What is this all?
This is Pearls of Mystery, a Blog about Basketball. Our motto is "The World Through the Eyes of a Basketball" which isn't as inaccurate as it sounds. Through hundreds of vignettes and analyses we explore the world, through the "eyes" (perspectives, that is) of basketball. To put it in Burl Ives' voice: "Isn't that a clever motto, children? Isn't it funny?"
Let's...move on. Who are you, anyway? Tell us about yourself.
Okay. I enjoy walking around, the Great American Songbook, and talking about myself.
I can totally relate to that. I think we all can. That really makes your pieces much more colorful and technically impressive.
What do you want me to say, man? I had a pretty normal childhood in suburbia, I was really into watching Michael Jordan even when he was on the Wizards, and I watched a lot of SportsCenter and dozens of sports. I internalized a lot of sports figures and stats, as if the numbers and sports were extra friends and family. Now, in my relative old age (22), I'm trying to turn all of that random information into a coherent set of characters - nay, an entire ideology and aesthetic. I was into sports, then I was into writing: Now I want to write about sports.
Blah, blah, blah, I also want to use this information to probe deeply into an understanding of sports and the human condition as a whole, seen through the framework of sports, etc.
Okay. Now clarify to confused readers why you said the mean things about Richard Jefferson.
Because RJ was a disappointing player on a Spurs team that could have been much better if he had not been so disappointing. His head is also a funny shape.
Oh. Okay, then why basketball specifically? Why do you write about it and why is it your favorite sport?
Hmm, I guess I'm focusing on basketball because it seems to have the most individual stuff going on in a team sport and the most team stuff going on in an individual sport, if that makes sense. It also happens to be the one with the starkest and most obviously atypical bodies and personalities of the four major sports. I mean you have seven-footers as the focal point of most teams, most eras. It's not just height, either: These abnormally tall players - seemingly out of social and physical necessity - often have abnormally strong personalities and playing styles. In their styles and personalities, they're as well-drawn and interesting as good characters in an epic novel. Kevin Garnett is almost archetypal in his punishing, almost childish, base persona. Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O'Neal, etc. are just as stark in their own ways. These sorts of players - often among the greatest players in their era - ensure that basketball always has the potential to reach the heights of classical drama.
But basketball is often better than the best through-written stuff: The game has uncertain end or means. Even after the story is written there is a completely new story to write. When you go to, say, "Oklahoma!" there's a small chance they play "Lonely Room" as an encore and Curly might flub a line amusingly. In basketball, the very story hasn't even been written. We don't know who dies or thrives or raises the conflict to its climax, if there is even such a climax. It's random movie night, drawing lots from an ether of space understood in principle but unknown in practice. And there's the addictive possibility of penalty: some games just aren't very good - are offensive, even - according to your personal mythology. These games have the potential to bring you down - your whole investment of mood crashing like 1929. It's always a gamble, and you might get burnt, and you might be elevated to higher states of collective experiences. Games, careers, even clipped playoff runs are all individually the stuff of drama with their own uncertain arcs with uncertain effects. Time and again these archetypal players and their qualities are set up in conflict with one another in our mythologies, ever to win or lose based on the ultimate and relative goodness of their most defining quality. That's how it seems, even with the glaring irony: we all know it's not the personality or hype machine that wins games but the ability to mostly sweep personality and intelligence under the rug in favor of pure psychophysical reaction and practiced habits.
Time for an interlude. What other blogs do you read and enjoy?
Everything Joe Posnanski writes, for starters. Originally in this FAQ I said that good writing is (more than it is not) just good personality applied to its chosen object. While I'm hardly an authority on writing (sorry if this FAQ has that vibe, it's just harder to write from weak rhetorical positions), it seems like Joe Posnanski is the living embodiment of this argument. A really good, solid person who happens to have an ear for the dramatic and the perfect sentences. I think even if he didn't have so much of a gift for communication, he would still be worth reading, because he has such a plentiful imagination, such a concern for what his contemporaries are saying, and such a sense of humor (which is sly and understated when it isn't virtuous and straightforward). I've said it before: Joe Posnanski is the Tim Duncan of sportswriting, and Tim Duncan is my favorite player. Do the analogy math. Heh.
