Gooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaalllllll!!!!! or Nil-Nil

MATTHEW A. KENT, ‘Aristotle’s Favorite Sport’:

 “...There’s a more complete way to explain why soccer is the best sport. Remember that there are four ways of answering the question “Why?”

First, there’s the material cause of soccer—what “stuff” is a soccer game made of? What’s the “matter” with soccer?

Think of the field, the ball, the eleven players per team, and the lone referee. Each of these physical components, in its own way, makes soccer able to fulfill the purposes of sports better than any other sport can.

A soccer field is much wider and longer than a basketball court or a hockey rink. The players are expected to cover an enormous area of turf. Yet, unlike other big-field sports (say, baseball or cricket), soccer demands almost constant running. The field’s dimensions never quite allow any of the twenty-two players to feel completely removed from the action. This produces more exercise and more recreation for all of them. A player’s physical exertion and mental attention are required by the game practically one hundred percent of the time.

The field, the ball, and the jerseys in soccer are also exceptionally suitable for the theatrical purposes of sports. The field is large enough to dominate a spectator’s view, including peripheral vision. The vast expanse of bright green grass is pleasing to the eye. But whether you’re seated in the back corner of the upper deck or next to the head of FIFA in a luxury suite overlooking midfield, you can always see what’s going on. The ball is large enough to be easily visible from a distance (unlike a hockey puck). The jerseys are colorful and graceful, with different designs from time to time for variety. All of this delights the senses. Aristotle indicates that such pleasures are very natural (Poetics, Chapter 4)…”

 

 Leon de Winter:

"Football is a form of insanity. You can express feelings that are normally repressed. You identify with top athletes as though they are warriors. We all want to be warriors and to kill the other team. Shooting the ball into the goal is ritualized rape; our archaic impulses come to the fore."

Simon Critchley:

"...Football is working-class ballet. It’s an experience of enchantment. For an hour and a half, a different order of time unfolds and one submits oneself to it. A football game is a temporal rupture with the routine of the everyday: ecstatic, evanescent and, most importantly, shared. At its best, football is about shifts in the intensity of experience. At times, it’s like Spinoza on maximizing intensities of existence. At other times, it’s more like Beckett’s Godot, where nothing happens twice.."

 
I love the world cup and consider myself plain lucky that I get to see it on TV.

I remember how my 8-year-old son started crying when the 2002 FIFA world cup ended on June 30. I too wanted to join him but I only hugged him.

Eduardo Galeano says "Tell me how you play and I will tell you who you are.". 

Mr. Galeano, Although my son is a football nut and plays it actively, I play football only in my daydreams, I have even attended some great matches there. And you are right, I am a day-dreamer!

  
Football originated in China and by women?

'Court Ladies in the Inner Palace' , circa. 1465-1509

Artist: Du Jin

Eternity? Good Thing It's Always Today

Kabir:

“I won’t come / I won’t go / I won’t live / I won’t die...I’m nothing / says Kabir / I’m not among the living / Or the dead.” 

Manjit Kumar:

"The strangest thing about mass-less particles is that for them there is no such thing as time. There is no past or present, only "now", and it stretches for all eternity – but since there is no tick of the clock, what eternity?"

Eternity: While in the popular mind, eternity often simply means existence for a limitless amount of time, many have used it to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside time.


placard says: "Are you ready for eternity?"

Artist: Robert J Day, The New Yorker, December 4 1943







The first placard in the picture above says: "The world will end tomorrow" and the second one says: "Good thing it's always today."

Artist: Johnny Hart, B.C.

Indeed, it's always today...it's never tomorrow...

Gazing Into Abyss (Not Straining Your Eye) and Give It The Finger

(Giving the finger has been covered on this blog in some detail in July 2012 here.)
 
Friedrich Nietzsche:

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."

['Beyond Good and Evil', Aphorism 146, 1886]

Shalom Auslander:

"There is a clothing brand in the United States named 'Life Is Good', a monstrous lie which is emblazoned on all their products. It is an enormously successful brand, and I'll tell you why: because life isn't good. 'They give birth astride of a grave,' wrote Samuel Beckett, 'the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.' He was only half-right; he left out the part about there being banana peels on the ground beside the grave, so that from the moment we are born, we slip, and drop our coffee, and everyone points at us and laughs, and then there's a Holocaust, and then, and only then, is it dark once more. Books that cry at the tragedy are easy and, in my view, lazy; these books look into the abyss, smile, and give the abyss the finger. That's much more difficult."




