The Tampa Bay Rays Do Too Have a Fan Base!

Tommy Pham, an outfielder who was traded by the St. Louis Cardinals to the Tampa Bay Rays in the middle of the 2018 season, said on MLB radio a few days ago that “it sucks going from playing in front of a great fan base to a team with really no fan base at all.”

He got it all wrong.  Tampa-St. Pete actually does have great fans.  The trouble is “our” fans only show up to root against us.  One Yankee player a couple of years ago was so struck by the number of Yankee fans at Tropicana Field that he said it seemed more like a home game than a road game for him.

And the same can be said of games against the Red Sox, Cubs, Orioles, Phillies, Pirates, Tigers and so on.  It’s so embarrassing that I boycott those games and attend only the ones against teams without a strong fan base in the Tampa area, like the Minnesota Twins, the Kansas City Royals, the Colorado Rockies, the Seattle Mariners, and so on.  Those midweek games only  draw 10-12,000, but the ones who do come, root (mostly) for the Rays.

So let’s put the blame where it belongs.  We are losing major league baseball in the Tampa-St. Pete area not because we lack a strong fan base but because the fan base roots against us.  It’s their fault our team will be moving to Montreal, Las Vegas, Portland, wherever.  

There is good news, though, because all it would take to turn things around is for our fan base of replanted Northerners to learn to love the team they're with.  It's a tried and tested process, after all, probably the very same one they used to choose their wives.  As Stephen Stills crooned half a century ago, "If you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with."

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

File this under More Depressing News:  A typical driver, over the course of his lifetime, according to the New York Times, spends some 38,000 hours driving his car.

That breaks down to 1,583 days, more than four years, or about 5.5% of a lifetime that stretches to 74 years.  What a waste.

All of which is depressing enough, so I hope I never get related statistics on how many hours I've lost waiting on bank and supermarket lines,  mowing the lawn, and praying to a God that doesn't exist in churches that fleeced me clean.

It Ain't the Fall Classic Anymore

It's Tuesday evening, October 23, and the Boston Red Sox are squaring off with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first game of the 2018 World Series.  The Fall Classic.

Temperatures will be in the 40s tonight with a wind-chill factor that will make it feel a lot colder.  Tomorrow night will be colder yet, temps dipping into the upper 30s at game time and the wind-chill factor making it feel in the lower 30s.  And if the series goes seven games, they'll wrap things up in Boston in November--at temps that could drop below freezing.  At the risk of saying the obvious, that's too cold for baseball games.  "Fall Classic" is a classic misnomer.

Of course we began calling the WS the "fall classic" back when it was played and completed in September, when we regularly enjoyed what we called Indian Summer, a late summer warming trend that soon gave way to the much colder weather of October.

But in 1961, the owners extended the season from 154 games to 162, which extended the season by eight games over about a week and a half.  And then beginning in 1969 a second round of post-season play was added, followed by a third round in 1994, and a fourth (the one-game wild-card playoff) in 2012.  And here we are in late October pretending this is baseball at its best--the best of the National League pitted against the best of the American League.  Ridiculous.  Laughable.

The two leagues don't even play the same game.  The AL allows since 1973 designated hitters to hit instead of weak hitting pitchers.  The NL holds on to the game's roots by insisting on pitchers taking their cuts at the plate.  If you were building a baseball team, do you think your roster and philosophy and strategy--your management of a pitching staff, your use of pinch hitters, and your nightly lineup--just to mention a few tactical issues--would be different if you could send up a hitter four times a night instead of a pitcher?  Once again, the situation is ridiculous.  Laughable.

The obvious conclusion is that the two leagues should not play each other at all until they all play the same game under temperature-regulated domed stadiums.  Put the two leagues on an equal standing so they can get back to playing a true World Series once again.  One thing is for sure, this ain't the fall classic anymore.  And it hasn't been for a long time.

Not Exactly an Apology

My new biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's love life, Longfellow in Love, has been out about two months.  Every day I have to fight off the impulse to apologize for it.

The first reason is because the paperback book runs to 261 pages (the notes, bibliography, and index swell it up to 287), yet it costs $45.  The publisher sets the price of course, so I'm not at all responsible, but it's clearly steeper than I'd like it to be.

The second reason is a tad more complicated.  I know my friends and relatives would like to encourage me, but if they can get past the price, they are still looking at a nonfiction title that most of them pass up for books on the fiction list.  And the ones who do read nonfiction, probably are not inclined to biography.  And the ones who do read biography might not want to read about a dead white male poet whose reputation took a nosedive in the 20th century.

