The Rake Magazine

Year: 2005

  • Vocabulary–The Key to Expression! (And Eternal Dorkitude)

    God bless good spellers. We’ve been watching the national spelling bee with some interest, and we’re proud of our two local finalists. But it should be no surprise that we’re somehow able to find something mean to say about it.

    Like energy drinks, bike riding, and deep-dish pizza, spelling bees have gone extreme. Just read through the inevitable profiles of the kids who make it to the final rounds today and tomorrow. Most of them are obsessive-compulsive savants who spend most of their free time reading Websters Unabridged. True, the better competitors learn much about linguistic structures and etymology (the better to guess at the spellings of words they have never seen before) and these are noble pursuits. But there is no way around the simple truth that a great speller today is a memorizer of words that never get used except in spelling bees. (Today’s gems, typical obscurities from the sciences: “Narcohypnia,” numbness from walking; and “selenography,” study of the surface of the moon.) Many great spellers grow up to wear bow ties, and that cannot be a good thing.

    Also, this: Each day we receive two or three “words of the day” from reputable sources like Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com. We used to try to make a special effort to use these words at some point during the day, but we found the exercise a real strain of credibility.

    It would be interesting to interview whoever is responsible for selecting a word of the day. There seems to be a subtle art to it. The perfect word of the day often has a subtle connection to current events (say “casus belli” comes up the day we invade Iran, or “rough trade” arrives in our in-box the day we hear that our president has a thing for gay, bald male escorts), and it is a word that you think you’ve heard before, but didn’t have enough confidence in your understanding of to actually pronounce it yourself.

    And we have to say we can totally detect when the editors at these services are coasting–when they give lame, elliptical synonyms that are not in common usage because they sound too much like another, better word that means exactly the same thing. (Say, “pliant” as opposed to “pliable,” or “sough” rather than “sigh.”) These words are for the spelling bees and the wearers of bow-ties, and we generally have no truck with them.

  • Break In The Action

    I’m headed out of town for a brief spell. I’ll be back early next week.

    This seems as good a time as any for a breather, since we seem to be basically recycling plotlines the last several days.

    I’ll leave you with some fine links to explore (and I’d encourage you to investigate the links over there to the left as well):

    Strange Baseball Injuries

    Nineteenth-Century Base Ball Pictures on the World Wide Web

    SABR’s Triple Plays Site

    Peter Schilling’s excellent round-up of new baseball books at Mudville Magazine

  • Hiatus

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    I’m headed out to Montana to read and take some pictures.

    Here are the CDs that travel with me wherever I go, whenever I go someplace that qualifies as somewhere else:

    Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music

    Creedence Clearwater Revival, Willie and the Poor Boys

    Minutemen, Double Nickels On The Dime

    Louis Armstong, The Hot Fives

    Kinks, Something Else

    Van Morrison, Astral Weeks

    Rolling Stones, Exile On Main Street

    Bob Dylan, Basement Tapes

    Fela, The Best of Fela Kuti

    Yo La Tengo, Fakebook and Painful

    Tom Waits, Rain Dogs and Mule Variations

    Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo

    Pogues, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash

    My Bloody Valentine, Loveless

    Goodbye Babylon

    The Clean, Compilation

    Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs

    Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band

    Velvet Underground, Loaded

    Big Star, Third

    Neil Young, Decade

    Rochereau and Franco, Omana Wapi

    LaBradford, Mi Media Naranja

    Ramones, All the Stuff

    Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um

    James Brown, Live at the Apollo

    Replacements, Pleased to Meet Me and Let it Be

    Johnny Cash, Love, God and Murder

    Clash, London Calling

    Count Basie, Atomic Basie

    Wire, Pink Flag

    Husker Du, New Day Rising

    Stevie Wonder, Talking Book

    Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures From the Vaults, Volume One

