by Ben Dolnick

As I’ve been watching the NBA playoffs this spring, I’ve reached an unhappy milestone: I’m now old enough to dread learning the birthdates of professional athletes.

When I was a kid, the only pertinent piece of data about a player was his height. That Spud Webb could dunk despite being 5′ 7″; that Michael Jordan was a palindromic, Greek-God-like 6’ 6″; these were the things that seemed to me worth knowing. I would no more have thought of the age of a basketball player than I would have thought of the age of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

But when I watch games now, a message flashes across my mind periodically like a Tornado Alert at the bottom of the screen: these men are barely old enough to drink.

NBA rosters, full as they are of people born in 1988, have become my personal flowers of the field, my reminders that all men shall perish. The fact that Chris Webber, who looked so heartbreakingly like a thirteen-year-old when he called that phantom timeout at Michigan, now sits behind a desk at halftime, joking with Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith like an old man on a boardwalk, is enough to make me mute the McDonald’s talking lemon ad and think.

And what I find myself thinking, most of the time, is: I’m not as young as I used to be. Twenty-eight, to my surprise, is turning out to be one of those pivot-point ages, a time for stocktaking and distance-measuring. Slumped on my couch, shaking my head at missed three-second calls, I find myself feeling like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused: I keep getting older, and they keep staying the same age. The youngest players on the court, coltish and uncertain, are always eighteen; the oldest, hobbled and embarrassed-looking, are always thirty-something. And now, like a slowly cruising Chevelle, I find myself passing from the first category into the second.

Which isn’t, of course, to say that I harbor the slightest fantasy of playing basketball. You don’t have to live by your vertical leap to be haunted by the spectacle of Juwan Howard lumbering around the court at thirty-eight. Basketball careers, with their raspberry-like shelf lives, are our secret fears, as we while away our early adulthoods in New York, made actual. That you can be washed up in your twenties. That your thirties are for bitterness and decline. That by forty you become your own living ghost.

This gloomy script has all the structure of an NBA season. Instead of All-Rookie teams, we have 20 Under 40 lists and Young Director Festivals and Best New Artist awards. Instead of being cut from the playoff roster, we have the moment when you realize that you no longer get carded; or that whole regions of Internet activity are not only unfamiliar to you but unfathomable; or that you’ve never heard of the host or the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”

The most unmistakable of these signs, for me, has been that I’ve finally come to understand, after years of seeing things indignantly from the other side, just how hard it is to take seriously people who are younger than you. A few years ago, when Jay McInerney wrote in the Times Book Review about a friend of his who insists that authors in their twenties have nothing to say, I harumphed. This felt to me, at twenty-three, abuzz with the conviction that I would soon have a home in the literary firmament, like being ushered toward the kids’ table. What transparent jealousy on the part of this unnamed friend! What narrow-minded nonsense!

And yet. I open the Book Review now and see a new novel by a twenty-three-year-old and I think: eh. I read on Pitchfork that a band of twenty-year-olds from New Jersey has made an important debut album and I think: no they haven’t.

And it’s my own twenty-year-old self that I’m thinking of. I look back at myself in college, demanding to be taken seriously as I hold forth on Middle Eastern politics or experimental film, and I think that I must have known (didn’t I?) that I was at some basic level full of it, that most of my opinions were so fresh from the store that they still had tags dangling from them. And so now, when most of my opinions have started to show signs of being tattered and ketchup-stained, I see these new young people coming along, full of their terrifying self-assurance, and I think, with desperation: They don’t mean it! They haven’t lived enough yet! Just wait!

I’m not proud of this shift in my way of thinking. I know full well that once you’ve started down the path of condescending to your earlier self, there’s no end to it. Undoubtedly I’ll look back one day on the self who wrote this essay and think, Twenty-eight years old?! You knew nothing about aging! Nothing! And whatever age I happen to be when I first have that thought (thirty-three, forty-two) I can rest assured that there will be a self who looks back on that self and thinks that he knew nothing about aging, that he was young, all things considered, and that not until you’re seventy-five can you really begin to understand. And so on and so on. I will always feel old, because I will always be the oldest that I have ever been.

