Comments on Ben and Alice: Bill James and the lemur

I'm teaching Moby-Dick and Gravity's Rai...

2008-07-30T14:40:00.000-04:00
I'm teaching Moby-Dick and Gravity's Rainbow together in a class about the encyclopedic novel. My dad suggested that I replace Pynchon with David Foster Wallace. So maybe DFW gets more readable with Melville in mind?

Bill James is on 'shrooms. The weasel, fisher, of...

2008-07-30T12:10:00.000-04:00
Bill James is on 'shrooms. The weasel, fisher, of skinny racoon he saw was not a ring-tailed lemur.

Another place where lemurs and baseball come together is our myspace music page -- where you can literally hear a song about lemurs, the 2004 Red Sox, and the pre-roids scandal Sammy Sosa. It's all there, baby!
www.myspace.com/wearemoonbats

This post made me laugh because, bizarrely enough,...

2008-07-29T21:59:00.000-04:00
This post made me laugh because, bizarrely enough, last night, despite not knowing about the New Yorker piece (our New Yorkers arrive late here in the Midwest), I thought about:

1 Bill James, because he loves
2 C. C. Sabathia, who was pitching in the baseball game I was watching,
3 Lemurs, because I'd just learned that Byron had one, and
4 Moby-Dick, because I was trying to draw on my love of its sprawling immensity to make me more receptive to the potential charms of Infinite Jest, which I was reading.

And I love that reading of Moby-Dick as "recombining multiple forms of information in an attempt to grasp something elusive." Such a helpful way to think about it!