"I did everything wrong 5 times."

Pat Murphy did not get a real big league managing job until he was 65 years old He has won Manager of the Year twice since Here is his whole story He never played a day in the major leagues himself. He was a catcher who signed with the San Francisco Giants and spent four years in the minors without ever getting called up He was the head coach at Arizona State for fifteen seasons. He won 629 games there and took them to the College World Series four times. Before that he was at Notre Dame and won 318 more Then it ended. He resigned in the middle of an NCAA investigation, after being told to resign or be fired The NCAA found him innocent of the violations. What they actually reprimanded him for was his attitude toward their investigators. They called it cavalier Here is how he describes that stretch "I was a college coach forever, and then I had this huge injustice happen, and I thought, Why me?" And then this, about himself "My ego was involved a great deal more than it should have been." So at 51 years old he went to the minor leagues Eugene, Oregon. Tucson. El Paso. Nearly five years riding buses in the low minors after fifteen years running one of the best programs in the country San Diego gave him the interim job and he went 42 and 54 in 96 games. They did not keep him "I did everything wrong five times." So he took a job as somebody's bench coach in Milwaukee. He did that for eight years Then Craig Counsell left for Chicago, and the Brewers handed it to the 65 year old Here is what happened next. Manager of the Year. Then Manager of the Year again. 97 wins last season, 103 this one And a sweep of a Los Angeles roster built to never lose a series like this He was not some nobody they found in a parking lot. He was one of the best college coaches alive before any of this, and the Brewers handed him a roster Counsell had already built. But he was 51 when he had to start over in the low minors, and 65 before anybody gave him a team of his own for a full season. Christian Yelich said it takes a certain kind of player to play for him. It took a certain kind of man to still be waiting at 65 (Via @thesportsontap)

— Punchoutpitch (@Punchoutpitch) October 18, 2026

I was interested in that quote — "I did everything wrong 5 times" — not because I'm following the Brewers, though I am, but because — just 5 days ago — I was blogging about the positive side of wrongness.

After Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize, I started reading her book "Wrong Norma," and I wrote about her answer to the question, "Tell me about the 'wrongness' in the title of Wrong Norma." She said that in academia you always feel "that you’re wrong or on the verge of being wrong and you have to worry about that, because everything is so judgmental and hierarchical." And that's "kind of a mentality I was interested in disabling." It "loosens the mind" not to worry about being wrong: "you can go on to think other things or wider things or the things underneath where you were. It’s just suddenly a different landscape." 

Apply that to baseball.

"Fiedler... would have been delighted by the ability of some of our best writers to dance knowingly around the volcano..."

"... the 'chuckles and whispers and much munching about the neck and shoulders' in Lorrie Moore’s 'Anagrams,' for example, or the 'tumblings and flexings and shudders' in John Barth’s 'The End of the Road,' or the 'stiffened giblets' in Tom Wolfe’s 'Hooking Up,' or the 'freaky rubs and naughty pinches' in Chuck Berry’s extraordinary autobiography."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "A Field Guide to the Dark, Sexy Swamp of American Literature With its bracing studies of fiction’s secrets, this 66-year-old work of literary criticism still surprises and delights" (NYT). The reissued book is "Love and Death in the American Novel" by Leslie A. Fiedler.

It's hard to write about sex! Apparently, the word "and" is helpful. Only the Tom Wolfe quote lacks an "and."

"Stiffened giblets." Wow, that's so offputting. Let's see, I've got "Hooking Up" here on Kindle. 

Ha ha, I've got the passage highlighted:

If anything, “sexual revolution” was rather a prim term for the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000. Every magazine stand was a riot of bare flesh, rouged areolae, moistened crevices, and stiffened giblets: boys with girls, girls with girls, boys with boys, bare-breasted female bodybuilders, so-called boys with breasts, riding backseat behind steroid-gorged bodybuilding bikers, naked except for cache-sexes and Panzer helmets, on huge chromed Honda or Harley-Davidson motorcycles. 

That's on page 5. Replete with "and." You need these pairs and lists for sex.

I see Wolfe uses "stiffened giblets" again — with 2 "ands" — on page 142:

"Edward Hopper's wife Jo Nivison... expected little in the way of material comforts.... [T]he couple lived frugally in Greenwich Village, in a top-floor walk-up..."

