The Is Not Baseball Book
The Is Not Baseball Book
a little lord
The Is Not Baseball Book a little lord
Contents i.
first base Sport Is Not a Metaphor
7
ii. second base A Matter of Design
25
iii. third base An Education
37
Appendix
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first base
Sport Is Not a Metaphor
It’s a symbol.
The Baseball Book
an enclosed garden, hortus conclusus, by Eric Gill.
10
Sport Is Not a Metaphor
metaphor, n A relatively simple figure of speech in which two seemingly different things are compared. symbol, n. A figure of speech with a “deeper” meaning. A symbol stands for, or represents, something else. Unlike a metaphor, a symbol temporarily embodies the thing it stands for. Traditionally, the symbol effectively becomes, or is, the thing it represents.
A
familiar approach to baseball has it that the sport is not “just like life.” To compare life to a game trivializes it. This is true enough. Nonetheless, baseball remains an excellent symbolic prism through which to view one’s time on earth. One of the most relevant symbols as it has occured throughout history is the hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden. 11
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Instances of the symbol hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden include: 1.
The Persian word from which we get “paradise.”1 The etymology of “paradise” refers to a garden enclosed by a wall. Persian nobility built such places for the purpose of contemplation. The familiar image of Eden suggests the possibility of a paradise on earth — the potential for an entirely peaceful, timeless place free of suffering.
2.
Historically, the New World and the United States have often been described as a wilderness with great potential for becoming a mythical garden. The symbol runs through “New England Puritanism, German Pietism, Quakerism, Mormonism, African American spirituals; all derived from biblical and classical sources.”2 A Thesis
The purpose of this unambitious, and meanderingly organized little book is to look into the symbolic meaning of baseball. Along the way we will examine the role of sports in the cultivation of leisure — scholē in Greek, otium in Latin. The preservation, cultivation, and proper use of leisure, as we will see, is an
1. 2.
See A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton University Press, 1966). Giamatti, Earthly Paradise, p. 47.
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Sport Is Not a Metaphor
essential, foundational element in the cultivation of intellect, liberty, and freedom. Like freedom, liberty and community are not givens. Each is a good that must be obtained through a specific kind of effort. As participants or spectators we can — but rarely do — reflect on a sport’s rhythms. The consolation experienced as a result of these rhythyms is the result of a temporary “Platonic” removal from the body politic. If practiced well, participation in this removal can return us to the everyday world more prepared. We exchange false, dischordant rhythms for harmony; sheer, unpleasant quantity (metrics) for number (Pythagorean qualities). Utopia
The problem with “utopian” ways of thinking, as that word is usually understood, is that most attempts to imagine such a “good place” only result in failure when practically implemented. Practical utopian experiments and communes, common in the 19th and 20th centuries, made the original thinking behind symbolic gardens and utopian ideas look foolish. Plato’s philosopher kings, Christ’s Kingdom of God, Augustine’s City of God, Thomas More’s Utopia, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and the writing of Marx, Fourier, or any number of others have become difficult to take seriously. Attempts to implement utopian ideas don’t need to be wholecloth communal experiments, however. 13
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The Island of Utopia after Ambrosius Holbein for the 1518 edition of Thomas More’s Utopia.
14
Sport Is Not a Metaphor
Such experiments could just as well be contingent, provisional, and partial; temporary and imaginative, but no less agonistic, disruptive, and real. The correct use for utopian, or general philosophical contemplation, it could be argued, is to temporarily and theoretically leave the context of the city — the place of business, negotiation, buying, and selling (topos, in Greek) — in order to imagine a better place (a eu-topos), or more desirable way of life.
15
The Baseball Book Baseball and the City
Cities have been the source of rich, vital cultures and communities made up of “self-governing streetneighborhood networks.”3 To be urbane is to have cultivated the abilty to move smoothly through a great number of people. Requiring the kind of vigilant intellect described in our discussion of the proper use of leisure (see page 13, above), the effort is rewarded with the creation of a kind of social, communal life, or energy. A high social metabolism affects the urbane individual and those around her. For this reason, the heart of the city has long been an ideal location for a baseball stadium. The considered use of leisure was central to the life of an American town. Recently, however, the previously urban, public city center has been transformed into a carefully managed, largely privatized, suburban space.4
3. 4.
