Isak

Sports, Top Ten Lists, and Feminism

In which I continue my sports guest-blogging over at Bitch Magazine. Catch up on my Top Ten series, in which I passionately lay out why I love sports so much:

#10: Sports are community-building

#9: Sports celebrate physical intelligence

#8: Sports are one of the few realms where adults play

#7: Sports are inherently optimistic

#6: Sports honor their history

Honestly, this is a really fascinating, fun exercise to parse out my sports fandom. It's an opportunity to reflect on where my emotion comes from when I watch a game, and to dig back into sports history for its most revelatory and inspiring moments.

At the same time, I feel a bit like an evangelist--making my case for why sports is worthwhile to an audience that veers towards the skeptical. The progressive readers of this magazine tend to make (often quite valid) critiques of sports as an arena for money-grubbing, chest-puffing, dishonest, and arrogant instincts. I'm getting a lot of joy from comments on the site (and on the magazine's Facebook page, where my posts also appear) from folks who are curious to hear a different point of view. (I'm also loving that I get a chance to elevate my beloved Michigan and Detroit sports; I emoted about Ernie Harwell in my most recent piece.) I like to think that my feminist and sports worlds can someday come together in one beautifully coherent community.

 A selected set of other sports pieces I've written:

• To Be A Title IX Dad
• Will Diana Taurasi Be The---ahem--Sportsman of the Year?
  
• Carly Welch Takes It Up a Notch
  
• Laura Ricketts Is First Openly Gay Owner Of A Pro Team
  
• "In the Name of First Ascents and Cultural Connection"
  
• Expect Great

The Morning After: A (Short) Word

Following yesterday's elections, I am hardly alone in having mixed feelings. I am unsettled with both disappointment, hope, gratitude and sadness. Here's why:

Kalamazoo, Michigan, voted for equality rights by upholding the LGBT non-discrimination policy that was on the ballot -- by an impressive margin of 62%, even in the midst of a transphobic opposing campaign about how scary bathrooms will be if Kalamazoo protects people from being fired for their gender identity.

Detroit elected its first openly gay politician, also by a large margin. Charles Pugh is now the council president. Cue my mixed feelings: this is an important milestone, and I honor that, but I didn't vote for Pugh. I don't think he has the right skill set for the council, and I just plain grieve for other qualified candidates (Lisa Howze, Rapheal Johnson) who should have won the seats they deserve. (And Ken Cockrel, Jr., deserved to keep his council presidency.) And seriously, JoAnn Watson beat out Howze? Good grief. This city council will no doubt be vastly improved--I'm thrilled by the election of Saunteel Jenkins, Gary Brown, James Tate, and Andre Spivey, for example. But still.

Oh, Maine, you break my heart. The contest was close--so tantalizingly close--but gay marriage was lost in the coastal state yesterday. I am about done with civil rights being on the ballot. Civil rights should be federally protected, not up for the opinions of the electorate. Can you imagine if, say, interracial marriage had been put to the vote? No. Our social evolution didn't happen that way. Related: Hear what the Golden Girls have to say about gay marriage.

My friend and colleague, Melanie Piana, won a seat on the Ferndale, Michigan, city council. I'm sure she'll offer sensible and compassionate leadership. This was her very first electoral campaign, and it's a testament to taking risks and the worth of dreams.

While the numbers aren't certain yet, it looks like Washington voters approved Referendum 71 and expanded gay rights.

Houston (Houston!) may have elected its first openly gay mayor, Annise Parker, but we won't know for awhile; that contest is going to a runoff election.

Cities, Newspapers, And A New World

Frank A. DeFilippo minces no words in his essay, "What it Means When a City Loses its Paper." Beyond job losses, he numbers cultural illiteracy and increasingly unwatched local government as the sentence for communities that presume that digital media will fill the void.

I feel like I'm a strange hybrid in this media evolution: I'm both a blogger and a subscriber to my local newspaper (the Detroit Free Press). I embrace social networking tools and innovations, and I also take great joy in purchasing print magazines and journals. I submit and publish my writing in both online and print publications.

