Joyce’s Martello Tower, Dublin

By Peter Honig

June 16 is Bloomsday, the unofficial holiday celebrating James Joyce’s epic masterpiece Ulysses. The entire action of that novel takes place on June 16, 1904, and so on this date, Joyce lovers from all over the world celebrate in a variety of ways. Some go to public readings and performances while others travel to Dublin to reenact the events of the novel. Last year, a Twitter feed was developed to tweet the entire novel over the course of the day.

And some, like me, make connections between Ulysses, widely considered the literary masterpiece of the 20th century, and The Wire, widely considered the TV masterpiece of the 21st century.

I have been a Joyce fan for even longer than I have been a Wire fan. In fact looking back, I think my obsession with Joyce prepared me for an obsession with The Wire. In many ways, Simon and Burns created the modern heir to Ulysses. Here are some of the similarities:

Reconstructed Cities
By setting his mammoth novel (it exceeds 700 pages in most editions) in a single city on a single day, Joyce gives a sense of the infinite in all parts of life. Joyce famously told his friend Frank Budgen that “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” One of the ways he did this was by making extensive use of real people and places from Dublin. Search Google and you will find countless maps of the action of Joyce’s work, and many of the locations where he set the action still stand in Dublin (most of them now bearing plaques boasting their appearance in the book).

Similarly, The Wire spends a lot of time on the real streets of Baltimore, with on-location shooting and its own fictional geography perfectly superimposed on the real geography of the city. A good portion of the cast and crew are Baltimore natives, and Simon and Burns include real people (Bunk and Landsman, to name a few) and events (like Mayor Schmoke’s radical approach to the war on drugs or Martin O’Malley’s Mayoral campaign). The effect, in both works, is a fictional city that overlaps so much with the real one as to feel like its ghostly double.

The Wire’s Baltimore

Obsession with realism
Joyce saw no greater enemy to the financially- and spiritually-impoverished Irish people than idealism. His fictional counterpart, Stephen Dedalus, constantly resists the pull of various nationalist movements. Lead by artists like Yeats, these movements wanted to redeem the nation from British oppression by reviving Ireland’s ancient folklore and language. Joyce thought that was a mindless escape, and instead he adopted a style of “srcupulous meanness” to show his nation its ugly flaws. This is part of why it took him nearly 10 years to publish Dubliners, his scathing collection of stories. He was obsessed with realism (even when experimenting radically with language) and wanted to force his countrymen to see their nation’s paralysis, which was the real cause of their ills.

Simon and Burns have a similar philosophy. Their goal is to force an American public to confront the ugly realities of our blighted cities and our crippled bureaucracies. At the same time, they had to fight against the absurdly-idealized view of law enforcement that the TV viewing public swallowed in massive doses in the form of police procedurals. As Simon told Nick Hornby, “I pitched The Wire to HBO as the anti-cop show, a rebellion of sorts against all the horseshit police procedurals afflicting American television.” The Wire takes 12 to 13 hours to portray a case that Law and Order would dispose of in 44 minutes. Simon and Burns create a pervading feeling of of disappointment (a feeling that also dominates many of Joyce’s works) that suggests that we will never get any neat resolutions to our problems.

Classical Greek Influence
Joyce used Homer’s Odyssey as a model for Ulysses, just as the Coen Brothers later did for O Brother Where Art Thou (only with less drinking and better music). Joyce borrowed the key events of Odysseus’ 10-year journey home and condensed and modernized them into a single day. This served a double effect: it shrunk the scope of the original, while elevating the seemingly-mundane events and citizens of Dublin to the level of the heroic.

In the Hornby interview linked above, Simon talks about a similar influence stemming from Ancient Greece. He describes his use of Greek tragedy: “We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality.”  In both cases, the creators modernize ancient myths to show how these essential archetypes continue to live in our culture in a slightly-altered but no-less-essential form.

Focus on connectivity
Probably the most stylistically-challenging chapter of Ulysses, “The Wandering Rocks” illustrates the height of urban connectivity. Taking place over the course of a single hour, Joyce takes 18 interlocking sections in which a huge assortment of characters roam the city as their paths intersect and overlap in many unseen ways. It is difficult to describe, but tracking all of the chapter’s complex links takes a chart that would make the most hardened actuary cringe.

The Wire functions on a similar level of connectivity, although stretched out over a longer period of time and space. This is a work of art with “sprawl,” as the characters would say. By the end of the series, there are so many characters that anyone can be easily connected to another by no more than one or two degrees of separation.

This overwhelming sense of connectivity, especially in such socially-paralyzed poverty-stricken cities is probably the greatest link between Ulysses and The Wire, and the greatest joy for their fans. Here are two worlds that show the way cities link all of their citizens and all of their words and actions. Every time I open Joyce’s masterpiece or pop in a Wire DVD, I feel like I am once again entering a wholly realized world. They are fictional, and yet they feel so familiar. I almost expect that I could go to either city, Dublin or Baltimore, and if I went to any corner or any bar or office building, I would run into another old friend who I have never actually met.

Update, Bloomsday, 2013: Just in time for another Bloomsday, I came across one more connection that confirms by belief in the relationship between Ulysses and The Wire. Just last week, Simon went on “Here’s The Thing,” Alec Baldwin’s WNYC radio show, for a fascinating interview. Among other things, Simon described in detail his transformation from journalist to television producer. 

Midway through the interview, Simon begins to discuss the structure of his television projects. While he prefaces it by saying that he only compares his shows to literature as a point of reference, he says the following:

“I’m always just using books as okay, Homicide was Dubliners. It’s all connected but it’s James Joyce’s Dubliners; these delicately connected stories about a place and an ethos and twenty-two separate stories. And there’s some story lines continue but there is a fresh theme for each. It was short story writing in a television sense.”

If Homicide, with its “delicately connected stories,” is analogous to Joyce’s immortal story collection, then by extension, the more novelistic, unified story of The Wire would be analogous to Ulysses.

(I might venture to say that Treme is Simon’s Finnegans Wake, but every analogy has its limits)

Follow The Wire Blog on Twitter at @thewireblog

First day of school coming up, right? So you all need like school clothes and shit?

