Quote of the Day (Noah Baumbach, Imagining Keith Richards’ Desert Island Disks and Dinner)

“DAY ONE. Rigged a distress flag with me gypsy scarf, but it droops like Mick's jowls. While waiting for it to fly, played all ten disks. Ate a peanut-butter-and-Fluff sandwich that the missus packed for me dinner and washed it down with me new poison of choice: Stoli and Sunkist. Smoked a Marlboro Red and watched the sun go down. Was lulled into me forty winks by the island's own music, the flop flop of the waves and the caw caw of the parrots.”—American screenwriter-director Noah Baumbach, “Shouts and Murmurs: Keith Richards’ Desert-Island Disks,” The New Yorker, Nov. 22, 1999

Quote of the Day (Laurence Sterne, on Error and Human Nature)

“The laws of nature will defend themselves;⁠—but error⁠…error, Sir, creeps in thro’ the minute holes and small crevices which human nature leaves unguarded.” —Anglo-Irish novelist and clergyman Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759)

And these days, with all the attempts to make human labor obsolete, error creeps into AI, too. 

Song Lyric of the Day (Classics IV, With an Appropriate Tune for Recent Turbulent Weather)

“You were the sunshine, baby, whenever you smiled
But I call you 'Stormy' today.”—James Cobb and Buddy Buie, “Stormy,” performed by Classics IV on their Mamas and Papas/Soul Train LP (1968)
 
The image accompanying this post, The Storm (1881), was created by American painter Edward Mitchell Bannister and hangs in the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum.

Photo of the Day: A Prized Pirate’s Locker, PNC Park, Pittsburgh

With this past weekend’s Baseball Hall of Fame induction of Jeff Kent, Carlos Beltran, and Andruw Jones, it seemed like an appropriate point to reflect on a place with reminders of its own Cooperstown members: Legacy Hall in PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

As I mentioned in this post from the other day, a thunderstorm cut short my plans to watch the Bucs for the first time while I was on vacation earlier this month. 

But before finding my seat and waiting impatiently for the “Play Ball” call that never came, I spent a few minutes in Legacy Hall, a multi-use space filled with some great team memorabilia, with much of it not previously displayed at the ballpark.

Several Hall of Fame players are commemorated here, including Willie Stargell, Ralph Kiner, Honus Wagner, and Bill Mazerowski. But I’ll focus on one in this post: an original locker from the club’s prior home in Three Rivers Stadium, occupied by Roberto Clemente. Elsewhere in the city, a museum honors the life and legacy of this great ballplayer and humanitarian.

But fans will still want to look and linger at what is on display honoring him at Legacy Hall: his uniform, jacket, cap, cleats, photos, and a bat—emblematic of a consistent and superb hitter who won four batting titles and collected 3,000 hits.

These days, Latinos and Hispanics make up anywhere from a quarter to a third of players in major league baseball. But Clemente was the first superstar of the group. What this proud and sensitive man had to endure from the media then was shameful and would not be tolerated today.

It took a while for Clemente’s skills to be noticed in a bumper crop among a bumper crop of contemporary outfielders that included Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Mickey Mantle, and Frank Robinson, but eventually his performance at the plate and on the field in the 1971 World Series exposed to a nationwide audience the greatness that so many in baseball had recognized since his debut in 1955.

His statistics and leadership had already made Clemente a basement legend. 

But his death on board a plane carrying supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua during the Christmas season of 1972 lifted him to the status of role model and icon, much like the New York Yankees’ Lou Gehrig—the only other player that Cooperstown’s Hall of Fame board explicitly waived its five-year rule for consideration to major league baseball’s Valhalla.

Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, Uniquely Translating the Circe Episode in Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’)

“The goddess, rising, asks her guests to stay,
Who blindly follow where she leads the way.
Eurylochus alone of all the band,
Suspecting fraud, more prudently remain’d.
On thrones around with downy coverings graced,
With semblance fair, the unhappy men she placed.
Milk newly press’d, the sacred flour of wheat,
And honey fresh, and Pramnian wines the treat:
But venom’d was the bread, and mix’d the bowl,
With drugs of force to darken all the soul:
Soon in the luscious feast themselves they lost,
And drank oblivion of their native coast.
Instant her circling wand the goddess waves,
To hogs transforms them, and the sty receives.
No more was seen the human form divine;
Head, face, and members, bristle into swine:
Still cursed with sense, their minds remain alone,
And their own voice affrights them when they groan.
Meanwhile the goddess in disdain bestows
The mast and acorn, brutal food! and strows
The fruits and cornel, as their feast, around;
Now prone and grovelling on unsavoury ground.”—English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), translation of Homer’s The Odyssey (1726)
 
I’ve had one inquiry so far about whether I’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey and if so, what I thought of it. So, here goes:
 
Yes, I saw it over the weekend and don’t regret doing so. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 the highest, I gave it 7 1/2 to 8 stars. The visuals and special effects were superb, as was much of the acting.
 
But at least 30 minutes could have been cut, and much of the dialogue was muffled by the ambient noise in the environment around the characters. Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday was correct about all its deviations from the original.
 
