Cheryl Truman on books

Lexington author Ed McClanahan’s new book, O the Clear Moment (Counterpoint, $23) comes out in September, a slim (186 pages) volume of short memoirs touted as “nostalgic and tongue-in-cheek.” The book contains several glancing blows at sports, of a fashion, appropriate to note since it’s time to kick off the football season — popularly known in Kentucky as the time we huddle together in football-bound tailgates ticking down the seconds until basketball season, which sends Kentuckians a-quiver with the knowledge that the state still doesn’t star in the high school basketball soaper ”Hoosiers,” this probably won’t be the miraculous season that the UK basketball team pulls out another NCAA championship and someone out there, the unholy trinity of Bobby Knight, Christian Laettner and Mike Krzyzewski still draw breath. Laettner is a particular thorn in the commonwealth’s collective side, as he figures in our greatest state nightmare, the 1992 buzzer-beater shot in which Duke knocked Kentucky out of the NCAA tournament (which is on YouTube, should you need to refresh your misery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY-iq58_oz4).

So yes, around here, we know something about the tongue in cheek. In part, that quality was given to me by a former boss who wandered around quoting liberally from McClanahan’s novel The Natural Man, which I would wager at one time I knew about as well as the author himself.

But back to McClanahan, one of Lexington’s most genial citizens and an oft-cited favorite in our Reader Top Ten summer swapfest of favorite books.

The kickoff essay is “Great Moments in Sports,” which is peripherally about sports but mainly about the teen pursuit of convivial company, which continues to this day, and in a manner just as classy, and when I say classy, I mean, probably involving property damage. (Yes, the teenagers have just about done me in, thank you: Every morning I wake up, grope around for the cell phone, ascertain that The Call has not come in about either of them while I slept fitfully, and then stumble into the bathroom to look for the JoBeth Williams mile-wide “Poltergeist” gray streak that I’m sure has sprouted in my hair overnight. Truly, it makes you wonder if anybody has mentioned to these Brangelina folks that all six of those little angels will be, simultaneously, teenagers, and that People magazine won’t pay 14 cents, much less $14 million, to take pictures of two hollow-cheeked parents who haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a decade and have recently spent time peering over the remains of a demolished device formerly automotive, murmuring, “And then you did what?” I’m just sayin’.)

I’m guessing the essay is even more hilarious read by McClanahan himself, and I hope to hear it, but until then just know that it concerns two Bobbys, the importance of impressing young women and, of course, eggs. Of course. McClanahan’s second take on the sporting life involves that very special period when he was a youngish activist, of sorts, and trying to make his way in a hotbed of Vietnam War-era political unrest that revolves loosely around “Bolshevik gremlins” and contains a trenchant observation about “the First Law of Revolutionary Physics, which is that tear gas is heavier than air.”

Again, hearing that one testified in person is probably even more entertaining.

In fact, come page 105, McClanahan confesses as much hisveryownself: “I expect I might as well go ahead and own up, right off the bat, to the fact that this little morsel of writing has but one ambition, which is to provide a vehicle that will allow me, when my vast audience clamors for me to read my work in public, to inflict upon them — be warned — the only three songs I’ve ever written, rendered up, strictly Acapulco, in — be doubly warned – my very own inimitable singing voice.”

And here’s McClanahan’s memory of trying to guard Cliff Hagan, who would later become UK basketball royalty: “Or the time twelve guys on our high school basketball team came down with the flu, and I was abruptly — not to say precipitously — elevated from second-string JV to the furthermost end of the varsity bench, and suddenly found myself, deep in the third quarter, not only in the game but also endeavoring to guard the great Cliff Hagan, then of Owensboro High, later of the University of Kentucky Wildcats and the St. Louis Hawks. On the first play he broke for the basket and went twinkle-toeing up my chest like he was Fred Astaire and I was the Stairway to the Stars.”

Here’s to McClanahan’s busy autumn, singing, as he puts it, Acapulco.