April 2006 Archives

At last! An entry that's related to books, rather than basketball, politics, or dook university!

First, the big news: I'm getting my first fiction publication.

Editor Bob Batchelor, the man who assembled Basketball in America, is editing a new series of anthologies inspired by songwriters. The first of these is Literary Cash : Writings Inspired by the Legendary Johnny Cash, coming out in January from Benbella Books. Among the other writers who've written stories for the book are Russell Rowland (In Open Spaces), Gayle Brandeis (The Book of Dead Birds), and Gretchen Moran Laskas (The Midwife's Tale), all three not only wonderful writers whose work I enthusiastically recommend, but also buddies of mine from Readerville.com. I'm therefore especially happy to have my own contribution, a short story called "Field of Diamonds," appearing alongside theirs.

(It also gives me some parity with Kelly, whose first published short story, "The Whispering Dictionary," appeared in The Readerville Journal about four years back. Not that I keep track of such things.)

I've long been a fan of Cash's, and his final albums were nothing short of mesmerizing, so when Bob asked for contributions, I soon found myself mulling over the deceptive simplicity of "Field of Diamonds," and soon after that some ideas began percolating through my head. I will admit that the narrator's in-car conversation with his wife is based on one I had with Kelly. Considering that, and the fact that we came up with the germ of Mother Wit on a drive through South Carolina, I'd have to say that the car is one of our most fertile locations for literary inspiration.

I've also finished a second draft of The Amazing Q. The manuscript is back in the editor's hands now, and I'm hoping to hear something back in the next fifteen seconds. I realize that this hope may be unrealistic.

(The year's first indigo bunting is on the feeder! Whoo hoo!

Sorry--I felt that had to be noted.)

With Q out of the way, I'm at a bit of a crossroads, writing-wise. Should I submit A Raven for Doves to a few more houses and/or agents? Should I go back and rework the existing version of the manuscript? Should I turn my creative energies toward finishing the abovementioned Mother Wit, which has been waiting patiently for Kelly and me to finish our solo projects?

Tough calls, all. But more fun to make knowing that I've got a story coming out in a few months.

4:12 PM

Just when is one obliged to feel schadenfreude, anyway?

My least favorite college basketball program, Duke, flamed out this season in a way that gave me no small amount of cheer. Despite the presence of the national Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year, despite a bench full of McDonald's All-Americans, despite returning four of five starters, despite pre-season crowing that they might not lose a game this year, the Blue Devils went down without even making it to the Final Four. And yes, I crowed myself when UNC took down the vaunted Duke senior class in Durham on Senior Night. And now that those two POY candidates (J.J. Redick and Shelden Williams ) have graduated, and one of those McDonald's All-Americans (Eric Boateng) is transferring, and another (Josh McRoberts) is rumored to be going pro, I have to say I'm looking forward to next year's contests against Duke with some degree of smug anticipation.

Still, despite my longtime dislike of Duke basketball, I've got no particular objection to the university itself. Sure, I see it as an institution too concerned with style over substance--that faux-Gothic thing just rubs me the wrong way--but I certainly can't claim that it's not a good school. I know a number of people who work there, mostly in the hospital, and my boss is the former head of the Divinity School, so I'm entirely willing to offer love and respect to members of the Duke community, even as I deny them to Coach K and his program.

All of which leads me to Duke's current problem: the basketball team is no longer the athletic squad most people in the country are talking about. Instead, it's the men's lacrosse team that has the nation's attention, and for all the wrong reasons.

The rape accusation leveled against the Duke lax team by a stripper hired to dance at a team party has set off a storm of counter-accusations, protests, counter-protests, political posturing, pontification, and the kind of national media attention no lacrosse team has ever seen before. Issues of race and class, which have been part of the Duke/Durham relationship for decades, have turned what might have been a simple he said/she said argument into some kind of gigantic Rohrschach test for everyone with a blog or a membership on an internet forum.

