Week 16: Literature from Out of Left Field

In much the same way that baseball has long cherished its oddball relievers (like the Red Sox's legendary Bill "Spaceman" Lee, shown at right), we're bringing our semester-long exploration of baseball literature to a close with a few strange selections from the fringes of experimental literature.

We'll start on Tuesday with a pair of somewhat interrelated works of conceptual poetry that enshrine the long-running rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees.  First is Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff's collaborative book Yo-Yo's with Money published in 1979 by United Artists Press.  The basic idea here is simple enough: two New York School poets go to see the Sox and Yankees play late in the 1977 season.  They take a handful of pills beforehand and drink a lot of beer during the game.  They've also brought along a portable tape machine and record themselves doing play-by-play.  Someone transcribes it and you've got a book!  I've paired that with Kenneth Goldsmith's Sports, the third and final installment in his "American 'On-the-Ones'" trilogy of transcriptive books that interact with radio.  The first two Traffic and The Weather transcribed long stretches of broadcasts from New York's 1010 WINS newsradio: The Weather is a year's worth of weather reports, while Traffic documents a 24-hour period.  For Sports, Goldsmith transcribed an entire radio broadcast of an August 2006 game between the two teams, which was, at the time, the longest nine-inning game in baseball history (running over five hours).

I'd like you to read the Berrigan/Schiff in its entirety.  As for Goldsmith, not even he wants you to read his books, which exist more as art objects than as texts for standard literary consumption, but I'd like to to read a little of it — either starting at the beginning or jumping in at a random point — to get a sense of what's going on.

As for Friday, we'll end with a few short selections: a Donald Barthelme piece that crosses the lines between baseball and the literary world that we've traced throughout books from Roth to Harbach to Kinsella, envisioning the secret baseball careers of a number of authors.  Then we'll switch gears to a few selections from Charles North's series of "lineup" poems which date back to the 1970s.

• Tues. April 16: Ted Berrigan & Harris Schiff, Yo-Yo's with Money [link]; Kenneth Goldsmith, Sports [link].
• Fri. April 19: Donald Barthelme, "The Art of Baseball" [link]; Charles North, from Lineups [link] [link]

Weeks 13 & 14: W.P. Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe"

We're quickly nearing the end of the semester and have reached our final novel, W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe — a book that's decidedly different that much of what we've read before.  Aside from the fact that Kinsella is Canadian (offering up a novel perspective on the game from the point of view of that fated nation [Expos R.I.P.]), he's working in more of a populist literary tradition than some of the more high-minded authors we've read, and while their baseball stories and novels are outliers among their larger collected works, Kinsella has made his career writing about the game, with Shoeless Joe joined by The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa and Box Socials.

That doesn't mean that there aren't interesting things going on in the novel, however.  Shoeless Joe is Kinsella's debut and full of the sort of daring feats you'd expect from an author's first time out of the gate.  In much the same way that Word Smith is haunted by the question of the Great American Novel in the novel of the same name, and Harbach's The Art of Fielding is guided by its own titular book-within-a-book and Melville's Moby Dick, here it's noted literary recluse J.D. Salinger who's captivated Kinsellas's imagination, appearing as a major character in the book and providing the name for its protagonist, Ray Kinsella (a minor character appearing in both The Catcher in the Rye and one of Salinger's stories).  You might also recognize the plot from a little-known film that was made from it called Field of Dreams.

As probably the most popular of our novels, I'd imagine we all have very different editions of Shoeless Joe and the novel doesn't easily break down, so I'll leave it to you to read roughly a third of the book for each day.

• Fri. April 5: first third
• Tues. April 9: second third
• Fri. April 12: third third

Final Essay Info (Due April 25th)

The final essay prompt for this class is relatively simple, however it's my hope that within its narrow constraints you'll find a lot of room for individual expression.  Throughout the semester we've discussed the greater symbolic significance of the game of baseball for those who play it as well as those who watch it, the meaning it gives to life and the lessons it offers.  For your final, I'd like you to trace the ways in which one of the following key ideas/virtues/truths is expressed through the characters populating our various readings:

• Heroism (ideally in the sense of classic Greek tragedy)
• Perseverance / Dedication / Hard Work
• Friendship / Camaraderie
• Faith
• Reinvention / Rebirth
• Patriotism / What it means to be an American
• Mortality (and the acknowledgment or defiance thereof) / Loss
• the ideal of the Great American Melting Pot
• Deception / Dishonesty / Cheating

Of course, this paper should not be a simple exercise in listing characters who exemplify these ideals.  First, you need to make a clear case for how your examples (of which there should be at least three) demonstrate your chosen topic, providing plentiful evidence from the texts themselves (this means quotations and summaries/paraphrases of plot points, all of which should be cited).  Moreover, you'll need to analyze your examples, discussing them in relation to one another.  Can you find nuances between characters, or outright contradictions?  Finally, you should address the question of how baseball is uniquely suited to reveal these truths (about the human condition, the nature of our existence, the nation in which we live, etc.).

