The Field of Play, testing 123

[Joseph Tracy]

This is a bi-informational email-

1- list messages started getting stuck in my online spamfilter, so  
test if new settings work

2- If you like Lewis Lapham he has an amusing piece in Common Dreams  
about the effects of games and sport on politics and conscousness.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/08-4

here is an exerpt
I'd gladly read the Q and A as comedy contrived by Monty Python if it  
didn't so closely resemble my own encounter in the autumn of 1957  
with the admissions officers at the CIA. Prepared for the doing of  
high deeds in Hungary and the boarding of a night train from Berlin,  
I had spent the days prior to the interview studying the terms of the  
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the map coordinates of the Fulda Gap, the  
routing of Lenin's transfer to the Finland Station. None of it was  
relevant.

My examiners, Yale men brave and true, didn't stoop to a concern with  
mere numbers. They wished to know whether I was the right sort,  
socially presentable and good at games. Instead of asking about the  
topography of central Europe, they inquired about the terrain of a  
golf course on eastern Long Island, the positioning of the marker  
buoys for a sailboat race around Nantucket, whether I played tennis  
on grass or clay.

The questions put an end to my interest in the CIA, but they brought  
to mind the distinction between Homo ludens and Homo sapiens, and  
that the confusing of the one with the other results in the numbering  
of 96,000 English dead at the first battle of the Somme. Huizinga  
speaks of play not as a way of the world as presented by nature, but  
as the imagining of a second, poetic world set apart from the world  
of nature. Not serious, and yet utterly serious, a thing of its own  
and a law unto itself.