    Chuck Berry, The Great Twenty-Eight

    Tommy Keane, Based on Happy Times

    Steve Earle, I’m Alright and Transcendental Blues

    Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation

    Lounge Lizards, Voice of Chunk

    Elmore James, King of the Slide Guitar

    Rod Stewart, Every Picture Tells a Story

    Def Jam Music Group, 10th Year Anniversary

    East River Pipe, The Gasoline Age

    Red House Painters, Ocean Beach

    King Sunny Ade, The Best of the Classic Years

    Culture, Two Sevens Clash

    X, More Fun in the New World

    The Handsome Family, Twilight

    Nick Drake, Way to Blue

    Mekons, Rock ‘n’ Roll

    Nick Lowe, Party of One

    NRBQ, At Yankee Stadium

    Hank Williams, Forty Greatest Hits

    Harry Nilsson, Personal Best

    Ornette Coleman, Dancing In Your Head

    Pretenders, Singles

    Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, L.A.M.F.

    PJ Harvey, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea

    The Goldwax Story, Volume One

    Elvis Costello, Get Happy

    Guided By Voices, Do the Collapse

    Warren Zevon, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

    Charley Patton, Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues

    Guitar Paradise of East Africa

    Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis

    Louvin Brothers, When I Stop Dreaming

    Skip James, The Complete Early Recordings

    Basehead, Play With Toys

    Alejandro Escovedo, Gravity

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    In the recurring dream

    my mother stands

    in her bridal gown

    under the burning lilac,

    with Bernard Shaw and Bertie

    Russell kissing her hands;

    the house behind her is in ruins;

    she is wearing an owl’s face

    and makes barking noises.

    Her minatory finger points.

    I pass through the cardboard doorway

    askew in the field

    and peer down a well

    where an albino walrus huffs.

    He has the gentlest eyes.

    If the dirt keeps sifting in,

    staining the water yellow,

    why should I be blamed?

    Never try to explain.

    That single Model A

    sputtering up the grade

    unfurled a highway behind

    where the tanks maneuver,

    revolving their turrets.

    In a murderous time

    the heart breaks and breaks

    and lives by breaking.

    It is necessary to go

    through dark and deeper dark

    and not to turn.

    I am looking for the trail.

    Where is my testing-tree?

    Give me back my stones!

    –Stanley Kunitz, from The Testing-Tree

  • Preaching to the Choir

    Apropos of last week’s post on this month’s cover story, we received a thoughtful comment from Christian Dude. He took issue with our casting Sen. Dean Johnson as a possible candidate to head up a putative “Christian Left.” He wanted to hear more about what Sen. Johnson has to say about the role of religion in politics. Fair enough, we thought. Johnson more or less dismissed the question, saying there is no serious role for instituional religion in politics.

    Here is why: The Christian Left cannot in good conscience legislate morality from any specific denominational or confessional position. It is an earmark of the Left–whether it is Christian, Jewish, secular, or Satan-worshipping–that diversity is a positive value, and specific creeds should hold no sway in the body politic.

    True, it may be possible to compile a sort of universal code of conduct that transcends religious differences, but has civic/spiritual overtones. In fact, that’s been done–it’s commonly known as the US Constittion, the Bill of Rights, and the Criminal Code. This is what scholars have long identified as the “civil religion” of the US. Modern efforts to rewrite any facet of these documents along denominational lines is to subvert them in the most fundamental way. And let’s make no mistake here: The Christian Right, as we have called it, operates like an exclusive, self-righteous, lockstep political entity–essentially a denomination that has become active where it is not all that welcome. (It is not welcome for the simple reason that most Americans are not fanatically self-righteous moral prigs who see the world only through the eyes of a conservative evangelist.) The Christian Right perceives itself as judge, jury, and legislature, and it does not tolerate dissent on the most obvious, discrete political issues like abortion and taxes. It sees “diversity,” especially of political opinion and identity, as widespread error, and it sees itself as victimized by this secular affliction. Even though there are significant differences in theologies on the right, these people do not waste much time on rational colloquy, and typically cut straight to the chase of self-service through the bizarre idolization of Jesus Christ as the personal patron saint of conspicuous consumerism. (As a wise man recently said to us, “Who do you think Jesus would associate with if he came back today?”)

