Month: May 2005

I just like the headline.

Okay, I stole that headline from the Observer or somewhere; sorry.

Anyway, VM contributor Tom Spurgeon offers up 10 reasons he may not see Star Wars III, including

2. If I had a dollar every time I heard someone on TV asserting Star Wars was important for no other reason than that they liked it a lot, I would still be about $49,973 short of the money one should be paid to hear people talk like that.

At the NYTimes, Virginia Heffernan’s been blogging from the “upfronts” presentations, where TV networks pitch next season’s new shows to advertisers. It’s a hoot:

In the big, comic presentations, “Hawaii,” “LAX,” and “Father of the Pride” were satirized as bad ideas. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler said that the people who created them are now in rehab. (In fact, they were probably in the audience, smarting at the slaps; just last year, of course, Mr. Zucker was hyping those same shows, doting on them, and hearing him tear them down like this year was like watching a parent smack a child.)

One of my coworkers asked me how I could possibly read Proust, as he’d fallen asleep in the first 30 pages every time he tried. When I first talk about it, I invariably sound like I’m pursuing it “because it’s there”, as if reading these books is the same as climbing a mountain.

And maybe it is. Because what I’m reading for, besides the totality of the experience and the wit, are the intensely beautiful passages, not the vistas I’ve seen from a mile elevation in New Zealand, but the views of the human soul. It’s the feeling not of understanding another person, but of being understood, as Orwell once wrote about Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

That said, here’s that Proust passage I mentioned earlier. Its specifics don’t pertain to my own relationship, since it’s about the narrator’s potential union to a bisexual social climber in fin de siecle Paris, but hey:

“But you yourself, what do you think of her?” I asked my mother.

“Well, I’m not the one who’s going to marry her. You could certainly do a great deal better in terms of marriage. But I feel that your grandmother would not have liked me to influence you. As a matter of fact, I can’t say what I think of Albertine; I don’t think of her. All I can say to you is, like Madame de Sevigne: ‘She has good qualities, or so I believe. But at this first stage I can praise her only by negatives. She is not this: she has not the Rennes accent. In time, I shall perhaps say: she is that.’ And I shall always think well of her if she can make you happy.”

But by these very words which left it to me to decide my own happiness, my mother had plunged me into that state of doubt in which I had been plunged long ago when, my father having allowed me to go to Phédré and, what was more, to take up writing as a career, I had suddenly felt myself burdened with too great a responsibility, the fear of distressing him, and that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

Those of you who’ve known me for a while are familiar with That Damned Hegel Quote. I first read it more than 10 years ago, during a semester-long study on Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right. (I’ve led an exciting life, as you can tell.)

The essence of the passage is that we must make decisions to become real. But Hegel says it better (or at least more completely) than I do:

A will which resolves on nothing is not an actual will; the characterless man can never resolve on anything. The reason for such indecision may also lie in an over-refined sensibility which knows that, in determining something, it enters the realm of finitude, imposing a limit on itself and relinquishing infinity; yet it does not wish to renounce the totality to which it intends. Such a disposition is dead, even if its aspiration is to be beautiful. “Whoever aspires to great things,” says Goethe, “must be able to limit himself.” Only by making resolutions can the human being enter actuality, however painful the process may be; for inertia would rather not emerge from that inward brooding in which it reserves a universal possibility for itself. But possibility is not yet actuality. The will which is sure of itself does not therefore lose itself in what it determines.

Those of you who’ve known me for a while are also familiar with my intense, paralyzing neuroses. My tendencies to hem and haw, to hedge every statement (“Well, almost every statement . . .”), to never quite reveal where I am, had to be as infuriating to my friends and loved ones as it was to me. I’m a lot better about it than I used to be. I was pretty much a cipher, back in the proverbial day.

But “such a disposition is dead, even if its aspiration is to be beautiful,” we read. I know too many people who live that way, avoiding life-decisions as a means of retaining their “freedom.” Most of them are artists. They’re getting old now. We all are, but they seem lonelier than my other friends.

When I first read that passage by Hegel, I felt like an insect, pinned to a collector’s display (or like a patient etherised upon a table, to recall that old influence). Intellectually, I knew that I couldn’t keep living like this, that it isn’t living. But there’s a difference between knowing something and living something. I feel like I’ve bridged that gap in the past two years. You long-time readers have been along for the ride, and that must’ve been entertaining.

Funny thing: all along, I was saving the Hegel passage for “just the right” entry, the unaccomplishable piece of writing that would make it the centerpiece, in which it would be fastened like a jewel. I’ll likely never get around to the great essay on identity and reification. Rather, I’ll likely get around to living it, but not writing it.

So instead you get this. I can’t do justice to that passage, but as William Gaddis once put it, “In the next world you get justice. Here you have the law.”

And that’s the rambling erudition I was talking about, bringing Proust, Hegel, Eliot, Orwell, Miller, Gaddis, et al. into the conversation. In the old days it was as if, by being everywhere, I could keep from being in one place. It’s still a nervous habit, quoting so much, but those writers and thinkers have informed a good part of how I see the world. They keep opening my eyes, making sure I can see life as it contines to unfold.