I don't do any of this out of pity for print mediums, or out of an inflated sense of digital technology being, singularly, "the future." I don't do it because I feel like I "should;" I do it because I like it, as a reader, a writer, a communicator, a person who feels deeply that, like DeFilippo, watchdog investigative journalism is worth investing in, not merely sounding off about. And while new media has certainly played the watchdog role, and will continue to do so, it remains that, generally, newspapers can claim the greatest systems of reporting--editing, reporting, a balance of accuracy and timeliness, a willingness to engage in that exercise of empathy as they present news in the msot objective way they can.

Through a large survey I conducted for a nonprofit, and certainly in my own experience, I've seen a strange dissonance: People trust print media, but they read online media.

There is a reason for both of those things: Print media has earned that trust over centuries of honing its craft, while online media offers unparalleled accessibility and timeliness.

I like to think that when this media chaos and crisis settles down, we'll find ourselves in a meaningful balance of print and online media, both individually and as a culture. I am concerned, like DeFilippo, that in our haste to embrace the gifts of online media, we're decimating print media entirely. At the other end of that rush, when we realize again that there are certain precious things that print media offers that cannot be replicated, we will be forced to rebuild something precious, something that wasn't by any means swiftly built in the first place.

Why go through that? "What is to be done?"

It's quite plain: make the personal political. Choose to invest your time and financial support behind the media that would pain you if it were lost. It's hardly an act of charity; in return you get to enjoy the benefits.

Nobody asks me why I embrace digital technology (well, almost nobody). But people are surprised to find that I'm a regular newspaper reader and subscriber. I offer, then, my reasons why:

1) Because there is no comparable source of intelligent, expansive coverage of my city, region, and state. Nothing even close. And I care about what's happening.

2) Because the newspaper has actively made my city a better and healthier place--not just by being active in the community by sponsoring, for example, the Detroit Marathon, but by catalyzing the downfall of our crook of a former mayor. (Happily, they were honored for their aggressive, painstaking investigative work by winning a Pulitzer Prize.)

3) Because it's easier to read the paper at breakfast, than it is to read a book, or scroll on a computer.

4) Because I like the mix of news, features, sports, editorial, and, um, comics (especially "Get Fuzzy") that appears in my newspaper.

5) To those who say that newspapers are bad for the environment, I point out that my subscription is an essential piece of my worm compost bin. And it's not as if computers run on vegetable oil (yet).

6) Because I just like it.

Image Credit: Splice Today

DETROIT STORIES: Tonight!

Just a reminder: Leopold's Books, the new shop in Midtown, is hosting its very first event tonight. Lucky us, it's a reading by Matthew Specktor, author of the novel That Summertime Sound (see Bookslut's admiring review here). The details of the reading are here. I'll see you there!

DETROIT STORIES: That Summertime Sound

Here's a hot tip: Leopold's Books in Detroit is hosting its very first reading with my pal Matthew Specktor, author of the novel That Summertime Sound. (Hear a bunch of Hollywood types like James Franco, Morgan Freeman, and Gwyneth Paltrow read excerpts of the novel here; take a look at Specktor's musical inspiration behind the novel here.)

A great new bookshop meets a great writer...spread the word! And I'll see you there.

Reading: Matthew Specktor
Tuesday, November 3, 2009, at 7:00 pm

Leopold's Books
15 East Kirby Street
Detroit, MI
(In the Park Shelton building, next door to Good Girls Go To Paris)
Phone: 313-875-4677
Email: leopoldsbooks@gmail.com

About the Writer:
Matthew Specktor grew up in Los Angeles. He received his BA from Hampshire College, and his MFA from Warren Wilson. He has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and his writing has appeared in Open City, Salon, and various anthologies. His screen adaptation of Shirley Hazzard’s novel, The Transit of Venus, was optioned by Warner Independent Pictures. He worked for many years in film development, running New York offices for Jersey Films and Fox 2000. He is presently completing his second novel.

