Atlanta and Houston are each one win away from a World Series matchup, I saw Jason Isbell at the Ryman last night, and I review Nick Offerman's new book.
He has been on an uncanny run of being comically wrong lately, to the point where it's become a meme that he can actually change the outcome of things by expressing a view.
Ok both those books sound like they are right up my alley.
I used to read all the time then fell out of the habit because it didn't seem "productive" (barf) and was too easy to skip unless it was required for a class or work, but I've been starting to schedule time in the evenings to read before I'm too tired so I have hopes those won't just sit on a shelf collecting dust.
I look at a MASSIVE tome like Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama and can't believe the brain in my head currently is the same one that read a dense 2" thick book on how human history and thought is influenced by landscapes both physical and imaginary.
That of course is assuming I actually stick to a schedule.
Of all my talents, likely my most outstanding one is the ability to meticulously write down detailed to-do lists and then immediately ignore the entire thing and poke around on my phone playing solitaire while I sit outside in the yard with my dog.
When my work-life balance is out of skew (rather often unfortunately) and I am not reading for pleasure, I feel unproductive about how I'm spending my leisure time.
The smart devices definitely cut into my reading time, but I'm fighting back. I'm working through Riders In The Chariot by Patrick White (fiction) and The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski right now, and I'm moving the bookmarks...
Can we still make fun of the Nats "fans" who do their best imitation of Lt. Dangle mixing drinks in his trailer with the most unoriginal cheer this side of Ric Flair?
That one at least is organic and doesn’t bother me as much as the “wave your caps“ thing after the top of the 4th … which I now think is just so people will be on their feet for when they introduce the members of the military. If I remember correctly, they had some sort of contest to decide on a “tradition“ for the new team back in 2005 and that’s what they landed on… And they have stuck to it stubbornly ever since.
PS It me, the guy who has never listened to Jason Isbell. I will try to remedy that soon.
Children of Children followed by Decoration Day would be my favorite concert moment ever... Damn. So glad you had a great time. One day I'll get to the Ryman.
Also, at Fenway last night we had a similar conversation about Valdez pitching 8 innings. It was legitimately shocking to see a pitcher go that deep.
I’d heard about the Offerman book but forgot about it. Your review here will make me pull the trigger on getting it. I did read Rebanks’ first book and would highly recommend it. I started following him on Twitter because I liked peaceful pictures of sheep and dogs, but the book is a thoughtful well written memoir. His recent book, called English Pastoral in the UK but Pastoral Song in the US, goes into more detail about the things you mention here. I haven’t read that one yet but if it’s anything like his first book it will be worth a read.
Fandom is so strange. I often wish I wasn't a fan of the team I'm a fan of (Twins). But hey, when I started playing baseball, there weren't any Dutch players in MLB, and even though he was only born here and moved to the USA when he was 4 years old, Blyleven is Dutch damnit!
But now my Twins fandom is really just a way to stay connected with my real sports love, an excuse to look at scores and follow the stories.
My current active sport though, hoo boy, do tennisfans have some crazy, crazy adherence to players. Maybe being a fan of an individual instead of a team brings out the extra special kind of crazy in fans?
Those books sound like something I will like. One will go nicely next to The End of Everything, a very readable populair science book about the possible ways the universe (the whole thing, not just our planet) may end.
That new Graeber book sounds a bit like his book "Debt: The First 5000 Years" through a slightly different prism. Highly recommend it if you haven't read it. I went back through my notes from reading it and pulled out this passage that sounds like echoes what this new book is about:
"Cash transactions between strangers were different [...] Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of how many of X will go for how many of Y, of calculating proportions, estimating quality, and trying to get the best deal for oneself. The result, during the Axial Age, was a new way of thinking about human motivation, a radical simplification of motives that made it possible to begin speaking of concepts like "profit" and "advantage"— and imagining that this is what people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence, as if the violence of war or the impersonality of the marketplace has simply allowed them to drop the pretense that they ever cared about anything else. It was this, in turn, that allowed human life to seem like it could be reduced to a matter of means-to-end calculation, and hence something that could be examined using the same means that one used to study the attraction and repulsion of celestial bodies. If the underlying assumption very much resembles those of contemporary economists, it's no coincidence—but with the difference that, in an age when money, markets, states, and military affairs were all intrinsically connected, money was needed to pay armies to capture slaves to mine gold to produce money; when "cutthroat competition" often did involve the literal cutting of throats, it never occurred to anyone to imagine that selfish ends could be pursued by peaceful means. Certainly, this picture of humanity does begin to appear, with startling consistency, across Eurasia, wherever we also see coinage and philosophy appear."
