Follow Me on Twitter






http://twitter.com/Mobute




Okay, I realize this entry is sort of thin. So, uh...

Baseball Between the Numbers






By now you might have noticed that I've mentioned baseball here a lot. The frequency of its discussion is entirely coincidental. The local team doesn't suck this year, prompting interest; pennant races heat up a little more each passing week, prompting more; and the non-baseball books I reserved from the local library keep getting renewed by whatever glacial readers currently have them, prompting the baseball books I reserved to keep coming in one after another.

Also, a few weeks ago, I read a review of one baseball book, which inspired me to check it out. While reading criticism of it, the critic mentioned and praised another baseball book, which I looked into, which led to the namedropping of another book and yet another. At that point, I figured I should try to cover all the bases (pardon the expression) and just read whatever everyone apparently considered to be the new "classic" sportswriting. After all, it beats another round of Nazis having their frostbitten toes gnawed off by mice.

As to why I'd be interested in baseball books in the first place, I enjoy the game. Even if I didn't, I'd probably affect an appreciation of it, considering the wife absolutely loathes football (which I love), and at some point you just need to watch sports for no particular reason other than to watch sports. (Thankfully, she thinks baseball's all right.) But I also especially enjoy relearning about a game I learned in childhood by applying to it sabermetrics, the new attempts to understand baseball from a mathematically quantifiable standpoint.

Unfortunately, I don't enjoy the math. This presents a problem. Sabermetrics — a back-formation from SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research — are incredibly compelling new measures of events in baseball, ones that cause us to rethink the collective wisdom of over a century, but they're all math. And not just the comfy counting or average-based math that you're used to from old baseball statistics. (For instance, home runs: counting. Batting average: adding up every time someone gets a hit and dividing by the number of times he appeared at the plate. PECOTA?—uh, I give up.) A great many of the metrics conceived of by saberguys the nation over require a wonky familiarity with advanced statistics. What this means, in practical terms, is that you may not have much fun reading Baseball Prospectus' Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong.

The book comes highly recommended from numerous sources, and for what it tries to do, it is unquestionably a very good book. Whether you can enjoy what it's doing is another matter entirely. Personally, I can't. I am not a luddite, but I struggled through calculus and never quite comfortably grasped standard deviation in my science courses. At some point, I throw my hands up in the air and just accept that the mathematics behind a thing like EQA (equivalent average, which factors in league and ballpark effects — i.e., worse pitching in the league, short fences in the player's home ballpark, both of which increase home runs and doubles — and thus represents an average that can compare reasonably with any other) just make sense and that I don't have the mental wherewithal to question the premises that informed its creation.

For the most part, I don't have to. Rival gangs of sabermetricians are out there ready to rumble with the Baseball Prospectus gang if their mathematics prove shoddy. This sounds like an exaggeration, but it's not. The sort of people who recreationally try to create new statistical measures are also the sort of people who take pleasure in examining the flaws of other people's statistical measures. Also, a lot of stat wonks are bitchy people. As unscientific as it might be to resign myself to the fact that these metrics just work, it's also just as true that everyone else in the same field has more interest than I do in disproving the worth of the metrics — especially if they were created by someone else and rival your own newly created metric.

As with most things academic, credit is almost all. Also, as with many things academic, the authors of a new, proven proprietary metric stand a chance of selling their services to interested parties and making money. (Still others stand a chance of being hired by baseball franchises, a monetary and childhood-dream compensation that provides a strong incentive to be right. Both Bill James, basically the father of sabermetrics, and Voros McCracken — who invented Defense-Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS) and whose name sounds like the punchline to a schoolboy roll-call joke in Greece — were hired by the Boston Red Sox.) For the most part, if a sabermetric is still in use by multiple stats sites after a couple of years, it means that it's held up under scrutiny and testing. It may not be the best means of measuring what it tries to measure, but that owes less to the notion that someone is trying to pass off poor mathematics and more to the fact that the ideal metric has yet to be devised.

Baseball Between the Numbers was definitely written by and for people who not only enjoy understanding those metrics currently devised but also enjoy the process of getting there, creating tables, testing hypotheses and expanding or contracting the amount of data analyzed. The book is divided into 27 chapters (like a ballgame: three outs, nine innings), each one asking a question. Almost all of the questions are engrossing to read:

1-2 Was Billy Martin Crazy?
4-1 What If Rickey Henderson Had Pete Incaviglia's Legs?
9-1 What Do Statistics Tell Us About Steroids?
9-3 Why Doesn't Billy Beane's Shit Work in the Playoffs?*

But the process of answering them is not. Almost every one of these questions can be answered with one sentence.
___________________
* — Answers:
1-2 No.
4-1 A relatively insignificant drop in runs scored.
9-1 Not much
9-3 A balanced team stands a better chance of winning, but teams with multiple solid starters and good defense and good offense fare better than teams with only one or two exceptional pitchers or merely an exceptional offense — which we already knew anyway.
___________________
Statistics, tables and methodology occupy most of the space of each chapter. Simply asking the question, stating why certain statistics are probative and explaining why the answer is significant takes far less space. There are two immediate downsides to this:

1. As said above, if you either understand or really like trying to understand statistics, the whole ride must be a blast. If you love data tables, this book might also be pornography for you. However, if terms start skirting around or outright abandoning your capacity to understand, most of the chapter becomes a wasted effort, and all those tables start to look like smut in a computer language too abstruse to turn you on. You can skip to the last page or skim aggressively without missing much more than you would already have helplessly missed to begin with.

2. If you already explicitly understand why an old idea is flawed and already understand the new metric that better informs you, the process of reaching a chapter's conclusion can be a wearisome journey through familiar territory. For example, take chapter 1-1 What's the Matter with RBI? ... and Other Traditional Statistics. If you care at all about baseball and sabermetrics, you already know the answer to this. You've probably been over the answer dozens of times by now. Simply put: RBI can't tell you how good an individual is, since his "runs batted in" are dependent on other people to get on base in front of him so he can bat them in. Given that the statistic is dependent on the performance of multiple players, its traditional usage as a metric for evaluating one player, without context, is fundamentally flawed. Similarly, people who get on base stand a better chance of scoring a run, because they are already one base closer to home plate. But batting average does not count walks. Player A, who gets one hit in every four at bats but strikes out three other times, will have a batting average of .250. Meanwhile, Player B, who strikes out twice in every four at bats but walks the other two times, will have a batting average of .000. However, Player B will get on base half the time, giving him a .500 on-base percentage (OBP), compared to Player A's .250. According to old baseball stats, Player B is worthless, while Player A is pretty much a league-average batter. But the goal of any baseball team is to score more runs than their opponents, and doing that requires getting on base. Given that, Player B is actually twice as valuable a player. (We won't get into slugging percentage here.)

In the case of item number one, the book's capacity to inform you is limited by your capacity to be informed. In the case of item number two, however, a good deal of what the book would teach you is information you may have learned elsewhere in more accessible, more memorable and more anecdotal ways. Probably the first example that leaps to mind is Michael Lewis' excellent Moneyball.

Comparing this book to Moneyball, though, is unfair. Lewis' book sought to profile a unique figure in baseball at a time when the ideas he used were far from mainstream. In part due to that book's success, Baseball Between the Numbers (published in 2006, well after the "Moneyball" concept of exploiting inefficient metrics in player evaluation had entered public consciousness) doesn't seek to reveal new ideas but rather give them fully articulated, tested and replicable credence. Its contents are less revelatory and more explanatory that Moneyball's precisely because these ideas entered the public consciousness enough that people began demanding more articulated mathematics to bolster their worth.

