The Rake Magazine

Author: Brad Zellar

  • Is Anybody Alive Out There?

    Is anybody still paying attention?

    Some of us, of course, can’t help ourselves. Some of us actually watched that game tonight.

    And some game, huh? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a game end on a dropped pop-up to the second baseman. That there qualifies as tee-ball heroics.

    Still, the Twins did come back after Nathan blew the save. Michael Cuddyer did hit a home run to tie the game. And Ian Kinsler did drop Jason Bartlett’s pop-up to give Minnesota the win.

    But still, again, what the hell? Why is Ron Gardenhire still handing Juan Rincon the ball in close games? Why doesn’t Justin Morneau hit home runs anymore? What’s wrong with Joe Mauer? How could Johan Santana have lost twelve games? How is it possible that virtually every single key guy from last year –with the exception of Torii Hunter and Joe Nathan– could decline in performance? How is that catching for the Twins has become the baseball version of drumming for Spinal Tap?

    And now Ron Gardenhire is purportedly musing aloud about opening next season with Nick Punto as his everyday second baseman? Great. I’m pretty sure Luis Rivas is out there somewhere and available, and he’s still only 28 years old.

    I really don’t get it. The entire second half –shit, the entire season— has been a series of infuriating streaks: four wins, three losses, five wins, four losses, five losses, three wins, five wins, four losses, six losses, three wins, four losses.

    Yet I just keep watching, because at this time of year it’s hard-wired in me how quickly the darkness begins to descend when that heavy black curtain is finally drawn on the season and winter begins its relentless march. It hurts. It still hurts, every year. It’s a terrible withdrawal, and a brutal disruption of routine at exactly the time of year when a comfortable routine is exactly what I need. So I’ll hold onto that routine as long as possible, and every day I’ll continue to hope that I’ll see something I haven’t seen before.

    At this point I’ll even be plenty happy to see something I have seen before. A well-played game, for instance, or a Justin Morneau home run.

  • Soundtrack For the Ultimate Roadtrip

    Fifty songs for fifty states.

    Not bad, but I’m sure we could swap out better choices for at least half of these.

  • Cue, Once Again, Barber's Adagio for Strings

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    We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels. We shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

    –Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

    It’s all just history now, that still incomprehensible day six years ago, history buried under history, with more awful history heaped on top of it. It gets buried deeper all the time. Rubble and ruin the central metaphor of the years since.

    How, you wonder, could such a day possibly be eclipsed by something so inconsequential as the passing of time? And yet it has been eclipsed, reduced now to token, knee-jerk political justification for virtually any new outrage, and reduced as well to fodder for entertainment –sensationalized films and television movies and books. A real, jarring leviathan of a memory collectively transformed into something sordid, a lurid, almost mythological spectacle from recent history, something that happened to other people and continues to be used to explain away terrible things that continue to be visited upon other other people in elsewheres near and far.

    All over the world the horrors of that day live on in brutal abstract and concrete concussion, a cruel cycle of visitations and revisitations and recrimination. But not, for the most part, here.

    Americans are accomplished at nothing so much as rolling with the punches that are thrown at other people, at slowing down briefly to gawk and tsk-tsk at the wreckage before moving on. We move swiftly out from under things and right back under our own things.

    Other people: the great shadow abstraction and peripheral nag of modern psychology.

    We all, certainly, can find reasons to feel ashamed of ourselves. All sorts of reasons. There is really no end to our shame, and no end in sight.

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  • Another Summer, Gone Into The Gloaming

    How was your lovely Labor Day weekend?

    Mine? Horseshit, but thanks for asking.

    Though it pains me to admit this, and though I should be ashamed of myself, I spent the weekend watching baseball.

    Over at On the Ball, Britt Robson, David Brauer, and I discuss the disappointing season to date. Go over there and chime in if you feel so inclined.

  • "Mrs. Iowa Pulled It Out Of My Foot"

    It’s kind of nice when a headline can make your day, and even nicer when the story is even better than the headline: “Beauty Contestant Bitten By Rattlesnake.”

  • When You Have So Few Big Things To Offer, It's The Little Things That'll Kill You Every Time: Swept In Cleveland, And Done

    Well, that was a tough series to watch. A team that we’ve learned to take for granted when it comes to executing the fundamentals of the game and not giving away ballgames has officially become a colossal disappointment.

    It would be hard, really, to even know where to start.

    I’ll say this, though: Nick Punto’s a good teammate and a fine fielder, but he better spend the entire winter working on his bunting, or his future –such as it is– is as a defensive highlight reel in the Northern League.

