April 2005 Archives

Basketball in America: From the Playgrounds to Jordan's Game and Beyond, featuring PC's essay "Seventeen Things I Learned from Dean Smith," is now available through Barnesandnoble.com in both paperback and hardcover editions.

Hallelujah!

The fat lady has NOT sung!

Elvis has NOT left the building!

This parrot has NOT rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible!

It's amazing to me that I can write this, but I can: the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is not extinct!

This morning, Kelly sent me the word that scientists had reported living, breathing Ivory-bills, and soon after that, I found this online report at CNN.com (Annoyingly, they seem to have replaced the photo that accompanied the original article with a painting. And here's a more recent CNN article, but I for one will not be satisfied until they provide a link to the videotape.)

To say I was astonished is the understatement of the year. Folks, this is a bird that by all accounts was extirpated from North America fifty-odd years ago--an avian fossil. But as in the case of the coelacanth, darned if somebody didn't turn up a fossil that hadn't gotten the memo.

The Ivory-bill is (Look! I'm using the present tense!) the largest American woodpecker by some margin, with a thirty-inch wingspan. Its nickname, the "Lord God" bird, comes not from its size, but from the usual interjection uttered by a person seeing one for the first time. As you can see from a look at Cornell's online guide, its size, bold black-and-white plumage, and brilliant red crest make it one of the most spectacular birds in the world, but I spent my entire life all but certain of its extinction. As readers of TV2B may recall, though, I once glimpsed a big black woodpecker flying over I-95 in South Carolina, and though I thought it was a Pileated Woodpecker, I later found that the white on the wings didn't look quite right. I still don't know what I saw that day nearly 20 years ago, but now I can at least reasonably believe I might have seen an Ivory-bill!

The presence of living Ivory-bills represents a seismic shift in American birding. Even as we speak, there are birders booking flights to Little Rock, polishing telephoto lenses, making spaces on life lists, and freeing up cash with which to bribe the locals of the Big Woods (the area in which the birds, according to the write-up in Science, have been sighted several times over the past year.) It's also going to have ramifications on the enrivonmental movement as well; clearly the bird must be listed as endangered, but what else will happen? Will the Big Woods area become a sanctuary? Will scientists attempt to capture Ivory-bills for a captive breeding program? Will the rush to see this bird actually put it in greater danger? Will its sudden "resurrection" give credence to those who claim that listing species as endangered doesn't help them?

I don't know what the answers will be. Frankly, at the moment, I'm too excited by the fact that I can even ask the questions. If this is true, what other miracles await us?

The Ivory-bill is alive! Lord God!

7:59 PM

Looking for that perfect Mother's Day gift? Basketball in America: From the Playgrounds to Jordan's Game and Beyond, featuring PC's essay "Seventeen Things I Learned from Dean Smith," and available through Barnesandnoble.com in both paperback and hardcover editions, will delight even the most hoop-obsessed mom!

I mention the above because my mom is, well...unusual.

It's fairly common, in our culture, for a basketball neophyte to learn about the game from his dad, or from his friends, or maybe his older siblings. I think it's a bit more unusual, or at least it was in the early 1970s, for the game to be a full-family experience. It's certainly true that my father taught me a lot about hoops--the fundamentals of shooting, passing, and dribbling--and that he himself, having played at the high school level, knew more about the game than Dave or I did; the two of us played in both 8th and 9th grades, but never even attempted to lace 'em up for Coach Ken Miller at CHHS, which is probably a good thing, both for our egos and the Tigers' record.

But Mom was there, too. To my knowledge, she never played an organized sport before signing up for a season of Rainbow Soccer in 1973 or so, and she'll tell you herself that her only remotely athletic skill lay in water-skiing. Nonetheless, when we went to see a Carolina basketball game, by god we went as a family.

To some degree, this may have had its origins in my parents' early budgetary concerns. When Mom & Dad got married, he was teaching school at Leroy Martin Jr. High in Raleigh, where he was paid like--um--a schoolteacher. As a result, there wasn't much money for luxuries like magazine subscriptions, but Mom, who was home with the infant PC all day, wasn't going to go without a weekly periodical or two to keep her brain from rotting. The two of them settled on Newsweek for keeping up with the news, but they could afford only one other magazine, and Dad lobbied hard for Sports Illustrated. Mom allowed this, though I'm sure at the time she couldn't have cared less about most of the games described in loving detail within. After a few issues, however, she discovered the ugly little secret of SI in its glory days: it was actually one of the best-written magazines on the stands. Gradually she became drawn into the subjects because they were described so well by the writers (an effect that will be recognized by anyone who reads John McPhee--and yes, McPhee is one of Mom's very favorite writers.)

