What more can you ask of life? George Whitman was a great man and lived a great life. I am better for having known him. Thank you, George.

George Whitman, December 12, 1913 – December 14, 2011.

The Folio awards, which give Eddies for editorial content and Ozzies for graphic design, are the largest and most all-encompassing magazine awards in the United States. Big names participate and this year magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, Utne Reader, and Playboy all won gold medals. However, to be absolutely honest, this remains the second-tier magazine award ceremony in the United States, as the National Magazine Awards curated by the American Society of Magazine Editors are by far the most prestigious. Personally, I liken it to the difference between winning the Champions League and the Europa League. Not that this diminishes my pleasure. As the players of Atlético Madrid can attest, all victories are to be savored.

Of course, I would be utterly remiss if I didn’t say that the only reason this gold medal came about was the brilliance of my editor James Geary. It is he, with his ever-curious mind, who assigns my subjects and gives me incredible leeway in my handling of them. James is also among the world’s leading authorities on both aphorisms and metaphors, so give his website a visit or, even better, buy his astoundingly interesting book I is the Other.

Needless to say, if you haven’t yet read the article, please do. You can find it *here*.

And now, I sit back and await gilded trinkets.

You can learn more about the edition *here*.

So, under this new philosophy, this fan strike seems both ridiculous and counter-productive to me. It’s like your children start having trouble at school and you decide to stop talking to them to teach them a lesson. Wouldn’t it be better to invest more love and energy? To sit down with them, encourage them, urge them to keep their head high during this dark period? And shouldn’t that be our approach with our sports teams? Instead of booing or wearing paper bags on heads or refusing to applaud, shouldn’t we cheer all the louder during the bad times, in hopes of propelling the team out of the muck?

Now, as readers of this space know, I spent three years of my life working on When the Guillotine Fell, a book that examined both the last execution in France and the history of the death penalty. In fact, I was so caught up in the subject that I also translated Robert Badinter’s L’Abolition, a memoir of his fight to abolish the death penalty.

As part of the anniversary brouhaha, I’ve had a few calls from journalists. Notably, I appeared on camera in a documentary about the Hamida Djandoubi case that was put together by Kilaohm Productions and will be broadcast on October 9th on the Planet Justice channel.

Now, there’s a curious story behind this documentary. The author, Jean-Yves Le Naour, ended up writing a quickie book (six weeks!) about the case in order to capitalize on the media frenzy that he anticipated would accompany the anniversary. And, sure enough, he got a fair amount of press out of it, press that might have otherwise gone to me. Was I perturbed? Not really. I went to the plate with this book in 2008 and my performance greatly resembled that of the Boston Red Sox this past September. I’ve put my ambitions to bed with this book.

Besides, I did get one really juicy hit. VSD (for Vendredi, Samedi, Dimanche) is a juicy glossy tabloid, kind of a low-market Paris-Match. And they proclaimed my book the ‘reference’ on the case. A little tabloid love goes a long way.

(If you want to read the article, click on the image and then click again to get a decent font size.)

To be honest, all though I am tremendously pleased and all affirmation does the creative soul good, I find the whole thing rather curious. On one hand, the awards do attract big name competitors: Playboy, People, Sports Illustrated, and Entertainment Weekly are among the magazines short-listed for various prizes. Yet in my category – Single Article, News/Commentary – the other finalists are city magazines from Newark, New Jersey and Dallas, Texas.

This seems odd. Shouldn’t all American magazine awards, especially the essay categories, be dominated by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, GQ, and the rest of the pantheon? Where are the big players? Or is this like the Carling Cup in English football, a secondary competition that titans like Chelsea and Manchester United tend to neglect? I know, I know, gift horses and mouthes. But if anybody knows the real story behind these awards, drop me a line.

(If you haven’t read the essay, click on the cover below … )

In this scene from The Baby’s Catalogue by Janet and Allan Ahlberg, a young girl brings her heavy-lidded father coffee in the morning. When I saw this, I thought, ‘Hey! That’s me and my daughter Santoline! Art is imitating my life!’ But then, as the days passed, I instinctively switched to anti-mimetic mode and lolled in bed a little longer, awaiting my coffee-bearing loin fruit, all guilt wiped away by the fact that this sort of sloth was acceptable according to popular children’s literature.

Now, if I am ever chided for my indolence, I need only quote from Oscar Wilde’s famous anti-mimetic essay The Decay of Lying: ”the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression … Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy.” You see honey, I’m not a lazy oaf; I’m simply realizing my artistic expression.