From my first viewing of The Wire Season 4, I have always been struck by just how quickly Simon and Co. make us care about the four boys. It is no easy task to drop four completely unknown characters into an already densely-populated world and expect the audience to connect to them.

And yet, by the time the boys step into Edward Tilghman Middle School to begin their Eighth Grade year, I already feel I know these boys, and I already feel invested in the paths that they will take over the next two seasons.

Watching Season 4 again, this time with a group of students new to the show as a whole, I noticed one reason why we make this quick connection. In 4.2 “Soft Eyes,” the annual childhood ritual of Back-To-School Shopping serves as a window into these boys’ lives.

Who can’t associate with that sinking feeling that comes across students around mid-August, when the first ads for Back-To-School fashions and school supply sales start appearing on TV and in the newspapers? I have to admit that, even now, I experience it, just as I still experience the same thrill when I get a phone call about a snow day.

But unlike these boys I never had to worry about where my school supplies were coming from, or whether I would have new, clean clothes to wear. In the Westside it is a different story. So as each boy deals with this need, we get a clearer picture of where each of their priorities lie.

Let’s take a look at them, from the bottom up:

Dukie is established from the beginning as the poorest, the most desperate of the boys. In “Boys Of Summer,” he is clearly the group’s punching bag, the Kenny to Namond’s Cartman. They mock his smell and the squalor in which he lives (“Hey Duke, how you know what running water sound like?”). His unlucky streak continues in “Soft Eyes,” when he happens to be the one boy not around when Monk comes around to give out Marlo’s cash.

Instead, Dukie ends up being the beneficiary of a second handout, this one far more well-intentioned and ethically-sound than Marlo’s drug money. Assistant Principal Marcia Donnelly sends highly-responsible classmate Crystal to Dukie’s house with a box of new clothes and supplies, along with the warning not to give the box to anybody other than Dukie. That scene gives us our only real look at Dukie’s dwelling, and the disturbing sight of an older male relative staggering as he eyes the box and sees the vials of Pandemic that he can convert it into. He grunts a primal command, “Gimme!,” before Dukie opens the window and intervenes. The boy’s greeting is so sweet, so in discord with the world in which he lives (both home and city) that it sets him up as the fragile child that needs to be protected. Even the most modest charity is unlikely to get to him.

Earlier in the episode, Namond solicits Bodie for a job for Michael, explaining that his friend needs money for school supplies, both for himself and for his little brother, Bug (who we hear about for the first time). Bodie responds in frustration, saying “What the fuck this look like, the Social Security Office?” He is not too far off the mark. Michael’s need to work for the money suggests the lack of parental influence at home. Or rather, Michael is the parental influence, caring for Bug just as Wallace cared for other neighborhood boys four years earlier.

His motive for working the corner stands in sharp contrast with Namond’s motive. The latter works in an ill-fated attempt to live up to the impossible standards of his tall-standing father, Wee-Bey (not to mention his fierce mother, De’Londa). Earlier, when visiting Namond tells prisoner Bey that he is just a lowly runner, the look of fatherly disappointment is palpable, as is Namond’s need to impress. But that need is not as strong as Michael’s more immediate need to care for his family, so Namond graciously steps down, offering Michael his position (this act of genuine friendship perfectly balances out the more-subtle tensions between Michael and Namond as they vie to be dominant in the young crew).

It is hard to call a boy taking a job running drugs responsible, but it is at the very least mature. For Michael, that maturity is emphasized by his later refusal of Marlo’s $200 handout. As much as he needs money, he also understands the significance of where it comes from. This is rare in a world where so many people, from young hoppers to State Senators stay wilfully blind to the origins of their money (“I’ll take any motherfukers money if he giving it away.”) As Marlo later observes, Michael is willing to work for it, but he won’t take it.

Michael is wary of taking money from Marlo. On the other end of the spectrum sits cornrowed, smiling Randy. He is so eager for cash that he even asks for the $200 that Michael refuses (“Don’t press,” Namond says, afraid of being embarrassed in front of the true gangsters whose attention he covets). In fact, Randy is so happy, so likeable, that it is easy to miss just how greedy, how money obsessed he is. It is also easy to miss how good Mr. Wagstaff has it with Miss Anna.

But the greed is there, right from the start. We see it in “Boys of Summer” when he sends Lex on his path to the vacant, all for a few bucks from Little Kevin. In this episode, as the boys debrief their sudden windfall, Randy explains why he asked for more. Unlike Michael and Dukie, Randy has a responsible caretaker in the form of foster mother Miss Anna, and she already gave him money for school supplies. But the money is gone, with neither pencil nor pair of pants to show for it. He explains that he invested all of the money into his burgeoning business. “I could’ve used that extra. I already spent all the clothes money Miss Anna gave me on stuff to sell at school.” Here is the true image of the young capitalist, reappropriating money away from needed supplies and into seed money for a potential windfall. So there is a sort of poetic justice in the fact that Randy is the one boy who loses his $200 when he gets caught by thieving Officer Walker. He gets money for his school supplies twice over, but never gets to spend a penny on any actual supplies.

At the top of this most modest of hierarchies stands loud-mouthed Namond, the heir apparent to the ruins of the Barksdale Empire. But that doesn’t mean that he has it all. In fact, he spends most of the episode complaining about his poverty. Part of that is earned–he does give up his job to allow Michael the opportunity to earn money for his supplies. The other part of it is absurd, as De’Londa threatens to withhold money until he starts doing better at Bodie’s corner (my students were rightly shocked at this case of a parent disciplining her child for NOT selling drugs).

That leads to a further absurdity: the rich who cry poverty. Michael points this out when he says that Namond’s family “got more money than all of us.” Nor is Namond afraid to flaunt it, particularly when it comes to his clothes. In the Monk scene, Namond wears a throwback jersey (the 99 of late-Philadelphia Eagles’ legend Jerome Brown), and even uses it as an excuse for backing down from a scuffle with Michael (“if I didn’t have this shit on, I’d have fucked you up.”) For Namond, money is his image and his shield. It is also love, or at least the twisted version of love that he gets from De’Londa.

