Personal Note: My First Latin Mass

Saturday night I went to my very first Latin Mass.  It was billed as the first Latin Mass on Staten Island in 48 years, which if I do my arithmetic correctly was 1965.  I was younger that year than my four year old son is now.  I saw the notice in the Worship section of the local newspaper last week and set my sights on attending.  What an opportunity.  For the past three years I had been scouting Churches in the area that held Latin Mass, but each was off Staten Island, which makes it difficult for Sunday mornings.  So I had put it off.  You can imagine how my heart jumped when I saw the notice.

The Mass was held at Sacred Heart Church, which stunned me with its beauty.  Sacred heart must be one of the most beautiful churches on Staten Island.  It’s a brick Romanesque style with a bell tower, a rose window over the Narthex, a lovely domed Apse with Christ showing his sacred heart in the back and a suspended crucifix high above before the altar.  It has two full domed Transepts with shrines, each shrine with three statues.  In addition there is a shrine with a statue on each side of the altar, Christ with His sacred heart on one and our Blessed Mother on the other.  I had never been in this church before, but it did occur to me as I walked about and praying at the shrines before Mass how humble my regular church was in comparison.

I can’t find any photos of the inside of the church, but here is the front facade. 

 

I should give one other piece of background before I give my impressions.  I have argued with the Latin Mass-ers (those that insist on returning to pre-Vatican II everything) that we should not go back to Latin only.  I’m not saying we should eliminate the Latin Mass; it should certainly be an option, and I wish it were more readily available.  But there is a directness to listening to the Word of God in your natural language that engages both your soul and intellect.  The Latin Mass-ers counter that Latin provides a sacred link back to the Church origins, a sort a language of the divine. 

That is a good point, but to that I counter that why Latin?  Christ at the last supper spoke in Aramaic; the apostles must have used it in their liturgies.  The New Testament is written in Greek, and surely the Greek liturgy came before Latin as the apostles radiated outward from Jerusalem.  Even if looks at Christianity as a continuity from Judaism, Hebrew was spoken in worship at the Temple.  So one could argue that Latin could be fourth in line if one were to search the primeval Christian tongue.  And I argue further, that when you look at the liturgies in the early centuries, Aramaic was used in the lands around Jerusalem, Coptic Egyptian in eastern Africa, Greek in the Greco half of the Roman empire, and Roman in the western half of the Roman empire.  If you look at those centuries, the liturgies were performed in the vernacular of each region.  So why shouldn’t we be celebrating Mass in the vernacular of today’s world?

So I have quipped to my Latin Mass-er friends, what language would God use to celebrate Mass in heaven?  Aramaic, of course, the language of Jesus, and St. Peter will hand out the Rosetta Stone CDs at the Pearlie Gates to learn the language.   Would you believe that there are still Churches that perform Mass in Aramaic?  My blogger friend, Joyce, who had such a fine Catholic Blog and was such a strong proponent of the Latin Mass, pointed out to me that the MaroniteCatholics still celebrate in Aramaic and as it turns out they have a church not far from me over in Brooklyn.    That’s my next excursion, to attend a Mass in Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ.

So what did I think of the Latin Mass?  I knew going in that the Extraordinary Form (Latin Mass) was structured differently than the Ordinary Form (vernacular).  They are not the same liturgy with only a language substitution.  For a good summary of the differences between the two forms read here.  My first mistake was sitting in the front row.  I wanted the full experience and since I got there early I got the best seat.  However, I had no feel for the sitting, standing, and kneeling parts, and with no one in front of me as a guide I was off.  I also knew beforehand the priest performs the liturgy facing the altar, and therefore facing God and not the congregation, but it felt a little nerve racking never seeing the priest’s face.  The other different part was that during the consecration of the holy sacrament the priest in certain sections speaks under his breath while the whole church goes silent.  I’m not saying any of that was negative, just different.

I wish the missal we were reading from was more use- friendly.  It’s hard enough the Mass spoken in a language I’m not fluent (they did have English translation on the facing page) but because certain sections applied to different types of Masses (High Holiday, for the dead, etc.) you had to jump around in the missal.  I gave up in mid way.  One surprise for me was that at receiving communion the priest doesn’t say in Latin what is said in English, “Body of Christ.”  There is a long sentence in Latin that the priest says to each recipient, and being in the front I could see the priest was getting tongue tied after a while.  The congregation must have had a couple of hundred attending.  And the priest was getting tired.  There were two altar rails, one on each side, and he had to go back and forth.  Oh yes, we had to kneel at the altar rail and receive on the tongue only.  I hadn’t received on the tongue since a teenager. 

One thing I did love was the Latin hymns.  They are more beautiful than those in English.  Two sung that I remember were Panis Angelicus and Salve Regina. 

Overall it was a pleasant experience.  My complaints I listed are minor.  I’m so glad I got to go and will go again if the opportunity arises.  It hasn’t changed my opinion though.  The Latin Mass should be available for those that want it, but I wouldn’t mandate it.  The average parishioner will get so much more from one in his vernacular. 

I’ll leave you off with this beautiful rendition.

 

 

Notable Quote: Dashiell Hammett

I consider Dashiell Hammett a fine craftsman when it comes to writing.  There is subtlety and purpose to every sentence. 

