Top 10

Chuck Klosterman recommends the writing of Matthew Osgood!

For a number of years now, I’ve been the one of my friends who will recommend books, articles, poems, or short stories to others. I base this on subjective interest levels, frequency of how much said person reads, and intelligence (that sounds awful, but a strictly academic book, Shakespeare the Thinker, for instance, wouldn’t be recommended to my 17-year old cousin, and so on). I’ve decided to make a list of books, in my opinion, that are essential reads. Of course, there needs to be some universal appeal, alas there won’t be any appearances by good old Billy Shakespeare, but I hope I’ve served you correctly.

The goal here is to go beyond the “classics” and delve deeper into some great, but less critically acclaimed novels. These are in no particular order:

1. Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer. The tragic story of 22-year old Chris McCandless, a young man from an affluent family who, after graduating college, abandoned his car, gave his life savings to charity, and ventured off into a soul-seeking journey that ultimately led to his death. Krakauer does a remarkable job reporting, but remains remarkably objective – despite obvious feelings – in helping the reader form an opinion on whether McCandless was a Thoreau-ian idealist or a narcissistic fool.
2. Into Thin Air – Jon Krakauer. The second appearance by Krakauer on this list. This is the tale of the cursed Mt. Everest attempt in 1996, the deadliest season in the history of summit attempts. Again, remarkable reporting and storytelling of a heartbreaking tale. This is an intense read.
3. The Selected Poem of – James Wright. A new favorite for me. I've fallen in love with his descriptions of nature and how simple beauty can be the most important thing we fail to realize is there.
4. Delights and Shadows – Ted Kooser. Another book of poetry. Kooser, a Midwest poet, meditates on the simplicity and beauty of the life around him. A Happy Birthday, Sure Signs.
5. The Last Shot – Darcy Frey. I read this one in college. Definitely the best basketball book I’ve ever read. Frey chronicles the lives of Lincoln High School basketball players, including current NBA superstar Stephon Marbury, who was a 9^th grader at the time.
6. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson. If you think the movie is funny, read the book. This was the first book I’ve ever read that made me laugh on every page. There’s not a dull line written in the book.
7. Slouching Towards Nirvana – Joan Didion. This is a collection of non-fiction essays. Didion is one of the generations greatest writers. Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream is the standout piece here.
8. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs – Chuck Klosterman. A must-read for pop culture fans. He writes on numerous topics with both humor and insight, including Saved by the Bell, the Lakers-Celtics rivalry, and how much he hates the band Coldplay.
9. The Trouble With Poetry – Billy Collins. Made me a lifelong fan with the poem "Monday"
   
10. I am Charlotte Simmons – Tom Wolfe. I debated putting this on here, but I just enjoyed this book so much. This is the story of a brilliant, virginal young woman who embarks into a world of sex, drugs, and deception: college. Wolfe is another great writer in our time. I guess the $6 million advance on his next book should tell us as much.

Authors

As I've told some of my friends I consistently share my work with, I've been reading a lot of John Updike lately. One of his essays in Due Considerations speaks of his literary influences, many of whom are obscure, but, regardless, have had their influence of one of the greatest writers of our time. Thus, I decided to write my own. This, I think, is still a work in progress.

I have, first and foremost, been influenced by non-fiction writing and writers. This fact is probably understood primarily through the idea that non-fiction is, while not always factual and concrete, real. As readers, we choose our non-fiction reading based on our interests, sports, politics, popular culture, etc. Subsequently, we’re given the unique passage into a place we were never in -the 1983 NBA Eastern Conference finals, the 2000 Republican National Convention – through someone else’s lens.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in an area where the sports took major precedence and the coverage of these teams was held to an incredibly high standard. The Boston Globe sports section still ranks as one of the best sports pages in the country. From the moment I could read, I would spread the agate page in front of me to see who won, who scored the most points, or what's going on tonight. Eventually, the fervor for opening the sports page turned away from statistics and toward the game story, where instead of just reading numbers, I could read and visualize what happened. Bob Ryan was always one of my favorite writers because he brought an element of history to his writing. He had been around the great Celtics teams and was able to put the current teams in the Boston area in a historical context that other writers could not.

In high school, I would publicly express my distain for reading, while reading every word of the classics we were asked to read like Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which paled, in my own estimation, in comparison to Tom Sawyer, but would never express this aloud because the latter wasn't required reading) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (..."So we beat on, boats against the current...").