So by the time UNC made its run of three straight Final Fours in the late 60s, Mom was both able (thanks to her reading up on hoops) and willing (thanks to the infant and the toddler at home) to appreciate the opportunity to go to the games with Dad. By the time Dave and I were old enough to enjoy the games ourselves, Mom was not only an enthusiast, but was on her way to becoming something of an expert; by the time Dave and I were old enough to think we knew something about hoops, Mom had graduated to spotting moving picks and complaining when the refs didn't call them.

I have a healthy respect for women, and my mother is a big reason why. She helped me develop it through some overt acts of feminism--subscribing to Ms. Magazine in the 70s, or playing Free to Be, You and Me on the stereo for Dave and me--but also by offering her own respect to something that the men in her family considered important. She wasn't watching basketball just for us, mind you, but I for one took a lot of pride in having a mom who could spot a moving pick. I still do.

Thus, when I say Basketball in America will make a great Mother's Day gift, I hope everyone realizes that I'm 100% serious.

And since Kelly's mom played the old-school six-player three-in-the-frontcourt-three-in-the-back style of girls' basketball when she was in school, I'm even willing to bet it would make a great Mother-in-Law's Day gift, too.

4:44 AM

Yes, you can STILL order Basketball in America: From the Playgrounds to Jordan's Game and Beyond, featuring PC's essay "Seventeen Things I Learned from Dean Smith," available through Barnesandnoble.com in both paperback and hardcover
editions.

So there's this dog.

He'd been wandering around campus for a while--maybe a week and a half. A long, rangy hound with a black saddle, brown head & ears, and spotted white legs and tail. A faded orange-red collar, but no tags. Very friendly, and rail-thin, despite a healthy-looking coat. I'd petted his head and seen him running around, but I didn't know him, and I'm generally able to assign any dog I see at Woodberry to some member of the community. Not this one.

As it happens, one of my colleagues, who makes a habit of taking in strays, had taken this one in, too, but he's already swimming in dogs. He fed this one and gave him a bed every night, but it was starting to look like a trip to the pound was in order. Somehow this word got to Kelly, who'd also met the dog, and she got to talking about it with the boys...

Long story short: he's living with us.

We've talked to the local shelters in case someone's looking for him, and we'll be putting up notices, but our best guess at the moment is that he was deliberately dumped here; our campus is a pretty safe environment, after all, and I guess the previous owners might well have expected that someone here might take him in. He's obviously been trained; he knows how to run at your heel when he's on a leash, he responds to whistles, clicks, and claps, and he's very quiet, even when he spots something to chase (like a rabbit.) Moreover, he's pretty close to housebroken (OK, there was that one incident in the night-time...) All this suggests that he might be a hunting dog who for some reason wouldn't hunt anymore; maybe he went gun-shy. In any case, he gets along beautifully with the kids (and with the neighbors' two-year-old), he's affectionate and obedient, and unless someone claims him, it looks like we have a new dog.

We're calling him Harlan.

9:05 PM

Order Basketball in America: From the Playgrounds to Jordan's Game and Beyond, featuring PC's essay "Seventeen Things I Learned from Dean Smith," available through Barnesandnoble.com in both paperback and hardcover
editions.

Well, I'm done.

It's only a first draft, and there will be much agonizing and sweating over revisions, but it's done.

Today, just after 5:00 p.m., I pushed my chair away from the keyboard and said "It's done." The first-draft manuscript of my first novel, A Raven for Doves, is finally done.

It took me roughly fifteen years from the night I had the idea for the story--an idea that actually came to me in a dream, though none of the characters or plot elements were there yet. I loved the idea, though, and I set about doing research to see if it had any basis in reality. (Answer: I'm not sure, and it doesn't matter anyway.) I went through repeated attempts to work it into a short-story form, spinning tales with titles such as "Waiting for the Robbers" and "Widow/er" and sending them out in exchange for rejection slips. Eventually I came to the realization that the idea wasn't working as a story not because it was a bad idea, but because it was too big an idea for a short story. That meant--gulp--that it was really a novel. And I had never written one of those.

At the time, of course, I was working on a whole different book, one that turned into TV2B, but I was able to give the occasional bit of attention to AR4D (and yes, as a matter of fact I am enjoying this whole business of giving my books the names of Star Wars droids...) until I finally got the former book out of my hands and into Paul Dry's. For a while, though, I wasn't really sure what to do with it.

