Poetry Night at the Ballpark

Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America

© 2015 Bill Kauffman

442 pages

 “Lift up your hearts, friends – America ain’t dead yet.”  For thirty years, Bill Kauffman has been blowing raspberries at or haranguing the politics of empire – mocking and condemning all things swollen and centralized, and cheering on the local and small.  This interestingly-titled volume collects a diverse amount of Kauffman’s writings, from  biographical sketches of eccentric American figures to literary reviews, with all manner of opinion pieces in between. It is an anthology that celebrates the little America outside of New York and Los Angeles, the America that breathes when the television is turned off.  If you have read any Kauffman before, or even read a review of Kauffman – or for that matter, the first two sentences of this review –  the general temper won’t  be a surprise. But Poetry Night at the Ballpark, while consistent with Kauffman’s usual spirit,  collects so many different kinds of writing that even his fans will find surprises here, and delivered with his usual fondness for amusing or provocative titles. Some of the sectional collections are definitely unexpected, like a series written about holidays (in which he champions Arbor Day over Earth Day, for instance)  and…some space-themed writing.   The sections called “Pols”, “Home Sweet Home”, and “The America That Lost” are more of his usual fare.  I’ve been reading Kauffman’s columns at the Front Porch Republic and other sources to have seen  and remembered a few of these – a favorite is 2012’s “Who Needs a President?” in which he revisits the antifederalist arguments against an executive office.

In Poetry Night at the Ballpark, Kuaffman introduces a multitude of forgotten individuals, all with their quirks, and recounts stories from American history which have been largely forgotten.  Take those arrogant Roosevelts – T.R.  tried to inflict a new kind of spelling on the entire nation, in one of the first examples of the Oval Office obviously unhinging whoever sat in it.  (Actually, considering the west wing was constructed during Teddyboy’s reign, maybe he was already unhinged and imbued it with his spirit.)    Franklin Roosevelt also moved Thanksgiving hither and yon hoping to create more shopping days for Christmas,  beginning the occasion’s slow  but total conquest by Christmas.  As varied as the essays are, they’re reliably grounded in Kauffman’s love for the small, local, and particular, be it movies or baseball. He begins  in and titles his  book   at the local ballpark , cheering on his hometown’s boys,  but has no use whatsoever for the major leagues, whose local connections are abstract, and who are oriented  towards money than  love of the game;   sports and home intersect in  his section on movies, where he calls for films that tell local stories with a local flavor, and comments at length on Hoosiers as a small-town classic.

I make no secret of liking Kauffman, and for me this book was like encountering him  at a bar and sticking around to  hear some salty stories of odd characters and fun stories, as well as some good old-fashioned belly-aching about the soulless suits in power.  It’s not as focused as his other work, so it’s best read by people who have already encountered Kauffman before – unless a first-timer opens the book in the store, finds themselves drawn in by his playful pen, and has to sit down to experience a bit more.

If you'd like a taste of Kauffman, one of my favorite speeches by him is called "Love is the Answer to Empire" That title links to a written version.

" [Walt Whitman] understood that any healthy political or social movement has to begin, has to have its heart and soul, at the grass roots. In Kansas, not on K Street.

"And it has to be based in love. Love not of some remote abstraction, some phantasm that exists only on the television screen—Ford Truck commercials and Lee Greenwood songs—but love of near things, things you can really know and experience. The love of a place and its people: their food, their games, their literature, their music, their smiles.

"I am a localist, a regionalist. To me, the glory of America comes not from its weaponry or wars or a mass culture that is equal parts stupidity, vulgarity, and cynical cupidity—one part 'The View,' one part Miley Cyrus, and a dollop of Rush Limbaugh—rather, it is in the flowering of our regions, our local  cultures. Our vitality is in the little places—city neighborhoods, town squares—the places that mean nothing to those who run this country but that give us our pith, our meaning."

Murder at Fenway Park

Murder at Fenway Park
© 1994 Troy Soos
252 pages

1912, Boston. The Titanic is only a few weeks lost to the North Atlantic bottom, but Mickey Rawling's mind isn't on one of the biggest maritime disasters of history. No, he's just been inducted into the Major Leagues, hired to play with the Boston Red Sox, and his first night he's stumbled upon a man beaten so badly the victim's face no longer exists. And then Mickey threw up on it, just for good measure. Murder at Fenway Park is the story of a rookie ball player who turns amateur detective when he realizes the police intend on fingering him for the crime. While the cozy relationship between the Red Sox and the police might protect him during the baseball season, come fall he'll be left to his own devices.

The first in Trey Soos' baseball-murder mysteries,  Murder at Fenway takes readers through a violence summer, in which Rawlings rubs shoulders with baseball greats like Ty Cobb,  and does his best -- with the aide of a nickelodeon musician and a Socialist working on the garment factory-version of The Jungle --  to figure out who did it before either being arrested or beaten to a pulp by the original murderer.   The writing is sometimes unpolished, but the opening framing device -- an old man wandering through the Baseball Hall of Fame, feeling he and the sport have become long-distant strangers, then flashing back to the murder story on seeing the victim on a baseball card -- was well executed.  I suspect readers will find the setting more interesting than the mystery, considering how dramatic this era was in baseball. This was the decade that produce legends who gave their names to awards -- Cy Young, Ty Cobb -- although we're two years away from Babe Ruth stepping up to the plate. This is technically alt-history, considering that Soos kills off a player who -- in reality, died of a heart attack in 1959.