    It’s almost hard to swallow so much bile on the eve of the Twins’ long-awaited ballpark groundbreaking, and equally hard to swallow the fact that most of the guys who we learned tonight will be skipping tomorrow’s affair –Torii Hunter, Joe Nathan, Johan Santana, and Justin Morneau, among others– likely won’t be wearing Minnesota uniforms when the team actually plays a game in the new park.

  • It's Not Dark Yet, But It's Getting There: 8-3 Drubbing In Cleveland

    I’ve got Little Jimmy Scott crooning from the stereo and that’s never a particularly good sign, at least so far as mood barometers go.

    At this point I’m not fool enough to say that’s it, but I nonetheless can’t deny that I’m mighty tempted to say that’s it, even as I’ve been mighty tempted to say that’s it for several months now.

    Yet every time I’ve been mighty tempted to say that’s it, this weird, baffling, infuriating team has done something to make me regret, at least momentarily, my lack of faith.

    The truth, of course, is that this team really has done very little –at least as a team, and in any kind of a sustained way– to encourage any real investment of faith or hope.

    It kills me that the Twins have now lost four times this season to that goofy slop slinger Paul Byrd. It kills me that Carlos Silva reverted to his spring training form at the worst possible time. Nights like this, in fact, with summer waning and the crickets winding down, it all sort of kills me.

    That triple play, though, that did not kill me. I don’t care what the circumstances, or which team hits into or turns it, I love a triple play. And that one tonight –a picture-perfect 5-4-3, around-the-horn job– looked so easy that it really makes you wonder why you don’t see one of the damn things all the time. Yet somehow the triple play remains almost as rare as a player hitting for the cycle.

  • A Prayer For Michael Vick

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    May you be forgiven.

    May you be given a second chance:

    May you come back as a dog.

    May you be lost.

    May you be found.

    May you be loved.

    May the whole world smell wonderful.

    And may you know the touch

    of gentle hands and the soft

    voice of someone who sees

    and knows and needs you,

    to the end of your days.

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    Hence comes the four-legged friendships of so many of the better kind of men, for on what indeed should one refresh oneself from the endless deceit, falseness, and cunning of men if it were not for the dogs into whose faithful countenance one may look without distrust?

    —Schopenhauer, Ethics

     

    I have seen the sun break through

    to illuminate a small field

    for a while, and gone my way

    and forgotten it. But that was the pearl

    of great price, the one field that had

    treasure in it. I realize now

    that I must give all that I have

    to possess it. Life is not hurrying

     

    on to a receeding future, nor hankering after

    an imagined past. It is the turning

    aside like Moses to the miracle

     

    of the lit bush, to a brightness

    that seemed as transitory as your youth

    once, but is the eternity that awaits you.


    —R.S. Thomas, "The Bright Field"

  • Junot Diaz

    Junot Diaz’s debut collection of short stories, Drown, appeared ten years ago and drew the kind of attention usually reserved for writers with more established résumés. A big part of that was the cool intensity of the prose, which chronicled the lives of adolescent boys living in hardscrabble communities in the Dominican Republic, or transplanted to equally challenging environments in New York and New Jersey. The stories were alternately grim and funny, and Diaz never condescended, making liberal use of native dialect and slang. So enthused were editors at the New Yorker that they named Diaz one of the twenty top writers for the twenty-first century. Something happened on the way to literary superstardom, however; a novel, A Cheater’s Guide to Love, was scheduled for release in 1997, but never appeared. Perhaps The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been salvaged from that earlier project, but who knows. Early indications are that this debut novel—a multicultural, multilingual tale of epic bad luck—more than justifies the decade-long wait. 952-920-0633; www.bn.com

  • Per Petterson

    It’s been a huge year for Norwegian writer Per Petterson. The acclaim for his latest novel ranged from Thomas McGuane’s front-page rave in the Times Book Review (“A gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader’s own experience of life”) to the $135,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

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    Award-winning author Richard Ford even chimed in with a ringing endorsement, and if you threw in a hosanna from Cormac McCarthy you’d have a pretty good idea of the sort of literary territory Petterson is exploring in Out Stealing Horses. It’s a quiet, spare, ruminative novel, in which the stoic protagonist wrestles with memory’s powerful undertow while enduring a sort of solitary confinement in a remote cabin. Petterson will spend a busy couple of days on the Minnesota leg of his tour, appearing as part of the Minneapolis Public Library’s Talk of the Stacks series (7 p.m.), and at the St. Olaf College Bookstore (4 p.m.) on September 28.