That sports of any kind at any level are worthy of the sort of rapturous, overwrought ejaculations characterized by Frank Deford‘s vapid Wednesday blatherings on NPR (usually about baseball) or, more immediately, David Foster Wallace’s much-ballyhooed 6,500 word meditation on Roger Federer (“Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” NYT 2006.8.20). It more or less goes without saying, then, that the likelihood of these sesquipedalian eruptions being worth reading is roughly on par with, say, the danger of terrorist attack. Deford, an aging sportswriter (he’s nearly 70), can’t get enough of baseball, and thinks it’s a great metaphor for life. As if that’s never been said before.

Still, Deford is a sportswriter, and one in the last act of his career. Sportswriters have always erred on the side of clumsy, purple prose — and false profundity — to avoid the central fact that reporting on sports is best accomplished with tables and numbers, not endless synonyms for “beat.”

Wallace, though, is theoretically some sort of elite literary craftsman (though one who should employ an editor capable of snapping his “footnote” key), which implies to us that he should have something more interesting to say than “I really, really like Roger Federer,” especially if he’s getting nearly 10,000¹ words in the New York Times.

Seriously. What. The. Fuck? We’re hardly unlettered here at Heathen, but the appeal escapes us utterly – and we even like tennis.

[1. His footnotes ran to over 2,000 words. Seriously, David, the whole footnote schtick was clever when Nabokov did it in 1962. Now it’s just irritating.]

Metafilter’s post today about novels without words caught our eye, as it features Madman’s Drum, an example of the genre we’ve actually seen thanks to the extensive prewar library of the McHornes.

Our favorite novel was up for the National Book Award in 1961. That part we know. What we forgot was that its competition was two other favorites: Catch-22 and The Moviegoer.

Good year for books, eh?

Tomorrow is the 102nd anniversary of Bloomsday. In lieu of creating our own Bloomsday Device, we suggest the consumption of copious amounts of Guinness. Who’s with me?

Via BoingBoing, we find the tale of Stephen Joyce, sole heir and executor of the James Joyce estate. If he doesn’t like what you might say in your paper, he’ll deny you permission to quote from Joyce’s work. He’s prevented all manner of projects from taking place, and is doing his best to stifle anything said about his grandfather that he doesn’t like. Stephen’s ire extends even to public readings of Ulysses on Bloomsday; his threat to sue the Irish government put the kibosh on any such readings during the 100th anniversary celebrations two years ago. The situation is such that a Stanford prof is suing the estate preemptively to establish that his research doesn’t violate copyright.

The sucky part? There was a time, briefly, when Stephen Joyce was irrelevant. Joyce’s work passed into public domain in the 90s, only to be sucked back in thanks to copyright extensions.

Design Observer weighs in on its “slow design;” it remains virtually identical in presentation and layout to its first issue in 1925:

[O]ne senses that each of the changes in The New Yorker was arrived at almost grudgingly. Designers are used to lecturing timid clients that change requires bravery. But after a certain point — 80 years? — not changing begins to seem like the bravest thing of all.

Hoopty Rides on The Complete New Yorker.

From a recent installment wherein he points out (again) how bizarrely wrong about just about everything LeHaye and Jenkins are, and how poorly their narrative holds together:

This disregard for continuity makes it difficult to read Left Behind as a single, coherent narrative. It forces the reader to regard the text as a collection of disparate, discrete stories — some of which apply to one set of storylines, others of which apply to another set. This is, of course, exactly how dispensationalists read the Bible. (It’s a complex, difficult system, but it allows you to pretend that the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t apply to you.)

Jonathan Lethem is a genius.

Just now, finishing a truly extraordinary book — read it, really — the final lines of another book popped into my head for reasons I couldn’t possibly name:

This was not judgement day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.

As it turns out, they belong at the end of Sophie’s Choice, which I’ve not read in fifteen years. Go read that one, too.

Hunter S. Thompson’s funeral will involve fireworks which incorporate the author’s ashes.