Murder at Fenway Park is by no means amazing literature, but it's enjoyable if you like early-20th century mysteries, or golden age baseball.

Hanging Curve

Hanging Curve

© 1999 Troy Soos
272 pages

St. Louis, 1922. Babe Ruth reigns as the king of baseball. Mickey Rawlings is no king, not even a prince, but he is at least in the peerage: a utility infielder for the St. Louis Browns.  This season, though, there’s more than  baseball on his mind. A man has been murdered, and his death may plunge the city into bedlam.  The story started when Rawlings,  desperate for a chance to play baseball instead of sitting in the dugout, accepted an intriguing offer to play one game between two local clubs  -- one of them being part of the Negro Leagues.   Professional white  ball players are forbidden from taking the field with black players by MLB management, and Mickey  was eager to test his skills against such obvious talent.  Crawford pitched magnificently, humbling the opposition, and then – days later – he was found lynched, hanging from the stadium’s walls.  There had been a fistfight at the game, and members of the Klan hovered about, but – would anyone murder for a baseball game?   With little else to do on the bench, Rawlings digs for answers.  His search casts a light on the simmering racial tensions in  Missouri, the widespread influence of the Midwest Ku Ku Klux, and a prenatal Civil Rights movement.

The golden age of baseball was not a golden age for its black fans.  Segregation flourished in early 20th century America, especially as southern blacks streamed northward in search of jobs. Rising racial tension led to a burgeoning Klan, and not only in its old home of the South:  the 1920s Klan was strongest in the midwest, practically taking over Indiana.  Racial unrest is the backdrop of Hanging Curve;   five years before its start, labor riots turned into a race war, leaving areas of East St. Louis utterly ruined. The death and mayhem of those hours haunts the memory of those who remain, but matters are rapidly deteriorating once again, apparently instigated by a baseball team. After Rawlings plays his match against members of the Negro League,  matters go awry. He played  unsuspectingly, with a team sponsored by an auto dealership, and many on it held an association with the Ku Klux Klan.  First a black player is hung, then beatings and arsons follow in reprisals and counterstrikes.  Those who survived the riots on both sides know where this is going, and it isn't a road  anyone wants to go down.  Blood feuds can take on a life of their own, though, and Rawlings has to work overtime to find a way to nip this one in the bud. He works closely not only with one of the dealership's Klan members, but with a NAACP lawyer to investigate who killed Crawford...and why. These budding relationships introduce Rawlings to two worlds which he had been otherwise blind to: the widespread popularity and influence of the Klan, and the segregated existence of America's black citizenry. Although the courts maintained segregation as separate but equal, not until Rawlings struck up a friendship with a black lawyer did he realize how factually bankrupt those claims were. In St. Louis, for instance,  the streetcars maintained two seperate lines,  but alloted so few cars and conductors to the black line that passengers were forced to wait far longer than their white counterparts. The Klan, too, was a surprise:  Rawlings thought it just a gang for roughneck racists, not suspecting the organization had a more sinister attraction on the respectable, masquerading as a civic organization.  The pieces of the puzzle indicate to Rawlings that the true motive for that first murder are just as hidden in deception as the Klan members who hovered around the game.

Hanging Curve is one of the most interesting  mysteries I've ever read, with a setting that invokes both warm, sentimental nostalgia for the lovely game of baseball and the sad reality of racial tension in America. Consider: the St. Louis Browns, who played in a city a stone's throw from Ferguson, are these days better known as the Baltimore Orioles. But as Rawlings discovers in Hanging Curve,  there is more to social dramas both in our day and in his than mere racism.  Rawlings was able to tease out the truth,  but will we?

The Chosen

The Chosen
© 1967 Chaim Potok
288 pages

Danny and Reuven are two Orthodox Jewish boys who take one thing very seriously: baseball.  When their rival schools meet on the baseball diamond, religious passion turns play to war, and an accident hospitalizes Reuven. Thus is born an unexpected friendship, one that matures throughout their adolescence.  The two come of age in a difficult era; the book begins in World War 2, and takes them through the discovery of the Holocaust, and the turmoil that surrounded Israel's creation. Making matters still more interesting is the boys' religious identities and their respective desires:  Danny is a Hasidic Jew being groomed to succeed his father, while Reuven's dad is a somewhat more secular professor.  Both boys are intellectually-oriented themselves, serious students of both their tradition and respective interests:  one is fascinated by logic, the other by Freud.  Their passion frequently causes them to bump heads with one another, and not necessarily over religious matters. Reuven's rationalism threatens not Danny's religion, but his passion of Freudian psychology.  Their most serious break has nothing to do with either of them, but with their fathers' respective politics: the professor is a passionate supporter of the nascent Israeli state, while the rabbi believes an Israel led by secular Jews is an obscenity, utter anathema to any devout follower of Torah.  This is mid-20th century America, a place utterly recognizable...but many of the characters live within a culture that is utterly exotic to the American mainstream, and The Chosen is simultaneously the story of boys becoming men and an education in Hasidic Judaism. There are five principle characters in this novel: the boys, their fathers, and the Talmud. Thousands of years of Jewish practice and biblical commentary are contained in its various volumes, and its demands and wisdom both guide our characters and fill their lives with reverent dread.  The Chosen is utterly fascinating with a strong redemptive finish.

