This episode was basically made for me so obviously I loved it. I stopped playing baseball after elementary school bc I was a library kid who sucked at sports but started up again a few years ago on a sandlot team, where everyone is pretty chill but competition definitely creeps in. Last year I hit over .300 and was feeling pretty good and this year I slumped horribly, just absolutely could not get it together at all, and it really did provoke a kind of dark night of the soul, far more than any silly Saturday activity for 30yo burnouts should. It was at the same time that my writing here was getting some attention so I was faced with succeeding much more than I thought I would at that while failing at the thing that actually makes up a big part of my IRL social life. And it really provoked like-- I thought I could reinvent myself as an athlete and make up for how much I sucked at it as a kid, but maybe I was deluding myself, and maybe for all the talk about how art feeds the soul and all that creative and intellectual life is actually in some sense just the refuge of people who couldn't hack it on the field. I don't actually believe that when it comes down to it, obviously, but it's kind of good to not get too puffed up about intellectual life nevertheless.
And I do love that there’s no excuses with baseball, everyone's watching you and you either succeed or you fail. It’s a really intense experience even in a league with no stakes and it teaches you a lot about yourself and your priorities. Even though it made for some tough times I love playing and I love my team, I'm very happy that I do it. And I love the sport, I think there is a great spiritual-pastoral-mathematical beauty in it. I get the same feeling from it as I do from A Midsummer Night's Dream or something, something so simple and frivolous that nevertheless seems to contain all the great truths of the universe.
I obviously don't believe that writing and intellectual life is a refuge for people who couldn't hack it on the field, but I do think that the bookish can certainly fail to appreciate the virtues of bodily excellence. I was a terrible baseball player, but was a surprisingly good wrestler, which doesn't have the pastoral beauty of baseball but has its own fascinations. More than any other sport I've played, it seemed like about as pure an expression as possible of what happens when the body explores how it can manipulate others with force and leverage. Like you can totally tell, when you've gotten pretty good at it, how it evolved organically from people tussling with each other, discovering in the moment how to position your arms and legs and move your body in order to coerce the other person. To feel that you have kind of control of your own body, and competence in controlling other bodies, is a real gift.
Oh, another thing i thought of when I was falling asleep last night, and sorry I can’t remember who said it. I don't think Brandon Taylor should write a novel about growing up in Alabama if he doesn't want to! IMO a big part of our Current Situation is the idea of the writer as the voice of some authentic experience and a lot of the dizzying pleasure of literature is the voice of someone who is FREE from their upbringing and who now has to decide what to do with that freedom. I happen to be a coastal elite by birth but if I wasn't I would hate to shed my skin and establish myself in the metropole and then find everyone just wants me to leverage my past. Ofc you're always going to bring your own baggage and experience to whatever you write but I feel (and Taylor feels, I think, which makes me actually interested in his new novel-- very rare for feted mainstream literary product!) that the role of the novelist has been reduced to some voice that can only reflect some particular experience instead of an anatomizer of society. I would like more novels to look like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina and The Age of Innocence and fewer to look like whatever trendy identity/trauma narrative makes for a good New Yorker profile. I like Alex's role as gadfly on here but where we part ways is when I feel, as I sometimes do, that he just wants things to be slightly rebalanced so there are more novels about taciturn Miami tough guys and fewer about children of immigrants at elite colleges, or whatever. I agree that might be a healthier and more interesting field but ultimately I am after a more expansive and free vision of the novel as a form.
I think what I was calling for was less to BT to hem himself to his personal experiences, and more to plumb the more interesting (in my view) parts of his life. He wrote two novels set in Iowa MFA world, where he spent a great deal of time. He hadn't so much freed himself from his upbringing as just choose a different autobiographical slice of his life to write about. That's his choice, but I would've loved more on Alabama the way Faulkner treated MS or Roth treated NJ. Brandon wants me to write a tennis novel, so I think both of us want more from the other, which is healthy.
