Sometimes I just want to talk to somebody. It could be an old  friend, an acquaintance, or maybe even someone I haven’t met before. Taverns used to be the best place to pick up a conversation, but it’s become nearly impossible to do so these days without the
omnipresent, glowing, flashing distraction of TVs. And not just one small TV at the end of the bar–now they’re multiple behemoths, tuned to multiple events–usually sports but sometimes talking heads. Sometimes the sound is on, and when it’s not, there’s loud music playing.

I think it started in the 80s, with MTV, cable channels, and 24-hour sports channels. And it’s crazy now.

Hackney’s, our local watering hole (food’s good, too), is usually relatively quiet, but the crowd there was boisterous after yesterday’s Bears win. Our friend Brad, whom we’ve mentioned here before, came in and despaired at how difficult it is now to find a quiet place to have a drink before dinner.  When an out-of-town guest visited him last week, Brad brought him to the Coq d’Or, an old-school, wood-paneled cocktail bar in Chicago’s vaunted Drake Hotel.

A good choice, I thought. Beth and I used to go to see the piano player there, Buddy Charles, who at the time was a local legend.

Well, apparently the Coq d’Or still has the clubby wood-paneled feel-but it also has TVs. Wide screen TVs. When Brad and his friend were there, all the TVs in the bar were tuned to some news story about a police raid in the Chicago area. One wide-screen was on the wall right next to Brad’s head, he told us. “Everyone was staring my way, not at me, but at the TV!”

The three of us, as well as Sean, the Sunday night bartender at Hackney’s, were hard pressed to come up with bars in Chicago that don’t have TVs. Sean did come up with one: the California Clipper at the corner of California and Augusta. So we have a list of one, and I’m hoping there are more. I’m pretty sure that a list of such places in various major cities would become a valued part of any travel guide.

So, got any secret TV-less taverns to wet your whistle and/or grab a bite to eat at the bar? Whether it’s in Chicago or elsewhere, please leave it in the comments section.

Because we all need a little respite from phosphorescent screens from time to time.

I’ve learned a lot about baseball from my husband Mike Knezovich over the years, but one aspect of the game that still confounds me is pitching. Which direction do curve balls curve? What’s the difference between a slider and a cutter?

Thanks to our generous friends Don Horvath and Juli Crabtree, we were able to enjoy last night’s White Sox win against the Detroit Tigers. Fans were given “Stretch Sale toys at the door to commemorate White Sox pitcher Chris Sale’s single-season record-breaking 270 strikeouts. I fondled my Stretch Sale throughout the game, and now I finally understand why legendary Los Angeles Dodgers baseball announcer Vin Scully refers to him as “Mr. Bones” and others liken the 170-pound 6’7” left-hander’s wind-up to a strained inverted w “ akin to a scarecrow.”

The Chris Sale action figure I got at last night’s game.

Mike is always around to answer my baseball questions, and good radio announcers like the Brewers’ Bob Uecker, the Tampa Bay Rays’ Dave Wills, and Giants’ Jonathan Miller have been a big help in my understanding the game, but I am still left to wonder how it is that baseball fanatics and skilled announcers can accurately predict that the next pitch will be a change-up or a braking ball, or more simply, a strike or a ball.

And so, at this time each year, as we enter the playoffs, I turn to literature to help me better understand how pitching works. And year after year, literature has disappointed me.

Perfect I’m Not by David Wells taught me more about beer, brawls, and backaches than about pitching a baseball. I found Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, annoying, probably because Jim Bouton reads the audio book himself, and he’s pretty arrogant. Author Buzz Bissinger follows the St. Louis Cardinals through a 2003 three-game stint against the Chicago Cubs Three Nights in August. The book was entertaining because I’d listened to that three-game series myself on the radio (2003 was the year Mike and I moved to Chicago) but I would have learned a lot more about pitching if Bissinger’s book had focused on Cardinal pitching coach Dave Duncan’s decision-making rather than fawning over Tony La Russa.

I’d just about given up learning anything about pitching from reading books when I opened up my daily Writer’s Almanac online on Saturday, September 19 and learned it was Roger Angell’s birthday that day. The almanac said Angell was born in New York in 1920, and his mother and stepfather were well known in the literary world. His mother was Katharine Sergeant Angell, the longtime New Yorker fiction editor, and his step-father was E.B. White, the essayist and children’s author.