This week at the Library: Hunger Games, Hunting, and Baseball

I started this year off by finishing The Hunger Games: its finale, Mockingjay, utterly consumed my attention. It's the story of revolution, a war against the oppressive Capitol which erupted in the course of the 75th Hunger Games, a teenage deathmatch used by the state to humble its constituent districts.  But somehow, forcing people to revel in the deaths of their children produced more than a spark of resistance, and in Mockingjay, war wages. But the war isn't between the evil Capitol and a shining city upon a hill: the rebellion and its leader have been hardened by decades of of war, and to them Katniss is a pawn to be used. Largely alone, Katniss has to overcome both the enemy and her 'allies'.

I've utterly enjoyed this series, though there were times in reading Mockingjay where I stopped reading, partially to  recover from the tensity and grimness, and partially to put off the ending: when engaged in a drama like this, who wants it to stop?  I can see this being a series I read again. They're action thrillers, essentially, with some character drama thrown in and a fair few brilliant one-liners, mostly from Katniss and her mentor Haymitch. The relationship angst is unobtrusive, and there's virtually no actual Romance, which almost never reads well -- at least, to me. I know there's a market for bedroom scenes on paper -- someone buys those bodrice-rippers in the supermarkers, and the 50 Shades of Grey books -- but I'm not of it.  The series will be a highlight, to be sure.

I also read another short baseball book, Michael Shaara's For the Love of the Game. I would wager that practically no one knows Shaara outside of his The Killer Angels novel, which covered the battle of Gettysburg, the movie of which spurred his son into becoming a historic novelist. For the Love is written in Shaara's style, right inside the character's head, with their scattered thoughts forming the text of the book. Stream-of-consciousness writing can be grating, but with Shaara I'm drawn in completely. Here, he tells the story of an aging baseball pitcher who has spent his life with one team, the Hawks, who has one last game to prove himself.  I'm not a sports fan, but I enjoyed it all the same.

This past week saw my first bit of nonfiction: Steven Rinelli's Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter.  I've never hunted in my life, unless you count wandering down the street with a slingshot and the naive ambition to see if I could hit some birds  with it -- and I invariably brought a book to read on my childhood fishing trips. But I'm mildly curious about both, and so enjoyed Rinelli's tales of hunting, trapping, and fishing. The book is entertaining in its novelty: I'm sure even seasoned hunters in my area have never hunted mountain lion (which Rinelli shyed away from, thinking it to be not enough of a challenge)  or pondered the taste of bear meat. According to him, bears taste like their diet, which is nice if you eat a blueberry-diner, but not altogether pleasant if you munch down on a beast that's been indulging in carrion. I had no idea people still trapped animals for fur: that kind of thing is straight out of the history books or Little House on the Prairie. But according to Rinelli, not only does a fur market exist, but it was rather healthy until the 1980s.  Rinelli covers not only the kind of hunting average sportsmen engage in, but the adventures most only dream of -- canoing and hiking far into the wilderness in pursuit of beasts few have laid eyes on. The adventures are complemented with reflections on outdoor life, in which Rinelli muses on the ethnics of trophy hunting, or what constitutes a 'challenge'.  For those interested in the lifestyle may find it, as I did, a vicarious jaunt into the wild.

Next week should see my first 'conventional' nonfiction reads for the year, as I'm halfway into Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300 - 1850 and anticipate getting into Home from Nowhere, shortly after that. Considering it's the sequel to The Geography of Nowhere, and concerns new urbanism, I may be so entirely distracted by it that I read it first.

It's a good bet.

Calico Joe

Calico Joe
© 2012 John Grisham
208 pages

It's not every day that dear old dad tries to murder your childhood hero, but such a thing happened to Paul Tracy. His dad was Warren Tracy, an abusive drunk playing for the Mets and rapidly pitching himself out of a job. His hero? Joe Castle, from Calico Rock, Arkansas, a man who had never struck out. A phenomenon behind the plate, "Calico Joe" was the greatest rookie to play the game...until the young, legendary hitter met the angry, bitter pitcher who wanted to teach the young squirt some manners. Hence, violence.  What happened between the two ruined both of their careers and drove Paul to avoid America's game for the next thirty years. But now, with Warren on his deathbed, Paul hopes to effect his reclamation...by arranging a meeting between the two aging players.

John Grisham has dabbled in sports books before, to some success; inevitably for a southern writer, previous forays into the athletic fields were football books. Here he writes on the baseball diamond, and has produced in Calico Joe a short and syrupy sweet novel heavy on character drama rather than plot twists. I read it just after Christmas, and its theme of redemption and forgiveness fit the mood; this is a fast-flying tale that's more of a extended short story than a meaty novel.