Otherwise, Free Darko and its writers (uh...who are amply discussed here on Pearls of Mystery), Ball Don't Lie (great roundup of the news; KD isn't the absolute best analyst (though for the game of basketball alone, maybe) out there but has a likeable and ridiculous persona and an unrivaled clarity of purpose; always comes correct with the figures), and...well, all the other major basketball blogs, though more sporadically.
Special shout-outs to a few cool other blogs that get less play: A Substitute For War, Seth Curry Saves Duke, and Gravity and Levity, all of which I associate with quality and moments of great insight.
Also Cameron Blues is a really solid blog about Duke that is now defunct. It really spoke to me, like it was me writing it instead of whoever was writing it. You might even say...I was one of the two major contributors.
Sometimes your fiction seems kind of judgmental and sketchy.
Go on....
Seriously, quite often your fiction seems like gossip with some made-up bull to rationalize the gossiping. "Some fake-ass shit" as Gang Starr might say. How is your work fundamentally different from the people that rant on Youtube about Michael Jordan's gambling or Delonte's forays in an attempt to be relevant and irreverent?
Because I write with better words and actual research into primary and secondary sources?
I guess, but really your fiction seems to cross the line between cute character humor and obsessive judgment way too often.Especially when it comes to Richard Jefferson.
You're right to bring it up: What about the sick fascination with celebrity culture, the personal investment into rich, indifferent public figures? Where do Pearls of Mystery and I stand? Well, to be honest, it's distantly tertiary - even arbitrary - compared to 1) the game itself and 2) the seemingly literary quality of the playing styles and personas that admit endless descriptions. Like, I wouldn't feel bad subscribing to Twitter feeds but I haven't made it a priority. It's kind of the same if I do or don't.
Besides the game itself (which is in my opinion the greatest game I've ever played or watched; even better than dodgeball) I care only about the mythology of basketball - the objective history of the game's characters and a literary description that fits within this history. We see mythology everywhere: The Lives of Kings, the Lives of Saints, the anecdotes about great composers - all the heroic and villainous things we accept about public figures more out of the wonder it stokes in us than out of any credibility.
But all mythologies are not created equal. The difference between what I'm doing and what, say, Skip Bayless is doing (besides having no class) is that Bayless is creating a mythology because a mythology needs to exist for something that is popular, regardless of the nature of the figures involved. Mythology essentially for its own sake. I on the other hand am creating a mythology to accord with the interesting and high-level competition of the NBA and its interaction with American culture at large. The brilliant form of basketball, the stark form of its players, the form of their competition, and the form of the league all demand that we (or someone, at least) construct a mythology that narrates to some extent who they are and what they've done while ever remaining conscious of the limitations of narrative.
For me the nature of the game precedes (and then demands) mythology, for Bayless and his ilk, the mythology precedes (and then does not even demand) the nature of the game. As much as this seems like a small distinction, as a general worldview it's huge: If we mythologize things before at all probing into their nature, we can make everything into a mythology no matter what its nature or even before asking if it is interesting enough to abide a narrative. And to me that's totally backwards, like figuring out style before figuring out what kinds of stories to tell. It's daffy.
Look at Kobe. When the "next Jordan and hype thereof" narrative precedes his play, Kobe is a fantastically uninteresting player - "oh, look, he doesn't trust his teammates so he doesn't pass the ball, just like Jordan sometimes. He is just like Jordan sometimes." On the other hand, when the narratives come from his play, he is equally fantastically interesting: A worldly man is obsessed with becoming (for our purposes) one of the gods. His obsession itself makes his image seem like that of a god, overcoming his actual and apparent flaws by force of personality. And he has so much tenacity, intelligence, and substance that his content as a man nearly equals this godlike image. Who flies and transforms himself and transcends himself faster and more unerringly than the moments follow one another, but Kobe? But his is a doomed reality: for he can never quite achieve the godhood he had sought, even as his image flies tauntingly above his actual content, and the discord this produces makes him kind of a cold, petty, arrogant person, makes his content as a man as shabby as it is brilliant, even as those below him continue to see him as a god.
