Just Another Ludwig van Ruthoven
Alex Checkovich My wife, like every single umpire known to history and to sabermetrics, is a mere human being. She sits on the Richmond regional selection committee for the University of Virginia’s Jefferson Scholars program. Each area high school nominates one of its seniors for the chance to earn one of about thirty full scholarships awarded annually by Mr. Jefferson’s university. My wife and her colleagues interview their batch of kids in order to select the handful who will go on to Charlottesville to compete against hand-picked representatives from every other designated region – D.C. suburbs, Virginia Beach, NYC, and so on – during one final weekend of exhaustive exhilarating testing. Those few who earn the nominations are formidable – nay, almost literally incredible. They must demonstrate outstanding Leadership, Scholarship, and Citizenship. And lo, so they do. Typical Candidate X was salutatorian with perfect SATs and captain of the varsity baseball team. Of course, that’s just the baseline. He also won special commendation from the governor for his distinguished service as an emergency medical technician with his local rescue squad, led his church youth group in a successful crusade to reconstruct the dilapidated housing stock of a neighborhood hit hard by that hurricane and, in his spare time, launched his own social-justice/connectivity app that’s already threatening a multi-million-dollar IPO. Meanwhile, Candidate Y was, as expected, valedictorian who earned eight “fives” on the AP tests. She also made All-State as a softball ace, published three papers on the cancer-fighting properties of mongoose mitochondria in peer-reviewed journals, served as the featured soloist when the Richmond Symphony Orchestra played the oboe concertos of Bruno Maderna and Reekhard Strauss, and personally recruited the Dalai Lama to a week-long residency at her school’s Blue Ridge retreat last fall… Do you see the problem here? Many, actually. Such as What a puny life I’ve led and How will my own children ever gain admission to UVA? plus oh yeah How to choose from among these candidates? But no. I’m talking about the interview questions these kids get asked. About half the questions fall into the No category. As in, No, you did NOT just ask that. Which three people who ever lived would you most like to have over for dinner? Estimate the total number of miles of roads that cover the planet. What color is your parachute? But we’re dealing with America’s All-Stars here, right? Future Hall-of-Famers. So for them, my own No softball would be just an inch or two off the plate – just a degree more, shall we say, idiosyncratic. Create composite figures of the three greatest composers and the three greatest position players, ca. 1936 (the year of the first Hall of Fame election). Use only the music of words. And remember: hybridity means both perfect contempt and perfect love. Play ball! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- JOHANNES “HONUS” SEBASTIAN PETER BACH was, first and foremost, a good man. He was so clearly the ablest of all who toiled before him during the dark ages of the Renaissance-slash-Nineteenth-Century. He had every tool you could ever want, expert in every skill and every form. He was also unbelievably prolific, fertile into his old age. True, he never slammed a homerun that we can safely call operatic (let alone Wagnerian), but, by Saint Matthew, transpose him into any other context and he would’ve authored dramatically cathartic clouts with the best. Any legend about this humblest of giants seems justified. Can we ever, truly, fathom his heart? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WOLFGANG RAYMOND AMADEUS COBB – the man-child – the daemon – l’enfant terrible, universally acclaimed a genius, tearing up the establishment from the get-go – the avenging angel haunted forever by his father and by his sense of never quite fitting in. Incandescent skills. Such virtuosity, such cat-n-mouse intricacies and daring grace, none had ever imagined. But it was never as easy as it looked; a burning desire, a relentless devotion to his art, drove him ever on. Only Death or the Live Ball could fell him – but by then the pinnacles had already been mounted. He was, in a cosmic sense, the purest of them all. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LUDWIG VAN RUTHOVEN. Romantic is an understatement for this rebel and pioneer. Nothing could ever be the same after he thwacked, by sheer force of blazing will, his own singular path. Yes, sociotechnical circumstances had swung in his favor – but do not underestimate the trick pitches of Fate he had to smash, ranging from lowly upbringing to severe bodily handicaps. It’s unclear if the man himself ever truly experienced romantic love, but he surely had love to spare for all of humanity. It’s not just the thunderously original aesthetic he permanently ushered in, it’s not just the literally incredible tales surrounding his larger-than-life persona, it’s the sheer staggering richness of the man’s total achievement that endures. Wherever you look in his record – his sixth-best season/sonata, say – it’s almost certain to dwarf the sixth-best of anybody else. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Such composed improvisations would of course be utterly expected – the mere baseline. The other kind of question, though… That’s Bert Blyleven’s knee-buckling curve ball. The dreaded So category. As in, So… what’s it all about, anyway? Thirty-five years from now, what you will consider to be your greatest achievement? Forty-one years from now, what will you regret the most? What’s something you’ve never told anyone about yourself that you wish everyone understood? (I almost want to ask, So… a society which encourages its brightest citizens to peak at age eighteen… how healthy can that really be? But I don’t want to believe that I’m that benighted or jealous or cruel.) No, my real So hardball is pitched to gauge their stances with regard to baselines, standards, clichés, the meaning of meritocracy, the meaning of higher education, the meaning of diversity, the meaning of community, the meaning of the sabermetric acronym WAR, the significance of league-quality adjustments when it comes to ranking ballplayers, what counts as a problem, the extent to which they grasp that technological change only makes our lives more complicated (not “easier”), whether the explanatory power of the word erosion is already washed up or is just getting warmed up, the myriad ways to interpret the ambivalent tone of click-bait essay titles, all the so-useful-they’re-common C-words I can imagine (context, change, conflict, complexity, contingency, contradiction, unintended consequences (UICs)), the uses of knowledge, the meaning of health, the meaning of happiness, the meaning of life, and, of course, that lazy tantalizing P-word, progress. The stats show that UVA’s incoming first-year class has, for decades now, been getting more impressive each year. Grades, test scores, awards, achievements – by virtually every measure, the cohort just keeps improving. (The same story has been unfolding at every selective university – the Ivies, the JHUs and Chicagos, the Berkeleys and UNCs… The average college entrant is apparently just better today than the average college entrant of [gulp] 1994.) And you guys, you “Jeffs,” are the leaders, right? You guys are the best of the best. And then you graduate, you all go out and get jobs and direct organizations and raise families and shape the world. So… if all this is true… then why isn’t society getting better? TELL ME: Why isn’t the Human Condition improving??? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Batter up. The world would be a better place – better meaning more interesting – if we all agreed to halt all technological change. Of course, because of the ways Homo faber has (historically!) built those exceedingly particular ballparks called culture or social relations or the fabric of this reality, technological change can hardly “stop.” I know! Still, a freshman seminar question, useful in its ahistoricity: Why doesn’t technological change just like, you know, stop?? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The unstoppable Iron Horse! First baseman Lou Gehrig! Exhilarating thunder, inexhaustible power, Babe’s teammate, Ruth’s Robin, the Bambino’s modest wholesome rock-solid frenemy. But what kids these days really wanna know is, Who was better, Babe or Lou? “There’s no such thing as better technology!” This is me, in my fantasy league, neighing at them. Thunderously. “Is Batman’s AK-97 better than John Winthrop’s musket? Is your iPhone 17.0 better than my 1998 flip phone?” Nay. Better for WHAT. For giving us more things to do? For complementing, transforming, and/or eroding extant sociotechnical niches and systems? For ramifying UICs whose nature and significance only become apparent – and keep morphing – over time? For promoting certain historically specific forms of political and economic order at the expense of others? For offering irreconcilable nodes with/thru which we invent/discover patchy overlapping IDs? For nurturing or militating against our (historically specific!) taken-for-granteds? You know, little stuff like Family, Community, Values, Aesthetics, repertoires and experiences of Emotion and Memory and Aging and the Senses, the Annihilation of Space by Time, plus of course the latest inevitable (yet novel!) Disputes over the Proper Boundaries of behavior/law/concept X… Every single category “normal” THING – especially the most first-basic – has its own exceedingly particular history. (Every single one. Once upon a time, “athletic ability” wasn’t a thing. Neither were “partisanship,” “childhood,” Bed Bath and Beyond, and “going to college.”) Better tech? No. There are only more powerful technologies. Powerful in terms of the work they can accomplish. Powerful in terms of how they rearrange/mobilize/obscure/hybridize elements of nature. (That’s all technology is, Ruth Cowan reminds us: nature transformed. An iPhone is chunks of the biosphere, rendered useful. So is Lou Gehrig’s 1936 road flannel.) “Advanced” tech? (Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic.”) Meh; foul ball. Could connote more powerful – okay. Could all too easily connote better – yikes. Too slippery-elm ambiguous, sliding down curves… Counterintuitive could be a C-word. Contrarian, curmudgeon. Count me out. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If a nano-genetic re-animated Babe Ruth strode onto the scene today, here’s what he’d do. (Well, first he’d strike out three or thirteen or thirty-three straight times. All those newfangled sliders and splitters and LOOGYs and all that colorful talent from all over the globe…) But soon enough, we can safely bet that this Silicon Colossus would loft a long fly whose trajectory would perfectly trace that Upward Slope. You know: the Great Curve that conveys, “So many huge trends keep going up – accelerating, actually – with no end in sight. And, incredibly, we live in these times! We [like every single human known to history?] are at the cutting edge!” Yes, the Roaring Twenties lie behind us – and ahead of us. We’re all modern now. We’re all umpires. So we can readily intuit that the X Axis represents Time. Kay. Fine. But what, exactly, does that romantic Ruthian curve represent? Hey, kids: What’s on the Y Axis?? “Well,” they say, “you know. Just about… everything!” Population, wealth, health [are they seriously suggesting that bodies, minds, spirits, suburbs, farms, jails, the media, and the Congress all keep getting healthier?], energy use, leisure, quality of life, dominion over nature, diseases, trash, spaces ads have colonized, gaps between haves and have-nots, ecological footprints, the total destructive power of our armaments, a lil thingness called stress, unprecedented timbres, toxic substances, fictions we live by, facts we don’t, intractable problems, uncertainty wrt what the biggest problems even are, not-boring ways to frame What Actually Happened, subsidized amnesia of natural and cultural and natural-cultural disasters, things to do, specific ways to suffer, patchy overlapping incommensurate ways of knowing and mapping, forgotten practices and modes, jadedness to blurred boundaries and sociotechnical hybrids, forsaken alternatives, every single C-word we can imagine… Right?? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- At least one of those rookies should basically say No. Keep pushing. Go out on a Louisville limb. We haven’t made any genuine progress if none of those future leaders turns both “composer” and “position player” completely upside down. LEROY KENNEDY “SATCH” ELLINGTON, tall, mercurial, and ageless, was truly one-of-a-kind. Both his style and his repertoire were untouchable. Also known as “THE PAGING DUKE,” he came of age in the Twenties but enjoyed his greatest artistic and professional triumphs – finding just the right pitch in the Halls of Carnegie and Crawford; taking swinging Kansas City in stride – in the Thirties and Forties. A hero to his own people, drawing massive crowds all over the Hemisphere, he always remained unflappable, a consummate professional. Though by reputation an inveterate ladies’ man, family mattered to him deeply (as did God, later in life). His achievement does not stand alone. More than with most, his is bound up with the men alongside whom he played – his trusted touring mates, the redoubtable characters he deployed as colorful instruments in his kaleidoscopic designs. Deep within his soul he harbored a certain resigned wisdom, melancholic yet wry, that few ever glimpsed. When pressed to name which of his own nigh countless records he preferred, he demurred; he never looked back. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Society keeps pushing forward? The Historian’s Job is to sort thru the Biases of Primary Sources, Discover the Facts, and Objectively figure out What Really Happened?? Where is the political party league of nations people for people who are for so much – for social and ecological justice, for robust communities teeming with wild freedoms, with unimagined idiosyncrasies – but against technological change? Which team can we suit up for? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Maybe the Bambino’s colossal clout would never really land. Maybe, like that ambivalently blessed baseball that Josh Gibson walloped one day in Pittsburgh, it would inexplicably disappear, only to return, unsolicited, legend-like, the following day in Philadelphia, falling from mute sky and into the mitt of a bemused outfielder, compelling the composed umpire to improvise, “Yer out, Gibson--yesterday, in Pittsburgh!!!” Maybe, like the primal contest twixt pitcher and batter that that arbitrary distance – sixty feet, six inches – has fixed into an equilibrium both endlessly contingent and utterly timeless, our ultra-modern vector has actually been careening this whole time toward some kind of asymptote. Some perfect collective limit upon peace or justice or interests or human potential or harmonious hybridity or fecund factasy, forever just out of the reach of our mitts. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- At least one of those eighteen-year-old aces should be thoughtful and brazen and UIC-ish enough to say So. As in, the question itself, in so many facty fictitious ways, is gloriously absurd. JOHN [or JOSHUA; it’s indeterminate] “OH, MILTON!” “THE CAGE” SADAHARU GIBSON enjoyed a legendary career amidst segregated oceans of silence. All things were possible – so, in effect, none were. If something’s boring, listen to it some more. If it’s still boring, keep listening. You’ll eventually find that it’s not boring at all. Interesting: someone once dubbed those unprecedented laminal noises musics by AMM, that freely improvising collective, “John Cage jazz.” These men all walked the planet at the same time. What kills you only makes your guts stronger. There’s no such thing as silence. There’s no such thing as the replacement player. There’s no such thing as better technology. There’s no such thing as progress. Wake, Negro Zen Finnegans! Are we sure there’s a baseline? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Josh Gibson, the Negro League catcher – according to our most heartfelt truthful fictions, the greatest masher of baseballs who ever lived – was thirty-five when he died of a broken heart upon learning that Jackie Robinson, not he, would be the first to break the Major Leagues’ dumb-as-hell “race” boundary. As I walk his planet at the age of forty-one, there’s only one thing that really interests me. That’s inventing/discovering prose structures forms logics musics awkwardities which e-race and turn upside-down and render wonder-full and wonderfully absurd any/all baseline boundaries between dumb ball and incisive strike, between fiction and non-. Don’t call ‘em “hybrids,” though. That’s batting average. That’s classical music. We don’t need that artificial intelligence. We’ve got Wins Above Replacement Player now. We’re warped. We live, thank the Maker, in the Epoch of Noise. We’re progressing beyond. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Donald Worster once intoned that in that international pastime of transforming the earth, we modern makers have also restructured ourselves and our social relations. Melvin Kranzberg once sang that technology itself is neither good nor bad – but it sure as hell isn’t “neutral,” either. Nowadays you can listen to AMM’s unutterably sublime noises at the click of a clichéd button; who knows what wild teeming cage-mashing beyond-Beethoven UICs that’ll permanently usher in. This little bandbox of a lyric essay is now part of your personal Fenway Park. You’re only eighteen?? Guess what, bambino: I’ve got an ambivalent blessing for ya, for all the not-neutral futures that await. In that patchy overlapping process of inventing our own facts, we also invent ourselves. Sources Indispensable baseline: Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s A Social History of American Technology (Oxford, 1997). The X/Y Axis conceit is directly inspired by conversations with UVA professor Bernie Carlson ten+ years ago and by his article, “Diversity and Progress: How Might We Picture Technology across Global Cultures?” Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 2 (2007): 128-155. Worster’s maxim – “in that process of transforming the earth, people have also restructured themselves and their social relations” – lurks within “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1087-1106. Kranzberg’s “First Law” – “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral” – opens his “Presidential Address: Technology and History,” Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 544-560. For sabermetrics – WAR, LOOGY, and all the latest P-wordy acronyms – I turn to fangraphs.com. The single best prose point of departure from which to plunge into AMM remains the timeline of hilarious and gut-punched reviews the band has compiled at web.archive.org/web/20060811225840/http://www.matchlessrecordings.com/amm_review.html, a remote dugout of earnest entreaty as rich, strange, and true as any fiction or composed music I know. Arthur C. Clarke’s bit on “advanced technology” abides in his Profiles of the Future (Pan Books, 1962). The famous description of Fenway – “a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark” – is from the first sentence of John Updike’s 1960 New Yorker article, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” |
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About the Author: Alex Checkovich is an instructor of "the body in space" at the University of Richmond, where he teaches freshman seminars called "Nature," "Health," and "Technology in American History." His main interest is inventing/discovering Oulipo nonfictions. Essays are out or forthcoming with Breathe Free Press, Five:2:One, #thesideshow, and Badlands.