Early Baseball

Read delightedly of the book The Summer of Beer and Whiskey (it had me at “summer”, or maybe “beer”, certainly by "whiskey"). It's an engaging history of the very early years of baseball.

Nugget of interest: Read where Oscar Wilde spent about a year visiting America, including going to a Cincy Reds game I believe. 1882-ish.

The book explains the popularity of baseball in those days to our desire for the interplay between communal activity with brilliant individual achievement, emphasis on the latter. Which baseball does showcase pretty effectively. The football counterpoint might be the quarterback and running back, both of whom have a huge individual role to play in football. But when your team is on defense you have no individual to key off since there's no pitcher equivalent in football. The 1880s version of baseball was quick-quick-quick. Fast-paced. No endless drag-out of batters stepping out between pitches, no commercial timeouts between innings. Games lasted between 90 minutes and 2 hours. Perfect.

Mark Twain called baseball the perfect image of his America: “the drive, push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century!” Wow. That feels like a completely different game than what we have now, a game that feels leisurely, lazy, and relaxed. It's almost like he's describing football, not baseball. Although perhaps baseball in the 1880s was the football of its generation: very driving, pushing and rushing compared to the alternatives. (Golf?) Probably in 40 years football will seem to slow to us and we'll look back at football as boring.

Sighted Near Campsite. #iconic

The Demise of August

“Not so long ago—well within the memory of half the American population—August was the vacation month. It was a time, much anticipated and much appreciated, of leisure, languor, lassitude and lingering at the beach well into suppertime… What we’ve done to August has made it the cruelest month: infuriating work and inescapable school obligations amid intoxicating weather.”

 
Link here.

Zimmerman Trial & MLK

One sees, in the adverse reaction against what appears to be the correct verdict in the Zimmerman trial, a glimmer of the greatness and genius of Rev. Martin Luther King.  In a time of much greater injustice towards blacks he was able to rise about the pettiness and vindictiveness.

Perhaps I didn't truly appreciate, when I was younger, now narrow the path he chose, and how broad the path of bitterness and hatred.

We also see the wisdom in King in that the non-violent, non-bitter way was so effective.  One would think for that reason alone it would be more often applied.

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Hard to take the news media seriously given the cartoonish, over-coverage on the trial. I assume it's designed to serve the anger needs of a public that likes to feel outraged. Certainly the threat of riots doesn't mean the media have to discard their judgement of what's proportionate coverage. Makes me appreciate the refuge of newspapers, which have devoted a relatively small fraction of their daily ink to the overblown trial.

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I like Jim Geraghty's take on the needless polarizations:

In the past few months, we've witnessed news events where the media quickly turned the story into a binary choice between two options:

Do we want to support the Syrian rebels or the Assad regime? Is Snowden a hero or a traitor? Do we stand with Morsi or with the Egyptian military?

Of course, in all of those examples, both antagonists are deeply flawed, perhaps too flawed to be worthy of official U.S. support, or even public-opinion support...

Snowden may have done the public a service by exposing an invasive surveillance system that violated privacy rights and perhaps the Fourth Amendment, but he also broke his oath, the law, and is now playing footsie with some of the world's most repressive regimes.

And now we have the George Zimmerman case. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that so many of our fellow citizens are choosing sides on Team Trayvon or Team Zimmerman, and insisting that the only form of "justice" would be the verdict that they prefer.

Why must we pick a side? Why is there this compulsion to declare one side is the "good guy" here?...

Benedict We Hardly Knew Ye

Hey, well, now that was surprising. Not every day do you read the Pope is retiring. Wow. I wonder how this jibes with that Malachian prediction that this is the last pope before the end of the world. Seems we may not have much time left.

I can see the Holy Father retiring in part because he has the freedom that Christians ought feel, that freedom not to follow conventions but to possess a spirit of liberty. Thus the fact no pope has retired since 1415 wouldn't be much of a deterrent to this holy pope. And he might well have considered that his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, already taught by his example of the dignity of old age and that the value of human life is apart from what can be “produced”.

Finally, the timing seems interesting given that this comes on the heels of producing the three volume work on the life of Christ. At the beginning of his papacy he wondered if he'd complete it before his death, and perhaps once it was done he felt he'd accomplished what he'd set out to do.

Of course another reason for his leaving, besides simply that it's his discernment of God's will, is that he can't travel anymore and in this day and age travel seems almost a job requirement for that position.

