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Michael Bishop
Hyping Brittle Innings: A Book Giveaway at Golden Park in Columbus, Georgia, Spring 1994
August 14
We have heard that all things come to those who wait—which may be true to some degree. But it seems more sensible that all things come to those who expect them, who get ready and work toward having them. Far too many wait for happiness to run them down and force joy on them. But having the right to something doesn’t make it happen. Joy is like a bubbling spring that pushes its way up through layers that would keep it from flowing. And is the essence of life, the s du i s di, the key. When something is presented to us, we can’t pick it apart and find fault with it. We don’t look around and see if someone else is interested in it before we decide—but we take it by the hand and walk with it, learn about it, bless it, and find that we have waited long enough.
I fear no man, and I depend only on the Great Spirit.
—Kondiaronk
—A Cherokee Feast of Days: Daily Meditations by Joyce Sequichie Hifler
At some point in 1992 or ’93, I bought a copy of Joyce Sequichie’s Hifler’s A Cherokee Feast of Days: Daily Meditations, published by Council Oak Books of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city in which I’d lived between my seventh and eleventh grades of public school (1957 to 1962), when my stepfather, an Air Force bomber pilot, was stationed there to test fly reconstituted B-47s and B-52s. I bought the book, however, from the Quality Paperback Book Club while resident in Pine Mountain, Georgia, during my eighteenth or nineteenth year here, the longest I’d lived without interruption in one place, having grown up the son of one military man and the stepchild of another. I still live in Pine Mountain, in the same house into which Jeri, our two kids, and I moved in October 1974, the domicile in which Jeri’s mother grew up in the 1930s and ’40s; and I marvel that this 120-year-old country Victorian still grips me with such tender ferocity.
What you will soon read here constitutes the whole of an account of one of the few original efforts I have ever made to publicize a novel of mine. I wrote it—here rendered as a typescript with all arbitrarily structured paragraphs intact—originally in cursive, in red ink, in the back of A Cherokee Feast of Days, with page 1 on the right-hand side of its final blank page, page 2 on the back of that page, facing the inside back cover, and pages 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 all working backward through its Index by Topic (pages 412–407) toward the 365 daily meditations making up A Cherokee Feast of Days. Why did I do that? I never meant the piece for publication (or maybe only after I was dead, if anybody cared), but I must have hoped to valorize in some way my unsuccessful effort at self-promotion.
I wrote in A Cherokee Feast of Days because I have a taste for brief passages of meditative prose and because our son Jamie had just flown off to Germany, to Kiel in its far north, for a year on a Fulbright, and I often copied a meditation or two from Hifler’s book into my letters to him, which I sent with clippings of Atlanta Braves baseball games and of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. I did not want to proselytize him, but neither did I wish to neglect my role as mentor, pal, and paternal comforter. I loved and missed him, and so I used the back of Hifler’s book of meditations to pen my report of a giveaway of copies of Brittle Innings at Columbus’s Golden Park. There, Jamie and I had attended a couple of games together, and baseball afforded us fodder for talk when other topics did not.
