Rake provides a good review this morning of a book I referred to on Monday, Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association. He also provides a link to a review Wilfred Sheed wrote for the NYTBR when the book was published back in 1968. Both reviews are worth reading. I’d only add the following:

* The book is very funny; for me it’s also weirdly inspiring.
* It’s unlike anything else Coover has written.
* The theological aspect isn’t likely to strike you unless you’re inclined in that direction (It didn’t; I’m not).
* It kind of falls apart at the end, but it doesn’t matter.
* You don’t have to be even remotely interested in baseball to enjoy it. (I’m not; I did.)

Sheed makes the last point better than I can: “Not to read it because you don’t like baseball is like not reading Balzac because you don’t like boarding houses.” Good man, that Sheed.

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There was an old television ad for Grecian Formula, the hair dye, that featured the late hockey great Maurice “Rocket” Richard. In the ad, Richard skates around the ice sans helmet—that was the fashion in those days—sporting a jet-black coif presumably treated with the sponsor’s product. A referee appears on the screen and blows a whistle: “That’s you, Richard. Two minutes for lookin’ so good.”

Pace Ed, that’s the message I’d like to send to many of my fellow literary bloggers this morning, who’ve induced me against my will to spend several hours in their company while many, many hours of profitable professional work on my desk awaits completion. I’m heading out for a meeting tomorrow in Silicone Valley (that’s how we pronounce it in the Midwest), and damned if you’ll let me get anything done beforehand. All of you bloggers, into the box!

Come to think of it, there was another ad I liked too. Richard’s teammate, Jean Beliveau, wheels around the ice and blasts a perfect shot at the net, hitting (but not damaging) a milk carton someone has placed in the goalmouth. Big Jean skates over to the camera. “PurePack Plasticarton. May-hey-hey-wee!” I think that ad is indirectly responsible for the fact that today I can read George Perec in English and French—and with nearly the same difficulty. Mais oui indeed.

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Two things that got my Tuesday morning off with a laugh: Ignatius J. Reilly vs. Spammer (via Everybody, starting with Maud):

How dare you? The rudeness of your email staggers me. You should be lashed till you drop! The hurt and pain this has caused me has done irreparable damage. My valve has never felt so bad.

And Sean Walsh’s “field report” from The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival:

John Carey sternly tells us to switch off our mobiles, and not to move until the poets have left the building. I feel like I’m being told off. He introduces the poets. I feel like I’m being told off about Heaney. I remember his lectures. It was like being told off about Milton.

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I read James Wood’s review of John Le Carre’s latest novel with a lot of enjoyment, as usual (via OGIC). Wood’s verdict on Absolute Friends, whether just or not, is consistent with the little I’ve read in and about the book. In the other half of his piece, where he surveys Le Carre’s career and critical reception, Wood provides some pleasures too, like the apt and unexpected resorts to Barthes and George Eliot. Of course, we also get the usual menagerie of abstractions — self-cancelling amnesties, serpentine pessimisms, ratified reticences, and the like — and some generally accepted ideas freshened up with bluntness (Le Carre writes a “species of romance,” repeats himself from book to book, “can write very well”). But overall it’s Wood at his most characteristic; which is to say, not boring.

In the end, though, I had to marvel: what an age of literary genius we must live in, that Graham Greene and Hemingway and, yes, Le Carre should be found so wanting in talent by comparison. Makes me want to race to the bookstore first thing tomorrow morning for the wonders that await me there.

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From Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968):

The bleachers were in an uproar! It might be the greatest pitching duel of all time! The old-timer Pioneers and other players from the past were out of their seats. All but old Brock. He sat like a country gentleman, leather jacket open, grinning affably, hands folded beneath his knees, leaning slightly forward.

“Rutherford! Rutherford! Rutherford!”

Henry, though, had a strange tingle in his spine. His mouth had gone dry and his heart, he knew, was racing. Damon’s throw of triple ones, the second set of ones in a row, had brought the Extraordinary Occurrences Chart into play! This was the only chart Henry still hadn’t memorized. For one thing, it didn’t get used much, seldom more than once a season; for another, it was pretty complicated. Stars and Aces could lose their special rating, unknowns could suddenly rise. Rain could end the game, a drunken fan could crack a player’s skull with a pitched beer bottle, a brawl could break out, game-throwing scandals could be discovered, epidemics of flu and dysentery could ravage a line-up. But as he got out the chart to look at it, Henry could see only one line:

1-1-1: Batter struck fatally by a bean ball.

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I guess there’s more dialect writing out there than you think, even in serious literature. Lizzie Skurnick reminded me of this in her review of Delores Phillips’ The Darkest Child in yesterday’s NYTBR:

”Rozelle never tol’ you nothing ’bout me. Never tol’ you how I used to sit for hours just holding you and looking down at yo’ face,” Crow says. ”It’s been some years, but y’all oughta remember me. Who yo’ mama got you thinking yo’ Daddy is?” In that long stretch of cutoffs and elisions, why do ”nothing” and ”looking” escape the knife — and why is an ”oughta” next to the cleanly bared ”used to”? Phillips’s awkward renderings of accent and erudition make it difficult to concentrate both on the characters and the story.

