Ethan Canin, M.D.

I'm on Spring Break from law school right now, and in between studying for Civil Procedure I've been reading Ethan Canin's short story collection, The Palace Thief. It's fantastic from the first line, which is from the story "The Accountant." I'll give it to you here:

"I am an accountant, that calling of exactitude and scruple, and my crime was small."

Damn. That is one of the best first lines I've ever read. Simple and perfect. Of course now you want to know what the crime is. Go read all of the collection. Apparently the title story has been made into a film starring Kevin Kline (it's all over the cover of the most recent edition of the book), but I've neither seen it nor heard of it before I picked up the book. Needless to say, I can't vouch for the film.

Canin is also a remarkable interviewee. Check that out here.

Richard Ford, Leaving For Kenosha

"Leaving for Kenosha" was recently published in the New Yorker. It's classic Richard Ford, a la Independence Day. You've got the significant anniversity (explicit in the first sentence), mini-road trip with child, divorce, and extra-perceptive narration - albeit in the third-person. Here's the beginning. Aside from the repetition of his older themes, I think it's wonderful:

"It was the anniversary of the disaster. Walter Hobbes was on his way uptown to pick up his daughter, Louise, at Trinity. She had the dentist at four. Then the two of them were going for a hilariously early dinner at the place Louise liked—Papa Andre’s—out on the Chef Highway, a roadhouse on stilts that the flood had missed. Then they were going back to his condo for her homework and a Bill Murray movie. This was New Orleans.

"It was their day. Betsy, Louise’s mother, was driving out to appraise some subdivision plats in Mississippi, then was staying at Mitch Daigle’s, across the lake. Which meant double whiskey sours and maybe a joint and some boiled shrimp. Walter and Betsy had been divorced for a year. Betsy had fallen in love with Mitch while she was showing him a house—a present he had planned for his wife for their twentieth anniversary. An anniversary that didn’t quite come off...."

Dwight Howard 2007 slam dunk contest

I'm glad he won tonight. He should have won for this. I don't care if he is 6'11''.

I Talked To A Blind Guy; or The Dreams of the Blind

I talked to a blind guy named Ben on the bus in Denver today. He had a smooth, even baritone and his speech didn't include any "ums" or "you knows." He should've been a talk radio show host. But anyway, we were discussing the Superbowl (which had had listened to on the radio) and specifically Tom Brady's performance. At one point during the conversation, I used a visual metaphor to describe the Giants' defense, which afterward got me thinking. But first, here's how the conversation went:

Blind Guy Ben: There was so much pregame hype talking about how the Giants' defense would decide the game, depending on whether the front line could get to Tom Brady. But I'll give the prognosticators credit. They were right. Strahan and company did the job, and the Giants won because of it.

Me: Yeah, Strahan, Tuck and Umenyiora were all over Brady like pirahnas on a mule crossing the Amazon.

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Blind Guy Ben: Right. Uh huh.

[awkward thirty seconds of silence.]

Blind Guy Ben: All right, this is my stop. Nice talking to you.

I was struck by his strange reaction to my (albeit pitiful) simile. It got me wondering: can blind people visualize metaphoric language? I mean, there are metaphors that deal with our different senses (i.e. sight, touch, smell, taste, sound), and there are metaphors, called synaesthetic metaphors, that mix our senses up (e.g., a sharp crack, a heavy explosion). While I'm sure blind people don't have problems with auditory metaphors, I hypothesized that Blind Guy Ben probably couldn't visualize pirahnas attacking a mule due to the fact that he lacked a reference point for the imagery.

So I went to an internet cafe and did some research, mostly on the analogous question of whether blind people have visual dreams. It turns out that it depends on when they went blind. If they've been blind from birth, they don't have visual dreams (because they don't have anything visual in their memories to recall), but if they've been blind since adolescence they generally will have visual dreams that will become hazier and fade with time.

