A Long Green Flattening

It's sports season; I am watching, and discussing in civilian life even more than usual, sporting events; according to Steve Almond (and I think he's right), the troubling recent political events out of Massachusetts can be called The Sports Talk Radio Election; and soon we, even the parts of we who don't give a shit about sports, will watch the 44th running of the American Football Super Bowl, an event so important, and an event that works as such a metaphor of importance, that every time I've been up for more than forty hours working on a paper, at some point I will begin thinking, over and over, "All right, Schratz, this paper is our Super Bowl". It's like a Waterloo that doesn't necessarily end you, which I guess means it's like the real Waterloo.

And so imagine my delight when the protagonist of the book currently serving as my roman de gare, Jonathan Lethem's the Fortress of Solitude, watches Super Bowl IX with his friend and the friend's father. He thinks this about the tilt, between the Minnesota Vikings and the Pittsburgh Steelers:

The game itself...turned out to be a long green flattening: of huffing, robotic men, and of Dylan's interest. Football was an arrangement of failures, a proving how unlikely most things were.

Later, Dylan, the protagonist, is given a ring that enables him to fly, so, that shows you how unlikely things in fiction (rather than sports) can stay. But no matter: there it is, a masterful evocation of The Sports. An arrangement of failures. The most crushing thing about sports -- and, I suppose, a thing that can crush us in fictions about which we care, as well, is the total lack of a) appellate processes, and b) corrigibility. No matter how much you care about the Buffalo Bills (and I do), or how much you think they ought to have won, based on talent, a particular game, they will a) never get the decision reversed, and b) never get to play quite that game again. And no matter how much you want Othello to wait ten minutes or whatever and listen to what Desdemona has to say, he is a) never not going to suffocate her, and b) never not going to kill himself later that scene. No appeals, no corrections. A proving how unlikely most things are.

Of course, unlikely things do happen, no matter how proven their unlikelihood. That is why I am announcing here, as the Official Super Bowl XLIV recipient of the support of the Unpacking My Library book blog, the previously un-Super Bowl'd New Orleans Saints. I hope that this works out better for them than the time we, as a blog, threw our support behind the Cleveland Indians. We'll find out in two weeks!