5.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 124 See, for example, Martha Rosler, “Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part III.” New York: e-flux journal #25, May 2011. Accessed at: e-flux.com/issues/25-may-2011 A. Bartlett Giamatti, Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games. New York: Summit Books, 1989, p. 53. The Latin word otium, and the Greek scholē, both mean leisure. These terms suggest a green place, full of growth — a garden of the mind. Neg-otium and a-scholia suggest profit without improvement, or cultivation.
18
Sport Is Not a Metaphor Suburban Baseball
The demands of maintaining a high cultural metabolism is not for everyone. Many who make their business in the city desire to retreat from the crowd as soon as possible. The suburbs were created by those who wish to profit from the city’s networks without contributing to them. The suburban is a condition that is neither urban nor rural, a non-city where energy is “imported, not created; where all decisions are basically private, and existence is nonpolitical.” To be suburban is to “live in retirement while still actually at work; it is to have the illusion of otium [leisure] while caught up in negotium [business and negotiation].”5 To spectate or participate in baseball out of an interest in management, control, and measured, predicted outcomes reduces a leisure activity to a negotiation; a desirable freedom is restricted to a suburban, utilitarian, busy-ness.
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Proof of the genius of ancient Greece is that it understood baseball’s future importance. Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic — in a word, moral — understanding.
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Sport Is Not a Metaphor
Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things. — George Will, Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball, page 3
21
The Baseball Book Baseball: A Political Art
Rules are meant to civilize. According to Dave Hickey, rules “translate the pain of violent conflict into the pleasures of disputation.” The liberating rule, however, that “civilized us yesterday, will seek to govern us tomorrow.” This realization is the source of the Enlightenment’s soulful disputation with dogmatic religion, and the U.S. Constitution’s refined disputation with government’s tendency toward autocratic rule. Like democracy, sports are are best when they “recognize the moment of portending government and deflect it.” Rules must be flexible enough to change when “they threaten to make the game less beautiful and less visible, when the game stops liberating and begins to educate.”6 Art, according to Hickey, attempts to “embody the image of our desire,” 7 while sport is “merely an armature upon which we project” that image. But both art and sport benefit from rules capable of liberating without governing.
6. 7. 8.
Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy. Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997, pp. 156–57 Hickey, Air Guitar, p. 158 Dawidoff, Nicholas. Baseball: A Literary Anthology. New York: Library of America, 2002, p. 5.
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Sport Is Not a Metaphor
“Base Ball” (1744) One of the earliest depictions of the game, from John Newberry’s A Little Pretty Pocket Book (1744), an abecedarium of twenty-six children’s games. The illustration was accompanied by this rhyme: The ball once struck Away flies the boy From each abandoned post To the next with joy. 8
23
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an enclosed park. The Polo Grounds, 1923. Photo: Library of Congress. 24
Sport Is Not a Metaphor
25
second base
A Matter of Design
Composition is more important than competition.
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Lokapurusa (cosmic man), a diagrammatic representation of the universe according to Jain cosmology. 28
A Matter of Design
T
he etymology of the word civilization derives from the idea of a body politic in repose — stretched out throughout the whole of a city.1 The Buddha reclines, and sacred diagrams illustrate the proper balance of parts. Ecological crises have made it clear that we cannot hope to “objectively” understand larger systems and the organizations of parts — ecological, social, political, or what was once called “cosmic” — without first understanding ourselves. Human agents do not act from a neutral, clinical remove. Whether we like it or not, we are implicated in the whole. Technological “solutions” have only introduced new problems. 29
The Baseball Book
Looked at in this way, the body, the soul, a sovereign state, an ecosystem, and even the entire universe can all be seen as problems of design, or composition. Each is concerned with the balance, harmony, interaction, mutual participation, and ultimate unity of parts. Games like chess or baseball involve the individual in complex systems that precisely mirror the greater systems listed above. Baseball, as we have seen, constitutes a symbolic paradise to be contemplatd in leisure. The diamond is a mythical “enclosed garden.” No time and no clock impose themselves on the “interior stadium.”2 Contrast this to the principles of scientific management, or systems design, which is all about control: “In the past,” Frederick Taylor writes, “man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”3
1. 2.
3. 4. 5.