“If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.”

― Dashiell Hammett

Short Study Review: “Who Killed Bob Teal?” by Dashiell Hammett

Kelly in a comment asked about Dashiell Hammett on my 2013 Reads, Update #3 post, and so I want to review the Hammett short story I read.  As it turns out I did findthe story on the internet.  It was published before 1924, so it’s in the free domain.  It’s not a very long story and on top of that it reads fast.  You might want to read it before I go through it, and I’m going to only say so much as to not give away the ending.
 

First a little something on Dashiell Hammett.  He was an actual detective for the famous Pinkerton National Detective Agency and he was known as “Sam” since his real first name was Samuel.  I didn’t know that until now.  What’s important about that is that his famous detective from his great novel, The Maltese Falcon, was named Sam Spade, so there’s an element of autobiography in his works.  He only wrote five novels, but they are among the best of the hardboiled detective genre.  I’m not sure if he actually invented the genre, but he was there at the beginning and he was among its best expounders.  According to Wikipedia, the NY Times Obituary called Hammett "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction.”

Four other things stand out about him.  He contacted tuberculosis while serving in WWI, and it plagued him throughout his life.  It may have been part of the reason he stopped writing novels at the age of forty.  The second thing is that he was not just a left-wing activist, but an ardent communist.  I don’t think it permeated his works, but it certainly affected his career.  He was blacklisted in the 1950s, and that also probably curtailed his output.  Third, he was a heavy drinker and smoker, and that only exacerbated his poor health.  Fourth, he had a long relationship with the American playwright, Lillian Hellman, who took care of him in his final years.

In my comment to Kelly I said that “Who Killed Bob Teal?” is not a great work.  It’s a fun work.  The work she should most definitely read if she wants to read Hammett at his most creative is The Maltese Falcon.  I consider The Maltese Falcon not just a detective novel, but a great novel outside of genre constraints.  You can find it at any public library.  Hammett did not really have the space in this short story to develop the characters to their fullest.  Part of what makes The Maltese Falcon so great is the distinct characterizations.  Another is the personal code that Sam Spade develops in making it through a chaotic and unpredictable world.  You’ve probably seen the movie based on thenovel, starring Humphrey Bogart.  The movie pretty much tracks with the novel, but what you miss with the movie is Hammett’s fine writing, of which I’ll give you an example from the short story.  See the movie if you haven’t, but read the novel first.  One other thing on The Maltese Falcon.  I once participated in a book discussion of it and a few of the women in the book group felt it was extremely sexist.  I think they were anticipating Agatha Christie, and no there are very hard edges to hardboiled detective stories.  So be forewarned on that, but I don’t personally consider it all that sexist for its time.

Let’s get to the story.  “Who killed Bob Teal?’ actually starts in a similar fashion to The Maltese Falcon.  A detective at the agency while shadowing a person for a client is murdered.  In this case it’s Bob Teal.  Here is the opening scene:

“Teal was killed last night.”

The Old Man—the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco manager — spoke without looking at me. His voice was as mild as his smile, and gave no indication of the turmoil that was seething in his mind.

If I kept quiet, waiting for the Old Man to go on, it wasn’t because the news didn’t mean anything to me. I had been fond of Bob Teal — we all had. He had come to the Agency fresh from college two years before; and if ever a man had the makings of a crack detective in him, this slender, broad-shouldered lad had. Two years is little enough time in which to pick up the first principles of sleuthing, but Bob Teal, with his quick eye, cool nerve, balanced head, and whole-hearted interest in the work, was already well along the way to expertness. I had an almost fatherly interest in him, since I had given him most of his early training.

The Old Man didn’t look at me as he went on. He was talking to the open window at his elbow.

“He was shot with a thirty-two, twice, through the heart. He was shot behind a row of signboards on the vacant lot on the northwest corner of Hyde and Eddy Streets, at about ten last night. His body was found by a patrolman a little after eleven. The gun was found about fifteen feet away. I have seen him and I have gone over the ground myself. The rain last night wiped out any leads the ground may have held, but from the condition of Teal’s clothing and the position in which he was found, I would say that there was no struggle, and that he was shot where he was found, and not carried there afterward. He was lying behind the signboards, about thirty feet from the sidewalk, and his hands were empty. The gun was held close enough to him to singe the breast of his coat. Apparently no one either saw or heard the shooting. The rain and wind would have kept pedestrians off the street, and would have deadened the reports of a thirty-two, which are not especially loud, anyway.” 

Notice the contrast between the internal, unspoken reaction of the detective first person narrator—the story’s unnamed central character—and the old manager’s external stoicism.  The detective speaks of his emotional connection to Teal, even stating that he felt “fatherly” to the young man.  The detective writes in syntactically organized sentences.  The emotions are complex and the language reflects it.  The manager on the other hand speaks in short declarative sentences by just laying out the facts, one by one, unorganized and empirical.  Internally he might be “seething” with “turmoil” but he doesn’t show it.  Internally there are emotions.  Externally there are only facts and you don’t reveal your vulnerability to them.

Teal was shadowing a man named Whitacre, who was a business partner to a man named Ogburn.  Ogburn suspected that Whitacre was stealing off him and so hired the Agency to investigate Whitacre’s doings.  Here is the narrator detective going to Ogbrun’s office to tell him what happened to Teal and scrutinize the partner’s reaction. 

