The Rake Magazine

Month: March 2005

  • Why Are We Having This Discussion?

    Maybe the team’s brass feels there needs to be some lingering sense of drama in the Twins spring training camp, given how few positions are really up in the air. I don’t know how else to explain why they haven’t just handed the starting shortstop job to Jason Bartlett.

    What exactly is the competition? Slick-fielding free agent acquisition Juan Castro –who is thirty-two years old and a career .226 hitter (with a .269 on base percentage)– has five errors already this spring. Nick Punto, who has hit .237 in just 194 Major League at bats and whose real value (presuming he ever gets healthy) is probably as a utility player, has been a no show so far, and is proving to be as reliable as Tommy “The Trainer’s Table” Herr. I’m not quite sure how a guy who never plays seems to have acquired a reputation as such a hard-nosed player.

    I don’t know diddly about Augie Ojeda, really, but I do like his name. That said, he’s thirty, and an even worse hitter than Castro or Punto (.219 hitter in 178 ML games).

    I realize the Twins have always emphasized defense, and have some concerns about Bartlett in that regard, but, seriously, come on, the guy is twenty-five, knows how to get on base, and has hit pretty much everywhere he’s ever played. Not to mention he tore up the Arizona Fall League, and the scouting reports indicate that his defense isn’t the serious concern it’s being made out to be. He’ll be fine, and the Twins are paying Castro a million dollars a year as insurance and to make the occasional appearance as a late-inning defensive replacement.

    Bartlett’s got nothing more to prove at Rochester, where he hit .331 with a .415 OBP last season. The job should be his, and I have to believe it is.

  • Strunk & White & Read All Over: Angell Edition

    We never got around to mentioning Roger Angell’s nice little remembrance of his step father, E.B. White, of a few weeks ago. It didn’t add a lot to the canon, as far as the personal and professional lives of Andy and Katherine Angell White, other than the lovely image of them working across the hallway from each other—the writer and the editor at their antipodes, which Roger Angell describes in a memorable turn-of-phrase that is certainly worthy of his stepdad:

    “Soon the noises of her typing out another letter to Harold Ross or Gus Lobrano are joined by the slower clatter of his Underwood: a New England light industry is again in full gear, pouring out its high-market daily product, and the labor force, for the moment, seems content. Soon it will be lunchtime.”

    The other interesting aspect of the piece was Roger’s thoughtful meditation on the Whites’ complimentary cases of hypochondria. One of the things we mourned about the only biography that has ever been written about Mrs. White, an above-average personal history by an amateur biographer, was that it dwelled heavily on her later years, and gave the impression that she was constantly afflicted with one dread disease or another—to the exclusion of what a singular role she had in shaping and maintaining the voice of the New Yorker throughout her life. (This topic has been given short shrift in every book ever written about the New Yorker, including Ben Yagoda’s excellent “About Town” and Thomas Kunkel’s “Genius in Disguise.” There are plenty of bread crumbs for the serious historian, though, sprinkled through the published “Letters From the Editor” in which Harold Ross cannot hide the fact that Katherine was his right-hand-woman from almost the beginning.) Roger toys with the idea that the White’s hypochondria was actually an important expression of their dependence and love for one another, and a meaningful development in their identities in later life, not an artifice or an affectation.

    The other thing we noticed: In discussing Andy’s main gift to writing, which was a sacred committment to clarity, Roger slipped a sly inside-joke into his piece:

    “Clarity is the message of “The Elements of Style,” the handbook he based on an early model written by Will Strunk, a professor of his at Cornell, which has helped more than ten million writers—the senior honors candidate, the rewriting lover, the overburdened historian—through the whichy thicket.”

    This was, of course, a gentle slap at Tom Wolfe, the most high-profile case of a well-known writer who has been excommunicated by the New Yorker. The cause? Wolfe’s most famous early magazine story was a 1966 takedown of William Shawn written for Clay Felker at New York magazine. The title of that piece was “Tiny Mummies,” and it poked a great deal of fun—at the apparent exepnse of the truth—at the New Yorker’s intense, well-oiled machine of old-fashioned prose. He lampooned the style as being full of “whichy thickets.”

