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2009.01.14

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Teresa

Yes. Figuring stuff out is overrated. Like the poet says: I don't want you to understand what I wrote so much as appreciate it. I loved this post, Jarrett.

Teresa

Peter

Treasuring incomprehension. I'm 51 and I've never tasted beer. I would have never tasted coffee, either, but my wife made me years ago. I'm not a teetotaler, I don't think: I like wine. There's some sort of aura that coffee and beer have for me that I figure might be ruined if I ever tasted it. I do like to shock people with my ignorance. I guess it's part of my long-term goal of becoming outre, or at least old and eccentric.

There are other things of which I'm "willingly ignorant," as the Good Book puts it: popular culture (movies, music, stars, style), cars (styling and mechanics), and (closer to your subject here) ice hockey. When I go out of my way to get across my ignorance of these subjects at school, my ninth graders just think I'm ignorant. I'm not sure why that always surprises me.

The telegraphs remind me of the old baseball broadcasters who, sitting in their studios, would unfold these telegraphs with sound effects (the pop of a bat) and crowd noise on a dial. I love listening to a good baseball radio broadcaster today, but I think the old way of doing it took even more talent. It must have been almost like turning sport into spectacle, a la Roland Barthes.


Mike

I'm a ~7th generation Australian. I don't watch sports or drink beer. When I went to work in the US and had to break this news, people asked if I'd been deported

Denis Wilson

Hi Jarrett.
I suspect you are in no danger of warranting shooting.
Even for born and bred Aussies, Cricket is something of a mystery. And it is changing very fast, with one-day matches and now the dreaded and noisy 20:20 game.
It is fast becoming a medium for commercialism.
I regret the loss of purity in the game. It is that loss which is the source of poetry for me.

Miss Bliss

Years ago while I was on tour in England a couple of crew guys tried to explain a cricket match to me that was on the TV in the tech office. But when he said there was something called "silly mid on" and "silly mid off" I decided there was no hope that I would be able to comprehend the game ever. I've always been more of a soccer girl myself...you know lots of heavy drinking and singing and rioting...my kind of fun.

dale

I laughed aloud through all of this.

One of my favorite memories of grad school was getting drunk with an visiting Oxford student who obligingly explained cricket to me for three hours (with many amusing literary & linguistic excursions: it was not dull at all.) I explained American race relations to him. We neither of us had the faintest idea what the other was saying, but we both enjoyed the transaction enormously.

Teresa

That last sentence is a good description of sex.

T.

Jarrett


Teresa contacted me later to advise that her last comment refers to the last sentence of the previous comment, not the last sentence of my post.

Thanks, everyone, for the interesting comments. Please keep them coming.

Pilgrim/Heretic

what a wonderful mystery!

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