Your final essays should be a minimum of two thousand (2,000) words (not counting your works cited list), and written in MLA style (including a proper header, parenthetical in-text citations and a works cited list at the end), double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman, no tricked-out margins, etc. You'll e-mail your papers to me (in .doc or .docx format; .rtf in a pinch) no later than 5:00 PM on Thursday, April 25th. Because e-mail is an imperfect delivery medium and the UC system is prone to collapse, take note that I'll reply to each paper received, letting students know that it's arrived safely, so if you don't receive that e-mail, get in touch with me, and should you have any questions or concerns prior to the deadline, don't hesitate to drop me a line.  I'm also sure that we'll have an open discussion of the final essay on Facebook.

Also, please don't forget that tardy papers will be docked a full letter grade for every day they're late and that papers that are less than the stated limit of two thousand words (again, not counting your works cited list) will automatically receive an F. Finally, I will not permit block quotes for this essay — whittle down your quotations to the essential information and make use of summary and paraphrase when necessary.

While two thousand words (roughly six full pages) seems like an endlessly long paper, I can assure you that it's not really a lot of space to discuss these topics in great depth, therefore I wholeheartedly encourage you to dispense with any and all filler, including bloated rhetoric and lengthy five-paragraph-style introductions that ultimately say very little while taking up a lot of word count. Don't hover over the surface of the issues — dive right in and get to the heart of your argument (i.e. evidence, analysis . . .  the good stuff) from the start. I also recommend that unless you have compelling reasons to do otherwise, organize your essay around the the facets of the topic you've chosen to discuss, rather than proceeding chronologically or dealing with each author individually, and also that you write through the source texts themselves, as demonstrated in the "Making Effective Arguments" post I put up at the start of the term. You do not need to do outside research for this assignment, and you should avoid lengthy explications of the authors' biographical details or summaries of the plots of texts outside of what relates directly to the points that you are making. Presume that the person reading your paper has read all of the texts you reference (because he has!). Finally, make sure that you are following the conventions of MLA formatting (which can be found in numerous places on the internet).

Week 13: Don DeLillo's "Pafko at the Wall"

Just like our brief poetic respite between The Great American Novel and The Art of Fielding, we're going to have another palate-cleanser between Harbach and our final novel of the semester, W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, though we're still in the prose mode.  Subtitled "The Shot Heard Round the World," Don DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall is concerned with just that: Bobby Thompson's game-winning home run against the Brooklyn Dodgers that won the 1951 NL Pennant for the New York Giants, which is widely considered to be one of the game's defining moments.

Pafko was first published in a folio edition in Harper's in October 1992 — this is the source of the version that we'll be reading  — and would later appear under the title "The Triumph of Death" as a prologue to DeLillo's epic novel Underworld (1997), before appearing on its own as a single-printing hardcover (shown at the left) in 2001.

You'll notice that unlike so much of the prose we've read so far, DeLillo's characters exist in our own real world rather than a fictional one, and this is a popular postmodern literary technique called "historiographic metafiction" (impress your friends with that one) — he'd also use this to great effect in novels including Mao II and Falling Man — and this, along with our foreknowledge of the game's outcome, create a fascinating literary tension for us as readers.  It's also worth noting once again, that like Malamud, Roth and Chabon, here we have one of the leading literary voices of his respective era making baseball a central part of his writing, which speaks to the place it occupies in our collective imagination.

You'll find a PDF copy of the novella here, and we'll be reading it in its entirety for April 2nd.  If you'd like a little more info on the game itself, check out the videos below.

Weeks 10–12: Chad Harbach's "The Art of Fielding"

We're going to make a little chronological leap with our next novel, simply for the sake of breaking up a big book over spring break.  Char Harbach's The Art of Fielding (2011) is a big book (512 pages in hardcover), but also a monumental work of contemporary fiction, considered not just one of the latest and greatest works of baseball literature, but also within the broader field of fiction as a whole.  It was judged one of 2011's best books by the New York Times, and shortlisted for the Guardian's First Book Award.  Of course, Harbach didn't come out of left field with his debut novel — in 2004 he cofounded the highly-influential journal n+1, and has written on a variety of topics for leading magazines during the nine years it took to write The Art of Fielding.