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There's no moral to this story, but it's probable that if you use a visual metaphor when talking to a blind guy, it's not going to help him understand your point. Although if the visual metaphor serves a conceptual purpose, it might be useful. It most likely depends on the function of the metaphor in whatever context it's being referred. For example, if the metaphor/simile functions as a joke that relies solely on imagery, it's probably going to fall flat. But if it's only purpose is to demonstrate some sort of conceptual relationship, then it'll probably be effective.

FOR FUTHER INQUIRY:

1. Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral," where a blind guy and a non-blind guy smoke pot and the non-blind guy tries to describe a Cathedral to the blind guy.

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2. Beethoven was deaf.

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3. A Scholarly Study on the Dreams of Blind People

Gary Smith Is The Best Sportswriter In America

Sports comes to us in boxes," Gary Smith explains, "the perimeters of our TV screens or the boundary lines of fields and courts. As much as I enjoy what goes on inside the boxes, I've always had the urge to bust out of them."

In the most recent Sports Illustrated, Smith has a great profile of Gene Upshaw, head the NFL Player's Association, and his role in the league's lack of assistance for former players. We recommend that you read it now. And then maybe donate five bucks to the Gridiron Greats when you're done.

You should also contrast this article with ESPN blogger Bill Simmons' recent contribution to ESPN The Magazine, where Simmons gets to the real problem of the Roger Clemens steroids scandal: his own sacred post-college memories are ruined.

We like both writers, but for different purposes. A lot of people on the Internets, especially over at Dead Spin, despise Simmons for his hacktastic articles and probably his popularity. Some people even go as far to compare Gary Smith with Bill Simmons in order to devalue Simmons' worth as a sportswriter. But we'll be the first to admit it's a bogus comparison. It's like comparing Clifford J. Levy to Perez Hilton. Both are reporters in that they "report" on what can liberally be termed "news," but Levy actually investigates his articles, interviews people and focuses on social issues, whereas Hilton relies on second-hand celebrity gossip and publishes unverified reports accompanied by defaced photos. It's essentially the same with Simmons and Smith: Both are writers who deal in the realm of "sports," but Simmons writes about sports from his LA mansion, obtaining his limited insight primarily from television, an occasional conversation with one his ESPN cronies and (rarely) an interview. In fact, Simmons doesn't really write stories; he writes comparison articles ('86 Celtics vs. '07 Patriots) and perfunctory pop culture hackjobs ([So and so] is similar to [80s movie character]).

On the other hand, Smith's reporting (I know nothing of the man's life, unlike Simmons) hints at a veracity that teeters on the edge of obssession. He first and foremost writes about people, as evidenced by the broad array people he interviews and the way in which he uses the first person to deftly illuminate his subject. Smith's articles take on a literary quality that extends beyond sports. Against the odds, Smith manages to achieve a level of introspection in a field that resists going beyond the sheen and the sparkle of the game.

If we were forced to analogize, we'd put it this way: Simmons is the Rush Limbaugh of sportswriters, and Smith has taken up the throne David Halberstam left vacant. That works best because you can't really compare the two. They serve different purposes. One's writing centers on the writer, the other's writing centers on the subject. One has an ideology, the other investigates the ideology of the subject. One is self-absorbed, the other is absorbed in the subject.

That's the difference between the two. And Simmons never pretended to care about his subject more than his own glib thoughts about the subject. That, in a sense, is the essence of blogging.

UPDATE: We're late to the Gary Smith coronation game.

We Are Envious of Derrick Rose's Jumping Ability

This past Saturday number-one ranked Memphis rocked Gonzaga, and Derrick Rose nearly had a triple double (19-9-8). (He also had a ridiculous buzzer beating tip dunk off a Joey Dorsey missed lay-up to end the first half - look it up - someone must have put it on youtube by now). Rose has been the catalyst for his team all year, and let me be the first to say it: he's the reason Memphis will WIN the NCAA tournament.

He's better than O.J. Mayo, Eric Gordon, Kevin Love and Michael Beasley. He's the best freshman in America, and the first player, if we were picking, to be taken in the 2008 NBA Draft. So far, the odds are in the favor of the Miami Heat winning that ignominious distinction. Can you imagine a back court of Rose and Dwayne Wade? It would be sick, with the added bonus that they're both Chicago boys. I bet Pat Reilly wouldn't flake out on that squad.