This book isn't intended to be a primer or an introductory course to sabermetric concepts but rather a fleshed-out exploration and demonstration of their validity. That's the point from which the real pleasure of this book springs: for everyone who's heard a baseball traditionalist irrationally demand a dozen concrete examples of the value of OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging), salvation comes in table after table and comparative analysis after comparative analysis. Those seeking a pithy and light introductory glance at new metrics will be disappointed. But anyone who's sat back in frustration at an inability to produce a research-paper's understanding of how speed contributes to winning ballgames — especially anybody who's felt a winning argument slipping away from a want of data — will find all sorts of salvation in each chapter.

If you decide that you're one of the latter people and pick up the book, only two remaining elements might be cause for irritation or disappointment:

1. Because this is a Baseball Prospectus book, written by Baseball Prospectus staffers, it often accidentally reads like an advertisement for Baseball Prospectus. No contributor seems to be consciously tooting his own horn or lavishing praise on his colleagues, but the constant repetition of BP's name gets progressively more annoying. It doesn't help that the writers use BP's own proprietary metrics and eschew metrics from other sabermetricians. It makes sense: they wouldn't create those metrics if they didn't believe they were the best, and obviously it doesn't make sense to celebrate others' work if they sincerely believe their own work to be superior. It just provides more instances in which the BP name gets dropped, contributing overall to the advertisement atmosphere, however deliberate or accidental that might be.

2. It's a book about stats written by statheads. As narrow-minded as it might sound, statisticians don't exactly have a long and storied track record as poets of the modern age. Bill James earned a reputation for verbal economy and interesting turns of phrase, but he's the exception that proves the rule. Aside from periodic jokes about some ballplayers' careers and aside from a few contributors' chapters — Dayn Perry's come to mind — there aren't many opportunities for smiles, wry observations, drama, suspense or humanity. The authors can't be blamed: this is a book about mathematical explication, not the triumph of the human spirit in the face of impossible odds. Still, in the hands of slightly more gifted authors, perhaps more humor and a more conversational style would have shone through. As it is, much of the book contains dry material explained via a kind of dry mentality.

Nevertheless, the book succeeds in setting out the complex data it wants to interpret and demonstrating how that interpretation is valid. It is doubtless an excellent resource for anyone who wants a detailed understanding of how sabermetrics work — or just an opportunity for a detailed argument about them. The question of whether the book will be an entertaining read is best asked of the reader, as interest in the book is something brought to it, rather than something it provides.

Rating: 3
Strongly recommended for anyone who enjoys statistics or seeking an extremely detailed argument about sabermetrics. Recommended for baseball fans determined to expand their understanding of sabermetrics, even if they can't fully grasp everything in the book. Not recommended for anyone looking for a breezy, anecdotal or character-oriented look at sabermetrics. For that, see Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.Also, for anyone interested in learning about how these metrics work via mockery of people who don't understand them and persist in using flawed stats like RBI, see FireJoeMorgan.

Why 'Rambo' Is Probably a Better Movie Than 'Saving Private Ryan'






The opening scene of Ramboshows Burmese soldiers throwing mines into rice paddies, hustling prisoners out of a transport, then forcing them to run through the rice paddies until they trip the mines. The soldiers bet on which prisoners will be the ones to die. Eventually, a prisoner's body erupts in a fountain of crimson and muddy water. From there, the movie only gets more meaninglessly violent. The thing is, that's probably what makes it good.

Ten years ago, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryanushered in an era of ultra-realistic violence in film with a frenzy of dismemberment, fragmentation, ventilation and explosion that was accepted almost uncritically. This acceptance derived in part from the fact that Spielberg brings a great deal of gravitas to any production, in part because he's an excellent filmmaker — and in part because he's Jewish, and it's hard to be critical of someone with his background demonizing Nazis — but also because Spielberg is very good at controlling the narrative tone of what he's showing.

Think back to the bookend scenes in Saving Private Ryan. An old man, with his family, approaches headstones at a veterans' cemetery on the Normandy coast. The message is already clear: lots of people who could have been loving husbands, fathers and grandfathers never left this beach. You haven't even seen the violence yet, but the pity and the importance of it are already unquestionable. If that lesson weren't obvious, Spielberg then clobbers you with it ruthlessly at the end. The father weeps and stammers and needs to know if he "was a good man" — i.e. did the way he lived his life measure up to the value of those who gave their last full measure to save him? The answer, duh, is yes. Of course he did, because we spent the last parts of the pre-battle WWII scenes seeing what a swell guy he was, and because even now his family envelops him in their many arms and comfort him because he's a really swell old guy now.

At no point is it suggested that, swell people with families aside, the war might still have been pointlessly horrific and morally questionable, see:

• carpet bombing of civilians in cities
• use of nuclear weapons
• war crimes, like executing surrendered/surrendering soldiers, which was all too common; taking Japanese skulls as trophies; ripping out gold teeth with pliers
• criminally and morally unsupportable internment of Japanese-American citizens
• the fascistic mobilization of the American home front, complete with the erosion of civil liberties and newspaper headlines written by intelligence agencies and sanitized beyond any remaining vague resemblance to the truth
• the fact that one of our allies (Unca' Joe!) ran a totalitarian regime even more nightmarishly lethal and terrifying, in the long run, than Nazi Germany, and may have executed as many as 20 million of his own citizens before the war even started etc.

Spielberg's too canny for that. Opening up any ambiguity about the subject matter would open up questions about the film itself; e.g. "Did it need to be this violent?" But by telling a saccharine homily, inwardly, from both ends of the plot, Spielberg succeeds in making a family friendly bloodbath, itself a goal so nauseatingly oxymoronic that it's only acceptable within the same sort of mindset that conceives of NewSpeak. Better still, by making the moral of the story "Americans sacrifice their lives nobly in big noble bloody effort," the film instantly created legions of defenders for whom the uncritical celebration of America was enough to excuse almost any sin.

Never mind that the film centers on the utterly hokey premise of wasting manpower and resources to rescue one guy who might be alive because, gosh, that's just the sort of ludicrously stupid things Americans do — sort of the war equivalent of sprinting through a riot to bring a neighbor on the other side of town a cup of sugar. Never mind that the composition of the characters comes straight out of the contemptibly pat propaganda "movies" of the WWII era.

The film-makers... were trying to "fix up 'an ideal situation from a picture point of view... trying to recreate war as we were all taught in history books.'" That is, the action must be rendered in the received clichés: otherwise it will look inauthentic to the audience.

Infantry units are all melting-pots, with the "universal platoon" comprising something like the following mixture:

One leader who dies
one inexperienced youth
one comic
one cynic (transformed before the end into a true believer)
one black or Hispanic, and
one person each from
                                         Brooklyn
                                         Texas, and
                                         the Middle West.

Of course, that's from Paul Fussell's Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War,written nine years before the movie came out and describing such dated and unappetizing fare as Guadalcanal Diary. Yet change black/hispanic to "Jewish," play up the religiosity of the southerner, stunt-cast a Hollywood wunderkind famous for writing a screenplay at a young age as the inexperienced youth, and you have Spielberg's offering.

