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John Wilkes Booth and the literature of rejection

April 15, 2015

A few posts ago, I talked about “The Literature of Rejection,” a course troubled quarterback Quinn Novak takes at Stanford in the upcoming “The Penalty for Holding,” the second novel in my series “The Games Men Play.”

The fictional course looks at the men – literary and historical – who had a disproportionate rage at rejection and so took terrible revenge as assassins, mass murderers and tyrants. Among them is John Wilkes Booth, who shot President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C. 150 years ago April 14 – Good Friday that year. (Lincoln died on April 15 – the same day the RMS Titanic would sink in 1912. April 15 is now also the deadline for income taxes, so death and taxes.)

The kind of men – and they are almost always men – who make up the literature of rejection are much in the news these days. Andreas Lubitz said he was going to do something others would notice and then took 149 people with him to his death aboard the Germanwings plane that he crashed in the French Alps. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, just convicted in the Boston Marathon bombings that eerily enough also took place on April 15 (2013), is the subject, along with his brother and co-conspirator Tamerlan, of the new book “The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy” by Masha Gessen (Riverhead Books, $27.95, 273 pages).

And there’s a new book on Booth, “Fortune’s Fool” by Terry Alford (Oxford University Press, $29.95, 464 pages).

Alford’s book, praised by Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer in The Wall Street Journal as “so deeply researched and persuasively argued that it should stand as the standard portrait for years,” is inclined to repetition. If we read that Booth was handsome and well-liked once, we must read it 10 times. But Alford does offer insight into the mind of this assassin, a man who yearned to do something great on the world stage but lacked the mind, character and discipline to achieve it. ...

Andy Murray’s big, fat celeb-less wedding

April 8, 2015

You got to hand it to the press when it comes to making a mountain out of the proverbial molehill. Andy Murray’s getting married Saturday, April 11 – congrats again to him and Kim Sears – and there will be no Feddy, Rafa or Nole. (Thank God for Andy’s lack of famous guests. For a while there, I thought we were going to have to live with Nole’s Miami meltdown until the start of the Monte Carlo Open.)

So Andy didn’t invite the rest of the so-called “Big Four.” What a surprise. Well, it is to the press. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic have been “banned,” “shunned” and “uninvited.” (Let us pause for a vocabulary lesson, here, shall we? In order to be uninvited, you would have to be invited to begin with.)

Look, when you play for the kind of stakes these guys play for, you’re not going to pal around. It messes with your head and your game. That’s precisely why I made the tennis players and swimmers in my debut novel “Water Music” rivals, friends and lovers: It’s delicious conflict, which is the meat of fiction. In my follow-up, “The Penalty for Holding,” the football players, too, find their personal relationships tangling their professional rivalries, although there it’s somewhat different, because football is a team sport.

Can rivals be friends in the real world? ...

She said, they said

April 8, 2015

Well, Rolling Stone magazine has really made a mess of it, hasn’t it?

A report from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, commissioned by the magazine, has concluded that the mag failed to do even basic due diligence in a cover story on a gang rape at the University of Virginia that it was forced to retract.

The author of the article – Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who will keep her job as will her bosses – failed to identify the attacker of the young woman, Jackie, or interview her friends. Apparently, her editors had a remarkable lack of curiosity about such details as well.

“Rolling Stone’s fundamental mistake, (managing editor Will) Dana said, was in suspending any skepticism about Jackie’s account because of the sensitivity of the issue,” The New York Times’ Ravi Somaiya wrote. ...

The ‘Pretty Woman’ theory of customer relations

April 1, 2015

The hullabaloo over the new crop of RFRAs (Religious Freedom Reformation Acts) raises an interesting question about what we owe ourselves and others in the workplace, a subject that figures prominently in “The Penalty for Holding,” the upcoming second novel in my series “The Games Men Play.”

Granted, the workplace there is the NFL, a far more specialized and glamorous environment than most of us will ever know. But whether you work at the local Starbucks or for an NFL team, the questions ignited by the RFRA debate in Indiana and Arkansas remain the same: To what extent may I impose my personal beliefs on others? To what extent may I find offense in theirs?

