Levi Stahl

That was a tough one.

Why is Treinen in this game instead of Sasaki? Wild managing.

Literally cannot even right now, despite the outcome. Wild.

Finally getting going and signing up for a print Sun-Times subscription.

I dislike the closeup shot where they show the hitter in the on-deck circle and every other element in the frame is out of focus. It makes reality look like a video game, and one of the countless reasons I’m not a gamer is that even the best video game looks like utter shit compared to reality.

She has been sent by some dark fate to nag and torment me.

—Peter O’Toole, on working with Katharine Hepburn

Realistically, since Schwarber didn’t homer in game 1, the absolute max we should hope for from him this month is 72 home runs. And that’s only if every series goes the limit.

To hope for more than that is to hope that he’ll hit 5 in at least one game, and that seems vanishingly unlikely.

“I’m sorry, Harold. It’s a nasty trick, but we’re nasty people.”

It was a hard situation for anyone to carry off with dignity and good temper. Widmerpool did not exactly attempt to conform to either of these two ideal standards.

—Anthony Powell, A Buyer’s Market

Suspense: A Good and Faithful Servant (BONUS) Podcast Episode · This Day in Jack Benny · 09/17/2025 · 28m

The June 2, 1952 episode of Suspense, in which Jack Benny spends a night in the vault, getting the tiniest taste of the life of Ed, the guard of Benny’s vault on Benny’s own program.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Always acknowledge the gift of a book before there has been time to read it; if you wait you have to commit yourself to an opinion.

—T. S. Eliot

I had missed that Criterion put out the whole set of Boetticher-Scott Ranown Westerns. That’ll be coming home with me the next time they have a sale.

Randolph Scott, Virtuous Loner of the West Lonesomeness, nobility, and anti-machismo: the ‘Ranown’ westerns are an underappreciated treasure of American cinema.

“Freedom is meant to be used for others. In each story, when confronted with injustice that isn’t his problem, the hero -makes it- his problem.

— @hannahgracelong.bsky.social for @thebulwark.com on the wonderful Ranown Westerns

www.thebulwark.com/p/randolph-s...

A panel by Bob Hall from the Emperor Doom graphic. Over showing Doom in closeup. He’s saying, “My greatest flaw. I surround myself with idiots.”

Good morning, friends!

On Margate Sands
I can connect
Nothing to nothing.
Inland, grottoed,
Shells connect all
To all
To Templar Knights.

—T. S. Eliot, early draft of The Waste Land, before he began to suspect the authenticity of the Shell Grotto

I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years.

—William Carlos Williams, on first reading The Waste Land, in his autobiography

All great art is based on a condition of fundamental boredom—passionate boredom.

—T. S. Eliot, recorded by Siegfried Sassoon in his diary, March 30, 1922

He liked . . . to hear and to tell ghost stories.

—Peter Ackroyd, on T. S. Eliot

Another point Murdoch makes implicitly in her fiction that I think of all the time is that we almost always know when we are doing wrong. We tell ourselves otherwise, but we are lying to ourselves.

At crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.

—Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

The realization of a state of society in which people just are ends in themselves -is- the point of politics, or at least of trying to make political change.

-- @philipchristman.bsky.social, newsletter

The way that at least some leftists will always hurl the word "bourgeois" at any piece of art in which anyone has a private life. Stop feeling things! You're on company time here!

-- @philipchristman.bsky.social, newsletter

Text: Settled in for the afternoon, surrounded by adoring ladies, the recluse of Rye sat complacent, holding my last new Persian kitten between his open palms, talking animatedly to the Beauty (Hunt's niece], who could not talk but looked. He quite forgot the poor beast, which was too polite and too squeezed between the upper and the nether millstone of the great man's hands to remind him of its existence, and I dared not rescue it until the sentence on which Mr. James was engaged was brought to a close--inside of half an hour.

Violet Hunt, on Henry James, from The Legend of the Master.

“[Eliot’s] attitude toward American was now a somewhat ambiguous one.”

So say we all, Tommy.

Oh, we got to see a Thiebaud exhibit a few years back, and it was wonderful.

Good morning, friends!

Our tv showing the Mariners-Tigers game, set up in our garden.

It’s good to have a new Taylor album and baseball on the radio when you need to cook enough for 16 people for the night game. Let’s go, Tigers.

All this reminds me that nearly 20 years ago now I wrote about poetry and baseball for the Poetry Foundation:

www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/689...

Iris Murdoch mentions the St. Louis Cardinals in Henry and Cato.

Play ball. Let’s go, Cubs.