All of which is to say, we’re in love, and I finally get it:

“[W]e have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.”

Now I’m gonna get back to my 15 pages.

Whoops! No sooner do I get my new domain-name and reconstitute the blogs than I go underground again! Thanks so much for the well-wishes. The moment I sent out that e-mail last week, I thought, “You just used a teaser about your engagement in an e-mail to drive traffic to the new blog. You geek.”

It was a busy weekend; sorry for the lack of updates. Saturday morning was spent looking over wedding sites, figuring out possible dates, making preliminary lists and checking them twice, etc. The afternoon was spent dumping the contents of a psychiatric office into a dumpster. Harder work than it might appear. Sunday was more of the wedding stuff, less of the psychiatric office stuff, but I was pretty tired by the time I got home last night, and didn’t get to writing.

I promise to get back to more frequent blogging. I think I’m going to write up a great Mad Mix tonight, after I get home from my evening stint of getting Dad’s ass onto the treadmill.

The other thing keeping me away from blogging has been my year-long effort to read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I was afraid to mention it early on, because I didn’t know if I’d have the dedication to read the whole thing. I read the first two books–Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove–in college, but never read the other five. At my birthday, I thought, “Hmm: 34 years old is just about middle-age, so why don’t I get started on Proust?” Sure, I could’ve bought a Corvette or something, but hey.

So I’m starting over. I’m nearly done with the fourth book now, Sodom and Gomorrah. There are “only” three books left, and they’re actually on the short side: 500 pages each (if you haven’t read these before, trust me: 500 pages feels like a walk in the park). Since the end of January, I’ve been reading at least 15 pages a night; if I skip a day, then I make it up the next day. It’s an insanely rewarding series of books, and the discipline involved in sticking with it has helped me a bunch, too.

Anyway, I bring it up because there was a pretty neat passage about marriage in the part that I read last night. Idiot that I am, I forgot to bring the book with me to work today. I’ll transcribe it tonight and post that, too, along with whatever ruminations I manage to put together.

It’s a been a heck of a couple of weeks, dear reader.

My dad got out of the hospital last Wednesday, and we’ve been working on his recuperation (I’ll post more on Andre2005 soon. He’s improving daily, and the surgeon seemed pretty optimistic at their get-together on Monday.

My web host has been out of commission for the past 10 days, and doesn’t show any sign of getting its act together. Till it’s up, I won’t be able to access any of my voyantpub.com files. That means that a lot of these archived entries are going to have useless links in them (any of the links that go to a voyantpub.com file, in other words). I’m going to try to fix those up in the next week or so. Also, a bunch of images were only hosted up on the site, so some of those will be dead for a while. I’ll repost the images that I have on hand.

On the plus side, this gives me an excuse to start over with the web. So I’ve bought a new domain name, republished my various blogs (Virtual Memories, Mad Mix and Andre2005), and can now get a leg up on my nefarious plot to waste people’s time on the internet!

To that end, I’m planning on building chimeraobscura.com into a sort of online magazine in the next couple of months. I’ve got some ideas for articles, interviews, and more content that I’d like to put up in a non-blog format. Zap over your e-mail address, and I’ll keep you apprised about that (you can also pitch me on article ideas).

* * *

But the biggest news I have is that the official VM girlfriend is no more. As of last night, she has become the official VM fiancé!

Yes, dear reader, your Virtual Memoirist has popped the question! My One True answered in the affirmative! Now we just have to figure out the rest of our lives!

* * *

I have a lot of stories to tell (as usual), and I’ll get to them as soon as I can. In the meantime, play in the archives, redirect your RSS feeds to http://chimeraobscura.com/vm/feed/, and be well.

John Rocker is pitching for the Long Island Ducks, trying to make a comeback to the major leagues after a couple years of rehab for rotator cuff surgery. He had a pretty bad first appearance, walking four batters in a row in a relief appearance, but I figure it means I need to give you guys my John Rocker story, so here goes.

In 1999, Georgia native John Rocker was a hard-throwing closer for the Atlanta Braves. He’d gained notoriety for sprinting out of the bullpen, generally being insanely pumped up, and giving the finger to fans for opposing teams after closing out a game. Mets fans in particular hated him.

In December of that year, Sports Illustrated ran an interview with Rocker in which he, to put it bluntly, made a complete ass of himself. Among the quotes:

“The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. I’m not a very big fan of foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?”

“I would retire first [before playing for a New York team]. It’s the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the Number 7 train to the ballpark next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of prison for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing.”

“Nowhere else in the country so people spit at you, throw bottles at you throw quarters at you, throw batteries at you and say, ‘Hey I did your mother last night–she’s a whore.’ I talked about what degenerates they were, and they proved me right. Just by saying something, I could make them mad enough to go home and slap their moms.”

Rocker was vilified after the interview. MLB fined him $20,000 and suspended him for spring training and a month of the regular season. The commissioner of baseball ordered Rocker to undergo psychiatric counseling. In the middle of the next season, he put a nice apology together.

