Some Wednesday Readings - Aug. 19, 2026

The Joy of Baseball – Daniel Darling at One Little Word. 

Know your rights as an author and don’t get scammed – Nathan Bransford.

 

Submerged memory: C.S. Lewis and the art of forgetting – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

Remembering Blaise Pascal’s Night of Fire – Emily Kleinhenz at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

On the third day: On the religious illiteracy of college students – The New Criterion. 

 

Child – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Britain: How taboos have stifled truth – Guy Dampier at The Critic Magazine.

 

Short Story, Deep Treasures: Biblical Allusion in “The Gift of the Magi” – John Savoie at Literary Matters.

 

Flashback: The Uses of a Novella – my post at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

 

Painting: Blaise Pascal about 1691.

Poets and Poems: Loren Broaddus and “Joe DiMaggio Moves Like Liquid Light”

Loren Broaddus writes poems about baseball, and life.

Stories, and poems, about baseball are often about something else entirely. Baseball, at least in America, is a filter, or a picture frame, for many things other than a sport – our ideas of who Americans are; what we think about our country; and why playing by the rules is so important, because rules reduce the playing field to skill and talent. Baseball is also a way we consider our childhood, those neighborhood sandlot baseball games, those baseball cards we collected or attached with clothespins to our bicycle wheels, the intense discussions that would go on about the World Series.

Joe DiMaggio Moves Like Liquid Light by Loren Broaddus is a collection of poems about baseball, but, like baseball, it’s about a lot more. Baseball is how we look backward at where we come from, how we remember significant events in our lives, how we hoard treasured memories, how we understand history, and how we understand ourselves.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Travis Thrasher’s “Home Run”

I usually resist reading novelizations of movies. Often hurriedly written, based completely on a movie script, novelizations are often marked by poor writing and a story less than satisfying than the movie itself. I particularly resist novelizations of movies I haven’t heard of, or that I’ve heard of but haven’t seen.

Home Run by Travis Thrasher is a bad example of the point I’m trying to make. I hadn’t seen or heard of the movie. And it’s ostensibly about baseball; I’m not a fan of sports novels. But I read this book. And I read simply because of the author who wrote it.

Chicago-based Thrasher is a fine writer. I’ve read nearly all of his books. Sky Blue (2007) is one of my favorite novels (I’ve read it twice, and it gets better the second time.) He’s written across a number of fiction genres, and does all of them very well indeed.

So I trusted the author and read Home Run, based on the script for the movie of the same name. And I met a hero who’s one of the most despicable human beings you’re likely to come across.

Corey Brand plays baseball for the Denver Grizzlies. If there’s one thing Corey knows how to do, it’s hit home runs. It may be the only admirable thing about him. Arrogant, unfeeling, uncaring, disconnected from his brother and his family. Drives fast cars, and drives them fast. Endless streams of women.

And alcohol. Corey Brand has a serious substance abuse problem. He’s in a hitting slump, and it’s contract renewal time.

Travis Thrasher

His agent packs him off to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, his home town. He has to spend eight weeks in a rehab program. Even before he arrives in town, he totals his rental car and injures his brother in the process.

And in his hometown, Corey has to face and confront his past, including the dead father who’s verbal abuse drove Corey away and shaped him into what he’s become, good and bad. And he has to face and confront the girlfriend he left behind, the girlfriend who was pregnant.

Like I said, a pretty despicable human being.

But Thrasher tells a good story. He’s not content simply to pull from a movie script. He ads depth to the characters. He adds depth to the story. And what could have been just another thin novelization becomes a story worth telling and a story worth reading, about how a man learns forgiveness and finds redemption.

I was right to trust my gut about a Travis Thrasher story.

Here’s the official trailer for the movie (which I still haven’t seen, and I may not since I don’t want it to run the chance of it ruining the novelization).

 

Poetry at Work: Casey at the Bat

If there is one poem that many adult males (and likely many adult females) will remember from elementary school, it is Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat.” Perhaps it was included in the elementary curricula because publishers, anthologists, or teachers realized it was exactly the kind of poem that could capture a boy’s attention and imagination. (Only one other 19^th century poem is as well known as “Casey,” and that’s Clement Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”)

The poem has an interesting history. Written by Thayer and published by William Randolph Hearts in May 1888, it made no great impression, until the comic actor DeWolf Hopper read it between acts at a performance in August of 1888. In the audience were several baseball players; it was “Baseball Night” at the theater. I\the reading was a huge success, and Hopper went on to recite the poem an estimated 15,000 times over almost 50 years. Other than his work as a student editor of the Harvard Crimson, Thayer is not known for any other writing.

What any of us (male or female) might remember most about the poem is the penultimate concluding line, the line that captures all of the emotion of dashed hope, bitter disappointment, and angst we might imagine: “But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.