Steven and Anthony, now that Steven’s retired, are keeping the TriBeCa loft and selling their house upstate. They want to get a place in TK town—it’ll be more convenient to the train, and the light is better, and anyway they can afford it. They’ve found a couple of young tech guys, friends who had equity in snapchat and want to alternate weekends, to buy the house, and though they’re a little skeptical of their intentions—Kevin in particular seems like he intends to cheap the place up, turn it into some kind of harem—they’re getting a good price and they’re ready to move on.
The only problem is the portrait of Ronald Reagan in the downstairs foyer. Five years ago, when they first moved in, they had a party that was a little too party, and, well, everyone sort of ended up drinking and smoking way too much, and there may have been some other drugs involved, it was sort of a party from a different decade, and when everybody woke up with oh-we’re-actually-in-our-fifties cramps and aches, there was a six-foot-tall portrait of Ronald Reagan, in 3/4 view, not just drawn but actually somehow etched (by into a slate wall whose blankness had previously been the defining impression on entering the home. What made this interesting was that, drooling on himself at the base of the portrait, they’d discovered their friend Newton, an artist who’d just finished becoming major. Two weeks later, when Newton had died in a smelting accident, they’d realized that this cartoon was possibly the last work he’d ever completed.
The question is what they ought to do about this painting. Steven’s in favor of just leaving it there. They can destroy it if Anthony really wants, but it’s part of the house—it belongs there. And, anyways, it’s on a slate wall—what are they going to do? It’ll go to pieces. Plus they have no idea if Newton even painted it anyway. And if he’d wanted to show it, he’d have said something. Anthony thinks they should find a way to take it with them—he doesn’t trust Kevin and Devin, for a number of reasons, and he likes having a reminder of Newton in the house. What’s ironic is that it was Anthony who’d felt sort of neutral at best toward Ronald in the last three years. Steven thinks that what’s changed is just that Anthony’s getting older, and more sentimental about things that have passed out of their lives, but what Steven doesn’t know is that Anthony’s been diagnosed, a few months ago, with an inoperable heart condition that’s supposed to give him about six months to live. Anthony hasn’t told Steven about this because he doesn’t want to deal with Steven being sad about this, but it’s changed his perspective. He wants to have the things he wants, as long as he’s alive. He wants things to be perfect.
Things come to a crisis when the conniving Kevin arrives at the house, one day during breakfast, with what seem to be lawyers. Steven and Anthony are having breakfast and pretend not to be home—but the texts Kevin sends to Steven imply heavily that Kevin’s found out from one of the other party-attendees that this is one of Newton’s paintings, and might be very valuable—he’s hoping to have Steven and Anthony sign a document stating that the contents and foundations of the house as sold will remain within after the sale—giving him the etching.
Steven and Anthony, waiting until Kevin and the lawyers go to check and see if anyone’s in the guest house, sneak out the back door and into the woods up the hill, where they hide and begin making phone calls to anyone they can think of—Devin, the lawyers’ main office, anyone in the area—to try and invent some reason for Kevin and the lawyers to leave. They’re willing to say anything, and they have to get it done quickly, because they have dinner plans. But in the course of all this excitement, Anthony’s heart begins to bother him—feeling weak, he collapses behind a pine tree clutching his chest. After recovering, he’s forced to explain to Steven about his heart, at which point they both cry. Once Kevin leaves, they drink a bottle of wine, and make a rubbing of Ronald, and then Steven gets the sledgehammer from the garage and destroys the etching while Anthony watches. Curtain on Steven and Anthony at the new house, living for the moment.
I spent most of the week listening to this album.It’s covers of Elliott Smith by Seth Avett and Jessica Lea Mayfield. It’s an odd one because without Elliott’s enormous craft talent a lot of the songs are actually sadder: ‘Fond Farewell’ is no longer a secret song about suicide. It’s just a song about suicide. What to do? Smith’s work was always a langue/parole game, songs about addiction and death arranged at the 99th percentile of folk/pop craft. What relationship, between the beauty of the confessing object and the pain of the confession? If, listening to ‘From a Basement on a Hill’ we almost forget that it’s twilight, is that an artistic achievement, a lie, or both? And if, in one’s own writing, a decade should have been spent largely in pursuit of atomic craft, and largely in pursuit of elegance at that, does the fact that Avett/Mayfield’s relatively graceless iterations of the Smith classics are in some cases (Between the Bars/Fond Farewell) more emotionally affecting than the originals indicate that there’re times to just sock the reader in the mouth? That flight-to-elegance is also a variety of flight?
Somewhere, all sports are sublimations. Two groups of men step onto a field; one triumphs. We want this, as a spectacle or practice, but we've recognized that the versions with death, with an actual finality to the defeat, aren't valuable--people die, is one thing that freaks us out, and then the issue with the gladiatorial thing is that it's bad business. Imagine being a gladiator PR guy in ancient Rome--you have a good thing going, a gladial brand that's really taking off, and then one Tuesday your guy stays out too late and some noname retiarius gets through his hamstring or achilles with that trident, and then what are you supposed to do? The story's over.
So, sports: the premise is a competition of mortal urgency and competition but NOT of mortal stakes. The required violence is directed towards an inanimate object of play and the affair between competitors is rendered (if not all the way polite) somehow moral, contained within a ruleset whose value is partially in their sacramental insistence on the basic fraternity of the competitors. They'll compete, but there'll also be a trading of jerseys and ritual exchange of pennants, they'll kick the ball out when someone's hurt or offer a hand to a downed opponent. All of these say: we’re on the same side, in the brotherhood of athletes, far more than we’re competitors, my desire to defeat you is not a desire to harm you. They say: despite the pace of my heart and the twitching absence of thought I remain a man of the enlightenment. I am aware of all humans as individuals; I have not become a savage, I have not regressed.
But then of course the entire drama or magic of sports is about the proximity of the unconscious, of the instinctive: watch van Persie score that goal again, or Villa’s backheel or that Jermaine Jones goal that put us in the game against Portugal, and attempt to pretend that these were conscious legislated acts, attempt to pretend that they have anything to do with the superego. Attempt to pretend that they were planned, considered, argued. If the moral structure of sports depends on an enlightenment code of self-control, of virtuous self-censoring dedication to a cooperative perfection, then the beauty of sports is largely in their frequent, sublime, undeniable immediacy. You can practice all you want but what will you do when the ball falls into your hands with 2 seconds left? Will you see the pass? Will your feet be right? Will you make history? Some of the best shots in sports (USA-Portugal and Ghana-Portugal games were dense with these, and the famous ‘Howard reaches for his head’ shot after the USA-Portugal game is an example) are those in which players for whom things have just gone wrong are washed by the sudden arrival of their conscious thought. As they realize what they ought to have done, or how bad it really is: the pain of the self, with all its stakes, re-entering the failing body.
Increasingly, sport trades explicitly on this frontier: every year the metrics are carrying even bigger sabers, the heatmaps are a little more precise, the scouting more elaborate and the gameplans more defined. But that only seems to place more weight, or more emphasis, on the few chaotic moments: those, after all, are the only ones in which anything can be surprising. It’s no surprise that the rhetoric of televised sports is a careful mashup of theatrical and candid photography, of elegant long-framed shots of everyone posed against clever zooms on secret anguish: the sports themselves, increasingly, are ballets punctuated by moments from reality TV. Sport: a carefully planned and expertly rehearsed motion of bodies, punctuated by moments of reactive tragedy or apotheosis. All that rigorous dashing in service of the few scarce surprising moments.
But then again there are rules. A great athlete is supposed to leave the superego, leave the game plan, improvise and change the story. And Suarez is a genius of improvisation (he’s a genius of other kinds, too, and it shouldn’t be unsaid—in 2013/24 he’s been one of the five best players in the world). But the improvisation has rules: it has to stay within the game, it has to flow along the predetermined paths. It can’t kick, it can’t elbow, it can’t reach for the face, and it certainly, certainly cannot bite.
