In Which I am Curmudgeonly Grump About Sports

I’ve not posted in a while. Mostly I’ve been working on other projects and blogging at the group blog at Ghost Island.

I renew my blogging here with a response to a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s called ‘How David Beats Goliath’ and is about a girls youth basketball team that goes all the way to the national championship tournament by using the full court press all of the time.

Gladwell wants this to be proof that by disregarding the standard rules, an inferior opponent can win by dint of sheer effort. He then asks why other teams don’t use the full court press. His answer, eventually, is they are not willing to put in the effort to run that hard. The fact is, at least as far as basketball is concerned, this is simply not the case.

The press works particularly well in youth basketball because of a lack of composure and ball handling skills among such young players. Skilled players can run on a press and can draw tons of fouls. I’ve played enough basketball and broken enough presses to know that even at the high school level the press is a risky proposition unless the pressing team is far more athletic than their opponent.

Gladwell brings up Rick Pitino and his preference for the press as proof of the constant press tactic at a high level, but this is misleading. Pitino may not always recruit traditionally blue chip players at the same rate as some other comparable coaches, but he is recruiting extremely good athletes that are handpicked to work within a pressing system. Essentially, he recruits the perfect player to take advantage of a strategic quirk.

The fact is that the press is not a better system than the half-court defense. Most teams have trouble against teams that press all of the time because most other teams don’t press all of the time. Very simply, you practice most of the time for the kinds of things that you see the most. Any team that adopts a system that their opponents are not used to has a built in advantage based on asymmetry of practice. As soon as the balance of teams started pressing constantly, the teams that ran smart half-court defenses and shut down fast breaks would see an advantage from playing teams not accustomed to running half-court sets.

Yes, a tough press can be a great tactic. However, a team with strong ball-handlers and a well-designed fast break will destroy a press. It’s nice to think that, as Gladwell proposes, David can beat Goliath by just outworking him. In truth, his advantage lies entirely in the asymmetry of comfort between a team accustomed to pressing constantly and one that rarely must face such a strategy and so doesn’t get a chance to run against it often.

I suspect that the half court defense evolved because, all things being equal, it is actually to the smarter defense. Presses tend to tire players and lead to foul trouble. Good point guards can dominate a press, especially if they are used to working against it. A few teams can overachieve by recruiting specifically for a pressing system, because in the overall scheme of things, those players will be undervalued and relatively cheap. This is not a new lesson and had been thoroughly discussed in books like ‘Money Ball’.

So yes, using a tactic that plays to your relative advantages and surprises your opponent makes a lot of sense. Gladwell’s key point is sound enough. But his basketball analysis is sorely lacking. Novelty plays and novelty strategies (the constant press, the 4 guard line-up, etc.) work because they emphasize a strength and subject the opposition to a strategy it isn’t used to countering. As soon as a novelty becomes widely adopted, the old standard can be effectively utilized just like the novelty had been before it (see the Miami Dolphin’s use of the direct snap).

Fragments of Fragments

I have not posted in a while because the things I have been thinking keep appearing other places, but said better. I am thinking now especially of fiction (text) as object thing I was going to work on until I saw that first essay in the Donald Barthelme’s book of assorted non-fiction and realized he’d thought the same thing, but more clearly and a good few decades ago. So the pieces you should have read here are now proliferating much more widely in diverse and more legitimate sources.

My other reason for writing less here is that I’ve been trying to work on my thesis. I will give you some excerpts so you can see the kinds of thoughts I’m having. The following are still in rough draft form and don’t include the quotations and citations that will buttress them.

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BEGINNINGS: Towards an Understanding of Potential, Literature, and Potential Literature

“Oulipo stops where the work begins”

1) I should like to begin my Beginnings with the beginning Beginning. I was walking to get coffee along the trash-strewn street in my South Philadelphia neighborhood and came upon thought that beginning Beginnings in this way was only appropriate, as it will highlight a few of the key concerns that will be begun and linked in the further Beginnings. These three keys will be:

1)- Language, repetition, and variation
2)- Concern with form
3)- Voluntariness and self-awareness

This is to say, the structure of the project itself plays with and into the fundamental topics under consideration. ‘Beginnings’ is a series of unfinished micro-essays that are thematically linked and the open up (in)to potentialities. Thus the project enacts (physically) the formal/materialist concerns of the Oulipo and (metaphorically) the nature of potentiality, thereby acting formally as instructive about the nature of both. This Beginning and those that follow are therefor not meant to be definitive remarks, but rather sites of interlinking explorations. As such, though the order of the Beginnings is significant and planned, it is not imperative that it is strictly followed. The reader is welcome to chart any course desired, to skip passages, to loop backwards. One of the most exciting things about Oulipian constraint is that it so often lends itself to a greater freedom for the reader.

