Anachronisms
18. Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella.
I’m going to cheat a little. I found this on my phone a while back, a tweet (RIP) I posted on September 7, 2024: “The novel Dances With Wolves could easily have been lost to history. The author, Michael Blake, couldn’t get an agent or a publisher. Fortunately he never gave up, plus he was friends with Kevin Costner.” I enjoyed Dances With Wolves, but I think the movie is better. It’s rare to say that; generally any time a movie is better than the book it’s because the book was a disaster. I hate that the first example that comes to mind is a Woody Allen movie, but Bananas was based on a terrible book called Don Quixote U.S.A. (I read part of it in grad school out of curiosity). Loosely based on, I should say; I remember reading that Allen and co-writer Mickey Rose thought the book was terrible and just kind of took the assignment but made their own movie. With Dances With Wolves, though, the book was good, and the movie was just better. I got the feeling, as I started reading Shoeless Joe, that Kevin Costner must have had a knack for making movies out of books that were just good enough but were always meant to be films. Shoeless Joe, if you don’t know, is the book from which Field of Dreams is adapted. I am happy to say I was wrong. Shoeless Joe is better. And weirder. The narrator is a guy named Ray Kinsella and after being told if he builds it they will come he is told to ease his pain. In the book the guy whose pain needs easing is J.D. Salinger. They had to change this in the movie. Kinsella drives all the way from Iowa to New Hampshire to take him, at gunpoint if needed (it’s not quite needed) to a Red Sox game and ends up taking him to Minnesota to pick up a ballplayer, then back to the farm in Iowa, where they can watch ballgames played by guys who have been dead for decades, stars like Shoeless Joe Jackson, but also guys who didn’t last, who didn’t make it big, guys like Moonlight Graham, from Minnesota.
I happen to be writing, mostly in my head at this point, a baseball novel, so I’m planning on sneaking in more baseball reading for research and mood and inspiration. I love baseball. I hardly watch it. I went to a Cubs game over the summer and while it was nice, it was also weird. Don’t get me started on the price of beer—but actually there was a group of loud guys in front of us, bro culture guys, stock market type guys, and they kept buying beers and hotdogs, and I couldn’t understand how they had that much money. They were young guys. When I was their age the only way I was eating a hot dog at a ballgame was if someone dropped it on the ground and was too squeamish to eat it. A thing that has been on my mind, especially as I was reading this book, which celebrates the magic of baseball, is that here we are in this dying empire and basically my two great loves, baseball and literature, are being hollowed out and sabotaged and attacked, and it feels like people just don’t care, and I think these things are related, the moribund empire contributing to a moribund culture; it’s perhaps chicken-and-egg but I’ve had this theory for a while now that basically “America” was lost when football became more popular than baseball. And everything MLB does to make it faster, more modern, more attention-grabbing, makes the game worse.
Ray is married to a woman named Annie, who is probably the most outlandish fantasy in the book: she is a person who never seems to get angry, who supports her husband’s ever wackier choices without reservation. You could make the case that she’s one-dimensional, that W.P. Kinsella doesn’t write women well; you could make the case that she’s of the same archetype of her husband, the American Dreamer. She is the one who convinces Ray to quit his soul-killing job selling insurance and rent and then buy a corn farm from a guy who claims to be the last living Chicago Cub from his era. Annie is unique in her family; her mom is a stuckup religious hardliner and her brother is a soulless corporate drone who wants to buy the farm out from under Ray. Why?
“You’re going to have to face the facts,” Mark said to me. “Your financial position is no secret. It appears to me that you either have to sell the farm now or lose it in the fall. Even if you have a bumper crop, which doesn’t appear likely, you’ll never be able to keep up with the mortgage payments. You can’t make a living off a quarter-section anymore. The days of the small farmer are gone forever. You’re an anachronism.”