So I think many of my friends and relatives will read the book, if they can manage it at all, as a dreary homework assignment.  That is very disappointing.  But there is good news too.

I wrote the book as narrative nonfiction, which means it is driven by fiction techniques, like not revealing the story until the end.  Like building suspense.  Like resolving conflicts.  Like developing characters who speak to each other in words taken directly from their letters and journals.  Like building to a climax, two of them in fact. Like consciously trying to entertain in the story telling.  The substructure is built on dependable scholarship, but the book is written in a narrative style, not an academic one.

My hope is that any reader who picks this book up (friends and relatives included) will be pleasantly surprised at how well it moves along from page to page, chapter to chapter, start to finish.

No need for an apology there.

Keep Your Pocket Comb Holstered

This just in from the New York Times:  A five-year study published in 2001 in something called "Academic Emergency Medicine," reported that "there were an estimated 105,000 injuries related to hair-care products." 

It is now nearly two decades later and the mind reels at the current hair-care casualty figures (not yet released).  I don't think there is any cause for panic, but clearly we need to use caution with these products.  Maybe it's time for the president to name a blue-ribbon national task force to look into the matter and head off future problems.  Let's just call this a word to the wise.

President for Life

As of today, it doesn't take much of a prophet to foresee that sexual miscreant Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed as a justice on the Supreme Court.  It's a case in point that proves the rightness of women's accusations against men in every other avenue of American life can be canceled out when the subject comes to politics.  The accusations against Kavanaugh by credible women in an open forum should have been enough to bury his nomination.  And his wild, undisciplined anger in response to the accusations proves he doesn't have the controlled presence of mind to be judicious enough to assume a seat on the court.

But he will.

Of course he is supported by the Trump-man himself whose record as a vulgar womanizer did not keep him from subverting the will of the people in the 2016 election, which he lost by a whopping three million votes--and still became president.  These are strange times when women's rights are being upheld and advanced in every corner of American life except partisan politics, where the old boys-will-be-boys defense hangs on as though it were still 1960.

One other prophecy while I'm looking into the crystal ball:  If some kind of magic keeps anti-Trump voters out of the voting booths in 2020, and if the moron president should thereby win a second term, he will begin early in that term to repeal the Twenty-Second Amendment which restricts presidents to two terms.  He will try to become President for Life, a modern-day Roman Emperor.  You wait and see.

To Borrow a Phrase, "Be All That You Can Be"

Years ago, when I fell by accident into the profession of college English teaching, I assessed the future I imagined for myself.  The year was 1965.  And somehow through the magic and mystery of history, there were at that time far more openings for teachers than there were teachers to fill them.  I saw for myself a lifetime of moving up from school to school, "professing" to eager students, and ending up at some very comfortable liberal arts college where my duties would never be terribly demanding and I would become beloved and crotchety, a shaggy-headed, tweed-wearing, old-man-on-campus.  A legend.

In short, my limited imagination allowed only for this dreary cliche of my future self.

The market for college English teachers dried up almost immediately after I entered it, which condemned me to a lifetime of junior college teaching.  I was still in the profession, but just barely, and so I worked hard to launch myself back into my dream position.  To that end, I picked up a hard-earned Ph.D. from NYU and determined to become a publishing scholar, a track that led me to writing scholarly books and journal articles--and then to branch out through movie reviewing into a more popular style that gradually seeped into my academic writing.  The goal was to be scholarly without being academic.  I found some success along those lines too.

I tried to be all I could be in my chosen field, and even though I never (thank God) reached my movie script image of being a college professor, I did do some good work with under-prepared students who were reinventing themselves into successful college graduates.  It was wonderful work with wonderful students I came to love.  I did become all that I could be--and was damn proud of it.

As to the writing, well, I haven't become as good a writer as I wanted to be, but here and there I did come close enough to satisfy my imagination.  And being all you can be is, after all, a lifetime challenge, so, and I'm very happy about this, I'm still working at it.

Females for Felons

The New York Times reported this week that Alan Abel at age 94 died--for the second time.  He first died in 1980, the Times running his obituary and calling him at that time a "satirist."  Which was true.  For his second death, the Times called him an "Ace Hoaxer."  Which is also true as he had hoaxed his first death.

His first major hoax was his 1959 campaign to clothe animals through the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, SINA, which eventually boasted chapters throughout the country and a slogan that got lots of national attention:  "A nude horse is a rude horse."  Time magazine exposed the hoax in 1963.

