Rock the Rock

So at this point in the writing/sports conversation, if it's not getting too stupid and reductive for everybody, I feel like I should mention my burgeoning interests in 1) mainstream/slightly not mainstream American sportswriting, and 2) Late 20th century Black Mountain-style poetics.

The first is last-two-years new, but surprisingly bullish: for someone who NEVER watched, or really even played team sports as a kid, I've found myself digesting a surprising amount of articles, books, and podcasts about them. Puzzling, at first (especially to myself); though upon further reflection, I think I understand what's going on. Sportswriting - good sportswriting that is, or at least the kind that I've found myself gravitating towards - is not actually about sports. It's about storytelling. Fuck the universities: the purest, most refined, and most probing narratological analysis right now is going on smack in the middle of the national consciousness - and as a writer (read: someone interested in stories and how they're made) I've found it more than just a little fascinating to watch how this discussion frequently plays out, branches, and spirals back to ideas and forms that seem to directly effect and fertilize my own endeavors.

Sports (and here I'm talking, not just about the sports you play, but about the sports your watch, consume, enter and live in: sports media, in other words) is a language. As with most languages, the success or failure of initial willed acclimations is often beyond the knocker's control (witness my repeated, pig-headed, but still fanatical attempts to like jazz. I'm talking stacks of CDs, Ralph Ellison essays, constipated, cocktail-sipping concerts, not to mention hours upon hours spent trying to hear what ever the fuck it was I was listening to, and yet still it's no dice. I don't even not like jazz: I simply can't hear it, which is to say, I can't speak it. For me to pass judgment on it would be like an American tourist passing judgment on Swahili). But in cases rich and overwhelming (meaning, any case worth your time), I'm a big believer in the guide. A Virgil, a map: that person or entity who can take you by the hand and tell you what's good, what's bad, what you should be looking for/give you a level ground of understanding, which you can then keep or dismantle as your tastes develop.

So far, I've had two ridiculously predictable, and yet totally infallible, sports-related guides: Bill Simmons and freedarko. What I find in each is, essentially, what I find in both: entertaining writing that is simultaneously about both a fascinating and complicated "obvious" topic (sports, or to be more specific, professional basketball), AND a hidden, secret, gnostic undertopic (writing). And there's the rub - for in using the medium of language to get at the heart of something inherently non-linguistic, I find, these two writers (or more than two: freedarko is actually a collective) inevitably seem to end up talking about writing, stories, history, creation.

(I'll dispense, for brevity's sake and under the banner of Tolstoyan familiarity, with a long proof on this point. Read FD's post on Celtics point guard Rajon Rondo (which contains the sentence "I've long maintained that point guards are like writers, whose effectiveness is determined not by their own personal ability to put the ball in the basket but to turn the court into their own dark funhouse and make the opposing team see the game on the point guard's revised and ultimately manipulative terms"), and try and tell me it isn't all about the flow-state/staticity argument we've been having. Or listen to Bill SImmons's tete-a-tete with Chuck Klosterman and see if there isn't something there pertaining to narratology and the storymaking of popular culture)

Anyway, words, words, words: but isn't the fascinating thing about sports, and about thinking about writing as a sport, the way that it acknowledges and respects the strange, mysterious core of all performance, be it linguistic or otherwise, while at the same time acknowledging the importance learned technique/inherited ability play in the coddling, cradling, and execution of those performances?

TO wit: Charles Olson's poetry may be bland, idiosyncratic, and imagistically poor hippie-babble, but when it comes to announcing the poetic sport, I find him one of the most entertaining and insightful of near-contemporary color men. Reading his essays (which poets from all over the world map credit with opening up the poetic field, turning their understanding of literature as something about to something), I get the feeling that I'm not just watching literature, but somehow participating it; that the energy inherent in poetry is somehow being transmitted to me, like a signal or electric charge. The parallel difference here: watching basketball as a spectator (which I do), and watching basketball as someone who will then go down to the local court and pull some crazy cross-over move whatever (or at least, will practice it until he can do it in a pick-up game). This, for me, is one of the greatest parts about being a writer: when I read, I'm not just being entertained, I'm being taught. Something is teaching me how to make. But then, to push the idea a little further, isn't it possible that, given the right guides and a sharp enough inquisitiveness, attention paid to ANY creative endeavor will end up teaching us about our own? Watch basketball, read sportswriting, listen to someone's grandmother talk about how to make a pie, hear a hobbyist hold forth on the peculiar pleasures of Amazon frog-collecting: in each case, there is something there that will talk to you about your own art/life/rhythm. One of my/our previous blog obsessions was the way that writing needed to be a conduit into, rather than away from life, and I feel that repeating itself here - though maybe the many-roomed-house metaphor needs to be subtilized. Not rooms, but worlds, constellations, whose motions parallel one another, but which touch only through our own inhabitation of each of them. Any real act will teach you about all the others.

Olson as point guard: "It is unbearable what knowledge of the past has been allowed to become, what function of human memory has been dribbled out to in the hands of these learned monsters whom people are led to think 'know.' They know nothing in not knowing how to reify what they do know. What is worse, they do not know how to pass over to us the energy implicit in any high work of the past because they purposely destroy that energy as dangerous to the states for which they work - which it is, for any concrete thing is a danger to the rhetoricians and politicians, as dangerous as a hard coin is to a banker." (The Human Universe)

Now, leaving off the obsession with monetary value (typical of even the greatest village explainers), watch the way that quote unlocks the "high work of the past", turning it from monument to generator, something we plug into. Which is the mystery at stake here, right? How do we create? Or, how do we harness our own unique combinations of talent and history in a way that allows us to put that fucking rock in the hole? In my own personal experience this is tricky, not least because you must first find a way to discover/create your position on the literary team - but in the moments that you do it? In the moments that you fit your art or life or whatever as smoothly as a key fits a lock or a bat fits a ball or a puck fits the net or word fits the world?

Olson is in the Emersonian line of energy transmition - but then again, so is Simmons. So are we. America is obsessed with renaissances and rebirths and revivals: not for nothing have we had (by the most conservative of estimates) three Great Awakenings in this country. A blog, written by beginning artists, about writing and life, must necessarily be obsessed with creation. But then, isn't its own making the secret subject of every made thing the world over? And don't we knock to be admitted, if not now, then please God, someday?