My wife is always amazed at how stoic I can be during emotional movies while she’s wiping tears away. Like I’m dead inside. What she doesn’t know is that I cannot make it through goddamn If We Were Vampires without practically sobbing.
I have long encountered "fandom purity" in the various science fiction fan communities. Only there it has the effect of scaring off anyone younger who might be part of the communities. It's kind of sad.
And I can speak from the experience of someone who was into superhero comics when they were the single most uncool thing and not the source of the Entertainment Industrial Complex's biggest cash cow. So there are times I find myself saying "I was into this stuff way before you, and you also don't really know a thing about these characters." And other times that I lament that there are millions of people who love superheroes and have never read a comic book. And what's more, they still think comics aren't cool. I can't win!
While I am not into comic books and superheros, I am way into Star Wars which unfortunately has similar levels of gatekeeping. I love Star Wars, but I hate a lot of Star Wars fans.
So I have heard. I lucked out and found a game through my wife that is pretty free of that. Doesn't hurt that all the players besides us are under 30, and that all the players but me are women. The toxic masculinity of the people my age who have been playing since 1983 is missing.
The Dawn of Everything sounds excellent. Pretty much anything with more information about Gobekli Tepe goes straight into my veins. Thanks for the callout!
That's the kind of stuff that fascinates me, anyway -- "What if most of us share the same language family because a Proto-Indo-European named Grok invented wagons right before the last glacial maximum ended?"
That and whatever the hell was going on in Ancient Elam. Nobody seems to know (in the west at least).
Drunk is a fun one too - I am not done yet, but in short "Societies may have formed once everyone realized you need to coordinate efforts to make that much beer."
That is one helluva set list. I'm deeply envious. I saw half a Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit show in Portland, Maine once, before I knew who he really was. I'd gone to see Josh Ritter, the opener. My wife was not into Jason (apologies), so we left early. I have since become a huge Isbell fan, and if I'd known him better at the time I probably would have had her go wait for me while I watched the rest of the show. That might not have gone over well...
I'd like to imagine one of my fellow regular commenters is the screen name of Nick Offerman, and we're all conversing with regularly. So if you're not Nick Offerman, don't tell me you aren't and ruin the illusion.
Even if you are Nick Offerman, don't tell us. It's better that were having back and forth discussions untainted by the fact we know you're a celebrity.
(All that said, I'm thinking it's Nato Coles with a convincing fake backstory)
Am I the only dork old enough to remember when Jeff Jarrett promised to rename the Ryman Auditorium as the “Double J Auditorium”? Guess we’re all still waiting.
Just checked the library website and they have one copy of Offerman's book, and it's not checked out. It will be in my hands in a couple of days when they transfer it to the library closest to me for pickup.
I have to say one good thing that came from the pandemic is it got me in the habit of checking the library first, before buying a book.
I was in the Ryman 3 or 4 years ago. I was in Nashville for a work conference and flew in a couple of days early to visit the town before the conference. I stayed in a Vanderbilt student's spare bedroom for $25 a night. Gotta love Air BnB. I was just in the Ryman in the afternoon, there was no show or anything going on. There was a highschool choral group in there too, maybe 20 kids, that decided to check off sing in the Ryman from their bucket list. They way those 20 odd kids voices filled the room was magical. I can only imagine was Isbell and the 400 sounded like. The acoustics in that place are unbelievable.
The NLCS is not over yet, but I would like to remind everyone that I said the NL East winner could have a "puncher's chance" in the postseason; I actually thought they'd have more trouble escaping Milwaukee but (as Nato has noted) the Brew Crew forgot that you have to both pitch AND hit in the postseason. Regardless of the outcome, I am going revel in being right.
