Dear Spaces

Susan/Circle:
You know, as a woman, of course I'm proud of Nancy Blinky Pelosi's achievement in becoming Madame Speaker …

 

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Susan/Circle:
But, you know, considering the so-called "marble ceiling" of male politicians consists primarily of lying and preening and raising ginormous sums of campaign money to insure one can continue a life of lying and preening ad infinitum, I'm unsure just how much of a forward step for women Pelosi's position really is.

 

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Susan/Circle:
When it comes to being an examplah of a woman's achievement in busting through ceilings, both figuratively and literally, I say look no furthah than Janet Marie Smith.

 

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Mike:
Seriously, what she's done with Fenway, including these most recent offseason improvements is totally effin' astonishing.

 

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Susan/Circle:
She is to Fenway what Brunelleschi was to Florence.

 

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Mike:
Because of her Fenway lives.

 

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Susan/Circle:
Have you ever noticed how the sky when seen over the Fenway rampahts is the brightest thing in Nature?

 

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Mike:
And the bluest.

 

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Susan/Circle:
The sky over Fenway is the absolute separation between the timeless man-made and the Eternal.

 

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Mike:
The distant past is brought into sharp adjacency with the present.

 

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Susan/Circle:
Do you realize that when the Yankees abandon The House the Ruth Built that Fenway alone will stand as the physical, primal connection between Baseball past, Baseball present, and Baseball future?

 

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Mike:
It is like the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy.

 

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Susan/Circle:
Somewhere are places where we have really been …

 

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Mike:
Dear spaces …

 

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Susan/Circle:
Of our deeds and faces, scenes we remembah

 

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Susan/Circle:
As unchanging because they were changed.

 

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Author's Notes

The "sky as brightest in nature" lines are derivations of an idea attributed to Virginia Woolf where she compared the sky as seen between leaves and comes via Geoff Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It (207).

The final 4 panels contain lines are from Auden's "In Transit" and also come by way of the Dyer work (246).

Comments

[Harwich Rich]

Lets not forget when you come up that ramp to go to your seat and the whole field opens up before you,the sheer greenness of it. OMG I'm waxing poetic.

[Kaz]

Susan just gave Wrigley Field middle-child syndrome...now it's going to pout, run off, and start a housefire somewhere for attention.

Fenway Park, 1912
Wrigley Field, 1914
Yankee Stadium, 1923

[lisa gray]

hart,

beautiful, just PERFECT, how you said what a politician really is. i usually just say P.O.S. but you turned that brief blunt saying into beautiful poetry. them slimebags don't deserve to be made to sound that good.

and thank you for starring janet marie smith. there ARE females who make a good difference in the world.

lisa

[louclinton]

I, too, am rendered giddy upon seeing the unfolding green coming up from the vomitorium, uh, bowels, uh, concourse of The Old Ballpark.

My field of vision gets broader and my visual acuity increases when sitting there, for all the reasons stated in the strip.

However, the phrase "putting lipstick on a pig" nevertheless comes to mind.

lc

[Harwich Rich]

lc,imagine the history in those horse troughs :)

[Harwich Rich]

...among other things.

[NolaSox]

If I still worked on a construction site, I would want Janet's Sox hard hat. Or if I ever go to another game at "middle child" Wrigley field.

[Billy Mahty]

sunny days
blue skies
green ivy on the walls

cotton candy
peanuts
beer
ice cream

base hits
runs scored
outs

fly balls
ground balls
errors

some wins
some losses

[Billy Mahty]

Notes for my comment:

Lines from Bob McCarthy's, "Wrigley Field."

[h.b.]

So true about the green. Unlike any other.

The focus today on the "sky over the ramparts" rather than the green of the field is a reflection of the offseason, when we, as fans, are locked out of paradise, if you will, so only see Fenway from the outside this time of year. That's what Circle and Mike were alluding to.

And FWIW apologies to Wrigley. I completely spaced out that it's also a old park with the same sort of romance.

But I think the character exchange regarding Fenway today still holds, since Wrigley is not evolving and being improved in the same way Fenway is.