What’s a bite, anyway? A lot’s been made of biting, much of it correct: biting as precivilized, biting as figurative vector for infection, biting as the behavior of an infant. What’s been mentioned less is that biting, unlike most other fouls in soccer, can’t be understood as part of a logical progression from rule-following. A bad tackle starts as or resembles a good one, an elbow to the face might be an attempt to keep one’s balance, most penalties are made of desperate lateness rather than cynical intention, handballs are usually about sloppy hand placement rather than deliberate cheating. But in no constructive soccer action does one begin to bite one’s opponent, or gesture toward biting one’s opponent, or really act with the teeth as any kind of tool. In fact generally teeth are among the last parts of one’s body one would like to involve in a soccer game. Which means that a serial biter (in addition to all the other things) must be understood as someone who’s disinterested in the arbitrary limits that the sport places on his competitive toolset.
This is more common than it sounds. In general athletes sometimes seem to have the feeling that the stakes of competition are too high to entrust to mere ability—and so they flap, they elbow, they harass, wipe pine tar on their necks. Anything to be a little surer that the game will go their way. And does it surprise us that in soccer—a sport which is such a poorly designed comparative experiment that it includes an entire result (the draw) which is in actuality a frank admission of the comparison’s inadequacy—this armature of extrasporting tactics should be particularly well-developed? That soccer, which asks one middle-aged man with two playing cards to keep control of 22 evenly dispersed millionaires, and in which one bad decision by said retired police corporal can change the actual trajectory of an entire nation, should be particularly well-embroidered with attempts to cheat?
It shouldn’t—but to describe Suarez’s biting as a simple overflow of the competitive urge seems inadequate. After all, in no circumstance has ‘biting a defender’ been an effective competitive or life strategy for Luis Suarez. It is not as though, having bitten Chiellini, Bakkal, or Ivanovic, he then proceeded easily to score. Instead each bite has been competitively trivial in the immediate present and both competitively and personally disastrous in the immediate aftermath. At no point, we might conjecture, has Luis Suarez’s sense of joy or achievement at having bitten someone extended further than the moment his teeth departed from his victim’s flesh. Biting is not a way of winning.
It seems more often to be an admission of (official, rule-following) defeat. Look at who Suarez bites, and when—omit Bakkal, the first incident and the only one in which it seems at all considered—Suarez bites central defenders, late in games in which his team is not performing as required. And look at where—in the opposing penalty box, almost beside the goal, after or in the vicinity of a collision. Soccer like most sports is elementally a struggle for space: a battle on the one side to obtain a free square meter in which to guide the ball into the net and on the other to ensure no such meters are available. Suarez is a ranger of the highest order, makes good defenses look like English muffins, but the men he bites are excellent defenders, ones who have harried and bothered and impeded him throughout the game. Phil Jagielka, one might note, never gets bit. You’re only bitten if you’re beating him.
Why bite? God knows. Say it’s a reflex, say it’s an atavism, say it’s evidence of illness. Or say that sport is an onion in three layers. On the outside the official rules of the game, the dictates not to kick and not to dive. Some players play here. And then, within that, the urge to win the contest, to make goals free kicks or cards happen to the opponent regardless of the topmost rules. And then within that, beating like a heart, an urge to win against another human, a will-to-power pitting each athlete against his direct competitor and insisting that he dominate. The best competitors manage to stay on the second level. They understand that there’s a middle ground of action that can win without following the rules. Perhaps biting is evidence that for some, for Suarez as for Tyson as for certain football players, there isn’t any second level. The game isn’t a sublimation of the need to win, not a polite channeling—it’s just a direct expression of their dominance. Only then—only if the problem of Chiellini’s obstinacy can become untethered from the context of the sport and become a dire offense to the man as well—can Suarez make the choice to bite. Only if he is not playing soccer at that moment. Not if soccer is a way of ceasing to be violent. If Suarez when unsuspended plays with an electric rawness, with an urgent invention that makes it feel, often, like he’s playing a different sport than some of the others, then perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. He'll be banned from soccer for a long time, but he was never really playing it--or any other sport.
Enormous acres of farmland, in the towns surrounding your reunion, have been washed out by the spring floods and it is impossible not to see them as you leave the campus or arrive. They are brown and wet and small tufts of opportunist grass have risen in the sodden rows. Nearby, in better-elevated places, young corn is still standing in its careful rows shin-high, leather-green, becoming. In the low bottoms of the field between the corn there linger still brown streams with dirty bubbles floating in them waiting to drain into the ground. Throughout the whole reunion the town river, previously considered tame despite its violent name, will churn and loathe against the bottoms of the bridges and the walls around the downtown bars.
At your reunion there is a desire to return to restaurants that were loved five years ago. On the way to the restaurants there are numerous confessions of past or continuing apostasy. Some people never liked those restaurants. The sandwiches were too wet, the ambience too grim. Other people, in the intervening years, have gotten used to better pizza. But there is nothing to do. The complainers put their adult hands back in their adult pockets and walk into the restaurant and order a sandwich. Both they and the devout agree the sandwiches are better than remembered. No one is accused of hypocrisy. At your reunion there is a desire to repeat the shibboleths. There are games of Frisbee and awkward visits to places parties once were held. People who did not like sandwiches are eating sandwiches; people who did not throw very many Frisbees are throwing Frisbees now, because these things feel like college, or like this college in particular.
Ten years ago (this is the elemental fact of your reunion) some number of people received letters informing them of their acceptance to a college. And some number of them came. They came for different reasons. Some had been expecting to get into other colleges, some had been surprised to get into this one. Some came after spending years in other places, other colleges. Some came from very near and some from very far. There is a desire at your reunion to feel that none of this was accidental. That these particular arrivals—to the place with the Frisbees and the overoiled sandwiches and tame river running through the town--corresponded to some common fate or quality. There is a desire to feel that coming here was right.
Sunburns at your reunion are common and severe. Milk-white thighs are seared the color of tongues, shoulders are a painful pink around the straps of tank tops. There is not a shortage of sunscreen. The bookstore is selling sunscreen for five dollars alongside college-colored kitsch of every kind. The friends or teammates of the sunburned may have sunscreen in their backpacks. But there are sunburns. Sunscreen is not forgotten, either. It could not be—the local sun is frantic in the summer, shouts and waves and craves attention, shines its hardest like a misbehaving middle schooler finally allowed onstage in the class play. But no one is putting sunscreen on. People are burning who know that they are burning, who have considered sunscreen and said no. There is a desire, at your reunion, to have become more powerful than you were in college. There is a desire for old limits, old fears to be irrelevant.
People at your reunion have become far more attractive than they were. There is some discussion over whether this is common or miraculous. Cynics hold that everyone has brought their favorite shorts, their favorite dresses and their favorite sunglasses; cynics claim that at your reunion everyone is thinking, at least sometimes, of their exes. On one telling it is natural: as people become further versions of themselves they should grow more confident, more certain. On another it is a product of the changing viewer: everyone has learned to like something different than they liked in college.
Boundaries, at your reunion, are recognized universally as crucial but still poorly understood. Specifically people are struggling with the rules about beer and tents. Beer is permitted both inside and outside of tents, but inside beer (served for free in plastic cups) cannot be brought outside and outside beer (contained in branded bottles) cannot be taken in. People who escape the tent with inside-beer are so proud to have escaped that they swing their inside-beers around in celebration and spill half of them. Soon the inside-beers are gone, and the outside-beers increasingly scarce, and then there is a rumor at your reunion that the class of 1999 still has beer somewhere else, at a different tent. By the time you arrive the class of 1999 is out of beer, and someone in the class of 1969, staying in the adjacent dorm, has promised to call the police unless the music is turned off. Some people, at your reunion, feel others should have stayed home. Back at the original (beer-depleted) tent a dance party has begun, but the music is largely current and the lights are kept up nice and bright. Everyone, at your reunion, understands how carefully the past must be approached, knows the difference between the moth that flies around the flame and the moth that just flies in.