"... on Washington Square whose only bathroom was in an outside hall. They had no children, just a cat named Arthur. Nivison devoted herself to her husband’s career. She served as his secretary, business manager and ever-willing model, posing in guises that ranged from a slender ingénue to a burlesque stripper and a melancholy movie usherette in a blue uniform.... She described her husband as a grump and a bully unwilling to acknowledge her artistic talents. In a diary entry from 1941, she confided that she would be delighted to have him 'choked or smothered or roasted until he had been forced to make some slight gesture of concern for my concerns.' At a time when the Metropolitan Museum’s joint exhibition of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock is focusing attention on the plight of artists’ wives, it makes sense to think about Nivison.... Unlike Krasner, Nivison... did not have much left for her own artwork.... But it would be nice if someone published her diaries and pointed out that she was a brilliant and witty writer."

Writes Deborah Solomon, in "When Edward Hopper Painted Lonely People, He Was Channeling America A new biography argues that the artist famous for haunting canvases of solitary figures in late-night diners was deeply influenced by his times" (NYT).

I agree! Let's read the diaries of Jo Nivison.  The wife of a famous artist put in writing the idea that he should be choked or smothered or roasted. Seems promising. You can read them on line here, and see her artwork — which Solomon bemoans as "tepid" — here. I click randomly and got this:

"My dad saw Houdini once—did I ever tell you this? He said it was much like you’d expect."

"They tied him up this way and that way, ropes, cables, locked him in a jail cell, then before you knew it came the sound of bolts dropping to the ground and locks flying off, and the great Houdini emerged. He just came walking out three paces behind the sheriff—and it was nothing! Anticlimax! Where was this? Manistique, Michigan, the county jail. Poor Houdini, she said. You should write a poor Houdini sonnet, Vern said. I hate it when people tell me what I should write, she said. I bet, Vern said. But still."

Wrote Anne Carson, the new winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in "Poor Houdini," published in 2024 in The New Yorker.

Manistique, Michigan is a real place. It sounds made up, though, don't you think? Like a portmanteau of "man" and "mystique." There's no [famous] book called "The Masculine Mystique."

"Start in the middle."

@newyorker The newly minted Nobel Prize winner Anne Carson shared a book recommendation and some timeless writing advice at the 2024 National Book Awards. #annecarson #poetry #booktok #classics ♬ original sound - The New Yorker

"Entertainment and the arts are undergoing what might be termed a Great Simplification."

"Take the Netflix film 'Irish Wish,' which ranked No. 1 on the streaming platform following its release in 2024. The film stars Lindsay Lohan as an American book editor named Maddie, who travels to Ireland dreaming of marriage to a hunky best-selling author (a genre of person more common in films than in life). As writer Will Tavlin observed, as you watch, you may notice that the characters are explaining what is going on, as if you are too slow to understand. In one scene, Maddie says to her lover, 'We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day, filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.' He replies, 'Fine. That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over, I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.'"

Writes James Marriot, in "Is society growing stupider? The clues are simple and repeated. Shorter sentences and monotonous lyrics form a sign of something bigger" (WaPo)(gift link).

Speaking of shorter sentences, yesterday, I happened to run across this long sentence:

"I say fling but he only worked like a dog in parkinglots, the most fantastic parkinglot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze and stop on a dime at the brickwall, and jump out, snake his way out of close fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour in a narrow space, shift, and back again into a tight spot with a few inches each side and come to a bouncing stop the same moment he’s jamming in the emergency brake; then run clear to the ticket shack like a track star, hand a ticket, leap into a newly arrived car before the owner is hardly out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start the car with the door flapping and roar off to the next available parking spot: working like that without pause eight hours a night, evening rush hours and after theater rush hours, in greasy wino pants with a frayed furlined jacket and beat shoes that flap."

Wrote Jack Kerouac, typing "On the Road: The Original Scroll." I'm fascinated by the readability of very long sentences, but that one struck me (at 40 mph) because I have a long-running debate with Meade about whether good drivers back into parking spaces. 

A new addition to the OED: "will-they-won't-they."

Why did we have to wait so long for that?

Definition: "Relating to or characterized by prolonged uncertainty about whether something is going to take place; spec. relating to whether a romantic relationship will develop between two people."

I see it counts as a TV trope:

This is a Fan Speak term used to describe any relationship that is obviously filled with Unresolved Sexual Tension but the characters resist going into a full blown relationship for a rather long time. Usually the two characters will be presented so that "they will" is the conclusion to root for; only rarely is the question of whether the writers think they should is in any real doubt....