In 1964 he backed a presidential candidate who was never actually seen, Yetta Bronstein, a grandmother living in the Bronx, he said, who supported National Bingo Tournaments and truth serum in congressional drinking water.

The list of hoaxes went on like  Omar's School for Beggars, "which claimed," according to the Times's Margalit Fox, "to teach the nouveau poor the gentle art of panhandling."  Then there was the Topless String Quartet that Frank Sinatra reportedly wanted to schedule a recording session with, and the Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra that one-time Klan Grand Wizard David Duke offered to conduct.  There were also Euthanasia Cruises "for people who wanted to expire in luxury."

Abel's crowning hoax was the one he called Females for Felons, "a group of Junior Leaguers who selflessly donated sex to the incarcerated."

I'm hoping for a third death.

Booming or Failing?

Most measures of our economy have to do with corporate health like the Dow Jones Industrial Average that is resting today at just under 26,000.  Or the unemployment rate that is currently less than 4 percent.  But at the same time corporations are showing billions of dollars in profits, working men and women are receiving average raises of 2.7 percent, less than the 2.9 percent rate of inflation, as reported by William Falk, Editor-in-Chief of The Week magazine (September 14, 2018). 

The reason, according to Falk, is an unbalanced accountability.  Corporate profits are directed to stockholders and management, not employees.  "On Wall Street, rising wages are seen as proof of bad management."

And thus the economy booms for investors and fails for workers.

It makes no sense, but Donald Trump claims credit for the business boom and claims at the same time to be the standard bearer of America's undervalued working men and women, and even though he has done nothing for average wage earners, his political base after all, they continue to stand behind him.

One would think that reason will eventually be returned to her throne.  That Trump's political base will eventually see they've been sold a bill of goods from America's slickest snake-oil salesman.  Surely they will come to their senses sooner or later, won't they?

A Sure-Fire, Double-Your-Money-Back Guaranteed Method to Develop Patience. . .

Never ever look at the clock on your car dashboard.

Accept the fact that you are going to be late.  Stay within the speed limit.  Come to a full stop at all stop signs. Never speed up through yellow lights. And never, ever look at the dashboard clock.

The first time you are actually able to do this, you'll want to call me up to say thank you.

A News Item. (No, Really. It's Florida, but Still. . .)

As reported in The Week, September 7, 2018.
     "A Florida security guard was fired from his job after his bosses discovered that he'b been posting videos of his thunderous flatulence on Instagram for six months.  The man, who goes by the name Paul Flart, began recording his farts after noticing that the hospital lobby where he worked the night shift had 'really great acoustics.'  Flart soon accumulated 52,000 followers, but was sacked after his employer became aware he was videoing himself while he was on the job.  Flart says he's since been contacted about hosting a flatulence-based TV show.  'There's a whole new opportunity out there for me now.'"

Last Word on Longfellow--My Last Word, That Is

In the summer of 2002, I got a phone call from the editor of Signet Classics asking if I would be interested in writing a new preface to a book that had originally been printed in 1964, Evangeline and Selected Tales and Poems.  I said yes, of course--the pay was good and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow fell generally under the umbrella of subjects that interest me, American poetry and literary history.

But Longfellow had never been a favorite of mine--because of the dip in his reputation during most of the 20th century, not because I had ever read enough of his work to draw my own conclusions.  I thought it would be fun to read in bulk one of the most prolific and popular poets of his generation, and I was right.  Great fun, in fact.

It was so much fun that I continued to research his life and to read his poetry until 2016, when I couldn't resist writing the book that was published two weeks ago, Longfellow in Love:  Passion and Tragedy in the Life of the Poet (McFarland & Company Publishers).  It wasn't sixteen years of continuous work because I took six years to write (and then rewrite) a long memoir, but that still leaves more than a decade of work on a poet who got more interesting to me by the year.  And as I got involved in Longfellow studies after I had retired from forty-odd years as an American Literature professor, I came to think of the work as my "end of life project."  And with its publication I have felt an exquisite joy because I couldn't be sure at any point in the many years of work that I would be able to see it through to publication--to find my subject, my voice, my publisher.  And as I got older every year and the work resisted its final form, I truly did wonder if I would live long enough to complete it.

I won't try to trace all the ups and downs of the many years of work, but I will say that originally I had hoped for about a 100,000 word book.  When I finished it, however, I didn't like the end at all, so I rewrote it until it came to nearly double the original size.  When I tried out the new length on a few publishers, it was far too long--if they were interested at all in a book about another dead white man from the 19th century.  I picked away at the manuscript until it came in at 140,000 words, which is the size editor Layla Milholen at McFarland saw the manuscript in November 2017.  She liked the book, but asked if I could trim another 20,000 words.  I managed 15,000 and we struck a deal.  There was a great deal of additional work to be done--permissions, manuscript format, page proofs, chapter notes, bibliography, and index--but all that was fast-tracked and the book was released on August 9, 2018.

