Batatas

Let me just tear down the curtain. I have two topics today and it's my goal to unite them. Those topics are football and sweet potatoes.

Footballs and sweet potatoes are essentially the same shape, but I don't think that will do to bring them together in any coherent way.

I tend to like both of these entities, but when the only thing a topic has in common with another topic is Me, that usually spells doom for the resulting composition.

There is some internet fact to be found that could probably lead me to a meshy (and messy) essay (meshay) during which I imagine (along with you readers) that Earnest Byner ate sweet potatoes the day of "The Fumble," and that those two things are inexorably linked in American Lore.

This potential post might take a little too long, though, and would be too cute by half a yard.

It wasn't that hard: "Earnest Byner, the Ravens' director of player development, purchased the turkeys.
Mars Supermarkets donated the side dishes, including cranberries, stuffing and sweet potatoes" (Baltimore Sun, 2001).

But, don't worry, I've got it. I can address football and sweet potatoes--together--by looking at the constantly surprising detours conversations take--I'm thinking of a specific conversation I had today that just happened to touch on both SPs and FB. And I can address both topics by asking What makes a thing a thing? In other words, What makes football football? and What makes a sweet potato a sweet potato?

Context: For lunch, the committee for the Propagation of Anglophilia (otherwise known as me and two other teachers who are leading a British Literature class) met for Bangers and Mash, American Style. That is, we all had a sausage dip (such a thing exists, 14-year olds; I understand your grinning). And some of us had fries.

I had sweet potato fries.

Just as in any conversation, an angel passed by at the seven-minute mark.

(As you will see in the latter link, this conversational phenomenon--the idea that groups pause after a certain amount of time no matter the raucousness--has (dubious, but intriguing) evolutionary roots: "It has been postulated that this seemingly impromptu onset [. . .] dates back to pre-historic man, [who was] hardwired [. . .] to listen for the approach of dangerous animals."

Dustin, Matt, and I, having ordered burgers, may have been listening for the approach of delicious animals).

At this preternatural pause in the conversation, Dustin asked me, "Do you like sweet potatoes?"

Now, here's something that's long-preoccupied me. Not sweet potatoes, but the conversational ability to say relatively thankless things. When "Do you like sweet potatoes?" and similar questions cross the minds of most-people--maybe even me--most-people dismiss those questions.

That's not suitable conversation-kindling, we think. Not spark(l)ing enough. Maybe even too personal somehow. He'll think I'm dumb for asking.

I didn't grow up in a family that excelled at chatter of this kind, but now I value it highly. I remind myself that sometimes it's my duty, even when all that's available is a mundane question or a conventional remark or even something that makes me sound a little ridiculous, to keep the conversational beach ball in the air, lest it fall onto the baseball field of timidity and be deflated by the vindictive groundskeeper of awkwardness.

Do you like sweet potatoes? is just as good a place to start as anywhere else, and it led somewhere relatively thrilling.

I said that I did like sweet potatoes--I give the sweet potato a B+; Dustin said that he didn't like them, too mushy (not much in this exchange, admittedly). But then Matt contended, "Sweet potatoes aren't really tuber enough to be potato, nor are they squash enough to be squash." He's not a fan.

Again, this is the sort of Yoda-ish thing I usually say, and it just as usually leads folks to check their watches. But, in my opinion, this kind of declaration is the rich-orange-buttery-brownsugary flesh of the best discussions!

The only problem is that we don't have readily-canned responses to unconventionally interesting statements about sweet potatoes. So, uncannily interesting people, when they make said statements about sweet potatoes, are often left feeling like they've broken some social rule.

But this line of potato-thought must be followed to its roots, and so I, undaunted, asked, "Now, what exactly is a tuber?" Matt readily responded. And, because of Dustin's opening entreaty we were allowed to get to this morsel:

"Matt, are you arguing this afternoon that the sweet potato isn't a potato at all?"

"I think that is what I'm arguing," Matt said. We had defeated the passing angel through a sheer act of collective, yammering will. We had talked about potatoes for eight minutes.

