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Archive for the ‘Story’ Category

Tigers still loose as race heats up

The manager was lying on his office couch. “Any questions?” he mumbled when the media entered, pretending he was just waking up. There were shouts from the food room, but not as many as you might expect. In the clubhouse itself, several Tigers were more involved with the flight of a remote-control helicopter in the middle of the room than in watching the White Sox put the finishing touches on a comeback victory against the Twins.
The Tigers don’t run a loose ship, but they’re a loose team. And this glimpse into an opportunity for them to indicate otherwise proved it.

What pennant race?
For a night game at home, the media are allowed into the Tigers clubhouse at 3:35 p.m. At that time, the White Sox weren’t in the midst of accomplishing the impossible against Twins closer Joe Nathan, because it obviously was possible.
But highly improbable.
With two outs in the ninth, nobody on, a 0-2 count on Chicago’s Gordon Beckham and the Twins leading 2-0, the game fell apart, not just for Nathan, but for the second-place Twins, who’d been on the brink of climbing a little closer.
Nathan’s next three pitches to Beckham were balls. The pitch after that Beckham hit for a home run. The implosion had begun.
The next batter, Paul Konerko, tied it by also taking Nathan deep on a full-count pitch. Shaken, Nathan walked Jermaine Dye on five pitches.
Pinch runner Dewayne Wise stole second, and on a full-count pitch, Nathan walked Carlos Quentin.

The Twins were losing their grip.
Matt Guerrier replaced Nathan and quickly got ahead of Alexei Ramirez with two strikes. His next pitch, however, was meant to be thrown anywhere but where Guerrier threw it, because, jumping on it, Ramirez hit a hard single to left to break the tie.
All that was left was a run-scoring wild pitch and a relatively easy save for Bobby Jenks in the bottom of the ninth. It was a huge loss for the Twins, and an important turn of events for the Tigers.
To which the remote control helicopter in the clubhouse went “bzzzz” while Leyland acted like he hadn’t even been watching.
Now, please, don’t react to all this by thinking the Tigers should be hanging on every pitch that’s thrown to the Twins, and on every swing that either goes their way or doesn’t.
It’s far too early for that. And far too early for the Tigers to mentally prepare in any fashion other than the way it’s accustomed.
If it takes a buzzing helicopter to stay loose, fly it.
If it takes a pretend nap for the manager to show the media he’s not into scoreboard watching, snooze away.
Just win games
Leyland watched the end of the Twins game, of course. He had watched with coach Gene Lamont in his office, but turned it off while Lamont summoned the media from down the hall.

When asked about the comeback, Leyland said, “That’s why baseball is a great game. I was sitting here thinking ‘Two outs nobody on, Twins keep winning,’ then you blink an eye and … but I don’t want to talk about them and the White Sox, I want to talk about the Tigers.”
What about the Tigers, though? Is it a good sign to be playing with remote controls while the Twins are falling apart?
“I want them to do what they do,” Leyland said. “However you handle it, you handle it. Enjoy it. I don’t want them sitting there, staring at TV.
“Just go win games. It doesn’t matter what the clubhouse is like. It doesn’t matter what the lunch room is like. You just have to win more games than anybody else. No sense `talking about it every day.”
No sense feeling end-of-September pressure at the beginning, anyway. That will arrive soon enough. But for now it’s clear the Tigers are following Leyland’s advice.
They’re doing what they do.

Pat Conroy’s prose flourishes in new novel ‘South of Broad’

When a popular author goes 14 years between novels, the pent-up expectations of fans must become an almost intolerable burden. That Pat Conroy succeeds at all in his latest, “South of Broad,” is testament to his formidable skills as a wordsmith.

Conroy’s previous novels, particularly “The Prince of Tides” (1986) and “Beach Music” (1995), were wildly popular, dramatic and self-referential books about family life in the modern South, reflecting Conroy’s love/hate relationship with just about everything in his life from the Citadel to his father to the Catholic Church.

“South of Broad” is the story of awkward, unattractive Leopold Bloom King, the son of a James Joyce-obsessed former nun and the world’s best father (for a change, in Conroy’s books). Young Leo idolizes his attractive, accomplished older brother Stephen, who suddenly commits suicide, causing Leo to suffer a nervous breakdown and putting the events of the novel into motion.

