Thursday, October 16, 2008

Metaphor-generating machine.

In Summerland, which is a pretty charming young adult novel by Michael Chabon, a character says this:
A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.
That seems pretty good, as a metaphor, to me--even though I'm not mad for baseball.

So, if a baseball game is "nothing but a great slow &c.," then what is a soccer game? a basketball game? a football game? a tennis match?

Sportos, I'm asking you. I do have a poem about soccer, but it's more of a mom poem than a player poem. So I need your help. My imaginative world depends on it.

Updates: I wrote a poem today. Here was my process:
  1. got up late.
  2. ate breakfast while assiduously checking out the internets.
  3. lay back down for some cozy reading of novel.
  4. joined by dog for cozy reading.
  5. fell asleep for a few minutes.
  6. woke up to sun in the window and absolute stillness, which crystallized into a frieze of imagery and phrases.
Yeah, I'm doing fine.

My neighbor plays tuneless, bass-heavy techno, every single night now for about ten days. Nice guy, but why?

Off to finish my baseball reverie. The world hangs in the balance. No, seriously. Chabon is surprisingly cosmological in this novel.

4 comments:

  1. I'll work on the metaphor, but just to let you know in the meantime how glad it makes me that you always have something new for me in the morning.... I love it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Tennis is a external mechanism designed to make your brain focus on what is immediately at hand: eye on the ball, eye on the ball, head up, etc.
    There is no past or future in tennis (not if you want to win); there is only now.

    Maybe sports in general is this: a way to get out of the brain and get into the moment (and the body).

    ReplyDelete
  3. This whole blog post is a lovely homage to all the things that are worth having in life: free time, a warm bed, a good book, a sweet dog, etc.

    P.S. Not to sound like I'm exhaling smoke in your nether regions, but you are a really elegant writer. I love the way you string words.

    ReplyDelete
  4. What is a frieze?
    Soccer is an external mechanism that allows the player to smell like sweat, grass, leather and shoes and to run until your lungs burn with sweet healthy oxygen.

    ReplyDelete

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