Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: Moby Dick

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

Theoharides On the Literary Landscape of the NBA Playoffs

Welcome to Wednesday, my Puddlers. In a break from tradition, I won't be making fun of the 4:20 holiday, so congratulations to you all.

Since it is Wednesday its time to let Alex Theoharides take the spotlight with his own look at things. Since Mr. Theoharides and I are such big basketball fans and the Playoffs have been phenomenal so far, some of you lesser sports fans will have to sit through another basketball post. However, the good news is that Alex's post is much more entertaining than mine and also features some great literary tie-ins.

So, I leave you for now with Mr. Alex Theoharides.

Theoharides on the Literary Landscape of the NBA Playoffs

 Where Literature meets Basketball and … We all win!

Alex Theoharides

Well ladies and gents, it’s been quite a start to the NBA playoffs. In fact, according to my Facebook page it was the best first weekend in the history of the NBA. Of course, my Facebook page is written by an idiot.

Two weeks ago, before our esteemed editor, the Lord of the Puddle himself, Mr. Matthew Domino, left his blog untended to visit, what I can only assume was, some ungodly region of the world, I teased you with the promise of under hyped story lines and fearless predictions heading into the heart of the NBA Playoffs. However, after the aforementioned Mr. Domino’s stellar work outlining the NBA playoffs, I’ve decided to come at you with a slightly different take. Today, I’d like to separate the pretenders from the contenders, while comparing each team in the playoffs to the best and worst of American literary classics. In other words, in the following lines, two titans will collide in an epic battle for control of my mind. Literature meets Basketball. But will we survive?

Let’s go worst to first:

The Pretenders aka (Domino will kill me but...) the John Steinbeck Division

Philadelphia 76ers - Call of the Wild

A team of gentle pups enters the savage world known as the NBA playoffs, only to go all rogue and leave their wizened leader scratching his head as to where he went wrong. Whammo!

Indiana Pacers - The Grapes of Wrath

Long, seemingly tough players, who aren’t afraid to get dirty and at times can compete with the best teams in the league, but ultimately unravel in long tangents, in which they don’t score, don’t defend, and make everyone want to change the channel. Oh yeah, and they don’t know how to finish. Done and done!

Atlanta Hawks - Catcher in the Rye

Angst ridden young men, who seem good at first glance, but always leave you with a bitter taste in your mouth. Bam!

Denver Nuggets - On the Road

Ironic in a way, considering Denver plays much better at home. However, just like Kerouac's rambling novel, this team makes little sense on paper, somehow manages to over-exceed expectations, but ultimately doesn’t have much to say about anything.

New York Knicks - Catch-22

The only way you can win with D’Antoni is if you don’t play his brand of basketball, but if they don’t play his brand of basketball the Knicks won’t score enough points to win.

 New Orleans Hornets - Lonesome Dove

An aging gunslinger, slowed by injuries, discarded in a barren wasteland, seeking one last hurrah before his knees go out and with them his career. Alright!

Portland Trailblazers meets Sometimes a Great Notion

A big, sprawling, hopelessly flawed team that plays in the Northwest? Shnikes!

Memphis Grizzlies - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A young, gifted team floating downriver, trying to overcome a history of failure, influenced by a coach and GM, both of who seemingly tricked their way into their jobs? Okay, so perhaps, it’s my biggest stretch.

The Contenders aka (Domino might agree) the Robert Penn Warren Division

Orlando Magic - Moby-Dick

A maniacal mad man at the helm, desperately searching for the whale that got away, a team that seemingly has no control over its own destiny, a strange, Middle Eastern man watching over everything … okay, okay …  it’s a stretch, but if you’re casting the role of Ahab you could do a lot worse than Stan Van Gundy

San Antonio Spurs - As I Lay Dying

A team of castoffs and sinners trying to come together to carry their dead leader to his grave. Oh yeah, and they’re boring to boot! 

Dallas Mavericks - The Great Gatsby

Let’s see, who does this remind you of? Man always wanted to be good at sports so that people would love him. Man isn’t good at sports. Man is good at business. Even though no one knows how he made his money or who he had to kill to do it. Man buys sports team and pretends to be one of the players, hoping to be loved. Man puts together the best team money can buy and gives them a shiny new stadium to play in. Man comes up hopelessly short.

Boston Celtics - A Farewell to Arms

A battle they’d thought they could win until they lost their beloved friend, and with him, their desire to fight! (God, I hope I’m wrong).

Miami Heat - All the Kings Men

A little poem I wrote:

Pat Riley made a bold call,

Pat Riley had a great fall,

All the Heat’s money and all the Heat’s men,

Couldn’t win Pat Riley a championship again.

L.A. Lakers - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

A schizophrenic man sets off on a journey across America, trying to reach the promised land. All he has with him is his best bike and his knowledge of how to fix it. But is it too late? Has he already burnt too many bridges?

Oklahoma City Thunder - All the Pretty Horses

A duo of talented young guns rolls into the west, guns blazing, for a romantic adventure. They come away just short, half-alive and scarred by what they’ve seen.

