unspilledmilk

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Slate and Longform.org have posted a series of (longform) articles on NBA legends to celebrate the league’s return, post-lockout. This New Yorker story on MJ, from just after the last lockout, is fascinating, even if you’re not a basketball fan. (If you are, you won’t be able to put it down.)

It’s some of the best sportswriting I’ve ever read. The narration of Jordan’s last game is nearly as thrilling as watching the game itself. But Jordan also comes across as some sort of super-perceptive character from a William Gibson novel, attuned to the subtle meanings of a game that others miss. So much so that BJ Armstrong read books on genius to try to better understand playing with the guy.

“A lot of players and coaches can look at film afterward and point their finger at the exact moment when a game slipped away, but Jordan could tell instantly, even as it was happening. It was, Armstrong thought, as if he were in the game playing and yet sitting there studying it and completely distanced from it.”

Then, there are the perfect, too-perfect, storylines that Jordan lived. The flu game. The last shot. If you ever found yourself wondering why guys of my generation were/are such ridiculous NBA fans, here’s as good an explanation as any — Jordan made it an artform. And, to paraphrase Larry Bird, he was Neo in sneakers. (Yeah, that’s right. Matrix reference. Deal with it.)

Sometimes, even statistics can be true. Matt Yglesias writes what may be the truest stat ever:

“And roughly the half of the people having sex, getting married, and having babies are men.”

Funny, but he also makes a good point in the post: why aren’t men writing about “women’s issues,” like parenting, taking care of families, and the safest mini-vans? I would say, probably for the same reason relatively few men go into nursing: it’s not “for” us and there’s no push to make it “for” us. That’s self-governing exclusion, in large part. Guys, even smart guys who arrange words with their very brains for a living, may make allusions to the lack of statistically significant evidence that you have a penis if you write about raising urchins or wear a scrubs and are not a doctor. And I bet dudes who write for big-name magazines still worry about those things, too.

I liked this essay, over at New Inquiry a lot. It’s smart, as usual for that site. And it’s a nice little casserole, with two layers of interstingness. First, the essayist, Matt Pearce, looks at what novelist Teju Cole is doing with Twitter. In sum, the novelist has adapted social media to his purposes, and his purposes to the form, writing literary-journalistic tidbits about deaths in his homeland of Lagos, Nigeria.

Pearce thinks a bit about how he, as a critic, can and should think about Cole’s use of the new, social media form. Then he moves in for more, or moves out, I should say, looking at a broader question: how should he (and we) feel morally about any such artistic representations of real death?

Ok, I’ll admit to being less interested in the second part. It’s a fine question, the ethics of art, but the first one, about a new format for expression, that’s killer. So to speak. I suspect Pearce moves to that question, in part, because he’s not quite sure what to do the the formal questions. As he says, “Despite having tens of millions of active users, Twitter remains, critically, a dark matter.” No centuries of novels to compare it to. No academy of poets. But, ethical questions, no offense meant to Pearce’s smart analysis, are old and musty enough for the critic to catch their flavor.

I find the idea of Cole’s literary use of Twitter pretty thrilling, though. It catches on something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Well, not even lately. Perhaps as long as I’ve been aware that writing was something that people placed any kind of value on. I like good writing. I like to try to complete good writing. But who am I aiming it at? I feel like short stories, what I was trained on (you might say, overly trained on) back at Iowa, get mostly read by other people looking to publish in the same journals, because they were trained in similar programs. But people read Twitter. People follow Twitter by the millions. I’m glad to see a novelist exploring those possibilities. And I’m glad that it confuses critics. It confuses me, too. In the best way.

The Times ran a story today about UK officials seeking access to oral histories of the Troubles — histories recorded (by Boston College researchers) with the promise that they would be sealed until the subjects’ deaths.

First of all, that’s some bullshit. Regardless of the outcome, this subpoena should have a chilling effect on similar projects in the future, right? Think of all the priceless, first-hand historical accounts that could be lost for the sake of this investigation. It’s a tremendous shame.

Second, check out this quote from one of the interview subjects:

“I think a lot of the stuff I’m saying here, I’m saying it on trust, because I have a trust in you. I have never, ever, ever admitted to being a member of the I.R.A. — never — and I’ve just done it here.”

I think about what it must have felt like for this man, revealing this secret to the first person, for the first, maybe only time. Was it a relief, the lifting of a burden? Did it just feel curious, to be saying things out loud, as if he were watching his own mouth do something?

