Roberto Galasso, Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, a beautiful book. But I think
that Christopher meant something different.
On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 7:15 PM, Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> According to Bill Bryson, Baseball, in its pre-Television days,
> contributed a lot to the American language mostly through sports
> reporters writing. Cricket as well. Both have highly complicated
> scoring systems and played over a period of time. Both have produced a
> lot of content. Sure, you can reduce it to a score, but the scores
> never do the game justice. Nor do the reports. It's hard to put into
> words, the coordination of thinking and reaction that goes on on a
> pitch or anywhere where sport is entertained. Of muscle and thought,
> of art:
>
> As Plutarch remarks with the dispatch of great Greek writers: "It
> appears that at that time there were men who, for deftness of hand,
> speed of legs, and strength of all muscles, transcended normal human
> nature and were tireless. They never used their physical capacities to
> help others to do good or to help others, but reveled in their own
> brutal arrogance and enjoyed exploiting their strength to commit
> savage, ferocious deeds, conquering, ill-treating, and murdering
> whosoever fell into their hands. For them, respect, justice, fairness,
> and magnanimity were virtues prized only by such as lacked the courage
> to do harm and were afraid of suffering it themselves; for those who
> had the strength to impose themselves, such qualities would have no
> meaning." It is Theseus an Heracles who first use force to a different
> end than that of merely crushing their opponents. They become
> "athletes on behalf of men." And, rather than strength itself, what
> they care about is the art of applying it. "Theseus invented the art
> of wrestling, and later teaching of the sport took the moves from him.
> Before Theseus it was merely a question of height and brute force."
>
> Robert Callasso in the Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony:
>
> Roger
>
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 3:08 PM, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> > <snip>
> > And last week he was at it again, this time attacking sport as "the
> > antithesis" of art. [AC]
> > <snip>
> >
> > I think there may be something in the antithesis argument after all.
> Sport,
> > surely, is an excess of result over 'content': you can reduce it to a
> result
> > (highest ever score when peeing against a wall) without doing untold
> damage.
> > But there can never be any sort of Teacher's Summary of, say, *King Lear*
> > that will ever do more than injustice to that 'content', which is forever
> in
> > excess.
> >
> > Anyway here are three related points.
> >
> > First Deleuze & Guattari on Kafka and the nature of 'minor literature'.
> > Meaning derives from the saying. It is not some putting-into-words of
> > something pre-existing. And it's the nature of 'minor literature' (its
> > indifference between speaking and spoken subjects, its asignifying
> quality,
> > its undermining of once established terrains through
> *deterritorialisation*,
> > that welling up of 'content', the point at which everything becomes
> > *political* and where everything also departs from being *political*)
> that
> > makes some sort of shared enunciation possible. And this is absolutely at
> > odds, I think, with what happens with football fans.
> >
> > Here is Tiziano Scarpa on the business of looking at football on the
> > television. He takes the example of someone watching pundits watching a
> > match that they're discussing: 'Who said that television tells us lies?
> > Television is sincerity got up as a screen. It tells the truth about
> itself:
> > it shows that there's nothing to see.'
> >
> > And here finally is a speaker in Nanni Balestrini's *I furiosi*, which is
> > about, I think, the AC Milan Ultras. The advantage, he says, of being a
> > football thug, is that you don't actually have to believe in things: no
> more
> > politics, thank G-d. All you need do now is just thump people.
> >
> > CW
> > _______________________________________________
> >
> > 'How to speak a different language and still be understood?
> > This is *communication* but we might call it politics, or we
> > might call it life.' (Judith Revel)
> >
>
>
>
> --
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> "I began to warm and chill
> to objects and their fields"
> Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
>
--
Anny Ballardini
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