Spring!

Poetry Foundation

Baseball in Literature and Culture

Heading soon to another annual "Baseball in Literature and Culture" conference in Ottawa, KS and KC, MO - this will be my fourth trip to Kansas (after the conference migrated from our school) and my eleventh consecutive presentation. Time does go by. Deja vu, all over again.

This time the schedule coincides with the opening of the MLB season and the Royals will be home, so I'll probably be freezing my asterisk on the 28th at the K - but, that's one more item to strike from the Bucket List.

My presentation this time asks "Who Cares?" Who cares about games, and who should, especially in troubled times like these? I've been working out my own answer in dialogue with Roger Angell (whose answer is that we should care about games for the same reason we should care about anything, and that caring about games makes us better at caring period) and three other authors, the last of whom will be in attendance in Ottawa.

  

I love Alva Noe's Kierkegaard epigraph: "The goal is to arrive at immediacy after reflection."

But, a propos his title I also love Carlo Revelli's reality check: "The only truly infinite thing is our ignorance." --Reality Is Not What It Used To Be

Who cares from Osopher

Black Klansman

Saw it last night. Rare combination of funny (the Alec Baldwin open, for instance) and deadly serious (the Charlottesville coda). Haven't seen "Green Book" yet but I understand why Spike Lee was angry to be shut out again by an inverted "Driving Miss Daisy".

Earthrise

On the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission, director Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee (@evaughanlee) released "Earthrise". This documentary tells the story of this special launch solely through the experience of the astronauts onboard. #overview #earthrise https://t.co/H6Bx9o6GbP pic.twitter.com/6jFMqnGav2

— The Long Now Foundation (@longnow) March 5, 2019

Unsheltered

I don't care what Dwight Garner says, I find Barbara Kingsolver's Unsheltered a delight. Meg Wolitzer gets it right, though,

Kingsolver has long written socially, politically and environmentally alert novels that engage with the wider world and its complications and vulnerabilities, all the while rendering the specific, smaller worlds of her characters humane and resonant. In “Unsheltered,” she has given us another densely packed and intricately imagined book. Variations on the word “shelter” appear in these pages repeatedly, as the novel considers what it means to be taken care of (or not), as well as what it means to be kept, or to willingly keep oneself, from the cold blast of the truth...

Kingsolver explores how anyone might possibly find a safe place in this world that we keep befouling through ignorance, greed or incompetence... Kingsolver’s dual narrative works beautifully here. By giving us a family and a world teetering on the brink in 2016, and conveying a different but connected type of 19th-century teetering, Kingsolver eventually creates a sense not so much that history repeats itself, but that as humans we’re inevitably connected through the possibility of collapse, whether it’s the collapse of our houses, our bodies, logic, the social order or earth itself.

I was not surprised to read in the Acknowledgements at the end that Kingsolver's guiding spirits in this novel happen to have included three "illuminating" books I've used in courses in the past: This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein, The Bridge at the Edge of the World, by James Gustave Speth, and The Book That Changed America, by Randall Fuller. And, "George Eliot kept nineteenth-century voices in my ear."

And there's plenty of wry insight into our moment in history. "When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order"... “Zeke embodied the contradiction of his generation: jaded about the fate of the world, idealistic about personal prospects”... "Everybody’s getting weather that never happened before. Melting permafrost means we’ve got like, a minute to turn this mess around, or else it’s going to stop us”... "Friends will probably count more than money, because wanting too much stuff is going to be toxic.”

Plus, this icing on the cake: an empathetic nod to we who toil in academia's public sector. “Teaching struck Willa as a saintly calling, especially given the pay. But even saints shouldn't be stuck with intro classes forever.”

I'm now motivated, at last, to discover My Antonia.