A book by Postsecret came through the store today. It’s amazing what people will say in those anonymous postcards. It’s hard to carry those things around. When you don’t tell anyone something, I think you’re always aware of it on some level. I imagine people (some of them, anyway) dropping those cards in the mail and letting go a heavy breath.

I’ve never read any Ayn Rand, perhaps because all my liberal friends scoff, if not barf, at her. A National Review, um, review of Atlas Shrugged shows smart conservatives also kinda think she sucked. Good to know (h/t @ebertchicago).

“Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality…”

Saw a couple friends post this essay on the facebooks. I have to admit — I’m one of those “over the mental age of 30″ folks who don’t get the hooting and hollering at an execution. Seemed a little immature as a response to death — not just a criminal’s, but all the folks leading up to the moment of his shooting. This author’s explanation for why kids acted like a crowd of sports fans is that…they saw it as a video game? Or a Star Wars episode? Ok, at least they’re not being immature about it. The response, and the especially the explanation, strikes me as a little gross.

All small fries, of course, in the broader narrative: murderer caught, war goes on, presidential polling boosts, etc. But really? This is your explanation, kids? You thought Bin Laden was a Harry Potter villain? Come on, you can do better than that.

It’s fun to see my facebook-iverse explode with multiple statii about the same topic.

One of the most sociologically interesting examples happened recently when rumors spread through facebook that we all had to play astrological musical chairs.

As a Gemini, I identify with this man. Also, similar physiques.

Yes, it seemed: we had all been following the WRONG arbitrary, un-scientific, bullshit personality assessment assigned according to star positions. People — people who I know don’t believe in this stuff — got really upset by this. And, I have to be honest, it upset me, too.

I did not realize how much I, or how much so many of my friends, had come to see our astrological signs as a stable pillar of our personalities. Is it that? Most of us, I don’t think, wouldn’t say it defines us. And, yet, try to take it away and we get possessive. I feel that, too.

Perhaps it’s nothing more complicated than attachment to something that’s been “ours” for our entire lives. Like family, like your last name, like your hometown, like your childhood home. You may have wanted to get out of, e.g., Iowa Falls, like Lebron James wanted out of Cleveland — but, for someone to say, “You’re not a true Iowan,” that ain’t cool. Ethanol pumps through these veins, buddy.

I think (in large part simply in order to make this post more interesting) that it might go deeper than that, though. As middle-class, American, non-religious, urban-flighty youth, most of my friends and I lack of a lot of stable definers of identity. Tribe has diluted due to the distance of first-generation immigration (not in my case on one side, however) and this big steaming melting pot in which we swim. Most of us have left the strictures of the church. We don’t speak the language of our ancestors (unless we are children of the damned British Imperialists). We’ve lost ties to place, having dug up those corn-based roots and set up shop in various, concrete jungles. Careerwise, mostly gone are the days when people, as my parents did, stay at one job for thirty years, retiring a company man.

You can predict my conclusion, given the above, about why star signs might feel more important than they should. Bullshit though we may believe them to be, they offer a bit of occult, tribal identity. What’s more, they fit these individualistic times quite well — dispensing with the constraints of tribal identification in favor of a personal brand. MY sign.

Perhaps, then, signs matter so much because they are our personal logos. It’s a branded world, after all. Apple has its bitten piece of fruit. Our schools have their mascots. We want one, too.

Imagine if someone tried to take away your personalized iPod. Or, worse, rewrote the “About Me” section on your facebook page. You might get as angry, or more so, as when a rumor tugged you from Gemini to Taurus.

But, anyway…apparently it was all a mistake. We’re all still the same.

The ACLU is doing just what George W. Bush wants.

That’s my suspicion, anyway, after reading of their calls for prosecution of the former POTUS based on his “Yeah, I fuckin’ tortured people!” comments in the new “book” that he “wrote.”

Someday, this image will be on the $100 bill.

Now, come on: this is just a classic “fuck you!” move. Bush is admitting — proudly, openly — that he approved torture. He knows very well that groups like the ACLU — and, more importantly, the wider liberal world — will call for his prosecution. He also knows very well that Obama’s AG, Eric Holder, is no way, no how going to do it. But, here’s the thing — W’s not even giving Holder (or, by extension, Obama) an “official denial” to hide behind. He’s not even giving us the bullshit that he ordered underlings to do what was necessary and someone else made the possibly-illegal decision. Holder can’t say, “The former president has denied involvement, and absent evidence the contrary, we see no reason to investigate.”

