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