The episode ends with the spoiled child getting exactly what he wants in exchange for absolutely nothing, except an obsession with image. Namond returns home to a grotesque distortion of a heartwarming mother-son moment. We see the Brice house, full of tropical fish and gaudy furniture, swirling with cigarette smoke, brash talk, and the earsplitting sound of “Love Rollercoaster.” Namond defiantly swipes a cigarette and heads to his room where he sees the ultimate back-to-school bounty, his bed piled high with jerseys, designer clothes, and bling.  “You ain’t think my son gonna go up to that school lookin’ like himself?” she says, and he blows her a kiss. All is right in his world, at least for now, and he disappears into a game of Halo 2.

He is all set for school to begin, and so are his friends, no matter what they will be wearing, or how they got it. In the end, the clothes don’t have any bearing on what the boys will learn and how, but it says a lot about the various worlds they occupy. As the season progresses, that may prove to be the more important factor.

I am currently teaching Season 4 of The Wire to my four 12th Grade English classes. This means that I am watching each episode four times over the course of two days. It is a testament to the greatness of The Wire, that I continue to gather a great amount of information and enjoyment out of each new viewing.

As part of the process, I am cataloguing the major concept patterns in each episode. It is sort of like Prez’s corkboard, where I can lay out all of the pieces and see how they fit together.

Below is a list of the examples that I found for six categories in “Boys of Summer.” There might be some missing pieces, some overlap, and some questionable interpretations. But it is my best attempt to track the patterns that are interwoven through each episode of this series that focuses so much on interconnection. Please feel free to add any examples that I missed in the comments section.

Schooling

• In the opening scene, Snoop describes her enlightening experience in the Big Box hardware store: “I been to school.”
• Instead of doing his job as a drug runner, Namond is more occupied with reading.
• Namond uses “back to school” shopping as a pretense to cut out of work. Bodie doesn’t buy it: “You stay suspended”
• In that same scene, Bodie makes the season’s first mention of “Social Promotion,” suggesting that without it, “your ass would still be in Pre-K. Daycare, probably.”
• Dukie knows that the boys are chasing a fake homer because he has been spending time learning about pigeons from Nemo, the keeper of Marlo’s coop. “He’s schooling me.”
• School security keeps out new teachers like Prez. “Not a goddamn thing in here works like it should.”
• Reecy’s trouble with the count anticipates Sherrod’s later struggles at Bubble’s Depo. Carver tells Bodie that if they can “put Reecy in remedial math…we’ll have done some good here today. Later, McNulty calls Bodie a “smart kiddo.”
• Westside detectives and Tilghman teachers behave like bored students during their dueling dull-power-point meetings. Passing notes, texting, struggling to stay awake, making wisecracks.
• For Santangelo, the the Homeland Security Binders are trash. For McNulty, they will at least make for free school supplies for Beadie’s “anklebiters.”
• Prez embraces a new identity as he first sees his new (trashed) classroom. “So, this is me?”
• Little Kevin asks Randy to deliver the message to Lex for fear of getting busted by Bodie for cutting work.

Childhood

• Massey and Sydnor bicker over space like siblings forced to share a room. “Working my last nerve…”
• Freamon calls Marlo “a babe in the woods” when it comes to avoiding a wiretap.
• Bodie calls Namond “late to work, early to play.”
• “Man, shit like that don’t even work in cartoons,” Namond says as they try to capture the bird. They use Wile E Coyote as a model for birdcatching. Randy: “We ain’t in no cartoons.” Namond: “Yeah, you is.” Michael: “Shhhh.”
• Namond and Dukie go back and forth about Pampers–”catch all that shit you been flushing.”
• Donnelly’s Epigraph: “Lambs to the Slaughter”
• Daniels and Mello discuss whether Tullman can handle being shift commander on his own. They describe him him as “Opie from Mayberry, but less fierce.”
• Carcetti whines like a grounded kid (his voice even cracks) about “dialing for dollars.” Passes time by making paperclip chain, paper airplane, stabbing his hand with a dart.
• Carcetti asks a donor if his kids can contribute as well. The donor protests that they are “in strollers.”
• Norman complains about having to drag Carcetti out of bed every morning.
• Rather than use guns to attack the terrace boys, Randy’s plan involves water balloons.
• The boys celebrate their battle at the Terrace with a celebration at an ice cream truck.
• Gun-toting Snoop emerges from the shadows of an abandoned playground to capture Lex.

Money

• Snoop pays cash for the Hilti Nail Gun, bypassing the cash register. “You earned that buck like a motherfucker.”
• Sydnor almost gives Massey’s coupons to Pearlman.
• Royce boasts about waterfront developers who will “Grow Baltimore’s tax base and revitalize our city.”
• Randy sees the potential profit in capturing a homing pigeon. Hopes for $300-$400 from Nemo
• Close up on the one-dollar bill that Namond peels from the stack and passes to Dukie (reluctantly, at Michael’s behest). He then offers one to Michael as well.
• Carcetti bristles when Norman says he won’t vote for him. “You’re gonna take my check and run my campaign?”
• Randy sets up shop down the street from Bodie’s corner, selling candy and chips that he gets at a discount “from the Koreans.”
• Little Kevin purchases a fateful bag of Skittles from Randy. Like Snoop in the opening scene, he lets Randy keep the change in exchange for a favor…tell Lex to go to the playground at 8.
• That night, Little Kevin stirs Randy’s guilt by telling him about Lex’s fate. He hands him some more money and says “just be cool, alright.”
• Carcetti, on the wasted radio ads: “How much money did we piss away on those?”

Time

• Snoop tells the Hardware Barn salesman “keep the rest for your time.”
• Carcetti to Norman: “In a minute, Norman.” Young Tony to Norman: “The candidate is on your clock. Don’t ever let him forget it.”
• Andy Kraw pesters Royce for time. “He said he needed just 10 minutes.”
• As Carcetti fields the senior citizen’s questions about Salisbury Steak, Norman impatiently checks his watch.
• Namond owes Bodie “extra time tomorrow” after skipping out to catch birds.
• Namond complains: “You took me off the clock for this craziness?”
• Terry chides Carcetti: “You ran late all morning.”
• Carcetti is late to the meeting with Miss Simmons and Rev. Garnett
• Carcetti’s meeting runs late, but Norman is forgiving: “you did good.”
• Miss Anna scolds Randy for returning home late.
• Carcetti thinks he spent 4 minutes of “quality time with the wife and kids.” When told it was 6 minutes, Carcetti says “I could’ve got laid.”

