<snip>
I'm up for it...any sports watcher of any kind - and I am the most
dilettante - knows that thinking of sport in terms of results is as
dull and misleading as, well, a teacher's summary of Lear. If sport
were simply a matter of result, who would be interested? [AC]
<snip>

When I wrote of antithetical excesses I didn't mean to imply that sport
lacked _any_ 'content', just that it was limited in scope. I accept, of
course, that sport is an 'improvisation within rules,' for example,
'existing in its doing and its unpredictability.' My quarrel would be with
calling that improvisation an 'ultimate' one: it's just not that grand a
thing.

I also think it pretty much apodictic that Chelsea's match against
Muddlecombe, with all its joy, hope, desire, beauty and overpriced club
favours, is more readily and acceptably summarised by 3-2 than is
Wordsworth's poem by, say, 'Bloke cheered by daffodils.' It's not that
either is particularly satisfactory. It's that one is a great deal more
satisfactory than the other. Sky, I believe, could alert me to all the
various sports results as they come in. So there must be some demand.

<snip>
What spills over - joy, hope, desire, beauty (all of these can be in sport)
is always in excess... [AC]
<snip>

Yes, of course. But in a very restricted sense: joy (in succeeding), hope
(to succeed), desire (to succeed), the beauty of craft, not of art.
Stephen's experience of _playing_ sport is very different from the
experience of watching commercial sport, the target of my critique. However,
even here those emotions are somewhat reduced because they are so focused, I
would have thought.

And when Roger writes of  'the coordination of thinking and reaction that
goes on on a pitch or anywhere where sport is entertained.  Of muscle and
thought,' that's what I mean by *craft*, although he himself calls it 'art'.

<snip>
The arts have their own version of the football hoons - those who think
bestseller lists or fame are a substitute for reading, say, or who value
visual art by its auction price [AC]
<snip>

No. It's not, I think, a matter of substitution but external validation, the
principle of the Veblen good. People read books _because_ they are
bestsellers. They value art because it is _known_ to be good. My Iraqi
neighbours support Chelsea because it has more cachet, as far as I can tell.

<snip>
[A]rt too has its corruptions. Is it fair to speak of the best of art and
the worst of sport?

I'd say there is that "deterritorialisation" in sport, those moments when it
lifts beyond its contexts into pure act, and becomes a joyous thing. You can
see that in great tennis matches where a brilliant player catches the crowd
out of its narrower loyalties. [AC]
<snip>

That's why I mentioned D&G on 'minor literature'. The tennis player moments
happen, I agree. And it's common to see them as some sort of outbreak of
Victor Turner's *communitas*. Although my neighbours from Basra remain
thoroughly marginalised for all their adherence. But is subsumption into
some sort of group identity really the same as D&G's excerpting of
subjectivity out of the mass, Cf Simondon on individuation for example, with
its different direction of flow and all its many political implications?
Deterritorialisation in this context is about how validation can happen
_within_ the medium, the emergence of related sorts of poetry for example,
rather than from outside: the production of feeling; not the hanging of
feeling onto something else, which is what happens all too easily watching
sport.

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)