2) The Etymologies of ‘Literature’ and ‘Potential’- A place where one might choose to begin this kind of investigation of words is in the words themselves. Our topic being potential literature, we thus has three natural etymological entry ways: Potential, Literature, and Potential Literature. Below we will attempt a preliminary etymology of each.

Literature:

Potential:

Potential Literature: Francois Le Lionais writes: “QUOTE from primer ”

3) The project of Beginnings needed a number that, like any given language unit, was both significant and arbitrary. To arrive at this number, I elected to use a variation of the practice of gematria, or Kabbalistic numerology. (Explain the process). Thus “Begin” translates “73” (2+5+7+9+50). And so 73 became my number, the number that would structure the entire project, holding within it a reference to both the highly potentializing practice of Kabbalist gematria and chosen arbitrary structuring of the classic Oulipian work.

Members of the Oulipo write frequently about their use of the axiomatic method. CITE from ‘Oulipo Primer’

24) Plagiarism by Anticipation/Plagiarism and Potential-

One of the more suggestive terms invented by the Oulipo is ‘Anticipatory Plagiarism’. The term is used to designate any instance in which an Oulipian constraint or structure turns out to predate it’s discovery or invention by an actual member of the group. This naturally leads to the cognate ‘Anticipatory Plagiarist’. Such plagiarists are held in high esteem.

Plagiarism after the fact, that is, plagiarism of the ordinary variety, is rarely looked upon with much favor. Oulipo’s playful co-opting of the term is not, at least primarily, a defense of plagiarism as such. Still, it operates within and nourishes a logic in which plagiarism can constitute a positive and creative act.

We should backtrack briefly to understand why this is so. For the certain general attitude towards language which this project has been obliquely tracing and describing, any instantiation of a grapheme is both unique and contingent. This is important if we take at face value the term ‘anticipatory plagiarism’. Of course this is a playful usage, but the Oulipians are a group that takes play quite seriously. So what does it mean to plagiarize Oulipo avant la lettre? It means that the idea becomes meaningful and unique to the Oulipo project when discovered or proposed within the Oulipo context, regardless of where it first originated. It also means that there is not simply a break between the meanings in the two contexts. Rather, each context carries the trace of the meaning of the other as a kind of supplement.

This same logic applies to ordinary or otherwise after the fact plagiarisms as well. To begin to explore this, let us look at three Don Quixote’s. The first, logically, is Cervantes’ original text. There is a kind of ghost-second here, which is introduced by translation, but we will leave this aside for the time being. The second Don Quixote is the plagiarized version written (assembled?re-mixed?) by Kathy Acker. Whole passages of Cervantes’ and several other pre-existing texts are lifted, fucked with, recontextualized. (Cont.) “What tiresome and laborious folly it is to write lengthy tomes, to expound in five hundred pages on an idea one could easily propound orally in a few minutes. Better is pretending that the books exist already and offereing a summary of commentary.” -Borges, as quoted in Benabou, why i have not written, p19.

The final Don Quiixote concerns not a direct plagiarism but the theoretical account of one. As Marcel Benabou reminds us in the epigraph to his ‘Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books’, Borges once wrote. “quote about the interest being in the description of a story rather than the telling.” In (one one register at least) keeping with this dictum, Borges provides us with the story ‘The Don Quixote of Pierre Menard’ in which the titular Menard seeks to “QUOTE on writing his own DQ”. (cont.)

56) Oulipo and Genius/Inspiration:

We can start from the platform of a platitude- Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Oulipo would tend to agree, but would instead say: What is inspiration even? What is success? Shouldn’t we just say, good work is as much an effect of craft as any kind of mystical ‘talent’ or ‘inspiration’?

This rejection of inspiration is then also a rejection of non-writing and of the very notion of ‘writer’s block’. Writing as craft takes on emphasis in projects like Harry Matthew’s ’20 Lines’, Georges Perec’s “XXXXXX’ project, and Raymond Queneau’s Excercises in Style’. In all of these, the act of writing is foregrounded.