War

• Snoop lays out quicklime over corpses, suggestive of mass graves.
• Marlo, on the prospect of taking down Bodie’s entire corner as revenge for Lex: “What I want with stacking bodies when nobody trying to war with us?”
• Norman and Carcetti visit “one of them neighborhoods between Oliver and the Middle East.” “Fucking Fallujah,” Carcetti replies.
• The drug dealers blockade the alleys with trash to stop the police from chasing them. Carcetti describes it as a “tank trap.”
• The boys set up an ambush on the terrace boys. It quickly devolves into a street scrum, with flying projectiles and shrapnel.
• During the Homeland Security briefing, the Western District boys imagine terrorists trying to take over Baltimore. “You want some real terrorists, go down to Pencey and Gold.”
• Namond treats at the ice cream truck. “One for every soldier that stood tall,” he says, evoking the language of his still-standing-tall father, Wee-Bey, for the now-defunct Barksdale Crew.
• As Carcetti and Norman return to the headquarters, Gerri remarks “our heroes, just back from the war.”

Games

• Carcetti excuses Young Tony’s one-term as mayor by saying “you got dealt a bad hand” with the riots.
• Royce refers to Carcetti as a “lost-ball-in-high-grass motherfucker,” anticipating the stray whiffle balls and dress shoe that litter Carcetti’s lawn.
• An old lady plays solitaire as Carcetti give his speech at the Old Age Home.
• Carcetti, in fundraising solitary, plays darts and debates the quality of the Orioles’ starting pitching.
• Bunk hands Freamon the now-dead Fruit’s phone as a “consolation prize” for losing a target of the wire.
• The boys reappropriate a volleyball net to try and catch a pigeon.
• Randy, like a casino cocktail waitress, sells snacks to the players in a back-alley dice game (possibly the same one Snotboogie used to play in).

I’ve been schooled, dog. I’m trying to tell you, for real.

I think it is about time I get back up on The Wire.

Since December, this site has been as quiet as the wire after the Season 1 stash-house raid. In fact, I haven’t written a word since September. All of this site’s content came from two months of focused writing from last summer. I had the time required to write over 100 pieces on Season 1 (including many that I have yet to post).

Then a new school year began.

Beyond planning and teaching lessons during the school day, I also have a huge grading workload from my 12th-grade English class. And that is only my second priority in life…I am also raising two children under the age of two.

I haven’t watched a full episode of The Wire in months.

But now, finally, there is a convergence, some talk on the wire. Next week I will begin teaching a 7-week unit on The Wire. So what better time to resume posting? I will be watching and discussing each episode 5 times over the course of the coming weeks (once to prepare my lessons and once for each of my four sections). It would be a shame to spend all of that time with the show without recording some of my experiences.

My school operates on “A/B Block” scheduling, which means that I meet with each class every other day for roughly 90 minutes (the perfect amount of time to show and discuss one episode). I meet with two of my English classes a day, so I hope to post once per day from Monday through Friday.
These posts won’t have the same format as my Season 1 pieces. They probably won’t be as long or detailed (which, by the way, I will continue to post as well). They will likely be a little more free-form, a collection of shorter observations and insights. To be honest, at this point, I’m not sure what it will be like, but I am excited to teach and learn on both sides of The Wire.

I hope you join me as I once again walk through the garden.

That’s not how the game is played!

The Wire’s ninth episode is called “Game Day,” but it’s always game day in Baltimore. The street side of the show revolves around the “game” metaphor (I am still waiting for “drapersayswhat” to do a supercut of characters in The Wire saying “it’s all in the game”), and while this metaphor is just as present in this episode as in any other, the title refers to a literal game as well: the Eastside vs. Westside basketball game, an annual contest for “bragging rights to the projects.”

It is just one game, an unofficial event that brings together two sides of a fractured city for some friendly competition. But for Avon, whose Westside team hasn’t won in three years, this is not just a friendly game (although it might provide some solace to know that lowly hoppers Poot and Bodie think the losing streak is only two). The episode opens with Avon dropping $20,000 to bring in a ringer. His goal is not to win in a fair game, nor is it bragging rights. For Avon, this game is inseparable from the “game” in which he is the kingpin. What happens as the game plays out illustrates just how dangerous it is to confuse the real game with the metaphorical.

It is a common mistake, actually. Whenver I watch this episode, my mind goes back to the disasterous game of “Eschaton” that is one of the highlights of David Foster Wallace’s epic novel Infinite Jest (if you don’t want to work through all 1000+ pages of that book, you can check out the Decembrists’ video for “Calamity Song,” where they recreate the Eschaton scene). The game of Eschaton is an annual tradition at the elite tennis school that is one of the novel’s central settings. It is sort of like a live-action game of risk, where the players spread out across tennis courts that represent the world, and engage in nuclear war using tennis balls, rackets, and precise technical calculations of radiation effects, fallout, and the like.

In the novel, everything goes according to the rules until it starts to snow. One boy argues that the snow should mitigate the damage he takes, but the game’s creator disagrees. Snow reduces damage in the reality within the game, but the snow only falls in the reality outside the game. “It’s snowing on the map, not the territory!” the creator shouts, in an echo of Alfred Korzybski’s famous dictum. The boy can’t see the difference, launches some balls in protest, and all hell breaks loose.

The inability to see the distinction between the “map” and the “territory” is a common mistake. It is one that Avon makes repeatedly within his own fenced-in court, as he sits on the bench and coaches his Westside stars (and one ringer from Eastside).

The map may not be the territory, but in Avon’s world, territory is everything. This leaves no room for maps and metaphors, be they in a basketball game or a game of chess. Games are luxuries best left to the underlings.

In this scene, there are actually several games going on at once. First, there is the game itself, a community gathering to celebrate a friendly rivalry (which is reinforced by the “big ass party” that the loser has to throw for the winner, a communal celebration for both sides after the competition has ended). Then, there is the gamesmanship that surrounds the bet between Avon and Eastside kingpin Proposition Joe (who makes his first appearance in this scene). Finally, there is the struggle that swirls in Avon’s mind, where basketball is not so much a game as yet another extension of the corners.