The answers are actually simpler than you would think if you keep one thing in mind: A business or a corporation is a public entity, emphasis on the word “public.” If someone plunks down a Ulysses S. Grant on the counter of my bake shop, I owe that person $50 worth of baked goods. Period.

Of course, I should present the baked goods with a smile and a good attitude. I might even offer more in the way of sample cookies on the counter. But I must in any event give value for value, regardless of what I perceived the person to be.

Otherwise, we would spend our days in knots about each person we encounter. Chances are very few people are going to share the same values you hold. ...

Russell Wilson ‘Passes the peace’

March 29, 2015

It’s been a quiet offseason thus far for the NFL – particularly given the fireworks of the regular season and playoffs (everything from Ray Rice to Deflategate).

But quiet isn’t necessarily a good thing. The NFL still has to decide what to do with Minnesota Viking Adrian Peterson, who pleaded no contest to taking a switch to his 4-year-old; and Carolina Panther Greg Hardy, who had his conviction for domestic abuse overturned; not to mention Deflategate.

Let me make a bold prediction: Peterson and Hardy will be back, and Deflategate will be swept under the rug, because basically the NFL prefers what Simon and Garfunkel would call “the sound of silence.”

One person who is not remaining silent is Seattle Seahawks’ quarterback Russell Wilson. On The Players’ Tribune site started by Derek Jeter, Wilson, who describes himself as “a recovering bully” despite his “Goody Two Shoes” image, wants to talk about domestic violence and then do something about it. ...

Fed, Davis Cup and ‘Just Say No’

February 25, 2015

Well, Feddy Bear has spoken and it’s ‘no’ to the Davis Cup this year.

Is it me, or does Roger Federer have a way of sounding self-centered even when he’s probably just trying to be logical?

"It wasn't a difficult decision," he was quoted as saying in Bleacher Report. "I have played for so long, and I think by winning it, I can finally do whatever I please, to be quite honest."

He also called the Davis Cup “a big burden” that lays on the guilt.

Reaction was predictable: “It’s ‘Me first’ again for Roger,” Mary Haw posted on the Bleacher Report report.

To be fair, Fed Ex does have a 50-17 record in Davis Cup. And he’s going to have to play it again to qualify for the Rio Olympics in 2016. Then, too, you have to pace yourself, particularly as you age. Sometimes you just have to say ‘no’ if you’re going to be fresh for tourneys, which are the main focus of a tennis player’s career.

That means ‘no’ to the guilt as well. In my novel “Water Music” and the upcoming “The Penalty for Holding” – both part of The Games Men Play series – the tennis players/swimmers and football players respectively are sometimes weighed down by the expectations of family and country. Tennis player Alí Iskandar – whose father is fond of quoting the biblical “To him to whom much has been given, much will be required” – wonders if there’s a statute of limitations on gratitude. Sometimes you have to put yourself first – something Feddy has no trouble doing.

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‘Shipping’ news

February 23, 2015

Still checking out the newly redesigned New York Times Magazine – so far, so good. But I was excited to see a page on “shipping” in the column Search Results by Jenna Wortham. And no, it wasn’t a column about Fed Ex.

Shipping is about relationshipping, or a romance between characters who are not otherwise romantically linked, such as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman’s Dr. John Watson on PBS’ “Sherlock.” (Drawings of them from the Tumblr website are featured on the Search Results page.)

Shipping, then, is the umbrella term for things like slash – gay pairings of characters who were not originally gay – and slash in turn includes male/male romance, which is where I come in. Though the characters in my series “The Games Men Play” – the swimmers and tennis players in “Water Music” and the football players in the forthcoming “The Penalty for Holding” – are entirely fictional, I won’t pretend that I wasn’t influenced by male/male romances I read on the Internet that either used real people (called RPF or real person fiction) or well-known fictional characters. ...