I didn't think I was agreeing with Christopher, Anny.
His third example of the football fan reminds me of the forces of
anarchy in Yeats 1919 - the edgy random violence that football
supporters, well, crowds can deliver. Of course, Yeats was talking
about the end of civilisation but I think that sports *contains* and
*attracts* the same energies.
Roger
On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 10:47 PM, Anny Ballardini
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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)
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
>> "I began to warm and chill
>> to objects and their fields"
>> Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Anny Ballardini
> http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
> http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
> I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
> star!
>
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"I began to warm and chill
to objects and their fields"
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
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