Why this Super Bowl stings a bit

I'm from northeast Ohio and grew up rooting for the Browns. When I moved to Maryland near Baltimore in 2004, I didn't really embrace the Ravens, because, as anyone who knows their football history is aware of, when the Browns closed up shop in Cleveland in 1995, they moved to Baltimore. Then, using the players and organization they took with them, they promptly won a Super Bowl in 2001, the same Super Bowl that had eluded the Browns and continues to elude them to this day. 

When I watch football now, I try very hard not to root for teams. I want to enjoy the game with perfect equanimity, appreciating greatness wherever it shows. To help me achieve this emotional detachment, if I find myself thinking I might root for one team during a game, I immediately place a bet for the other team to win. This usually enables me to find some level of calm.

During the AFC Championship game a few weeks ago, though, I was not able to keep calm. Even when I placed a bet on the Chiefs, I couldn't keep from rooting for the Ravens. No, it did not have to do with Taylor Swift hatred, although I do wonder why the universe thinks it necessary to heap so much good fortune on one person. It was because I was hoping a victory by the Ravens would put to rest a sneakily racist attitude still living among some fans.

For a very long time, there were no Black quarterbacks. Open and undisguised racism was a big part of it. Coaches didn't think Black players were smart enough to be quarterbacks. They thought they were athletic enough to be running backs or wide receivers or linemen, but not quarterbacks. Last year's Super Bowl, when two Black quarterbacks faced off against each other, was a huge moment for the game. But there is still sneakily racist discourse about Black quarterbacks, especially ones who are also athletic. Among fans I speak to or read, I continue to see and hear what I take to be coded racist language, particularly when it comes to the Ravens' quarterback, Lamar Jackson. This language will sound something like this:

A: Mobile quarterbacks can win some games, but they'll never win a Super Bowl.

B: Wasn't John Elway pretty mobile? And Steve Young? 

A: Yeah, but they were different. They were pass-first and then they ran when they had to.

B: Young played a long time. Elway played a long time. They both had a lot of years when they didn't win a Super Bowl. Won't Jackson likely eventually get one, too?

A: No, because he's just not that good. 

B: Not good how? His teams put up tons of points.

A: But not in the playoffs.

B: Isn't it just hard to win playoff games against good teams?

A: But the greats do it, and he's not that great. He can run, but Super Bowl quarterbacks stand in the pocket and make throws in crunch time. 

When I hear this kind of bullshit from white fans, I feel like they're offering me a shibboleth, because they think that as a white person, I might want to join them in their coded horseshit. It makes me angry that anyone thinks I want to be a part of their shenanigans. 

Unlike Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, last year's winning Super Bowl quarterback, who is part white, Jackson does not give a great interview. He is not especially handsome or dynamic or magnetic. He's just a great football player. Vaguely racist fans, in their illogical worldview, don't see Mahomes as a violation of their rule that athletic, Black quarterbacks can't also be smart and efficient throwing the ball in the pocket. Jackson would have been.

Jackson has had some great years, but never much playoff success. This year was his best year, and it had a lot to do with having an offensive coordinator who understood how to use him as a weapon. I think that often, when athletic quarterbacks have struggled, it's been because so few coordinators understand how to use them. 

The Ravens had a great chance. They were the best team in the league all year, they had home-field advantage, and they were relatively healthy. They just picked a lousy time to play their worst game of the year. 

I'm not a football expert, but I think you can look at a few reasons why they lost. The Chiefs do have a very good defense, and their defensive coordinator came up with some clever tricks to keep the Ravens off-balance. The Ravens also probably didn't have a great game plan. A week after the Chiefs gave up a ton of running yard to the Bills, the Ravens, who were the best running team in the league, didn't really run the ball much. There was also some bad luck, like a fumble right at the goal line. 

The Ravens also probably suffered from the wrong mindset, playing not to lose rather than to win. That's the fault of everyone, not just Jackson. Jackson didn't play a great game. Brady, Manning, Mahomes, and the other greats have a lot of playoff wins to their name when they also didn't play great, but they played well enough to win. Jackson very nearly did that, gutting out a tough win under tough circumstances. Football is cruel. It's why I try not to root for teams. 