Which set me a-thinkin’ . . . sorry, which prompted some random thoughts about narrative written in dialect form.

* On dialect in general: almost impossible to think about it without focusing on black dialect and specifically Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus. Also, of course, Jim in Huckleberry Finn. As Merriam-Webster would say, usu. taken to be offensive.

* Dialect has been synonomous with bad writing for many years, perhaps a delayed reaction to its strong vogue in the 19thC, perhaps because of said potential for offense. Early interdictions seem to be based on the difficulty of doing it right (see Twain’s The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper). Later advice tends to “use sparingly” (see Caroline Gordon’s tips near the end of this page).

* A more recent development is narrative attempting to represent the dialect of a future society. The best known example is probably Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. A current one is found in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, as John Clute notes in his review. Clute also mentions Iain Banks’ Feersum Endjinn.

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In the Tribune on Sunday:

* Porter Shreve reviews John McNally’s Book of Ralph. “McNally’s uncanny portraits of adolescent desire, confusion and bad behavior led T. Coraghessan Boyle to compare him to an American Roddy Doyle. McNally’s strength as a short-story writer is to capture, in brief, vibrant sequences, those moments when boys realize but refuse to concede that they can’t be boys forever.”

* Laura Demanski reviews the second volume of memoirs from critic and editor Ted Solotaroff, First Loves. “Writing from what one thinks is fiction rather than from what one knows of life commonly occurs among beginning writers. It is the mistake that any serious writing teacher will immediately spot and prescribe for. But I was to remain blithely unaware of it. The story won second prize and I was off and running, away from my discernment, away from the experiences that led to it, away from their pain and complexity.”

* Nathan Bierma briefly interviews Jim McManus on his newfound, poker-powered fame. “Your book is a bestseller, plus you won $250,000 at the World Series. Was this a gamble that paid off? Since I won, I can say it was the right call. People think it changed my poker life. It really changed my writing life. I have a two-book contract with arguably the best publisher in New York [Farrar, Strauss & Giroux], and now a pretty good deal with Esquire.”

Meanwhile, in the Sun-Times:

* An account of a campaign to have the city honor James T. Farrell in his centenary year. “Once they present petitions to the city, they hope officials will declare a James T. Farrell day, give the author an honorary street name, erect a statue of him in Washington Park, which appears frequently in his novels, and select Farrell’s 1932 novel Young Lonigan for the city’s “One Book, One Chicago” reading program. Any city commemoration would be separate from events already planned by the Newberry Library on May 21-22 and the Society of Midland Authors on Oct. 12.” (I count only two statues in town that are dedicated to authors: Shakespeare and Goethe.)

* In the literary calendar, a mention of Edwidge Danticat’s reading at Borders on W. 95th tonight. (Check out Richard Eder’s review in last week’s NYTBR.) The calendar also notes the Beckett biographer Dierdre Bair is in town this week, talking about her recent Jung bio.

Finally, New City mentions that Barbara’s Bookstore on Wells is closing. I know they’ve got the new store at UIC and the spot in Fields; it’s still a bummer.

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An account of a dream, mid-1920s, from Michel Leiris, Nights as Day, Days as Night (1961):

I walk along the beach and risk being engulfed by the waves. I am wearing a top hat crowned by a flame that seems to be a Pentecostal fire. And I have long hair.

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Once again, no good Chicagoan should venture from home or office today without first scanning the Readings list in the Chicago Reader. I won’t call out all the literary events which they, in their endless industry, have ferreted out for the coming week, but let’s just say it exceeds my humble gatherings at right.

I will mention just one event, since a) I’ve neglected this Chicago author while hyping her homies Dybek, McNally, and Petrakis; b) the folks at Women & Children First say her book is wonderful; and c) the event commences at a place that serves the city’s best pierogi, the local functional equivalent of the madeleine:

IRENE ZABYTKO: The writer leads a walking tour based on sites in her story collection, When Luba Leaves Home. Sunday, March 28, 11 AM: starting at Sak’s Ukrainian Village Restaurant, 2301 W. Chicago. 773-489-2986.

Great idea, Irene …

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Washington Post.com’s Off the Page series comes to Chicago tomorrow, with a live online discussion from the AWP conference. The guests are Stuart Dybek and John McNally.

The discussion is at 1 pm ET tomorrow. Transcripts from previous discussions (Shirley Hazzard, Paul Auster, Tim Parks, Tobias Wolff, Richard Bausch, Martin Amis, Edward P. Jones, etc.) are also available at the site.

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