Anyone lucky enough to be watching the U.S. Open last night would've seen what I consider to be celebrities with class--also, down-to-earth sincerity, poised modesty, honesty, generosity with their talents, and, best of all, good humor. In his last set ever on the professional circuit, despite a bit of grandstanding, personable Justin Gimelstob gave Andy Roddick an excellent match and then said goodbye in winning high good humor until he moves into the sportscasting area. As his interviewer handed him the mike, he then interviewed Roddick and was wonderfully funny, easy about it, the whole crowd enjoying the moment; and Roddick in turn was everything I said in the first sentence. Especially when he said it was the most awkward thing he'd ever done and finally took the microphone away from Gimelstob to end the fun. This was in high contrast to the brattiness of Frank Dancivic this morning in his loss to Safin, repeatedly hurling his racket on the ground in little temper tantrums betraying his unsportsmanlike conduct, more like a three-year-old than a 23-year-old and reminding me of the low point in Buford's Heat when Mario Batali brags juvenilely, "Katherine Turner gave me tongue!"
We have a vested interest in Roddick, who was born here in Omaha in 1982, the family moving away when he was five to Florida for tennis reasons. Omaha insists upon claiming him, though, despite the contradiction then in Nebraska's claiming Willa Cather, born in Virginia, who moved here when she was nine or ten (depending upon which source one reads). We're accustomed to our famous people moving away, of course, Fred Astaire, Dorothy Maguire, Marlon Brando, Malcolm X (Malcolm Little), Gerald Ford, Nick Nolte, Alexander Paine.
A few more final words about Buford's Heat. He's astutely entertaining, as when he identifies the major distinction between English hunting and ours: theirs is for the royal and wealthy, the property owners, which is why poaching was always a serious crime and led to such tales as Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Ours is for the common people, and I can attest to that from Dad, an avid hunter and fisherman and the source of much of our meat seasonally, whether I liked eating it or not. Mostly not, disliking any gamy taste.
And Buford irritated me with his frequent martyrdom shtick over cuts and burns, when he often said he'd been an amateur cook for friends. No amateur cook I know drops meat into sizzling deep grease for scalding splashes, and most have been warned on TV and elsewhere to curl fingers under to avoid cutting fingertips off. But similarly, of course, he is actually writing an autobragography and finally gaining butchering knowledge (from the Italian sources!) Batali lacks as well as having Batali ask him when Buford's opening his own restaurant. Aw, shucks, no, he's happy as a mere cook.
Enough. James Lee Burke pleased me in Pegasus Descending with this passage about Stephen Crane: "Crane said few of us are nouns. Most of us are adverbs. No tragedy is orchestrated by one individual. An event we blame ourselves for may have been years in the making, and may have much more to do with others than ourselves. Without recognition of that fact, we never acquire any wisdom about anything." He also refers to Homer, Dante, and ". . . as Faulkner said . . . the past is not only still with us, the past is not even the past." (And I'm only to page 123.) The three authors I did most of my term papers on in college were Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, and W. H. Auden.
If they recognize his name, readers, mainly English majors, know Stephen Crane is best known for The Red Badge of Courage, a Civil War novel written by a noncombatant who had interviewed veterans and read their stories, or some of his much-anthologized short stories, "The Open Boat," "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," or the one I favor, being about wintery Nebraska, "The Blue Hotel." His first grimly realistic novel was about a prostitute, Maggie: Girl of the Streets, and he wrote heavily ironic poetry; in fact, irony is his middle name. He died of tuberculosis at 28.
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