I've put a ton of items in my "for website" folder over the last month or so, but I haven't been moved to write about hardly any of them for some reason, especially The Big Important Issues in the news. So here's some blathering over a few exceedingly unimportant things:
The book, it ain't worth a-rea-eadin': I recently read Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Vol. 1, and it wasn't bad, but it also it wasn't very good either, and nowhere near what I expected from the lavish praise given it by critics (the paperback edition I read starts with twelve and a half pages of ecstatic blurbs from reviewers). As most reviewers noted, this isn't a comprehensive memoir; Dylan instead covers four vignettes, or perhaps a better word would be acts (in the sense of acts of a stage play) in his career, two of them before he was a star and two from later in his career, and he doesn't cover them in chronological order. I'm fine with that approach conceptually; the trouble is that the two vignettes from later in his career are real "who cares" territory (the longest section of the book deals with the recording of his 1989 album No Mercy -- can you name a single song from that album? me neither), and not much insight can be gained from the other two sections, in my view. Certainly he doesn't answer those obvious questions about his career that everyone asks (like, "when are the Traveling Wilburys getting back together?" and "So what's with all those adverbial / adjectival song titles in the 60s, like 'Queen Jane Approximately,' 'Absolutely Sweet Marie,' 'Obviously Five Believers,' 'Temporary Like Achilles,' 'Positively 4th Street'?" and "What kind of song can a tambourine man play, anyway? You are aware it's a percussion instrument, right?"). What it lacked in a coherent narrative, it also lacked in memorable anecdotes. Not recommended.
It don't come easy: The Tigers beat the Twins today, 4-3, in their 12th one-run game in their first twenty-four games (they're 7-5 in one run games, 6-6 in the rest). That's a pace for 81 one-run games, which sounded like a lot to me. It's worrisome, too: it would seem like playing every other game with no margin for error would eventually wear players down psychologically. Last year the Detroiters played 44 one run games (and were 24-20, worse on a percentage basis than their overall record of 95-67, which means last year's turnaround wasn't due at all to lucky bounces in close games); the major league leader last year in one run games was Pittsburgh with 55. A little internet searching disclosed that the record for a season is 75 -- Houston in 1971. The AL record is 74 -- the White Sox in 1968. I found that record in The Sporting News Baseball Record Book, which I was astonished (and gratified) to learn is now a free electronic download on the Sporting News' website. I'll definitely have to take advantage of that, since my hardcopy version of the book is the 1987 edition.
Down in the basement: Not to sound like Ron Burgundy ("I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany"), but I own a number of horror/ science fiction anthologies, most of them used 1960s paperbacks. I hardly ever get rid of books, especially ones I might look at later, and especially ones that are not easily replaced, but apparently I got rid of one of my horror anthology books, the one with a story called "The Thing in the Cellar," because I could never find the book with that story in it. I remembered it scaring the bejeebers out of me when I was a kid, and I tried to find it because I didn't want to deprive my son of that experience. No luck, though, and I figured there was no way to to find it again. I couldn't remember the title of the anthology or the author of the story and thought because of copyright (and the obscurity of the story) that the text wouldn't be posted on the internets, but I thought wrong. A quick search of The Google for "The Thing in the Cellar" turned up the full text of the story (which was published much earlier (1932) than I had thought), along with some biographical details on the author, an English doctor named David Keller. It doesn't seem much to read it now, but this short story made quite an impression on me as a kid (and I wasn't the only one; the fellow who posted it on the web says the creepy little tale gave him sleepless nights as a twelve year old).