( I can still name the starting lineup of my favorite all-time team: Gary Carter behind the plate, Warren Cromartie at first, Rodney Scott at second, Chris Spier at short, Larry Parrish at third, and an outfield of Tim Raines, Ellis Valentine, and Andre Dawson, with Steve Rogers on the mound and Bill Lee warming up in the bullpen. And I swear I didn’t check that on the Internet and I may have spelled Chris Spier wrong because I refuse to confirm online what is seared in my heart.)

Oddly, despite decades of following sports, it feels like I haven’t actually improved as a sports fan. As a child, when Rick Monday hit the home run that knocked the Expos out of the playoffs, I crushed the Joe Louis cake I had in my hand and then had to hold my head over the toilet because I felt like vomiting. As a man in my late 30s, when Olympique de Marseille lost the Coupe de France to our arch rivals Paris Saint Germain I got myself so drunk that I tumbled down a flight of stone steps and concussed myself. Even a minor loss by Marseille can send me into a depression and I am forced to avoid newspapers, Internet, and radio for days lest I hear a recap of the game that rips my slow-healing wounds open.

And its not just the losing I find hard to accept. I actually take very little pleasure in watching my team play. For the ninety minutes of an Olympique de Marseille game, I generally sit with my teeth clenched and a crushing sense of dread that something bad is about to happen. When my team scores a goal, of course it gives me pleasure but it can be a very dangerous pleasure: twice I’ve fainted in bars because of the sudden metabolic change from sitting clenched and anguished on a bar stool to leaping euphorically about the room. In fact, the only time I actually get consistent, gentle pleasure from watching my team play is when we are winning 3-0 in the second half and, alas, my team rarely finds itself with a 3-0 lead in the second half.

So, at the advanced age of 40 I’ve decided I’ve had enough of this foolish behavior. This year, I am going to try to enjoy watching my team play, win or lose. My strategy is to treat the players of Olympique de Marseille like my children. Just as I still love Santoline and Rosco after they pour juice on my laptop or scribble on the walls, I will try to love Steve Mandanda when he misplays a corner kick. Each game will no longer be about proving my team’s worth and dominating our opponent, but rather and opportunity to watch my children grow and evolve. (‘Oh, look, Andre-Pierre Gignac has actually lost some weight! And Lucho has a new tattoo!). And no longer will I be obsessed with performance; just as Santoline is far from Mary Lou Retton during her baby gym classes, I still applaud  and relish her effort; likewise, I will applaud Jeremy Morel’s efforts, even as the slow-footed defender lets striker after striker waltz by him.

Oh yes, this is the year I will finally learn to watch sports. And considering Marseille has opened the season with three lamentable ties, it couldn’t have come any sooner.

Well, those chickens, Jessica and Deborah, are now departed, having met a savage end at the fangs of local dogs. I have since replaced them with a trio of new hens (who shall remain unnamed in hopes of forestalling emotional attachment) and these new hens have been slowly making their home in my garden.

Imagine my surprise when I caught two of these new hens perched atop the vines and gorging themselves on the high-hanging grapes. At first I was shocked that I might lose an entire grape harvest to these birds on the vine. But then a deep pride overwhelmed me and I ran inside to get my video camera. I had some damn bright hens on my hands and a few dozen bunches of grapes is a small price to pay for the company of gifted chickens.

What does this mean? Well, likely, I’ve hit peak readership. By some reckoning, each Simmons column gets 1.4 million page views and he has tremendously devoted fans so it is highly probable that more than a million people read words (badly phrased, off the cuff words, but whatever) I wrote.

How does that compare to the past? Some of my newspaper articles were picked up across Canada and internationally, but it is hard to estimate the net circulation of the newspapers involved and newspaper readers notoriously ignore the vast majority of the articles. Ode Magazine has a really impressive and committed readership, but it measures in the hundreds of thousands, not the millions. A piece I wrote for The Guardian on my favorite bookstores got and gets a ton of buzz but it’s impossible to measure in terms of actual eyeballs because I have no access to the site’s web data. And my Shakespeare book attained some success, but gross international sales aren’t much more 100,000 copies.

Ironically, the thing that comes closest to this inadvertent mail bag question in terms of readership was a rant I wrote to Andrew Sullivan a few years back noting that part of me was relieved by the housing crash because it cheapened the price I paid for dropping out of society (the home and pension I forsook suddenly had less value and were more precarious). What do the Andrew Sullivan Rant and the Bill Simmons Mailbag have in common? I, of course, was paid for neither of them.

So, am I depressed that a Simmons’ mailbag represents my peak readership to date? Not really. I remain highly optimistic that one day I will settle down and write a sizzlingly popular crime series or that maybe my Mary Magdalene book (whenever it’s done) will go colossal. However, it might cause me to rethink parts of my writing strategy: instead of bunkering down with Steven Pinker and Hobbes in attempts to write thoughtful essays, maybe I should just riff and rant on the Internet …