Advantage Nadal

There are only two teams in sports that I will lose my mind over: the Philadelphia Eagles and the University of North Carolina Tar Heels.  I can’t even relay to you how many hours I have spent yelling at various televisions in public or in private when these teams are playing a game on TV.  I grew up in Philadelphia, so I became a die hard Eagles fan.  Over the years I have been pulled in at their attempts at success only to be repeatedly disappointed and tortured by their defeats. It is a cycle that has defined my sports fandom. I became a North Carolina Tar Heel fan because, at the age of seven, my father took me to an event known as the 1993 East Regional Semifinals aka the Sweet Sixteen.  We went to the Meadowlands to watch Virginia take on Cincinnati.  The game ended and I enjoyed my second live basketball game. As I moved to get up, my father stopped me and said, “Hold on.  There’s another game.”  My budding sports fan’s mind couldn’t believe it.  Then, the North Carolina Tar Heels took the floor in their Carolina Blue uniforms.  Eric Montross and Donald Williams were the stars of the team.  They beat Virginia that night and my dad and I didn’t get home until one or two in the morning.  I was hooked on the North Carolina Tar Heels and watched as they went on to win the 1993 NCAA Championship.  My love of these two teams, their players, their traditions – one successful, the other torturous – have been unparalleled throughout my life.  I have screamed horrible things at Cowboys and Giants fans.  I literally hate Duke University and every player that played there (unless they redeem themselves with gritty play in the NBA).  I will never admit that the Cowboys, Giants or Duke Blue Devils ever have a superior team – they always suck and get lucky.  And that has been the story of my sporting passion.

I realized recently, that slowly a third figure was emerging as a figure where I could direct my sporting passion and frustration toward.  Shockingly, this figure emerged in the sport of tennis. I sport I had for the most part always overlooked and even in some cases frowned upon as I was growing up.  However, in part due to this man, my opinion has changed on the sport entirely.  That man is Rafael Nadal.  And, in the most underrated sports story of the year, he has become my third favorite athlete/sports team to root for – perhaps of all time.

How did this happen you ask?  Well let me start in the spring of 2008 when I moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  My roommate was a big tennis fan and as we entered the peak of tennis season with the French Open and Wimbledon, I began to sit and be patient and watch tennis matches with him.  We watched as Nadal won his fourth straight French Open in 2008.  I had seen Nadal play before, but I never paid very close attention.  However, as I watched the 2008 French Open unfold, I realized that he had all the attributes that I enjoyed in an athlete: drive, toughness, determination, grittiness, a bit of magic, passion and the essence of the underdog, the unwillingness to ever give in.  I say “the essence of the underdog” because Federer was then and in many ways still is seen as the best player in the world.  Federer was one of the reasons I did not like tennis.  He seemed to win too easily, he seemed smug (I have since come to find out that he is one of the greatest champions and nicest human beings, but I remain skeptical) and content with himself – in other words, he represented everything that I do not like in other people or in the world.  There was something substantive to Nadal.  He was Spanish and I love the Spanish culture.  He had long hair and played hard, so hard that everyone questioned if he could keep up his pace.  He was like a Romantic poet, like Keats or Shelley, someone who may just die at 25 or 26 because they are too damn explosive for this world.

Then, we came to Wimbledon 2008.  In my personal life, Wimbledon came on the last day of one of the best Fourth of July weekends I have ever had in my life.  Quite possibly the best, though this past one has risen very close to that level. As I watched the match at my kitchen table with friends of mine who were staying over, we suddenly realized that we were watching history.  We were watching quite possibly the best tennis match of all time.  You had Nadal and Federer with two contrasting styles, but both with the same desire to win the match.  This was on tennis’ biggest stage.  There was the drama of the rain that continued to threaten.  There was Nadal jumping up two sets and then Federer coming back.  There were the rain delays and then the match entered a fifth set and everyone began to wonder if the darkness would set in and that the match would have to be concluded on Monday – the fortnight plus one.  My friends and I also had the added drama of catching a train back to the city.  As the match went on, we let one train go. The match continued and we decided to let a second train go.  The match continued and we needed to make the third train or else we wouldn’t have a ride to the station. So, we sat in anticipation as the fifth set carried on into tiebreak.  Nadal and Federer went back and forth.  The match stretched closer and closer to the five hour mark. Finally, as the darkness was just about to envelop the edges of the stadium, and that iconic green court would have turned to a murky purple and grey, Nadal forced Federer into the net, collapsed on his back and screamed up into the evening air, his all white uniform standing out against the gloaming.  Federer cried (of course) as Nadal held up the Wimbledon trophy. Then, my friends and I grabbed a train to head back to the city and our overheated apartments.

Nadal kept the hits coming as he won the Gold Medal in the 2008 Olympics while Federer bowed out early.  Everyone began to question Federer’s dominance as Nadal rose to number one in the world.  However, I watched Nadal lose to Andy Murray at the U.S. Open and felt that first burning in my chest that some injustice had been done to my man.  Murray wasn’t better, he must have cheated.  Murray sucked and he got lucky.  Those were the thoughts that ran through my head.

When the tennis season resumed in February 2009 for the 2009 Australian Open, I found myself genuinely excited to watch.  And, when Federer and Nadal were to face each other once more in the final, I had to stay up all night.  I had been out at a show and been drinking, but I kept myself up at least long enough to watch the epic first set of that match.  The first set lasted nearly and hour as Federer and Nadal went back and forth. Nadal came out strong, but then Federer took control of the set, only to have Nadal come roaring back. They each made impossible shot after impossible shot. I sipped on late night beers just to keep my engine going, but I could barely keep my eyes open. Finally, Nadal won the set and I was able to stumble to my room and fall asleep in the four in the morning darkness. But not before I streamed coverage of the match on my computer.  I woke up the next morning to the terrific news that Nadal had won in four sets. He had certainly pulled even with Federer and was looking to leave the former smug champion in his rearview mirror.  As the spring came, I was anticipating another glorious summer of Nadal, who I all of a sudden realized I was a fan of.