And Matt was onto something, according to Wikipedia: "Although it is sometimes called a yam in North America, the sweet potato is not in the yam family, nor is it closely related to the common potato [. . .] but the name which stayed was the indigenous Taino name of 'batata'. This name was later transmuted to the similar name for a different vegetable, the ordinary potato, causing confusion from which it never recovered."

So sweet potatoes aren't potatoes. Matt was right. And he was right about their tuberousness, too. I'd thought wrongly that all tubers were potatoes, as all squares are rectangles; but sweet potatoes, which are not potatoes, are sometimes referred to as uber-tubers nonetheless. And as for the claim that SPs are squashy, well, there is such a thing as a Sweet Potato Squash.


So, what makes a sweet potato a sweet potato? I guess I'm still not sure, but I know what a sweet potato isn't, and I know they're hard to get really crispy.

When I was halfway through my french-fried batatas, we turned our attention to football--from Tubers to Tebows--and we decided the increase in concussions in the NFL is unsettling. We came up with four policy proposals to limit injury:

1. If a player is guilty of an egregious hit, he should be ejected, and his team should have to play defense with 10 players for the rest of the game.

2. Players should not be allowed to wear masks, and would therefore not lead with their heads.

3. Kickoffs should be throw-offs from the 50-yard line so that Special Teams collisions won't be as intense.

4. Offensive and Defensive Linemen should have to start plays standing up so that they hit each other with less force. No more three-point stances.

Radically, I put forth the idea that tackling should only be legal on first down and that second and third down should be played as flag football, encouraging more passing, and discouraging physical aggression.

"What you're describing is football that wouldn't really be football," Matt said.

And now we were back in sweet-potato-land. Is the sweet potato a potato or a tuber or a squash? Two of those three? None of those three? Is football the strategic advancement of a ball toward a goal-line or is it just collisions?

To save ourselves, and future generations of football players, from headaches, we should just agree that it's about the strategy (plus a dash of hitting) and adopt the suggestions put forth in my controversial conversational white paper.

Incidentally, sweet potatoes can save us from headaches, too. They also make an exemplary meal for wide receivers, and if you do happen to take a hard hit over the middle, Earnest Byner, they're wonderful for bringing down the swelling.

English Interlude

For the next 30 days or so I'm going to be doing a little bit of reading every day from the Norton Anthology of English Literature (20th Century). There are 30 slips of paper in my old (I should say aged so it doesn't sound like I have an Old Milwaukee hat) Milwaukee Brewers hat; each slip has a name of a writer. . .and so on and so forth. (See earlier note).

Today I read the surprisingly great WWI poems of Ivor Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918), having read the surprisingly great WWII poems of Keith Douglas and Charles Causley yesterday. I say surprisingly great because the topic itself usually overwhelms this kind of poem, and, 65-95 years on, they seem pretty well-worn and (understandably) maudlin.

But these poems are very specific and represent, according to the anthology, the working class, grunt infantry perspective as opposed to the better-known, and pretty good poems of Wilfred Owen, which are from an officer's perspective.

Here's a memorable description of a rat in a trench, from Rosenberg's poem "Break of Day in the Trenches."

"Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life [. . .]"

And now for my daily draw: W.H. Auden. Looks like I'm headed back to WWII.

Ham

"Why don't you marry it?"

That's what my first grade enemies used to ask me when I said, "I love ham," in the cafeteria at Federal Street South Elementary School. Every boy in my class was named either Kyle or Josh, and they all seemed to believe that ham was stupid and that love meant marriage (also, that pegging me with a red rubber ball at the red brick wall was the tops).

Now, let me be honest. If I ever did marry a lunchmeat, I'd choose, without reservations, to be pronounced man-and-ham. It's the superior coldcut: salty enough to be familiar; pink enough to seem exotically highbrow.



And I think ham would really get me, you know? Like, we'd make a connection and figure out this crazy-thing-called-life----together. And anyway, I always go for just-under-the-radar attachments. None of that trendy stuff for this guy. I didn't love the prom queen. I don't love turkey. I'm a ham guy.