The Oxford American shames us by pointing out that Larry Brown died when we weren’t paying attention. He had a heart attack last November 24. He was 53.

Coverage still up at NPR and the MIssissippi Writers Page. If you haven’t read what he’s written — Pat Conroy famously said he wrote “like a force of nature” — do yourself a favor and pick up something from your local independent bookshop.

Fred “Slacktivist” Clark has been reading and dissecting the Left Behind series on Fridays — he refers to it as “Pretrib Porno,” after the nutbird faction of Christianity these books represent.

Among the literary failings he’s uncovered is a staggering lack of imagination. The world of LB involves a sudden, literal rapture — meaning that every true-blue Christian and child below the age of accountability was suddenly and bodily whisked away to heaven. By Fred’s reckoning (which he freely admits may be off, as he doesn’t agree with what Jenkins and LeHaye clearly think of as “real” Christianity), literally billions (Fred figures 37% of us) of people have suddenly vanished, including everyone on earth who orders from the kid’s menu. The scale of such an event is hard to internalize or understand, sure, but when you’re reading a book about such an event, you sort of expect the author not to suffer this sort of failure of imagination — but J & L fail here miserably. He’s got a character in a hotel trying to relax with CNN on, but he makes no mention of what’s on CNN. Fred puts it this way:

Whatever the precise figure of the disappeared, however, we can safely assume that it included hundred of thousands, if not millions of young, attractive white women. Buck is watching CNN. Think of it: Millions of missing white women, all at the same time. What would CNN do? Would they cover them all? Or maybe just the blonde ones?

The late Dr Thompson’s ashes will be fired from a cannon set atop a five-story version of his famous Gonzo logo; his neighbors have agreed, and Johnny Depp has financed the construction of said (temporary) monument.

Garry Trudeau’s Uncle Duke character has a bit of an existential crisis today.

And again, on 3/8:

(His first appearances are also online, btw.)

From the LA Times, 3/3/05:

Gonzo but Not Forgotten
by George S. McGovern As the candidate who lost 49 states to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election, I have always been pleased that among the precious few who thought I would have made the better president was Hunter S. Thompson, who went to his untimely grave saying that I was “the best of a lousy lot.” Thompson’s position was that I was “honest”–except for one “wicked moment” when I attended Nixon’s funeral and said a few sympathetic words to his family and friends. “Yeah,” Hunter told me, “you went into the tank with that evil bastard.” Hunter relished such frightful words. “Evil,” “wicked,” “fear and loathing.” These were the words that described the world best for him. Once, when he was pressed into the back seat of my car with three other people, he tried to escape to a nearby bar when I slowed for a red light in heavy traffic. Foiled by the baby lock that had been inadvertently clicked on, he raged at me: “Get me out of this evil contraption before I start killing.” On the jacket of his now-classic book about the 1972 election, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” he printed a photograph of the two of us with the following caption: “Pictured above is George McGovern urging Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to accept the vice presidential nomination.” In retrospect, I wish I had. Perhaps then Hunter and I might both still be alive and well instead of dead and wounded, respectively. It’s true, as many have noted in recent days, that Hunter did not devote his energy and talent to the pursuit of factual accuracy. But accuracy isn’t everything. Frank Mankiewicz, the political director of my campaign, was right to call Hunter’s book “the least accurate and most truthful” of the campaign books that appeared after the 1972 race. Hunter was disheartened after the campaign, and it fell to me on several occasions to try to persuade him not to give up on what he called “this f—– up country.” What I didn’t get to tell him was that one of the reasons we should never give up on America is that from time to time, as we have been reminded recently, this country produces a genuine original–a Katharine Hepburn, a Ray Charles, an Arthur Miller, a Johnny Carson, an Ossie Davis, a professor Seymour Melman, or an inaccurate and irreverent and truthful Hunter Thompson. George S. McGovern was the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972.

Re-imagined romance covers.

Ooops. Link fixed.