    Ever since, professional writers have held Wolfe in a kind of state of horror-envy. There is no higher aspiration in the business than being published in the great ship of state once helmed by Ross and Shawn; the converse is that there is no greater transgression than disrespecting it. There is no consolation for permanent exile—such are the contingencies of an icon—and we think we can detect the bitterness in almost everything the dapper southern gentleman writes.

  • Headed toward bankruptcy

    Well, the credit card companies didn’t waste any time. Emboldened by the Senate’s passage of the new bankruptcy bill last week (also known as the “Buy the Government Now and Pay Later” Bill,) my credit card company today sent me “IMPORTANT AMENDMENTS TO YOUR COMMERCIAL CREDIT AGREEMENT.”

    The first amendment is that they can immediately report late payments to the credit bureaus. I take this to mean, “We used to give you a little grace period and try to work things out with you, but now we’ll do our best to start causing you grief right away.”

    The second amendment was even better. The old agreement on foreign currency transactions, for which they could charge you the actual wholesale rate for those currencies (which is what banks, i.e. credit card companies, get it for,) is now out the window. The new agreement is that they can charge you whatever they want to charge as an exchange rate, and then add up to three percent on top of that.

    Just when you thought the credit card issuers couldn’t get any greedier, they fool you again.

  • Poacher & Poached: Self-Congratulation Edition

    There is fire falling from the sky, the timbered ceilings are barely holding, the low-pile carpet is soggy with rising bile, the white boards are weeping away the month’s strategy, the troops are rebelling, the dogs are snarling, the elevator alarms are bawling.

    No, but the new issue of the magazine is due to the printer this week, which means we begin to slough off on this here blog. No time to muck around with the internal politics of the New York Times, no time to argue the finer points of punctuation, no time to gripe about writers and poets who childishly refuse to capitalize their initials—nor to celebrate the brave editors who refuse to comply.

    But we do note with a small fizzy kick of pleasure that CJ, our friend over at the Star Tribune Newspaper of the Twin Cities, seems to believe that she has a copyright on the facts. It would seem that someone over at Page Six clipped a tragi-comic item she penned back in February regarding some charity event or another, about some quaint risposte between vulgar comedian, schoolmarmish grandmother, and the princely sum of $25 thousand.

    We’ve been over this before—one man’s poaching is another man’s public information. We feel your pain, CJ, and wish to take this opportunity merely to suggest that no one is immune from the old Reach Around.

    Now, we know that CJ would never pick up an item from any other gossip columnist, at least without a little credit. She is, after all, the hardest working woman in local print journalism, writing as often as three times per week, in a news-generating community that is an open-pit mine of rich gossip concerning professional athletes and the news readers who dig through their garbage. Also, occasionally, a movie star has a layover out at our International airport.

    So when CJ asks, “Is there no honor among gossip columnists?” we think the answer is pretty obvious, but we’ll have to check first with our sources.

    UPDATE: We have been asked by “Bewildered” to explain how we find time to read CJ during production week. Easy. Our rigorously adhered-to schedule and patented Deluxe Peerless Editorial System allows us to raise our nose from the grindstone at least once a day for a period of up to thirty seconds–precisely the amount of time it takes to read and digest CJ, when necessary.

  • E…T…C…

    big fingers.jpg

    ‘The question at stake,’ said Epictetus, ‘is no common one; it is this: Are we in our senses, or are we not?’

    —The Golden Sayings of Epictetus

    We cannot truly know whether we are not at this moment sitting in a madhouse.

    —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

    There are those to whom one must advise madness.

    —Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks

    But the plausible would never be our medium.

    —Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture

    People –dreamers– look out. Never trust anyone who talks about the real world. Don’t get too close to the edge. I’m warning you: those tennis rackets are dangerous. If you put wheels on your feet you’re just asking for trouble. A mechanical bull will make a broken fool of you. Beware also of overweight white men, going door-to-door, running for things.