Quick pause for today's ham-handed half-fact: some people apparently prefer ham that comes from the left leg of a pig--the sinister side--reasoning that a pig scratches itself with its right leg, making that meat tougher. I've always heard, though, that the more an animal's muscle is used, the tastier it is. Not only am I a ham guy, then. I'm a right-legged ham guy, all the way.

So why don't I marry the right leg of a ham?

Maybe I will. What do you think of that, Josh? (That always seemed to shut 'em up).

But besides all of the above, I'm really more interested in why these Kyles taunted ham so hard, or, really, why they taunted love so hard. Let's think about "Why don't you marry it?" as a logical retort, shall we?

The comeback--remember when having a good comeback was pretty much the most important thing, and remember that you probably haven't thought about comebacks for most of the rest of your life?--is obviously meant to insult. You love something? Gross. Then why don't you marry it?

Maybe I was being subtly shamed for having a feeling about anything. Anyway, their mild bullying seemed a little loaded, like they were teasing me for being a sissy, like they were hamophobic.

But if I can be so bold, it seems like these Joshes really had a problem with linguistic inauthenticity, like they were calling me on my pigshit.

Dear sir, I say, I question your so-called "love" for this pork product (they'd make air quotes with their fish-sticky hands). I believe you to be exaggerating, and it stands to reason that if you "loved" ham as you claim, you'd most certainly want to marry it. Since you don't, I presume, want to marry it--ham--you must not "love" it. I'll thank you to be more precise with your diction. Point for me, what?

First of all, that's clearly a fallacy, Kyle. You love your mom and, even though you're a momma's boy, you don't want to marry her. So, it's clear that one can love someone or something without that love leading to marriage. Second, what you don't understand, Josh, is that, like the many and splendoured varieties of ham, there, too, are many and splendoured varieties of love, and that "love," in this particular cafeteria milieu, is metonymic for "strong preference." I, then, have a strong preference for ham.

Why couldn't I have thought of that then? "Strong preference" would have been a great comeback.

But if I had a "strong preference" for ham then why, they might have countered, wouldn't I marry it?

Touche. (Those Kyles had me at every turn).

Luckily, even though my feelings were always a tiny bit hurt by their ham-slams, I had my sandwich to soothe me. One slice, on white bread, American Cheese and Animal Crackers.

And I did, in the end, marry a ham.



The best revenge is living well, and revenge is a dish best served coldcut. So pardon me while I enjoy my second ham sandwich of the day.

And, in summation: bite me, Josh.

English Interlude

For the next 30 days or so I'm going to be doing a little bit of reading every day from the Norton Anthology of English Literature (20th Century). There are 30 slips of paper in my old Milwaukee Brewers hat, each one with a name of a writer. I pick; I read. And I thought I'd chronicle that reading here in the form of snippets of text, perhaps related to my own blogposts.

Nov. 15th reading:

"Vergissmeinnicht," by Keith Douglas (1920-1944)

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht. (*means "Forget me not")
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

Tennis Lessons

This fall, I've had a Tennissance.

I've played more in the last two months than I have in the last ten years, and some of the matches have put me back in touch with the eleven-year old me, in short red and yellow shorts (c'mon mom, really?!), who picked up (and promptly broke) his first real, non-hand-me-down racket in the early nineties.

Thanks to my brother, I was pretty good for my age; he'd spent a couple summers beating up on me on our street-court (which had a crack for a net and fire hydrant baselines). And so when I met Mr. Kells, heroic Mr. Kells, I could hold my own, at least when it came to hitting the ball. Finer facets of the game were beyond my grasp, as we'll see.



I had my first lesson (fancy-schmancy, I know) with my friend Cheese (short for "Cheesehead"--origin, mostly unknown). We met Mr. Kells, a 71 year-old-retiree who looked a little like a slim George Kennedy, at his house. On his backyard court, he taught me how to hit with top-spin while Cheese stood idly by thinking about video games and chilling (he works for Google now, so his distant mind was in the right place).

