Jamie Malanowski's Blog, page 9

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, YOUR 1963 BALTIMORE ORIOLES!

Fifty years ago, on September 8, 1963, the Baltimore Orioles held a Fan Camera Day promotion. Prior to the game, fans were allowed to come down to the infield railing. Players would come out, like horses passing in a paddock, and fans would be allowed to take photos. My Dad, not really a camera buff, nonetheless jumped at the chance, and here are the results. Above, John `Boog” Powell, the team’s young slugging star. Below: Hall of Famers Luis Aparicio, right in his prime, and Robin Roberts, getting by on guile. Powell, supposedly so big, would seem small next to Big Papi and other sluggers. (How did Dad miss Brooks Robinson, the team’s star?)





Above, reliable relive Dick Hall, who once retired 27 batters without yielding a hit, prompting one sportswriter to campaign for crediting Hall with a no-hitter; and hard-charging outfielder Russ Snyder, both of whom made big contributions to the 1966 team that won the World Series; below, utility iielder Bob Saverine, who once set a league record by making 12 outs in a doubleheader; and outfielder Sam Bowens, or Fred Valentine, or most likely Al Smith, because his nickname was–no kidding–“Fuzzy.”



Below, manager Billy Hitchcock, who guided the team to an 86-76 record, good enough for fourth place in the American League 18.5 games behind the Yankees. Hitchcock was replaced by Hank Bauer, who eventually led the O’s to a World Championship in 1966. At right, some linguine-armed right-hander whose name has been lost to history.

MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH

On Thursday night, we were one small strike away from having viewed a future Yankees Classic. A Magical Mystery Tour of a six-run seventh brought the Yankees all the way back from a dispiriting 7-2 deficit to the loathsome Red Sox, and suddenly we were up 8-7 with Robertson ready to pitch the eighth and Rivera to pitch the ninth, and thus redeem himself from blowing the save in July that Molly had brought me to. Well, just as Ichico, Wells, Granderson, Gardner, Jeter and Overbay had done, Robertson got the Sox out in the eighth. When Mo retired the first two outs in the ninth, one of whom was the fierce David Ortiz, we began to yelp and cheer, but then the Sox had a single, a stolen base, an error, and a broken bat single, and suddenly the Great Rivera had blown another save, and the roaring ninth inning stadium–the experience for which I had paid my money–fell into embarrassed silence. Nothing to say, other than it was an exciting game. But who wants to see an exciting game? I wanted to see a win! I wanted to exit Yankee Stadium with a victorious spring in my step, singing `New York, New York.’ Oh well, another day. It was great to hang with my old Spy buddy George Kalogerakis, though. (Pictures: Top, Rivera, backed by Rodriquez and Jeter, delivers; Middle, me and George; Bottom, Rivera pitches to Big Papi.)

YANKS DISAPPOINT

Ginny and I spent a humid day ay Yankee Stadium watching the Yanks patiently scrimp together a 3-0 lead, which they prodigally squandered by allowing the Orioles a seven-run seventh. If they miss the playoffs by one game, this will be one of the ones they will point to. I believe this is the first baseball game that Ginny and I have attended alone since the 1980s. (Top to bottom: Robinson Cano; Alfonso Soriano; Alex Rodriguez; Andy Pettitte; and Derek Jeter.)

AUGUST RAMBLE

Dave Jensen and I went to the Midnight Ramble on Saturday, and we had a great time. It was a slightly different show, at least for us. The opening act was Steve Forbert, who was amiable and emotive and entertaining. Then the Midnight Ramble Band came on and did maybe 8 or 10 songs–“This Wheel’s On Fire,” “The Shape I’m In,” “Atlantic City,” “Good news,” “Tango of Love,” “Mystery Train,” “Dirt Farmer,” “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning” (Teresa Williams!) maybe a couple more, crowd-pleasers every one. They were then joined by Stax recording legend William Bell, a smooth soul crooner of the old school, who did about a dozen numbers, possibly best known of which was “You Don’t Miss You’re Water,” and “Born Under a Bad Sign,” which was very exciting as he gave each band ember about 30 seconds to solo. Electrifying!

STILL MISTRESS OF HER DOMAIN

Vicki rousted a flock of turkeys at the Edith Macy Center this morning, showing those gobblers who is still the boss. Considerably blinder and deafer and stiffer and smellier, Vicki soldiers on. We are happy she prevails.