After a few shots of the game itself and the fans who have gathered to watch it, we get our first sense of the most-literal game. Stringer gives Avon the scouting report on Prop Joe’s ringer, a professional from Italy. This leads to some amusing trash talk between the kings/coaches (it is also worth noting: the fact that the kingpins are also coaches shows how central the drug trade is to the projects). “You got to go all the way to Europe to get you a ringer?” Avon taunts. “Naw, he home now. But I see you pulling boys out the junior colleges. He from Eastside, went to Dunbar.” Here, we see an interesting attitude towards the rules. Ideally, a game like this should be played by the best ballers currently living in the projects, but both coaches have brought in outsiders. This might be technically against the rules, but both men seem to accept this gamesmanship as an inevitable part of the event. Instead, they quibble about the ethics of who can be a legitimate ringer.

Avon proceeds to criticize Joe’s appearance. “Why you wearing that suit, B? For real, it’s 85 fucking degrees out here and you trying to be Pat Riley.” Prop Joe gives us our first taste of his “way with words” when he offers the advice: “Man, look the part be the part motherfucker.” Joe has faith in the power of the external (“look the part”) to influence the essence (“be the part”), but Avon is not impressed. “You walking around with a fake fucking clipboard!” he shouts, his voice almost cracking with outrage. “You can’t even read a playbook. Be for real, bunch of bitches.”

The two rivals blur the lines between genuine outrage and friendly trash talk, but there is a real ideological debate going on here. Avon keeps repeating the phrase “for real.” He wants a level of honesty (even if this doesn’t extend to his use of ringers), and is upset that Joe plays the part of the coach with such enthusiasm. The problem is, Avon has trouble keeping the levels of reality straight in his own mind.

If he could see more clearly, he would realize that,clipboard or no, Joe has his playbook down cold. For Avon, the game is the bet, and both game and bet are life, with his pride and ego bound up in them. Prop Joe can separate appearance from the reality, and we see this in the way he uses the game to manipulate the bet.

He creates the appearance that he is a basketball mastermind, but the subterfuge masks the fact that he is really a mastermind of gambling. He pulls off a sophisticated trick that exploits Avon’s devotion to appearance. I call it the Double Ringer Hustle.

In the first half, Joe matches Avon’s ringer with his own slightly-less-skilled player. This leads to a 12-point Westside lead and a cocky Avon. Joe insists the game isn’t over, saying “you never know.” Avon, puts his trust in the truth of appearance, saying “I know man, we up 12.” This confidence opens the door for Joe, who offers to double the bet to $100,000. Avon agrees. Then Joe, the master tactician, nods to a player sitting on the end of the bench. He is fresh and ready to play, and a quick cut to the image of Avon’s team, hydrating and catching their breath on the bench, shows how uncertain that lead really is.

The second ringer takes over, faking out anybody unfortunate enough to be defending him. He could have learned this deception from his coach. Avon seems upset, but he has to acknowledge that he got played by a better chess master. It’s not until the final play that Avon really explodes and loses sight of what is actually happening. Avon’s ringer goes for a layup and there is contact, but the Ref doesn’t call it. Joe’s second ringer takes the ball full court to take the game. The Eastside players and fans celebrate while a sore, wounded Avon goes on the hunt.

He corners the Ref and begins to accost him. It is a frightening scene. We know how important this game is to Avon, and how much money he invested in its ability to solidify his reputation. Presumably the Ref knows who he is as well. He must be terrified of what could happen if he pisses off Avon Barksdale (Consider the fact that Avon was willing to sentence the three members of Omar’s crew to death for taking $40,000. He loses three times that amount in this game). The Ref tries to salvage the situation with a concession. “Look, if you want, I can put time back on the clock and replay it,” he nervously offers. This only sets Avon off further, and what follows is one of Avon’s ugliest moments in the series.

It starts out as more of a tantrum than anything. Avon’s limbs flail as he bounces around uncontrollably. “You talking about a do-over, baby? That’s not how the game is played! You can’t do that!” His speaks and movies like a spoiled child who just learns that the world doesn’t always comply to his definition of “how the game is played.”

Suddenly, Avon remembers himself. He reestablishes his position of power, and the tone shifts to cruel aggression. “Man, you supposed to be the ref, right? Why don’t you stand up for your fuckin self? You pussy! You can’t just let any old motherfuckin nigger get in your face, you understand? Now walk away.” It is hard to watch the scene without feeling the Ref’s fear and his powerlessness. Here is Avon as pure bully, tormenting and emasculating an innocent man to cover up his own powerlessness at the hands of the smarter Prop Joe.

It is a low point for Avon, and one character in particular looks on with disgust: D’Angelo. There is a great shot of his face as his uncle mercilessly tortures this man. We know that D’Angelo is already becoming disillusioned with the drug game, and at this moment, he seems to lose his final fragment of respect for Avon. After the game breaks up, we see the crowd disperse to go their two separate directions. They all seem happy with an entertaining afternoon. Only Avon is left with a bruised ego and an empty wallet.

Like the boy in Infinite Jest, Avon can’t tell the difference between the map and the territory. In his world, everything is a reflection of his ego. Everything is about his power and his reputation, and everything threatens to take those things from him. As a result, a simple game of basketball proves costly in all of those respects.

Avon’s flaw seems to be his failure to understand the very purpose of a game. We create games as miniature versions of the outer reality. As we play in those miniature worlds, we enact the possibilities of that outer reality from a safe distance, enabling us to understand the potential outcomes without suffering the consequences. Eschaton enables us to play out an all out nuclear war without actually destroying the planet, just as Monopoly enables us to build or lose a real estate empire without actually going bankrupt.

Avon focuses his rage on the Ref because that poor man represents an authority figure. Outside of the fence, the authority figures (who are even then scrambling to track down Avon) are invisible, abstract, terrifying. For once, he can stare down an authority figure and call him a pussy to his face.

For Avon, the game doesn’t end when the final whistle blows. His life is a game, and perhaps that has drained the power out of the actual games, the diversions that we create to socialize and explore our limitations. Instead, it just becomes another skirmish in yet another endless, unwinnable game.