The almanac said Roger Angell started working for The New Yorker in 1956 and is best known for writing about baseball. “He was 79 when he published his first full-length book, A Pitcher’s Story.”

What? A Pitcher’s Story? I looked for Angell’s first “full-length book” on BARD, the Library of Congress National Library Service that provides audio books free of charge to people who are blind or visually handicapped, and bingo! A Pitcher’s Story was available. It did not disappoint.

Example? In Chapter 7 (called “Get a Grip”) Angell is sitting in the Yankee bullpen and asks pitcher David Cone to describe how he holds a baseball for each pitch, and what he expects to happen next. He asks readers to put down their book and “root around the house for an old baseball.” I did as I was told and found mine in my top dresser drawer, signed by White Sox pitcher Roberto Hernandez after I met him in a sports store in the late 1990s and asked to feel the circumference of his upper arm with my two hands. Oh, my.

But back to Roger Angell’s “A Pitcher’s Story:

The ball, it will be seen, keeps representing a horseshoe curve of stitches when rotated. There are four of them. If we grab a horseshoe so that the first and middle-finger fingertips just slip over the top broadmost curve of the stitches, a red row of stiching will appear to run down the aver side of both fingers, as if to frame them. With these two fingers slightly parted, the odd conviction comes that you’re on top of the ball.

”This is the two—seamer,” Cone tells Angell in the book. “You’ve got it!” Cone describes how to adjust the two-seamer into a four-seamer, and how four-seamers are meant to cut the wind, while two-seamers tend to sink. “The one-liner is just a variation on the two-seamer,” Cone says. “Let your finger slip a little toward the wider white area of the ball, and you press down more with your forefinger.” “They moved on from there to the curve, the slider, the splitter, and Angell acknowledges that he’d hoped to sit down with Cone before one of his starts so Cone might go over one of the other team’s batting orders, describe each batters’ strengths and weaknesses and let Angell know his plans. “It was a dumb idea,” Angell concedes, and while I get back to playing with my Chris Sale doll, I’ll leave you with Roger Angell explaining why that was so dumb:

Each hitter and turn at bat presents the pitcher not with a fixed offensive array, but with something fluid and conditional, a cloud chamber of variables. The count, the score, the inning, the number of outs, the position of base runners, the umpire’s strike zone, capability of the outfielders, the quickness of the catcher, how much you can trust this particular receiver to handle the splitter in the dirt, the runner at third, how this next hitter was swinging in his last at-bat and the one before that.

Let the playoffs begin!

“Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba…”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

Motorcycles—and riding them—have been a part of most of my adult life. I say most, because I seem to have sworn them off any number of times, only to feel an ache to get back on.

Me, Pick, and a friend incognito under the helmet before a ride, circa 1981.

I bought my first when I was 19, and I don’t know how I managed that without being thrown out of the house. I was an idiot who was more lucky than good, often riding without a helmet and never with earplugs. (The latter practice, combine with too speakers in a small dorm room and too many arena concerts, have left me with an annoying case of tinnitus.)

I graduated from college, took a job in Washington, D.C., and determined that the responsible thing to do as I entered the real world was sell my bike.

In D.C., maintaining ownership of a car proved too expensive. And so, I sold the four-wheeler and … bought another motorcycle. I commuted in all kinds of weather, but when it was too bad, I relied on the kindness of my roommate, Pick, who drove to work on most days, for a ride. Pick ended up buying himself a motorcycle, and we spent many happy weekends camping along the Blue Ridge.

My companion last week, a Triumph Bonneville.

The next rite of passage was marriage, and again, for some reason I was compelled to bite the bullet and give up on the bike. This, despite Beth not really caring either way.

A lot happened, years passed, and one day a vintage BMW motorcycle whooshed by as I sat on our front porch in Urbana. A longtime friend rode one years ago, and I always had a thing for it. Uh oh.

Next thing, I was on a used BMW R80/7.

This time around, now a parent, I took things a might more seriously. I took the Motorcycle Safety Foundation course, bought good protective gear, and pretty much worked on my skills every time I rode. I read voraciously about technique, and even took a class at a race track.