Because Leo is a paperboy who delivers his product to the exquisite houses in the historic Charleston neighborhood “south of Broad,” in recounting his route, Conroy unleashes some of his lushest prose. He describes gardens like “ivied jewel boxes” emitting fragrance over high walls, the dew burning off the scent of tea olive and jasmine.
Conroy is also peerless in describing the flora and fauna of the saltwater-flooded creeks and bays of South Carolina, as well as the ugly side of nature when he recounts the devastation that hit Charleston after Hurricane Hugo.
The book’s narrative traces a diverse and unlikely group of friends — ultimately, too unlikely — who come together only because of their friendship with Leo. The book starts in 1969, when Leo bakes some benne wafers out of the Charleston Receipts cookbook and takes them over as a welcome gift to his operatically dysfunctional new neighbors Sheba and Trevor Poe, and their alcoholic mother. Conroy goes back and forth between 1969 and the 1980s, just before Hurricane Hugo hit, wrapping up the action with an AIDS subplot and a dramatic and gruesome plot twist that solves the suicide of Leo’s brother.
As always in his books, family life is fraught with peril, and lines like “Family is a contact sport” are classic Conroy.
But too often the characters, especially the African-American friends who bond with Leo in segregated, 1960s Charleston, are sterile stereotypes more than believable humans, and the narrative strains credulity.
Reading “South of Broad” won’t convert any new readers to Conroy’s work, but for old friends who want a jolt of his gorgeously florid prose and magnolia-scented charm, the book is a stopgap until he tries again.

Strangers and Brothers

Strangers and Brothers is a series of novels by C. P. Snow, published between 1940 and 1974. They deal - amongst other things - with questions of political and personal integrity, and the mechanics of exercising power.

All eleven novels in the series are narrated by ‘Lewis Eliot’. The series follows his life and career from humble beginnings in an English provincial town, to reasonably successful London lawyer, to Cambridge don, to wartime service in Whitehall, to senior civil servant and finally retirement.

Viewed solely as literature, the series has not weathered well, and only The Masters is considered outstanding. However, nearly all of the novels have two compensating strengths. The first is that they provide vivid, contemporary pictures of life in mid-twentieth-century England. The New Men deals with the scientific community’s involvement in (and reaction to) the development and deployment of nuclear weapons during the Second World War. Conscience of the Rich concerns a wealthy, Anglo-Jewish merchant-banking family. Time of Hope and George Passant show us the price paid by clever, poor young men to escape their provincial origins. All of this is engaging and informative for anyone interested in a contemporary take on the period.

The second - and much greater - strength is that each novel is almost a text-book on the gaining and exercising of political power. The word ‘political’ here is used in the widest sense, meaning the effective application of influence in any sphere, whether personal, private or public. This was a subject on which C. P. Snow could not help writing readably and fascinatingly.

His gift is seen to best effect in analysing the professional world, scrutinising microscopical shifts of power within the enclosed settings of a Cambridge college, a Whitehall ministry, a law-firm. He is not so much at home with the emotional currents of family life, or the complex world of actual politics. In both, there are too many variables. Snow’s novelistic world has a curious resemblance to the ‘classical’ detective story, which needs to exclude as many variables as possible from the problem (a passing stranger cannot be the murderer - it has to be one of the houseguests). The intensity of Snow’s fiction similarly derives from containing his characters in the smallest possible area of operation, with no appeal to outside.

For this reason, the strongest novels are those set in the Cambridge college (a thinly-veiled Christ’s), where a small, disparate group of men is required to reach a collective decision on an important subject. In The Masters, the dozen or so college members elect a new head (the Master) by majority vote. In The Affair, a small group of dons sets out to correct a possible injustice: they must convince the rest of the college to re-open an investigation into scientific fraud. In both novels, the characters strongly resist letting in the external world, whether it be the press, public opinion, the college “Visitor”, or outside experts. They have to decide for themselves.

By contrast, while The New Men and Corridors of Power concern themselves with a much bigger subject - the English debate over nuclear weapons in the 1940s and 1950s - their emotional impact is lessened by too many characters, too many locations and too many different sources of influence. This world is too large for Snow’s particular talents to be shown to good advantage. Because the college dons are answerable to no-one except themselves, and have nowhere to hide from each other, the dramatic tension is much greater.

The novels dealing with Lewis Eliot’s private life (Time of Hope, Homecomings, Last Things) are generally the weakest of the series.