Someone at your reunion is telling you what they think of law school, someone is telling you what they think of art school, someone is describing the politics of pottery. Everyone is talking about the World Cup. Someone is talking about crime novels, someone has just gotten approval for their film, someone who did not come is doing well. Someone you didn’t know has gotten very interesting, someone you did has gotten very boring, someone you were afraid of may have also been afraid of you, and mostly everyone has forgiven one another for being who they were in college. All reunion people are telling stories about themselves. All of the stories are different but few of the stories are surprising. Most people are recognizably the same as they were when you went to college with them. Those who have changed radically have not been broken by the world but seem to have reinvented consciously. Some people at your reunion arrived with plans to feel competitive, but mostly they were frustrated: competition is a preoccupation with endings, and very few stories have had time to do anything other than begin. Five years, at your reunion, seems like almost no time at all.
Economy of Delight: Spain, Xavi, and the Trouble with Winning
Winning, we tend to feel as Americans, is a neat summary of all the virtues in the competition. We’re the best country, with the best people and the best schools and the best companies and so when you go compete you win, because winning means that you’re the best, because the best people and teams and countries are the ones that win! In the medal count, the trophy case, the distant rafters of the gymnasium are proofs not only of our historical triumph but also of our virtue, our lineage of rightness. When we say that winning isn’t everything but the only thing, what we mean isn’t that everything else doesn’t matter—it’s just that winning is a summary, an amalgam of all other possible competitive virtues.
One of the things that makes soccer a hard sell to Americans is that this absolute concern with winning is psychologically impossible to sustain when you follow a soccer team for any period of team. Become a fan of even the best soccer team in the world and you’ll have to handle the following on a pretty regular basis: good teams losing. Bad teams winning. Teams winning despite making no positive attempt to play the actual game of soccer. Teams of extraordinary talent looking bored and sluggish against valiant minnows and winning anyways. Teams of extraordinary talent looking brilliantly effervescent against worse opposition and still losing. Teams of extraordinary valiance frustrating bored opposition all game and then losing to infuriating late goals or poor decisions. Referees whose bad calls can alter not just a sizable portion of the game but the entire scoreline. All of this isn’t restricted to the irrelevance of the ‘regular season’—it happens all the time, in the most crucial matches. If you try to follow soccer for more than a game at a time while insisting on winning as the emperor of values, you’ll go insane—winning in soccer is frequently, radically unfair. And if winning isn’t fair, then fans of a sport are forced into an alternative valuation, into a different set of ideas about sports and their importance.
Last week the Spanish national team lost the Chilean national team 2-0, and it wasn’t that close. Spain are done—they won’t qualify from the group, and won’t defend their title from four years ago. The scale of the collapse—and the scale of the following reckoning—is difficult to analogize in American sports. Imagine a team that had been the best not just last year, not just for a few years, but since 2008 suddenly losing in the first round of the playoffs. And losing embarrassingly, crumbling, getting swept or blown out. All of this matters, but the real reason Spain going out matters (and the reason Spain’s previous dominance had mattered) isn’t about victory but about those alternative soccer-fan valuations: in soccer, winning often isn’t fair, and the way soccer fans and followers think about the game instead has made the recent Spain team something of a fetish object for both its followers and its detractors.
Why isn’t winning fair in soccer? Start with the scoring. Soccer, in addition to being extremely difficult to just play, is also scored in a way that’s quite obscure relative to the way most of the game is played: you kick the ball around in the middle of a field, prizing careful passes to your teammates, but then win or lose based on your ability to blast the ball into a small rectangular space past the only player on the opposing team who’s allowed to use his hands. This is way different—in football you move down the field using the exact same methods you use to score, in basketball everything is thrown and the goal is always attainable.
But in soccer even just getting yourself to a point where it’s plausible to score—where you can lift your leg up and consider it plausible that this will be a goal—is enormously rare. In a given game only 2 or 3 of a team’s 11 players may even have a chance, let alone take it. This means that while the task of playing well (of being the better team) is a collective one, the task of winning is often a lonely one, dependent on two or three of the game’s 22 players to determine, in probably 30 total seconds of the game’s 5400. And, even more than being lonely, it’s also high-variance. Soccer is a 90-minute sample of soccer—more than enough to determine which team is better—but only maybe a 10-chance sample of ‘attempting to score.’ Even if you’re way better, anything can happen.
This disjunction, between the actions of playing and the actions of scoring, explains a lot about the game—why so many teams manage to be dominant but not victorious, why players (like Spain’s) who could pass the ball into a trash can from thirty yards can go two games without scoring a goal from open play, and why the enormously rare individuals with an instinctive grasp of ‘how to kick it in the net’ are so valuable as to be played even when, like Spain’s Diego Costa, they’re active impediments to everything else that their team want to do. But it’s also an instance of winning being unfair. Since scoring is so difficult, so sui generis, it follows that winning is to a degree as well—you can win by playing well, but you can also win (as the US did against Ghana) by playing like crap (well, stolid crap anyway) and getting lucky once or twice. Winning is sometimes earned, but also sometimes accidental, and nobody who follows soccer seriously believes that winning has anything consistent to do with morality, or skill, or anything at all, except that you won.
Another thing that makes winning recede a little bit in the soccer-fan consciousness is that the kind of enormous talent disparity that American sports institutions neurotically discourage is basically the accepted state of affairs in pretty much all soccer games ever. At the World Cup this is reasonably apparent—the Spanish or German or Brazilian teams, when they play against the Iranian or Honduran sides, are basically the Seattle Seahawks playing against your college intramural touch football team. The situation is even worse in the club game, where there’s no draft, nothing even vaguely resembling a salary cap, and the accepted best method of obtaining players is, instead of trading, to offer their current clubs millions of dollars to send them over to you. Since most of the smaller clubs flirt with bankruptcy from season to season, this means that usually each nation’s domestic league consists of two to six ‘big’ zillionaire clubs, who spend each summer plundering the remaining 14-to-18 skinflint clubs for any player who even looks like they have a chance of being any good—in return for which, the small clubs get to stay solvent for another few years. And this holds even further up the food chain--selling one Bale to a megapredator like Madrid can buy most of a new team for a medium-sized carnivore like Spurs. It’s a (barely) functioning economic system, but it means that in many of the matches (all of those featuring ‘big’ versus ‘small’ clubs) there’s an enormous weight of talent, training, and funding falling on one side—the World Cup’s talent disparity is a slightly less transactional version of this, in which the nations with the largest populations and greatest amount of institutional expertise have enormous advantages. Iran should never come anywhere near scoring against France.
What does this mean for winning? It means that winning is asymmetrical—both teams do not have an equal chance to win. In most games one team faces enormous pressure to win simply because it is a much better team. And the value of the win is inversely asymmetrical. Chelsea beating Stoke, or Argentina beating Iran, is a mild relief—but Stoke over Chelsea or Iran over Argentina is a rapturous ecstasy for the unlikely winners. Fans of all kinds (who’ve seen their sides immensely favored in some matches and immensely disadvantaged in others) understand that there are such things as losing well, or winning badly—and that near-misses in unlikely situations are among the sport’s best dramas. A weak team can attract enormous credit, as Australia did last week, just for playing bravely and competitively against much better sides. Americans look at Australia and see 0-2, but world soccer sees an extremely brave and limited side that deserves praise even though it probably won’t win a single game. Soccer fans are used to counting this way—used to counting something other, softer than goals in their assessment of a team’s performance.