Perhaps what is most interesting, in light of the inquiries we are making here, is what this rejection of inspiration says about the refusal to write. In removing ‘writer’s block’ and the failure of inspiration, Oulipo actually elevates non-writing. To not write becomes a positive act, a refusal. Or else it becomes inexcusable. Stripped of the concept of inspiration, non-writing takes on the same voluntary character as writing. Both agency and responsibility are thus highlighted in the act of writing. Here then the central paradoxes appear as they will continuously: the arbitrary becomes linked to the voluntary, both action and inaction to agency, unknowable potential to demystification…

New David Foster Wallace

This has been widely blogged about among huge literature nerds, but I am excited and so want to make a short post.

The following links are from the New Yorker. The excerpt is from David Foster Wallace’s incomplete final novel, ‘The Pale King’ and the essay is a biographical piece that focuses especially on DFW’s struggles with said book and the general project of continuing to write fiction.

I’ve written here before about the importance his fiction holds for me. I feel like it’s so hard to write about the people that I not only admire but am somewhat in awe of- that seem not only great or exciting but actually important. Anyways, the following is classic DFW- full of technical mastery, but even more full of an intense attempt at honesty and at using craft to approach something like that honesty via a dozen simultaneously intersecting routes. Which is to say, approaching that honesty by way of perhaps the only route possible.

Essay

Excerpt

Novella

Ok, so I mentioned this on my facebook status a few days ago, but for those of you who have enough of a life not to troll around on facebook looking at statuses:

I finished the first draft of my new novella a few days ago. Please let me know if you are interested in reading it/giving me some feedback. I’d be happy to send you a copy. Just leave a comment or email me.

(home plan: chateau novella)

Depression Stories

Having recently taken the Greyhound bus from Chicago to Philadelphia, I can safely say that the saddest people in the world travel on buses. I think this is because they are the people that have to go very long distances on as little money as possible, don’t own cars, and would rather give up an entire day of their lives than spend an extra hundred dollars on an airplane ticket. This means that if they are older than 30, they are probably in some kind of very bad situation.

During my trip, I heard the absolutely most depressing stories of betrayal and self-sabotage, of people giving up their whole lives for a partner who dumps them and sends them, penniless, back to central Ohio. I heard a man who’d never before left the state of Michigan exclaim ‘It’s like a dream! I’ve never seen a city like this before!’ We were pulling into Pittsburgh. It turns out he’d been laid off and his fiance had left him for his best friend.

The bus is a good place to travel slowly, to see the countryside and get in a lot of reading. It’s a good place to remind you of your privilege.

In Defense of Radicalism

This critique ought to begin with a bit of appreciation. I actually really like Nate Silver and Fivethirtyeight.com, and tend to agree with many of his opinions. However, he recently wrote a post contrasting ‘Radical’ and ‘Rational’ progressivism. As part of this post, Silver produced a chart to describe the difference between these two types of progressives that relies on assumptions that I find highly troubling.

This post (which can be read here) has gotten a fair amount of play among left-leaning bloggers. My own response focuses on a few key points that, while not a comprehensive discussion of his entire argument, does generally lay out my basic objections.

1) Silver claims: Reformist sees politics as a battle of ideas, Radical sees politics as a battle of wills. This seems to me to be entirely wrong. Perhaps the neo-liberal or reform-minded progressives see politics as a matter simply of good governance or ‘doing what works’, whereas the more radical wing believes that there are such things as ideology that make the simple task of ‘good governance’ a highly fraught task. What I mean is that the radical objection is roughly as follows: People are deeply entrenched within ideological frameworks, therefor, it is often impossible to convince someone of the correctness of a policy by way of logical demonstration. In this way, the good ideas of progressivism cannot triumph simply through being good ideas, but require a certain amount of will and a recognition of the essentially agonistic nature of politics.

This could be seen as a argument between post-partisanship and a partisanship of deep convictions. Rather than say: we are beyond politics and all just want what’s best for our country, it’s better to to say: we admit disagreement about what’s best for the country and will admit that we cannot all agree on what constitutes good governance regardless of how hard we try.