The first non-fiction writer I came to admire - and attempt a miserably failing stylistic mirroring - was the late Hunter S. Thompson, who did not survive the shotgun blast to his own head in the early spring of 2005. Aside from some of the humor and craziness evoked in his writing, Thompson possessed the remarkable ability to chronicle his subjects individually as well as capture the larger picture with grand accuracy. He was the first writer I began to read consistently in high school solely for his aptitude for comedic storytelling, and eventually began to understand his prose and writing ability through studying his work as an undergraduate in Springfield.

Thompson, though not extensively studied in any academic realm, was a catalyst for the reading and eventual enjoyment of other writer's in the same generation. He led the way for discovering writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and John Updike, the latter two became favorites upon classroom readings - and re-readings - of Didion's Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream and Updike's homage to Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. These writers represent for me a generation of academics who redefined the term journalism, but kept most of the romantic and classic elements of prose alive. This is what drew me toward their work, and consciously veered me in the direction that I went.

These four writers possess the ability to show the tendencies and nuances of others based on what they saw. Even though their subjective opinions were not entirely transparent, they allowed the reader to make their own judgments. Paradoxically, their writing about someone else is autobiographical inasmuch as how they choose their stories, which angles they take, and the language used to report their stories. Enviably, each of these four writers that could very well be classified as non-fiction writers have dipped their toes in the waters of fiction, which is a natural avenue for superb storytellers.

In college, I was introduced to Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and have read the book at least four different times since, once in its entirety on a six-hour cross country flight after finding my college copy in an old box. Krakauer's writing, reporting, and storytelling, in addition to his inclusion of autobiographical material lured me into reading his other books, and has catapulted him to the forefront of American authors. I was fortunate to familiarize myself - for better or worse - with a number of authors during my college years, including William Shakespeare (taught by the passionate and brilliant Dr. Dennis Gouws), where I learned how shameful it is the sonnets and comedies are not taught in high schools instead of the tragedies and H.D. Thoreau, the only author to whom I've ever attached the "it's not what he did, it's that he did it" mantra. We read John Hollinger, Sally Jenkins, Chinua Achebe, John McPhee, Jim Murray, Frank DeFord (His Johnny Unitas piece!!), and Truman Capote.

Since my undergraduate years, my reading has been completely dominated by the influence of American poetry. I've been reading W.H. Auden ("Time will tell you nothing but I told you so..."), Charles Simic, Walt Whitman, Charles Bukowski, E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and especially Ted Kooser. My popular culture reading comes solely from the cynical and hysterical Chuck Klosterman and the uproarious travel writing of Bill Bryson, both of whom provide a light breeze. I'm sure there is someone I'm forgetting, as these literary influences have encouraged stylistic revision, ideas, and inspiration for what I’ve got so far to constitute my life’s work.

All "choked" up

This was an e-mail written to a friend following the Patriots 17-14 loss in Super Bowl XLII. I'm posting this by request from my brother. It's a pretty tough thing to revisit because I'm still not okay with the idea of the Patriots losing that game. The piece itself is somber - actually miserable - in tone, but enjoy.

My wife of fifty years could leave me and I wouldn’t feel worse than I do right now. The Patriots lost. The Patriots lost to a team they would have beaten nineteen out of twenty times. But none of that matters. History is tarnished. The only game of the season that the Patriots lost was the only game that matters. As a sports fan, we’ve reached the pinnacle of letdown. The worst-case scenario was realized, then blown up and exaggerated a hundred thousand times.

The 2007-2008 New England Patriots will go down in history as the biggest choke artists of all time. In 2004 when the Boston Red Sox overcame a 3-0 deficit to defeat the New York Yankees, the Bronx Bombers were crowned the kings of choking. For the last three years, when ESPN would run their Top Ten segment on teams that choked or blew leads, the Yankees were there at the top. Now? There’s a new number one. They’ve moved past the 2004 Yankees, past the 1980 Russian hockey team, and past Mike Tyson getting knocked out by a 49 to 1 underdog Buster Douglas.

In the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, pundits were talking about history. They were talking about the historical impact there Patriots had on the NFL. They would talk about what a victory would do for the legacy of Tom Brady. They placed him on par with Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw, and Troy Aikman. What of that now? I don’t claim to be an expert on much, but this much I do know. Montana, Bradshaw, Aikman and the like would have never played as poorly as Brady did in Super Bowl XLII. Those guys would have never lost a game with such historical implications. This paragraph sucked to write. Unfortunately, the honesty and accuracy behind it is absolutely true. The best quarterbacks of all time would not have let that slip through their hands. I hope he enjoys his MVP trophy and has the NFL record books hanging on his refrigerator. Those mean nothing.