A stenographer ushered me into a tastefully furnished office, where Ogburn sat at a desk signing mail. He offered me a chair. I introduced myself to him, a medium-sized man of perhaps thirty-five, with sleek brown hair and the cleft chin that is associated in my mind with orators, lawyers, and salesmen.

“Oh, yes!” he said, pushing aside the mail, his mobile, intelligent face lighting up. “Has Mr. Teal found anything?”

“Mr. Teal was shot and killed last night.”

He looked at me blankly for a moment out of wide brown eyes, and then repeated: “Killed?”

“Yes,” I replied, and told him what little I knew about it.

“You don’t think —” he began when I had finished, and then stopped. “You don’t think Herb would have done that?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think Herb would commit murder! He’s been jumpy the last few days, and I was beginning to think he suspected I had discovered his thefts, but I don’t believe he would have gone that far, even if he knew Mr. Teal was following him. I honestly don’t!”

“Suppose,” I suggested, “that sometime yesterday Teal found where he had put the stolen money, and then Whitacre learned that Teal knew it. Don’t you think that under those circumstances Whitacre might have killed him?”

“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “but I’d hate to think so. In a moment of panic Herb might — but I really don’t think he would.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Yesterday. We were here in the office together most of the day. He left for home a few minutes before six. But I talked to him over the phone later. He called me up at home at a little after seven, and said he was coming down to see me, wanted to tell me something. I thought he was going to confess his dishonesty, and that maybe we would be able to straighten out this miserable affair. His wife called up at about ten. She wanted him to bring something from downtown when he went home, but of course he was not there. I stayed in all evening waiting for him, but he didn’t —”

He stuttered, stopped talking, and his face drained white.

“My God, I’m wiped out!” he said faintly, as if the thought of his own position had just come to him. “Herb gone, money gone, three years’ work gone for nothing! And I’m legally responsible for every cent he stole. God!”

He looked at me with eyes that pleaded for contradiction, but I couldn’t do anything except assure him that everything possible would be done to find both Whitacre and the money. I left him trying frantically to get his attorney on the telephone. 

Then the detective decides to interrogate Whitacre’s wife.  Entering her house he meets a police detective, George Dean, there for the same reason, and so they interrogate her together.

I arrived in the vestibule as Dean pressed Whitacre’s bell-button.

“Hello,” I said. “You in on this?”

“Uh-huh. What d’you know?”

“Nothing. I just got it.”

The front door clicked open, and we went together up to the Whitacres’ apartment on the third floor. A plump, blond woman in a light blue house-dress opened the apartment door. She was rather pretty in a thick-featured, stolid way.

“Mrs. Whitacre?” Dean inquired.

“Yes.”

“Is Mr. Whitacre in?”

“No. He went to Los Angeles this morning,” she said, and her face was truthful.

“Know where we can get in touch with him there?”

“Perhaps at the Ambassador, but I think he’ll be back by tomorrow or the next day.”

Dean showed her his badge.

“We want to ask you a few questions,” he told her, and with no appearance of astonishment she opened the door wide for us to enter. She led us into a blue and cream living-room where we found a chair apiece. She sat facing us on a big blue settle.

“Where was your husband last night?” Dean asked.

“Home. Why?” Her round blue eyes were faintly curious.

“Home all night?”

“Yes, it was a rotten rainy night. Why?” She looked from Dean to me.

Dean’s glance met mine, and I nodded an answer to the question that I read there.

“Mrs. Whitacre,” he said bluntly, “I have a warrant for your husband’s arrest.”

“A warrant? For what?”

“Murder.”

“Murder?” It was a stifled scream.

“Exactly, an’ last night.”

“But —but I told you he was —”

“And Ogburn told me,” I interrupted, leaning forward, “that you called up his apartment last night, asking if your husband was there.”

She looked at me blankly for a dozen seconds, and then she laughed, the clear laugh of one who has been the victim of some slight joke.

“You win,” she said, and there was neither shame nor humiliation in either face or voice. “Now listen” — the amusement had left her — “I don’t know what Herb has done, or how I stand, and I oughtn’t to talk until I see a lawyer. But I like to dodge all the trouble I can. If you folks will tell me what’s what, on your word of honour, I’ll maybe tell you what I know, if anything. What I mean is, if talking will make things any easier for me, if you can show me it will, maybe I’ll talk — provided I know anything.”

That seemed fair enough, if a little surprising. Apparently this plump woman who could lie with every semblance of candour, and laugh when she was tripped up, wasn’t interested in anything much beyond her own comfort.

“You tell it,” Dean said to me.

I shot it out all in a lump.

“Your husband had been cooking the books for some time, and got into his partner for something like two hundred thousand dollars before Ogburn got wise to it. Then he had your husband shadowed, trying to find the money. Last night your husband took the man who was shadowing him over on a lot and shot him.”

Her face puckered thoughtfully. Mechanically she reached for a package of popular-brand cigarettes that lay on a table behind the settle, and proffered them to Dean and me. We shook our heads. She put a cigarette in her mouth, scratched a match on the sole of her slipper, lit the cigarette, and stared at the burning end. Finally she shrugged, her face cleared, and she looked up at us.