So let me say this clearly: I have no idea who to believe. So much of this case has been tried in the media that it's hard to imagine what the jury will eventually see. (For that matter, where will they find a jury of people who haven't already made up their minds? It's not going to be anywhere near Durham, that's for sure.) Every other day seems to bring up a new alibi or a new bit of evidence, and I for one feel sure I'm missing an awful lot of the information. In such a situation, who WOULDN'T want to wait until all the facts are in?

A lot of people, apparently. In any discussion of the case, there are those who firmly believe in the players' guilt or innocence on the basis of everything from the time-stamped digital photos to the use of pseudonyms by the party-throwers to the political ambitions of the D.A. to the broken fingernails in the bathroom to the lack of DNA evidence to the racial slurs overheard by the neighbors to the inherent aggression of lacrosse players to the inherent untrustworthiness of exotic dancers. Me, I'm inclined to wait until there's some actual testimony.

I wish I could say I'm not going to pay any more attention to the case until it goes to trial, but the fact is that I'm just as curious as anyone else to see where this will lead. Until then, however, I'm going to try to reserve judgment. This goes well beyond UNC vs. Duke and into fundamental questions about perception vs. truth.

And the truth is, J.J. Redick is not going to be a star in the NBA. He's not going to have three screens set to open up a shot for him anywhere but in K's offense. And who the heck is he going to guard? If he's lucky, he'll be a Steve Kerr, a spot-duty player that a good coach can use in particular situations. If he's not lucky, remember these two words: "Trajan Langdon."

So it's schadenfreude. That doesn't mean it's not true.

3:37 PM

Okay, okay, so I didn't make it back within a week. So sue me. Too many verdammt papers to grade...

But I've got a little free time now. Too MUCH free time, in some ways, as Kelly and the boys have taken off for a week to hang out with Kel's mom in NC. I'm here baching it with Harlan the Hound, and I'm hoping that the next 24 hours or so will give me a chance to rest up and get my head together.

It's been a long winter.

One thing that's come out of it, however, is that I've finally finished another draft of The Amazing Q, and once I get it printed up and into the mail, perhaps it will generate some interest. It's certainly tighter than it was, and with any luck that will make it a bit more marketable.

What else is up?

*I've now seen the whole first season of the new Battlestar Galactica (thank you, Netflix), and all I can say is AIEE! That's one wicked cliffhanger!

*I've picked up Art Chansky's Blue Blood, a history of the Carolina-Duke basketball rivalry that covers the same subject as Will Blythe's To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever, but with a very different purpose. Will was attempting to show what the rivalry means to people, while Chansky's simply out to report on its history. I'm only a few chapters in, but so far I'd have to say that Blue Blood is a lesser book than To Hate Like This... For one thing, Will's a considerably better writer, capable of deeper insights, better phrasing, and much wittier prose, but I have to say I'm also annoyed by the lousy copy-editing in Chansky's book; I've found grammatical errors and misspellings of the sort I'd correct in my freshmen's papers.

(In the spirit of full disclosure, I'll admit to some bias against Chansky, who used to co-own the Four Corners restaurant on Franklin Street; back in high school, when my brother was working next door at Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe, Chansky once falsely accused him of breaking into 4C's cooler and swiping some beer--not something I'm likely to forgive. Still, I've known bigger jerks who could write better.)

*Weird bird fact: we're halfway through April and I haven't yet seen a Northern Flicker in calendar year 2006. Is this just me, or is any other birder out there having a similarly flickerless year?

*You know a band that doesn't get talked about much? World Party. The brainchild of Karl Wallinger, who played most of the instruments, wrote most of the songs, and handled the production to boot, the band had only one real hit ("Ship of Fools," off the debut, Private Revolution) but the second album, Goodbye Jumbo, is a work of brilliance. The propulsive rhythm of "Way Down Now" is a fabulous reworking of "Sympathy for the Devil" (an homage Wallinger makes plain when the backup singers start chanting "Woooot Wooooo" as the song starts its fade). "Ain't Gonna Come Till I'm Ready" sounds like a mid-70s blend of Marvin Gaye and 10CC, while "Sweet Soul Dream" is a beautiful 6/8 musing on materialism.