About the Novel:

Matthew Specktor's That Summertime Sound isn't so much a book as it is a door, hinged in memory, and swinging wide to every tenderhearted throb of lust and longing and precocious regret still there where you left it, at the periphery of adulthood. How does the novel perform this trick? By prose as lucid and classical as Graham Greene's in The End of the Affair, yet saturated in detail such that if you'd never had the luck to outgrow an '80's teenage dream in Columbus, Ohio, you'll feel you had after reading it.

-- Jonathan Lethem

"Matthew Specktor’s beautiful and arresting first book, That Summertime Sound (MTV Press, $24), chronicles a different sort of ’tween experience—the obsessive desires and frustrations of a young man caught in the time warp between adolescence and adulthood in the ’80s. Specktor, an L.A. native who has worked for years in film development, has a crisp, evocative style that captures both the nuances of a particular time and the universal themes of any insightful coming-of-age story. We’ve all been there."

-- L.A. Times

Storytelling in the City

Have you heard of The Moth? It's something of a movement for live, unscripted storytelling that was founded in New York City by a writer who missed the summer night tales that he and his friends shared. The Moth has expanded fast--it is a live event in eight cities, it is a radio hour, a storyslam, and a podcast. It boasts of having brought more than 3,000 live stories to over 100,000 audience members.

And it charms me. I listen to it via the podcast, and I really love the variety of voices telling true stories about their lives. They are often hilarious and disarming and moving. Which is why I was so pleased to hear that The Moth was expanding its live events to include the stories of Chicago and my own city of Detroit.

Not only that, but the storytelling is going down at one of my very favorite places in the city--Cliff Bell's, a stylish art deco jazz club. It seems right that a club that embraces improv and innovation with music would do the same with words.

So, Detroiters, I know you have stories to tell. And I sure want to here them. Here's the (ahem) word:

Detroit StorySLAMs

Detroit SLAMs are on the first Thursday of each month at:

Cliff Bell's
2030 Park Avenue
Detroit, MI 48226

Upcoming SLAMs in Detroit:

November 5: Blunders

December 3: Cars

7pm Doors/7.30pm Stories

$5 at the door

Learn more about how to prepare your true, 5-minute story and sign up for the Detroit mailing list - we'll send you a note one week before every Detroit StorySLAM with tips and tricks on how to come up with the best story.

What, feeling nervous to give it a try? Or feeling ambivalent about stopping by for the stories? Remember the beating heart behind The Moth project:

The Moth is dedicated to promoting the art of storytelling. We celebrate the ability of stories to honor the diversity and commonality of human experience, and to satisfy a vital human need for connection. We do so by helping our storytellers to shape their stories and to share them with the community at large. One goal of The Moth is to present the finest storytellers among established and emerging writers, performers and artists; another is to encourage storytelling among populations whose stories often go unheard.

DETROIT STORIES: A Word From Philip Levine

It is an impressive moment: Philip Levine has just published his twentieth collection of poetry. Or his seventeenth collection, as the press materials and the dust jacket of News of the World seem to disagree. (My independent count of Levine's books comes to twenty, after all).

Regardless, I was glad to have News of the World arrive on my doorstep the other day. Levine, of course, is the Detroit native who has won a Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards and said that it was his time working in the city's auto plants in the 1950's that turned him to verse.

Indeed, this seems evident as a substantial part of this new collection is set in Detroit; the final poem of the collection, "Magic," is located at the famous/infamous Michigan Central train station, "which was once the scene of my enlightenment," says the poem's narrator; where the stars are "icy and pure" and where exotic animals are traveling through on first-class journeys to somewhere else.

News of the World also moves through Barcelona, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Andorra and beyond.

"An Extraordinary Morning" appears both in this collection and in the July/August issue of Poetry Magazine.