“I’m going to talk,” she said. “Never got any of the money, and I’d be a chump to make a goat of myself for Herb. He was all right, but if he’s run out and left me flat, there’s no use of me making a lot of trouble for myself over it. Here goes: I’m not Mrs. Whitacre, except on the register. My name is Mae Landis. Maybe there is a real Mrs. Whitacre, and maybe not. I don’t know. Herb and I have been living together here for over a year. 

What a fine little scene and so typical of Hammett.  What you see is an unbalanced world.  First she says her husband was with her that night, then she admits he was not; first you are under the assumption they are husband and wife, then you find out they are just faking marriage and living together, which would in itself be startling in the 1920s; first you know her by one name, suddenly you find out she’s got another.  Facts may be empirical but they are unstable.  The world is not a puzzle to piece together as in an Agatha Christie mystery.  The world is in a state of flux where you just don’t know what reality is.  That little detail where she lights her match under her foot is striking.  Smoking, even by the 1920s, was a rebellious act for women, and striking the match under her foot emphasizes the grittiness of her character.  She is not a genteel lady.    

Later they find out that Mae Landis had been spending time in another apartment.  The detective and George Dean decide to go over and invstigate.  There they interrogate the landlady to find out if Landis is actually living there and with whom.   

It was a ramshackle building, divided into apartments or flats of a dismal and dingy sort. We found the landlady in the basement: a gaunt woman in soiled gray, with a hard, thin-lipped mouth and pale, suspicious eyes. She was rocking vigorously in a creaking chair and sewing on a pair of overalls, while three dirty kids tussled with a mongrel puppy up and down the room.

Dean showed his badge, and told her that we wanted to speak to her in privacy. She got up to chase the kids and their dog out, and then stood with hands on hips facing us.

“Well, what do you want?” she demanded sourly. 

Isn’t that marvelous.  The landlady’s character is the story’s finest creation.  It’s these subtle bits of writing that make stories special for me. 

“Want to get a line on your tenants,” Dean said. “Tell us about them.”

“Tell you about them?” She had a voice that would have been harsh enough even if she hadn’t been in such a peevish mood. “What do you think I got to say about ‘em? What do you think I am? I’m a woman that minds her own business! Nobody can’t say that I don’t run a respectable —”

This was getting us nowhere.

“Who lives in number one?” I asked.

“The Auds — two old folks and their grandchildren. If you know anything against them, it’s more’n them that has lived with ‘em for ten years does!”

“Who lives in number two?”

“Mrs. Codman and her boys, Frank and Fred. They been here three years, and —”

I carried her from apartment to apartment, until finally we reached a second-floor one that didn’t bring quite so harsh an indictment of my stupidity for suspecting its occupants of whatever it was that I suspected them of.

“The Quirks live there.” She merely glowered now, whereas she had had a snippy manner before. “And they’re decent people, if you ask me!”

“How long have they been here?”

“Six months or more.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“I don’t know.” Sullenly: “Travels, maybe.”

“How many in the family?”

“Just him and her, and they’re nice quiet people, too.”

“What does he look like?”

“Like an ordinary man. I ain’t a detective, I don’t go ’round snoopin’ into folks’ faces to see what they look like, and prying into their business. I ain’t —”

“How old a man is he?”

“Maybe between thirty-five and forty, if he ain’t younger or older.”

“Large or small?”

“He ain’t as short as you and he ain’t as tall as this feller with you,” glaring scornfully from my short stoutness to Dean’s big hulk, “and he ain’t as fat as neither of you.”

“Moustache?”

“No.”

“Light hair?”

“No.” Triumphantly: “Dark.”

“Dark eyes, too?”

“I guess so.”

Dean, standing off to one side, looked over the woman’s shoulder at me. His lips framed the name “Whitacre.”

“Now how about Mrs. Quirk — what does she look like?” I went on.

“She’s got light hair, is short and chunky, and maybe under thirty.”

Dean and I nodded our satisfaction at each other; that sounded like Mae Landis, right enough.

“Are they home much?” I continued.

“I don’t know,” the gaunt woman snarled sullenly, and I knew she did know, so I waited, looking at her, and presently she added grudgingly: “I think they’re away a lot, but I ain’t sure.”

“I know,” I ventured, “they are home very seldom, and then only in the daytime — and you know it.”

She didn’t deny it, so I asked: “Are they in now?”

“I don’t think so, but they might be.”

“Let’s take a look at the joint,” I suggested to Dean.

He nodded and told the woman: “Take us up to their apartment an’ Janlock the door for us.”

“I won’t!” she said with sharp emphasis. “You got no right goin’ into folks’ homes unless you got a search warrant. You got one?” 

Oh that just makes me smile.  Hammett is so good at characterization.   I’m going to leave it there.  You can read the rest.  I’ll leave you with a scene from the movie rendition of The Maltese Falcon.

 

 

2013 Reading List: Update #3

You can read about my previous 2013 progress updates here and here and here.  This is the third quarter update, now heading for the last three months of the year. 

As you can see since the last update I've completed seven short stories, two short books of the Old Testament, an encyclical by the Holy Father which came this year and was unplanned, and two works of non-fiction, ifferisms, my one annual read on writing, and Pitching in a Pinch, a book on baseball by the great pitcher, Christy Mathewson.