One's goals should always be beyond what a person thinks he can accomplish.  Mine have always been--a Ph.D. in American Studies, and three books that have made small contributions to American literary history--on an obscure 18th-century poet, David Humphreys; on the popular 20th-century poet and Dante translator, John Ciardi; and now on the once-sainted 19th-century poet (and Dante translator), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  Each book presented enormous obstacles that I eventually learned how to overcome.  Every step of the way I persevered, a quality I learned that is far more important than talent.  It has been a great journey, and if I am lucky, there may yet be a little more to accomplish.  I just came across a C.S. Lewis quotation:  "You are never too old to set a new goal, to dream a new dream."  I think he may be on to something there.

Eggs, Chocolate, and Longevity: Are We After the Wrong Thing?

CNN reported this week that "eating an egg a day may lower your risk of cardiovascular disease," if a study of more than 400,000 adults in China can be trusted.  "Daily egg eaters had an 18% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease," they reported, as opposed to those who avoided eggs in their diet.  They said the news was published in the journal "Heart."

Which reminded me of this OpEd piece I wrote for the New Jersey Herald on Sunday, April 4, 1999:

Chocolate lovers, rejoice!

In what may be the best science news of 1998, researchers at Harvard's School of Public Health have announced that among the 8,000 men in their study, the ones who ate chocolate and other candy one to three times a month lived about a year longer than the ones who didn't.

The scientists seemed baffled by their finding but speculated that maybe it was the antioxidants present in chocolate that produced the healthful result.  And they also backed off by pointing out that the results were preliminary.  But there it is.  Chocolate and candy bars, if you can believer Harvard, are good for you.

Even people who pigged out on three or more candy bars a week had a 16 percent decreased risk of death than those who had eliminated chocolate from their diets completely.

Something is wacky.  For those who haven't noticed, there have been several shocking reversals from the medical establishment recently.  Doctors are now recommending moderate drinking, one to three glasses of red wine every day, for example.  The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the high-fiber diets of 88,000 nurses did not prevent colorectal cancer.  Some time back, real butter took a step forward when margarine was discovered to have something called "trans-fatty acids," worse by far than butter itself.

Furthermore, milk fat has been discovered to contain several cancer-fighting agents, according to research done for the American Dairy Science Association.  Even vitamins, herbs and magnets, the kind of therapy sometimes called "alternative" medicine and dismissed as folklore by the American Medical Association, is now given a measure of respect.

What's going on here?  And where will it end?  Maybe cigarette smoke will turn out to be beneficial to one's health, and asbestos and chemical pesticides, too.

For more years than anyone can remember, we've been bombarded with warnings about our diets, sedentary lifestyles and pollution of every sort.  Maybe this is payback time for all those who were skeptical of warnings and scientific "announcements."  More likely, however, it is the normal movement to the center, where most truth, scientific and otherwise, generally lies.

Of course, the real but underlying obsession is with longevity.  We seem to have decided as a society that death is embarrassing, that we need to apologize for it, drop out of sight and memory when it is impending, and never ever talk about it.  We join gyms, eat according to the newest food pyramid, avoid sweets, and quit smoking.  It seems to be working too because the average length of the average life gets longer and longer, from 47 to 72 for men over the past hundred years.  Women are doing even better.

This is probably a good thing on balance, but what will happen when people regularly live to 110 or 115?  Will they have enough of their minds and bodies left to enjoy those extra years?  Will they have outlived all their friends and family and face their longevity in prolonged grief?  Will they have spent all their productive years earlier?  Will youngsters mortify them at their 115th birthdays by saying they don't look a day over 106?

From a purely practical standpoint, what impact will so many centenarians have on the economy?  How much will their health care cost?  Will insurance companies be able to keep up benefits that stretch on and on for decades longer than the actuarial tables projected?  And for the young people, who will have to wait longer in junior positions while older people continue working, there will be the added burden of picking up the Social Security tab on an aging but death-resistant society.

How many 100-year-old drivers will there be on the roads?

In the end it's all frustratingly relative anyway.  The planet is 14.5 billion years old.  Dinosaurs faded out a mere 65 million years ago, and nothing even remotely like man came on the scene until two or three million years ago.  If you're looking for your own family tree, it doesn't even start until about 40,000 years ago--and none of them lived very long either.