Yet the existence of the clichés themselves are, in the end, of less consequence than the fact that they exist in service to a veritable orgy of violence and destruction. That sexual term might seem unfair until you reach the scene where a German hushes and whispers, while penetrating an American soldier's chest with a bayonet, like a strong and overconfident boyfriend taking his virginal date for the first time. And just when you'd start to have any doubt whether all this was really truly bearable or necessary, there's a nice old fellow in a sweater being hugged by yuppies and moppets who assure him that, yes, it was all worth it.

Conversely, Rambo makes almost no attempt to convince you of anything. The Burmese soldiers are obviously sadists, the products of a system invested with tremendous power and no accountability, but almost everything else is a mystery. Are the rebels "good" people? Who knows? They seem to be by dint of not being the Burmese soldiers, but beyond that they might well be awful. No attempt is made to ennoble them, to make the violence they commit pretty while the Burmese soldiers' violence is ugly and reprehensible. What you can be sure of is that everyone is very violent. There's no nobility here; dismemberment has no moral. It's incredibly ugly and unpleasant to watch. Bodies are hacked apart and suddenly atomize into standing mists of blood. Bones and parts are stripped away, torn and scattered. It's a struggle to see how it's at all supposed to be fun or something you watch because you want to see it.

The natural counterargument to make here is, "You're mistaking the accidental for the deliberate. The fact that the rebels aren't explicitly portrayed as the Good Guys while the violence is over the top isn't indicative of deliberate ambiguity and an anti-violence message. Sylvester Stallone is just a terrible director. Come on, you saw Staying Alive, right? This is the same guy who thought that, 'Strut,' was the word and scene to go out on."

Ordinarily, that Occam's Razor explanation would be correct. But remember that this movie franchise actually started out on a dynamic and subtle note. First Blood came out in 1982, before a broad idea of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder took hold in the United States, but the plot stars a textbook sufferer of the condition. Instead of being set upon by peace activists, he's mistaken for an unkempt drifter and persecuted by uptight law-and-order local police with no respect for civil rights. The exact same group that would normally be trying to out-Hitler Hitler on the Dolchstoßlegende front, consoling the returning warrior for fighting in spite of heartless liberal queers stabbing him in the back, instead persecutes him and sees him as a problem. The rest of the film isn't a revenge fantasy against liberals but a desperate attempt by the powerless to compel even a local government of conservative law-and-order bent to give him both liberty and justice.

Rambo pulls similar baits-and-switches, seeming to play on the most negative possible instincts in the viewer before failing to deliver on them. A tense scene on a boat and later in a prison camp raises the possibility of Burmese soldiers raping blonde leading lady Julie Benz, better known for being a pregnant vampire or the girlfriend of a serial killer. Yet just as the "they're violating our beautiful WHITE women!" specter looms, it's dissipated by the very real and very imminent rape of several asian women by asian men. Their rape is no less horrifying for not being interracial; if anything, it's far more so because it's very obviously going to happen, which leaves you with the realization that the movie is teasing your capacity to see or be sensitive to bigotry. Similarly, a Burmese officer walks away with a young boy, obviously to sodomize him, which perhaps provides a moment's amplified tension that homosexual rape will occur. But again it's secondary to the reality of the inexorable beginnings of heterosexual rape. Why should one form of violation be any more or less horrible? Why are you getting more upset or anxious about this? Finally, one character persists in decrying all forms of violence, refusing to take up arms in his own defense. In any other movie, he'd be sucking down a venti macchiato and obviously worrying more about why he couldn't ride an electric boat. In this one, he's a devout evangelical Christian.

At any one of half a dozen points, Rambo could turn into a slaughterhouse of any number of straw men in service to self-congratulatory right-wing mythology. Instead, just when you begin to expect the plot to venture down these paths, it suddenly changes course and subverts the prejudicial attitudes you've imported to the process of watching. This tactic unfolds with the most effectiveness at the end. Just as Rambo and the rebels are about to triumph — at the moment in time when you're likely to be most gratified, even sanctified, by blood — the violence remains just as off-putting. The message isn't that there is just and wonderful killing, that there are times when we are, indeed, good men for dwelling in a vale of death. The message is as elemental as Snowden's Secret: man is meat, and that statement's realization is always horrifying.

Unlike Spielberg's extended panegyric for murder and the United Goddamn States of America, this movie attaches no facile codicil for you. No puppet character asks you what the moral of the story is, inviting someone else to tell you. Remarkably, Rambo seems to have more respect for the intelligence and character of its viewers than Saving Private Ryan. It assumes you'll be smart enough to ask what happened and what was said. Better yet, it assumes that what you come up with on your own has just as much value as the lesson it might want you to learn. Its effects and acting may not be as smooth, but intellectually it's probably a better and more challenging movie. Plus, Stallone shoots a dude with arrows to the face.

Arrows!

Ramblings #1






• Do you think John Madden ever puts on a fresh Florsheim ComforTech and feels that his life, if not his shoe, is just a little empty?

• Someone needs to strap Maynard James Keenan to a chair in the "It's a Small World After All" ride for as many hours as it takes for him to agree to either lighten up or shut the fuck up.

• Anyone who tells you they actually felt something deep for the first time by listening to a Tool or A Perfect Circle song basically has the same level of insight, selflessness and object permanence as a four-year-old.

• I have yet to listen to any piece of music and have a friend remark, "This is good. This chord here. Really plangent."

• Am I the only person who hears the lines "Holy infant, so tender and mild" in Silent Night and thinks they're talking about boneless hot wings?

• There's gotta be one huge wing of dog heaven that just features an endless supply of bulldogs chewing the ankles off an endless supply of those sickos who put sweaters on their bulldogs.

• Metallica Fans: clarify for me, what exactly is digging the unforgiven? Also, can one entrench the unacceptable or gently grade the unappealing? Please explain.

• The standard gesture of affection in baseball is already the Ass Pat. Can we stop nicknaming every eighth guy "[something]-Rod" now? (Note: 20 years ago, I was against the name "Dickie Thon" for the same reasons.)

• There can't be two more antithetical fashion statements than the white-boy silver bling chain and the loafer. What are you going to do, Chet? Are you and your "Nig-Gas" gonna fuck me up by smudging your Rockports? Or are you going to sell me on a sub-prime loan that's "bangin', totally bangin'"? Which is it? Fuck you, Chet. And fuck your tickets to the latest A Perfect Circle tour.

• Eating enchiladas is doubtless unhealthy for you. But if you really challenged me on it, I could probably eat three or four tablespoons of sour cream in front of my doctor.

• Neville Chamberlain will likely be forever reviled for waving the "Peace in Our Time" Munich Agreement with Hitler after the '38 conference. But I like to think that history would treat him much more kindly if he'd been an accomplished amateur oboist.

• There's got to be at least one asshole out there who just bought a Volkswagen Scirocco and who's explaining it to people with, "You know, it's named after a kind of Mediterranean wind."

• Any parents who named their daughter "Fancy" are just dooming her to a young adulthood as a car-wax model at auto shows, followed by a long middle age riding a barstool in some honkytonk karaoke joint, weeping bitter tears into a $2 scotch every time some girl gets up to sing that fucking song.



• I think it's awesome that we're getting so many more latin Americans and Japanese players in baseball and welcome its further globalization (especially if we can get that diversity in the states to make MLB truly the best baseball available anywhere). That said, the fact that we have two dudes named "Aybar" and neither of them are Scottish drunks is just a mockery of global opportunity.

