DoolittleBrothers

Yesterday was a busy day but enjoyable, and at the end of it I realized that I’ve finally settled into a nice life rhythm for the first time since returning to Chicago. I woke up before six and wrote a Five Thoughts piece for Basketball Prospectus. That took longer than it should because I spent too much time crunching historical NBA road record data, but I still finished by 8:30 or so. I did some editing for a company that I freelance for, then took Hunter for a whirl around the block. After giving him some duck treats, I packed up my guitar and drove over to Lincoln Square for my first class at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

That was fun. I’ve never played a musical instrument in my life, unless you want to count the recorders we were all forced to play in the fourth grade. The teacher, Elaine, was entertaining and helpful and much more encouraging than we probably deserved. Guess that’s part of her job. We learned the D and A7 chords and played a very, very slow version of Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya,” which consists of only those two chords. We played with our fingers, which surprised me in that I always thought it was easier to play with a pick, so in my aborted attempts at teaching myself the instrument, I’d always used a pick. That was wrong. So we strummed and made our simple chord changes and sang along with Elaine until my fingers started to hurt. I think that held true for all the other students. We then adjourned to the auditorium upstairs, where we joined with the other classes for a half-hour play-along. It was fun to at least be pretending to play music. I sat by myself in the back row, which the teacher gave me a hard time about, but I just am a back row kind of guy. There’s only like eight rows anyway. So I know two chords, though I guess I already knew them because they are the first two every self-teaching book shows you. I am still too aware that being able to strum chords doesn’t mean you are playing a song. There are beats and rhythm to the strumming, once you get up to speed, and that will be the hardest part for me.

Why am I undertaking such a project at this point in my life? Believe it or not, it goes back to writing. Ever since I went freelance full-time a few months ago, I have been expecting to jump with both feet back into fiction writing. I’ve struggled with it. I can recall the mindset you have to have to write creatively, at least in first draft form. You have to shut off the internal censor and just channel your thought impulses through your fingertips. Whatever emerges on the page emerges and you have to go with it. Chances are, you kind of know where you’re going before you start because what has sent you to the blank fiction page is some kind of story spark. However, you don’t plod through the story from point to point, you dance around it and shake it and dig around for everything underneath your initial surface thoughts. Those are where the surprises come from and that’s where fully-realized fiction is born.

I’ve reached the point where I can shut off my internal censor, but what comes out is generally not that helpful. I think I know why this is happening. The mindset you use to write journalism is very different from the creative process. I’ve written thousands of journalistic pieces by now, churning them out over and over and over. There is a familiarity to the process. Since I do so much commentary and analysis, I tend to write arguments, building my piece through various rhetorical techniques but always in support of an overriding contention. When I write fiction, I am not trying to prove anything. I’m trying to discover something. Somewhere along the way, the channels of my brain that used to guide my spontaneous prose have been blocked off. And this is why I’m trying to learn the guitar and why I’m making an concentrated effort to immerse myself in creative writing and to meet creative people. I am trying to figure out how to get back the fictional voice that I had seven years ago. That I am still a practicing journalist and editor complicates this process, but we’ll see.

After lunching on some fabulous falafel at the Mediterranean Grill and Cuisine in Lincoln Square, the best I’ve had in Chicago, I headed home tend to the dog and to do some more writing. I took off for the gym in the late afternoon and had a really nice workout. (The strengthening and conditioning of my body is another part of the rediscovering-my-inner-creative-voice process.) I’m still too heavy, but I’m feeling stronger and more energetic after only a couple of weeks of consistent exercise. I then popped into Farragut’s next door to the gym, where I had a Three Floyd’s Ale and wrote a few hundred words on my Blackberry for a feature I’m working on. I lost track of time, and had to rush outside to hail a cab. The driver took me home so I could drop off my gym bag and grab my sports coat, then drove me to Sheffield’s in Wrigleyville for Reading Under the Influence. It was a great time and I met several interesting people, all of them writers and/or lovers of literature. Going to a bar and not having to talk about sports is something I really missed.