I did root in that game, just because I wanted a very stupid racist trope to get another kick in the pants. It'll have to wait until next year, though. I'm sure the NFL is thrilled to have a Taylor Swift extravaganza for its big night, and I'm sure ratings will be through the roof. The Ravens will be kicking themselves, although they shouldn't be. Football teams make adjustments throughout the year. They find weaknesses in other teams and shore up their own. The Chiefs benefitted from a bad spell in the middle of the season when other teams showed them where they were weak. They fixed the problem just in time to make a good run in the playoffs. The Ravens, unfortunately, didn't have anyone to show them where they were weak until that AFC Championship Game. 

I can't imagine how athletes pick themselves up emotionally from losses like that, where the job in front of them now is to go play another entire season well enough to get back where they were and redeem themselves. It must seem so daunting. But I hope they do it. Just, you know, not enough that I'm going to root for them. 

Have I been a low-key CNF guy all along?

Despair has its advantages. I know I've said a dozen times in the last ten years that I was giving up writing fiction, but this current funk feels more permanent, in proportion to the acuteness of the despair. At the very least, I needed a break, so for the time being, I've moved on from reading contemporary literary fiction. Not knowing what to read instead, I've been kind of choosing things at random. One recent book I read was the 2023 Best American Essays collection, edited by Vivian Gornick. It says "essays," but I think the book is filled with what might be more accurately called "creative non-fiction." Some of the entries are essays, in the sense that they're sustained discourse or argument about a subject or theme. But many are more short memoir.

Whether they were essay or memoir, I found myself much more engaged and interested in the anthology than I have been in perhaps any volume of Best American Short Stories. I only found myself not generally enthralled with two of the entries. Maybe this is simply because it's new to me. People who spend a lot of time with one type of literature--like, say, the short stories that show up in literary magazines--tend to get a little fastidious. When "Cat Person" became a big sensation, the strongest backlash against it was from the literary fiction community, for whom it was just one story among many, and not the best example. Ordinary readers seemed to love it, or at least hate it in a way where they were interested in it. So maybe I just don't know enough about what contemporary CNF looks like to find the faults in this collection. 

I've had some exposure to CNF, of course, but never read one essay after another the way I did for the book. It's strange to say, but I found reading non-fiction, which you'd think of as dryer and more like work than reading stories, to be far less taxing than reading fiction. Reading it was closer to pleasure than I've felt in a long time. More than this being a result of my lack of exposure to CNF, I think I might have been discovering, this late in the game, that I've really got more of a CNF mind than a fictional one. 

I don't mind the occasional slant-wise telling of the truth, but maybe at heart, I'm kind of a pragmatic guy who wants you to just give it to me plain. Even in reading fiction all these years, I think the greatest pleasure I've gotten in it has been when I've felt I was able to take a work of fiction and then re-cast it into an essay analyzing the fiction in plain language. I've valued the slant truth in no small part for the opportunity it's given me to try to straighten it back out. 

Even when writing my own fiction, I think I've tended to try to write the kinds of stories that lend themselves to the very kind of analysis I like to do. That contrasts with how a lot of fiction writers say they write. They tend to be more like method actors, who try to treat their characters like real people and then become them. I always found this way of talking about one's characters, like what they did "surprised" you, to be a little annoying and artificial. There was an episode of "Only Murders in the Building" this most recent season in which Matthew Broderick plays himself, only the version of himself is so obsessed with getting to the core of his character, it eventually drives his director, Oliver, to fire him. That's what a lot of fiction writers sound like to me. 

I've toyed with trying CNF over the years, but one major hurdle has stopped me. I still don't really understand the line between CNF and, say, a very good editorial. Google's first offered answer to the question seems to me more or less in the right ballpark. It suggests that compared to traditional essays, CNF is more likely to emphasize scene, character development, narrative, and subjectivity. Concerning subjectivity, it suggests that: "In traditional nonfiction, the writer keeps a distance from the subject. But in creative nonfiction, the writer’s perspective, emotions, and insights can be part of the story. This is particularly true of personal essays, which are often written from a first-person point of view."