However, Nadal injured his knee in the French Open when he lost to Soderling, which allowed Federer to win the French Open – the one tournament he had never won before.  That was followed by Federer defeating an ever-so-earnest Andy Roddick in the longest Wimbledon Final of all time.  We had to watch Roddick make self-deprecating jokes after playing the best tennis of his life and still losing to an off the charts smug looking Federer. I had to watch Federer in his gold and white jump suit as he was coronated “The Best Tennis Player of All Time” with the Most Grand Slam Tournament Championships of All-Time.  It made me sick. And I realized that that sensation, that sickness was the same emotion I had only reserved for the New York Giants, the Dallas Cowboys and the Duke Blue Devils.  I wanted blood.

Nadal tried to come back at the U.S. Open but fell meekly to Del Potro in the semifinals on a strange grey September day in New York.  Then, after I waited with a shocking amount of anxiousness for the 2010 Tennis Season, Nadal had to retire against Murray at the Australian Open.  The floodgates opened for the pundits – “this is it for Nadal,” “his knees couldn’t keep up,” “his game isn’t like Federer’s,” “he’ll still go down as one of the best.”  I couldn’t stand all of this, because I knew that he had more in him.  I knew that Nadal would not be denied.  He was an underdog, he was tough, he had a passion for the game that seemed to extend outward to life; in short, he reminded me of a young me.

Fast forward to this past June.  Nadal smokes Soderling in the French Open Final after Federer had lost to Soderling in the Quarterfinals.  It’s Nadal’s fifth French Open and seventh Grand Slam Championship.  Nadal is healthy.  He is ready to head to Wimbledon and win another title there.  He cruises through the first two rounds but goes five sets in the third.  Then, on June 12, the day the U.S. lost to Ghana, I woke up to find Nadal struggling against some guy named Petzschner.  He was down two sets to one and it looked like Petzschner was going to win the match.  I was slightly hung over and I was livid. My apartment was boiling hot and I just lost it.

“God damnit! Come on, Nadal! This guy looks like Tom Jane! You can’t fucking lose to him!”

Nadal fought back to tie the set, but then Petzschner pulled ahead again.  The pillows started flying across my living room.  However, Nadal composed himself (through a trainer break) and came back to win the set and tie the match at two sets apiece.  He was back in it and he had the mental edge. Heading into the fifth set, you knew that Petzschner was done.  And he was.  Petzschner had come so close to defeating Nadal, he had used all the essential tools to beat Nadal (strong serve that forces Nadal back on the baseline, attacking the net to keep him off-guard, for Nadal thrives on keeping his opponents off-guard with off-speeed shots), yet he couldn’t finish it off.  Nadal cooly won the fifth set 6-4.  He was into the quarters to play Soderling. I knew he’d beat Soderling after the confidence Nadal displayed at the French Open and as I followed the game tracker at work I was pleased to see he did.  I was also pleased to see that Federer lost .  The head boss at my office noticed I was following the matches.

“Did he lose?” He asked me.

“Federer?” I hid my nerves.

“Yes.”

“Yeah, Berdych beat him pretty cooly.”

“I can’t believe it. And Nadal?”

“Beat Soderling in straight sets.”

“I play so much tennis,” he said. “That I don’t watch tennis.” He chuckled and walked away in his finely tailored Italian suit.

Nadal was even helping me score points with my boss.  So, I knew that when he faced Murray, a player who had Nadal’s number in the past, that he would win.  And, following at work again, I was pleased to see my prediction come true.  Nadal beat him in straight sets.  Just outworking him and taking all the advantages that Murray gave him and also allowing Murray to beat himself.  I knew that Nadal would beat Berdych in the Wimbledon Final.

I woke up on Sunday morning with a house full of people.  We had partied by my pool the night before. As people staggered in and sat around the kitchen table with my family and I and our bagels and the hot, black coffee, we all watched as Nadal, once again cooly beat his opponent in straight sets.  He had won his second Wimbledon Title.  Reading about the match afterwards, Berdych said that Nadal was not playing his best, but that he just couldn’t use the opportunities to beat him.  It was then that I realized Nadal had become what Federer once was – the man that lets his opponent beat himself; that, even is he is not playing his best game, will not be beaten, becaue his opponents are so aware of the opportunity they have to beat the best, that they end up forcing their own mistakes and give the match away.  This was the trademark of the Federer era and it will be the trademark of the Nadal era.

As I look forward to Nadal trying to win the Career Slam at only 24 years old at the U.S. Open in September, I can’t help but think of how much he’s been through.  His knees have constantly been questioned.  He witnessed his parents’ divorce last year.  He suffered humiliating defeats and forfeits, yet at 24 years old, he has 8 Grand Slams to Federer’s 16.  Federer had only 5 by the time he was 25.  We will see if Nadal has to rack up all of his championships while he is young and if his game will not hold up over time.  However, I love Rafael Nadal.  And I do not doubt him for a second.  His serve has improved, his backhand is devastating and he is rounding his game out to keep the pressure off his knees.  He is in amazing shape and he defeats his opponents mentally by first defeating them physically.  He is a machine that can’t be stopped or slowed down. You see his opponents getting tired when they are up 2 sets to 1.  But Nadal never slows down.  You know he’s going to win.  He’s doesn’t suck and isn’t lucky like Federer is.  In Nadal, there is passion, there is grit, there is always that underdog essence.  And most of all, he wants to beat Federer because he wants to be the best.