"Will-they-won't-they" reminds me of "The Mock Turtle's Song": “Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?”

What if fecal matter had a dream? What would the people in the dream be wearing?

Just a question I had, trying to read this NYT fashion article, "Fecal Matter Dreams a Fashion Dream/Pregnant women, bodybuilders, punks, family — a heartfelt Matières Fécales show jolts Paris Fashion Week. But what about the clothes?"

That's a gift link — as all NYT links are now — so go over and check out the clothes, know the dream. We're told these clothes "signal... the belief that fashion is more than pretty stuff, it is a form of identitymaxxing."

The show "began with a pregnant woman in a head scarf, baby on her back, and ended with a woman in a gold, asymmetric ruched cocktail dress — two mannequins in bankers’ black suits draped over her shoulders like big game trophies."

Are people saying "identitymaxxing" now?

"Lounging idly in the deserted little waiting-room was the usual shabby, bored, lonely ticket-seller, prodigiously indifferent to the grave beauty of the scene before him and to the throng of ancient memories jostling him where he stood."

Having recently suffered a bout of isolated transient alexia, I worry about a relapse when I encounter a sentence like that. It makes me wonder: Do I still have the ability to read?

That's the first sentence of a novel — writers put a lot of effort into crafting sentence #1, you know! — and that one is calling out to readers who are not me. Somehow every noun needs at least one adjective — or 3 or 6.

The book is "The Brimming Cup" by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. It was the #2 bestseller of 1921. (#1 was "Main Street" by Sinclair Lewis.) Here's a great picture of Canfield Fisher:

"The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum...."

"This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day."

Wrote Annie Dillard, quoted by Sam Anderson, in "One of Our Greatest Writers Has Died. But Not for Me. Annie Dillard died this week. But her voice — wild and holy and hilarious — continues to live in my head, my soul and, somehow, my dog" (NYT gift link).

"Franzen believes the most difficult part of writing a new novel is that it requires him to change..."

"... he needs to become 'the kind of person who can write the novel. I’ve had to become a different person in some significant way to get each book written.'"

I'm reading an interview with Jonathan Franzen in The Guardian.

"To move from The Corrections to Freedom he had to let go of his anger. To write Crossroads, he had to become more forgiving. Right now, he says, 'I’m waiting to wake up as the person who is alive again and not the same person he was five years ago.' Does this mean he sees writing as a means of self-improvement? God, no!... 'If you’re really engaged with [writing], it’s not a matter of morality, but a matter of getting at something true. So I prefer truth as a goal to morality, to self-improvement, to the betterment of one’s soul... I don’t really care about bettering my soul...."

"We hold [these events] aloft as crystalline emblems of how this carnival government of men advances the professional interests of men, at the expense of all who are not men."

Crystalline emblems, eh?

I'm trying to read "The Thomas and Kavanaugh Hearings Restaged as a Theatre of Fact
'The Ford/Hill Project,' a documentary play, may capture recent events, but it’s a product of the present: activist theatre in a moment when the idea of civic urgency is losing purchase," by Doreen St. Félix, in The New Yorker. (Felix covered the Kavanaugh hearings for The New Yorker.)

"Hamilton’s Kavanaugh delivers his denial in bleats of indignation, and Bougere’s Thomas is rigid, stentorian, as he categorically rejects Hill’s claims. Because the stage is so empty, rid of the bureaucratic veneer of the so-called system, we start thinking about the state as an invisible force, everywhere and nowhere...."

I wondered if anyone had ever, before this, called anything a "crystalline emblem," and discovered the sad little world of car logos bedazzled with crystals. Like this.

"Crystalline emblem" could also be some magical object floating somewhere in a video game. As in "the naaru-like crystalline emblems on the spaulders are pretty cool."

But I get how it comes up in writing about art. "Crystalline" is one of those words like "luminous" that belong on a list of words never to use again to describe writing.  

"Plenty of worthwhile things are easier than they once were. The real question is whether ease becomes dependence."

"Writers who hand their thinking to a machine will almost certainly become weaker. Writers who use AI to challenge their assumptions, strengthen their prose, and sharpen their judgment will become stronger than they would have been without it. The decisive variable isn’t the software. It’s the mind directing it. Good writing has always depended on disciplined thinking. And AI has made disciplined thinking more important and valuable than ever."

Writes Bryan A. Garner, in "AI Is Only as Good as the Writer Using It" (National Review).

