The Field of Play, testing 123

[Mark Kohut]

Pynchon was there.....mentally.....so very ATD



----- Original Message ----
From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, June 10, 2010 11:58:08 AM
Subject: The Field of Play, testing 123

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.