the mystery or detective novel where the protagonists search for an elusive answer, whereas the postmodern text is science fictional, which is more interested in experiences than answers. What’s brilliant about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is that it straddles this dividing line perfectly, perhaps knowingly—it’s an ontologically foregrounded detective story.

Anyway, it’s one of those books where I both mourned the coming of last page, yet could not put it down. Many rereads are on the cards, I would guess.

UPDATE: Of course, I no sooner write this when I listen to the rest of the interview and Chabon makes a specific point to bring the conversation back to science fiction. I think it’s actually the interviewer from Harper Audio who doesn’t understand the connection, but Chabon actually makes an eloquent case for this novel joining the ranks of other great alternate histories such as L. Sprague De Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall and, yes, The Man in the High Castle. Sorry to have doubted you Mike.

Current Mood: Quite Good |

I ended up finishing Kindred last week and concluded that I thought it was pretty good. My initial critique still stands, and maybe I just got crabby, but I think I got even more critical. In addition to the “As You Know, Bob” dialogues, I would also say there are a number of “messages from Fred,” most specifically when Dana makes an internal comment about having over-planned her escape.

I also became highly suspicious of the nature of some of the conversations going on. It’s hard not to take for granted how much philosophy permeates our daily lives, and if you’re writing about an earlier period, you have to back out whatever philosophy wasn’t around at the time. Two huge examples would be Darwin and Freud—it’s very difficult to imagine how much the concepts evolution and psychology impact the way we interpret the world. I’m by no means an expert on this, but it seems like the 19th Century characters in Kindred seems to have a too-modern perspective on issues of what it means to be a person and ownership of the body. Of course, I don’t doubt for a second that slaves thought of themselves as equally human as anyone, and I’m sure they fully believed that it was a crime to violate their bodies, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily had the vocabulary to express themselves or think of themselves in that way at that time. It’s an extremely complicated issue and one that’s really tough, if perhaps impossible, for an author to get 100% right. I would need to reread closely and come up with specific passages, but my knee-jerk reaction is that a lot of these ideas in these terms came to prominence in the 1960’s and 70’s. But I could be wrong…

I had also remarked on Kindred not paying a ton of attention to language. This is in marked contrast to the audio book I started next, which is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. For some odd reason, I’ve found myself wanting to dislike Chabon’s work and I have no idea why. That’s going out the window though, since I’ve been enthralled with the opening 100 or so pages of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is blowing me away. There are authors I admire for their ideas, and there are authors I admire for the way they tell a story, but Chabon’s one of those authors where I think, “I want to write more like that.” His sentences are meticulously well-crafted and his descriptions are rich, his characterizations nuanced, and only rarely does he strike a false, or perhaps overly-literary-for-my-tastes, note.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union brilliantly straddles a number of genres—the artful literary novel, the science fictional alternate history, and the pulpy detective novel. I’m not very far into the story yet, but I’m well and truly hooked. The more Chabon I read (most recently before this was “The God of Dark Laughter” in Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology) the more I think I should be a leading fan-boy (not that he needs them) for his insistence on blending ghettoized genres into the more “respectable” world of literary fiction, to the betterment of both.

Oh, the reason I’m reading this? One of my professors practically insisted that I include it on my prelim reading list on postmodernist, hard-to-categorize, genre-bending novels. So yes, it fits the bill nicely.

The outdoor team I’m on played for the first time on Saturday. We lost 3-1 to a team that hadn’t beaten us in five years, according to some of their players. It was a poor performance and we deserved to lose.

I’ve decided too that the guys I hate the most in these leagues are the defenders who think they’re so tough. In this league, the fields aren’t great, no one’s in great shape, it’s tough to move the ball around. The goals scored tend to be of the ugly variety. I played at right back for the opening ten minutes and it was amazingly easy—if you have any question whatsoever, boot the ball up the field or out of bounds. Believe me, it’s about twenty times harder to actually bring it down and pass it with some conviction given these conditions—I know because I played in midfield for the rest of the time and trying to do anything worth mentioning was much harder.

A disappointing start to the season but I think we’ll recover, both by playing poorer teams and by having more guys on hand. We had three subs, they had about eight. Quality aside, it would be interesting how many times the team with more subs wins the game. It was my strong suspicion in the fall that many of our lopsided results only happened because we would score two or three goals in the second half, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence we usually had five or six subs to the opposition’s two or three.

On the bright side, my Dr. Scholl’s gel inserts seemed to have worked extremely well. I was sore from my hips to my toes from the shock of running on hard ground after playing outdoors last Tuesday, but the good doctor’s claims of inserts that provide shock absorbency would, at this point, appear to be valid.