But back to basketball, which I do hope eventually to be able to watch without sinking quite so deep into an autumnal funk. At that point maybe I’ll see Derrick Rose merely as a brilliant scorer, rather than as a TWENTY-TWO YEAR OLD NOT EVEN AWARE OF HOW SOON HE’LL BE EARTHBOUND. And Shaquille O’Neal will be one of the greatest centers ever to play, rather than a THIRTY-NINE YEAR-OLD REMINDER OF DEATH.

But until then, some last thoughts from this wilted cherry-blossom of a playoff season:

We are all of us subject to betrayal by our bodies, to softening, to failure to fulfill our promise. We may wake up and realize that the primes of our lives took place behind our own backs. We, who often still feel like children, may soon be watching basketball with our own children, and we will point at the coach on the sideline, the heavy man in the ill-fitting suit, and we’ll say, “He used to be a really good shooting guard! I think he was on the Sonics!” And our children will say, “Who are the Sonics?”

Ben Dolnick lives in New York. His new novel, You Know Who You Are, has gotten great reviews, despite the author’s age.

Man, remember when everyone was soiling their undergarments over the possibility that Sarah Palin might become president? These days she’s getting compared to Gary Hart. And not the ’84 model. It’s a funny old world.

“Traditional Generation X marketing was built on big claims of what the product and brand could do for you but people don’t believe that anymore. If you draw attention to the fact that an advertisement is an advertisement, it becomes disarming and you can communicate what you want.”
 — Congratulations, Gen X-ers! You have survived long enough that you are now the prime demographic target for Dairy Queen! And they are totally hip to your anti-advertising stance!

“While healthy people expect the future to be slightly better than it ends up being, people with severe depression tend to be pessimistically biased: they expect things to be worse than they end up being. People with mild depression are relatively accurate when predicting future events. They see the world as it is. In other words, in the absence of a neural mechanism that generates unrealistic optimism, it is possible all humans would be mildly depressed.”

Eight Great Commercials With Writers As Pitchmen

by Sean Manning

A recent New York Times Book Review essay on author brand-building cited Ernest Hemingway’s and John Steinbeck’s stints as a spokespersons for Ballantine Ale. (Not mentioned was The Poseidon Adventure author Paul Gallico, who appeared in the same series of print ads for the beer.) Of course, they weren’t the first or last authors to shill. Mark Twain’s name and likeness were used (not always with his permission) to sell everything from shirt collars to passenger trains. Émile Zola, H.G. Wells, Alexandre Dumas, Henrik Ibsen and Jules Verne all provided testimonials for the cocaine-infused French elixir Vin Mariani. More than a century later, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac plugged Gap khakis — in Kerouac’s case, posthumously. A couple years after his death, Hunter S. Thompson was co-opted by Converse.

So why then are contemporary authors so utterly neglected by Madison Avenue? Sure, there’s John Hodgman and Apple. But where’s the Ray-Ban campaign featuring Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz and Gary Shteyngart? The Best Buy commercial in which Jennifer Egan receives a visit from the Geek Squad? The Planters endorsement deal for Mr. Peanut author Adam Ross? Most puzzling is authors’ absence from e-Reader commercials. Of the big four device-makers — Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Sony — only the last has used an author in a TV spot. (While various authors, including Toni Morrison, Michael Lewis and James Patterson, have done mini-infomercials for Kindle, these appear only on Amazon.com.)

In case today’s Sterling Coopers need still further evidence of authors’ promotional skills, here are some other memorable examples.

1. Mickey Spillane for Miller Lite. During the 1970s and ’80s, the legendary crime novelist appeared in more than a hundred promos for the “great taste, less filling” beer:

2. Kurt Vonnegut for Discover:

3. George Plimpton for Intellivision. The most ubiquitous modern author-spokesperson, The Paris Review patriarch lent his name to Saab, Pop Secret popcorn, Carlsburg beer, Dry Dock Savings Bank and even a Hamptons pool company. But his most indelible pitches were for this eighties’ home video game system:

4. Stephen King for American Express:

5. Stephen King for ESPN:

6. William S. Burroughs for Nike:

7. F. Scott Fitzgerald for Calvin Klein. One of a series of David Lynch-directed commercials for the Obsession fragrance that also featured passages by Ernest Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence. And yes, that’s a young Benicio Del Toro and Heather Graham:

8. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal for Tyde. In this SCTV spoof, Eugene Levy and Martin Short send up one of literature’s most famous feuds:

Sean Manning is the author of the memoir The Things That Need Doing and editor of several nonfiction anthologies, most recently Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book.

