Pure Wind

MUSIC +++ FILM +++ SPORT +++ PHOTO +++ LINK +++ POORLY REASONED POLITICAL OPINION AND STUPID JOKE

Hello. I'm Johnny Cash.

LIT
I'm here today simply because I haven't checked in in a while, and while the hundred-odd deaths from the crash of a planeload of journalists into an Iranian apartment building would be news enough for some, this reporter (snigger) has the willpower to let it spiral down the commode of history.

Just following the lead of my government. (The Reagan Revolution was based around small government. Right? Worked almost as well as... well, as Communism.)

So given that the newsmakers refuse to make real news -- at least until Terrell Owens buys McNabb one of those exploding cigars for Christmas -- I'll risk the ire of the copyright police and reprint a little of what I've been reading of late.

So, this is from a George Orwell essay -- if you're not familiar with Orwell's frighteningly familiar fiction, just take a careful look around you -- entitled "Why I Write." (Readers hoping to gain similar insight into this author's motives can go sit on the history pot.)

Orwell, writing in 1946, declares:

"What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice." [Note: while "partisan" has become an explicitly dirty word these days, the book's front cover predicts that phenomenon by addressing its source, declaring, "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."]

To continue: "When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because these is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing." Or as hardscrabble African American writer James Baldwin penned, "Every novel is a protest novel."

Orwell even reprints a poem he wrote in the mid-30's, purportedly about his own career crisis. The following stanza emerges:

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them;
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

That sounds familiar too. The little fat men, in, one presumes, their little fat hats, are disticntly political figures. That segues into another interesting line from the essay, which states, "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." For those who wonder, again, why I get bogged down in political nattering.

Or, perhaps, a better explanation: Orwell lays out "four great motives for writing" by any author, and lists the first as "Sheer egoism." (The others, in order, are: "aesthetic enthusiasm," "historical impulse," and "political purpose.") "All writers," Orwell confides, "are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery." On this he does not say more.

He does confess, "I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure..."

I guess if I picked this up hoping to encourage my own writing "habit," perhaps I should have turned to the "For Dummies" series for a tad more ass-patting. But, despite what my high school basketball coach claimed, I've always preferred blunt-force honesty to ass-patting.

Or as the great man puts it, "I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life."

Quite right, Memory, quite right.

SPRT
Yes. Yes!! Brian Sabean once again proves his mettle. The Giants just traded LaTroy Hawkins -- a hard-throwing,weak-spirited righthander with good numbers -- for Steve Kline, a veteran lefty with a pretty decent history. This is unquestionably good.

Ditto the Tim Worrell signing, which we could only do at two years and $4 million because he ducked out on much of last year to sort out a psychological problem. Worrell is smart, a workhorse, and a guy who, completely opposite of Hawkins, stays comfortable in tough situations, and can therefore close games.

In Kline, the Giants got the closest approximation of a replacement for lefty horse Scott Eyre, who parlayed a fantastic season -- some heaven-blessed sportswriter even gave Erye a tenth-place vote in the MVP balloting -- into an eight-figure deal with the Cubs.

Kline, despite numbers not as consistently stingy as Hawkins', is tough on righties, just as Eyre was, and should make for a solid compliment to Worrell, so a healthy Armando Benitez can go back to blowing games in the ninth.

MR

QWTOFDY
"I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true..."
-George Orwell