While Paul places the finishing touches on the new E-Verse TV episode (Baseball), I’ve decided to pull a top five list out of the vault. I have a great number of superb top five lists that have not yet made it to the public. This is due to the fact that I have switched from a weekday to a weekly newsletter. Also, we have themed shows now, so most of the top five lists are purpose built by my staff writers.

So here’s a cool one to tide you over these summer days until the new episode goes live.

Top Five Bugs Named After Women:

5. Damselfly

4. Black widow spider

3. Broad damsel bug

2. American painted lady

1. Ladybug (also known as the lady beetle. There are a whole bunch of interesting varieties, like the twicestabbed lady beetle, the convergent lady beetle, and the eyespotted lady beetle)

Check back for future top five lists from the vault. There are plenty more where these came from!

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E-Verser J. S. Renau accompanied the E-Verse crew to the Phillies game on Saturday, July 14th, the day before the famous 10,000th Phillies loss. He wrote a lovely short essay on the loss, and I would like to share it with E-Versers. Even if you have little or no interest in baseball, I highly recommend this little gem.

On the Philadelphia Phillies and their 10,000th loss, by J.S Renau

Back in 1962, the expansion New York Metropolitans were worse than bad, finishing their first year of existence with a paltry 40-120 record, the worst of any team in the modern era of Major League Baseball. Field manager Casey Stengel was once asked to comment upon the performance of his ace pitcher (a relative term when applied to the 1962 Mets) Roger Craig after Craig dropped his 20th decision of the season. With his characteristic wit and aplomb, Stengel replied, “You have to be pretty good to lose 20 games.”

You might scratch your head and dismiss the response as a typical Stengelism, but Casey was right in his way�truly awful pitchers aren’t given the opportunity to lose that many games; instead, they’re consigned to places like Terre Haute and Boise until they improve (or don’t, in which case, it’s off to the gas station or post office for a “real” job).

I view the Philadelphia Phillies’ recent ignominy of being the first professional sports franchise to post 10,000 losses in much the same manner. You have to be a pretty good franchise to stick around long enough in order to lose that many times.

After all, the Phillies have been losing baseball games since 1883, and what is more remarkable, they have been doing it in the same city for the entire time. Most unsuccessful baseball franchises—at least, those that survive—have picked up stakes and tried their luck in a different city. Take, for instance, the laughing stock of the American League, the St. Louis Browns. The Browns were synonymous with losing for nearly the entire span of the team’s existence, winning but one pennant (1944), and needing a World War Two-depleted American League in order to accomplish that. In St. Louis, they always played second fiddle to the perennially strong Cardinals franchise of the National League. Rather than stick around and continue their losing ways, the Browns decided that enough was enough, and in 1954, the St. Louis Browns became the Baltimore Orioles, and about ten years later, the Orioles supplanted the New York Yankees as the team to beat in the American League and were more or less the class of the AL for nearly two decades, winning six pennants and three world championships during that span.

The Phillies know what it’s like to play second fiddle in your own hometown. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Phillies shared Philadelphia with Connie Mack’s Athletics franchise. Although once considered the young upstart (the Athletics began play in 1901), the A’s quickly became the toast of Philadelphia, winning six of the first 14 American League pennants and three World Series. The A’s, particularly during the glory years, always seemed to have star power, with ace pitchers Eddie Plank, Rube Waddell, and Chief Bender, while the Phillies, with a few exceptions here and there, were largely composed of cast-offs and wannabes.

And then, of course, there were the legendary A’s teams of 1929-1931, which collected three consecutive world championships . . . and did so during the height of the New York Yankees’ rise to prominence. Those A’s teams are routinely mentioned when old salts try to answer the eternally vexing question of which team was the best of all time. As for the Phillies, during that three-year span of A’s excellence, they managed to lose 282 games, lowlighted by 1930’s last-place ball club that lost 102 games.