Still, Hollywood has done far worse in adapting classics, and it wasn’t as painful for me to experience as Richmond Lattimore’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey in my college Literary Humanities course. (Achilles in his tent didn’t pout half so much as I at the prospect of enduring Homer’s endless repetitions, rendered by Lattimore with teeth-gnashing fidelity.)
 
With Hollywood’s latest attempt at Homer, the 2017 translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson has attracted the lion's share of attention, with retrospective respect given previous ones by Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles.
 
Virtually nobody has talked about Alexander Pope’s, published in five volumes in 1725 and 1726 (with the help of two collaborators), though it was celebrated as a literary masterpiece, and an improvement on prior translations) in its time. With the poet’s characteristic rhyming couplets, the cliché is that it’s far more Pope than Homer.
 
Though Lattimore’s translation is supposed to be extremely faithful to the original Greek, with its hexameter meter and repeated use of epithets, I found the passage from Pope of one of the most famous episodes from the book (and one of the most memorable scenes from the Nolan film) powerful—perhaps because the couplets exert tremendous compact force. 

It’s difficult to top, for instance, these lines about the sorceress Circe: “Instant her circling wand the goddess waves,/To hogs transforms them, and the sty receives.”
 
Pope’s Homer translations were not covered in the English Restoration literature class I took in college, nor in the university’s Literary Humanities curriculum. But based on the passage above, at least, they can still be read with great pleasure.
 
(The image accompanying this post shows Samantha Morton as Circe in Christopher Nolan’s film.)

Quote of the Day (Jimmy Breslin, on the Original Mets as Lovable Losers)

“You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a t-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American columnist and novelist Jimmy Breslin (1928-2017), Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year (1963)

In the late 1970s, when Jimmy Breslin accepted an award from my college newspaper, he described the astounding experience of covering the 1962 New York Mets, or, as he called them, “the worst baseball team in the history of the universe.”

As the above paragraph indicates, that version of the Amazin’s acquired a certain cachet as classic underdogs. Nothing could help them, as they staggered to a 40-120 record, 10^th and last in the National League, and so far from first place (60½ games!!!!) that they could have used a telescope to find it.

As this year’s major league baseball trade deadline approaches, the 2026 squad doesn’t remotely approach it in ineptitude, but it doesn’t come near it in lovability, either. 

As I type this, their record stands at 44-62, placing them last in the National League East, 18½ games behind their divisional rivals, the Atlanta Braves. With hyperexpensive (signed to a 15-year, $765 million) right fielder Juan Soto going on the injured list for a second time this season, the squad is extremely unlikely to make a late-season run for anything except the exit ramp.

Owner Steve Cohen must be gnashing his teeth over his dismal return on investment. Their sorry mid-season mark comes for a franchise that, at $367.9 million, ranks second only to the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers as having the highest payroll in major league baseball, even surpassing that of their hated crosstown rivals, the New York Yankees.

The 1992 Mets season was so disappointing (a $45 million payroll combined with a 72-90 record) that few people could argue with the title that sportswriters Bob Klapisch and John Harper came up with the following year for their account: The Worst Team Money Could Buy. One hates to think of the title for any prospective postmortem of this year.

Photo of the Day: Fireworks Display, PNC Park, Pittsburgh PA

I took the image accompanying this post a little over two weeks ago, while visiting a close relative in Pittsburgh. Several times before, I had been impressed by the exterior of the home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, PNC Park.

With its setting along the Allegheny River, statues paying tribute to several Hall of Famers with the club, and easy access to multiple points in the Smoky City, the ballpark, which opened in spring 2001, struck me as a picturesque throwback to old-time baseball venues, much like Baltimore’s Camden Yards.

Yet I had yet to see a game there, until a few days after the Fourth of July, when the Pirates were to square off against the Milwaukee Brewers, ahead of them by a dozen games in the National League Central Division. 

It promised to be a pivotal series, with any hope for the home team making the playoffs, even as a wild-card contender, starting here. To underscore the dramatics involved, there would even be a fireworks display at the ballpark.

So much for the best-laid plans of mice and men.

By mid-afternoon, the Pittsburgh area was drenched in a thunderstorm that didn’t dissipate until  6:30. Fans still poured into the stands, optimistic that at the end of the hour-long rain delay would  eventually lead to the cry, “Play ball!”

That hope lasted until the announcer’s voice came on the loudspeaker: “The good news is that the planned fireworks display will take place in 10 minutes….”

The fans who had patiently sat through the rain delay already sensed what the rest of the announcement would be—“But tonight’s game will be rescheduled”—and promptly began booing. They had waited long enough, and could see on the weather apps on their cell phones that it was unlikely more rain would follow. They were not happy.

That game was to be my first attending a Pirates game. Now, with me heading out of town the next morning, it would have to wait a while longer—perhaps next season.

Well, sometimes in life you have to endure disappointments—like rainouts—and sometimes there are compensations—like the gorgeous multi-color display seen here on a warm summer night over one of America’s great rivers.