One thing that irks me about my early writing is that there are all these clever puns and brilliant wordplay, to the complete detriment of substance. It's an echo-chamber of an artist who has little else to speak of save for art itself. Jetsam from a high-IQ individual obsessed with creative genesis and process to the detriment (often to the deliberate detriment) of end product. I had this essay in high school where I used a run of twenty-six consecutive words each (you guessed it) starting with a consecutive letter of the alphabet. When I found this essay in my archives, I was blushing and couldn't bear to find the passage. I got a perfect score with the substitute who graded it saying, "Yeah, your command of the English language is much greater than mine, and I have no right to judge it." There was some truth to that statement, but, like not all that much. I wasn't that smart. I was intelligent and knew a lot of words, but I wasn't communicating intelligently: I was pontificating and stretching the limits of how I could use language, more like a 5-year-old learning to knead dough than someone who cared about the bread at the end. I was writing for the sake of writing, trying to find my own voice, and in the process of process, I became embarrassingly self-indulgent and substanceless, which would've been fine if there wasn't also a lump of perfectly round dough that I was proudly presenting to others as if I'd solved world hunger. Heh. In and of itself none of this is a bad thing. Figuring out what makes you go, figuring out what you're capable of, figuring out how many voices you can fit into that fugue? Yeah, it's important stuff. And in the end tally, some of it was honestly pretty decent, or at least salvageable as more than archive.
But a new day dawns and invariably I feel older. And with age comes the realization of something larger: Obligation. I won't get far into the sticky businesses of integrity and reputation and professionalism and communication and discretion, where one ought to speak to be heard and say what one means and mean what one says, and where one ought not speak to undermine or inflate without proper cause. Suffice it to say that when I say that Joe Posnanski or Zach Lowe is the finest sportswriter in America, if I value my reputation at all, I ought to be able to defend that opinion and believe that I have made earnest enough strides to ensure that it is defensible and, what's more, that I actually believe it. I don't have to be perfect, I have to be as perfect as I am, a communications engineer with a conscience, but no more and no less. That is my obligation. We are in a business of finite time and finite patience and the finite accumulation of millions of others' attentions. And from that scarcity springs obligation. If we shirk those obligations because of a fixation on process, or a decision to ignore our audience, or a desire to be "real"? We will find ourselves without readers. We will find ourselves without a platform. It will happen like gravity, in our dismal economy of attention's relentless self-correction.
I say this all not simply to talk, but to frame something else: See, I read this Chuck Klosterman piece this afternoon, and somehow, my conscience sort of snapped and a question lit up: What the hell am I reading? And it made me so upset that I couldn't find an answer. I mean, I knew the superficial answer: I was upset because suddenly the Popovich-Stern situation, which had seen no end of pontificating commentators (including myself), suddenly become a vehicle for Klosterman to pontificate about himself, through the things he feels about the relationship between competition and entertainment.
Klosterman's piece is an obvious dichotomy which is resolved with a moment's thought and several obvious descriptive statements that everyone that watches sports has either voiced or thought: Sports is distinguished chiefly by competition. Sports without competition is mere spectacle or dance, perhaps fine on its own merits but less dramatically motivated. Competition is more entertaining when the emotional stakes are higher. Competition is more entertaining when the sport in question is more interesting. Competition is more entertaining when the players and the teams are as good as can be. Competition is more entertaining when the sports in question appear to have a fundamental level of uncertainty and unpredictability in outcome and process. Even if you know how a grandmaster is great, you can still enjoy watching or playing against him. But you'll only get the most out of him if you're putting him against another grandmaster.
All these things are true, and David Stern understands them all, and understands them better than any of us. And yet, what Klosterman does is to obfuscate these things, to turn interesting game-theoretic observations into bluster, to talk about "what matters," to tell us "who was justified"; in other words, to tell us who was right and who was wrong. To tell us who was deep and who was shallow. Who represents the head and who the heart. Who represents entertainment and who represents competition. Who represents image and who represents reality. Is there a reality? Who is rational and who is intuitive? And so on. That's what irked me about the piece, that it seemed like an attempt to create a narrative first from labelling things (beginning), having those labels fail (middle), and then re-labelling them with better labels (end). That's not a story; that's someone thinking out loud. Even if we grant(land) Klosterman the first two parts hat's not a conclusion, it's just a new opinion, sort of coming from nowhere. It's not even an end: It's an opening for further discourse, because it's just another stupid label to agree or disagree with. Klosterman's piece somehow takes issue with every other piece on Popovich-Stern for missing the point and then manages to end with a "Although I sorta hear Popovich, Stern's right because...". It's the post-modern critique embodied: Someone tries to escape from the banality of narratives only to find themselves writing pieces with equally banal takeaway. It's like that friend you know that claims to hate politics and then proceeds to offer up his own awful political opinions. Hey, at least they're "off the grid"!
Most strict dichotomies built on language don't exactly answer a question. So what? Choose another framework. Trying and failing to use a given framework is not an enlightening experiment, generally. No, generally, all that failed attempt tells us is about the frailty of the framework, not about the nature of the question. The bucket is ill-fitted to carry the stones, the stones aren't interesting simply for not fitting into the bucket. Writing is often very much the art of finding the right descriptive framework for a problem, and Klosterman's "thinking out loud" approach is little better than a teenager learning to write and using every synonym for "hatred" in a piece about how much it sucks growing up. Yes, you can make some fascinating multi-level, complex statements between entertainment and competition. They are "deep" concepts as far as sports media is concerned, and you can follow them a long way to uncover between these concepts instances of contradiction, multi-level and multi-faceted relationships, deconstruction, and on some wonderful occasions, even cathartic synthesis. There are elements of competition and entertainment that are fantastically unstraightforward, and perhaps some of these complications deserve a writerly treatment.
But I don't feel like that's what I've been given, and in this piece, I see Klosterman's flaws cruelly parodying my own. I see the crashing of the Tower of Babel that the difficulties of language and communication breed in my mind. I see my own facility with words preceding my facility with substance, and from this disparity the untold reams of papers that ensue. I see on the side of the road of life a bucket filled with wet dough that I'd once mistaken for a milestone of baking. In the arduous process of development as a person and as a craftsman, I am suddenly struck that this process will never complete and that I will never be actualized. I will never arrive. And I feel the cynicism of wasted hours and years, and the seeming triviality and dough-kneading-for-the-sake-of-dough-kneading of my supposed betters. Like Uncle Vanya, I get first bitterness and then delusions and then, finally, in the great culmination of my rage, miss even the target I'd sought to hit. And then I go back to blogging about Richard Jefferson or whatever happens to cross my mind, and all of this pain and doubt clears up, more puns and wordplay for my fevered, fertile imagination washing away my anxiety and cynicism.
That's my thought process: Beginning, middle, end. I don't know that it counts as a story, though.
Heh.
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