    As a slightly related aside, we strongly recommend last week’s article in the New Yorker about “intelligent design,” the beguiling pseudo-scientific effort to debunk Darwinism. It speaks to the deep neurosis so many Christians have that reality is not sufficient unto itself, that despite all overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there is a God the takes a personal interest in my affairs, the state of my soul, and the intricate mechanism of all life. That life itself is not sufficiently miraculous without some Prime Mover in a toga somewhere beyond the stars. More to the point, these people are pushing intelligent design not to do what science normally does–limn the working laws of physical nature without respect to the existence of an unseen deity–but to support a political and social agenda. As writer H. Allen Orr so eloquently points out, intelligent design has never actually succeeded in any meaningful way in the laboratory, which is generally where legitimate science is practiced under the arcane conceits of experimentation, repetition, and peer review.

    On a recent episode of TV’s best series, House, the good doctor suffered through a near-death experience himself. He saw the white light, he saw the future. His colleagues were galled that Dr. House would dismiss these visions as “physical, chemical reactions” occuring in a decommissioned brain. “That’s it? Is that all there is? Why?” they demanded to know. Dr. House had the best, most succint answer we have ever heard, in all our years of dabbling in theology, religion, politics, and culture. He said, “Because I prefer to believe that this [life] is not a test.”

  • Remedial Education

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  • With Apologies To Jumbo, The Day Off Was Sort Of Nice

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    I don’t know about you, but I spent the day not watching baseball. I did tune in briefly to the end of the White Sox game tonight, but what I saw was not encouraging. I saw a tough and resiliant team which is, at least at the moment, showing why it’s the best –and certainly the most improved– club in the Central.

    The Sox comeback against Anaheim was a classic small-ball rally, and if you’re not already sick of hearing about small ball in connection with the Central, I’m pretty sure you will be –we all will be– before everything’s said and done. The difference between the White Sox and Twins right now is that the strategy involved represents a deliberate organizational approach on Chicago’s part.

    Trailing the Angels 4-3 in the ninth (after Ozzie Guillen left Mark Buehrle out there in the top of the inning to cough up a 3-2 lead –with an assist from Damaso Marte), pinch hitter Willie Harris walked and swiped second. Joe Crede followed with another walk, and Scott Podsednik sacrificed the runners. Carl Everett, pinch hitting for Tadahito Iguchi, then struck out against Scott Shields.

    Yet with two outs, Timo Perez, who replaced Frank Thomas at DH after Thomas left the game in the seventh with a hip flexor, lined a two-run single to left for the game winner. Thomas, of course, was in the line-up for the first time since last July.

    We’ve seen the Twins stage comebacks like this occasionally this year, but after managing just eight hits over the last two games in Toronto, it’s becoming apparent that right now they’re a small-ball team –and not a very good one– out of necessity rather than design. More than half of their line-up is not truly capable of executing fundamentally on a day-to-day basis, but they’ve also so far proved incapable of tossing up crooked numbers with any regularity.

    If the 2005 Twins are going to be anything more than a splendid pitching staff and an underperforming offense, they’re going to need the guys in the middle of the order to start delivering some extra base hits and hitting some home runs. If it comes down to scrambling for runs and playing station-to-station baseball, the White Sox –who do also have some guys who can hit the long ball with consistency– will run away with the Central. All those one-run games they’ve won are something of an oddity, but they’re also a sign that they’re doing some things right.

  • Not Sleeping

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    He would get up from his bed each morning in the long hours after midnight, confused, sour with his inability to sleep, insomnia the curse of his life, stretching all the way back to when he was a boy and was still excited to imagine all the wonders and revelations he might miss every night when he closed his eyes. It never once occurred to him then that sleep might offer wonders of its own.

    Into his middle years he had no recollection of ever having dreamed. A dream to him was a metaphor for the things people wished for in vain.

    He was no longer quite so excited to be up and wandering the dark rooms of his house at three a.m. The wee hours had long since lost whatever charms they might once have offered. Every one of his sleepless nights would follow him into the day like an abusive shadow. He was unfit for anything that the rest of the world might have considered a normal life. That sort of thing –and he could no longer even imagine what ‘that sort of thing’ might entail– was apparently no longer in the cards. He was stuck with Mahler and Schubert and Ben Webster and Schopenhauer and three a.m. Not to mention mornings of blind, stupored misery hunched over the daily newspaper and pouring caffeine down his throat, desperately trying to goad his blood, head, and heart into some passable impersonation of a conscious and functioning human being.