As with so many things in history, the turning point for the Phillies had less to do with the Phillies franchise itself and more to do with outside factors, in this case the temperament of Connie Mack, the owner and field manager of the cross-town Athletics. After winning his third consecutive World Series in 1931, Mack grew tired of escalating salaries and egos and put nearly his entire team on the chopping block. Legendary pitcher Lefty Grove—perhaps the greatest left-handed pitcher ever—was sent packing to the Boston Red Sox, along with fellow pitcher Rube Walberg. And over time, Mack continued to dismantle his championship team, a team that was loaded with future Hall of Famers. What followed was arguably the longest stretch of excrementally bad baseball ever witnessed from one franchise. From 1935 to 1954, the Athletics finished in last place 11 times and finished in next to last place an additional three times. The A’s lost 100-plus games in six of those seasons and finished no closer to first place than 12— games. In most seasons during this span, the A’s were history before Memorial Day.

Amid such losing, even the Phillies looked competent, and by the end of this period, the Phillies actually were competent. In 1950, the “Whiz Kids” captured the Phillies’ first pennant since 1915, and Philadelphians, tired of Connie Mack’s parsimony and almost masochistic desire to field last-place clubs, began switching allegiances to the once-neglected Phillies. The result: the A’s were sold and eventually moved, first to Kansas City, and then to Oakland.

Yes, the Phillies have lost 10,000 games, but in the course of doing so have displayed an almost cockroach-like resiliency, and like the cockroach, the Phillies are hard to love, but they should garner a little grudging respect. You do indeed have to be good, on some level, to lose 10,000 games.

Have a look at J.S. Renau’s infamous blog, The Divigator:

http://divagator.blogspot.com/

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As most readers of the E-Verse blog already know, I am the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review. We publish twelve issues a year. The current issue is always available for free to readers for one month, after which the articles are added to the ever-growing archive, available to paid subscribers.

This month, a skeptical Joan Houlihan reviews the first book of poetry by novelist Nathaniel Bellows.

Houlihan writes: “The esteemed critic and poet Richard Howard hails Bellows as ‘an unchallengeable voice, new among us but veteran for poetry,’ a statement easily challenged by anyone who takes the time, as I did, to actually read and think about these poems. Bellows’s publisher, the esteemed W.W. Norton, claims for him ‘tremendous lyrical and technical gifts’ and asserts that ‘we find ourselves with one of the most impressive debuts in recent memory’ which leads me to wonder how recent that memory is: hours? minutes?”

You may read the full review in the current issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review for free here:

http://www.cprw.com/Houlihan/bellows.htm

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My good friend and collaborator Daniel Felsenfeld is the topic of a “talk of the town” piece in this week’s New Yorker. His surname means “boneyard,” and it has captured the imagination of a number of novelists who have gone on to create Felsenfeld characters in their novels.

Danny and I have collaborated on several operas, including Summer and All it Brings (performed at the Bowery Poetry Club and by the New York City Opera at Symphony Space) and The Last of Manhattan (performed at The Kitchen in Chelsea, NY). I provide the librettos for Danny’s operas.

It is a short piece, so I reproduce it in its entirety here.
Close Reading Dept.
“Namesake”
by Brian Thomas Gallagher July 30, 2007

The Felsenfeld Movement was well under way when Michael Chabon arrived at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, to work on a novel, in February of 2004. By that time, four novelists at the colony had already created fictional characters called Felsenfeld, named after a quirky and charismatic classical composer from Brooklyn who was also in residence. Eventually, there would be a grand total of seven Felsenfelds: three in books that have been published in the United States since 2006, one in an Austrian best-seller, and three in works that are still in progress.

“It just immediately sounded like a name that I already would have been using,’ Chabon said recently. ‘It’s not only an intrinsically interesting name but it seemed it would fit perfectly with the book I was writing, which was “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.’ I was so happy to have the name, because it had the sound of a likely Jewish surname but was not overly familiar.”

