World Series 2008 - 2

World Series 2008 (Part II)

Joe Safdie

October 25 What is that insane children’s jingle playing in the background as the Tampa Bay starting lineup is announced? “Fish, fish, fish . . .” Are the fans hearing this? This is outrageous! I guess it must be intentional – the Phillies score first on psychological warfare (as the promos for 24 punctuate the transmission, at least an improvement over TBS’ Frank TV). And then the starting lineup in reverse? This is truly odd . . . but then it’s back to normality. “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise, and remove your hats.” I’ll try to keep these stanzas more discrete for this report and end each sixth line with syntactical closure. Numbers are important in this particular rain-delayed game, with the oldest player in major league baseball, 45-year-old Jamie Moyer, throwing the first pitch at 10:07 Eastern time and getting the Japanese leadoff hitter to fly to center. Now it’s BJ Upton striding to the plate, with DL Hughley on CNN debuting a news comedy show, somewhat in the vein of these transmissions. Are white players ever called by their initials? (Another noble aesthetic intention bites the dust). “The dangerous but so far hitless Evan Longoria” (Hughley showed a picture of Eva on his show a few minutes ago, and the Phillies fans chant right along). Moyer gets out of the first through his experience, while the young Matt Garza succumbs to the pressure somewhat, giving just one run, trying to get to 7:47 PM (sorry, switched to west coast time there) when the moon goes into Libra. “Emotion not a bad thing,” says the repellent Joe Buck, thinking perhaps that he’s engaging children, or language poets. “Drinkability,” it must be said, is not Bud Light, but more along the lines of the Presidente brandy I’m sipping to calm me as I report on this tense contest, the Tampa Bay Devil-less Rays drawing even in the second on Carl Crawford’s speed. I don’t have any crystal meth, but have recently taken a few puffs of the only joint of marijuana we’ve grown this year, which is pretty good (but perhaps I should defer to my readers on that). “And now he goes deep to left . . . and Ruiz puts the Phillies back on top.” You’re the top, sang Cole Porter, you’re the Louvre Museum. It’s a rainy night in Philly, while here in So Cal the Santa Anas mentioned in part one of this report have finally eased, “There’s some moisture in the air” reported my wife a few minutes before now, 7:47 PM, as the moon goes into Libra, no longer “void of course.” The music of the spheres was more than a metaphor to the 17th century poets I taught last week, Donne’s sublime metaphorical anguish the last of

its line, just as “the poetry of witness,” according to some theorists of Flarf, is old-hat, like the World Series (among the results of a recent Google search was Nada’s blog of 2003 mentioning my use of that term, and asking, not quite indignantly, “What would someone looking for Carolyn Forché be doing on my blog?”) Still two-one Phillies and Rollins is definitely bothering Garza, his 24-year old emotional nature a metonomy for the young and untested Barack Obama, and Navarro throws fucking Rollins OUT, definitely a good sign (and really, doesn’t Charlie Manuel remind us all of John McCain, a genial and probably decent man, albeit obviously showing signs of senility, while Joe Madden of the Rays is often described as “cerebral”)? I’m sorry, of course, for the loss of his mother – I lost my own mother earlier this year – as I’m sorry that Senator McCain was tortured for five years in unbearably painful conditions, but how long, exactly, can we play the sympathy card? Shane Victorino as well had a recent death in his family, or as Ben Jonson put it in a poem I taught last week, “Here lies Ben Jonson / his best piece of poetry” (writing about his son, dead at seven years old). What a great catch by Upton on a line drive to center by – what’s his name – interesting how an all-star name can temporarily escape my mind – Chase Utley – what were his parents thinking about, do you think, when they named him “Chase”? How many people do you know named “Chase”? It’s funny, I’ve always liked Donne a lot more than Jonson, but as time goes by I can see the appeal of Jonson’s plain-spoken matter-of-factness, an admission that he would never really have the wild genius of Shakespeare, only the temperament of an artist and a desire to make the best of his intelligence. But who can really judge the vagaries of the creative process, language poetry, the poetry of witness, Flarf, or this cockamamie reminiscence of Black Mountain I’ve been trying to carry on for some thirty years now, we’re just watching 45-year-old Jamie Moyer plow through the eager young devil-less Rays, who don’t know I’ll have to teach Paradise Lost in a few weeks, where Satan becomes the epic hero, Joe Buck gives us a pre-review of 24 during the game (talk about product placement!) starring Jon Voight, one of the only McCain supporters in Hollywood, just 90 miles up the road from here in Encinitas, the quiet and suburban northern part of San Diego county, where people of faith, even more conservative than in the rest of these military environs, are preparing to vote down gay marriage, again.