What is not reflected in completed list is that I’ve spent a good deal of time with Dante’s Purgotorio.  It’s been two months since I started it and I’ve gotten stuck at Canto 26, which is exactly three quarters way through the 33 Cantos.  Perhaps “stuck” is the wrong word.  It is not a quagmire where one’s heart prevents any kind of further progress.  It’s more of a need to take a breather.  I’ve actually been reading two translations, which makes it double the read.  I’ll explain that when I post on it.  And so as a breather I’ve been reading quite a few fun short stories: a father Brown mystery by Chesterton, a short, short story by Borges, a horror story by Stevens, and a detective story by Dashiell Hammett. 

The Currently Being Read list has been altered since last quarter.  I continue to make tiny progress in the Rome and Jerusalem and Imagist poetry books.  I’ll have to find time to knock them off.  I mentioned my progress on Dante.  I’ve decided to push off Hugo’s Les Misérables until next year.  I’m not doing it justice.  I’m done for the Old Testament for the year but I’ve moved up Acts of the Apostles. 

Upcoming plans have not changed.  I am getting a feeling I may not complete them all by the end of the year.  What I need to do is take a few days off from work to just read.  Not sure I can do that, though.  I’m roughly on track for my typical amount of reading for the year.  I’ve completed 19 short stories, seven book length works (three novels, a biography, and three other non-fiction works, of which I include the encyclical), and a few hundred pages of a number of books from the Old Testament.

As I’ve said before, if there is a work I’ve read that I haven’t blogged on, or a work I plan to read that you really want my thoughts on, please let me know.  I’ll be glad to accommodate.

Completed:

“A Star Trap,” a short story by Bram Stoker.

“Grandfather and Grandson,” a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, a novel by G.K. Chesterton.

“Feathers,” a short story by Raymond Carver.

The Cossacks, a novel by Leo Tolstoy.

“In Another Country,” a short story by Earnest Hemingway.

First Book of Chronicles, a book of the Old Testament, KJV.

Catherine of Siena, a biography by Sigrid Undset.

“The Masque of Red Death,” a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.

“William Wilson,” a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.

“A Descent into Maelstrom,” a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.

“The Lovely Lady,” a short story by D.H. Lawrence.

“Hills Like White Elephants,” a short story by Earnest Hemingway.

“The Killers,” a short story by Earnest Hemingway.

Second Book of Chronicles, a book of the Old Testament, KJV.

“The Fall of the House of Usher,” a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.

“The Waste Land,” a long poem by T.S. Eliot.

A Soldier of the Great War, a novel by Mark Helprin.

“The Shawl,” a short story by Cynthia Ozick.

Completed Since Last Quarter:

ifferisms: An Anthology of Aphorisms That Begin With the Word if, a work of non-fiction by Dr. Mardy Grothe.

“Rip Van Winkle,” a short story by Washington Irving.

The Book of Ezra, a book of the Old Testament, KJV.

“Chi Ti Dice La Patria?” a short story by Earnest Hemingway.

Lumen Fidei, an Encyclical of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Book of Nehemiah, a book of the Old Testament, KJV.

“Pillar of Salt,” a short story by Shirley Jackson.

“The Shape of the Sword,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.

“The Body-Snatcher,” a short story by Robert Lewis Stevenson.

Pitching In A Pinch: Baseball From The Inside, a non-fiction book on baseball by Christy Mathewson.

“The Blue Cross,” a Father Brown mystery short story by G. K. Chesterton.

“Who Killed Bob Teal?” a short story by Dashiell Hammett. 

Currently Being Read:

Acts of the Apostles, a book of the New Testament, KJV & NAB.

Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations, a non-fiction history by Martin Goodman.

Imagist Poetry: An Anthology, a collection of poetry edited by Bob Blaisdell.

Purgatorio, 2^nd part of the epic poem of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.

 

Upcoming Plans:

Life on the Mississippi, a memoir by Mark Twain.

Washington Square, a novel by Henry James.

MacBeth, a play by William Shakespeare.

Cannery Row, a short novel by John Steinbeck.

Les Misérables, a novel by Victor Hugo. (2014)

Matthew Monday: Pumpkin Picking

We went on Sunday.  It's always a lot of fun. 

Here's Matthew riding the hay wagon hitched to a tractor taking us to the pumpkin patch.

 

 

 

Picking a pumpkin.  "Mommy, is this the one?"

 

 

 

 

 

 

OK, he had to sit by the giant spider.

 

 

 

 

This year we decided to try the corn field maze.  Boy that was tough.  It was just Matthew and Daddy and we walked around and tried to find our way.  Finally my wife calls on the cell and says she's tired of waiting and where the hell are we?  I told her I had no idea.  Luckily we stumbled upon another family who was also lost, but their eight year old son said he knew the way out.  And remarkably he did!  Thank God for that little kid or we would still be in there...lol.

 

Here we are going into the maze.

 

 

 

And here's Matthew inside.

 

 

 

 

Finally, the face cutout panels are really fun.  Matthew and Daddy got to be pirates.