The history channel was new then and I remember that Mr. Kells always had it on before and after the lesson, if it wasn't Wimbledon time. Now I know why. He'd been a P.O.W. in World War II and his interest persisted.

At the time, I didn't know that. He was just the guy who provided my tennis lessons and Sprite once a week during the summer. And, in fact, I didn't know about Mr. Kells's history until today when I searched online for a picture of him. Just this past Friday, a first-person article was published detailing his experience in the European theater. I haven't spoken to him in fifteen years, but his voice was recognizable:

"The squad of Germans (about eight to ten people) were shooting away from our hole, they knew exactly where we were, but the bullets were glancing off the road," Mr. Kells told the writer, Elise Forbes Tripp. "They deliberately avoided killing us right then: they were trying to tell us, We've got you pinned down."

I heard all of this in the sing-songy clip I remembered him using to teach young kids how to serve. "Pronate, now. That's it." And I thought back to a time when I wrongly assumed I could put this old guy on his heels with a well-struck backhand.

***

From that first lesson with Mr. Kells, I was pretty much a brat. I launched tennis balls over his back fence; I shuffled my feet when it came time to gather up the Wilson 4's and Penn 2's; and, most unforgivably, I smashed my racket almost every time I missed a shot, groaning like the little McEnroe I was. Love-15.



It's safe to say that I was a pretty mild-mannered kid, but I'd always had a temper about sports. And there was something about tennis that seemed unbearably more aggravating than any other game. Especially when I kept losing to Mr. Kells, who, to me, seemed like a beatable older man. Love-30.

Tennis was the first thing I was any good at, besides state capitals. The first thing I succeeded at by myself, and when a game went right, I felt miraculous control, like a wizard. That I was looping pathetic moon-balls over a net to a septuagenarian in even shorter shorts than I wore didn't take away from the fact that playing made me feel huge. I could imagine my beautiful shot, and then imagine it into reality. 15-30.

Andre Agassi was telling me in camera commercials of the time that image was everything, and so I acted all cool and attitude-y. I strode around like a punk (in really clean whites), secretly happy behind the compulsory pissed-off sneering of the Serious Player. 30 All.

Hitting a nice volley felt like timing a punchline correctly. I'd win a point; or, people would laugh. Either way, I'd feel superior, pleasantly contemptuous. I wouldn't smile. Gentlemen don't acknowledge exertion. 40-30.

Let's be clear. I wasn't great at tennis, but I was alright, and I think I can guess that the arrogance I felt is what a lot of players feel. "It seems impossible to succeed at what I've just so easily triumphed at. Harrumph, harrumph, What of it?"

Which makes failing at tennis all the worse. The hard task made easy is complete joy. The hard task that's suddenly difficult again--because the pixie dust that made it possible has abruptly blown away--is excruciating. Tennis felt so much like showing off--still requires so much unearned, and for me unnatural swagger--that when it went wrong I was exposed. Deuce. Ad-out. Game. Set. Match. Loss.

***

"We got out [of our foxhole], put our hands up, we walked up this little knoll where they were above us," Mr. Kells told the interviewer. And it's odd for me to hear it because I associate him with perfect flowers and a nice tennis court, with everything safe, Sprite-like, in control.

"They had complete control. We're now in the hands of the Germans and our troops are shooting furiously at the Germans and us."

***

Though I was improving my brattyness, sometimes after Mr. Kells beat me (he was 42-0 all-time), I'd slam my racket, especially if I'd felt I had him on the run.

I mangled a Dunlop and felt pretty terrible when I got a new one for Christmas later in the year--my parents' gift was shamingly kind, and though it might seem like they were rewarding me for my bad behavior, I got the message. They were going to keep giving; but they were going to point out that they shouldn't have to.

"Everyone knows what happened to your last one, so. . .," they'd say. I did. I'd lost it, the racket, because I'd lost it, the temper. It wouldn't happen again.


