Monday

Let's Play 162

Found out a few weeks ago my baseball-themed story "Eternal and Unnecessary" will appear in the Autumn/Winter issue of Stymie Magazine. Exciting stuff. Since it's opening day I also have reason to run the following once written by Roger Angell. It is f'ing fantastic.

Baseball: learn it, live it, love it.

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift. Roger Angell, "Agincourt and After", 1975

1 comment:

  1. Brendan, your pastel windbreaker story was brutal/hilarious! Congrats on Stymie, dude, and it'll be great to be w/ ya in the issue.

    Roger Angell is an amazing writer. His "Consider the Catcher" is an superb essay.

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