The novel exists within several discourses — baseball culture as a whole, American literature as a whole and the discreet nexus of baseball literature — and given the readings we've already done this term, it'll be interesting to see how many nods to each of these fields you see in Harbach's writing.  Moreover, while so much of the work we've read this term, and will be reading, depicts baseball in a historic, and sometimes pastoral or even archaic manner — almost as if shooting it through an old-timey Instagram filter — in Harbach, we find a baseball novel that feels refreshingly contemporary.

Here's our breakdown for The Art of Fielding.  Take note that there's a big jump after spring break, so pace yourself and don't fall behind:

• Tues. March 12: Chapters 1–11
• Fri. March 15: Chapters 12–28
• Tues. March 19: No Class — Spring Break
• Fri. March 22: No Class — Spring Break
• Tues. March 26: Chapters 29–64
• Fri. March 29: Chapters 65–82

Also take note that for the sake of thoroughly enjoying your spring breaks, we should shut down Facebook comments after Friday the 15th and not start up again until the 26th.  You've earned the break (and so have I)!

Finally, here are some supplemental readings on The Art of Fielding for your spring break perusing pleasure:

• NYT review of The Art of Fielding
• Harbach discusses the novel with Terry Gross on NPR's All Things Considered
• another NPR feature on the novel, from Talk of the Nation
• The Los Angeles Times' review of the novel
• The Onion's A.V. Club reviews the novel
• The Wall Street Journal's review
• two reviews from The Guardian: 1 / 2
• GQ interviews Harbach 

Week 9: Baseball Poetry

Poet Marianne Moore throws out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium, Opening Day 1968.

We've just finished one lengthy baseball novel (Roth's The Great American Novel) and we've got another one ahead of us (Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding), so I thought it would be the perfect time for a seventh-inning stretch of sorts, shifting scale from the very large to the very small with a week spent on poems about baseball.

We'll be using a PDF anthology that I've put together specially for this class (available here) and don't forget about the guide to analyzing poetry, found in this blog's righthand sidebar, which should be a useful resource as you make your way through the readings.

Here's how we'll split the readings for next week's classes:

• Tues. March 5:  Franklin Pierce Adams to Ron Loewinsohn
• Fri. March 8: Bernadette Mayer to Baron Wormser

We'll return to poetry at the very end of the semester when we look at some more experimental writing on baseball by Ted Berrigan & Harris Schiff, Kenneth Goldsmith, Richard Brautigan and Charles North.

Weeks 6-8: Philip Roth's "The Great American Novel"

As we shift gears into our third novel of the semester, we find ourselves with, in essence, a synthesis of the diverse styles found in Malamud and Coover.  Philip Roth's The Great American Novel doesn't exactly live up to its lofty title, though for the writer — coming after several scattered attempts to follow up his wildly successful Portnoy's Complaint (the novella The Breast, the political satire Our Gang) — it might be more representative of his overall goal, rather than where he ended up.  Or rather, there's reason to believe that, particularly when handled as lovingly as Roth does here, baseball itself might be the great American novel of his (and our) lifetime.

Again, we're dealing with alternate history — here's it's the WWII-era Patriot League — and an author who revels in the more absurd details the game has to offer.  Specifically, it's the wartime replacement players of Roth's youth, along with the sport's growing ethnic diversity that inspires him to create perhaps the most lovable losers imaginable on the diamond.  Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s also factor into the narrative, which, like Malamud and Coover before him, takes great pleasure in baseball's most intimate details, its culture and mythology.

Because the "great" in The Great American Novel is not just an appraisal of its quality, but also its size, we're going to spread it out over a few more classes than usual (the same will be true of Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding).  Here's the schedule:

• Fri. February 15: pgs 1-82 (break at bottom of pg)
• Tues. February 19: pgs 82-165 (break at bottom of pg)
• Fri. February 22: pgs 165-246 (break at top of pg)
• Tues. February 26: pgs 246-322 (break in middle of pg)
• Fri. March 1: pgs 322-400

And here are a few supplemental resources:

• the New York Times' 1973 review of the book
• a story from last spring about Roth's unsuccessful lawsuit against a performance artist using The Great American Novel (specifically, reading it) as part of an installation 

Weeks 5 & 6: Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association..."