After 8 innings of solid pitching and with a relatively low pitch count, I was a wee bit surprised Dusty didn’t let Valdez come back out for the 9th. Regardless, it was refreshing and nice to have a game where the pitcher did what you historically think of as starting pitcher duty AND to see the first 5 innings feel like what I love, a pitching duel. I know the casual fans love the offensive action, but I love everything about the strategy and beauty of two pitchers and two catchers who are just on. It was also nice to see the Astros retake the lead in the series (talk about complicated fandoms!).
I knew Nick Offerman was a big baseball fan, but only through the show “Making It” which, if you haven’t seen it, is the most awesome and purely delightful thing on TV. It was my salve when I felt the world was falling apart in recent years. Interestingly, it’s also the only way I know Offerman because -GASP- I didn’t watch Parks and Rec. His book sounds like a good read. I’m a weird person who likes to read about hiking and camping, but doesn’t actually do it. I imagine I was outdoorsy in a previous life, but now I sometimes have drinks on the patio and that’s really the extent of my communing with nature. But man, do I love the scenery it provides.
Which confused me, because I couldn't remember Nick Offerman being in it. Then I realized I couldn't remember anything about the show at all except its theme song. I'm watching the credits in the above link, waiting to see Nick Offerman's name and what he was doing in an old, apparently disco themed, sitcom, without taking the time to think he would have only been 9 years old at the time.
*Almost* no one is counting their chickens before they hatch.
https://twitter.com/UnfortunateMLB/status/1451028584672505857
That seals it: L.A. in seven.
He has been on an uncanny run of being comically wrong lately, to the point where it's become a meme that he can actually change the outcome of things by expressing a view.
Lately?
Ok both those books sound like they are right up my alley.
I used to read all the time then fell out of the habit because it didn't seem "productive" (barf) and was too easy to skip unless it was required for a class or work, but I've been starting to schedule time in the evenings to read before I'm too tired so I have hopes those won't just sit on a shelf collecting dust.
Ugh, I fall into that trap too. Scheduling time is a good idea to combat it.
I look at a MASSIVE tome like Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama and can't believe the brain in my head currently is the same one that read a dense 2" thick book on how human history and thought is influenced by landscapes both physical and imaginary.
It's just not possible.
That of course is assuming I actually stick to a schedule.
Of all my talents, likely my most outstanding one is the ability to meticulously write down detailed to-do lists and then immediately ignore the entire thing and poke around on my phone playing solitaire while I sit outside in the yard with my dog.
When my work-life balance is out of skew (rather often unfortunately) and I am not reading for pleasure, I feel unproductive about how I'm spending my leisure time.
Check out John McPhee, one of my personal favorites. Offerman's subject matter and style sound very similar. Start with "Travels in Georgia."
The smart devices definitely cut into my reading time, but I'm fighting back. I'm working through Riders In The Chariot by Patrick White (fiction) and The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski right now, and I'm moving the bookmarks...
Can we still make fun of the Nats "fans" who do their best imitation of Lt. Dangle mixing drinks in his trailer with the most unoriginal cheer this side of Ric Flair?
That one at least is organic and doesn’t bother me as much as the “wave your caps“ thing after the top of the 4th … which I now think is just so people will be on their feet for when they introduce the members of the military. If I remember correctly, they had some sort of contest to decide on a “tradition“ for the new team back in 2005 and that’s what they landed on… And they have stuck to it stubbornly ever since.
PS It me, the guy who has never listened to Jason Isbell. I will try to remedy that soon.
Except it’s not — off the top of my head the Jets and the UK Wildcats have. The. Exact. Same. Cheer.
Asking not arguing - including the "woo!"?
Full disclosure - I don't love it but it seems to make people (who are in attendance) happy so I'm OK with it. Anything's better than the Wave.
Maybe not the “woo!” But insistence that that makes is a very Vanilla Ice kind of argument (https://youtu.be/6TLo4Z_LWu4)
Again, not insisting ... it's more than a little silly but it feels genuine to me. Clearly your mileage varies!
Can we at least agree that "Take On Me" is fun - especially all the people trying to hit the high note when the music drops out?
That we can - it reminds me of this https://youtu.be/8jDTCRhCbX8
Children of Children followed by Decoration Day would be my favorite concert moment ever... Damn. So glad you had a great time. One day I'll get to the Ryman.
Also, at Fenway last night we had a similar conversation about Valdez pitching 8 innings. It was legitimately shocking to see a pitcher go that deep.
