Fan's Notes

To close out our offseason cities series, we're focusing on George V. Higgins' slim 1970 book The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which Elmore Leonard called the greatest crime novel ever written. Ostensibly set in Boston but with a reach that expands out to all points in Massachusetts, not to mention New Hampshire and Rhode Island, this books packs a ton into 183 pages of mostly dialogue. Don't miss Jesse's live reading of the final two pages in two baroque Boston accents! On the basketball side, we discuss the Celtics' free agency grab of Al Horford and what they still need in order to get past the Cleveland Cavaliers. (NB: Basketball talk begins around the 32 minute mark.)

It's a disappointment pod this week, as Jesse, a Saul Bellow fan, admits to being underwhelmed by Seize The Day, Bellow's short 1956 novella, and calls on Adam to make a case for its durability. On the basketball side, they discuss the bizarre offseason for the Chicago Bulls, and whether their Frankenstein roster has any chance of succeeding. (NB: the book discussion runs for the first 41 minutes. Next up is the last of our summer series linking books to NBA cities, and we'll be looking at the Boston Celtics and George V. Higgins' wonderful little crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle--grab a copy and join us next week!)

For our New York episode, we looked at Paula Fox's strange, slim novel from 1970, Desperate Characters, about a Brooklyn couple whose marriage may or may not be disintegrating. A marvel that fell out of print for a few decades, we highly recommend readers seek this book out. On the basketball side, we discuss the chances for a new-look Knicks team, which brought in ex-Bulls Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah this summer. Will they be good and for how long, and what does this mean for the long-term development of Kristaps Porzingis? (NB: We discuss Desperate Characters for the first 38 minutes of the podcast, then move on to the Knicks. And feel free to pick up a copy of Saul Bellow's Seize The Day and read along for our discussion next week--it clocks in at a breezy 114 pages! Also, we now have a twitter account (@fansnotespod) as well as an email address ([email protected]) so hit us up with any books you'd like us to read and discuss or other ideas for literature & sports discussions you'd like to see us undertake on the pod. Thanks for listening!

The novelist, short-story writer and noted sports-agnostic J. Robert Lennon drops by the pod for a conversation about whether sports and literature can ever make nice, or if they'll just keep circling each other warily and talking shit behind each other's backs. Along the way we bemoan the utter disposability of most sports writing as well as the obsequiousness of dude writers who deploy sports in their work as a signifier of working class credibility. We may not have achieved a cease-fire between the warring factions yet, but we thank John for coming on and offering his reasoned repartee. In addition to winning the coveted prize of being the first guest to appear on the Fan's Notes podcast, J. Robert Lennon's newest novel, Broken River, is being published by Graywolf Press in May, 2017. Pre-order it y'all!

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends." That is Joan Didion, from her essay "On Keeping a Notebook,' from her classic collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. We chose this book because we thought it might shine some light on the plight of the Lakers--things fall apart; the centre cannot hold--but in point of fact all it did was make us think of other Didion lines. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." "We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce." "Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself." Chock full of some of the greatest essays ever committed to paper, Slouching Toward Bethlehem begs to be read and read again. Our apologies if our discussion of the anemic 2016-2017 Los Angeles Lakers roster pales when placed alongside it. (NB: we discuss the Didion collection until around the 38 minute mark, then dive into our low expectations for the upcoming Lakers season. Also, stay tuned for our emergency pod with the novelist J. Robert Lennon on whether or not sports and literature have anything to say to one another. The answer may surprise you!)

In the first of our city/author mashups we'll be doing this summer, we picked Elmore Leonard and Miami. Yes, we are aware that Leonard is most closely associated with Detroit, but we've selected one of his Palm Beach/Miami books, 1995's Riding The Rap, which features his flinty lawman Raylan Givens, a hippie-dippie psychic and a botched ransom plot. We discuss Leonard's genius for quick-sketch character and razor-sharp dialog, as well as whether he should be considered a "genre" or a "literary" author. Then we keep things in South Florida with a look at the Miami Heat's offseason and potential for 2016-2017. Were they right to let Dwyane Wade walk? Will Chris Bosh ever play again? Can their youthful core of Tyler Johnson, Josh Richardson, Justise Winslow and Dion Waiters make the leap this year? All that and more in this episode of the Fan's Notes podcast. (NB: we talk about Riding The Rap until the 35 minute mark, then the Miami Heat talk begins. Also, for our next episode, we'll be reading Joan Didion's seminal 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and looking at what the future holds for the Los Angeles Lakers. Look for it the week of August 15th!)

In this episode we look at the thin line between genius and fraud, as embodied by Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith's terrific 1955 thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley. We then pivot to the NBA's Summer League, that week of barely watchable basketball that takes place in the Nevada desert. Who looked promising, who looked like a bust, and is it possible to draw any firm conclusions from these performances at all? (NB: We discuss the Highsmith book for the first 41 minutes, then spend the rest of the pod on Summer League. Also, as a programming note: for our next episode we'll start our occasional summer program of specific teams' upcoming season previews, paired with a book set in that city. First up is Miami. We'll be discussing where they're at after the D-Wade trade and where they go from here, as well as reading Elmore Leonard's Riding The Rap. Look for it in the first week of August.)

Well, we intended for this to be a long meandering journey through the epic story of the 2015-16 NBA season, paired with the wanderings of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus around Dublin on June 16th, 1904 in James Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses. But Kevin Durant's jaw-dropping decision to leave the Oklahoma City Thunder in favor of the Golden State Warriors was too monumental to avoid, so we wound up talking about that, and its repercussions for the league. (NB: We discuss Ulysses for the first 30 minutes, then jump over to the NBA.)

There's disagreement in the pod today, as we square off over who should go #1 in the Draft. The conversation gets sullen, juvenile, and decidedly anti-phony, in keeping with the tone of this week's book: J.D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye. It's worth tuning in just to hear Jesse compare Holden Caulfield to Donald Trump, as well as Adam's paean to 7-foot-2 Chinese prospect Zhou Qi. (NB: We discuss the book for the first 25 minutes, and then talk Draft stuff for the rest of the hour.)

Game 7 of the Finals is upon us, and to celebrate the last night of the 2016 NBA season, we've chosen a harrowing short story by James Salter, called, appropriately enough, Last Night. We've been wrong about almost everything in this series so far, so why not laugh at our useless predictions one last time before we say goodbye to this season once and for all. (NB: we discuss the Salter story for about the first 21 minutes or so of the podcast. It's available online and you should definitely read it! After that, from ~21:00 to ~45:00, we talk about the game.)