We began receiving the NYT Weekender this week, thus avoiding my driving to the two Ristretto locations and cherry-picking the sections I want before anyone snags them. Most of the paper wound up on the sofa, where I can read it at my leisure throughout the week. This morning at 6:30, over a cup of Nicaragua coffee my husband roasted yesterday, it was the Sports section, an article about John Updike's essay on the great Ted Williams. It was nice enough to read about how Updike came to be at Williams' last game, and the reverence and playfulness and seriousness with which he wrote his first and last piece on baseball, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu", which appeared in The New Yorker in 1960, but what I really took from it was a renewed sense of joy, via this quote (emphasis mine):
[T]he essay is never precious or self-consciously literary, the way a lot of subsequent Fenway prose became, penned by earnest, heavy-breathing scribes clustered in Updike’s shadow. Roger Angell, who began writing about baseball for The New Yorker two years after Updike, and whose career has had an astonishing longevity — he’s the Ripken or Gehrig to Updike’s blazing youthful phenom — has said that “Hub Fans” most of all supplied him with a tone: colloquial, attentive, unashamed of feeling or of striving for an elegant turn of phrase. It seems obvious now, but Updike was one of the first to show that you don’t have to write down about sports or empurple them, either.
I have a library ladder in my office, just to the right of where I sit at my desk. Currently occupying its second rung is "The Thinker's Thesaurus," which Ilearned existed when I saw it on the bookshelf in which Christopher Hitchens was posed at his desk. The only thesaurus I have ever owned is a generic copy of Roget's, printed on pulp paper and bought from a street vendor in New York in the early 1980s for five dollars. At its worst, a thesaurus is a faux form of productive procrastination; at its best, it gets you out of the word-rut you plopped yourself in and helps you think. Or so I thought. The Thinker's Thesaurus turns out to be series of illustrative and author Peter Meltzer-subjective journeys, via other authors' quotes. The funniest comment I read about the book is that the quotes show consistentanti-Bill Clintonism (note: "pepperpot" is not listed as a qualifier for "portly," though there is "stomachy," which I adore). The book has provided me with much pleasure, and last week, made me remember that I love to write.
It's been a little easy to forget this. Only those still lying abed with their pillows over their heads do not acknowledge that the venues in which to run 6,000-essays about baseball grow slender and slenderer still. Fear not, I am not here to complain, only to admit that perhaps the experience of seeing five of my seven favorite editors dismissed in the past year; of writing solid pieces for one-sixth the money, felt like a punch in the eye. Feels pretty much healed today.
To come: Joy [Part 2], wherein I wonder whether anxious wives start making homemade eggrolls