It’s already been a long week. I had a Bulls game on Monday. There is another one tonight (Memphis) and Saturday (Dallas). Tomorrow, we’ll probably check out First Friday at the Folk school. On Sunday, I’m hitting an Oscars party at the Fat Cat with a cinema-lovers group I joined. Monday is a reception held by the Chicago Clean Air Commission, in the Signature Room of the Hancock Center. There is another group I joined–peak oil / clean energy enthusiasts like myself–that is meeting there, and I am also hoping to make some contacts and get some ideas for some writing on these topics. Tuesday is another Bulls game (Utah Jazz!). Wednesday means guitar class. Thursday is a cocktail party for media professionals at the Redhead Piano Bar in that hideous tourist stretch of Ontario Street. Through all of this will be lots of reading, writing and crunching of sports data.

A danger of freelance writing is that you become too isolated. In reality, there is no reason for me to ever leave the house. I could even have groceries delivered. I could stay in this apartment for months at a time. And given my personal tendencies towards hermitage, I have to make a conscious decision not to be isolated. This includes working in coffee shops a few times a week, but that’s just in the morning. For a long time, I was having a hard time with other parts of the day because my old habit is to wander around from bar to bar. This simply just doesn’t do it for me any more. It’s depressing as hell, to tell you the truth. So I found myself falling into the trap of staying home way too much. When the Bulls were out of town, I’d go for days at a time without wearing anything except for my pajamas. Finally, though, it seems like I’ve found some ways to re-join the world while at the same time helping me in my work. Life rhythms are hard to change, but it’s exciting when they do.

Tags: creative process, writing, writing fiction

The other night, I took Amy to a small theater in the Bryn Mawr area of the Edgewater neighborhood to see MacBeth. The CityLit Theater is located on the second floor of an old, cavernous church which has the feel of a decrepit urban high school. The theater itself is a classic small Chicago performing arts venue, with a stage in one corner of the room (it’s the floor, actually), with curtains, a few props and a raised area. The bleacher seating consists of three five-row sections. The windows are blacked over, but you can hear the buses rumble by outside and even the whir of traffic buzzing along on nearby Lake Shore Drive. You really don’t notice this except when there is honking.

This was the first production we’ve seen at the CityLit, which is a theater that focuses on classic works and adapting literary pieces for the stage. The performances were solid, with Cameron Feagin, the actress portraying Lady MacBeth, doing a particularly fine job. We saw the play at night and there were only about 18 people in the seats, which I found a perfect setting to watch a play that delves so thoroughly into the macabre. This take on my favorite Shakespeare play was interesting. Not only did they portray the murdering of MacDuff’s family, which usually takes place off-stage, but they made the witches (or Weird Sisters as they are called in the text) more omnipresent than usual, often putting them behind a sheer curtain for key scenes, as if to remind us that MacBeth is a slave to the fate they had handed him.

I’m so fond of MacBeth because it touches upon a theme that I often probe in my own attempts at literature. How do you live with crossing the line? Let’s say you have a clear ambition or desire in mind. And let’s say you know of a direct route to achieve or acquire that which you want. However, there is an obstacle–be it morality, or a wall, or your conscience, or a lack of means…whatever. You also know of a shortcut, but you know the shortcut is wrong. You’re not sure you can live with taking it, but you take it nonetheless. Than afterward, all you can do is think about what you have done. How does one live with irreversible regret?

Tags: CityLit Theater, MacBeth, Shakespeare, unadulterated genius, writing

The muse has been missing the last couple of months. She’s a fickle little skank and probably packed off to warmer environs for the winter. Each morning, I stumble into my library, hoping for a torrent of text to spill from my fingertips. I start off the morning banging away on my old Underwood manual. Few, if any, sounds are more comforting to me than the sound of those keystrokes. Less comforting is the gibberish they’ve been producing on the page of late.

The spillover into my sports writing, the bill-paying part of my writer’s life, has been nigh devastating. The muse isn’t really needed for sports writing, only coherent thought and good information. Unfortunately, coherent thoughts have been few and far between–a tangible issue regarding my scrambled brain chemistry. I keep turning out, day after day, with my ass firmly planted in my desk chair. Eventually, that should pay off, but that day can’t come soon enough for me.

