The Fiddleback

One of the most common baseball truisms is that failure is central to the game’s appeal. Even the best hitters, baseball’s historians and poets will tell you, fail to get a hit in two-thirds of their attempts. They trudge back to the dugout having failed, over and over again, all season long. And the next day, they will return to the field and go through the same motions, day in and day out, for months, years, decades. It’s enough to make one suspect that baseball is not about failure so much as repetition: the same basic set of tasks, some resulting in success, some not, repeated endlessly.

So it is appropriate that Chad Harbach’s debut novel, The Art of Fielding, begins with practice. Our hero, Henry Skrimshander, takes the field after a game to field ground balls. In the stands, Mike Schwartz, starting catcher and team captain of the Westish College Harpooners, recognizes Henry’s natural talents and recruits him to play shortstop at the small Wisconsin school. Schwartz, who is gruff and intimidating beyond his years, takes Henry under his wing, imposing a workout regimen and practice schedule to which Henry adheres religiously. Three years later, he is a star, a major league prospect, poised to break the NCAA record for consecutive error-free games set by his idol, the former St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez. Rodriguez, whose name will serve as a kind of double allusion for baseball fans, wrote a book that is one of Henry’s prized possessions (and is also titled The Art of Fielding), containing zen musings such as, “The shortstop is a source of stillness at the center of the defense” and “There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.” For the first seventy-or-so pages, Harbach’s novel has a similar pastoral quality. I sometimes had to remind myself that the novel is set in the present day. Henry’s roommate, Owen, a fellow team member who is also openly gay, was often the vehicle for these reminders.

It’s also true that for the first half of the novel, Henry is probably the least interesting character. For one thing, we don’t know much about him. For another, all he does is work out and play baseball. We do learn a good deal about his surroundings, though, often by way of Guert Affenlight, a Melville scholar and Westish College’s president (who made a name for himself writing about homoeroticism in Melville and begins the novel suffering from a romantic infatuation with Owen) and his daughter, Pella, who, after several years’ estrangement, moves back in with her father and takes a job as a dishwasher at the dining hall. These two characters, along with Owen and Mike Schwartz, provide the book with much of its emotional core in the early going, as well as its narrative impetus. These characters also help broaden the focus of the novel beyond baseball, to include college life in general and the crucial role it serves for so many people in their transition to adulthood. In this way, The Art of Fielding is surprisingly Dickensian. Or, more accurately, Franzenian. Harbach is fascinated by the manners and mores of college life in the Midwest, and the ensemble cast is perfectly suited to elucidate the subject.

But for much of the novel, this leaves Henry as a kind of perfect void around which the rest of the novel’s world revolves. At least, that is, until he makes an error. That first error initiates a bout of crippling self-doubt on Henry’s part, which leads to more errors and a series of events that spur the plot of this ambitious novel. Henry’s failures—and his bewildered anguish over them—turn him into a deeply sympathetic character. Once he’s no longer an instrument of perfection engineered by the affably domineering Schwartz, we begin to see who he is. His character is forming before our eyes.

This struggle to find some kind of meaning in failure is what makes the book richer and more satisfying than one might expect from a baseball novel or a campus novel. Henry must finally face the emptiness of that near-universal American religion: the faith in self-improvement. Harbach characterizes Henry’s particular version of the faith like this: “Every day was like the day before but a little better. You ran the stadium a little faster. You bench-pressed a little more. You hit the ball a little harder in the cage…Hitches, bad habits, useless thoughts—whatever you didn’t need slowly fell away. Whatever was simple and useful remained. You improved little by little till the day it all became perfect and stayed that way. Forever.”

And in this way, Harbach succeeds in allegorizing the game without oversimplifying either his subject or his characters. He focuses less on what happens on the field than on how those events ripple out into the lives and fragile psyches of the characters. If you’re a player, baseball isn’t like life. It is life. And perhaps the daily experience of it—the routine, the repetition, the self-doubt, the labyrinthine workings of consciousness from moment to moment—isn’t so different from the experience of being a dishwasher or a college president. Regardless of a person’s vocation, one still has to reconcile oneself to error and bad luck and loss.

Occasionally, though, magic intrudes. And who could fault Harbach for introducing a little baseball magic into the book? Just look at the 2011 World Series, won in miraculous fashion by Henry’s favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals. Or look at the coincidences and twists of fate that piled up on the final day of the regular season, which, if they had occurred in a piece of fiction, would be dismissed as implausible to the point of absurdity. Harbach, like his characters, has striven for perfection, but it is the pursuit rather than the achievement that holds our interest. If we catch glimpses of the rivets and bolts holding the whole thing together, so much the better. After all, that is what a novel does (as does baseball, or college, for that matter): assembles the various pieces of ability and experience into something that resembles a coherent whole, but isn’t quite. We’re always falling short, and thank goodness. Perfection is boring. The play’s the thing.

Watch Other Lives play a full set in France. For more info, including recently announced tour dates with Radiohead, visit OtherLives.com.

