First of all, a big hello to everyone reading, to those that I know personally and to those that I don’t know personally, to those that have been frustrated by my tendency to go off the map periodically but have been good enough to forgive me,. I hope that you’re having a fine Sunday, or rather that you had a good Sunday. I have been rattling along as if strings with soup-cans were all hooked up to me, but that is only for the last few days. As mentioned above my name is Matthew Yeager, and I will be blogging all this week for Best American Poetry. I’m simply going to go; I have zero blogging experience, and I can’t pretend to have a feel for how talky or how “essayistic” I should be. I suppose the phrase “essayistic” is itself, by nature, what you’d call “talky;” one doesn’t want to be wearing a tie when others are wearing swimsuits. One doesn't want the opposite either. Basically one simply doesn't want to be ridiculed. About four years ago, an email I sent to a friend regarding Chad Johnson, the flamboyant Bengals wide-receiver, was posted on his own blog. He's a comedian. This was then linked to from a sports blog called Deadspin, which to the sports world as Gawker is to those who follow celebrities for amusement. Sports constitute huge amounts of internet traffic, and my friend’s blog page began to suffered almost humanly, turning green. Realistically, it was as if 300 people barged into a 40 seat bar and bowled the doorman sideways, then began tearing off the wallpaper and ripping out the sconces. We were both mildly terrified by it. If I am honest with myself, that little blog post has undoubtedly been read by more people than have ever read any single thing I’ve written. inclined to at least try to find some significance in this, as I’ve been scratching away as a poet for a minute here. As a diehard devotee for 20 years of one of the three worst franchises in sports,* the Cincinnati Bengals, I embraced their brief turnaround in 2004 and 2005 with the lunacy of one who has never been there before. Symbolic of this lunacy of hope were the touchdown celebrations of Chad Johnson. As gestures, they were ecstatic embodiments of having never been before. They were the opposite of, as coaches drum into your head from a young age, “acting like you’ve been there before.” They seemed to take into consideration that he might never get back into the end zone again. CJ, now Ochocinco, proposed to a cheerleader; he put on a Santa hat and tossed out presents to a crowd from an enormous stocking; he danced the Meringue and the Irish jig with, as was noted, the beautiful fluid hips of a pro; he putted a football like it was a golfball, with a pylon. In 04-05, I would drink coffee all through the Sunday afternoon at one of several bars which aired all the games. The Bengals would still be relegated to one of the smallest, least visible television sets, but I’d situate myself directly under it and periodically scream and yell in a way that a person needs to every now and again.
Anyhow, one of my imaginative activities as that time was more or less playing with the idea of a celebrating Chad Johnson, just toying him around in my head, as a boy would with an action figure. Is that odd? Personally I wouldn’t screw in the Freudian monocle, at least not yet; all who write are invariably communing, in some degree, with the fantastical imagination of childhood….Over a few months that fall, mostly at work, I dreamt up a long list of potential touchdown celebrations, all for the ostensible purpose of the minute-to-minute happiness of saying something that my friend, whom I’ll call here Zest One, might find funny. Me being myself, I kept these touchdown celebrations close enough to the real world that were Chad Johnson, for instance, to be mailed a list of them, he might conceivably be able to execute one of them. What would the equivalent of this be for me? Like writing a cello piece in your studio apartment and having it be played by Yo-Yo Ma. I can’t know. At catering events during that 2004-2005 season, during prolonged periods of bussing glasses, which is a good activity in which to let your mind wander (ala the job of sitting at the top of the mast of a Mellvillian whaling ship, overcome with a wind and vision), I would occasionally giggle and whisper to myself at the prospect of Chad Johnson celebrating a touchdown with one of my ideas. It was that thrilling to me. I was even once lightly reprimanded for it, which was a peculiar thing to be reprimanded for – whispering and giggling to yourself. “Hey you, stop giggling to yourself.”
Anyhow, these were the best ones, which I cut-and-paste for you now. That they are all possible is their strength. They will of course be of no interest to you if you’re not a sports fan; the second one was the one that was explicated in detail in the email.
1. JAMES BROWN: Ala James Brown, a sequined cape would be thrown over a kneeling Chad Johnson’s shoulders by a teammate. Chad would then be led out of the end zone, only to run back in, kneel back down, have the cape reapplied to his quivering shoulders.
2. ENDZONE GRAFFITTI: Chad Johnson stashes cans of spray paint in the vicinity of both an opponent’s end zones. Upon scoring a touchdown, he retrieves a can of spray paint, and sprays an orange CJ on an opponent’s end zone, as a barrage of car batteries are hurled at him by the fans of Cleveland.
3. TOUCHDOWN TOAST: In winter, when the stakes are up, Chad Johnson hides a champagne bottle in a snow bank. After a mid game touchdown, he pops the cork out and dumps it all over himself in celebration. This celebration would go well with a touchdown to go up 28-7, late in the third quarter. (I would perhaps trade a pinky toe to watch this transpire at Heinz field, in a game that would usher Cincy past Pittsburgh into the playoffs.)