I may be writing this in haste or anger, which is partially true, though I am remaining incredibly composed through this terrible ordeal (though, as of 8:15 this morning, the sun hasn’t peaked through the dreary Boston clouds – I’m actually convincing myself that the sun doesn’t even want to come up today. I don’t want it too). Brady, at the tender age of 30 still has some great years in front of him, but I’ve never seen him perform at such a low level.

I’ve never seen a Bill Belichick game plan go awry the way I did tonight. This is the biggest choke job in the history of sports. Did I say that yet? When the Patriots lost to the Broncos a couple years ago, it could be blamed on some controversial calls from the referees. With the loss to the Colts in the AFC Championship last year, it was heartbreaking blowing a very comfortable lead. With the loss, however, we could take solace in the idea that Indianapolis was the better team. This is not the case this year.

There are a number of reasons why the Patriots losing the Super Bowl after going undefeated throughout the entire season is heartbreaking. First, of course, is where this places us in history. It doesn’t matter how well they do next year. Even if they win a Super Bowl next year, we will always be known as the team that blew it’s chance at history, the team that couldn’t come through in the only game that matters.

With regards to SpyGate, it almost reaffirms everything the rest of the country assumes. I could defend the idea that the Patriots were a little shady with their research tactics with the idea that the game still needed to be played. Preparation can take a team only so far, and execution is the most important part of the game. Now? I’m looking at this through the lens that maybe the Patriots could have had a leg up illegally. Since all these allegations came to light, maybe the Patriots only won because of the illegal advantaged they’ve had. It’s a tough concept to grasp, but not such an unbelievable idea now.

I’ve said before that the worst thing a person can be is a sports fan. Collectively, we put an insane amount of pride into the teams we watch. We root through the thick and the thin. We invest too much emotionally for a contingent of athletes that represent us that we refuse to acknowledge that our paychecks aren’t getting any bigger or smaller based on the teams performance. We spend an inordinate amount of money buying merchandise and going to games; we spent too much time analyzing every coaching or personnel decision, every snap and every drive; we lose our voices to scream at crucial moments, and it’s never of matter of “them” or “us” as a separate entity. As a sports fan, it’s collectively “we.” “We’re going to the Super Bowl,” “We’re playing like shit.”

If I eventually have children who want to become sports fans, I’m going to point to Super Bowl XLII as evidence that being a fan rips at your heart for a very small chance at realizing the highest pinnacle. I want to beg and plead with my next of kin to choose something else. Collect stamps, study historical documents.

This isn’t about X’s and O’s. I’m not going to drone on about what the Patriots did wrong. I won’t lament missed opportunities or point out three or four times when we had a chance to put the dagger in the heart of the Giants. This is about me. I don't want to read the papers, I don't want to turn on ESPN, and I'm losing about 60% of what I do on the Internet because my main avenue of browsing through cyberspace prominently involves espn.com, patriots.com, nfl.com, and cbssporstline.com. I'm thinking of writing a note for the mailman when he walks towards my door on Wednesday to deliver my Sports Illustrated. I'm pretty sure the note would read like this,

"Dear Mailman-

Please do not deliver this week's Sports Illustrated to me. I don't want it. I don't want to acknowledge that it exists. I will be very upset if, upon my return from work, there is a Sports Illustrated in my mailbox. Again, delivering this is against my wishes. There will be a fresh pile of shit waiting for you on Thursday if you leave that piece of shit magazine in my mail.

Thanks,

Matt Osgood"

This feeling is not going to leave me very soon. Is there a word for depressed, shocked, and angry combined? I don't know if any of this is making sense, nor do I know whether or not I could come off like a complete baby. Frankly, I don't care. The Patriots could win the Super Bowl next year and we still wouldn't be able to make sense of the fact that they lost the most important game in NFL history. Enjoy the champagne Mercury Morris. (That's the most depressing sentence I've ever written.)

Lastly, remember the scene towards the end of Wedding Crashers, where Owen Wilson's character is all depressed, and his voicemail says, "Hey, this is John ..... (sigh) ......whatever." ? That sums up how I feel completely.

The Haunting Voice of Ben Patterson

One recent Saturday, I was driving in the snow listening to a local band I'd become fond of. Upon remembering a story concerning the lead singer, my mind began to wander and reflect on how much local art has gone undiscovered and tried to figure out the reasons why.

All is quiet in a house usually filled with many noises, people talking, dishes clanging, dog’s paws patting on the hardwood floors, and the sound of Ben Patterson’s voice is haunting me. Patterson, the lead singer and guitar player of a little-known and now-defunct local folk-country band Blythe Hollow, sings nasally, but the carefully crafted lyrics are also evoking pensive thought.