6.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. What Is Civilisation?, and Other Essays. Ipswich, MA: Golgonooza Press, 1989. See Angell, Roger. “The Interior Stadium.” The New Yorker, February 20, 1971; collected in in The Summer Game. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Taylor, Frederick. Principles of Scientific Management, New York: Harper, 1915, p. 7. Will, George F. Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1991, p. 3. An acceptance of paradox, ambiguity, and contradiction. See Walter Jackson Bate. John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, esp. ch. 10: “Negative Capability.” See Hugill, Andrew. Pataphysics: A Useless Guide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
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A Matter of Design Autotelic Systems Design
George Will describes the manager’s role in the game of baseball: A manager assembles a team, trains it, devises a lineup for a particular game.4 Historically, the manager has been important to the game. Personalities like Casey Stengel (1890–1970) were well known for managing by means of koanlike, paradoxical statements of seemingly nonsensical wisdom. Years of participatory immersion in the game allowed managers like Stengel to cultivate a leadership style characterized by an ingenious capacity for a negative capability,5 or something like Alfred Jarry’s Pataphysics: “the science of imaginary solutions and the laws governing exceptions.” 6 Such a “pataphysical” management system is designed to allow for teams of players to function as what have been called autotelic, self-learning systems, or thinking machines. The team becomes aware of itself as an intelligent system whose thinking is larger than, and independent from any individual participant’s contribution. Sport, Art, and Ritual Design
According to Dave Hickey, art is meant to “embody the image of our desire,” while sport is “merely an armature upon which we project” that image. 31
A Matter of Design
The art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy echoes this idea. Traditional art, Coomaraswamy writes, was always rooted in praxis: it had a practical, religious function. Art gave visual form to ritual practices and spiritual, theological ideas. The symbolic content of traditional art is not lost, however, when it is no longer practised out of a sense of ritual necessity: Even when such a sport has been completely secularized and has become for the profane a mere recreation or amusement it is still possible for whoever possesses the requisite knowledge of traditional symbolism to complete this physical participation in the sport, or enjoyment of it as a spectacle, and so restore, for himself at least, the “polar balance of physical and metaphysical” that is characteristic of all traditional cultures.7 The traditional purpose of involving the body in ritual practice — including what we think of as sports — comes from a belief in the unity of parts. The human agent is not independent from her environment. A traditional, spiritual anthroplogy suggests that we should understand the interaction of our own psychological parts before attempting to impose our will on the people, plants, animals, and other biological material that surrounds us. opposit e: Casey Stengel as a player for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1916. Photo: Library of Congress 33
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The “psychological” elements we need to familiarize ourselves with are more expansive than we have come to understand from contemporary psychology. “Man is a unity composed of ‘concentric’ dimensions and the points of connection between them,” writes Ghazi bin Muhammed.8 These interrelated, “concentric” elements are the Spirit, soul, and body. In the Christian system these are known, Prince Ghazi points out, as spiritus, animus, and corpus; In Islam they are called the ruh, nafs, and jism; and in the Classical Pythagorean and Platonic systems they are referred to as pneuma, psyche, and soma.9 Relating, connecting, and integrating these basic elements of the self is traditionally understood to be arduous work. Analysis, talking therapy, and psychoactive drugs provide relatively superficial treatments when compared to the art of sacred sports. The added benefit of sports, of course, is that they involve both the body and the will, or volition.
7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
Coomaraswamy. What Is Civilisation?, p. 135. Ghazi bin Muhammad. The Sacred Origin and Nature of Sports and Culture. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 1998, p. 73. Ghazi bin Muhammad. The Sacred Origin of Sports, p. 73. Okakura, Kakuzō. The Book of Tea. Boston: Shambhala, 2003, p. 89. Okakura, The Book of Tea, p. 64. Herrigel, Eugen. Zen in the Art of Archery. New York: Vintage Books, 1999 (1953), p. 61.
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A Matter of Design
Well-known examples of traditional arts that aim to involve the spirit, soul, and body include Japanese archery and tea ceremonies. Both ritualize apparently mundane, pragmatic activities, raising them to sacred status. Involving the more mundane aspects of everyday life allows the “lowest” parts of the body to be implicated by association. As Okakura Kakuzō puts it in his classic Book of Tea: Until one has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty. 10 The viewer is involved in what we might call an “athletic” aesthetics; she is not a passive, neutral, objective observer. “The spectator must cultivate the proper attitude for receiving the message,” Okakura writes, “as the artist must know how to impart it.” 11 Ritual involves multiple participants by means of a sympathetic communication, or intuition, capable of simultaneously coordinating the mind, senses, spirit, and intellect. Eugen Herrigel, a German philosophy professor teaching in Tokyo in the 1920s, describes his training in the traditional Japanese art of archery in very similar terms. Art and athletics are both involved in an attempt to access the “everyday mind” — the pre-cognitive, “artless” mind that intuitively, instinctively acts and reacts in sympathetic recognition of its surroundings. So it is that “bow, arrow, goal, and ego, all melt into one another, so that I can no longer separate them.” 12 35
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A Matter of Design
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third base
Baseball as an Education
The Greek word for leisure is our word for school.