That’s why I love him. He’s got me as a fan now and there will be plenty of expletives and thrown household objects to come.

Short Week

I know that I've been laying on some heavy blog posts recently, but I suppose I've just had a lot on my mind for whatever reason.  I use this blog space as a means of articulating it.  And, if you don't like it, just remember that if Tolstoy were alive now that he would be using a blog to articulate his own rambling and misconceived ideas about the universe, time, love and friendship. Besides, its the basketball offseason anyway, there will be plenty of basketball posts in the upcoming months that will drive you crazy and bore you to death - especially after the LeBron's Choice Special airing on ESPN at 9:00 PM tomorrow night.

This is a short week and I am actually very busy these days.  I am going to give you a Nadal column tomorrow evening and I would like to get a podcast up on Friday, but I don't think that its going to happen.  We have a few good ones coming up that just need to get done, but I urge to all you listen to the Lauren Gidwitz podcast, which is just gold in my opinion.  As well as this podcast, which is one of the most underrated and one of my favorites.

Before I leave you to take on my other projects (podcasts, revising my second novel, submitting sketches to Saturday Night Live), I just want to wax poetic briefly on the Fourth of July.  This past weekend I had a bunch of friends come to my parents home on Long Island to watch my father and I roast a lamb on his birthday, July 3.  Now, they also were able to swim in the pool and avoid the heat of the city, which is crucial.  However, it was a very happy occurance for me to have so many people I cared about in the same place and enjoying each other's company and the lucky fortune that I have been able to stumble across in my life.  It was a day where a lot of people were  united and even reunited.  The next day, a few of those guests stayed and I was able to show them the beauty of Long Island in the summer and on the Fourth of July, as I took them to my friend's humble, amazing and cozy apartment on Thatch Meadow Farm in the town known as Head of the Harbor.  There, we raked for clams at low tide in Head of the Harbor, watched dogs swim and huff with their heads above the salt water, we sailed on a Hobi-Cat sailboat while tugging a canoe, we swam, we watched the sunset surreal colors of purple, pink and then eventually that graceful periwinkle grey of the evening. Finally, the fireworks went off all along the horizon on the harbor, some exploding far out over the sound, some just over our heads from the shadows of some secluded wealthy lawn.  As a fire burned and our clams cooked on a pot with beer, garlic and butter, I watched the reflections of the fireworks in the water.  I thought about how there is nothing that I am more thankful for than these privileged glimpses of nature and natural beauty that I was able to grow up with and now show my friends; the people that I love.  I thought about the sound of fireworks over a body of water on Long Island and how, no matter where you may be sitting, if you sit by a body of water on Long Island, in the summer, while the heat of the day slowly turns to night, that there is the sound of chatter and the slight shimmer of gold forever in the air.  I thought about how that lasting sensation and image is always riding somewhere deep in my gut, and is always searching to be given word in different representations, objects and perceptions. 

All this, while the smoke of a summer long gone, floats away, like the dying of our conversation in the adjacent room.

That last line is from some funny idea I have for a very eloquent and elegant novel called The Adjacent Room. Sounds pretentious, no?

Anyway my Puddlers, no matter how serious I may get, there is always a joke, there is always gold around the corner.  So stick with me.  I will not let you down.

Friends 2

I’m going to write about Rafael Nadal winning Wimbledon another evening during this brutally hot week.  For now, there are other things I need to address, but there is something elemental about his struggles and achievement in all of this – at least I suppose so.

As someone who has spent the majority of his youth trying to understand the  impossibility of friendship rather than comprehend the fathoms of love, I again found myself, the day after the Fourth of July, staring into the azure blue of the deep end of my childhood pool and cleaning dirt and mulch from the shimmering bottom.  This isn’t to say that I never enjoyed cleaning my pool – in fact I always have loved it in some strange way.  I’ve loved it because you can stand outside in the heat, away from your neighbors and listen to the radio in private.  You can become the shrieking heretic in “Sympathy for the Devil,” or the snide hipster of “Like a Rolling Stone,” and then when you’re done, you can jump in the pool, submerge the heat and the sounds of the radio, only to emerge once more, pleasantly surprised by the heat of the air and the slick feeling of your hair as you push it or flick it back on your head.  Then, if you choose to, you can get out and touch the soles of your feet to the bricks that your parents paid for to surround the pool.  Or, if you choose to, you can simply float.

Jay Gatsby was shot in a pool, but I was never anything like him, though I did think I could’ve made an admirable Nick Carraway.  What I always admired about the whole mess that led to Gatsby’s demise, besides the idea of creating an image of yourself and building an identity in America, was the illusive notion of friendship that Nick Carraway seemed to identify with the Gatsby.  This idea was recently resuscitated with an almost equal level of eloquence by Joseph O’Neill in his novel Netherland.  These are both novels about men who are lost and who are able to find out truths about themselves by making acquaintances with two different criminals.  Gatsby is by all means a high level bootlegger and gambler as we are led to believe, while Chuck Ramkissoon runs an intricate but low-level Caribbean “lottery” throughout New York City. These narrators, Nick Carraway and Hans, are both looking to make an identity for themselves in New York, and have lost touch or have chosen to the lose touch with the places they came from. For Nick, that is the Midwest, for Hans it is London and his native Netherlands. Hans actually has a wife that he is estranged from, where Nick Carraway looks for love with the distant, independent, and modern female tennis player (see, I told you Nadal was in here!) Jordan Baker.  Because their love lives are unreliable, they look to notions of friendship they find in unreliable males.  Both Hans and Nick are able to find the sensations of masculinity in male friendship in both Gatsby and Chuck Ramkissoon: feeling privileged to be in the other’s company, the sense of adventure of moving about in the world with the other, the sense of sharing a similar desolation, the ability to drink a beer in the sun and share a private moment.  However, each one is left grasping at what their friendship meant or could have done after their “friend” has been murdered in each story.  Nick Carraway tells us in the beginning of The Great Gatsby that he wants no more “privileged glimpses into the hearts of other men.”  That, in essence, is what male friendship boils down to.