A confession: I am a Philadelphia sports fan. I was too young to remember the 1983 Sixers, so the city’s epic 25-year title drought was pretty much my entire life as a sports fan (I won’t even go into my college team, a certain birthplace of college football that has experienced nothing but abject failure ever since). Then, finally, in 2008 the Phillies won the World Series, and the streak was over. It was pretty exciting.

Until 2009 rolled around. The Phillies lost to the Yankees in the World Series, and all was right with the world. I was a loser once again.

That’s the problem with games. There’s always another one around the corner, and today’s thrilling win is tomorrow’s devastating loss. In the world of games, there really is no end. There is always one more term in an endless series.

The brief conversation between Herc and Carver that gives “Game Day” its epigraph is like all of their conversations: both absurdly funny and surprisingly profound. It plays out on a rooftop, where the partners keep watch over an eerily-empty Pit. Herc is playing his own personal game, tossing pebbles into a nearby bucket of tar. It doesn’t seem like he is keeping score, but it is a game nonetheless. He has clearly developed into a pretty skilled pebble-tosser after countless hours on this roof. It calls to mind the scene in Groundhog Day where the immortal Phil Connors shows off his talent for flicking cards into a nearby hat. “So this is what you do with eternity,” Rita observes. “Now you know,” Phil answers matter-of-factly. Apparently, time is the only thing needed to master any skill.

For Herc, the steady rhythm of the pebble-tossing sparks a meditation on the inexplicable nature of seldom-travelled corners of the urban world. Herc wonders how those pebbles got up there, and there really is no answer to the question. Perhaps a bird brought them up there one at a time (maybe the same bird from James Joyce’s hellish vision of infinity), or maybe there is some practical explanation (maybe the pebbles keep the tar from eroding) or a metaphysical one (the pebbles as remnants from a cosmic game like the one in the Italo Calvinio story from which I borrowed the title of this post). Either way, the question is troubling because it forces us to acknowledge how much uncertainty we live with, how many seemingly-pointless pebbles lay scattered throughout our world. Herc does his part to combat that uncertainty with his little game. He gathers the scattered pebbles into the centralized location of the bucket, mindlessly bringing order to the chaos.

Perhaps that is a metaphor for the very reason these two detectives are on the roof in the first place. They play out their parts as soldiers in the war on drugs. Their goal is to clean up the corners, and wipe the drug trade out of the city. But here is yet another unwinnable game, as Carver himself pointed out back in the first episode. “You can’t even call this shit a war,” he tells Herc. “Wars end.” Right from the beginning, the game is defined as both unwinnable and infinite. Or perhaps it is unwinnable precisely because it is infinite.

So it is fitting that the (slightly) more perceptive Carver is the one who notices how oddly-empty the pit is. It feels like a ghost town, and he senses that something is out of place. Herc, however, stays on his train of thought and indulges in another fantasy. This time, he imagines some sort of theoretical doomsday weapon that the police implement unannounced, ending the drug war once and for all. “Maybe we won.”

Even in this scenario, Herc imagines himself somehow the loser. He and Carver are stuck on the roof like the soldiers of the battle of New Orleans, left behind to fight a war that has already been won. The truth isn’t much better. There will always be stray pebbles on the roof just as there will always be hoppers in the courtyards. The game will continue, whether in Philadelphia, down in the Pit, up in Burrell’s conference room, or in a basketball court across town.

That’s how they do

In the morally-ambiguous world of The Wire, there are few truly-noble characters, but there is no doubt that Shardene, the stripper from the county, is one of them. From the beginning, she is presented to us as an honest soul in a world of players. She pays back one disgruntled customer even though she didn’t actually take his money, and later she reveals her blissful ignorance of her true employers and their business. Perhaps that is what keeps her noble–she exists outside of the game (even more so than the arguably-noble Omar). She lives by a simpler code of honesty, fairness, and simple human decency. As Freamon puts it “she’s a citizen.”

There is no greater evidence of Shardene’s character than when Kima and Freamon bring her in to try to flip her. They come at her directly, even bluntly, and she repays that directness by offering little resistance and no bullshit. She agrees to help them out even though they have nothing on her. They have no leverage, no charge on her and nothing material they can offer. They flip her with a purely ethical appear. For the genuinely ethical Shardene, that is more than enough.

Of course, it is that very ethical nature that draws Kima and Freamon to her in the first place. This goes back to the scene where they pick her out from all of Orlando’s strippers. “I like her face,” Kima says. Freamon is even more specific: “Soul, conscience, whatever you want to call it.” Later in that same episode, we see proof of that soul in the concern Shardene shows for her missing coworker Kiesha, the way she empathises with D’Angelo’s plight, and her awareness of a stable life that is only possible outside of the game.

This awareness comes into play again in “Game Day,” as Kima and Freamon bring her in for questioning. While Kima sets up the interrogation room, Shardene turns the tables by questioning Freamon about his models. It is the first time anybody has shown an interest in this quirky hobby (with the exception of Sydnor’s bemused questioning in “The Detail”) and Freamon is happy to talk about his hobby with a person who has actually owned her own dollhouse and who can recognize the beauty of the furniture that he makes. When he says “I only make em and sell em,” she replies “That seems kind of sad. You should have a house for them. “ Shardene may have previously told D’Angelo that she doesn’t want a “key,” but she clearly longs for a piece of the security and warmth that a domestic life can offer.

So when the real interview begins, Kima and Freamon force Shardene to face the reality that the world she works in is the exact opposite of this, even if she is blind to its criminal element. This acknowledgement of reality is part of their appeal. Shardene denies knowledge of the Barksdale crew’s murderous doings, but by telling her, the detectives make her complicit. “Now you do know, right, because we are telling you.” They strip her of her ability to hide behind a curtain of ignorance. Kima senses this, and she realizes that the best way to push Shardene over the edge is to bring her into the coldest example of the deadly Barksdale world: the morgue.