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The Pythagorean, “Mundane,” Monochord, from Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, 1621. 40
An Education The purpose of training in baseball is not health but the formation of the soul. To hit like a shooting star, to catch a ball beyond one’s capabilities . . . such beautiful plays are not the result of technique but the result of good deeds. For all these are made possible by a strong spiritual power.1
suishu tobita
A
ncient and medieval philosophers advocate the education of the soul through music, and the education of the body through sport.2 A synthesis of the two, and thus an education of the whole person, is the goal of the Pythagorean system’s approach to numbers. An analytic approach to statistics is not entirely sufficient, in other words, when a musical, or poetic statistics is also possible. An “education” is obtained through familiarizing oneself with the mathematical rhythms of the game. The highest virtues, according to Aristotle, are cultivated through leisurely contemplation. And the highest virtues obtaining in a game like baseball are to be found in rhythmic, qualitative, number. 41
The Baseball Book “Number is Different from Quantity,” the anthropologist Gregory Bateson explains in a 1978 article for CoEvolution Quarterly.3 Quantity, according to Pythagorus, is derived from the limited, illusory nature of pure abstraction. Number, on the other hand, is used by a located, participating subject to count things. Counting is capable of adapting and contextualizing. Unlike quantity, number allows counter and counted to interact, participate, or play, thus avoiding the trap of calculating, or measuring from a position of detached, abstract, carefully measured objectivity. The essence of the Pythagorean understanding of number is that makes up “the material, corporeal basis of the mathematical science of harmonics.”4 Truly complex systems do not respond to quantitative measures and input because they do not operate according to quantitative means. Harmony, participation, and style are the only effective (or “virtuous”) way to understand a complex system. The same, we
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Suishu Tobita, quoted in Whiting, Robert. You Gotta Have Wa. New York: Vintage Departures, 2009, p. 38. Cf., Republic 4.441.d—4.442.a, and Maimonides, Guide p. 385. Bateson, Gregory. “Number is Different from Quantity,” CoEvolution Quarterly, Spring 1978, 44 – 46. Christensen, Thomas Street, The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, p. 272. Republic 7.536.b Westbrook, Ground Rules: Baseball & Myth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996, p. 287.
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An Education might argue, applies to systems divided into three strikes, twenty-seven outs, and nine innings. Education, according to Plato’s Republic, is accomplished not through compulsion, but through play.4 The education we acquire through participating in and watching baseball likewise begins with the practical image of an individual, trusted to play at, or practice, being sovereign — solely responsible for his actions. This image is central to baseball: each participant is part of a larger team, but the individual is not absorbed into the whole. Given his turn at bat, the player is allowed to pursue a form of self-determination. Each individual in the batting order faces the best from the opponent, and is given the opportunity to do perform with courage. Self-determination, we learn, is not easy. It requires an exercise of will in the face of freedom and opportunity. Baseball’s mythology, according to literary critic Diane Westbrook, is built on players learning from experience, observation, and analysis — constituting the present out of familiar pieces from the past. The group, too, learns from a leisurely reflection on a collection of individual experiences. We find “mythic debris,” Westbrook writes, “in the game’s ancient archetypal signifiers (in the weathered stones of Eden’s wall, now pressed into use in its outfield fence, or in its base paths, the configuration of all journeys).” 6 Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (see appendix, below) describes time spent reflecting, in leisurely 43
The Baseball Book contemplation, as scholē (school). It’s the place we exercise the highest active virtue. By way of contrast, businesses and compulsory “schools” built on the model of scientific management and programmatic efficiency,7 are a-scholē, non-schools, “without leisure” or freedom, and thus without the opportunity for education, rhythm, harmony, or style. According to A. Bart Giammatti, the function of sport at its best is the development of self-knowledge, or autotelism.8 This is produced by means of a practiced freedom, and the development of a habitual, studied response when presented with regular opportunities to exercise courage. Practical, active doing, when combined with understanding, results in the education of the whole person; the development of “soul.” A soulful person is one who knows she’s “been through the wars,” as
7.
