"Doesn't suck," Zig agrees.

[bandwraith at aol.com]

In New York that may have been less than hyperbole. DeLillo understands how important baseball was for this town, back in the day, when there were three teams not more than a subway ride away, vying for the World Series. Unbelievable, but true, and they played in the middle of the day! People stopped working, studying, fucking, whatever, and walked out in the streets to listen, or into the bars to watch. It was a moment in time, gone forever. He captures that specific moment perfectly. But more than that, he's a great writer, and he takes the specific into the general. Pafko stopped at the wall and watched. The ball continued on

It may be still bouncing, but this is a different place and a different time. I think he uses The Shot Heard 'round the World as the intial salvo that marked the end of the modern and the beginning of the postmodern- which seems to have straggled on until about 9/11. 



-----Original Message-----
From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: Bandwraith at aol.com <bandwraith at aol.com>
Cc: “pynchon-l at waste.or 
g“ <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tue, Apr 30, 2013 9:51 am
Subject: Re: "Doesn't suck," Zig agrees.


LA Dodgers announcer Vince Scully in an interview claimed that the
rooklyn Dodger announcer Red Barber after the Thompson home run said
 pretty amazing thing--something along the lines that amidst the
oyous celebration of the giant fans and the despair of the dodgers,
or perspective think of of all those many families having lost sons
ho would never be coming home again (speaking of Korea)--i cant find
vidence that he actually said that but I kinda hope its true.
p.s. and yes I think Pafko at the Wall is the best thing Delillo
rote. it so reminds me of my Dad and his stories of being a baseball
an at  that time and a life-long New Yorker
rich
On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 9:03 PM,  <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
 The Shot Heard 'round the World was a momentous occassion on October 3,
 1951, in the Polo Grounds, NYC. The Wikipedia article is pretty cool-

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_Heard_'Round_the_World_(baseball)

 Especially interesting is the article's detailing of the sportswriter Red
 Smith's lead in for his New York Herald Tribune recap the day after:

     Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The
 art of fiction is dead.
     Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the
 inexpressibly fantastic, can
     ever be plausible again.



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130430/cfe7df55/attachment.html>