A writer named Ellen Slezak had inadvertently started the movement when she arrived at MacDowell a few weeks before Chabon. �I needed a Jewish name, and I didn�t have my usual sources to find one�I don�t know, looking through a phone book or taking a walk in a Jewish cemetery,� she said. �I was sitting there in my little studio that day, and I started saying to myself, �Felsenfeld, Felsenfeld, Danny�that guy who�s always around.� � So came into being the character of Sarah Felsenfeld, a University of Michigan student in the late seventies who works on the grounds crew at the school�s athletic complex and �looks great in overalls,� according to Slezak�s upcoming novel.

The nonfictional Danny Felsenfeld is gregarious, bespectacled, and possessed of the uncanny ability to be present anytime someone was looking for a conversation, making him something of a human water cooler for idling writers. Charmed by him, and by his memorable last name, they began inserting namesakes into their manuscripts. “Danny was a central character for all of us,” Lisa Carey, a fellow-MacDowellite, said. (Dr. Felsenfeld, in her novel “Every Visible Thing,” is a pipe-smoking high-school principal.) “Whenever someone arrived and we found that that person was working on a novel, we’d say, ‘You have to put in a Felsenfeld. Everyone here is doing it.’”

Chabon bestowed Danny’s surname on a schlubby, absentee cop named Inspector Felsenfeld. “Names that end in ‘feld’ generally tend to have an appeal,” Chabon said. “There’s just something pleasurable about the Felsenfeld ending. And it has the re-implication of the ‘fel.’ I think it may be . . . uh, Fel-sen-feld . . . I think it is a dactyl. That always has a nice little galloping sound to it.”

The novelist Benjamin Anastas, whose Herr Felsenfeld, in his book “At the Feet of the Divine,” is a half-mad, pre-Anschluss Talmudic scholar, concurred: “There is something kind of poetic about it. You imagine water falling over steps or something.”

“Come on, the ‘F’s are so great,” Slezak said. “You’ve got the three syllables—the comedic rule of three. And there’s something about Danny himself—he is just so funny.”

“If I were going to create some kind of tragic character, I don’t think I’d name him Felsenfeld,” Katherine Min, the author of “The Secondhand World,” said. Her Mr. Felsenfeld is a youngish teacher patrolling the halls of his school for untoward displays of public affection between students. “It’s not a name to be made fun of, but it makes me feel kind of happy,” she said. “It’s an upbeat name.” She plans to include a Felsenfeld in all of her future works.

The original Felsenfeld, sitting in his Brooklyn apartment not long ago, seemed to be enjoying his new role as a literary Zelig. “It’s a really sweet and weird thing,” he said. But growing up Felsenfeld, he said, wasn’t so easy: “I always thought the name was a bit of a burden. It got misspelled all the time. I’d get, like, Felsenstein or Seinfeld. People would ‘insert other half of Jewish name here.’ Felsenberg. Goldfeld.” These days, though, he thinks the name “kind of swings.”

Felsenfeld’s fiancee, Elizabeth Isadora Gold, is working on a novel herself, although she has no plans to include a Felsenfeld. The couple will marry in September. The bride will keep her name.

Have a look at Danny’s blog, felsenmusick, here:

http://felsenmusick.blogspot.com/

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Welcome to the first installment of E-Verse’s 100 Cool Novels.

This is an informal list of E-Verse’s favorite novels written in English in the last century and is meant to be more amusing than strictly instructive. The criteria we used for selection are:

1. Popular reception
2. Stylistic influence
3. Internal complexity and formal achievement
4. Heart
5. Guts

We originally planned this as a way to thumb our noses at Time Magazine’s top 100 novels, which we felt was incredibly dull and predictable as well as just silly.

Number 100: Parade’s End quaternary comprised of Some Do Not . . . (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928), by Ford Madox Ford.

With great elegance and formal precision, Ford chronicles the passing of the Edwardian and Victorian ages and their values from English life.

It ranks with Siegfried Sassoon’s trilogy of memoirs and Robert Graves’s fictional autobiography Goodbye to All That as a testament to a declining age of aristocratic privilege and shared moral certainty destroyed by the advance of science and the terrible uses to which that science was used in the First World War.

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