That description could be straight out of Dostoevsky or Bob Dylan, "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison or Solomon himself. Is it a stretch? Yeah, kind of (a lot), but like, it's a compelling first attempt, you know? It's something that would be fun to try to fit to reality. And even if it doesn't turn out great, I think the attempt would be at least revelatory to write down. And we don't get that kind of thing all that much, except among the odder blog-birds out there. No, we get countless fluff pieces and hit pieces, we get endless historical rankings and "Jordan was an alpha dog and Kobe was not", we get Kobe and Phil Jackson firing lame-ass shots at each other through the media. Yeah, just my opinion, I know, and there's always a place for the transient, don't get me wrong. But I mean, can you see what I'm going for? Can you sense the passion?
When I'm writing I generally don't give a damn about anything that doesn't interact with the mythology at least indirectly. And I think as long as something I write is within the confines of human decency and class, and as long as it does something for the mythology of basketball, I've succeeded. And otherwise, I've failed. It's one of the reasons I haven't devoted too much space to Kobe, because I feel like the hype-machine of hundreds of articles would kind of dampen my passion.
"The Mythology of Basketball"? Who is your audience, grad students in comparative literature or creative writing?
Well, I mean, it's not some sort of complex, high-falutin' idea, even as poorly and verbosely as I'm describing it. The short of it is: Basketball has its own subculture with Gods and Muses and Fates and Taboos and Superstitions. There are the Trials, the Heros-for-a-Day, the Sacrifices, the Great Schisms and Great Coups. Much of professional basketball even has a well-balanced, effective schedule of Conflicts. It sure seems close to a mythology. And I think I might be forgiven for writing a verse or two in contribution. Everything I write seems to come back to the mythology of something, following from its nature, and so I figure: Why not basketball?
Why is (insert piece here) so fan-fictiony/horrible/incomprehensible?
Well, good question. I don't always know why some of it is horrible, is the short answer. It used to be a matter of total ignorance. I would fail to do the most basic research beyond watching the games. I didn't treat the blog seriously in the beginning except as a vessel for how intelligent and random I was. I mean, I didn't even bother to do an FAQ until 2 years after I started, and the first four months of posts, with a few great exceptions, aren't even really readable. So there's that. For example, my opinion of Ilguaskas was largely constructed from his immediate (and true in isolation, unfortunately) appearance as this awkward, old player that couldn't do much of anything. I was almost totally ignorant of his past, his generosity and class, and his stoic determination in the face of all kinds of mediocre treatment from his organization. When I did take this blog more seriously, when I did put in time to read features and stuff, I naturally started to empathize a bit more: to make less frequently the gut-level surface judgments that plague the first months of the blog. Nowadays sometimes it's just horrible because of whatever I've been reading and unconsciously have been imitating.
As for the fan-fiction thing? Well, I guess many of it is technically fan-fiction. But it's kind of annoying that genre heuristic can be used to dismiss anything in the genre. If you read or watch sci-fi or fantasy, hell, even the novel, hell, even the written word or television or video games or ragtime or rock and roll, you're experiencing something that used to be derided as something less than literature or art, and slowly - largely because of momentum that had little to do with artistic merit - became acceptable.
Now, usually there's a real point there: Comics were and are mostly pulp to fill the idle seconds. Fanfictions are usually fixations and over-personalizations/idealizations with no basis in reality. Adding sports adds also another layer of potentially horrible possibility for the writer: Now the writer is talking about people who mostly don't talk when they're performing the deeds that would become their characterization. That's pretty weird, and it's a legitimate concern. I mean, there is a layer of abstraction involved in this kind of mythology that is perhaps as fictional as anything Skip Bayless says. Rarely outright false, but often quite misleading. I take players' legacy and what their personality appears to be, and then I construct anecdotes using their voices to prove or reject elements of their legacy or personality. It's a Rube Goldberg machine. And yet, precisely for this inefficiency does it have the potential to become literature. I hope.
