joel zumaya is already in baseball love poems, but he's positioned to make himself the epic hero.
what are epic heroes made of? after reading this great write-up in ESPN: The Magazine, i'm thinking it's at least one part ingenuity:
Nothing had ever come easy for him, so why should baseball? His dad worked in construction, while mom Yvonne worked at Burger King. (Joel Jr., the oldest of three kids, taught himself to pitch with a ball made of electrical tape.)
there's something of Sisyphus in that, no? what about the maximus poems with zumaya instead?
is there something strange about a young lady so freaking obsessed with baseball? who knows, but if i could get a PhD in baseball poems, i'd be in line tomorrow. (because any decent school isn't open for admission at 11:10 pm on a sunday).
anyway, watch this:
1 comment:
There's probably room for a good study of sports and literature. Sports are one of the major cultural forms of expression, especially in 20th-century America. Why no "critical sports studies" in English departments?
Why no write-up of the California Renaissance with respect to outfield defense? No homoerotic readings of Hemingway teaching Pound to box, or all of the tennis metaphors in both writers?
And any book that listed great literary references to sports (esp baseball) would have no problem getting published.
You could start with Pindar's odes to the Olympic athletes and run to the present. I leave it to you, AVG, to make it happen.
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