And the cover is just... well, you've got to see it to believe it:




I'm pretty sure that's Karl in the gas mask...

*My fantasy baseball team, the Varied Buntings*, continues to struggle. We lost our initial week-long battle with the BALCO Bombers, going down 18-10. We're doing a little better this week, but we're still trailing the Nabobs of Negativism 11-17 going into Saturday night's games. I'll need a big performance from my starting pitchers on Sunday--Josh Beckett and Mark Mulder--to stave off defeat.

Oh, the footnote: *Yes, I said a few entries ago that my next fantasy team would be named the New England Transcendentalists, in honor of Will Blythe's comments about my essay "17 Things I Learned from Dean Smith" (still available in Basketball in America: From the Playgrounds to Jordan's Game and Beyond, edited by Bob Batchelor). Unfortunately, in the Yahoo! league in which I'm playing, team names must use no more than twenty characters, and "Transcendentalists" alone is eighteen. But next time I play in a non-Yahoo! league...

*Finally, this May 19-21, I'm planning to be in Washington, D.C., for at least part of this year's Book Expo America. I attended the 2003 BEA in L.A. and still think of it fondly, though I continue to hang my head in shame over the Cell Phone Incident. (Not the one at the hotel bar--I'm not likely to share that one here--but the one at Neil Gaiman's reading when my brand-new phone started ringing and I didn't know how to shut it off.) I'm hoping Kelly and I can meet some of our old Readerville buddies face to face--in some cases for the first time--and maybe get a few freebies into the bargain... we'll see!

11:23 PM

I don't usually like to let more than a week go by without posting here. What's kept me away for the last 11 days?

1) Work. All-new classes for the spring means yet another round of setting up syllabi and working through the basics of how I conduct my classes. We've also had plenty of other action--a student having significant family issues, a visit from the VAIS team that accredits our school every ten years, meetings with both my academic departments (English and Fine Arts), a meeting of the Summer Reading Program committee (for which I volunteered), a faculty meeting, our annual College Weekend, and (on the same weekend) our annual Invite-Back Weekend for prospective students, during which I shook off some rust and performed at the Friday-night open mic. (I played "Mexican Wine" by Fountains of Wayne, "Behind Blue Eyes" by the Who, and "My Life of Crime" by Pierce Pettis, if you're wondering.)

2) Family. Thing One has been stressing out over the final delivery of his upcoming year-long project for the Blue Ridge Virtual Governor's School. The kid has absorbed a RIDICULOUS amount of information on Roman military technology, and he's able to assemble it in what I'd consider pretty clear and coherent English, but the process of actually getting it all down on paper has been making him mildly insane. A fifteen-pager is a bigger project than he's used to, and he's still learning how to pace himself. Meanwhile, Thing Two is still working on getting himself to Britain with the People to People program, and he's rehearsing daily for WFS's spring production of Much Ado About Nothing, in which he plays Boy ("The role he was born to play!"--his mom & me.) He also got a surprise chance to go to Richmond with the student government group; he spent two nights there discussing and debating ideas, and he actually won the speech contest, which did my li'l speech teacher's heart proud. All Kelly's done is dig through the usual mountain o'laundry, drive everyone everywhere, work on her novel, write a few short pieces of fanfic, work at the library, and do the taxes. Granted, she did get two nights off; on one of them, we skipped out for Thai and a showing of Inside Man (an intelligent crime-caper flick with some of our favorite actors, Denzel & Jodie). On the other, she skipped off to visit online bud Carrie, eat Moroccan food, and take in a Tres Chicas show. But that last didn't really prevent me from blogging.