The obverse of the enormous talent disparity, and the reason that underdogs are only warily lauded, is that in soccer effort and talent are much closer substitutes for one another than in the sports Americans tend to watch. You or I can work as hard as we want but we will never be as good at basketball as Lebron—or even a mid-tier NBA starter. More to the point, we will never come anywhere near able to defend Lebron. You simply have to be a certain height. And in football you have to be a certain size as well. But in soccer (due to the large field, the large number of players, the many ways of being good, the fact that most of the action occurs around shin-level where height can be a liability as much as an advantage), working really really hard and paying a whole lot of attention to the game can make you, if not a world-beater, a serviceable professional. And the ability of ‘serviceable professional’ to frustrate ‘world-beater’ is far, far higher in soccer than it is in some other sports. Soccer has a component of skill and a component of athleticism, basically, and while amounts of skill vary widely athleticism is basically both trainable and extremely effective at neutralizing skill--you stand two feet away from them and kick them every time they get the ball. It’s far easier to run hard than it is to be talented, and hard, intelligent running closes a lot more of the gaps in soccer than in other sports.
Here again, winning is devalued—for, while everyone can laud an Australia or Iran for getting a result or a brave loss against a better team, the fact is that those games are often boring to watch. The diligent underdogs set up to only play defense and hope for a lucky goal by counterattacking, the favorites are fouled frequently, nerves become strained—perhaps Iran does win a game. But the game won by Iran is not a joy to anyone other than Iranians. It’s a victory achieved only by killing the excitement and delight of play, by abandoning the positive skillful purpose of the sport (at which only the more talented team can compete) in favor of the more equitable athletics. So here again, soccer fans know that winning isn’t everything—in fact (as anyone who’s ever watched a Mourinho side knows) winning can often be a negative indicator, a sign that soccer has not in any meaningful sense occurred.
Over time, these themes—the unreliability, the frequent lameness of winning in soccer—have trained soccer fans to adopt a set of attitudes about the game that we Americans might find bizarre. Soccer fans, having suffered through years of good-play-one-week-earning-poor-results followed by dour-defending-with-a-scraped-goal earning victory the next week, are different: they’ve developed, in addition to the American economy of winning, a secondary economy of delight that runs beneath (and sometimes above) the first. They’ve learned to watch the sport in search of beauty rather than results, of good play rather than high numbers.
That’s the first part of why this Spain side were such a big deal to some people. They’ve been superstars in the economy of delight; their players individually and collectively have been perhaps the most consistently skilled the game has ever seen. If soccer is a series of caresses, a love affair between a foot and ball, then from 2008 to sometime in 2013 this Spanish national side were among the sexiest the world has ever seen. Not the biggest, not the fastest, and certainly not the most physical—but the best at the basic act of soccer, at kicking it from one person to the next, at finding surprising spaces between the opposition. They had the best feet and the best minds.
Usually, great national teams feature a single historically-great goalscorer (Pele, Maradona, Ronaldo Fenomeno), but Spain managed to win three consecutive international tournaments without one—instead they were built around Xavi and Iniesta, guys who look like a mushroom farmer and a tax accountant, one slow and one fast, both small and both absolutely brilliant. Xavi, who’ll retire after this debacle was (it’s hard to know whether to write about him in past or present tense) one of the most intelligent players in the history of the game. Lacking any real physical gifts, he made an immortal career out of receiving a ten-yard pass, looking up, making a ten-yard pass, and then running five yards more. How? By doing each of these things perfectly, every time, in every game—and by knowing exactly which ten-yard-pass to play, which hole to drift into, how he could make space for his team and deny it to the other. At his peak for Barca and Spain watching him was like watching someone play a video game about soccer—not in terms of Xavi’s (kinda bad) dribbling or his (almost nonexistent) implausible goalscoring, but just in terms of the perspective, of the sense that the entire contest was becoming a projection of a single player’s vision and control. All great players are absurd, all imagine a world other than the one that is, but all vary in the type imaginations. In current terms Iniesta is the artist, the whimsical embroiderer of functionalities, Messi the dreamer, the invoker of impossibilities, and Ronaldo the Bolshevik, the radical cadre imposing his logic on the world—but Xavi is modern soccer’s great solipsist. From the late noughties until sometime very recently, every game he played in was a world he’d created, a product of his subtle senses.
And Xavi was an absolute master of the economy of delight. In big matches, basically Xavi’s team kept the ball the entire game in a mesmeric sequence of short passes and runs, always mere feet ahead of the panting opposition, probing on one flank and then moving immediately to the other, pulling back and pushing forwards, pulsing as though playing with one common intellect and then finally, usually late in the game with the opponent tired of chasing them, breaking through to score a simple and usually beautiful goal. This came to be known, for the small, metronomic sounds of the short passing, as tiki-taka. If the soccer we had played in elementary school was a riotous chasing-after, an impish incontrollability, a Sisyphean mess followed by a box of popsicles, tiki-taka was a kind of Principia Mathematica: the revelation that there were clear and simple ways of knowing things, that the space and ball could be mastered and controlled and held. Barcelona, Spain didn’t always win, but they always played with an identifiable style, with clear principles about how to control the ball and what to do with it. And the teams they beat? Bigger, faster, stronger, and completely powerless to stop them. To some of us, this was delightful.
But the question about any economy of delight is: whose delight? For, as hypnotic as tiki-taka could be, it made some people very bored and eventually angry. All that possession? All those clever balls? As the world eventually figured out those were ways of playing defense: the other team couldn’t score if they didn’t have the ball. And so Barcelona/Spain would pass the ball from one side, to the other, back to the one, always close enough to making a chance that the opposition had to take them seriously, always far enough way that they could step away from danger before they lost the ball, in some circumstances not even attempting to score goals but just keeping possession for its own sake, because eventually the other guys would tire. In a way this was no different than Iran or Stoke putting all ten men behind the ball—they just defended with their skill rather than their bodies. If you wanted incident, wanted charging and havoc, this might have bothered you—especially because, when the players did want to score, they almost always did something breathtaking. They just knew that ‘breathtaking’ lost the ball far more often than it scored, and they hated losing the ball—the flipside of being physically ungifted is being really really bad at defense, and the tiki-taka teams were (especially when Puyol was hurt or old). The only way they could keep from getting scored on was by having the ball, all the time. For about six years this was the dominant way of playing in Europe and the world, and for six years people complained. Spain’s games, because they lacked the chaotic genius of Barcelona’s Messi (and because Spain generally lacked a truly inventive goalscorer) tended to be low-scoring, self-similar, and often quite boring.The polite term used by the undelighted was ‘sterile domination:’ a game that (like the worst of 0-0 draws) had ceased to be a game, that had become a tedium, 90 minutes of jogging followed by a victory for the team that Xavi played on.
A lot of the comment on the Spanish defeat has had a Hamletish inexplicability: the size of the speaking will exceed the size of the incident. After all, three of the last four world cup champions failed, just like this Spain, to qualify for the knockout round at the next tournament, and the others had far easier groups: it turns out its extremely difficult for the same group of players to be the world’s best at times n and n+4, and also that it’s extremely difficult for the coach in n+4 to stop playing any of the guys who won in n—after all, they’re still the best until something like this happens. So people aren’t writing about Spain, and they aren’t even writing about the economy of victory. They’re writing about ‘Spain,’ and their personal economies of delight, and the possible death of tiki-taka.
Is tiki-taka dead? Of course it is. No team has ever really succeeded playing tiki-taka that didn’t have Xavi, and Xavi is pretty close to done. And over the last four years the world have figured out what to do about tiki-taka—you bother the crap out of the midfielders, the tiki-takars themselves, and when they lose the ball you run towards their goal as fast as you can. It’s refreshingly visceral, and Chile did excellently at it today. High, frantic pressing followed by extremely rapid attacking is what many of the best sides in the club and international game are doing, and it is very very effective against even Xavi’s tiki-taka.
But then is tiki-taka dead? Of course it isn’t. It’s one of the only real positive visions of the game to emerge in the last decade or two. There’s been an enormous amount of tinkering with which sides the wingers go on or how far up the fullbacks move or how false the nines are—but tiki-taka is close to the only modern system, the only comprehensive idea about how to play and also the only one that seems underwritten by any kind of aesthetics or conviction. And, even if tiki-taka isn’t played anymore, everyone is now playing what beats tiki-taka. And this game—with everyone playing their hardest, all the time, and enormous numbers of goals and chances--is one of the best we’ve ever seen.