This episode was basically made for me so obviously I loved it. I stopped playing baseball after elementary school bc I was a library kid who sucked at sports but started up again a few years ago on a sandlot team, where everyone is pretty chill but competition definitely creeps in. Last year I hit over .300 and was feeling pretty good and this year I slumped horribly, just absolutely could not get it together at all, and it really did provoke a kind of dark night of the soul, far more than any silly Saturday activity for 30yo burnouts should. It was at the same time that my writing here was getting some attention so I was faced with succeeding much more than I thought I would at that while failing at the thing that actually makes up a big part of my IRL social life. And it really provoked like-- I thought I could reinvent myself as an athlete and make up for how much I sucked at it as a kid, but maybe I was deluding myself, and maybe for all the talk about how art feeds the soul and all that creative and intellectual life is actually in some sense just the refuge of people who couldn't hack it on the field. I don't actually believe that when it comes down to it, obviously, but it's kind of good to not get too puffed up about intellectual life nevertheless.
And I do love that there’s no excuses with baseball, everyone's watching you and you either succeed or you fail. It’s a really intense experience even in a league with no stakes and it teaches you a lot about yourself and your priorities. Even though it made for some tough times I love playing and I love my team, I'm very happy that I do it. And I love the sport, I think there is a great spiritual-pastoral-mathematical beauty in it. I get the same feeling from it as I do from A Midsummer Night's Dream or something, something so simple and frivolous that nevertheless seems to contain all the great truths of the universe.
I obviously don't believe that writing and intellectual life is a refuge for people who couldn't hack it on the field, but I do think that the bookish can certainly fail to appreciate the virtues of bodily excellence. I was a terrible baseball player, but was a surprisingly good wrestler, which doesn't have the pastoral beauty of baseball but has its own fascinations. More than any other sport I've played, it seemed like about as pure an expression as possible of what happens when the body explores how it can manipulate others with force and leverage. Like you can totally tell, when you've gotten pretty good at it, how it evolved organically from people tussling with each other, discovering in the moment how to position your arms and legs and move your body in order to coerce the other person. To feel that you have kind of control of your own body, and competence in controlling other bodies, is a real gift.
Oh, another thing i thought of when I was falling asleep last night, and sorry I can’t remember who said it. I don't think Brandon Taylor should write a novel about growing up in Alabama if he doesn't want to! IMO a big part of our Current Situation is the idea of the writer as the voice of some authentic experience and a lot of the dizzying pleasure of literature is the voice of someone who is FREE from their upbringing and who now has to decide what to do with that freedom. I happen to be a coastal elite by birth but if I wasn't I would hate to shed my skin and establish myself in the metropole and then find everyone just wants me to leverage my past. Ofc you're always going to bring your own baggage and experience to whatever you write but I feel (and Taylor feels, I think, which makes me actually interested in his new novel-- very rare for feted mainstream literary product!) that the role of the novelist has been reduced to some voice that can only reflect some particular experience instead of an anatomizer of society. I would like more novels to look like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina and The Age of Innocence and fewer to look like whatever trendy identity/trauma narrative makes for a good New Yorker profile. I like Alex's role as gadfly on here but where we part ways is when I feel, as I sometimes do, that he just wants things to be slightly rebalanced so there are more novels about taciturn Miami tough guys and fewer about children of immigrants at elite colleges, or whatever. I agree that might be a healthier and more interesting field but ultimately I am after a more expansive and free vision of the novel as a form.
Yeah I think I agree with that. No prescription for what there should be; freedom to do whatever.
I think what I was calling for was less to BT to hem himself to his personal experiences, and more to plumb the more interesting (in my view) parts of his life. He wrote two novels set in Iowa MFA world, where he spent a great deal of time. He hadn't so much freed himself from his upbringing as just choose a different autobiographical slice of his life to write about. That's his choice, but I would've loved more on Alabama the way Faulkner treated MS or Roth treated NJ. Brandon wants me to write a tennis novel, so I think both of us want more from the other, which is healthy.