So only Fenway under the direction of Janet Marie Smith fulfills Auden's line "As unchanging because they were changed."

Meanwhile, I want to echo something Lou wrote the other day about thanking the Pats for giving him his life back.

With football now a memory, I woke up this morning with a focus and anticipation and just general happiness at the prospect of Spring and Baseball than I've felt in quite some time.

[yazbread]

The ramp. The green field. And then the contrast of the orange dirt.

[Bob]

From the Globe (this is so cool):

The Sox are using some of the new space to build a batting cage for visiting teams, who no longer will have to walk out to the center-field bleachers to take some extra hacks. The wrinkle here is that the batting cage abuts a wall of the restaurant Game On! That wall will be replaced by a one-way mirror, Smith said, that will allow the restaurant patrons to watch opposition players work on their swings (A-Rod under glass).

[h.b.]

Yeah, isn't that awesome?!

Janet Marie Smith is on her way to becoming more important to humanity than the Hoff!

[Kaz]

"As unchanging because they were changed."

Or as Mark McGuire (no, not *that* McGuire), vice president of Cubs business operations, told a group at the Cubs Convention in 2006, "The goal is that it looks very much like it did before".

Please, h.b., I implore you! Wrigley has already set a housefire and run off. Don't escalate its jealousy until it murders a cab driver and ends up in a police standoff. It's doing the best it can to keep up with Fenway for improvements that keep the old ballpark alive and well in today's pack'em-in era.

[Dave C]

More imprtant than the Hoff? Let's not go overboard here...

[Natalie]

Holy crap, Bob, that is so completely cool!! Will that be ready by Opening Day? I can't think of a more fascinating view while drinking a beer before the game. Now, any plans to do something similar for the Sox cage? I'd love to see 'Tek that up-close and personal. :)

[birthofasoxfan97]

First, with the blinky thing - I think we should immediately take it a step further and christen Bush, Pelosi, and Cheney as Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod.

Second, a Texas sunset is tremendously powerful, but nothing, absolutley nothing beats the sun setting over Fenway.

Sigh.

[Rob in CT]

birthofasoxfan97 (bertha? birtha?) - I couldn't agree more. Little affects me like sitting in the cheap seats behind center field for a 7:05 game and watching another beautiful sunset over the top of the grandstands along the 3rd base line. Between the stadium lights and the sunset, the green of the grass and the Monster take on an other-worldly quality.

[Rob in CT]

Also, Gregg Easterbrook had a take on the whole "Cheney doesn't blink!" thing in yesterday's TMQ column. Funny as hell:

"Speaker Pelosi blinked non-stop. The president blinked frequently. Cheney never blinked. Check a video. Increasingly I fear that "Richard Cheney" is the host of a slug-like alien symbiot creature that has been implanted in his body and controls his brain."

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/070124

[Scott]

Hate to rain on everyone's sunset, but the impossiblity of getting decent seats at face value nowadays has taken much of the luster out of the old park for me.

I'll stay here in Denver and sit in great seats for $12.

I can scalp Pats playoff tickets for less than a regular season interleague game.

How do the Monster seats improve my view of the game?

[soxdownunder]

and the orange at sunset at Fenway is the orangest orange there is...it's the only time and the only plae that orange and green go together ...

[Bob]

Surly but Lovable; I assume that's the same LC as the one over at Maine Web Report?

Love that site.

[Jason O.]

They rebuilt Fenway after last season's five game re-enactment of the third punic war?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Punic_War

This Smith is indeed a miracle worker.

[Bob]

But Jason, didn't Georgie decide to tear down the Toilet Bowl right after the '04 League Series?

How do the Skankee fans feel about that, BTW?

[soxdownunder]

very cruel j.o. la la

to carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

oh lord...

[h.b.]

We've already been through this before with another commenter, but anyway....

So if the Sox losing a 5 game series during the regular season to the Yankees and then the Yankees going on to get eliminated first round of the wildcard later that season is the Third Punic War, then what exactly is the much bigger battle and ensuing slaughter that came in the '04 ALCS to be compared too?

Hiroshima?