    More: don’t lean on the counter. Don’t ask so many damn questions; answers never did a man any good in this world. Don’t stare at the elderly. Avoid malt liquor and anything that tastes too much like melon. Don’t waste your money on cologne or goldfish. Don’t feed the pigeons. Never give candy to strangers. If you see a swell broad on the street, tip your hat. Always remember that librarians put their pants on one leg at a time just like everybody else. Don’t sass your mama. Pat the bunny. Don’t be afraid of the merge. Turn that fucking frown upside down and smile.

    clementine 3.jpg

    To say nothing of the day behind me. Possible, but not likely, not likely at all. Something will sneak down through the clouds, always does. Above me the Attic Moses, beleaguered, rages –poor man never sleeps. I can hear him up there at all hours, moving things around and manufacturing the occasional shit-storm. I always respect his wrath, but I also get tired of walking on eggshells.

    I can change, I swear. Give me just a little more time to familiarize myself with your demands.

    Let’s call a spade a spade. Let’s give this thing one more try. Let’s work together. Let’s get it on. Let’s blow this pop-stand. Let’s get ready to rumble. Let’s roll. Let’s bowl. Let’s rock and roll. Let’s go downtown. Let’s dance. Let’s get high. Let’s party. Let’s get something to eat. Let’s paint the town. Let’s wish upon a star. Let’s go swimming. Let’s get busy. Let’s get to work. Let’s clean up this mess. Let’s take a short break. Let’s just take a good look and see what we have here. Let’s be honest. Let’s be friends. Let’s let bygones be bygones. Let’s not get carried away. Let’s not get into that tonight. Let’s just calm down. Let’s just agree to disagree. Let’s call the whole thing off. Let’s just pretend the whole thing never happened. Let’s not and say we did. Let’s stop this nonsense right now. Let’s get the fuck out of here. Let’s get some shut-eye. Let’s call it a night.

  • God Help Us All

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    I stopped over to visit my old friend Rich last night. Rich is having a bit of a tough time, or so he had told me on the phone.

    I go way back with this guy, and on a certain level I’ve always gotten a kick out of him. That said, he is, like many of my favorite people, something of a menace to society. Once upon a time he was going to be a rock star (you probably never heard of his first band, Shitsicle, or his later band, bumskuller. They didn’t play out much). These days he’s hoping to become a screenwriter. He’s got some good ideas –he’s always had good ideas– but he hasn’t managed to write anything yet, and in the meantime he’s working at Office Max.

    Rich has had many jobs, and I’m confident he will have many more.

    I seldom interfere in the private lives of my friends, but at present Rich is posing something of a dilemma in this regard. He has a child now. I’m not sure exactly how old Cassidy is –I’m not good at that sort of thing– but I think it’s safe to call her a toddler. She isn’t yet capable of speaking anything but gibberish, at any rate, and seems uncommonly filthy even for a toddler.

    Cassidy’s mother and Rich’s girlfriend is a woman named Trina, a woman I think it’s fair to say is sort of stunted and unbalanced, a description, that to be just, could also be applied to Rich. Trina is taking an extended time-out at the moment, apparently. She has been “visiting” her sister in Wisconsin for the last couple weeks, this after she and Rich had fought over her disapproval of his attempts at growing a beard. Her objections, she had allegedly said, were based on the fact that she found the beard “too pubey.”

    Rich was not so much insulted by Trina’s criticism of his facial hair as he was deeply aggrieved by her use of “pubey” as an adjective. Fair enough, it seemed to me.

    Last night when I dropped by Rich was wearing an old Def Leppard tee-shirt and cut-offs, which I’ll admit struck me as a bit odd given that it is still winter in Minnesota. Cassidy had a cold, I was told, so Rich was making Nyquil grasshoppers in the blender and spoon feeding this concoction to his child. He was also trying to teach Cassidy to croak, “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore’” like a parrot. If successful, he announced proudly, these would be his daughter’s first words.