I’d heard about the Offerman book but forgot about it. Your review here will make me pull the trigger on getting it. I did read Rebanks’ first book and would highly recommend it. I started following him on Twitter because I liked peaceful pictures of sheep and dogs, but the book is a thoughtful well written memoir. His recent book, called English Pastoral in the UK but Pastoral Song in the US, goes into more detail about the things you mention here. I haven’t read that one yet but if it’s anything like his first book it will be worth a read.
Fandom is so strange. I often wish I wasn't a fan of the team I'm a fan of (Twins). But hey, when I started playing baseball, there weren't any Dutch players in MLB, and even though he was only born here and moved to the USA when he was 4 years old, Blyleven is Dutch damnit!
But now my Twins fandom is really just a way to stay connected with my real sports love, an excuse to look at scores and follow the stories.
My current active sport though, hoo boy, do tennisfans have some crazy, crazy adherence to players. Maybe being a fan of an individual instead of a team brings out the extra special kind of crazy in fans?
Those books sound like something I will like. One will go nicely next to The End of Everything, a very readable populair science book about the possible ways the universe (the whole thing, not just our planet) may end.
My lasting memory of Bert (the pic on the right):
https://twitter.com/super70ssports/status/800908482400624641
That new Graeber book sounds a bit like his book "Debt: The First 5000 Years" through a slightly different prism. Highly recommend it if you haven't read it. I went back through my notes from reading it and pulled out this passage that sounds like echoes what this new book is about:
"Cash transactions between strangers were different [...] Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of how many of X will go for how many of Y, of calculating proportions, estimating quality, and trying to get the best deal for oneself. The result, during the Axial Age, was a new way of thinking about human motivation, a radical simplification of motives that made it possible to begin speaking of concepts like "profit" and "advantage"— and imagining that this is what people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence, as if the violence of war or the impersonality of the marketplace has simply allowed them to drop the pretense that they ever cared about anything else. It was this, in turn, that allowed human life to seem like it could be reduced to a matter of means-to-end calculation, and hence something that could be examined using the same means that one used to study the attraction and repulsion of celestial bodies. If the underlying assumption very much resembles those of contemporary economists, it's no coincidence—but with the difference that, in an age when money, markets, states, and military affairs were all intrinsically connected, money was needed to pay armies to capture slaves to mine gold to produce money; when "cutthroat competition" often did involve the literal cutting of throats, it never occurred to anyone to imagine that selfish ends could be pursued by peaceful means. Certainly, this picture of humanity does begin to appear, with startling consistency, across Eurasia, wherever we also see coinage and philosophy appear."
My wife is always amazed at how stoic I can be during emotional movies while she’s wiping tears away. Like I’m dead inside. What she doesn’t know is that I cannot make it through goddamn If We Were Vampires without practically sobbing.
I have long encountered "fandom purity" in the various science fiction fan communities. Only there it has the effect of scaring off anyone younger who might be part of the communities. It's kind of sad.
And I can speak from the experience of someone who was into superhero comics when they were the single most uncool thing and not the source of the Entertainment Industrial Complex's biggest cash cow. So there are times I find myself saying "I was into this stuff way before you, and you also don't really know a thing about these characters." And other times that I lament that there are millions of people who love superheroes and have never read a comic book. And what's more, they still think comics aren't cool. I can't win!
I'd wager that the sports fandom culture that Craig talks about applies to *any* field with a significant fandom.
While I am not into comic books and superheros, I am way into Star Wars which unfortunately has similar levels of gatekeeping. I love Star Wars, but I hate a lot of Star Wars fans.
Role playing games is another one that can be not only rabid but actively toxic.
So I have heard. I lucked out and found a game through my wife that is pretty free of that. Doesn't hurt that all the players besides us are under 30, and that all the players but me are women. The toxic masculinity of the people my age who have been playing since 1983 is missing.
The Dawn of Everything sounds excellent. Pretty much anything with more information about Gobekli Tepe goes straight into my veins. Thanks for the callout!
That's the kind of stuff that fascinates me, anyway -- "What if most of us share the same language family because a Proto-Indo-European named Grok invented wagons right before the last glacial maximum ended?"
That and whatever the hell was going on in Ancient Elam. Nobody seems to know (in the west at least).