I mean I saw the look on Yankees fans faces for weeks and months after that. Talk about having seen the "unforgettable fire"... And you know each time the Yankees face the Red Sox now, Yankees fans look up in fear of seeing the Enola Gay. They used to be so confident in beating the Sox, now, not so much.

Indeed, such hollow men (and women) have they become that they need to hold up as the height of achievement a 5 game sweep in a season that ended once again w/o a Yankees WS victory.

[louclinton]

Bob, I am from Maine, but that's a pithy imposter. I am familiar with the site, and think it is a monumental waste of bandwidth.

lc

[soxdownunder]

so the skankee fans are the Hollow Persons and 'the toilet bowl' (like it!) is the Waste Land?

[Bob]

I kinda like that site, LC. Although the guy who runs it is surly but grouchy.

He did just help bring down Maine's Director of Tourism though. And I'm almost always in favor of massive falls from grace.

[Jason O.]

I'm looking over my previous posts as to where I even remotely equated the 5 game sweep to something as grandiose as "the height of achievement."

What the sweep did do was effectively end the season for the Red Sox 6 weeks early.

I'm not exactly sure how fresh memories of last year's ass whipping will make Yankees fans less secure about the Red Sox, aka "fear the enola gay," but, as always I defer to your superlative judgment on the motivations of others.

Oh, you mentioned '04? Nothing more than any one of many past events that add spice to the recipe.

[soxdownunder]

well jason, you DID compare 5 baseball games to the Roman's victory at Carthage, which was cosidered to be the height of ahievement at the time ...

[soxdownunder]

well, at least by the romans

[Edgy Reggie]

Actually, I was the one that brought up the 5 game series at Fenway last August.

It was in the same thread in which Bob compared the Yankees to the Manson family, to which I replied that yeah, the Yankees certainly dispatched the Sox in that 5 game series in Manson massacre type fashion. That was it, pretty much tongue in cheek. Nothing was said about some big crowning achievement.

But it sure was fun blowing Boston's hopes for the 2006 out of the water in front of the Fenway Faithful. And the thing is, this was the most recent chapter in the Yanks-Sox rivalry so it is relevant.

h.b. If you want to bring up past accomplishments like 2004, and compare Boston's history with the Yankees, well, you don't have a chance.

[Edgy Reggie]

Hmmmm...that's funny. Several comments have disappeared that were at the end of this thread. Several very important, relevant comments.

h.b., are you cherry-picking comments, a la George Bush cherry-picking intelligence information on the probabilities of Iraq possessing WMDs?

[Dave S.]

Hey Bob-

er...my disappointment that the Yankees are building a new stadium lies in the fact that the upper deck will have a considerably less intimate view of the game. It's a lot less steep and pushed further back.

I don't mind them making a new one...honestly, the original House that Ruth Built became the House that George Built back in '77. For all intents and purposes, it's a 30-year old stadium, essentially built in the Brutalist style. It's kind of ugly. What it does really have going for it is the closeness of the upper deck to the action. The seats are reasonable, and it gives the place a real colliseum atmosphere; I think as Fenway's intimacy helps accentuate the fan's intensity, so does the tightness of that upper deck at Yankee stadium.

The rest of design seems fine, I suppose; I really wish that they cramped the thing in a little more, just a little steeper and tighter. New York IS the Rome of our little empire, no? Burning, waiting to be pillaged, pornographic?

[Jason O.]

Relax, Reggie. It's been my experience that hb only deletes obviously inflammatory posts, trolls, etc.

It would be out of character for hb to behave in the less that forthright manner that you suggest.

[h.b.]

Here's the deal with the missing/deleted comments.

I posted a comment last night while heavily under the influence of certain mind-altering and rather unexpectedly strong substances, which, among other things, hampered my common sense and I broke my "never post a comment in an altered state of mind" rule.

When I awoke this morning, I didn't even realize I had done such. (Oh NLPH you are demon mistress!) And was more than a little dissappointed in the tone/content of what I wrote.

So, yeah, I deleted it. My prerogative.

But since, post deletion, Edgy's reply to my comment no longer had proper context, I deleted it as well.

There you have it.