In this issue of Idiosyncratic Musings:

Something for everyone?

Some People I Root For

In my mind, each of these names is prefaced by “The great…”

☞ Kyle MacLachlan’s “funny, moving, and playfully self-aware memoir” Fictional Selves is on presale.

☞ Anna Tubbs delivered a wonderful commencement address at Occidental College in under fourteen minutes.

☞ Rozina Ali’s “sweeping narrative history of the U.S. government’s broken compact with its Muslim citizens,” Seasons of Fury, is also on presale.

☞ Adam Plunkett has an essay on Milton, Eliot, and Frost in the spring issue of Liberties. (Adam also deserves a lot of credit, and no blame, for my burgeoning love of poetry discussed below.)

The Parable of the Unassisted Triple Play

Fifteen times in Major League history has a fielder made all three outs on one play without assistance. Thirteen of these fifteen came from shortstops & second basemen, which makes sense: You catch a line drive (one out), you step on second base with the runner already departed for third (two outs), and you tag another runner on his exuberant way from first (three outs). Well, maybe you don’t, but these thirteen guys did.

An unassisted triple play in the middle infield requires some quick thinking, but it’s also a lot of right place, right time. In the most recent example, Eric Bruntlett’s triple play in 2009, the two runners were on base because of Bruntlett’s own errors. That’s a great moment to have an unassisted triple play.

That explains thirteen of fifteen. It’s the other two I’m obsessed with — George Burns in 1923 & Johnny Neun in 1927 — because Burns & Neun were first basemen. An unassisted triple play from first base requires a complete abdication of team sports in favor of individual glory.

You catch a line drive at first. One out. Your runner has already departed, optimistically, for second, and you step on your base. Two outs. You’ve noticed that the runner on second, gripped by an even greater optimism, is on his way to third. Hmm. Someone should put him out! But if he’s not already scrambling back to second, he will be soon.

In this instant, you have a choice: You can throw the ball to one of a number of teammates who are closer to second base than you are. Or you can put your head down & charge second base in your pursuit of niche immortality.

Wikipedia describes Neun heading for second “despite shouts from his shortstop to throw him the ball.” No kidding! What an idiot!

But he beat the runner back to second, so I’m thinking about him ninety-nine years later.

An Autobiography in Underlining, Part I

“I may add here that one of the secrets of my happy life is that I have never made the mistake of learning to drive a car.”

— The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

“My humiliation was complete with his discovery that I couldn’t even drive a car.”

— Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin

“Put an author in the driver’s seat of a car, and his natural goofiness seems to become intensified.”

— Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse

“Not to drive is the latest snobbery, I am told.”

— Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow

The Soul selects her own Society

My uncle Dave is a great declaimer of verse. Like the mariner, he stoppeth one of three, and if you haven’t had him seize your lapels to give you a sampling of Sammy’s finest, you’ve hardly lived.

This is one of many things about my uncle Dave that demonstrate I come by my idiosyncrasies honestly. One theme of my adult life is that, however skeptical I might have been at age 16, Dave has ended up being right. Willa Cather? Yes! Crossword puzzles? Yes! Nostromo? How could I not have appreciated Nostromo! Johnny Hartman? The truth is I actually loved Johnny Hartman at age 16, which tells you a lot. Likewise with Wodehouse & Didion: adolescent me fell in love with them just fine.

But My Antonia & crossword puzzles needed a couple decades to sink in. Well, it’s happening again, because at age 39, I’m realizing I should have been memorizing poems my whole life. I’ve always appreciated poetry, in the sense that I knew better than to be in opposition to humanity’s oldest & most beautiful literary form — & every once in a while I’d say, “Hey, that’s pretty good,” adding my much-awaited endorsement to the work of Yeats or Shakespeare — but I’ve been what a beloved literature professor of mine recently called “a novel guy." (For a while I sought out novels written by poets, and it might have followed that I would have liked their poetry? Or maybe not.)