In books, actual incidents and exisitng work can be a source of drama, but usually the author heavily manipulates and recontextualizes them. Have you ever actually followed, say, a great musician's chain of influences back? Brian Wilson - one of the great polyphonic writers and melodists of the 20th century - credits Gershwin and Phil Spector and Bach pretty frequently (let's add Chuck Berry, the Four Freshmen, and Burt Bacharach, too). While there are direct homages (even covers and direct copies) out there, if you tried to mix them, you would not be able to derive his finished products for the most part. "Our Prayer" might have a certain vocal arrangement that harmonizes like the Four Freshmen's and has contours like Bach's, but to take everything he was listening to and to write what he did took the effort, creativity, and musicality of a great composer. The same is at work with what I do, except without the great skill (work-in-progress, for sure) and with the fact that the end result differs in form from the source material.
Okay so you have some kind of sense of purpose, we've established that. Cool. Now, your fiction is pretty weird, dude. I hate to keep bringing this up. But this is what 90% of your questions boil down to. I mean the fiction has a sound purpose it sounds like, you sound like a decent person, blah blah, but it's inescapably weird. Not all of it is morally challenging or stupid in its weirdness, but some of it seems to be written from the pulpit or from a jail cell or something. What did Richard Jefferson ever do to you?
Okay, there are two main kinds of weirdness that arise in dealing with public figures from the unwashed masses: Idolization and Denigration. Both of these are weird, because they seem to betray something weird and vicarious about the person engaging in them. You'd probably get "Deification" and "Total Mockery" from my respective depictions of Tim Duncan and RJ. So this whole blog is kind of weird. Inescapably, even.
While I can't justify the weirdness, I can justify the ultimate existence of that weirdness. I recently watched David Lynch's "Eraserhead" which...is about as viscerally and emotionally jarring as much as the title is horrifyingly comprehensible by the end. It is so weird, you guys: A true body horror film with some literary statement to make. If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend it. But on the topic of this blog: "Eraserhead" arguably fails to make its point for a general audience, it arguably stretches the emotional and visceral horror of the audience way too far to express what Lynch wanted. At some point we as a society set limits on art (at least that we show publicly). But are these (arguable) artistic failures enough to justify not making the film? Are the weird, horrifying indulgences of vision and sound enough to prevent "Eraserhead" from being made from a purely ethical perspective? I don't think so. Even for (and partially because of) all its weirdness, "Eraserhead" is important and necessary to the American film canon. It challenges the viewer with scenes of the mental distortions of guilt and shame that match the distortions of physiology. It says something, and being that the characters were fictional, no one was hurt. It is a morally justifiable film, and I will happily justify it.
In this blog I usually deal in fictional characters, most of which bear a resemblance in name and certain attributes to professional basketball players. This isn't because I want to capitalize on their popularity for my own fiction. It's because, as with genre fiction and multi-volume fantasy sagas, basketball provides an existing - if mostly implicit - mythology (like I talked about above) which serves as shorthand for things I write. When I say "Kevin Garnett," sure, he's a real person. But to millions of basketball fans, that's also a real entity there which, in an obviously fictional piece, has certain archetypal connotations that I either have to demonstrate, ignore, or invalidate in the course of the piece. I think and have thought that a worthy goal. Even if it is weirder than "Eraserhead" from time to time. I have to express myself. If I could make it less weird without making fundamental artistic sacrifices, I would in an instant. But I chose a weird form, and it's most suited to me.
It may be weird, but I think at the end of the day, you and I are not so different. Fans at large don't seem to like Tim Duncan all that much (and have a complicated relationship with Manu). They also seem to like Richard Jefferson a great deal, unaccountably. Also they like Kobe more. But besides all of that, the only systematic way I'm different from any other fan is that fans at large seem to be really into the fashion and gossip and rumors and such. Not me, and maybe not you. Gossip, no, mythology, yes. That is the theme statement of the blog. Basketball Minus Skip Bayless. That's it.
I have a lot of questions that you never answered. Okay, just one.
Well, say it, then, right down there in the comments of the appropriate entry or this FAQ, if it's a more general question.
It's kind of private. It involves... mice. It's not something that is pleasant to read about...or share
Uh...hit me up at Alex dot Dewey dot 1989 at gmail dot com if you have any other questions. The dots are . symbols. The at's an @.