4. TOUCHDOWN TOPCOAT: A gifted tailor, using the leather from deconstructed footballs Chad has scored touchdowns with, constructs a leather coat. As Chad scores and scores, more articles of clothing sewn from footballs could be assembled: pants, top hat, coat tails. In the fantasy, in a coat that manages to be brown, durable, and yet utterly fantastical, Chad would simply circulate. Perhaps he would change his name to Egregious Johnson. That coat, being a one-of-a-kind art object, would enter the Hall of Fame independent of Chad, just as Don Griese’s eye-glasses entered the Hall before Don Griese did, greasing the doorjambs.
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Anyhow, that such a post would be the most read thing I’ve ever written signals one thing. It signals that I gave the people what the people wanted. The thing with internet hit counts is that we understand them, in large part, through the lens of money; we compute them as we compute money. Money, or the accumulation thereof, if it is undeniably anything, “is the symbol of having done for mankind what mankind has wanted.” That statement can be gotten into at a later point, and should be thought about psychoanalytically….I’ll just say that it’s easy to conflate a hit into a speck of money because they accrue in such a similar way, and in relatively similar number scales. The You-Tube video or MySpace page of streaming music is judged to be good or bad in large part by something resembling the counting mechanism in a turn-style. Ultimately the individual makes the call himself if he likes it or not, but that a musical act is validated by 10,000 visits necessarily signals that it must have offered something to someone at some point along the line. If I see a friend’s band has a certain amount of hits, how can I not be curious? Just in our basic wiring as economic creatures, we are tuned into a logic that these 10,000 visits mean something tangible. And yet it is not 10,000 anythings; it is pure information. Yes, but hits represent the cold hard truth of what the people want. The turning of turn-styles generates continuous money, like electricity made from flowing water. It is not money transforming into information, but information transforming into money. This is a Marshall McLuhan prediction.
Really, though, it should be no surprise the amount of internet traffic that is devoted to sports. That should be the least surprising thing about the internet to us. Professional sports as we know them grew out of a technological innovation, that being the telegraph wire. That’s an important thing to consider. Technology didn’t adopt pro sports and expand them, it literally created the possibility for them. Marshall McLuhan, whom I mean to talk in depth on over this week, would call the telegraph the “ablative absolute” of professional sports. Of course, he then wouldn’t bother to tell you what an ablative absolute was, Icon of Incomprehensibility that he was.
I’m going to sound off here because I actually know this one, and once a blue moon I even am glad that I know it; an “ablative absolute” is a Latin construction that allows you to say, in a two-word, boom-boom fashion: Now that this has happened. The most famous example, at least as I was taught, is from Caesar; “Mutatis mutandis;” The two word phrase roughly translates in English to “the things that need to be changed having been changed.” The sense is that as a result of these changes, good things will now be able to happen; people will walk w/ their arms around the shoulders of strangers, dogs will wag tails in unison, etc. “The bathtub having been scrubbed, she is able to breathe normally.” McLuhan’s personal application of the term refers to the way a new medium generates a field of possibility wherein certain cultural and societal changes can take place. It’s a slightly different manner of reasoning than pure cause-and-effect. The bathtub having been scrubbed helps to create an “environment” in which a lowering of anxiety can happen.
So to say that the telegraph was the “ablative absolute” of pro sports is to say what? What does that mean? Is it to say that pro sports are purely a creation of media? Yes, I suppose is it is to say exactly that. Up until the 1840s, the fastest that verbal information could travel was roughly 35 mph, which was the speed of a locomotive. In today’s terms, now that even movies are streaming, it’s good to recollect this. Like a good splash of cold water on the face, or maybe simply a contemplative sip of ice water. From the days of the original Marathon in 490 BCE until the mid 19th Century, the rate that information could move had increased only by about 28 mph. (We’ll give the Marathoner 8 minute miles – so about 7 mph.) Over the course of a few years, with the inception of Morse’s telegraph, information could suddenly go at the rate of electricity. This is one of the watershed events in the history of Western Civilization; it makes landing on the moon seem like a minor improvement of the golf ball. Information and transportation were forever spliced; the limitations of body had once and for all been transcended; this created an environment conducive to, among other things, pro sports. Suddenly squads could venture far from home and have their results known back home almost instantaneously, and now we have an industry that’s upwards in the billions of dollars. It is as valuable to us as just about anything that we have, in terms of practical purposes.
When you think about it, the box score page of a paper is the central document in the Cult of Sports. As a document, as a form, it was authored by the telegraph, which is to say that the box score is an embodiment of all that the telegraph does well. The box score contains a large amount of short-hand information transmitted from far-off sources. Events are condensed into a code that when interpreted gives a quick, imageless overview of action that took place nowhere near your own five senses. Magic. Ideologically, you can say that the box score, as a form, as a context, commemorates the conquering of the body’s limits, the aforementioned disembodiment of information from transportation. This is perhaps interesting in light of sports. Here the medium (telegraph / internet) and the message (sports) would be saying two entirely opposite things. The medium (telegraph / internet) says the human body is without end. The message (sports) are grounded in the principle that the body has ends, that a bar or hoop can only be so high for a human to jump up to it, that a human body can handle playing a sport only for so long….