This CNN piece places HST’s suicide in some context:

DENVER, Colorado (AP) — Journalist Hunter S. Thompson did not take his life “in a moment of haste or anger or despondency” and probably planned his suicide well in advance because of his declining health, the family’s spokesman said Wednesday. Douglas Brinkley, a historian and author who has edited some of Thompson’s work, said the founder of “gonzo” journalism shot himself Sunday night after weeks of pain from a host of physical problems that included a broken leg and a hip replacement. “I think he made a conscious decision that he had an incredible run of 67 years, lived the way he wanted to, and wasn’t going to suffer the indignities of old age,” Brinkley said in a telephone interview from Aspen. “He was not going to let anybody dictate how he was going to die.” Thompson, famous for “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and other works of New Journalism, spent an intimate weekend with his son, Juan, daughter-in-law, Jennifer, and young grandson, William, the spokesman said. “He was trying to really bond and be close to the family” before his suicide, Brinkley said. “This was not just an act of irrationality. It was a very pre-planned act.” The family is looking into whether Thompson’s cremated remains can be blasted out of a cannon, a wish the gun-loving writer often expressed, Brinkley said. “The optimal, best-case scenario is the ashes will be shot out of a cannon,” he said. Other arrangements were pending.

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history,” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what’s actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L.L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was. No doubt at all about that . . . There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eye you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas:
A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
1971

Hunter Stockton Thompson, giant of American life and letters, 1937 – 2005.

(Update: Fafblog gives us hope.)

(Update: Denver Post obit.)

Reason is running an interview with Neal Stephenson conducted by Mike Godwin. It’s a fascinating read, but powerful geeky.

The venerable Paris Review has posted most of its interviews in PDF format for your perusal. The subject list includes heavyweights Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker, William Styron, Ralph Ellison, T. S. Eliot, and many others. Enjoy.

Slashdot’s got a great interview with Neal Stephenson up, which reminds us that after we finish the huge-ass book we’re reading now, we’ve got another one to slog through.

We’re almost certain we enjoyed reading the interview more than we’ll ultimately enjoy the conclusion to his long-winded trilogy, but we’re gonna read it anyway.

Hard Case Crime brings back the lurid pulp format, but with the likes of Lawrence Block writing the prose. Neat idea.

We’ve started Positively Fifth Street, Jim McManus’ participatory study of the World Series of Poker, and it’s pretty darn good; we’re particularly amused by this bit, taken from an early part of the book wherein McManus is trying to convince his wife that he needs to gamble his Harper’s advance in order to get the $10,000 buy-in needed to play in the tournament himself:

Plus a responsible journalist needed actual table experience to capture the rhythms and texture of the hair-raising brand of no-limit Texas hold’em that decides the world championship, right? Krakauer on Everest, I mentioned. McPhee in Alaska. Bill Buford rioting in Sardinia. Susan Orlean slogging through the Fakahatchee Strand…

We giggle because, of course, we read and loved Krakauer’s Into Thin Air as well as Orlean’s Orchid Thief, not to mention the bizarre film it inspired. Buford’s Among the Thugs, wherein the writer sets out to explore the phenomenon of soccer hooliganism and ends up participating, was one of our favorite books a couple years ago when a mad Scotsman loaned it to us; it’s out of print, but you ought to find it anyway. The only one we don’t know is the McPhee refernece, but we’re sure someone will help us.

In Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he documents a 1968 road trip taken with his son. As it happens, there are pictures online documenting part of the journey. Neat.

This is the sort of thing we can’t believe didn’t happen already. Marvel and Gotham Comics are launching an “Indian-ized” Spiderman for the subcontinent. He looks pretty cool.

Today is the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place in 1904 Dublin.

We had long planned to be IN Dublin today, but certain financial realities prevented such travel; as a substitute, we will certainly be enjoying a few pints of Guinness in an establishment of Irish theme here in that most un-Joycean of cities, Houston.

This review in the NYT may be the meanest thing we’ve ever read. Hit it quick (nogators/nogators), as the Grey Weasels take stories down after a few weeks.