3) Baseball. Once again, Greg Jacobs and I are on the air (or on the web, anyway--at www.woodberry.org ) broadcasting Woodberry's home varsity baseball games. Greg remains capable of spotting and describing the most arcane of baseball arcana--his knowledge of the game is encyclopedic, and I know that's no exaggerating, because he's written an encyclopedia about the game. Yes, it's for kids, but it covers everything--it's The Everything Kids' Baseball Book (fourth edition), and it's a great read for the youngsters in the house, or even the older folks who want to know the Ten Most Important Home Runs, or which current players Greg thinks will make the Hall of Fame. (Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, and Greg Maddux are the only certainties, if I recall correctly.) It's not an everyday job, but it has eaten a number of afternoons, during which Greg and I have been perched atop the broadcast tower, unable to leave the microphones, for two to four hours. (Yes, the doubleheaders are rough.) So far we've had two good broadcasts and one bad one--the doubleheader--but I think we'll be in regular-season form from here on out.

4) TV. Living in the Broadcast Hole as we do, we don't get to see any series that isn't available on DVD through Netflix (or owned by friends/neighbors). We've been wading through a number of shows, trying to replace the Whedonverse shows that made up the staple of our video diet for practically all of 2003 and 2004, and the results have been mixed. Battlestar Galactica looks pretty and works one hell of a lot better than the original series as SF, though I'm still trying to figure out why the culture of the planets from which the BSG crewmembers come is so damned similar to Earth's; I mean, 21-gun salutes at military funerals? Still, it's enjoyable, and it's got lots of interesting character interaction to chew on. (And Kelly's got a crush on Starbuck.) Smallville is all about putting pretty people in ridiculous situations. It's thoroughly sub-Whedon, with plotting that clunks and dialogue that's inert when it's not shifting into prose so purple it's edging into the ultraviolet. Still, it's got lovely art direction--the comic-book intensity of the colors is a treat in itself--and it plays entertaining games with the fanboy in me. And there are all those pretty people. The pleasant surprise is Scrubs, a sitcom that not only has a wildly loopy sense of humor and rich characters, but also provides some interesting cultural insights: the white characters are NOT the default norms. The three main characters are two white interns (goofy, well-meaning guy J.D. and tightly-wound alpha female Elliott) and a black one (Turk, a confident surgeon and less confident boyfriend) who seem comfortable in Whitebread Land, but whose own cultural references are often African-American in nature. J.D. and Turk are roomies obsessed with everything from Sanford and Son to What's Happening, and they neither obsess over their racial differences nor ignore them. And then there's Dr. Cox, the conflicted, brilliant, sharp-witted workaholic who may be my favorite sitcom character in decades; the spiel he fires off when he discovers Elliott wasting time chatting with a hyperconnected patient is a classic (which I'll paraphrase here):

"Right now, my patience is a lot like your virginity. You always thought it would be there, but then there was that one night when you weren't feeling so good about yourself, and then Kevin came by with a copy of About Last Night and a four-pack of Bartles and Jaymes, and POW!..."

Joe Bob says check it out.

5) The Internet. I've been caught up in everything from fantasy baseball prep to exploring the fall of Tom DeLay to following the Duke lacrosse team scandal, but the biggest time-suck has been the discovery of InsideCarolina.com, a board full of people at least as obsessed with I am with UNC sports, specifically basketball. These are my people: fans who remember Ged Doughton and Dave Colescott and can remember which was a better ballhandler, who actually TRY to remember whether Kevin Madden was from North Carolina or not (not--he was from Virginia), and who argue at length about whether Tyler Hansbough's game is more like Rasheed Wallace's or Mitch Kupchak's. I've spent way too much time there in recent weeks, but at least I've finally achieved "Redshirt Freshman" status by having posted more than 100 times. I've got Will Blythe to thank for this; had he not mentioned IC in his brilliant, engaging, hilarious, and sometimes touching book about the UNC-Duke hoops rivalry, To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever, I would have been here long before now, honest.

So those are my excuses. Take your pick. And I'll see you in a week or so.

2:41 PM