 

 

 

 

Book Excerpt: Pitching in a Pinch: Baseball from the Inside by Christy Mathewson

While in the airport on my way to Germany I stopped in one of the bookstores, and like Pavlov’s dog, I salivated and wound up buying another book even though I had taken plenty of reading material with me for the trip.  The book that caught my attention was a book on baseball, but what was fascinating it was in the classics section.  With the baseball season winding down to division races, and my beloved Baltimore Orioles in the race to make a wildcard playoff spot, I picked it up and flipped through it. 

The book was originally written in 1912 by the great pitcher of the then NY Giants (they moved to San Francisco in 1958), Christy Mathewson, who is one of the all time greatest pitchers, and that’s no exaggeration.  I had not known he had written a book.  What was most intriguing was that it was published by Penguin Classics, which is a publisher of more literary works.  This is the book cover.

 

 

I bought it.  Of course.  I read about half on my trip and since then finished even though I was in the middle of Dante’s Purgatorio.  So this blog post will present some of the highlights of the book.  I hope this whets your appetite for the playoffs and the coming World Series later this month.

First some background on Christy Mathewson.  You can read his biography on Wikipedia.    There are four things of his life that are striking to me.  First, he was a college graduate when most people never went or even contemplated attending college, let alone a baseball ballplayer.  He was known as a sort of intellectual ballplayer, one who studied nuances of the game.  He was also a world class checkers player, and had he lived longer would probably have made a fine baseball manager.  The fact that he could write this book and write it well attests to his intelligence.  Second, he was religious for a ball player.  He refused to pitch on Sundays, was known as “the Christian Gentleman,” and was so honest that even the umpires looked to him for a call if they weren’t sure.  For a star athlete, his humility is most noticeable, and I’ll have more to say on that later. 

Third, his baseball records are incredible.  You can read about them, but he was a superstar at the Babe Ruth level, which so few can claim.  When the Baseball Hall of Fame was inaugurated, five players were honored as automatic inductees, as “immortals,” and Matty was one of them.  Fourth, his death showed his nobility and Christian stoicism.  When the United States entered World War I, Mathewson signed up and since his college degree was in what would be considered chemistry today he was commissioned in the Chemical Warfare Service.  There was a training accident and he took in gas which damaged his lungs and led to tuberculosis.  He would go on in a weakened state trying to work and attend to his family for five or six years until he died at the age of forty-five.

In the Forward to this book, Chad Harbach frames what Mathewson meant to country

By spring of 1912, when Pitching in a Pinch was published, New York Giants pitcher Christopher Mathewson—a.k.a. “Christy,” “Matty,” or, more obscurely, “Big Six”—had become the nation’s first sporting icon, the original and archetype of the American superstar.  Tall and blond and broad-shouldered, college educated (he earned a 96 in analytic chemistry at Brucknell while staring for the football team), ferociously competitive but always fair-minded (the umpires looked to him on close-calls), Matty seemed too good to be real.  He was the most famous ballplayer in America by far, and one of the most famous people, period.  If you didn’t know Matty, you didn’t know much. 

 

Much of his fame, of course, owed to his dominance on the mound.  In 1900, while still a teenager, Matty broke in with the Giants.  In 1905, he played the best World Series anyone has ever played, firing three complete-game shutouts against the A’s in six days.  By the time he retired, Matty had racked up 373 wins to go with a handsome 2.13 ERA.  When the Hall of Fame opened in 1936, he was among the celebrated inaugural five inductees—the only one of the five not to live to see that day.  [p. vii]

 

Excerpts are taken from Penguin Books, published in 2013.

The other key figure in the book is Mathewson’s manager and friend, John McGraw.  McGraw and Mathewson are forever linked as a baseball couple.  In the book Mathewson praises McGraw, who is truly considered one of the greatest managers of the game, but they were as different as night and day.  It’s a curious relationship, and Mathewson in the book repeatedly credits McGraw with much of the team’s success.  From Harbach’s Foreward.  

Together, Matty and McGraw make up baseball’s classic odd couple.  Christy was the strapping upright all-American college boy, erudite, temperate, and ethical; McGraw was the abrasive, undersized, hard-drinking Irishman who never an unprofaned sentence and would haggle with the devil for an insurance run.  But their sympathies and commonalities ran deep.  McGraw had been a great player before injuries confined him to coaching; Christy would go on to manage the Cincinnati Reds.  Both men were uncommonly competitive, even among athletes, and endlessly dogged in sniffing out an advantage.  McGraw may have been the undisputed master of in-game tactics, but Matty, one of the country’s best checkers players (he would occasionally play simultaneous blindfold exhibitions) could hold his own.  [p. xi]

 

So here are some of the excerpts.  Here is Christy on the art of pitching:

 

A pitcher has two types of batters to face.  One is the man who is always thinking and guessing and waiting, trying to get the pitcher in the hole.  Evers, of the Cubs, is that sort.  They tell me “Ty” Cobb of Detroit is the most highly developed of this type of hitter.  I have never seen him play.  The the other kind is the natural slugger, who does not wait for anything, and who could not outguess a pitcher if he did.  The brainy man is the harder for a pitcher to face because he is a constant source of worry.