    He’d begun to notice a sadness in himself that he was certain hadn’t been there before, this dull, muffled ache that started just behind his eyes and gradually worked its way down into his legs. This represented a fundamental change in the character of his exhaustion. For most of his life his sleeplessness, as well as its hangover effects, had been marked by a confused, agitated buzz, a sort of hyper-consciousness. His body would be worn out, he would feel sluggish and disoriented, but his brain would continue to stir up its usual ceaseless production of static and sparks. It was like being sleepless and exhausted in a great, teeming city, with stimulus above and around him on all sides.

    In his mid-thirties things started to change. He supposed that years of nocturnal living and around-the-clock consciousness of one sort or another had done serious damage to his mind. The nights would now pass in a muddled crawl. The analogy was no longer a teeming city, but rather a long, dark road in the country, the city and the old amusements of his insomnia reduced to a distant, impressionistic spectacle on the far horizon. The carnival had gone black, and he was left with the more abstract entertainments of the planetarium, the dark astral clutter of his skull.

  • Uncle Jumbo's Playground

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    –Illustration by James Dankert

    It’s my older brother Rich’s 25th wedding anniversary this weekend, and his wife’s family is throwing a big party for the special occasion. There are almost certainly no two words in tandem that I hate more than “special occasion.”

    My brother and his wife may be the only couple on the planet that had a chow mein buffet at their wedding reception, which was, at least from a purely personal standpoint, a recipe for disaster. Thanks to the wonders of videotape I’ll have to relive that night for the rest of my life. That tape gets dragged out at every family gathering, and has been widely and irresponsibly pirated and disseminated. I don’t doubt you could find a copy on eBay right this moment. What you’d see –or what you may already have seen– if you got your hands on that humiliating document is yours truly, shirtless and listing noticeably, playing a tambourine with the world’s worst cover band as it sleepwalks through songs by such execrable outfits as the Little River Band and Pablo Cruise. A little later on in the tape you’ll see me –inexplicably wearing a sombrero– passed out with my face in a plate of chow mein.

    I’m sure I’ll get another chance to revisit that otherwise wholly lost night this weekend, provided the Celica can make the trip to Blooming Void without incident, and I’m almost hoping it can’t. I’m sure I’ll also have to accompany my mother to the cemetery to visit the old man’s grave. We’ll have the same argument we have every time we go out there, and my mother will muster an increasingly unconvincing imitation of bereavement. The source of our disagreement is my father’s tombstone, on which my mother had had inscribed beneath his name the word “Papa,” a term that was, I’m absolutely certain, never once uttered in connection with my old man.

    I won’t be able to resist pointing out to my mother, as I’ve been pointing out to her for eleven years, “Nobody called him Papa.”

    “Everybody called him Papa,” she’ll say, and then we’ll argue a bit about it, and then she’ll have her breakdown. It never fails, and at this point I have to imagine that the old man would get a pretty good kick out of the whole scene.

    I’m also pretty sure –weather permitting– that I’ll get a chance to thrash my nephews in Whiffleball, which is something that never fails to give me enjoyment. Even when they were so little they could barely swing the damn bat I never took mercy on them, and by now they’re so scarred by the ass-whippings I’ve administered over the years that my domination is almost purely psychological. Almost. Even if they were chippy, strapping lads I’d still kick their asses. I am unquestionably one of the world’s greatest Whiffleball players.

    I should be able to catch at least parts of the next couple Twins games on the radio, and I’ll probably get a little time to camp out on my mother’s couch to take in some of the TV broadcasts. It’s an absolute disgrace that there’s no game on Memorial Day, of course. What the hell’s up with that nonsense? I’ll be back home by Monday, and what am I supposed to do with a day off? Sit around my apartment listening to John Philip Sousa records and doing crossword puzzles? I’ll be good and damned if I know, to be perfectly honest with you. I’m afraid things could get very messy.

