So Long, and Thanks for all the Outfield Flies
And so, with yesterday’s disheartening loss to the Yankees, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome’s days as a ballpark have come to an end. Next season, the Twins move outdoors to their new home, Target Field. I didn’t get to pay a farewell visit this season to what’s been my baseball homepark for the past quarter century.
It’s a melancholic moment for me. I attended a game or two in the Dome’s first two seasons, 1982 and 1983, but it was in 1984 that I fell in love with that improbable ballpark. Those were the days of Puckett, Hrbek, Viola, Brunansky (and Faedo, Jimenez, Laudner….). I went to twenty or thirty games that year and had my heart broken when the team collapsed the last two weeks of the season, including a world historical 11-10 loss to the Cleveland Indians in a game that saw Minnesota with a 10-0 lead in the third inning.
I even tried to write a novel about those 1984 Twins. I tinkered away on it for years, and every once in a while I still go back to it and tinker some more. A few sections of it were published here and there over the years. In honor of the Metrodome’s last game, let me post one of those here. “Sister Carrie” originally appeared as a short story in Elysian Fields Quarterly back in 1998. I was a shy lad back then and so published it under a pen name, Kevin Michaels. As you’ll see, the story revolves around the quirks of the Metrodome–the crazy turf they used the first few years, the weird air pressure system that holds up the roof, etc. Oddly enough, Chicago plays a big role in the story as well. Enjoy:
When Steve pushed through the revolving doors and into the lobby of the Metrodome, he felt his ears pop. Carrie was already inside, standing in an open doorway across the concourse, her back to him. She was gazing down through the door at the green baseball field below, her hands gracefully folded together behind her. It was a sign that their argument had at last flickered out. Steve approached her cautiously. He looked over her shoulder at the players warming up down on the field below.
(Continue reading “Sister Carrie” here)
Summer Reading
I’d been meaning to read Jim Harrison for a few decades now, but it wasn’t until this summer that I finally got around to it. His most recent novel, The English Major, follows its title character, a Michigan farmer (and ex-teacher and, yes, ex-English major) in his sixties who’s just been dumped by his wife as he heads west on a journey to remake, literally, himself and his country. The remaking America project involves coining new names for all fifty states; the remaking himself project starts with booze, sex, and driving, but these provide only temporary comfort. Mourning his beloved dog, Lola, brings the hero a bit closer to his goal, which actually seems to come within reach as the novel ends. Very nice.
Next I moved down south, taking up Mary Robison’s brutal One D.O.A. One on the Way. It’s a fractured narrative sunk deep in the chaos that is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. An open wound of a novel, it is presented in cut-up form, 225 numbered passages arranged seemingly in chronological order across 166 pages. Eve, the heroine, is married into a wealthy, ailing New Orleans family, and amid stunning lists of statistics that measure from multiple angles the moral failure of America’s response to the man-made disaster that befell the Delta, her sometimes funny, sometimes morbid story unfolds. To be honest, I had a hard time connecting emotionally with the characters or their stories–and yet again that was in many ways the whole point. This is what alienation feels like, circa 2009.
Now, I’m about a hundred pages into Donald Hays’ 1984 baseball novel, The Dixie Association. Once again, I’m swimming in the larger-than-life loquacity of Southern gab, this time from the players, managers and hangers-on of an Arkansas minor-league team made up of leftists, dropouts, and other assorted outcasts. The narrator is an ex-con slugger who makes me laugh every few pages, but I’m beginning to wonder how far his smart-aleck lip will be able to carry the book. At least, it keeps my minds off the 2009 Minnesota Twins and the even more painful 2009 season of my fantasy baseball team, the woeful Twinkies.
This and That
Under the conditions of late capitalism, Tokyo in the summer of 2009 is apparently undergoing invasion by giant dinosaurs and robots. The Owl of Minerva, perhaps?
In the meanwhile, over in Nagoya, Hakuho (13-1) has the sumo tournament just about wrapped up, if he can just knock off fellow yokozuna Asashoryu (11-3) in the final match tomorrow. The latter pulled off a remarkable win over Harumafuji on Day 13 using the spectacular kimarite (technique) “yaguranage,” last seen in 1975.