An Extraordinary Morning
By Philip Levine

Two young men—you just might call them boys—

waiting for the Woodward streetcar to get

them downtown. Yes, they’re tired, they’re also

dirty, and happy. Happy because they’ve

finished a short work week and if they’re not rich

they’re as close to rich as they’ll ever be

in this town. Are they truly brothers?

You could ask the husky one, the one

in the black jacket he fills to bursting;

he seems friendly enough, snapping

his fingers while he shakes his ass and sings

“Sweet Lorraine,” or if you’re put off

by his mocking tone ask the one leaning

against the locked door of Ruby’s Rib Shack,

the one whose eyelids flutter in time

with nothing. Tell him it’s crucial to know

if in truth this is brotherly love. He won’t

get angry, he’s too tired for anger,

too relieved to be here, he won’t even laugh

though he’ll find you silly. It’s Thursday,

maybe a holy day somewhere else, maybe

the Sabbath, but these two, neither devout

nor cynical, have no idea how to worship

except by doing what they’re doing,

singing a song about a woman they love

merely for her name, breathing in and out

the used and soiled air they wouldn’t know

how to live without, and by filling

the twin bodies they’ve disguised as filth.

Yours Sportingly

 

I'm guest blogging about sports for the next couple months at Bitch Magazine. In my first post, "Expect Great," I talk about Detroit as a sports city; ESPN and Sports Illustrated; the WNBA; fan culture; women athletes; Twitter haters; and poker. Also: some swearing.

Related: In my piece, I talk about the news that the Detroit Shock may be moving to Tulsa ... news that has this afternoon been confirmed. I'm so down about it. I'm left to wonder whether the Shock's three (3) championship banners are going to stay in the Palace or if they are moving to Oklahoma too.

Don't Go Getting Award Fatigue On Me Now!

... Because the National Book Award folks just announced this year's finalists, and it's a very interesting selection. Special high-fives for Bonnie Jo Campbell and David Small. Campbell's nod for the fiction title is for her book American Salvage, which is published by Wayne State University Press as part of its Made in Michigan series. I just queried about reviewing it yesterday.

And of course, David Small's graphic memoir of growing up in Detroit has many, many of us all a-flutter; it is only the second graphic novel to be a finalist for an NBA. I'm confused, though, why it is nominated under Young People's Literature, rather than Nonfiction. Perhaps because he's written children's books before? Because there are pictures in Stitches? Sheesh. (UPDATE: See what National Book Foundation executive director Harold Augenbraum and Norton, Small's publisher, had to say when GalleyCat asked him about this very category confusion.)

See the main NBA site for more information on the shortlisted titles and the judges for each category. The winners of the sixtieth anniversary awards will be announced November 18 (along with the announcement of the "Best of the National Book Awards Fiction"). Also, Gore Vidal and Dave Eggers will receive lifetime achievement awards.

FICTION

• Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
• Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
• Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W. W. Norton & Co.)
• Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

NONFICTION

• David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook
• (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
• Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)
• T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
• (Alfred A. Knopf)

POETRY

• Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
• Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
• Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)
• Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy
• (University of California Press)

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE

• Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith
• (Henry Holt)
• Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
• (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• David Small, Stitches (W. W. Norton & Co.)
• Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
• Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)

DETROIT STORIES: Moby-Dick

Not too long ago, I was giggling about folks who are surprised about the expanse and wildness of the Great Lakes; lakes, mind you, that hold about 22% of the world's surface freshwater--enough water to cover the 48 contiguous U.S. states with a uniform depth of about 9.5 feet. So as I was reading along with Herman Melville in Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale, I was pleased to see that ol' Ishmael gets it. In fact, speaking from the vantage point of the book's 1851 publication, he knew these waters to be especially haunted.

In this scene, Ishmael lounging about in Lima, drinking with two Peruvians, and telling them about strapping young sailor from Buffalo that he knew. This fellow's name is Steelkilt, nicknamed "Lakeman" because his experience comes from freshwater ships:

"... this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly associated with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, these grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagos of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the birch canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born and wild-ocean nurtured, as much an audacious mariner as any ..."