{"id":6305,"date":"2011-03-29T10:32:53","date_gmt":"2011-03-29T14:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=6305"},"modified":"2012-06-25T20:54:42","modified_gmt":"2012-06-26T00:54:42","slug":"cardboard-gods%e2%80%98-josh-wilker-paperback-writer-the-rock-town-hall-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/cardboard-gods%e2%80%98-josh-wilker-paperback-writer-the-rock-town-hall-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Cardboard Gods<\/em>\u2018 Josh Wilker, Paperback Writer: The Rock Town Hall Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Paperback edition of Josh Wilker's Cardboard Gods<\/p><\/div>\n

One day last year I was paging through an issue of Entertainment Weekly<\/em> when I arrived at a spread they run every few issues, containing about 4 pages of gift ideas. It’s the sort of seemingly paid marketing\/alluring editorial hybrid feature that typically bugs me, but EW<\/em> does it so well. It’s rare that I don’t read that section without briefly considering purchasing some\u00a0fancy\u00a0electronics item that feeds into my deep sense of nostalgia. The people who put together that section have a remarkable knack for knowing what feeds the emptiness of a middle-aged, middle-class man’s consumer life. How I miss the days of being so excited over the release of a new Elvis Costello record that I was once\u00a0willing to follow my friend’s idea of breaking into his friend’s parents’ extremely permissive house to listen to our new purchase over a bone<\/em>, I think to myself. Next thing I know I’m seeing if I can justify dropping $299 on an mp3 player\/clock radio\u00a0that’s in the form of a Close ‘N Play phonograph.<\/p>\n

One day a book recommendation caught my eye, an actual, affordable hardcover book. Maybe it was part of one of these marketing-driven spreads or maybe it was part of the book reviews section\u2014after you’ve read EW<\/em> for a while it’s easy to lose all distinctions between marketing and editorial. Whatever. The book was called\u00a0Cardboard Gods<\/em>, by someone named Josh Wilker<\/strong>. The review read, in part:<\/p>\n

A baseball-loving loner deciphers his complicated childhood through his old box of trading cards. . . . Wilker\u2019s book is as nostalgically intoxicating as the gum that sweetened his card-collecting youth. [Grade:] A \u2014Entertainment Weekly<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There was no need for excruciating self-analysis and consideration of this item’s ability to fill The Void. I put a big lower corner dog ear on that page of the magazine\u00a0(ie,\u00a0my\u00a0“important point to revisit” dog ear rather than the smaller placeholder one at\u00a0the upper corner of where I left off reading)\u00a0preparation for my next trip to the “library.” I re-read the review a few more times, each time getting more excited at the prospect of revisiting my own life as a baseball card collector, solitary baseball board-game player (and more importantly, manager and league commissioner), and generally desperate kid\u00a0who was\u00a0in need of the power provided by the sport’s\u00a0over-arching history and\u00a0frequent\u00a0periods of anticipation (ie, what non-baseball lovers call “all the boring parts”). A couple of days later, without hesitation, I picked up a copy of Cardboard Gods<\/em> and\u00a0proceeded to\u00a0tear through it, cover to cover, in the course of a weekend.<\/p>\n

The book was everything I could have imagined, with color reproductions of a mid-’70s\u2013era baseball card kicking off each chapter’s meditation on what that player’s card meant in the\u00a0lovingly dysfunctional childhood world of its author. It was so much fun to tap into another kid’s relationship and chew on life’s inner meanings while contemplating baseball cards of the likes of Rudy Meoli<\/a><\/strong>, Mike Kekich<\/a><\/strong>, and Mike Cosgrove<\/a><\/strong> (no, not that<\/em> one<\/a>). This wasn’t some thumbsucking attempt by Wilker to explain away his life according to an in-vogue branch of\u00a0pop psychology or the agenda of a “special interests” group, as is too-often the case these days. This book was nice and messy\u2014and truly personal, the way we were more comfortable being in the Do Your Own Thing 1970s. In the words of fully satisfied moviegoers of my youth, I laughed and I cried.<\/p>\n