Chicago Bulls - Native Son

A man born on the mean city streets, trying to overcome a giant shadow, surrounded by weak men trying to save him from himself … okay fine, so I only made this comparison because the title was perfect. But it is!

Fearless Prediction:

This is the end of basketball as we know it. All the old boys, the Spurs, Magic, Celtics, Mavericks and Lakers will all go down before the finals. Who does that leave to duel it out? The young guns. Thunder vs. Bulls. Bulls take it in six. Followed by the self-combustion of the evil psycho robot that is David Stern, because he yet again missed out on the LeBron vs. Kobe NBA Finals he wants so badly.

A Shot in the Mark

Good evening, my Puddlers.  What a week this has been for me.  Some major aspects of my life are changing even at this second and I may be able to reveal details to you at some point in the near future.  I feel as though I am living in an episode of Mad Men, perhaps even a season.  So, take that, at this moment, for what you will.

On this evening, in the aftermath of snow, I am giving you a column by the winner of the 2010 Puddles of Myself Henry Jones Sr. Quest for the Holy Grail Award, the one, the only, Mark Jack.  Now, I know I usually pump up the guest columnists on the blog, but this week Mark Jack is bringing to light a great point - not many people still read Ralph Waldo Emerson. I wrote about and read a lot of work by Ralph Waldo Emerson in college and he remains one of the best writers on the notion of the soul, of passion, and of remaining spiritually liberated in the history of the English language.  It seems very fitting to read him on a quiet day, when large clouds and snow muffle New York City.  I highly recommend you look into Emerson and his work immediately.

Now, without further ado, Mr. Mark Jack:


Emerson: For Your Consideration


Mark Jack

Ah, em, mmmm, you’ll have to excuse me. I have been feeling a little under the weather lately. I have been feeling small and under the weather. Sometimes I feel like a small boy under all this weather. So be kind. The calendar became quite monotonous on the first of this month, and as we may have been told to reminisce just days before, now we are commanded to look ahead. And yet the shape of things to come is not so easily determined, or, is not so easily Euclidean. The creation of triangles progressed throughout the last year, but we are, here, in the first weeks of this new year, hopelessly contorted and contained by so many once triangulating lines.  I am worried by such entanglements and horrified by our calm. We most avoid the plague of wistful tones.  

I spent a few days at my parent’s house since last I wrote to you all, which was pleasant, though the compulsion to spend some quality time with my folks and all my old friends was, and is always, a little overbearing. Sometimes I feel like a small boy under all this friendship.  What did we have to say to each other? Nothing, really. I sat with my oldest friend, Ryan, at a bar and in the middle of our visit, for almost a minute, we were silent. We just sipped our beers and sat—together. That felt the most right. With my father I conversed, as usual, on themes just vaguely spiritual, which is to say, protestant and liberal. He is a minister.

We began, my father and I, to explore the influence on our thought. We began, that is, to speak again of Emerson. I do not know what has become of the man and his influence, but I feel/fear that he/it has become somewhat less than en vogue. Where do we establish lasting influence in the short history of American literature? Surely every time I mention Melville I cause many a head to shake affirmatively. I would, and do, nod just the same. Poe is given less than he should, maybe, but his place is sure and still explored with some enthusiasm. I could go on, but I’ll refrain, and suggest instead that Emerson is too infrequently read — this is a shame. There is something about his writing, which, unlike Thoreau, speaks to calm thoughtfulness. It is the writing of middle age, and perhaps too often only desperate youth, or maybe hoary wisdom, excites our reading eyes alone.

Emerson’s poetry is, for me, a bit of a bummer, by which I mean, not good. However, his essays contain a remarkable sort of wisdom that is not often written. He writes more surely to matters of the unsure than almost any other prose writer in the American tradition. Emerson’s audience is the person who finds him or herself as a worried idler of some world experience.  The type of person who despite their travels and inevitable knowledge, still retains the feeling of a youthful lack of wisdom. And this is a huge audience. It is perhaps the only audience that truly reads, or just reads with any sense. “Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius!” he writes in Experience. And later, “Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference.”  

We do not need, it seems, to read the advice of the calm Emerson, but his sentences are not so terribly calm, nor are they calmly terrible. There is something in Emerson, which is something I’ve come to observe in most people, and that is that strange mix of knowledge hesitantly understood, of experience and memory only unevenly incorporated. In our youth we have our lives before us and great stores of surety. Even in our inexperience we remain convinced of our ability or future ability to know all things. We can only ever, no matter what our age, look with some vague assurance upon the coming wisdom of old age. So much of our lives, and almost all our lives are lived between and in the midst of knowledge and lack, or perceived knowledge and perceived lack. Emerson is the great conveyor of the mind at such an impasse and is a great comforter of the same. We should read him more.

I, for my part, spend my time convincing my self of my own activity. I don’t think about it. Mostly, there is too little room for all the considerations I must endure, but I do not see any reasonable way to go about editing.

Mark