These similar tropes have been seen in the work of Jack Kerouac, whom I think in the 21st century should be madatory reading for elementary school boys instead of Treasure Island and that kind of book.  The Duluoz Legend of Keroauc’s mind’s eye represents the what should be the new “adventure book.”  Kids know about all the dirty things earlier now anyway, why should they not read about unbridled enthusiasm and driving across the country, climbing mountains, driving in cars, when they are young and are forced to be driven around by their parents.  No one wrote better about a fall day coming home from school and eating peanut butter crackers with milk than Kerouac anyway.  He was a maudlin and unapologetic nostaligist.  And, he often depicted the search for friendship in the cast of characters in one’s life better than most writers in any medium.  You may find him amateurish and by all means he certainly is, but even in the most amateur of technique, or brutish sensibilities, we can find the truths of the world.  The friendship between Kerouac and Neal Cassidy as it was fictionalized or marginalized by Kerouac’s work is something that should be admired as the representation of a relationship between two people in this world, two friends, two men trying to make sense of the years and whims that rose up within them and without them.

So, because of novels like these, I spent much of my youth looking for that kernel of truth in friendship, in male friendship that would answer me some kind of question.  What does it truly mean to be a friend to someone?  How does one get by when those friends have to travel and move on to do the different things with their lives?  What happens when our adventures end? Do our adventures ever end? Is it even possible to love somebody else?  These are the questions that the illusive search for friendship can raise up in your mind.  And I spent much time cleaning my pool and thinking about these types of things.  I found myself doing the same thing the day after this past Fourth of July because I had a variety of friends staying at my home from different levels of life: elementary school, junior high and high school, college, and post college.  Some of them knew each other very well, some of them knew me very well, some didn’t and vice versa.  Yet, we all got along and had a memorable time.  The kind of time that sticks to your memory and leaves the details there, so, that even if you are one who loses tracks of the details to distinct places and “times” easily, you would be able to recall the year, the light and perhaps who was even there.  And of course, when it was all over, when the beer and other litter had been dragged to the curb, I was there cleaning the pool, thinking about all that had happened and all of the fun that had ended.  The radio played and the mercury in the temperature inched closer and closer to 100 degrees – ambition echoed hollow In my gut and I just wanted to be finished with it all and be able to swim.  I wanted to run out into the shade and the swaying of the trees and the heat.  After that, I didn’t know what I wanted to happen – I just wanted that.

Then, a song I had been longing to hear came on the radio.  It was “Mother” by John Lennon, from Plastic Ono Band.  I, thinking of friends, of course thought of The Beatles and about how stories end and how we move on as I have written about before.  If you have listened to Plastic Ono Band it is all about moving on and how we do it in the different areas and through the different traumas of our lives.  I grew up loving the album, because when I was younger, I related to John Lennon more than any of The Beatles just like most kids do.  You gravitate towards John Lennon because he was the “smart one.”  All the Beatles were funny, but he had the quickest and most biting wit.  He made the bold statements.  He was the leader.  You don’t think about the finer shades that you do the longer you spend with the Beatles: “Paul was the most melodic,” “Paul was the most natural musician,” “George’s songwriting was held back just look at All Things Must Pass,” “I agree with George’s pragmaticism and spirituality more than with anything harsh that John had to say, or simple that Paul had to say.” When you are young, you love John Lennon, because that is what time has taught us about the Beatles.

And I loved John Lennon on Plastic Ono Band because he said all the bold things, because he screamed in his John Lennon way and because he made hooks out of the syllables in his verses in that singular John Lennon/Beatles/mostly John Lennon way (just listen to “Mother” when he says “Sooo, ayyyyyeee”).  However, I loved it the most because no matter what I was going through, I could listen to it and feel clean again.  It was like getting a haircut for your soul.  That image seems demeaning, but the sentiment is true.  Whenever you go for a haircut, you go for that feeling of newness, of freshness. “With this haircut, I’m going to do something. I’m going to impress someone. Something’s gonna be different.”  Whenever I put on Plastic Ono Band that is the intent that I have. From the refrain of “Mother” when Lennon says “So, I/I just have to tell you/Goodbye, goodbye” to the thrilling coda when he screams “Momma don’t go/Daddy come home” you know that he is losing the demons and  whatever yours may be, you can lose them to with his screams and with the hypnotic piano and drums. Then we get to “I Found Out” where John tells whoever is listening that “I’ve seen the junkets/I’ve been through it all/I’ve seen religion from Jesus to Paul/Don’t let them fool you with dope and cocaine/No one can harm you/Feel your own pain.” And of course he throws the double entendre in there with the loaded word “Paul,” making you think just a little bit harder about what he means because he is saying it with such conviction.  As the album veers from harsher commentary to the brooding slower numbers such as “Love,” “Working Class Hero,” and “Look At Me,” you get the ultimate sense of someone stripping themselves to the essentials.  There are no comments on what friendship is or what love is, besides to say that “Love is real/Real is love.”  This effect is refreshing since there is no overarching statement leading you in a direction.  Love is real, is merely an indicator of a feeling.  Because even John probably didn’t even know what it was that he was calling his love with Yoko Ono at that time.

