GR sighting, (and baseball and a good book)

[Bekah]

From "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach (2011) -  page about 331,  discussing the phenomenon of Steve Blass,  a  major league pitcher and his sudden inability to throw.   (Fwiw,  if you're interested,  this is the voice of the 3rd person omniscient and intimate narrator): 

"Nineteen seventy-three.   In the public imagination it was as fraught a year as you could name:  Watergate,  Roe v. Wade,  withdrawal from Vietnam.  Gravity’s Rainbow. Was it also the year that Prufrockian paralysis went mainstream— the year it entered baseball?  It made sense that a psychic condition sensed by the artists of one generation— the Modernists of the First World War— would take a while to reveal itself throughout the population.   And if that psychic condition happened to be a profound failure of confidence in the significance of individual human action,  then the condition became an epidemic when it entered the realm of utmost confidence in same: the realm of professional sport.  In fact, that might make for a workable definition of the postmodernist era: an era when even the athletes were anguished Modernists.  In which case the American postmodern period began in spring 1973, when a pitcher named Steve Blass lost his aim." 

Harbach, Chad (2011-09-07). The Art of Fielding: A Novel (Kindle Location 5232). Hachette Book Group. Kindle Edition. 

Yup - it's a good book - especially if you like contemporary US lit and baseball - maybe Moby Dick for good measure. 

Bek