• Birthdays and Christmases I get, but why do people other than the spouses ever get the couple gifts on their anniversary? A birthday can be a sad reminder of age, and Christmases can be oppressively sad. But if two people are still married to each other, it suggests that they still bring each other happiness, which is enough reward that it doesn't need supplements from outside. It's sort of like giving a teenage boy some sort of referral payment for masturbating while thinking of a supermodel spokeswoman. Kid was gonna be okay without that.

• Speaking of gifts: why are the two staple gifts for funerals reminders of impermanence? You bring people food, which spoils on the buffet table after a few hours or in the fridge after a few days; or you bring them flowers that can't last much past one week without help to stave off the effects of death. What a comfort. (Why not bring someone a replica of the Sphinx after they have nose cancer?) Here's an idea: when your aunt dies, if you want to make your uncle feel better, ditch the $75 on roses, go in with a few relatives, and buy him a home theater system.

• Do you think people who drive a Daewoo buy Daewoo TVs too, as a way of somehow validating their completely bizarre choice in cars? Like someone says, "You drive a Daewoo?" and they say, "Drive one? I like the brand so much, I watch a Daewoo."

• "Daewoo" also sounds like Asian mom babytalk for "diaper shit."

• Why do directors always try to cram as many stylized elements as possible into pilots when anyone who's spent even five years idly watching TV could tell you which elements will be eliminated within a season? Take a look at the House pilot, then watch season four. David Shore filmed everything in OrangeVision™, lit all the scenes like David Fincher directing a Nine Inch Nails video, used every opportunity to do the "camera disappears inside a person's body" trick and crammed every scene with medical cliches ("You hear hoofbeats, you think HORSES! Not ZEBRAS!"). By season four, colors are normal; people use lights in rooms; the camera doesn't dawdle inside people, and there's more interest in a fake reality show than in whining about "dispositive proof."

• Why does iced-tea turn cloudy? Also, why does it taste funky right after brewing but taste great eight hours later? And why is sun tea ridiculously better?

• My friend Byron thinks that "chorizo" sounds like the name of a fabulous Spanish transvestite children's TV host, but I disagree. It sounds like the name of a mechanized tiger that attacks Japanese cities.

Stalingrad II: Thirteen Errors






The "story" of the Battle of Stalingradis fairly simple, so a brief recap for those unfamiliar with it should help before moving on to Beevor's arguments about those events.

In 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, a massive attack on the Soviet Union. Despite ample evidence from his own intelligence agencies, Stalin refused to believe an invasion was imminent, choosing instead to believe that Hitler would honor the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Because of this unpreparedness and because of both extensive purges of high-ranked military officers and the politicization of the army, the Wehrmacht encircled hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers, forcing their surrender. The Germans soon found themselves at the gates of Moscow and controlling all of the Soviet territories west of a line that stretched roughly due south from Leningrad.

In late spring, 1942, the Germans began Operation Blau, which sought to capture Stalingrad, which would cut off a valuable industrial city and part of key trading routes while scoring a propaganda victory by taking "Stalin's" city. The capture would also provide strategic protection for future operations in the oil-rich Caucasus, which would hopefully fuel the Nazi war machine while bringing Stalin's to a sputtering halt.

The Germans succeeded in capturing all of the city but a westernmost sliver on the banks of the Volga. The Soviet troops remaining in the city stood between the Werhmacht and a river. Their supplies and reinforcements, from the other side, frequently failed to survive the crossing. However, the Luftwaffe's bombing of the city turned it to mounds of rubble ideal for ambushes, snipers and attrition streetfighting, which enabled the Soviet troops to hold out and repulse superior firepower. The Germans repeatedly flung their best troops against what they believed were the last remnants of the Red Army, only to be beaten back.

Over the next several months, the Germans did not detect the Russians' amassing troops for their counteroffensive, Operation Uranus, whose name was changed at the last minute from, "Operation What the Hell Are You Giggling At?" As a result, Soviet troops caught the Germans unawares, encircling them. Having just spent half a year engaging in the same attrition warfare he had vowed to avoid, Hitler idiotically called for more senseless bloodshed, ordering Sixth Army commander General Friedrich Paulus to hold his position. Despite unreliable resupply from the Luftwaffe; despite a lack of ammunition, medicine, fuel, winter clothing and food; despite deaths from starvation, infection, typhus, typhoid, dysentery and exposure, Hitler ordered the Sixth to fight to the last bullet, perhaps because its continued existence prevented seven Soviet armies from attacking German positions elsewhere. He promoted Paulus to Field Marshal to ensure that he would fight on — no German Field Marshal had ever surrendered — and was furious to discover Paulus did not blow his own brains out. (Paulus reportedly said, "I have no intention of shooting myself for that Austrian corporal.") Over the course of roughly 200 days, the two armies lost over 1.5 million casualties, to say nothing of the civilians who lived in the city and surrounding countryside.


Beevor relates the course of these events with lively — and sometimes gruesome — detail. Regardless, his prose entertains and at times takes on the pacing and intensity of a novel, a truly remarkable distinction considering almost everyone reading the book already knows the ending. The book even flashes a sense of humor at times, no mean feat when the next page is likely to describe people dying of exhaustion while sitting up in shell holes in a field littered with horse entrails.

However, while the book is an excellent example of how reading historical narratives can be engrossing and fun, that's not what makes Beevor's treatment of the subject so interesting. As said in part one, the importance of the book as a historical work isn't in the plot but rather what arguments and theories Beevor proffers in response to it. And while the book contains remarkable information about the Soviet forces (historians writing prior to 1990 often had to work without access to most relevant information about Red Army operations), the interesting arguments Beevor makes almost exclusively pertain to the Germans. At the risk of aping the Rocky II/Star Trek III cold-open repeat formula:

The impetus for these events belongs to Adolf Hitler, to the German General Staff and, to a lesser extent, to General Friedrich Paulus. It's a German story. The story told in Russia may still be about The Great Patriotic War, and in our minds we may first think of thousands of faceless armed Russian peasants slogging across a punishing white landscape to exact their revenge. But the heart of the story remains more compellingly the high-water mark of the Third Reich. The progression of events stems from the Germans' blunders, without which they would not have broken the Wehrmacht's back on a city on the Volga.

In short, to catalogue Beevor's arguments necessarily requires enumerating the mistakes made by Hitler and the Wehrmacht.

TEN ERRORS MADE by HITLER and the GENERAL STAFF

1. The Germans underestimated the levels of Russian patriotism. Few historians will doubt this, making it probably most predictable conclusion Beevor makes, but it's worth mentioning that the error may have been arrived at honestly. Prior to the invasion, the remaining non-ideologues (read: non-Nazis) on the German General Staff argued that a war in Russia could not be won unless it became a civil war. To wit: treat the invasion as a liberation, protect ethnic groups harassed by the Soviets, distribute food to the local populations, round up the commissars. Indeed, it's possible this could have worked, but by then even the Wehrmacht had been politicized. Not only did the Einsatzgruppen invade the east on the Wehrmacht's coattails, but the latter itself had been ordered to combine the duty of winning the war with solving the Jewish and the Bolshevik "problems." Thus, instead of accelerating centrifugal forces that could have destabilized the Soviet regime, the Germans' invasion, Einsatzgruppen executions, rapes and wholesale plunder of the countryside likely fomented the strong patriotic reaction needed to defeat them. Perhaps they mistakenly assumed Soviet society to be too fragmented to ever cohere patriotically, or perhaps they assumed too many people would be dead.

