One that won’t make me crash my car.
Or make me feel three feet thick.
We’re overdue. Like these guys were:
The part about celebrating with ginger ale for Hamilton’s sake is nice.
Not that I have any links for the grill. OK, here’s one: 25 reasons you shouldn’t vote for Don Perata. However, I’ll offer one reason you should: getting shit done. Were I an Oakland voter, that one would outweigh the EBX’s 25.
Panda and the Freak
I like to see Mills stepping in there. He always made more sense to me than Not-Travis in that lineup.
Also: I don’t own the rights to that clip.
Bless you google shields
OK.
Also: Linda Pitmon is hawt
Speaking of Giants-fan Huey Lewis songs …
The only thing I will note in response to this is that I’m absolutely befuddled as to why people think Cistulli is a good writer.
Cistulli is the sort of writer sabr-types are most prone to overrate, I think. People who do not have much experience of literature and/or are wired to think in terms of puzzles and numbers often mistake purply wanking for “writerly writing” and self-conscious cutesy cleverness for “humor”.
When someone does a thing we are unable to do, it seems a lot more impressive (to us) than it is. When ptbnl/andeux/nanosomethingorother talk about whatever the fuck it is they talk about when phrases like “curvature parameter” start cropping up, I think holy shit that is so far beyond the scope of my intellectual ability/frame of reference, I should just drink a gallon of wine, go to bed, and hope I wake up feeling slightly less stupid tomorrow.
Same thing with (some) sabr-people and Carson Cistulli: he does stuff, effortlessly, that they can’t really do, so they’re impressed.
That’s my theory, anyway.
This is why I’ll never see myself as a “writer”, as much as I love to write.
1. Haven’t read much of anything not field-related to linguistics or language (classic literature, for example)
2. While I understand obscure words due to my language study, my inexperience with using them in my own writing makes me wary of even trying, lest I come across as a poseur (which, frankly, I would be).
Creativity in the field of writing is not limited to “serious” literature. If you want to be accepted in that realm, then, yes, you do have to well-versed in it, at least to the point of knowing what is popular to steal right now. But quite frankly, I cannot see any of you being interested in pleasing that group of people, at least as a primary motivation.
I would posit that the ones with whom we remember long term aren’t always necessarily wordsmiths–Hemmingway was notorious sparse–in contemporary circles, Coetzee’s the same. Charles Dickens was essentially his time’s Stephen King. Shakespeare, the man whom we credit as being the Godfather of modern literature as we know it, was both a notorious thief (most of the ideas/plays that he wrote already existed in one form or another–he just wrote them with more flourish) and what he wrote wasn’t intended AS literature. It was intended as plays.
Even my namesake, who was shooting for immortality with Finnegans Wake, if not Ulysses, always had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, sticking his nose out at the debate between “high” and “low” literature. In Ulysses, he describes in the most sanguine terms, masturbation, taking a shit and picking your nose. And anyone who tells me he wasn’t intentionally focusing on the basest of our human natures and “elevating” them seriously gets a big polar bear punch in their puss.
Think about sports writing. I can honestly say that I liked Bill Simmons when he first started, because he had a unique voice, he was creative and funny. He didn’t change a thing about his writing style though, so ten years later, he’s still making a lot of money doing what he does, but his writing is contrived and stupid. Not because he’s contrived and stupid, but because he failed to enlarge and expand upon his original, interesting starting point. I see Posnanski as falling in that same trap–in fact, sports writers are notorious for it–Peter King, Ray Ratto—they develop a point of view that works, that finds voice, and then run it into the ground. The problem isn’t that they suck. the problem is that they fail to continue to try to develop it, so it becomes stale. It allows them to succeed in the world, so I can’t really find fault with them, but it is why they become basically unreadable in the matter of a decade or less.
Um, sorry for the rant.
i love this post. moar plz, lb.
Ditto.
1. You write well. A lot better than Carson Cistulli.
2. I meant to say that using big words is not the same thing as writing well, and just as I don’t know bad sabermetrics when I see it, it’s hard for people who don’t spend much time around good writing to know bad writing when they see it.
3. I think LB is wrong when he says of sportwriters, “the problem isn’t that they suck. the problem is that they fail to continue to try to develop”. The problem is that they suck. But also it’s not really a problem. Good writers who limit themselves to sports are, well, limiting themselves.
4. I don’t know what I mean by “good writers” or “suck” in this context. Maybe a better way to put it would be to say that sportswriters are what they are, nothing more.
