Of Boobies and Baseball

Day 165 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Ruthie is reading Fifty-Nine in '84, by Edward Achorn, about Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had, because of the coincidence that Old Hoss Radbourn lived in her town, she likes baseball history more than baseball itself, and a nephew happened to be a producer of the documentary We Believe, about Cubs fans.

I am not yet reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson, because I do not have it, in English or Swedish, but I fear Nora Ephron has read at least one book of the trilogy, as she nails it in this spoof (with a few spoilers, so be warned), "The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut," in The New Yorker online. I love Ephron, her sense of humor, and her own tiny boobies, which she has written about in an essay that appears in some college readers. It is really about bras, not boobies, but boobies go in bras. If they want to.

Speaking of feminism, I am reading In the Next Galaxy, by Ruth Stone, and Level Green, by Judith Vollmer--that is, I am reading two books of poems at the same time, along with The Death of Adam, a book of essays by Marilynne Robinson, as all of these things are intense, and I need to space them out a bit, by alternating--and both poets are steeped in feminism of the late-20th-century sort, its wild waters swirling around us if we grew up in it, its definitions and factions ever-changing. This came home to me in a recent discussion over at poet Martha Silano's blog, Blue Positive, and I will ponder it for a while, and also how lucky I am to be living when I do, where I do, with something closer to equal rights for women than many women ever had the chance to see or enjoy.

I've lived through the backlash, too, but women have worked very hard to secure rights and freedoms, and to be considered equally human, of equal human value. Thank you. (And I don't think a girl in baseball lingerie is a threat to what we've achieved.) I am lucky, for instance, to be able to read humor about boobies by Nora Ephron and shop for a baseball-stitch bra if I want to, and also to have women be called poets, not poetesses, with the old connotations of dismissal in that "poetess," and have their work taken seriously.

I am also pondering a few lines of poetry, from Vollmer, that state the opposite of yesterday's (pre-meme) entry concluding with Dickinson on the too-bright light. Here is a quotation from "Palomas Fountain" by Judith Vollmer:

He tells me poetry isn't so

different from welding:

you shield your eyes too long from the blue flame

you can't shape the iron.

The "he" is her father, evidently a welder. This hit me at the right time, thinking I need to look directly at the blue flame these days, even if it does blind me, or I won't be able to shape the poem.

This must be what happened to Ruth Stone, who is now blind. (Speaking metaphorically about literal blindness, which has its own causes, unknown to me.)

P.S. to Kim: A meme is something that gets repeated, particularly across the Internet, like those sets of questions you answer at Facebook, etc.

P.P.S. to random commercial services related to selling sex who might be attracted to the "boobies" in my title and image: I won't be posting your comments/ads for services. This is something else. I am not selling sex, nor using sex to sell the idea of reading. Sigh.... As if that would work or could happen. I am just mixing things together in a humorous, serious, in-constant-awe-of-the-world way. Everything is out there.

Take Me Out to the Old Hoss Game

Day 57 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and baseball season has begun, so a man from out of town, a perfect stranger to me--he has a name, but I don't know it--is reading a stack of baseball books.

One of them is Old Hoss, by James W. Bennett, a fictionalized account of the life of baseball legend Charles Radbourn. I always think his name is spelled Radbourne, with an "e," and now I know why! It is spelled that way, on his tombstone and a plaque in Evergreen Cemetery, which is how I know him best. Every year in October, actors stand up and speak as the dead buried in this beautiful cemetery in Bloomington, Illinois, and I got to see and hear Rhys Lovell speak and spit tobacco (stage secret: Tootsie Rolls) as Charles Radbourn.

For a more factual account of this undeniably fantastic pitcher, you can read Fifty-Nine in '84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had by Edward Achorn. The 59 here refers to Radbourn's wins in his thrilling 1884 season pitching for the Providence Grays. The official scorekeeper that day actually credited the win to Radbourn, giving him 60 wins that season, instead of to Joe "Cyclone" Miller, the starting pitcher (who pitched 5 innings), but, according to Wikipedia, modern rules would give the win to Miller, leaving the statistic in dispute.

As the Achorn subtitle says, Radbourn played in the days of barehanded baseball, when even catchers caught the ball without a glove. Radbourn was called "Old Hoss" for his horselike stamina and strength, in pitching almost non-stop in that crucial Grays season after fellow pitcher Charlie Sweeney was first suspended and then kicked off the team for bad behavior (came to practice drunk, refused to leave the mound for a relief pitcher, etc.).

In his cemetery performance, Lovell incorporated this bit of Radbourn bragging, here quoted from an article about 19th-century baseball by Eric Miklich, who reminds us that Radbourn was a butcher:

"Once asked if he ever tired of pitching so often, [Radbourn] replied, 'Tired out tossing a little five-ounce baseball for two hours? I used to be a butcher. From four in the morning until eight at night I knocked down steers with a 25-pound sledge. Tired from playing 2-hours a day for 10 times the money I used to get for 16 hours a day?'”

When he retired from baseball, Old Hoss Radbourn ran a tavern and billiard room in Bloomington. As bold as he sounds above, he was apparently too shy (or too vain) to come out in public after losing an eye in a hunting accident. He entered the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939.

Edward Achorn, who wrote the 59 in '84 book, and won a Pulitzer as a historian, was an editor for the Providence Journal, in Providence, Rhode Island, home of the Grays. James W. Bennett, who wrote Old Hoss, lived and wrote for a time in Bloomington, where Radbourn died.