“Who?” she asked. She was reading in the other room.
“The fans, the soccer fans on TV.”
She came out into the room and looked at the screen. He’d paused it and was rewinding slowly through the scenes of Celebrating Americans. Americans were Celebrating in a narrow space between two Brooklyn buildings, in a large yard somewhere in Chicago, in a public space in Kansas City.
“What do you mean different?” she asked. “These are the same as any other fans. Look, they’re even wearing the same stupid red-white-and-blue hats.”
“That’s the whole point,” he said.
“Here we go,” she said, sighing,“what do you mean?”
“Look,” he asked. “Do you remember the last World Cup? South Africa?”
“That was the one with the horns?”
“And, like, one of the most dominant national team performances of the last several tournaments, and, you know, Suarez’ handball on the line, Donovan against Algeria…”
“Get to the fans.”
“Okay, well—of course you didn’t watch. But they were doing all of these fan shots on TV. Every time the US scored, or won, or anything? They’d cut to these joyous Americans. It’s like a staple.”
“Yeah, it’s weird how they do that. Why do they?”
“I don’t know why they do it, Christ—the point is--”
“I always thought it had some kind of reassuring function. Like, it was a congratulations to the audience for having the good sense to watch things on television. Look at this poor bastard in his pirate outfit getting a sunburn. Look at how drunk he is! Look at how much time and money he’s spending on this! You’re lucky to be disengaged, television-watcher—you’re lucky you care just enough to watch it on TV and no more. You’re lucky to be sane. Doesn’t it feel sane, watching television?”
“Hmm. Yeah, anyways, look—last world cup they’d always cut to like this tiny bar in Seattle. Or somewhere that was only marginally American. Austin, Portland. And the bar would be seriously tiny. Like there’d be three rows of people squeezed into just the foreground.”
“Why does the size of the bar matter?”
“It’s a rhetoric of openness? Or something? In a country whose like single recurring principle is how fucking BIG it is? To have to be in a small bar is to be a secret. To not be general. It’s like an admission of guilt if you’re somewhere small that doesn’t serve Coors Light and hot wings. And then at the front of the crowd the biggest fans are always like huge ginger dudes with star-spangled bandannas and, I don’t know, the flag dyed into their beard.”
“Are their beards allowed to touch the ground? If they, y’know?”
“I’m not sure. But everyone else is improvised as well. There’s lots of face paint and flag-as-shawl and miscellaneous RWB brooches and stuff.”
“And that matters why?”
“Well, it’s another rhetoric of difference, right? Proper American sports teams have been selling apparel to their fans for like fifty years, and their fans are all good upper-bourgeois consumers, right? So when they show the shots of the Steelers fans everyone has the same Jersey, the same towel, the same markers of tribal identity. But soccer hasn’t been around as long, and people don’t buy as much, and then there’s no constant uniform identity either so it’s just this bricolage of vaguely patriotic stuff. It reads as disruptive, unconventional. The camera reads the individualism as threatening. The whole thing is this rhetoric of difference, of weirdness that’s offered to the cable-television viewer: look at these people with their road-warrior fandom in their tiny bar in their not-entirely-‘American’ city. These are soccer fans and they’re different from you. They look like they had to scavenge their costume from their slain enemies.”
“Okay…”
“But, look, this year it’s different—“ he plays the DVR and it shows again Chicago, again Kansas City. Four boys in plaid shirts and sunglasses are all wearing poofy red-white-and-blue plush top hats. A girl in a white tank top and a blue bandanna is jumping up and down, screaming into the camera. “See? These people are outside? They’re willing to be in public space? Official public space, too. This is space—these metropolitan ampitheatre spaces--that’s supposed to just be for community theatre productions and like KISS concerts. Now it’s for Soccer too. They used to show shots of Brazilians watching soccer on screens like this and the subtitle must have been WHAT A BUNCH OF SOCCER WACKOS but now Americans are doing it too, and these are totally standard Americans. Waitresses, college fraternity vice presidents, pretty white girls. And there’s not a single ginger mad-max type in sight. And they’re all wearing like mass-produced Americana. Look at those dumb hats. It’s totally legit! It’s mainstream. This is how you know soccer is gonna make it in America: television producers have stopped shooting it as bizarre and started shooting it as stirring.”
“That’s so depressing.”
“No, I think it’s great, soccer is a great game…”
“No, that it’s the television producers,"
“Well, it’s not like they have power, necessarily, or not too much power—they’re just little gestalt puppets like the rest of us.”
The ESPN broadcast ends and goes on to the next thing—the Mets and Cardinals, playing on a beautiful St. Louis afternoon. The game hasn’t started and the cameras pan appreciatively over the arriving fans. He gets excited.
“Oh, this is perfect,” he says. “Look at this. White people sitting down in hats. What could be a better contrast? All those empty seats? The median age has to be, what, fifty-two? And they all have the same hat?”
“They probably think they represent America just like you think you represent it.”
1) On Robin van: All of these things are harder than they look, but there are a whole bunch of people, just physically speaking, who could have made the run that brought Van Persie from onsides, behind the switched-off Sergio Ramos, to the point where he headed in Blind’s ball. And there’s a smaller-but-still-large set that could have managed to make some kind of legal soccer contact with the ball using their head, legs or chest (though this part is still totally fuckable-up).
It’s when we start to talk about where the ball goes that things really get hard. We’d expect most professional soccer players, most of the time, to at least direct the ball in the general direction of the goal. A decent striker would manage to put actual pace or power on the ball so as to give it a chance of beating the goalkeeper. A good striker could make sure that ‘in the direction of the goal’ meant actually ‘on target,’ so that the goalkeeper would have to work to save it, and a great striker would, even while doing all of the above, even while sprinting and contorting to meet the (immaculate) ball from Blint, retain such an intuitive sense of where he was on the field, and such exquisite control of his limbs, that he’d direct the ball not merely towards the goal but towards one of the goal’s four corners, where the goalie’d have the hardest time saving.
But then—Iker Casillas was until recently a great goalkeeper, and in the 44th minute here was positioned well to save even a great strike—a few yards off his line in the center of the goal, where he’d be able to leap to cut off the angle between van Persie and any of the four corners. And this is where van Persie, who probably isn’t the best center forward in the world but may just be the most brilliant, separates himself. Because unlike most strikers he isn’t just aiming for a goal in his head. He looks, while he’s running for the ball, to find Casillas. Ye sees him a few yards off his line. And then he solves the problem. He doesn't try to put it past Casilllas. He pushes his header five feet over Casillas’ head where the goalie can literally only watch it.
Spend a few minutes browsing the ‘best-ofs’ on Youtube and it’s apparent that the modern trend in center-forwards is towards a kind of Euclidean muscularity, towards men who move irresistibly along straight lines. Ronaldo’s scorching implacability, Ibrahimovic’s fortissimo gymnastics, the pugilism of Aguero Balotelli or Diego Costa--these compose a generation of enlightenment goal-scorers, proud physical Newtonians acting out their proofs that the shortest path between two points is always a straight line, drawn as quickly and as forcefully as possible and preferably with a couple of dismayed defenders lying prostrate in behind them. But at his best Van Persie (like Suarez and Messi) sees the game in a different way—connects two points with a curve rather than a blast. After his best goals everyone is standing up. That’s because his best goals aren’t about doing anything faster or harder or stronger than anyone else. They aren’t even about competing, necessarily. They're conceptual, artistic. Solitary moments of creation that happen to occur on television. To athletes in crucial moments it must seem that the whole world falls away, time slows, everything condenses to the ball and field and boot and head—only the most inspiring can make us feel that way as well, can make us shiver as we watch.
