Dear ESPN:

Please, please consider showing a baseball game that involves teams other than the Red Sox and Yankees on your national broadcasts. Please. You're making a bad problem worse. I grant you, you got some nice publicity last night when the Angels first baseman took a foul ball away from Ben Afflek; I'm sure you'll get lots of mileage out of that clip on those stellar shows "Cold Pizza," "The Horn," and "PTI," but you're killing me and everyone else who actually cares about the sport of baseball. Remember when you used to show sports most of the time, instead of endless versions of fat and/or orange-tinted guys in suits talking about sports? That was interesting. I remember learning something about less-popular games and games from other nations. It is funny how you started producing Xeroxed copies of sports "talk" or "analysis" shows just when you had the money to show more sports, thereby increasing your profits to untold amounts while doing less of what you started out wanting to do. Is there a cheaper kind of show to make on television than one featuring a desk with two guys sitting in front of futuristic graphics, talking? And to make things even easier, you replay them endlessly in loops. I admit, I have to admire your ability to figure out how to make sports entertainment into such a cash cow (if I can use that phrase). Can you imagine what this country would be like if the media allowed as much analysis--and from as wide a range of opinions--of public policy decisions as it does of sports games/business? The depth of analysis is actually quite deep on many sports talk shows, and the knowledge of the intricacies of the business of sports is widely displayed by a large number of commentators and call-in guests. It is just the subject that is shallow. But on political talk shows, the subjects are potentially deep (when the subjects are the policies themselves and not the politics and power-plays that they are embedded in), but the analysis is pathetically shallow. Why do you think that is, ESPN? I wonder, are you partly to blame, or are you just "giving the people what they want"? Your old friend, B

Life's full (if trivial) circle

Hello from the sunroom at the Moravian Book/Cook Shop. This was the first coffeeshop-like space in Bethlehem back before coffee was a pastime, and so it was a place for the artsy and artsy-wannabes to hang out and read and write in our journals (after walking around in Nisky Hill, of course). By the mid-90s places like Java Jack's and the Deja Brew were opening as the southside became more gentrified, and now we have the tiny-but-cool Wise Bean on the northside, the Caffeine Cafe and the aforementioned Deja Brew on the southside, and all manor of Borders/Barnes and Noble/Starbucks/etc. in the outlying sprawl. The Cook Shop has changed since my own early days here (the late 80s) primarily in that it has expanded to about twice its former size, in both directions. And most recently, the sunroom area was amended to include an adjacent walkway between the two parts of the shop, but the greenhouse roof and the plants and old wooden cafe tables are still here. And, obviously, so is a wireless connection for those of us who've finally grown from legal-pad journals to laptops. Maybe "grown" is the wrong word. Perhaps "bourgoised" (as verb, but the spelling is iffy). THE PHILLIES: Are killing me. They blew a three run lead in the late innings last night after another fine outing from Cole Hamels, who may be the only person to jump from nowhere to single-A ball to the majors to requesting a trade in one season, if they don't stop screwing up his wins. He'd have at least three more if not for the bullpen. Some are calling for major changes in the Phils (such as the pholks at PhilliesNation.com), including the ownership group. But I am slow to take up calls like this. Baseball is incredibly hard, both to play and to "control." I don't think the ownership or anyone else in the organization actually wants to do badly. The people who are calling for others' heads now are the same ones who were psyched out of their minds when Pat Burrell came up, and with all the pitching prospects. Now they just can't--CAN'T--understand how management could fail to see the obvious poor judgment in giving Burrell a huge contract a few years ago. They also have a penchant for dissing one of the best players to ever wear the Phillies pinstripes, Bobby Abreu. All he does is hit .300, drive in 100 runs, and walk a billion times a year, every damn year. But to them, all of this is insignificant in that he doesn't look miserable enough when the team is anything but ten runs up, that he glides when he runs instead of looking like a Chevy Chevette on the highway about to rattle itself to pieces like players such as Lenny Dykstra did, mistaking this for some kind of intensity required to give the fans what they feel they deserve: a world series championship. I've been an avowed phan for ten years now (the long story of my conversion from being a Dodgers fan is in the archives of the Elysian Fields Quarterly journal), and the only thing I can say about watching the Phillies as they play in their home city is that the fans of this team have always gotten exactly what they deserve.