    I’m sure there are plenty of yahoos who are giddy as school girls about tonight’s 7-2 win in Toronto (not to mention Chicago’s 6-2 loss to Texas). Good for them.

    Sure, it’s nice to have shaved a couple games off Chicago’s lead in the last week, but I can’t get too excited about a victory in which the Twins rapped sixteen hits and stranded eleven runners. I also don’t much like to see the leadoff hitter tied for the club lead in home runs, and leading the team in total bases. I will say this: if it wasn’t for Stewart and the bench scrubs on this team right now, the Twins would be in deep shit.

    And speaking of bench scrubs, did anyone else hear Dan Gladden say tonight that Nick Punto was going to be “a force on this team for years to come”?

    A force? For years to come? Nick Punto? I don’t know, maybe we’re already in deep shit.

  • Every Day, In Every Way, I'm Getting Better And Better

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    Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has, nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some bright morning to find it gone, clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of life gone with it.

    —Charles Pierce, Selected Works

    It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light, and the smell of an unrecognized plant brings back to some men a sense of childhood, and of future hope; and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.

    –Graham Greene, The Honorary Counsul

    That’s bullshit, and you know it’s bullshit. I put that shovel next to the porch and now it’s gone. I made a special trip to Home Depot to buy that damn shovel, and I think you can well imagine how difficult such an excursion was for me. I hate the very thought of places filled to the rafters with tools and all sorts of other inexplicable nonsense that makes me feel utterly useless as a man.

    I can’t dig a hole if I don’t have a shovel. And if I don’t dig a hole I have no place to put the words. If I don’t have a hole in which to bury the words I have no reason in the world to produce the words, and so the words have no purpose and just pile up around me until I can’t even get out of bed in the morning.

    Jesus, this place is murky. I feel like I’m living in an aquarium, and not a large one, either. No, it’s more like I’m living in a filthy aquarium in a Chinese restaurant, treading water while slimy eels swim lazy laps around me.

    I’m not shitting you, people, maybe you live here, maybe you know what I’m talking about: All it ever does is rain. There’s a moment in every day when I feel like I’m going to fall right off the planet and into the darkness beyond the clouds, where the stars are like little farmhouses strung out across the great, empty country of the sky.

  • Objects In The Rearview Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

    The bad news is that the Twins aren’t scoring many runs. The good news is that neither are the White Sox. As I mentioned the other day, the Central race looks increasingly like it’s going to come down to which team’s pitching can carry it the longest.

    There is, of course, always the possibility that the offense that everyone –myself included– thought was going to be much improved this year will finally get rolling, but after three seasons (and two months) of this frustrating one-step-forward, two-steps-back routine for virtually every hitter in the Minnesota line-up, I’m not going to hold my breath.

    Anybody out there still remember Richard Stanley Such, Tom Kelly’s erstwhile valet/pitching coach? Remember how Twins pitchers during Such’s looooong tenure in Minnesota never seemed to a) develop, or b) be able to sustain any consistency?

    I used to waste a lot of time and energy bitching about Dick Such, and puzzling over Kelly’s maddening loyalty to the man. I remember one ex-Twin telling me how Such’s trips to the mound used to consist of such helpful advice as, “Throw strikes. You’re pissing off the manager.”

    Such had his defenders, although they were fewer as time went on. Their main argument was generally, “He can’t throw the ball for these guys.” One look at the man’s career numbers as a Major League pitcher made that point all too clear.

    Since Rick Anderson has been installed as Such’s replacement, the Twins have demonstrated remarkable pitching improvement almost across the board. Maybe, of course, that has a lot to do with the fact that the organization is simply producing better pitchers for Anderson to work with. Or, just possibly, perhaps Anderson really does know what he’s doing. The reality is probably a combination of those two factors.

    I guess I’m just wondering if maybe right now we might be looking at some correlation between the dark ages when Minnesota’s pitching routinely posted team ERAs that were among the worst in the league, and the team’s current extended offensive malaise.

    Like I said, I’m just wondering. That’s all.