Late summer, baseball and a silence that lasts

The Gentleman’s Hurler, 1910

Late July is the most boring time of the year, especially if you like sports. The NBA Summer League is over, training camp for the NFL hasn’t started, the British Open is over, Wimbledon is over and the baseball games don’t seem to matter. The weather is hot everywhere in the contiguous states, and the back-to-school sales are getting ready to start up well before anyone is ready to get back to school. Things seem to have ended, or be ending, and not quite to have restarted again as we’re expecting them to. Everything is stagnating in flux, in constant movement towards nothing at all.

‘The future was amazing!’ A brief thought on futurity: sooner, soon or later

Occurrences are happening somewhere right now leading up to an event many of us aren’t expecting that, in the near future, will be remembered as almost inevitable and definitive of its time. Certain catastrophes and events – the Depression, the Second World War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, your uncle’s death – seem foreordained by the historical forces leading up to them, confluences of events, times and individuals that, flowing together, seem to point toward that one determinate result.

And yet: those events surprised so many, death surprised so many, they would not have thought so much would fall apart. How many different now-defunct, barely-remembered empires have been so extensive in territorial gains that you could rationally say the sun never set on them? The Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire, the United Kingdom, ancient Persia: there was always daylight in at least one province, perhaps because the Lord never trusts an emperor in the dark.

And then things crumbled. From our contemporary historical vantage, that seems to be the way things had to be. But it didn’t then – the sea seemed peaceful until the tsunami swelled, the economy was humming along until a sudden bank run, the indigenous populations were placated – and it won’t seem that way before things fall apart or combust again, whenever that may be, whether sooner, soon or later.

Game theory will provide some pertinent lessons to learn, but the question always remains: to what historical instances and what contemporary situations does the theory apply? Time is precious and it’s finite: who’s to say if we’re better off applying that resource to events in the Senkaku Islands, Syria or Wyoming? We’ll know after what’s inevitable surprises us and comes to pass.

Listenings 2015: Preferred Sounds of the Year (So Far)

Preferred Albums, arranged in a vaguely descending order of enthusiasm:

Everything Is 4 – Jason Derulo

Eat Pray Thug – Heems

In Colour – Jamie XX

Complicated Game – James McMurtry

Pageant Material – Kacey Musgraves

At.Long.Last.A$AP – A$AP Rocky (Lord, I hate writing that)

Barter 6 – Young Thug

Surf – Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment

Break Stuff  – Vijay Iyer Trio

Wildheart ­– Miguel

To Pimp a Butterfly – Kendrick Lamar

Mr. Wonderful – Action Bronson

I Don’t Like Sh*t, I Don’t Go Outside – Earl Sweatshirt

Ba Power – Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba

I’m bored of the Internet

I’m bored of the Internet. I’m bored of the Internet. I’m bored by the Internet. I’m bored of the Internet.

Do you search the same terms over and over again, refresh the same sites, find the same articles in Google with a purple link with a note that you’ve visited that same page ‘many times?’ That’s my internet experience.

I look for something that isn’t there: I’m looking for a world that isn’t there, a world I want and have to invent because it isn’t real. A republic of letters, maybe, one on a beach that’s fascinating and, paradoxically for a shoreline empire, without end.

Jeffrey Eugenides posted a nice review of the newest installment of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard; not only a review of the book, but his own role in an anecdote Karl Ove told about an interaction with an unnamed and disappointed American author. It was, as is most everything for Karl Ove, almost physically, painfully awkward.

And it’s artful, how Eugenides relates the anecdote, reveals the unnamed author was him, reviews the novel and the scope of Knausgaard’s previous volumes, then ties it up by returning to that first interaction. Marvelous.

And that’s it. There’s nothing else on the Internet for me right now. It’s boring. The Internet is such a mighty promise: the world at your fingertips! endless information! connect everywhere now! But then you find yourself alone, bored, wondering where the rest of the world is hiding.

Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire, 2015

When I was in college, I told myself that I would complete a Proust Questionnaire every April, around Eastertime.  I never did; now, I do.

(Format sourced from the Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire.)

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Purpose and benevolence in perfect measure with enriching pleasure.

2. What is your greatest fear?

To be forgotten, posthaste.

3. Which historical figure do you most associate with?

The first name that came into my head was Wyatt Earp. I have no idea why, but I’ll trust my preconscious instinct: Wyatt Earp.

4. Which living person do you most admire?

Nicanor Parra, probably, or Brian Wilson, or someone anonymous who is trying to live a heroically normal life under an oppressive regime.

5. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

The sense of superiority drowned in intense self-doubt & self-loathing.

6. What is the trait you most deplore in others?

A lack of empathy.

7. What is your greatest extravagance?

Books, a superabundance of unneeded clothing and overpriced coffee beans.

8. On what occasion do you lie?

When the occasion demands a lie.

9. What do you most dislike about your appearance?

The totality of it, except for the middle digit on the left hand and the crooked pinkie on the right.

10. When and where were you happiest?

When I was two or three after my brother was born, living in a condominium in Long Island, before my grandfather had died.

11. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

Rid myself of my fear of failure and novel circumstance.

12. If you could change one thing about your family what would it be?

That it were still familial.

13. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

When I was fifteen years old, I believe, I ate so much after skiing I could not walk and had to be carried back; as I fell asleep I saw my heaping belly. When I woke up, my belly was flat and I had gained no weight.

14. If you died and came back as a person or thing what do you think it would be?

A tortoise, a parson or a cherry tree.

15. What is your most treasured possession?

Either my custom Martin D-28 guitar, my one-out-of-fifty-in-the-world baseball card featuring a swath of Babe Ruth’s jersey and bat and Lou Gehrig’s jersey and bat, or my two watches.

16. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Hopelessness and the death of a friend.

17. Who are your heroes in real life?

Someone anonymous who is trying to live a heroically normal life under an oppressive regime.

18. What is it that you most dislike?

Unnecessary war, oppressive governance, childhood starvation, incivility, materialism, unnecessary cynicism, impatience, gracelessness and lack of empathy.

19. How would you like to die?

In the sunlight, debt-free.

20. What is your motto?

He who lives upon Hope, dies farting. –Benjamin Franklin

TESTING TESTING ONE TWO ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX ROADRU- (Stress: the Extinction Agenda)

Testing testing one two one two one two one two one two one two

Roadrunner roadrunner

It’s rather easy to think about writing something; thinking is noncommittal. The writing is what introduces stress: the stress of perfection, the stress of performance, the stress of accomplishment and the fear of failure. Bill Russell used to vomit before most every game; if he didn’t go blow chunks in the pisspot, his teammates would be worried he didn’t care enough about the game to perform. (That is a nice way of looking at anxiety.) Perform: you can contemplate the performance and the act of performing, but that is nothing until you put the ball on the court; or, in this case, metaphorically, put pen to paper; or, literally, touch digit to key. But doing the deed – whatever be the deed – is how you overcome the stress. See? I’m doing it right now.

Usually when I think of failure – which is how I always see myself, flailing and failing – I think of the titled of Organized Konfusion’s second album, released in 1994. It’s called Stress: the Extinction Agenda. That’s beautiful and artfully inclined, what with the the one solid atomic block of a word cordoned off by the colon, after which the subject is briefly, and perfectly, elucidated. It’s what repeats in my head: ‘stress: the extinction agenda. stress: the extinction agenda. stress: the extinction agenda’ in saecula saeculorum. You can pound out with your fists the stress – there it is – the stresses in that line: stress: the extinction agenda. A perfect title with a perfect pulse.

baruch haba, reader.