Current Mood: Not Looking Forward to a New Week |

Since Amy’s due on Sunday, May 10th, I’m trying to get all of my final papers done by the Friday before, May 8th. Normally they wouldn’t be due until the 18th or so, so effectively I’m shaving about a week-and-a-half off my semester. If that doesn’t happen I can always ask for an extension, but I’d rather have things totally done and dusted before life goes wonky.

It feels like I’m reading about three hundred different things right now and trying to keep them all separated in my head. I have classes where I’m reading social and political philosophy in one and business and technical writing teaching theory in the other; on the side, I’m reading chapters out of Magical Realism: Theory, History, and Community, finishing Borges’ Ficciones, and I’m listening to Octavia Butler’s Kindred. And then there’s the small matter of reading the essays from English 101 along with the material I’ve assigned…

Oddly enough, I kind of like it. It’s strange how I find myself making connections between all of them, including the business writing stuff. And then it all comes around when I’m thinking about what information I privilege when I teach.

I had a dream last night that I got to hang out with Fernando Torres in a hospitality tent at the FA Cup, after Liverpool lost to Newcastle. He was telling me that if Liverpool kept playing like they were, he thought they would still win the Premier League title. I wondered aloud if Newcastle was going to do the dubious double of winning the FA Cup and getting relegated.

Dreams often have a grain of truth in them, and both Liverpool and Newcastle are out of the FA Cup. That leaves Liverpool winning the title or Newcastle going down. I know which one my money is on.

Oh, one last snitty “I was here way before you” comment directed to FSC’s Mark Rogondino. This past weekend, he said that Newcastle had been in the Premier League since the year it started back in 1992. “Before then,” he said, “They were playing in the Championship.”

Wrong. In 1992, the old First Division became the Premier League. To make things confusing, the old second division renamed itself the First Division, even though it was the second-tier league. This continued until 2004 when the First Division decided to brand itself the Championship and the second division (which was formerly the third division) changed its name to Football League One. So to correct Rogondino’s statement, he should have said, “Before then, Newcastle were playing in the Second Division.” Which wouldn’t have made sense to most viewers but would have been factually true.

The sobering thing is that I remember reading about the proposed name change to the Premier League in Soccer America, which I read during study hall in high school. The claim back then was that the marketing ploy would help brand English football and would help it get a foothold on a global audience. (Back in those days, the Italian Serie A was the place to be with AC Milan winning everything in sight.) So, how’d that work out for them?

Current Mood: Tired |

I’m about halfway through Octavia Butler’s Kindred and I’ve got the same reaction to this book as I did to Parable of Sower and Parable of the Talents: I like it, but not as much as I feel like I’m supposed to. Many people are ga-ga over Butler’s books but I’m only lukewarm on what I’ve read.

For me, Butler falls into the same category as Philip K Dick, meaning they’re science fiction writers who have fabulous ideas but the writing is somewhat clunky. Dick’s prose rarely shines (decent dialogue and nuanced characterization are frequent casualties) but he makes up for it with tightly plotted stories and awesome, brain-bending ideas.

Butler has a real knack for conveying grim situations but she suffers from a ton of “As you know, Bob” dialogue, and I find I’m not a huge fan of her protagonists. Lauren Olamina and Edana come from the same mold, strong female protagonists who seem to have the whole world against them. The problem is that they’re both too good—their brief moments of indecision and doubt ring hollow for me. More often than not, they come off as overly-well-prepared know-it-alls. As odd as it might sound, I would like them a lot more if there were more reasons to like them a lot less (follow that?).

Still, Kindred (like a lot of Dick’s work) has many moments of brilliance—like the moment Dana realizes that in her situation in traveling back in time, she’s got three strikes against her being a black woman who is also smart. And (like a lot of Dick’s works) the story clips on from there where a more strictly literary-minded text might mull this over a little more and thread this through the entire narrative. Butler and Dick have what I consider a classic “science fictional” tendency to churn out many ideas that have wide-reaching ramifications without always taking full advantage of them. Like Dick, I also note that Butler’s works tend to be pretty short.

I have a feeling my final verdict will be that Kindred is a good book, but not a great one. Here, as in the other Butler works I’ve read, her character spends a lot of time planning for contingencies and doing a lot of talking that helps build the world rather than fully develop the character. I would compare this against Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, a much more outwardly literary text, that has the opposite problem—back when I listened to it, I felt it spent way too much time dwelling on relationship tensions. I’d be happiest with a book somewhere in the middle, but maybe leaning more towards the Butler/ideas/plotty style.

Current Mood: Feh |

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Slightly different genres…or are they?

Current Mood: Okay |