I want to go back to sleep. I can’t go back to sleep. Pandora isn’t helping–it’s playing “Us and Them.” In college, I listened to Dark Side of the Moon each night at bedtime, sober or more likely drunk, for nearly two years. The sound makes me drowsy, happy drowsy, relaxed. This is where I nod to Beckett: I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

Tags: typewriter, writing

I came across an excerpt from John Rechy’s “City of Night” while reading an anthology of work published by the great Grove Press. Where o’ where are there publishers like THAT these days? In one sense, they don’t exist. The Grove imprint lives on, but the market for once-subversive books has dried up, in large part because of the efforts of Grove founder Barney Rosset. But I’m not talking about putting out subversive material, I’m just musing about a publisher of means actually taking some chances. But I digress …

Anyhow, the “City of Night” excerpt grabbed me because it’s not often I come across unknown-to-me 46-year-old prose that vibrates like that. “City of Night” is a road book with the romanticism of Jack Kerouac’s early work ripped away. The subject matter reminds one of great cinematic efforts like “Taxi Driver”, “Midnight Cowboy” and “My Own Private Idaho”.

I’m only about a third of the way through “City of Night”, so I’m not yet sure what I’m in for. Rechy is given to flights of literary fancy, but it all holds together. There are some annoying issues with tense to wade through (an intentional stylistic choice I presume) and the work is a bit self-indulgent at times. Yet, I set the book aside reluctantly. That’s about the best thing you can say about a book. Rechy is taking me into a world that I’ll never get close to. Indeed, it may not exist any more.

Tags: books, cityofnight, rechy, underground, whatimreading

I’ve had to take a short sabbatical from blogging as I try to finish up some more pieces for Basketball Prospectus and also meet a Friday deadline to submit a short story to the Nelson Algren awards.

Algren was an interesting guy, a blue-collar type of author that sprang from the ugly sectors of Chicago and eventually cultivated a sort of tough-guy intellectual persona. His best known book, The Man with the Golden Arm, had nothing to do with baseball. No the hero of that tale was a hardcore junkie. Frank Sinatra played him in the 1950s movie version. It’s good stuff, as is Algren’s Walk on the Wild Side, Somebody in Boots and his paean to the city he loved, Chicago: City on the Make. Algren was friends with the Chicago literary elite, including Saul Bellow, and amazingly enough, had a long-running affair with Simon de Beauvoir.

Anyway, Algren is a writer I’ve always admired and I’ve always wanted to be recognized in that contest. The story I’m submitting is called “The Spider, the Hare and the Moon.” It’s about a very confused young lady living in the vicinity of the Lake of the Ozarks area of Missouri.

Before I get back to all of that, I want to offer a plug for 2008 The Hardball Times Preseason Annual. This is simply a must-have for any thinking baseball fan and I say that not just because I wrote the chapter on the Royals. Dave studeman, David Gassko and company have put together something that you just can’t get anywhere else. In particular, I am psyched about the team-by-team fielding projections. Order your copy today direct from the publishers. No reason to cut Amazon in on the excellence. Fair warning: This is likely the first of many plugs on this publication that you’ll see on DooBros.

Moving on, most Royals fans who stop by here probably already know that Rany Jazayerli’s new Royals blog is off and running. We know what we’ll get here: Cockeyed optimism and plenty of excellent commentary. Royals fans with active cyberlives are truly fortunate.

Finally, an old KC Star colleague, Kevin Kaduk, has just moved into a position with Yahoo as their chief baseball blogger. ‘Duk, as he is usually called, has a truly irreverant approach to writing about the game and is always a fun read. His efforts there should go over well.

You know those live chat thingies that you see at all the big sports Web sites? Well, I’m doing one of those. Come by Baseball Prospectus on Wednesday at noon (Central time) to talk some NBA. Brian, I expect you to drop whatever work task you’re involved in at that time to lob me a few softballs. It’s imperative that you do so.

I spoke to our old pal Mike Freeman yesterday. He’s doing really well. You should give him a call.

