Books

"And then Amalfitano walked into his devastated front yard and looked up and down the street, craning his neck he didn’t see any car or Rosa and he gripped Dieste’s book tightly, which he was still holding in his left hand. And he looked up at the sky and saw the moon, too big and too wrinkled, although it wasn’t night yet. And then he returned to his ravaged backyard and for a few seconds he stopped, looking left and right, ahead and behind, trying to see his shadow, but although it was still daytime and the sun was still shining in the west, toward Tijuana, he couldn’t see it. And then his eyes fell on the four rows of cord, each tied at one end to a kind of miniature soccer goal, two posts perhaps six feet tall planted in the ground, and a third post bolted horizontally across the top, making them sturdier, the cords strung from this top bar to hooks fixed in the side of the house. It was the clothesline, although the only things he saw hanging on it were a shirt of Rosa’s, white with ocher embroidery around the neck, and a pair of underpants and two towels, still dripping. In the corner, in a brick hut, was the washing machine. For a while he didn’t move, breathing with his mouth open, leaning on the horizontal bar of the clothesline. Then he went into the hut as if he were short of oxygen, and from a plastic bag with the logo of the supermarket where he went with his daughter to do the weekly shopping, he took out three clothespins, which he persisted in calling perritos, as they were called in Chile, and with them he clamped the book and hung it from one of the cords and then went back into the house, feeling much calmer."

The Part about Amalfitano, 2666 by Roberto Bolano

Who hasn’t, even among book lovers (especially among book lovers), thought of clothespinning a particularly irritating tome? Or burying a book in one’s garden (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/05/20/fashion/20090521-poison-slideshow_6.html)? To let nature really have at it, in the same way it erodes rock or bone. As Roberto Bolano acknowledges, the idea was Duchamp’s. The surrealist once encouraged his sister to first buy and then fasten a geometry book from strings hanging from her balcony. He called it “Unhappy Readymade” with the idea being for the wind to “go through the book, chose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages.”

I’m hoping Pau Gasol won’t be tempted to do the same with 2666, the book Lakers coach Phil Jackson recently gave him. I read Bolano’s final book last year and now rank it among my favorites, often brutal, but beautifully so. At first I wondered whether Gasol received the English or Spanish edition. But the LA Times said it was the 898-page edition which means English. As my friend Steve points out, the paperback Spanish edition runs around 1100 pages. It sometimes takes longer to say things in Spanish, although I’m sure Gasol would prefer to read en Espanol.

Phil’s annual rite of giving out books to members of the team got me thinking about what books I’d give to my beloved Lakers including ones from my own library. So here it is just in time for their return from an eight-game roadie:

Ron Artest – The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll
From one New York City hustler to another. I love this book. I first read it growing up out here in LA and when I lived in New York I used to read it on the subway on my way to parties and the like. I have the thin, pocketsized paperback with the gangly, seated Carroll on the cover. There’s another one with the late JC in a tank top with his arms just popping out. God just molds some people to be junkies. The caveat is not to give Ron Ron the Leonardo DiCaprio cover edition. I like Leo and all but his basketball playing in the film version set hoops films back 20 years.

Shannon Brown – Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Not expecting a book report from Shannon any time soon, but title seems apropos for this year’s slam dunk champ.

Kobe Bryant – No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
When you think about it, Kobe is like the NBA equivalent to Anton Chigurh, a cold-blooded killer with a code who leaves nothing in the chamber (see Nike ad). “You’re asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do,” Chigurh says to Carla Jean Moss moments before dispatching her. “I have only one way to live. It doesn’t allow for special cases.”

Andrew Bynum – The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (lifetime subscription)
It’s hard to finds a book for a 22-year-old making 12.5 million a year. This subscription gives him the ability to argue going under the knife versus in-season, three-month rehab. Sit down, Gary Vitti.

Jordan Farmar – Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
People in Los Angeles are afraid to merge on freeways, or in Jordan’s case consistently hit the three.

Derek Fisher – The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Clutch shooter. Union rep. Caring father. Great guy. Fish is all of these things, but like Jay Gatsby he’s got a dark side as well. He occasionally flops and some consider him to be a dirty player. The guy is crafty. For all we know, he could be secretly be running a bootlegging operation.

Pau Gasol - 2666 by Roberto Bolano.
Honorable Mention, Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar. The title eludes to the fact that you can play around with the order of Cortazar’s narrative, reading it straight through or following his suggested skips at the end of each chapter. It reminds me of Pau’s recent play. He’s great one night. Skip ahead and he goes 5-14 and misses six free throws.

D.J. Mbenga – The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard.
Ballard’s tale of a doctor who discovers a third Nile is hallucinatory read set in a fictional land that could be Mbenga’s native DRC. Not that he pines for his homeland.

Adam Morrison – Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
I actually gave Adam a book once (Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces). This time I'm giving him Tower's book of short stories to send him on his way to his next destination. Plus the title sounds a bit like a summation of AmMo’s career. Note: Nothing about Che. I know he’s exhausted the subject. Honorable Mention: Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary by Bertrand M. Patenaude.

Lamar Odom – The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner
Just looking at the title sitting on his shelf should make LO’s mouth water. Honorable Mention: Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Josh Powell – Edisto by Padgett Powell (no relation)
I don’t know much about JP other than he can roll out of bed and hit a fifteen footer. But he’s from Charleston, SC, a jumper away from the setting of Padgett’s best novel.

Sasha Vujacic – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
I’m going big guns here. The current Mr. Maria Sharapova needs to know how a Russian woman thinks and this classic offers the best insight.

Luke Walton – Wooden, A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court by Coach John Wooden with Steve Jamison (Bill Walton autographed copy)
Learn from the master teachers, Luke. And no parties in Papa’s house.