New Hobbies
How are you taking advantage of this time? My excellent friend Jami Milne sent me this article earlier in the week about the soothing peace of memorizing poetry during quarantine, which is a very Jami Milne kind of concept. In April, my friend Laura Palmer texted me "I think you could do a newsletter about 'Quar and Peace' (unless someone else has used that idea already)." It says a lot about Laura that her expectation is that her pun-based, context-free suggestion would be taken by someone else already despite the fact that, by her own admission, she has no idea what "Quar and Peace" is or what it would look like. It should be said that Palmer and I spent a lot of time discussing a potential restaurant we were going to open where the menu items were all based on Amanda Bynes movies called What A Girl Eats. I mean, we spent a lot of time on this and this is an actress who has not appeared in a film in ten years (the only food item I can remember was the "She's the Manwich on Sydney Whitebread"). My point is, we now have a lot more time on our hands than we did so what are you doing with it? Yes, the time is different and may not seem like free time (especially if you are homeschooling) but we aren't going to bars or baby showers and that allows for other things.
Many of us are filling that time with what passes for shared culture like Tiger King or The Last Dance but many, no doubt to Palmer's delight, are taking up Tolstoy's magnificent epic War & Peace. If you search for #TolstoyTogether on Twitter, you will find thousands of entries from readers who, since March 16, have been spending 30 minutes a day reading 10 to 15 pages of War & Peace and working their way through it on a 90-day timeline (they passed the halfway point last week). The idea was the brainchild of Yiyun Li, a Chinese-American author who set up the challenge and watched it blossom. "I have found that the more uncertain life is, the more solidity and structure Tolstoy’s novels provide," Li writes. Tolstoy certainly provides solidity. My copy of War & Peace, a well-thumbed paperback, is still thick and heavy enough to be used as a murder weapon. Inside of it, however, is some of the most delicate, complex and beautiful storytelling in literature and I'm thrilled that so many people are adding the stoic, pragmatic Bolkonskys, the ebullient Natasha Rostov and the forthright Pierre Bezukhov to their quarantine crew. Contributors to the #TolstoyTogether thread express the joy of reading the novel, debate their favorite characters and compare subtle difference among translations. Translating this book must be an undertaking. Russian is a language with no word for blue (they have two words for dark blue and light blue) and, more ominously for a nation not known for its tolerance, they have no word for bigot. Writing it in its original Russian was hard enough, Tolstoy's poor wife (there is always a woman behind the man) had to write out the drafts for him in longhand, all 1300 pages, six times. That's a lot of words. But those words create a tableau as rich as humanity itself. It is not an intimidating novel, it is the perfect book for taking advantage of this time.
Speaking of those who are taking advantage of this time, I am disheartened by the amount of governments that have used the crisis to grab power for themselves. Crises attract autocrats like a moth to the flame and that has proven out once again. Hungary's Viktor Orban, already one of the more illiberal leaders in Europe, has manipulated his parliament (and I do mean "his") to give him near unlimited power. This move was ostensibly a reaction to the coronavirus panic but there is no stated timeline for removing those powers once the crisis is over. China is the worst offender, having cracked down on pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, taking advantage of the fact that the world is looking the other way to effectively tear up that territory's Basic Law, a constitution that protects certain freedoms. China has also announced its jurisdiction over the South China Sea, drawing ire from Vietnam, which claims ownership over an area China now says they control. This is bad news in a region that is becoming more and more unstable (especially considering the, uh, unclear situation regarding the health of the leader of North Korea), and bodes poorly for the continued sovereignty of Taiwan, perhaps the democracy that has best responded to COVID-19, which will certainly be on China's radar should their crackdowns and territory grabs go unchecked.
It should be said, though, that moths are not attracted to flames, they are confused by them. Light sources that aren't the sun or the moon are relatively recent phenomena, so an insect like a moth, which has set its flight trajectory based on a stationary, faraway spot like the sun, becomes totally disoriented by flames or light bulbs which move and are significantly closer than the sun.
Even Major League Baseball joins that ignoble list of organizations that are using the crisis to expand their reach. As restrictions ease, it is becoming more and more likely that we will have baseball in some form this year. The latest proposal that is gaining traction would mean a 100-game regular season starting in late June, with teams playing in empty home stadiums (previous plans had teams huddling in three hubs of Arizona, Texas and Florida and playing all games in venues there to avoid travel). Since travel is to be lessened, the league will be split into three divisions, East, Central and West, with teams in those regions from both leagues competing amongst themselves. According to the article, doing so "would abolish the traditional American and National Leagues, and realign the divisions based on geography." The words "abolish the traditional American and National Leagues," gives me anxiety that only an intense 30-minute session with War & Peace can abate.
Despite my approval last week of some states taking certain steps to reopen their economies, I am not part of the battery of bubbas and buffoons who believe we have overreacted to this crisis. By and large, the world has reacted admirably to keep this scourge from taking hundreds of millions of lives. At the same time, the National League, which began playing when Ulysses S. Grant was president and kept playing through both World Wars, conflicts that brought just about every other major sports league to a halt, should not be one of COVID-19's victims, even if it is a senior citizen.
Why am I strident about this? The popularity of The Last Dance, the documentary series about the 1997-1998 Chicago Bulls, has caused fans to relitigate Michael Jordan's place in the basketball pantheon. The amount of tweets about the April's NFL Draft, which is just barely sports, blow #TolstoyTogether out of the water. The heart of sports fandom is discussion and social connection, where history is the coin of the realm. Baseball has twice as much history as the other leagues and part of that history is the separation between the NL and the AL, which only became a single organization in 2000, nearly 100 years after competing against each other. That separation is key. Baseball is the only league in which its two parts have different rules. It connects me with my grandfather that I root for a team that plays in the league that was the first to integrate, the first to play professionally and the last (for now) to let all players bat for themselves, just as he did. Something is lost when that history gets swept away.
Because of business reasons, my alma mater, the University of Missouri, switched conferences from the Big XII to the SEC ten years ago, breaking a chain of continuity that stretched generations. I now have to teach my child to hate Florida and Georgia when a) I don't and b) I really hate kansas and Oklahoma but that won't make sense to him, seeing as we don't play them anymore. Can I teach my son to despise the Minnesota Twins or the Kansas City Royals, teams the Cardinals will share a division with under this proposal? Probably. One of the great things about kids is that we can teach them to hate anything. But it won't be the same and it won't mean as much. Of course, the argument is that this reformatting is temporary and things will go back to normal in 2021 or whenever health permits a return to travel. I need that in writing otherwise those promises mean as much as Viktor Orban's. I understand this situation requires disruption. This weekend should have seen the running of the Kentucky Derby, which predates the National League by one year, but it will be run this September. I expect good, ol' fashioned senior circuit baseball to be right beside it.