5. Ditto your general sentiment with regard to “writing” versus “writer”, though. I don’t love writing, as you do (in fact the idea of loving writing seems totally crazy to me, as I’ve never experienced it as anything other than difficult and frustrating). However I do write a lot, because it’s a good way to think about things, and occasionally I squeeze out something that is semi-satisfying for like three minutes until I hate it. But that is not remotely the same thing as being a writer.
6. I know that I am being precious about the term “writer”, and that I am a snob. Fuck it. I don’t care.
7. Cistulli paint by numbers: Coloful adjectives. Colorful alliterative adjectives. Colorful alliterative italicized adjectives. Sly/wry allusions to Nabokov and Plato and so forth. Idiosyncratic digressions that eventually relate via pun to somebody’s FIP or ground ball rate. Lots of perhaps’s and merely’s. Colloquialisms couched in ever so clever ever so light irony. Etc.
I may have told you guys this story before, but I absolutely love it. After Virginia Woolf killed herself (wherein she loaded her pockets with rocks and waded into the “river” close to her house–the first-hand account by my mentor strongly suggested it was more a drainage ditch than a river), they were cleaning out her things. They came across a copy of To the Lighthouse, where Woolf herself had gone back through the published copy and made changes.
So your experience may be more akin to the “professional ” writing experience than you think, mk.
1. To repackage something I recently said on this very site, the Virginia Woolf to me analogy is just too preposterous to indulge.
2. There is a dog day care facility here in Portland called “Virginia Woof”.
2. really should be called “To the Doghouse”
2. Would be better in Richmond or Arlington.
I’m familiar enough with principles of good writing to usually A) recognize bad writing as such and B) know when my writing falls into that category.
My biggest problem as a writer, and what likely keeps me from being as prolific as I’d like, is that my self-censoring (whether it be due to nelsonmuntzaphobia or my general inability to express my thoughts and creative impressions) keeps my word count to a minimum. This paragraph has been drafted and revised six or seven times, including two times when I completely deleted everything. To tell the truth, I’m not even sure I know what I’m thinking half the time, so finding a way to articulate my thoughts often feels futile.
It humbles me that so many of you on this site seem to write such large quantities of genuinely interesting material so effortlessly. I don’t feel that anybody here is verbose–if anything, I’m jealous of the apparent ease with which you all achieve such eloquence. If you all can write such thoughtful, coherent statements, I can’t fathom the depth of the thoughts that you can’t verbalize. I’m not trying to fellate all of you here–I’m just expressing some of the obstacles that keep me from wanting to post more here and write more in my spare time (as I look at the preceding sentence, I just know that there’s a more “writerly” way to express the same ideas–it just seems too much of a hassle to do so).
But then, like a wise person once said, we often compare ourselves at our worst to others at their best, and perhaps there’s some of that here in my assessment of my own (and your) writing.
Yeah. Combine this with the Perfectionist’s Dilemma you described just prior, and you’ve got yourself a clusterfuck.
You might separate writing into three broad components:
1. the initial mash of notions
2. the final product
3. the process involved to negotiate the distance between the two
I always have #1. Sometimes I have #2, sometimes not, but even when I do it is in my head as though at the opposite end of a bank of fog, visible but not coherent. So the problem is not just that I envision the final product as perfect, it’s that there’s no specificity to the perfection. I envision it as perfect, not as its perfect self. It’s one thing to get from Fuzzy A to Pristine but Well-Defined B, but quite another to get from Fuzzy A to Equally Fuzzy but Must Be Pristine B. It’s not the toil that makes me dawdle and hesitate, it’s that it’s toil without a map, toil to potentially nowhere, toil in pursuit of a perectly vague perfect thing.
(Much easier to interact on a blog, because you always have A Thing To Say in response to some thing somebody else said)
I’ve tried to concretely define #2 before starting, but most of the time the only way to reveal #2 is to do #3. I’ve also tried to think in terms of an imperfect, no pressure, who cares, it’s okay if it’s bullshit #2. Because you know, frenzied though my perfectionism may be, my #2’s remain 99% bullshit. This is the kicker, and I think my shoulders would slouch a lot less if I could manage to accept that from the get-go.
But sometimes you just have to acquiesce to your personality. The better bet, the one I am currently attempting, is not to accept the inevitable imperfection of #2, but rather to accept the difficulty of #3, and fucking do it anyway.
Y’know, I read this, stopped at “you always have A Thing To Say in response,” and then re-read it looking for a TWSS setup.
Wrong meme.
