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Alpha report
May. 31st, 2014 02:40 pmSo the read-my-books-in-alpha-order scheme ground to a halt on Book 2, against the slender side of Prochain épisode. No idea why. It seemed like my sort of thing.
In the meantime, I read some review books, and then I read The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop. I am still on the alpha scheme -- I'm just skipping ahead until I hit something that pleases me. This also means I have yet again escaped Northanger Abbey. Huzzah!
UBA is a genuine literary oddity (I'm setting up an opposition here between literary oddities and merely weird bad books) -- a book for which there really isn't any precedent or any genre label, and its only real descendent could be another book that is wholly its own thing, rather than another book about tabletop baseball games. Maybe it has a very slight aura of Philip K. Dick, but its metaphysical space is both subtler and more claustrophobic. I like Dick*, but I felt like there was more at stake in Henry pissing off his boss than in the end of the world in Dick's SciFi.
I keep reading that it's The Best Baseball Book Ever, which seems almost completely beside the point -- baseball is the starting-point, maybe, but it's about -- well, I think it's about how you start off just trying to agree on the rules of the game you're all going to play, and then your negotiation over the rules turns into politics, and eventually into religion. Or about how wanting God or Dog to cheat in your favour is kind of the foundation of religious faith. Also about being a person who is immersed in fantasy, and how if you're lucky that makes you an artist, and if you're not lucky it makes you a lonely sod who drinks too much and can't communicate what matters to you to anyone else.
You will understand why I had to read it in small doses.
{rf}
*Har de har har
In the meantime, I read some review books, and then I read The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop. I am still on the alpha scheme -- I'm just skipping ahead until I hit something that pleases me. This also means I have yet again escaped Northanger Abbey. Huzzah!
UBA is a genuine literary oddity (I'm setting up an opposition here between literary oddities and merely weird bad books) -- a book for which there really isn't any precedent or any genre label, and its only real descendent could be another book that is wholly its own thing, rather than another book about tabletop baseball games. Maybe it has a very slight aura of Philip K. Dick, but its metaphysical space is both subtler and more claustrophobic. I like Dick*, but I felt like there was more at stake in Henry pissing off his boss than in the end of the world in Dick's SciFi.
I keep reading that it's The Best Baseball Book Ever, which seems almost completely beside the point -- baseball is the starting-point, maybe, but it's about -- well, I think it's about how you start off just trying to agree on the rules of the game you're all going to play, and then your negotiation over the rules turns into politics, and eventually into religion. Or about how wanting God or Dog to cheat in your favour is kind of the foundation of religious faith. Also about being a person who is immersed in fantasy, and how if you're lucky that makes you an artist, and if you're not lucky it makes you a lonely sod who drinks too much and can't communicate what matters to you to anyone else.
You will understand why I had to read it in small doses.
{rf}
*Har de har har
