Roger Angell (1920–2022)

What a wonderful writer, about baseball (which I know nothing about) and assorted other subjects. The New Yorker has a piece about him by David Remnick. The New York Times has an obituary.

One of the regrets of my teaching life is that I never found an occasion for asking students to read Angell’s 2014 essay about old age, “This Old Man.”

A handful of posts about Roger Angell
An excerpt from ”This Old Man“ : “The dream of a nine-year-old boy” : Notebook man : On Don Zimmer : On Trump’s tweetsOn voting

[P.S. to the Times: This Old Man, the book, is not “a collection of essays about aging.”]

Roger Angell, closing in

A celebration for the writer Roger Angell, who’s nearing his hundredth birthday.

Angell’s essay “This Old Man” is one of the best things I’ve ever read.

Related reading
A handful of OCA Roger Angell posts

“By the Book” for the rest of us

I’m beginning to suspect that the “By the Book” people at The New York Times are never going to call. Perhaps it’s because of my snarky posts about Michiko Kakutani’s too-frequent use of the word messy. Sigh. So I’m making my own “By the Book” column, or post, with questions pulled from a couple of Times columns. Why should such questions be the province of the well-known alone?

What books are on your nightstand?

As Gertrude Stein might have said, There ain’t any nightstand, there ain’t going to be any nightstand, there never has been any nightstand, that’s the nightstand.

But I have many books yet to read on shelves or in piles. A few: James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain; Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; W.G. Sebald, A Place in the Country; Gabriele Tergit, Käsebier Takes Berlin.

What’s the last great book you read?

Robertson Davies, Fifth Business, the first novel of The Deptford Trilogy. Elaine has been praising these novels for years. Now we’re reading them together, and I second her emotion. I’d say that if you like Steven Millhauser’s fiction, you’ll love Robertson Davies.

Describe your ideal reading experience.

A printed book. A chair or sofa that’s comfortable enough but not too comfortable. (Zzz.) A cup of coffee or tea nearby. A pencil. Post-it Notes. My iPhone for looking up words on the fly.

What’s your favorite little-known book?

Many of my favorite books are little known. I’ll pick one: Ted Berrigan’s A Certain Slant of Sunlight, late poems written on postcards, published posthumously. Berrigan’s use of the postcard has a lot to do with the way I’ve come to think of the blog post: a small but extremely flexible space.

Another: Works and Days, an several-hundred-page issue of the Quarterly Review of Literature devoted to the poet David Schubert: all his poems, published and unpublished, and a running commentary on his life and work by those who knew him.

Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

I think highly of Roger Angell, Rae Armantrout, Clark Coolidge, Bryan Garner, Steven Millhauser, and Alice Munro, among others. But most of my reading is of the dead, and really, any writer whose work is being read is working today. John Ashbery and Toni Morrison are working today.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

The story of the Bollandists, an association founded by Jesuits and devoted to hagiography. The work of the group is part of Fifth Business.

How do you organize your books?

Not as well as I once did. There’s one bookcase of ancients. Another with works running from Gilgamesh to Thomas Hardy. Two more with modern poetry. Another with modern fiction. Another with art and music. Two more with non-fiction prose and reference works. Two more with books recently read and books on tap. As my reading interests have expanded, it’s not as easy to find things as it used to be.

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

I have almost two dozen books by or about Thomas Merton. What can I say? I am a devout non-believer and Thomas Merton fan. I admire his humanity, his humor, and his ability to change his thinking: having found the answer, he discovered that there were others. Reading Merton’s journals has taught me a lot about my own world of work. An academic department, with people (mostly) in for the long haul, is in some ways much like a monastic community. Better hope you can get along with your abbot (chair).

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I read mostly comic books, How and Why books, and the World Book Encyclopedia. The book that made a reader and re-reader of fiction: Clifford Hicks’s Alvin’s Secret Code, which I borrowed again and again from the public library. I still re-read it once a year (now as an ex-library copy of my own). The only “classic” I can recall reading in childhood is Treasure Island, in sixth grade, for school.

[March 13: A “classic” I forgot: Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I also bought A Tale of Two Cities, but I don’t think I ever read it. I bought these books in a department store, 45¢ each.]

How have your reading tastes changed over time?