Meanwhile, there’s a very nice profile of retired sumo wrestler Konishiki in the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper.
No robots, dinosaurs, or sumo wrestlers here in Chicago: just lovely summer weather. Our backyard patio reconstruction project is nearing completion, meaning it will soon be time to fire up the barbecue grill again. In the meanwhile, I’m enjoying reading Jim Harrison’s comic novel The English Major and (for the first time in Japanese) Oe Kenzaburo’s Kojinteki na taiken (A Personal Matter). What are you reading this summer?
I Never Read My Own Reviews (But Here’s What They Say)
My favorite line about writing reviews comes from Oscar Wilde: “I never read books I must review; it prejudices you so.” But I actually did read Ken Ito’s new study, An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel (Stanford University Press), and my review has just been published in the latest issue of Monumenta Nipponica. In what I thought was a fine book, Ito takes up several enormously popular potboilers of the late Meiji period and unpacks the complex, often self-contradictory logics by which they work. I think I got a little carried away by my own rhetoric in the review, but here’s the conclusion:
Ito provides us with illuminating, careful readings of some of the most popular works published in the Meiji period—works whose tainted pedigree has scared away many previous scholars. He demonstrates these novels to be crucial sites of the cultural work needed to produce modern Japan. An Age of Melodrama forces us to redraw our genealogical charts of modern Japanese literature: whether by adoption or marriage, previously neglected relations must be accepted into the family. The proud patriarchs of the canon may scowl when forced to open the gates of their estates to these uncouth relations—but as Meiji melodramas loved to show, there is nothing so turbulent as domestic family life.
I, in turn, have recently become the target of a reviewer’s eye. A glowing notice by Wendy Jacobson on Avery 4: An Anthology of New Fiction appears in the most recent issue of Book/Mark Quarterly Review. She praises the collection as “a fine sampling from a group of talented writers who are on their way to increased notoriety and success” (editorial comment: notoriety, perhaps; success, perhaps not) and highlights my short story “Invasive Species” as being “told with poetic mature insight.” The whole issue is well worth your while, and I promise that reading it won’t prejudice you in the least. You can order it here for a mere ten bucks.
The Current Reading List
Over the past couple months, I’ve been leisurely making my way through 『可能性としての「在日」』 (’Zainichi’ as possibility), a collection of essays and speeches by Lee Hoesung (Japanese: Ri Kaisei), who in 1972 became the first ethnically Korean writer to win the Akutagawa Prize. It’s a fascinating read.
The earliest piece in the book comes from 1970, the latest from 2002. It’s particularly interesting to watch Lee’s position develop over the decades, from his decision to travel to South Korea in the early 1970s despite its still being under military dictatorship, to his decision to switch his legal citizenship from North to South Korea, to his enthusiastic support for Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy in the 1990s. In the 1970s, he seeks in Zainichi identity the possibility for a popular nationalism that preserves a critical distance from the governments of both North and South Korea; in the 2000s, he finds in it possibilities for a global coalition of minority cultures. Lee is keenly intelligent, honest, and constantly rethinking his own ethical responsibilities in response to the flows of power and history. He’s also not afraid to take his critics to task, often by name.
I’m also reading 「ムッシュ！Monsieur!」, the autobiography of Kamayatsu Hiroshi. Kamayatsu was born in Tokyo in 1939, the son of a Japanese-American jazz singer and a Japanese woman. In the late 1950s, he launched his musical career as a rockabilly and country-western singer. In the 1960s, he became the main creative force behind Group Sounds superstars The Spiders. In the 1970s, he remade himself yet again, this time as a brilliant New Music singer-songwriter, and he remains today a beloved elder statesman of Japanese rock. It’s an absorbing story, even if Kamayatsu refrains from spilling the real dirt: he could learn a trick or two from Lee Hoesung.
Finally, I’m just finishing up Nick Hornby’s first young adult novel, Slam! As usual, Hornby brilliantly captures the male protagonist, in this case a teenage skateboarder who finds himself stumbling into fatherhood. We see all of his vainglorious foibles, as well as his attempts to uphold something like honor. I don’t find it quite as compelling as, say, High Fidelity, but then again, I’m not really part of the target audience for this one.