Sympathy for the (Modern) Devil

"Doctrine" and "dogma" are dirty words these days, having fallen into greater disrepute than the gal with the plunging neckline and the micro-skirt in the bad part of town. We've come a long way from when rejoicing Christians greeted the bishops of the 5th century after the latter determined that Mary was indeed the Theotokos, the Mother of God. Even some Catholics are doctrinal-allergic, either because of a weariness with apologetics, fear of division, or simply out of anger at those, like Fr. Corapi, who offered vinegary speech while failing to live up to it. (Hey, hypocrites are people too! And how did Corapi attract such a large crowd if offering vinegar?)

It's like shooting fish in the barrel, talking about how bad, old doctrines get in the way of a relationship with Christ, or that it's better to be "spiritual rather than religious." It's really a shame because many doctrines are quite beautiful, in addition to being true. There's the surety, for example, of the sacraments.

Truth, though, has a hard row to hoe and surely always had. Beauty, it's said, will save the world, a slippery concept perhaps. Pretty pictures? (Mark Doty wrote a poem titled Theories of Beauty.)

And so with that parenthetical, I'll quit pontificating.

Various & Sundry

I'm getting scads of emails from folks wanting a 2010 edition of Babes of the Blogosphere: Catlick Edition. (Okay, only one person, but she's an avid reader of this blog which ought count for something.) It's a tempting offer, given how much fun last year's was, but I loathe the idea of leaving anyone off. Good writing is sexy and so there are a lot of sexy blogosphere babes. You know who you are.

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Announcement: Effective Janurary 1st, this blog will limit Tiger Woods' role in its marketing.

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There was an interesting article in the paper Sunday about how Charles Dickens life has become something of a fascination:

Of the making of books by or about Charles Dickens, there apparently is no end. He wrote constantly, published promiscuously, lived intensely, dreamed extravagantly.

Dickens influenced, inspired and challenged others to produce amazing things, too. The thriving field of what we might call Contingent Dickens — works based on Dickens’ works, or on his life or on the Victorian era that his vivid word portraits made famous — is a significant literary genre in its own right.

Consider A Christmas Carol, one of his best-known tales, being performed on stages nationwide. Consider the new film version of the same tale, with Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge, the mean old miser who gets his holiday comeuppance. Consider Drood (2009), the brooding, brilliant Dan Simmons novel that features a distastefully conniving Dickens. Consider The Last Dickens (2009), Matthew Pearl’s fictional picture of Dickens’ American lecture tour. Consider Mr. Timothy (2003), Louis Bayard’s strikingly atmospheric novel that imagines the adult Tiny Tim, the cheerful sickly lad in Carol.

Wrapping one’s arms around Dickens is no easy task. He was too big, too restless, too productive, too accomplished, too complicated, too mysterious.

That mysterious streak is part of the reason for the fascination. The article prompted me to read some of Chesterton's remarkable biography of Charles Dickens and it feels as timely as if it could be written yesterday. On the lack of heroes:

[Thomas] Carlyle killed the heroes; there have been none since his time. He killed the heroic (which he sincerely loved) by forcing upon each man this question: "Am I strong or weak?" To which the answer from any honest man whatever (yes, from Cæsar or Bismarck) would "weak." He asked for candidates for a definite aristocracy, for men who should hold themselves consciously above their fellows. He advertised for them, so to speak; he promised them glory; he promised them omnipotence. They have not appeared yet. They never will. For the real heroes of whom he wrote had appeared out of an ecstacy of the ordinary. [Carlyle] was disappointed with Equality; but Equality was not disappointed with him. Equality is justified of all her children. But we, in the post-Carlylean period, have be come fastidious about great men. Every man examines himself, every man examines his neighbours, to see whether they or he quite come up to the exact line of greatness. The answer is, naturally, "No." And many a man calls himself contentedly "a minor poet" who would then have been inspired to be a major prophet.

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"The gate that gives entry into these riches of his wisdom is the cross; because it is a narrow gate, while many seek the joys that can be gained through it, it is given to few to desire to pass through it." - St. John of the Cross

Also o'er the weekend read a lot about my new favorite book of the Bible - “the book of Consolation” as it is sometimes called - that of Isaiah, specifically chapters 54 & 55. Sure it feels like cherry-picking, as if attempting to procure promises without conspicuous effort on my part. Sure it was written to those in deep exile, pre-Christ. But hey it's part of the Bible too!