Garner takes issue with what Bret Stephens wrote in the NYT: "I’m Begging You: Never Write with A.I." Stephens's column ends: "The next time you’re tempted to just adopt an automated response for a text message or an email, don’t. Type out a response that’s your own. Think of it as an act of free will. Or a vote against Trump. What takes you a few additional seconds is an act of resistance against an ever-dumber world."

How did Trump get in there? Talk about ever-dumber! It's the good old human touch. Wouldn't want to challenge it. Well, let me challenge it. I asked Grok to assess that Stephens quote so I could see what Stephens missed out on by not using AI to challenge his writing (as Garner advises). Grok's answer:

"If Julius Caesar had debuted this year, William Shakespeare might have been accused of writing it with AI."

"A certain suspicious rhetorical device appears again and again in the play. It’s in Act I, Scene ii: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.' In Act III, Scene ii: 'Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.' And later in that same scene: 'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.' These famous lines include what has become perhaps the best-known tic of AI writing—a sentence that tells you what the subject isn’t as well as what it is: It’s not X; it’s Y. Once you start noticing the construction, you see it all over the place...."

Writes Will Oremus, in "The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious/Why chatbots love 'it’s not X, it’s Y'" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

"Although chatbots have advanced dramatically in their research and reasoning capacities, they are still fundamentally text-prediction machines. They generate answers one “token”—or chunk of text—at a time, based on what has come before. Each successive word choice factors in both the statistical likelihood of that word coming next in a sequence, based on patterns in the original training data, and the likelihood that it will lead to a highly rated response overall. In other words, the models are always seeking a balance between the clever word choice and the obvious one. When a chatbot uses negative parallelism, according to this theory, it’s essentially hedging between the two...."

"Given all the lovemaking, it’s remarkable any of them had time for painting or poetry. But each activity reinforced the next, sex flowing into art..."

"... art turning into sex, all of it transforming what was ostensibly a holiday by the sea among friends into a frenzy of erotic and creative expression — an outpouring that, as Europe girded for war, acquired a rebellious political charge. 'It’s as if the group were thumbing their noses at fascism,' Thomasson writes, their lives and work serving as a 'manifesto for an alternative world to the one that was coming into being.'"

From "Sex and Surrealism on the French Riviera/A group of artists gathered at a hotel on the Côte d’Azur in 1937. A new book by Anna Thomasson captures the art and escapades the holiday inspired" (NYT).

I'm skeptical... but envious.

Is the book readable? Sample text: "We get a powerful sense of physicality. Of bodies, of limbs and breasts and bottoms and penises, alone or entwined, still or in action. We feel the warm sun and salt water on bare skin and sand between toes, intimacy and proximity and responsiveness and desire." It's really hard to write about sex! Actually, that writing reminds me of a podcast I like: "Boring History for Sleep." It goes on and on about how everything looks and feels and smells and sounds. 

"I left Google to study neuroscience, and what I found in the research literature helps explain why the A.I. summary poses a danger to learning."

"Curiosity, it turns out, is not just an individual’s desire to find out discrete facts; it’s also a feature of our biology designed to help us learn more broadly. And it requires a specific condition: a gap between what you want to know and what you find out. Researchers have found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would. In that same study, the researchers also placed those people in brain scanners. They found that waiting for an answer activates reward circuits in the brain and readies the hippocampus to help form new memories.... Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board.... Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens. The danger is not that people will stop asking questions. It is that questions will become endpoints...."

Writes Anne-Laure Le Cunff, "a neuroscientist who studies curiosity," in "We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask" (NYT).

Intriguing questions that popped up for me: 1. What kind of name is "Le Cunff"? 2. "The danger is not.../It is..." seems to be one of those things — like em dashes and the word "delve" — that A.I. tends to write, so did Le Cunff use A.I. to write this essay?

Answers: 1. It means "the gentle," "the affable," or "the debonnaire." 2. It's a rhetorical device that A.I. has learned from real human writers, and real human writers don't need to avoid it, they just, as always, need to use it well, which, in this case, Le Cunff did. 

"The process of note-writing helps me formulate my medical decision-making and then check whether it really holds up...."