2) On the World Cup: Meanwhile, it’s the age of disillusionment, the age of reblogged skepticism from all quarters. A photo of a bad field in Manaus has become a global icon. The hip attitude about the World Cup is that it’s a scam perpetrated by FIFA on the host country, and that all those stadiums should be schools instead—and have you heard about the dead migrants in Qatar? When three schoolchildren released doves before the first match between Brazil and Croatia, the most immediate thought was that probably the doves had been repressed, or that there was somewhere a dove commissioner who had taken a bribe, and that these doves probably deserved a lot better.
The first match was far from a tonic. Hosts Brazil looked nervous and curdled against a niftily industrious Croatia—the Brazilian fullbacks either old or arrogant, the midfielders basic and the attackers nonexistent. Croatia led after ten minutes to a Marcelo own goal and Brazil looked rattled—national synecdoche Neymar could easily have been sent off for an elbow while still behind. But Brazil crawled back into the game on a scuffed shot that ought to have been saved, led after an abominable penalty given by referee Yuichi Nishimura, and then won 3-1 after Croatia’d had a fine goal disallowed. In the next game, this morning, Mexico and Cameroon played out a nasty 1-0 with several more fine goals disallowed and numerous cards unshown to both sides.
Soccer in 2014 is in a weird place: if you look at just what’s happening on the field, things are getting more and more exciting by the season. The best teams in Europe are (mostly) playing expansive, exciting attacking soccer, mostly depending on lovable young Reuses and Januzajs. Every team at the world cup has a prodigy or two, and the staleness of 2006’s catenaccio or 2010’s tiki-taka has given way to the nonstop awesome of 2014’s gegenpressing. But at the same time everything that happens off the field is getting more and more depressing with each passing season: the small clubs where the game is really born are being bankrupted at an alarming rate; most of those exciting European teams are either deeply in debt or owned by morally indictable petro-oligarchs, FIFA are more visibly corrupt than they’ve ever been before, refereeing decisions are exactly as wrong as always and infinitely more scrutinized, and the next two world cups will be in Putin’s Russia and slavery’s Qatar.
What all this means is that increasingly talking about soccer, the game played by teams of 11 on a field with two goals, is engrossing and delightful. But talking about soccer, the international business concern run by Sepp Blatter on behalf of the world’s corrupt functionaries and oil sheikhs, is depressing and exhausting.
That, maybe, is the true value of Van Persie’s goal today—after a month scrutinizing satellite images of Manaus and seeing pictures of protests, and after two days of moaning about biased refereeing, the world cup was getting to seem like a big fat drag—a carnival, somewhere far away, as craven and as futile as anything else that happens in the world. But then Blind found a little space on the left wing, curled a ball towards the penalty spot, and the World Cup started—the World Cup that, rather than being a politics or an investment or an exploitation, was a whole month of the world’s best sport being played by its best athletes, who would from time to time, if they can't make Sepp Blatter and Dilma Rousseff and Yuichi Nishimura worth it, can at least distract us.
3) On the Moral Drama of the Sport: In America, we tend to like sports of aggregation. Lebron and Tony run back and forth 200 times and one of them scores more. After every chance the opposition gets a chance; victory seems in some games to come down to certain shots in certain crucial moments but really is about, over those 200 posessions—or over the 1400 possessions in a series—creating slightly better shots, getting out slightly faster to contest, taking 100 extra passes. By the end of most games heroics are irrelevant--someone is ahead by twenty, someone isn't. And generally it works: the four NBA conference finalists this year were pretty much the same four best teams everyone predicted. A game of basketball, like a game of football, is a pretty reliable method for determining which of two basketball teams is better—to say nothing of seven basketball games.
Soccer is different. Playing soccer is a terrible way of determining which of two soccer teams is better. Largely this is because scoring goals is incredibly difficult—legs are a far better tool for getting in the way of things than they are for kicking balls into nets past guys who can use their hands; a player like Van Persie, who can score a goal on average every three hours, is among the world’s best.
But associated with the difficulty of scoring in soccer is a perfect urgency, a cathartic relief that’s almost totally unknown in American sports. There are so few goals that each one changes everything--before Van Persie scored Spain had been good value for their 1-0, Silva had just come agonizingly close to scoring Spain's second, the Spanish midfield was in control and their centrebacks not yet completely bothered. Then Robin did THAT, and then the game was different.
In the two sports, two dramas: one of careful tallying and one of extravagant effusion. Don’t we recognize in this dichotomy something about the economies of nations? If we’re wealthy, aren’t we comforted by the persistence of baskets, the ability for the good work we did two quarters ago to remain in our ledger forever? Isn’t the durability of those advantages a kind of fairy tale for white people, born to college educated parents and then attending college? Don’t American sports all romanticize the middle-class virtues of the resume? To do something, and then to write it down, and then to do it again, and to press on forever through small battles, knowing that all past victories can still be counted to your credit?
And doesn’t soccer whisper oppositely? A game of soccer, even an excellent game, is 85 minutes of inconclusive toil, relieved by maybe ten chances to become immortal and maybe two successes. Whose fantasy is that? That despite the general vacancy or poverty of life a single perfect moment will change everything? That, no matter how much we’ve been outplayed, we can always turn the world upside down? That victory, success is an exception rather than a habit of execution? That the world is made of goals as opposed to heatmaps. It’s less reliable but somehow more hopeful.
This is associated, I want to say, with the increasing marginal utility of relievers—when you’re adding pleasure, the tenth piece of cake is worth less than the first. But when you’re subtracting pain, getting rid of the last pain item helps way more than getting rid of the first. So: poverty creates (among other things) binging as a rational response—it’s better to get rid of all the pain sometimes than to get rid of half of it all the time. This is inadequately done because its 3am, but American sports are sports for the prosperous—sports for consumption smoothers, dramatizing the effort for a little more, a little better every day. Soccer is a sport for dreamers, a sport for people who know life mostly happens far away from either goal but do (can, must) live for the rare shining exception, when things become perfect and everything changes.
Maybe that’s why soccer’s always been so much bigger than football or basketball around the world—most people are poor, the moral drama of soccer (which is the moral drama of revolution, or transcendence, or discovery) is far more compelling for most humans than the moral drama of our sports (which is the drama of hoarding, of gradual arithmetic). And so perhaps its no surprise that soccer is already the sport of the world, or that it’s making inroads into an increasingly unequal and inegalitarian US—soccer is the perfect sport for an unequal world.
The crux in Satantango is: are we willing to entertain our own discomfort as a defensible goal of or mechanism for fictional achievement? The difficulty is: we aren’t very good at being uncomfortable. The closest thing we have to discomfort in modern mega-media is the Red Wedding, and the Red Wedding has basically the same relationship to Satantango that Othello’s tragic death bears to the actual theatre burning down. So Satantango is particularly difficult for moderns. Does that make it particularly essential? Maybe it does.
There are a few elegant extensions. One reads the dispersion of the villagers as an actual redemption, a removal from the hell of rain and mud into a world of actual delightful noticing. A stitch here connecting the notional noticing of the Halicses and Kraners post-end-of-Tango with the realized noticing of the Doctor in his easy chair with the diseased noticing of the 21c reader. Another extension relates one’s (Corley’s) changing attitudes about the oblique or difficult in fiction to his evolving anxieties of recognition over the last say decade. Everyone thinks they’re someone and everyone wants to be right. Another is about community and disruption and maybe Irimias is Krasznahorkai, or maybe the doctor is: ‘two paths for the novelist.’ The image of the evangelical novelist, Irimias, as possibly or explicitly criminal despite his charm and effectiveness, and of the catholic novelist, the doctor, as beatific and whole despite his hilarious irrelevance. Another is about states of cognitive and physical scarcity and how Satantango interacts.
Satantango is a novel of medium length and great acclaim in the west. I've read the first hundred pages. Satantango happens on a mostly-abandoned and almost cartoonishly dilapidated 'estate' somewhere in hungary: most people have gone but a few remain. The sense is that mostly these few spend their time being horrible to one another: sleeping with each other's wives, conspiring, abusing their helpers and behaving threateningly.