    I knew that the real reason Rich wanted to see me was because he needed money, but I sat fascinated for perhaps an hour while he squawked “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore,’” over and over to Cassidy and she eagerly slurped Nyquil grasshoppers and babbled happily. I could see that Rich was becoming frustrated, and he was also really pounding the grasshoppers.

    In my defense I should note that I did mention to Rich that this particular cold remedy didn’t seem terribly kosher for a child of Cassidy’s age, at which point he changed the subject and asked to borrow $100. I gave him the money, of course, and as I drove home I tried to convince myself that I had done so out of sympathy for the child.

    That, I fully realize and probably don’t need to tell you, was a lie.

  • Umm…Excuse Me?

    I love Baseball Prospectus as much as the next guy, and since Bill James’ regrettable vanishing act it’s probably the single most reliable annual. That said, these guys do occasionally spout some real nonsense. I don’t know, for instance, who wrote this year’s entry for the Twins, but this item on Matthew LeCroy got me laughing pretty hard:

    …He’s a championship-caliber role player, a nifty DH or spot-starter at first against all lefties. If one of the outfielders broke down for a long stretch, it would be nice to see what he could do in an extended trial in a corner, before he gets much older.

    Hello? Are we actually talking about the same Matt LeCroy? The guy I’m thinking of couldn’t beat Herb Carneal from first to third, and is likely to get “an extended trial in a corner” about the time they unveil Tim Laudner’s bust in Cooperstown.

    Of course the Twins do have a shortage of outfielders, now that I think about it.

  • Bush Leaguers in Congress

    Mario Mendoza.jpg
    Good field, no hit. But, he did have to face Steve Carlton

    Every little boy I grew up with wanted to be a Major League baseball player. When you are young, you think you can do anything, and you give no thought to being a teacher, or fireman, or, for god’s sake, a journalist. Nobody I know wanted to be a Congressman, that’s for sure.

    But, there are only 750 Major League ballplayers at any one time. Any good sized town in Florida has more than 750 kids playing Little League each season, so you figure the chances. So a lot of us end up doing those other things, and some, like Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia, end up as Congressional committee chairmen.

    Davis chairs the Government Reform Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, where he has the discretion to order hearings on almost anything he wants…or not.

    This week, his committee will be taking on steroids in baseball. We’re not sure what that has to do with Government Reform, but what the hell. From all reports, Davis is a big baseball fan. We infer that he played as a kid and wanted his time in the big leagues just like the rest of us. But, Davis is now a member of an even more exclusive club (there are only 535 members of Congress–although, if anything is certain these days, it requires no particular talent other than mean spiritedness to get there.)

    So, Davis now gets to call people like Jose Canseco, Sammy Sosa, Jason Giambi and Mark McGwire to do his bidding. (For some odd reason, he gave a free pass to Barry Bonds.) And since everyone over the age of T-ball knows that ball players have been using steroids for the last several years with impunity, Davis has really set himself up to take a really big cut at what amounts to a batting practice fast ball.

    But as anyone who has actually played the game knows, the good hitters can hit the real hard stuff–the 90 plus fastball, the slider and the splitter. That’s what separates real big leaguers from the rest of us.

    Now if there were an equivalent pitch repetoire in Congress, it might include having the Government Reform committee look into intelligence failures regarding Iraq, who leaked the name of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak, or why our government sends prisoners to Syria to be tortured. That would be hitting one out of the park if Davis got to the bottom of some of those messes.

    Unfortunately, none of those matters rated a turn at bat before his committee. We think Davis maybe ought to give Balco a call himself and see if they have any magic creams that would give him some integrity–artificial or otherwise.

    Right now, in that regard, Davis is a bit below the “Mendoza line.”