"When that cognitive labor is offloaded to a machine, I’ve come to see, my job shifts. Even when I try to speak my reasoning aloud for the A.I. scribe, I am still doing something different from writing the note myself. I am no longer using the note, sentence by sentence, to think through the case in my own words, to decide what to emphasize, what to soften — or, as I’m writing, to identify when my reasoning strains. And unlike when I dictate a note, I can’t watch my own phrasing appear on the screen in real time. With the A.I.-generated note, I am instead auditing afterward. I am playing a version of 'Where’s Waldo?' — What’s missing? Has this note gone astray, and if so, where? — and it’s a search made all the more difficult because the A.I.’s draft arrives fluent, confident. It sounds so right."

Writes Helen Ouyang, in "How A.I. Might Change the Way Doctors Think/For generations, writing up a summary of a patient exam was a vital step for physicians trying to make an accurate diagnosis. What happens when A.I. does it for them?" (NYT).

"That cognitive shift does not happen the moment the A.I. scribe delivers a note. It begins in the exam room. Because I know A.I. is recording, I stop listening in the same way. Before A.I. scribes arrived, I would outline a story in my head as a patient talked, fitting the pieces together so I would know what to ask next. In the scribe’s presence, that work is deferred. Let the machine do it! The mind drifts."

"I think Platner is probably worse than Newsom but he reminds me more of Fetterman, who I originally liked. That may be why I have never liked Platner."

"I am intimately acquainted with the genre of New England failsons, being as I am a faildaughter of that sort of edge of aristocracy myself. He has no principles as far as I can tell and no real experience in much of anything but arrogance. He’s bad news through and through, and I suspect a Dino if you will. Even without the nazi tattoos and the extremely believable and coherent accusations of sexual wrongdoing and quite possibly assault, this is not someone we need in the Senate."

Writes someone called mygothlaundry in a Metafilter discussion based on a Liberal Currents article titled "Graham Platner and the Class Politics of Impunity/Solidarity with working class women never seems to enter into it."

"Failsons" and "faildaughters"... I'd never noticed those words before, but, poking around, I can see they've been around for a while.

"A.I. also had a weird habit of making its characters fidget constantly, always running a finger along the edge of a table or adjusting a collar."

"The most reliable marker, though, was something more abstract, and, I suppose, upon reflection, even a little spooky. The scenes generated by A.I. had characters, but, apart from fidgeting, they mostly did nothing.... [After some new directives,] suddenly, every fake passage was filled with characters hopping on a horse, or delivering an important package, or running.... So I loosened the rules a bit... If Claude prefers to write these passages in which nothing seemingly happens and the hallways are always empty and the characters do nothing except idly touch nearby furniture, it’s because we do, too. Claude, I am sure, will soon be able to have one of these characters at least fire up a stove or drive a buggy to Norwich...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "Can A.I. Produce Writing That We Actually Want to Read?/I recently created a simple test, which convinced me that the answer is no" (The New Yorker).

"Just as the Founding Fathers might have anticipated (had they been microdosing while drafting the Declaration of Independence)..."

"... the American republic will celebrate its two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary next month with a full card of mixed-martial-arts brawls on the South Lawn of the White House. Weigh-ins will take place at the Lincoln Memorial. The night of mayhem is also meant to celebrate the eightieth birthday of the President of the United States, a longtime fan of the sport...."

So begins "Dana White Thinks Everyone’s a Fighter/The U.F.C. president on his decades of friendship with Donald Trump, his relationship with Joe Rogan, and his 'awesome' night at the White House Correspondents’ dinner" in The New Yorker, written by David Remnick.

I wanted to quote that here because I feel as though I'm seeing a trend in Trump-hating writing. There's a choice to couch descriptions within a problem of the distortion of reality. In this article we have the idea of the Framers microdosing. Last night, I blogged a WaPo writer saying "at least half of life with RFK Jr. feels like something you dreamed"... though "It sure feels real in your lower intestines, doesn’t it?"

Why did the writer take us inside her body like that? It's one thing to say my mind is off, I feel like I'm on drugs or I must be dreaming or maybe I'm crazy, but it's another thing to invite us into the nether regions. People often speak of their "gut reaction," but it's rather intimate to bring up "lower intestines." At least we're not directed to think about the colons of the Founding Fathers.

Anyway, speaking of getting physical: mixed martial arts. Mixed martial arts for the celebration of America's "two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary next month." Next month is June. The 4th of July is in July. But the fighting on the White House lawn is June 14th. That's Trump's birthday. Can't he have what he wants?

What did George Washington do on his birthday? It's 4 in the morning, and I'm writing this wide awake and sober: I'm going to guess nothing.

History in the making 👀

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