This is Pearls of Mystery, a Blog about Basketball. Our motto is "The World Through the Eyes of a Basketball" which isn't as inaccurate as it sounds. Through hundreds of vignettes and analyses we explore the world, through the "eyes" (perspectives, that is) of basketball. To put it in Burl Ives' voice: "Isn't that a clever motto, children? Isn't it funny?"
Let's...move on. Who are you, anyway? Tell us about yourself.
Okay. I enjoy walking around, the Great American Songbook, and talking about myself.
I can totally relate to that. I think we all can. That really makes your pieces much more colorful and technically impressive.
What do you want me to say, man? I had a pretty normal childhood in suburbia, I was really into watching Michael Jordan even when he was on the Wizards, and I watched a lot of SportsCenter and dozens of sports. I internalized a lot of sports figures and stats, as if the numbers and sports were extra friends and family. Now, in my relative old age (22), I'm trying to turn all of that random information into a coherent set of characters - nay, an entire ideology and aesthetic. I was into sports, then I was into writing: Now I want to write about sports.
Blah, blah, blah, I also want to use this information to probe deeply into an understanding of sports and the human condition as a whole, seen through the framework of sports, etc.
Okay. Now clarify to confused readers why you said the mean things about Richard Jefferson.
Because RJ was a disappointing player on a Spurs team that could have been much better if he had not been so disappointing. His head is also a funny shape.
Oh. Okay, then why basketball specifically? Why do you write about it and why is it your favorite sport?
Hmm, I guess I'm focusing on basketball because it seems to have the most individual stuff going on in a team sport and the most team stuff going on in an individual sport, if that makes sense. It also happens to be the one with the starkest and most obviously atypical bodies and personalities of the four major sports. I mean you have seven-footers as the focal point of most teams, most eras. It's not just height, either: These abnormally tall players - seemingly out of social and physical necessity - often have abnormally strong personalities and playing styles. In their styles and personalities, they're as well-drawn and interesting as good characters in an epic novel. Kevin Garnett is almost archetypal in his punishing, almost childish, base persona. Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O'Neal, etc. are just as stark in their own ways. These sorts of players - often among the greatest players in their era - ensure that basketball always has the potential to reach the heights of classical drama.
But basketball is often better than the best through-written stuff: The game has uncertain end or means. Even after the story is written there is a completely new story to write. When you go to, say, "Oklahoma!" there's a small chance they play "Lonely Room" as an encore and Curly might flub a line amusingly. In basketball, the very story hasn't even been written. We don't know who dies or thrives or raises the conflict to its climax, if there is even such a climax. It's random movie night, drawing lots from an ether of space understood in principle but unknown in practice. And there's the addictive possibility of penalty: some games just aren't very good - are offensive, even - according to your personal mythology. These games have the potential to bring you down - your whole investment of mood crashing like 1929. It's always a gamble, and you might get burnt, and you might be elevated to higher states of collective experiences. Games, careers, even clipped playoff runs are all individually the stuff of drama with their own uncertain arcs with uncertain effects. Time and again these archetypal players and their qualities are set up in conflict with one another in our mythologies, ever to win or lose based on the ultimate and relative goodness of their most defining quality. That's how it seems, even with the glaring irony: we all know it's not the personality or hype machine that wins games but the ability to mostly sweep personality and intelligence under the rug in favor of pure psychophysical reaction and practiced habits.
Time for an interlude. What other blogs do you read and enjoy?
Everything Joe Posnanski writes, for starters. Originally in this FAQ I said that good writing is (more than it is not) just good personality applied to its chosen object. While I'm hardly an authority on writing (sorry if this FAQ has that vibe, it's just harder to write from weak rhetorical positions), it seems like Joe Posnanski is the living embodiment of this argument. A really good, solid person who happens to have an ear for the dramatic and the perfect sentences. I think even if he didn't have so much of a gift for communication, he would still be worth reading, because he has such a plentiful imagination, such a concern for what his contemporaries are saying, and such a sense of humor (which is sly and understated when it isn't virtuous and straightforward). I've said it before: Joe Posnanski is the Tim Duncan of sportswriting, and Tim Duncan is my favorite player. Do the analogy math. Heh.