***

Mr. Kells, who's 89 now, was the subject of my college application essay. I imagine I wrote about the Respect I had for him--he was a great old guy and we had fun together. I think I said he taught me Lessons (vague, college-application Lessons), showed me how to Persevere (vague, pampered Perseverance). That he was like another Grandfather. That he'd shown me what it meant to be a Good, Charitable person.

I knew what words to capitalize in order to woo a Catholic school's admissions committee.

What I didn't mention, and what I should have, is that he had patience with me, but only up to a point, and that he broke me of my terrible temper, not by yelling, but only by telling me that he no longer wanted to play together if I kept acting that way. "Your racket didn't do anything to you," he'd say, still sing-songy.

Now, when I play tennis I hit shots that I have no business hitting--cross-court masterpieces that someone with a dearth of athletic talent like me shouldn't even attempt; and I hit shots that belong on the blooper reel, too--horrible episodes of botchery during which I threaten my own testicular health, and the dignity of the game.

My opponents will have noticed that I--somewhat bizarrely, compulsively--stare at my racket after both. They might think I'm worshiping it, or blaming it. Nope.

I'm just trying to remind myself that the feeling of control--the addictive tennis emotion--and the feeling of helplessness--the unavoidable tennis affliction--get doled out in equal measure. And, as Mr. Kells has taught me in a couple different ways, they probably always will.

English Interlude

For the next 30 days or so I'm going to be doing a little bit of reading every day from the Norton Anthology of English Literature (20th Century). There are 30 slips of paper in my old Milwaukee Brewers hat, each one with a name of a writer. I pick; I read. And I thought I'd chronicle that reading here in the form of snippets of text, perhaps related to my own blogposts, perhaps not.

Nov. 14th reading:

Joseph Conrad's "The Task of the Artist"

"All art [. . .] appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music--which is the art of arts."

Snakes

Today, a new category of day: balmy-November.

It's seventy-five degrees in Athens and the wind seems to be blowing in off of some sea. Has West Virginia become an ocean? Are the mountaineer-sailors shouting “Land Ho” as they float westward past The Omelette Shoppe on Old Sea Route 50 in Parkersburg?



I'm telling you for serious now, for serious, that I can almost smell a body of saltwater and its fishy, tasty death. Columbus, I think, is overwhelmed with oysters.

So, of course, I'm November-sweaty, a new category of sweaty. And thinking, involuntarily, of the word “oleaginous.”

I'm not even sure I know what “oleaginous” means, but its five syllables seem to be actively oozing out of my brain and onto my now-enwettened forehead. (Blast you, Kentucky-Sea air! How are you both oceanic and thick?)

Oily, it means. “Oleaginous” does. From Latin, as most good words are. From French, too, naturally. It's a gross sounding word that both literally and figuratively means slick.

It's hard not to be oleaginous while pronouncing “oleaginous.” I feel like kind of a slimeball just writing it. Same feeling I get when I use the word “epitome,” or “obsequious” (which my really smart boss would be glad to know is actually synonymous with “oleaginous”).

And it's even hard to pronounce “oleaginous” without also pronouncing some spittle with it.



Old Timey Snake Oil Salesmen bring the two definitions of the word together, but I'm not really sure what Old Timey Snake Oil Salesmen were either, truthfully. Snake Oil Salesmen had some physical oil, I guess, and were thought to be slick in their selling of it—flim-flam artists, grifters, gafflers, hustle junkies.

When I was sitting a few minutes ago, overcome by oleagineity and mysterious toe pain, my mind—swell con-man itself—drifted to Snake Oil. What was it? Could it soothe my Itchy Toe? And who was its purveyor, that archetypal liar?

Also, shouldn't the Snake Oil Salesman have come up with a better name for his product? I think if I were attempting to peddle fake medicine to frontiersfolk, I might've called it something much more soothing than snake oil, even if it actually was the oil of a snake. And it was. At least in China, originally. Because the Chinese Water Snake's oils are thought to have anti-inflammatory properties.

