Sunset, Wednesday, 14 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Without meaning to, editorial demon Aime Ballard-Wood corrected me today on my post from Sunday about the overuse of what I was calling ‘exclamation marks’. After writing to me about yesterday’s post on the World Series (she commented, “Afternoon baseball: Hell yeah!” and I replied, “I was feeling like a lonely lunatic!”), Aime said, “Did you have to think about that exclamation point?”

Point? Not mark?

(My response, incidentally, was to give her my best Rex Harrison: They’re second nature to me now/ Like breathing out and breathing in ...)

When I asked Aime about it, she said:

I’ve always said, and I quite like, exclamation point. I like it so much that I refuse to try to look it up. 

It fell to me to do the grueling work. So after three minutes I came up with:

Exclamation point/mark? Chicago [The Chicago Manual of Style – online here, although I was referring to the print edition on my shelf] uses only ‘point’, dumb as rocks Wikipedia leads with ‘marks’ – that alone lends a lot of weight to points, as does the preponderance of ‘marks’ via Google. I liked the sound of marks but will have to go with points.

So I went to my post from Sunday and changed it. Evidence of my Exclamation Mark Period [sic?] is already being covered over by the shifting cybersands.

We ended our discussion as follows.

BILL: Doesn’t it suck that we’re doing this when we should be watching October afternoon baseball?

AIME [exclaims]: Yes!

Sunset, Tuesday, 13 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I couldn’t quite figure out how to say this without sounding like a retro reactionary nostalgia-mongering reprobate anarchist out to sabotage the U.S. economy and undercut the moral fiber of our youth, not to mention our elderly, and ... everybody else. Oh well.

I also know that the core of this idea is already popular with a certain small retro reactionary (etc.) minority of sports fans, but I may have added something to it that makes it even better ... or worse.

For the temperate zones of the northern hemisphere, it should be evident that October baseball was meant to be played in the daytime. This means the World Series, of course, and, by extension into modern times, the playoffs that lead up to it. Of course I’m influenced by warm gauzy memories of Indian summer afternoons when people stopped what they were doing at work or school to follow the game. I’m well aware of the economic imperatives of prime time television revenues that drove these games into the dark ... and into perfect football weather. I also believe that we are generally much, much more driven in our busy daytime lives than we used to be – how many would dare to stop and watch baseball at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday?

My wicked solution: Go whole hog. Make the Fall Classic into a variable series of national quasi-holidays, feast days, or picnic days if you will, to celebrate America. What is more American? (Lacrosse, the fastest sport on foot, but we’ll let that go ... for now. Oh, and basketball, but ... where was I?) So, O.K., what could feel more classically American? Not only that, these are festive days we would share, increasingly, with friends in Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, China, Japan, Korea, all the places where baseball has taken hold. It would be great for baseball, and would mean more money, overall, not less. It would be good for the nation and our impoverished workaday obsessions. It would be good for the soul.

And I was very happy when it dawned on me, so to speak, that this little composition isn’t really a random digression but has everything to do with the sun going down on a warm autumn day like the one we’ve just had here.

Sunset’s for someone very close who’s having a tough week. For Rev. Sister S., cheers and love from this side of the Hully Gully.

Sunset, Monday, 12 October 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

This seems to be an evening to mention subjects I can’t write about quite yet.

I’ve been sneaking up on the idea of writing about Edgar Allan Poe’s beautiful story “The Island of the Fay,” which I’ve read about five times in the last week. I think I finally see a way ... soon.

If I can’t write about Poe (at one time considered by his peers to be a gifted athlete), that of course leaves us with baseball. For now, all I can do is ask how excruciating it would be if the Colorado Rockies made it to the World Series and we had to watch night baseball from Denver in late October.

More about that, too, another time. Sun’s about to set on what has been a chilly and, until just about this moment, overcast day.