Soxy Friday

Sitting on the Sofa on a Friday afternoon... watching a Boston - New York evening game (and indeed, Joe DiMaggio is nowhere to be found). And Dice K is being Dice E, meaning that he is erratic (not that he is cursing in mediocre movies/standup). The first inning in sequence:

• Damon reached on a squib single past the pitcher on the first base side
• Jeter runs a full count bu tpops out to center
• Abreu runs a full count, hits a groundball up the middle which Pedroia stupidly tries to throw to second. Lugo, with Damon on top of him (he was running on the full count), drops the ball.
• First pitch curveball plunks A-Rod. bases loaded, one out.
• Posada smashes the ball to Youk at first, who... throws home, nearly drilling Dice K in the head. Wow. Why go 3-6-1 when you can prolong the inning? Damon is out at the plate on the force, though. Bases still loaded, two outs.
• Matsui goes 3-0, takes a strike, fouls off a pitch, and finlly grounds out to Lugo. Phew. 27 pitches, and no damage thus far.

Why the detailed account? Sox have a five game lead which could potentially shrink to 2 with a Yankees sweep here. Which would be accompanied by a whole lot of badness in New England. Badness of the shrieking / moaning / screaming variety, or "par for the New England Sports course."

And speaking of New England Sports, the blogverse / sportsverse / whateververse has eschewed poignant, contemporary headlines like mine ("The Patriot Act") for 35 year old snowclone "CameraGate" or the slightly more clever "Sets, Spies, and Videotape" (though that is still a reference to a movie from the late '80s). And in case you missed it, Belichick has been fined $500K, the Patriots fined $250K and lost some draft picks. Them'$ $ome expen$ive $tolen $igns, eh? I am at home with the idea of a single person being fined $500K. I crunched some numbers, and I think this is the equivalent of fining Sparkle eleven hot dogs.

Mike NTPB mocked a comment I made on our baseball board and said that maybe I should study for the LSAT so I could learn about logic and analytic thinking. I replied that I stopped studying for the LSAT when I realized I couldn't understand the math required to set a price on my soul. Oh, me so pithy, oh, oh, me so pithy.

Sox just went quietly in the first; Dice K has resumed his struggles in the 2nd (currently runner on first with one out). Oh, we'll keep you faux-updated.

I finished Falling Man yesterday, a 9/11 Topical by Don Delillo (here are Don Delillo's 9/11 thoughts a few months after the fact). I'll save any kind of real analysis for a later review (my "review to do" inbox is stacked quite high these days), but as far as its immediate connection to the Nyetverse (is concerned), there's one thing that stood out to me. The novel is on one hand a collapse of the "9/11 idea" back into the day and its events themselves. On the other, it's an account of the bizarre space created in the aftermath of the event. One of the foci of this bizarre space is the titular character, The Falling Man, a performance artist who jumps off buildings around NYC and assumes the pose portrayed in a rather famous and taboo photograph (pictured here, along with a historical account of the shot). The question or comment is obvious, but it's rendered vibrant by the book - how can art, particularly art in the ironist/postmodern age, interact with an event so widely believed tragic, heinous beyond belief and beyond the purview of artistic comment?

I remember the iPJ passionately arguing that 9/11 brought an end to faux-hipster, detached ironic commentary, that the event carried such real, objective gravity that indifference and apathy were no longer options. While I agreed that in the immediate this was true, that such an event on your home soil, "in your back yard," was sure to shake people off their invincible high chairs, I didn't think it was a permanent end. While the ironic, distanced stance is often one of convenience - this is a relative of the "no atheists in the foxhole" concept, that you can only refuse to care if circumstances don't dictate that you do - even real, tangible events cannot crush its application, and Delillo's FM character illustrates this. And he is not necessarily being an ironist - it could be a form of visceral protest, it could be ironic commentary, it could be an effort at keeping the event real for as long as possible. Still, the point is that even in that bizarre aftermath, individual take and expression is possible, whether it violates concepts of taste or not.

Anyhoo - more complete thoughts / review pending. I have progressed on to the theoretical "best American novel of the past 25 years," Beloved by Toni Morrison, which if nothing else is a nice respite from the clinical angular style of Delillo's dialog. So that's "what's next."

The Sox are up by two after three, and I grow weary of this account. Check ESPN if you're interested.