2. The Germans underestimated the effects weather would have on supplying their armies and maneuvering them. Many people are doubtless aware that the German Sixth Army never received adequate winter clothes. But Beevor points out that the panzers' inability to maneuver on ice was just as important — their treads were too narrow to find much purchase — as it robbed the Germans of the high-speed, accurate tactics that had led them to fatally encircle so many enemy armies in the past. In short, the German high command expected to win a war with tactics rendered impossible by the very war they chose to start.

3. While the Luftwaffe had served Germany well in previous invasions by destroying enemy planes, airbases and other tactically significant military sites, the carpet bombing of Stalingrad created exactly the sorts of conditions that enabled the Red Army to hold out in the city for so long. The conversion of the city to rubble effectively made it the perfect ground for a battle of attrition conducted by outnumbered and outgunned troops. The Russian soldiers laid anti-tank mines throughout the city, had excellent cover for snipers and virtually unlimited opportunities to hide in wait for advancing Germans. Again, Beevor suggests that the conduct of the war the German's chose necessarily contained in it the means by which they could not win.

4. The Germans vastly underestimated the Soviets' capacity for economic and materiel recovery. There can be no reasonable justification for this oversight, neither from an intelligence nor a common-sense/basic probability standpoint. Almost from the start of the battle for Stalingrad, Hitler and many generals baselessly assumed that the troops they faced were the last Russia had. Beevor argues that this insupportable and fatal assumption may well have stemmed from the fact that:

5. Hitler genuinely believed in his message of Aryan superiority. To a certain extent, this argument offers something of a copout and is one of Beevor's weakest. Why did Hitler not support stirring up a Russian civil war and making the invasion easier?—Aryan superiority. Why didn't Hitler order Paulus to break out of encirclement to save the Sixth Army?—Aryan superiority. The argument works best as a bridge between gaps but defines little on its own. It's far likelier that Hitler proffered this belief as a rhetorical spin on the arrogance he felt after his successes in Poland and Western Europe. Full credit to Beevor, however, as he doesn't offer the Aryan superiority argument in a vacuum and acknowledges Hitler's military arrogance.

6. Whether caused by aristocratic snobbery or the superiority of a century of proud military tradition, the (formerly Prussian) General Staff doubted Hitler's predictions about remilitarizing the Rhineland, Anschluss with Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland. Later, the successes of Poland and France either converted them to believers in the low-born genius or cemented their desire to see him fall. Certainly some generals hoped their predictions of failure in Russia would come true so that Hitler could be seen to overreach and thus be more easily replaced, but placing these people in the majority probably exaggerates their numbers. Hitler triumphed over them so many times that many became as convinced of his invincibility as he was. After all, he'd given them so much reason to doubt their own judgment. Consequently his arrogance met a cowed audience who, as he replaced, demoted and disgraced naysayers, increasingly lacked security in raising objections. Hitler and his arrogance thus created two problems. First, in the upper echelons of planning, fewer voices remained willing to challenge his grandiose pronouncements. Second, despite over a century of Prussian military tradition of battlefield improvisation, Hitler began to control decisions mid-battle from Berlin or the Wolfsschanze. This dependency and insecurity manifested itself most fatally in Paulus' unwillingness or inability to take action after Russians encircled the Sixth Army. Had Manstein or Hitler ordered him to break the encirclement immediately, the Sixth Army quite likely would have been saved. Instead, Paulus wasted valuable days heeding his last (utterly insensible) order to maintain position as the Red Army slowly constricted the German Sixth.


7. Worse, in addition to creating cowed and paralyzed field commanders, Hitler's encouragement of a cronyist, kleptocratic state in which higher ministers carved out mini-fiefdoms and maneuvered against each other virtually guaranteed a never-ending supply of bad advice at home. In attempting to curry favor with Der Führer, advisors like Reichsmarschall and Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring felt no compunction in showing up rivals by nakedly lying about their abilities and trusting in their chance to fudge the numbers later. Hence, Göring's catastrophic lie that the Luftwaffe could supply the encircled Sixth Army by air — in spite of the fact that:

a. the Sixth Army needed roughly 750 tons of supplies per day;
b. Göring ignored this and promised 500 tons anyway;
c. his advisors told him the Luftwaffe could only supply at best 350 tons per day;
d. this ability would only be temporary;
e. this ability would depend on the strength of Soviet anti-aircraft fire, nearly perfect weather conditions and the continued silence of the Soviet Air Force.

It's doubtful that Hitler would have ordered the Sixth to break the encirclement had he been given better information, but no one can be sure. Nonetheless, an accurate reporting of the inability to resupply the Sixth would have forced some reconsideration, whatever the outcome.

8. Prior to the encirclement of the Sixth Army, both Hitler and the General Staff believed their own falsehoods about the strength of the armies under their command. What they wound up maneuvering on paper in Berlin often had little more value than paper. Corps depleted through street fighting, ill health and poor supplies often had little more to them than their names. In Berlin, these paper armies and the polite fiction that they still existed informed tactical decisions that affected hundreds of thousands of surviving troops. Not only did the insistence that ghost armies actually existed lead to less effective deployment that facilitated the Russians' encircling the Sixth, but this capacity for self-delusion (which manifested again in Goring's re-supply pledge) continued through to Hitler's belief that Paulus would commit suicide and that his famine-wracked army would fight to the death rather than surrender.

9. Finally, Hitler, as one would expect, lacked ideological flexibility. Despite creating a totalitarian state in which the truth was whatever he said it was right now, he lacked the mental capacity to do a strategic about-face. Having publicly declared that Germany would reduce Stalingrad's defenses and take control of a city with such a resonant name, he refused to withdraw his troops when the cost exceeded the gain. Rather than admit an error and redeploy his troops to a more profitable task, he committed and re-committed them to a war of attrition, consigning them to a fate like the troops at Verdun — a fate that he, as a WWI veteran, had pledged to avoid. This ossification of his strategic thinking stands oddly in contradistinction to Stalin's willingness to change his mind. Having begun the war convinced Germany wouldn't attack, Stalin adopted a horribly misguided no-surrender policy, later withdrawing troops to focus on the defense of Moscow and Leningrad, and still later realizing the benefit of old imperial affectations. Just as Hitler backslid into repeating the trench warfare mistakes of WWI, Stalin realized the benefit of a non-political, non-Bolshevik army system, stripping commissars of battlefield authority and reintroducing imperial medals to increase troop morale. By the end of the Stalingrad siege, the most opportunistic leader going into the war had become the most hidebound, while the fiercer ideologue had compromised the effects of his own purges when he saw a chance to stop his armies' bleeding.

10. As suggested in the above item, as the tangible benefits of Stalingrad sank deeper under rubble and corpses, the significance of the name loomed larger in Hitler's mentality and rhetoric. The war on the Ostfront very much resembled a battle by proxy, for both Hitler and Stalin, but Hitler believed more in its rhetorical and personal import as a corporeal victory slipped further out of reach. While it's true that ordering the remnants of the Sixth Army to fight to the last served to keep seven of Stalin's armies occupied with their reduction, it's also possible that Hitler sought to deprive Stalin, for as long as possible, of the city that bore his name while expending lives in what amounted to little more than rhetorical flourish and vain stagecraft.


