R.A. Dickey and the gift of perspective

Friday night’s seventh inning notwithstanding, R.A. Dickey is officially my favorite New York Met.

Not only was the man an English major in college — like me — but his career reboot is happening for him now, at age 35. A recent article at MLB Fanhouse summed it up perfectly: his entire career has been like The Odyssey. Here he is, starting over, perhaps for a long time, and maybe finally finding himself (or at least, finding success and confidence on the mound) at age 35, largely the result of re-inventing himself a few years earlier as a knuckleballer.

It’s a story I can entirely relate to. At age 37 (and shortly, it will be 38), I still often wonder what I’ll be when I grow up. A decade after leaving sportswriting full-time, I’m still looking for my own knuckleball, the pitch to re-invent my career, a way to re-boot to my season, or at least find some profession that will give me satisfaction, confidence, and self-worth.

Perhaps I’ll never find it, the way R.A. Dickey has for these last two magical months. I’m blessed with a radiant wife and an exuberant nearly-4-year-old son, a warm home with a roof over my head, a purring cat, and relatively healthy parents. These are real things. And even if you don’t have the career you thought you would at 21 years old, just merely seeing and rooting for someone who finally gains success in the second half of his 30s gives you both hope and perspective.

That’s why R.A. Dickey is my favorite Met.

Algren, Hemingway, outrage and not writing

Happy post-holidays, happy new year.

Mrs. Icepick got me the best Christmas gift this year — the 50th anniversary critical edition of Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm. I was mooning about missing a talk this fall at one of the local universities on one of my favorite writers (in honor of Algren’s 100th birthday), so Mrs. Icepick bought me the novel, which of course I already owned and haven’t fully read since college. But the gem of this anniversary edition is the critical notes about post-war Chicago’s bard (even a Chicago that apparently dismissed him for so long, until it didn’t any longer, sort of) with essays from writers like Vonnegut, Mike Royko, Studs Terkel, and others. Russell Banks, who was one of the panelists at the talk I missed, is sadly not included here in this edition — Banks was mentored at one time by Algren and was positively influenced by him.

It may be impolitic, I’ve found, to admit to being both an Algren and Hemingway fan, but there you have me. Hemingway was certainly an Algren fan, perhaps to the bemusement of some Algren scholars, and Algren of course visited then wrote about Hemingway.

(Digression: I loved my gift so much, but I am a piss-poor caretaker. We keep many of our opened Christmas gifts under our tree for the ensuing weeks, partly for reasons of laziness, partly to fill up the space under the slowly dying tree, partly to keep the cat from drinking the water from the damn tree stand (fail). One night, somehow, I managed to over-water the tree stand and not realize it, and the next day I was crushed to find my new book soaked. Serves me right for not putting it away, and the back pages are now all stiff and crinkly from my drying the book on a radiator.)

Anyway, geek that I am, I’m going through the essays in the new book first, rather than the novel proper. I’ve become a sucker for critical analysis in recent years. As soon as I got home well after midnight from a 10:40 p.m. showing of Avatar last weekend (awesome, by the way) I looked up movie reviews online. I do that after watching flicks on cable for the first time, too. With novels, well, who has the time to re-read the whole thing, eh, so I just jumped into the essays. So it goes.

Writing, journalism and the 'way it is now'

Maybe as journalists, would-be journalists, wanna-be journalists, ex-journalists, bought-out journalists, hacks, reporters and disenchanted prematurely retired ex-journalists, perhaps all that is left to cover is ourselves and by extension, our opinions, even if it is only for an audience of one.

And as a seasoned reporter myself — after two whole conventions — I can safely say that you get about as many insights into the hearts and souls of the candidates on the campaign trail as you would watching a plastic fern grow.

—Matthew Klam, Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail, New York Times Magazine, September 2004

The Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy says the same thing, almost four years later, about sports — “That’s just the way it is now,” he writes — and bemoans the lost access to players the media once had.

Shaughnessy is 100% correct — that’s just the way it is now.

To which I say, yeah, it sucks. Just deal with it.

Pat Jordan is worried, too, but he seems to be adapting to it better.

It’s been coming to this point for a long time. Thirty-five years ago, Red Smith said it best:

The sportswriter learns to adjust, to make allowances. When you’re listening to these people, who are serving special interests, you simply adjust by taking a little off the top.

Pat Jordan might have taken a lot off the top for his Deadspin article, but I applaud the adjustment. After all, it’s the future.

Writing buzz-kill

Finally saw the Buzz Bissinger rant from HBO. Almost a week later he sounds regretful in his tone — even though he was still spoiling for a fight two days afterward in a New York Times story — and I have to agree with him on bemoaning the overuse of gossip on blogs. But whereas David Simon’s anger made me want to save newspapers and pray for their survival, Bissinger’s over 50 anger made me hope they’d die off, and die quickly.

Perhaps the best point of the reaction to Bissinger’s comments is the blogosphere gives hacks and never-was’s like me a space to write, even at a table of one. At some point, much like a career minor league pitcher, you realize you’ve gone as far as you can go professionally.