• CURRENT NEWS & INFORMATION
  
• New Cosmic Team- The Dharma Roses (November 28)
  
• Body Parts @ Hand Tools- Personal Cosmic Game Report (November 24)
  
• O HOLY COW! The Poetry of Phil Rizzuto (November 21)
  
• Jack Pilot: Poetry Online (November 20)
  
• Muses @ Planets- Personal Cosmic Game Report (November 8)
  
• Islandia Instruments Replace Bookhouse Classifications (November 6)
  
• Henry Miller- New Bohemian G.M. (November 4)
  
• Anarchists Draft Mumia Abu-Jamal (November 2)
  
• Kerouac Archive Controversy- Litigation Update (November 1)
  
• October News (Archive)
  
• September News (Archive)
  

The Cosmic Baseball Association is pleased to announce the creation of a brand new cosmic baseball team, the DHARMA ROSES. The ROSES consist of interesting women associated in one way or another with the Beat Generation movement that flourished in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Beats have stereotypically been described as a boys club whose major writers, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs were all men (of interesting and complicated sexual identites.) It really wasn't until Joyce Glassman Johnson published her excellent memoir, Minor Characters in 1983 that a serious reexamination of the relationship between the sexes in the movement was undertaken. Carolyn Cassady's Off The Road and Brenda Knight's excellent resource, Women of the Beat Generation have added to the discussion.

What we have seen is that many of the women associated with the Beats, some well known and others relatively obscure, were articulating many of the ideas that feminism and the gay political movement brought into sharper focus in the 1960s and 1970s.

The ROSES are intimately connected with the DHARMA BEATS, a cosmic Overleague team. Several of the ROSES have played for the BEATS. Both teams are from Dharma, that most interesting place that spawns so much creative activity. The ROSES have been assigned to the cosmic Underleague and they will replace the deactivated Biblicals.

The DHARMA ROSES, consisting of writers, poets, painters, muses, wives, mothers and lovers is a small contribution to the greater recognition of some very important and creative individuals.

The Body Parts, playing without a Leg or an Arm, still found enough offensive muscle to overcome a 3-1 deficit and defeat the Hand Tools in a Personal Cosmic Game played on November 24.

The Parts hitters amassed eleven hits, including two homeruns and a triple.The Neck had a homerun and the triple, going 2-for-4 with an RBI. The Stomach, the game's MCP, contributed a single, double and homerun garnering 2 RBIs on a 3-for-4 outing. Hand the pitcher did a respectable job yielding three runs in nine innings with a walk and four strikeouts.

The Tools couldn't match the offensive push of the Parts. The Saw launched a three-run homerun in the second inning accounting for all of the Tools' run production. Aside from the Saw this was not a squad of power tools today.

After the game, Body Parts manager Vagina told reporters, "bring on the Electric Tools, we're ready for all comers."

Phil "The Scooter" Rizzuto, a New York Yankee secondbaseman for fifteen years and a longtime Yankee broadcaster, is recognized as a man with baseball poetry in his heart. O HOLY COW! is a book of Rizzuto's verse culled from tapes of his game broadcasts and edited by Tom Peyer, a comic book writer, and Hart Seely, a Syracuse-based journalist. The book, published by Ecco Press in Hopewell, New Jersey contains over ninety poems reflecting the Scooter's poetic baseball soul.

In the introduction to the book, Ray Blount, Jr. writes that "The Scooter's lyricism springs not from any imperative to advance literary tradition but from a half century of familiarity with baseball's various means of transmission..."

The CBA is pleased to publish online a small selection of the Scooter's baseball poetry.

Jack Pilot is a California-based poet with several published books of poetry. His early work of the 1970s and 1980s is "neo-Beat" obviously influenced by poets like Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima and Gregory Corso. His more recent work in the 1990s has become distinctly experimental as his "Poetry Online" selections available here at the CBA demonstrates.

Born in Colorado, Pilot has a Masters degree in Chemistry from the University of Chicago. After several years working for Proctor & Gamble in Ohio, he headed West claiming that the city of Cincinnati "isn't fit for man or beast...it's just a cultural wasteland littered with automatons." Mr. Pilot currently lives near Pismo Beach by the more inspiring Pacific Ocean.

Click Here for Jack Pilot's "Poetry Online"

In a contest between mythology and science, the Apollotown Muses played the Solarcity Planets in a cosmic baseball game of celestial proportions. Science won the game. The Nine Planets, despite a mediocre pitching performance from Mercury, seized on the Nine Muses' own pitching problems in the form of a complete loss of control by the Muse Calliope in the fourth inning. The Planets won a game that maybe neither team should have won.

The Muses have been mentioned in classical western literature at least since the time of Homer and Hesiod (8th century B.C.). Virtually every classical author has referred to the Muses including Pindar, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle and Ovid.

The last of the nine planets, Pluto, was accidentally discovered in 1930.