Then, of course we get to “God,” which has always been one of my favorite songs of all time because it doesn’t let you get away with anything.  Now, many people may call this song merely self-important sermonizing, but I can’t stress how powerful I used to find this song and how necessary I still find it.  How often to you address a statement to God that could be addressed to the earth or to something more definite, when all you are doing is trying to measure out the amount of pain or confusion you are feeling?  How often to you place meaning on a false idol of any kind, God or anything else?  When John lists through the names of all the things he doesn’t believe in anymore, all the icons that he is tearing down, it is timeless in a careening way of never letting yourself get consumed in the things that you have consumed your time with.  It is an exercise in separation, in distance and in seeing something from a new perspective.  When punk music came around, they did the same thing, in a less eloquent and less conscious way.  They wanted to tear down icons because it looked cool, not because it trapped them.  This is all the stuff of James Joyce.  There should be no nets that trap you.  All our Elvis’, our Zimmermans, our Kennedys, and our Beatles need to be overthrown at every turn because they are wait rein is in to saying “we can’t.” Those images and icons, while showing us what is possible, also indicate to us that there is something that we can’t or shouldn’t do or that we aren’t capable of doing, but we are always more than capable.  So we have to get rid of what we’ve already known from time to time, we need to start over again to remember that there is only us in the end and that’s all that there ever was to begin with.  That is the haircut that allows us to see what we’ve been consumed with better than we’ve ever been able to see it before.  That allows us to understand what our love is; what the feelings of friendship we are longing to define are.

This was supposed to be a manual on cleaning pools, but now its about cleaning something else.  I guess what it’s all about is realizing that the Midwest of your youth never really existed, that no matter how many books you read, how many words you learn, you’ll never come upon that word known to all men, you’ll never truly understand how to describe the impossibility of friendship or the fathoms and blue shades of love.  All you can do is remember all of the things that brought you to a certain point and then try to forget them all, try to forget the way you saw them so that you can see them in the way that they really are.  Because in the end, its all about what you can accomplish and very often you can’t accomplish much without other people, but with them you can often lose yourself by forgetting what’s important or forgetting how you see them. So, you have to get a haircut from time to time – alter that identity and those identifications, if ever so slighlty, in order to keep chasing what you’ll never be able to fully capture.

Actually, this was a pitch for a new TV show called Friends 2.

Summertime Clothes

I don’t have John Williams’ novel, Stoner, in front of me at the moment, so I will lack the ability to provide you with all the quotes that I want to share.  However, there is one poignant quote that I was able to track down.  It is somewhat lengthy, but it sums up a lot of things in general:

“He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”

Now, this is not the most upbeat quote that you could pick out. And Stoner is not itself a novel that is filled with humor or anything terribly upbeat.  But there is a truthfulness to it, a kind of simplicty and an inevitablity that you can’t argue with and that you have to eventually account for.

I am always going to associate Stoner, oddly enough with sensations of summertime.  One of the reasons I am going to do this is because I read the book during the high heat of this past June. I read it sweating on the Union Square 4,5,6 platform; I read it with an aggravating headache at the Lorimer L stop; I read it drinking water and coffee simultaneously on the rooftop out of my kitchen window on luxurious summer Fridays; I read it in my bed, sweating again, but listening to the whirr of my fan and the whish of cars along the road outside.  Stoner as a novel is more than just summer.  Its pages actually remind one more of the end of summer, the kind of weather we have refreshingly felt this past week along the avenues of the city and I’m sure elsewhere.  That thrilling morning chill when the sun is still very bright and you know that the heat of the day is simply lurking in the shadows of the homes and buildings that surround you, possibly in the grass and the dirt and will reveal itself in the stretch of the afternoon until it finally disappears into the cool and dew of the night – that time when you pull out a sweater or sweatshirt and wear it on your bare chest, perspiring only lightly. Stoner does all seasons.  But the concern here, the concern with summer is that Stoner offers such a view of detachment from one’s life that it seems so out of step with the things we feel in the summertime.  Usually, summer is a time for getting grass stains on your shirts.  Letting those dripping ice cream streaks run down and plummet to the knitted tops of your socks;  running blackfooted on grass and pavement; allowing the sweat to stick to your skin and the smell of dirt to linger on your fingertips and fingernails.  Sand and salt live in our hair in this vision of a popularized summer.  Stoner on the other hand is a tale of a man who finds his life being lived for him as he goes along.  Sure he participates in a marriage, a career, an affair that could be called love, and a passion for literature that he supposes rings true, but in the end he is left grasping at what has been truly palpable in his life.  That is not what we want to think about in summer.  In summer we want to think about staying up all night; we want to think about swimming in the ocean; we want to think about love and drinking coffee early in the morning and surprising ourselves at how good that can feel when everying this quiet and hot.

So how can Stoner help us in the summer? Well, it can give us memories of reading its direct and poetic prose for starters.  However, it can also cause us to remember to take hold of our lives at every moment. A passion may be stirring in your gut and you may be told by someone who is older and presumably wiser than you what that exact fire is supposed to be, but you don’t necessarily have to listen.  You can decide what the definition of your own passion is.  You may be intrigued by a quiet, charming girl at a party and you may want to make her your wife.  And perhaps you do.  And perhaps you try at that marriage and it doesn’t work, even though you have a child.  That doesn’t mean you have to listen to that institution of marriage and remain within its walls.  You don’t have to let life define you.  You don’t have to give in to a career when true love is calling to you.  You don’t have to turn your back.