PAULUS' ERRORS and SHORTCOMINGS

And what of the poor, much-maligned General Friedrich Paulus? Beevor is tough on Paulus, but it's tough to see how he does not deserve it. His critiques are these:

1. Paulus failed to liase with allied divisions, maintaining poor communications with the Romanian armies on his flank and failing to share supplies with them, despite their having almost no anti-tank weaponry. This last failure proved most costly during the Russian encirclement. Moreover, his impatience with earlier Romanian reports of Soviet activity — in fairness, they had cried wolf in the past — led him to discount their reports alerting Sixth Army HQ as to the commencement of the Russian encirclement. Finally, prior to the Russian attack, Romanian commanders asked to withdraw their troops to the rear bank of the Don river. Given their lack of anti-tank weapons, the Don could have been used as a natural tank defense. The Romanians were rebuffed and ordered to hold position.

2. Paulus squandered trained Panzer corps on meaningless streetfighting, leaving tanks behind to be driven by untrained or replacement personnel. Worse, he squandered his tanks on streetfighting, neglecting to place any vehicles in reserve for a swift counter-attack. Paulus complied with Hitler's fantasy that the Russians in Stalingrad represented the last of the Red Army. As such he was complicit in the Sixth Army's encirclement and destruction. Had he placed tanks and ammunition and fuel dumps in reserve ready to repel an attack, the Sixth not only could have avoided encirclement but also had the resources to crush much of the force arrayed against them. Instead of using his resources to prepare for attack, Paulus assented to every measure that sapped his ability to conduct a counterattack. When the General Staff recommended sending his horses far behind the lines to reduce the cost of shipping them food, he complied. In doing so, he immobilized his own artillery, still dependent on horses for transport. When the Russian attack came, German troops abandoned hundreds of guns to the enemy.

3. In many ways, Paulus exemplified the pliant, doubting German commander Hitler tried so ruthlessly to create, to increase his security as absolute leader of Germany. Beevor points out that while Paulus possessed many sound gifts as a planner, his patience, need for certainty and comfort working within a hierarchy where the ultimate responsibility did not lie with him made him particularly unsuited to be a battlefield commander. Because of this, he failed to realize that every day spent encircled by the Soviet army virtually eliminated the tiny remaining hope of breaking out of it. Only a swift and immediate counterattack to break the encirclement and flee west could have saved the Sixth Army. But Paulus' lack of personal initiative, unwillingness to ignore or creatively interpret orders and comfort in deferring to Hitler's order to stand his ground effectively destroyed the Sixth Army. Make no mistake: its destruction originates in Hitler's suicidal and hubristic orders, but Paulus' complicity and lack of imagination were necessary to carry them out.

These, then, are the lessons Beevor draws from the events leading to the Sixth Army's surrender. While he fairly gives credit to Stalin and the Red Army when appropriate (specifically: Stalin's ideological flexibility, the Soviets' excellent deception leading up to Operation Uranus, and General Georgy Zhukov and General Aleksandr Vasilevsky's thorough and excellent planning for it), the thrust of his arguments tends toward condemnation of Hitler, the General Staff and Paulus for hubris, lack of initiative and planning failures. The combination of new information, thoughtful argument and entertaining narrative style make Beevor's book not only smart and insightful but eminently readable. By the standards of historical writing and the prose stylings to which historians are prone, it is an exceptional book.

Rating: 5
Strongly recommended for anyone interested in history.

Stalingrad I: Reading History






Once every few months, a bell rings in my head reminding me that I used to be smart and am getting less so each passing day. For instance, the other day I stood in my kitchen and gestured feebly at a hand towel and said, "Hand me the... hand me the, uh... uh... drying flag." When this happens, I spend 20 minutes doing Wikipedia searches until I stumble across the entry for aphasia, swear this is the last time I'll forget to bookmark it, then pick a serious book to read in order to do some heavy brainisthenics.

This time I lucked into having someone to read a serious book with. I get to see my friend John about once a month, and while it seems he's the only person who reads as much as I do, he rarely if ever reads the same things I do at the same time. If he and I have both read de Tocqueville, it means I just finished it, and he read it in 1997. If we've both just finished something fictional, he's read something called Llanath, and the Transswaard Blood-Oath, which he swears is actually an excellent novel with literary qualities that just happens to be a fantasy novel, and which I would not read even if I were on fire and only the sight of its words could relieve my torment.

By chance, after having an idiot moment just a short bit ago, John called me and mentioned he wanted to read Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. My choice was clear. Without hesitation, I picked up Beevor's book, read a third of it, read a baseball book, read another third of Beevor's book, started another baseball book, read two issues of the New Yorker, then finally found out how the war ended. (Spoiler Alert: the Russians win.)

Before addressing the book itself, there are two truisms of historical writing and one of historical reading that must be mentioned. First, that of the thousands of master's and doctoral theses, books, textbooks and biographies written every year, 90% of them tell you something another book could tell you just as well. Thousands of people every year manage to revisit interesting topics unnecessarily, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. ("A new Jefferson laundry bill has been discovered! Here's my chance to argue he was America's first Reagan.")

Second, of the 10% of books about fascinating new topics or reviewing familiar material in dynamic new ways, 90% of them will be written very badly. Most of the authors probably can't be blamed. George Orwell wrote about this phenomenon in 1946 in "Politics and the English Language": something about academic and political language flogs ideas to death and drives all vitality from the page. By the time someone's sitting down to begin his Ph.D thesis, he probably can't answer the question, "Are you hungry?" without prefacing the answer with, "It may be fair to say...." If you ever have the privilege to read a history book both well-researched and well-written, chances are you heard about its name and author from non-academic sources, because it's a rarity that people will rave about.

Third, if you've never been a serious history student, the thing to remember about academic history reading is that you're not really reading for history: you're reading for historiography. If you get to the point where you've figured out you want to give someone tens of thousands of dollars for a paper that says you're an expert in telling other people about things that have already happened, you already know the Five W's of whatever you're studying. The reasoning behind the historian's stance, his motivation for rehabilitating one character and condemning another, whether he has access to new materials that others do not, these take primacy over "and then what happened?"*
___________________
* — The cheapest and quickest way to get the historiography out of a book requires reading no more than the introduction, the concluding chapter, and the first and last pages of every chapter. The first and last chapters usually feature the author saying, "Here is my point," and, "Here was my point," respectively. The opening and closing of each chapter tends to do the same in greater detail about specific facets of the historian's argument. History students, the ones with personal lives at least, discover this trick somewhere during finals freshmen year. Once you know five general facts about an event and two historians' opinions about it, you have ten different arguments to make and can fill bluebooks for hours at finals time. Unfortunately, this ploy can provide mixed results if you haven't read much history.