The CBA announced that the Bookhouse Classifications cosmic baseball team will be deactivated and replaced by the Islandia Instruments for the 1999 season

The Islandia Instruments are a new cosmic team consisting of a variety of musical instruments including the Saxophone, the Shakuhachi and the Synclavier. The team is managed by the Violin. The Instruments will compete in the Cosmic Underleague.

The Bookhouse Classifications were created last season and posted a mediocre 74-88 won-loss record. Based on the Dewey Decimal library cataloguing system, the Classifications did not draw many fans to their games.

Henry Miller, the long time field manager for the Paradise Pisces who lost his job in the recent Pisces shakeup because he wasn't born between February 19 and March 21 (see related news item) has accepted the General Manager's position with CBA's team of interesting writers, the Eden Bohemians, for the 1999 cosmic season. Miller replaces the retiring Jack London.

Henry Miller was born December 26, 1891 in New York City. He wrote some of the most provocative fiction of the 20th century. When looking for a man "whose passion rushes like lava through a chill intellectual world" the erotic diarist Anais Nin selected Miller. That was in real life. Unfortunately Miller and Nin's professional association at the CBA is over. In fact, Nin was the person most responsible for Miller's departure from the Pisces since it was her idea to restructure the winningest team of 1998. Not ironically, Nin has installed herself as the new Pisces field manager.

In such remarkable novels as The Tropic of Cancer, The Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring, and the Rosy Crucifixion, Miller claims that it is our sexual and erotic lives that offer the best potential for true human transformation. Erica Jong in her book about Miller, The Devil At Large, points out that for Miller sex is "one of the great revolutionary forces of our lives, a force that has the power to open our eyes and souls."

A fundamentally weak man dominated by strong and eclectic woman, we can expect Miller to seek out more women to add to the Eden Bohemians' roster. Despite female ownership (Simone de Beauvoir), the Bohemians have traditonally used mostly male cosmic baseball players. Miller has already indicated he would like to sign author and utility infielder Virginia Woolf. Also recently released by the Pisces, Woolf is another writer with interesting sexual ideas.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

The Armageddonia Anarchists, CBA's team of interesting anarchists, has drafted Mumia Abu-Jamal for its 1999 official team roster. Abu-Jamal is currently an outfielder playing in the Pennsylvania Death Row League.

In the early morning of Dec. 9, 1981, at 13th and Locust Streets in Philadelphia, Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook) was an unemployed radio talk show host earning a living driving a cab. According to the government, Abu-Jamal shot and killed Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. On July 3, 1982 after a contentious jury trial convicted Abu-Jamal of the premeditated murder of Faulkner, he was given a death sentence. Since that time Abu-Jamal has become for some an international symbol of resistance against racist culture elements in the United States. He has become an iconic hero for various political causes including the opponents of the death penalty. Abu-Jamal claims he is innocent of the charges and that the Philadelphia Police Department and other government entities have framed him.

The debate rages: is Mumia Abu-Jabal a political prisoner, a victim of a racist and death-penalty crazed country or is he just a cold-blooded cop-killer?

A number of attempts have been made to overturn the conviction. However, as recently as October 29, 1998 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld Abu-Jamal's conviction and sentence.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is expected to be the Anarchists' starting rightfielder.

Jack Kerouac Beat Leftfielder

On October 30 the New Mexico Supreme Court granted Gerald Nicosia's petition to hear his case in his attempt to overturn an earlier New Mexico Court of Appeals decision (see related news item) that granted the heirs of Jan Kerouac (Jack Kerouac's biological daughter) the right to dismiss a lawsuit in Florida initiated by Jan Kerouac in May 1994.

It is a complicated tale but the controversy relates to the status of the Jack Kerouac literary estate which is now worth an estimated $10 million dollars. When Kerouac died in 1969 in Florida he left his estate (valued then at less than $100) to his mother, Gabrielle ("Memere"). When Gabrielle died in 1973 she left her estate to Stella Sampas. Stella was Jack's third wife. When Stella died in 1990 she left her estate, which now included Kerouac's literary archives, to her family. Today, John Sampas, Stella's brother, is the effective executor of the Kerouac estate and its literary archives.

Nicosia, author of a biography of Jack Kerouac, Memory Babe, assisted Jan Kerouac in her attempt to prove that Gabrielle's signature on her will was forged thus placing ownership of the estate in doubt. The litigation in Florida, if it proceeds, will decide that issue. Jan Kerouac died in 1996 in New Mexico while the Florida litigation was still pending.

The question for the New Mexico legal system to determine is whether or not Nicosia has the right to continue the Florida litigation on behalf of Jan Kerouac. The Sampas family, obviously, and Jan Kerouac's heirs, including her ex-husband John Lash, not so obviously, do not want the Florida litigation to proceed.

CBA News & Information Plate- November 1998 Archive
URL http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/1198news.html
Archived: December 1, 1998
Copyright © 1998 by the Cosmic Baseball Association

Email: editor@cosmicbaseball.com

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