Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

A few years ago, I reread Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, and—at the risk of sounding like an asshole—I found that it didn't hold up as well as many of my childhood favorites. But the fact that I've become a fussy adult doesn't diminish the impact the Time Quartet had on me as a kid. And it must be said that, even in the rereading, the IT is sublimely creepy, and Aunt Beast remains one of my favorite literary characters of all time.

L'Engle passed away yesterday at the age of 88. From the NYTimes obit:

The “St. James Guide to Children’s Writers” called Ms. L’Engle “one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.” Such accolades did not come from pulling punches: “Wrinkle” is one of the most banned books because of its treatment of the deity.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” it begins, repeating the line of a 19th- century novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, and presaging the immortal sentence that Snoopy, the inspiration-challenged beagle of the Peanuts cartoon, would type again and again. After the opening, “Wrinkle,” quite literally, takes off. Meg Murray, with help from her psychic baby brother, uses time travel and extrasensory perception to rescue her father, a gifted scientist, from a planet controlled by the Dark Thing. She does so through the power of love.

The book used concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand. She also characterized the book as her refutation of ideas of German theologians.

I love ballsy YA authors and ballsy old ladies, and Lady L'Engle seems to have been both. I think I'll go back and reread the rest of the Time series in her honor.

The Scooter has moved on to that big Yankee Stadium in the sky. (Not the one I wrote about in terza rima for an 11th-grade English assignment inspired by Dante's Inferno, in which George Steinbrenner is condemned to an eternal home game in which the Yankees flub every possible play—under the management of the then-recently-late Billy Martin—and George is perpetually prevented from firing anyone by the divine intervention of baseballs that fly out of nowhere and down his throat every time he opens his mouth. No, I'm certain Phil is chillin' at the game further upstairs.) From the NYTimes obit:

Phil Rizzuto, the sure-handed Hall of Fame Yankees shortstop nicknamed The Scooter, who punctuated his extended Yankee life as a broadcaster with birthday wishes to nuns and exclamations of “Holy cow!” died today. He was 89.

...

He was a 5-foot-6-inch, 150-pound sparkplug who did the little things right, from turning the pivot on a double play to laying down a perfect sacrifice bunt. He left the slugging to powerful teammates like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Tommy Henrich, Charlie Keller and Yogi Berra.

“I hustled and got on base and made the double play,” he said of his role. “That’s all the Yankees needed in those days.”

His career statistics were not spectacular: a batting average of .273, 38 home runs and 562 runs batted in. But in his best season, 1950, when he hit a career-high .324 and drove in 66 runs, he won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award.

Rizzuto was frequently compared with other shortstops of his era, among them Pee Wee Reese of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Marty Marion of the St. Louis Cardinals. But to DiMaggio, his teammate for eight seasons — each man lost three seasons to military service during World War II — Rizzuto was the best.

“The little guy in front of me,” said DiMaggio, one of the game’s great centerfielders. “He made my job easy. I didn’t have to pick up so many ground balls.”

Though he may have been the "little guy" on the field, Rizzuto towered over other commentators in the great game of Divergent Baseball Announcement. Quoth the NYT: “Rizzuto’s ramblings and pro-Yankee sentiments maddened detractors, who felt he paid too little attention to the game. But fans adored Rizzuto as they would a delightful uncle, and colleagues were fond of recalling his scorecard notation of 'W.W.,' for 'Wasn’t Watching.'”

If you've never read O Holy Cow!, a collection of found poems based on Rizzuto's broadcasts, now would be the moment to do so. A sample (courtesy of the Comic Baseball Association, which has considerately posted a few of the pieces online so I don't have to run home and dig out my copy of the book and come back and transcribe—they've got more over there, so pay a visit):

Chess

I.

A lot of money in that chess.
I'll tell you that.
It's gotta be..
Can't be...
Not a good game for television.


II.

I'm not knocking it.
But it's not a spectator sport.