For instance, if you want to pull this trick on a book about the origins of the Second World War, you need to already know the Five W's about it. You're not looking for facts; you're looking for interpretation. You need to have already figured out what the hell a Hossbach Memorandum is, since that's probably the thing everyone's going to be arguing about anyway. Also, it's a good idea to know the principal arguments being thrown about. Sometimes a historian's point reads more clearly when you know whom he's arguing against. Knowing the opponent's thesis makes the bitchier elements of the book you're reading that much clearer. So without knowing names like A.J.P Taylor and terms like Sonderweg, you're going to wander helplessly in the wilderness. Still, once you have a little background, you can go to a bookstore an hour before meeting someone, spend thirty minutes flipping through introductions and conclusions and cobble together a brief opinion to give on that "functionalist jackass Kershaw."
___________________
This explains why history wonks are apt to tell you that an entertaining history book is actually terrible. Typically, if the author produces a text whose every semblance of liveliness hasn't been crushed to death, chances are he:

is an idiot whom no graduate school wanted, allowing him to walk away with his purple prose and bad ideas unscathed;

is an ideological idiot who's omitting fact in order to make punchy points and make room for punchier sentences (the right wing tends to produce rather more of these — mainly, I think, because writing a book is a long-term commitment and eventually liberals would start to feel guilty about the dishonesty, but also because republicans just seem to really enjoy making up hateful bullshit);

authored a book you found at the Barnes & Noble $4.99 bargain table, home of such tomes as Lincoln: America's Second Reagan, Roman Emperors Who Were Also Spies, Cop/Hooker: A Memoir, and Ignominious IV: The Pope Who Totally Killed This Dude Who Was Going to Be an All-Pro Running Back for Penn State;

or, if you're very lucky, you're holding in your hand one of those 1-in-100 works in which the writing and scholarship are top notch. Antony Beevor's Stalingrad qualifies as one such book. Unfortunately, I doubt the reliability of my rating, mostly because my Battle of Stalingrad knowledge is fairly slim, owing to a sharp dislike of military history.

As far as historiographical dislikes go, it's hardly an irrational one. Military historians tend to make two major mistakes in writing military histories for a general audience. First, they assume everyone else really, really loves military history the way they do. John Keegan — arguably the best living military historian, and a popular one at that — still suffers such a problem in his First World War, in which pages seem to stretch on with passages like:

At 8:45 a.m., Col. Beaufort of IX Corps at the Malreaux salient telegraphed to 24th Army HQ that all was prepared. At 8:47 a.m., 24th Army HQ telegraphed back to IX Corps to indicate "message received." At 8:49 a.m., outside the Malreaux salient, Lt. H. F. Jeffaud noticed that some mud had rolled down some other mud, which altered the shape of the salient 0.0000274%. Thus, at 8:51 a.m. Col. Beaufort reported to 24th Army HQ that IX Corps had lost 0.0000274% of the Malreaux salient to either the enemy or gravity. "Quite frankly," he confessed later, in a diary, "it was just too early to tell."

If you're at all a normal human being, the numbers bleed together, none of it makes the slightest bit of sense, and you're bored to tears. More importantly, you can't visualize any of it, which makes everything the author writes about later seem like a horrible marl of mud and squiggly lines. This is the second problem military historians have: they mistakenly assume that readers can visualize the battlefield with the same clarity they can, despite not having spent the last three years of their lives staring at four-foot maps in a french archive.

Thankfully, Beevor hasn't picked maps so hopelessly vague as to aid only the specialist. The handful of maps in the book clearly show every major movement you need to know, and they're placed in chapters just at the time that the new troop dispositions need to be visually relevant to the narrative. More importantly, though, Beevor doesn't belabor minute troop movements and company-by-company dispositions of the lines. He's more interested in broad causes, failures in leadership and the horrible conditions in which the troops of both sides lived and fought.

This distinction makes Beevor unique amongst military historians. Too often, the minutiae of ranks, dispositions and number of guns seem to be the whole point of a military history, with consequences and interpretations tacked on as an unpleasant afterthought necessary to legitimize 500 pages of war pornography. But with Beevor, though he studied under Keegan and at Sandhurst and served five years as a military officer, the military details exist to give you the clearest possible idea of how each force acted and, more importantly, to explain why each action was significant.*
___________________
* — It's a credit to either Beevor's command of language or the quality of my professors that, even eight years since last reading a history book for a serious purpose, the historiographically significant portions of the book came leaping off the page at me in a logically organized manner. I used to be able to read a book for my thesis in one night and write down ten page numbers in a small notebook, reach the end of the book, flip back to the ten pages and write a five-page response paper, with quotations, in about 45 minutes. I'd long suspected that this skill was lost forever, but I suppose it had gone only because I hadn't called upon it. Granted, I'd retained the annoying voice that would pop up while reading history books and say, "This is important and the core of X's point!" (In talking to friends and family of similar backgrounds, I've learned this voice apparently never entirely goes away for anyone.) But I suppose what surprised me most was the rapidity with which I organized these annoying voices into a coherent response, something I didn't have to do at all and something I hadn't done in a long time.

The credit for my mental rejuvenation also belongs to my friend John. For about three months, every time I spoke to him, he told me about some two-volume 2,000-page history of WWII written by some British historian with such dry detail that he might as well have had a five-page chapter on every single day of the war. Almost everything John had to say about the book came as a revelation. It made me feel like a total moron. I think I read this book with as much focus as I did precisely because I didn't want to talk with him about it, hear him say, "Well, I think Beevor's thesis hinges on Points A, B, C, D and E," to which I'd reply, "Buuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ffffffffffffffffsssssssshhhhhhhhhhh" and then stab myself in the face with the bottom end of my ice-cream cone.
___________________
Of course, the star of Beevor's scholarship is the wealth of new material he presents, as well as the breadth of old material finally synthesized in one resource. The fact that almost every book written even peripherally about the subject since Stalingrad's publication cites Beevor heavily testifies to the quality of his research. Beevor drew on personal interviews with survivors from both sides, unprecedented access to Soviet diaries and German letters and written materials that were found or seized by the Soviets.

Yet despite the wealth of new knowledge on the Soviet side, the impetus for these events belongs to Adolf Hitler, to the German General Staff and, to a lesser extent, to General Friedrich Paulus. It's a German story. The story told in Russia may still be about The Great Patriotic War, and in our minds we may first think of thousands of faceless armed Russian peasants slogging across a punishing white landscape to exact their revenge. But the heart of the story remains more compellingly the high-water mark of the Third Reich. The progression of events stems from the Germans' blunders, without which they would not have broken the Wehrmacht's back on a city on the Volga.

Review continues tomorrow.

My Friend Cory Has Been Trapper-Keepered by a Lack of Imagination






You may remember my friend Cory from the first chatlog I posted. You know, the good one. Cory — who Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" function tells me is the person pictured at right — has gone back to school to get an MFA in Creative Writing, and he's already made two huge mistakes.

First up, the degree. Do you have any idea how many chumps who want to get an MFA in creative writing enroll in a creative writing MFA program? Like, all of them. Idiots. If you really want to wow the prof. with your creativity, you need some misdirection. You ever notice how all magicians have really hot lady assistants with tremendous racks? Of course you did. What you didn't notice was the magician inserting a tiny plastic barrier into the tank to keep his face separated from the piranhas and the wolf eels. Misdirection.

If you really want to blow away your MFA thesis advisor, walk into the room looking confused. Sheepishly answer every question he asks with something non-committal and awkward, if not self-contradictory. Try to exude befuddlement and incompetence. Then, when you're locked into the coursework and the DROP/ADD period has passed, hit him with Big Reveal #1: you're actually a Ph.D candidate in geography, specializing in hydrography and in particular undersea mountain ridges; you just walked into the creative writing classroom by accident and were too mortified by your mistake to leave. With any luck, he'll be so moved by your crippling lack of self-confidence and your determination to succeed in a field you don't even like that he'll go bonkers over your tediously workmanlike story of a man on the verge of 30 going back to school, suddenly feeling old and learning the lesson that, while creative writing is easy, the more difficult and rewarding task is creative living.