Nisky Hill

The best park in Bethlehem is a cemetery. Since I've lived in B'hem, I 've often walked around Nisky Hill, just over the New Street Bridge on Church Street, sometimes for hours. It is also my choice for the viewing of the many fireworks displays that get fired off here. The place is large, but what makes it truly remarkable are the trees--lots and lots of large, old oaks and others that have been allowed to remain, rather than clear-cut, as at many other unfortunate final resting places. Why wouldn't all graveyards be full of trees? Who would want to spend eternity amidst the monoculture of a heavily "fertilized" and manicured sun-blind lawn, which is the effect of many cemeteries? I for one want to be surrounded by trees, and underneath as many as possible. Anyway, Nisky Hill is most famous (though that's probably too strong a word) as the final resting place of the Modernist poet H.D., who was a Moravian native of Bethlehem. She has a sturdy, flat stone slab, like many others of her background, among her family members, including her father, who was a professor at Lehigh University and the Univ. of Pennsylvania. Since the mid-90s, people have been leaving shells and other small tokens on her gravestone as a sign of affection and tribute. It currently has many small shells and some stone stars that someone left. Sometimes there are fragments of verse written on scraps placed under rocks to hold them down. It is cherished spot for me. (By the way, for all you Lehigh Valley enthusiasts out there who like to see us get some attention on the world stage, pick up H.D.'s The Gift, where she describes growning up in Bethlehem and southeastern PA. Her description of Christmas in the Moravian tradition is more than a little lovely, if you like that sort of thing.) Another famous personage laid in Nisky Hill just down the path from H.D. is Eugene Grace, the Bethlehem Steel executive that started out with Charles Schwab and ran the business throughout its heyday, pretty much up to his death in 1960. His memorial is unique and much more intended to impress upon visitors his importance. It is a large granite (I think) slab, about four feet square and ten inches thick, with his and his wife's names etched in large letters covering the surface. The stone is surrounded by ivy of some kind, and encircled by a marble rim with a quotation from the book of Micah (I think) that wraps around the whole thing. Encircling half of that is a marble bench, which faces out over the Lehigh River and Canal toward the once-enormous Bethlehem Steel plant just across the river. The whole thing has a diameter of about 20 feet. It seems that visitors are expected to sit on the bench and watch the Steel at work across the river, contemplating the life's work and empire of the late Eugene, finding peace and awe in the vista. Well, that was the case for a little while, I suppose, but now the Steel is quiet and empty, the trees on the bank of the water have been allowed to grow over the view, and the longer historical view of American super-corporations has been complicated by the consequences of their dominance and, in many cases, their demise. I wonder what old Eugene thinks of me as one of his regular visitors. I have actually sat there in the past and watched those huge crucibles of bright molten steel get poured into molds, and it is a sight I'll never forget, especially in winter when snow is everywhere and the city is mostly quiet. But I'm not exactly capitalism's biggest fan, so my pride in Bethlehem Steel was always tempered in much hesitation and shame at the acts of my countrymen. And the arrogance of the capitalist aristocracy has a nice monument in Grace's gravesite, with its use of enough marble to build a pagan temple and its apparently unironic use of the Biblical quote extolling humility. Still, Grace didn't live in New York or New Jersey or Southern California or Texas or Hong Kong or London, as so many world-makers and corporate kings do today. He lived in little Bethlehem, near his company, near the men and women he used to build his industry and reluctantly allowed to unionize, near the colleges and churches he patronized. And he provided an ass-wearying seat for me as I tried to take up pipe smoking just after college, or scribbled in my little journal, or just watched the seasons change and fewer and fewer trains go by. I wonder what Jack Welch's or Bill Gates's or Donald Trump's (though I doubt his actual organic-ness) graves will look like, or where they'll be, or if anyone will give a crap 46 years after they die.

John Adams was a stud

Every summer I go through a little Colonial History phase, and this summer's has been a little stronger than usual, causing me to read several books that take me far from the work I'm supposed to be doing. At any rate, here are a few quotes from John Adams about education and democracy that I like. "You will ever remember that all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen." (letter to John Quincy) "Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to humane and generous minds, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant." (from Adams's Thoughts On Government) While I know that the use of the word "liberal" has a specific and--increasingly in these times--historic meaning in that context, it is important to remember that the old meaning and the current one still have some relation to each other, and that those who have worked so hard to denigrate the term denigrate a part of what made the U.S. the U.S. Does a "liberal education" make people more "liberal"? If so, what does that really say?

A couple of things today. I am writing this on my new, cheap-ass, little notebook computer, what I purchased not 'alf an hour ago (well, not really, but who can resist a little Monty Python reference). Gnarley. Now I have to work on my dissertation more regularly--I have no excuse. Also, the Phillies are unbelievably depressing this year--giving up every one-run lead they get the very next inning, having one starting pitcher after another get shelled or get arrested for domestic assault, having a catcher that strikes out on three pitches more often than any player I ever remember watching. I was way too optimistic going into this season, and I still hold out some hope for this year if they can just get a little decent starting pitching, but things are bleak, bleak. And while I hesitate to blame managers and general managers as heartily as others often do (Ed Wade deserves a lot more credit than he gets), I think the Phillies would have been better off choosing someone other than Charlie Manuel two seasons ago. That's all for now. Stay tuned to slightly more timely postings, including one about a person who lurks in the background of many of the events detailed here, but who has been neglected in print. You know who you are, Wigs...