Critically, radicalism does not close off pragmatism. Rather, it says at all moments: These are out firm beliefs. On some points, we cannot compromise, on others we must. But when we compromise, we will not call it a triumph but rather a partial failure in light of our real goals. The distinction of Idea v. Will is a misapprehension of the distinction between an attitude about the power of ideology and the minimums at which compromise is acceptable.

2: Silver claims that reformists are “Technocratic” and that radicals are “Populist”. Radicalism does not equal populism, although that is sometimes a form in which the far left manifests. Of course, populism is also a form in which the far right manifests. This also can hold true for technocracy with regards to the center-right and -left. So what Silver is arguing is that the radical branches of any politics lose sight of rational thought in favor of a broad populism.

However, I would argue that this distinction is highly problematic. For example, mainstream DLC-style Democrats use the populist appeal to the “center” in order to assert their political power. Further, radical thinkers like Paul Virilio and Donna Haraway take technological advancements as true openings for new modes of progressive politics and radical life-techniques. In fact, the history of Marxist thought is essentially technocratic, as it takes the development of mechanized industry as an essential stage in the development of a generally socialized society (hence the fundamental contradiction in largely undeveloped countries like Russia and China attempting to establish socialist states).

3) Later in the post, Silver makes the critical (if common) error of judging Marxism by the failure of the Soviet Union. Marxist modes of thought are not equivalent to the specific case of Sovietism, which is in fact a gross betrayal of the specifically internationalist tendency of Marxist critique. In fact, the lessons of Marxism are still quite valuable to even a reform-minded thinker, as they provide the basis for an understanding of property, value, commodity, and ideology. Much of my previous discussion is informed by Marxist thought, though I would never claim that it equates to an unquestioning acceptance of said thought, much less a desire for Soviet-style governance.

To me the real danger of a reformist politics is that in some cases, the reforms act to retrench and solidify interests and structures that in truth need to be entirely overhauled. Hence, if I say I am wary of certain kinds of health care reform, it is not because I do not see the desperate need for improved material conditions. Rather, it is that I fear that certain kinds of reform fail to greatly improve the situation and at the same time make it more difficult to enact the kind of change that is needed. This is not a matter of idealism v. pragmatism, it is a kind of calculation between short-term and long-term pragmatism.

There are, unfortunately, many totally non-pragmatic so-called radicals who take extremely shrill and self-righteous standpoints and totally close off any kind of rational debate. Having gone to Hampshire College, I’ve met more than my fair share of them. However, the election of President Obama should serve as proof of the fact that in a pinch, the majority of even radical progressives will act pragmatically. That they (we) will do so and then vocally criticize the very people thereby elected is not frivolity or inconsistency, but essentially the true mode of radicalism.

That is, the radical will act in a reformist capacity to relieve material suffering as much as possible, but will never call such action victorious. I once heard Alain Badiou say that of course he would (if he were American) vote for Obama, but he would not consider that as an action of (or even part of) radical politics. This kind of co-existance of pragmatism and radicalism, and the self-awareness to not confuse the two seems to me the proper condition of a thoughtful radicalism.

A radical politics deserving of the name requires a pragmatic approach that simply calculates risk/reward differently than Silver or the majority of Democratic Party members. Deciding the kinds of policies and compromises we deem acceptable is a serious and worthwhile debate. Attacking those that find themselves to answering these questions differently as ‘anti-intellectual’ or ‘anti-ideas’ is a thoroughly useless (and entirely non-pragmatic gesture), and is something that I normally consider Mr. Silver to be above.

Stutterings & Mild Observations

– I’ve been trying lately to immerse myself in my reading for my thesis and have as a result not been nearly as up on current events as I normally like to be. The corollary to this is that: 1) I haven’t come across as many news items I feel like writing about. 2) What I have heard about, I do not feel like I know enough about to comment on productively.

– I of course celebrated my birthday with the pure joy of a Steelers Super Bowl victory. Now come the months of worrying over draft choices and free agent signings.

– A note for my youngest sister: Michael Phelps was caught on camera smoking weed from a bong.

– I’m growing fond of this kind of short writing-burst, of openings-up without definite endings or developed arguments. In researching for my thesis, I came across a series of aphorisms by the French writer Marcel Benabou. Here are a few: “Perhaps you are one of those who believe that there is a goal or limit to writing. Not me. Writing is writing without end, and without other end than writing.” And “Perhaps you are one of those who believe that language is neutral and innocent. Not me. I consider it so far from innocent that I feel at each instant the need to chastise it.” And “Perhaps you are one of those who are afraid to imitate. Not me. I continue to dream of a day when even plagiarism will be recognized as an eminently dignified sign of culture.”

