Richard Sosis

Rich’s Corner of the Table: Anthropological Musings of a Ping Pong Pop

Hi. I’m the author of The Ping Pong Player and the Professor. The publisher of this book, Wildhouse Publications, is a small, nonprofit press run by an Aussie academic with a hopeless addiction for creating institutions. It is a rather unconventional press, which I like, but I suspect it was the Aussie accent that ultimately won me over. Regardless, it has been a good fit for me. Wildhouse Publications has a very nice publicity manager, whose greatest virtue, at least from my vantage point, is that she puts up with me. This is no small accomplishment. I am well aware that as an author I’m a nightmare to work with. My problem—or more accurately, my main problem—is that I’m an introverted luddite. I do not participate in any of what people call “social media,” and in fact I live my life trying to avoid doing anything related to either of those words. My preferred state of existence is reading a good book in a hobbit hole. Needless to say, my publicity manager has asked me to do many things to which I have politely responded, “I’m sorry, I know you are just doing your job, but I’d rather visit a proctologist.” But when she asked me about writing a blog I couldn’t immediately give my patented response. I may prefer reading in a hobbit hole, but I can write there just as well. The only real issue was that I have never followed a blog before so I don’t really know what they are about and why anyone would read them, let alone write them. One of my children, however, thought writing a blog was a good idea and I was feeling guilty about being a difficult author. So, I silenced the countless neurotic voices in my head telling me to ignore the world and bury myself in a good book: I acquiesced and committed to writing a blog a month. So, what’s the blog about?

A little bit of table tennis, a smattering of anthropology, and probably a heavy dose of whatever I’m worried about when I sit down to write. On the latter topic, I’m a worrier, so there will be no shortage of things to discuss—even I’m not worried about that. As far table tennis goes,
I find the US table tennis community to be utterly fascinating, so also, no shortage of material. Why is it fascinating? Well, the community has a proud history that it often celebrates, but it’s a community that always looks toward the future. It is diverse in every way imaginable, but is also distinctly quirky. It is anguished and insecure (something I can relate to), yet remarkably resilient, passionate, and
unwaveringly hopeful. Most importantly, it is a human community, with all the grace, generosity, shortcomings, and contradictions that characterize humanity and the communities we create.

Despite these virtues, the US table tennis community is generally unknown, and certainly underappreciated. In my own small way, I’d like to change that. Each month I will share some reflections and stories about my assorted adventures—as competitor, fan, coach, father of an elite-level player, chronicler, and ethnographic researcher—in this hidden world. If you decide to endure these musings, I should apologize ahead of time as my writings will surely be self-absorbed. Sorry about that. I’ll undoubtedly include some anthropological thoughts on whatever I am rambling about, but the overall tone will be playful. Indeed, I hope to have a bit of fun since I always seem to have a better time when I’m having fun. I know this is tautological (or as my children remind me when I utter such thoughts, “typically illogical”), but it doesn’t make it any less true. I hope these blogs provide some fun for you too.

  • A Kveller Blog

    In my blog last month I mentioned that the new publicist for Wildhouse Publishers wanted to promote the parenting angle of my book, The Ping Pong Player and the Professor. Despite my parenting experience, four times over, I’m certainly not a parenting expert, so I was skeptical. But the new publicist is persistent and I…

  • On Being a Daddy: Reflections of a Ping Pong Pop

    Wildhouse Publications recently hired a new publicist. I don’t know what happened to the previous publicist, but she apparently resigned shortly after the publication of The Ping Pong Player and the Professor. We hadn’t been in contact for quite some time so I assumed she had simply given up on me, which, incidentally, I thought…

  • A Long-expected Wedding Party

    Before I get to my main topic, there are two things I’d like to mention. First, in my April blog I wished Will Shortz a speedy recovery from his recent stroke. I had also written that his stroke ended his “playing streak of nearly 4000 consecutive days.” Although my last blog pushed for USATT to…

  • What Can USA Table Tennis Learn from a Passover Seder?

    I’m sorry for the blogging lapse. Teaching, traveling, feeling worn down (from the aforementioned teaching and traveling), losing myself in engaging books and mesmerizing jazz recordings, rubbing Goldberry’s belly, filling my belly with ash reshteh (courtesy of one of my graduate students), and so forth—as I’ve written elsewhere, I have no shortage of excuses. So,…

  • I am not Spock

    Trust me, nobody has ever confused me for Spock. But I’ve co-opted the title of Leonard Nimoy’s first autobiography for the title of this blog because I’ve recently been thinking a lot about human illogicalities and incongruities. Nimoy himself was not immune to such inconsistencies. In a move of incomparable irony, he followed up I…

  • Excuses: The Good, the Bad, and the Fallow

    First things first. I apologize for the absence of a December blog. Skipping December was not something I had originally planned when I decided to try my hand at monthly blogging. But as any academic will tell you, closing out a semester is hectic business, especially for the disorganized, and of my many shortcomings, disorganization…

  • Family, Friends, and Feasts

    I had a surprisingly lovely Thanksgiving holiday. Yes, surprising. Before the holiday I was feeling anxious. I had no particular reason to feel anxious, just a lifetime of observation that when you bring lots of genetically-related kin together, something invariably goes wrong. Oddly, my evolutionary biology classes always suggested a different dynamic among those who…

  • Small Acts of Kindness

    I had intended for this month’s blog to be about Eliel’s travels in China over the summer. I was planning to share a few of his stories and make some connections between anthropological research on pilgrimage, which I find fascinating, and Eliel’s explorations of table tennis’s epicenter on this planet. Eliel was in China as…

  • The Value of Dusting Off Those Rusty Ideas Just One More Time

    Last year I began conducting research at a table tennis club. In hindsight, developing and carrying out this research was one of the best decisions I’ve made in quite a while. Okay, admittedly, my children would likely note that competition within the category “Daddy’s Good Decisions” is rather thin. Regardless, the plan to pursue this…

  • Why a Game Manufacturer Might Sue Me

    Throughout the world, people, places, and things can become polluted. I don’t mean polluted in the sense of becoming smoggy, soiled, or splattered with your toddler’s unwanted supper. Rather, I mean impure or contaminated. Desacralized. Like cooties, albeit for adults. For example, on an atoll in Micronesia where I conducted fieldwork, the highest chief possessed…

  • Why an Alleged Luddite Relies on Uber

    Are all Uber drivers more interesting than the rest of us, or just my Uber drivers? I guess I shouldn’t speak for the rest of humanity, but Uber drivers are certainly more interesting than I am. I’ve always wondered whether wannabe Uber drivers have to pass a series of exams that assess the extraordinariness of…