My formal eduction was almost entirely about Anglo-American lit. Now I read more and more in translation from French and German and Spanish. I am back to my high-school self in a way, when I was reading Borges and Kafka. And I’ve become much more generous toward the nineteenth century. Not everything needs to be modernist.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

I’m sorry, but I really have no reason to think that anyone I might invite would show up. I’d rather spend an evening with true friends. But I’d give anything to speak, through an interpreter, with Homer and Sappho, whoever they were.

What do you plan to read next?

The Manticore and World of Wonders, the next two novels of The Deptford Trilogy.

An invitation in the spirit of the open Internet: Reader, why not post your own responses to such questions? Add some, omit some, make up your own. If you write such a post, let me know, and I will link to it here.

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March 4: At 30 Squares of Ontario, J.D. Lowe offers what he calls a tongue-in-cheek “By the Book”: “By the Book” — Miniature Buildings Edition.

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March 11: At Traingeek, Steve Boyko offers “By the Book” — Railfan Edition.

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May 4: Pete Anderson offers his responses to The Guardian ’s “Books that made me” prompts. And, inspired by Pete’s effort, Elaine Fine offers her responses to those prompts. (I think I prefer those prompts to the NYT questions.)

Old-timers

Carl Reiner:

In my ninety-six-and-a-half years, I’ve seen a lot of things. But the one thing I cannot bear to see is America being destroyed by racism, fear-mongering, and lies. Fortunately, there is something we can do about that. On November sixth, we can vote for elected officials who will hold this president accountable. And after we’ve done that, my personal goal will be to stick around until 2020 and vote to make sure we have have a decent, moral, law-abiding citizen in Washington who will make us all proud again to live in America.

And Roger Angell, who’s ninety-eight:

What we can all do at this moment is vote — get up, brush our teeth, go to the polling place, and get in line. I was never in combat as a soldier, but now I am. Those of you who haven’t quite been getting to your polling place lately, who want better candidates or a clearer system of making yourself heard, or who just aren’t in the habit, need to get it done this time around. If you stay home, count yourself among the hundreds of thousands now being disenfranchised by the relentless parade of restrictions that Republicans everywhere are imposing and enforcing. If you don’t vote, they have won, and you are a captive, one of their prizes.

When you do go to vote on Tuesday, take a friend, a nephew, a neighbor, or a partner, and be patient when in line. Just up ahead of you, the old guy in a sailing cap, leaning on his cane and accompanied by his wife, is me, again not minding the wait, and again enthralled by the moment and its meaning.

Related posts
Roger Angell on Donald Trump
David Foster Wallace on voting

Roger Angell on Trump tweeting

Roger Angell:

Mr. Trump, for me, has become Tweety, peeping out soprano observations from his high, caged perch. The old Looney Tunes dialogue follows automatically: “Tewwible! Just found out that Pwesident Obama tapped my phones at Twump Tower!”

“The dream of a nine-year-old boy”

In The New Yorker , Roger Angell writes about the upcoming presidential election. After recounting various well-known Donald Trump insults and crudities, Angell turns to one more, Trump’s comment upon receiving a replica Purple Heart from a veteran. “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier,” Trump said. Angell writes:

What? Mr. Trump is saying he wishes that he had joined the armed forces somehow (he had a chance but skimmed out, like so many others of his time) and then had died or been scarred or maimed in combat? This is the dream of a nine-year-old boy, and it impugns the five hundred thousand young Americans who have died in combat in my lifetime, and the many hundreds of thousands more whose lives were altered or shattered by their wounds of war.

Roger Angell is now ninety-six. He is a veteran of the Second World War. He calls his vote in the upcoming election “the most important one of my lifetime.” You don’t need to share his confidence in Hillary Clinton to agree that it’s necessary to vote for her.

A related post
Allegory (Choosing between A and B)

Roger Angell FTW

Roger Angell’s essay “This Old Man” has won a National Magazine Award for The New Yorker in the category of Essays and Criticism.

I read much of “This Old Man” again last night. It’s a great essay.

Roger Angell on Don Zimmer

It’s a short piece at The New Yorker. It begins:

Don Zimmer, who died yesterday at eighty-three, was an original Met and an original sweetie pie. His sixty-six years in baseball were scripted by Disney and produced by Ken Burns. (Grainy black-and-white early footage, tinkly piano, as he marries for life at local home plate in bushy, front-porchy Elmira, New York; smiling baggy-pants young teammates raise bats to form arch.)