“As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells. Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for ‘illegally petitioning’ the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.”

Well, the most terrible story in the world has reached its conclusion by verdict. “The jury convicted both officers of official misconduct for entering the woman’s apartment, but found them not guilty of all other charges, including burglary and falsifying business records.” So…. that’s that. (Although the civil case will proceed.)

I’m sure Dominique Strauss-Kahn is breathing easier this morning.

We presume it’ll be “mildly expensive” (not like NetJets expensive!) but starting today, the Standard Hotel plane is available for public bookings! It’s an eight-seater Cessna water plane, and they’re doing a 300-mile range. In case you’re aboard and scared of dying, reasonably, the airplane’s stall speed is 106 km/h, so keep one eye on your coke and another on the pilot’s dials and you’ll be fine.

“A retired dentist suffered a broken leg after driving his quad bike into a tree while being attacked by a goose.”

Each year for as long as I can remember, I’ve been invited to go to Israel for free, to see the country: the discos of Haifa! The towers of Tel Aviv! The horrible, horrible weather! Sometimes this solicitation comes from the government or the foreign ministry or its tourist bureau; sometimes from various nonprofits, or sometimes from the Emergency Committee for Israel. It makes a lot of sense, of course: you go over, you see some beautiful countryside, you meet some nice people — and suddenly you feel personally interested and even invested (if you aren’t already) in the future of Israel. And then you’re all like: Palestine? What Palestine? So this year’s solicitation comes today from an outfit called Stand With Us, which has produced some nice anti-flotilla propaganda. (Remember last year? When Israeli soldiers boarded aid boats bound for Gaza and killed nine passengers, inflaming Turkey-Israel tensions?) They also opposed the Tony Kushner honorary degree at CUNY recently, and are “disappointed” by Obama’s recent speech on Israel. They’ve also published a pamphlet called “The Nazi Roots of Middle Eastern Anti-Semitism.” And they run a website called Librarians4Fairness! And many others! What I can’t find anywhere, which is odd for a nonprofit based in Los Angeles, is an annual report.

But hey.

This is how the solicitation goes. Usually they’re a little more formal, when they come from the state’s agencies directly. This one’s personalized… ish!

My Name is [REDACTED], I’m a student at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa Israel.

I’m a big fan of your blog http://www.theawl.com/ and I would like a few minutes of your time to tell you about the “Once in a lifetime 2.0” project.

My Fellow students and I are representing the StandWithUs fellowship, a public diplomacy leadership program that trains selected students to advocate Israel.

StandWithUs is a non-profit organization which ensures that Israel is accurately portrayed and justly represented on college campuses, in the media, and in communities around the world. http://www.standwithus.co.il/ .

As a part of this project I would like to offer a once in a life time opportunity for famous bloggers and influential media people, like yourself, to experience the real Israel in a ten day trip that would take place on August 21st, 2011 to the Holy Land! All expenses paid!

Our Visitors will experience the reality of being an Israeli, whether it’s through cultural diversity, exquisite food, technology and progress, security and the holy sites that only Israel can offer.
All you have to do is fill out the attached form and agree to document your trip to the “Jewel of the Middle east”- Israel on your blog.

Please find attached our project one pager, that will be able to explain more about us and our project!

Also please check out our Facebook page-
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Once-in-A-Lifetime-20/155399707857622
our website:
http://www.onceinalifetime.org.il

We are looking forward to hearing from you, and we will be happy to show you around Israel, from the Golan Heights in the north through Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem to the Dead Sea.

But do we get to see the checkpoints???

Well I do love free trips! The application is really easy! They just want to know a few things.

What do you know and what have you heard about Israel? :

What is your personal opinion about what you heard? :

Why are you interested in joining us for the “Once in A Lifetime 2.0” experience? :
In a few words tell us about yourself and about your blog/activity:

What’s most interesting to me is: who goes on these trips? I do need a vacation….