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• DEK and I went to the Washington Wild Things game last night. "What is a Washington Wild Thing?" you might ask. Well, the team is a Frontier League baseball squad that is disturbingly popular for independent baseball. The mascot/logo is some strange semi-bear, semi-cat thing (the logo more cat, the mascot more bear), basically from the same marketing people who brought you Poochie. Sadly, we missed by one night "clubhouse attendant get to play" night. But we were there for Bill Mazeroski signs every damn thing in sight night.
  
• Context (part 1 of 2): Funnel cakes are wonderful outdoor activity snack food and are sadly not as widespread as other types. I enjoy them immensely. I pointed out in a private email to Mr. Kidder on Monday that even though I had eaten a funnel cake at the "Arts" Festival on Sunday, I did not mention it in my blog entry because, "I don't mock funnel cakes." Funnel cakes were available at the Wild Things game.
  
• Since he's the Director of Baseball Operations and apparently pitching coach, every night is Kent Tekulve signs every damn thing in sight night. And for the right price, you can have the excitement of a Kent Tekulve personal appearance at your own event, gathering, or presumably just hanging around your rumpus room. You can also pay the Wild Things to have hitting coach Joe Charbonneau not show up at your gathering.
  
• Random, Out-of-Context Quote of the Evening: What if Phoebe Cates were making the funnel cakes?
  
• Yesterday I finished reading Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden, which was a strange read in many ways. First off, it's a 40-year-old academic book, and those never age well without showing a lot of warts. In this case, for instance, Marx was a scholar out of the early days of the American Studies movement. After World War II, American Studies started growing as a discipline to study "American exceptionalism" (generally framed as a parallel to my mock CBI intramural question: Why is the U.S. the best damn country in the world?)--a fairly dubious scholarly and intellectual enterprise, but one that sparked some interesting debates anyway. By the late '60s American Studies was morphing into what it remains today--an interrogation of the idea of American exceptionalism that focuses on the big sociocultural categories: race, gender, class, sexuality, etc. Depending on your point-of-view, then, American Studies has largely evolved or devolved into ethnic and gender studies.
  But back to Marx, this book represents an attempt to understand American culture--and, more directly, to interpret American literature--through the dual metaphors of "machine" and "garden" and through the concept of the "pastoral" Starting with Shakespeare's The Tempest and going through early (1707) histories of Virginia, Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Twain and finally Fitzgerald, he develops the running theme of America as a new Eden embraced as an agrarian paradise, but constantly under siege from technological progress destroying the pastoral dream. The tricky part, however, is that the garden itself is already a developed place--it is not undeveloped wilderness, but rather cultivated, managed land--and development and progress are also built into American ideals and literature as positive values. The machine (often in literature the railroad or the steamboat) intrudes upon the pastoral, but this intrusion is an ambivalent development because it signals progress and destiny even as it undermines the Edenic dream.
  Marx sees most Americans, and most of his authors, advocating some sort of "middle course" where technology prospers but in harmony with the garden or in some way removed from it. This is paradoxical, however, in part because the garden itself is a representation of progress over the wilderness, but also because the ideal of progress does not allow for a cut-off point--i.e., if one believes in progress, there is no point where one can say, "OK, that's enough progress." According to Marx, then, the endings of many of our greatest books (Huck Finn, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby) are unsatisfactory because they fail to resolve the machine/garden dilemma they posit, but in a sense they are necessarily so because there is no real resolution possible.
  I picked up this book because I have been thinking a lot about the tensions in American culture in terms of "culture wars" as substantially based around a dualism of the urban/cosmopolitan and the rural/pastoral. I am emphatically on the side of the cosmopolitan, and so I'm trying to understand the power of the pastoral myth. One way to frame this is I'm trying to figure out why it seems that I am increasingly on the opposite side of the cultural divide from both major political parties, instead of just one and a half.
  Did this book help? Well, it did give me some context for how we can simultaneously fetishize "progress" and rural life. It also showed me why gender and ethnic studies happened; it's kind of appalling that as late as 1964 a serious scholar could write a book that talks about "our greatest writers" and "serious writers" without asking any questions at all about what those concepts mean and why they matter, and why they're all white guys from Virginia and New England. In the end, though, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who didn't need to put it in a footnote of something, unless they had a direct intellectual interest in the issues at play here.
  
• Context (part 2 of 2): The Washington Wild Things have a player named Zach Cates, who I speculated might be the horrible combination of Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates. I wondered if the bright light would affect his play, and hoped team meals don't occur after midnight. DEK asked if it were possible for anything involving Phoebe Cates to be a horrible combination. I said that anything can be made horrible in the wrong combination: peanut butter and chocolate, good; peanut butter and botulism, bad. DEK asked, what about Phoebe Cates and peanut butter, to which I replied that I was going to the men's room and would see him in two innings, as I was channeling Judge Reinhold.
  
• I'm cheering pretty hard for the Nets, only because I would like to see the crashing down of the East/West power imbalance in the NBA. So go New Jersey--be ept, and do a full-assed job.