----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, April 08, 2005 10:49 PM
Subject: Re: God is a Reds fan
> Back to baseball, etc. The Spicer poem that Pierre posted is an example of
> a large genre, written and in film, of baseball as metaphysical drama.
> Which is the way USians tend to experience the game. Is there a similar
> literature of cricket, or does it always remain cricket?
>
> Mark
>
>
As it happens I have by my computer, next to the mouse for easy access, an
anthology of cricket pieces called 'Summer Days: Writers On Cricket' edited
by Michael Meyer (Eyre Methuen, London, 1981). It includes writers such as
Melvyn Bragg, Roy Fuller, Ted Hughes, Harold Pinter, Kingsley Amis and Leo
McKern. I'll just quote from one little piece which I feel is relevant:
We may be a small and callow race but there is a divinity to our cricket.
There are profound social and cultural reasons for it. As late as the 1950s,
the curriculum in Australian schools was identical to that of an English
grammar school. Poetry cut out at Tennyson. The only history was European
history. When we spoke of literary figures, we spoke of Englishmen. But when
we spoke of cricket, we spoke of our own. We couldn't make it in literature
because we had none of the right seasons, the plants laughed at European
botany, the absurd animals had no mythology behind them. But cricket was
possible! We knew why it was. We had more sunshine, we ate more protein, we
washed more regularly than the Poms! In the manner in which soccer is the
great way up for children from the economic sumps of Brazil, so cricket was
the great way out of Australian cultural ignominy. No Australian had written
_Paradise Lost_, but Bradman had made 100 before lunch at Lords.
... from _The Cyclical Supremacy of Australia in World Cricket_ by Thomas
Kenneally.
I'd like to quote more - of that essay and others - but I haven't got the
time and maybe not the right. (A student of mine saw the book at a St
Vincent de Paul store and bought it for me for $A2.50. Bargain.) (I teach my
students that life is more important than literature, and that cricket is
more important than life. Well, almost. A teacher has to be a little
eccentric, don't you think?)
Perhaps for next week's Snapshots we should all approach the seasonal sport
at hand in our neck of the woods ... Here, it would be Aussie Rules. They
have overburdened it with rules during my lifetime - earlier it was a
rough-and-ready sport. Now they have tribunals to punish rough play. Sigh.
Today, the two Australian Football League teams from Western Australia (a
large state but thinly poulated out of the capital city area, and isolated
by desert, etc) play off in a hometown derby. I'll be watching that one!
Dockers vs Eagles ...
Andrew
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