Irresistible, right? Even if you know next to nothing about baseball.

Related posts
Roger Angell, notebook man
Roger Angell, “This Old Man”

Roger Angell, notebook man

Roger Angell is a notebook man:

Inside the cabinets above his desk, he has stored what may be his most valuable assets: stacks of the three-subject notebooks he uses while reporting. “Mead notebooks,” he says, “the best notebook in the world. [The New Yorker editor] David Remnick and I talk about how you can’t get anything to replace the Mead notebook, which is unavailable now. They take ink perfectly. There is a great flow. All the other notebooks are coated with something so your pen slides along.” In recent years, when he goes on reporting trips, he has resorted to making use of old Mead notebooks that still have blank pages.

Here (not from the interview) is a photograph of Angell with a notebook. And here (not from the interview) is a photograph of the notebook. Could Angell’s notebook be the not-three-subject 6″ x 9 1/2″ Mead?

Mead still makes three-subject notebooks, including the 6″ x 9 1/2″. Perhaps their quality isn’t what it was.

Related posts
Ron Angell on Don Zimmer
Roger Angell, “This Old Man”

[Found via kottke.org.]

Roger Angell, “This Old Man”

Roger Angell, writing in The New Yorker about old age:

People my age and younger friends as well seem able to recall entire tapestries of childhood, and swatches from their children’s early lives as well: conversations, exact meals, birthday parties, illnesses, picnics, vacation B. and B.s, trips to the ballet, the time when . . . I can’t do this and it eats at me, but then, without announcement or connection, something turns up. I am walking on Ludlow Lane, in Snedens, with my two young daughters, years ago on a summer morning. I’m in my late thirties; they’re about nine and six, and I’m complaining about the steep little stretch of road between us and our house, just up the hill. Maybe I’m getting old, I offer. Then I say that one day I’ll be really old and they’ll have to hold me up. I imitate an old man mumbling nonsense and start to walk with wobbly legs. Callie and Alice scream with laughter and hold me up, one on each side. When I stop, they ask for more, and we do this over and over.

Roger Angell is ninety-three.

[“This Old Man” shifts in tone again and again, so any excerpt is unrepresentative of the whole. Read the whole.]

Palomino Blackwing non-users

[Egg on face: I’d forgotten that Blackwing Pages called attention to Levenger’s advertising copy last year, in one of the very posts I link to below: Facts, Fiction, and the Palomino “Blackwing Experience.” E. B. White though is a new addition to the chorus of Palomino praise-singers.]

From the Levenger website:



I’m reminded of the Dashiell Hammett story in which the Continental Op looks at a sign in a bar — “ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE” — and begins to count the lies. No, Steinbeck, White, and Wolfe never sang the praises of the Palomino Blackwing, because they lived and died before that pencil came into production. To claim that these writers sang the praises of a Palomino product is equivalent to claiming that Blind Boy Fuller sang the praises of my National guitar. No, because my guitar is a replica. And so is the Palomino Blackwing.

California Cedar has chosen, again and again, to promote its products by invoking the names of prominent people, among them Duke Ellington, John Lennon, and Frank Lloyd Wright, all of whom lived and died before the Palomino Blackwing and thus could never have used that pencil. What’s more, there is no evidence that Ellington or Lennon or Wright had any particular allegiance to the original Blackwing. (Nor to my knowledge is there evidence that White sang the praises of the original Blackwing.) Facts are stubborn things, as someone once said.

Related posts
Duke Ellington, Blackwings, and aspirational branding
The Palomino Blackwing pencil and truth in advertising

And from Blackwing Pages
Facts, Fiction, and the Palomino “Blackwing Experience”
Wright or Wrong?

And from pencil talk
California Cedar: What’s going on?

[I’ve invoked the Op before, when writing about an “old-fashioned recipe” for lemonade. Martha White’s introduction to In the Words of E. B. White (2011) mentions “boxes of Blackwing pencils” from White’s office. Well-known photographs show White composing at the typewriter. Roger Angell’s foreword to the fourth edition of The Elements of Style describes White composing at the typewriter “in hesitant bursts, with long silences in between.”]