If you plotted it in a workshop I wouldn't like it: none of the characters really even approach likability, the first 100 pages have a lonely common plot thread but also have several others, none of which are developed for more than a chapter at a time. Pronouns are used inconsistently. Every chapter has a threat and none of the threats are carried through. There are no paragraphs. A staleness is breeding, a readerly tedium only infrequently alleviated by prose acrobatics. This is the kind of novel I am trying very hard not to write.
[Really? My 18-year-old self is disappointed: part of the project is supposed to be writing and appreciating great novels. Loving that which is different and finding its value.]
Among this, though, undeniable moments. An insufferable bureacracy scene is revealed to be the bureacracy of resurrection. A villager realizes unhappily that 'his comfortable life, which had slipped uneventfully into its fifty-second year, was as insignificant in the great rank of competing lives as cigarette smoke in a burning train.' If he misses more similes than he hits, are we going to be so upset? The hits are worth it.
The question of course is whether the mess is intentional--whether there's a design behind the difficulty and whether the design, when worked for, is worth the reader's work. 100 pages is too soon to tell but I think there might be. It is a bear of a book though. The critics say that the obtuseness of K effectively achieves 'a portrait of universal decay that is also buoyant with the hazy possibility of transcendent meaning'. I haven't gotten to the transcendent meaning part but I'm interested in the relevance of universal decay. A world where no space has not been infiltrated by cockroaches and no boots are not muddy and no neighbor is not plotting. We consider this representation to be of value. But I think the risk now isn't disintegration of meaning, isn't muddiness, but rather re-integration of meaning--rather cleanliness, rather the perfect tidy politeness of the iPhone (which is after all a tool for putting meaning in your pocket everywhere) and the constant sharing of relevant webpieces. Reading Krasznahorkai now feels like trying to turn the gears the wrong way.
We have lots of fantasies of a clean de-escalation of stimulus--Walking Dead is partially wish-fulfillment for a world of extraordinary presence. But the collapses we imagine are always somehow sanitary--feature bright more-or-less good people behaving more or less well. Satantango says: what if they're ugly? What if there are cockroaches everywhere? What if it is always raining? What if the savage isn't noble?
For a long time, in my fiction especially, I've tried to solve problems with more writing. Another scene, another paragraph, another sentence. There's probably a lot of reasons for this. One is the hope that good art is more about getting something right than it is about getting nothing wrong. One is that after you work on something for a while you are desperate for it to contain everything. One is that I am better at writing than I am at cutting. And so you end up with a work like a dirty room. Each time I rewrote the novel it got longer.
The Rehearsal is a short excellent novel that intelligently deforms its codes. Things that other writers would narrate are here spoken, things that would be conversations are here narrated. Catton did a lot of drama work, apparently, and it shows. There are parts of it I'm not so sure about but it is short and excellent and saliently it does not want to be everything. It wants to be a short novel about a particular thing. And then it just gets on doing that.
From among the afterlives, choose one typified by local recurrence. Choose the belief that, having died, we return throughout eternity to do the things that we were doing just before we died. This belief may be difficult to locate in the holy texts. You may have to invent it for yourself. Invent it. Go for a walk, and imagine the habits of the dead. Many of the habits are unhappy. Philip Seymour Hoffman, in the afterlife you have invented, will be forever desperate, forever plummeting, forever caught by what was always chasing him. And the old men who died, after the hurricane, when the elevators lost power and no one came to feed them, will repeat each day a desperate weak-kneed toddling to the door, making it some days to the stairwell, other days down the first two flights, other days nearly to the street before a joint fails and they fall. Reflect that most deaths are preceded by protracted dyings.
Next, consider the adulthood that you have discovered. Admit that it can be scarce and fretful. That the world can be a darker thing than you’d imagined and yourself a dimmer bulb. Consider that if you personally died tomorrow what recurred eternally might be exhaustion, confusion and concern. And then remember the years of your life when you went to college, and flew far away to Frisbee tournaments. Remember the brightness that you’d taper in your legs, and the sharp confident last practices, and the songs you’d sing along to as you packed, and Thursday dinner with your teammates, and the dreams you’d have the night before, and your broad invincible lungs, and the hundred things you’d have to do before you left—and then remember closing the car door, and letting the campus and the winter wash away behind you. Remember the sense you had, passing Musser, of all the hooks undone, all the braces and supports kicked out, and yourself and your best friends as something irresistibly and finally present, prepared now (for a weekend) to be the best selves you could imagine, to be concerned with nothing other than the throbbing bodied urgency of just right now exactly. Remember this. Recite to yourself, maybe, lines from an old poem: ‘there lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail/there gloom the dark, broad seas…that which we are, we are/one equal temper of heroic hearts…’ and feel in all earnestness that, yes, that was how it was. Remember how good that was, and how simple, and how much of life—not your own life only, but of all lives—is spent searching for such dedication and such clarity.
Here is the hard part. You will have to squint with your heart to see it this way. You will have to be very careful not to knock on anything that you have built in case you find that it is hollow. For at least a few moments you will have to believe—you, you cynic, you intellectual—in some metaphysical preference for happy endings. But you may be able to find, among the boulders of the horror, a pebble of consolation. You may be able, for five or seven breaths, to be comforted by the goodness of the thing that they were doing, and the thought that—in the peculiar afterlife you have invented—they will always be so whole, always be so bright, as on the Friday that came before the tournament.
Eventually you will fall out of the pose. You will realize that the brightness of what’s interrupted does not redeem but instead constitutes the horror of the interruption, and that it is sometimes impossible to put together words, or thoughts, that can coax a horror into being anything other than a horror.
It’s weird reading the bitcoin founding document and seeing what problem these guys were trying to solve. Basically: for thousands of years money (and then credit) was fine, but now that people are trying to move money to people they’ve never met or don’t intend to meet at more-or-less instantaneous speeds some of the issues with money are becoming apparent. It’s hard to send cash to Tokyo, and if you want to wire money you have to trust somebody—a bank, Western Union, whoever. The bitcoin idea is that you shouldn’t have to do any trusting, because trust both (1) creates vulnerability to fraud when trusted agents become untrustworthy and (2) creates institutional dependence on things like banks, which we agree are icky for reasons not related to trust.
Anyways, the basic idea of bitcoin (as I very vaguely and probably incorrectly understand it) is that all the parties involved will replace trust with hard (but not too hard) math. When any bitcoin transaction takes place, basically both parties involved do some hard (but not too hard) math and then upload the results of that math to a central datalog. Everyone else who’s bitcoining then checks the math, which is again hbnth. If a majority of the math that’s done agrees that the original math you’ve done is right, your transaction goes through. If not, then not. In a way that’s hard to understand without getting way crunchier, somehow this means that it’s almost impossible to do fake transactions (the big risk is someone paying for many things with the same bitcoin, apparently) unless you have a faster computer than everyone else on bitcoin put together.
You can use bitcoin for lots of transactions, but the first transaction is an exchange of trust for math. It's hard to know if that's a good trade or not. From a tragic perspective it makes it look like trust isn’t a virtue but the least-bad solution to a really basic issue with the dialectic. From a humanist perspective it feels vacant, tyrannical: the attitude here is that we trust people in proportion to the power of their CPUs, and that if someone has a faster computer than everyone else put together maybe he deserves all that money. [It seems like the stereotypical techno-libertarian bitcoin crowd will probably eventually be disappointed when it turns out to be worth Goldman’s money to put together a computer that’ll all the mining math the fastest.] And then from a comic perspective: even if you replace trust with math, human individuals tend to still run on the trust model rather than the math model, and so they do things like give control of all their bitcoins to some guys in Japan who have a website where you used to trade magic cards and who are apparently totally incompetent, and then all the future-math-money is gone. To fanatics all failings are cases of human, rather than programmatic, inadequacy.