8. 9.
John Taylor Gatto: “Schools were designed by Horace Mann, Barnas Sears, and W.R. Harper of the University of Chicago, and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, and other to be instruments for the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.” From “Why Schools Don’t Educate,” Chapel Hill, NC: The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas. Issue 175, June, 1990. Accessed at thesunmagazine.org/ issues/175 Giammatti, Take Time for Paradise, p. 19. On what might be called “numerical style,” or rhythm, see Charles Olson, “Against Wisdom as Such,” in Olson, Charles, Collected Prose.
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An Education it were, and learned from the experience. When the multiple levels of the self (psychological, physical, social, and universal) have learned to work together, consonance, or harmony, is achieved. The result, often referred to as style,9 can be observed in an individual’s performance. In the same way, a lack of style may indicate that further education is needed. Shakespeare provides a conclusive warning against the tendency to reduce sport to the level of mere entertainment. Baseball may not be “just like life,” but it remains one of our last, best means of soulful education. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
Merchant of Venice V, i, 83 – 87
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home
Appendix
Selections from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (10.7).
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If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be that of the best thing in us. From Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics 10.7, translated by W. D. Ross.
Whether it be reason [contemplative, intellectual intuition], or something else that is this element which is thought to be our natural ruler and guide and to take thought of things noble and divine, whether it be itself also divine or only 48
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the most divine element in us, the activity of this in accordance with its proper virtue will be perfect happiness. That this activity is contemplative we have already said. Now this would seem to be in agreement with the truth. For, firstly, this activity is the best (since not only is reason [contemplative, intellectual intuition], the best thing in us, but the objects of reason are the best of knowable obContemplative, intelletual intuition (or Reason), in accordance with its proper virtue will be perfect happiness.
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jects); and secondly, it is the most continuous, since we can contemplate truth more continuously than we can do anything. And we think happiness has pleasure mingled with it, but the activity of philosophic wisThe activity of philodom is adsophical wisdom is the pleasantest of mittedly the activities; it offers pleasures marvellous pleasantest for their purity and of virtuous enduringness. activities; at all events the pursuit of it is thought to offer pleasures marvellous for their purity and their enduringness.
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And the self-sufficiency that is spoken of must belong most to the contemplative activity. For while a philosopher, as well as a just man or one possessing any other virtue, needs the necessaries of life, when they Self-sufficiency must are sufbelong to the contemplative activity. ficiently equipped with things of that sort the just man needs people towards whom and with whom he shall act justly, and the temperate man, the brave man, and each of the others is 51
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in the same case, but the philosopher, even when by himself, can contemplate truth, and the better the wiser he is; he can perhaps do so better if he has fellow-workers, but still he is the most self-sufficient. And this activity alone would seem to be loved for its own sake; for nothing arises from it apart from the contemplating, while from practical activities we gain more or less apart from the action. And happiness is Happiness depends on leisure; we are busy so that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.
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thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace. Now the activity of the practical virtues is exhibited in political or military affairs, but the actions concerned with these seem to be unleisurely. Warlike actions are completely so (for no one chooses to be at war, or provokes war, for the sake of being at war; any one would seem absolutely murderous if he were to make enemies of his friends in order to bring about battle and slaughter); but the action of 53
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the statesman is also unleisurely, and — apart from the political action itself — aims at despotic power and honours, or at all events happiness, for him and his fellow citizens — a happiness different from political action, and evidently sought as being different. So if among virtuous actions political and military actions are distinguished by nobility and greatness, and these are unleisurely and aim at an end and are not desirable for their own sake, but the activity of reason [intellectual intuition], which is 54
An Education
contemplative, seems both to be superior in serious worth and to aim at no end beyond itself, and to have its pleasure proper to itself (and this augments the activity), and the self-sufficiency, leisureliness, unweariedness (so far as this is possible for man), and all the other attributes ascribed to the supremely happy man are evidently those connected with this activity, it follows that this will be the complete happiness of man, if it be allowed a complete term of life (for none of the attributes of happiness is incomplete). 55
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But such a life would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him; and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exercise of the other kind of virtue. If reason [intellectual intuition] is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, 56
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to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything. This would seem, too, to be each man himself, since it is the authoritative and better part of him. It would be strange, We must strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us.