Snake fat was also big in ancient Egyptian medicine, maybe Greek too, and it was mixed with “the fats of lion, hippopotamus, crocodile, tomcat, and Nubian ibex into a homogeneous mass believed to cause bald men to grow hair.” So, if snake guts really put hair on a bald King Tut, then I can see why its sellers wouldn't have been ashamed to call themselves what they were. Snake Oil Salesman has a better ring than Nubian Ibex Oil Salesman, after all.



But in America, “Snake Oil” was often made of beef fat.

So, my question still remains. You decide to become a grifter. You get yourself a product. And in a fit of ad-wizardry, you name it Snake Oil? Not Stallion Salve, or Gizmo Juice, or God's Tears, or any other combination of nonsense words that would sound perfectly reassuring to your average Deadwood resident. Not Brahm's Balm or Willard's Wonder Water. Nope, just Snake Oil.



One word, snake, that since Eden itself has meant treachery + a second word, oil, that, especially in the heyday of quack medicine in the early 20th Century, would have brought to mind risky speculation. Sign me up for ten bottles! This toe is getting worse!

But Snake Oil Salesmen, at least some of them, seemed to have believed in their own product and would not have appreciated the derogatory term we now use.

“As I was thought a great deal of by the medicine man,” recalled S.O.S. Clark Stanley in an 1897 book, “he gave me the secret of making the Snake Oil Medicine, which is now named Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment.” Back then, Clark Stanley's medicine was used for “Rheumatism, Neuralgia, Sciatica, Lame Back, Contracted Muscles, Sprains, Swellings, Frost Bites, Chilblains, Bruises, Sore Throat, Bites of Animals, Insects and Reptiles.” (No word on whether it cured Viper's Dance or Scrivener's Palsy or Itchy Toe or Siriasis, but my toe still hurts and it's still 75 degrees in Athens, in case you were wondering).

Back to Stanley. Having learned from the Indians, he set up snake-shop in Beverly, Mass, toured the country with a snake-killing show, and eventually added red pepper flakes and turpentine to his concoction. Somewhere along the line, even though he'd trusted in those Indian wise men and their original blend, his stuff got less snake and more fake.

For peddling snake oil that ultimately didn't have any snake oil in it, he was fined $20 (about $425.70 in today's dollars, or about 851 bottles in today's Stanley's Snake Oil Liniments. But if a sucker is born every minute, he would have needed only 14 hours to make his money back, so that's good for him).

A sucker is born every minute. Someone is selling a “new” Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment sign on Ebay; that does not seem like a safe buy, and yet I'm intrigued.

I don't know the last time I was really fooled badly, so I might go for it. I used to have a reputation for gullibility in middle school, I know, but I don't recall being out-and-out scammed since then, to any large degree at least. I'm pretty often worried, though, that someone's puttin' one over on me (a phrase which doesn't have an immediately discernible origin, if the internet is to be believed). And even now, trying to remember the last big prank I endured, I'm pretty sure that since I can't tell who the sucker at the table is, it must be me.

So I ask myself on most days, How am I being duped? By the culture, by commercials? What are my blind spots? What snake oil have I bought without even realizing the cost?

And usually my mind wanders to those places when I'm reading something about the way Ancient or British folk drank the kool-aid of their own ridiculous ideologies, accepting some pre-ordained oppression or another. I can't be much different.

But the other day, the mind-wandering and the reading came together nicely. I was looking into some required Plato and daydreaming about how I might be getting screwed by the world; and then Socrates said that he knows he's the wisest man around only because he's the only one who's realized he doesn't know anything.





Maybe I've been fooled into believing I can think my way out of all of this. That's how they've gotten me. That's my blindspot (some snake oils are said to cure dry eyes, but not blindness).

Turns out, Socrates used to call his rivals, The Sophists, Snake Oil Salesmen of The Soul. That's a sophisticated line (wait, strike that). Anyway, there's some argument about whether those Sophists knew they were selling spiritual sputum to their audience or whether they, too, bought into their own brand of rhetoric, of oleagiosity. They thought they could talk their way out of anything, think their way around logic. But were they right? Maybe.

And if you believe that, I've got some ocean-front property in Appalachia to sell you.