Time for dinner, a break in the action. What will you do, readers, in the midst of this narrative, knowing that the writer has taken a break, that he’s interrupted the composition of this line, perhaps even before the sentence has ended, to attend to his own bodily needs? A flood of proposition advertisements on commercial breaks in California, no presidential ads, unlike, one presumes, in Pennsylvania and Florida, still officially “swing states” in the snapshot of the electoral college I consulted earlier today and Tampa Bay gets a runner on in the top of the fifth, hoping to tie this game, even Stephen, yin yang, the union of opposites, as seen for example in Donne’s poem “The Ecstasy,” where the lovers unite body and soul simply by looking in each other’s eyes (that line would have been a good ending for tonight’s installment, if only the game wasn’t even one half over, it’s Gabe Gross now and Bartlett on deck, one on, one out, and the sympathy card is played again with mention of Jamie Moyer’s great charity work at Children’s Hospital in Seattle, “it’s been a clinic so far for Moyer” (sorry, a little obvious, I bet you could see that one coming). David Foster Wallace is also on my mind while making this report, his meandering footnotes very much a model (of sorts) to these reflections, Tampa Bay gone in the fifth, he and Lawrence Sterne, that is, Tristram Shandy, the great post-modern novel written in 1759, the slightest bit different than Ryan Howard’s poetic endorsement of the Subway Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich. But that’s “poetry for the masses,” what the general populace thinks when they think about poetry, little do they know that such sublime poetic reflections are being composed about a game they only know as baseball, “he’s racked up a lot of wins,” says Joe Buck of Moyer, “and made a lot of money since then,” can we vote to get this guy off the air? Fox is probably not as affected by the Great Economic Crisis as the rest of us, this World Series in fact probably the first attempt at government bread and circuses to distract us from the no doubt unbearably straitened economic circumstances we’re plunging into, “a challenge,” as they say, for the new Obama administration, similar to the one facing the Tampa Bay Angel Rays, trying to time the 45-year-old Jamie Moyer and it’s heart BREAK as Evan Eva Longoria hits it hard enough to go out but the Philly wind blows it back, and we go to the bottom of the sixth with the score still tied two to one. A glance at Part I of this transmission reveals the uncomfortable fact that there’s only one stanza

to go, I’d better compose the next few lines thoughtfully, “right into the teeth of this wind,” that’s a big tongue, Jamie, “looked like Gene Simmons” the one good Joe Buck line so far, as Utley (I remembered his name instantly) homers to right, three to one, and Howard follows him for four, bailing me out early, perhaps that old invocation to the muses hasn’t yet lost its potency, with any luck I should be able to stop witnessing now and say, before I resume these transmissions, that the Phillies have won Game 3.* *A lot of things happened after I wrote these last words, Tampa Bay coming back from 4-1 to tie the game, first on a bad call at first in the seventh, then on the speed of BJ Upton, who stole second, third and home in the eighth, and then the Phillies’ threat in the bottom half was cut short by stupid base running, but “Je est un autre,” as Rimbaud said – one can’t expect total fidelity to the facts in poetic work: what did you think you were reading here, some outmoded poetry of witness? The muses keep their word in the end (more than can be said about most), and the Phillies triumph over the strange five-man infield, 5 to 4.

Part Three What a great Series! The moon in Libra (exactly three hours in last night when the Phillies won Game Three) should mean peace and harmony, more of the Obama communal spirit than the last lingering gasps of cowboy capitalism as exemplified by Senator McCain, interviewed today by Brokaw . . .