First apologies of hopefully not so many.
I’ve been busy in my life, and Barcelona is out of the Champion’s League, and Derrick Rose tore his ACL, and I’m something of a wreck. But I registered another domain name, http://www.inforthenight.wordpress.com, and I like that name a bit better than this, but I’ll have to figure out what to use it for first. Anyhow, that’s it for today, but more to come, more to come.
This is a silly idea I had the other day. It’s silly because it’s not true. They both have kids. Wade is apparently dating Gabrielle Union. Whatever.
BUT, HYPOTHETICALLY, y’all, what if one day, a random July day in the off-season, these NBA star athletes released a simple press release announcing that they were gay, and furthermore, that they were in a serious, monogamous relationship with one another? That they had both self-identified as gay for the entirety of their adult lives. That, though this was heartbreak to their families, and perhaps many fans, the two of them felt, being the monogamous couple that they were, and had been for some time now, that they were now incapable of living out the rest of their lives lying to themselves, each other, and the world?
How would this change the perception of homosexuality in this country? And everywhere? What would happen to them? To basketball?
I have to go now. Will expand upon this later.
Shit would blow up
I’m not sure what to post about! Already tongue tied, on my third day.
But, uh, I guess that’s the point of a blog where you’re required to write something. Nice work, last week’s brain. You’ve gotten us into another pickle!
Here’s something. I stumbled across (saw on Facebook) this letter from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in response to Fitzgerald’s then recently published novel, Tender Is the Night. In his letter, Hemingway is critical of the way Fitzy depicted their mutual friends. But he’s not upset about their inclusion as characters, he just thinks it’s bogus that F. falsified some of their information, specifically some info about their parents and upbringing.
“Goddamn it you took liberties with peoples’ pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvellously faked case histories. You, who can write better than anybody can, who are so lousy with talent that you have to—the hell with it. Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises. You could write a fine book about Gerald and Sara for instance if you knew enough about them and they would not have any feeling, except passing, if it were true.”
Lots to take away from that passage. It raises questions such as, what is the difference between a fully realized character in fiction and an actual human being? Hemingway seems to think you can achieve such fullness on the page, comparing F.’s imperfect characters to mere case studies.
Hem also suggests that nothing is worth writing about unless it actually happened. He writes,”You can take you or me or Zelda or Pauline or Hadley or Sara or Gerald but you have to keep them the same and you can only make them do what they would do. You can’t make one be another. Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen.” It’s sort of unclear to me if he is talking just about when you’re writing a book about people you know, or all the time. If he means all of the time, the fiction is simply sticking somebody you know into a situation that they’ve yet to encounter in their life, and charting how they would react. You can then achieve both fullness of character (because the character is a real person) and a compelling story (because real people react in complicated ways).
My second impulse upon reading the letter (after my initial envy) was to disregard it. Hemingway is one of those impossibly stylized writers whose advice, though in this case directed towards a more traditional writer in Fitzgerald, seems derived totally from his own inimitable success. “Do it like I do! Cause how I do it’s good!” Yeah, okay. But after rereading everything, I think I appreciate what he’s saying. That the tired instruction all young authors pocket on the first and last days of Fiction 101—to write what you know—doesn’t actually go far enough. You must write what you know without compromise. For compromise, whether for the sake of advancing the story or sparing the real life counterpart, is just another complicated way to lie.
So. Barcelona just lost. But, they weren’t outplayed. They were just unlucky, which will happen to the very best of us. So a happy little lighthouse across the ocean of my life extinguishes his flame. But not forever. Just for the night.
FC Barcelona, the Spanish soccer team, whom I have never seen in person and to whom I have no outward connection of any kind, has come to mean a great deal to me and, I think, my life, over the last four years.