[September 4, 1992
Texas at New York
Rich Monteleone pitching to Rafael Palmeiro
Seventh inning, no outs, bases empty
Yankees lead 6-3]

Hall and Nokes

So second time around
Mel Hall and Matt Nokes
Solve Tapani's pitch
Heh Heh
That's right
John Moore's on the ball.
It does sound like a good rock group.
Hall and Nokes.
Oh?
Hall and Oates?
Oh yeah?
That's one I missed.
I'll have to go out
And buy some of their records tonight.

[June 11, 1991
New York at Minnesota
Kevin Tapani pitching to Alvaro Espinoza
Fifth inning, two outs, two base runners
Twins lead 1-0]

Reversal of Opinion

And he hits one in the hole
They're gonna have to hurry.
THEY'LL NEVER GET HIM!
They got him.
How do you like that.
Holy cow.
I changed my mind before he got there.
So that doesn't count as an error.

[July 10, 1992
Seattle at New York
Dave Fleming pitching to Andy Stankiewicz
First inning, no outs, bases empty
Mariners lead 1-0]

And finally, in memoriam:

Prayer for the Captain

There's a little prayer I always say
Whenever I think of my family or when I'm flying,
When I'm afraid, and I am afraid of flying.
It's just a little one. You can say it no matter what,
Whether you're Catholic or Jewish or Protestant or
whatever.
And I've probably said it a thousand times
Since I heard the news on Thurman Munson.

It's not trying to be maudlin or anything.
His Eminence, Cardinal Cooke, is going to come out
And say a little prayer for Thurman Munson.
But this is just a little one I say time and time again,
It's just: Angel of God, Thurman's guardian dear,
To whom his love commits him here there or everywhere,
Ever this night and day be at his side,
To light and guard, to rule and guide.

For some reason it makes me feel like I'm talking to
Thurman,
Or whoever's name you put in there,
Whether it be my wife or any of my children, my parents
or anything.
It's just something to keep you really from going bananas.
Because if you let this,
If you keep thinking about what happened, and you can't
understand it,
That's what really drives you to despair.

Faith. You gotta have faith.
You know, they say time heals all wounds,
And I don't quite agree with that a hundred percent.
It gets you to cope with wounds.
You carry them the rest of your life.

[August 3, 1979
Baltimore at New York
Pregame show]

Gung Hay Fat Choy! Git out yer party hats, people, cuz it's the YEAR OF THE HAWG!



(It's also Daytona 500 day, so you know how Lady Z is celebrating...)

Look, we all knew it was going to happen one day, we knew it every time he taunted a tarantula or straddled a disgruntled croc, and I know I'm not the only one who found it impossible to watch his shows without yelling "Oh you are SO asking for it, dude!" at regular intervals, but that doesn't mean it's not a little bit shocking and a lot bit sad to hear that Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin was taken out for good by a stingray today while filming a show off the Great Barrier Reef.

And I don't want to hear any "I told you so"s from the peanut gallery, not even when you learn that the show he was filming was called "Ocean's Deadliest," because as annoying as Steve Irwin could be (I've always preferred that South African guy Nigel Something who swims with the sharks), I demand a moment of respect for a guy who loved scary animals with such fervent lunacy. For reals.

1. If watching the Monkees' movie Head (1968) doesn't make you wonder, "Am I on drugs?" then you obviously are on drugs.

2. Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the longest game in the history of professional baseball—33 innings—played between my childhood hometown team, the Rochester Red Wings, and my more recent hometown team, the Paw[tucket Red] Sox. Cal Ripkin Jr. played for the Red Wings (then an Orioles' feeder) and Wade Boggs for the Paw Sox (a Red Sox feeder, duh). I love this story; it reminds me of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy by W. P. Kinsella, a novel I loved as a kid. Incidentally, since I grew up a devoted Yankees fan, I always considered the Paw Sox a special enemy, even though they had no particular beef with the Red Wings. I like that crossover of animosity between the major and minor leagues, and I like that this historic game grants my arbitrary marriage of the two teams some legitimacy. I cannot explain, however, how I came to live in the enemy territory of Southern New England for so long. My best guess is that God is mean.

