I always read at least two baseball books each summer. (One of this summer's reads is Dan Okrent's Nine Innings.) My interest in the 1950s of course leads me to baseball through another route--actually it's three interests converging: baseball, the 50s, and poetry. The best expression I know of this is Gerald Early's essay published in the American Poetry Review in July/August 1996, "Birdland: Two Observations on the Cultural Significance of Baseball." I put an excerpt from this essay on my 1950s site.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
baseball: symbol of American civic religion
I adore baseball in every way it's possible to do so: see it live, play it (rarely but longingly), view it on MTV.TV, read about it. 
I always read at least two baseball books each summer. (One of this summer's reads is Dan Okrent's Nine Innings.) My interest in the 1950s of course leads me to baseball through another route--actually it's three interests converging: baseball, the 50s, and poetry. The best expression I know of this is Gerald Early's essay published in the American Poetry Review in July/August 1996, "Birdland: Two Observations on the Cultural Significance of Baseball." I put an excerpt from this essay on my 1950s site.
I always read at least two baseball books each summer. (One of this summer's reads is Dan Okrent's Nine Innings.) My interest in the 1950s of course leads me to baseball through another route--actually it's three interests converging: baseball, the 50s, and poetry. The best expression I know of this is Gerald Early's essay published in the American Poetry Review in July/August 1996, "Birdland: Two Observations on the Cultural Significance of Baseball." I put an excerpt from this essay on my 1950s site.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