Luckily, in September of 2002, I had the great good fortune to pick up a copy of John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, and in the course of absorbing its wisdom, I could almost hear the story fall into place with a series of clicks. Suddenly I knew not only what the novel was, but that I could write the novel.

Or I would have, anyway, if I'd ever had any time to write the damn thing. But time at WFS is a rare bird indeed, and it wasn't nesting anywhere near me, so after a month or so, I decided on artificial incubation: I took up the gauntlet of National Novel Writing Month.

I hasten to note that I cheated, at least as far as NaNoWriMo's rules go. Yes, I did my best to write 1667 words a day for the entire thirty days of November, which would have given me 50,000 words in a month. (I actually managed about 36,000 words, which was still a far higher output than I'd ever maintained during any other month of work.) I was cheating, though, because a true NaNoWriMo project springs from the author's brow like Athena from that of Zeus, without any prior effort or existing manuscript on which to hang the new material. I blatantly violated this principle and simply turned a big chunk of novel into a much bigger chunk. But yeah, having that intense Shut-Up-and-Get-The-Damn-Thing-WRITTEN drive was enormously helpful to helping the book grow.

2003 was eaten up with a lot of travel and book promotion, but I still managed a little writing, albeit slowly. Not until the next November did I make another big jump--another 20,000 words or so--and then I was treading water again. In the summer of 2004 I made a deal with Kelly: as an anniversary present, we would give each other a month of novel writing. Her honest-to-gosh NaNoWriMo 2003 book, very tentatively titled Licking Melvin, has been growing steadily over the years, but I wanted to give it a boost, and I figured I could use one as well. I kept at the book through our JuNoWriMo month--our anniversary is July 12--and since then it's been a little bit here, a little bit there. I topped 90,000 words and picked up steam. A few weeks back, I sent word to some of my Readerville friends that I was over 100k and closing on the end. When I wrapped up my writing on Friday afternoon, just shy of 105,000 words, I felt pretty sure I was close--"either ten paragraphs or ten pages," as I told one friend.

But this afternoon, I dove in for the last step. I'd written the ending weeks ago, so I didn't have any gratifying fanfare of "Let's Hear It For the Boy" from the Muses, but when I had filled up the emotional gaps between the last chapter and the next-to-the-last chapter, and then when I'd added a little more depth to that last chapter, and when I'd let Anna touch the door of that phone booth one more time... yeah, I knew it was done.

So now I'm going to back away for a few days and think. I'm not going to think about revising it, or about selling it. I've been working with Rob and Laurie and Cynthia for fifteen years, and with Paula, Anna, and Dr. Hitomaro almost as long, and even with characters who just showed up and took places in the book, like Gibby and Mrs. Riggins, for several years now... and dammit, these people deserve a vacation.

Done!

3:25 AM

If basketball is your thing, I've got good news.

Yes, much of the good news stems from Monday night's championship game. New things have happened: Roy Williams has his first championship at last, a recruiting class that suffered through UNC's worst season goes out on top, and Matt Doherty's recruiting abilities are displayed for all to see. In addition, the traditional nature of the universe has been restored: once again, UNC has finished in the top three in the ACC, defeated a number one seed to achieve the summit of the college basketball pyramid, and owns more NCAA titles than Duke. All's right with the world.

But there is more good hoops news to be shared, and I am here to share it: I am pleased to announce the long-awaited release of Basketball in America: From the Playgrounds to Jordan's Game and Beyond, edited by Bob Batchelor, and available through Barnesandnoble.com in both paperback and hardcover
editions.

My own contribution to the book is a piece called "Seventeen Things I Learned from Dean Smith," which concerns the lessons I absorbed from the corner seats at Carmichael Auditorium in my youth, particularly the ones that I picked up during a brief but intense period of study on March 2, 1974, as the clock ticked down on the greatest comeback in college basketball history. Many are obvious lessons dealing with issues like effort and loyalty; others are perhaps more arcane, touching on subjects such as sweat, smoking, and profanity. Still, my purpose in writing was to explain why Coach Smith, perhaps more than any other individual outside my immediate circle of friends and family, has had such a deep and lasting impact on my life. If I had any professional commitment to basketball, this might be easy to understand--if I were a coach or a player, or even a sportswriter, his influence could probably be easily seen and understood. Given where I am and what I do, however, I sometimes feel the need to let others know that a coach, like a teacher, can offer influence in some surprising ways.