ELMORE LEONARD’S TIPS FOR WRITERS

Elmore Leonard, the great novelist, died on Tuesday at 87. Too often pigeon-holed as a crime genre specialist, Leonard was a brilliant stylist and a peerless entertainer. Todayt the critic Janet Maslin noted that while Leonard ‘s novels were frequently adapted for the screen, none of the movies were better than the original novel. I would say that is mostly true, except for Out of Sight and possibly Hombre. In 2001, he published his his Ten Rules for Writing in The New York Times. Writers, ignore them at your peril.

These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.



They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s ”Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ”I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”



3. Never use a verb other than ”said” to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ”she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ”said” . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ”full of rape and adverbs.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.



6. Never use the words ”suddenly” or ”all hell broke loose.”



This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ”suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ”Close Range.”



8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.



Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s ”Hills Like White Elephants” what do the ”American and the girl with him” look like? ”She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.



9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.



And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character — the one whose view best brings the scene to life — I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in ”Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ”Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, ”Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled ”Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter ”Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ”Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”

”Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

“THESE ARE UNIQUE TIMES”

So said Yankee GM Brian Cashman, a careful man so practiced in studied speech that this must rank as a wild exclamation. The Yankees, Major League Baseball, and the team’s one-time superstar multimillionaire third baseman Alex Rodriquez have found themselves embroiled in a controversy so complex that it is difficult to find someone to root for.

To begin, Rodriguez has been one of the greatest players of his generation, a prodigious hitter and splendid fielder who has been a All Star twelve times and won three Most Valuable Player awards. He is, however, 38 years old, has suffered debilitating hip injuries, and after this season will still have four years left on a contract which will earn him about $100 million. This is a paltry sum for abig boppin’ All-Star, but it’s a crippling waste of money for a guy on the DL.

A-Rod, moreover, is a cheater. In February 2009, surrounded by supportive Yankee teammates, A-Rod admitted that he used steroids in 2001 and 2003, while a member of the Texas Rangers. This always had the odor of untruth about it, it being one of those `But it was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead’ admissions where the crime that is being acknowledged happened so long ago and so far away and on top of that, so far outside the sanctity of the Yankee uniform, that we should all forget about it. And most of us—especially when he slugged his way through the 2009 post-season—did just that.

But then there were stories about Alex going to Berlin to get treatment for his hip. And then visiting a clinic that’s located in a strip mall in Florida. So when baseball investigated and hit A-Rod with a 211 game suspension last month, most people thought that he must have done something to deserve it—even though Rodriguez never failed a test, which happen to yield false positives anyway.

The Yankees were probably happy. A-Rod has been a pain-in-the-ass lightning rod during his entire tenure, and a 211 game suspension saves the Yankees maybe $36 million for a guy who wasn’t having an off year, who wasn’t over the hill, but who was contributing nothing.

But A-Rod doesn’t think he deserves a 211 game suspension; he says he deserves no suspension at all, and has appealed MLB’s decision. And indeed, MLB’s decision does seem awfully arbitrary. Other players who’ve been suspended for using PEDs have been hit with far shorter suspensions, even ones who, like A-Rod, have been accused of trying to undermine or elude MLB’s investigations. Even before the suspension was announced, baseball could be observed mulling the length of sentence, as though they were trying to triangulate a number that was strict, fair, and has good PR spin. To no one’s surprise, A-Rod has appealed the verdict.

And why not? The number seems arbitrary. The proof has not been disclosed. The penalty will cost him millions, and might, moreover, be an effective lifetime ban, since there is no telling how well he might perform when he comes back in 2014, just short of 40 years old. His goals of reaching of reaching 700 homers (he now has 649), 2000 RBIs (1956) and 3000 hits (2917), which once seemed automatic, not seem very distant, and fading.

A-Rod has not only appealed; he’s come out punching, accusing the Yankee organization of mistreating his injuries and colluding with MLB to ban him so that the Yanks can save money. These allegations fall between “Unlikely’’ and “Who knows?’’, but the real promise is that during the course of such a lawsuit, so much dirty linen will be aired that no one will emerge clean. All the more reason for the arbitrator, whenever he finally hears the case, to issue a Solomonic ruling that still punishes Rodriguez, but shortens his stretch enough that he concludes that his best interests lie in just doing the time. Eighty games? A hundred?