Progress to a guy like Mark is a farm run by computers. There’s a guy in some dark space pressing buttons but mostly all the work is done by and run machines. That’s the future. It’s even more impossible to be a small farmer today, but I know there are Marks out there, telling stories of the computer-run farm. This is the way forward, this is always the way forward. Ray is an anachronism, a guy who cares more about baseball than money. I think there’s something important in that: in our culture, a person who cares about anything, other than lip service to religious faith, more than money, you’re an anachronism, an outsider, a weirdo. I kept having this thought as I was reading, that books are an anachronism, and the people who write them or care about them are more and more going to be seen as kooks. I don’t think the future is Fahrenheit 451; I think it’s just the kookification of literacy. We won’t be persecuted, but we’ll be cast aside, culturally, reading our out-of-date books while people sit on the couches scrolling their phones while they watch AI-generated background content on Netflix.
What Ray Kinsella says about baseball is also true of poetry: “the sense of urgency that governs most lives is pushed to one side like junk mail shoved to the back of a desk.” Baseball has been taken over by nerds but it is the most poetic sport. People complain about the slowness of the game—and what’s worse the people in charge of the game have heard them and are changing it to make it more fast-paced—but that slowness invites contemplation and dreaming. You have time to get lost in thought at a ballgame, although it is deliberately difficult to do that because there is something demanding your attention for every second of every break between innings, t-shirt cannons, pointless tributes, all to fill the empty space that should be used for reviewing your scorecard, talking about the game, or envisioning yourself on the field, warming up in the on-deck circle waiting to stare down the pitcher. The empty spaces in our lives are now filled for us by phones, by streaming, by content, and reading is anachronistic within such a framework.
I’m not going to say anything about it; I’m just going to type up a passage from the book that I put a star next to, and at the top of the page I wrote “perfect.”
The play reaffirms what I already know—that baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. I have often thought, If only there was a framework to life, rules to live by. But suddenly I see, like a silver flash of lightning on the horizon, a meaning I have never grasped before.
I feel as if I’ve escaped my skin, as if I left a dry shell of myself back in Iowa. My skin is so new and pink it feels raw to my touch; it’s as if I’ve peeled off a blister that covered my whole body. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That’s why they say, “The game is never over until the last man is out.” Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.
It might seem wacky to pair Shoeless Joe Jackson and J.D. Salinger, but these are two all-time greats whose careers were shorter than they might have been, albeit for different reasons, and it makes for a good road trip novel.
19. The Walls Are Closing In On Us, a novel by Joshua Trent Brown. This is a big ol’ book. It came in over 100,000 words, although I knocked it down to 99,000ish. Trent describes it as a Southern odyssey and I like that. Comes out March 2026. Keep any eye out for it.
20. When Sad Ones Go Outside by Monica Wang. This is a very short chapbook by my friend Monica. When I have a chance I would like to write about one or two of the poems.
21. Terrestrial, a novella by Suzy Eynon. Another Malarkey title, polar opposite of The Walls Are Closing In On Us. Suzy’s book is short, and spare, but no less powerful. It’s set in a time before cell phones dominated our society and culture and daily lives, and in its way is a good reminder that we were lonely, atomized, and desperate for connection before cell phones. This one is out in May 2026.
I don’t intend to cheapen these posts with flurries of links, but I am obligated to mention that the first print column of Good Reads is coming out soon, or now I guess, in issue 24 of King Ludd’s Rag. I have written a sort of close read of a poem that was published in the esteemed Taco Bell Quarterly. The poem is “EVERYONE I HAVE EVER KISSED THINKS ABOUT ME ALL OF THE TIME AND IS IN LOVE WITH ME” by Hilary Kaufman. I won’t say any more about it here, but if you’re interested in reading that close read, you can order the print issue for $5 or the PDF (which you can print out if, like me, you hate reading on screens, even though you are, presumably doing so right now) for $1. The money does go to a good cause: Malarkey. I really enjoy making King Ludd’s Rag, especially now that I don’t have to wade through submissions, thanks to crack editor Zach Kocanda, but it does not make us any money. Most of the time we lose a little money, but I regard it as good advertising, partly, although it’s hard to tell if anyone ever buys a book because they ended up with a copy of KLR. But I also just think it’s valuable to promote long stories in print, even if it is really hard to keep going. This issue features stories by J. Edward Gregal and Tori Rego. We do need to sell copies but if for any reason you cannot afford to buy a copy but would like to read it, if you email me I will send you a PDF, or you can use the code GOOD-READS to get the PDF for free at the link below.