There’s two lessons. One is about the displacement of trust. We’ve always understood trust as something almost totally unquantifiable: it’s a lack of gleaming eyes, an intuited solidity in those we think we know. Bitcoin isn’t interested in that—it would like us to trust one another because we all show our work, and more specifically because our computers show our work. The most terrifying thing in the entire conversation is how quickly and brightly the CPU becomes part of the ‘I’ or the ‘we.’ The other is about the stickiness of human models. You can invent a system where you don’t need a bank, or any trusted third party, but then your users will want to have a bank, and the bank will be robbable.
At a dinner party, two things are happening. If the dinner party occurs in a novel, probably three things need to happen. At least one of the things needs to be specific and local to the dinner party, and at least one of the things should be for now subterranean, alluded to, begun but not concluded. One thing in the past perfect, one in the imperfect, and everything in the present tense.
Fiction has many dinner parties: Joyce eats with his parents and their family at the beginning of portrait. Hollinghurst writes dinner parties almost exclusively. There is a dinner party, kind of, in The Luminaries, and parties extensively in fiction. Generally in fiction the difference between the dinner party and the party is whether the climax is a moment of physical unity or physical separation: the party reaches its peak when the agonists divide, separate into shadowed corners and achieve their private meanings. The dinner party, though, finds its peak in the togetherness. Here is everyone around the table. Someone is behaving at a personal extreme. The rest of are shocked. Extreme behavior is an indication of need. Need indicates that history might be negative, but the premise of the dinner party is that history is all positive: we gather here tonight to celebrate the stability that we've achieved, to celebrate our comfort. As an admission of discomfort the extreme behavior is a kind of refutation of the premise of the dinner party.
If a dinner party is a ritual, whose rules can be broken, then a party is a carnival, which exists to provide a breaking of rules. Hollinghurst's protagonists wander bizarrely, making assignations with the help and wondering who's gay. The climax of the party scene is a private transaction, an affair between two members of some secret society pre-existing or just created. [Hollinghurst then prefers one last moment of togetherness, a resumption of dinner-party-ish togetherness but under circumstances of carnival, when to behave normally is the offense.]
The conventional narration of a party usually depends on the action of a single individual protagonist. The protagonist's path through the carnival, or alternatively the protagonist's private reflection on the dinner party's inevitable breach of etiquette, offers the basically intersubjective party or dinner party a structure of consistent meaning or perspective that renders it intelligible. A continuity, basically.
But what if the text is discontinuous? Parties and dinner parties are bad sites for twitchy electronic discontinuity--we consider them as refuges from electronic activity. Maybe this can be made explicit by making the dinner party a party without cell phones. This maybe can also provide one of the local plots--an attendee is nervous, finds it difficult to make conversation without his phone. This can be a recurring discontinuity--the uncomfortable individual's attempts to communicate without resort. Can provide comic relief throughout the party. This is less a local plot and more an ongoing diversion or joke. Probably actually all the characters. One premise of this text is that no effect is too unsubtle for inclusion.
There remains a local and a long-term plot. The long-term plot comes from the arc of the whole book: two of the characters must meet, must be attracted to each other, must make an appointment to see each other later in the text. This plot is basically a party plot: much happens, and it's reduced in the end to a single interaction between the agonists.
And then a local plot: of course the dinner party has been convened for some purpose. There is a group task at hand. Ordinarily the local dinner-party plot is an objection to a premise--someone's discomfort with something that's assumed. And I think everyone at this particular dinner party has at least some objection to the premise. But I think it's reluctant to collapse into any particular personal tension.
The hidden tension in this group of people is the notion that their similar age and collocation mean they have anything in common. But that tension's too big to give away this early--or maybe it isn't. Maybe you can kind of shake the line in the first big scene and then return to it again and again. Invoke it as a statement of principle, not a completed plot--someone claims that there's an interhuman continuity, or implies it. And someone else, rubbed the wrong way by the phone-confiscation, or the company, or what's served for dinner, takes up the issue. And makes claims. Then the stage is set: the initial condition is accepted discontinuity, which moves into forced continuity.
Everyone arrives. The host takes their phones as they do. Conversations are had while everyone arrives. Something is cooking on the grill. What's cooking is not vegetarian. Someone is nominated to go down and get some veggie burgers in order that we are inclusive. It is an evening in August. This person forgets to bring their phone. They arrive downstairs, and reach the supermarket, but get lost on the way back. Without the phone they're forced into a world of friction. This seems nice until you get lost. Meanwhile, people at the party are discussing things and failing to show pictures, send links, find quotes, share contact information. The veggie burgerer (or burgerette) finally returns, with veggie burgers. Dinner is had. The host gives a short talk (not a Short Talk) about the group. Someone objects. The group responds, the objector is incorporated. Rules are agreed to for the group's operation (not dramatized) and then the group departs. The agonists agree to meet for a coffee, or a studio tour.
It is a quality of excellent poetry to leap surprisingly from one thing to the next. The same suddenness is not considered a quality of excellent milk.
Pavel makes a good point about Shakespeare: the difference between RJ and Othello is the presence of deception. In Romeo and Juliet everyone behaves exactly as themselves, reacts immediately to various stimuli. We stop to lament, but never to consider. Othello on the other hand is a drama of deception: something is not what it appears to be.
Can we claim that the shakespeare that's survived best into modernity is the deliberative shakespeare? The stuff where people are trying to decide what to do? Or is that just what I like the best: Hamlet, much of Macbeth, read as far more relevant than Lear. Lear's problem is that the king's decision feels inexplicable. I suppose maybe the modern idea of tragedy has to do more with decision-making.
Adapted plot from Cinzio: Oliver is a PhD student in biology, doing important new research with his mentor, Stephen. But Oliver falls in love with Stephen's daughter, Olivia, possibly because their names are so similar. They keep their affair a secret until Oliver and Stephen publish their research and Oliver secures an adjunct-but-promising position teaching in another state. When Olivia happens to also end up in that state, Stephen is not suspicious, but when he realizes from a facebook photograph taken by an academic friend that they're together, he flies into a rage even he doesn't understand very well. By this time Oliver has secured an offer for a tenure-track position at his university, but Stephen offers him a tenure-track position with him at the original university, and then pretends to be surprised and delighted that Oliver and Olivia are seeing each other. Everything goes well until Oliver's tenure review, when Stephen angrily objects to everything about his career, and even claims that the original research they'd done together was fabricated by Oliver, a claim he's altered records to support. Oliver is denied tenure, and the foundation of his career thrown into doubt. He may commit suicide, as may Olivia.
An untranslatable plot: a judge convinces a beautiful woman to become his mistress by promising to pardon her brother. She agrees, but instead he sentences the brother to death. Distraught, she complains to the king, who orders the judge to marry her and then also sentences the judge to death. But the woman, now either behaving in accord with wifely principles or having fallen in love with the judge, persuades the king to pardon him. The couple live happily forever after. And oh also the brother was a rapist.
What's untranslatable about the story--and what's partially untranslatable about many of these novellae--is the presence of agonists, usually male, with complete, life-and-death power over the other agents in the story. In the original grad student story, the older man has his daughter's husband and her children killed and then like casually shows her the corpses. But also Creon, Agamemnon, the kings in Shakespeare: much of literature, until quite recently, can be read as a grappling with the misbehavior of absolutely empowered male authorities. Iuriste (the judge story) is interesting in that it has two layers of AEMA--the judge, and then the king, each of whom behave bizarrely.
One of the common themes in the AEMA story is the development of excellent outcomes following displays of quiet (silent) virtuosity by the female protagonists--men in positions of power behave awfully, some of the time, but everything ends up okay if the women they're behaving awfully to just sit and bear it.
One thing that I want Pavel to do more often (at all) is try to connect these different items in the history of the novel to items in the social or economic history of the novel-writers or novel-readers. Art, especially popular art, spends a lot of time and energy reassuring its readers that the lives they're living are right or noble or otherwise defensible.