Books I’m currently reading: “Happiest Man Alive”, a Henry Miller bio by someone who I don’t get the feeling really likes Henry Miller all that much. And “The Age of Reason” by the always-cheery Jean-Paul Sartre. Most people don’t really care for the existentialists’ efforts at fiction, but I dig it.

I’m sick of this incessant cold. There, I said it. Ordinarily, I relish the change of seasons. There is not one I would do without, though if I could skip August in Kansas City, that would be nice. But this cold snap sucks. I think spending a week in Utah, where the weather was like this, put me off. New snow is nice. Old snow just gets dirty and ice forms and pipes freeze and the dog catches a cold. Perhaps if I didn’t live in a 100-year-old house. Actually, 99 years. The centennial of Giles Hall is next year. Yes — my house has a name. I don’t know who named it but there is a framed “history” of this structure that is passed along from owner to owner.

I’m just generally pissed off today. I slept too long. The riff I was practicing on the guitar yesterday is stuck in my head. I’m behind on various projects. I ate too much cheese when I got off of work last night. The “unplugged” room where I keep my old Underwood manual typewriter is too cold to use. The beer fridge upstairs is empty. The house is getting dirty because the vacuum cleaner broke. I have no time for domestic tasks. My French pronunciation (I’m trying to learn myself Francais during my daily 10-minute stint in the toilet) remains terrible. William S. Burroughs is still dead, as is Hunter Thompson, Ernie Hemingway, Hank Miller and that glorious old aristocrat, Ivan Turgenev. In fact, there are very few living authors on the fiction shelves behind me in my library. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is still kicking, I think, but he’s getting pretty old. Is Saul Bellow still alive? He must be 140 years old by now.

Brian, I’m almost out of orange ginger mint tea. At least we’re agreed that Zepp IV is overrated. NBA consultant? Ah, enough of this…

Henry Miller tended to place even the most mundane facts of his existence in an almost mystical category. Such was the conceit that marked him as a supreme writer and great artist. Because he was born on Dec. 26 (a few hours late thanks to an unyielding mother who wouldn’t let him escape), he always felt a kinship with Christ. Because the year was 1891 — the year Rimbaud died — he found the poet to be a kindred spirit.

I suppose I have some of the same tendencies. The date of my birth was Dec. 7 and so I’ve always felt my life to bear the mark of calamity. My best friend’s funeral was on Sept. 11, 1995, which follows in the same vein, even if I didn’t realize it until well after the fact. I also met my first wife on a Sept. 11 — a future calamity to be sure. Once I started thinking of a poem that I’d scribbled somewhere. It took me hours to find it and when I did, I realized that I’d written it five years before, almost to the very second that I finally laid my hands on it. The poem was very bad but startled me because of an apocalyptic tone that seemed unlikely considering the tender age at which I’d written it.

Miller died in 1980. Our lives overlapped. We walked the earth at the same time. Perhaps once on a vacation with my family, we drove past him as he rode his bicycle to the market. Who knows? (Unlikely, since I’ve never been to California and I don’t think he traveled much during his final years.) The date of his death was June 7. Some quick browsing uncovers some insignificant facts. Dorothy Parker died on that day in 1967. Louis XIV was crowned on June 7, 1654. The Vatican City came into being on June 7, 1929. In 1986, Amos Otis and Steve Busby became the first members of the Royals’ Hall of Fame.

What was I doing when Henry Miller died? Did I feel something, an unexplained pang of remorse? Did something of his essence pass into the universal consciousness? Was I able to breathe in something of this essence all the way in Red Oak, Iowa? The Royals won their first pennant that year. On the evening of June 7, they beat Gaylord Perry and the Rangers 7-2 thanks to a 5-RBI performance by Clint Hurdle. George Brett went zero for four, dropping his average to .325 — 65 points under where he’d eventually end up. Probably I was listening to that game on KMA out of Shenandoah. Denny and Fred. At some point, I probably drifted off to sleep — I couldn’t stay awake late in those days.

Perhaps in my slumber that night, the spirit of Henry Miller paid me a visit and tapped me on the shoulder. Perhaps he was telling me to wake up. Wake up, Henry said. Wake up. For Chrissakes, Henry, leave me alone. I’ll be up soon.

