Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on McGilchrist. Picking up The Count of Monte Cristo again, from Dantes' escape.
Finally finished Moby-Dick, which I've been meaning to read since I was 15 or 16, and started reading mid-December. The ending was actually pretty cool, but my God did it take a long time to get there. The actual plot is a pretty engaging slice of proto-Lovecraft cosmic horror, but I must confess that I would love to see a condensed version of the novel which cuts out the pages and pages of cetological rambling. I sincerely think it would lose nothing in the process (especially given that many of the factual assertions made in these chapters are now known to be false).
After finally defeating my white whale, I cleansed my palate by reading another story from my Ted Chiang collection. This one was called "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" (great title) and envisions a future in which you can communicate with "paraselves" - versions of yourself in a parallel universe in which a quantum coin flip landed heads rather than tails. Cracking story - not just thought-provoking in a speculative sense, but also engaging at the level of plot and character. The concept of multiple slightly different versions of the same person interacting with one another echoed some of the points in Age of Em.
My girlfriend and I play this game where we go into a bookshop together and each buys the other a book that they think the other would enjoy. Sort of as a joke, she bought me this Japanese YA novella called Idol, Burning. I'm about fifty pages in and I'm not exactly sure where it's going yet, it's about this teenage girl who's an obsessive stan of a J-pop idol (her "oshi"). UPDATE: didn't like it, didn't do anything for me.
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We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. This is the perfect novel to reread. Short, not an ounce of fat, and I have a different interpretation every time. Haunting of Hill House casts a longer shadow culturally, but horror stories where the supernatural embodies secret trauma have been done to death since — heck, even in video game writing.
Castle's story of already isolated, broken people drawing into greater isolation and delusion when on the brink of opening up is really special. I've seen the novel described as a class commentary or a reflection on mental illness, but I think the act of stating an interpretation reduces it. Also, boy could Jackson spin a sentence together.
I read both of those novels, Jackson does not miss.
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A Season in Time by Todd Denault, the story of the 1992–93 NHL season. It's pretty much an object lesson on why Americans can't stand Canadian sportswriters. It starts off with a preface where the author boldly proclaims that this was the greatest season in NHL history, and also lets it drop that this happened to be his senior year of high school and that he stopped following hockey as closely when he got to college. Okay, so there's some emotional attachment to the subject selection, but that's not too big a deal. That season did have a number of compelling storylines—Gretzky coming back from injury to make his only cup finals appearance with the Kings, Mario Lemieux's battle with cancer that saw him miss a month of the season and still win the scoring race, Teemu Selanne absolutely destroying Mike Bossy's rookie goal scoring record, the inaugural seasons of the expansion Tampa Bay Lightning and Ottawa Senators, and several others. It also happened to be the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup.
Unfortunately, if you knew nothing about the season when you started reading this you'd incorrectly assume that this team was the Toronto Maple Leafs, because Denault spends the first five chapters talking about them. They were a storied franchise in hockey's most important city that had been god awful for over a decade, and in 1993 they put together an unlikely playoff run. But they got eliminated in the Conference finals. Denault can't even talk about other teams without bringing the Leafs into the discussion; the Pittsburgh Penguins were an absolute juggernaut that year and were expected to cruise to a third straight championship before getting upset in the second round of the playoffs. That and Lemieux's story make the PEnguins a compelling team to talk about this season. But we have to hear about them in terms of how this was the team the Maple Leafs aspired to be, blah, blah, blah. We have an entire chapter about GM Cliff Fletcher's time with Calgary in the '80s. We have a chapter about coach Pat Burns's career as a police officer before entering coaching. If he wanted to write a book about the 92–93 Leafs, why not just do it?
The book is about as extensively researched as one can expect it to be, provided you don't expect the author to leave Toronto. When discussing media reaction to the events of the season, the quotes are almost exclusively from Toronto newspapers or The Hockey News. There's something disconcerting about discussing media reaction without bothering to see what people in the cities where the teams actually played were saying. After all, these are the guys who are covering one team full-time all season. He discusses the calls on Hockey Night in Canada Broadcasts as though they were the definitive icons of the game, even if the game involved two American teams. It's almost as if he lives in a solipsistic dreamland where the only real team is the Toronto Maple Leafs and all other teams exists solely to give them competition; they don't have their own struggles or fanbases or media. It's like they're all the Washington Generals going up against the Harlem Globetrotters, except the Globetrotters suck.
I could forgive all that, though, if the book were at least engaging. And it is, provided the author is giving background information and speaking in broad strokes. Unfortunately, most of the book is descriptions of games that mean little if you aren't actually watching them. It suffers from the same problem as war histories that try to provide overly detailed descriptions of actual battles. It doesn't matter how good the prose is if you don't have a lighted map to show you the troop movements. This isn't too much of a problem until we get to the playoffs, at which point it's nothing but this, over and over again. Even the interstitial bits between games aren't compelling since all he does is quote players and coaches giving meaningless quotes to the media like "We need to play better" after a loss. I get that there's not much to go with here, but Denault doesn't give his audience any credit and quotes this stuff as if it were genuinely insightful.