 

There are two ways of fooling a batter.  One is literally to “mix ‘em up,” and the other is to keep feeding him the same sort of ball, but to induce him to think that something else is coming.  When a brainy man is at his best, he is always trying to figure out what to expect.  If he knows, then his chances of getting a hit are greatly increased.  For instance, if a batter has two balls and two strikes on him, he naturally concludes that the pitcher will throw him a curve ball, and prepares for it.  Big League ball-players recognize only two kinds of pitched balls—the curve and the straight one.  [p. 9-10]

 

In the book Matty talks a lot on the nature of pitching, but not in a way that is overly technical.  He brings it down to a fan’s level.  Here is a great section on the psychology of pitching. 

A pitcher is in a tight game, and the batter makes a hit.  Another follows and some fan back in the stands cries in stentorian tones:

“Take him out!”

It is the dirge of baseball which has broken the hearts of pitchers ever since the game began and ill continue to do so as long as it lives.  Another fan takes up the shout, and another, and another, until it is a chorus.

“Take him out!  Take him out!  Take him out!”

The pitcher has to grin, but that constant cry is wearing on his nerves strung to the breaking point.  The crowd is against him, and the next batter hits, and a run scores.  The manager stops the game, beckons to the pitcher from the bench, and he has to walk away from the box, facing the crowd—not the team—which has beaten him.  It is the psychology of baseball.

Some foolish words once whispered into the ear of a batter by a clever manager in the crises of one of the closest games ever played in baseball turned the tide and unbalanced the pitcher who had been working like a perfectly adjusted machine through seven terrific innings.  That is also the “psychology of pitching.”  The man wasn’t beaten because he weakened, because he lost his grip, because of any physical definciency, but because some foolish words—words that meant nothing, had nothing to do with the game—had upset his mental attitude.

The game was the first one played between the Giants and the Yankees in the post-season series of 1910, the batter was Bridwell, the manager was John Mcgraw, and the pitcher, Russell Ford of the Yankees.  The cast of characters having been named, the story now may enter the block.

Spectators who recall the game will remember that the two clubs had been battling through the early innings with neither team able to get an advantage, and the Giants came to bat for the eighth inning with the score a tie.  Ford was pitching perfectly with all the art of a master craftsman.  Each team had made one run.  I was the first man up and started the eighth inning with a single because ford slackened up a little against me, thinking that I was not dangerous.  Devore beat out an infield hit, and Doyle bunted and was safe, filling the bases.  Then Ford went to work.  He struck out Snodgrass, and Hemphill caught Murray’s fly far too near the infield to permit me to try to score.  It looked like Ford were going to get out of the hole when “Al” Bridwell, the former Giant shortstop, came to the bat.   Ford threw him two bad balls, and then McGraw ran out from the bench, and, with an autocratic finger, held up the game while he whispered into Bridwell’s ear.

Al nodded knowingly, and the whole thing was a pantomime, a wordless play, that made Sumurun look like a bush-league production.  Bridwell stepped back into the batter’s box, and McGraw returned to the bench.  On the next pitch, “Al” was hit in the leg and went to first base, forcing the run that broke the tie across the plate.  That run also broke Ford’s heart.  And here is what McGraw whispered into the attentive ear of Bridwell:

“How many quail did you say you shot when you were hunting last fall, Al?”

John McGraw, the psychologist, baseball general and manager, had heard opportunity knock.  With his fingers on the pulse of the game, he had felt the tenseness of the situation, and realized, all in the flash of an eye, that Ford was wabbling and that anything would push him over.  He stopped the game and whispered into Bridwell’s ear while Ford was feeling more and more the intensity of the crises.  He had an opportunity to observe the three men on the bases.  He wondered what McGraw was whispering, what trick was to be expected.  Was he telling the batter to get hit?  Yes, he must be.  Then he did just that—hit the batter, and lost the game.  [p. 15-7]

 

Here is Christy giving a remarkably insight on the flow of a game. 

In most Big League ball games, there comes an inning on which hangs the victory or defeat.  Certain intellectuals call it a crises; college professors, interested in the sport, have named it the psychological moment; Big League managers mention it as the “break,” and pitchers speak of the “pinch.”

This is the time when each team is staining every nerve either to win or to prevent defeat.  The players and spectators realize that the outcome of the inning is of vital importance.  And in most of these pinches, the real burden falls on the pitcher.  It is the moment that he is “putting all he has” on the ball, and simultaneously his opponents are doing everything they can to disconcert him. 

Mangers wait for this break, and the shrewd league leader can often time it.  Frequently a certain style of play is adopted to lead to the pinch, then suddenly a slovenly mode of attack is changed, and the team comes on with a rush in an effort to break up the game.  That is the real test of a pitcher.  He must be able to live through these squalls.  [p. 33]

 

That has altered the way I look at a game now.  Now I look for that moment of pinch, where a pitcher has to knuckle down if he is to win the game.  Today relief pitchers typically come in that moment of pinch, but in Mathewson’s day a starting pitcher went through most of the game.  And later in the chapter he continues about how through his own experience he learned to manage his pitching throughout the game. 

I have always been against a twirler pitching himself out, when there is no necessity for it, as so many youngsters do.  They burn them through for eight innings and then, when the pinch comes, something is lacking.  A pitcher must remember that there are eight other men in the game, drawing more or less salary to stop balls hit at them, and he must have confidence in them.  Some pitchers will put all that they have on each ball.  This is foolish for two reasons.