Otherwise, Free Darko and its writers (uh...who are amply discussed here on Pearls of Mystery), Ball Don't Lie (great roundup of the news; KD isn't the absolute best analyst (though for the game of basketball alone, maybe) out there but has a likeable and ridiculous persona and an unrivaled clarity of purpose; always comes correct with the figures), and...well, all the other major basketball blogs, though more sporadically.
Special shout-outs to a few cool other blogs that get less play: A Substitute For War, Seth Curry Saves Duke, and Gravity and Levity, all of which I associate with quality and moments of great insight.
Also Cameron Blues is a really solid blog about Duke that is now defunct. It really spoke to me, like it was me writing it instead of whoever was writing it. You might even say...I was one of the two major contributors.
Sometimes your fiction seems kind of judgmental and sketchy.
Go on....
Seriously, quite often your fiction seems like gossip with some made-up bull to rationalize the gossiping. "Some fake-ass shit" as Gang Starr might say. How is your work fundamentally different from the people that rant on Youtube about Michael Jordan's gambling or Delonte's forays in an attempt to be relevant and irreverent?
Because I write with better words and actual research into primary and secondary sources?
I guess, but really your fiction seems to cross the line between cute character humor and obsessive judgment way too often.Especially when it comes to Richard Jefferson.
You're right to bring it up: What about the sick fascination with celebrity culture, the personal investment into rich, indifferent public figures? Where do Pearls of Mystery and I stand? Well, to be honest, it's distantly tertiary - even arbitrary - compared to 1) the game itself and 2) the seemingly literary quality of the playing styles and personas that admit endless descriptions. Like, I wouldn't feel bad subscribing to Twitter feeds but I haven't made it a priority. It's kind of the same if I do or don't.
Besides the game itself (which is in my opinion the greatest game I've ever played or watched; even better than dodgeball) I care only about the mythology of basketball - the objective history of the game's characters and a literary description that fits within this history. We see mythology everywhere: The Lives of Kings, the Lives of Saints, the anecdotes about great composers - all the heroic and villainous things we accept about public figures more out of the wonder it stokes in us than out of any credibility.
But all mythologies are not created equal. The difference between what I'm doing and what, say, Skip Bayless is doing (besides having no class) is that Bayless is creating a mythology because a mythology needs to exist for something that is popular, regardless of the nature of the figures involved. Mythology essentially for its own sake. I on the other hand am creating a mythology to accord with the interesting and high-level competition of the NBA and its interaction with American culture at large. The brilliant form of basketball, the stark form of its players, the form of their competition, and the form of the league all demand that we (or someone, at least) construct a mythology that narrates to some extent who they are and what they've done while ever remaining conscious of the limitations of narrative.
For me the nature of the game precedes (and then demands) mythology, for Bayless and his ilk, the mythology precedes (and then does not even demand) the nature of the game. As much as this seems like a small distinction, as a general worldview it's huge: If we mythologize things before at all probing into their nature, we can make everything into a mythology no matter what its nature or even before asking if it is interesting enough to abide a narrative. And to me that's totally backwards, like figuring out style before figuring out what kinds of stories to tell. It's daffy.
Look at Kobe. When the "next Jordan and hype thereof" narrative precedes his play, Kobe is a fantastically uninteresting player - "oh, look, he doesn't trust his teammates so he doesn't pass the ball, just like Jordan sometimes. He is just like Jordan sometimes." On the other hand, when the narratives come from his play, he is equally fantastically interesting: A worldly man is obsessed with becoming (for our purposes) one of the gods. His obsession itself makes his image seem like that of a god, overcoming his actual and apparent flaws by force of personality. And he has so much tenacity, intelligence, and substance that his content as a man nearly equals this godlike image. Who flies and transforms himself and transcends himself faster and more unerringly than the moments follow one another, but Kobe? But his is a doomed reality: for he can never quite achieve the godhood he had sought, even as his image flies tauntingly above his actual content, and the discord this produces makes him kind of a cold, petty, arrogant person, makes his content as a man as shabby as it is brilliant, even as those below him continue to see him as a god.