It is a chilling scene in every sense of the word. The camera slowly pans across the corpse of Shardene’s dead friend as the coroner lists the clinical details behind her death. She was found nude in a dumpster, with positive toxicology for heroin and cocaine, and the semen of three men in all three of her orifices. Shardene’s face registers the sheer horror at her friend’s inhuman fate. As with the two previous visits to the morgue (to see the bodies of Gant and Brandon) there is a clear division between the objective and the emotional.

Kima and Freamon do their best to bridge that gap, retelling the story in a way that adequately incorporates their outrage at the perpetrators. More specifically, they place the responsibility precisely where it belongs–into the hands of the people who so callously disposed of the body. First Freamon and then Kima use the phrase “that’s how they do.” Kima elaborates. “She overdosed and whoever was with her didn’t do shit but roll her up and throw her away.” And later, “they fucked her and threw her away.” By using the pronoun “they,” Kima keeps the focus broad enough, not just on a single person, but everybody who profits off of a game that disposes of people in such a way.

It is a powerful condemnation, framing Keisha’s death as more than just an isolated event. It is routine for the crew, as much a part of the game as moving product or chasing a rival gang off of the corner. More importantly, the detectives expose the twisted rationale that enables the crew members to act this way. They hint at their wire, which they describe as a way to know “what they’re thinking.” It is like a magical portal into the twisted psychology of the crew members. In the case of Keisha, they said “the stupid bitch didn’t know how good the snort was at Little Man’s party. That it’s her own fault.” Kima extends this to the ethic of the entire game. “They use people, and when they throw ‘em away they find a way to say it ain’t on them.” As much as the members of the crew pretend that there are rules to this game they are playing, they will do whatever suits them, and when they need to cross a line, they simply rationalize it away.

As much as Kima and Freamon rely on “they” to describe the Barksdales, we know that Shardene must be personalizing it, thinking of the one member of the crew who she really knows: D’Angelo. She says, half to herself, “lying motherfucker, he said they took her to a hospital.” We already know about this lie, since we saw D’Angelo evade the issue of Keisha in the previous episode. But in that same scene, we also saw D’Angelo express an almost identical outrage at the ethics of the game, especially when he says “you got people using each other.” It seems like a contradiction, and when Shardene says “he seemed like he was different,” we seem to agree. After all, like Freamon, we feel like we know D’Angelo by now. We have seen enough of him to know that he has more of a conscience than the rest of the crew.

And yet, conscience or no, he still lied about what happened with Keisha. There is no way to know if he actively helped dispose of the body, but at the very least, he lied about her death, and at the worst, he left her in the hands of the very people who let her overdose to begin with. No matter how you look at it, he is culpable.

That is the problem with being a member of a gang. D’Angelo is sensitive and empathetic. He has the emotional capacity to feel horrified at the dead body that he finds in Little Man’s house, and he suffers the guilt afterwards. But he is still part of a game that says that a death like that needs to be swept under the rug (or rolled up in it), and the game also says that no matter how much D’Angelo objects to this, he can’t say anything about it because that would make him a snitch. D’Angelo is ethical in a vacuum, but those ethics will always be subject to the broader ethics of the game in which he plays. From Avon and Stringer all the way on down to Bodie and Poot, the crew operates like a machine, bringing in money and spitting out drugs, taking territory and tearing up the fiends and rival gangs in the process. The bottom line is all that matters. Anything else is just material to get to that profit margin.

It is fitting, then, that the Barksdales use garbage bags to move money and product (we see this twice in “Game Day”: in Omar’s heist and the bag of money that Herc and Carver take from Wee-Bey). From a practical level, a garbage bag is the perfect vessel for moving illegal goods. It is opaque, sturdy, and easily transportable. But it also suggests that the objects in the bag, whatever they may be, are irrelevant. They are merely means to operate a more profitable business. They are “product.”

So later in the episode, when Shardene finally moves out of D’Angelo’s apartment, she appropriately packs her things in a garbage bag. She confronts him with this notion, both directly and indirectly. “I don’t look like something you could roll up in a rug and throw in the trash?” she asks. As she walks out, she asserts her own humanity, taking her own possessions so that she doesn’t become a possession for somebody else.

It is a key decision, one that she probably arrived at while sitting in the detail office after the visit to the morgue. Back from the land of the dead, Freamon takes the final step towards convincing Shardene to help them out. “Keisha was not the first. Unless somebody steps up a little bit, she’s not going to be the last neither.” He reinforces what she saw in the morgue, telling her that the crew thrives on turning people into disposable objects.

He then calls on her directly, calling on her to do what she can to end it. Unfortunately, the very detachment that enables the detectives to flip Shardene also means that she has no access to the information she wants. The only people worth flipping can’t be flipped. Still, she opens up the possibility of some information (which will become important later).

There is an surprisingly-tender moment at the end of this scene, one that sticks out among the ugliness of Keisha’s death and the other pieces of Barksdale business that dominate the show. As Freamon convinces Shardene to help them out, she plays with one of his models. He notices and says “You like that one, why don’t you keep it?” She whispers a grateful “thank you” and looks down at it. It is a baby in a cradle. She gently caresses its hand, and it moves in a lifelike way. It is the great irony that this model baby, crafted by Freamon’s careful, precise hands and taken into Shardene’s warm embrace, feels more human than any of the disposable players of the drug game.

At the start of “Game Day,” Stringer describes Omar as a modern Robin Hood who steals from the rich dealers and gives to the poor fiends. By the end of the episode, however, Omar proves to align with a very different character type. When he strolls into Prop Joe’s shop bearing a bag of Avon’s heroin as an offering, he tells Joe “we free.” Suddenly, this seemingly-noble folk hero is stealing from the rich and giving to the rich. Not exactly the socialist equalizer he is made out to be.

In fact, this entire episode highlights the dark side of the Omar mystique. His purpose is not equality, nor is it social justice. He is out for revenge, pure and simple. Even his supposed generosity is just a way to get the locals to protect him. It is easy to miss, because Omar is not out for power or personal wealth, but in his single-minded crusade for revenge, he proves to be every bit as cutthroat of a businessman as Stringer.

This becomes clear when Joe suggests that he could simply take the product and throw Omar out. Omar has an answer ready: “Avon goes down, the projects be open market again, right?” Prop Joe responds by calling Omar “predatory,” showing a fearful admiration for this stickup boy’s mastery of vulture capitalism and the exacting laws of supply and demand.

