Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Picks Fights, Not Noses
Bill James, author of The Baseball Abstract, has a new book out. Here is an excerpt.
It's an interesting thought experiment to think that we spend all of our resources developing talent in things like athletics and that's why we have not produced more Shakespeares, Johnsons and Coleridges.
I'll counter that we DO produce lots of incredible literature, far better than most of what those yokels produced, Shakespeare excluded. But those other writers go to the low-hanging fruit first, and explored many of the narratives and found the limits of many literary devices (ready any recently released iambic pentameter)?
Saying that we don't produce great writers in the mold of the great English poets is like saying we don't produce great explorers in the mold of Vasco de Gama. No, of course we don't explore the oceans for the first time with sketchy maps. Instead, we travel to the bottom of them, and fly over them on a few gallons of gas, and map them to the meter.
James' point that we are better at sussing out talent in baseball is true. It's also true in nearly every other field of human endeavor.
Labels: Increasingly we can win them all
¶ 10:18 AM
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I would add to your counter point. We have produced equally good writers. But they are surrounded by a strong field of contemporaries, rather than highlighted as one a handful of full-time artists, as was the case in jolly olde England. They’re not the only bard in town and, thus, don’t stand out.
Listen Billy, the number one factor in artistic output is free time. Leisure is a gift from Adam Smith’s specialization and division of labor and oversupply beyond the subsistence level. There’s a reason every scientist up to the 19th century was the son of a lord. Once wealth freed us from the daily grind we had time to sit and think. For further clues check out the Left Bank.
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Listen Billy, the number one factor in artistic output is free time. Leisure is a gift from Adam Smith’s specialization and division of labor and oversupply beyond the subsistence level. There’s a reason every scientist up to the 19th century was the son of a lord. Once wealth freed us from the daily grind we had time to sit and think. For further clues check out the Left Bank.
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