Futbol
The sky is a cloudless blue this morning: it looks as artificial as the surface of a Jeff Koons balloon dog. Two nights ago we woke up to puddles of rain on the carport roof, outside the bedroom, and a damp deck out front. Unusual at this time of year.
The campus has filled with high school students doing academics and sports of various sorts--huge, colourful contingent of futbol (lovely word, can we keep it, to replace "soccer"?) players. I watched the second half of the U.S.-Germany game yesterday at the gym, an exercise in defense, I think, but with a good outcome; it will keep the U.S. interested in the next World Cup round. In many ways a more fun event than the Olympics--maybe that has something to do with Brazil? But also with the way "little" countries get star-billing? The Olympics are dead serious, the World Cup has sprezzatura, lightness, comedy. It's Hamlet against MNDream.
The TLS of 13th June has a poem by CK Williams, "Bark," (death as a friendly old dog) which is, as usual, crafty, but also a departure from CKW's usual syntax in the way it jams phrases together without the linking strategies of conventional English syntax, and yet makes perfect emotional and esthetic sense. Very different in many ways from the deconstructions of an Ashbery poem in the last (?) New Yorker. Ashbery is playful, CKW, fundamentally, isn't. CKW is the Olympics, Ashbery is futbol. I might be getting carried away.
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