By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
Times Square and Other Stories, by William Baer (Able Muse Press: San Jose, CA, 2015), 202 pp. Available at www.ablemusepress.com.
A collection of masterfully crafted, fascinating stories that always pique the reader’s curiosity by presenting ironies, dilemmas, or questions that seem unanswerable or inexplicable, this volume presents a host of tales on a myriad of topics — from art to film to baseball to academic mills to love stories to creative writing degrees to plagiarism and to a miraculous escape from Communist police.
In “Outline,” a story about an aspiring author schooled in creative writing courses who lacks the storyteller’s ability to devise an intriguing plot, the writer knows the art which he cannot put into practice, something he learned from Aristotle: “The ending should be unexpected but not unbelievable.”
This statement informs all the stories in this delightful collection. It is impossible to foresee the conclusion of the tale, but the endings are all probable and thought-provoking. Unlike the author in the story who cannot invent a plot of human interest, William Baer has mastered the craft of a good storyteller.
For instance, the story on baseball entitled “Screwball” portrays Ricky Kight, a pitcher with the extraordinary record of 19-0 who suffers a career-ending accident and then suddenly dies in an automobile accident.
However, prior to his great performance of 19 wins, Ricky, struggling in the minor leagues and performing only “less-than-mediocre in his first crack at the bigs,” did not have the marks of a premier major league pitcher. Just when it appears his short-term career in professional baseball has ended, he goes to spring training camp and impresses everyone by striking out the first 16 batters, then during the season earning the title of “ace of the staff,” and then nearly achieving a glorious season record of 24-0. No one has any idea of the sudden transformation of an average pitcher to one of the best in the major leagues.
Somehow the narrative that his new training regimen and new pitching coach explain the dramatic change does not persuade the baseball coaches, as people begin to speculate about “the secret.” The secret happens to be a surgery performed by a physician-friend courting Ricky’s sister, an operation that gives Ricky a new pitching motion and a strange pitch known as a screwball — “Ricky’s undeniably peculiar three-quarters sidearm, almost herky-jerky motion in both the acceleration phase and his follow through.”
The physician learned of the secret from a letter written to Ricky by a fan from Kentucky who remembered a pitching sensation by the name of Harvey Hopkins who injured his pitching arm in a combine accident and needed surgery. The operation forced him to pitch with a new motion and delivery that resulted in an un-hittable screwball. Ricky’s similar surgery explained his astounding success.
The physician explains, “I put six breaks in Ricky’s arm, and it was a fairly easy operation, and he recovered quickly.” Whether this surgery is morally justifiable (“Athletes have operations all the time”) or indefensible (surgery is meant to repair, not mutilate) poses an intriguing moral question in the story.
In “Diploma Mill,” Shannon Moore, a professor of education who has earned a prestigious reputation for exposing the academic mills who grant degrees without rigorous requirements or high standards, investigates a program entitled Athens University that she suspects to be a fraud and sham.
In the process of checking the validity of the degree and education offered by the non-traditional school, the distinguished professor discovers the shallowness of her formal education — a professor of education who has never read Rousseau’s Emile or Plato’s The Republic.
She finds it embarrassing to learn that a student in the Athens program has read more of the Classics and great books than she, the professor with a doctorate in education and an expert on bona fide degrees. She suspects that a degree from this institution is bogus because “it had most of the typical characteristics of the American diploma mill: no classes, no facilities, and no library.”
To validate her suspicions and continue her investigation, Shannon enrolls in the program and receives a challenging reading list that includes selections from the Old Testament, Homer, Greek tragedy, Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, Marcus Aurelius, and St. Augustine — all works her undergraduate and graduate degrees never required students to read. Ironically, the professor of education fails the test on these books a first and second time.
While exposing the sham of diploma mills, Shannon confronts the ignorance of her own mind and her inferior education. She confronts also the hard truths about the colleges she regards as distinguished institutions of higher learning in an article written by a deceased colleague.
He condemns these colleges that Shannon views as the paradigm of intellectual excellence for “inadequate writing skills competency, exorbitant tuitions, grade inflation, exploitation of athletes, abuse of minority students through preferential placing/mismatching, and much more.”
These glorified colleges have replaced the great books of Western civilization with “peripheral studies” that lack rigor and content. Ironically, the academic mill she was presumably about to indict for fraud had taught her more in a few months than the eight years she spent earning her degrees.
Of all the twists and turns a plot can take, Shannon finally discovers that the director of the University of Athens non-traditional program of studies is the deceased former colleague whose articles on the decadence of the American university made her reconsider her career and agenda.
In a story about a writer who studies writing but cannot write, who knows all the methods incorporated in good stories but cannot apply them to his own work, Eric — lost in the realms of abstract theory — overlooks the obvious and self-evident.
He has all the material for a good story before him which the title “Outline” suggests, all based on an actual experience before his own eyes that he fails to imagine in the form of a story. Frustrated, Eric’s sister Jane can no longer suppress the truth and bluntly tells her brother, “I think you can’t write because of those damned schools. I think those writing classes destroyed your creativity — and imagination.”
As Eric ponders his life and his romantic relationship with Irene, a woman his mother does not approve of, he examines all the letters and memorabilia from their past, only to encounter an unopened letter with the words, “Here’s an outline for the writer who can’t write.”
What his sister Jane and girlfriend Irene have both independently said to Eric teaches him the simple rudiments his professors overlooked in their preoccupation with plot, setting, description, and dialogue: He has no outline, no plot, even though the real life around him is filled with the suspense and mystery that form the basis for a good plot. Eric’s life, Irene’s story, and their romance are waiting to be told while Eric acts oblivious to the material before him.
Jane tells him the plain truth that Irene was communicating: “Write up this story. It might not be Oedipus Rex, but at least it’s a start.”
Like the professor of education who needs to be educated and the writer who cannot write, characters in “Disumbrationism” (some avant-garde school of art) depict artists who cannot see or paint and pseudo-intellectuals who imagine themselves to be connoisseurs of fraudulent art, pictures that were not only frauds but “frauds of frauds” appearing in famous galleries.
This corruption repudiates the noble purpose of great art known in the past as “the sublime” or the splendor of the form Aquinas called claritas — ideals that no longer inspire art.
Instead of uplifting the soul, modern art has renounced the transcendent realities of the true, the good, and the beautiful and lowered standards to fill galleries with “self-indulgent exercises in pretension” and “repulsive self-exposure.”
Great art has degenerated to forgery, and: “They’ve abandoned all care for the beautiful,” says a woman who slashes one of these paintings with a knife in protest at the bastardization of dishonest art posing as high style as forgers, curators, art critics, and collectors imagine the worthless works of art to be classic masterpieces.
A Pleasure To Read
These stories offer a sampling of the art of William’s Baer’s craft. He finds plots and stories everywhere that depict the human condition in all its mystery, intrigue, irony, folly, chicanery, pretentiousness, pomposity, and simple wisdom. The stories always move forward to a discovery of the hard truths that are often conveniently shelved, rationalized, or denied — but only for so long.
The secret of the pitcher who threw the screwball does not remain a secret forever. The professor of education must learn sooner or later that she is not qualified to be an expert on education. The writer who cannot write can invent no more excuses for his inability to compose when a real plot is thickening before his own eyes and in his own life. And the so-called achievements of modern art only deserve to be ruined with a knife to protest the grand hoax.
These stories are a pleasure to read, mysteries to solve with the mind of a detective, and keen insights into much of the fraud and sham in art, film, universities, and literature that pose as culture and education.
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