Now here's the tricky part. After he's already raved about the thesis, make sure you have his evaluation and the thesis in your hands. Then you hit him with Big Reveal #2: you really are a creative writing master's candidate, and this was all an elaborate lie. See? This is actually creative. Any twit who wants a degree in P.E. can show up in gym shorts and do calisthenics in a P.E. program. You think that makes for an interesting story? It takes real stones and wit to show up to a P.E. program in a wheelchair in order to get a master's in non-Euclidean geometry. If your professor applauds your dynamism, guile and, above all, creativity, then let him grade the thesis again and up your evaluation. If he flips out, you've already got all the papers you'll need in your hands. Don't look back—RUN!

But, of course, he didn't do that. Cory took the totally obvious route. Then he wrote a blog post about it. This was mistake number two. Read that title. Go ahead, read it. What's it say? "I Hope All the Other Kids Like My Trapper Keeper." Now read that blog entry. Six-hundred ninety-two words. That's right; I counted. So where's this mistake?

Look, Cory, I got a free tip for you, Mr. Creative Writer. If you start out a story by mentioning a Trapper Keeper and then finish it without saying shit about the Trapper Keeper, your story frickin' blows.

Seriously, I clicked on these six paragraphs of "whaaaaah do I really have what it takes to ROCK IT???" navel-gazing blueballs for one reason and one reason only: to find out what was on the goddamn Trapper Keeper, and I get to the end, and there isn't a thing said about it.

Well you know what? Forget it. Anyone who would do that kind of thing to a dude reading his story is someone whose Trapper Keeper I don't want to see. Besides, I already know what kind of Trapper Keeper you'd have. You'd have the lamest one possible. It would fall apart and it wouldn't even hold your official Mary-Kate & Ashley stationery, and the velcro wouldn't even shut. In fact, I'm so convinced that you would, even accidentally, have the gayest-ass Trapper Keeper possible that I can guess with 100% accuracy exactly what style Trapper Keeper you would have for each TV show.

Star Trek:
Fabulous Sulu

Uncomfortably Sexual Old Uhura

Knight Rider:
Devon Miles

The Dukes of Hazzard:
Coy and Vance Duke

Babylon 5:
Peacock Hair Dude

Miami Vice:
Detective Stan Switek

Airwolf:
Anything Other Than the Helicopter

Do you see what this is? Do you see this, Cory? This is me creatively throwing down. There are cattle out there who've been accidentally branded twice whose asses haven't been burned and owned this hard. Seriously, save your money and drop out of that MFA program, because you just got schooled, son.

The Executioner's Song






Clocking in at a hefty 1,050 pages of both non-fiction and life that will not be returned to me, it's sort of a waste to not talk about this book. It's also sort of a waste because it's an excellent book.

The Executioner's Song is probably categorized best as a "new journalism" book. Constructed from thousands of hours of interviews with hundreds of people, it tells the tale of Gary Mark Gilmore, a man who spent most of his life behind bars, was released, fell in love, murdered two people, was sentenced to death and was then almost forbidden to die after he asked that he simply be executed on schedule and without appeal.

The book begins with his parole, follows his non-adjustment to life outside, his love affair, his murders and then ends after his death. (This isn't a spoiler, by the way. At the time the book was written, everyone in America knew who Gilmore was and what happened to him.) Gilmore is a fascinating main character. He's a career thief, a violent ex-con, a charming and bright autodidact, a painter and an amateur poet.

The book is as much a character study as it is an indictment of the American penal system. Gilmore, for all intents and purposes, should be "reformed." Yet what the reader finds is a man so malformed by prison that fundamental aspects of being a free man are absolutely alien and unimaginable to him. Further, the book is also a meditation on capital punishment. Gilmore's execution came at the end of an eleven-year moratorium on executions in the United States. As such, executing Gary Gilmore said something, legally, about what America was.

All of this is pretty pedantic, but I think the book succeeds overall in not lecturing people. The narration is third-person omniscient and in the past tense. Author Norman Mailer reports without editorializing, at least not in a way easily detectible within the progression of the story. When prison "reformation" is discussed or lambasted, it's done by the people who were involved. Critiques of the death penalty sound from the ACLU lawyers who sought to stay Gilmore's execution. Praise and ridicule of the media that sought to capitalize on Gilmore's crimes by making them famous comes from those who were in the media's eye or working as journalists at the time.

Despite its enormity, the book is actually a well-paced and entertaining read. If you can make it through the first hundred pages, you'll probably finish the book. The first 500 are devoted to Gilmore's release, love affair, work, crimes and trial. The last 500 are devoted to the media frenzy, spin, "exclusive rights" deals and legal wrangling over his death. The book intensifies in pace with each hundred pages or so, and the second half almost reads as a sprint to a very ghoulish finish line.

The flaws in the book are limited but important. The first one is length. This is a very good 1,050-page book, but it's hard not to wonder how much better it could have been at even 950. Exhaustive detail about the lives of all the protagonists can be interesting but not for every person involved. While it's nice to know that Gilmore's mom was a Mormon who left home to be with a man and who also told her family that a mountain near their house was "her mountain," it's not really that important. It hardly illuminates her relationship with Gary. Details like this give the reader pause and make him wonder, despite the book's pleasures, whether everything is really leading somewhere.

Similarly, it's nice to know the backgrounds of his various attorneys, but you don't really need to know anecdotes about when they played college ball. It has zero bearing on their relationship to Gary and instead seems like Mailer just pointing out to the reader, "By the way, I know everything about everyone in this book, and I could tell you even more than this, but instead I'll just leave you these few extraneous details to let you know how much more I could tell you." The 100 pages devoted to that stuff could be removed, and it wouldn't take even a shade away from the dimensions of Gilmore's character.

The second problem is accuracy. Mailer perhaps rightly — and certainly cagily — doesn't mention it until the afterword, but there is a lot of interpolation going on in this book. Though there are tens of thousands of hours of interviews to rely on, not to mention the thousands of pages that Gilmore wrote to his girlfriend, people just basically forget when and where stuff happened. You don't know at the beginning just how much Mailer guesses his way through all of this. Worse, he excises portions of newspaper articles and transposes parts of interviews and letters in order to "avoid repetition" and make for "more cohesion." But all the same, you can't really be sure what's done for artistry's sake and what's done for the truth's sake. Mailer doesn't editorialize with his narrator's voice, but how much editorializing was done with the arrangement and presentation of the facts and "what people could remember"? I'd like to think that he'd be above petty axe-grinding when he compiled his facts, but everyone has his weaknesses.

The Executioner's Song is far more entertaining than any "serious" and "huge" book has any right to be. Though it is journalism, you could easily imagine this book succeeding as a novel. In a way, the journalistic aspects melt so effectively into the background that one can read this as a novel. That aspect and the troubles related to the veracity of the reporting probably explain why the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.


RATING: 4
Point taken off for length, a sometimes overbearing devotion to background details and potential monkeying with "the record." Recommended to law wonks, journalism wonks, true crime wonks and sociology wonks. Not recommended to people who don't dig the long book, anyone looking for gory details.