The other night, sitting around the commons room watching the championship game with the guys on dorm--I was on duty Monday, or I would have been at my next-door neighbor's house, watching his big-screen--I accepted the presence of those rooting for Illinois. Not everyone is a UNC fan, I know; some are even Duke fans, which I find regrettable, but which I can do little to prevent. Some of the students occasionally enjoyed testing my limits, cracking on the Heels, or mocking Roy Williams for crying after close losses. I didn't have a problem with it; to me, a fair shot at winning the national championship was all I could ask for, and I didn't think it necessary to establish my authority by cracking down on the criticism. I don't like to "stick" kids--to issue demerits, in our jargon--and I certainly don't do so in order to shore myself up.

But then one kid, a good kid with a tendency to mouth off, and one who established himself early in the evening as an ABCer (Anybody But Carolina), started to say something about Dean. At that point, I felt compelled to state my position clearly: "If you start saying bad things about Dean Smith, I will stick you."

Coach Smith doesn't need my protection. Neither do the rest of the Heels, especially not this week. But thirty-odd years after I first saw them, I still feel compelled to give it. And the fact that I do tells me that somebody must have taught me something. Take a look at Basketball in America and see if the lesson makes sense to you.

4:03 PM

I'm a long way from Franklin Street, and have been for some years now, but there's not much more to be said right now except this:

National Champions.

March's madness is past, and May is here early. Ah, spring!

6:29 PM

One of my daily surf-by stops is Kevin Drum's Political Animal blog, a cogently written and well-researched site presented by a guy with something to say and a powerful means of persuading his audience that it's worth saying. It's some of the best liberal commentary on the web, that's for sure (and I've got to thank my ol' buddy Tony Plutonium for sending me there in the first place).

One thing Kevin does is provide a Comment function so that readers can discuss his entries in something relatively close to real time. (It's something I've occasionally thought about doing here, but I write so few entries by comparison, and so few of them are worth discussing... so for the moment, y'all will have to settle for using the email link to contact me directly.) I don't comment all that often--for one thing, webcrawlers will harvest your email address and spam your ass in a heartbeat if you do--but I was moved to do so a few weeks back when Kevin offered his thoughts on Princeton philosophy professor Harry G. Frankfurt's slim but pithy volume On Bullshit. Yes, it's a scholarly essay on bullshit--and not scholarly in some smart-ass irony-dripping James-Hynes-style-"Elvis-studies" way, but in a straightforward and illuminating style, as dry as a bone.

Kevin's summary of the book, which I hadn't read at the time, gave me good reason to want to check it out, because it illuminated certain political activities in a new way for me:

It turns out that Frankfurt's fundamental insight, illustrated with an intriguingly weird anecdote about Ludwig Wittgenstein, is that the defining characteristic of bullshit is not that the bullshitter is lying, an act that requires the perpetrator to know the truth in the first place, but that the bullshitter doesn't care one way or the other. The actual facts are irrelevant, and if the bullshitter ends up telling the truth, that's fine. He just doesn't care. The relationship of this unblinking indifference to facts with our present day political environment is both obvious and striking...

This, I think, is a key characteristic of bullshit: not just that the bullshitter knows he's bullshitting, but that the bullshittee also knows it. He may know it for sure, or he may just suspect it deep in his heart, but part of the essence of bullshit is that both sides implictly recognize that the statement in question is, in fact, bullshit. In this way it acts like a compact between spewer and receiver, a shared secret that brings them closer together. Thus the piquancy of bullshit, as well as its popularity.

This struck close to the mark, I thought, but not quite, and I was thus moved to comment:

What might be a more accurate statement is that the bullshittee doesn't care if he's being bullshitted. This, to me, suggests the attitude of both the typical Limbaugh listener (who doesn't care whether Rush is making up facts of not, so long as his own prejudices are confirmed) and the current occupant of the White House (who doesn't care if the Iraq intelligence he's getting is accurate or not, since he's going to invade regardless). Detecting bullshit requires skepticism, and independent thinking, and all kinds of, y'know, effort.

Or to use your own recent metaphor: the typical bullshittee is one who can't be bothered to click on the link.

Kevin's response:

PCashwell: I like that. It's very symmetric. The bullshitter doesn't care one way or the other whether he's telling the truth, and the bullshittee doesn't care one way or the other whether he's hearing the truth. Nice.

And now that I've finally read On Bullshit for myself, I can say thanks to Prof. Frankfurter for his fascinating insights, thanks to Mr. Drum for his perceptive analysis and kind words, and best wishes to all of you for a happy and bullshit-free April Fool's Day.

Watch where you're stepping, people!

2:23 PM