Narrating a World Into Being

Tonight I finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman, another novel in the recent string of novels I've polished off, a sudden resurgence of reading productivity of late that has swallowed up a bit of Star Wars brain candy, You Suck! by Christopher Moore, Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami, and The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night Time by Mark Haddon. Something has rekindled the love of narrative in me, which might have had something to do with the five hour flight either side of the trip to Hawaii, which allowed me to put large dents in Kafka and American Gods.

There is something doubly creative about a good work of fiction, which is why, in my opinion, the novel is always going to be better than a movie adaptation; the reader engaged with the novel creates in his own head the world invoked by the narrative. It feels substantial.

It is here that one can find a parallel between reading a novel and following a sports season. And this leads me to a dilemma: I have lost the main protagonist for the upcoming English Premiership season, as Newcastle United were relegated.

Why were they my favorite? For the simple reason that they were Alan Shearer's hometown and final club. Why was Alan Shearer the key to my allegiance? I'm not sure, but when I first saw televised Premiership football, I saw Shearer playing for Blackburn Rovers, and he made an impression on me, much like a totem from the Pacific Northwest might if it showed up unexpectedly in your living room one day.

There's no real rhyme or reason to it: I have no geographical affiliation with Newcastle, other than passing by the city on the train from London to Edinburgh on our family vacation in 2008, and geographical affiliation is really the most sensible basis for sports fan allegiance--if there can be said to be anything sensible about sports fanaticism. And even the path of the talisman, that of Alan Shearer, if he had ended up playing for a different team, Chelsea or Manchester United, I might have cheered for them; more on this question in a separate blog, as I won't torture the non-sports-fanatics with a breakdown of my quest for a new favorite team.

But here's the best metaphor I can find: the football season with Newcastle not playing in the Premiership will be like reading a Sherlock Holmes story without Sherlock Holmes in it: sure, stuff might happen, but it just won't feel the same. It feels wrong.

Bear in mind that as I have no real stake in the matter, my British friends who actually cheer for various football teams have good reason to consider me an impostor, but oh well.

The point is, for a narrative to work as best as it might, you need a filter, a viewpoint that pervades the entire work and that appeals to the reader. For instance, following one sports team establishes a stake in the results of what unfolds on the playing field; this is why I enjoy writing about the baseball games I'm attending this year.

Establishing this filter is key to writing fiction successfully, I suspect, and it may be why I have such a problem writing fiction. So, an experiment. I have an actual blog on which I post many of the same entries I post on LiveJournal; I think I ought to narrow the focus of my blog, or separate the blog into multiple blogs to handle the different subjects that appeal to me: pop culture, sports, reading, etc. The more precise the voice in each blog, the better the chance of developing a readership, perhaps, or learning how to tell a coherent story.

On the other hand, I could be completely wrong about everything ever.

Hmm.

Play Ball

Summer has set in with unusual ferocity, as well as a blatant disregard for a calendar that implies that it is still technically spring. With this heat wave has come the crazies.

By crazies, I mean that general sense of lassitude and things going off-kilter. For instance, the other night I was riding the 38-Geary down O'Farrell, and it had to make a detour down a couple of blocks and over along Post Street due to fire engines clogging the street; once I got to the BART station, I heard the metallic announcements from the PA system announcing that debris on the tracks near Daly City was causing long delays in either direction; we were stopped in the tunnel between 16th and 24th Streets for a good five minutes, and I was getting slightly antsy, slightly claustrophobic, couldn't quite tell if we were moving or not, because there was that gentle vibration in the walls of the car.

Late Tuesday night, I had a conversation with a homeless man named Nathaniel, whose name, he pointed out, means "a gift from God." That would have meant more to me if I believed in God, I suppose; he also told me, if I heard right, which I don't think I could have done, that he came here from DC for the free HIV, and he wanted me to have a cup of coffee with him, my treat, at 12:00 on Wednesday morning and to give him my phone number so I could call him with job opportunities down the road. All very weird stuff.

It's feeling a bit like the world is coming undone like a baseball whose covering is coming unstitched.

Which means it is time to write about baseball.

This is the first entry to introduce a chronicle of what I hope are at least 7 entries covering baseball games I attend this year, as my goal is to get to one game, either Oakland or the Giants, in every month of the season, April through September. It will give a nice element of structure to the year, I think, and maybe I'll capture some of the magic--in miniature--of David Halberstam's great book, Summer of '49.

I'm already two games to the good this year, with a game in Oakland last Tuesday and a game in San Francisco last Saturday, and a Giants-Braves Memorial Day game planned. I might even get to an Oakland-Giants match-up in June, which might merit two entries, one for each team's perspective.

Baseball is full of so many narratives and meanings. Just to tout a few of my own: the Giants-Diamondbacks game I went to on Saturday featured the team I grew up with versus the team affiliated with the Missoula Osprey, so I have a connection there, and I think I saw the Diamondbacks catcher play once back home. The Giants-Braves match-up is a repeat of the very first baseball game I ever attended with my dad, 1985, a game when Bob Brenly made three errors but won the game with a home run.

When looking for something to write, might as well write about something you love and something that holds your fascination, something to get you into a groove of writing consistently.

Tomorrow I'll write about learning the heartbreaking truth behind the myth of East Bay warmth, the scandal of the scorecard and the hot chocolate, the dissonance of Red Sox fans outnumbering the good guys, and the other details of the Oakland-Boston game from last Tuesday night. Like the baseball season, writing happens every day.