Soon after reading the book I found Wilker’s\u00a0Cardboard Gods<\/em> blog<\/a> and became a regular visitor there. I wrote him a gushing e-mail and over the course of a few e-mail exchanges learned that he was also a music obsessive. Baseball: check. Music: check. Good egg? Highly likely! A few weeks ago I read that Cardboard Gods<\/em> was being released in paperback. I wrote Wilker and asked if he’d consent to a Rock Town Hall interview that would attempt to further bridge the relationship between baseball and\u00a0music and their roles\u00a0in the predominantly male means of\u00a0sharing\u00a0personal information. Good egg that he is, Wilker was all for this chat. If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend checking out Carboard Gods<\/em>,\u00a0both in book and blog form. Batter up!<\/em><\/p>\n

RTH:<\/strong> The Cardboard Gods<\/em> blog preceded your book, right? (I was late to the party, learning of your book before being directed to the blog.) Was there a turning point in writing the blog that you realized you actually could organize a full-blown memoir through the prism of your card collection?<\/p>\n

Josh Wilker:<\/strong> For most of my adult life I have been on the lookout for things that might develop into a book, a habit that has almost always crushed the life out of whatever it is that might have otherwise developed organically if I just gave it some space to grow. And I started the blog as an anti-book in a way, since I\u2019d just finished several years working on a novel that I wasn\u2019t able to sell and I was a little discouraged and just trying to have some fun. That said, I think I had the feeling almost immediately, like a tug on the end of a line, that there was something going on with the baseball cards, but I consciously tried to put thoughts of a book aside for a while and just have fun and go wherever the cards wanted to go.<\/p>\n

RTH: <\/strong>Baseball in the mid- to late-’70s, like the world of your childhood, experienced a latent period of counterculture-rooted self-awareness. As a boy were there certain players who best represented your family’s new world? Were there other players you felt represented the “square” world your family was leaving?<\/p>\n

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JW:<\/strong> Two guys mentioned in the book most clearly represented those two poles for me, Bill Lee<\/a><\/strong> being someone who seemed like he could have easily walked through our mud room door alongside any of my parents\u2019 friends, while Steve Garvey<\/a><\/strong> represented that far away ideal of a \u201creal American.\u201d<\/p>\n

RTH: <\/strong>Former Expos reliever Don Stanhouse<\/strong><\/a> actually stumbled across your blog entry on one of his cards and contacted you. Have other present or former players found their way to your writing?<\/p>\n

JW: <\/strong>Of course I can\u2019t be 100% sure that it was the real Don Stanhouse who sent a vaguely intimidating message to my site, but it\u2019s nice to think it was really him. Not much else has happened in the way of contact with the real world of baseball, though I think John Montefusco<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s sister weighed in on a comments thread about the Count. I\u2019ve also really enjoyed the periodic \u201cbrush with greatness\u201d (or \u201cbrush with mediocrity\u201d) stories from other baseball fans who read the blog. One of my favorites was a guy who emailed me to tell me that he was friends with Buzz Capra<\/strong> and that Capra is a nice guy and is still in possession of his Mets cap that Pedro Borbon<\/strong> gnawed on after the Capra vs. Borbon undercard to the Rose-Harrelson brawl during the \u201973 playoffs.<\/p>\n

RTH: <\/strong>Your peak card collecting years are about 2 or 3 years behind my own period (ie, 1971-1977), but you probably collected during some of the mid-’70s years that had anecdotes and little cartoons about the players<\/a> on the back. If so, does any anecdote stand out for you after all these years? (For instance, on my deathbed, as my life flashes before my eyes, I will recall a mid-’70s John Lowenstein<\/strong> card that reported that he once hit 4 home runs in a Little League game.)<\/p>\n

JW: <\/strong>My favorite was the cartoon on the back of Jeff Burroughs<\/a><\/strong>\u2019 1974 card\u2014it said \u201cJeff likes watching TV\u201d and had a cartoon of a guy in a baseball uniform holding a TV in his glove.<\/p>\n

RTH: <\/strong>Can serious card collectors, the guys who hermetically seal their treasured mint-condition cards<\/a>, commune with their cardboard gods the way those of us who still keep them loose and frayed in shoeboxes do?<\/p>\n