Meanwhile, he continues to play, and productively. After 14 games, he is hitting .296, with 2 homers and 6 RBIs , a pace that would have given him 23 homers and 69 RBIs over a full season (which he will never again play.) His return to the line-up has been cheered by fans, and his presence, along with contributions from the returning Eduardo Nunez and Curtis Granderson and new arrivals like Alfonso Soriano, has brought the Yanks back into the playoff chase. Last Sunday, Red Sox pitcher Ryan Dempster deliberately hit Rodriguez with a pitch, his way of expressing his view that A-Rod shouldn’t be playing. Dempster was suspended five games and fined $2500; as one Boston Globe writer put it, it was MLB’s way of winking and shaking his hand. Yankee manager Joe Girardi was fines twice that sum for protesting.

Who knows? Dempster’s action seems to have invigorated the Yanks, who won the game behind an A-Rod performance where he homered and went 2 for 4, with 2 ribbies and 2 runs scored. Who knows? By the time this is over, A-Rod may lead a team he is suing all the way to a World Series title, and receive a World Series MVP award from a commissioner who has tried to end his career. After which time, he may begin a lengthy suspension. Unique times, indeed.

JOHN HOLLANDER, RIP

The poet John Hollander has died at 83. He wrote one of my favorite poems, Hobbes, 1651:

When I returned at last from Paris hoofbeats pounded

Over the harsh and relenting road;

It was cold, the snow high; I was old, and the winter

Sharp, and the dead mid-century sped by

In ominous, blurred streaks as, brutish, the wind moaned

Among black branches. I rode through a kind

Of graceless winter nature, bled of what looked like life.

My vexing horse threw me. If it was not safe

In England yet, or ever, that nowhere beneath the gray

Sky would be much safer seemed very plain.

Kind of wonderful to write a poem about one of founders of modern political philosophy. In 1651, Hobbes was returning to England from exile in Paris, and publishing his great work The Leviathan. So brilliant of Hollander to write about the act of returning, and the atmosphere of danger and portent which is at the hear of The Leviathan, rather than write about the work itself.

THE WORST PLATFORM EVER

When I worked at Playboy a few years ago, some of the fellows were fond of a saying: “Don’t mess with another man’s blow job.” Crude, blunt, and yet eloquent, the saying had a lot of applications. Don’t criticize another man’s girlfriend (boyfriend.) Don’t come on to another man’s girlfriend (boyfriend.) Don’t interfere with his gig. And most generally, mind your own business.

It is good, sound advice.

Astonishingly, Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican Lt. Governor of Virginia who is running for governor, has proposed, as part of his platform, to mess with the blow job of everyone in the state. Specifically, he has proposed outlawing oral and anal sex, even among consenting adults. He is doing this despite figures from the Centers for Disease Control that show that 82 percent of me and 80 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 44 admit to having had oral sex, and that the Kinsey Institute has studies showing that nearly everyone who practices vaginal intercourse also engages in oral sex. It is one of those things, it seems, that people like to do.. It is also one of those things, like marching on a picket line or voting one you turn 18, that the Supreme Court has actually said states can’t stop you from doing. Cuccinelli says he is proposig this, not because he is anti-sex, but because it is the only effective way to stop child molestation, even though Virginia has strong laws on the books against rape. Statutory rape, and child molestation. Cuccinelli has assured Virginians that once this law is passed, it will never be used against ordinary people engaged in sexual fun. He is a moron to think that anyone will believe him. He is a moron to think that this is any way good government. He should be chased from one end of the state to the other, followed by people chanting `Don’t mess with another man’s blow job.’’

It’s a crude, blunt phrase, but maybe that’s what’s necessary to get him to pay attention.

APPALACHIAN SUMMER: HARPER’S FERRY, WVA, AUGUST 4th

Beautiful Harper’s Ferry, sitting at he confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers at the bottom of the steep trio of Loudon, Bolivar and Maryland Heights, once had one of only two federal arsenals in the United States, which is why John Brown decided to begin his slave uprising there. Less than two years later, his action spawned secession and the Civil War. Above, the Conjoined Potomac. Immediately below left, a marker designating where Brown made his stand; right, in Harper’s Ferry less than ten minutes, and already they’ve dedicated a marker to her!



Immediately below: looking up into town; Far below: looking across to Maryland Heights.