question

[Otto]

>
>    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".
>
>

Indeed there is extremely little sports to be found in his oeuvre. Pynchon a
Churchill-fan (No Sports Please)?

> kai frederik file://:: 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 ...
>

I always thought something like that: for example Oliver Kahn as Chewbacca
... and I was never of the opinion that Lothar Mathäus is entirely human ...

Babe Otto