Watch him as he goes

Roger Clemens and I share a last name. Pretty much solely on account of this coincidence, he was my hero growing up. Clemens first made a splash in 1986, as a member of the ill-fated Red Sox team that lost a heartbreaking World Series to the Mets. The following year, my dad decided it was time to introduce me to baseball, and the first person he told me about was Clemens, indisputably the best pitcher in the American League. Dad didn't know if we were related to Roger, but the relative obscurity of our last name enabled me to hold out hope for years that I shared some of those incredible genes.

He's the reason I became a Red Sox fan. By the time he devastated most of New England by signing with the Blue Jays (and soon after accepting a trade to the Yankees), my loyalties had long since shifted from player to team; Clemens left, but I stayed with the Sox.

He's the reason I skipped class to drive to Boston for their historic victory parade in 2004. He's the reason I dressed up as Manny Ramirez for a costume party, ridiculously wearing a black pom-pom on my head to simulate dreadlocks. He's the reason I love Pedro Martinez in embarrassing and inarticulable ways.

Still, Clemens was always my idol. I remember listening to Game 5 of the American League Championship Series on the car radio in October 2000, on the way back from visiting my girlfriend in Massachusetts. He struck out 15 batters while throwing a complete game one-hitter against the Mariners, probably the greatest postseason performance of the last 50 years. He was with the Yankees at the time-- and god I hate the Yankees-- but I was there for him on every pitch.

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I found out we weren't related when I read a fawning Sports Illustrated piece on Roger in the early 1990s. The article mentioned in passing that he wasn't related to Mark Twain-- aka Samuel Clemens-- to whom I knew I was related thanks to my grandmother's extensive genealogy a decade prior.

When people would ask how to spell my last name, I would always tell them "it's spelled like Roger Clemens." A major turning point in my life came as a salesman for a travel agency after college, when, having made thousands of cold calls to assholes all over the country, I realized more of them recognized Samuel Clemens than they did Roger. As a naive 21 year old, it was hard to believe anyone didn't know who Roger was (much less that anyone DID know Mark Twain's real name). It took me 15 years of hero worship before I realized that (a) Sam Clemens was far more famous than Roger could ever hope to be, and (b) it's far, far, far more interesting to be related to Sam than to Roger.

Another Roger Clemens-inspired watershed moment occurred this afternoon, during Clemens's testimony before the Congressional oversight committee investigating illegal drug use in baseball. When asked if he was a vegan-- part of a series of questions relating to why he accepted injections of Vitamin B-12-- Clemens explained that he doesn't know what a vegan is. (A fuller explanation of the questioning can be found here.)

I was startled by how sharply this statement drew into contrast the life I lead and the one I thought I wanted as a kid. Being a vegetarian is really important to me. So is having a working knowledge of lifestyles and cultures besides my own. And so is knowing the meanings of common words.

Over and out, Roger.

Infinite Jerks

Last Thursday, I went to a book reading in SoHo celebrating the 10th anniversary of the publication of the novel Infinite Jest. The organizers probably didn't even bother inviting the author, David Foster Wallace, because it's clear to anyone who knows or even feels like they know him that he would never come to something like this.

Instead, the bill featured some of Wallace's former editors, a couple of critics, the head writer from The Onion, and John Krasinski, the handsome-in-a-clumsy-sort-of-way co-star of NBC's The Office. The implication being that the head writer from The Onion and John Krasinski are big fans of Infinite Jest.

And but so the event wasn't much of a book reading at all. Three people read short passages from IJ, while the critics sat around and critiqued stuff for a while. The Onion guy brought his ex-editor-in-chief (and ex-girlfriend) along, and rather than talk about IJ, they decided to read, in tandem, the painfully unfunny article one of them wrote a few years ago about a breakup letter David Foster Wallace wrote to his girlfriend.

(Curmudgeonly aside about The Onion: the aforelinked article is a prime example of one of those articles that takes one funny idea, distills it into a mildly amusing headline, then spends the rest of the article retelling the same joke in different and progressively worse ways. Making matters worse, the article is one of those where if it's funny at all, it's only funny to someone who's familiar with David Foster Wallace. But the thing is, anyone who's read any Wallace will recognize that the article is nothing but a flaccid, meritless imitation.

And yet the attendees at Thursday's "Jest Fest" loved the article. Why? Because they were familiar with D.F.W., they felt a surge of pride in being part of the tiny audience at which the article was aimed. Group identification: they laughed because they got the joke, not because the joke was funny. Like that little fish Christians used to draw in the dirt, the article serves merely as a password, an identifying label, which fellow club members can read and remind themselves that they're members of that particular club. It's completely artless.)

In short, the Onion guy was only there to promote his stupid newspaper.

And John Krasinski was even worse. He hung out in the back so he could walk, star-like, down the aisle to the lectern while everyone looked in awe at his messy hair. So he shows up and admits right off the bat that he "can't remember" if he ever finished reading Infinite Jest. Then after making a couple of completely incoherent jokes, he says he'd feel stupid talking about IJ in front of so many smart people, so he's going to read a passage from another of Wallace's books, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, instead. This is frustrating enough by itself- this was an Infinite Jest party, not a Wallace party. But then Krasinski casually mentions that he's currently adapting this latter book into a film.

I suppose I was always aware that stars go to these events to promote themselves. And that's fine. But I didn't expect the self-promotion to be so...naked. It was enough to make me wish I kept a bullshit diary.