http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/jackie/news/story?id=2828584

This is a fascinating update on black baseball players. It is 60 years since Jackie Robinson and yet, for all sorts of reasons, only 9% of MLB players are black. Any sharedness of baseball that DeLillo may have been suggesting (Cotter and Waterson or Nick and Sims) is vastly diminished in today's version of the game. Not only are there few black players, there are only 2 black managers, few front office types, and a dwindling fan base. Two teams, the Houston Astros and the Atlanta Braves, have 0 black players. There are more players from the Dominican (81) than African Americans (68) and the MLB invests 5 or 6 times more money in player/youth development programs in Latin America than in the urban U.S.

so ive been meaning to post links to these two new york times articles for a while,

http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=daa22e9836cf2a402e2fb3491b03b936&_docnum=1&wchp=dGLbVzW-zSkVA&_md5=b52a186aa4abdebf78414e9453b17b0d

"Your Brain on Baseball" by David Brooks

this is by the times's conservative pundit and it's about the exact same type of automated brain functions that wallace attirbutes to tennis players (bottom of page 260 is one example) only with baseball players at spring training, pretty interesting stuff

http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=9d550e9075d64e6301e2d7646ec1bf4a&_docnum=1&wchp=dGLbVzW-zSkVA&_md5=946b019e72aad143a1d68a83a16f758d

Someone mentioned during today's discussionn that neither tennis players nor drug addicts do anything important or essential for society. It made me think of a theory I once heard about the evolution of man. The theory holds that we are no longer homo sapiens but have moved on to a new order of homo: homo ludens. While homo sapiens translates from the latin as "wise man" or "knowing man", homo ludens means "man the player" or "playing man." The transition doesn't suggest that homo ludens are physiologically different from homo sapiens but that our priorities as a species have shifted from "knowing" towards "playing".

I'm engaged with The Wasteland in another class and one thing we've talked about is the multiplicity of wastelands that inhabit that poem. Underworld, though it may not name TS Eliot (or hasn't yet) is also deeply concerned with wastelands. One way to read the title "Underworld" is physically, as in the buried world of nuclear waste. These underworlds are, in a way, an evolution of the Eliot's WWI battlefield wastelands. Both are products of the military-industrial complex though the nature of Cold War- its technologies and secrecy- have driven the wasteland underground. While lilacs bread out of the dead land of Eliot's Modern wasteland, the Postmodern underworld/wasteland is specifically toxic, carcinogenic, and must be isolated from the natural world.

just stumbled across an interesting trash story in my daily podcast digest, it starts at what I presume to be the Fresh Kills landfill

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/14

enjoy

few thoughts/annotations after first 30 pages

By 1957 both teams had left New York. By 1964 the Polo Grounds no longer existed.

"Robinson" is Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in 1947. Played for the Dodgers his whole career. HOF 1962.

Waterson's comments to Cotter are interesting in that he praises the tradition and sameness of baseball ("you do what they did before you") in the presence of Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, two black athletes that did more to transform the landscape of sports, pop culture, and society than anyone until Magic w/ aids and MJ's global branding.

I've found the resources available in this novel for the changing of time, place, and reality to be staggering. Though we're in these 9 days we've been so very many places. Along these lines, thinking about this book in relation to more traditional novels is kinda like comparing cartoons and sitcoms. The Simpsons can go anywhere and do anything while it is tough for Seinfeld to incorporate too much chronological, geographic, or supernatural flexibility. GR seems to move effortessly and oftentimes so seamlessly it is hard to notice between places, times, and realities. We have so many episodes, of course, and these make it easy to move around and restart, but the fluidity and reactiveness of the narrative enables this movement as well. A bottle of ether spills and the fumes not only reach roger and the doctor but Pynchon as well.