question

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

Otto schrieb:


> Kai asked:
> >
> >
> >                                     [re: kerouac, roth, delillo, irving]
> >
> >
> >
> >   why is there no sports in pynchon's world?
> >


> What about Soccer?
>
> "(...) a quid wager on the Blackpool-Preston North End game (...)." (GR 19)
>
> http://www.itap.de/homes/otto/pynchon/soccer.htm


   thank you, otto, for this lonesome ref! i now seem to remember that there's 
   another minor soccer reference in m&d. but taken pynchon's whole work this is 
   not much, is it? roth wrote a whole novel on baseball, and recently i read 
   that "underworld"'s endless baseball beginning will be published as a single 
   book. we also heard here about kerouac's life-long baseball diaries.    
   there's sports in musil, and both, hemmingway and brecht, were very fond of  
   boxing. yet pynchon largely ignores sports. is this just his personal revenge 
   because he, perhaps, was always the guy with excellent marks in english and 
   history but a "d" or something in sports? or is there an - ähem - deeper 
   meaning in this exclusion? maybe it's about the 'totalitarian' potential    
   of modern athletics, about what adorno named the "mass calling of sports". 

kai frederik //:: ps: the inspiration to ask this question came with this week's 
                episode of the "x-files", where i learned that all the great 
               post-war baseball players were, actually, aliens ...