In fact, Omar himself adopts the image of the predator earlier in the episode when he takes the drugs that he will later use to buy Avon’s pager number. He strolls into the lowrises, knowing exactly where the stash is and knowing the hoppers by name (his negotiations with Terrell even seem cordial). When the keepers of the stash make a futile attempt to scare him off,  Omar evokes a wholly different nursery rhyme: the three little pigs. Naturally, he sees himself as the Big Bad Wolf, and even though his prey hide behind brick, they are scared enough to drop the bag.

So which one is Omar, the Wolf at the door, or the merry Robin Hood?

Maybe he is a little of both. Maybe the line between the two is so thin that it sometimes becomes hard to tell them apart. Maybe part of the fun of Omar, part of his popularity, is that his charisma enables us to root for somebody who is entirely predatory while feeling like he is doing something noble. But it is also important not to be blinded by that charisma, by his whistle, his swagger and his British phrasing. Omar is no hero, even if he is fun to root for. He would never even claim to be a hero himself (which is just one more reason to like him).

Testers are out, and everybody is having run-ins. First, Bubbles recognizes Walon from the NA meeting he attended in “One Arrest.” Johnny, thinking Walon is there to get high, mocks the big man for his hypocracy. But then Bodie arrives and Johnny recognizes him as the boy who put him in the hospital. Johnny shuffles off to find a less-traumatic source for his next blast.

Not that Bodie would notice or care. In his eyes, all fiends are the same, even a white one who he personally beat down. He is far too busy managing the pack of fiends that swarm around him in supplication, seeking one of his precious vials (Bodie keeps them in a bag of Utz crab chips, the best place to keep a Baltimore stash).

Finally, Bodie gets fed up with the crowd and so he tosses the vials into the grass behind the fiends, who descend on it like a flock of hungry birds on a handful of breadcrumbs. Bubbles is either smart enough or lucky enough to have been standing away from the crowd, so three vials land at his feet. He snatches them and steps away from the feeding frenzy. He catches up with Walon and generously offer one of his vials, but the tattooed man says he is not there to cop.

No, he is there to protect his nephew, a scrawny white boy who could be Johnny’s younger brother. As Walon and Bubbles look back, they see him crawling through the grass, frantically searching for stray vials and fending off the rest of the crawling fiends. The image of people circling and looking for treasure hidden in the grass, the scene is oddly reminiscent of an easter-egg hunt.

It is a perverse twist on that childhood ritual. On Easter, children search the spring grass for carefully-placed eggs, the symbol of life and rebirth. In the projects, the fiends search for their own elixir, one that promises life but brings death.

Still, Bubbles’ conversation with Walon suggests a hint of rebirth, at least for this one soul that remains “young at heart.” It starts when Bubbles admits to Walon that his claim of 24-hours sober at the meeting was fraudulent. Walon is forgiving, saying “stood up, though.” He sees hope in Bubbles desire to be seen as sober, since desire is the necessary first step to making sobriety a reality.

But that is a tough reality to attain. Walon has no illusions about being able to keep his nephew clean. Instead, he envisions a decade or more of this lifestyle before the nephew sees “that bottom coming up at him.” This timeline clearly strikes a chord with Bubbles, who is at least a decade closer to his own bottom. His face twitches guiltily as Walon talks. Bubbles is not quite at his own bottom, but he senses it down there, waiting to smash his world to pieces.

He will get to the bottom (or at least, a bottom) later in this episode. After narrowly avoiding a beating over a bag of vialed-up Arm&Hammer, he goes to the only place he can think of: his estranged sister. It is an uncomfortable conversation (it is particularly heartbreaking when he is suddenly overwhelmed with regret and and says “that’s not right, is it?”), but at the end of it, she gives him the key to the basement. It is a symbolically significant moment. He has been entrusted with a key to his very own bottom, a place where he can nervously ride out the tide of withdrawal in his attempt to emerge anew. Plus he already has the chain that can hold the key.

Why would anybody want to leave Baltimore?

I have been writing this blog for six months now, and I am currently on Season 1, Episode 9. I am going to keep on writing and posting those pieces, albeit at a slower pace (maybe one or two posts per week). At the same time, as I finish writing about Season 1, I have also begun setting my sights on Season 2.

For the past two years, I have been totally immersed in The Wire’s first season. Between teaching it and writing about it, I have probably seen each episode at least 10 times each during that span. At the same time, my attention naturally drifted away from the other seasons of the show. I know them well (I have probably seen them at least five times each), but I have yet to examine them with the level of depth that I have been applying to Season 1. It’s like the difference between listening to the wire through the ears of Freamon versus Herc.

At the same time, I thought it might be interesting to experiment with the power of Twitter as a medium for collective close viewing and discussion. The social network offers the possibility to reach a large audience, while the 140-character limit enables me to point out some interesting parts of the show in small bursts. In many ways, it is closer to the way I teach the show. Or maybe not. I really have no idea how this will go.

So here are the rules I am setting for myself (which, of course, I will probably break as I see fit):

• I will watch one episode per week, and I invite you to watch along with me. Break out those DVD sets or fire up the HBOGo. Over the course of the week, I will post 7 tweets a day (most likely in two or thre bursts) going sequentially through the episode. Even if you don’t watch, I hope my tweets will bring back memories and perhaps suggest some things you might have missed or connections you never considered.
• Each tweet will have the hashtag of the episode (for example, “Ebb Tide” will be marked with #TheWire2_1). In this way, you can search the entire feed of tweets and catch up on any you missed.
• I also invite all of you to join in on the discussion. I will be tweeting things that I noticed, but I would love to hear from you as well. The more eyes on the show, the more meaning we can get from it and the more comprehensive the discussion. I will retweet interesting responses, and I encourage you to make use of the episode’s hashtag as well.
• At the end of the week, I will post the entire feed of 49 tweets on this blog. This will help me to expand the range of the blog beyond Season 1 (it will also provide a preview of some of the ideas I will explore later, when I begin writing longer posts about this season).

As always, I appreciate any feedback you have to offer, and I look forward to seeing where this takes us. If nothing else, it is yet another excuse to watch The Wire again, with soft eyes.