No, chocolate or no chocolate, longevity by itself is not a worthy enough goal.  The real measure has to be what we do with the time we have.  The American philosopher William James put it this way about a hundred years ago:  "The great use of life is to spend it on something that outlasts it."  Amen.

A Letter to Heather: Why Longfellow?

Dear Heather,
     The book on Longfellow is not yet in print, but McFarland & Co. Publishers plan to include it in their fall catalog.  As you know, I've been working on the book on and off since '03 I think, with a long time off (five years) while I wrote my own life story, so let's say I've worked on the Longfellow book for about a decade, which is not unusual for biographies by the way.
     Perhaps because of all that time and work, you were surprised when I mentioned last week that I wasn't a huge fan of Longfellow's poetry.  I told you that for me there are long stretches that I find unbearable, but that these are at least partly balanced by other stretches that I like very much.  But I smiled because liking the subject of a biography and admiring his work aren't necessary at all.
     When I wrote my doctoral dissertation on an obscure American poet from the 18th century, David Humphreys, I made the discovery that liking the work was much less important than seeing a book into print on a writer who, in this case, needed to be written about.  All the other "major" Connecticut Wits, as they are known, had a book about them already published.  Only Humphreys remained bookless, so to speak.  My Ph.D. advisor explained all that to me, and finally I saw the wisdom of making him happy, writing a book that had a very good chance of being published, and learning how to go about the daunting process of writing biography. Liking the man and his work didn't factor in at all--but of course, by the time I had finished, I had come to admire Humphreys and even to like some of his mostly wooden poems.
     The decade I spent working on John Ciardi's biography was more a labor of love.  Again, there were huge patches of poetry that I didn't like, but there were so many that I loved and valued that I wanted to write about him.  There were other attractions, like the fact that he was an Italian American of my father's generation--and that so much of the information I had to gather would come from interviews with scores of mid-century cultural icons.  I had spent a decade on Humphreys from the 18th century and never spoken to a soul about the work or the man.  This time I hardly stopped talking (listening actually) for ten years.  I was a man on a mission in that book, wanting to frame all future dialogue about Ciardi with my biography--that plus all the other books I edited and compiled, his collected letters, poems, and essays.
     By then I had begun to see what was obvious, that my talents in the academy were as a literary historian, not a critic.  I never liked reading literary criticism, and instead felt comfortable reconstructing literary history, but this was a realization that surprised me.  My career had taken a turn that I hadn't anticipated.  It wasn't what I had had in mind for myself, but I could see that I was making a small impact on American literary studies--and that I should be pleased to be making any impact at all.  So I went with it.
     I chose to work on Longfellow for several reasons.  One was that he was a 19th-century figure.  My first book was on an 18th-century writer; Ciardi was a 20th-century figure, so Longfellow filled out the timeline.  Considering that the Humphreys book had earned me a Ph.D., in my mind the work that followed was like earning new Ph.D'.s in centuries that needed completely new research before the writing could begin.  It was an exciting challenge.  So that was one factor that led me to Longfellow, who was also centrally important in American 19th-century poetry.
     Another factor was that Longfellow had left what biographers long for:  published letters and journals.  That's a huge advantage.  I was also attracted to him because he was popular, even revered, by readers on both sides of the Atlantic.  He was a major figure in his own time, unlike either Humphreys or Ciardi.  He'd been so popular that there were a dozen biographies of him already.  I was going to have to produce a book that was different and valuable on a subject who had been worked over pretty thoroughly.  Another challenge.
     And one other factor argued for Longfellow:  none of the figures in his life story was still alive--which I thought would be a welcome change after I had spent ten years on non-stop interviewing for the Ciardi book.  All that talk had grown tiresome after the first year or two.
     But most of all, there was a wonderful story in Longfellow's life that I wanted to tell--not a new story, but one that had such human warmth that I thought I could write it for the larger audience I had never written for in my books.  That's what led me to the form known as "narrative nonfiction," which doesn't give the main point up in the first paragraph but keeps the reader reading to find out what happens.  The form borrows from narrative fiction, so I would aim in my book for characters, dialogue, conflicts, resolutions, and in this case two distinct climaxes.  I had material to draw from, a natural story about the women in his life, and an inclination to tell the story in a format that academics rarely use.  It was irresistible.  What did it matter that Hiawatha had long stretches that were virtually unreadable?
     Longfellow in Love was a book that needed to be written, and I felt lucky to be the one writing it.
     Hope that helps a little.  For me, choosing Longfellow made perfect sense.

     Love, DE