"Be Careful, It's Dangerous" - Answers.com Creative Writing Challenge entry

The Federales pulled my brother and me over on Mexican Highway 1, just south of Tijuana, in a rented truck packed with insects, arachnids, and a violent toucan. We were accused of illegal wildlife trafficking. The insects were stacked in the back of the truck in clear plastic containers and the bird was in a rusty cage. We had just left Dr. Raoul Sirentas’s research facility after responding to his advertisement in the Los Angeles Times. He’d sold us his insects.

Dr. Sirentas was an entomologist who had developed a tragic case of melissophobia after accidentally drinking a bee that had drowned in his sugared coffee. The bee’s corpse, upon coming into contact with his throat, stung his tonsil. Sadly, in the following weeks his melissophobia snowballed into entomophobia, and soon Dr. Sirentas couldn’t get within a football field of his insect-filled laboratory without convulsing with fear. Eventually, he stopped going altogether and the Mexican government was forced to abrogate his research grant. In order to feed his wife and kids, Dr. Sirentas decided to sell his beloved, but feared, insect collection.

Around the same time five-hundred miles away, my brother’s bookie, Chuck, called my brother and offered him a tip on the fifth race at Santa Anita in exchange for a payout he owed him, quid pro quo. My brother accepted and Chuck told him about Yo-Yo Dude, a filly from Belize.

“She’s a surefire winner,” Chuck said. “I also like Rice Crispies and Prozac in that race.”

“Those are horses?” My brother asked.

“Yup,” Chuck said. “For all intents and purposes, racehorses are warm-blooded brand names.”

Twenty minutes later, my brother won $5,962 on a trifecta.

The next morning, as we ate a perfunctory breakfast in the apartment we shared, I read an article in Time about insect breeders who supply wealthy European socialites with exotic insects. Apparently, rare insects are a sign of prestige in certain social circles, and rich Europeans like to show-off their collections to other rich Europeans.

Shortly after reading the article in Time, we stumbled across Dr. Sirentas’s advertisement in the newspaper, offering his entire inventory of insects and arachnids for $4,000. It included tarantulas, African honey bees, brown recluse spiders, Mojave beetles, fire ants, and more. We viewed this - the article, the advertisement, and my brother’s recent windfall - as a can't miss money-making opportunity. So we rented a truck and on a quixotic whim headed south toward Dr. Sirentas's home in Corvalis, Mexico.

When we arrived, the transaction was quick. We forked over the money and loaded the insects into the truck. In no time, we were careening back toward the United States with our cargo and a toucan my brother purchased from a roadside vendor. As we were leaving the vendor's stand, the man said, "be careful, it's dangerous." We thought he was talking about the road.

At 2 A.M., just when we could see the glow of Tijuana through the desert’s ubiquitous quarter-moon darkness, I noticed flashing lights coming up from behind us. Soon they were directly on our bumper, and an amplified voice ordered us to pull over. I cautiously applied the breaks and we rolled to a stop.

Two uniformed men exited their car and approached our truck; they had pistols in their holsters. One asked in Spanish if we were Americans. I tried to answer the question in his native tongue, but instead of saying “Si, Es verdad…Yes, that's true,” I said “Si, Es verde…Yes, it's green.”

“You’re an idiot,” my brother said.

The Federales ordered us out of the truck and onto the ground. They opened up the back and inspected our haul. I could hear them talking to each other, amazed as they shined their flashlights into each container. When they came upon the toucan, one of the officers unlocked the cage; immediately, the toucan attacked him, stabbing him in the eye with his banana-sized beak.

Cursing us, the Federales sped off for medical help, kicking up a plume of dust. The injured officer screamed as their car disappeared into the night. My brother and I got up and quickly shut the truck’s back door. The toucan was still loose inside.

Two hours later we were in a hotel parking lot in San Ysidro. When we opened the back of the truck, we discovered that the toucan had smashed each plastic container and eaten every last insect.

One-hundred miles to the south, Dr. Sirentas laid in his bed, sobbing.