As you can see, Benabou, has taken a set form and used to as the engine to produce a series of (in my opinion) very powerful reflections. This is a simple and neat example of the Oulipian project, which is not so much the project of writing under constraint but of recognizing that all writing happens under constraints and asks only to choose its constraints voluntarily.

– Overheard today while reading at my neighborhood coffee shop: “His cousin gave him a hit of acid in a phone booth and he couldn’t figure out how to get out, so he called his mother and she had to drive an hour and a half to get him. He was never the same again.”

Once in a Lifetime

There are a lot of reasonable and well-considered analyses to be made about the upcoming super bowl. Important questions involve the two quarterbacks, the condition of Hines Ward’s knee, whether or not Larry Fitzgerald is human, can the Steelers’ offensive line maintain protection, etcetc.

However, the internet is littered with expert opinions and insight. There is little reason for me to provide in depth arguments, although I will provide the following (very brief) opinion: The Steelers are the stronger team overall and will win unless they have major breakdowns involving special teams or turnovers.

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The real reason that the Steelers ought to triumph does not, in fact, have anything to do with statistics or personnel match-ups, but instead with a kind of personal-biographical astrological alignment that only happens once or twice in a lifetime, if that.

You see, the Superbowl takes place on my birthday. This is not terribly unusual, as the Feb 1 features the superbowl once every 7 years. Still, it is a reasonably rare occasion. Now, all things being even, the chances that any given team will play in the superbowl in a given season are 1 in 16. A bit of multiplication yields the result that a given team is likely to be in the superbowl on my birthday approximately once every 112 years.

Of course, the Steelers are not any team. They are a very well run franchise and have historically represented the AFC in about 1 of every 6 or 7 superbowls. Even if the Steelers continue their success, they are only likely to play on my birthday once every 40 to 50 years. Which means that this is the kind of big deal life event that will only maybe happen once more in my whole life, like a wedding or something.

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Also of note: People rooting for the Steelers include: the US astronauts currently in space and President Obama. The Cardinals have McCain. I think we notice a winner/loser pattern here…

Punctuation Notes

Yesterday, I attended a lecture at Penn about the history of punctuation in early modern texts. Basically, the discussion was of how punctuation had two primary purposes and was developed in accordance with these. The first is syntactic and has come to be the predominant strain. The second tradition was punctuation in order to designate intensities in the text, especially with regards to how the reader modulate the voice. This second function of punctuation was almost like a kind of recording technology, so it doesn’t surprise me that it has become largely outmoded.

It did, however, have a major lasting effect on Spanish punctuation with the introduction of the inverted question and exclamation marks before words to signify how to read a given sentence at its start. This innovation was only developed in the mid 1700s, and it caught the eye of Ben Franklin. In a letter to Noah Webster, Franklin even suggested that English should adopt these kinds of marks. He explained that it’s a good thing to have the question mark in a sentence, “But this is absurdly Places at its End, so that the Reader does not discover it , ’till he finds he has wrongly modulated his Voice and is therefor obliged to begin again the Sentence.”

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In some minor personal news, I have a piece up currently at Pequin and new work in the print journal ‘The Benefactor’.

After so much time…

I’ve been absent from the internet for a few days because I have been active in the real world. I’ve been at least sort of active.

Please excuse this post. It is not legitimate. I am not really discussing anything, although I will soon. I just wanted to quickly write down a few thoughts about things that have happened recently.

1) The pope just reinstated a formerly defrocked priest who is a Holocaust denier. I’d never made much of the pope’s nazi-youth past because he was only a child at the time, but it takes on a new significance in light of his tolerance of such historical-revisionist antisemitism.

2) I read a very interesting article about the Israeli military using Deleuze to provide a basis for planning urban warfare techniques. For example, the concept of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space apparently figured into the development of their strategy in their recent war in Lebanon.

3) Obama… There’s not much to say and a ton to wonder about. I guess the only thing to do is watch and be hopeful.

4) Pittsburgh’s going to the Super Bowl. Awesome.

Ok, I think I’m going to write a more thorough SB preview later this week as well as a real essay/article or two. For now I am tired and in lazy Sunday mode.