That description could be straight out of Dostoevsky or Bob Dylan, "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison or Solomon himself. Is it a stretch? Yeah, kind of (a lot), but like, it's a compelling first attempt, you know? It's something that would be fun to try to fit to reality. And even if it doesn't turn out great, I think the attempt would be at least revelatory to write down. And we don't get that kind of thing all that much, except among the odder blog-birds out there. No, we get countless fluff pieces and hit pieces, we get endless historical rankings and "Jordan was an alpha dog and Kobe was not", we get Kobe and Phil Jackson firing lame-ass shots at each other through the media. Yeah, just my opinion, I know, and there's always a place for the transient, don't get me wrong. But I mean, can you see what I'm going for? Can you sense the passion?
When I'm writing I generally don't give a damn about anything that doesn't interact with the mythology at least indirectly. And I think as long as something I write is within the confines of human decency and class, and as long as it does something for the mythology of basketball, I've succeeded. And otherwise, I've failed. It's one of the reasons I haven't devoted too much space to Kobe, because I feel like the hype-machine of hundreds of articles would kind of dampen my passion.
"The Mythology of Basketball"? Who is your audience, grad students in comparative literature or creative writing?
Well, I mean, it's not some sort of complex, high-falutin' idea, even as poorly and verbosely as I'm describing it. The short of it is: Basketball has its own subculture with Gods and Muses and Fates and Taboos and Superstitions. There are the Trials, the Heros-for-a-Day, the Sacrifices, the Great Schisms and Great Coups. Much of professional basketball even has a well-balanced, effective schedule of Conflicts. It sure seems close to a mythology. And I think I might be forgiven for writing a verse or two in contribution. Everything I write seems to come back to the mythology of something, following from its nature, and so I figure: Why not basketball?
Why is (insert piece here) so fan-fictiony/horrible/incomprehensible?
Well, good question. I don't always know why some of it is horrible, is the short answer. It used to be a matter of total ignorance. I would fail to do the most basic research beyond watching the games. I didn't treat the blog seriously in the beginning except as a vessel for how intelligent and random I was. I mean, I didn't even bother to do an FAQ until 2 years after I started, and the first four months of posts, with a few great exceptions, aren't even really readable. So there's that. For example, my opinion of Ilguaskas was largely constructed from his immediate (and true in isolation, unfortunately) appearance as this awkward, old player that couldn't do much of anything. I was almost totally ignorant of his past, his generosity and class, and his stoic determination in the face of all kinds of mediocre treatment from his organization. When I did take this blog more seriously, when I did put in time to read features and stuff, I naturally started to empathize a bit more: to make less frequently the gut-level surface judgments that plague the first months of the blog. Nowadays sometimes it's just horrible because of whatever I've been reading and unconsciously have been imitating.
As for the fan-fiction thing? Well, I guess many of it is technically fan-fiction. But it's kind of annoying that genre heuristic can be used to dismiss anything in the genre. If you read or watch sci-fi or fantasy, hell, even the novel, hell, even the written word or television or video games or ragtime or rock and roll, you're experiencing something that used to be derided as something less than literature or art, and slowly - largely because of momentum that had little to do with artistic merit - became acceptable.
Now, usually there's a real point there: Comics were and are mostly pulp to fill the idle seconds. Fanfictions are usually fixations and over-personalizations/idealizations with no basis in reality. Adding sports adds also another layer of potentially horrible possibility for the writer: Now the writer is talking about people who mostly don't talk when they're performing the deeds that would become their characterization. That's pretty weird, and it's a legitimate concern. I mean, there is a layer of abstraction involved in this kind of mythology that is perhaps as fictional as anything Skip Bayless says. Rarely outright false, but often quite misleading. I take players' legacy and what their personality appears to be, and then I construct anecdotes using their voices to prove or reject elements of their legacy or personality. It's a Rube Goldberg machine. And yet, precisely for this inefficiency does it have the potential to become literature. I hope.