For years that followed, motorcycling was my meditation. It might seem odd that someone like me—prone to angst and worry—would find peace in an activity that requires hypervigilance just to avoid catastrophe. But I do.

I think it’s because I’m prone to mental spinning, thinking of too many things at one time. On a bike, that stops. Maybe it’s self preservation. Or the extreme stimulation of the experience. Robert M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, described the experience as well as I ever could:

“In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”

For years riding was an escape—even if for only a couple hours on a weekend afternoon. I’d get on, head out to the country to a forest preserve, take a hike, and come back.

When we moved to the city,the expense of storing a motorcycle, combined with the combat attitude necessary to survive on downtown streets, led to me, once again, letting my motorcycle go.

The last few months have been especially demanding workwise, and I’ve had a harder and harder time leaving the stress behind. So I took a few days off last week and…rented a motorcycle. I had it just for a couple days and rode around well outside the Chicago city limits. Open spaces and…well…it was as good as ever.

Not sure I want to go to the trouble of buying one and finding a place to keep it and all that.

But I know this: It won’t be my last ride.

A blog post I published here earlier this month got such an intriguing comment from a blogger in Germany that I asked her to write a guest post here. She said “Ja!”

Photo Narrations — pictures for the blind and sighted

by Tina Paulick

Beth’s post was about how she asked writers in her memoir writing class to describe a photograph to someone who is blind and the amazing texts resulting from this exercise. Our blog Photo Narrations for the blind and sighted is dedicated to describing photographs taken by photographers who are visually impaired or blind. It is a great place for blind and sighted photographers and creative writers to:

• reflect on photographs
• gain a better understanding of the process of seeing and perceiving
• respect photography and photo narration as art forms

Two sighted students help a blind photographer adjust her camera to take a picture in Berlin. (Photo credit: Stephan Wilke)

If you are wondering now why blind people are interested in something so visual as photography, our blog also features interviews and guest posts by blind photographers explaining their motivations and how they work. One of our contributors writes:

People always ask, why do blind people want to take photos. I always get this question and it frustrates me, so why don’t we give them an answer. Because we want to, because we can! Why do you take photographs? The world is full of images, we are surrounded by them. Obviously they are important. But blind people cannot see them in the same way sighted people do. We see with sound, touch and our imagination. That’s why photo narration is so important to us. The photo narration helps to capture the image we ultimately see in our minds.

Our sighted describers also benefit from the experience – writing photo narrations for blind people expands one’s perception and imagined boundaries. Karsten Hein, a sighted photographer from Germany who initiated this project writes:

For me as a sighted person, interested in pictures and the perception of pictures, it is a remarkable experience to describe pictures for blind people. It’s a completely different thing, when I look at a photograph in order to describe it for someone, who cannot see it. I have to think in a completely different way than I normally would. What’s important in the photograph? What’s worth mentioning? I look closer and closer, closer than I would look at it in nearly any other context. And the more I look at it the more I have to come to understand how little I really know about the photograph.

Karsten’s idea for this project came after he did a portrait series featuring people who are blind. He talked to his models during the shootings so they’d forget the camera and feel more comfortable. The models had many questions about what impact their appearance might make on other people, and they expressed an interest in photography. Thus, Karsten developed photography workshops for visually impaired and blind photographers.

Karsten’s classes are run in cooperation with a University in Berlin. A small team of sighted students is allocated to every photographer to help him or her to find motives, adjust the camera ,select the best picture and describe the resulting photo in text. We set up our German blog Bilder für die Blinden to showcase the work.

Now we’ve started an English Photo Narrations blog, too, to spread our idea further and to encourage people all over the world to become part of our creative community. We are always looking for volunteers to write descriptions of photographs for us. As Beth pointed out in her Describing a photograph to someone who can’t see blog post, it’s a great creative writing exercise.

Additionally, we provide a platform to publish and discuss the narrations writers come up with for the photographs — our blind and visually impaired members can write comments and ask further questions.

Back to me — I may just give this a try! I don’t think I’ll take any photos, but I may send some photos people give me to the photo narrations blog to see how they describe what’s going on there. Take a look at — or a listen to — the Photo Narrations blog for further information or contact them at: picdesc@gmail.com
You can like them on Facebook or follow them on twitter at @PicDesc, too.