Anyway, here is that unedited report:
May 17, 1994
[1:] Jeri and I drive to Columbus, Georgia, down Highway 27, with a stop at Central Office to drop off a copy of Jeri’s updated résumé for a counseling position that has opened up at the high school [in Harris County] (she would prefer to stay, however, in Troup Co., at the elem.-school level), where we run into Prakash Rai briefly, before continuing down the road with our respective library books (Jeri has one on play therapy and another on the sexual abuse of children from the Columbus College library, while I have Konrad Lorenz’s Man Meets Dog from that facility and two other titles from the Bradley [Library], The Lore of the Dog and The Natural History of the Dog). We stop at both libraries to drop off these books before their due dates, then continue to town where we eat rather quickly at the Burger King on 4th Avenue (?)—whoppers and shakes—and go on to the stadium, Golden Park, parking on the edge of shoulder overlooking the Chattahoochee and walking up to the Will Call booth to get our tickets. There’s a line, a rather slow-moving one; and my impatience, fueled by a concern that I won’t be able to squeeze in the interview with the RedStixx radio broadcaster, Dave Wilson, before the game begins, leads to me to petition a woman keeping the ticketstile to let us in without the tickets or to speed the procedure. She recommends that I knock on the back of the booth or call the other woman on duty there to a helpful notice of my predicament. (It’s probably 6:15 P.M. or so.) I can’t bring myself to interrupt her attention to the other people in line, and, bingo, the clog breaks and we obtain our tickets fairly expeditiously, [2:] after all. (Going in, another sign of my anxiety but hardly of my temperance, I express some irritation when the woman taking tickets refuses to let Jeri pass through with two cups of ice from Burger King—RC has the soft drink concession at Golden Park, and the cups from B.K. bear Coca-Cola logos—which she must dump in a trash container before entering.) Our tickets, assigned apparently by the young director of administration, John Atkinson, are for box seats behind the backstop, just a little to the left of home plate.
In the stadium’s office, just beyond the Guest Relations desk on the concourse, we almost immediately run into Charlie Gardner, a pleasant young fellow who seems to be something of a jack of all trades at the park, including groundskeeping, and he takes me upstairs to the broadcasting booth while Jeri finds our seats directly below them. We first encounter there, in the booth to the right of the PA announcer and scorekeeper’s box, only Mark Littleton, media relations staffer, a nice-looking young man with a semisatanic goatee and [3:] the wispy mustache of a Renaissance Dutch painter, wolfing down his dinner, some generic fast food that my own recent fix at B.K. renders totally anonymous. Charlie introduces me to Mark, and as we turn to seek Dave Wilson, he appears on the catwalk outside the booth. More introductions. Charlie and Mark seem almost to evaporate, and Dave, director of broadcasting, an Indiana boy who is pulling for the Pacers in their second round play-off series against the Hawks, outfits me with a headset and a sponge-headed mike for an interview that he will be able to use during RedStixx rain delays. It was a fairly comprehensive interview. At one point during it, rather late into it, in fact, a telephone in the booth rang, interrupting us. “I didn’t know that it could do that with this setup,” Wilson said. He shut off the hand-sized tape recorder and answered the phone. A female voice on the other end of the line was broadcast into the booth over a
speaker unit, or possibly my headset, saying in a thin, plaintive tone, “You didn’t call me.” “I’ll get right back to you, okay?” said Wilson, amiably enough, and his wife—it was his wife—had no problem with that. Wilson rewound the recorder to my last complete sentence, stopped the machine, and started taping again from that point with a new question. He has a rich, easy delivery, asked informed questions, and elicited from me a reasonably fluent series of responses (I think). I autographed a copy of Brittle Innings for him, and he invited me to drop into the booth, with Jeri, at any point in the game we chose to come up, an invitation I intended to act upon but ultimately did not take him up on. I found Jeri in the box seats behind home plate, and she moved over one so that I could sit on the aisle beside her. Next to us, about three seats to our left beyond [4:] [the] aisle, sat a couple in their late forties to mid-fifties, the mustachioed man smoking a foul-smelling cigar. He struggled, it seemed, to be discreet with it, but a breeze was blowing across him and wife in our direction, and the fruity stench of the cigar soon had me feeling faintly nauseated and bringing up air in small successive belches. Jeri suggested offering to trade places with the couple, but the man’s cigar seemed pretty well smoked down by this point, and we instead elected to wait him out. Eventually he crushed the butt out under his shoe and had