I've certainly read much worse things, but I'm pissed off that the book started off engaging enough but slowed to a crawl when the playoffs just became game after game after game. So I'm waaay too far into this to stop reading (over 300 pages) but I've still got a hundred to go and I can only read it in short sittings. It's frustrating. I hope Canadian teams lose and lose early for every year here on out because the Canadian media deserves it. I'd like to talk about how Canadian hockey fans suck and most Americans parrot the same bullshit because they assume the Canadians know better, but that's a rant for another day.
They were though. Don Cherry is a legend and the announcers were an order of magnitude better than any of the American ones who knew (and still to this day know) absolutely nothing about hockey. Like, lacking basic terminology about the game and substituting generic folksy expressions for their ignorant viewers. Then there was the FoxTrax glow puck debacle, because American sports fans were apparently incapable of keeping up with a game that wasn't 75% advertisements and breaks in play a la NFL/MLB.
Anyways, then Hockey Night in Canada they sold the trademark music to RDS and Don Cherry's dementia progressed to a point where Ron Mclean couldn't drag him through the weekly programs. RIP.
This is the year. McJesus is bringing Lord Stanley's cup home.
But yeah, fuck the Leafs.
Wat? In my timeline he was coherent enough to complain onair about 'you people' who won't wear a poppy on Remembrance day, resulting in rapid cancellation due to 'anti-immigrant dogwhistling'. I think he did a podcast or something for a while?
Naturally -- I can agree that I don't want to read a book about the '93 Leafs; maybe I will go reread "The Game" instead, I think it's still in the basement.
I don't know man. Things were pretty grim there at the end (the whole channel recommends itself). But man, was it great television.
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You're going to have to cite your sources if you want to make blanket statements about American announcers being terrible, especially when Hockey Night in Canada featured the grating Jim Hughson for so many years. The series from the book I was particularly irritated about was the Pens-Isles series from that year. For the Pens you had Mike Lange, possibly the greatest hockey play-by-play man of all time (though I'm admittedly biased), who had a flow that was simply unparalleled. For the Isles you had Jiggs McDonald, who isn't my personal favorite but who you can't argue against personally since he, um, did games for HNIC. And for the national broadcast, such as it existed at the time, you had Gary Thorne, who also had a flow the Canadian guys just can't seem to match and had plenty of his own iconic calls as well, especially on ABC in the early 2000s. The larger point is that nobody who actually cared about the Pens or the Isles was watching the HNIC broadcast, except possibly Ray Ferraro's parents. I want my sports books to capture the emotion of being an actual fan, not the disinterest of someone watching what is essentially an out of market broadcast.
As for Fox and the glowing pucks, I wasn't a fan of them either, but it wasn't because they thought Americans were incapable of keeping up with the game. When Fox started getting major league sports packages in the mid 90s they experimented with a number of broadcasting ideas, some of which fared better than others. They were also the first network that thought fans of any sport were apparently incapable of keeping track of what the score was; now it's unthinkable that this information wouldn't be displayed on screen, along with the time and time left in the penalty and other information we used to just have to guess at. In this respect the NFL is actually worse, since they keep adding more shit on the screen every year, starting with the first down line and going from there. Glow pucks were an early attempt at doing the same thing that wasn't as well-received. There was also NBC's idea to show a football game with just a stadium announcer that everyone hated, and Fox's disastrous decision to put Jimmy Johnson and Terry Bradshaw together as two color guys. The idea was to see what it would be like to casually watch a game with two guys who knew a lot about football, but it didn't work out. These days, though, you have stuff like the Manning brothers broadcast and the Ryan Whitney broadcast so I guess the idea was just too far ahead of its time.
Edmonton won't win a cup in the foreseeable future because they haven't figured out that you can't put your superstars on the same line. Especially when one of them is a center. There's a reason the Pens won three cups — when you have Sid on line 1 and Geno on line 2, it doesn't matter if you're feeding the puck to Chris Kunitz or Ruslan Fedotenko or fucking Max Talbot. But no, they load up their first line with superstars and as soon as you run into a team with a first defensive pairing that can shut them down in the playoffs you're in trouble. And even if you can't shut them down, they can only play 20 minutes a game. Then they've got Nugent-Hopkins on line 2 who's fine by himself but by God why do you put him on your first PP too? To intentionally cut the PP scoring in half? The rest of the team is scrubs and has-beens. Defense and goaltending are decent but not stellar. They might make the conference final, but overreliance on offensive firepower killed many a team. This is why the Penguins traded John Cullen in '91 and Mark Recchi in '92.
Source: Me, after living and breathing hockey for a decade and a half growing up and then moving to America as an adult. Maybe things are different in Pittsburgh, but watching games for the local team in one of the smaller hockey markets (i.e. outside the original 6 and the midwest) was excruciating. Announcers were explaining relatively basic rules, clearly had no grasp on the strategy, positioning or how the game is played and just shoutcasted goals.
Even in Boston, if you go to a Bruins game the presumably CTE-riddled fanbase seems to operate on two principles: if a Bruins player has the puck, yell SHOOT THE PUCK at the top of your lungs. If the other team has the puck, yell HIT HIM. If the Bruins lost, it's probably because they didn't shoot the puck enough.