Maybe I missed the point of the novel and maybe things like a career, the institutions of live, and the advice of older people are all vital and important.  But why I want to dwell on this, is because William Stoner is the second character that I have encountered in fiction that so attracted me due to the sort of disconnect that was so apparent in that character.  The first was Jack Burden from All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren.  Jack Burden’s world was vastly different than William Stoner’s.  Jack Burden was involved in the political game of 1930’s Louisiana.  Jack Burden knew humidity and heat, he knew how to dig in the dirt – he knew how to find the kind of things that stuck to people.  Jack Burden helped Willie Stark become the governor of Louisiana and he was good at digging up dirt and making it stick, yet he did it with such a detachment, with a wave of the hand that said “that’s just the way life is” that I was always so intrigued.  It made the posture of sticking your hands in your pockets seem like a defense mechanism against all that was complicated and band in the world – because with your hands in your pockets, you could just walk away from Pandora’s box, you could let it all fall to hell and not give a damn; only breaking a sweat if you pulled your one hand out to grasp a flask of whiskey in the humid Louisiana night.  Jack Burden wanted to care about things, which William Stoner  very well wanted to do as well.  Perhaps the first person narration helped Jack Burden’s case a little bit more.  For in the end of All The King’s Men, after everything has come down, Jack Burden understands how to return to his life. He has recaptured what is important to him, something that he had forgotten a long time ago, or perhaps never even truly known, and made it palpable. He is able to pursue it. And, as he so famously does, he becomes one with the mist with Anne Stanton amid the pines in Burdenville.

All The King’s Men reeks of summer and it always will.  The heat of the highway is captured as perfectly as it has ever been captured in that novel.  And you will get no better feelings of nightime in the summer than when Robert Penn Warren describes driving on the road at night and soon images of a spiderweb and the inevitability of actions in life come to the page and you start thinking about those late nights that you drove in the summer, smelling woodsmoke after a western rain, or in the orange light of sand lined streets, or away from the fair where the merry-go-round and ferris wheel lights blinked and spun as if they could tell you something you felt you already knew.

Blitzen Trapper reek of summer as well – at least I think they do.  And like Stoner, even if they don’t, my experience of their new album Destroyer of the Void has been filtered though the season of summer.  I’ve digested the album just as the summer entered the beginning of its strongest phase.  I did the same with Blitzen Trapper’s first big album, Wild Mountain Nation, which was actually their third album.  I listened to that album along the playing fields of Brewster Academy, revelling its mix of slide guitars and eccentric Pavement noise workouts.  Then, in 2008, there was Furr.  That album came at the end of the summer and it worked perfectly.  It was more focused on the rustic element of their sound and featured infectious folk rockers with playful lyrics and raucous grooves alongside memorable folk melodies and neo-murder ballads.  This latest album Destroyer of the Void has them expanding on that sound and adding a level of lushness that hasn’t been a part of their palette so far.  However, the two songs I want to tie together are two of their best piano ballads, that were actually recently compared by Pitchfork in their review of the album.  “Not Your Lover” is off Furr and is very much a Neil Young styled piano song.  Pitchfork said that this song was inferior to the newer “Heaven and Earth” off Destroyer of the Void.  I disagree.  “Not Your Lover” is definitely a poignant song about a guy sleeping next to his lover and realizing that while he is asleep, he’s not her lover anymore.  This is an endlessly fascinating idea of who we become when we are asleep.  It’s very much in line with Finnegan’s Wake because when we go to sleep we leave those realities and identies of our waking life behind and we can theoretically enter the heads and dreams of people we don’t even know, we can even become a part of that great unconscious story of history.  Certainly our identity as a lover is taken away, because when we are asleep we are alone and we indulge in those fantasies we have of who we can be.  This is all interesting stuff to be sure, but a line can be very neatly drawn from this song to After the Goldrush-era Neil Young. “Heavan and Earth” is a different beast.  Again, it is a piano ballad, but it hooks you in with a repetitive chorus/chant that introduces you to the song.  It then leads you on a vision of simplicty that I find to be very in tune with much of the writing that is found in Stoner or even in All the King’s Men. Lines like, “Over the Western World/Shadows fall under the kind and dying trees we call together/Still to feel the breeze/To shatter all these waking dreams we’ve told ourselves/To keep us free and clean.”  Again we are entering this play of dreams and the waking life.  The things that keep us free and clean are our dreams, because we can just take off and become bandits every time we hear the song “Isis” come on and forget about our jobs and whatever the hell else we are supposed to care about and go on and be clean and free of all those things.  The waking life is that life that keeps our identity in check, it is what defines us as lovers or as friends – it is what enriches us and attaches us to the earth. So, like the singer of Blitzen Trapper (I don’t know the names I just like the music) says in the song, “Heaven and Earth are mine, says I.”

So, we have Blitzen Trapper, we have All the King’s Men, we have Stoner and we have summer. On the surface, they don’t all seem to have anything to do with summer.  But, summer is that most tortured of seasons.  Not just because its so hot and because the days can stretch on forever and lead to a certain boredom and malaise.  Its because its so fractured.  You start off summer full of a crazed excitement because the weather is fantastic and you have to get outside for every hour of the long day; you have to drink refreshing cocktails; sit outside and eat; you have to go to all those places before they close up for the fall, before it gets too cold.  Then, summer, disturbingly, yet peacefully comes to an end with those fall breezes sneaking in and reminding you of something, at first school, but then you realize it is something more than that, because it always reminded you of something more than that when you were in school.  Summer is about escape, but its also about getting dirty, about feeling the earth on you more than you ever have during the past year. Its about sleeping contendedly with your shorts in a heap on the floor, grass and dirt stains all along the seat; its about drinking on rooftops and not giving a damn about the morning, because the stars look so good sitting in place up there.  See, all these things reek of summer.  And we are individuals whose lives are shaping themselves in front of us. And we can take part in that life whenever we want to, we can grip it and make it in our image.  Even if we don’t know exactly what that life is going to be.  Because, like Robert Penn Warren wrote in All the King’s Men, “the end of man is to know.”