the somewhat surprising courtesy not to light up again during the game. (He compensated, [5:] though, by drinking a couple of beers and sharing a funnel cake with his wife.) His wife, once the PA announcer started calling out ticket-stub numbers for the giveaway copies of Brittle Innings, actually expressed interest in the signing scheduled at Waldenbooks in Peachtree Mall on Saturday. Dave Platta, from Channel 9 came over and spoke to Jeri and me after establishing himself in his box to our right and let us know that his feature on Brittle Innings would run on Thursday night, both at six and at nine, although the earlier broadcast would boast the longer story. An overweight young woman with a strong soprano voice sang the national anthem, albeit to a dead mike through the first several bars. Fans in the bleacher seats couldn’t really hear her, and one woman shouted, “Turn it on.” The mike came on with an explosive crackle, and the remainder of the anthem floated over Golden Park with class and authority. (During it, local Little Leaguers stood on the field around the RedStixx personnel who played their positions; one young fellow, as everyone else stood at attention, cavorted around second base as if school had [6:] just let out. “I hope someone talks to him about that,” Jeri said afterwards. “For his own sake.”) The anthem-singer conferred briefly with the mike man behind her and then strolled toward the RedStixx dugout on the third-base line and [toward] a gate back into the stadium proper—the grandstands and concourse. “Very nice,” I said as she passed Jeri and me. “Thanks,” she responded, giving us a smile. I hustled down the ramp for a program, which I purchased from the aproned black man who also sells peanuts in the grandstands, and then headed back to my seat. At this time, I encountered the anthem singer again and commiserated with her over the mike failure. “But we were close enough to hear even the unmiked portion,” I said, “and it was lovely.”
Back by Jeri, I tried to fill out my scoresheets in the program for last night’s game and missed a great many players on both teams. On one trip past me, Dave Platta handed me a sheet on which were printed the lineups of both the RedStixx and the Savannah Cardinals, last names only, and I finished filling in my program’s game card.
[7:] Savannah’s pitcher, Marquardt, threw a no-hitter through six innings while his teammates built a 4-to-0 lead, primarily on walks, singles, and wild pitches. The Stixx got back two runs in the seventh on a single by Enrique Wilson, the shortstop, and [on] a following home run by first baseman Richie Sexon. Later, in the bottom of the ninth, the Stixx scored three more times on singles by Diaz, Caw[t]horn, Thompson, and pinch hitter Pedro Marte (I believe) and pulled it out, gaining in the process a full game on the league-leading Savannah club.
During the game, the PA announcer recited ticket stub numbers four times—middle of the second, middle of the fourth, bottom of the sixth, and middle of the eighth—to determine winners of inscribed copies of Brittle Innings, each time also announcing the signing at Waldenbooks. I trotted down to the Guest Relations desk on all four occasions, so that I could meet and talk with the winner. It turned out that only two people actually showed with ticket stubs, a tall, blond, slightly self-conscious nineteen- or twenty-year-old named Doug at the fourth-inning break (he was wearing a ballcap and admitted that this was the first RedStixx game he’d ever attended) and a somewhat stocky, curly-headed young woman named Gloria who said that she had never owned an [8:] autographed-by-the-author book before, but that she was a big reader. In different ways, both Doug and Gloria seemed pleased to have won, and I got a small adrenalin rush handing over the books and inscribing them for them. On my last trip to the Guest Relations desk, I talked with Carol Malone, director of community relations, and told her a little about the book’s historical setting and its characters. She replied that she might pick up copies for relatives, specifically one for her dad for Father’s Day. I, of course, encouraged her to do so. Jeri and I, after pulling the Stixx through in the bottom of the ninth, came home with two of the five copies that I had carried to Columbus expressly to give away.
* * *
Afterword
So what made me transcribe and send “Hyping Brittle Innings” to the New York Review of Science Fiction during the October 2012 Major League playoffs? Simple.
Fairwood Press, under the able direction of writer, editor, and publisher Patrick Swenson, released a discreetly revised, print-on-demand edition of Brittle Innings, with a dynamic new cover by Patrick’s brother Paul and a generous, self-solicited introduction by Elizabeth Hand, and I figured I’d try to hype our product.
After all, back in May of 1994, I asked Mark Littleton, the media relations man for the Columbus Red Stixx, if any of their players were readers, thinking (either naively or not at all) that it might be a (modest) coup to give the guys copies and get them talking about Brittle Innings around the South Atlantic League.