The remarkably well-produced lone album, Somehow Home, has played a unique role in my life as I’m sure it has for the members of the band, who are all somewhere, I’m assuming, trying to continue the dream of being a paid artist. The CD, purchased for a meager $8 at one of the band’s shows, came to California with me as my stretch as a resident of the Golden State was coming to a conclusion. Subsequently, the lyrics and melodies of loss, lament, and whiskey drinking came with me back to Massachusetts, reminding me of all of those people and memories I had left behind across the country. The sad guitar notes produce images of both fiction and reality, but leave the listener with recollections of a time where things were good, getting better, then button-hooks into the present where things will never be quite as good as they were. The Kristofferson-like emotions evoked serve as a reminder that sometimes the present is not what or where we expected it to be, as if we chose the wrong road “ages and ages hence” and are struggling to reach the elusive crossroads that await us.

This, of course, isn’t supposed to be a review of their album, but an explanation of what I mean by Patterson’s voice providing a haunt in my life, nor is it to call to action music executives to discover the works of someone talented, but overlooked. Patterson, with whom I’ve spent some time through mutual friends around a campfire, usually drunk and smoking cigarettes, talking about life, music, and writing, I discovered, has recently moved back to his hometown. Whether or not he’s still continuing to write and make music is a question I do not know the answer to. The unanswered question is not, again, why his voice has been haunting me this afternoon.

As I’m sure it’s been gathered, I’m particularly fond of this person’s music. The genre is one that I’m fond of, the writing is spectacular, and the nostalgia-induced is also noteworthy, but I’m afraid of the loss of artistry in current society. Is this the best indie album in the world? Probably not, but what concerns me is that there are too many truly great albums I’ll never hear; that there are too many unknown artists, musicians, and writers in this world going unnoticed. In my time around all three, I’ve seen some fine artists struggle keeping their passion alive only to allow it to go to the side in order to make a living. This certainly isn’t to say that we paint, play guitar, or write poems and manuscripts to be multi-millionaires, but some recognition is eventually due. Some of the best poetry I’ve read was by friends yearning for their voices to be heard. Some of the best music I’ve heard came passionately from the voice and guitar of someone who genuinely cares about the art.

This speaks to a larger truth that most people don’t understand how to make opinions for themselves. When we go to the music store or Barnes & Noble (if we go), we’re directed towards the best sellers lists. We’re served on a platter what good art is (and how no one does it better than the masters of yesteryear), good music is (a pretty, blonde 16 year old in a tube top), and good writing is (big print, short chapters, elementary school vocabulary). Maybe it’s society’s fault; maybe it’s ours. Or maybe it’s the creators of such art.

In a multi-tasking world with fast-food drive thru’s, online shopping, and thirty-second news stories, it’s become increasingly hard to focus on just one thing at a time. With our coffee, a newspaper (or, more fittingly, time spent reading the headlines on yahoo.com); with our drive to work, a cell phone call; even with our sleep, the television blares on a 30-minute sleep timer. We have imbedded in ourselves the mindset that it’s too time consuming to look at a piece of art and make our own decisions as to what the artist was creating; it’s uncomfortable to listen to lyrics of a full song without speaking to the person sitting next to us or wandering off in thought; And if a poem is too esoteric, we mindlessly skip over the line without breaking rhythm then declare, “I don’t get it.” Somewhere along the line we’ve become too busy to observe these things, and when we do (“Look at the sunset”), it’s just an ephemeral glance before our mind goes onto our next passing fancy. Is this what we’ve become? A society of people more likely to read Cliff’s Notes than a novel; more likely to watch Sunrise Earth on the Discovery Channel than the real thing?

Another problem is that some people have become snobby about the arts. Getting interested in attending art shows or visiting museums is daunting because, akin to discussing politics, there is always someone who knows, in their own humble opinion, more and is willing to explain as much. We live in a “no” culture, where there is always someone to tell you that you’re wrong, misled, or offers something better. Like Monet? He’s no Brueghel, someone says. Enjoy Bob Dylan? You should listen to Joan Baez. Think Twain’s The Adventure’s of Huckleberry Finn is the best example of American literature? No. Someone will certainly to glad explain why Tom Sawyer was better. This has scared people into expressing an opinion on anything. We end our sentences with phrases like “you know?” and “right?” as if to say “I have nothing invested in my own opinion on this matter, but would you be willing to share in my non-existent outlook?”

Will this ever change? I’m pessimistic. Society and the arts continually get pushed farther away from one another, so much so that the Boston Globe no longer produces an Arts and Events section every day, and that section of the website is updated even less frequently.

Poetry is long gone from our newspapers with book reviews not far behind. Art crowds tend to be elitist.

And I’ll never find a copy of Somehow Home on iTunes.

March 1, 2008