  • Good Guys Finish Last, But With A Small Bonus and a Trophy

    We’ve never been huge fans of Steve Sack’s work, but that’s probably more to do with his medium than himself. Editorial cartooning is one of those dusty old traditions of publishing that we’re glad to see persist, without feeling terribly interested. Come to think of it, that’s true of newspapers as a whole—glad they’re around, but don’t feel we’re missing much when the subscription lapses. Still, editorial cartooning is one of the few bright spots in a trade that is otherwise in steep decline.

    That explains why we were especially galled by the Pioneer-Press’s decision a couple years ago to drop Kirk Anderson. It seemed to many people to be yet another sign of end times at the dilapidated Knight-Ridder operation across town. Anderson resurfaced at the alt weekly— good for him, and good for them.

    The thing about editorial cartoonists is that they seem to work harder than anyone else at the newspaper. While editors sit in business strategy meetings trying to conform the news to the interests of rich suburban readers, while the columnists sit on their thumbs two days out of every three, Sack publishes a new cartoon virtually each morning. There is no one else we can readily identify at the Strib who churns out this much work—of any quality. You might argue that there is nothing easier than expressing your opinion and getting paid to do it, but you would be wrong. The daily opinion part is itself a challenge, but attempting to be funny at the same time is about the hardest thing you can do in a seated position. Naturally, there are ups and there are downs, and the trick with succeeding in the media business is to get the average quality to the highest possible level and sustain it there for as long as you can.

    For his sustained level of quality, and for his raw output alone, Sack certainly deserves the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award he just received as best editorial cartoonist in the nation—that’s a well-earned ten thousand dollar bonus, in our humble view.

    The main virtue of the editorial cartoon is that it makes optimum use of its medium—in the best cases, it combines opinion, news, humor, and art in an instant visual snapshot that would not work as well in any other context, certainly not in broadcast journalism. At the same time, the editorial cartoon is the archetype for the one bright spot and growth area in the “news” business these days—the Daily Show, the Onion, the blogosphere, and all other iterations of hard news as soft entertainment turned up to eleven. This compares unfavorably with the general drift of newspapering these days, which is trying to make soft news (lifestyle magazine-type content) look and act like hard news, and also have it compete in the attention economy as entertainment—certainly a lost cause. In other words, most newspapers today (indeed, most magazines too) are trying to look and act like TV—while the true heroes such as Sack soldier on in the unglamorous backpages of a hollowed-out advertising vehicle.

  • Swarm or Smarm?

    Too busy to say anything of any substance today, so sounding a little like a broken record, but look here:

    As I’ve mentioned before, there seems to be some panic abroad that the disinformation spread by hardcore partisan bloggers is somehow shaping reality for the nonpartisan centrists who seem to be in hiding. I have always had my doubts—and if I have to cast my lot with anyone, it will be with the optimists and the anthropologists, who tend to see the big picture and the broad view. In other words, it should be reassuring that we live in intensely polarized times where the tyranny of the majority rests on the thinnest margin, and the minority isn’t shy about saying so. (I do worry though about the violence that can be done to the country and its constitution in such a brief burst of pressing a slight advantage.) It should be possible for a slight majority of voters within the next two years to lose the scales from their eyes, and see raw power-grabbing for what it is, and begin the slow process of fixing what’s been done to us. (Didn’t this guy just win a seat and now he’s already looking for a promotion?)

    As for certain silly attempts to continue to “frame” the conversation, I’m with editor Anders Gyllenhaal—bring ’em on. The neo-con blogosphere has already run up against the glass ceiling of credibility. When the choir is already full, and you just keep preaching the same gospel, the only room for movement is back out of the choir, where the rest of us have plenty of doctrinal elbow room.

    Take, for example, this litany of supposed lefty bias exhibited by Dan Rather. It only appears to be evidence of lefty bias if you yourself are biased in the other direction. There are times when the facts militate against a particular political paradigm—but then the right has never shown much respect for or interest in the facts. If you need a measure of hubris, it is when they believe their gotcha moments are self-evident, when they are merely self-defeating, risible indications of the troglodyte’s myopia.