Archives for 2005

As longtime readers know, I’m a big hockey fan, though tonight the sport made mincemeat of my nerves and left me, in the end, sad and wistful. (Thanks for the consolation call, Dad. I have the best dad.)

As longtime readers also know, I occasionally smuggle in hockey content here, though I’m usually decently artful about dressing it up as arts content. Not today. This one’s nakedly a sports post, though it does offer links to a number of good writers–on hockey, natch. But beyond the aesthetic attractions of words strung together nicely that include “goon” and “icing,” this post is in no way arts-related.

Because the vast majority of sports writing is so banal, good sports writing gives me more pleasure than perhaps any other kind of good writing. There’s an element of happy surprise attached to finding something smart and interesting in a desert of hackwork, and there’s a luxury as well to great writing about inconsequential things. At least as much as in the arts, I think, the invention of blogging has enhanced the quantity and quality of worthwhile sports writing out there. Something about the combination of the ephemerality of sports and the passion they inspire makes them a subject perfectly suited for blog coverage. For a hockey fan in this country where we’re considered quaint curiosities, hockey blogs have become nothing less than a lifeline for me to like-minded souls. And since the end of the lockout and the game’s return, it seems to me that the hockey blogging scene has grown especially vibrant and fun. So I share with you a few of the essential stops in my daily hockey blog tour:

– The original: Eric McErlain’s Off Wing Opinion is the granddaddy of hockey blogs, and covers notable news from throughout the sports world. Because Eric’s one of the best known bloggers in all of sports and has a puck and a red line bannering his site, he does a great service to our sadly neglected (in the U.S.) sport, every single day.

– While not, strictly speaking, a hockey blogger, Colby Cosh earns a place on this list because when he does blog hockey, he does it unbeatably. Colby knows a ton about everything, so his hockey posts tend to be, shall we say, broadly informed and inspired.

– Jeff and Alanah at Vancouver Canucks Op-Ed are booksellers and hockey fans. What more need be said? I will say, too, that they’re better than anyone I know at the art of the good-natured insult. This is a formidable skill, and their blog is a delight.

– Dour is one word for Tom Benjamin, who runs the Canucks Corner NHL weblog out of Canucks Corner. Authoritative is another. Smart is another. Half the time you see his name on other blogs, it’s attached to the word “cranky,” but no one who says so would think of skipping his site.

– This one’s new, at least to me, but I’m crazy about Jes Golbez’s Hockey Rants. It’s endlessly entertaining. I look back on Jes’s Halloween gallery of hockey ghouls with particular fondness.

There endeth today’s recruiting effort. Enjoy your weekend.

Speaking of Anna Karenina, which someone was in the post below, I heard a fantastic talk on Anna’s suicide last week and wrote it up very briefly here.

It has been at least fifteen years since I read Tolstoy’s novel, and it’s not a book I ever close-read. So Gary Saul Morson’s observation that Anna, in her last scene, is consciously copying the death of the watchman in her first scene struck me like a jolt of electricity. I always took the rail accident of the first scene as just so much ill boding, which I believe is the standard lazy reading, but Morson exploded it by very simply pointing out that Anna remembers the accident and decides to follow suit: “And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do.” (I’m quoting from this on-line edition.) That’s not foreshadowing, it’s the opposite. Rather than being ready-built as a meaningful sign, the watchman’s death is only retrospectively endowed with significance by Anna and the decision she makes based on her sudden memory of it.

If ever you have the opportunity to hear Morson speak, you should do so.

That’ll do it for the day, and for the week as well (except for the regular Friday drama-column teaser and the usual routine daily stuff). I’m going to try practicing what I’ve been preaching.

Later.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Absurd Person Singular (comedy, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)

– Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)

– Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)

– Sweeney Todd* (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Orson’s Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Dec. 31, reviewed here)

– See What I Wanna See (musical, R, adult subject matter, explicit sexual situations, strong language, closes Dec. 4, reviewed here)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

– Combined advance paid to Ernest Hemingway by Scribner’s in 1926 for The Sun Also Rises and The Torrents of Spring: $1,500

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $15,849.36

(Source: Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography)

“One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.”

Charles Baudelaire, Journal intime

O.K., it’s not that bad, but I don’t have quite enough steam left in the boiler to write and post the concluding installment of “All Over the Place” before bedtime. It’ll have to wait.

In lieu of same, I’ve posted four new Top Fives to divert you. Much, much more tomorrow.

First, though, a word from Morpheus….

– Fee paid to Neil Simon by Paramount in 1965 for film rights to The Odd Couple: $400,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,383,255.82

(Source: Rob Edelman and Audrey Kupferberg, Matthau: A Life)