In the first place, it exhausts the man physically and, when the pinch comes, he has not the strength to last it out.  But second and more important, it shows the batter everything that he has, which is senseless.  A man should always hold something in reserve, a surprise to spring when things get tight.  If a pitcher has displayed his whole assortment to the batters in the early part of the game and has used all his speed and his fastest breaking curve, then, when the crises comes, he “hasn’t anything” to fall back on.

Like all youngsters, I was eager to make a record during my first year in the Big League, and in one of the first games I pitched against Cincinnati I made the mistake of putting all that I had on every ball.  We were playing at the Polo Grounds [NY Giants home field back then], and the giants had the visitors beaten 2 to 0, going into the last inning.  I had been popping them through, trying to strike out every hitter and had not held anything in reserve.  The first man to the bat in the ninth got a single, the next a two bagger, and by the time they had stopped hitting me, the scorer had credited the Cincinnati club with four runs, and we lost the game 4 to 2.

I was very much down in the mouth over the defeat, after I had the game won, and George davis, then the manager of the Giants, noticed it in the clubhouse.

“Never mind, Matty,” he said, “it was worth it.  The game ought to teach you not to pitch your head off when you don’t need to.”

It did.  I have never forgotten the lesson.  Many spectators wonder why a pitcher does not work as hard as he can all through the game, instead of just in the pinches.  If he did, they argue, there would be no pinches.  But there would be, and, if the pitcher did not conserve his energy, the pinches would usually go against him.  [p. 38-9]

 

It is quite striking how throughout the book Mathewson hardly ever praises himself or builds his stature.  Most of his examples are of his failures, as you can see in the above example.  For a man who won the overwhelming majority of his games and could easily argue being the greatest pitcher in the history of the game, let alone up to his day, Christy shows true Christian humility.

One of the central stories of the book is Mathewson’s retelling of a famous game in 1908 which decided the National League championship.  Behind this game was a previous game of September  23^rd where the Giants had the game won, but lost it dramatically on a “bonehead” runningmistake by their outfielder, Fred Merkle. If the Giants would have won that game, the one game playoff against the Chicago Cubs would not have been necessary.  Mathewson starts that chapter with heightened setting. 

The New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs played a game at the Polo Grounds on October 8, 1908, which decided the championship of the National League in one afternoon, which was responsible for the deaths of two spectators, who fell from the elevated railroad structure overlooking the grounds, which made Fred Merkle famous for not touching second, which caused lifelong friends to become bitter enemies, and which altogether, was the most dramatic and important contest in the history of baseball.  It stands out from every-day events like the battle of Waterloo and the assassination of President Lincoln.  It was a tragedy from a New York point of view.  The Cubs won by the score of 4 to 2.  [p. 105]

 

Three hundred and seventy-three wins is an incredible number for a career, and yet we repeatedly find Mathewson speaking about his failures.  It’s also hard to for us to understand the significance to the public consciousness of that game over a hundred years later, but we have all experienced sporting events that seem to alter the nation.  Christy goes on about that game.

 

The crowd that day was inflammable.  The players caught this incendiary spirit.  McGinnity, batting out to our infield in practice, insisted on driving Chance away from the plate before the Cubs leader thought his team had had its full share of the batting rehearsal.  “Joe” shoved him a little, and in a minute fists were flying, although Chance and McGinnity are very good friends off the field.

Fights immediately started all around the stands.  I remember seeing two men roll from the top to the bottom of the right field bleachers, over the heads of the rest of the spectators.  And they were yanked to their feet and run out of the park by the police.

“Too bad,” I said to Bresnahan, nodding my head toward the departing belligerents, “they could have waited until they saw the game anyway.  I’ll bet they stood outside the park all night to get in, only to be run out before it started.”

I forgot the crowd, forgot the fights, and didn’t hear the howling after the game started.  I knew only one thing, and that was my curved ball wouldn’t break for me.  It surprised me that the Cubs didn’t hit it far, right away, but two of them fanned in the first inning and Herzog threw out Evers.  Then came our first time at bat.  Pfiester was plainly nervous and hit Tenny.  Herzog walked and Bresnahan fanned out, Herzog being doubled up at second base because he tried to advance on a short pass ball.  “Mike” Donlin whisked a double to right field and Tenny counted.  [p. 115-6]

 

Isn’t that sumptuous  writing?  It’s not Nobel  prize winning literature, but if you’re baseball fan you will get so much out of this book.  One of my takeaways from reading this, certainly unintended by Mathewson, is that despite how much the game seems to have changed in these one hundred years, it really hasn’t changed much.  In reading Mathewson, I grew to love Mathewson.  As the World Series approaches, this book would make great bedside reading for the baseball enthusiast. 

 

I think I should also end with a Wikipedia quote on Mathewson’s last words.  I think it sums up his character.  Apparently he knew his fate on that last day.

According to the Ken Burns' documentary series, Baseball, one of Mathewson's last words were to his wife: Now Jane, I want you to go outside and have yourself a good cry. Don't make it a long one; this can't be helped.

 

 

"You can learn little from victory. You can learn everything from defeat."
-- Christy Mathewson