Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...father is head of a large clothing company in Pennsylvania. This isn't held against him in baseball, where there are "just a bunch of guys, like at Harvard or anywhere else. Hell, look at Varney." And indeed, White Sox catcher Pete Varney '71 comes from Quincy, Massachusetts--his background has none of the trappings of the Harvard stereotype, unless it is the very real stereotype of the local kid plucked up by Harvard athletics. With an occasional exception. Brayton says, ball players don't know or care if the guy out on the mound comes from Teddy Kennedy...
...father.) "This is the only thing I ever really worked hard at, the only thing I always knew wasn't going to be given to me because I went to such-and-such a school. If I make it, I'll make it on my own--if anything, my background will count against...
...cynic might suggest that it is exactly because Brayton comes from a privileged background that he can afford to follow up the chancy business of flirting with a baseball career--he's got an out if things fall through. But he's too serious for that...
Hiroshima Mon Amour. A "you are there" look at August 8, 1945, in Peace Square. Sort of a mixture of War Games and Last Year at Marienbad--a wordless, one-night love affair takes place against the background of documentary footage of Hiroshima. Resnais is not being profound or fascinating in a verbal way, but the film has deep pull, like a strong undertow. It will always be "One million degrees in Peace Square...
...railing, staring from the page with a dreadful mixture of rhetoric and solipsism, entitled simply Lecura - madness. To see Delacroix's watercolor sketch of a tiger, lying on some imaginary ridge in Algeria with the ripples of its striped back imitating the profile of mountains in the background, is to be reminded how that animal - an embodiment of natural force to the Romantics - was for Delacroix akin to a self-portrait...