In classic fashion, I had to learn for myself what Dave & others knew all along, which is that an appreciation of poetry benefits from memory & recitation, even recitation to myself while jogging Forest Park. (Especially recitation to myself while jogging Forest Park.) A couple months ago Peyton & I were looking at “Adam’s Curse,” and I couldn’t get enough of it until I knew it. For a second project I selected “Kubla Khan,” because I already found it beautiful; I had seen in Dave the joy of muttering Coleridge to oneself; and it’s the subject of one of my favorite quotes about literary creation:

Time t, a room contains the following: man, table, paper, pen, ink. The man is Coleridge. Time t+n, the room contains the following: man, table, paper, pen, ink, Kubla Khan.

— Helen DeWitt

Let me skip ahead, “anticipate events” as an old novel might have it, to where this has taken me. My newfound love of old poetry has resulted in my checking off one of the clearest diagnostic criteria for midlife crisis in the American male: an inexplicable obsession with Emily Dickinson.

I’ve had to cut myself off, temporarily, because I find her poems & letters too affecting. I read them, I memorize them, I picture her binding her small books with yarn & putting them in a drawer for no one to see, and I can hardly go on with my day. Right or wrong, it’s easy to project onto her the unrealistic, quasi-spiritual conception of literary genius that I look for in my heroes even though I know better — & to find in her a beautiful, draining sensitivity with which I’m all too ready to empathize.

(“How frugal is the Chariot / That bears the Human soul,” indeed, unless you seek out the 1998 three-volume variorum edition of the poems & the 1958 three-volume edition of the letters & then scrutinize your credit-card statement with your wife at the end of the month. Nor can you say, “Mine – is the more convenient / To Carry in the Hand–”)

While I am an extrovert’s extrovert & manage more or less to function in the world, I sometimes feel like a raw nerve unready & unequipped for the emotions of life. (My uncle Dave, who is sounding increasingly like a character I’ve devised for convenient illustration, won’t mind if I describe him also as prone to Stendhal Syndrome & similar aesthetic sensitivities.) And though I am, by comparison to the Emily Dickinson you meet in the Letters, a scarred-over stoic & a great practitioner of hard reality, reading her further heightens inside me a saturated awareness of life that could debilitate me if I let it. So when Carlo died, it was time to take a break.

In more prosaic pursuits — though you couldn’t choose a worse adjective — I have one volume left of my second trip through In Search of Lost Time. The first time, I did a volume a year amid other books, and it was everything it was made out to be. Knowing how I sound, I resist the urge to tell everyone I know that they must not die without reading Proust. I am thankful, however, that friend of the newsletter Jim T. delivered a similar message to me.

This time I decided to read the Search without interspersing other novels, a goal I have almost lived up to, and it has been even better. All to say, consider how much time I’ve been spending lately inside the infinitely attuned minds of two people who couldn’t always manage to leave their respective bedrooms. I feel like a harp string set to vibrating by the smallest things. (“For have not the Clovers, names, to the Bees?”) At times I can’t remember the purpose of all this beauty.

“I’ll tell you how the Sun rose – / A Ribbon at a time”:

Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, like hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress. At a certain moment, when I was counting over the thoughts that had filled my mind during the preceding minutes, so as to discover whether I had just been asleep or not (and when the very uncertainty which made me ask myself the question was to furnish me with an affirmative answer), in the pale square of the window, above a small black wood, I saw some ragged clouds whose fleecy edges were of a fixed, dead pink, not liable to change, like the colour that dyes the feathers of a wing that has assimilated it, or a pastel on which it has been deposited by the artist’s whim. But I felt that, unlike them, this colour was neither inertia nor caprice, but necessity and life. Presently there gathered behind it reserves of light. It brightened; the sky turned to a glowing pink which I strove, glueing my eyes to the window, to see more clearly, for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate life of Nature, but, the course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with moonlight, its pond encrusted with the opalescent sheen of night, beneath a firmament still spangled with all its stars, and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it anew, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the line, so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view and a continuous picture of it.

— Within a Budding Grove, 316-7

“The steeples swam in Amethyst –”