Two For the Price of One?

I'm trying to concoct a longer blog post for you all this evening at the moment.  However, in order to hedge my bets I decided that in case the internet craps out, or in case I run out of time to post something before I pass out from beer stupor, that I would get something quick up for you.  Right now I am toying around with a feeling that has to do with music of the summer, Blitzen Trapper and the novel Stoner by John Williams.  I'm going to furiously scribble away at that right now.  However, in the meantime, I am going to leave you with a song that I recorded with David Stern of the Sanctuaries and Erik Gundel of Motel Motel two distant summers ago.  Let's hope that we recreate the magic in order to achieve a dream of mine: creating my own song medley.

Stay tuned:

Puddles of My Podcast - Episode 17

In the heat of the summer, I make my promises come true.  On this slightly cooler Tuesday evening I bring you yet another episode of Puddles of My Podcast.  In this, Episode 17 of Puddles of My Podcast, I welcome the artist, Chicago native and Lost fan, Lauren Gidwitz.  In this conversation, Ms. Gidwitz and I discuss growing up in Chicago during the Chicago Bulls' 1990's dynasty, her B.J. Armstrong poster, her influences as an artist, her love of the human anatomy and youthful desire to become a medical student, how to manipulate paint, Beiruit, why she chooses subjects for her painting, the Lost series finale and so much more. This podcast took about a month of planning to finally complete and is completely worth it.  I highly recommend listening to this podcast if you are of the mind to undertake any creative endeavour.

I will be back with a post on Thursday and hopefully another podcast will be posted on Friday.  Stay cool my Puddlers and keep wishing for that breeze to blow through your non-air conditioned apartment, just like I am.

Hot Hot Heat

  

 No, this post is not about the 1995 crime drama starring Al Pacino and Robert Dinero, its about how godforsaken hot and humid it has been over the past few days.  I spent the weekend playing some pickup basketball near McCarren Park, which literally made me want to write another column about the pure joy of playing basketball.  However, I may have to pair the joy of playing basketball with another topic in order to write something that deserves full length.  

Now, I was exhausted from the weekend after I got back from work today, but I was listening to "Isis" by Bob Dylan and I realized in My Puddles of My Own Podcast that I should have said that "Isis" was my favorite song of all time.  And I may just write an entire post about Isis in the upcoming days.  However, I am lamenting the fact that it is doggedly hot and that I do not have any terribly new content to put up for all you poor Puddlers out there just trying to stay cool in Puddles of Myself.  But, I am working on a few podcasts for this week that had to be rescheduled.  I am editing From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt and I am working on setting up a real live reading of some of my work in the near future.  Things will be happening.  I should be finishing the recording of a podcast tomorrow night with Lauren Gidwitz and once I get back from that I will try to pump out a column for you all, either about "Isis" by Bob Dylan and some assorted delusions that are related to that song or a diatribe against all those who do not listen to Blitzen Trapper.  Or, I may just discuss the novel Stoner and my immediate impressions.   I definitely want to take a break from basketball as the hype for July 1, 2010 is rapidly becoming insane. 

Don't worry my Puddlers.  I got your back.  Just be patient with me.

However, now, I leave you with the next installment of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt:

Liza

    Eve is holding the book in her hands and flipping the pages nonchalantly.  She is wearing a thin charm braclet with a whale’s tale as the only charm.  I can feel a slight breeze from the book pass across my skirt.

    “You can probably tell that this is much more my kind of book,” she says. “I know guys mostly like Hemingway, but this book seemed romantic to me for some reason even with all the bull fights.  There’s just something about Jake I like and that last scene with he and Brett. That last line.”

    “I’m not there yet.”

    “Oh,” Eve covers her mouth quickly and laughs.  “I won’t ruin it.”  She puts the book gently down on the table, pats it and crosses her legs.  Tom comes striding through the room with James following after.  I catch myself laughing at the reversal of roles;  though, Tom stopped following James after awhile.  Eve watches James as he passes.  You can feel the energy in the room change.  This girl – woman – sitting next to me gives off the strangest feeling when my brother passes by.  It was like mom and dad in a way.  They both did that for the other.  Maybe I’m exaggerating or maybe I am the only one who noticed because I was home alone the longest.

    Eve turns towards me. “How are you doing?”

    I feel water in my nose and I have to frown. “I think I’m OK.  It’s been a long day.  I don’t really know.”

    She leans over and hugs me.  I’ve been trying all day to figure out what perfume she’s wearing.  I can almost place it.  There is lavender in there somewhere, something strong and citrusy.

    “It’ll all be alright,” Eve says. She grabs my shoulders.  Her hands are actually strong. “I don’t know what else to say besides that.”

    My eyes are getting watery with tears.  I look up at her but I see the brick facades of the buildings at school and the titlted iron roofs over the walkways throughout the campus.  The walkway roofs are a sort of green – green rust comes from the rain.

    “You think so?”

    Eve nods.  Her brown eyes serious. “Sure. I think you’re a strong girl.”

    I laugh.  It sounds wrong coming from her.

    “What?” Eve asks. She laughs too. “I’m not a motivational speaker.”

    “No,” I say. “I think it will be alright.”

    “You’ll go back to school.  You’ll be fine.  It’ll be hard.  But it’ll be OK.”  She pats my hands.

