In possibly the most famous baseball event/moment of all the time, New York Giants’ star Bobby Thompson hit a home run in the bottom on the ninth inning off pitcher Ralph Branca to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, 5-4, to win the National League pennant.

It is now known, famously, as ‘The Shot Heard ‘Round the World.’

But it turns out, Thompson and the Giants were cheating.

They were stealing the Dodgers’ pitching signs and knew what was coming. Author Joshua Prager has written a book about it, years after he came up with the original theory.

One literary note: the best chronicle of the game (obviously fictionalized), is possibly the best piece of American prose written in the past 40 years…it is the opening chapter of Don DeLillo’s literary masterpiece Underworld.

It’s taken me a while to post this, because I have been busy with tons of other stuff. But we (the Kiel-based Fulbrighters) took a trip to Lübeck, in northern Germany about two-and-a-half weeks ago.

And besides being one of the most scenic and picturesque cities (please look through all my photos on flickr –its incredible), it also is the birthplace of novelist Thomas Mann.

And most apropos to my current reading (and life), the city was also the site of a horrific Allied bombing during WWII, where (if I understand it correctly) American and British forces firebombed the city, as a test to see if their new firepower and military weaponry would be effective in the German naval city of Kiel.

Both Kiel and Lübeck were similarly designed and built, so a “successful” test in Lubeck would be a good indication of how the firebombing would “work” in Kiel, where Hitler’s submarines and warships were built, repaired, and docked.

And the bombing of Lubeck took place on Good Sunday 1942.

And so the significance of that date, and event, was featured prominently in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

And in it, Pynchon surmises that the unexpected and horrible Lubeck raid helped facilitate and energize the German development of the V-2 rocket.

(more…)

Poem:

“For the Falling Man”

by Annie Farnsworth from Bodies of Water, Bodies of Light.

© Annie Farnsworth. Reprinted with permission.

I see you again and again
tumbling out of the sky,
in your slate-grey suit and pressed white shirt.

At first I thought you were debris
from the explosion, maybe gray plaster wall
or fuselage but then I realized
that people were leaping.

I know who you are, I know
there’s more to you than just this image
on the news, this ragdoll plummeting—

I know you were someone’s lover, husband,
daddy. Last night you read stories
to your children, tucked them in, then curled into sleep
next to your wife. Perhaps there was small
sleepy talk of the future. Then,
before your morning coffee had cooled
you’d come to this; a choice between fire
or falling.

How feeble these words, billowing
in this aftermath, how ineffectual
this utterance of sorrow. We can see plainly
it’s hopeless, even as the words trail from our mouths
—but we can’t help ourselves—how I wish
we could trade them for something
that could really have caught you.

More Portraits of Grief.

Supposedly the great literary mind of our generation is Dave Eggers, he of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Besides his own literary work, Eggers edits the acclaimed McSweeney’s literary zine and runs the 862 Valencia art studio in SF (and its chain of facsimiles in other cities).

But Eggers’ PR savvy, his knack for self-promotion (z.B., he actually applied to be on the Real World in San Francisco), and the lack of depth in most-to-all of his writing, to me evidence a better marketer than writer.

Whereas on the other hand is David Foster Wallace, who has gotten his share of praise and accolades. But Wallace is still rarely mentioned as the next great American writer. In fact, I have seen the Jonathan Safran Foer mentioned ahead of Wallace — which is real proof that media-savvy can sometimes trump real literary talent.

But in last month’s article about Roger Federer in the New York Times Magazine sports supplement, Wallace proved why he writes stylistically and, possibly more importantly, about subject matter with more talent than Eggers has ever demonstrated.

It may be true that Wallace has already reached the heights of his success and talent with Infinite Jest, but even that is enough. A contribution of that size and enormity to the American literary landscape is worth 10 “heartbreaking works.”

And that’s forgetting that he has contributed other fun and enjoyable reads, though all are of far less weight that IJ.

I had no idea until today (where have I been?) but Thomas Pynchon has written a new novel.

The always-elusive Pynchon described as “If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two” in a now-deleted descriptor on Amazon.com.

John Stodder, the Los Angeles blogger, has the best post about it. (Thanks, LAObserved.com)