It has been nearly ten years since the Atlanta heavy metal quartet Mastodon burst onto the international scene. As mainstream metal transitioned from the likes of Korn and Limp Bizkit to Linkin Park and Avenged Sevenfold, underground metal got far more wykkid. Increasingly technically proficient music by death metal acts such as Cryptopsy and the drone doom sounds of Sunn O))) took metal in a variety of different directions, reviving the genre, after Nirvana and other grunge acts almost killed it in the early 1990s. Heavy metal's resurgence was all but complete when the legendary acts Judas Priest and Iron Maiden cajoled their famous frontmen to return to their old gigs. In the midst of all this activity, Mastodon forged their own distinct blend of these various forms of metallurgy. They were both forcefully loud and melodic, grunting out their sentence-fragment lyrics—a typical blend of the subject matter of heavy metal fantasia: ghosts, mammoth beasts, angry gods, strange visions—amidst a dizzying array of time changes pulled off as seamlessly as tender meat from perfectly cooked pork ribs. Across four stellar albums, Remission (2002), Leviathan (2004), Blood Mountain (2006), and Crack the Skye (2009), they became revered in metal circles, ultimately able to draw in fans of mainstream and indie rock.

With The Hunter, they move closer and closer to expanding their audience. They abandon the album-long concepts which had marked all their albums since Leviathan (which boasts a story-arc loosely based on Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick). In a sense, this move is reminiscent of Metallica's self-titled 1991 blockbuster, a record that saw them forsake their concept album fixation in favor of more melodicism. Producer Mike Elizondo—who counts among his most metal of clients Alanis Morrissette and Maroon 5—actually provides a more balanced and crisp recording than his predecessor, Brendan O'Brien, whose arid production work sabotaged what should have been Mastodon's best song cycle, Crack the Skye. And some of these songs pack quite a wallop, especially "All the Heavy Lifting," "Thickening," and "Spectrelight," proving that Elizondo is not out of his depth here. What is noticeably different about The Hunter, though, is that the more jagged edges of Mastodon's sound have been smoothed out and made slightly more melodic. Drummer Brann Dailor's awe-inspiring, time-change-loaded drum fills are less frequent. Most notably, the band's vocals, once shouted with little attention to things like proper key and pitch, are more melodic as well (listen to the awkward "Creature Lives" or "Bedazzled Fingernails" to get a taste of this newer, shinier Mastodon). They even take a stab at creating a classic rock riff on the album's first single, "Curl of the Burl." It's actually quite effective, as thick fuzz drips from the lead guitar. All the while, it still manages to sound like Mastodon, despite hardly resembling anything they have done before. Though the record does improve with repeated listens, I find The Hunter to be a minor step backward for Mastodon. It is, frankly, not all that interesting, especially as a new direction for the group, and it possesses far too many plateaus—and not enough mangled gladiator corpse-strewn peaks—for a thirteen song, fifty-two minute album.

Dear Friends of The Fiddleback,

I am excited to announce that the music section of the December issue of The Fiddleback will include a “Best Albums of 2011” feature. We thought about making this an “Our Favorite Albums of 2011,” feature, especially considering our music staff is only four, and the scope of our tastes, while ambitious, couldn’t possibly account for enough diversity to say our list contains the “Best” albums of the year. In order to make our list a “Best” albums list, then, we would like some participation. And please, feel free to share this—the more lists we get, the better.

Here is how this will work:

• Send us a list of your favorite albums of the year. Lists should have no fewer than 10 albums, and no more than 30. 
• Send your list to music@thefiddleback.com. 
• Please put something like “AOTY 2011” or “Albums List” in the subject line.
• If possible, send your list in the body of the email. Attachments will just slow us down. 
• Format entries kind of like this: 1. Album – Artist. 
• You are more than welcome to include blurbs about any or all of the albums on your list. Blurbs should be between 50-100 words. If we like your blurb, we may use it in the list (credited to you, of course). 
• Do this no later than November 10, 2011. I know that’s early, and not everything that you might love from this year will be released (though this year’s release schedule thins out a ton by then). I’d like to make the deadline later, but our December issue goes live on 12/1, and we’d like to have the list included in that. This means that, between 11/10 and shortly before 12/1, we need to tabulate votes, write blurbs etc… So, this list might not be definitive by the end of 2012, but it will provide an interesting snapshot of 2011 in review. 
• You can include EP’s and Live Albums. You cannot include Greatest Hits, Retrospectives, Reissues, Best ofs, etc…
• Please rank your albums. The top 3 albums on your list will receive point bonuses (I haven’t figured out the full point break down, yet, but it will be something like this: 1 = 37 points, 2 = 32, 3 = 30, 4 = 27, 5 = 26, 6 = 25….counting down to your last album. 
• We will assume lists are ranked if not numbered. If you want the list to be unranked, we’ll determine the total number of points for your list, then average the points per album. So if you send us 20 albums, unranked, we’d add up the total points for 20 albums, divide by 20, and each album will get that many points. 

Anyway—this should be fun. Please send us your lists and blurbs and be a part of history*.

*Being a part of history simply means participating in The Fiddleback’s first and only, ever “Best Albums of 2011” list.

Thanks for your time and energy.

Sincerely,

James Brubaker and the Rest of the Music Editors.