{snerk}
I like your observation about “as perfect, not as its perfect self”
This happened to me back when I was trying to learn French. I got to where I could have a dream where characters other than me were speaking perfect French, which either meant I knew it but was holding myself back for some reason or I was just doing the same thing you’re doing.
I’d never thought of that before.
Also, with other people we only see the end product, so it’s easy to imagine that their writing sprang forth fully-formed directly from their head, rather than being the product of four re-writes and a couple sleepless hours mulling it over the previous night.
To tell the truth, I’m not even sure I know what I’m thinking half the time, so finding a way to articulate my thoughts often feels futile.
You have to have faith:
And you have to know that you will fail. Everyone fails. Expression is failure. There is no way to wholly embody your (or any) experience of the world in words, and further, no way those words can sustain their (delicate, inchoate) meaning upon collision with a reader or listener. It is all just gesturing.
The essay’s author calls the compulsion to pursue this certain failure “the muse of impossibility”, and for me, framing the problem in this way is galvanizing. If failure is water and you are a fish, failure disappears. Or, at least, it is failure you accept and accommodate, failure that is a condition of being rather than failure that you, in particular, have wrought. Failure that measures the distance between things as they are and what your senses behold (or, if you like, between God and you), and is in that way beautiful.
I suppose that is all a bit grandiose and obvious, but I think it is so deeply, intrinsically true that we forget it, and that that forgetting is an essential component of perfectionism (and that perfectionism is an essential component of inertia).
3. Scares me.
Well, I was too harsh there (thus #4).
To clarify:
Many people who write primarily about sports, write well. Craig Calcaterra writes well. Tom Tango writes well. As do various SBN contributors and lots of other people. But when people say Carson Cistulli or (dare I say it!) Joe Posnanski are “great writers”, they are crediting them with a virtuosity beyond the ability to
effectively convey information and arguments. “Great writer” implies more than “is articulate in writing”. It implies a level of storytelling or insight or linguistic dexterity that is, for lack of a better word, artistic.
My contention is that Cistulli, and to an extent Posnanski, earn this praise by virtue of style, not skill. That is to say, people tend to be easily/overly impressed by lilting, adjective heavy, digression peppered compositions. You might call it the ooh! look! pretty! fallacy.
Once I clicked a link to a Posnanski post (you know the kind: “Here is another great, awesome, just perfect, fabulous post by Poz. A national treaure, that guy.”), and came across the phrase “achingly beautiful” in the first paragraph. And I thought to myself that if I was teaching 8th grade English, and some kid turned in an essay containing that phrase, I would cross it out with the thickest red pen I could find, then write at top of the page in the same thick red ink “F-. IT IS GOOD TO PROVOKE A REACTION FROM YOUR READER, BUT THAT REACTION SHOULD BE SOMETHING OTHER THAN ‘GAG REFLEX’.” I probably would be much nicer to a real 8th grader than that hypothetical one, but you get the point.*
* I admit I wrote that paragraph just to give andeux an aneurysm. It is true, though. Achingly beautiful. Christ.
8th-graders, Dude
Where the hell were you FKers when those asshats at U of C needed eviscerating?
FSU: does #5 count as “getting shit done”?
Gammon missed an opportunity to link that one with #12, vis Dennis Chaconas, because that issue involved a Perata ally peddling waterless urinals.
Of course, Gammon’s list of 25 is really only 4-5 issues, restated and split up to make it look like more. If you dislike the appearance of impropriety and favoritism, obviously Perata ain’t your candidate. if you like someone who knows the rules chapter and verse, and can work within them (if only barely) to get stuff done, then The Don is your guy.
From reading this and your response below w/r/t Perata changing his tune once in office on a new stadium, I can only conclude that he will be pushing a TROUGH-URINAL-FREE NEW STADIUM.
Highest and best use of OK Cupid blog:
TWTPOWS
i want to see %answering “ur mom” and “my wang”
My ex-wife would answer ur mom. She used to like to say that a lot.
ur mom would answer “my wang”!
Wait, that means that your mom’s wang…
Dang it, I am so not cool.
Wait, whose mom is answering your wang? And what was your wang’s question?
In former Soviet Union, your wang answers, “Whose mom?”
I like the map of “Canada, our wacky gay neighbor.”
re Perata: Really?