Is it sad to see the box score drifting towards extinction? Yes; absolutely. “Down with form triumphant,” Seamus Heaney would say, “Up with form mendicant and convalescent.” Unfolded to its full size, the back-of-the-front-page-in-the-Sports-section is/was, at core ideology, a daily reminder that the hundreds of miles of terrain between American cities had been made to disappear. Scores, names, results from plate appearances, innings pitched. What your team did the night before, what all the teams in all the cities did the night before; changes in the standings; and all of this information printed in a short hand jargon that any 12-year-old kid could use to rapidly construct a sense of a game no one that he knew personally had attended. All of these separate boxes were arrayed in a simultaneous visual field, a series of windows that looked into a variety of ballgames in a variety of different cities. Bill Simmons “The Sports Guy,” who is a better sports-writer than just about anyone is an anything, laments that this quality of the paper box score can’t be reproduced on the internet, that you can’t spread the internet out and have all the box scores at once in front of you.
Anyhow, in the case of professional sports, if we think about what they are founded upon, (which is fans following them), and if we think further about how they are ultimately financed, (also by fans following them), we see that the true source of modern pro sports was the development of the means by which they could be followed. It was the medium of the telegraph, which brought the results of the games to the people. The telegraph revolutionized the concept of the newspaper, and necessitated the creation of a certain sort of content to fill it. As pro sports are founded on the telegraph, and the telegraph is ancestor to the internet, this is also to say that sports will likely not become extinct any time soon. They will necessarily be made stronger by it.
“Are professional sports here to stay?” This is something that young poets who like sports tend to discuss, puffing themselves up, as poets do, with the one thing that poetry undeniably has going for it – its long and storied tradition of preserving itself. Poets peer together up at a screen, let us say at a transmission of weeknight baseball, and they push up their glasses, and do admittedly scoff a little at pro sports’ idea of immortality, which can’t exactly be called immortality until someone has lasted 300 years. Will the deeds these athletes are doing, now that they are commemorated so vibrantly in the collective consciousness, go on? In the year 2432, will people speak of Lebron James in the way that, say, people still speak of Shakespeare more than any current author?
In the fantasy of Poetry, (in which it conquers all other media), this interest in professional sports wanes, just as a whole other series of fixations necessarily do. They become fads. Poetry has been around since we our species could grunt, and Homer’s Odyssey dates to the neighborhood of 800 BC, and In the fantasy of Poetry, Poetry evolves to once again lend a symbolic unity to the experience of living and dying. The Modernist embrace of Vico, and cyclical civilizations and ages, argues for at very least, this state returning, or some form of it –a new Age of Poetry. Certainly this was Joyce and others’ fantasy. I wonder if it isn’t mine. In realistic terms, Poetry over the next couple hundred years will probably continue on in the culture in a role similar to the one that it has now. In its marginalized status, it will occasionally complain that it is not legislating all of Society. In all seriousness, my hunch is that pro sports are going to be around for quite some time in our culture. Advances in communication technologies – in the internet, and whatever it evolves into next, are inherently going to benefit pro sports, and we’d be off kilter if we thought otherwise.
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My goodness. I see that I have tied up four solid pages; the sun has set on me so long ago that now I must worry about the sun rising. I did not leave enough time for this. I have had about 8 cups of coffee today, and admittedly am so loopy off of that it and an extremely long day of work yesterday (Saturday) that were I to try to off myself right now, I’d probably slit my ankles. This was not what I was planning on talking about at all, though I am admittedly pleased with tonight’s post’s length, scrolling upwards.
Hmmm….I have to say my general plan over the course of blogging this week here on the Best American Poetry Blog, is to type as much I can about as much as I can in what time I have. I propose this spirit generally, teleologically, and I suppose it’s in keeping with “A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment,” the short film that is the occasion for my being on here at all…. As a plan, it is vague, in the way that you plan on going somewhere warm and doing nothing, but I suppose that is the way one blogs.
Over the course of the next week, I’ll hopefully be blogging on any of a number of different things, none of which are likely to produce any scandals; I have a couple days off here, and I’m going to see what I can do; I do not know what to say; welcome to my woodshed; here is your straw hat. Here are some potential topics: Sunday as a Day, A Re-evaluation of Pete Rose in Light of the Steroid Era, Hopkins and Foil, W.H. Auden, Allegory: Dante-Vico-Joyce-Beckett + Eliot, Film as a Medium compared to Poetry as a Medium; the Short Film as a Form; the Prose Poem (as medium, to expand on Michael Hamburger’s excellent concept), McLuhan, My Job as a Caterer in New York City, The Differences between the Way Men and Women Work, Hope, Poetry in General, and maybe some Theology.