Drafts

I'm hoping that the reading I'm doing can help me furnish some kind of draft for next week. I'm reading a lot about the place of baseball in history, in American cultural heritage. What it's looking like now is that I could start putting together something of a draft of the introduction for my main essay. The notion of inherited cultural legacy is something that keeps popping up again and again. It points to a sense of cultural continuity as a way for meaning to be attached to a particular place. I'm not yet sure that I'm ready to say that that idea subsumes all the other things I want to write my final project about but, I do think that it is a forceful notion that has a lot to do with why Fenway Park is so significant.

Thanks Dave

The conference was really helpful in that it made clear the connection between the book I am reading and my project. In fact it was precicely the sort of connection I wanted to discover, and now I feel that a few of my sources are actually more relevant than I originally thought they were. I certainly left feeling much more confident about how everything is going to fit together.

Conferences

I'm planning on getting some good piece of writing for the conference. I've been reading some books and stuff. Good stuff. I'm counting this as my free meaningless blog post. Impasse, but at least not hungover.

The Hangover

I still find myelf confused about the reflective essay and exactly what it is that I'm supposed to write it about. I get the part about looking back on what it is that we have learned but not how much it is to focus on what I learned about my topic, over and against what I thought prior to taking the course as opposed discussing some metaphysical meaning of the words "learning" or "knowledge".

The Topic

What I love most about my topic is how "unacademic" it is. I'm writing about a game when there are certainly many more serious topics to look at. In the beginning it was kind of intimidating to be honest. I was in a way happy to do my presentation on the first day because I was afraid that after seeing everyone else present, people wouldn't take mine seriously. I think that such apprehensions were helpful though because a project based soley around the topic of Fenway Park and the game that is played inside of it, would fail to elicit a feeling of importance in a significant protion of my audience. A lot of people just don't care about baseball. So I made a stronger effort to incorporarte the historical, sociological and cultural aspects of Fenway. This way I think my project can engage the interests of many, for history, society and culture are sort of common denominators for most people.

The Pitch

Red Sox pitcher and Japanese phenom Daisuke Matsuzaka makes his first start at Fenway on Wednesday. It's amazing to see how important he is to Japanese popular culture. Hordes upon hordes of Japanese media personnel have descended upon Boston, scrutinizing every game, every pitch, practically every move this man makes. The popularity of the Boston Red Sox has taken on an international aspect and the benefits the team expects to derive from Dice-K's celebrity appears likely to offset the $100,000,000 they paid to secure his services. I think this could be yet another angle from which to look at my project. I think it would be interesting to look at a potential international significance for Fenway. Incidentally, all Matsuzaka's starts will be televised in Japan.

The Opening

The Red Sox have their home opener on Wed. night and I was able to jot down a few player opinions (especially first year Red Sox players) about why taking the field at Fenway has such a singular feel to it. I saw mostly the answers that I predicted: citing the history, the intensity, the nostalgia.. etc. Unfortunately pro baseball players aren't payed millions of dollars because they can articualte clearly or eloquently. Still it would be really nice to get something insightful, as seen from a player's perspective becuase I want this project to take on a wholistic approach, not relying exclusively on what fans and writers have to say. The players expericene a Fenway in way nobody else gets to and it's not a point of view that I can just ignore.

The Outdoors

Now that the weather is getting warmer I looking to get the majority of my service hours in. I was unwilling to work outside in the cold. The connection between my service work and my portfolio topic is one aspect that seems a little bit fuzzy right now so I hope that I have many enjoyable and thought-provocing hours to look forward to. As it stands right now, I'm not too sure where and how I'm going to incorporate the volunteer aspect in, but I know that that will all become clearer to me as I collect some first-hand experience.

The Spring Cleaning

Too hard to work on this shit over break. Too much baseball to watch. So I said to myself: wait isn't watching baseball kinda like working on a baseball-related project? I've found a pretext for slacking off.
Somethings never change: after Opening Day, people still don't go to Brewer games..... Sad.