Perhaps because there’s a lot to be said for Barcelona, or Barca, as they’re called. By most reasonable opinions, they’ve been the best team in the world in that four year span. They have the world’s best player in Lionel Messi, an Argentine. And something like half of their starting squad plays for Spain, the country that last won the world cup. But the truly indomitable spirit of these team didn’t really seem to come together until they found their manager, Pep Guardiola, an ex-Barca player, who has been able to combine all of the team’s talent into a cohesive footballing force. Barcelona is the kind of team that doesn’t lose games. And, when they do, it almost never feels as if the team was beaten; rather that they were simply unlucky, or, because of the slew of games the world’s great teams must play, they were likely resting a top talent for a more important contest, and their lack of overwhelming depth finally showed. But the team is almost never “at fault,” at least in my (sort of neutral) opinion. Even the road to greatness, when studied under a microscope, reveals some imperfections.
Like any beautiful thing in the world, there’s a market out there for people who want to see it burn up. And, because Barca never burns up, those people want to read about the idea of it burning up. So people speculate, and prognosticate, and outright claim to know that the end is in sight. Barcelona will not win the Spanish league this year for the first time in a few, surrendering the crown to their arch-nemesis (and likely the 2nd best team in the world), Real Madrid. One of their top players, Xavi, is on the tail-end of his career. And teams have figured out the best way to play them, which is to put 9 men on defense at all times, clogging passing lanes and counter-attacking whenever possible. Their opponents writhe on the ground after being tackled (or just any time), stomp Lionel Messi, and do whatever they can (except play soccer) to waste time and skew the odds in their favor. Because to try and outplay Barcelona is certain death. This is, quite astoundingly, a universally accepted fact.
Tomorrow, London’s Chelsea is coming to Barcelona to play the second leg of their Champions League bout, up 1-0 on aggregate. If Barca fails to score, they’ll be eliminated, and won’t become the first time to ever win back-to-back Champions League trophies. Despite Barca’s brilliance, this is a possibility, because Chelsea is one of the best teams in the world at wasting time, fucking up play, and writhing around on the ground for 90 minutes. And then Barca will have lost the league, and the Champions League, and more people will write about their impending demise (or, at least, their return to earth). And this will really upset me.
What’s weird about my relationship with the team is how marginal it is. I don’t watch all of their games. Sometimes I don’t even realize they’ve played until I see the result online. But I’ve always known, in the back of my mind, that if they’re playing, or if they played, in all likelihood they won. In all likelihood, they won soundly. And beautifully. Barcelona’s goals are moments of joy, never a scramble at the goalmouth but a frenetic workup of telepathic passes and diagonal runs into minute pockets of space, where back heel passes are collected, shots faked, passes returned and cooly slotted past a helpless keeper. The players are artists, in every sense of the word, and their medium is the physical arrangement of bodies and the geographic interpretations of moving a sphere through space, like synchronized swimmers playing catch while hurtling through an asteroid belt.
That’s a life constant that I don’t want to lose. A bit of exultation I keep deeply vested. It’s beyond optimism. It’s a belief. And, though I’ll always have these years as a kind of proof, I’d really hate to have to resort to memory.
The 100’s Method is a thing I invented to make me more productive on days I would otherwise waste on the couch or in my bed.
The idea behind it is simple: It’s fun to hit goals, even when they’re little goals. So set a bunch of achievable, but meaningful, benchmarks. And spend your day hitting them. Cross off each item as you pass it, and then move on to the next, or work on one, take a break, and come back to it. I arrange my goals around the number 100 because of its inherent relationship with success and completeness. Doing 100 of something feels like enough. So try formulating your goals around the number 100 — whether that’s 100 repetitions, minutes, pages, or whatever you come up with. Another nice thing about the method — it’s super customizable to whatever you’re trying to do.
This is what my basic 100’s Method day looks like:
That’s it! Simple and fun and productive. Turn that lazy Sunday upside down, and then beat it senseless with your productive self.
This post is a place holder. It doesn’t count. It’s just here to say, hey, thanks for stopping by, and don’t forget to come back tomorrow.
This post barely exists at all.
American Typo 