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Friday, August 22, 2008

And Now For Something Completely Different...


Eurozine: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-08-07-seymour-en.html  
Blurred boundaries
Sport, art and activity

 ...I want to take up a series of propositions from Loren Goldner's remarkable book Herman Melville, identifying sport as one site of the emergence of an epochally new form of human activity. Goldner develops C.L.R. James' observations regarding Melville's famous novel Moby Dick and James's provocative reflections on the place of sport in the life of the working class... ...James, who grew up in Trinidad, was well placed to register this transfusion between art and sport, raised as he was on a steady stream of English novels and constant games of cricket. James became fascinated by what he called the "social aesthetic" of cricket: "men from the neighbourhood described by his aunts as 'ne'er-do-wells' were transformed into aristocrats of self-mastery and brilliance at bat in cricket matches."...

Something new and fascinating, perfectly timed for August and the Olympics. Read it and sit through the outrageously philosophical Marxian blah-blah and you will see that Sports is an important area of human behaviour worthy of serious consideration... ...particularly the price of hot dogs at the ball park... ...or the cost of tiffin boxes at Eden Gardens...

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