Drunk is a fun one too - I am not done yet, but in short "Societies may have formed once everyone realized you need to coordinate efforts to make that much beer."
You sound like you must already know about this, but if you don't: Patrick Wyman's podcast "Tides of History" is incredible.
It’s unbelievable how accessible he makes prehistory.
That is one helluva set list. I'm deeply envious. I saw half a Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit show in Portland, Maine once, before I knew who he really was. I'd gone to see Josh Ritter, the opener. My wife was not into Jason (apologies), so we left early. I have since become a huge Isbell fan, and if I'd known him better at the time I probably would have had her go wait for me while I watched the rest of the show. That might not have gone over well...
I'd like to imagine one of my fellow regular commenters is the screen name of Nick Offerman, and we're all conversing with regularly. So if you're not Nick Offerman, don't tell me you aren't and ruin the illusion.
Even if you are Nick Offerman, don't tell us. It's better that were having back and forth discussions untainted by the fact we know you're a celebrity.
(All that said, I'm thinking it's Nato Coles with a convincing fake backstory)
This sounds exactly like what Nick Offerman would say to make us think his screen name was not bolweevils2
In accordance with my own request, I will neither confirm nor deny that I am Nick Offerman.
I am Spartacus
Am I the only dork old enough to remember when Jeff Jarrett promised to rename the Ryman Auditorium as the “Double J Auditorium”? Guess we’re all still waiting.
I'm surprised it's taken this long, because Jarrett's method of conflict resolution* doesn't seem like it would drag out for years.
* percussive guitar
Just checked the library website and they have one copy of Offerman's book, and it's not checked out. It will be in my hands in a couple of days when they transfer it to the library closest to me for pickup.
I have to say one good thing that came from the pandemic is it got me in the habit of checking the library first, before buying a book.
I was in the Ryman 3 or 4 years ago. I was in Nashville for a work conference and flew in a couple of days early to visit the town before the conference. I stayed in a Vanderbilt student's spare bedroom for $25 a night. Gotta love Air BnB. I was just in the Ryman in the afternoon, there was no show or anything going on. There was a highschool choral group in there too, maybe 20 kids, that decided to check off sing in the Ryman from their bucket list. They way those 20 odd kids voices filled the room was magical. I can only imagine was Isbell and the 400 sounded like. The acoustics in that place are unbelievable.
My library shows the book as on order, but still allowed me to make a request. I have no idea how many people may be ahead of me though.
The NLCS is not over yet, but I would like to remind everyone that I said the NL East winner could have a "puncher's chance" in the postseason; I actually thought they'd have more trouble escaping Milwaukee but (as Nato has noted) the Brew Crew forgot that you have to both pitch AND hit in the postseason. Regardless of the outcome, I am going revel in being right.
After 8 innings of solid pitching and with a relatively low pitch count, I was a wee bit surprised Dusty didn’t let Valdez come back out for the 9th. Regardless, it was refreshing and nice to have a game where the pitcher did what you historically think of as starting pitcher duty AND to see the first 5 innings feel like what I love, a pitching duel. I know the casual fans love the offensive action, but I love everything about the strategy and beauty of two pitchers and two catchers who are just on. It was also nice to see the Astros retake the lead in the series (talk about complicated fandoms!).
I knew Nick Offerman was a big baseball fan, but only through the show “Making It” which, if you haven’t seen it, is the most awesome and purely delightful thing on TV. It was my salve when I felt the world was falling apart in recent years. Interestingly, it’s also the only way I know Offerman because -GASP- I didn’t watch Parks and Rec. His book sounds like a good read. I’m a weird person who likes to read about hiking and camping, but doesn’t actually do it. I imagine I was outdoorsy in a previous life, but now I sometimes have drinks on the patio and that’s really the extent of my communing with nature. But man, do I love the scenery it provides.
Your reference to Making It made me mistake it for a vaguely remembered old sitcom "Makin' It".
https://youtu.be/7We6t2qOG-o
Which confused me, because I couldn't remember Nick Offerman being in it. Then I realized I couldn't remember anything about the show at all except its theme song. I'm watching the credits in the above link, waiting to see Nick Offerman's name and what he was doing in an old, apparently disco themed, sitcom, without taking the time to think he would have only been 9 years old at the time.