Okay, so that would explain why sometimes, I've read CNF and not realized it wasn't a short story until the end. To judge by the 2023 anthology, some CNF is nothing but a personal story without any real reflection on how it might fit into a larger theme in the world. "Any Kind of Leaving" by Jillian Barnett would be one example. Some begin as memoir but then transition into thoughts on how the personal fits into the political. For example, "Care Credit" by Angelique Stevens begins with the author's own struggles with poverty, with her poor dental health as the leading symbol of that poverty, then occasionally moves into thoughts about American health care in general. Still other entries were very like traditional essay, with only small amounts of narrative or personal experience thrown in. "Gender: A Melee" by Laura Kipnis could have appeared in Mother Jones or, if it was feeling particularly frisky that day, The Atlantic, and not seemed out of place. "Life and Story" by Sigrid Nunez is more "essay about the literature on why writers write with occasional personal information" than it is grounded in the personal with occasional references to the world. "An Archaeological Inquest" by Phillip Lopate begins with a story of someone giving him an old literary review, but the essay is entirely an analysis of the old review and an assessment of how literary culture has since changed. 

Other than the literary analysis I do on this blog, I think a lot of what I write on here could be considered CNF. But if so, it leans toward the kind of CNF where it's "essay with occasional personal bits" rather than the other kind, and I think the other kind is a lot more prevalent and likely to be published among journals that publish CNF. I think editors are unlikely to want much of what I write. One of the essays in the anthology this year was "Dreamers Awaken" by Scott Spencer, a memoir-short about a baby boomer who was once asked to play John Henry in blackface for a school concert. It's a great read, but at the end, it kind of intentionally avoids drawing conclusions about its meaning in the larger context of society. He is standing with a black school official he tried to apologize to, with her seeming to refuse to understand the meaning of his apology. "We were in our own little impromptu pageant, folktales from the future, and we were waiting for the invisible proctor to tell us in a whisper, or perhaps with some urgency, what to say next." It's perfect for the story, but I tend to write stuff that's more like "Here's how to solve racism" and then I use a few personal experiences to make my point. That seems likely to get the editor's "not for us" generic rejection letter. 

I started this blog as a way to work through the frustrations of trying to figure out writing, but also, since I was sure I would figure them out, to be a record in the future of how I had done so. It would be there to encourage others struggling along the same path. See how much trouble Jake had? But he got through it, and so will you. Now that I've despaired of ever really succeeding, I've often thought of just making this blog my whole writing project. 

Of course, that presents me with a problem of presentation. It seems like a successful blog (if such things still exist in a world with TikTok) would need to have content more or less centered on a coherent, central theme. Writing about literary fiction in some sense gave me such a theme. Readers might tolerate an occasional digression into "Here's how to solve racism," but only if I'm normally sticking to one kind of topic. "Jake's brilliant thoughts on sundry things" can't be the main draw of the blog. Not if I want people to read it, which I do.

I guess I could change this to a blog that writes about CNF. I could write a lot of analysis of CNF, the same as I've done for fiction, and then occasionally mix it up with my own CNF. But CNF, I think, doesn't really lend itself to the kind of analysis I've been doing for fiction. Fiction isn't making an argument in a straightforward way. It needs analysis in order for ordinary human brains to see more in them than the surface story. But CNF is sort of already analyzed. Especially in the more essay-like forms of CNF, what it has to say, it has already said in more or less plain terms. I could write personal responses to CNF pieces, but for the most part, there wouldn't be a lot to break down. 

Ceasing to write altogether isn't an option for me. Responding to the world with words is like breathing. Despair will stop me from submitting stories to the journals who've rejected me a million times, but it won't keep me from writing. Not for good. As many doubts as I have about being as good as I wish I were, I also feel pretty certain I'm a better writer than many people who make a living doing it, so I feel like I deserve some sort of platform. Or if not deserve, at least it's not an abomination. 

Whatever form my writing takes from here, I'm glad I chose to spend some time with CNF, however I've felt in the past about the uncertainty of what it is. I felt things reading I haven't felt in a long time, and in the end, I realized I still have a lot more I want to say myself.