| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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it just ended. that was not bad at all. i'll look forward to seeing it replayed every 5 minutes for the next 30 days. i'm going out for beer, does anyone need anything? |
if i had a damn tv i'd be more up to date on these things. |
or don't. |
I could go for some Salt-n-vinegar chips. |
Those aside, the flick was well done, and the rest of the casting quite nice, most prominently a superb job by Don Cheadle, though the actors doing Lawrence and Martin were also good. |
but it never happened. go figure. |
there's a brilliant chapter near the start about some famous october 1953 ball game between the giants and the dodgers on the very eve of the start of the cold war. the next day the new york times gives both stories, the outcome of the game and that the russians did their first atomic bomb tests, equal play on the front page. and the next day a character hears someone mention "the shot heard 'round the world," and he thinks they're talking about the atomic bomb, but he's talking about a home run. anyway, when delillo was doing research for the book, he read that j. edgar hoover had shared a box with toots shor, jackie gleason, and frank sinatra. so he has hoover find out about the tests during the game. and hoover comes across a page from that month's life magazine that shows a bruegel painting called "the triumph of death" - http://metalab.unc.edu/wm/paint/auth/bruegel/death.jpg - which hoover is fascinated by, especially the bottom-left detail of a skeleton about to rape a woman's corspe. anyway, the imagined conversation between hoover and sinatra is fascinating. anyone who is interested in these people should read this section of the book (which, I believe, was separately published as a novella back in the early '90s). |
It recounts the famous baseball game of 1951, and it does it in such a way that you don't need to know or care about baseball to catch the suspense and the dizzying implications of the game's conclusion. If you do care about baseball you are presumably eye-deep in legend as soon as you realise where you are: the now demolished Polo Grounds, New York, 3 October. We get the following points of view mingled with many others: that of Cotter Martin, a 14-year old black boy, who has jumped the turnstiles to get in for free; that of Russ Hodges, a radio commentator; those of J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason who have arrived together. Gleason is playing hookey from a rehearsal for The Honeymooners , has been drinking hooch and stuffing himself with junk food, and is sick on Sinatra's shoes at the climactic moment of the game. Hoover is preoccupied, because an agent has just crept up to him and told him about the Russian bomb. Old jokes, like the one about Speedy Gonzalez, are glimpsed in moments of their early life, and Life magazine not only brings Bruegel into the scene, it shows a picture of Sinatra with Ava Gardner. All this stuff has fallen indelibly into the past, but DeLillo retrieves it by the sheer energy and movement of his prose, and his shifts of angle, and by threading into the story of the game - the Giants are losing, it seems they cannot win, they win at last on an unlikely home run from Bobby Thomson - the story of the fight for the ball Thomson hit into the stands. After much struggle, and being chased along the streets until he makes it home to Harlem, Cotter manages to keep the ball. But then his slippery, drinking father sees money in it, and once the boy is asleep makes off with it and sells it. Throughout the novel, in a series of cross-referenced moments, the ball reappears, a collector's item passing through various hands, coveted mainly, it seems, for the least obvious of reasons. Not by Giants fans, in memory of the great occasion, and not for money or curiosity, but by Dodgers fans, as a tangible trace of the instant of loss, defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Loss is important in Underworld , a tune played in many keys. The home run ball stands for history in its most immediate and elusive sense: you can handle it, you can touch time past, but it's also just an old ball. It's significant too that no character in the novel knows the whole story, how Cotter got the ball, and how his father sold it. So history, as detectable record, the reverse trail back to 1951, stops one stage short of the game itself, at the man the father sold the ball to. Only fiction bridges that last gap. |
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Ooh, I loved that book. I'm sorry you never got your chips, quidam. |
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where's sheila? |
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mark. . .. ... .... ..... ...... ....... ...... ..... .... ... .. . . . . . . |
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