He has put Holder and Obama in the uncomfortable position of doing nothing after an official CONFESSED to wrongdoing. Holder and Obama know the tremendous political fallout that would accompany prosecuting their predecessor — and Bush knows they know this (anyway, Karl Rove probably told him). It’s ballsy, I’ll give him that — and he prides himself on being ballsy: But, Bush is making Obama look bad. Republicans, they’re good at this politics thing.

The New York Times, now one of my facebook friends (jealous, aren’t you?), told me today about this article they paid someone to write but which I can look at for free. And I actually did it. (See! Social media CAN save newspapers!)

Interesting subject — it’s about a study of chimp warfare. Now, I know what you’re thinking — mid ’80′s Saturday Morning Cartoon with some sort of cybernetic chimps driving jet planes. As undeniably awesome as that would be, this is pretty cool, too.

Hey there monkey, I produce Enterouge. Say hello to your damn, dirty ape mother for me.

Author Nicholas Wade writes about how bands of douchey (seriously — he describes them as behaving “like frat boys”) young male chimps periodically go on raids of surrounding chimp territory. It’s, as described, pretty clearly a form of warfare — pillaging, really. When the chimp bands have numerical advantages, they murder rival males, spare the females — and eat the children. (Didn’t see that one coming.)

The warring chimp tribes gain measurable advantages — they annex territory and gather additional fruit trees, which in turn make their females more fertile. Also, the conquering heroes return with some really romantic monkey-hide rugs to do it on.

Wade spends some time on the question of whether the individual chimps know about the advantages they get, as a group, from waging war. I thought it was hopelessly optimistic to even consider that a question. Why would they need to “know”? They’ve evolved to be aggressive, because it has conferred advantages — and so warfare comes naturally to them.

The scientists Wade interviewed answered the question as I had anticipated, with the impressive degrees to back it up:

“A simpler explanation is that the chimps are just innately aggressive toward their neighbors, and that natural selection has shaped them this way because of the survival advantage that will accrue to the winner. “

It’s a sobering thought. As the article goes on to speculate, the shared ancestor of humans and chimps could, very conceivably, have evolved inherent, aggressive tendencies. Human history, human current events, and any given Friday night at a college bar all bear this out in spades. I don’t think humans have gone to war over and over again because we have been convinced by logical arguments. Our violence comes from thinking with testosterone glands. It’s irresistible. It will probably never stop.

I’m not actually as pessimistic as all that may sound. I think humans can move past animal natures that no longer serve us. But not without acknowledging that they’re there — that war is not some mistake we keep bumbling into, but part of our nature — like addiction, like racism — that requires a struggle to overcome.

Around this time of year, usually, I get even less interesting than usual. It’s the NBA playoffs. I enjoy this sport. A little bit too much probably.

It’s a great Finals this year, though — whether you believe me or not. There are plenty of reasons — primarily, the revival of the age-old Celtics-Lakers rivalry — and, really, this year does count as a “revival” of the rivalry. When they met in 2008, it wasn’t a rivalry. Not for the players — maybe for older fans who remember the 80s and even the 50s. For the players, and fans who have just started on their beer bellies, it was a great series with a lot of flashback montages of guys in short-shorts during halftime shows. Now, having faced each other two years ago, these teams actually HAVE inherited the rivalry.

Less obviously, though — the Celtics are just an interesting team to watch. Why? Variety. Complexity. Lots of moving parts. There are teams built around one or two major pistons (so to speak), like the Cavs, who punch you with Lebron, or the Magic, who hit you with the big man, Dwight Howard, and throw it out for three pointers. The Celtics, by contrast, have a strange setup for the NBA: there’s no center. Um, I mean, they have a guy playing center…but there’s no central focus. They are a bunch of guys who do various things well and they mix those ingredients together — in different ways pretty much every game.

There are a lot of cliches in sports — and there are probably more about the importance of teamwork than any other concept — save “playing hard” and “continuing to play hard.” You don’t need me to lecture you about teamwork lessons from sports. God help me, I wouldn’t want to. I’m talking about something different — The Celtics are a mechanism, or a — PRETENTIOUS SPORTS METAPHOR ALERT — symphony. Ok, I like mechanism better. An internal combustion engine is more interesting than a hammer is all I’m saying I guess — and that applies to sports, too.

If you follow them. For the casual fan, maybe Lebron jumping really high is more exciting. Oh man…I think I’m a basketball snob.