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then, if he were to choose not the life of his self but that of something else. And what we said before will apply now; that which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore, the life according to reason [intellectual intuition, or conscience] is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest. following spread: A “green garden of the mind.� Baseball diamond used by coal miners and families. Nemacolin, Greene County, Pennsylvania. Source: National Archives, Department of the Interior, June 13, 1946.
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Bibliography Adair, Robert Kemp. The Physics of Baseball. New York: Perennial, 2002. Angell, Roger. “The Interior Stadium.” The New Yorker, February 20, 1971; collected in in The Summer Game. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics, trans. W.D. Ross. Accessed at: classics.mit.edu/Aristotle Barbery, Muriel, and Alison Anderson. The Elegance of the Hedgehog. New York: Europa Editions, 2011. Bate, Walter Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994 (1966). Bateson, Gregory. “Number is Different from Quantity,” CoEvolution Quarterly, Spring 1978, 44–46. Christensen, Thomas Street. The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. What Is Civilisation?, and Other Essays. Ipswich, MA: Golgonooza Press, 1989. Dawidoff, Nicholas. Baseball: A Literary Anthology. New York: Library of America, 2002. Gatto, John Taylor. “Why Schools Don’t Educate.” Chapel Hill, NC: The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas. Issue 175, June, 1990; accessed at thesunmagazine. org/issues/175 63
The Baseball Book Ghazi bin Muhammad. The Sacred Origin and Nature of Sports and Culture. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 1998. Giamatti, A. Bartlett. A Great and Glorious Game. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1998. ———. Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games. New York: Summit Books, 1989. ———. The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic. Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1966. Gordon, Peter H., Sydney Waller, and Paul L. Weinman. Diamonds Are Forever: Artists and Writers on Baseball. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1987. Herrigel, Eugen. Zen in the Art of Archery. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Hickey, Dave. Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy. Los Angeles: Art issues. Press, 1997. Hugill, Andrew. Pataphysics: A Useless Guide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Kahn, Roger. The Boys of Summer. New York: HarperPerennial, 2006. Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides). The Guide for the Perplexed: Moses Maimonides. New York: Dover Publications, 1990 (1956). Malamud, Bernard, and Kevin Baker. The Natural. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Okakura, Kakuzō. The Book of Tea. Boston: Shambhala, 2003.
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Bibliography Okrent, Daniel, Harris Lewine, and David Nemec. The Ultimate Baseball Book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. O’Laughlin, Michael. The Garlands of Repose: The Literary Celebration of Civic and Retired Leisure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Olson, Charles, “Against Wisdom as Such,” in Collected Prose. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Plato, Edith Hamilton, and Huntington Cairns. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Rosler, Martha. “Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part III.” New York: e-flux journal #25, May 2011. Accessed at: e-flux.com/issues/25may-2011. Taylor, Frederick. Principles of Scientific Management, New York: Harper, 1915. Westbrook, Ground Rules: Baseball & Myth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Whiting, Robert. You Gotta Have Wa. New York: Vintage, 1990. Will, George F. Bunts. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1999. ———. Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. New York: Harper, 2010. ———. One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009.
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2nd print-on-demand edition, June 2013. Š Are Not Books & Publications Wheaton, Illinois 60187 arenotbooks.com The Little Lords are small-format artists’ books published by Are Not Books & Publications. As designers, not authorities, we are intellectually curious and thoroughly critical, but with no aspiration or pretense to anything like expertise or authority. Indeed, our goal is to remain anonymous, and to acquire no reputation. This print-on-demand edition was not copyedited or proofread. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.
the is no t baseba ll book
T
o say baseball provides a pleasant distraction or escape is trite. Sports, art, music, literature, philosophy and the mystical elements of religion all imagine a “good place,” or eu-topos. Baseball, for example, is played in a variation on the ancient symbol for paradise: an enclosed park, or garden. According to Sebastian de Grazia, work dignifies, while leisure perfects. Progress moves from the necessary to the desirable, from the utilitarian to the liberal, or free. Scholia, the Greek word for leisure is our word for school. Education is not training for work, but preparation for leisure. The dignified labor of baseball suggests that we might judge a person not by what they do for a living, but by how they spend their free time. ...
the lit tle lords are small-format artists’ books published by Are Not Books—a group of artists, writers, and designers who work together in groups of two or three.