His 2000 season started shakily, as Rocker tried to mend fences with his teammates, but he ended relatively well. In 2001, he was shakier, but he did have 19 saves in 23 opportunities by midseason. In June of 2001, while the Braves were in New York to face the Mets, the team traded Rocker to the Cleveland Indians.

And that’s where our paths crossed.

I was at Newark Airport to board a Continental flight for San Diego for the annual BIO conference. The monorail to my terminal had a few stops. At one of them, I noticed a tall, well-built guy in a black suit, about to board the car behind mine. I thought, “That guy looks like John Rocker.” Then he picked up his Atlanta Braves athletic bag and I thought, “That guy IS John Rocker!”

We got off at the same terminal, and I walked beside him to the escalator.

“John?” I asked.

He looked at me, smirked, and nodded.

“Congratulations on the new job,” I said, low-keying it. “Good luck with the transfer.”

“Thanks,” he replied.

“I’m a Yankees fan, so I’m not wishing you TOO much luck . . .”

He smiled. “Man, we’re gonna be back here next week. But I’ll try to take it easy on ’em for ya.”

“I wouldn’t expect it,” I said. We headed down the escalator. I asked him for an autograph for my publisher, who’s a Mets fan.

“So he hates me?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, as he signed a card.

Now, keep in mind that this guy had just been traded and was in a territory where he had to assume that anyone who recognized him would greet him with “ROCKERYOUSUCK!” Nonetheless, he was perfectly cordial and friendly when I approached him.

So, as we got off the escalator, I decided to talk with him a little. I said, “Let me ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

“When all the controversy broke out after that SI piece, I remember reading a couple of articles about how you were a pretty good student, and how you wanted to go back to college and all.”

“You read that stuff?” he asked.

“Yeah. So what I’m wondering is: do you, uh, read much?”

Now, this might strike you as a weird question, given the circumstances, but I figured the guy had already been talked to death about the content of his SI interview.

I was genuinely curious to find out what the “inner life” of a ballplayer might be like (there’s another anecdote about the time I sat with the players’ wives at a Hornets game in 2002, but I’ll tellya that later), but my curiosity didn’t prepare me for what came out of Rocker’s mouth next.

He replied, “I tellya, man. It’s tough. During the regular season, we’re traveling so much, I can’t really focus on prose as much I do in the offseason, so I tend to read more poetry than novels.”

I think I kept my “cocker-spaniel tilt” to an unnoticeable minimum.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I guess my favorite poet would have to be Poe.” He then cited a poem whose title I can’t remember, but do recall that it wasn’t one of the “standards” of Poe’s oeuvre. I nodded.

“But y’know who I’m really getting into lately? And it’s gonna sound weird, because he’s not known for his poetry: Henry Rollins.”

“That makes perfect sense to me, ” I told him.

“Yeah?”

“Well, he’s like, spoken-word on steroids, and you’re relief pitcher on steroids.” I quickly added, “Metaphorically speaking.”

He laughed. “I guess you’re right.”

I pulled out a copy of the first book that I’d published, Vince Czyz’s Adrift in a Vanishing City (I always kept copies on hand to shill). I told him, “I’m a publisher, and this is the first book I did. It has a story with this really strong Poe character in it; you might like it.”

His face lit up as he took the book from me. “Thanks, man. That’s really cool of you,” he said. And we went our separate ways: I was off to San Diego, he was headed to Kansas City, to meet up with his new team.

The postscript to this meeting was two or three days later, as I was back in my hotel room after a day at the conference. I turned on SportsCenter and saw a tape of Rocker’s first press conference with the Indians. He was on fire:

“F*** the Braves! F*** Atlanta! If you’re name’s not f***ing Glavine, f***ing Maddux or f***ing Smoltz, they don’t give a f*** about you!”

And it hit me, “This guy’s acting.”

It was all there. He was totally playing up the camera, like your standard WWF (at the time) wrestler. All the bombast, all the theatrics: it was all so he could be the Heel, to get the opposing crowds fired up against him, so he could get himself fired up.

I thought, “If you just approach this guy in a normal conversation, even when he’s in a hostile place and just been told that his team doesn’t want him around, he can have a conversation about Poe, Rollins, and the travails of his work-schedule. Put a mic in front of him, and he goes bananas.” He had every reason to just ignore me when I spoke to him, or be a raging a**hole, but he was perfectly willing to just talk like a normal person. But put him on camera, and you may as well have Gene Okerlund onscreen with him.

Rocker’s career really fell apart in the last bunch of years. He had shoulder trouble, and finished the 2002 season with Texas and a humorous ERA of 6.66. He made two appearances for Tampa Bay in 2003, but was ineffective, left for rotator cuff surgery, and is now trying to make that comeback.

Writers immediately jumped on the irony of Rocker playing for a New York-area team after his comments in SI. It’s their right, but Rocker did make a pretty good observation to an AP writer last month: “Everybody is a lot different at 24 than they are at 30.”