Interviews

Jim Bouton

In the first of our monthly interview series, American Polymath editor Clayton Trutor chats with Jim Bouton, author of the greatest book ever written about baseball, Ball Four (1970). Bouton spent a total of ten seasons in the big leagues, primarily with the New York Yankees (1962-1968). Edited by sportswriter Leonard Schecter, Ball Four is a diary of Bouton’s 1969 season with the expansion Seattle Pilots. The book describes the world of big league baseball, including its warts. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn aimed to discredit the wildly popular and critically acclaimed book by demanding that Bouton sign a statement that said his book was entirely fictional. Bouton refused and was soon out of big league baseball, aside from a brief 1978 comeback with the Atlanta Braves.
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Culture

Robocop's Detroit

Clayton Trutor

One of the most memorable scenes in Michael Moore’s Roger & Me features a 1987 visit by then-President Reagan to Flint, Michigan. Reagan tries to comfort a handful of the city’s newly unemployed autoworkers by taking them out for pizza. Over supper, the President offers them encouragement. He tells the workers to stay optimistic and consider moving out west to find employment. One of the President’s supper guests took a different course of action. He walked off with the cash register.
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Your Favorites

What’s Your Favorite Tom Petty Song?

American Polymath’s panel of experts sets out to answer the first of our monthly "your favorites" questions: What’s Your Favorite Tom Petty Song?
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Fiction

Fighting

Jon Sealy

I came from the cotton mills, Carolina textiles, Springs Industries. Two generations back, my people trudged up the hill of the Gayle at daybreak to the crumbled brick building, the clack and whirr of looms and shellac, shuttle fillers, the 6 a.m. whistle bell, lintheads and bobbindodgers in weave room #6. Chopped up fingers, bone fragments, blood, a great aunt’s hair caught in a machine, her scalp ripped off at one, back at work by four, an arc of stitches on the side of her head, a football seam. Chinaberry, cane patches, oak, a cotton lint cloud, prototype asbestos, and finally, finally: long evenings on the porch dead tired, getting drunk on bootleg and playing bluegrass, hacking up brown lung.
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Fiction

Kingdom Come

Denton Loving

Ben waits for the green arrow to let him turn at the Pineville bridge, while his dad Richard reads the signs at the Exxon station out loud. Richard always refers to this as the new gas station because it is not the one that sat on the corner for the first half of his life. The new station has an Arby’s and a Little Caesar’s Pizza inside it.

"Five dollar pizzas, all day, every day," Richard reads from a sign that lights up at night. "Ben, when I use to drive through here, I didn’t have five dollars to give ‘em for a pizza." He says this every time they make the trip back to Kentucky.
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Society

2-S

Barry Trutor

I flunked out of the University of Vermont in May 1968. For the last forty years, I’ve told folks that the Dean of Arts and Sciences, based on my stellar performance, instructed me to go on sabbatical. Nine thousand miles away, the Vietnam War was raging. In light of my sabbatical, the Selective Service board changed my 2-S student deferment to 1-A. 1-A equaled a direct do-not-pass-go induction into the United States Marine Corps. I didn’t see myself as a Marine.
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Politics

If You Read This, The Communists Win: An Evening with Glenn Beck

Mike Gormly

Would you pay $20 to watch a loud, unfunny man make jokes about the hilarious warning label he found on a bottle of dog shampoo? I didn’t. But on June 4th, 2009, I was surrounded by people who had. That evening, I sat in a movie theater and watched a simulcast of his new comedy routine, entitled Common Sense. Sadly, the only funny thing about this comedian is that he is the new leading light of populist right, Glenn Beck.
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Society

I Finally Realized that Facebook has Changed the World

Clayton Trutor

At 27, I’m the youngest person I know without a Facebook account. I make this claim after a month’s worth of low-intensity research into the matter. Since the site’s launch in 2004, virtually all of my friends have made reference to their activities on Facebook. I broadened my narrow survey sample by strolling through computer labs at several universities and public libraries in the Boston area. When I asked the numerous strangers I saw logged into the site to show me how Facebook works, every one of them sat me down for a lesson. These predominately youthful strangers showed me the ins and outs of their personal accounts: pictures, instant messages, "pokes" from their hundreds of friends, and a message board "wall" visible to anyone with full access to their page. New Englanders, I concluded, are both friendly and unfamiliar with stranger danger. I finished up my research by typing in the names of over 200 acquaintances that live outside of New England into Google. I came across a Facebook page for every one of them.
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Culture

Remembering Mark Fidrych, 1954-2009

Clayton Trutor

Growing up in Vermont, I was raised to believe that Mark Fidrych was one of ours. I think I got this idea from NBC. The producers of Game of the Week during the late 80s seemed to dust off the same highlight and blooper reels every time they faced a rain delay. The only rain-delay clip I recall highlighted "The Birdman’s" antics on the mound during that bicentennial summer. It featured close-ups of Fidrych talking to the ball before befuddling another batter with his cockamamie pitches. Fans in the Motor City and even those in opposing ballparks showered the young, duck-fluff haired righty with affection for marching around the mound after outs and manicuring the rubber before every inning.
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