“No,” Mark told me. “None.”
“They don’t read at all?”
“The sports pages, I guess,” Mark conceded. Like a heartbroken moron, I nodded. “Comic books, at times,” he went on. “But that’s about it. Sorry.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Me, too.”
But here at the New York Review of Science Fiction, I’m addressing a subscriber base of hard-core, discriminating readers of what critic John Clute has evocatively labeled fantastika, and maybe some of you will actually take the time to order copies of a novel that James Morrow claims—really and truly—“deserves to remain in print until the last ball game is played on planet Earth.”
So thank you for your attention, and play ball.
* * *
Michael Bishop lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia.
Motherboard, written by Adam Scott Mazer, directed by Will Fulton
produced by Antimatter Collective, featuring Rebecca Hirota and Casey Robinson
The Secret Theatre, Long Island City, New York
reviewed by Jen Gunnels
I have to admit to a certain delight in Antimatter Collective’s creative abuses of actors. Last year one was beaten to death with a shovel. This year, O delight of delights, one was knee-capped and shot in the head. Rereading these first sentences, it would appear that I’m a fairly bloodthirsty individual, but this is not so. What draws my praise is Antimatter Collective’s abilities in staging realistic violence on stage within frameworks utilizing fantastic narratives. Motherboard, performed this September at the Secret Theatre, could have used more polish in specific areas, but nevertheless they presented a beautifully conceived sf subject and staging—a marriage of The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Mary Poppins.
The program laid out a timeline beginning in 1920 when Czech playwright Karel Čapek coined the term “robot.” Following the technological progress of the next 550 yea
rs, we learn that the U.S. and Pakistan fought the first fully automated war in 2078, that the Mumbai Pact of 2110 standardized universal connectivity for all machines, and that the creation of humanoid androids has prompted lawmakers to call for a limitation on emotion engine development. Inevitably, humans manage to clever themselves into near extinction, and in 2445 the machines destroy two-thirds of the global population. Suddenly, the machines simply deactivate with no explanation. Twenty years later, machines are outlawed, and the story begins with Gershwin (James Rutherford), a specialist in robotic engineering, and Abraham (Casey Robinson), a decorated war hero, dissecting whatever androids are found in attempt to understand why they simply deactivated when the machines could have easily destroyed everyone.
The military warehouse has stored a Questcorp Nurtureon (a “nanny-bot”) model C-12 (Rebecca Hirota), which for unknown reasons has remained relatively unscathed. Gershwin admires the beauty of the engineering while Abraham makes his hatred of machines very plain. He will never trust or see a machine as anything other than a threat. During the course of the examination, Gershwin removes the memory chip for examination, and C-12 reactivates. As he futilely attempts to subdue her, C-12 rips off Abraham’s arm, spraying blood everywhere and leaving him to scream into unconsciousness behind the examination table. Gershwin cowers on the floor as the android advances on him. Gershwin begs for his life, and C-12 stops inches from him. She begins to access the barest essentials of her programming and allows Gershwin to reinstall the memory chip. His admiration for C-12’s design and her behavior after the installation of her chip leads him to disguise her so that she can make her escape and return “home” to her original family to fulfill her programming.
C-12 then journeys through the nuclear waste of the outside world where law is questionable or nonexistent. Obtaining help from two scavengers, Maggot (Bryce Henry) and Sweetums (Allison Laplatney), C-12 is taken to a local warlord, Ned (Andrew Krug), and the All-Mother, a mechanical savant named Penelope (Elizabeth Bay). After selling her, Sweetums and Maggot believe that there must be something amazing to scavenge at C-12’s original destination, but all they find is the military. The two are taken to headquarters and interrogated, but their loyalty lies with anyone and anything outside the authorities. Sweetums and Maggot refuse to give up C-12’s location—they think she’s one of them. But Sweetums complies when Abraham ruthlessly shoots Maggot in the knee and then kills him.
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