In books, actual incidents and exisitng work can be a source of drama, but usually the author heavily manipulates and recontextualizes them. Have you ever actually followed, say, a great musician's chain of influences back? Brian Wilson - one of the great polyphonic writers and melodists of the 20th century - credits Gershwin and Phil Spector and Bach pretty frequently (let's add Chuck Berry, the Four Freshmen, and Burt Bacharach, too). While there are direct homages (even covers and direct copies) out there, if you tried to mix them, you would not be able to derive his finished products for the most part. "Our Prayer" might have a certain vocal arrangement that harmonizes like the Four Freshmen's and has contours like Bach's, but to take everything he was listening to and to write what he did took the effort, creativity, and musicality of a great composer. The same is at work with what I do, except without the great skill (work-in-progress, for sure) and with the fact that the end result differs in form from the source material.
Okay so you have some kind of sense of purpose, we've established that. Cool. Now, your fiction is pretty weird, dude. I hate to keep bringing this up. But this is what 90% of your questions boil down to. I mean the fiction has a sound purpose it sounds like, you sound like a decent person, blah blah, but it's inescapably weird. Not all of it is morally challenging or stupid in its weirdness, but some of it seems to be written from the pulpit or from a jail cell or something. What did Richard Jefferson ever do to you?
Okay, there are two main kinds of weirdness that arise in dealing with public figures from the unwashed masses: Idolization and Denigration. Both of these are weird, because they seem to betray something weird and vicarious about the person engaging in them. You'd probably get "Deification" and "Total Mockery" from my respective depictions of Tim Duncan and RJ. So this whole blog is kind of weird. Inescapably, even.
While I can't justify the weirdness, I can justify the ultimate existence of that weirdness. I recently watched David Lynch's "Eraserhead" which...is about as viscerally and emotionally jarring as much as the title is horrifyingly comprehensible by the end. It is so weird, you guys: A true body horror film with some literary statement to make. If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend it. But on the topic of this blog: "Eraserhead" arguably fails to make its point for a general audience, it arguably stretches the emotional and visceral horror of the audience way too far to express what Lynch wanted. At some point we as a society set limits on art (at least that we show publicly). But are these (arguable) artistic failures enough to justify not making the film? Are the weird, horrifying indulgences of vision and sound enough to prevent "Eraserhead" from being made from a purely ethical perspective? I don't think so. Even for (and partially because of) all its weirdness, "Eraserhead" is important and necessary to the American film canon. It challenges the viewer with scenes of the mental distortions of guilt and shame that match the distortions of physiology. It says something, and being that the characters were fictional, no one was hurt. It is a morally justifiable film, and I will happily justify it.
In this blog I usually deal in fictional characters, most of which bear a resemblance in name and certain attributes to professional basketball players. This isn't because I want to capitalize on their popularity for my own fiction. It's because, as with genre fiction and multi-volume fantasy sagas, basketball provides an existing - if mostly implicit - mythology (like I talked about above) which serves as shorthand for things I write. When I say "Kevin Garnett," sure, he's a real person. But to millions of basketball fans, that's also a real entity there which, in an obviously fictional piece, has certain archetypal connotations that I either have to demonstrate, ignore, or invalidate in the course of the piece. I think and have thought that a worthy goal. Even if it is weirder than "Eraserhead" from time to time. I have to express myself. If I could make it less weird without making fundamental artistic sacrifices, I would in an instant. But I chose a weird form, and it's most suited to me.
It may be weird, but I think at the end of the day, you and I are not so different. Fans at large don't seem to like Tim Duncan all that much (and have a complicated relationship with Manu). They also seem to like Richard Jefferson a great deal, unaccountably. Also they like Kobe more. But besides all of that, the only systematic way I'm different from any other fan is that fans at large seem to be really into the fashion and gossip and rumors and such. Not me, and maybe not you. Gossip, no, mythology, yes. That is the theme statement of the blog. Basketball Minus Skip Bayless. That's it.
I have a lot of questions that you never answered. Okay, just one.
Well, say it, then, right down there in the comments of the appropriate entry or this FAQ, if it's a more general question.
It's kind of private. It involves... mice. It's not something that is pleasant to read about...or share
Uh...hit me up at Alex dot Dewey dot 1989 at gmail dot com if you have any other questions. The dots are . symbols. The at's an @.