Granted, you know about 25 times as much as I do about Oakland politics, and the little I do know comes mostly from the alternarags, which seem to uniformly despise Perata. Also, my opinion doesn’t much matter since I don’t live in Oakland anyway. But
1. Perata seems a lot better at getting things done for himself and his cronies than for his constituents
2. Isn’t “he’s a seasoned deal-maker on a bigger stage, with the experience and connection to get things done” basically the same argument that was used in favor of first Jerry Brown and then Ron Dellums? I’ve come around to the idea that the best person to get things done locally is someone with an actual deep interest in local issues. (And as an on-topic example, in those quotes about the A’s stadium the other day, Quan seemed to be the only one who was on top of recent developments.)
(Side note: while their reason #25 is clearly meant as a self-deprecating joke, I wish there were a way to make Gammon stop writing. He’s really a hack.)
(I think there are some demonstrated ways to make East Bay journalists stop writing.)
Too soon, monkey.
The EBE, in one of their better moments, were actually the ones who originally exposed the YBMB corruption, a few years before the Chauncy Bailey hit happened.
Willie Brown was pretty good for SF. Much better than our current posturer-in-chief
Newsom has pretty much proved every single variety of his detractors right, hasn’t he?
He just doesn’t care about actually running the city. He clearly wants to be
presidentlieutenant president some day.Well, any of Perata Quan or Kaplan will be an enormous improvement, simply by virtue of showing up and having some idea of how to wield power. I’ve come to the conclusion over many years that the only thing that matters for a mayor is the ability to get shit done. Ideology is meaningless (and in fact is a harmful distraction, as we saw with Dellums). Oakland desperately needs someone who will make government work to advance an agenda…and at least among the contenders, which particular agenda is less important than the mayor’s ability to make it happen. Like LBJ, of whom I spoke admiringly the other day, Perata has a real track record of marshalling support to accomplish real stuff (gun control, health care, and state infrastructure, for examples).
(As an aside, no one voted for Dellums because of the seasoned deal-maker thing. Jerry, sort of (though recall that was Jerry the KPFA guy, not Jerry the Uptown developer). But Dellums’ supporters thought he’d uplift the City by sheer force of rhetorical inspiration, and that a nascent progressive revolution was just waiting for a catalyst like him to spring forth. Didn’t work out that way.)
Quan postures as though she’s fiscally responsible, but is in reality a dangerous fiscal illiterate (see OUSD board and stupid employee pension deals, for examples). And Quan is kind of a dingbat. Kaplan is very interesting, but has of late shown disturbing signs of Jerry Brownism–the genuine commitment to nothing other than her career. The trip from committed policy wonk to finger-in-the-winder in like 18 months concerns me. If she regains a commitment to core policy values she could be a very good pol in years to come.
Perata is all about economic development. While his business-first posture would give me pause when voting for a state legislator or US rep, it’s what Oakland needs most. To that end, BTW, I am absolutely certain that his answer on the A’s question you reference represents his full thinking on the subject…tactically, a month before election day, there’s no gain for him to say anything other than the fiscally conservative thing. But if/when elected, you’ll see a very different position in his actions w/r/t the A’s ballpark. Count on that.
The graft, yeah, it’s a concern, but Perata’s MO has been actual accomplishments (which, sure, benefit his pals more than the less well connected). But I believe Don genuinely wants to cap his political career by being able to say he turned Oakland around, and since his skill set is so very well matched with what Oakland needs, I’m willing to accept the risks for the benefits.
Thanks for the info. Like I said, you know a lot more about these people than I do.
Perhaps, though as with ex-ballplayers doing color commentary or GMing, direct personal knowledge does not always mean being right.
You know what sucks?
I’ll tell you: waiting 3 weeks for a package from eBay only to find that the item was listed incorrectly. Sure, the seller’s cooperating to avoid negative feedback, but I have to wait another two weeks for her to receive the item before I get a refund, and I’m out 2500 yen for return shipping.
In the end I’m paying 30 bucks to wait 5 weeks to not have my money or a product. And now I gotta find another one. Geez.
Buddy, if they listed it wrong, they should be paying for the shipping…
This
We’ll see what she has to say.
Dernit! New eBay “Buyer Protection” policy:
It’s going to cost about $37 to ship. How the hell is that buyer protection? The old PayPal dispute system consistently protected the buyers from return shipping costs.
I’m sure there was a lot of fraud, but my case is a verifiable not-as-described situation. In the end, I’m going to have to keep the thing (which has limited functionality compared to the one I wanted) and give the seller negative feedback.
Thank god she doesn’t order her cronies to throw you down a flight of stairs. ixnay on the riticismkay.
Wait, that person throwing her down the stairs…is that…is that Jerry Brown?!
You’re wide of the mark.