I grant that things may have been better in Pittsburgh.
I mean, maybe I just fell for the Canadian 'hurr durr America dumb' propaganda, but it sure seems a lot of people talked about it that way:
I watch far from every Edmonton game, but I'm pretty sure they've experimented with splitting up Draisaitl and McDavid a few years back and I don't think it went well for them. At that point, you can trade Draisaitl for some depth I guess - but man would it take some massive balls to try and explain why you traded one of the top scorers in the league and one half of the most productive duo in the NHL for some solid second-line players.
Kane and Nugent-Hopkins should be able to match Geno on paper. But maybe I'm too deep in the hopium. Perhaps McJesus was the false prophet all along and Brock Boeser will bring Lord Stanley's cup back to the motherland.
The Pens won three cups because they had a hell of a lot more than Crosby and Geno. Letang and Fleury were pretty damn good too, and Kessel was on an eldritch hot-dog fueled rampage just to spite the Leafs (which I fully approve of).
Dude, their defense and goaltending are ass. They averaged over 3 goals against this season with a franchise record winning streak. But they're also fucked by cap space; how are they going to improve their back end without trading their stars? See comment above about massive balls required to trade some of the best scorers in the league.
All that said, I'm just a meathead who played a lot of hockey growing up and beer leagues as an adult. I have no idea what makes a good NHL team, but thankfully, that seems to be fairly universally true. See the Golden Knights for the entirety of their existence, somehow this year's Canucks.
I know about 'fool me once' and 'fool me twice' -- who should be ashamed over 'fool me four times'?
Your recollections of the comet-puck and American announcers do match mine -- to this day there are radio play-by-plays of hockey games in Canada, I wonder if this leads to a better talent pool?
Also Cherry still seems to be putting out podcasts:
https://doncherrysgrapevine.podbean.com/
Not something I would normally listen to, but maybe I'll give one a try to see how demented he is! As far as I can remember he pretty much always talked like he does in your clips -- maybe it's a sort of Trumpy thing where you need to be on his wavelength?
It's true, I played one for a minute and he didn't sound half bad.
My record of listening to Cherry is pretty sporadic. He seemed much more coherent in some of his older legendary rants I've listened to, but I definitely wasn't a tune-in-every-week kind of guy.
Huh, are you one of those rootless millenial types? Just that in my formative years, you were tuning in to Cherry every Saturday night whether you liked it or not. Something something neuroplasticity, foreign languages.
Not entirely sure what you mean by this, but my family and childhood social groups slowly scattered over the last decade or two as Quebec continues to hemorrhage anglos. I had to move a couple of times for grad school, but I have a family/house and I've been in the same city for the past five years or so.
Oddly enough I don't think anyone I knew growing up would watch Don Cherry or even hockey games that regularly. But then, I was also the only kid in the advanced class that played a sport, and I was never that close with any of my hockey teammates so could just be a function of my social circle.
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I'm still on War and Peace. I'm loving it so much this time around.
Why?
The sheer subtle depth of the book is astounding. The philosophy of Tolstoy is deep and really beautifully played out through the novel. The book is four novels running at the same time. I'm seeing so much more of the depth of it in my 30s, with the knowledge to see the intricacies of how ethnicity is being formed, in many ways the novel is about the formation of a Russian nation in real time. I'm more attuned to the invisible, but intended interactions of class. The philosophy may also appeal to me more today than it once did, though it's always been an understanding.
It's also how I'm reading it. I'm taking margin notes and highlighting constantly, leaving all my thoughts, before I send it over to a close friend, who is going to read it and discuss it with me. It's like she's over my shoulder the whole time, and encourages me to really engage with the material.
Hm. It's been a while for me. Maybe I should re-read, too.
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I started reading Purple Days, a Game of Thrones fanfiction about Joffrey going through a timeloop that restarts at the beginning of the books every time he dies. I've seen it recommended a lot in various fanfic/GoT communities I've participated in but so far I really don't see the hype. In canon, Joffrey is a sociopath that, while not smart, possesses some low cunning and is capable of deception. He has no remorse in how he treats other and takes pleasure in causing pain. Where as in the fanfic, he's just a total idiot that aggressively lashes out at anyone he's upset with, with no regards to possible consequences. And(GoT spoilers)his journey of moral growth starts with him being told there's something wrong with him by Ned, and later learning he's the product of incest(and therefore the traitors who tried to usurp his throne weren't actually traitors since he was never the rightful king).
I might read more because I do like both GoT and time loop stories, and I have seen so many recommendations for it, but it's quite disappointing so far.
I'm also on book 2 of Dune. I don't really get why Paul can't stop the Jihad in his name that he hates by just telling them to stop.
It's been a while since I read it, but my recollection is that Paul believes that the Fremen would stop following him if he did that, and continue the jihad anyway. So he attempts to try to channel the Fremen as best he can, in order to lessen the damage they cause.
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Seth Klarman's Margin of Safety, and Alexander Lowen's Narcissism.
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