Well, it may perhaps be obvious to close readers of this Tohu Bohu that I am still very far behind on my Book Reports. For one thing, three weeks ago Your Humble Blogger set a (partial) quote from the introduction to Jane Smiley’s A Year at the Races for the general bemusement of Gentle Readers. I don’t remember if I had finished the book by that time, but I certainly finished it within a week or so, which means I am at least two weeks behindhand. On the other hand, I appear to only have three books on my stack. So perhaps I will catch up purely by virtue of leaving a bunch of stuff off. Or perhaps I really have only read three books in the last two weeks, which (now that I think about it) is possible, what will all the running around I’ve been doing.
Anyway.
I was going to write about the quote that I quoted before, but that was a long time ago, and I don’t feel inspired about that anymore. Ah, well. The other thing that I was going to write about was horseracing. Or, well, not just horseracing but...
Ms. Smiley points out that at some point the horseracing industry decided that rather than expand their audience base, they would concentrate on getting more money from the handicappers they had. I think this worked, in the short term, with simulcasting and off-track betting increasing (as I understand it) the revenues without much in the way of additional cost. On the other hand, as horseplayers generally fail to turn their children (or spouses) into horseplayers in the absence of other social inducements, the industry is increasingly dependent on a bunch of old men. Ms. Smiley observes that going to a racetrack is like going into a time warp, or some bizarre wildlife preserve set up for men born before the World War Two. It’s the only place in the world, she says, where people totally unselfconsciously light up cigars in public. I don’t think that’s true, but it does give you a sense of what it’s like down in the grandstand: a bunch of old guys in old-fashioned suits, talking in old-fashioned accents (often New York accents, oddly enough, as there shouldn’t be any shortage of Chicago guys or Boston guys or even Baltimore guys, even at Bay Meadows or Del Mar), with old-fashioned manners and old-fashioned lack of manners, now and then breaking into their handicapping with conversations about the world they have all lost.
I was brought up a New Yorker in the desert, with what in retrospect is a totally bizarre pride in things like bagels, pastrami, horseracing, poker, baseball, books and plays, public transportation, and the Democratic Party. It was my Father’s world, kept in amber, really, and there was an underlying implication that Our People were better (in some unexplained sense) than people who drank beer, preferred football or basketball, watched movies, and talked about their cars. Some of that superiority is justifiable: baseball really is better than football, and baseball fans really are better people than football fans. It’s harder to make the argument that black pastrami is inherently better than, oh, whatever the goyim put on sandwiches. It’s even harder to explain what horseracing has to do with the whole thing. It’s not Jewishness, you understand, as most horseplayers aren’t Jewish. And it’s not even New York-ositiageness, because most horseplayers aren’t New Yorkers. But if my Best Reader makes it to eighteen without knowing how to read a Racing Form, I will feel as if I have somehow failed my father, and his culture.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.