3. In the immortal words of Daniel Handler, "I Love Murakami." Today, I specifically love Kafka on the Shore. I'm going to go read it now.

Are you talking to me?

Just a reminder: on this date in 1942, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized commanders of the U.S. Armed Forces "to prescribe military areas ... from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restriction the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion." Soon after the order was given, public notices such as the one pictured here (read the full text ) began appearing, effecting the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans—of which over half were American-born citizens—for the duration of WWII.

Gerald Ford rescinded 9066 in 1976.

For those of you looking for a way to commemorate the occasion, or just a way to pass the day, I recommend the following books:

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories by Hisaye Yamamoto
No-No Boy by John Okada
Obasan by Joy Kogawa
When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

It's not really an occasion for chocolate and lingerie, but today is the 17th anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeni's fatwa on Salman Rushdie in response to Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses.

Now I too believe the man jumped major shark when he buddied up with Bono in '99, but that doesn't lessen the gravity of the fact that Rushdie lived for a decade with a bounty on his head because of a novel he authored. Yesterday I was teaching Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759), which includes this passage on the life and task of a poet:

He must divest himself of the prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same: he must therefore content himself with the slow progress of his name; contemn the applause of his own time, and commit his claims to the justice of posterity. He must write as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations; as a being superiour to time and place.

I don't quite share Johnson's belief in "transcendental truths," or if I do, I'm sure they're not the same truths he had in mind. But I think his meditation on the strange position of poets—in our day and age, novelists are certainly a part of this group—who must be of the world without being in it, who must be able to see things on a scale infinitely larger than the self, and to speak with and to power that extends over and above the lived experience of one's human peers—I think this is beautiful. (Percy Shelley must have, too—he echoed the good Doctor years later in The Defense of Poetry.) What strikes me today is how tragic it is that when the power of the poet's work actually registers on the ground of the world he moves through, when it is felt as a political reality and not an airy fantasy, that the shock of it is so violent that it inspires fear and hatred. That the acknowledgement of the poet's legislative powers should come in the form of a death threat.

The passage above continues:

His labour is not yet at an end: he must know many languages and many sciences; and, that his stile may be worthy of his thoughts, must, by incessant practice, familiarize to himself every delicacy of speech and grace of harmony.

I believe Rushdie has lived up admirably to Johnson's lofty specifications, and so I say to him, Keep writing, man. But for the love of all that is great and good, get yourself some decent music.

Entirely coincidentally, I finished Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh this morning, so here's my review of it:

Maybe it's all the Lost I've been watching lately, but I found reading this novel like hacking my way through a surrealistically lush jungle—in a good way, most of the time. Rushdie's signature gleeful prose blooms in its full glory from page one and doesn't stop for over four hundred pages, so that at times it goes beyond dazzling, decaying into something murky, exhausting, even academically fey. When I was in college, I accused a then-boyfriend (in all earnestness) of being a "racist Brit" because he declared a distaste for Rushdie's "florid" style, and there were moments when I felt that this novel was some kind of payback. But let me not be mistaken: Rushdie is some kind of genius, and whatever else it might be, The Moor's Last Sigh is not disappointing.

I will continue to recommend Midnight's Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories to Rushdie novices, but if you enjoyed those, read this one too.

Happy birthday to Mozart, Donna Reed, André the Giant, and my sister Kathryn.

Happy 136th anniversary to Kappa Alpha Theta, the first college sorority, founded at a college at which I will be giving an on-campus interview in two weeks.

Happy commemoration of the Paris Peace Accord, which ended the Vietnam War in 1973.

Happy belated Australia Day.

Happy Friday.

ETA: As grendel1031 points out, it is also the birthday of Colette, sexy French author of GiGi and the wonderful Claudine novels. And, I have just discovered, it is also the birthday our beloved Bitch Ph.D. Damn, busy day.