    My stomach feels like its going up and down a hill.  Like Mount Grey Road with all of its hills which made the car fly.  I remember the night before I left for school. I was standing out in front of the garage and all of the trees were dark between our house and the neighbor’s house.  Light from the pool was on some of the leaves and the crickets were making their noises everywhere.  I looked into the garage at all of the things on the shelves: dad’s tools, the old sporting equiptment, the neon striped beach chairs – there just seemed to be too much in the world.

    Mom came out of the house.  She looked up and saw me.  She shuffled her sandals on the loose rug and walked down the steps.  She stepped out into the dark to meet me.  The moon was above her.

    “I can’t believe you’re going,” she said.

    “Oh, mom.”

    “I’m sorry.” She looked straight at me, tearing up.  I always hated to see her cry. “I got like this with the others too.”

    “But, Tom didn’t -”

    She shook her head.

    “What do you want from me, mom? Do you want me to stay?”

    Mom looked out into the dark. “Don’t talk so loud.”

    I felt so angry at her then.  The night was full of something, some life some moisture.  It was the end of summer and there was a breeze on my legs reminding me that I had soccer practice, but really didn’t because I didn’t have to do that anymore and I don’t have to do that anymore.

    “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s  just hard every time.”

    “I have to go, mom.”

    “Yes, I know.”

    I wanted to hug her so badly, but all I could do was look at the line where the light concrete from the garage met the the black tar of the driveway.  There was still a small puddle from the rain.  I looked at her and the crickets were so loud.

    Eve is still looking at me. “What do you think?” she asks.

    I have to confess and it might as well be her who I confess to because she is so nice and she smells the way  I want to smell and I understand why James fell in love with her. Because she is just Eve and I don’t know what that even means, but it makes me want to tell her what I have to say. The feeling of the hill – the feeling of my stomach runs through me.

    “I killed mom, Eve.  I was the one who did it.”

    “What?” She raises her eyebrows. Her hands still on mine.

    “I killed her and  I couldn’t help it.”

The Return of The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Every few months or so, I like to take stock of what has occurred in music, sports, cultural and in my general mindset and create a list that is broken up into three distinct categories: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.  So, on this night of an NBA Draft with two Good players, a lot of Bad players and a TON of Ugly players, I feel that it is only my duty to weigh in on what has been Good, Bad and Ugly in the past four to five months.

The Good:

-The Boston Celtics memorable and gutsy run to the NBA Finals.  Sometimes glorious, sometimes excruciating, but always exciting and (if you're an NBA fan) thought-provoking. I'll definitely remember the 2010 NBA Celtics for Good and Bad.

- The 30-Day Countdown to Season 4 of Mad Men has begun.

- The NCAA Tournament.  Perhaps the most exciting NCAA Tournament in the history of college basketball.  There were too many buzzer beaters, under achieving and mediocre teams to count.  Who knew that mediocrity would ever lead to excitement?

- The neverending efforts of Janelle Sing, which can also be seen here  and here.  I'm telling you all: never stop working at those creative endeavors. If you don't stop, you'll never lose.

- Tinkers by Paul Harding.  I can not say enough about this book.  Just read it please.

- The Wall Street Ferry to Yankee Stadium.  Who knew?

- Ms. Farrell being added to the Mad Men website.  Meaning, hopefully, that America's new hearthrob (at least in my mind) will be a big part of Season 4.

- Brinsley Schwartz's version of "What's So Funny ('Bout Peace, Love and Understanding)?"

- Landon Donovan's goal.  C'mon.

- Newport, RI.

- John Williams' Stoner. An excerpt: "In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt and an embarassed nostalgia.  Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligenct and the heart."

- Treme.  One of the best stories about a city since Ulysses.  Including a very "Wandering Rocksesque" Episode.

- Blitzen Trapper's fifth album Destroyer of the Void.

- The cover art for the new Walkmen album, Lisbon.

- The beach.

- Rondo's diving steal/layup against the Orlando Magic in the Eastern Conference Finals.

- Air.

- The Garnett to Pierce to Rondo play in the 2010 NBA Finals.

- The smell of a tree.

- Mad Men Season 4 coming on July 25, 2010.


The Bad:

- Kobe Bryant's performance in Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals.

- Backlash to the Lost series finale.  C'mon it was just a show.  It had Sayeed and Sawyer and Hurley and Jack and Kate and Mr. Eko and Locke and Desmond and Ben Linus and the Smoke Monster and Boone and Shannon and Libby and Vincent the Dog and Michael and Walt and...

- Time.  It's always just passing isn't it?  So depressing.

- The Lebron James sweepstakes.

- The oil spill. C'mon.

- The phantom penalty/offsides called against the U.S. in the Slovenia Game.  Awful.  We all thought basketball was bad.

- My exclusion from the Top 20 Writers Under 40 List published by the New Yorker.

- Mad Men being overshadowed by the attention given to Breaking Bad.  Just you wait until Season 4.

- The commercials for ABC's summer programming.

- The fact that I am not a TV writer when ABC is pumping out shows like The Gates and Rookie Blue.  I'm not bitter but, c'mon that stuff is terrible.

- The New York State Government.  Makes you long for the corrupt politics of Willie Stark, "Kingfish" Huey Long, or Boss Tweed.  At least times were simpler.

- Apple Stores.  That just has to be hell on earth, no?

- Michael Jordan's anti-semitic moustache.

- Hitting peak garbage smell season in New York City.

- The Haiti Earthquake. 


And now, of course, it is THE UGLY:

 

Alright, my Puddlers.  I should be back with another Puddles of My Podcast tomorrow.  If not, have a great weekend. Enjoy the heat and enjoy the thunderstorms if they come.  Watch the U.S. try to beat Ghana and make sure to vote on the newest Puddles of Poll on the sidebar of the blog.  I do pay attention to what you have to say about the blog.

Until the next time.