For our second baseball novel of the semester, we're only jumping ahead sixteen years (from 1952 to 1968), however in terms of tone and style, these books are as wildly different from one another as the eras in which they were produced.  While Bernard Malamud's The Natural is a product of stoic postwar philosophy and a logical extension of the modernist prose style, Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association... revels in the burgeoning aesthetic movement that would come to be known as postmodernism.  You can already tell that by looking at their names alone, though as we'll see, for all their differences, the central conceit of baseball will provide both authors with a surprising amount of common ground.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. — there, I've said its full name once and now we can abbreviate at will! —is Robert Coover's second novel, following his 1966 début, The Origin of the Brunists and written concurrently with many of the daring, genre-defining short stories that would be published the following year in the collection Pricksongs and Descants: Fictions (you've already read one story from this volume, "McDuff on the Mound;" perhaps his most [in]famous story, "The Babysitter," is also found there).  For all of the stylistic play at work in the novel, it's is nonetheless a story of great character-centered emotion, particularly focused on the novel's titular hero and protagonist, J. Henry Waugh, a lonesome accountant by day who spends his evenings obsessively playing a tabletop baseball game of his own invention.  While such a lifestyle doesn't seem ripe for drama, you'd be surprised just how much can happen in only a short time.

While the UBA was appreciated in its own time, it's particularly interesting to read the novel through the modern frame of SABRmetrics, whose practitioners' actuarial attention to detail would put someone like Henry to shame (chalk it up to the difference between his era and our computer-dominated data landscape, perhaps?).  Nonetheless, much like The Natural, there's a sort of mythological overtone here — note that Henry's initials are close to JHWH, a Hebrew abbreviation for Yahweh in the Bible — and are our observations of a potential God complex in Henry (or the questions raised in our discussion of The Natural about whether one can control reality, change fate, etc.) so far off the mark when SABRmetrician Nate Silver can predict the outcomes of the past two presidential elections with startling accuracy simply by massaging the numbers?  

We'll divide our time with the UBA into three segments as follows:

• Tues. February 5: chapters 1-3
• Fri. February 8: chapters 4 & 5
• Tues. February 12: chapters 6-8

And here are some supplemental links that might be of interest to you:

• the original New York Times review of the novel
• a 2010 reappraisal of the book in the Times
• Coover isn't the only American novelist to envision a tabletop baseball game.  Beat Generation icon Jack Kerouac created his own game, which used cards instead of dice.  Read more about it in a Times article here, and don't miss the slideshow of images from the game here.

Weeks 3 & 4: Bernard Malamud's "The Natural"

Moving on from the minor leagues of Baseball's Best Short Stories, we'll begin our work in earnest with the first of five classic baseball novels (or five and a half, counting Delillo's novella Pafko at the Wall) that will constitute the majority of our work this term.  Our starting point on this barnstorming tour of American baseball literature, and the earliest book on our reading list, is Bernard Malamud's debut novel, The Natural (1952).

I mentioned in our discussion of Thurber's "You Could Look It Up" as a prefiguring of Eddie Gaedel's (in)famous at bat that there are certain colorful tales in baseball's history — like Gaedel, the Black Sox scandal, "the Shot Heard 'Round the World," or Ray Chapman's death — that have continually captivated the imaginations of writers, and The Natural, loosely based on Phillies 1B Eddie Waitkus, is another such story.  Like Waitkus, Roy Hobbs is a young player with seemingly boundless talents whose career is sidelined when he's shot by a mysterious stalker.  We catch up with him many years later on his path towards redemption, signing on with the New York Knights as their new right fielder, where he's quickly swept up by forces larger than himself.

Malamud stands, along with Philip Roth (whose The Great American Novel we'll be reading later in the semester) and Saul Bellow, as a major force among Jewish-American authors, as well as mainstream mid-century literature, and so it's not surprising that in The Natural we find not only echoes of the classic Greek tragic hero, but also a fairly detailed and innovative reframing of the myth of the Fisher King.  This Arthurian legend — which you might've encountered in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" or Terry Gilliam's 1991 film of the same name — is centered around a wounded king whose kingdom is falling into disrepair due to his injuries.  While many knights come to attempt to heal him, only the chosen, Percival (or Parsifal), is capable of finding the holy grail and restoring order.  In The Natural, Knights manager Pop Fisher is the Fisher King, the pennant his grail and Roy his Percival (complete with his bat, "Wonderboy," as an ersatz Excalibur).  Asked about his motivation in mixing baseball and mythology in a 1975 Paris Review interview, Malamud observed that:

Baseball flat is baseball flat. I had to do something else to enrich the subject. I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish. The mythological analogy is a system of metaphor. It enriches the vision without resorting to montage. This guy gets up with his baseball bat and all at once he is, through the ages, a knight—somewhat battered—with a lance; not to mention a guy with a blackjack, or someone attempting murder with a flower. You relate to the past and predict the future. I’m not talented as a conceptual thinker but I am in the uses of metaphor. The mythological and symbolic excite my imagination. Incidentally, Keats said, "I am not a conceptual thinker, I am a man of ideas."

We'll read The Natural in three installments, as follows:

• Fri. January 25: introduction, pgs 3-107 
• Tues. January 29: pgs 108-185
• Fri. February 1: pgs 186-230

Weeks 2 & 3: Baseball's Best Short Stories

Moving on from "Casey at the Bat," we'll ease into the larger novels that will make up the bulk of our work this term by spending a few classes reading shorter baseball fiction by a wide array of authors.  The majority of the stories will be found in Paul D. Staudohar's anthology, Baseball's Best Short Stories, and you should be fine using either the older version or the recent reissue pictured here.

Our challenge here, and throughout the term, will be two-fold: to respond to these writings as literature and as literature about baseball.  In terms of the latter, we might appreciate a writer's thoughtful (or skillfully obscure) handling of baseball subject matter/lingo/etc. or the way in which the game and its players are used to embody larger symbolic meanings and lessons; however we shouldn't forget that while we're (hopefully) having fun talking about our national pastime, we should still be engaged in serious and detailed literary analysis.

Page numbers below are for the earlier edition of BBSS, and a few external links are provided:

• Tues. January 15: Ring Lardner, "Alibi Ike" (49), "My Roomy" (149), "Horseshoes" (221); James Thurber, "You Could Look It Up" (117)
• Fri. January 18: Michael Chabon, "Smoke" (133); Stuart Dybek, "Death of a Right Fielder" (355); A.E. Housman, "To an Athlete Dying Young" [link]; Max Apple, "Understanding Alvarado" [PDF]
• Tues. January 22: Garrison Keillor, "What Did We Do Wrong?" (211); Chet Williamson, "Ghandi at the Bat" (277); Kimball McIlroy, "Joe, the Great McWhiff" (303); T.C. Boyle, "The Hector Quesadilla Story" (375)

Friday, Jan. 11: Casey at the Bat

We'll start our work this term by looking at one of the fundamental works of baseball literature, and probably your first exposure to writing about baseball, Ernest L. Thayer's classic "Casey at the Bat."  Originally published under the nickname "Phin" in the San Francisco Examiner in June 1888 — and with the much grander title, "Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888" — Thayer's poem is one of the first and finest examples of writing inspired by America's burgeoning national pastime.  As the longer title implies, "Casey" is no mere tall tale, but a fairly detailed account of the sport in the late 19th century and a caricature of Mike "King" Kelly, one of the sport's first rich superstars, whose contract was purchased from Chicago by Boston for the princely sum of $10,000.

Nonetheless, as a uniquely American version of ancient Greek tragedy, "Casey" has captivated generations of readers and inspired numerous adaptations and homages.  We'll consider a few of them alongside the original for our first proper class:

• Ernest L. Thayer, "Casey at the Bat" (Baseball's Best Short Stories, 1)
• Frank DeFord, "Casey at the Bat" (written for Sports Illustrated to honor the poem's centenary) (BBSS, 5)
• Robert Coover, "McDuff on the Mound" [PDF]
• Grantland Rice, "Casey's Revenge" (a 1907 sequel of sorts) [link]

Course Description

For more than 150 years, baseball has not only been our national pastime, but also a source of inspiration for some of this country’s finest writers. As we endure another dormant winter, awaiting the promise of spring and a new season on the diamond, we’ll explore the very best that baseball’s literary canon has to offer, from classic novels (Malamud’s The Natural, Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association…, Delillo’s Pafko at the Wall, Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, Roth’s The Great American Novel and Harbach’s The Art of Fielding), to short fiction, poetry and even experimental hybrids. Along the way, we’ll consider the meaning and metaphors baseball gives to our ordinary lives and the lessons offered by its heroes and tragedies.