Paul Auster wrote three of my favorite stories: “City of Glass,” “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room.” They were eventually combined into one book called “The New York Trilogy.” They’re superficially detective stories but they’re really sort of post-modern freakouts in the form of detective stories. Which was something that blew my mind when I read them in the mid-90s or whenever it was. I re-read them every couple of years and, God, you should go read them too. They’re amazing.
Auster has another book I like too, “Book of Illusions.” Totally different thing -- a mourning writer and long-missing silent film star -- but there are post-modern elements to it too. Stuff where the author gets mixed up with the characters and things like that. I haven’t read a lot of his other stuff, but I assume that’s just one of his things: exploding the story and turning it inside out or whatever. A little of that goes a long way in my experience, but he does it very well.
But maybe he should stick to blowing up his characters’ lives and step away from blowing up baseball. From the New York Times Letters to the Sports Editor page from the other day:To the Sports Editor:
Re “In Push to Shorten Games, There’s No Time to Waste,” Aug. 17: I would like to offer a suggestion about speeding up baseball. Eliminate the two-strike foul ball as a neutral play (neither strike nor ball) and rule it a strike. To compensate for the advantage this would give the pitcher, allow the batter to go to first base after three balls instead of four.
This way, no at-bat could last more than five pitches. Pitch counts would go down, allowing starting pitchers to go deeper into games, which in turn would reduce the dead time caused by changing pitchers — the primary reason games last so long these days.
Traditionalists will argue that this will alter baseball as we know it. But if games continue to drag on for three hours or longer, baseball as we know it will lose its audience.
PAUL AUSTER
Brooklyn
I feel like that would blow my mind in a bad way even more than “New York Trilogy” blew my mind in a good way when I first read it.
(h/t to the Baseball Freaks)
