Strange crossings | Literature & football

In 1937 appearance, James Joyce joined Hungarians ‘in the middle’

Jun 16 | Why has a 1937 alignment of literary stars not featured in Vienna in the European Championship’s cultural program? Vladimir Nabokov lectures in a Parisian literary salon and espies James Joyce “sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team.”

Remembering 'Manno' Sanon

A big day for Haiti, a big day for little Haitians

Miami, May 31 | Haiti past, present and future came together early in May on an urban oasis in Little Haiti. After 10 years of negotiation and bureaucratic delay, an all too rare inner-city, publicly funded, full-size soccer pitch opened on one-time industrial ground north of downtown. With multimedia and podcast.

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• Long-form Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith again has applied his odd epistemology to soccer (“Alive and Kicking," Jun 23). In 8,000 words, he writes passionately in his familiar mode of author-vacated all-knowing about the Fugees of Clarkston, Georgia—ground already well plowed by Warren St. John of the New York Times (see 25 Jan 07). (Jun 19) Go to post »
• Toward the end of a Jun 17 National Public Radio interview, Marlene Assmann of BSV Al-Dersimspor discloses that her multicultural Kreuzberg side from Berlin again will brave Islamic strictures for a second friendly match in Iran. Assmann competed in the 2–2 draw on 28 Apr 06 at Ararat Stadium in Tehran that featured the Iranian national women's team against the German amateurs (see 29 Sept 07). (Jun 19) Go to post »
• The Global Game: Writers on Soccer is scheduled for November release—the product of some three years of compiling, winnowing and permissions seeking by myself and editors Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab, along with strong support and belief from the University of Nebraska Press in Lincoln and heroic efforts from a network of translators, working in Spanish, French, Italian, Danish, Portuguese and Slovenian. (Apr 24) Go to post »
• A film conceived by Chileans about the aspirations of Palestine's national team has stirred a Chicago film festival—at least judging by an 11-page torrent of comments that debates which filmmaker deserves credit for the idea and which has the more authoritative connections to justice struggles (Ed M. Koziarski, "Social Justice, with Soccer," Chicago Reader, Apr 3). Go to post »
• Which was the first American association football team? Some evidence points to Oneida Football Club of Boston, honored with an obelisk in Boston Common as "the first organized football club in the United States." While Oneida played one of the football codes—perhaps a soccer-rugby hybrid—beginning in 1862, photographic evidence offered by a descendant of a Paterson FC captain suggests that the New Jersey side, formed in 1880, staked claim early to playing by the Football Association rules established in London in 1863 (see also Mar 30). (Apr 16) Go to post »
• According to an extended allegorical match account mailed to the Zimbabwe Standard (“Matchless Match," Apr 12), the Destroyers—meaning the state apparatus of entrenched president Robert Mugabe—hold a 10–2 edge over political opponents, the Rebuilders. (Apr 15) Go to post »
• Avant garde photographer Spencer Tunick has requested 2,008 nude participants—each with football—for a May 11 "installation" at Ernst Happel Stadion in Vienna, site of the Euro 2008 final. (Apr 14) Go to post »
• As one should not judge a book by the cover, one should not judge a film by its trailer. But the trailer for Maradona: La mano de Dios, which opened the 11mm Fußballfilmfestival in Berlin on Apr 4, sounds a warning: handle with care. (Apr 5) Go to post »
• As similar programs in Italy have discovered (see 12 Jan 07), a London-based football league presents "regular, constant, holistic treatment" for those afflicted with mental health problems ranging from schizophrenia to social anxiety (Angus Watson, "More Than a Game," Financial Times, Mar 22). (Mar 25) Go to post »
• One of the most lyrical descriptions of traveling to women's football in Africa comes from the recent e-mail newsletter of Africa Unplugged in Nkhata Bay, Malawi. A revival of the charity's Nkhata Bay United Sisters FC (see 15 Jan 07) involved several players participating in regional trials for the Malawi senior women's team. (Mar 19) Go to post »
• Portsmouth goalkeeper David James writes an entertaining column for Guardian Unlimited, most recently meditating on the cultural contact between football and smoking and confessing his own "15-year 20-a-day habit" (“It's Time for the Whole Game to Stub Out My Filthy Habit," Mar 16). (Mar 19) Go to post »
• We publish an excerpt from Matthew Concanen the Elder's 1720 canto describing a six-a-side football match in Dublin—at variance with a traditional view that only the frenzied folk football variety was contested at the time. The players "around the field in decent order stand ..." (Mar 13) Go to post »
• Ongoing exhibits in Chicago (“The Ancient Americas”) and Washington, D.C. (“Exploring the Early Americas”), feature artifacts of ball-playing in Mesoamerican cultures as part of larger surveys. (Mar 6) Go to post »
• James Montague has dissected the "footballing Venn diagram of ... political and social hatreds" that constituted the recent East Asian Championships in Chongqing, China (“Football? What Football? The Asian Game Is about Politics," Guardian Unlimited, Mar 3). Within Asia, Montague concludes, football still comes with political intrigue, readily available in every permutation of a four-team round-robin featuring the hosts plus Japan, South Korea and North Korea. (Mar 5) Go to post »
• Alan Sillitoe's work was on the syllabus in my short-story class as a college freshman. Naturally, the story considered most representative was "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner," consisting of a teenage cross-country runner's interior dialogues upon liberation each day from the Borstal fetters (“I'm a human being and I've got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me ...”). But a fresh assessment on Sillitoe's 80th birthday today suggests that the short story "The Match," which takes its tone from the terrace gloaming at Notts County's Meadow Lane, might be the best introduction. (Mar 4) Go to post »