I have to be honest: I’m not really prepared to blog today. Haven’t been for quite awhile. But I wrote down in my day planner “3. Blog” and, well, once it goes in the day planner, there are no questions to be asked.

You know my favorite entries from other blogs? The ones that start off with, “Sorry I haven’t posted in awhile.” OK, not really. I mean, with a few exceptions, these are not commercial endeavors. Brian and I don’t get paid to blog. Sometimes, I have a hard time remembering why we wanted to do it in the first place. Then I remember that, as writers, we like to write. Simple enough. What’s more, there are some things that we like to write that have no real place in the world, except for this one right here. But, really, none of us owe anybody any sort of explanation. We all understand that when it comes to our blogs, if you want to be read, you have to post. I haven’t been keeping up my end of the bargain but, gratefully, Brian has been keeping these pages fresh.

Since I’m not prepared, I won’t go into any of my recent articles for The Star. I owe a long-overdue explanation on parts of my “trade David DeJesus” column that turned out to be kind of polarizing. Some people followed my train of thought, even if they didn’t necessarily agree with it. Others agreed with it, such as my semi-pal Soren Petro from WHB. (Or so I’m told, I actually missed his show that day. Sorry, Soren.) Lots of people just didn’t want to entertain the thought of trading DeJesus because, frankly, he’s a nice kid. You can’t argue with that. He is a nice kid. And I understand why that’s important to people — really I do. But I still think they should trade him.

Two fellas who aren’t on board with my ‘trade DeJesus’ plan are Joe and Larry, the hard-working duo at the Barbers of Westport. They like his defense. But, as Joe says, he’s got his opinion and I’ve got mine. There’s no reason we can’t all get along. Joe and Larry wield a mean set of shearing tools and are no bush-league coiffeurs — they are the men responsible for the handsome locks of Royals pitchers Jorge De La Rosa and Joakim Soria. They also are the barbers of choice for Albert Pujols when he’s in town.

Anyway, that’s what happens when you’re not prepared to blog but go ahead with it anyway. You write about your barbers. I suppose I’m still enchanted by the barber-client vibe. I went a long time without it because for 10 years, I shaved my head.

Another piece I did recently was about Satchel Paige. I went in and projected his big-league career as if there had never been a color line, using the five seasons he played from 1948-53 (didn’t play in the majors in 1950) as a baseline. I got a lot of response on that piece, more for the accompanying narrative than the stats, which is what took the most efffort. Most of the feedback I get (98 percent, I’d say) is via e-mail but, in this case, I received a number of complimentary phone calls, some of which I still need to return. Anyway, I really enjoyed doing that article and want to do more like it. I’m greatly anticipated the pending release of SABR’s Negro League Baseball Encyclopedia.

Finally, I want to call attention to the profile on Jim Eisenreich I did for “108″ (see image above), a magazine that every serious baseball fan should subscribe to post haste. It’s really top-quality stuff on history, with baseball fiction and lots more. I really enjoyed meeting Eisenreich. He’s a tremendously friendly and positive sort of person, someone you have to admire. The magazine is on newsstands now.

“108″ didn’t put my story online, but they did post the ‘Contributers’ section. In it is the explanation for why I’ve been away from DooBros for so long. Among the many balls I attempt to juggle, perhaps the one most dear to me is the one marked ‘Fiction’. I’ve always considered myself to be a creative writer, first and foremost. Unfortunately, for many years I’ve allowed what Henry Miller calls the “ordered fatuity of responsible adult life” to serve as an excuse to just piddle around mith my fiction projects rather than get serious. For whatever reason, I’ve found myself lately spending a great deal of time perched in front of my 70-year-old Underwood manual typewriter. On it, I’ve been composing what I hope will be my first completed novel. I’ve been playing around with it for six years and, for the first time, I can actually see that it will one day be finished. So for the last two months, I’ve been spending my fungible time at home working on that while blocking out all distractions — including the Internet. Well, you need to be on the Web to post in a blog and that’s one of many things that I’ve set aside as long as this good streak persists.

Nonetheless, I’ve got a backlog of topics I want to write about for this space. Keep tuning in and we’ll see if we can’t get caught up on things together.