Artist: Bernie, Spectator UK, December 2011

When Did Tarzan Start Shaving?

The day after tomorrow- June 2 2014- is 110th Birth Anniversary of Johnny Weissmuller...the Tarzan for me.

Edgar Rice Burroughs: 

"Perhaps the fact that I lived in Chicago and yet hated cities and crowds of people made me write my first Tarzan story." 

Gore Vidal, Esquire, December 1963:

"...There is something basic in the appeal of the 1914 Tarzan which makes me think that he can still hold his own as a daydream figure, despite the sophisticated challenge of his two young competitors, James Bond and Mike Hammer. For most adults, Tarzan (and John Carter of Mars) can hardly compete with the conspicuous consumer consumption of James Bond or the sickly violence of Mike Hammer, but for children and adolescents the old appeal continues. All of us need the idea of a world alternative to this one. From Plato’s Republic to Opar to Bondland, at every level, the human imagination has tried to imagine something better for itself than the existing society. Man left Eden when he got up off all fours, endowing his descendants with nostalgia as well as chronic backache. In its naïve way, the Tarzan legend returns us to that Eden where, free of clothes and the inhibitions of an oppressive society, a man is able, as William Faulkner put it in his high Confederate style, to prevail as well as endure. The current fascination with LSD and drugs—not to mention alcohol—is all a result of a general sense of boredom. Since the individual’s desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society that every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming. James Bond, Mike Hammer, and Tarzan are all dream selves, and the aim of each is to establish personal primacy in a world that, more and more, diminishes the individual. Among adults, the current popularity of these lively fictions strikes me as a most significant and unbearably sad phenomenon..."


(Think of the popularity of all the super heroes in 2014 and then re-read Vidal's quote above!)

I first read Burroughs's Tarzan book in Marathi. I did not know it was a translation. I used to feel miserable reading how Tarzan was orphaned. I did not want to be a kid-Tarzan. For a long time, my knowledge of Africa was entirely restricted to what Tarzan books taught!

I guess as a kid I loved Hindi films like Suraj, 1966 because they had Tarzan-like elements in them. 

(Read entries on this blog, about about my other childhood heroes: Nath Madhav's  Virdhawal   and Lee Falk's Phantom.)

When I first saw Johnny Weissmuller film, I realized how sculpted a male could look. Later I learnt he was a champion swimmer too. 

Of course, as always with me, Maureen O'Sullivan playing Jane helped!

 

But one thing I never realised...when did Tarzan start to shave?

Artist: Joe Dator, The New Yorker, February 2014

Tarzan of the Apes and its twenty-two sequels together have sold more than 30 million copies. Mr. Burroughs was also a popular science fiction writer. His 'A Princess of Mars' is a futuristic sci-fi fantasy romance.

Like Ms. O'Sullivan, the princess looks enticing to me.

courtesy: Penguin Classics FB  page

Astrological signs, Lida Goodman and My Mother

I have never read Linda Goodman's (1925-1995) 'Sun Signs' (1968) or 'Love Signs' (1978).

Some of my (pretty) female work colleagues in Mumbai often quoted from it during 1984-1987. Especially, if I behaved like a jerk, they found its rationale in 'signs'. (Another famous miss is Ayn Rand. I never read a page from any of her books, unlike, again, those pretty girls.)

'Gemini'

Artist: Salvador Dali, Courtesy: Brainpickings.org

Until I turned 21, I did not even know there was something called Sun sign (mine Gemini) that is different from Moon sign (mine Taurus).

'Taurus'

Artist: Salvador Dali, Courtesy: Brainpickings.org

But my mother was a big believer in Moon signs and the concept of 'Sade-sati' (साडेसाती). She often traced my scratchy throat to my moon sign!

She thought my father's financial and occasional health struggles during our early childhood  were due to 'sade sati'. Whatever the truth, it was soothing to the ears because we knew they all were going to end because 'Sade sati' always ends!

Now that she is gone, I realize that I forgot to ask her when her own final 'sade sati' began and did it ever end?