Sports Quiz

Doing the Friday Five thing, while other bloggers seem to like it, doesn’t feel like it would be useful to me. As far as this weblog goes, I’m kinda with Mark Bernstein: why write if I don’t have a reason? While I’ve expressed my motivations before — research weblog and all that, writing to figure things out, bla bla bla — it still sometimes feels so vague, muddled (I mean, just look at the categories, which I really, really need to overhaul; it’s like ‘class’ is my kitchen sink), nebulous, confused. Trying to pull all this disparate stuff together that keeps skating away, while I keep changing my perspective as I read. I don’t know how much this really applies, but it feels apt to the dissertating process, and it’s one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, so I thought it worth including here.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

(Mark Strand, “Keeping Things Whole.” From Sleeping with One Eye Open. New York: Knopf, 1964.)

But I was talking about the Friday Five, which I’m not going to do here. Instead, I hope you won’t mind if I offer in its spirit — since it often feels like a sort of abbreviated essay exam — a quick two-question quiz for discussion. Call it a Friday Two.

1. Name two sports you associate with the upper classes.

2. Name two sports you associate with the lower classes.

Yes, I’m using “upper” and “lower” as vague conveniences. Don’t think too long about your answers, please; a gut reaction is fine. We’ll discuss inside.

Before we discuss, I need to give a little background. Knowing my propensity for boozy reasoning (metaphorically only, I’m afraid, being currently on the wagon for various reasons medical and non-), Curtiss was kind enough to forward me a NY Daily News story on inconsistent enforcement of public drinking laws on the 4th of July. Discounting the odd synchronicity between the story’s strange non-sequitur ending and Curtiss’s recent discussion of employment and jobs, the Reader’s Digest version would be: drink beer on the beach, you’ll get busted; drink wine at a classical music performance, you’re fine. While both instances of public drinking are equally illegal, billionaire Mayor Bloomberg defended the unequal enforcement by suggesting that the wine drinkers (those in his beverage class if not his financial class) were more “well-behaved.”

It fits the stereotype, at least. I mean, we all know what a “beer brawl” is, but I don’t think anybody’s ever uttered the phrase “wine brawl” (except in one absolutely godawful metaphor). Which makes me ask: is violence, in its intimate connection to the body, a classed phenomenon? At first glance, it seems like a ridiculous question: of course it’s not classed, I want to say; violence is sadly universal. But consider how violence plays out in contemporary society, who its victims and perpetrators are, how it’s represented in the media: “Cops“, anyone? Or maybe the very different attacks Gavin and Doyle make on one another in Changing Lanes? (One obvious counterargument to the latter would be Sam Bowden’s actions toward Max Cady in the 1991 Cape Fear, but I’d argue that Bowden distances the violence from his own body by hiring it out, and — via the same movie logic that makes anyone who has sex in a horror flick die — is punished for his transgression of class lines in even doing that much.) Even if violence itself isn’t classed, I think we might perceive it as classed. (As I’ve implied in other posts, this perception might assign classes to both sides of the Cartesian binary. Or maybe I’m just being the guy with a hammer who sees nails everywhere he looks.)

And the connection-to-the-body angle is why I asked the sports and class questions. My first answer for an upper-class sport was polo, but I immediately threw that out as just way too obvious, and besides it’s far more English than American, and the two nations have different class systems. (I’d like to go for the Latinate digression on horses, equites, knights, and classes here, but like I said last time, I’ve already used up my weekly allowance of pedantry trying to suck up to The Happy Tutor, to pathetically little avail.) So: my revised answers: golf and tennis for the upper classes, football and basketball for the lower classes. Consider the separations of bodies from one another in all cases, and the separations of bodies from the various balls in all cases: where does contact take place? (Consider, also, the class mobility narratives presented in basketball movies and football movies.) And as for what connection this might possibly have to writing instruction in computer classrooms: I have no idea.

Now: names at the top right, please, and pass your papers to the front. We’ll check our work together. Your answers?