Baseball IQ

"I didn't know you knew so much about baseball." I don't, but I was at someone's house with people who talked about scoring "points." It wasn't hard to seem like I knew something about it. I view it as "territorial" knowledge. Growing up as male in the 1970s I simply know the minimum that anybody in my situation would have to know. Like someone living in a town would know where the major streets in the town are.

You would know that if the catcher drops the third strike, he must throw to first.

That if the home team is ahead toward the end of the game, they can skip the bottom of the ninth. If they are behind in the bottom of the ninth, the minute the score, the game is over.

I knew that RISP is runners in scoring position (2nd or 3rd base). I know what era and rbi stand for.

***

I underestimated my baseball IQ because I am do not follow baseball very much, or watch it much except for when the local team is in the world series. I am not a baseball expert or serious fanatic at all. Yet I know that baseball has umps, not refs, the meaning of some basic terminology. I know you score runs, not "points."

We probably underestimate or overestimate our knowledge of many things. A speaker we had yesterday said that I new more about American poetry than most people in English departments would know. That is true.

The Historical Future

I've written about this meme before: my version of the time traveler going back with orders to kill baby Hitler is that, upon his return to his own time, he is put on trial for killing an innocent: having killed baby Hitler, there is no holocaust anymore either, so his crime has no justification. He himself has no evidence of being sent on this mission. His only vindication might come in having his own baby-self killed, thus negating his killing of baby Hitler but also re-instating the holocaust.

***

Imagine a person alive in 1900. Various people. They have no fucking clue about what will happen in the next 50 years of history. Nothing is foreseeable. It seem like it is, or should have been, because we know now what happened. They seem tragically blind to us. History explains why things happen, and gives an aura of inevitability to event, but this is an illusion: we can only explain because we know the outcomes already.


***

So the truest form of historical fiction would be science fiction. The only true test is whether we can predict the future, because prediction of the past is based on purely circular reasoning. We are tragically blind to what is about to happen, in the same position now as people 100 years ago.

Dahl

I made kind of a sofrito with onions, hot peppers, and tomatoes and Indian spices, then added a cup of red lentils and three cups of water. That had to cook for a while, basically until most of the liquid was gone, with some stirring toward the end. Roasted peanuts and cilantro completed it. I put more hot peppers in my bowl before I ate it, but spared my dining companion those. Salad and grilled pork chop made the meal complete, with some asparagus from the night before.

Folk Hermeneutics

My students told me last summer that they like poetry in free verse, because the meaning is open. A sonnet will have a fixed meaning. Therefore, they like fixed-form poetry in class because the professor can tell you what it means.

In the course this semester, my students say they like poetry because it is open to whatever meaning the reader wants to attribute to it. Narrative prose has more fixed meanings.

I don't bother to argue with these conceptions. Rather, I find them interesting. I would argue with a grad student, but not with an undergraduate. This is simply the folk hermeneutics of the bright but not professionalized student. The Spanish major / minor is not a specialist in literature, but studies literature as one of the components of the course of study, enjoying it when it's taught well and h/she can be caught up in the enthusiasm of the prof.

Shadow CV

Nobody cares about your list of rejections and failures. When I first saw the title of this essay I thought it would be about something much more interesting: the parts of the scholarly formation that seem less scholarly but that somehow affect one's writing: my study of jazz and percussion, my obsession with prosody: all the things I never wrote about but that are essential to who I am: for my friends, it could be their work as zen masters, or being in a band: the translations someone has worked on but not published.

The point the article is trying to make is that we see a cv loaded with stuff but don't see the rejections and failures that everyone experiences. The longer the cv, the longer the shadow cv too, because someone more active will also have more opportunity not to get grants they apply for. Everyone knows this, so it's supposed to be great for younger people to see that these successful people have also failed. I get the point, but it is a stupid article because it is not the one I would have written with this title. (Sorry.)

Control

I believe certain things are under my direct and conscious control. For example, at certain point I decided I wanted to weigh 155 pounds, rather than 164, so now, after some months, I do. This could be a false belief (I don't know!) but you would have a hard time convincing me of it. I believe I could weigh 150 lbs or 145 if I wanted, or 180. There are limits at either end, but it's up to me how much I want to weigh within those limits.

I know this is heresy, since a lot of people seems to believe that their weight is as fixed as their height, even when these very same people try to modify their weight in largely ineffectual ways.

***

I want you to try to touch your knees together. (Ok. You were probably successful at that.)

Now I want you to touch your knees together. (Don't make an attempt at it, simply do it.)

What is the difference there? In the second case, you take out that intermediate step of making the attempt at doing it. That turns something remarkably simple into something overly complicated.

Trying to go to the gym effectively means NOT GOING there. I suppose if the police stopped you on the way and arrested you then you would have made a failed attempt to go the gym, but otherwise you simply did not go. So people who try to do things like this are setting themselves up for failure.

***

I could say that my fallow periods were the fault of other people preventing me from writing or publishing. This would be a lie, though. I simply did not write. I did not try to write and fail. I simply didn't do it. It's fine because I still published more than you did over my career (unless you are in the small percentage of people who've published more). It might even be true that I am correct in not have written another book or two, that those books would have been redundant. Nevertheless, there is nobody else responsible.

Ornithology

When I read poetry and Spanish and have to look up words in the dictionary, about 95% of this vocabulary is botanical or ornithological. A lot of times these terms are not in most dictionaries. At other times, the English equivalent is also unknown to me. So it would have made sense to have studied plants and birds to be a specialist in what I study. Why is knowledge of history and politics seen as essential but not knowledge of the natural world? Of course I know gorriones, gavilanes, gaviotas, golondrinas, palomas, halcones, perdices, petirrojos, águilas, avestruces, pavos, pavos reales, cuervos, mirlos, patos, gallos and gallinas, faisanes, lechuzas, buitres, and a few others, but I have birdwatcher friends who know hundreds of species.