JW: <\/strong>Yes, I\u2019m sure they can, though the mode of communion is probably a little different. When I first noticed sometime in the 1980s that kids had begun treating their cards so carefully, I looked down on it as a joyless, economically motivated development, 10-year-olds protecting their investment like little stockbrokers instead of using the cards for fun. But taking care of cards is certainly not a bad thing, and I\u2019m sure that anyone who keeps up that practice beyond childhood\u2014who becomes a serious collector\u2014has to have a passion for the cards that has forged as deep a connection as I ever could in my own much more card-ruining way. Dave Jamieson<\/strong>\u2019s recent book Mint Condition<\/a><\/em> offers a fascinating history of baseball cards that features enjoyable portraits of some of the more serious collectors through history, and these guys (yes, shockingly, they are all dudes) were and are all not just connected to the cards but in some deep way shaped by them, and they all took great care of whatever cards they got their hands on.<\/p>\n

RTH: <\/strong>Have you read Robert Coover<\/strong>‘s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.<\/a><\/em>? I know you’ve played Strat-o-Matic Baseball and other baseball board games. Did you ever give a particular player an extra roll of the dice or otherwise cheat, while playing by yourself, to give that favorite “god” a better chance of succeeding?<\/p>\n

JW: <\/strong>Yes, I love Coover\u2019s book. I played a lot of solitaire Strat-o-Matic as a kid, and somehow I knew that if I started cheating it would blow the whole deal. I mean, it would really be just me alone, rather than some situation that had some of the unpredictable elements of interactions with the actual world. So I adhered to the dice rolls and periodically had tantrums when the dice rolls weren\u2019t going the way I wanted them to. I punched a dent into the sheetrock of my room one day when the 1982 Strat-o-Matic version of my favorite basketball team, the Celtics, were unaccountably getting slaughtered by the 1982 Kelly Tripucka-led Pistons.<\/p>\n

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The author as Stooges fan and cat lover.<\/p><\/div>\n

RTH: <\/strong>When you got into your later teens and college years you also turned to record collecting, right? Does staring at album covers hold any similar godly insights for you? What’s an album cover that means something special to you?<\/p>\n

JW: <\/strong>I actually started buying records as a kid, and one of my earliest purchases is among the most memorable in terms of album covers\u2014 KISS: Alive II<\/em>, which featured shots of all four guys in the band, including my favorite, Ace Frehley<\/a><\/strong>, as well as, most spectacularly, Gene Simmons<\/a><\/strong> drooling blood. Records and the covers they came in do have a lot of meaning to me, and the novel I was working on for some years before turning to my cards was an earlier stab at telling the basic story of Cardboard Gods<\/em> and was structured as a double album, my attempt to channel into fiction the multi-voiced \u201cback to the land\u201d albums of The Byrds<\/strong>, The Grateful Dead<\/strong>, and The Band<\/strong>. The first album by The Band is one from my childhood that I stared at a lot, the guys pictured on the front becoming extended parts of the family almost. I also felt this way about the very familiar longhairs on the cover of Let It Be<\/em>.<\/p>\n

NEXT: Josh Wilker sits down for a round of Dugout Chatter!<\/em><\/p>\n

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Following are our DUGOUT CHATTER questions. Remember,\u00a0 there are no “right” or “wrong” answers; your gut answers are all that are required:<\/em><\/p>\n

RTH: <\/strong>What’s your favorite pose on a baseball card, either a specific player’s pose or a standard posed shot?<\/p>\n

JW: <\/strong>I like the \u201cholding a bat out\u201d pose. The barrel of the bat is often out of the frame, so it seems as if the stiff, awkwardly smiling player is engaging in a tug of war with someone off camera who wants to take the subject\u2019s bat.<\/p>\n

RTH: <\/strong>Which series of Topps card is more rocking, 1971’s Let It Be<\/em> design<\/a> or 1972’s Magical Mystery Tour<\/em> collection<\/a>?<\/p>\n

JW: <\/strong>My head says 1971 but my heart says 1972. If we\u2019re talking albums, both my head and heart say Let It Be<\/em>, which has at times been my favorite Beatles album, a beautiful mess.<\/p>\n

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SHOWDOWN (choose one): Topps' 1971 \"Let It Be\"-style baseball cards or their 1972 \"Magical Mystery Tour\"-style collection?<\/strong><\/p>